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 Between Us

  Shame, embarrassment, and perhaps sadness, mean you are down in the relationship. These concepts come with submission, or with the acknowledgment of being weak, at least relative to the other person in the relationship. Awe is another emotion where you are down in the relationship, this time by mere awareness of how small you are compared to a particular other, or to the environment at large. For awe, think of being in the audience of an extremely inspiring concert, or listening to a charismatic teacher or leader. You can move closer or further away, be up or down. Yet another option is that you stay where you are. Some emotions describe just that: acceptance and calmness are examples, but so is depression. There are many reasons for not moving: You can be at ease with the environment (calm), open to anything that has, or would, come your way (acceptance), or not know where to move, even if you wanted to (depressed, hopeless). You can also “keep calm and carry on,” as the British say. But the movement is staying where you were, and the result is no immediate change in the environment—at least, no change that is initiated by you. It does not take a scientist to come up with these emotional moves: they are the basic moves to be found in any relationship, and at this basic level, they will occur in all human societies and in other animals that live in groups (e.g., apes). Finding emotion concepts across the world that refer to these basic moves (or basic “episodes,” as I have labeled them above) should not surprise, because these are the logical possibilities of aligning oneself with the environment—in other words, this is how we live. Yet, even if we share these logical possibilities of relating to the world, we do not share universal emotion concepts. Words in Action As an Egyptian Bedouin woman, I would feel uncomfortable encountering a man my own age. Knowing this to be an instance of hasham directly makes sense of the situation, and tells me what to do: I cast down my eyes, I avoid any contact, and I disappear, if possible. And in doing so I know that this is the right response. As a Japanese mother, I would perceive my unreasonable and loud toddler to amaeru, which tells me that I am to amayakasu: to accept my child’s unwelcome behavior. This is what good mothers do. Should I be a German mother, having Ärger (annoyance or anger) at my disposal, I might perceive my equally unreasonable and loud toddler as disobedient. I would not accept my child’s unwelcome behavior, I might hold them accountable, and set them straight.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  Soon I was more familiar with the gods of Greece than with the religion of Jesus. I was with Paris when he gave the fateful apple to Venus, I saw Troy burn, and followed Ulysses on his wanderings. The prototypes of all that is beautiful sank deep into my soul, and consequently at the time when other boys are coarse and obscene, I displayed an insurmountable aversion to everything base, vulgar, unbeautiful. “To me, the maturing youth, love for women seemed something especially base and unbeautiful, for it showed itself to me first in all its commonness. I avoided all contact with the fair sex; in short, I was supersensual to madness. “When I was about fourteen my mother had a charming chamber-maid, young, attractive, with a figure just budding into womanhood. I was sitting one day studying my Tacitus and growing enthusiastic over the virtues of the ancient Teutons, while she was sweeping my room. Suddenly she stopped, bent down over me, in the meantime holding fast to the broom, and a pair of fresh, full, adorable lips touched mine. The kiss of the enamoured little cat ran through me like a shudder, but I raised up my Germania , like a shield against the temptress, and indignantly left the room.” Wanda broke out in loud laughter. “It would, indeed, be hard to find another man like you, but continue.” “There is another unforgetable incident belonging to that period,” I continued my story. “Countess Sobol, a distant aunt of mine, was visiting my parents. She was a beautiful majestic woman with an attractive smile. I, however, hated her, for she was regarded by the family as a sort of Messalina. My behavior toward her was as rude, malicious, and awkward as possible. “One day my parents drove to the capital of the district. My aunt determined to take advantage of their absence, and to exercise judgment over me. She entered unexpectedly in her fur-lined kazabaika, 2 followed by the cook, kitchen-maid, and the cat of a chamber-maid whom I had scorned. Without asking any questions, they seized me and bound me hand and foot, in spite of my violent resistance. Then my aunt, with an evil smile, rolled up her sleeve and began to whip me with a stout switch. She whipped so hard that the blood flowed, and that, at last, notwithstanding my heroic spirit, I cried and wept and begged for mercy.

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  And then this incredible crescendo of birds. One morning I came over the hill and the green, wet smells came up. And then the birds, the sound of them I’d never really noticed, never heard birds before. I was walking down the hill and I was transfixed. It was very beautiful. I hadn’t been writing all the time I was in Mexico. And poetry was the thing I had with words, that was so important ... And on that hill, I had the first intimation that I could bring those two together. I could infuse words directly with what I was feeling. I didn’t have to create the world I wrote about. I realized that words could tell. That there was such a thing as an emotional sentence. Until then, I would make these constructs and somewhere in there would be a nugget, like a Chinese bun, a piece of nourishment, the thing I really needed, which I had to create. There on that hill, I was filled with the smell and feeling and the way it looked, filled with such beauty that I could not believe ... I had always fantasized it before. I used to fantasize trees and dream forest. Until I got spectacles when I was four I thought trees were green clouds. When I read Shakespeare in high school, I would get off on his gardens and Spanish moss and roses and trellises with beautiful women at rest and sun on red brick. When I was in Mexico I found out this could be a reality. And I learned that day on the mountain that words can match that, re-create it. Adrienne: Do you think that in Mexico you were seeing a reality as extraordinary and vivid and sensual as you had been fantasizing it could be? Audre: I think so. I had always thought I had to do it in my head, make it up. I learned in Mexico that you can’t even make it up unless it happens, or can happen. Where it happened first for me I don’t know; I do remember stories my mother would tell us about Grenada in the West Indies, where she was born ... But that morning in Mexico I realized I did not have to make beauty up for the rest of my life. I remember trying to tell Eudora about this epiphany, and I didn’t have the words for it. And I remember her saying, “Write a poem.” When I tried to write a poem about the way I felt that morning, I could not do it, and all I had was the memory that there must be a way. That was incredibly important. I know that I came back from Mexico very, very different, and much of it had to do with what I learned from Eudora. But more than that, it was a kind of releasing of my work, a releasing of myself.

• From Mud Vein (2014)

  The animals impaled on that ride are angry, their eyes rolling, heads kicked back like something has spooked them. It’s what you would expect from a ride that sits on the devil’s tailbone. Isaac took me there for my thirtieth birthday, on the last day of winter. I remember being surprised that he knew it was my birthday, and that he knew where to take me. Not to a pretentious dinner, but to a clearing in the woods where a little bit of dark magic still lived. “As your doctor, I have access to your medical records,” he reminded me, when I asked how he knew. He wouldn’t tell me where we were going. He loaded me into his car and played a rap song. Six months ago my music was wordless, now I was listening to rap. Isaac was a virus. The Devil’s Backbone is curved like a serpent; it’s a steep rock path you half walk, half skid down. Isaac held my hand as walked, dodging boulders that jutted out of the ground like knobs on a spine. When we stepped into the circle of the trees, the moon was already hanging over the carousel. My breath caught. Right away, I knew there wasn’t something right. The colors were wrong, the animals were wrong, the sentiment was wrong. Isaac handed five dollars to an old man sitting at the controls. He was eating sardines out of a can with his fingers. He stuck the five dollars in the front pocket of his shirt, and stood to open the gate. “Choose wisely,” Isaac whispered as we crossed the threshold. I went left; he went right. There was a ram and a dragon and an ostrich. I passed them by. This felt important, as if what I chose to ride on my thirtieth birthday said something. I stopped beside a horse that looked more angry than scared. Black with an arrow piercing its heart. Its head was bowed like it was ready for the fight, arrow or not. I chose that one, glancing over at Isaac as I swung my leg over the saddle. He was a few rows up, already on a white horse. It had a medical cross on its saddle and blood on its hooves. Perfect, I thought. I liked that he didn’t feel the need to ride next to me. He took his decision as seriously as I took mine, and in the end we each rode alone. There was no music. Just the swish of the trees and the hum of machinery. The old man let us ride twice. When it was over Isaac came over to help me down. His finger stroked my pinkie, which was still wrapped around the cracked pole that speared my horse. “I’m in love with you,” he said.

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

  Hroswitha was an isolated personality and the mediaeval play had its origin not with her, but in the liturgical ritual for the festivals of Easter, Good Friday, and Christmas. To make the impression of the service more vivid than the reading or chanting of the text could do, dramatic features were introduced which were at first little more than the simplest tableaux vivants. They can be traced beyond the eleventh century and have their ancestry in the tropes or poetical interpolations inserted into the liturgy for popular effect.2108 The first dramatic action was associated with the services on Good Friday and Easter. On Good Friday the cross was hid in a cloth or in a recess in the walls, or in a wooden enclosure, specially put together. Such recesses in the walls, called "sepulchres," are still found in Northwold, Navenby, and other English churches. On Easter day the crucifix was taken out from its place of concealment with solemn ritual. In Davis’ Ancient Rites of Durham is the following description:2109 — "Within the church of Durham upon Good Friday there was a marvellous solemn service in which two of the ancient monks took a goodly large crucifix all of gold of the picture of our Saviour Christ, nailed upon the cross .... The service being ended, the said two monks carried the cross to the Sepulchre with great reverence (which Sepulchre was set up that morning on the north side of the quire, nigh unto the high altar before the service time) and there did lay it within the said Sepulchre with great devotion." To this simple ceremony, adapted to impress the popular imagination, were soon added other realistic elements, such as the appearance of the angels and the women at the sepulchre, the race between Peter and John, and the conversation between Mary and the gardener. Dialogues made up of biblical language were introduced, one of the earliest of which is the conversation between the women and the angels:— Whom seek ye in the sepulchre, worshippers of Christ? Jesus of Nazareth, the crucified, O heavenly denizens. Quam quaeritis in sepulchro, Christocolae? Jesum Nazarenum, crucifixum, O coelicolae. On Christmas the dramatic action included the angels, the Magi, and other actors, and a real cradle or manger. Priests in the garb of shepherds, as they approached the stable, were met with the question,— Whom seek ye in the stable, O shepherds, say? Quem quaeritis in praesepe, pastores, dicite? To which they replied, The Saviour, Christ the Lord, the infant wound in swaddling clothes. From such beginnings, the field was easily extended so as to include all Scriptural subjects, from Adam’s fall to the last judgment. The first notice of a miracle play in England is the play of St. Katherine, presented by the schoolboys of Dunstable abbey, soon after the year 1100.2110 William Fitz-Stephen, writing about 1180, contrasted the religious plays performed in his day in London with the stage of pagan Rome.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  The martyrs didn’t have any beefsteaks either.” I followed her resentfully, gnawing at my hunger. “I have given up the idea of finding a place in the city,” Wanda continued. “It will be difficult to find an entire floor which is shut off and where you can do as you please. In such a strange, mad relationship as ours there must be no jarring note. I shall rent an entire villa—and you will be surprised. You have my permission now to satisfy your hunger, and look about a bit in Florence. I won’t be home till evening. If I need you then, I will have you called.” I looked at the Duomo, the Palazzo Vecchio, the Logia di Lanzi, and then I stood for a long time on the banks of the Arno. Again and again I let my eyes rest on the magnificent ancient Florence, whose round cupolas and towers were drawn in soft lines against the blue, cloudless sky. I watched its splendid bridges beneath whose wide arches the lively waves of the beautiful, yellow river ran, and the green hills which surrounded the city, bearing slender cypresses and extensive buildings, palaces and monasteries. It is a different world, this one in which we are—a gay, sensuous, smiling world. The landscape too has nothing of the seriousness and somberness of ours. It is a long ways off to the last white villas scattered among the pale green of the mountains, and yet there isn’t a spot that isn’t bright with sunlight. The people are less serious than we; perhaps, they think less, but they all look as though they were happy. It is also maintained that death is easier in the South. I have a vague feeling now that such a thing as beauty without thorn and love of the senses without torment does exist. Wanda has discovered a delightful little villa and rented it for the winter. It is situated on a charming hill on the left bank of the Arno, opposite the Cascine. It is surrounded by an attractive garden with lovely paths, grass plots, and magnificent meadow of camelias. It is only two stories high, quadrangular in the Italian fashion. An open gallery runs along one side, a sort of loggia with plaster-casts of antique statues; stone steps lead from it down into the garden. From the gallery you enter a bath with a magnificent marble basin, from which winding stairs lead to my mistress’ bed-chamber. Wanda occupies the second story by herself. A room on the ground floor has been assigned to me; it is very attractive, and even has a fireplace. I have roamed through the garden. On a round hillock I discovered a little temple, but I found its door locked. However, there is a chink in the door and when I glue my eye to it, I see the goddess of love on a white pedestal. A slight shudder passes over me.

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  And suppose you don’t have the money to pay? Well, I said, if you don’t have the money to pay, sometimes you died. And there was no mistaking my gesture, even though he had to wait for the translator to translate it. We left him looking absolutely nonplussed, standing in the middle of the square with his mouth open and his hand under his chin staring after me, as in utter amazement that human beings could die from lack of medical care. It’s things like that that keep me dreaming about Russia long after I’ve returned. There’s much that I think that Russian people now take for granted. I think they take for granted free hospitalization and medical care. They take for granted free universities and free schooling as well as the presumption of universal bread, even with a rose or two, although no meat. We are all more blind to what we have than to what we have not. One night after midnight, Fikre and I were walking through a park in Tashkent and we were approached by a Russian man with whom Fikre had a short, sharp conversation, after which the man bowed and walked away. Fikre would not tell me what they’d said, but I had the strong feeling he had tried to pick one of us up, either Fikre or me. Tashkent is, in some respects, a Russian playground. I asked Fikre what the Soviet position was on homosexuality, and Fikre answered that there was no public position because it wasn’t a public matter. Of course, I know better than that, but I have very few inroads into finding out the truth, and Helen is much too proper to discuss anything sexual. V The last few days after we returned to Moscow I got to meet one woman I had noticed all through the Conference. She was an Eskimo woman. Her name was Toni and she’s Chukwo. They are from the part of Russia closest to Alaska, the part that wasn’t sold by the Russians, across the Bering Straits. Toni did not speak English and I didn’t speak Russian, but I felt as if we were making love that last night through our interpreters. I still don’t know if she knew what was going on or not, but I suspect that she did. I had been extremely moved by her presentation earlier in the day. We sat down to dinner, about ten of us, and Toni started speaking to me through our interpreters. She said that she had been searching for my eyes in the crowd all through her speech because she felt as if she were talking to my heart. And that when she sang the little song that she did, she sang it for a beginning that she hoped for all of our people.

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  In all of the women I’ve met here I feel an air of security and awareness of their own powers as women, as producers, and as human beings that is very affirming. But I also feel a stony rigidity, a resistance to questioning that frightens me, saddens me, because it feels destructive of progress as process. We arrived in Samarkand about 9:30 P.M ., quite wearied by a very full day. We got into the main square just in time to catch the last light-show at Tamerlane’s tomb. The less said about that the better. But the following day, Helen, Fikre, and I played hooky from one mausoleum and ran across the street and went to a market. It is very reassuring and good as always. People in markets find a way of getting down to the essentials of I have, you want; you have, I want. The tile tombs and the midrasas (ancient schools) of Samarkand are truly beautiful, intricate, and still. Incredibly painstaking work is being done to restore them. I could feel stillness in my bones, walking through these places, knowing that so much history had been buried there. I found two feathers in the Tomb of Bebe, Timor’s favorite wife, and I felt almost as if I had come there to find them. The Tomb of Bebe has beautiful minarets, but the Tomb itself was never used. The mosque was never used. There is a story that Bebe was Tamerlane’s favorite wife and he “loved her with all of his heart.” However, he had many, many journeys to go upon and he left her so often that he broke her heart and she died. When he returned and found she was dead, he was very upset because he had loved her so much, and he vowed that he would build the biggest mausoleum in the world, the most ornate mosque for her, and that is what he did. But then, just before it was completed, it collapsed. They say it was due to an error of the architect, but it was never used. One up for the lady shades. The tile tombs and the midrasas are engrossing, but it’s the market that caught my heart. We went later in that afternoon to another meeting of solidarity for the oppressed people of Somewhere. The only thing that I was quite sure of was that it was not for the oppressed Black people of America, which point, of course, I had questioned a number of days before and was still awaiting a reply. So we stood in the hot sun at the porcelain factory and it almost baked my brains, and I thought about a lot of things.

• From Mud Vein (2014)

  When the last note played, I started my car and drove to the hospital fighting a smile. I’d expected something to strip me naked like the Florence Welch song had. The title and its tie to the great Oscar Wilde had been enough to make me smirk, but the words, which to anyone else fighting cancer would have felt insensitive, uplifted me. So gloriously morbid. I hit play and listened one more time, drumming my fingers on the steering wheel as I drove. I was sitting in the exam room in a hospital gown when Isaac walked in, followed by a nurse, Dr. Akela and the plastic surgeon I saw a few weeks earlier—I think his name was Dr. Monroe, or maybe it was Dr. Morton. Isaac was wearing black scrubs underneath his white lab coat. I had a moment to study him as he looked over my chart. Dr. Akela was smiling at me, standing almost too close to Isaac. Was that possession? Dr. Monroe/Morton looked bored. On television they called his kind Plastics. Finally, Isaac looked up. “Senna,” he said. Dr. Akela glanced up at him when he used my first name. I wondered if she was where he went missing to when he wasn’t with me. If I were a man, I’d go missing to Dr. Akela, too. She’d make a beautiful hiding place. Her sense was sight, I decided. Everything about her called loudly to the eyes: the way she moved, the way she looked, the way she spoke sentences with only her body. Isaac asked me to sit up. “We’re going to take a look.” He gently untied the back of my hospital gown and stepped away so I could lower it myself. I made myself feel nothing, staring straight ahead as the cold air touched my skin. “Lie back, Senna,” he said softly. I did. I focused on the ceiling as I felt his hands on me. He examined each breast, his fingers lingering around the lump on the right side. His touch was gentle, but professional. If anyone else had been touching me, I would have bolted upright and run straight out of the room. When he was done, he helped me sit up and retied my gown. I saw Dr. Akela watching him again. “Your labs look good,” he said. “Everything is set for the surgery next week. Dr. Montoll is here to talk to you about reconstruction.” Montoll! “And Dr. Akela would like to go over the radiation treatments with you.” “I won’t be needing to speak with Dr. Montoll,” I said. Isaac’s face jerked up from my chart. “You’ll want to discuss reconstruction of—” “No,” I said. “I don’t.” Dr. Montoll the Plastic stepped in, suddenly not looking quite as bored. “Ms. Richards, if we get the expanders in now, your reconstruction—” “I’m not interested in reconstruction,” I said, dismissively. “I’ll have the mastectomy and then I’ll go home without expanders. That’s my decision.” Dr.

• From Going Clear (2013)

  In the hospital, Hubbard says, he was also given a psychiatric examination. To his alarm, the doctor wrote two pages of notes. “And I was watching this, you know, saying, ‘Well, have I gone nuts, after all?’ ” He conspired to take a look at the records to see what the doctor had written. “I got to the end and it said, ‘In short, this officer has no neurotic or psychotic tendencies of any kind whatsoever.’ ” (There is no psychiatric evaluation contained in Hubbard’s medical records.) POLLY AND THE TWO CHILDREN had spent the war waiting for Ron on their plot in Port Orchard, but there was no joyous homecoming. “My wife left me while I was in a hospital with ulcers,” Hubbard noted. “It was a terrible blow when she left me for I was ill and without prospects.” Soon after leaving the hospital, Hubbard towed a house trailer behind an old Packard to Southern California, where so many ambitious and rootless members of his generation were seeking their destiny. There was a proliferation of exotic new religions in America and many other countries, caused by the tumult of war and disruptions of progress that older denominations weren’t prepared to solve. Southern California was filled with migrants who weren’t tied to old creeds and were ready to experiment with new ways of thinking. The region was swarming with Theosophists, Rosicrucians, Zoroastrians, and Vedantists. Swamis, mystics, and gurus of many different faiths pulled acolytes into their orbits. The most brilliant member of this galaxy of occultists was John Whiteside Parsons, known as Jack, a rocket scientist working at what would later become the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Technical Institute. (Parsons, who has a crater on the Moon named after him, developed solid rocket fuel.) Darkly handsome and brawny, later called by some scholars the “James Dean of the occult,” Parsons was a science-fiction fan and an outspoken advocate of free love. He acquired a three-story Craftsman-style mansion, with a twelve-car garage, at 1003 South Orange Grove Avenue in Pasadena—a sedate, palm-lined street known as Millionaires Row. The house had once belonged to Arthur H. Fleming, a logging tycoon and philanthropist, who had hosted former president Theodore Roosevelt, John Muir, and Albert Einstein in its oval dining room. The street had also been home to William Wrigley, of the chewing-gum fortune, and the beer baron Adolph Busch, whose widow still lived next door. She must have been appalled to watch as Parsons divided the historic home and the coach house behind it into nineteen apartments, then advertised for renters. He sought artists, anarchists, and musicians—the more Bohemian the better. “Must not believe in God,” the ad stated. Among those passing through the “Parsonage” were an aging actress from the silent movie era, an opera singer, several astrologers, an ex- convict, and the chief engineer for the development of the atomic bomb.

• From Going Clear (2013)

  Realism was no asset in this kind of writing, he complained, remarking on “my utter inability to sell a story which has any connection with my own background.... Reality seems to be a very detested quantity.” Then, on New Year’s Day, 1938, Hubbard had a revelation that would change his life—and eventually, the lives of many others. During a dental operation, he received a gas anesthetic. “While under the influence of it my heart must have stopped beating,” he relates. “It was like sliding helter-skelter down into a vortex of scarlet and it was knowing that one was dying and that the process of dying was far from pleasant.” In those brief, hallucinatory moments, Hubbard believed that the secrets of existence were accidentally revealed to him. Forrest Ackerman, who later became his literary agent, said that Hubbard told him that he had risen from the dental chair in spirit form, glanced back at his former body, and wondered, “Where do we go from here?” Hubbard’s disembodied spirit then noticed a huge ornate gate in the distance, which he floated through. On the other side, Ackerman relates, Hubbard discovered “an intellectual smorgasbord of everything that had ever puzzled the mind of man—you know, how did it all begin, where do we go from here, are there past lives—and like a sponge he was just absorbing all this esoteric information. And all of a sudden, there was a kind of swishing in the air and he heard a voice, ‘No, not yet! He’s not ready!’ And like a long umbilical cord, he felt himself being pulled back, back, back. And he lay down in his body, and he opened his eyes, and he said to the nurse, ‘I was dead, wasn’t I?’ ” The nurse looked startled, and the doctor gave her a dirty look for letting Hubbard know what had happened. In Hubbard’s own written account of the event, he remembers voices crying out as he is being restored to life, “Don’t let him know!” When he came to, he was “still in contact with something.” The intimation that he had briefly been given access to the divine mystery lingered for several days, but he couldn’t call it back. “And then one morning, just as I awoke, it came to me.” In a fever, he dashed off a small book he titled Excalibur. “Once upon a time, according to a writer in The Arabian Nights, there lived a very wise old man,” the book begins, in the brief portion that the church has published of the fragments it says it has in its possession.

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  The tile tombs and the midrasas (ancient schools) of Samarkand are truly beautiful, intricate, and still. Incredibly painstaking work is being done to restore them. I could feel stillness in my bones, walking through these places, knowing that so much history had been buried there. I found two feathers in the Tomb of Bebe, Timor’s favorite wife, and I felt almost as if I had come there to find them. The Tomb of Bebe has beautiful minarets, but the Tomb itself was never used. The mosque was never used. There is a story that Bebe was Tamerlane’s favorite wife and he “loved her with all of his heart.” However, he had many, many journeys to go upon and he left her so often that he broke her heart and she died. When he returned and found she was dead, he was very upset because he had loved her so much, and he vowed that he would build the biggest mausoleum in the world, the most ornate mosque for her, and that is what he did. But then, just before it was completed, it collapsed. They say it was due to an error of the architect, but it was never used. One up for the lady shades. The tile tombs and the midrasas are engrossing, but it’s the market that caught my heart. We went later in that afternoon to another meeting of solidarity for the oppressed people of Somewhere. The only thing that I was quite sure of was that it was not for the oppressed Black people of America, which point, of course, I had questioned a number of days before and was still awaiting a reply. So we stood in the hot sun at the porcelain factory and it almost baked my brains, and I thought about a lot of things. The peoples of the Soviet Union, in many respects, impress me as people who can not yet afford to be honest. When they can be they will either blossom into a marvel or sink into decay. What gets me about the United States is that it pretends to be honest and therefore has so little room to move toward hope. I think that in America there are certain kinds of problems and in Russia there are certain kinds of problems, but basically, when you find people who start from a position where human beings are at the core, as opposed to a position where profit is at the core, the solutions can be very different. I wonder how similar human problems will be solved. But I am not always convinced that human beings are at the core here, either, although there is more lip service done to that idea than in the U.S.

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  That is, the labor of one’s hands is measured by how much food you can produce, and then you take that and compare its importance to the worth of the other work that you do. Some men and women spend their whole lives, for instance, learning and doing the infinitely slow and patient handwork of retouching Persian Blue tiles down in Samarkand to restore the ancient mausoleums. It is considered very precious work. But antiquities have a particular value, whereas carrying someone else’s bag does not have a very high priority because it is not very productive either of beauty or worth. If you can’t manage it, then that’s another story. I find it a very interesting concept. It’s about thirty miles from the airport to the city of Moscow, and the road and the trees and the drivers could have been people from Northern Westchester in late winter, except I couldn’t read any of the signs. We would pass from time to time incredibly beautiful, old, uncared for Russian-Orthodox-style houses, with gorgeous painted wooden colors and outlined ornate windows. Some of them were almost falling down. But there was a large ornate richness about the landscape and architecture on the outskirts of Moscow, even in its grey winter, that seemed to tell me immediately that I was not at home. I stayed at the Hotel Younnost, which is one of the international hotels in Moscow. The room was a square studio affair with Hollywood bed couches, and a huge picture window looking towards the National Stadium, over a railroad bridge, with a very imposing view of the University buildings against the skyline. But everything was so reminiscent of New York in winter that even as I sat at 9:30 P.M. after dinner, writing, looking through the blinds, there was the sound of a train and light on the skyline, and every now and then the tail lights of an auto curving around between the railroad bridge and the hotel. And it felt like a hundred nights that I remembered along Riverside Drive, except that just on the edge of the picture was the golden onion-shaped dome of a Russian Orthodox church. Before dinner I took a short walk. It was already growing dark, but down the street from the hotel was the Stadium stop on the Metro, which is a subway. I walked down there and into the Metro station and I stood in front of the escalators for awhile just watching the faces of the people coming and going. It felt like instant 14th Street of my childhood, before Blacks and Latins colored New York, except everyone was much more orderly and the whole place seemed much less crowded. The thing that was really strangest of all for the ten minutes that I stood there was that there were no Black people. And the token collector and the station manager were women.

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

  Servetus begins the "Restitution," as well as his first book against the Trinity, with the doctrine of Christ. He rises from the humanity of the historical Jesus of Nazareth to his Messiahship and Divine Sonship, and from this to his divinity.1094 This is, we may say, the view of the Synoptical Gospels, as distinct from the usual orthodox method which, with the Prologue of the fourth Gospel, descends from his divinity to his humanity through the act of the incarnation of the second person of the Trinity. In this respect he anticipates the modern humanitarian Christology. Jesus is, according to Servetus, begotten, not of the first person of God, but of the essence of the one undivided and indivisible God. He is born, according to the flesh, of the Virgin Mary by the overshadowing cloud of the Spirit (Matt. 1:18, 20, 23; Luke 1:32, 35). The whole aim of the gospel is to lead men to believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God (comp. John 20:31).1095 But the term "Son of God" is in the Scriptures always used of the man Jesus, and never of the Logos.1096 He is the one true and natural son of God, born of the substance of God; we are sons by adoption, by an act of grace. We are made sons of God by faith (John 1:12; Gal. 3:26; Rom. 8:23; Eph. 1:5). He is, moreover, truly and veritably God. The whole essence of God is manifest in him; God dwells in him bodily.1097 To his last breath Servetus worshipped Jesus as the Son of the eternal God. But he did not admit him to be the eternal Son of God except in an ideal and pantheistic sense, in which the whole world was in the mind of God from eternity, and comprehended in the Divine Wisdom (Sophia) and the Divine Word (Logos).

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  Tonight, because of a slight error on the part of the waitress, Helen had two dinners and thought very little about eating them both. And no one is terribly fat, but I think that has a good deal to do with the weather. We had wine at dinner tonight, and wine seems to be used a lot to loosen up one’s tongue. It almost seems a prescription. At every dinner meal there are always three glasses: one for water, one for wine, and one for vodka, which flows like water, and with apparently as little effect upon Russians. A group from the conference with our Intourist guides went sightseeing today. It’s hard to believe that today’s Sunday because the whole city seems so full of weekday life, so intent on its own purposes, that it makes the week seem extended by an extra day. We saw the Novagrodsky Convent Museum and the brilliant, saucy golden onion steeples that shock me back from the feeling this is Manhattan. We went to see the University and of course many plaques for many heroes, but I never saw one that moved me as much as the tough old lady coming in on Aeroflot. And the Bolshoi Ballet Theatre. It was rainy and grey and overcast — a New York December day — and very imposing in the way the Grand Concourse at 161st Street in the Bronx can be imposing in the middle of December, or Columbus Circle. The golden onion steeples on some older buildings are beautiful and they glisten all the time, even in this weather, which makes them look like joyful promises on the landscape, or fairy palaces, and the lovely colors of greens, whites, yellows and oranges decorating and outlining windows make a wonderfully colorful accent in the greyness. I hope that I get a chance to see the Pushkin Museum. I was interviewed by a sweetly astute, motherly woman who was one of the members of the Union of Soviet Writers. She was doing a study of “Negro policy,” as she said, and of course she was very interested in women in the States. We talked for a good two hours and one of the things I told her was about the old woman on the plane with the medals, and I asked her if she had any idea what they were. She said the woman was probably an older farm worker who had been awarded and named a “Hero of the Republic.” Those were mostly given to people who worked very hard, she said. It was interesting because earlier, at lunch, I had seen a side of Helen, my interpreter, that surprised me. She was quite out of sorts with one of the waitresses who did not wait on her quickly enough, and it does take a long time to get waited on.

• From Going Clear (2013)

  No rain, he would have lost the bet. A narrow slice of night sky separated the blackness of the earth and the blackness of the clouds like a window closing on creation. Flashes of lighting illuminated the silhouette of the Davis Mountains and formed cobwebs on the dome of the sky like a cracked China bowl. No telling how big this storm is, Sonny thought, all the way to New Mexico at least. In this darkness, something caught his eye, a brightness where there hadn’t been brightness before, a speck of orange and yellow across the floor of the high desert at the base of the opposing mesa, and then Sonny realized what he was looking at. “Fire! Across the valley,” he told Lola. “Looks like the Miller place.” While Sonny loaded the truck with shovels and gunny sacks, along with gloves, jackets, and helmets—the basics—Lola phoned the other members of the local volunteer fire department. They were already awake because of the storm. With no other fire department to call on out here, neighbors had to take care of each other. Grass was money, especially now, but in this drought it was also explosively combustible. The month before there had been a fire on the other side of the mountains that shot up a plume like a hydrogen bomb. Wildfires were finishing off the West. It took half an hour to get to the Miller place, even with Sonny driving at high speed, and by that time the wind had blown the blaze across the prairie, the shriveled yellow grass gulping the flames and creosote bushes feeding sparks to the wind. The earth glowed in an awful majesty so bright it illuminated the clouds, which seemed almost in reach. A Ford 350 with a water pump in the bed served as the nearest fire engine. It was already at the Miller place, along with a couple dozen overwhelmed volunteers. Some had never fought a fire before, at least not one this big and hungry, and amplified by lightning strikes that kept everyone off guard. Lola passed out gunny sacks to those who didn’t have them, which they soaked in the stock tank and used to bat out the flames, trying to keep the inferno away from the house and the barn directly downwind. As chief of the volunteer force, Sonny raced his pickup across the field to intercept the pump truck, which was doing no good by spraying the back of the fire. Sonny honked until he got the attention of the driver, Frank Acosta, who looked at Sonny as if he had no idea where he was.

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  Later on along the roads there were literally hills of cotton being loaded onto trains. Each town that we pass through has a cafe, where the villagers can come and spend an evening or chat or talk or watch TV or listen to propaganda, who knows, but where they can meet. And all over, in between very old looking villages, there are also new four story buildings in progress, factories, new apartment houses. Trains full of building slabs and other kinds of materials, coal and rock and tractors pass by, even one with row after row after row of small automobiles. There are three different Russian automobiles. This is the cheapest, and most popular — hundreds and hundreds of cars stacked, all the same lemon color. Obviously, that month the factory was producing yellow. I watched all of this industry pass and it came through to me on that bus ride down to Samarkand that this land was not industrial so much as it was industrious. There was a flavor of people working hard and doing things and it was very attractive. On top of that, I learned that this area between Tashkent and Samarkand was once known as the “Hungry Desert” because although it was fertile, no rain ever fell and it was covered with a coat of salt. Through technology devised to lift the salt, and a great deal of human hands and engineering, this whole area has been made to bloom, and it really does bloom. It is being farmed, mostly with cotton. People live here and there are massive irrigation ditches and pipes that maintain trees where there are towns and collective farms. All through Uzbekistan the feeling of a desert having been reclaimed and bearing huge fruit is very constant. Later on, as we headed on south after the great feast, we stopped at an oasis, and I picked some desert flowers that were growing — small little scrub flowers that were growing in the sand. And just for so, I tasted one of them and as honeysuckle is sweet, so is this flower salt. It was as if the earth itself was still producing salt or still pouring salt into its products . There’s very beautiful marble throughout Uzbekistan. The stairs of the hotels and sometimes the streets have a beautiful pink and green marble. That was in Tashkent, which means “Stone City.” But on this ride from Tashkent to Samarkand I saw no stones or rocks of any kind near the road. I don’t know why, except that it is a reclaimed desert. The roads felt very good, and they were very broad because of course there was always heavy machinery and trucking traveling back and forth. We had another glowing welcome in Gulstan, which means the “Hungry Desert.”

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  Adrienne: That thing those other people presumably did. Do you remember what that was like? Andre: Yes. I had an image of trying to reach something around a corner, that it was just eluding me. The image was constantly vanishing. There was an experience I had in Mexico, when I moved to Cuernavaca … Adrienne: This was when you were about how old? Andre: I was nineteen. I was commuting to Mexico City for classes. In order to get to my early class I would catch a six o’clock turismo in the village plaza. I would come out of my house before dawn. You know, there are two volcanoes, Popocatepetl and Ixtacuhuatl. I thought they were clouds the first time I saw them through my windows. It would be dark, and I would see the snow on top of the mountains and the sun coming up. And when the sun crested, at a certain point, the birds would start. But because we were in the valley it would still look like night. But there would be the light of the snow. And then this incredible crescendo of birds. One morning I came over the hill and the green, wet smells came up. And then the birds, the sound of them I’d never really noticed, never heard birds before. I was walking down the hill and I was transfixed. It was very beautiful. I hadn’t been writing all the time I was in Mexico. And poetry was the thing I had with words, that was so important … And on that hill, I had the first intimation that I could bring those two together. I could infuse words directly with what I was feeling. I didn’t have to create the world I wrote about. I realized that words could tell. That there was such a thing as an emotional sentence. Until then, I would make these constructs and somewhere in there would be a nugget, like a Chinese bun, a piece of nourishment, the thing I really needed, which I had to create. There on that hill, I was filled with the smell and feeling and the way it looked, filled with such beauty that I could not believe … I had always fantasized it before. I used to fantasize trees and dream forest. Until I got spectacles when I was four I thought trees were green clouds. When I read Shakespeare in high school, I would get off on his gardens and Spanish moss and roses and trellises with beautiful women at rest and sun on red brick. When I was in Mexico I found out this could be a reality. And I learned that day on the mountain that words can match that, re-create it. Adrienne: Do you think that in Mexico you were seeing a reality as extraordinary and vivid and sensual as you had been fantasizing it could be?

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  That’s a very difficult way to live, but it also has served me. It’s been an asset as well as a liability. When I went to high school, I found out that people really thought in different ways — perceived, puzzled out, acquired information verbally. I had such a hard time. I never studied; I literally intuited all my teachers. That’s why it was so important to get a teacher who I liked because I never studied, I never read my assignment, and I would get all this stuff — what they felt, what they knew — but I missed a lot of other stuff, a lot of my own original workings. Adrienne: When you said you never read, you meant you never read the assignments, but you were reading? Audre: If I read things that were assigned, I didn’t read them the way we were supposed to. Everything was like a poem, with different curves, different levels. So I always felt that the ways I took things in were different from the ways other people took them in. I used to practice trying to think. Adrienne: That thing those other people presumably did. Do you remember what that was like? Andre: Yes. I had an image of trying to reach something around a corner, that it was just eluding me. The image was constantly vanishing. There was an experience I had in Mexico, when I moved to Cuernavaca … Adrienne: This was when you were about how old? Andre: I was nineteen. I was commuting to Mexico City for classes. In order to get to my early class I would catch a six o’clock turismo in the village plaza. I would come out of my house before dawn. You know, there are two volcanoes, Popocatepetl and Ixtacuhuatl. I thought they were clouds the first time I saw them through my windows. It would be dark, and I would see the snow on top of the mountains and the sun coming up. And when the sun crested, at a certain point, the birds would start. But because we were in the valley it would still look like night. But there would be the light of the snow. And then this incredible crescendo of birds. One morning I came over the hill and the green, wet smells came up. And then the birds, the sound of them I’d never really noticed, never heard birds before. I was walking down the hill and I was transfixed. It was very beautiful. I hadn’t been writing all the time I was in Mexico. And poetry was the thing I had with words, that was so important … And on that hill, I had the first intimation that I could bring those two together. I could infuse words directly with what I was feeling. I didn’t have to create the world I wrote about.

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

  747, May 29th, the second Sept. 30th, the third Dec. 5th. See the full table of Encke, p. 429. We supplement this account by an extract from an article on the Star of the Wise Men by the Rev. Charles Pritchard, M.A., Hon. Secretary of the Royal Astronomical Society, who made a fresh calculation of the constellation in a.u. 747, from May to December, and published the results in Memoirs of Royal Ast. Society, vol. xxv., and in Smith’s "Bible Dictionary," p. 3108, Am. ed., where he says: "At that time [end of Sept., b.c. 7] there can be no doubt Jupiter would present to astronomers, especially in so clear an atmosphere, a magnificent spectacle. It was then at its most brilliant apparition, for it was at its nearest approach both to the sun and to the earth. Not far from it would be seen its duller and much less conspicuous companion, Saturn. This glorious spectacle continued almost unaltered for several days, when the planets again slowly separated, then came to a halt, when, by reassuming a direct motion, Jupiter again approached to a conjunction for a third time with Saturn, just as the Magi may be supposed to have entered the Holy City. And, to complete the fascination of the tale, about an hour and a half after sunset, the two planets might be seen from Jerusalem, hanging as it were in the meridian, and suspended over Bethlehem in the distance. These celestial phenomena thus described are, it will be seen, beyond the reach of question, and at the first impression they assuredly appear to fulfil the conditions of the Star of the Magi." If Pritchard, nevertheless, rejects the identity of the constellation with the single star of Matthew, it is because of a too literal understanding of Matthew’s language, that the star proh'gen aujtouv" and ejstavqh ejpavnw, which would make it miraculous in either case. The Fifteenth Year of Tiberius. (3) Luke 3:1, 23, gives us an important and evidently careful indication of the reigning powers at the time when John the Baptist and Christ entered upon their public ministry, which, according to Levitical custom, was at the age of thirty.113 John the Baptist began his ministry "in the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius,"114 and Jesus, who was only about six months younger than John (comp. Luke 1:5, 26), was baptized and began to teach when he was "about thirty years of age."115 Tiberius began to reign jointly with Augustus, as "collega imperii," a.u. 764 (or, at all events, in the beginning of 765), and independently, Aug. 19, a.u. 767 (A.D. 14); consequently, the fifteenth year of his reign was either a.u. 779, if we count from the joint reign (as Luke probably did, using the more general term hJgemoniva rather than monarciva or basileiva116 or 782, if we reckon from the independent reign (as was the usual Roman method).117 Now, if we reckon back thirty years from a.u. 779 or 782, we come to a.u.