Awe

Passages

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

Page 147 of 217 · 20 per page

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  I feel something pressing against my own chest, leaning in, a question wanting an answer. But there’s no time for contemplation: I have to get her back on the glove, or she’ll stuff her face and won’t fly tomorrow. It’s time for the ancient falconer’s trick to stop a hawk from feeling she’s been robbed of her prize. First I cut off one of the rabbit’s hind legs and hide it behind my back, then lay handfuls of grass in a stack by my side. Then I hold out the leg in my glove, throwing the grass over the rabbit to hide it. The hawk looks down, sees grass at her feet, looks up, sees food, leaps straight to my fist and eats. And as I tuck the rabbit into the back pocket of my waistcoat the noise begins. First it is a low, dopplering growl. It dies away, returns. Engines. Big engines, growing louder. The note climbs to a vast marine roar – and a Second World War bomber, a Flying Fortress, emerges from behind the trees. Woodpigeons spray from the tops of the oaks in terror. Pheasants crow, shadows flicker, the remaining rabbits bolt to their holes. I feel an urgent need to hide. But Mabel gives the monstrous thing a single, indifferent glance and continues to eat. I’m astonished. How can the hawk not see it as a threat, this vast, impossibly heavy whale of a plane? She comes right overhead, absurdly low; she is painted a deep USAAF wartime green, and as she banks through the sun-furred air I see the bomb bay and the gun turret on her belly. The size of her, the deep thrumming drone of her four Pratt & Whitney engines, the sense that she is alive, an animal – all these things hold me transfixed. I sit back on my heels and stare, my fear forgotten. And two lines fall into my head. Consider this, and in our time As the hawk sees it, or the helmeted airman: The poet W. H. Auden had written those lines in 1930, and I hadn’t thought of them for years. To have the commanding view of the hawk and airman: to be lifted free from the messy realities of human life to a prospect of height and power from which one can observe the world below. To have safe vantage, from which death may descend. Safety.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  We’d come to a different place today, a field on the other side of town overrun with rabbits. It took less than a minute for Mabel to grab one deep in a drift of nettles. Hawks don’t retrieve their prey: you must run to them, let them eat a while, then take them back onto your fist for a reward of food. I ran, bent down, parted the stinging stems, picked the rabbit up with the hawk, and put them both down on the grass. Now the rabbit is dead, its pelt bunched between the hawk’s gripping talons, but blood upwells as she breaks into its chest, and I cannot stop watching it, this horrible, mesmerising, seeping claret filling up the space, growing jelly-like as it meets the air, like a thing alive. It was a thing alive. I want to sit and think. This is a great mystery. I feel something pressing against my own chest, leaning in, a question wanting an answer. But there’s no time for contemplation: I have to get her back on the glove, or she’ll stuff her face and won’t fly tomorrow. It’s time for the ancient falconer’s trick to stop a hawk from feeling she’s been robbed of her prize. First I cut off one of the rabbit’s hind legs and hide it behind my back, then lay handfuls of grass in a stack by my side. Then I hold out the leg in my glove, throwing the grass over the rabbit to hide it. The hawk looks down, sees grass at her feet, looks up, sees food, leaps straight to my fist and eats. And as I tuck the rabbit into the back pocket of my waistcoat the noise begins. First it is a low, dopplering growl. It dies away, returns. Engines. Big engines, growing louder. The note climbs to a vast marine roar – and a Second World War bomber, a Flying Fortress, emerges from behind the trees. Woodpigeons spray from the tops of the oaks in terror. Pheasants crow, shadows flicker, the remaining rabbits bolt to their holes. I feel an urgent need to hide. But Mabel gives the monstrous thing a single, indifferent glance and continues to eat. I’m astonished. How can the hawk not see it as a threat, this vast, impossibly heavy whale of a plane? She comes right overhead, absurdly low; she is painted a deep USAAF wartime green, and as she banks through the sun-furred air I see the bomb bay and the gun turret on her belly. The size of her, the deep thrumming drone of her four Pratt & Whitney engines, the sense that she is alive, an animal – all these things hold me transfixed. I sit back on my heels and stare, my fear forgotten. And two lines fall into my head. Consider this, and in our time As the hawk sees it, or the helmeted airman:

• From Educated (2018)

  A stone gate barred the entrance to Trinity College. Cut into the gate was a small wooden door. I stepped through it. A porter in a black overcoat and bowler hat showed me around the college, leading me through Great Court, the largest of the courtyards. We walked through a stone passageway and into a covered corridor whose stone was the color of ripe wheat. “This is the north cloister,” the porter said. “It is here that Newton stomped his foot to measure the echo, calculating the speed of sound for the first time.” We returned to the Great Gate. My room was directly opposite it, up three flights of stairs. After the porter left I stood, bookended by my suitcases, and stared out my little window at the mythic stone gate and its otherworldly battlements. Cambridge was just as I remembered: ancient, beautiful. I was different. I was not a visitor, not a guest. I was a member of the university. My name was painted on the door. According to the paperwork, I belonged here. I dressed in dark colors for my first lecture, hoping I wouldn’t stand out, but even so I didn’t think I looked like the other students. I certainly didn’t sound like them, and not just because they were British. Their

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  He sits in the torn-leather armchair in the room with the peeling walls. The plangent sound of hawk-bells drifts through the open window each time the falcons bate from their blocks on the lawn. Cully is dead: she tangled herself in strawberry netting in the cottage barn and hung herself, but he has trained two merlins since, and now he has two peregrines: a bad-tempered falcon called Cressida, and a nervous young tiercel as yet unnamed. For the last half-hour he has been recording the delicate steps of their training in a vellum-bound journal. He pauses. A thought has struck him, borne in with the sound of bells. Perhaps he might write the book about hawks after all. He had tried once, and failed. Perhaps he would try again. It would not be the usual naturalist’s book about hawks. That would be bogus, he thinks. This would be real literature. He begins to sketch out why: The initiation ceremonies, the voodoo hut of the falconer, the noises in the magic dark, the necromantic knots. Knots were probably the earliest spells. The two hawks consider themselves spell-bound to their blocks by my arts . . . I am convinced that if nobody had ever invented knots, nobody would ever have imagined magicians. As a falconer he would be in the book, along with all the other parts he would play in the hawk’s education. First he will be Torquemada, the inquisitor. Then the ‘witch doctor of the ceremonies of puberty’ – and the terrifying presence that will test them, their ‘devil-god of the cave’. And then he will be Prospero, of course, the masterly magician who has led them through all the ceremonies and ordeals of their hawkish adolescence, for White thinks he knows what freedom is now, and what growing up means. He is party to the magic that is the binding of the hawk to the magician’s will, and knows that at the end of the book must come the deepest mystery of all. The hawk must escape. Of course it must; for the hawk would have to ‘unwind the charm, to escape, to cock his snook at the nigromant – only to find that there was a charm within the charm, that the wizard was a holy man after all, quite happy about the escape himself’. He finishes the paragraph and finds himself greatly moved. There he would stand, small and inverted, looking up from the scorned earth, his planetarium of a cloak blowing in the wind, his wand outwitted, his white beard streaming. And Falco? A triumph, a hatred and a gratitude. No logic or moral. Only the magic for its own sake, weaving and unwoven. 28 Winter histories

• From Educated (2018)

  The first time I saw King’s College, Cambridge, I didn’t think I was dreaming, but only because my imagination had never produced anything so grand. My eyes settled on a clock tower with stone carvings. I was led to the tower, then we passed through it and into the college. There was a lake of perfectly clipped grass and, across the lake, an ivory-tinted building I vaguely recognized as Greco-Roman. But it was the Gothic chapel, three hundred feet long and a hundred feet high, a stone mountain, that dominated the scene. I was taken past the chapel and into another courtyard, then up a spiral staircase. A door was opened, and I was told that this was my room. I was left to make myself comfortable. The kindly man who’d given me this instruction did not realize how impossible it was. Breakfast the next morning was served in a great hall. It was like eating in a church, the ceiling was cavernous, and I felt under scrutiny, as if the hall knew I was there and I shouldn’t be. I’d chosen a long table full of other students from BYU. The women were talking about the clothes they had brought. Marianne had gone shopping when she learned she’d been accepted to the program. “You need different pieces for Europe,” she said. Heather agreed. Her grandmother had paid for her plane ticket, so

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  White air and aching bones. Another migraine. I swallow a dose of codeine and paracetamol. My head still hurts. There’s a brumous, pewter light outside, as if someone had stuck tracing paper against the glass. I go back to bed. Must fly goshawk , I think when I wake. Must fly goshawk . But I’m finding it so hard to move that secretly I’m hoping the hawk’s weight is wrong, or the weather is. I have no excuse to stay in bed this time: both hawk and weather are fine. We drive into a strange, windless, sunny afternoon that makes everything resemble hollow metal models painted with enamel. Clouds, swags of leaves, houses. All in the same plane, like a stage-set, and riveted together. The air smells of woodsmoke. I am inexpressibly tired. I park the car on the grassy verge near the field, change Mabel’s jesses, unhood her, and she snaps into yarak in an instant. She knows where she is. And here we are. And there are the rabbits. She leaves the fist. As soon as she does the pain in my head recedes and my exhaustion fades. Her flight is getting much more stylish. I am still astonished by how fast she is. When I watch her scaly, foreshortened, hunched flight away from me towards a distant target, I swear that the world around her slows. She seems to be moving at precisely the right speed, and everything around her – rabbits running, leaves falling, a pigeon flying overhead, all these things slow down as if they’re moving through liquid. I am becoming fascinated by her quality of attention. I’m starting to believe in what Barry Lopez has called ‘the conversation of death’, something he saw in the exchange of glances between caribou and hunting wolves, a wordless negotiation that ends up with them working out whether they will become hunter and hunted, or passers-by. I am wondering whether my goshawk does this. Mabel back on the fist, I walk towards three rabbits. They are sitting on the grass, right there, no more than ten yards away . Closer . Five yards! Mabel is in raging yarak, but is ignoring them. She’s staring with interest at the other end of the field. Something out there, a good six or seven seconds’ flight away. ‘Mabel!’ I murmur . ‘Look!’ And I try to angle my hand so her head turns towards the rabbits underneath her nose. One of them hops about. It is just there . She still ignores it. I don’t understand. She cranes her neck to the other end of the field, again. And then my fist is empty. She’s gone, flying to the far side of the field, very low, very fast, dancing about the tops of the short nettles, missing one rabbit, making split-second calculations and attention-switches, then crashing down on another .

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  I ran, bent down, parted the stinging stems, picked the rabbit up with the hawk, and put them both down on the grass. Now the rabbit is dead, its pelt bunched between the hawk’s gripping talons, but blood upwells as she breaks into its chest, and I cannot stop watching it, this horrible, mesmerising, seeping claret filling up the space, growing jelly-like as it meets the air, like a thing alive. It was a thing alive. I want to sit and think. This is a great mystery. I feel something pressing against my own chest , leaning in , a question wanting an answer . But there’s no time for contemplation: I have to get her back on the glove, or she’ll stuff her face and won’t fly tomorrow. It’s time for the ancient falconer’s trick to stop a hawk from feeling she’s been robbed of her prize. First I cut off one of the rabbit’s hind legs and hide it behind my back, then lay handfuls of grass in a stack by my side. Then I hold out the leg in my glove, throwing the grass over the rabbit to hide it. The hawk looks down, sees grass at her feet, looks up, sees food, leaps straight to my fist and eats. And as I tuck the rabbit into the back pocket of my waistcoat the noise begins. First it is a low, dopplering growl. It dies away , returns. Engines. Big engines, growing louder . The note climbs to a vast marine roar – and a Second World War bomber , a Flying Fortress, emerges from behind the trees. Woodpigeons spray from the tops of the oaks in terror . Pheasants crow , shadows flicker , the remaining rabbits bolt to their holes. I feel an urgent need to hide. But Mabel gives the monstrous thing a single, indifferent glance and continues to eat. I’m astonished. How can the hawk not see it as a threat, this vast, impossibly heavy whale of a plane? She comes right overhead, absurdly low; she is painted a deep USAAF wartime green, and as she banks through the sun-furred air I see the bomb bay and the gun turret on her belly. The size of her, the deep thrumming drone of her four Pratt & Whitney engines, the sense that she is alive, an animal – all these things hold me transfixed. I sit back on my heels and stare, my fear forgotten. And two lines fall into my head. Consider this, and in our time As the hawk sees it, or the helmeted airman: The poet W. H. Auden had written those lines in 1930, and I hadn’t thought of them for years. To have the commanding view of the hawk and airman: to be lifted free from the messy realities of human life to a prospect of height and power from which one can observe the world below. To have safe vantage, from which death may descend.

• From Educated (2018)

  Dad worries that the Government will force us to go but it can’t, because it doesn’t know about us. Four of my parents’ seven children don’t have birth certificates. We have no medical records because we were born at home and have never seen a doctor or nurse. * We have no school records because we’ve never set foot in a classroom. When I am nine, I will be issued a Delayed Certificate of Birth, but at this moment, according to the state of Idaho and the federal government, I do not exist. Of course I did exist. I had grown up preparing for the Days of Abomination, watching for the sun to darken, for the moon to drip as if with blood. I spent my summers bottling peaches and my winters rotating supplies. When the World of Men failed, my family would continue on, unaffected. I had been educated in the rhythms of the mountain, rhythms in which change was never fundamental, only cyclical. The same sun appeared each morning, swept over the valley and dropped behind the peak. The snows that fell in winter always melted in the spring. Our lives were a cycle—the cycle of the day, the cycle of the seasons—circles of perpetual change that, when complete, meant nothing had changed at all. I believed my family was a part of this immortal pattern, that we were, in some sense, eternal. But eternity belonged only to the mountain. There’s a story my father used to tell about the peak. She was a grand old thing, a cathedral of a mountain. The range had other mountains, taller, more imposing, but Buck’s Peak was the most finely crafted. Its base spanned a mile, its dark form swelling out of the earth and rising into a flawless spire. From a distance, you could see the impression of a woman’s body on the mountain face: her legs formed of huge ravines, her hair a spray of pines fanning over the northern ridge. Her stance was commanding, one leg thrust forward in a powerful movement, more stride than step. My father called her the Indian Princess. She emerged each year when the snows began to melt, facing south, watching the buffalo return to the valley. Dad said the nomadic Indians had watched for her appearance as a sign of spring, a signal the mountain was thawing, winter was over, and it was time to come home. All my father’s stories were about our mountain, our valley, our jagged little patch of Idaho. He never told me what to do if I left the mountain, if I crossed oceans and continents and found myself in strange terrain, where I could no longer search the horizon for the Princess. He never told me how I’d know when it was time to come home. * Except for my sister Audrey, who broke both an arm and a leg when she was young. She was taken to get a cast. PART ONE

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  White’s hawk was taken from the wild. No one bred goshawks in captivity in the 1930s: there was no need to try. There were a hundred thousand wild gosses out there in European forests, and no import restrictions to speak of. Like nearly all falconers’ goshawks back then, White’s had come from a nest in Germany. ‘A bundle of precipitous sticks and some white droppings’ was how he imagined his hawk’s birthplace: he’d never seen a goshawk nest. But you can see one, and there’s no need to strike out into the forest to do so. There’s live feed of goshawk nests, now, on the internet. One click, and you’re given an up-close and personal view of the family life of this most secretive of hawks. There, in a four-inch box in low-resolution glitter, is a square of English woodland. The hissing you hear from your computer speakers is a digitised amalgam of leaves, wind and chaffinch song. You see the nest itself, a bulky concatenation of sticks pushed hard up against conifer bark and lined with sprays of green leaves. On the webcam the male goshawk appears on the nest. It’s so sudden, and he’s so brightly shiny white and silver-grey, that it’s like watching a jumping salmon. There’s something about the combination of his rapidity and the lag of the compressed image that plays tricks with your perception: you carry an impression of the bird as you watch it, and the living bird’s movements palimpsest over the impression the bird has made until he fairly glows with substance. Goshawk substance. And he bows his head and calls. Chew-chew-chew-chew-chew-chew. Black mouth, soft smoke in the cold April morning. And then the female arrives. She’s huge. She lands on the edge of the nest and it shakes. Her gnarly feet make the male’s look tiny. She is like an ocean liner. A Cunard goshawk. And on each leg, as she turns, you can see the leather anklets she wears. This bird was bred in captivity somewhere, in an aviary just like the one in Northern Ireland that bred mine. She was flown by a nameless falconer, was lost, and now here she is, settling on four pale eggs, being watched on computer screens as the very type of the wild.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  Night falls. The Wart sleeps under a tree, and the next morning he comes across a high-gabled stone cottage in a clearing in the wood. Outside it, drawing water from a well, is a tall elderly man with spectacles and a long white beard, wearing a gown splashed with mutes and embroidered with stars and leaves and mystical signs. It is his teacher, Merlyn the magician, and when the Wart walks into his cottage he finds it is a treasury of wonderful things: thousands of books, stuffed birds, live grass snakes in an aquarium, baby badgers, an owl called Archimedes. There is Venetian glass, a set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, paint-boxes, fossils, a bottle of Mastic varnish, purse-nets and rabbit-wires, a rod-box, salmon flies, and a fox’s mask mounted on the wall. Nearly all of these things were in White’s cottage as he wrote. The book was White’s ‘Kingdom of Grammerie’, wrote Sylvia Townsend Warner, ‘where there was room and redress for anything he liked to put in it’. But there is another way of reading this scene, one far less mundane than a writer’s amusement at putting in his book the things around him as he writes: it is that Merlyn’s cottage in the woods is his own. On White’s shelves were a whole clutch of books on human psychology. He’d read them, underlined passages, made notes in the margins on the pathology of sexual deviance. In Alfred Adler’s Individual Psychology he’d found a whole chapter on homosexuality. It held that the attitude of homosexuals was ‘that of people desirous of interfering with the flight of time’. Adler thought homosexuals were irresponsible because they refused to develop into heterosexual adulthood. But interfering with the flight of time? Words once read run deep.

• From Educated (2018)

  banging on a sheet of metal with a hammer. In my imagination the doctor used the same corrugated sheets of tin that Dad used to roof hay sheds. But that was only sometimes. Usually I saw something else. Proof that my ancestors walked that peak, watching and waiting, angels at their command. — I DON’T KNOW WHY Dad was alone on the mountain that day. The car crusher was coming. I suppose he wanted to remove that last fuel tank, but I can’t imagine what possessed him to light his torch without first draining the fuel. I don’t know how far he got, how many of the iron belts he managed to sever, before a spark from the torch made it into the tank. But I know Dad was standing next to the car, his body pressed against the frame, when the tank exploded. He was wearing a long-sleeved shirt, leather gloves and a welding shield. His face and fingers took the brunt of the blast. The heat from the explosion melted through the shield as if it were a plastic spoon. The lower half of his face liquefied: the fire consumed plastic, then skin, then muscle. The same process was repeated with his fingers—the leather gloves were no match for the inferno that passed over and through them —then tongues of flame licked across his shoulders and chest. When he crawled away from the flaming wreckage, I imagine he looked more like a corpse than a living man. It is unfathomable to me that he was able to move, let alone drag himself a quarter mile through fields and over ditches. If ever a man needed angels, it was that man. But against all reason he did it, and—as his father had decades before—huddled outside his wife’s door, unable to knock. My cousin Kylie was working for my mother that day, filling vials of essential oil. A few other women worked nearby, weighing dried leaves or straining tinctures. Kylie heard a soft tap on the back door, as if someone was bumping it with their elbow. She opened it but has no memory of what was on the other side. “I’ve blocked it out,” she would later tell me. “I can’t remember what I saw. I only remember what I thought, which was, He has no skin.”

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

  Nor have any forensic or mercantile basilicas, to our knowledge, been transformed into Christian churches.1173 But in external architectural form there is without question an affinity, and there appears no reason why the church should not have employed this classic form. The basilicas,1174 or royal halls, were public judicial and mercantile buildings, of simple, but beautiful structure, in the form of a long rectangle, consisting of a main hall, or main nave, two, often four, side naves,1175 which were separated by colonnades from the central space, and were somewhat lower. Here the people assembled for business and amusement. At the end of the hall opposite the entrance, stood a semicircular, somewhat elevated niche (apsis, tribune), arched over with a half-dome, where were the seats of the judges and advocates, and where judicial business was transacted. Under the floor of the tribunal was sometimes a cellar-like place of confinement for accused criminals. In the history of architecture, too, there is a Nemesis. As the cross became changed from a sign of weakness to a sign of honor and victory, so must the basilica in which Christ and innumerable martyrs were condemned to death, become a place for the worship of the crucified One. The judicial tribune became the altar; the seat of the praetor behind it became the bishop’s chair; the benches of the jurymen became the seats of presbyters; the hall of business and trade became a place of devotion for the faithful people; the subterranean jail became a crypt or burial place, the superterrene birth-place, of a Christian martyr. To these were added other changes, especially the introduction of a cross-nave between the apse and the main nave, giving to the basilica the symbolical form of the once despised, but now glorious cross, and forming, so to speak, a recumbent crucifix. The cross with equal arms is called the Greek; that with unequal arms, in which the transept is shorter than the main nave from the entrance to the altar, the Latin. Towers, which express the heavenward spirit of the Christian religion, were not introduced till the ninth century, and were then built primarily for bells. This style found rapid acceptance in the course of the fourth century with East and West; most of all in Rome, where a considerable number of basilicas, some in their ancient venerable simplicity, some with later alterations, are still preserved. The church of St. Maria Maggiore on the Esquiline hill affords the best view of an ancient basilica; the oldest principal church of Rome—S. Giovanni in Laterano (so named from the Roman patrician family of the Laterans), dedicated to the Evangelist John and to John the Baptist; the church of St. Paul, outside the city on the way to Ostia, which was burnt in 1823, but afterwards rebuilt splendidly in the same style, and consecrated by the pope in December, 1854; also S. Clemente, S. Agnese, and S. Lorenzo, outside the walls—are examples. The old church of St.

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

  When he ate the noxious apple, whose reward was death and hell, Noted then this wood, the ruin of the ancient wood to quell. "For the work of our Salvation needs would have his order so, And the multiform deceiver’s art by art would overthrow; And from thence would bring the medicine whence the venom of the foe. "Wherefore, when the sacred fulness of the appointed time was come, This world’s Maker left His Father, left His bright and heavenly home, And proceeded, God Incarnate, of the Virgin’s holy womb. "Weeps the Infant in the manger that in Bethlehem’s stable stands; And His limbs the Virgin Mother doth compose in swaddling bands, Meetly thus in linen folding of her God the feet and hands. "Thirty years among us dwelling, His appointed time fulfilled, Born for this, He meets His Passion, for that this He freely willed: On the Cross the Lamb is lifted, where His life-blood shall be spilled. "He endured the shame and spitting, vinegar, and nails, and reed; As His blessed side is opened, water thence and blood proceed: Earth, and sky, and stars, and ocean, by that flood are cleansed indeed. "Faithful Cross! above all other, one and only noble Tree! None in foliage, none in blossom, none in fruit thy peers may be; Sweetest wood and sweetest iron, sweetest weight is hung on thee!1279 "Bend thy boughs, O Tree of Glory! thy relaxing sinews bend; For awhile the ancient rigor, that thy birth bestowed, suspend; And the King of heavenly beauty on thy bosom gently tend. "Thou alone wast counted worthy this world’s ransom to uphold; For a shipwreck’d race preparing harbor, like the Ark of old: With the sacred blood anointed from the wounded Lamb that roll’d. "Laud and honor to the Father, laud and honor to the Son, Laud and honor to the Spirit, ever Three and ever One: Consubstantial, co-eternal, while unending ages run. Far less important as a poet is Gregory I. (590–604), the last of the fathers and the first of the mediaeval popes. Many hymns of doubtful origin have been ascribed to him and received into the Breviary. The best is his Sunday hymn: "Primo dierum omnium."1280 The hymns are the fairest flowers of the poetry of the ancient church. But besides them many epic and didactic poems arose, especially in Gaul and Spain, which counteracted the invading flood of barbarism, and contributed to preserve a connection with the treasures of the classic culture. Juvencus, a Spanish presbyter under Constantine, composed the first Christian epic, a Gospel history in four books (3,226 lines), on the model of Virgil, but as to poetic merit never rising above mediocrity. Far superior to him is Prudentius († 405); he wrote, besides the hymns already mentioned, several didactic, epic, and polemic poems. St. Pontius Paulinus, bishop of Nola († 431), who was led by the poet Ausonius to the mysteries of the Muses,1281 and a friend of Augustine and Jerome, is the author of some thirty poems full of devout spirit; the best are those on the festival of S. Felix, his patron. Prosper Aquitanus († 460), layman, and friend of Augustine, wrote a didactic poem against the Pelagians, and several epigrams; Avitus, bishop of Vienne († 523), an epic on the creation and the origin of evil; Arator, a court official under Justinian, afterwards a sub-deacon of the Roman church (about 544), a paraphrase, in heroic verse, of the Acts of the Apostles, in two books of about 1,800 lines. Claudianus Mamertus,1282 Benedictus Paulinus, Elpidius, Orontius, and Draconti CHAPTER IX.

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

  Such a combination and succession of men of genius in the fine arts as Italy produced, in a period extending over three centuries, has nowhere else been known. They divided their triumphs between Florence and Rome, but imparted their magic touch to many other Italian cities, including Venice, which had remained cold to the literary movement. Here again Rome drew upon Florence for painters such as Giotto and Fra Angelico, and for sculptors such as Ghiberti, Donatello, Brunelleschi and Michelangelo. While the Italy of the 15th century—or the quattrocento, as the Italians call it—was giving expression to her own artistic conceptions in color and marble and churchly dome, masterpieces of ancient sculpture, restless, in the graves where for centuries they had had rude sepulture, came forth to excite the admiring astonishment of a new generation. What the age of Nicolas V. was for the discovery of manuscripts, the age of Julius II. was for the discovery of classic Greek statuary. The extensive villa of the Emperor Hadrian at Tivoli, which extended over several miles and embraced a theatre, lyceum, temple, basilica, library, and race-course, alone furnished immense treasures of art. Others were found in the bed of the Tiber or brought from Greece or taken from the Roman baths, where their worth had not been discerned. In Alexander VI.’s pontificate the Apollo Belvedere was found; under Julius II. the torso of Hercules, the Laocoön group1025 and the Vatican Venus. The Greek ideals of human beauty were again revealed and kindled an enthusiasm for similar achievements. Petrarca’s collections were repeated. Paul II. deposited his rich store of antiquities in his palace of San Marco. In Florence, Lorenzo de’ Medici was active in securing pieces of ancient art. The museum on the Capitoline Hill in Rome, where Nicolas V. seems to have restored the entire palace of the senate, dates from 1471, one of its earliest treasures being the statue of Marcus Aurelius. The Vatican museum was the creation of Julius II. To these museums and the museums in Florence were added the galleries of private collectors. In architecture, the Renaissance artists never adopted the stern Gothic of the North. In 1452, Leon Battista Alberti showed to Nicolas V. a copy of his De re aedificatoria, a work on architecture, based upon his studies of the Roman monuments. Nicolas opened the line of great builders in Rome and his plans were on a splendid scale. The art of the Renaissance blends the glorification of mediaeval Catholicism with the charms of classical paganism, the history of the Bible with the mythology of Greece and Rome. The earlier painters of the 14th and 15th centuries were more simple, chaste and devout than those of the 16th, who reached a higher distinction as artists. The Catholic type of piety is shown in the preponderance of the pictures of the Madonna holding the infant Saviour in her arms or on her lap and in the portraiture of St. Sebastian and other saints.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  This, at any rate, was the view of a visionary priest, who in about 1200 claimed that Ahura Mazda had commissioned him to restore order to the steppes. 12 His name was Zoroaster. When he received his divine vocation, the new prophet was about thirty years old and strongly rooted in the Aryan faith. He had probably studied for the priesthood since he was seven years old, and was so steeped in tradition that he could improvise sacred chants to the gods during the sacrifice. But Zoroaster was deeply disturbed by the cattle raids, and after completing his education, he had spent some time in consultation with other priests, and had meditated on the rituals to find a solution to the problem. One morning, while he was celebrating the spring festival, Zoroaster had risen at dawn and walked down to the river to collect water for the daily sacrifice. Wading in, he immersed himself in the pure element, and when he emerged, saw a shining being standing on the riverbank, who told Zoroaster that his name was Vohu Manah (“Good Purpose”). Once he had been assured of Zoroaster’s own good intentions, he led him into the presence of the greatest of the ahuras: Mazda, lord of wisdom and justice, who was surrounded by his retinue of seven radiant gods. He told Zoroaster to mobilize his people in a holy war against terror and violence. 13 The story is bright with the promise of a new beginning. A fresh era had dawned: everybody had to make a decision, gods and humans alike. Were they on the side of order or evil? Zoroaster’s vision convinced him that Lord Mazda was not simply one of the great ahuras, but that he was the Supreme God. For Zoroaster and his followers, Mazda was no longer immanent in the natural world, but had become transcendent, different in kind from any other divinity. 14 This was not quite monotheism, the belief in a single, unique deity. The seven luminous beings in Mazda’s retinue—the Holy Immortals—were also divine: each expressed one of Mazda’s attributes and was linked, in the traditional way, with one of the seven original creations. There was, however, a monotheistic tendency in Zoroaster’s vision. Lord Mazda had created the Holy Immortals; they were “of one mind, one voice, one act” with him. 15 Mazda was not the only deity, but he was the first to exist. Zoroaster had probably reached this position by meditating on the creation story, which claimed that in the beginning there had been one plant, one animal, and one human being.

• From The Erotic Mind (1995)

  • An integration of opposites, most notably a healing of the traditional mind/body split and a bridging of the gap between masculine and feminine.6 Those who have transcendent experiences during peak sex usually don’t consciously seek them out. Instead these experiences unfold naturally from a level of participation so all-encompassing and free that the self is unexpectedly released from its normal constraints. Carla’s story captures the feeling: My boyfriend and I had been driving around all day, exploring new and exciting places. It began to rain and soon thunder and lightning followed. We both had the same idea: let’s get a bottle of champagne and drive up to Twin Peaks to watch the city being drenched by this incredible storm. We cheered when we found no one else there. As we sipped our champagne and talked there was an uncanny chemistry between us. Sometimes we would talk, sometimes kiss, sometimes be silent, holding hands, listening to the rain as it beat upon the windshield, watching and feeling it seep through the slightly opened windows. Our breath was taken away when bolts of lightning lit up the sky and thunder rumbled. Soon we were embracing. Our kisses matched the rhythms of the storm. When we made love it seemed so much more beautiful than any time before. Maybe it was the awesome power of the storm combined with the fact that we could be caught at any moment? All I can say is that we both felt a high afterward (and it wasn’t the champagne because we had very little). The feeling was more mystical, meditative. I walked a bit lighter for several days. Theirs is a marvelous synchronicity of time and place, a union of love and lust joined with the majestic forces of nature. During transcendent experiences, with or without an overtly erotic component, the perception of oneself as a part of the natural world is often the catalyst that draws the participants into the larger universe. Surely the spirit of adventure that Carla and her boyfriend shared throughout the day also primed them for the ecstasies to follow. This is definitely not a safe encounter. Whereas most of us would retreat indoors at the first sign of a thunderstorm, these two seek out a mountaintop, eager to be closer to and revel in the danger and drama that moves them so deeply. In peak eroticism, as in all of life, lucky moments often happen to those willing to go out on a limb. Transcendent moments sometimes lead to growth because they shake up and enlarge our perceptions so that apparent contradictions can be tolerated and integrated. Like Carl Jung before him, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has pointed out that in growing we simultaneously become both more separate and more interconnected:

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  It was eight thirty exactly. I was looking down at a little sprig of mahonia growing out of the turf, its oxblood leaves like buffed pigskin. I glanced up. And then I saw my goshawks. There they were. A pair, soaring above the canopy in the rapidly warming air. There was a flat, hot hand of sun on the back of my neck, but I smelt ice in my nose, seeing those goshawks soaring. I smelt ice and bracken stems and pine resin. Goshawk cocktail. They were on the soar . Goshawks in the air are a complicated grey colour . Not slate grey , nor pigeon grey. But a kind of raincloud grey, and despite their distance, I could see the big powder-puff of white undertail feathers, fanned out, with the thick, blunt tail behind it, and that superb bend and curve of the secondaries of a soaring goshawk that makes them utterly unlike sparrowhawks. And they were being mobbed by crows, and they just didn’t care, like, whatever . A crow barrelled down on the male and he sort of raised one wing to let the crow past. Crow was not stupid, and didn’t dip below the hawk for long. These goshawks weren’t fully displaying: there was none of the skydiving I’d read about in books. But they were loving the space between each other , and carving it into all sorts of beautiful concentric chords and distances. A couple of flaps, and the male, the tiercel, would be above the female, and then he’d drift north of her, and then slip down, fast, like a knife-cut, a smooth calligraphic scrawl underneath her, and she’d dip a wing, and then they’d soar up again. They were above a stand of pines, right there. And then they were gone. One minute my pair of goshawks was describing lines from physics textbooks in the sky, and then nothing at all. I don’t remember looking down, or away. Perhaps I blinked. Perhaps it was as simple as that. And in that tiny black gap which the brain disguises they’d dived into the wood. I sat down, tired and content. The goshawks were gone, the sky blank. Time passed. The wavelength of the light around me shortened. The day built itself. A sparrowhawk, light as a toy of balsa-wood and doped tissue-paper, zipped past at knee-level, kiting up over a bank of brambles and away into the trees. I watched it go, lost in recollection. This memory was candescent, irresistible. The air reeked of pine resin and the pitchy vinegar of wood ants. I felt my small-girl fingers hooked through plastic chain-link and the weight of a pair of East German binoculars around my neck. I was bored. I was nine. Dad was standing next to me. We were looking for sparrowhawks.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  I look up and see her crouching, staring at me with round eyes, pupils dilated with excitement and attention, crayon-yellow toes gripping dead ash branches. Or floating above me, above the branches, flickering through, sending submarine ripples behind her. There’s no narrative to be spoken of. There is the moment when I turn and see the calm, haunting face of a young rabbit looking out of a hole ten feet away, ears up, nose twitching. A little grey doe. I can’t call attention to it. The world triangulates and halts dead. The rabbit and I look at each other. It realizes this stare is an involvement in death, and disappears. Mabel doesn’t see it until the moment where the rabbit becomes air as it pops back down the hole, but she has to fly anyway, to the after-image, just in case; and tears off at low level and brushes the hole with one foot before swinging up high in a tree and shaking her tail, looking down. There is the moment where I’m running blindly after the hawk, and see her footing at a branch forty foot up a sweet chestnut: a failed attack at a grey squirrel, which skitters up the helically coiled saglines of the trunk and away to the safety of a high branch, and bark shards fall around me like delicate, waxen snow as Mabel returns, on call, to my fist, and I’m relieved as hell, because squirrels bite. They can take the toe off a hawk’s foot. Not that I can blame them, given the circumstances. Then the moment where she comes towards me at ground level, because that’s the only way through a big bank of elder twigs, and as she comes, I am watching the way the feathers on her back lift just a little as she stalls to slam into the glove – blam – all eight toes and talons gripping hard, then relaxing; and she looks right at me, in a blaze of expectation. And then, quite suddenly, she sees something through the trees, out there on the other side of the hedge. Her pupils grow wide. She snakes her neck and flattens her crown, and the tiny grey hair-feathers around her beak and eyes crinkle into a frown that I’ve learned means there’s something there. I decide to investigate, even though I don’t have permission to fly her over there. Carefully, so as not to put it anywhere near my trousers – so far I have torn three pairs to shreds, out hawking – I high-step over the rusty fence-wire, turn about, and find myself calf-deep in dead game-cover crop the colour of wet tobacco. We are looking out across a wide downland valley. It’s beautiful. I take one deep breath and exhale, full of the ballooning light-headedness of standing on chalk. Chalk landscapes do this to me; bring an exhilarating, on-tiptoe sense that some deep revelation is at hand. This makes me feel guilty.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  The feathers down her front are the colour of sunned newsprint, of tea-stained paper, and each is marked darkly towards its tip with a leaf-bladed spearhead, so from her throat to her feet she is patterned with a shower of falling raindrops. Her wings are the colour of stained oak, their covert feathers edged in palest teak, barred flight-feathers folded quietly beneath. And there’s a strange grey tint to her that is felt, rather than seen, a kind of silvery light like a rainy sky reflected from the surface of a river. She looks new. Looks as if the world cannot touch her. As if everything that exists and is observed rolls off like drops of water from her oiled and close-packed feathers. And the more I sit with her, the more I marvel at how reptilian she is. The lucency of her pale, round eyes. The waxy yellow skin about her Bakelite-black beak. The way she snakes her small head from side to side to focus on distant objects. Half the time she seems as alien as a snake, a thing hammered of metal and scales and glass. But then I see ineffably birdlike things about her, familiar qualities that turn her into something loveable and close. She scratches her fluffy chin with one awkward, taloned foot; sneezes when bits of errant down get up her nose. And when I look again she seems neither bird nor reptile, but a creature shaped by a million years of evolution for a life she’s not yet lived. Those long, barred tailfeathers and short, broad wings are perfectly shaped for sharp turns and brutal acceleration through a world of woodland obstacles; the patterns on her plumage will hide her in perfect, camouflaging drifts of light and shade. The tiny, hair-like feathers between her beak and eye – crines – are for catching blood so that it will dry, and flake, and fall away, and the frowning eyebrows that lend her face its hollow rapacious intensity are bony projections to protect her eyes when crashing into undergrowth after prey.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  The feathers down her front are the colour of sunned newsprint, of tea-stained paper, and each is marked darkly towards its tip with a leaf-bladed spearhead, so from her throat to her feet she is patterned with a shower of falling raindrops. Her wings are the colour of stained oak, their covert feathers edged in palest teak, barred flight-feathers folded quietly beneath. And there’s a strange grey tint to her that is felt, rather than seen, a kind of silvery light like a rainy sky reflected from the surface of a river. She looks new. Looks as if the world cannot touch her. As if everything that exists and is observed rolls off like drops of water from her oiled and close-packed feathers. And the more I sit with her, the more I marvel at how reptilian she is. The lucency of her pale, round eyes. The waxy yellow skin about her Bakelite-black beak. The way she snakes her small head from side to side to focus on distant objects. Half the time she seems as alien as a snake, a thing hammered of metal and scales and glass. But then I see ineffably birdlike things about her, familiar qualities that turn her into something loveable and close. She scratches her fluffy chin with one awkward, taloned foot; sneezes when bits of errant down get up her nose. And when I look again she seems neither bird nor reptile, but a creature shaped by a million years of evolution for a life she’s not yet lived. Those long, barred tailfeathers and short, broad wings are perfectly shaped for sharp turns and brutal acceleration through a world of woodland obstacles; the patterns on her plumage will hide her in perfect, camouflaging drifts of light and shade. The tiny, hair-like feathers between her beak and eye – crines – are for catching blood so that it will dry, and flake, and fall away, and the frowning eyebrows that lend her face its hollow rapacious intensity are bony projections to protect her eyes when crashing into undergrowth after prey.