Awe

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

Page 116 of 217 · 20 per page

• From Wild (2012)

  “Because the lake is so pure and deep, it absorbs every color of visible light except blue, so it reflects pure blue back to us,” said a stranger who stood beside me, answering the question I’d nearly uttered out loud in my amazement. “Thanks,” I said to her. Because the water was so deep and pure it absorbed every color of visible light except blue seemed like a perfectly sound and scientific explanation, and yet there was still something about Crater Lake that remained inexplicable. The Klamath tribe still considered the lake a sacred site and I could see why. I wasn’t a skeptic about this. It didn’t matter that all around me there were tourists taking pictures and driving slowly past in their cars. I could feel the lake’s power. It seemed a shock in the midst of this great land: inviolable, separate and alone, as if it had always been and would always be here, absorbing every color of visible light but blue. I took a few photographs and walked along the lake’s rim near a small gathering of buildings that had been built to accommodate tourists. I had no choice but to spend the day because it was a Sunday and the park’s post office was closed; I couldn’t get my box until tomorrow. It was sunny and finally warm again, and as I walked, I thought that if I’d continued with the pregnancy I’d learned about in that motel room in Sioux Falls the night before I decided to hike the PCT, I’d be giving birth to a baby right about now. The week of my mother’s birthday would’ve been my due date. The crushing coalescence of those dates felt like a punch in the gut at the time, but it didn’t compel me to waver in my decision to end my pregnancy. It only made me beg the universe to give me another chance. To let me become who I needed to before I became a mother: a woman whose life was profoundly different than my mother’s had been. Much as I loved and admired my mother, I’d spent my childhood planning not to become her. I knew why she’d married my father at nineteen, pregnant and only a tiny bit in love. It was one of the stories I’d made her tell when I’d asked and asked and she’d shaken her head and said, Why do you want to know? I’d asked so much that she finally gave in. When she’d learned she was pregnant, she’d pondered two options: an illegal abortion in Denver or hiding out in a distant city during her pregnancy, then handing over my sister to her mother, who’d offered to raise the baby as her own. But my mother hadn’t done either of those things. She decided to have her baby, so she’d married my dad instead. She’d become Karen’s mother and then mine and then Leif’s. Ours.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Here now we have the elements of the dogma of the Trinity, that is, the doctrine of the living, only true God, Father, Son, and Spirit, of whom, through whom, and to whom are all things. This dogma has a peculiar, comprehensive, and definitive import in the Christian system, as a brief summary of all the truths and blessings of revealed religion. Hence the baptismal formula (Matt. 28:19), which forms the basis of all the ancient creeds, is trinitarian; as is the apostolic benediction also (2 Cor. 13:14). This doctrine meets us in the Scriptures, however, not so much in direct statements and single expressions, of which the two just mentioned are the clearest, as in great living facts; in the history of a threefold revelation of the living God in the creation and government, the reconciliation and redemption, and the sanctification and consummation of the world—a history continued in the experience of Christendom. In the article of the Trinity the Christian conception of God completely defines itself, in distinction alike from the abstract monotheism of the Jewish religion, and from the polytheism and dualism of the heathen. It has accordingly been looked upon in all ages as the sacred symbol and the fundamental doctrine of the Christian church, with the denial of which the divinity of Christ and the Holy Spirit, and the divine character of the work of redemption and sanctification, fall to the ground. On this scriptural basis and the Christian consciousness of a threefold relation we sustain to God as our Maker, Redeemer, and Sanctifier, the church dogma of the Trinity arose; and it directly or indirectly ruled even the ante-Nicene theology though it did not attain its fixed definition till in the Nicene age. It is primarily of a practical religious nature, and speculative only in a secondary sense. It arose not from the field of metaphysics, but from that of experience and worship; and not as an abstract, isolated dogma, but in inseparable connection with the study of Christ and of the Holy Spirit; especially in connection with Christology, since all theology proceeds from "God in Christ reconciling the world unto himself." Under the condition of monotheism, this doctrine followed of necessity from the doctrine of the divinity of Christ and of the Holy Spirit. The unity of God was already immovably fixed by the Old Testament as a fundamental article of revealed religion in opposition to all forms of idolatry. But the New Testament and the Christian consciousness as firmly demanded faith in the divinity of the Son, who effected redemption, and of the Holy Spirit, who founded the church and dwells in believers; and these apparently contradictory interests could be reconciled only in the form of the Trinity;1036 that is, by distinguishing in the one and indivisible essence of God1037 three hypostases or persons;1038 at the same time allowing for the insufficiency of all human conceptions and words to describe such an unfathomable mystery.

• From Talk Dirty to Me: An Intimate Philosophy of Sex (1994)

  There is one specific element to many fantasies that might be called a kind of dominance but isn’t dominance as we usually define it. I mean the dream of being dominated by sex itself—being forced, as it were, by the intensity of the sex to submit to and accept sex, be bound by sex, mastered by sex. To give up resistance to appetite. In this dream everything else disappears for real—not for a single instant, not almost, not pretend. Our ego is completely submerged. I can dream of being made to until I admit that I want to, that I want to without having to ask. And without asking I will get exactly what I want. This is the fantasy of everyday life—that those around us will meet our needs, will just know what we want, will understand. It’s the fantasy of pure love. Sexual dominance, sexual bondage can be metaphorical states. They can be metaphysical states, too, but what I’m talking about here is the fact that we think dominance always implies another person having control over us. But dominance is really about cowardice and courage, our unwillingness and inability to let go completely for even a second, and our wish to be dominated by our wish. To have sexuality itself say to us: I know what you want, baby, and I’m going to give it to you. III [image file=image_rsrc10C.jpg] Climax10The Japanese tradition of erotic art is one of extraordinary technique, humor, and maturity. Japanese erotic pictures are called “shunga,” which means “spring pictures,” but this bit of poetry implies nothing more than “sex pictures” to a Japanese. This art form reached its pinnacle during the Ukiyo-e period of the 1600s into the 1700s. I first saw real shunga—rather than reproductions—in the Orientalia Collection of the British Library, delicious dishes served up, as are all the treats of the British Library, in a civilized reading room by infinitely polite librarians.

• From The Erotic Engine (2011)

  Pornography was such a massive force on the early Internet for several reasons. Anonymity and convenience were part of it—you could get porn piped directly into your living room without ever having another person see your face, hear your voice or even know your name. The global scope of the Net meant that people who lived in places where pornography in traditional media was illegal or unavailable could now acquire it. And at the same time, people were no longer limited by geography when it came to connecting with others. The Internet opened up entirely new possibilities for friendship, romance and passion. People talk about the Internet today as though it were a single medium, but it isn’t, and it never was. The one-medium perception is enhanced by the way the majority of modern online experiences—email, web surfing, database searching, social networking—tend to filter through a single application: a browser. Some people might use a separate email program, and gamers, pirates and computing professionals still experience parts of the Internet via other software, but for many people, the Internet, the World Wide Web and their browser are essentially the same thing. By 1980, users of online services needed a fluency in the technology itself, including terms from “telnet” and “FTP” to “baud” and “data packet.” Users forced themselves to learn dozens if not hundreds of alien terms to describe various software and hardware features. (In fact, many people started by learning the terms “software” and “hardware.”) Neophytes faced a sprawling mess of protocols, applications, devices and arcane terminology that reflected the diversity of innovation and creativity spurred on by an increasingly networked world. And within that maelstrom of change, pornography remained a constant, guiding beacon, keeping people focused, and motivating them to find the time and patience to master the Internet. Early cyberspace was a testament to the true power of pornography to draw people to a new technology. It’s one thing to use sex to get people to fiddle with an extra dial on their television or install a new cable box. Learning how to get online, though, involved investing hours and hours of time in return for only the most grudging cooperation from the technology. One particular early application, called Usenet, was key to both pornography and to the development of the Internet. Although it is still in use today, it never really gained the same kind of prominence in the public mind as the World Wide Web or email. Usenet was a global variation on those early BBSs. It was also a direct technological and intellectual precursor to both modern peer-to-peer file sharing and social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace.

• From Dante's Divine Comedy (2001)

  ©2001 The Teaching Company. vi Table of Contents Dante’s Divine Comedy Illustrations................................................................................................ 84 Timeline for the Life of Dante.................................................................. 89 Timeline for the Political World of Dante............................................... 90 Timeline for Characters and Events in Dante’s Commedia in the Lectures............................................ 91 Bibliography.............................................................................................. 94 Textual quotations from Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, translated by Mark Musa, copyright © 1971 by Indiana University Press. Reproduced with permission of the publisher, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, Indiana, www.indiana.edu/~iupress. ©2001 The Teaching Company 1 Dante’s Divine Comedy Scope: This 24-lecture course is intended to help you analyze and appreciate the long poem by Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) known as the Divine Comedy. One of the most profound and satisfying poems ever written, the Divine Comedy (or simply the Commedia, to use Dante’s own title) is well worth our continuing study. In its unified narrative structure, Dante incorporates aspects of the biblical and classical traditions, weaving these together in a brilliant synthesis that has helped form the basis for Western writers ever since. Or, as James Joyce once put it, “Dante is my spiritual food!” The full achievement of the Commedia, however, goes far beyond anything merely structural or “literary” in a technical sense. Dante is a geographer of the cosmos, and of the individual human soul. He dramatizes and asks us to reflect on fundamental questions—questions about our political institutions and problems, the nature of our moral actions, the possibilities for spiritual transformation, and the reasons for reading and writing; questions whose poignancy the lapse of seven centuries has blunted not at all. Dante does all this, moreover, in a demanding Italian verse form called terza rima and uses a complex arrangement of materials that makes the Commedia one of the great virtuoso pieces of world literature and most impressive artworks ever created in any medium. The Commedia is a three-part journey undertaken by the pilgrim Dante to the realms of the Christian afterlife: Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven (in Italian, Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso). Set at Eastertide in the year 1300, the poem begins with Dante lost midlife in a dark wood (selva oscura) of error. Unable to recover his true path or extricate himself from danger, he is rescued by the great Roman poet Virgil. Virgil conducts Dante first on a descent through the nine circles of hell, continues with the climbing of the seven terraces of the mount of purgatory, then directs (but does not accompany) Dante on a journey toward a personal encounter with God at the very summit of paradise. Along the way, Dante changes guides. Virgil gives way to Beatrice, a young woman about whom Dante wrote in his early love poetry and who becomes his guide through most of the spheres of paradise. Beatrice in turn

• From Dante's Divine Comedy (2001)

  H i s a b i l i t y t o s e e c o n t i n u e s t o g r o w e v e n t h o u g h G o d r e m a i n s t h e same. C. Perhaps the Commedia is a bit like this: Not a word changes, but every time we return to the poem we see it anew. VIII. Dante reflects on the mysteries of the Trinity and the Incarnation. A. H e i s “ g a z i n g ” a t t h e s e m y s t e r i e s . B. H e b e c o m e s p a r t o f w h a t h e s e e s : H e d o e s n o t u n d e r s t a n d ; h e experiences. C. T h e “ l o v e t h a t m o v e s t h e s u n a n d t h e o t h e r s t a r s ” i s n o w m o v i n g his desire and his will. D. T h e p o e m e n d s w i t h D a n t e t a k e n u p “ i n a g r e a t f l a s h o f understanding,” so that he is living in these Christian mysteries, his wish granted. E. He is in harmony with the Creator and the Creation; “the love that moves the stars” moves Dante’s being as well. IX. T h i s f i n a l v i s i o n i s c o n t a i n e d i n the last few lines of Paradiso. A. T h e p o e m m i g h t s e e m t o b e e n d i n g a b r u p t l y . B. B u t t h a t v i s i o n i s w h a t h a s g e n e r a t e d t h e p o e m .

• From Dante's Divine Comedy (2001)

  Scope: The poem presents a number of preparatory climaxes to the reader as we move toward the final climax at the very end. In this lecture, we see the final lessons of Beatrice to Dante the pilgrim. We see the universe turned inside out as the pilgrim moves through seventh heaven, from which the earth seems very small, and beyond space and time into the realm of the empyrean. Here, the pilgrim sees the white rose that is the “home” of the souls in paradise, and as Beatrice returns to her place in this rose, her role as Dante’s guide is taken over by Bernard of Clairvaux, Dante’s third and final companion. We discuss some of the reasons that Bernard is a particularly important guide to the direct vision of God that constitutes the ending of the poem, including the various ways in which his life can be seen as a model for the pilgrim in his journey. Outline I. After moving through the last of the seven planetary spheres, that of Saturn, Dante finds himself in the sphere of the fixed stars. A. Here he is examined in the virtues of faith, hope, and love, respectively, by the three greatest apostles, Saints Peter, James, and John. B. The virtues that were first treated in Paradiso--faith, hope, and love-- now return, but from within the pilgrim rather than from outside him. C. Saint Benedict of Nursia, the founder of Western monasticism, also speaks to the pilgrim as a role model. We get a chance to see how much Dante has learned. D. As the exchange with Benedict shows, Dante has learned a great deal from his pilgrimage through the afterlife, and his vision is becoming cumulative, allowing him to encompass more and more within its basic unity. II. Saint Peter (the first pope) examines Dante in faith in Canto 24.

• From Talk Dirty to Me: An Intimate Philosophy of Sex (1994)

  A gradual, quiet “desegregation” of P.C. books began in the 1960s—works by Havelock Ellis, Henry Miller, Emile Zola, and D. H. Lawrence, scientific treatises and bibliographies all once kept in the Private Case are now in the general collection. One day I asked a library clerk if, in fact, the P.C. material wasn’t being quietly returned to the general catalogue. She answered with a resounding no. “Some of this material, you know,” she said confidingly, “is very hard-core.” That same day I requested one of the newest books in the collection, Wet Dreams, a 1973 account of a somewhat orgiastic sex film festival held in Amsterdam, supposedly attended by various luminaries like Betty Dodson, Germaine Greer, Al Goldstein, and Anthony Haden-Guest. I leafed through the diary accounts, poems, and stories and came across naked photos of not one, but two writers I know. There is nothing like a library. England, like the United States, is generally contradictory about sex. After several hours poring over Victorian flagellation erotica, I stopped at a small pharmacy near Russell Square. There was the Daily Sport, with its ads for sex phone lines (“I like something done to my backside. I’m touching my toes right now”) and for videos, sex dolls, and vibrators, and, surprisingly, for an inflatable sheep. But England is also a monarchy. Paul Cross, a longtime British Librarian, writes that the Private Case is not the only collection of hidden books in the British Library. There is also a collection labelled S.S., or Suppressed Safe. S.S. books are subversive, to “the throne, of religion, or of propriety.” They are considered the worst books of all, worse than Flesh in the Ring and My Secret Life. “Because of legal implications” they are omitted from the general catalogue and, unlike the library’s pornography, “under no circumstances are they made available to readers.” Conservative feminists such as the lawyer Catharine MacKinnon, Andrea Dworkin, and Dorchen Leidholdt believe that violence, even murder, is the end point of all pornography—and that pornography is the natural product of a sexually violent culture. (For all its crudeness, there’s a lot of ironic humor in pornography and virtually none in conservative feminism.) Leidholdt has written that within the “governing sexual system” women have “no meaningful choice, real agency, or genuine pleasure.” If I believe that, there is very little I can do; I am stuck with what we have, for life.

• From The Argonauts (2015)

  The capaciousness of growing a baby. The way a baby literally makes space where there wasn't space before. The cartilage nub where my ribs used to fit together at the sternum. The little slide in my lower rib cage when I twist right or left that didn't used to slide. The rearrangement of internal organs, the upward squeezing of the lungs. The dirt that collects on your belly button when it finally pops inside out, revealing its bottom—finite, after all. The husky feeling in my postpartum perineum, the way my breasts filling all at once with milk is like an orgasm but more painful, powerful as a hard rain. While one nipple is getting sucked, the other sometimes sprays forth, unstoppable.

• From Deceptions and Myths of the Bible (1975)

  If you would know how turbulent they eventually become, you have only to look at the sun, their most violent stage. Our religion-perverted mystics tell us the sun is the abode of “divine beings” and therefore a “holy place.” Literally and actually the sun is hell in heaven, spatially speaking, a cosmic inferno whose violence is beyond our comprehension. And do not call this blasphemy; you cannot blaspheme El Shaddai, powerwise; “the half has never been told.” Telescopic observations of his violence are but reality seen “through a glass darkly.” This is the original hell or Hades of the Greeks, and the hell of religion is but this perverted by priests for “benefit of clergy.” And yet what hell it has caused us racially; millions have lived and died in the fear of it, and all for want of knowledge of Reality. While on the subject of violence we can interpret that statement, “The kingdom of heaven must be taken by violence.” This too is a grievance to our “students of divinity,” so contrary is it to the teachings of Christ, and of common sense. Not so, however, when seen in this cosmic context. “The kingdom of heaven” is the postsolid, evolutionary planes, and from the pre-solid planes can be reached only by and through the violent sun period. This is also the meaning of that statement, “The kingdom of heaven is at hand,” not an imminent moral millennium, but the time for involutionary life to become evolutionary. You will notice it does not say “the kingdom of God”—this is violence. Whenever this phrase is used it is of this violent period the mythologist is speaking, as for instance, “Verily I say unto you, that there be some of them that stand here, which shall not taste of death, till they have seen the kingdom of God come with power” (Mark 9:1). “The kingdom of God come with power” is the sun stage and those who would not taste of death until they saw it were the planetary elements. The death implied here is the death of the Life Principle in dense matter, and the bright sun stage comes first. This the elements would see, and this, strange to say, constitutes the sixth miracle. This likewise is the meaning of the dire predictions concerning the last days. “For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom, and there shall be earthquakes in divers places, and there shall be famine and troubles: these are the beginnings of sorrow.” Yes for the planetary entity—”The Sorrows of Satan” and the troubles of Pharaoh, namely, materiality. It is also Adam’s Paradise Lost.

• From Talk Dirty to Me: An Intimate Philosophy of Sex (1994)

  The great alchemist Paracelsus was fascinated by Adam and Eve. He believed that their real punishment was to be given genitals. Genitals divided people from the androgynous God; they were a mutation, a monstrous refolding of the flesh in such a way that we eternally long for each other, and are eternally kept apart. The genitalia are certainly unique—messy, wrinkled even at birth, vulnerable in men and disguised in women, inexplicably ridiculous, inexplicably beautiful. Genitalia are visceral and wet; they are the body’s insides, out, decay as well as life. And most of all, they are just always there, unavoidable, on every person we pass in the street. Every swelling female chest, every bulge in a man’s pants, every outlined buttock, serves to remind us of our own. Many mammals have a ridge in their genitals called the penis bone. Supposedly the Buddha and the Dalai Lamas can retract their genitals like many animals, tucking them out of harm’s way—and, perhaps, out of mind. What a different world it would be if we all could. Vaginas are all the same, penises all the same, and yet different. For all the variations in hue, scalloping, curvature, and size, genitalia rapidly lose the capacity to surprise a viewer. Yet they never lose the capacity to excite. With enough time, we can become so familiar with another person’s penis or vulva as to give it a voice, the capacity to tell jokes and make demands. We call them names. Nice words for penises are hard words, hard-sounding: cock, prick, dick, stick. Insults are soft: wuss, pantywaist, wimp. But bad words for vaginas are the hard-sounding ones, the sharp-edged ones: cunt, snatch, box; compliments for women’s genitalia, such as they are, sound soft and safe to the ear: pussy, muff, fur. We like to keep our boundaries clear. We of the western tradition have no shunga, and little more than the Song of Solomon as a paean to sexual love. (Christian scholars have gone to extremes to find church metaphors in the Song of Solomon, but its meaning is simple and clear.) The Hawaiians, who were great poets, had a whole song tradition called mele ma’i, or genital chanting. When important babies were born to Hawaiian royalty, songs about their genitalia were composed, describing and celebrating their beauty and future capacity. The Hawaiian language has a lot of words for sexual gratification and delight, and the mele ma’i often included names for the genitals; Queen Liliuokalani’s were ’Anapau, that is, “frisky,” vigorous, merry ones. What a sorry bunch that makes us look. “The penis,” wrote Masters and Johnson in a moment of inadvertent poetry, “constantly has been viewed but rarely seen.”

• From The Erotic Engine (2011)

  The technology has a whiff of science fiction about it. Many haptic applications are extensions of virtual worlds, and they hint at a virtual reality that is vastly more real than anything currently in existence. In fact, one of the first inventions designed to transmit tactile data bears an unmistakable resemblance to one of sci-fi’s most iconic creations. The permanent collection at the Museum of Sex in New York City includes a mannequin dressed in what appears to be a modified Borg costume (the most notable modification being the addition of a black leather penis pouch). More black leather and chrome cover various body parts, and a mass of wires extend from various nodes, giving the suit a sadomasochistic aura. Created by experimental media artists Stahl Stenslie and Kirk Woolford in 1993 (four years after the Borg race made its debut on Star Trek: The Next Generation), CyberSM suits were one of the first forays into the haptic field known as teledildonics—the science and technology of remote-controlled sexual stimulation. Each partner created an online persona, which appeared on the other’s screen. As the avatars had sex online, the suits replicated the relevant tactile stimuli for the users. Teledildonics deals with motors, heaters and other noncommunications technology. But at its heart, it is a communications technology. Haptics feels different from the usual forms of communication, for good reason. Human beings have five basic senses, but almost all conventional communications technology deals with only two: sight and sound. Taste and smell are not part of any major medium, and touch has found no purchase beyond the Braille language. Forty per cent of the human brain is devoted to processing visual information, which gives some idea how much of what we know about the world comes to us through our eyes. Auditory information is almost as important. It is reasonable to think, though, that if one more sense is going to be added to the tools of communications, it will be touch. It is a powerful means of human communication and it lends itself particularly to sexual communication. In day-to-day life, of course, haptic information is not limited to sex. Think of the information conveyed through the strength of someone’s handshake or the way a friend puts her arm around your shoulders during hard times. Think about testing the ripeness of an avocado, or sinking down into a couch. Think about trying on clothes, or test-driving a new car or giving someone a wedgie. All these experiences involve sending and receiving tactile information. Tactile communications technology could change how we shop, work and interact with others. There is some way to go before people start buying groceries from a haptic-enabled virtual fruit stand, but the journey has begun. In fact, it has already made it to the infomercial stage.

• From Wild (2012)

  Perhaps Clarke’s most important contribution to the trail was making the acquaintance of Warren Rogers, who was twenty-four when the two met in 1932. Rogers was working for the YMCA in Alhambra, California, when Clarke convinced him to help map the route by assigning teams of YMCA volunteers to chart and in some cases construct what would become the PCT. Though initially reluctant, Rogers soon became passionate about the trail’s creation, and he spent the rest of his life championing the PCT and working to overcome all the legal, financial, and logistical obstacles that stood in its way. Rogers lived to see Congress designate the Pacific Crest National Scenic Trail in 1968, but he died in 1992, a year before the trail was finished. I’d read the section in my guidebook about the trail’s history the winter before, but it wasn’t until now—a couple of miles out of Burney Falls, as I walked in my flimsy sandals in the early evening heat—that the realization of what that story meant picked up force and hit me squarely in the chest: preposterous as it was, when Catherine Montgomery and Clinton Clarke and Warren Rogers and the hundreds of others who’d created the PCT had imagined the people who would walk that high trail that wound down the heights of our western mountains, they’d been imagining me. It didn’t matter that everything from my cheap knockoff sandals to my high-tech-by-1995-standards boots and backpack would have been foreign to them, because what mattered was utterly timeless. It was the thing that had compelled them to fight for the trail against all the odds, and it was the thing that drove me and every other long-distance hiker onward on the most miserable days. It had nothing to do with gear or footwear or the backpacking fads or philosophies of any particular era or even with getting from point A to point B. It had only to do with how it felt to be in the wild. With what it was like to walk for miles for no reason other than to witness the accumulation of trees and meadows, mountains and deserts, streams and rocks, rivers and grasses, sunrises and sunsets. The experience was powerful and fundamental. It seemed to me that it had always felt like this to be a human in the wild, and as long as the wild existed it would always feel this way. That’s what Montgomery knew, I supposed. And what Clarke knew and Rogers and what thousands of people who preceded and followed them knew. It was what I knew before I even really did, before I could have known how truly hard and glorious the PCT would be, how profoundly the trail would both shatter and shelter me.

• From The Argonauts (2015)

  They measure again. Fully effaced, fully dilated. The midwife is ecstatic. Says we’re ready to go. I want to know what will happen next. Just wait, they say. at a certain point i woke up. i listened for her breath, which i heard after a moment. much shallower, faster. i became alert, just then the AC unit went on, aurally overtaking the sound of her. this had happened innumerable times before, and it was always a strange bardo for me. would the breath still be happening when the fan went back off? i strained to hear her breath over the grinding of the fan but couldn’t. my torso leapt and sat up to check if her chest was moving. it didn’t seem to be. the AC roared. her left hand puffed the sheet up suddenly, the tiniest, instant halloween ghost. her first movement—a signaling. i leapt to her, to that hand. her eyes were open now, illuminated, looking up, her mouth was now closed, her face no longer tilted, akimbo. she was beautiful. and dying. her mouth was in slow-motion rounding up little bits of earth air for her lungs, or just an echo of that i guess. her eyes were in light and open. she was jutting her chin in the sweetest, most dignified little coquettish juts. she was in the doorway of all worlds and i was in the doorway too. i forced myself not to disturb her, she seemed all at once to know where she was going and how to get there. her map. her job. the goal at hand. i cupped her warm hand in mine and let her go. i told her one more time, you are surrounded in love, you are surrounded in light, don’t be afraid. and her neck was pulsing a little bit? her eyes were looking at something in another place. her mouth needed less air, less often and her chin moving more slowly. i never wanted it to end. i have never wanted infinity to open up under an instant like i wanted that then. and then her eyes relaxed and her shoulders relaxed of a piece. and i knew she had found her way. dared. summoned up her smarts and courage and whacked a way through. i was really astonished. proud of her. i looked at the clock it was 2:16. They think my bladder is too full, that it’s in the way. I can’t stand up to pee anymore in the slow-dancing position. They put in a catheter. It stings. Then the doctor comes in, says he’d like to break the water, says it’s enormously full. OK but how. He brandishes what appears to be a bamboo back scratcher. OK. The waters are broken. It feels tremendously good. I am lying in a warm ocean.

• From Talk Dirty to Me: An Intimate Philosophy of Sex (1994)

  I pick up a red book with an embossed cover. Each page is almost neon-bright with colors, tiny delicate draftsmanship on fine paper. Often shunga has text, captions giving careful instruction, making small jokes, telling a story. Some have word balloons (“How big you are!”) and others have little characters in the corners commenting sarcastically on the performance of the lovers. Pillow books were largely meant as instruction manuals, even discreetly slipped into the drawer of a bride’s dresser by the salesman at times, but shunga was also seen in “laughing books” and as separate artworks. In pillow books it seems always to be daytime, and the loving couple (or trio) is often either outside or in a room open to a garden. An old Asian term for intercourse was “clouds and rain,” the clouds being the vaginal secretions, and the rain, sperm. In shunga, sex and the natural world are wholly entwined. Men and women both carry a sense of stillness about them in these drawings, and it ultimately adds to the arousing power of the images. These are clear-eyed lovers, unapologetic, controlled, at ease—as though they could stay like this for hours, as though they already have. It was quite common for pillow books to include pictures of couples post-amour, in loving repose. The last pages of this particular book show a languid couple, fully clothed and snuggling, with only a single hand lost in the folds of fabric. The impression is one of a clear spring morning, where all is green and blooming. The spare, empty rooms, clean walls, and neatly pruned gardens contrast with the chaos of draped fabric, the frenzy of tiny patterns and wild colors in the kimonos. The picture tells me that sex lies somewhere between these extremes. Shunga was banned periodically from the 1700s on, and by the mid-1800s its style was more repressed and hostile. Explicit erotic art was banned in Japan altogether by the late 1800s. Elements of horror and violence replaced affection and genital explicitness in sexual art. Shunga is a dead tradition; nothing like it exists in Japan now, and modern Japanese are generally not allowed access to uncensored historical Japanese art. With westernization came prudishness, censorship, and harsh, violent pornography. In virtually all places, at all times, the depiction of pubic hair is forbidden. Japanese censors and Japanese artists are in a continual battle for interpretation of the law. A shaved pubis is also forbidden, say the censors, because the pubis should have pubic hair. Artists sometimes get away with cutting out the genitals in their art and leaving perfectly shaped blank spaces instead. In pornography, genitals are either hidden or digitally scrambled, the moaning actors deformed by vibrating cross-hatch patterns in a near-perfect parody of the lost art of the erotic.

• From The Erotic Engine (2011)

  In the post-war years, the technology (along with its cousins microfiche and microcards) became a prime means for libraries and other institutions to save space and preserve documents, and today back issues of everything from local newspapers and rare texts to Playboy magazine have been archived in miniature. A technology that Thomas Sutton, in his 1858 Dictionary of Photography, described as “of little or no practical utility” had survived, thanks to a small but dedicated market of voyeurs, long enough to fundamentally change our ability to archive and document material that might otherwise have been lost to deterioration, fire or plain old lack of room. Without the Stanhope and the erotic material that kept it alive in its early years, our cultural archive would be greatly impoverished. Today, Stanhopes have returned to their original role of novelty item, with naughtier versions still selling at a premium. Pennsylvania tinkerer Michael Sheibley keeps the microphotography flame alive through his business, Stanhope Microworks. He stumbled across the technology decades after it had all but disappeared into antiquity. “I’m a violinmaker by profession,” he told me. “I make forgeries of authentic instruments that are worth a lot of money. I had a virtuoso here one night. She was playing a $4.5-million violin and it broke. She didn’t know what to do. She shows up at my place about one o’clock in the morning, and I fix her violin through the night so she could play it again the next day. As she was leaving she said, ‘Have you ever seen a bow like this?’ She told me it was a Vuillaume bow.” Jean-Baptiste Vuillaume was one of the most famous French violin and bow makers. In the 1850s, he partnered with a Parisian jeweller to insert Stanhopes into the frog of a bow—the part at the held end that keeps the bow’s hair in place. “When I looked inside, there was a picture of Niccolò Paganini, the most famous violinist of all time. It blew me away.” An entrepreneur and experimenter at heart, Sheibley reverse-engineered this lost technology and made it the basis of a modern business. As had happened the first time around, erotic images drove the early market, paving the way for Sheibley’s expansion into mainstream. “Earlier on, the majority of what we did was nudes,” he said. Once things got rolling, though, he kind of kept that to himself. “We shot porn then, but now, because of the popularity of the Lord’s Prayer, crosses and things like that, we shoot mostly religious. We don’t push the porn like we used to. I think, though, there’s always a corner in every market for porn somewhere: it is such a collectible item. In fact we charge ten dollars more for pornographic pictures, just because they are porn.”

• From Wild (2012)

  16 MAZAMACrater Lake used to be a mountain. Mount Mazama, it was called. It was not so unlike the chain of dormant volcanoes I’d be traversing on the PCT in Oregon—Mount McLoughlin, the Three Sisters peaks, Mount Washington, Three Fingered Jack, Mount Jefferson, and Mount Hood—except that it was bigger than them all, having reached an elevation that’s estimated at a little under 12,000 feet. Mount Mazama blew up about 7,700 years ago in a cataclysmic eruption that was forty-two times more voluminous than the eruption that decapitated Mount St. Helens in 1980. It was the largest explosive eruption in the Cascade Range going back a million years. In the wake of Mazama’s destruction, ash and pumice blanketed the landscape for 500,000 square miles—covering nearly all of Oregon and reaching as far as Alberta, Canada. The Klamath tribe of Native Americans who witnessed the eruption believed it was a fierce battle between Llao, the spirit of the underworld, and Skell, the spirit of the sky. When the battle was over, Llao was driven back into the underworld and Mount Mazama had become an empty bowl. A caldera, it’s called—a sort of mountain in reverse. A mountain that’s had its very heart removed. Slowly, over hundreds of years, the caldera filled with water, collecting the Oregon rain and snowmelt, until it became the lake that it is now. Reaching a maximum depth of more than 1,900 feet, Crater Lake is the deepest lake in the United States and among the deepest in the world. I knew a little something about lakes, having come from Minnesota, but as I walked away from Ashland, I couldn’t quite imagine what I would see at Crater Lake. It would be like Lake Superior, I supposed, the lake near which my mother had died, going off blue forever into the horizon. My guidebook said only that my first view of it from the rim, which rose 900 feet above the lake’s surface, would be “one of disbelief.” I had a new guidebook now. A new bible. The Pacific Crest Trail, Volume 2: Oregon and Washington, though back at the co-op in Ashland, I’d ripped off the last 130 of the book’s pages because I didn’t need the Washington part. My first night out of Ashland, I paged through the book before falling asleep, reading bits here and there, the same as I had with the California guidebook in the desert on my first night on the PCT.

• From Wild (2012)

  As I walked during those first days out of Ashland, I caught a couple of glimpses of Mount Shasta to the south, but mostly I walked in forests that obscured views. Among backpackers, the Oregon PCT was often referred to as the “green tunnel” because it opened up to far fewer panoramas than the California trail did. I no longer had the feeling that I was perched above looking down on everything, and it felt odd not to be able to see out across the terrain. California had altered my vision, but Oregon shifted it again, drew it closer in. I hiked through forests of noble, grand, and Douglas fir, pushing past bushy lakes through grasses and weedy thistles that sometimes obscured the trail. I crossed into the Rogue River National Forest and walked beneath tremendous ancient trees before emerging into clear-cuts like those I’d seen a few weeks before, vast open spaces of stumps and tree roots that had been exposed by the logging of the dense forest. I spent an afternoon lost amid the debris, walking for hours before I emerged onto a paved road and found the PCT again. It was sunny and clear but the air was cool, and it grew progressively cooler with each day as I passed into the Sky Lakes Wilderness, where the trail stayed above 6,000 feet. The views opened up again as I walked along a ridgeline of volcanic rocks and boulders, glimpsing lakes occasionally below the trail and the land that spread beyond. In spite of the sun, it felt like an early October morning instead of a mid-August afternoon. I had to keep moving to stay warm. If I stopped for more than five minutes the sweat that drenched the back of my T-shirt turned icy cold. I’d seen no one since I left Ashland, but now I encountered a few day hikers and overnight backpackers who’d climbed up to the PCT on one of the many trails that intersected it, which led to peaks above or lakes below. Mostly I was alone, which wasn’t unusual, but the cold made the trail seem even more vacant, the wind clattering the branches of the persevering trees. It felt colder too, even colder than it had been up in the snow above Sierra City, though I saw only small patches of snow here and there. I realized it was because back then the mountains had been moving toward summer, and now, only six weeks later, they were already moving away from it, reaching toward autumn, in a direction that pushed me out.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  I lifted one of the rotors from a shelf in one of the labs. It was not a light object. It was milled out of some kind of compressed titanium alloy and it was finished in an elegant anodized black. It looked like a forty-five-dollar dark-chocolate birthday cake, with holes for, say, eight unusually thick candles—but it weighed about as much as a bowling ball, or a human head. I’m seldom as impressed as I should be when I hear that a weightless entity like an electrical impulse can dash around in its silicon irrigation ditches a thousand times a second, or even a million times a second, because electricity is ungraspable; opposable thumbs are of no use in its presence. But when a California company manufactured a machine that could get something heavy, something that you might grunt gently in lifting, that would dent turf if you dropped it, to rotate a thousand times a second, the achievement seemed close enough to being conceivable that it became inconceivable. A head, spinning a thousand times a second! I was impressed when the little girl in The Exorcist spun hers around once. As I held the rotor, knowing myself to be the one unstill being in the center of a temporarily still universe, I began to want very much for my own head to revolve at ultracentrifugational speeds—I wanted to spin so fast my ears would rip off my head and slap onto opposite walls; I wanted my grotesquely elongated tongue, unretractable after I opened my mouth to utter the usual “Help!” of the Faustian inventor, to form a pink Saturnian ring or an Elizabethan collar before my brain finally blew. Not only could the human head not survive sixty thousand r.p.m., I thought, it could hardly survive thinking about sixty thousand r.p.m. And in fact, when I reflect on it now, I realize that my Foldouts are in many ways equivalent to centrifugation, since when I spend a few hours of quality time in the Fold I am in fact held in the vacuum chamber of a single exceedingly patient millisecond, potentially doing a thousand things, reading whole books, wandering through buildings filled with scientific instrumentation, and thus, from a bystander’s perspective, moving over my closed loop at miraculous Spinco speeds.

• From Wild (2012)

  I looked around at the trees, the waning light slanting through them. It would be evening soon and I’d have to find a place to camp. I would pitch my tent in the snow and wake in the snow and continue on in the snow. This, in spite of everything I’d done to avoid it. I walked on and eventually found what passed for a fairly cozy spot to pitch a tent when you have no choice but to allow a frozen sheaf of snow beneath a tree to be cozy. When I crawled into my sleeping bag, wearing my rain gear over all my clothes, I was chilly but okay, my water bottles wedged in close beside me so they wouldn’t freeze. In the morning, the walls of my tent were covered with swirls of frost, condensation from my breath that had frozen in the night. I lay quiet but awake for a while, not ready to confront the snow yet, listening to the songs of birds I couldn’t name. I only knew that the sound of them had become familiar to me. When I sat up and unzipped the door and looked out, I watched the birds flitter from tree to tree, elegant and plain and indifferent to me. I got my pot and poured water and Better Than Milk into it and stirred, then added some granola and sat eating it near the open door of my tent, hoping that I was still on the PCT. I stood and washed out my pot with a handful of snow and scanned the landscape. I was surrounded by rocks and trees that jutted out from the icy snow. I felt both uneasy about my situation and astounded by the vast lonesome beauty. Should I continue on or turn back? I wondered, though I knew my answer. I could feel it lodged in my gut: of course I was continuing on. I’d worked too hard to get here to do otherwise. Turning back made logical sense. I could retrace my steps to Sierra City and catch another ride farther north still, clear of the snow. It was safe. It was reasonable. It was probably the right thing to do. But nothing in me would do it. I walked all day, falling and skidding and trudging along, bracing so hard with my ski pole that my hand blistered. I switched to the other hand and it blistered too. Around every bend and over every ridge and on the other side of every meadow I hoped there would be no more snow. But there was always more snow amid the occasional patches where the ground was visible. Is that the PCT? I’d wonder when I saw the actual ground. I could never be certain. Only time would tell.