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

  At last he completed his active obedience by the passive obedience of suffering in cheerful resignation to the holy will of God. Hated and persecuted by the Jewish hierarchy, betrayed into their hands by Judas, accused by false witnesses, condemned by the Sanhedrin, rejected by the people denied by Peter, but declared innocent by the representative of the Roman law and justice, surrounded by his weeping mother and faithful disciples, revealing in those dark hours by word and silence the gentleness of a lamb and the dignity of a God, praying for his murderers, dispensing to the penitent thief a place in paradise, committing his soul to his heavenly Father he died, with the exclamation: "It is finished!" He died before he had reached the prime of manhood. The Saviour of the world a youth! He died the shameful death of the cross the just for the unjust, the innocent for the guilty, a free self, sacrifice of infinite love, to reconcile the world unto God. He conquered sin and death on their own ground, and thus redeemed and sanctified all who are willing to accept his benefits and to follow his example. He instituted the Lord’s Supper, to perpetuate the memory of his death and the cleansing and atoning power of his blood till the end of time. The third day he rose from the grave, the conqueror of death and hell, the prince of life and resurrection. He repeatedly appeared to his disciples; he commissioned them to preach the gospel of the resurrection to every creature; he took possession of his heavenly throne, and by the outpouring of the Holy Spirit he established the church, which he has ever since protected, nourished, and comforted, and with which he has promised to abide, till he shall come again in glory to judge the quick and the dead. This is a meagre outline of the story which the evangelists tell us with childlike simplicity, and yet with more general and lasting effect than could be produced by the highest art of historical composition. They modestly abstained from adding their own impressions to the record of the words and acts of the Master whose "glory they beheld, the glory as of the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth."

• From Sex with Kings: 500 Years of Adultery, Power, Rivalry, and Revenge (2004)

  But Iberian customs were not popular with the rest of Europe. Trying to imitate Charles II, when George, elector of Hanover (1660–1727), inherited the throne of Great Britain in 1714, he imported not one, but two royal mistresses into his new land. George’s German mistresses failed to impress his British subjects, who were shocked—not at his moral laxity, but at his taste in women. One was tall and thin to the point of emaciation, the other short and fat enough to burst, the pair of them hopelessly ugly. For his part, the king was pleased when his English subjects ridiculed his mistresses, even when someone sent an old nag with a broken saddle through the streets of London bearing a sign that read, “Let nobody stop me—I am the King’s Hanover equipage going to fetch His Majesty and his whore to England.”7 Such jokes reflected well on his masculinity, George concluded. When George’s son Prince George of Hanover, the future George II (1683–1760), took an English mistress, his elderly grandmother applauded it as an excellent means of improving his knowledge of the language. Some twenty years later, Lord Hervey described King George II’s relationship with the same woman, Mrs. Howard, as one of form more than passion. The king “seemed to look upon a mistress rather as a necessary appurtenance to his grandeur as a prince than an addition to his pleasures as a man, and thus only pretended to distinguish what it was evident he overlooked and affected to caress what it was manifest he did not love.”8 The king was heard to call his faithful mistress “an old, dull, deaf, peevish beast.”9 Once again, things were handled with far greater style on the southern side of the English Channel. George’s contemporary Louis XV (1710–1774) installed Madame de Pompadour as maîtresse-en-titre in 1745. Beautiful, gracious, brilliant, and kind, Madame de Pompadour practically ruled France for nineteen years. She encouraged artists and writers, produced plays in which she sang and danced, invested in French industry, designed châteaus, cut gems, made engravings, experimented in horticulture, and ran the army during the Seven Years’ War. But at the height of her power she warily eyed the approaching storm. “After us, the deluge,” she said, though it was not Madame de Pompadour but her successor, Madame du Barry, whose pretty powdered head rolled onto the straw-covered scaffold.10 In France palaces were ransacked and burned. The tombs of kings and courtiers were cracked open and plundered, the bones strewn about. With the sudden crashing force of a guillotine, the French Revolution severed the power of royal mistresses across Europe as its effects rippled like waves in all directions. The lavish self-indulgence of a civilization was indeed deluged, drowned in a sea of wine-dark blood. Gone with it was the glorification of a fallen woman bedecked in crown jewels.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  By this time we had an arrangement with the lady in the ticket-booth: we gave her a nod and a smile as we arrived, then sauntered past her window and chose any seat in the hall beyond that we fancied. Usually, this was somewhere in the gallery. I could never understand the attraction of the stalls ticket; it seemed unnatural to me to seat oneself below the stage, and have to peer up at the artistes from a level somewhere near their ankles, through the faint, shimmering haze of heat that rose above the footlights. The circle gave a better view, but the gallery, though further away, to my mind gave the best of all; and there were two seats in the front row, at the very centre of the gallery, that Alice and I particular favoured. Here you knew yourself to be not just at a show but in a theatre: you caught the shape of the stage and the sweep of the seats; and you marvelled to see your neighbours’ faces, and to know your own to be like theirs - all queerly lit by the glow of the footlights, and damp at the lip, and with a grin upon it, like that of a demon at some hellish revue. It was certainly as hot as hell in the Canterbury Palace on Gully Sutherland’s opening night - so hot that, when Alice and I leaned over the gallery rail to gaze at the audience below, we were met by a blast of tobacco- and sweat-scented air, that made us reel and cough. The theatre, as Tony’s uncle had calculated, was almost full; yet it was strangely hushed. People spoke in murmurs, or not at all. When one looked from the gallery to the circle and the stalls, one saw only the flap of hats and programmes. The flapping didn’t stop when the orchestra struck up its few bars of overture and the house lights dimmed; but it slowed a little, and people sat up rather straighter in their seats. The hush of fatigue became a silence of expectation. The Palace was an old-fashioned music hall and, like many such places in the 1880s, still employed a chairman. This, of course, was Tricky himself: he sat at a table between the stalls and the orchestra and introduced the acts, and called for order if the crowd became too rowdy, and led us in toasts to the Queen. He had a top-hat and a gavel - I have never seen a chairman without a gavel - and a mug of porter. On his table stood a candle: this was kept lit for as long as there were artistes upon the stage, but it was extinguished for the interval, and at the show’s close. Tricky was a plain-faced man with a very handsome voice - a voice like the sound of a clarinet, at once liquid and penetrating, and lovely to listen to.

• From Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection (2013)

  181 experiences of positive emotions can open those doors as well, expanding your outlook on life and setting off spiritual experiences: Patty Van Cappellen and Vassilis Saraglou (2011). “Awe activates religious and spiritual feelings and behavioral intention.” Psychology of Religion and Spirituality. Advance online publication. doi: 10.1037/a0025986. 182 “to take the next step, to see the unknown as an adventure, to launch a journey” … “an active, open state that makes us willing to explore”: These two quotes from Sharon Salzberg are drawn from pages 12 and 67, respectively, of her 2002 book, Faith: Trusting Your Own Deepest Experience. New York: Riverhead Books. 182 “Love is the shortest definition of spirituality I know”: George Vaillant (2009). Spiritual Evolution: How We Are Wired for Faith, Hope, and Love. New York: Three Rivers Press. Chapter 9 185 I never knew how to worship until I knew how to love: Henry Ward Beecher (1869/2010). Plymouth Pulpit: Sermons Preached at Plymouth Church, Brooklyn, Volume 4. Charleston, NC: Nabu Press. 187 What Barrett and her collaborators (including one of my newest Carolina colleagues, Kristen Lindquist) have asked is simply, what is an emotion?: Lisa Feldman Barrett (2012). “Emotions are real.” Emotion. See also Kristen A. Lindquist and Lisa Feldman Barrett (2008). “Constructing emotion: The experience of fear as a conceptual act.” Psychological Science 19(9): 898–903. 187 William James himself devoted considerable attention to this very question back in 1884: William James (1884). “What is an emotion?” Mind 9: 188–205. 188 Research coming out of Barrett’s lab and other labs, including my own: Barrett (2012); Lindquist and Barrett (2008). See also forthcoming publications by Lindsay Kennedy, Bethany Kok, and me. 188 Those who took anger to be an emotion showed the typical jumps in heart rate and blood pressure, whereas those for whom the idea that anger is an emotion was debunked had an appreciably more muted cardiovascular response: Kennedy, Kok, and Fredrickson. Manuscript in preparation. 189 A global poll, released on Valentine’s Day, 2012, revealed that most married people, or those similarly coupled, identify their significant other as their most important source of happiness: http://af.reuters.com/article/commoditiesNews/idAFL2E8DDGDX20120214?pageNumber=1&virtualBrandChannel=0 [inactive]. 190 By the flip of a coin, they tried either LKM or a different style of mediation, one that does not aim to cultivate loving feelings: In this latest research, we compare learning loving-kindness meditation to learning mindfulness meditation, a similar practice albeit with less emphasis on cultivating positive emotions. This is work I am conducting with Steve Cole, Karen Grewen, Sara Algoe, Sy-Miin Chow, Kimberly Coffey, Ann Firestine, and others, which is funded by the National Institute of Nursing Research at NIH (R01NR012899). 191 Feeling good is that indicator: See classic work by Michel Cabanac (1971). “Physiological role of pleasure.” Science 173(4002): 1103–7. 191 That’s because good feelings trigger a cascade of neurochemicals that makes you like whatever caused it: Berridge (2007). 192 Evidence suggests that it isn’t until midlife or beyond that people develop true wisdom about positivity’s quiet cues: Catalino, Coffey, and Fredrickson. Manuscript in preparation.

• From The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007)

  Begin Reading Table of Contents Copyright Page For Wellpinit and Reardan, my hometowns Explore book giveaways, sneak peeks, deals, and more. Tap here to learn more. Foreword “I was born with water on the brain.” The opening line from a masterful work by a genius storyteller. The other night I thought I’d try reading this book out loud to my nine-year-old son. The copy we have is worn and dog-eared, a first edition bought only a few days after it was published in 2007. At the time I didn’t yet have a son, and my daughter was still very young. I had bought Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian for myself, having already, before it was published, heard how amazing it was. With that opening line, Alexie brought me into the world of Junior—struggling artist, ballplayer, survivor of two very different kinds of education. And inside Junior’s world, I was awakened to life on the reservation—meeting people and finding myself in situations I had never imagined. Dr. Rudine Sims Bishop, who has written extensively about the importance of children’s literature, talks about how books can be both mirrors and windows—mirrors in which readers can see themselves on the pages of literature and thereby know their existence in the world is valid and true, and windows into worlds they might never have imagined. This book is a window into Junior’s world—a window Alexie pulls the curtains back from and lovingly invites us into. But it is also a mirror for the many First Nations people who have not seen themselves in literature. It is hard to read The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian and not find a part of yourself in its pages. The other night, as my son and I ascended the stairs to his bedroom, I grabbed the book off the shelf—“Let’s just try it,” I said. My son, holding a comic book, said, “No.” Flatly. “Yes,” I said. “We’re going to give it a try.” I knew at once he’d love Junior and Rowdy and the many people he’d meet on the reservation. With that first line, my boy was hooked, the way I had been many years ago. The way my now-teenage daughter had been two summers ago, when she closed the book and exclaimed, “This book is so good, I cannot believe it was assigned.” How does one author touch so many different people at so many different points in their lives? Alexie’s brilliance lies in his ability to speak truth to power with humor, grace, and love. He loves the characters he brings to the page, and, by extension, we fall in love with them, too.

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

  I. The geographical and descriptive works on the Holy Land by Reland (1714), Robinson (1838 and 1856), Ritter (1850–1855), Raumer (4th ed. 1860), Tobler (several monographs from 1849 to 1869), W. M. Thomson (revised ed. 1880), Stanley (1853, 6th ed. 1866), Tristram (1864), Schaff (1878; enlarged ed. 1889), Guérin (1869, 1875, 1880). See Tobler’s Bibliographia geographica Palaestinae (Leipz. 1867) and the supplementary lists of more recent works by Ph. Wolff in the "Jahrbücher für deutsche Theologie, " 1868 and 1872, and by Socin in the "Zeitschrift des deutschen Palaestina-Vereins," 1878, p. 40, etc. II. The "Histories of New Testament Times" (Neutestamentliche Zeitgeschichte, a special department of historical theology recently introduced), by Schneckburger (1862), Hausrath (1868 sqq.), and Schürer (1874). See Lit. in § 8, p. 56. There is a wonderful harmony between the life of our Lord as described by the Evangelists, and his geographical and historical environment as known to us from contemporary writers, and illustrated and confirmed by modern discovery and research. This harmony contributes not a little to the credibility of the gospel history. The more we come to understand the age and country in which Jesus lived, the more we feel, in reading the Gospels, that we are treading on the solid ground of real history illuminated by the highest revelation from heaven. The poetry of the canonical Gospels, if we may so call their prose, which in spiritual beauty excels all poetry, is not (like that of the Apocryphal Gospels) the poetry of human fiction—"no fable old, no mythic lore, nor dream of bards and seers;" it is the poetry of revealed truth, the poetry of the sublimest facts the poetry of the infinite wisdom and love of God which, ever before had entered the imagination of man, but which assumed human flesh and blood in Jesus of Nazareth and solved through his life and work the deepest problem of our existence.

• From Less (2017)

  The second time he went with Robert. It was in the middle of their time together, when Less was finally worldly enough to be of help with travel and Robert had not become so filled with bitterness that he was a hindrance, the time when any couple has found its balance, and passion has quieted from its early scream, but gratitude is still abundant; what no one realizes are the golden years. Robert was in a rare mood for travel and had accepted an invitation to read at a literary festival in Rome. Rome was itself enough, but showing Rome to Less was like having the chance to introduce someone to a beloved aunt. Whatever happened would be memorable. What they did not realize until they arrived was that the event was to take place in the ancient Forum, where thousands would gather in the summer wind to listen to a poet read before a crumbling arch; he would be standing on a dais lit by pink spotlights, with an orchestra playing Philip Glass between each poem. “I will never read anywhere like this again,” Robert whispered to Less, standing backstage as a brief biographical clip played for the audience on an enormous screen—Robert as a boy in a cowboy costume; as a serious Harvard student with his pal Ross; then he and Ross in a San Francisco café, a woodland setting—picking up more and more artistic companions until Robert reached the face recognizable from his Newsweek photograph: hair gone gray and wild, retaining that monkey-business expression of a capering mind (he would not frown for a photo). The music swelled, his name was called. Four thousand people applauded, and Robert, in his gray silk suit, readied himself to stride onto a pink-lit stage below the ruins of the centuries, and let go of his lover’s hand like someone falling from a cliff… Less opens his eyes to a countryside of autumn vineyards, endless rows of the crucified plants, a pink rosebush always planted at the end. He wonders why. The hills roll to the horizon, and atop each hill, a little town, silhouetted with its single church spire, and no visible way of approach except with rope and a pick. Less senses by the sun’s shift that at least an hour has passed. He is not headed to Turin, then; he is being taken somewhere else. Switzerland? Less understands at last what is happening: he is in the wrong car.

• From Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection (2013)

  In these moments, borders seem to evaporate and you feel part of something far larger than yourself, be it nature, eternity, humanity, or the divine. This is the “oceanic feeling” that Sigmund Freud dismissed as a regression to the infantile sense of being merged with your mother, but that William James and many others have held up as the bedrock of people’s embodied experiences of spirituality. Following in James’s footsteps, I take spirituality to revolve around expansive emotional moments like these. Consistent with the idea that words fail to capture the essence of spirituality, in his 1902 classic, The Varieties of Religious Experience , James wrote: “Feeling is the deeper source of religion, and . . . philosophical and theological formulas are secondary products, like translations of a text into another tongue.” More than a century after James equated spirituality with emotions, Karen Armstrong opened her 2009 book, The Case for God , with a vivid and harrowing description of what it feels like to make your way down some sixty-five feet below ground level—at times crawling on your hands and knees in complete darkness—to explore the ancient caves on the border of France and Spain where you can view the elaborate paintings created by our Stone Age ancestors some seventeen thousand years ago. She concludes: Like art, the truths of religion require the disciplined cultivation of a different mode of consciousness. The cave experience always began with the disorientation of utter darkness, which annihilated normal habits of mind. Human beings are so constituted that periodically they seek out [what the Greeks called] ekstasis, a “stepping outside” the norm. Today people who no longer find it in a religious setting resort to other outlets: music, dance, art, sex, drugs, or sport. We make a point of seeking out those experiences that touch us deeply within and lift us momentarily beyond ourselves. At such times, we feel that we inhabit our humanity more fully than usual and experience an enhancement of being.” To Armstrong, religion is doing, not belief. It’s the effort you put into repeatedly cultivating such peak, unbounded epiphanies that stretch open your heart and mind, and make you more attuned to boundless possibilities. As Armstrong notes, religion isn’t the only path to expanded modes of consciousness. Back in chapter 4 I drew on that age-old metaphor about swinging open the doors of perception, first used by William Blake, and then more than 160 years later by Aldous Huxley. Your own commonplace experiences of positive emotions can open those doors as well, expanding your outlook on life and setting off spiritual experiences.

• From The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir (2004)

  That was where my power resided and where it shifted. As hostess at my front door, I was, as you now know, the critical Queen, the impossible Princess, the angry child. But with A-Man in my ass, I became sweet again. So sweet. Within days, I told the Boyfriend that we were done. All done. I couldn’t be sweet with him, only mad. He may have resided in “reality,” but those three hours with A-Man clarified everything for me: “reality” was not my home. WHY THERE? Once gravity reasserted its hold on me, I immediately started examining my experience. It felt like my new job. I’d been given a gift and now I had to attempt some understanding. Why? Why me? Why him? Why there? I had given my vaginal virginity to the first man who paid me any consistent sexual attention. I would have married him as only a virgin would: with adoration and ignorance. Eight penises later, I married one. Ten years later, when I departed that union, I was horny as hell, like never before—a bunny on a hot tin roof—but intercourse was not what I wanted. I needed love, admiration, and pussy worship. This insatiable desire ruled my life. But then A-Man came along and shook my overanalyzed ego off its self-important pedestal. I was an anal virgin. He showed me, physically, where my rage resided. Anger thrives in your ass. A Dickensian alley, the ass. Despite its tiny, ignored entry, once opened, it contains literally yard upon yard of coiled past traumas, the internal gripping of the emotionally unbearable. A-Man penetrated the site of my anger and cauterized my wound. I was now being given a second chance—not on the well-trodden vaginal trail, but in a place entirely new to my consciousness—and it quickly became the site of my consciousness. Truly virgin, once again. With the discovery of this new world, I experienced all the wonder and beauty that a deflowering might be but rarely is. And so it began, in naive complicity, once a week, twice a week, three times a week. Mostly late afternoons. He was an expert and I was willing. I began to count. It just seemed like the right thing to do. #41 Ablaze afterward, he stood up, still hard, and slugged some water from a blue bottle. “What is it about?” I asked from the bed, flushed and dazed. He stopped drinking, looked over at me, paused, and said, “Vibrations.” He says we’re learning something about time. The passage of time, the experience of time, the truth of time, the eternity of time. The best time. ENTERING THE EXIT Once initiated, I couldn’t help thinking about anal everything. Including the mechanics.

• From The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir (2004)

  And it is the birth of love. His cock is my laser healer. Every point it probes inside me pierces my armor, the armor of self-protection, and the two fears—love and death—momentarily lose their grip and I experience a moment of immortality. #75 Vertical fucking. Upside down, legs over my head, knees by my ears, ass up, he perches over me like an acrobat and points his cock down into me. He thrusts downward to Earth’s center, and I am grounded. I point upward, outward to the sky, to the Milky Way, to heaven’s gate, and I see clearly between my legs his cock pumping like a piston. Angle is everything. We achieve a kind of gravity-free coordination, complete transcendence of the “fight”—the fight that is life—total trust allowing his deep, hard, long, and fast plunges entirely without self-protective gripping. Undulating . . . and great inner peace as I am rocked like a mermaid in the ocean. #98 He fucked me in the ass at 11:20 last night so long, so hard, so smooth, so hilariously, so slowly, so fast, so very, very deep. After forty-five minutes of this he says, “Now I’m gonna fuck your pussy.” And he fucked my pussy 360 degrees around. Then he says, “I’m gonna get me some sacred spot.” And he does, anointing my sacred place—the grave of my past—with his blasphemous baptismal juice. “I think it’s your greatest gift,” he says after. “What is?” “Submission.” THE DOUBLE-SPHINCTER THEORY More mechanics: the inner anal sphincter is not within conscious control. It is regulated by the brain in the gut, the enteric nervous system, and is reflexive, opening on demand. The external sphincter, the internal’s sister sphincter, is, however, connected to the conscious brain, regulated by conscious control—witness the ability to grip and hold when necessary, when angry, when scared, when stressed. Unconscious internal sphincter, conscious external sphincter, only centimeters apart. Where else is one’s unconscious and conscious mind so intimately connected, so readily regulated, so easily probed? It is a psychological playground of the most intriguing potential. Put an ass on the couch and much is revealed. But the external sphincter did not begin with consciousness. For the first year or so of life it was unconscious, reacting in conjunction with the internal and letting go on demand—hence diapers. The brain and spinal cord at birth are not yet developed enough for conscious control . And then comes toilet training.

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

  It is the great and difficult task of the biographer of Jesus to show how he, by external and internal development, under the conditions of a particular people, age, and country, came to be in fact what he was in idea and destination, and what he will continue to be for the faith of Christendom, the God-Man and Saviour of the world. Being divine from eternity, he could not become God; but as man he was subject to the laws of human life and gradual growth. "He advanced in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and man."96 Though he was the Son of God, "yet he learned obedience by the things which he suffered; and having been made perfect, he became the author of eternal salvation unto all them that obey him."97 There is no conflict between the historical Jesus of Nazareth and the ideal Christ of faith. The full understanding of his truly human life, by its very perfection and elevation above all other men before and after him, will necessarily lead to an admission of his own testimony concerning his divinity. "Deep strike thy roots, O heavenly Vine, Within our earthly sod! Most human and yet most divine, The flower of man and God!" Jesus Christ came into the world under Caesar Augustus, the first Roman emperor, before the death of king Herod the Great, four years before the traditional date of our Dionysian aera. He was born at Bethlehem of Judaea, in the royal line of David, from Mary, "the wedded Maid and Virgin Mother." The world was at peace, and the gates of Janus were closed for only the second time in the history of Rome. There is a poetic and moral fitness in this coincidence: it secured a hearing for the gentle message of peace which might have been drowned in the passions of war and the clamor of arms. Angels from heaven proclaimed the good tidings of his birth with songs of praise; Jewish shepherds from the neighboring fields, and heathen sages from the far east greeted the newborn king and Saviour with the homage of believing hearts. Heaven and earth gathered in joyful adoration around the Christ-child, and the blessing of this event is renewed from year to year among high and low, rich and poor, old and young, throughout the civilized world. The idea of a perfect childhood, sinless and holy, yet truly human and natural, had never entered the mind of poet or historian before; and when the legendary fancy of the Apocryphal Gospels attempted to fill out the chaste silence of the Evangelists, it painted an unnatural prodigy of a child to whom wild animals, trees, and dumb idols bowed, and who changed balls of clay into flying birds for the amusement of his playmates.

• From The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir (2004)

  A-Man and I exist in the land beyond the intercourse that breeds babies. That is good, too, don’t get me wrong. We do that, too, warm-up. But we live in the land beyond, behind. The place where depth is infinite and the love seems infinite, ever growing. Deep penetration, deep love. The physical depth somehow leads into that other depth as if my soul slept in my bowels and is now awakened. The directions are clear: if you want to procreate enter the front door, but if you really want to become a part of a woman’s internal workings, to penetrate her being most deeply, the back door is your portal. Anxiety, that ever-present agony, exists because of the inescapable knowledge that all must end. Enter an ass and you enter a passage that does not end. It is the exit to infinity. The back door to liberty. Besides, pussies have just been through too much. Give them a rest. They are old news—tired, betrayed, overused, reused, abused—and have been overly publicized, politicized, and redeemed. They are no longer naughty, no longer the place for defiance, rebellion, or rebirth. Pussies are now too politically correct. The ass is where it’s at: the playground for anarchists, iconoclasts, artists, explorers, little boys, horny men, and women desperate to relinquish, even temporarily, the power that has been so hard won and cruelly awarded by the feminist movement. Ass-fucking realigns the balance for a woman with too much power—and a man with too little. (I think this explains the prevalence of butt-fucking in heterosexual porn: masses of men, refugees from feminism, watching, hard and ever-hopeful.) In his forays inside me, A-Man hits new walls, new angles, new ends, and that self-preserving voice of “too much” echoes through my brain as I feel a kind of pressure, a resistance. But I have never said “too much.” Never. I breathe through, adjust the angle, and stay where he pushes until I open and receive him in farther. I expand into him and the pain subsides, transforms, into a profound sensation of freedom—freedom from pain, freedom to be crazy, freedom to harmonize with the universe. This is all physical. And it is the birth of love. His cock is my laser healer. Every point it probes inside me pierces my armor, the armor of self-protection, and the two fears—love and death—momentarily lose their grip and I experience a moment of immortality. #75 Vertical fucking. Upside down, legs over my head, knees by my ears, ass up, he perches over me like an acrobat and points his cock down into me. He thrusts downward to Earth’s center, and I am grounded. I point upward, outward to the sky, to the Milky Way, to heaven’s gate, and I see clearly between my legs his cock pumping like a piston. Angle is everything.

• From The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir (2004)

  Once gravity reasserted its hold on me, I immediately started examining my experience. It felt like my new job. I’d been given a gift and now I had to attempt some understanding. Why? Why me? Why him? Why there? I had given my vaginal virginity to the first man who paid me any consistent sexual attention. I would have married him as only a virgin would: with adoration and ignorance. Eight penises later, I married one. Ten years later, when I departed that union, I was horny as hell, like never before—a bunny on a hot tin roof—but intercourse was not what I wanted. I needed love, admiration, and pussy worship. This insatiable desire ruled my life. But then A-Man came along and shook my overanalyzed ego off its self-important pedestal. I was an anal virgin. He showed me, physically, where my rage resided. Anger thrives in your ass. A Dickensian alley, the ass. Despite its tiny, ignored entry, once opened, it contains literally yard upon yard of coiled past traumas, the internal gripping of the emotionally unbearable. A-Man penetrated the site of my anger and cauterized my wound. I was now being given a second chance—not on the well-trodden vaginal trail, but in a place entirely new to my consciousness—and it quickly became the site of my consciousness. Truly virgin, once again. With the discovery of this new world, I experienced all the wonder and beauty that a deflowering might be but rarely is. And so it began, in naive complicity, once a week, twice a week, three times a week. Mostly late afternoons. He was an expert and I was willing. I began to count. It just seemed like the right thing to do. #41 Ablaze afterward, he stood up, still hard, and slugged some water from a blue bottle. “What is it about?” I asked from the bed, flushed and dazed. He stopped drinking, looked over at me, paused, and said, “Vibrations.” He says we’re learning something about time. The passage of time, the experience of time, the truth of time, the eternity of time. The best time. ENTERING THE EXIT Once initiated, I couldn’t help thinking about anal everything. Including the mechanics. The digestive system is a one-way pipe where peristaltic contractions urge food from mouth to anus. Ass-fucking entails the bold—and contrary—attempt to travel the route in reverse. Fucking a pussy is entering a cave with only one pinprick exit—the hole in the cervix that enters the womb. (And, of course, it is an “exit” to parenthood.) Under normal circumstances, the pussy is a pretty closed, if expandable, place. The vagina is a receptacle. The anal canal, on the other hand, is directly, though complexly, connected to the mouth, the point of entry, the place that feeds the life. Thirty feet or so of digestive track from rectum to colon to small intestine to stomach to esophagus to throat to mouth is the route entered by the anal fucker.

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

  As religion is the deepest and holiest concern of man, the entrance of the Christian religion into history is the most momentous of all events. It is the end of the old world and the beginning of the new. It was a great idea of Dionysius "the Little" to date our era from the birth of our Saviour. Jesus Christ, the God-Man, the prophet, priest, and king of mankind, is, in fact, the centre and turning-point not only of chronology, but of all history, and the key to all its mysteries. Around him, as the sun of the moral universe, revolve at their several distances, all nations and all important events, in the religious life of the world; and all must, directly or indirectly, consciously or unconsciously, contribute to glorify his name and advance his cause. The history of mankind before his birth must be viewed as a preparation for his coming, and the history after his birth as a gradual diffusion of his spirit and progress of his kingdom. "All things were created by him, and for him." He is "the desire of all nations." He appeared in the "fulness of time,"45 when the process of preparation was finished, and the world’s need of redemption fully disclosed. This preparation for Christianity began properly with the very creation of man, who was made in the image of God, and destined for communion with him through the eternal Son; and with the promise of salvation which God gave to our first parents as a star of hope to guide them through the darkness of sin and error.46 Vague memories of a primitive paradise and subsequent fall, and hopes of a future redemption, survive even in the heathen religions. With Abraham, about nineteen hundred years before Christ, the religious development of humanity separates into the two independent, and, in their compass, very unequal branches of Judaism and heathenism. These meet and unite—at last in Christ as the common Saviour, the fulfiller of the types and prophecies, desires and hopes of the ancient world; while at the same time the ungodly elements of both league in deadly hostility against him, and thus draw forth the full revelation of his all—conquering power of truth and love.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  We returned to the change-room for our coats: its jets were all flaring now, and there were white-faced women in it with handkerchiefs before their eyes. Then we stepped to the stage door, and waited while the doorman found a cab for us. This seemed to take an age. It was two o‘clock or later before we started on our journey home; and then we sat, on different seats, in silence - Kitty repeating only, now and then: ‘Poor Gully! What a thing to do!’, and I still drunk, still dazed, still desperately stirred, but still uncertain. It was a bitterly cold and beautiful night - perfectly quiet, once we had left the clamour of the party behind us, and still. The roads were foggy, and thick with ice: every so often I felt the wheels of our carriage slide a little, and caught the sound of the horse’s slithering, uncertain step, and the driver’s gentle curses. Beside us the pavements glittered with frost, and each street-lamp glowed, in the fog, from the centre of its own yellow nimbus. For long stretches, ours was the only vehicle on the streets at all; the horse, the driver, Kitty and I might have been the only wakeful creatures in a city of stone and ice and slumber. At length we reached Lambeth Bridge, where Kitty and I had stood only a few weeks before and gazed at the pleasure-boats below. Now, with our faces pressed to the carriage window, we saw it all transformed - saw the lights of the Embankment, a belt of amber beads dissolving into the night; and the great dark jagged bulk of the Houses of Parliament looming over the river; and the Thames itself, its boats all moored and silent, its water grey and sluggish and thick, and rather strange. It was this last which made Kitty pull the window down, and call to the driver, in a high, excited voice, to stop. Then she pushed the carriage door open, pulled me to the iron parapet of the bridge, and seized my hand. ‘Look,’ she said. Her grief seemed all forgotten. Below us, in the water, there were great slivers of ice six feet across, drifting and gently turning in the winding currents, like basking seals. The Thames was freezing over. I looked from the river to Kitty, and from Kitty to the bridge on which we stood. There was no one near us save our driver - and he had the collar of his cape about his ears, and was busy with his pipe and his tobacco-pouch. I looked at the river again - at that extraordinary, ordinary transformation, that easy submission to the urgings of a natural law, that was yet so rare and so unsettling. It seemed a little miracle, done just for Kitty and me. ‘How cold it must be!’

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

  On the ground of these descriptions, and of the Abgar and the Veronica legends, arose a vast number of pictures of Christ, which are divided into two classes: the Salvator pictures, with the expression of calm serenity and dignity, without the faintest mark of grief, and the Ecce Homo pictures of the suffering Saviour with the crown of thorns. The greatest painters and sculptors have exhausted the resources of their genius in representations of Christ; but neither color nor chisel nor pen can do more than produce a feeble reflection of the beauty and glory of Him who is the Son of God and the Son of Man. Among modern biographers of Christ, Dr. Sepp (Rom. Cath., Das Leben Jesu Christi, 1865, vol. VI. 312 sqq.) defends the legend of St. Veronica of the Herodian family, and the genuineness of the picture, of the suffering Saviour with the crown of thorns which he impressed on her silken veil. He rejects the philological explanation of the legend from "the true image" (vera eijkw;n = Veronica), and derives the name from ferenivkh (Berenice), the Victorious. But Bishop Hefele (Art. Christusbilder, in the Cath. Kirchen-Lexikon of Wetzer and Welte, II. 519–524) is inclined, with Grimm, to identify Veronica with the Berenice who is said to have erected a statue to Christ at Caesarea Philippi (Euseb. VII. 18), and to see in the Veronica legend only the Latin version of the Abgar legend of the Greek Church. Dr. Hase (Leben Jesu, p. 79) ascribes to Christ manly beauty, firm health, and delicate, yet not very characteristic features. He quotes John 20:14 and Luke 24:16, where it is said that his friends did not recognize him, but these passages refer only to the mysterious appearances of the risen Lord. Renan (Vie de Jésus, ch. X-XIV. p. 403) describes him in the frivolous style of a novelist, as a doux Galilèen, of calm and dignified attitude, as a beau jeune homme who made a deep impression upon women, especially Mary of Magdala; even a proud Roman lady, the wife of Pontius Pilate, when she caught a glimpse of him from the window (?), was enchanted, dreamed of him in the night and was frightened at the prospect of his death. Dr. Keim (I. 463) infers from his character, as described in the Synoptical Gospels, that he was perhaps not strikingly handsome, yet certainly noble, lovely, manly, healthy and vigorous, looking like a prophet, commanding reverence, making men, women, children, sick and poor people feel happy in his presence. Canon Farrar (I. 150) adopts the view of Jerome and Augustine, and speaks of Christ as "full of mingled majesty and tenderness in— ’That face How beautiful, if sorrow had not made Sorrow more beautiful than beauty’s self.’ "

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

  Johann Calvin. Seine Kirche und sein Staat in Genf. Erster Band, Leipzig, 1869, p. 274 sq. "Calvin’s Lehrbuch der christlichen Religion ist ohne Frage das hervorragendste und bedeutendste Erzeugniss, welches die reformatorische Literatur des sechszehnten Jahrhunderts auf dem Gebiete der Dogmatik aufzuweisen hat. Schon ein oberflächlicher Vergleich lässt uns den gewaltigen Fortschritt erkennen, den es gegenüber den bisherigen Leistungen auf diesem Gebiete bezeichnet. Statt der unvollkommenen, nach der einen oder andern Seite unzulänglichen Versuche Melanchthon’s, Zwingli’s, Farel’s erhalten wir aus Calvin’s Hand das Kunstwerk eines, wenn auch nicht harmonisch in sich abgeschlossenen, so doch wohlgegliederten, durchgebildeten Systems, das in allen seinen Theilen die leitenden Grundgedanken widerspiegelt und von vollständiger Beherrschung des Stoffes zeugt. Es hatte eine unverkennbare Berechtigung, wenn man den Verfasser der Institution als den Aristoteles der Reformation bezeichnete. Die ausserordentliche Belesenheit in der biblischen und patristischen Literatur, wie sie schon in den früheren Ausgaben des Werkes hervortritt, setzt in Erstaunen. Die Methode ist lichtvoll und klar, der Gedankengang streng logisch, überall durchsicktig, die Eintheilung und Ordnung des Stoffes dem leitenden Grundgedanken entsprechend; die Darstellung schreitet ernst und gemessen vor und nimmt, obschon in den späteren Ausgaben mehr gelehrt als anziehend, mehr auf den Verstand als auf das Gemüth berechnet, doch zuweilen einen höheren Schwung an. Calvin’s Institution enthält Abschnitte, die dem Schönsten, was von Pascal und Bossuet geschrieben worden ist, an die Seite gestellt werden können: Stellen, wie jene fiber die Erhabenheit der heiligen Schrift, aber das Elend des gefallenen Menschen, über die Bedeutung des Gebetes, werden nie verfehlen, ait den Leser einen tiefen Eindruck zu machen. Auch von den katholischen Gegnern Calvin’s sind diese Vorzüge anerkannt und manche Abschnitte seines Werkes sogar benutzt worden. Man begreift es vollkommen, wenn er selbst mit dem Gefühl der Befriedigung und des Stolzes auf sein Werk blickt und in seinen übrigen Schriften gern auf das ’Lehrbuch’ zurückverweist." "Und doch beschleicht uns, trotz aller Bewunderung, zu der uns der Verfasser nöthigt, bei dem Durchlesen seines Werkes ein unheimliches Gefühl. Ein System, das von dem furchtbaren Gedanken der doppelten Praedestination ausgeht, welches die Menschen ohne jede Rücksicht auf das eigene Verhalten in Erwählte und Verworfene scheidet und die Einen wie die Anderen zu blossen Werkzeugen zur Verherrlichung der göttlichen Majestät macht ... ein solches System kann unmöglich dem deukenden, Belehrung und Trost suchenden Menschengeist innere Ruhe und Befriedigung gewähren." Baum, Cunitz, and Reuss. Joh. Calvini Opera, vol. I. p. ix. The Strassburg editors of Calvin’s Works belong to the modern liberal school of theology.

• From Less (2017)

  I remember Arthur Less in his youth. I was twelve or so and very bored at an adult party. The apartment itself was all in white, as was everyone invited, and I was given some kind of colorless soda and told not to sit on anything. The silver-white wallpaper had a jasmine-vine repetition that fascinated me for long enough to notice that every three feet, a little bee was kept from landing on a flower by the frozen nature of art. Then I felt a hand on my shoulder—“Do you want to draw something?” I turned, and there was a young blond man smiling down at me. Tall, thin, long hair on top, the idealized face of a Roman statue, and slightly pop eyed as he grinned at me: the kind of animated expression that delights children. I must have assumed he was a teenager. He brought me to the kitchen, where he had pencils and paper, and said we could draw the view. I asked if I could draw him. He laughed at that, but he said all right and sat on a stool listening to the music playing from the other room. I knew the band. It never occurred to me that he was hiding from the party. No one could rival Arthur Less for his ability to exit a room while remaining inside it. He sat, and his mind immediately left me behind. His lean frame in pegged jeans and a big speckled white cable-knit sweater, his long flushed neck stretched as he listened—“So lonely, so lonely ”—too big a head for his frame, in a way, too long and rectangular, lips too red, cheeks too rosy, and a thick glossy head of blond hair buzzed short on the sides and falling in a wave over his forehead. Staring off at the fog, hands in his lap, and mouthing along to the lyrics—“So lonely, so lonely ”—I blush to think of the tangle of lines I made of him. I was too much in awe of his self-sufficiency, of his freedom. To disappear within himself for ten or fifteen minutes while I drew him, when I could barely sit still to hold the pencil. And after a while, his eyes brightened, and he looked at me and said, “What do you got?” and I showed him. He smiled and nodded and gave me some tips, and asked if I wanted more soda. “How old are you?” I asked him. His mouth screwed into a smile. He brushed the hair out of his eyes. “I’m twenty-seven.” For some reason, I found this to be a terrible betrayal. “You’re not a kid!” I told him. “You’re a man!”

• From The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir (2004)

  As his cock entered me to the full, the pressure made me flinch. He looked down at me and said gently, “I won’t hurt you.” Actually, it did hurt—he had a big cock—but somehow I understood intuitively that it wasn’t about hurting me, it was about something else. As with dancing, I knew that I had to work with my discomfort, embrace it, to get to the next level. And then he fucked me in the ass. Is this what he learned while out of town? It was the first time for me. Ever. My God, he was good. I mean bad. What nerve he had. So graceful. It was very slow, very careful, very connected and painful. It was here, in there, that I first tasted the experience of moving through pain and fear to that plateau on the other side where I met this man in a foreign land called Bliss. Bliss is not a pain-free zone; it is a postpain zone. Big difference. His cock inside me on that virgin voyage was an emotional and anatomical miracle: the impossible had come to pass in my ass. Now God had my total attention. If I had walked on water I couldn’t have been more amazed. This was my first act of sacrifice that was not mired in the vicious circle of self-reflective narcissism, the first that delivered me to an entirely new place, instead of a new angle on the old one. I have been changed ever since. Forever changed. And it began physically with his cock in my ass—the act that proposed the mystery—and psychically with my decision to allow it, the best one I ever made. I simply wanted to let this particular man into me, literally. I wanted who he was deep inside who I was. Of course, it also took his balls, the balls to want and try and dare to fuck me in my tiny, tight ass. I’ll respect him forever for that. Finally, a man who was not afraid. The Young Man, 3-Way Man, was transfigured before my eyes. A-Man was born. Something else happened that first afternoon. I stopped mourning my marriage. The mourning ceased, I believe, because someone else had entered my consciousness deeply enough to override the grief, transforming the previous loss into a blessing, making space for a new entry. No one had tried my back door before. That was where my power resided and where it shifted. As hostess at my front door, I was, as you now know, the critical Queen, the impossible Princess, the angry child. But with A-Man in my ass, I became sweet again. So sweet. Within days, I told the Boyfriend that we were done. All done. I couldn’t be sweet with him, only mad. He may have resided in “reality,” but those three hours with A-Man clarified everything for me: “reality” was not my home. WHY THERE?

• From The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir (2004)

  It was here, in there, that I first tasted the experience of moving through pain and fear to that plateau on the other side where I met this man in a foreign land called Bliss. Bliss is not a pain-free zone; it is a postpain zone. Big difference. His cock inside me on that virgin voyage was an emotional and anatomical miracle: the impossible had come to pass in my ass. Now God had my total attention. If I had walked on water I couldn’t have been more amazed. This was my first act of sacrifice that was not mired in the vicious circle of self-reflective narcissism, the first that delivered me to an entirely new place, instead of a new angle on the old one. I have been changed ever since. Forever changed. And it began physically with his cock in my ass—the act that proposed the mystery—and psychically with my decision to allow it, the best one I ever made. I simply wanted to let this particular man into me, literally. I wanted who he was deep inside who I was. Of course, it also took his balls, the balls to want and try and dare to fuck me in my tiny, tight ass. I’ll respect him forever for that. Finally, a man who was not afraid. The Young Man, 3-Way Man, was transfigured before my eyes. A-Man was born. Something else happened that first afternoon. I stopped mourning my marriage. The mourning ceased, I believe, because someone else had entered my consciousness deeply enough to override the grief, transforming the previous loss into a blessing, making space for a new entry. No one had tried my back door before. That was where my power resided and where it shifted. As hostess at my front door, I was, as you now know, the critical Queen, the impossible Princess, the angry child. But with A-Man in my ass, I became sweet again. So sweet . Within days, I told the Boyfriend that we were done. All done. I couldn’t be sweet with him, only mad. He may have resided in “reality,” but those three hours with A-Man clarified everything for me: “reality” was not my home. #41 Ablaze afterward, he stood up, still hard, and slugged some water from a blue bottle. “What is it about?” I asked from the bed, flushed and dazed. He stopped drinking, looked over at me, paused, and said, “Vibrations.” He says we’re learning something about time. The passage of time, the experience of time, the truth of time, the eternity of time. The best time. ENTERING THE EXIT Once initiated, I couldn’t help thinking about anal everything. Including the mechanics.