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 Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (1994)

  She was on metal crutches, and she was just plugging along, one tiny step after another, moving one crutch forward two or three inches, then moving a leg, then moving the other crutch two or three inches, then moving the other leg. It was just excruciating. Plus, I was starving to death. Inside I was going, Come on, come on, come on, swabbing at my forehead with anxiety, while she kept taking these two- or three-inch steps forward. What felt like four hours later, she crossed the finish line, and you could see that she was absolutely stoked, in a shy, girlish way. A tall African American man with no front teeth fell into step with me as I left the bleachers to go look for some lunch. He tugged on the sleeve of my sweater, and I looked up at him, and he handed me a Polaroid someone had taken of him and his friends that day. “Look at us,” he said. His speech was difficult to understand, thick and slow as a warped record. His two friends in the picture had Down’s syndrome. All three of them looked extremely pleased with themselves. I admired the picture and then handed it back to him. He stopped, so I stopped, too. He pointed to his own image. “That,” he said, “is one cool man.” And this was the image from which an article began forming, although I could not have told you exactly what the piece would end up being about. I just knew that something had started to emerge. After lunch I wandered over to the auditorium, where it turned out a men’s basketball game was in progress. The African American man with no front teeth was the star of the game. You could tell that he was because even though no one had made a basket yet, his teammates almost always passed him the ball. Even the people on the other team passed him the ball a lot. In lieu of any scoring, the men stampeded in slow motion up and down the court, dribbling the ball thunderously. I had never heard such a loud game. It was all sort of crazily beautiful. I imagined describing the game for my article and then for my students: the loudness, the joy. I kept replaying the scene of the girl on crutches making her way up the track to the finish line—and all of a sudden my article began to appear out of the grayish green murk. And I could see that it was about tragedy transformed over the years into joy. It was about the beauty of sheer effort. I could see it almost as clearly as I could the photograph of that one cool man and his two friends. The auditorium bleachers were packed.

• From The Canterbury Tales (2009)

  domain of Venus, was floating upon the walls of the temple. In its gardens could be seen the figure of Idleness, the keeper of love’s gates. Here was Narcissus, of ancient times, together with lecherous King Solomon. There were other martyrs to love. There was Hercules, betrayed by goddesses and mortal women. There was Turnus, who lost all for love. There was Croesus, wretched in captivity. On another wall were the two enchantresses Medea and Circe, holding out their potions of love. There is no force on earth that can withstand Venus - not wisdom, not wealth, not beauty, not cunning, not strength or endurance. All will fail. She rules the world. I have given you one or two examples of her mastery. There are a thousand more. She captured all these lovers in her net, and all they could do was let slip the word ‘alas’. The image of Venus, in this temple, was glorious to see. She was naked, floating on a limitless ocean of green; from the navel down she was environed by waves as glittering as any glass. She held a lute in her right hand, ready to play upon its strings, and on her head she wore a garland of fresh roses; their perfume rose into the air above her, where fluttered turtle-doves. Beside her stood her son, young winged Cupid; he was blind, as the legend tells us, but he bore a bow with arrows bright and keen. Why should I not also tell you about the frescoes within the temple of red Mars? The walls were all painted from top to bottom, just as if they were the interior apartments of his desolate temple in Thrace. It is a region of frost and snow, where the great god of war has his dominion. So on the wall was painted the image of a forest, forlorn and deserted, with black and knotted boughs and bare, ruined trees. Between these stumps and dead things there came a blast of wind, like a sigh from hell, as though a hideous tempest might whirl everything away. There on a bank, beside a hill, stood the temple of Mars omnipotent; it was wrought of burnished steel, its entrance long and narrow. Through this grim portal there rushed an endless wind that shook the hinges of the gates. An icy light from the north shone through the doors of this temple, for there were no windows in the edifice itself. The doors themselves were adamantine and eternal, their frames plated with sheets of thick iron. The pillars that supported the temple were as thick as barrels, cast out of cold glittering iron. There on the walls I saw all the dark imaginings of the warring world. I saw the plans and schemes of Felony. I saw cruel Anger, glowing like a coal in a furnace. I saw the thief. I saw pale Fear itself. I saw the smiler with the knife under his coat.

• From The Canterbury Tales (2009)

  She came into the alley where the cesspit had been dug, in which his little body was buried. Oh great God, whose praises are sung in the mouths of the innocent, how great is Thy power! This is what happened. This jewel of chastity, this emerald of innocence, this ruby of martyrdom, sat up in his filthy grave and, with his throat cut from ear to ear, began to sing. He sang ‘Alma Redemptoris’ in a clear strong voice that could be heard throughout the ghetto. All the Christian people in the neighbourhood gathered together to watch this miracle. They called for the magistrate at once, and he arrived very quickly. He heard the boy singing. He gave thanks to Christ, and to our Saviour’s heavenly Mother, before ordering that all the Jews of the quarter should be arrested. The child was borne on the shoulders of the crowd and carried in procession to the abbey; he sang all the way. His mother was carried, fainting, beside him. No one could persuade her to leave the side of her small son. She was another Rachel, inconsolable for loss of her child. The magistrate ordained that the Jews with knowledge of the murder should be put to death immediately in the most shameful and terrible way. He could not countenance their unholy crime. Some of them were torn apart by horses. Some were hanged, drawn and quartered. ‘Evil shall they have,’ he said, ‘that evil deserve.’ The little child lay upon a bier before the high altar, where a mass was said for the sake of his soul. After the service was over the abbot and the monks made haste to bury the child in consecrated ground. And, as they sprinkled holy water over the bier, the child once more rose up and sang ‘Alma Redemptoris’. The abbot was a saintly man. The monks were holy, too, or ought to have been. So the reverend father began to question the boy. ‘Dear child,’ he said to him, ‘I beseech you. I call upon you in the name of the blessed Trinity. Why are you singing? How can you sing, when your throat is cut from side to side?’ ‘My throat is cut as deep as my neck bone,’ the child replied. ‘In the course of nature, I would be long dead. But Jesus Christ has deemed it fit that His power should be known to the world. He has performed this deed in honour of His sacred Mother, the blessed Virgin. That is why I am able to sing “Alma Redemptoris”. ‘I have always loved the Virgin above all others. She is, in the light of my faulty understanding, the source of grace and mercy. She appeared before me

• From The Canterbury Tales (2009)

  Oh blessed Mary, the flower of all virgins, I call upon you first to guide my pen. You are the comfort of all sinners on the earth. Help me to tell the story of the maiden’s death, and how through her martyrdom she won eternal life in the mansions of heaven. Hail holy Mother of God, well of mercy, balm of sinful souls, in whom our Saviour chose to dwell for the sake of all mankind. Your humility has exalted you. You have so sanctified our nature that God Himself chose to take on flesh and blood. Within the blessed temple of your body the threefold God, the centre of eternal love and peace, took human form. All creation sends up unceasing prayer and praise to Father, Son and Holy Ghost. You are the spotless Virgin who carried in your womb the creator of the world. You are the spring of mercy, pity, peace and love. You are the source of virtue and of bliss. You come to the aid of those who pray to you, but out of your benignity you help others before they beseech you for comfort in distress. You go before, and heal their sorrow. So help me now, blessed maid, in the valley of the shadow of death. Think of the woman from Canaan, who told your blessed Son that even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from the tables of their masters. I know that I am a sinful and unworthy daughter of Eve, but please accept my faithful prayer. Faith is dead without good deeds. Allow me the time and place to perform works in your honour, and thus avoid the darkness of hell. Hail Mary, full of grace. I beg you to speak a word for me in the abode of bliss where there is eternal song. Daughter of Anna, blessed one, Mother of Christ, hosanna! Send your light to me in the darkness of the prison of this world; lift from me the burden and contagion of the flesh; save me from lust and all false affections. You are the haven of refuge, the solace and the comfort of all those in distress. Assist me now in my appointed task. I ask that all those who hear, and read, this story will forgive my lack of grace. I have no skill or subtlety in narration. I am relying upon the words of one who so revered the saint that he wrote down her story. It is to be found in the book known as The Golden Legend. Please pardon any of my faults for the sake of the holy martyr herself. Interpretacio nominis Cecilie quam ponit Frater Jacobus Januensis in Legenda

• From The Letter to the Hebrews (The New Daily Study Bible) (2002)

  It can mean what Christina Rossetti meant in the carol ‘In the bleak midwinter’ when she said: ‘Heaven cannot hold Him.’ Jesus is so great that even heaven is too small a place for him. No one ever stressed the sheer greatness of Jesus in the same way as the writer to the Hebrews . (2) Then he turns to the other side. No one was ever surer of Jesus’ complete identity with human beings. He went through everything that an individual has to go through and is like us in all things – except that he emerged from it all completely sinless. Before we turn to examine more closely the meaning of this, there is one thing we must note. The fact that Jesus was without sin means that he knew depths and tensions and assaults of temptation which we never can know. Far from his battle being easier, it was immeasurably harder. Why? For this reason – we fall to temptation long before the tempter has put out the whole of his power. We never know temptation at its fiercest because we fall long before that stage is reached. But Jesus was tempted far beyond anything we might experience; for in his case the tempter put everything he possessed into the attack. Think of this in terms of pain. There is a degree of pain which the human frame can stand – and, when that degree is passed, a person loses consciousness so that there are agonies of pain which are not realized. It is the same with temptation. Faced with temptation, we collapse; but Jesus went to our limit of temptation and far beyond it and still did not collapse. It is true to say that he was tempted in all things, just as we are; but it is also true to say that no one was tempted as he was. (3) This experience of Jesus had three effects. (a) It gave him the gift of sympathy . Here is something which we must understand but which we find very difficult. The Christian idea of God as a loving Father is interwoven into the very fabric of our mind and heart; but it was a new idea . To the Jews, the basic idea of God was that he was holy in the sense of being different . In no sense did he share our human experience – and he was in fact incapable of sharing it, simply because he was God . It was even more so with the Greeks. The Stoics, the highest Greek thinkers, said that the primary attribute of God was apatheia , by which they meant essential inability to feel anything at all. They argued that if people could feel sorrow or joy, it meant that others were able to influence them. If so, the other people must, at least for that moment, be greater than they.

• From The Canterbury Tales (2009)

  The Wife of Bath’s Tale Heere bigynneth the Tale of the Wyf of Bathe In the good old days, in the time of blessed King Arthur, this island was filled with spirits. It was a magical land. The queen of the fairies danced over green mead and meadow, with all her elves and pixies in attendance. That was what people believed, in any case. It must have been hundreds of years ago, by my reckoning. Now we live in the modern world. We no longer see fairies. Do you know why? They have been chased away by monks and friars who are forever purifying and sanctifying the different parts of the country. These clericals seek out woods and streams; they spread out over the land as thick as specks of dust in the sunbeam. They bless the halls, the chambers, the kitchens and the bedrooms; they bless cities, towns, boroughs, castles and high towers; they bless villages, barns, stables and dairies. That is why there are no more fairies. The friars now tread upon the elvish paths, morning and evening, saying their matins and their other holy offices; where there were once pixies there are now prayers. Of course a woman can feel much safer, knowing that there won’t be an evil spirit beneath a bush or tree. She may meet a friar, of course. But he will take only her chastity, not her soul. Once upon a time there was a knight at the court of King Arthur. One day this knight was riding by the riverside, without any company, when all at once he saw a young maid walking ahead of him. She was also alone. He took advantage of the situation, and raped her. She tried to fight him off, but she did not have the strength. This sinful deed caused such an uproar, and provoked such criticism at court, that the king ordered the knight to be executed. He would have been beheaded, according to the law, were it not for the fact that the queen and the other ladies of the court pleaded for his life. They cried, ‘Mercy! Mercy!’ so long and so loudly that the king eventually gave in and delegated the decision to his wife. She would decide whether the knight lived or died. The queen thanked her lord for his graciousness and, as soon as she found the opportunity, she called the knight to her. ‘Your fate is in the balance,’ she said to him. ‘You cannot be certain of your life. The day of your doom may be nearer than you think. I will save you, if you can tell me one thing. What is it that women most desire? Be careful! Think before you speak. That is the only way you will be able to rescue your neck from the executioner’s blade. If you cannot give me the answer today, I will give you permission to leave the court. Seek out the answer far and wide.

• From Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (1994)

  It turns out that the truth, or reality, is our home. Look at the two extremes. Maybe you find truth in Samuel Beckett—that we’re very much alone and it’s all scary and annoying and it smells like dirty feet and the most you can hope for is that periodically someone will offer a hand or a rag or a tiny word of encouragement just when you’re going under. The redemption in Beckett is so small: in the second act of Waiting for Godot , the barren dying twig of a tree has put out a leaf. Just one leaf. It’s not much; still Beckett didn’t commit suicide. He wrote. Or maybe truth as you understand it is 180 degrees away—that God is everywhere and we are all where we’re supposed to be and more will be revealed one day. Maybe you feel that Wordsworth was right, maybe Rumi, maybe Stephen Mitchell writing on Job: “The physical body is acknowledged as dust, the personal drama as delusion. It is as if the world we perceive through our senses, that whole gorgeous and terrible pageant, were the breath-thin surface of a bubble, and everything else, inside and outside, is pure radiance. Both suffering and joy come then like a brief reflection, and death like a pin.” But you can’t get to any of these truths by sitting in a field smiling beatifically, avoiding your anger and damage and grief. Your anger and damage and grief are the way to the truth. We don’t have much truth to express unless we have gone into those rooms and closets and woods and abysses that we were told not to go in to. When we have gone in and looked around for a long while, just breathing and finally taking it in—then we will be able to speak in our own voice and to stay in the present moment. And that moment is home. GivingAnnie Dillard has said that day by day you have to give the work before you all the best stuff you have, not saving up for later projects. If you give freely, there will always be more. This is a radical proposition that runs so contrary to human nature, or at least to my nature, that I personally keep trying to find loopholes in it. But it is only when I go ahead and decide to shoot my literary, creative wad on a daily basis that I get any sense of full presence, of being Zorba the Greek at the keyboard. Otherwise I am a wired little rodent squirreling things away, hoarding and worrying about supply.

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  But the nurse sent another note saying Lori couldn’t attend Emerson unless she wore glasses, and the school would pay for them, so Mom gave in. When the glasses were ready, we all went down to the optometrist. The lenses were so thick they made Lori’s eyes look big and bugged out, like fish eyes. She kept swiveling her head around and up and down. “What’s the matter?” I asked. Instead of answering, Lori ran outside. I followed her. She was standing in the parking lot, gazing in awe at the trees, the houses, and the office buildings behind them. “You see that tree over there?” she said, pointing at a sycamore about a hundred feet away. I nodded. “I can not only see that tree, I can see the individual leaves on it.” She looked at me triumphantly. “Can you see them?” I nodded. She didn’t seem to believe me. “The individual leaves? I mean, not just the branches but each little leaf?” I nodded. Lori looked at me and then burst into tears. On the way home, she kept seeing for the first time all these things that most everyone else had stopped noticing because they’d seen them every day. She read street signs and billboards aloud. She pointed out starlings perched on the telephone wires. We went into a bank and she stared up at the vaulted ceiling and described the octagonal patterns. At home, Lori insisted that I try on her glasses. They would blur my vision as much as they corrected hers, she said, so I’d be able to see things as she always had. I put on the glasses, and the world dissolved into fuzzy, blotchy shapes. I took a few steps and banged my shin on the coffee table, and then I realized why Lori didn’t like to go exploring as much as Brian and I did. She couldn’t see. Lori wanted Mom to try on the glasses, too. Mom slipped them on and, blinking, looked around the room. She studied one of her own paintings quietly, then handed the glasses back to Lori. “Did you see better?” I asked. “I wouldn’t say better,” Mom answered. “I’d say different.” “Maybe you should get a pair, Mom.” “I like the world just fine the way I see it,” she said. But Lori loved seeing the world clearly. She started compulsively drawing and painting all the wondrous things she was discovering, like the way each curved tile on Emerson’s roof cast its own curved shadow on the tile below, and the way the setting sun painted the underbellies of the clouds pink but left the piled-up tops purple. Not long after Lori got her glasses, she decided she wanted to be an artist, like Mom. • • • As soon as we’d settled into the house, Mom threw herself into her art career.

• From Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (1994)

  We like certain characters because they are good or decent—they internalize some decency in the world that makes them able to take a risk or make a sacrifice for someone else. They let us see that there is in fact some sort of moral compass still at work here, and that we, too, could travel by this compass if we so choose. In good fiction, we have one eye on the hero or the good guys and a fascinated eye on the bad guys, who may be a lot more interesting. The plot leads all of these people (and us) into dark woods where we find, against all odds, a woman or a man with the compass, and it still points true north. That’s the miracle, and it’s astonishing. This shaft of light, sometimes only a glimmer, both defines and thwarts the darkness. Think of a medieval morality play as the model. We love to hear that goodness will triumph over evil, that the fragile prize—humanity, life—will be saved. In formula fiction, evil wins out until the very end, and then against all odds goodness prevails and the hero gets to kiss the girl with the big bosoms. Life is somewhat more complicated than it was in the Middle Ages, but in many ways it is so much the same—violent, terrifying, full of chaos and plague, murderers and thieves. So the acknowledgment that in the midst of ourselves there is still a good part that hasn’t been corrupted and destroyed, that we can tap into and reclaim, is most reassuring. When a more or less ordinary character, someone who is both kind and self-serving, somehow finds that place within where he or she is still capable of courage and goodness, we get to see something true that we long for. This is what helps us connect with your characters and with your book. This is what makes it a book we will foist on our friends, a book we will remember, that will accompany us through life. But you have to believe in your position, or nothing will be driving your work. If you don’t believe in what you are saying, there is no point in your saying it. You might as well call it a day and go bowling. However, if you do care deeply about something—if, for instance, you are conservative in the great sense of the word, if you are someone who is trying to conserve the landscape and the natural world—then this belief will keep you going as you struggle to get your work done. To be a good writer, you not only have to write a great deal but you have to care. You do not have to have a complicated moral philosophy.

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  But the nurse sent another note saying Lori couldn’t attend Emerson unless she wore glasses, and the school would pay for them, so Mom gave in. When the glasses were ready, we all went down to the optometrist. The lenses were so thick they made Lori’s eyes look big and bugged out, like fish eyes. She kept swiveling her head around and up and down. “What’s the matter?” I asked. Instead of answering, Lori ran outside. I followed her. She was standing in the parking lot, gazing in awe at the trees, the houses, and the office buildings behind them. “You see that tree over there?” she said, pointing at a sycamore about a hundred feet away. I nodded. “I can not only see that tree, I can see the individual leaves on it.” She looked at me triumphantly. “Can you see them?” I nodded. She didn’t seem to believe me. “The individual leaves? I mean, not just the branches but each little leaf?” I nodded. Lori looked at me and then burst into tears. On the way home, she kept seeing for the first time all these things that most everyone else had stopped noticing because they’d seen them every day. She read street signs and billboards aloud. She pointed out starlings perched on the telephone wires. We went into a bank and she stared up at the vaulted ceiling and described the octagonal patterns. At home, Lori insisted that I try on her glasses. They would blur my vision as much as they corrected hers, she said, so I’d be able to see things as she always had. I put on the glasses, and the world dissolved into fuzzy, blotchy shapes. I took a few steps and banged my shin on the coffee table, and then I realized why Lori didn’t like to go exploring as much as Brian and I did. She couldn’t see. Lori wanted Mom to try on the glasses, too. Mom slipped them on and, blinking, looked around the room. She studied one of her own paintings quietly, then handed the glasses back to Lori. “Did you see better?” I asked. “I wouldn’t say better,” Mom answered. “I’d say different.” “Maybe you should get a pair, Mom.” “I like the world just fine the way I see it,” she said. But Lori loved seeing the world clearly. She started compulsively drawing and painting all the wondrous things she was discovering, like the way each curved tile on Emerson’s roof cast its own curved shadow on the tile below, and the way the setting sun painted the underbellies of the clouds pink but left the piled-up tops purple. Not long after Lori got her glasses, she decided she wanted to be an artist, like Mom. • • • As soon as we’d settled into the house, Mom threw herself into her art career.

• From Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (1994)

  Let someone do this with your manuscripts, help you get rid of the twists in the plot that are never going to work no matter how hard you try or how many passes you make at it. If I tell thirty students to write me a story about two married people who are considering divorce until something unforeseen happens, they’ll give me thirty wildly different stories, because they will have thirty different personal histories and sensibilities. One person is going to write an epiphany story, where the wife sees some wild geese pass in the night, lit by the moon, and suddenly decides to give her husband another chance. Another person is going to write about the moment when the husband, on his morning run, first comes to believe his marriage is worth saving and then is jogging home to share the good news with his wife when he gets hit by a student driver. Another will set the story in Hollywood, because he’s been reading Nathanael West recently, and it will be jewellike in its weirdness. Each writer will come up with his or her own description of what love and life are all about. Some of these descriptions will be cynical, some rueful, some full of hope. Some will be slow and interior, some will crackle with drama. Drama is the way of holding the reader’s attention. The basic formula for drama is setup, buildup, payoff—just like a joke. The setup tells us what the game is. The buildup is where you put in all the moves, the forward motion, where you get all the meat off the turkey. The payoff answers the question, Why are we here anyway? What is it that you’ve been trying to give? Drama must move forward and upward, or the seats on which the audience is sitting will become very hard and uncomfortable. So, in fact, will the audience. And eventually the audience will become impatient, disappointed, and unhappy. There must be movement. You need to be moving your characters forward, even if they only go slowly. Imagine moving them across a lily pond. If each lily pad is beautifully, carefully written, the reader will stay with you as you move toward the other side of the pond, needing only the barest of connections—such as rhythm, tone, or mood. Now, you may have to use effects and tricks to move things along and to help us remember who each character is—give him a cigar, give her piggy little alcoholic eyes—but if you’re faking it, it will show. If you knowingly fake something to get the plot to move forward—if, for instance, you have taken a character you don’t understand and given her feelings you don’t really feel because you want the plot to work—you probably won’t get away with it. The reader will stop trusting you and will possibly even become bitter and resentful.

• From Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (1994)

  A month or so later I had the opportunity to write a three-minute essay for a radio show on anything I wanted, and I asked Brice’s parents if it would feel like an invasion of privacy if I wrote about their son. They said no, just the opposite. So I sat down with my index cards, and I looked through the one-inch picture frame, and started writing: Sam saw his first dead person last month. Two friends of ours had a baby who died, and we went to spend the morning with them and the body of their son. He was five months old and weighed eight pounds, down from the ten he weighed at birth. He wore a white baptismal gown, and lay in a big basket on top of his crib, covered with flower petals from the waist down, white as a rose. There were flowers and shrines everywhere, statues of the Buddha and pictures of his Holiness the Dalai Lama (because his mother is a Buddhist) and of Jesus (because his father is a Christian). Brice looked like a small, concerned angel from someplace snowy. None of us, including Sam, could take our eyes off him. He looked like God . “You what?” my relatives asked when I mentioned this. “You took Sam to see what?” as in, What will you take him to see next? Brain surgery? I couldn’t explain why I thought it was right, except that I was taught to be terrified of sickness and death (especially early death and also, ironically, aging) and I believe this greatly compromised my life. Of course I want better for Sam . Lots of my friends have died of cancer and AIDS. But Brice was the first dead person Sam ever saw. Sam didn’t seem scared. Maybe it was because Brice looked so beautiful in death. He was an old pro at it: he had died during delivery and was resuscitated seven minutes later, and so was born a second time, but it turned out that he had been gone too long. His eyes were deep gray, and always open, and he never cried or, for that matter, smiled, or even blinked . Brice’s mother’s Buddhist friends called him Cloud Boy because he was suspended between heaven and earth, not quite here, not quite there. His father’s Christian friends did much of the cooking. Everyone held him and rocked him. Sam and I spent a lot of time reading to him, mostly Dr. Seuss . “He’s a good baby,” Sam assured Brice’s parents one day.

• From Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (1994)

  It is relatively easy to look tenderly and with recognition at a child, especially your own child and especially when he is being cute or funny, even if he is hurting your feelings. And it’s relatively easy to look tenderly at, say, a chipmunk and even to see it with some clarity, to see that real life is right there at your feet, or at least right there in that low branch, to recognize this living breathing animal with its own agenda, to hear its sharp, high-pitched chirps, and yet not get all caught up in its cuteness. I don’t want to sound too Cosmica Rama here, but in those moments, you see that you and the chipmunk are alike, are a part of a whole. I think we would see this more often if we didn’t have our conscious minds. The conscious mind seems to block that feeling of oneness so we can function efficiently, maneuver in the world a little bit better, get our taxes done on time. But it’s even possible to have this feeling when you see—really see—a police officer, when you look right at him and you see that he’s a living breathing person who like everyone else is suffering like a son of a bitch, and you don’t see him with a transparency over him of all the images of violence and chaos and danger that cops represent. You accept him as an equal. Obviously, it’s harder by far to look at yourself with this same sense of compassionate detachment. Practice helps. As with exercise, you may be sore the first few days, but then you will get a little bit better at it every day. I am learning slowly to bring my crazy pinball-machine mind back to this place of friendly detachment toward myself, so I can look out at the world and see all those other things with respect. Try looking at your mind as a wayward puppy that you are trying to paper train. You don’t drop-kick a puppy into the neighbor’s yard every time it piddles on the floor. You just keep bringing it back to the newspaper. So I keep trying gently to bring my mind back to what is really there to be seen, maybe to be seen and noted with a kind of reverence. Because if I don’t learn to do this, I think I’ll keep getting things wrong. I honestly think in order to be a writer, you have to learn to be reverent. If not, why are you writing? Why are you here? Let’s think of reverence as awe, as presence in and openness to the world.

• From St. Augustine's Confessions (2004)

  Scope: The 24 lectures of this course are devoted to an analysis of one of the world’s greatest and most beloved books, the Confessions of Saint Augustine of Hippo (354–430). The first four lectures provide several types of useful background for an intelligent reading of the Confessions. We deal with everything from Roman history to Christian controversies at the time of Augustine to the corpus of the writings of Augustine. The 24 th lecture looks forward from antiquity to the 21 st century, pointing out authors who have been moved and influenced by Augustine from his time to ours. By bringing the story to the present, we mean to suggest the ongoing usefulness of the book and how it may serve as a guide to us, despite the obvious differences between Augustine’s world and ours. All the other lectures are a continuous exegesis of and meditation on the 13 books that make up the Confessions. The bulk of the course examines the first nine books, in which Augustine tells his life story from his birth to the time of his conversion at age 31. For many modern readers, these nine books are the Confessions, because many ignore the four non-narrative books that follow the story of Augustine’s life. There is, indeed, almost nothing in the world’s literature that is more powerful than some of the stories that Augustine tells—his stealing of some pears, his struggle to understand God’s nature, the powerful moment of his conversion when he opens Paul’s letter to the Romans and reads words that lead him to God, and the death of his beloved mother, Monica. Yet we also devote four lectures to those books that tell no story. His reflection on memory in Book X explains how it is possible to write the story of his life. His meditation on time and eternity (Book XI) continues a theme incorporated into the narrative books. The last two books discuss approaches to Scripture and provide a powerful allegorical reading of the beginning of the Book of Genesis. Our goal for the course is to bring all those who hear us to the text itself. We hope that when people finish the course, they will run to the bookstore or library to obtain the Confessions, then commit to spend a good long time marveling at its beauty and applying its insights to themselves. ©2004 The Teaching Company. 1 Lecture One Augustine and the Confessions

• From Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (1994)

  One of these images might show up dimly in the lower right quadrant of the imaginary Polaroid you took; you didn’t even know at first that it was part of the landscape, and here it turns out to evoke something so deep in you that you can’t put your finger on it. Here is one sentence by Gary Snyder: Ripples on the surface of the water— were silver salmon passing under—different from the ripples caused by breezes Those words, less than twenty of them, make ripples clear and bright, distinct again. I have a tape of a Tibetan nun singing a mantra of compassion over and over for an hour, eight words over and over, and every line feels different, feels cared about, and experienced as she is singing. You never once have the sense that she is glancing down at her watch, thinking, “Jesus Christ, it’s only been fifteen minutes.” Forty-five minutes later she is still singing each line distinctly, word by word, until the last word is sung. Mostly things are not that way, that simple and pure, with so much focus given to each syllable of life as life sings itself. But that kind of attention is the prize. To be engrossed by something outside ourselves is a powerful antidote for the rational mind, the mind that so frequently has its head up its own ass—seeing things in such a narrow and darkly narcissistic way that it presents a colo-rectal theology, offering hope to no one. The Moral Point of ViewIf you find that you start a number of stories or pieces that you don’t ever bother finishing, that you lose interest or faith in them along the way, it may be that there is nothing at their center about which you care passionately. You need to put yourself at their center, you and what you believe to be true or right. The core, ethical concepts in which you most passionately believe are the language in which you are writing. These concepts probably feel like givens, like things no one ever had to make up, that have been true through all cultures and for all time. Telling these truths is your job. You have nothing else to tell us. But needless to say, you can’t tell them in a sentence or a paragraph; the truth doesn’t come out in bumper stickers. There may be a flickering moment of insight in a one-liner, in a sound bite, but everyday meat-and-potato truth is beyond our ability to capture in a few words. Your whole piece is the truth, not just one shining epigrammatic moment in it.

• From St. Augustine's Confessions (2004)

  2. “[S]ky and the earth and sea are readily available to me.” B. Whatever else we might want to say about memory, we need to see it as a great treasure house. III. Augustine discusses certain paradoxes of memory to explore differences between mind and body. A. We can remember pain without feeling the pain. B. We can remember things we have forgotten; that is, we can remember forgetfulness. C. What does it mean to remember the concept “forgetfulness”? D. He talks about what happens when we find something that we have lost. 1. When we find such an object, memory tells us that we have found what we were looking for. 2. We haven’t found the lost object unless we are able to recognize it. IV. Our memory also has the astonishing capacity to call up things that are not images, for example, things that we have learned through what Augustine calls “a liberal education.” A. He means, for example, what he has learned about rhetoric or philosophy. B. In this case, what the mind, through its faculty of memory, is calling up is not an image of something but the thing itself. C. The memory is able to store countless truths and laws of mathematics. D. We may learn of these truths when they are sounded out to us through language, but the sound is not the same as the truth the sounds convey. V. Augustine uses some of the paradoxes of memory as a kind of help in describing the search for God. A. We could not search for happiness unless, to some extent, we know what it is. B. Happiness must, to some degree, be a function of memory. 62 ©2004 The Teaching Company.

• From The Canterbury Tales (2009)

  You are a deaf man.’ I do not believe that a better priest could be found. He never expected deference or reverence from those he met, and he did not affect an over-refined conscience. He simply taught, and followed, the law of Christ and the gospel of the apostles. He was God’s darling. I was in such awe of him that I scarcely talked to him.

• From City of Night (1963)

  And youre inside a bar with long splintery wooden tables, names carved on them; uncomfortable benches without backs—the actual bar, small, winding toward a side door leading to the head outside. The walls are colored dark purple. It’s typically semidark; dimlights and thick clouds of smoke. From the ceiling hang three hideous monster faces and a facsimile of a giant snaring cobweb. Like an electric monster, a huge jukebox radiates fantastic colors. Jammed into the benches are the malehustlers, usually shirtless, coming here directly from the beach; with them an occasional toughfaced young girl. Scores are here, too; and masculine homosexuals cruising each other; queens in semibeachdrag; lesbians—femme and bull types; even a few well-dressed women, slumming with their well-dressed husbands or escorts—but, usually, knowingly slumming.... Junk is pushed here—usually soft stuff: marijuana, pills—but you can also score for hard. Ratty pushers scrutinize the crowd for teaheads, hypes.... Some of the faces are like slightly mellower representations of the set monster-masks dangling from the ceiling. In a small clearing surrounded by the tables and benches, a line of six young males danced the Madison: without touching—making it legal. With the man, I stand purposely toward the back of the bar, expecting that he wont want to stay. But already hes suggested we sit and have a drink. The people on the bench move closer to each other to make room for us, welcomingly (their bodies can touch more intimately). The Madison ends. The youngmen disperse into the bar. The jukebox is rocking, sounds monotonous but exciting: African-drumming, jungle-moaning; the insistent beat-beat: sexually, primitively: the sound of this world, I think, not the moody sounds of jazz—but that monotonous pounding of cannibalistic music wearing at your senses.... From somewhere, lured by the jungle sexsounds—a dark Latin queen rushed frenziedly onto the small clearing of the dancefloor: beach-hat with lurid dyed feathers, red-polka-dotted loose-sleeved blouse tied at her stomach, white knee-length beachpants glowing purplish in the light, a gaudy gold butterfly pinned to her hip, several bracelets—beaded, multicolored, on her long brown arms. Dark body gleaming, thin and sinewy, she twists, grinds—lips parted, teeth gnashed. In convulsed, savagely rhythmic movements, accompanied by guttural groans, she writhes the reptile body, contracts it suddenly—simulating a woman’s orgasm. She crumbles near us on the floor in a dark, sweating, panting, violently colored heap.... More than a dance, it has been a demand for Recognition of her mutilated sex. I look at the man, and his eyes are staring down at the table.

• From Going Clear (2013)

  A number of children from various alliances constantly raced through the house. Parsons threw parties that featured “women in diaphanous gowns,” as one visitor observed, who “would dance around a pot of fire, surrounded by coffins topped with candles.” Parsons turned the mansion into the headquarters of the Agapé Lodge, a branch of the Ordo Templi Orientis, a secret fraternal organization dedicated to witchcraft and sexual “magick,” based on the writings of the notorious British writer and provocateur Aleister Crowley, whose glowering countenance was captured in a portrait hanging in the stairwell. Despite the bizarre atmosphere that he cultivated, Parsons took his involvement in the OTO seriously, making brazen ethical claims for his movement—claims that would sound familiar when Scientology arose only a few years later. “The breakup of the home and family, the confusion in problems of morals and behavior, the frustration of the individual need for love, self-expression and freedom, and the immanence of the total destruction of western civilization all indicate the need for a basic reexamination and alteration of individual and social values,” Parsons writes in a brief manifesto. “Mature investigation on the part of philosophers and social scientists have [sic] indicated the existence of only one force of sufficient power to solve these problems and effect the necessary changes, and that is the force of a new religion.” TWENTY-ONE-YEAR-OLD Sara Elizabeth “Betty” Northrup, Parsons’s feisty mistress, was the younger half sister of his wife, who had run off with another man. Sara was tall, blond, buxom, and wild, often claiming to have lost her virginity at the age of ten. “Her chief interest in life is amusement,” one of the boarders observed. But she was also quick and intelligent and full of joy, delighting everyone around her. She had become involved with Parsons, who was ten years older, when she was fifteen. Her parents tolerated the relationship; in fact, her indulgent father helped bankroll the Parsonage, which Sara purchased jointly with Parsons while she was still a teenager. One evening Robert Heinlein appeared at the house, bringing along his friend L. Ron Hubbard, who was wearing dark glasses and carrying a silver-handled cane. “He was not only a writer but he was a captain of a ship that had been downed in the Pacific and he was weeks on a raft and had been blinded by the sun and his back had been broken,” Sara later recalled. “I believed everything he said.” A few months later, Hubbard moved in.

• From The Canterbury Tales (2009)

  It was a mile in circumference, the shape of a circle, environed with great walls and moats. The seats rose in tiers some sixty feet, and were so well arranged that everyone had a full view of the arena. On the eastern side there stood a gate of white marble, balanced in harmony with its counterpart on the western side. It was a dream of stone. Nothing of this style had ever been built so well or so quickly. Theseus enquired throughout his land and enlisted the services of every craftsman skilled in arithmetic or in geometry; he hired the best artists, and the most renowned sculptors, in the construction of this glorious theatre. And then, for the purposes of worship and ceremonial, he caused to be built an altar and a shrine to Venus in a room above the eastern gate. Above the western gate there was constructed a temple to Mars. They cost a wagon-load of gold. And then on the northern side, within a turret on the wall, Theseus built an exquisite temple to the goddess of chastity, Diana, elaborately wrought out of white alabaster and red coral. I had almost forgotten to describe to you the noble carvings and paintings that adorned these three temples, displaying all the most delicate skills of expression and action. On the walls of the temple of Venus, for example, were depicted images of the broken sleep and pitiful sighs of the servants of love; here also were pictures of the sacred tears and lamentations of lovers, together with the fiery strokes of their desires. Here were the oaths they passed. Here were the figures of Pleasure and of Hope, of Desire and of Foolishness, of Beauty and of Youth, of Mirth and of Costliness, of Luxury and Care and Jealousy. Jealousy wore a garland of golden marigolds, the token of cruelty and despair; on her hand was perched a cuckoo, bright bird of infidelity. On the walls, too, were painted frescoes of all the feasts, concerts, songs and dances devoted to love. Here were images of desire and display, all the circumstances of love that ever have been and ever will be celebrated. I cannot mention them all. Suffice it to say that the whole island of Cytherea, the dwelling and