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.

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• From Barclay's Guide to the New Testament (2008)

  (6) As a result of all this, through Jesus Christ, all who believe have life (4:9, 5:11-12). This is true in a double sense. Believers have life in the sense that they are saved from death; and they have life in the sense that living has ceased to be mere existence and has become life in its fullest sense. ('7) All this may be summed up by saying that Jesus is the Saviour of the world (4:14). Here, we have something which has to be set out in full. `The Father has sent his Son as the Saviour of the world' (4:14). We have already talked of Jesus as pleading our case before God. If we were to leave that without addition, it might be argued that God wished to condemn human beings and was deflected from his dire purpose by the self-sacrifice of Jesus Christ. But that is not so, because, for John, as for every writer in the New Testament, the whole initiative lay with God. It was God who sent his Son to be the Saviour of men and women. Within the short span of this letter, the wonder and the glory and the grace of Christ are most fully set out. The Spirit In this letter, John has less to say about the Spirit; for his highest teaching about the Spirit, we must turn back to the Fourth Gospel. It may be said that, in i John, the function of the Spirit is in some sense to be the liaison between God and his people. It is the Spirit who makes us conscious that there is within us the abiding presence of God through Jesus Christ (3:24, 4:13). We may say that it is the Spirit who enables us to grasp the precious fellowship with God which is being offered to us. The World The world within which Christians live is hostile; it is a world without God. It does not know Christians, because it did not know Christ (3:1). It hates Christians, just as it hated Christ (3:13). The false teachers are from the world and not from God, and it is because they speak its language that the world is ready to hear them and accept them (4:4-5). In a sweeping statement, John says that the whole world is in the power of the evil one (5:19). It is for that reason that Christians have to overcome it, and their weapon in the struggle with the world is faith (5:4).

• From The Hours (1998)

  Clarissa Dalloway, she thinks, will kill herself over something that seems, on the surface, like very little. Her party will fail, or her husband will once again refuse to notice some effort she’s made about her person or their home. The trick will be to render intact the magnitude of Clarissa’s miniature but very real desperation; to fully convince the reader that, for her, domestic defeats are every bit as devastating as are lost battles to a general. Virginia walks through the door. She feels fully in command of the character who is Virginia Woolf, and as that character she removes her cloak, hangs it up, and goes downstairs to the kitchen to speak to Nelly about lunch. In the kitchen, Nelly is rolling out a crust. Nelly is herself, always herself; always large and red, regal, indignant, as if she’d spent her life in an age of glory and decorum that ended, forever, some ten minutes before you entered the room. Virginia marvels at her. How does she remember, how does she manage, every day and every hour, to be so exactly the same? “Hello, Nelly,” Virginia says. “Hello, ma’am.” Nelly concentrates on the crust, as if her rolling pin were revealing faint but legible writing in the dough. “Is that a pie for lunch?” “Yes, ma’am. I thought a lamb pie, there’s that lamb left over, and you was so hard at work this morning we didn’t speak.” “A lamb pie sounds lovely,” Virginia says, though she must work to stay in character. She reminds herself: food is not sinister. Do not think of putrefaction or feces; do not think of the face in the mirror. “I’ve got the cress soup,” Nelly says. “And the pie. And then I thought just some of them yellow pears for pudding, unless you’d like something fancier.” Here it is, then: the challenge thrown down. Unless you’d like something fancier. So the subjugated Amazon stands on the riverbank wrapped in the fur of animals she has killed and skinned; so she drops a pear before the queen’s gold slippers and says, “Here is what I’ve brought. Unless you’d like something fancier.”

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  [image file=image_rsrc13J.jpg] The small butterfly, light blue above, grayish beneath, of which the two type specimens (male holotype on the left, both sides, one hindwing slightly damaged; and male paratype on the right, both sides), preserved in the American Museum of Natural History and figured now for the first time from photographs made by that institution, is Plebejus (Lysandra) cormion Nabokov. The first name is that of the genus, the second that of the subgenus, the third that of the species, and the fourth that of the author of the original description which I published in September 1941 (Journal of the New York Entomological Society, Vol. 49, p. 265), later figuring the genitalia of the paratype (October 26, 1945, Psyche, Vol. 52, Pl. 1). Possibly, as I pointed out, my butterfly owed its origin to hybridization between Plebejus (Lysandra) coridon Poda (in the large sense) and Plebejus (Meleageria) daphnis Schiffermüller. Live organisms are less conscious of specific or subgeneric differences than the taxonomist is. I took the two males figured, and saw at least two more (but no females) on July 20 (paratype) and 22 (holotype), 1938, at about 4,000 ft. near the village of Moulinet, Alpes Maritimes. It may not rank high enough to deserve a name, but whatever it be—a new species in the making, a striking sport, or a chance cross—it remains a great and delightful rarity. 141THE spiral is a spiritualized circle. In the spiral form, the circle, uncoiled, unwound, has ceased to be vicious; it has been set free. I thought this up when I was a schoolboy, and I also discovered that Hegel’s triadic series (so popular in old Russia) expressed merely the essential spirality of all things in their relation to time. Twirl follows twirl, and every synthesis is the thesis of the next series. If we consider the simplest spiral, three stages may be distinguished in it, corresponding to those of the triad: We can call “thetic” the small curve or arc that initiates the convolution centrally; “antithetic” the larger arc that faces the first in the process of continuing it; and “synthetic” the still ampler arc that continues the second while following the first along the outer side. And so on. A colored spiral in a small ball of glass, this is how I see my own life. The twenty years I spent in my native Russia (1899–1919) take care of the thetic arc. Twenty-one years of voluntary exile in England, Germany and France (1919–1940) supply the obvious antithesis. The period spent in my adopted country (1940–1960) forms a synthesis—and a new thesis. For the moment I am concerned with my antithetic stage, and more particularly with my life in Continental Europe after I had graduated from Cambridge in 1922.

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  Next came a Ukrainian, an exuberant mathematician with a dark mustache and a sparkling smile. He spent part of the winter of 1907–1908 with us. He, too, had his accomplishments, among which a vanishing-coin trick was particularly fetching. A coin, placed on a sheet of paper, is covered with a tumbler and forthwith disappears. Take an ordinary drinking glass. Paste neatly over its mouth a round piece of paper. The paper should be ruled (or otherwise patterned)—this will enhance the illusion. Place upon a similarly ruled sheet a small coin (a silver twenty-kopek piece will do). Briskly slip the tumbler over the coin, taking care to have both sets of rules or patterns tally. Coincidence of pattern is one of the wonders of nature. The wonders of nature were beginning to impress me at that early age. On one of his Sundays off, the poor conjuror collapsed in the street and was shoved by the police into a cold cell with a dozen drunks. Actually, he suffered from a heart condition, of which he died a few years later. The next picture looks as if it had come on the screen upside down. It shows our third tutor standing on his head. He was a large, formidably athletic Lett, who walked on his hands, lifted enormous weights, juggled with dumbbells and in a trice could fill a large room with a garrison’s worth of sweat reek. When he deemed it fit to punish me for some slight misdemeanor (I remember, for instance, letting a child’s marble fall from an upper landing upon his attractive, hard-looking head as he walked downstairs), he would adopt the remarkable pedagogic measure of suggesting that he and I put on boxing gloves for a bit of sparring. He would then punch me in the face with stinging accuracy. Although I preferred this to the hand-cramping pensums Mademoiselle would think up, such as making me copy out two hundred times the proverb Qui aime bien, châtie bien, I did not miss the good man when he left after a stormy month’s stay.

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  Soon after the wardrobe affair I found a spectacular moth, marooned in a corner of a vestibule window, and my mother dispatched it with ether. In later years, I used many killing agents, but the least contact with the initial stuff would always cause the porch of the past to light up and attract that blundering beauty. Once, as a grown man, I was under ether during appendectomy, and with the vividness of a decalcomania picture I saw my own self in a sailor suit mounting a freshly emerged Emperor moth under the guidance of a Chinese lady who I knew was my mother. It was all there, brilliantly reproduced in my dream, while my own vitals were being exposed: the soaking, ice-cold absorbent cotton pressed to the insect’s lemurian head; the subsiding spasms of its body; the satisfying crackle produced by the pin penetrating the hard crust of its thorax; the careful insertion of the point of the pin in the cork-bottomed groove of the spreading board; the symmetrical adjustment of the thick, strong-veined wings under neatly affixed strips of semitransparent paper. 2I must have been eight when, in a storeroom of our country house, among all kinds of dusty objects, I discovered some wonderful books acquired in the days when my mother’s mother had been interested in natural science and had had a famous university professor of zoology (Shimkevich) give private lessons to her daughter. Some of these books were mere curios, such as the four huge brown folios of Albertus Seba’s work Locupletissimi Rerum Naturalium Thesauri Accurata Descriptio …), printed in Amsterdam around 1750. On their coarse-grained pages I found woodcuts of serpents and butterflies and embryos. The fetus of an Ethiopian female child hanging by the neck in a glass jar used to give me a nasty shock every time I came across it; nor did I much care for the stuffed hydra on plate CII, with its seven lion-toothed turtleheads on seven serpentine necks and its strange, bloated body which bore buttonlike tubercules along the sides and ended in a knotted tail. Other books I found in that attic, among herbariums full of alpine columbines, and blue palemoniums, and Jove’s campions, and orange-red lilies, and other Davos flowers, came closer to my subject. I took in my arms and carried downstairs glorious loads of fantastically attractive volumes: Maria Sibylla Merian’s (1647–1717) lovely plates of Surinam insects, and Esper’s noble Die Schmetterlinge (Erlangen, 1777), and Boisduval’s Icones Historiques de Lépidoptères Nouveaux ou Peu Connus (Paris, begun in 1832). Still more exciting were the products of the latter half of the century—Newman’s Natural History of British Butterflies and Moths, Hofmann’s Die Gross-Schmetterlinge Europas, the Grand Duke Nikolay Mihailovich’s Mémoires on Asiatic lepidoptera (with incomparably beautiful figures painted by Kavrigin, Rybakov, Lang), Scudder’s stupendous work on the Butterflies of New England.

• From Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family (1901)

  But then he came across a lengthy chapter, which he read from the first to the last letter, with tight-lipped lips and furrowed brows, serious, with a complete, almost dead seriousness on his face that could not be influenced by any emotion in life around him. But this chapter bore the title: "About death and its relationship to the indestructibility of our being itself." He was missing a few lines when, at four o'clock, the maid came through the garden and invited him to dinner. He nodded, read the rest of the sentences, closed the book and looked around... He felt his whole being immensely expanded and filled with a heavy, dark intoxication; his mind befogged and completely intoxicated by something unspeakably new, alluring, and full of promise, reminiscent of the first, hopeful longing for love. But as he put the book in the drawer of the garden table with cold and unsteady hands, his glowing head, in which there was a strange pressure, a frightening tension, as if something might burst, was not capable of a perfect thought. what was this he asked himself as he went into the house, climbed the main staircase and sat down with his family in the dining room... What happened to me? What did I hear? What was said to me, to me, Thomas Buddenbrook, councilor of this city, head of the grain company Johann Buddenbrook...? Was this meant for me? can i take it I don't know what it was...I just know it's too much, too much for my citizen brain... In this state of heavy, dark, drunken, and thoughtless overwhelm he remained all day. But then evening came, and unable to keep his head on his shoulders any longer, he went to bed early. He slept for three hours, deeply, unattainably deeply, like never before in his life. Then he awoke, so suddenly, so deliciously frightened, as one wakes up lonely, with a burgeoning love in his heart. He knew he was alone in the big bedroom because Gerda was now sleeping in Ida Jungmann's room, who had recently moved into one of the three balconies in order to be closer to little Johann. It was thick night around him, since the curtains of the two high windows were tightly closed. In deep silence and gently oppressive mugginess he lay on his back and looked up into the darkness. And lo and behold: suddenly it was as if the darkness were tearing apart before his eyes, as if the velvet wall of the night was yawning and an immeasurably deep, eternally distant view of light was revealed... I will live ! said Thomas Buddenbrook almost aloud, feeling his chest tremble with internal sobs. It is this that I shall live! It will live ... and that this It is not me, that is only a delusion, that was only a mistake that death will correct. So it is, so it is!... Why?

• From The Hours (1998)

  The vestibule door opens onto a June morning so fine and scrubbed Clarissa pauses at the threshold as she would at the edge of a pool, watching the turquoise water lapping at the tiles, the liquid nets of sun wavering in the blue depths. As if standing at the edge of a pool she delays for a moment the plunge, the quick membrane of chill, the plain shock of immersion. New York in its racket and stern brown decrepitude, its bottomless decline, always produces a few summer mornings like this; mornings invaded everywhere by an assertion of new life so determined it is almost comic, like a cartoon character that endures endless, hideous punishments and always emerges unburnt, unscarred, ready for more. This June, again, the trees along West Tenth Street have produced perfect little leaves from the squares of dog dirt and discarded wrappers in which they stand. Again the window box of the old woman next door, filled as it always is with faded red plastic geraniums pushed into the dirt, has sprouted a rogue dandelion.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  "It is impossible to state the exact order in which these different questions arose, i.e., about men, animals, plants, the earth, sun, moon, etc. The lower animals did not receive so much thought as was bestowed upon man and the earth; perhaps because I put man and beast in the same class, since I believed that man would be annihilated and there was no resurrection beyond the grave,—though I am told by my mother that, in answer to my question, in the case of a deceased uncle who looked to me like a person in sleep, she had tried to make me understand that he would awake in the far future. It was my belief that man and beast derived their being from the same source and were to be laid down in the dust in a state of annihilation. Considering the brute animal as of secondary importance, and allied to man on a lower level, man and the earth were the two things on which my mind dwelled most. "I think I was five years old, when I began to understand the descent from parent to child and the propagation of animals. I was nearly eleven years old, when I entered the Institution where I was educated; and I remember distinctly that it was at least two years before this time that I began to ask myself the question as to the origin of the universe. My age was then about eight, not over nine years. "Of the form of the earth, I had no idea in my childhood, except that, from a look at a map of the hemispheres, I inferred there were two immense disks of matter lying near each other. I also believed the sun and moon to be round, flat plates of illuminating matter; and for those luminaries I entertained a sort of reverence on account of their power of lighting and heating the earth. I thought from their coming up and going down, travelling across the sky in so regular a manner that there must be a certain something having power to govern their course. I believed the sun went into a hole at the west and came out of another at the east, travelling through a great tube in the earth, describing the same curve as it seemed to describe in the sky. The stars seemed to me to be tiny lights studded in the sky.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  Such a one is counting the lines, comparing their intervals, or the like. An equilibrium of the attention, persistent for any length of time, is under no circumstances attainable. The natural tendency of attention when left to itself is to wander to ever new things; and so soon as the interest of its object is over, so soon as nothing new is to be noticed there, it passes, in spite of our will, to something else. If we wish to keep it upon one and the same object, we must seek constantly to find out something new about the latter, especially if other powerful impressions are attracting us away." And again criticising an author who had treated of attention as an activity absolutely subject to the conscious will, Helmholtz writes: "This is only restrictedly true. We move our eyes by our will; but one without training cannot so easily execute the intention of making them converge. At any moment, however, he can execute that of looking at a near object, in which act convergence is involved. Now just as little can we carry out our purpose to keep our attention steadily fixed upon a certain object, when our interest in the object is exhausted, and the purpose is inwardly formulated in this abstract way. But we can set ourselves new questions about the object, so that a new interest in it arises, and then the attention will remain riveted . The relation of attention to will is, then, less one of immediate than of mediate control." These words of Helmholtz are of fundamental importance. And if true of sensorial attention, how much more true are they of the intellectual variety! The conditio sine quâ non of sustained attention to a given topic of thought is that we should roll it over and over incessantly and consider different aspects and relations of it in turn. Only in pathological states will a fixed and ever monotonously recurring idea possess the mind. And now we can see why it is that what is called sustained attention is the easier, the richer in acquisitions and the fresher and more original the mind. In such minds, subjects bud and sprout and grow At every moment, they please by a new consequence and rivet the attention afresh. But an intellect unfurnished with materials, stagnant, unoriginal, will hardly be likely to consider any subject long. A glance exhausts its possibilities of interest. Geniuses are commonly believed to excel other men in their power of sustained attention.[343] In most of them, it is to be feared, the so-called 'power' is of the passive sort. Their ideas coruscate, every subject branches infinitely before their fertile minds, and so for hours they may be rapt.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  Gustav Theodor Fechner first proved it to be a law for all departments of sensation. Psychology owes to him the first comprehensive investigation of sensations from a physical point of view, the first basis of an exact Theory of Sensibility." So much for a general account of what Fechner calls Weber's law. The 'exactness' of the theory of sensibility to which it leads consists in the supposed fact that it gives the means of representing sensations by numbers. The unit of any kind of sensation will be that increment which, when the stimulus is increased, we can just barely perceive to be added. The total number of units which any given sensation contains will consist of the total number of such increments which may be perceived in passing from no sensation of the kind to a sensation of the present amount. We cannot get at this number directly, but we can, now that we know Weber's law, get at it by means of the physical stimulus of which it is a function. For if we know how much of the stimulus it will take to give a barely perceptible sensation, and then what percentage of addition to the stimulus will constantly give a barely perceptible increment to the sensation, it is at bottom only a question of compound interest to compute, out of the total amount of stimulus which we may be employing at any moment, the number of such increments, or, in other words, of sensational units to which it may give rise. This number bears the same relation to the total stimulus which the time elapsed bears to the capital plus the compound interest accrued. To take an example: If stimulus A just falls short of producing a sensation, and if r be the percentage of itself which must be added to it to get a sensation which is barely perceptible—call this sensation 1—then we should have the series of sensation-numbers corresponding to their several stimuli as follows: Sensation 0 = stimulus A; " 1 = " A (1 + r ); " 2 = " A (1 + r )2 ; " 3 = " A (1 + r )3 ; . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . " n = " A (1 + r )n . The sensations here form an arithmetical series, and the stimuli a geometrical series, and the two series correspond term for term.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  So natural is this way of looking at the matter that it has given rise to what is on the whole the most flourishing of all psychological systems—that of the Lockian school of associated ideas—of which school the mind-stuff theory is nothing but the last and subtlest offshoot. The second difficulty is deeper still. The 'entire brain-process' is not a physical fact at all . It is the appearance to an onlooking mind of a multitude of physical facts. 'Entire brain' is nothing but our name for the way in which a million of molecules arranged in certain positions may affect our sense. On the principles of the corpuscular or mechanical philosophy, the only realities are the separate molecules, or at most the cells. Their aggregation into a 'brain' is a fiction of popular speech. Such a fiction cannot serve as the objectively real counterpart to any psychic state whatever. Only a genuinely physical fact can so serve. But the molecular fact is the only genuine physical fact—whereupon we seem, if we are to have an elementary psycho-physic law at all, thrust right back upon something like the mind-stuff theory, for the molecular fact, being an element of the 'brain,' would seem naturally to correspond, not to the total thoughts, but to elements in the thought. What shall we do? Many would find relief at this point in celebrating the mystery of the Unknowable and the 'awe' which we should feel at having such a principle to take final charge of our perplexities. Others would rejoice that the finite and separatist view of things with which we started had at last developed its contradictions, and was about to lead us dialectically upwards to some 'higher synthesis' in which inconsistencies cease from troubling and logic is at rest. It may be a constitutional infirmity, but I can take no comfort in such devices for making a luxury of intellectual defeat. They are but spiritual chloroform. Better live on the ragged edge, better gnaw the file forever! THE MATERIAL—MONAD THEORY. The most rational thing to do is to suspect that there may be a third possibility, an alternative supposition which we have not considered. Now there is an alternative supposition—a supposition moreover which has been frequently made in the history of philosophy, and which is freer from logical objections than either of the views we have ourselves discussed. It may be called the theory of polyzoism or multiple monadism ; and it conceives the matter thus: Every brain-cell has its own individual consciousness, which no other cell knows anything about, all individual consciousness being 'ejective' to each other.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  Sensational consciousness is something quasi-material, hardly cognitive, which one need not much wonder at. Relating consciousness is quite the reverse, and the mystery of it is unspeakable. Professor Ladd, for example, in his usually excellent book, [609] after well showing the matter-of-fact dependence of retention and reproduction on brain-paths, says: "In the study of perception psycho-physics can do much towards a scientific explanation. It can tell what qualities of stimuli produce certain qualities of sensations; it can suggest a principle relating the quantity of the stimuli to the intensity of the sensation; it can investigate the laws under which, by combined action of various excitations, the sensations are combined [?] into presentations of sense; it can show how the time-relations of the sensations and percepts in consciousness correspond to the objective relations in time of the stimulations. But for that spiritual activity which actually puts together in consciousness the sensations, it cannot even suggest the beginning of a physical explanation. Moreover, no cerebral process can be conceived of, which—in case it were known to exist—could possibly be regarded as a fitting basis for this unifying actus of mind. Thus also, and even more emphatically, must we insist upon the complete inability of physiology to suggest an explanation for conscious memory, in so far as it is memory—that is, in so far as it most imperatively calls for explanation. . . . The very essence of the act of memory consists in the ability to say: This after-image is the image of a percept I had a moment since; or this image of memory is the image of the percept I had at a certain time—I do not remember precisely how long since. It would, then, be quite contrary to the facts to hold that, when an image of memory appears in consciousness, it is recognized as belonging to a particular original percept on account of its perceived resemblance to this percept. The original percept does not exist and will never be reproduced. Even more palpably false and absurd would it be to hold that any similarity of the impressions or processes in end organs or central organs explains the act of conscious memory. Consciousness knows nothing of such similarity; knows nothing even of the existence of nervous impressions and processes.

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  Although heavy snowfalls were much more usual in St. Petersburg than, say, around Boston, the several automobiles that circulated among the numerous sleighs of the town before World War One somehow never seemed to get into the kind of hideous trouble that modern cars get into on a good New England white Christmas. Many strange forces had been involved in the building of the city. One is led to suppose that the arrangement of its snows—tidy drifts along the sidewalks and a smooth solid spread on the octangular wood blocks of the pavement—was arrived at by some unholy cooperation between the geometry of the streets and the physics of the snow clouds. Anyway, driving to school never took more than a quarter of an hour. Our house was No. 47 in Morskaya Street. Then came Prince Oginski’s (No. 45), then the Italian Embassy (No. 43), then the German Embassy (No. 41), and then the vast Maria Square, after which the house numbers continued to dwindle. There was a small public park on the north side of the square. In one of its linden trees an ear and a finger had been found one day—remnants of a terrorist whose hand had slipped while he was arranging a lethal parcel in his room on the other side of the square. Those same trees (a pattern of silver filigree in a mother-of-pearl mist out of which the bronze dome of St. Isaac’s arose in the background) had also seen children shot down at random from the branches into which they had climbed in a vain attempt to escape the mounted gendarmes who were quelling the First Revolution (1905–06). Quite a few little stories like these were attached to squares and streets in St. Petersburg. Upon reaching Nevski Avenue, one followed it for a long stretch, during which it was a pleasure to overtake with no effort some cloaked guardsman in his light sleigh drawn by a pair of black stallions snorting and speeding along under the bright blue netting that prevented lumps of hard snow from flying into the passenger’s face. A street on the left side with a lovely name—Karavannaya (the Street of Caravans)—took one past an unforgettable toyshop. Next came the Cinizelli Circus (famous for its wrestling tournaments). Finally, after crossing an ice-bound canal one drove up to the gates of Tenishev School in Mohovaya Street (the Street of Mosses).

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  5I remember the dreamy flow of punts and canoes on the Cam, the Hawaiian whine of phonographs slowly passing through sunshine and shade and a girl’s hand gently twirling this way and that the handle of her peacock-bright parasol as she reclined on the cushions of the punt which I dreamily navigated. The pink-coned chestnuts were in full fan; they made overlapping masses along the banks, they crowded the sky out of the river, and their special pattern of flowers and leaves produced a kind of en escalier effect, the angular figuration of some splendid green and old-rose tapestry. The air was as warm as in the Crimea, with the same sweet, fluffy smell of a certain flowering bush that I never could quite identify (I later caught whiffs of it in the gardens of the southern States). The three arches of an Italianate bridge, spanning the narrow stream, combined to form, with the help of their almost perfect, almost unrippled replicas in the water, three lovely ovals. In its turn, the water cast a patch of lacy light on the stone of the intrados under which one’s gliding craft passed. Now and then, shed by a blossoming tree, a petal would come down, down, down, and with the odd feeling of seeing something neither worshiper nor casual spectator ought to see, one would manage to glimpse its reflection which swiftly—more swiftly than the petal fell—rose to meet it; and, for the fraction of a second, one feared that the trick would not work, that the blessed oil would not catch fire, that the reflection might miss and the petal float away alone, but every time the delicate union did take place, with the magic precision of a poet’s word meeting halfway his, or a reader’s, recollection.

• From The Hours (1998)

  I thought a lamb pie, there’s that lamb left over, and you was so hard at work this morning we didn’t speak.” “A lamb pie sounds lovely,” Virginia says, though she must work to stay in character. She reminds herself: food is not sinister. Do not think of putrefaction or feces; do not think of the face in the mirror. “I’ve got the cress soup,” Nelly says. “And the pie. And then I thought just some of them yellow pears for pudding, unless you’d like something fancier.” Here it is, then: the challenge thrown down. Unless you’d like something fancier. So the subjugated Amazon stands on the riverbank wrapped in the fur of animals she has killed and skinned; so she drops a pear before the queen’s gold slippers and says, “Here is what I’ve brought. Unless you’d like something fancier.” “Pears will be fine,” Virginia says, though of course pears will not be fine at all; not now. If Virginia had performed properly and appeared in the kitchen that morning to order lunch, the pudding could be almost anything. It could be blancmange or a souffle´; it could, in fact, be pears. Virginia could easily have walked into the kitchen at eight o’clock and said, “Let’s not bother much about the pudding today, pears will suit us perfectly.” But instead she skulked straightaway to her study, fearful that her day’s writing (that fragile impulse, that egg balanced on a spoon) might dissolve before one of Nelly’s moods. Nelly knows this, of course she knows, and in offering pears she reminds Virginia that she, Nelly, is powerful; that she knows secrets; that queens who care more about solving puzzles in their chambers than they do about the welfare of their people must take whatever they get. Virginia picks up a curl of crust from the pastry board, molds it between her fingers. She says, “Do you remember that Vanessa and the children are coming at four?” “Yes, ma’am, I remember.” Nelly lifts the crust with elaborate competence and drapes it into the pie pan. The tender, practiced movement reminds Virginia of diapering a baby, and briefly she feels like a girl witnessing, in awe and fury, the impenetrable competence of a mother. She says, “There should be China tea, I think. And sugared ginger.” “China tea, ma’am? And ginger?” “We’ve not had Vanessa in more than a fortnight. I’d prefer to give her something better than yesterday’s scraps for tea.” “China tea and sugared ginger would mean London, they don’t sell that here.” “The trains run on the half hour, the buses on the hour. Aren’t there other things we need in London?” “Oh, there’s always things. It’s just, it’s half past eleven now, and luncheon is far from finished. Missus Bell comes at four.

• From Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family (1901)

  The little book on the ecclesiastical modes which he had printed was recommended for private study in two or three conservatories, and his fugues and chorale arrangements were played here and there where, to the glory of God, an organ was played. These compositions, as well as the fantasies he performed on Sundays in St. Mary's Church, were unassailable, flawless, imbued with the inexorable, imposing, moral-logical dignity of the strict sentence. Their nature was alien to all earthly beauty, and what they expressed touched no layman's purely human feeling. Technology, which had become an ascetic religion, triumphed victoriously in them, ability that had become an end in itself, elevated to absolute sanctity. Edmund Pfühl thought little of all goodwill and spoke of the beautiful melody without love, that's true. But no matter how enigmatic it may be, he was neither a dry man nor a hardened fellow. "Palestrina!" he said with a categorical and frightening expression. But immediately afterwards, while he played a series of archaistic tricks on the instrument, his face was all softness, remoteness and enthusiasm, and as if he saw the ultimate necessity of everything happening directly at work, his gaze rested in a sacred distance... This musician's gaze , which appears vague and empty because it dwells in the realm of a deeper, purer, more uncluttered and unconditional logic than that of our linguistic concepts and thoughts. His hands were large, soft, seemingly boneless, and covered with freckles - and soft and hollow, as if a morsel were digging in his gullet, was the voice with which he greeted Gerda Buddenbrook as she pushed back the curtains and entered from the living room: "Your servant, madam!" While he rose a little from the armchair and, with bowed head, respectfully accepted the hand she extended to him, he already sounded the fifths firmly and clearly with his left hand, whereupon Gerda took the Stradivarius and quickly, with a sure ear, tuned the strings . »Bach's G minor concerto, Herr Pfühl. I think the whole Adagio went rather poorly..." And the organist intoned. But no sooner had the first chords followed one another than it used to happen that slowly, very carefully, the door to the corridor was opened and little Johann crept silently cautiously across the carpet to an armchair. There he sat down, clasped his knees with both hands, kept still and listened: to the sounds as well as to what was being said. "Well, Hanno, have a bite of music?" asked Gerda in a pause, letting her close-set, shadowed eyes, in which the game had kindled a moist glow, slide over to him... Then he got up and, with a silent bow, shook hands with Herr Pfühl, who gently and lovingly stroked Hanno's light brown hair, which nestled so softly and gracefully around his forehead and temples.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  (3) The third wonderful sign is that, though our Lord’s Body be in many places, in many Hosts, in many fragments of the Host, yet it is not divided into parts, but remains whole and undivided. The Apostle asks if Christ be divided; as much as to say that, though He is in Heaven locally, in the hearts of the good spiritually, and in many places sacramentally, He is always one and whole. The explanation of this miracle is the unspeakable union of God and man, of flesh and the Word. For as the Word of God is everywhere, filling all Heaven and the whole universe, yet remaining undivided, so He granted power to His Body to be undivided; that is, the Body which He assumed of the Blessed Virgin and gave to His Apostles. As His Godhead is everywhere, it fills that Body and unites it with itself, and brings it about that as the Godhead is one, so the truth of the Body of Jesus is one Body in truth. St. Augustin says, ‘When we eat Christ we do not make Him into parts; but in the Holy Sacrament He is that which each one receives. Each one receives his own part in this Sacrament, but our Lord remains whole and undivided in Himself. He abideth whole and undivided in Heaven; He abideth whole and undivided in your heart. For He was altogether whole with the Father when He came to the Blessed Virgin; but when He filled her with Himself He did not go away from God. He came in the flesh, that men might feed upon Him; and yet, that He might feed the Angels, He abode wholly with His Father.’ We should therefore pray to our Lord that, though we may be bodily divided from one another, we may be always spiritually joined to Him in love. We should pray, too, that He will always so feed us sacramentally with Himself in this life that, with the Angels, we may hereafter feed for ever on the unveiled vision of His face. The Voice of the Holy Ghost (1) About His Body in a small Host; 1. The wisdom of the Holy Ghost, the worker; Having all power, overseeing all things, and containing all spirits, intelligible, pure, subtile. Wisd. 7:23.

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  On late afternoons, we got into the last row of seats in one of the two movie theatres (the Parisiana and the Piccadilly) on Nevski Avenue. The art was progressing. Sea waves were tinted a sickly blue and as they rode in and burst into foam against a black, remembered rock (Rocher de la Vierge, Biarritz—funny, I thought, to see again the beach of my cosmopolitan childhood), there was a special machine that imitated the sound of the surf, making a kind of washy swish that never quite managed to stop short with the scene but for three or four seconds accompanied the next feature—a brisk funeral, say, or shabby prisoners of war with their dapper captors. As often as not, the title of the main picture was a quotation from some popular poem or song and might be quite long-winded, such as The Chrysanthemums Blossom No More in the Garden or Her Heart Was a Toy in His Hands and Like a Toy It Got Broken. Female stars had low foreheads, magnificent eyebrows, lavishly shaded eyes. The favorite actor of the day was Mozzhuhin. One famous director had acquired in the Moscow countryside a white-pillared mansion (not unlike that of my uncle), and it appeared in all the pictures he made. Mozzhuhin would drive up to it in a smart sleigh and fix a steely eye on a light in one window while a celebrated little muscle twitched under the tight skin of his jaw. When museums and movie houses failed us and the night was young, we were reduced to exploring the wilderness of the world’s most gaunt and enigmatic city. Solitary street lamps were metamorphosed into sea creatures with prismatic spines by the icy moisture on our eyelashes. As we crossed the vast squares, various architectural phantoms arose with silent suddenness right before us. We felt a cold thrill, generally associated not with height but with depth—with an abyss opening at one’s feet—when great, monolithic pillars of polished granite (polished by slaves, repolished by the moon, and rotating smoothly in the polished vacuum of the night) zoomed above us to support the mysterious rotundities of St. Isaac’s cathedral. We stopped on the brink, as it were, of these perilous massifs of stone and metal, and with linked hands, in Lilliputian awe, craned our heads to watch new colossal visions rise in our way—the ten glossy-gray atlantes of a palace portico, or a giant vase of porphyry near the iron gate of a garden, or that enormous column with a black angel on its summit that obsessed, rather than adorned, the moon-flooded Palace Square, and went up and up, trying in vain to reach the subbase of Pushkin’s “Exegi monumentum.”

• From Blue Like Jazz (2003)

  And there it was: setting, conflict, climax, and resolution. As silly as it seemed, it met the requirements of the heart and it matched the facts of reality. It felt more than true, it felt meaningful. I was starting to believe I was a character in a greater story, which is why the elements of story made sense in the first place. The magical proposition of the gospel, once free from the clasps of fairy tale, was very adult to me, very gritty like something from Hemingway or Steinbeck, like something with copious amounts of sex and blood. Christian spirituality was not a children’s story. It wasn’t cute or neat. It was mystical and odd and clean, and it was reaching into dirty. There was wonder in it and enchantment. Perhaps, I thought, Christian spirituality really was the difference between illusion and magic. 4 Shifts Find a Penny SOME OF THE CHRISTIANS IN PORTLAND TALK about Reed College as if it is hades. They say the students at Reed are pagans, heathens in heart. Reed was recently selected by the Princeton Review as the college where students are most likely to ignore God. It is true. It is a godless place, known for existential experimentation of all sorts. There are no rules at Reed, and many of the students there have issues with authority. Reed students, however, are also brilliant. Loren Pope, former education editor for the New York Times, calls Reed “the most intellectual college in the country.” Reed receives more awards and fellowships, per capita, than any other American college and has entertained more than thirty Rhodes scholars. For a time, my friend Ross and I got together once each week to talk about life and the Old Testament. Ross used to teach Old Testament at a local seminary. Sometimes Ross would talk about his son, Michael, who was a student at Reed. During the year Ross and I were getting together to talk about the Old Testament, I had heard Michael was not doing well. Ross told me Michael had gotten his girlfriend pregnant and the girl was not allowing him to see the child. His son was pretty heartbroken about it. During his senior year at Reed, Ross’s son died by suicide. He jumped from a cliff on the Oregon coast. After it happened, Ross was in terrible pain. The next time I got together with him, about a month after the tragedy, Ross sat across from me with blue cheeks and moist eyes. It was as if everything sorrowful in the world was pressing on his chest. To this day, I cannot imagine any greater pain than losing a child. I never knew Michael, but everybody who did loved him. The students at Reed flooded his e-mail box with good-bye letters and notes of disbelief. Through the years after Michael’s death, even after Ross and I stopped meeting because I moved across town, Reed remained in the back of my mind.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  Still more striking are the cutaneous anæsthesias. The old witch-finders looking for the 'devil's seals' learned well the existence of those insensible patches on the skin of their victims, to which the minute physical examinations of recent medicine have but recently attracted attention again. They may be scattered anywhere, but are very apt to affect one side of the body. Not infrequently they affect an entire lateral half, from head to foot; and the insensible skin of, say, the left side will then be found separated from the naturally sensitive skin of the right by a perfectly sharp line of demarcation down the middle of the front and back. Sometimes, most remarkable of all, the entire skin, hands, feet, face, everything, and the mucous membranes, muscles and joints so far as they can be explored, become completely insensible without the other vital functions becoming gravely disturbed. These hysterical anæsthesias can be made to disappear more or less completely by various odd processes. It has been recently found that magnets, plates of metal, or the electrodes of a battery, placed against the skin, have this peculiar power. And when one side is relieved in this way, the anæsthesia is often found to have transferred itself to the opposite side, which until then was well. Whether these strange effects of magnets and metals be due to their direct physiological action, or to a prior effect on the patient's mind ('expectant attention' or 'suggestion') is still a mooted question. A still better awakener of sensibility is the hypnotic trance, into which many of these patients can be very easily placed, and in which their lost sensibility not infrequently becomes entirely restored. Such returns of sensibility succeed the times of insensibility and alternate with them. But Messrs. Pierre Janet[200] and A. Binet[201] have shown that during the times of anæsthesia, and coexisting with it, sensibility to the anæsthetic parts is also there, in the form of a secondary consciousness entirely cut off from the primary or normal one, but susceptible of being tapped and made to testify to its existence in various odd ways. Chief amongst these is what M. Janet calls 'the method of distraction .' These hysterics are apt to possess a very narrow field of attention, and to be unable to think of more than one thing at a time. When talking with any person they forget everything else. "When Lucie talked directly with any one," says M. Janet, "she ceased to be able to hear any other person. You may stand behind her, call her by name, shout abuse into her ears, without making her turn round; or place yourself before her, show her objects, touch her, etc., without attracting her notice. When finally she becomes aware of you, she thinks you have just come into the room again, and greets you accordingly. This singular forgetfulness makes her liable to tell all her secrets aloud, unrestrained by the presence of unsuitable auditors." Now M.