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 A Way of Being (1980)

  four-hundredth anniversary, brought to me by a special emissary from this ancient Dutch seat of learning. There have been the dozens of highly personal letters from those whose lives have been touched or changed by my writings. These never cease to amaze me. That I could have had an important part in altering the life of a man in South Africa or a woman in the “outback” of Australia still seems a bit incredible—like magic, somehow. THOUGHTS REGARDING DEATH And then there is the ending of life. It may surprise you that at my age I think very little about death. The current popular interest in it surprises me. Ten or fifteen years ago I felt quite certain that death was the total end of the person. I still regard that as the most likely prospect; however, it does not seem to me a tragic or awful prospect. I have been able to live my life—not to the full, certainly, but with a satisfying degree of fullness—and it seems natural that my life should come to an end. I already have a degree of immortality in other persons. I have sometimes said that, psychologically, I have strong sons and daughters all over the world. Also, I believe that the ideas and the ways of being that I and others have helped to develop will continue, for some time at least. So if I, as an individual, come to a complete and final end, aspects of me will still live on in a variety of growing ways, and that is a pleasant thought. I think that no one can know whether he or she fears death until it arrives. Certainly, death is the ultimate leap in the dark, and I think it is highly probable that the apprehension I feel when going under an anesthetic will be duplicated or increased when I face death. Yet I don’t experience a really deep fear of this process. So far as I am aware, my fears concerning death relate to its circumstances. I have a dread of any long and painful illness leading to death. I dread the thought of senility or of partial brain damage due to a stroke. My preference would be to die quickly, before it is too late to die with dignity. I think of Winston Churchill. I didn’t mourn his death. I mourned the fact that death had not come sooner, when he could have died with the dignity he deserved. My belief that death is the end has, however, been modified by some of my learnings of the past decade. I am impressed with the accounts by Raymond Moody (1975) of the experience of persons who have been so near death as to be declared dead, but who have come back to life. I am impressed by some of the reports of reincarnation, although reincarnation seems a very dubious blessing indeed. I am interested in the work of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and the conclusions she has reached about life after death. I find definitely appealing the views of Arthur Koestler that individual consciousness is but a fragment of a cosmic consciousness, the fragment being reabsorbed into the whole upon the death of the individual. I like his analogy of the individual river eventually flowing into

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

  Pure sensations can only be realized in the earliest days of life. They are all but impossible to adults with memories and stores of associations acquired. Prior to all impressions on sense-organs the brain is plunged in deep sleep and consciousness is practically non-existent. Even the first weeks after birth are passed in almost unbroken sleep by human infants. It takes a strong message from the sense-organs to break this slumber. In a new-born brain this gives rise to an absolutely pure sensation. But the experience leaves its 'unimaginable touch' on the matter of the convolutions, and the next impression which a sense-organs transmits produces a cerebral reaction in which the awakened vestige of the last impression plays its part. Another sort of feeling and a higher grade of cognition are the consequence; and the complication goes on increasing till the end of life, no two successive impressions falling on an identical brain, and no two successive thoughts being exactly the same. (See above, p. 230 ff.) The first sensation which an infant gets is for him the Universe. And the Universe which he latter comes to know is nothing but an amplification and an implication of that first simple germ which, by accretion on the one hand and intussusception on the other, has grown so big and complex and articulate that its first estate is unrememberable. In his dumb awakening to the consciousness of something there, a mere this as yet (or something for which even the term this would perhaps be too discriminative, and the intellectual acknowledgment of which would be better expressed by the bare interjection 'lo!'), the infant encounters an object in which (though it be given in a pure sensation) all the 'categories of the understanding' are contained. It has objectivity, unity, substantiality, causality, in the full sense in which any later object or system of objects has these things. Here the young knower meets and greets his world; and the miracle of knowledge bursts forth, as Voltaire says, as much in the infant's lowest sensation as in the highest achievement of a Newton's brain. The physiological condition of this first sensible experience is probably nerve-currents coming in from many peripheral organs at once. Later, the one confused Fact which these currents cause to appear is perceived to be many facts, and to contain man qualities.[10] For as the currents vary, and the brain-paths are moulded by them, other thoughts with other 'objects' come, and the 'same thing' which was apprehended as a present this soon figures as a past that, about which many unsuspected things have come to light. The principles of this development have been laid down already in Chapters XII and XIII, and nothing more need here be added to that account. "THE RELATIVITY OF KNOWLEDGE."

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  At this moment the model emerged with a sheet about her and probably because of my praise Alexander introduced me to Mlle. Jeanne and said I was a distinguished American writer. She nodded to me saucily, flashing white teeth at me, mounted the estrade, threw off the sheet and took up her pose—all in a moment. I was carried off my feet; the more I looked, the more perfections I discovered. For the first time I saw a figure that I could find no fault with. Needless to say I told her so in my best French with a hundred similes. Alexander also I conciliated by begging him to do no more to the sketch but sell it to me and do another. Finally he took four hundred and fifty francs for it and in an hour had made another sketch. My purchase had convinced Mlle. Jeanne that I was a young millionaire and when I asked her if I might accompany her to her home, she consented more than readily. As a matter of fact, I took her for a drive in the Bois de Boulogne and from there to dinner in a private room at the Café Anglais. During the meal I had got to like her: she lived with her mother, Alexander had told me; though by no means prudish, still less virginal, she was not a _coureuse_. I thought I might risk connection; but when I got her to take off her clothes and began to caress her sex, she drew away and said quite as a matter of course: “Why not _faire minette_?” When I asked her what she meant, she told me frankly: “We women do not get excited in a moment as you men do; why not kiss and tongue me there for a few minutes, then I shall have enjoyed myself and shall be ready....” I’m afraid I made rather a face for she remarked coolly: “Just as you like, you know. I prefer in a meal the _hors d’oeuvres_ to the _pièce de résistance_ like a good many other women: indeed I often content myself with the _hors d’oeuvres_ and don’t take any more. Surely you understand that a woman goes on getting more and more excited for an hour or two and no man is capable of bringing her to the highest pitch of enjoyment while pleasing himself.” “I’m able”, I said stubbornly, “I can go on all night if you please me, so we should skip appetizers.” “No, no!” she replied, laughing, “let us have a banquet then, but begin with lips and tongue!” The delay, the bandying to and fro of argument and above all, the idea of kissing and tonguing her sex, had brought me to coolness and reason. Was I not just as foolish as Bancroft if I yielded to the—an unknown girl.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  Automatically I took down the volume and it opened of itself at the last page of Emerson’s advice to the scholars of Dartmouth College. Every word is still printed on my memory: I can see the left-hand page and read again that divine message: I make no excuse for quoting it almost word for word: “Gentlemen, I have ventured to offer you these considerations upon the scholar’s place and hope, because I thought that standing, as many of you now do, on the threshold of this College, girt and ready to go and assume tasks, public and private, in your country, you would not be sorry to be admonished of those primary duties of the intellect whereof you will seldom hear from the lips of your new companions. You will hear every day the maxims of a low prudence. You will hear that the first duty is to get land and money, place and name. ‘What is this Truth you seek? what is this beauty!’ men will ask, with derision. If nevertheless God have called any of you to explore truth and beauty, be bold, be firm, be true. When you shall say, ‘As others do, so will I: I renounce, I am sorry for it, my early visions; I must eat the good of the land and let learning and romantic expectations go, until a more convenient season’;—then dies the man in you; then once more perish the buds of art, and poetry, and science, as they have died already in a thousand thousand men. The hour of that choice is the crisis of your history, and see that you hold yourself fast by the intellect. It is this domineering temper of the sensual world that creates the extreme need of the priests of science.... Be content with a little light, so it be your own. Explore, and explore. Be neither chided nor flattered out of your position of perpetual inquiry. Neither dogmatize, nor accept another’s dogmatism. Why should you renounce your right to traverse the star-lit deserts of truth, for the premature comforts of an acre, house, and barn? Truth also has its roof, and bed, and board. Make yourself necessary to the world, and mankind will give you bread, and if not store of it, yet such as shall not take away your property in all men’s affections, in art, in nature, and in hope.” The truth of it shocked me: “then perish the buds of art and poetry and science in you as they have perished already in a thousand, thousand men!” That explained why it was that there was no Shakespeare, no Bacon, no Swinburne in America where, according to population and wealth there should be dozens. There flashed on me the realization of the truth, that just because wealth was easy to get here, it exercised an incomparable attraction and in its pursuit “perished a thousand, thousand” gifted spirits who might have steered humanity to new and nobler accomplishment.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  The habit of separating religion and politics is now so routine in the West that it is difficult for us to appreciate how thoroughly the two co-inhered in the past. It was never simply a question of the state “using” religion; the two were indivisible. Dissociating them would have seemed like trying to extract the gin from a cocktail. In the premodern world, religion permeated all aspects of life. We shall see that a host of activities now considered mundane were experienced as deeply sacred: forest clearing, hunting, football matches, dice games, astronomy, farming, state building, tugs-of-war, town planning, commerce, imbibing strong drink, and, most particularly, warfare. Ancient peoples would have found it impossible to see where “religion” ended and “politics” began. This was not because they were too stupid to understand the distinction but because they wanted to invest everything they did with ultimate value. We are meaning-seeking creatures and, unlike other animals, fall very easily into despair if we fail to make sense of our lives. We find the prospect of our inevitable extinction hard to bear. We are troubled by natural disasters and human cruelty and are acutely aware of our physical and psychological frailty. We find it astonishing that we are here at all and want to know why. We also have a great capacity for wonder. Ancient philosophies were entranced by the order of the cosmos; they marveled at the mysterious power that kept the heavenly bodies in their orbits and the seas within bounds and that ensured that the earth regularly came to life again after the dearth of winter, and they longed to participate in this richer and more permanent existence. They expressed this yearning in terms of what is known as the perennial philosophy, so called because it was present, in some form, in most premodern cultures. 11 Every single person, object, or experience was seen as a replica, a pale shadow, of a reality that was stronger and more enduring than anything in their ordinary experience but that they only glimpsed in visionary moments or in dreams. By ritually imitating what they understood to be the gestures and actions of their celestial alter egos—whether gods, ancestors, or culture heroes—premodern folk felt themselves to be caught up in their larger dimension of being. We humans are profoundly artificial and tend naturally toward archetypes and paradigms. 12 We constantly strive to improve on nature or approximate to an ideal that transcends the day-to-day. Even our contemporary cult of celebrity can be understood as an expression of our reverence for and yearning to emulate models of “superhumanity.” Feeling ourselves connected to such extraordinary realities satisfies an essential craving.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  [58] Some of the colourful transvestite ascetic stories may have contained a kernel of truth, but the majority are likely to be further examples of male storytellers ‘thinking with women’ to organize their own emotional worlds. It is telling that there are no complementary stories of male ascetics passing as women. We are back with that trope of early Christianity that, to achieve perfection, a woman must become male, albeit a virginal male. It is the only way of transcending that natural characteristic of women, their subjection to ungovernable passions. 11. The early thirteenth-century portal depicting the parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins at Hovhannavank monastery (Aragatsotn province, Armenia) shows the Wise Virgins as monks with beards. Examples of this thought are frequent in contemporary Christian literary texts that are far more obviously based on reality than the transvestite legends. It could be regarded as one of the organizing principles in Gregory of Nyssa’s biography of Macrina, who practised her asceticism in a very different social setting from that of Mary of Egypt. Gregory begins his account of his sister with the observation that, ‘A woman is the start of the narrative, if indeed a woman, for I do not know if it is proper to name her who is above nature [out of the terms] of nature.’ [59] Genderless or male, certainly not female: this was the best way of expressing Macrina’s extraordinary closeness to heaven beyond normal feminine capacity. ‘According to nature I am a woman, but not according to my thoughts,’ said the fifth-century Egyptian ‘Desert Mother’ Amma Sarah, a saying preserved when very few of her pronouncements attracted the attention of male scribes, and a fine definition of ‘gendering’. [60] Some of the iconography of the Church in Armenia goes further than most Christian art by expressing the idea in a sculptural motif. Jesus’s parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins (Matt. 25.1–13) is pictured with the wise among the virgins lighting their lamps for the bridegroom, but not as the young women of the original story: they are monks with beards. [61] *

• From Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble (2014)

  Sasha says. “No, I want a plastic bag, and you can put it over my head and tie it around my neck.” “That’s the spirit,” Sasha says, and we open the door and head inside to face the mayhem. Every new HubSpot employee has to go through training to learn how to use the software. That’s a good idea, and it also keeps me from having to worry about what I’m supposed to be doing here, or why Cranium, who hired me, still has never come by to say hello or talk about what he wants me to work on. Training takes place in a tiny room, where for two weeks I sit shoulder to shoulder with twenty other new recruits, listening to pep talks that start to sound like the brainwashing you get when you join a cult. It’s amazing, and hilarious. It’s everything I ever imagined might take place inside a tech company, only even better. Our head trainer is Dave, a wiry, energetic guy in his forties with a shaved head and a gray goatee. On the first day we all go around and introduce ourselves, and tell everyone about something that makes us special. Dave’s thing is that he plays in a heavy metal cover band on weekends. Dave is part teacher and part preacher. Every two weeks he gets a batch of new recruits, and he goes through the same spiel, showing the same slides, telling the same jokes. He’s good at it. He loves HubSpot, he tells us, unabashedly. He’s had lots of jobs, and this is by far the best place he’s ever worked. This company has changed his life. He hopes it will change ours as well. “We’re not just selling a product here,” Dave tells us. “HubSpot is leading a revolution. A movement. HubSpot is changing the world. This software doesn’t just help companies sell products. This product changes people’s lives. We are changing people’s lives.” He tells a story about a guy named Brandon, a pool installer in Virginia. His business was struggling. He could barely get by. But then he started using HubSpot software, and his business took off. Soon, his company was installing pools all around the country. He was rich! Eventually he was doing so well that he hired someone else to run his pool company so that he could become a motivational speaker. He travels the world spreading the gospel of inbound marketing, transforming the lives of thousands of other people. “This guy has become a superstar,” Dave says. “He’s a rock star. And it all started with HubSpot. That’s what we’re doing here. That’s what you are part of.”

• From The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica Volume 10 (2011)

  “He’s not a dog,” Aunt Zippy said. “He’s a cat, Morris, my long time companion. He will never harm you.” She led us down a long hallway, lined with photos of her with many different women. There was a picture of Aunt Zippy seated with Greta Garbo on a park bench. Another picture showed Aunt Zippy drinking cocktails with Mae West at a long bar and another showed her sitting in a rowboat with Eleanor Roosevelt on a calm lake. There was also a photo of Aunt Zippy shaking hands with Golda Meir. We entered a light airy room with a high ceiling. Curtains of crystal beads hung in front of the high windows, sending shining reflections of sparkling light on the white walls. A modern white sofa stood in the center of the room, flanked by matching armchairs. The only testament to Aunt Zippy’s profession was a gleaming skull on top of the pine coffee table in front of the sofa. The contemporary decor surprised me. “Just because I’m a witch,” Aunt Zippy said, “is no reason for me to succumb to conventional thinking about my vocation. I’ve already lived a hundred and ten years. Maybe I’ll live a hundred more. Why should I spend my time in some dismal dump filled with bats? Like they say, it isn’t over until the fat lady sings.” My mother giggled. “Right,” she said, smiling. Aunt Zippy snapped her fingers and three glasses filled with ruby liquid materialized on the coffee table. She picked up one of the glasses and handed it to me. “Enjoy this wine,” she said, “A glass of wine a day will keep the worry wrinkles away. Your mother and I will be back shortly.” My mother nodded at me encouragingly as she and Aunt Zippy each picked up a glass. They vanished through a door decorated with black roses that had appeared in a corner of the room. Morris didn’t follow them. He spread out under the coffee table and regarded me lugubriously. I had never tasted wine before. I took a sniff. It smelled like raspberries and Vicks Cough Syrup. When I tasted it I found it had a much stronger zing. I closed my eyes and listened to Morris purr softly somewhere below me. He seemed to be humming the first few bars of “Earth Angel”, my favorite song. Morty Rothman and I danced to it when we met at the party celebrating my friend Cora Sue’s sixteenth birthday. That was the first time I felt a boy’s bone grow hard and press against me through my clothes. He nuzzled my neck and stuck his tongue in my ear, another first. It was warm and wet and I liked it. The Witch of Jerome Avenue 393

• From Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010)

  It is a theme that runs through many of her novels. She often describes a character shocked into a perception of the “mystery” of another object or person, which is unexpectedly revealed as marvelously separate from himself or herself. Here a self-absorbed, somewhat superficial girl, a former art student, visits the National Gallery in London during a personal crisis and discovers that she is moved by the pictures in a new way: Here was something that her consciousness could not wretchedly devour, and by making it part of her fantasy make it worthless. Even [her estranged husband], she thought, only existed now as someone she dreamt about; or else as a vague external menace never really encountered and understood. But the pictures were something real outside herself, which spoke to her kindly and yet in sovereign tones, something superior and good whose presence destroyed the dreary, trance-like solipsism of her earlier mood. When the world had seemed to be subjective it had seemed to be without interest or value. But now there was something in it after all. 2 4 Such an experience is an ekstasis that releases us from the prison of selfhood. The aim of this step is threefold: (1) to recognize and appreciate the unknown and unknowable, (2) to become sensitive to overconfident assertions of certainty in ourselves and other people, and (3) to make ourselves aware of the numinous mystery of each human being we encounter during the day. First, think about those experiences that touch you deeply and lift you momentarily beyond yourself so that you seem to inhabit your humanity more fully than usual. It may be listening to a particular piece of music, reading certain poems, looking at a beautiful view, or sitting quietly with someone you love. Spend a little time each day enjoying this ekstasis and notice how difficult it is to speak of your experience or to say exactly what it is that moves you. Try to explain to somebody precisely how it has this effect on you, what it is telling you, and listen to the inadequacy of your words. Investigate the theme of unknowing in human experience. If you are scientifically inclined, you can explore the indeterminate universe of quantum mechanics, the neurological complexity of the mind, or depth psychology. Second, stand back and listen to the aggressive certainty that characterizes so much of our discourse these days.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  4 Jesus the Christ The energies released by the relatively short earthly life and execution of Jesus still fuel a world faith, currently engaging the loyalties of around a third of its inhabitants. A little over three decades in an identifiable period of history have resonated beyond historic time, transforming all around them. Yet the young man at the centre of it startles by having such an ordinary name. His parents, like many at the time, called him Jeshua, in memory of the liberator who led the Hebrews into the Promised Land after the death of Moses. [1] Christians do their best to disguise this relationship between the two Jeshuas, by differentiating their names, so the name of the original liberating hero is rendered for instance into English as Joshua. The later liberating Saviour is called Jesus, a Greek variant (Jesous) on the original Hebrew. [2] Christians have added a second descriptor for him which is a title, and which should not be mistaken for a surname like ‘MacCulloch’. ‘Christ’ is another Greek word, translating the Hebrew word ‘Messiah’, or ‘Anointed One’, the future hope of Israel; it takes the ordinariness of the first name Jeshua and catapults it into the cosmos. The Saviour of the world has taken flesh (carnis in Latin), in what Western Christians call the ‘Incarnation’. This is the story set forth in four different accounts of the earthly life and resurrection of Jesus Christ, written for different communities now difficult to identify somewhere on the eastern Mediterranean seaboard. They form a literary genre with little Classical precedent, focusing on a level of ordinary society that biography normally ignored: the interactions of Jesus with ordinary people, often on the margins of their society. One modern scholar has described them as ‘down-market’ versions of biography. [3] It is therefore appropriate that they (and some later imitations of them) share a distinctive description, which is, in English, ‘Gospel’. This is an Old English word meaning ‘good news’; many languages have kept the same idea in forms of the preceding Latin word, deriving in turn from Greek: Evangelium. Three of the Gospels, written by ‘Evangelists’ identified as Mark, Matthew and Luke, are together known as the ‘Synoptic’ Gospels, to distinguish them from the Gospel of John, which was probably written a decade or two later than they were. The Synoptics present the basic story of Jesus in a similar way, quite differently from John’s narrative: they even disagree with John on the length of Jesus’s public ministry, John’s account suggesting around three years, the others something over one. On this and other issues, the Synoptics ‘see together’, the root meaning of the Greek synopsis. [4] INFANCY AND FAMILY In the fourth century CE, the Mediterranean Christian Church created two summary statements of belief, now known as the Apostles’ and the Nicene Creeds.

• From Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010)

  The very first extant documents of Homo sapiens indicate that we devised art forms at the same time and for many of the same reasons as we created religious systems. Our neocortex has made us meaning-seeking creatures, acutely aware of the perplexity and tragedy of our predicament, and if we do not discover some ultimate significance in our lives, we fall easily into despair. In art as in religion, we find a means of letting go and encouraging the “softness” and “pliability” that draw us toward the other; art and religion both propel us into a new place within ourselves, where we find a degree of serenity. The earliest cave paintings created by our Palaeolithic ancestors some thirty thousand years ago in southern France and northern Spain almost certainly had a ritual function. From the very beginning, therefore, art and religion were allied. These frescoes and engravings have an aesthetic power that still evokes awe in visitors. Their depiction of the animals on whom these hunting communities were entirely dependent has a numinous quality; intent as they were on the acquisition of food—the first of the Four Fs—the ferocity of the hunters was tempered by a manifest tenderness toward and affinity with the beasts they were obliged to kill. The vision that inspired the cave paintings so long ago may have been similar to the spirituality of modern indigenous hunting communities.11 These tribesmen are disturbed by the fact that their lives depend on the slaughter of the animals they regard as friends and patrons, and they assuage their anxiety in rituals that evoke respect for and empathy with their prey. In the Kalahari Desert, for example, where wood is scarce, Bushmen rely on light weapons that can only graze the surface of the skin, so they anoint their arrows with a poison that kills the animal very slowly. The hunter has to remain with his victim during its last days—crying when it cries out, shuddering when it trembles, and entering symbolically into its death throes.

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  Yet Big Pictures lead to different outcomes. Some provide an explanation and others an interpretation of our world. To explore this important distinction, so easily overlooked, we will reflect on scientific and philosophical Big Pictures and the significantly different outcomes that these generate. We begin by thinking about the natural sciences. Explaining Our World: A Scientific Big Picture A scientific theory offers a way of imagining or beholding the world, which enables its fundamental ordering and coherence to be discerned. Without this theoretical lens, this order cannot be discerned. Earlier, I mentioned Dmitri Mendeleev’s ‘Periodic Table of the Elements,’ developed in 1869. The novelist C. P. Snow gives a fictionalised account of how using this table as an interpretative lens enabled him to see past the apparent chaos of a seemingly disconnected accumulation of chemical observations and discern the fundamental principles that lay behind them. I saw a medley of haphazard facts fall into line and order. All the jumbles and recipes and hotchpotch of the inorganic chemistry of my boyhood seemed to fit into the scheme before my eyes – as though one were standing beside a jungle and it suddenly transformed itself into a Dutch garden. 18 One of the greatest achievements of science is the ‘mathematisation’ of nature – the representation of its relationships and structures using mathematical equations. One of the best examples of this mathematical mastering of nature is Isaac Newton’s theory of universal gravitation. This was widely seen as an intellectual wonder of the early modern age, a stunning demonstration of the power of human reason to make the mysteries of the universe rationally transparent and intelligible. On being asked how he came up with the notion of gravity, Newton told his friends that the idea came to him in the summer of 1666 when an outbreak of the plague at Cambridge University forced him to hastily leave his rooms at Trinity College and retreat to the safety of his mother’s house in rural Lincolnshire. The story of what followed is well known, even if it likely involves a significant degree of poetic licence. While sitting in his mother’s garden, Newton tells us, he observed an apple fall from a tree – and thereby made a connection with the way in which planets orbited the sun. If there was some fundamental force of attraction between physical bodies – which we now know as ‘gravity’ – this would explain the orbits of planets round the sun, the moon around the earth and the falling of apples to the ground. 19 Some fifty years earlier, Johannes Kepler had shown that – for reasons he did not understand – the square of the orbital period of any planet was proportional to the cube of the semi-major axis of its orbit.

• From Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010)

  16 But far from being depressed by his lack of knowledge, he actually reveled in it: “One of the many great sources of happiness is to get a glimpse, here and there, of a new aspect of the incredible world we live in and of our incredible role in it.” 17 Albert Einstein (1879–1955) experienced mystical wonder when he contemplated the universe: To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself to us as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms—this knowledge, this feeling is at the center of all true religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I belong to the ranks of devoutly religious men. 18 He was convinced that “he to whom this emotion is a stranger ... is as good as dead.” 19 Albert Schweitzer might have agreed. When he looked back on his life, he saw that one of its guiding perceptions had been the “realization that the world is inexplicably mysterious.” 20 At their most insightful, the religions have insisted that the core of each man and woman eludes our grasp and is transcendent. This is where we discover Nirvana, Brahman, and what the German-born Protestant theologian Paul Tillich (1886–1965) called the very Ground of Being; we find the Kingdom of Heaven within us and discover that Allah is closer to us than our jugular vein. The Renaissance humanists developed a profound respect for the wonder of the human being, and their vision is beautifully expressed by William Shakespeare (1564–1616), when he makes his tragic hero Hamlet cry: What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculties! in form and moving, how express and admirable! in action, how like an angel! in apprehension, how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals! 21 Even though each human being is a “quintessence of dust,” a moribund and in many ways tragic creature, 22 he or she remains a godlike marvel and should be accorded absolute respect. Hindus acknowledge this when they greet each other by bowing with joined hands to honor the sacred mystery they are encountering. Yet most of us fail to express this reverence for others in our daily lives. All too often we claim omniscience about other people, other nations, other cultures, and even those we claim to love, and our views about them are frequently colored by our own needs, fears, ambitions, and desires. This is beautifully expressed in another passage from Hamlet.

• From The Fixed Stars: A Memoir (2020)

  [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] The summer we were sixteen, my cousin Katie and I went to a pre-college program at what was then15 California College of Arts and Crafts. My mother flew to California with me, and she and her twin sister, Tina, got us settled in the dorms on the school’s small Oakland campus. Katie and I were there for three weeks, our first time living on our own like that, without parents. We stocked the fridge with fruited yogurts from Safeway, made peanut butter sandwiches for lunch, and walked down College Avenue to eat black bean soup at a vegetarian place near the Rockridge BART station. I was thrilled by all this freedom, but I didn’t feel like testing it. I liked being the kind of kid you could trust to not go off the deep end. We were disciplined, turned in our work on time, didn’t drink or smoke. Some afternoons between classes, we’d walk to the Starbucks a few doors down from Safeway and order Frappuccinos. Coming from Oklahoma City, this was the big time. Each day we had three-hour studio classes in drawing and painting. We drew from live models for the first time. I tried not to giggle or wince as I studied each day’s flaccid penis, whorl of pubic hair, or breasts in a variety of shapes. It was much more fun, Katie and I agreed, to draw the female models than the male ones. The male models were hard to look at, all angles or droop, and hairy. The women were softer, more familiar, more beautiful. Katie and I had grown up analyzing, appraising, and envying women’s bodies in movies and on the covers of magazines. To study them felt natural. That summer was the first time I saw a fat woman naked. Our instructor had hired models of all ages and sizes. A couple of the women had thick legs and round, rolling bellies, and I was stunned by how beautiful they were. I had thought they would be ugly. I’d grown up believing that the human body should be—and could be, with sufficient rigor—molded into thinness. Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels, the saying went. But these women’s bodies, fat and thin and in between, seemed to exist on their own terms—good the way a tree or a flower is good, molecules declaring their presence with the neutrality of fact.

• From Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010)

  Letting go of our “tribal” egotism can become a spiritual process, which is beautifully illustrated in the story of the Prophet Muhammad’s Night Journey (isr [image file=image_461.jpg] ’) to Jerusalem and his Ascension to Heaven (mi‘r [image file=image_461.jpg] j).7 This is a mythos; it describes an archetypal process rather than an accurate occurrence. There are references in the Qur’an to a mystical experience of the Prophet, but they don’t resemble the detailed narrative that was written down for the first time during the eighth century.8 Muhammad’s early biographers inserted the story into the period when the Prophet was being forced to leave Mecca, abandon his tribe, and take up permanent residence with another, and like any myth, it explores the deeper significance of what was happening. The hijrah (“migration”) from Mecca to the agricultural settlement of Medina, some 250 miles to the north, was more than a change of address: abandoning your tribe, the most sacred value of all, amounted to blasphemy in Arabia at this time. The word hijrah itself suggests a painful rupture, its root HJR meaning “he cut himself off from friendly or loving communication or intercourse … he ceased … to associate with them.”9 Traditional Arab odes often depicted the poet embarking on a night journey, a terrifying trek across the desert, before enjoying a joyful reunion with his tribe, which he celebrates in a hymn of praise to its unique superiority, its valor in war, and its eternal hatred of those who threaten its survival.10 But Muhammad’s Night Journey reverses this pattern. Instead of ending in a tribal reunion, the journey finishes in faraway Jerusalem, the holy city of Jews and Christians. Instead of glorifying hatred and war, it is a story of harmony and transcendence of the tribal group. One night, so the story goes, when Muhammad was sleeping beside the Kabah, he was awakened by Gabriel, the spirit of revelation, and miraculously conveyed to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. There he was greeted by all the great prophets of the past, who invited him to preach to them before he began his ascent, like a Jewish mystic, through the seven heavens to the throne of God. The story falls reverently silent when Muhammad enters the divine presence, but it is clear that it was based on the surrender (islam) of the ego: “In awe, he lost his speech and lost himself—Muhammad did not know Muhammad here, saw not himself.”11

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  Richard Dawkins also recognises the importance of such experiences. ‘The great religions have a place for awe, for ecstatic transport at the wonder and beauty of creation. And it’s exactly this feeling of spine-shivering, breath-catching awe – almost worship – this flooding of the chest with epiphanic wonder, that modern science can provide.’37 Yet this experience is neither ‘religious’ nor ‘scientific’; it is simply an experience, until and unless it is connected with a conceptual framework, a network of beliefs that illuminates its nature and endows it with meaning. Psychological accounts of the origins of an experience of awe can easily be given.38 These, however, are simply explanations of how an experience of awe arises within the human consciousness; it does not explain how meaning might arise from it, or what that meaning might be. In The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), William James drew extensively on personal testimonies to the perceived significance of religious experiences, which he framed in terms of intense and brief ‘privileged moments’ that carry an ‘enormous sense of inner authority and illumination’, transfiguring the understanding of those who experience them, often taking the form of disclosures of ‘new depths of truth unplumbed by the discursive intellect.’39 For James, it seemed as if there is ‘in the human consciousness a sense of reality, a feeling of objective presence, a perception of what we may call “something there,” more deep and more general than any of the special and particular “senses” by which the current psychology supposes existent realities to be originally revealed.’40 Truth is something that needs to be felt, that needs to resonate with our experience of life. Examples of these experiences would include the exquisite sense of longing for something undefined and apparently unattainable, often referred to using the German term Sehnsucht, which Matthew Arnold glossed as a ‘wistful, soft, tearful longing’.41 In his Prelude, Wordsworth similarly pointed to a ‘dim and undetermined sense’ of ‘unknown modes of being.’ These liminal experiences hint at a new world beyond a limiting threshold of human vision. Virginia Woolf once spoke of experiencing privileged ‘moments of being’, which seemed to her to be ‘a token of some real thing behind appearances’42 which constantly eluded her attempts to find and possess it. More recently, the term ‘epiphany’ has come to be used for such moments of disclosure or insight – an ‘overwhelming existentially significant manifestation of value in experience, often sudden and surprising,’ which ‘feels like it “comes from outside”’ and allows us to grasp something new.’43 While such epiphanies are not necessarily religious, they are often linked with what is usually described as ‘religious experience’.

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

  Such an intent as this brings a charge of sin against the servant of God; for it is an evil and horrible intent that a devout and tried spirit should lust after an evil deed; and especially that the chaste Hermas should do so-he who abstained from every evil desire, and was full of all simplicity, and of great innocence!’ 3. " ’But [she continued] God is not angry with thee on account of this, but in order that thou mayest convert thy house, which has done iniquity against the Lord, and against you who art their parent. But thou, in thy love for your children (filovtekno" wjn) didst not rebuke thy house, but didst allow it to become dreadfully wicked. On this account is the Lord angry with thee; but He will heal all the evils that happened aforetime in thy house; for through the sins and iniquities of thy household thou hast been corrupted by the affairs of this life. But the mercy of the Lord had compassion upon thee, and upon thy house, and will make thee strong and establish thee in His glory. Only be not slothful, but be of good courage and strengthen thy house. For even as the smith, by smiting his work with the hammer, accomplishes the thing that he wishes, so shall the daily word of righteousness overcome all iniquity. Fail not, therefore, to rebuke thy children, for I know that if they will repent with all their heart, they will be written in the book of life, together with the saints.’ "After these words of hers were ended, she said unto me: ’Dost thou wish to hear me read?’ I said unto her: ’Yea, Lady, I do wish it.’ She said unto me: ’Be thou a hearer, and listen to the glories of God.’ Then I heard, after a great and wonderful fashion, that which my memory was unable to retain; for all the words were terrible, and beyond man’s power to bear. The last words, however, I remembered; for they were profitable for us, and gentle: ’Behold the God of power, who by his invisible strength, and His great wisdom, has created the world, and by His magnificent counsel hath crowned His creation with glory, and by His mighty word has fixed the heaven, and founded the earth upon the waters, and by His own wisdom and foresight has formed His holy church, which He has also blessed! Behold, He removes the heavens from their places, and the mountains, and the hills, and the stars, and everything becomes smooth before His elect, that He may give unto them the blessing which He promised them with great glory and joy, if only they shall keep with firm faith the laws of God which they have received.’ 4. "When, therefore, she had ended her reading, and had risen up from the chair, there came four young men, and took up the chair, and departed towards the east.

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

  government of Italy and Africa, and is universally represented as a cruel, dissolute tyrant, hated by heathens and Christians alike,16 called by the Roman people to their aid, Constantine marched from Gaul across the Alps with an army of ninety-eight thousand soldiers of every nationality, and defeated Maxentius in three battles; the last in October, 312, at the Milvian bridge, near Rome, where Maxentius found a disgraceful death in the waters of the Tiber. Here belongs the familiar story of the miraculous cross. The precise day and place cannot be fixed, but the event must have occurred shortly before the final victory over Maxentius in the neighborhood of Rome. As this vision is one of the most noted miracles in church history, and has a representative significance, it deserves a closer examination. It marks for us on the one hand the victory of Christianity over paganism in the Roman empire, and on the other the ominous admixture of foreign, political, and military interests with it.17 We need not be surprised that in the Nicene age so great a revolution and transition should have been clothed with a supernatural character. The occurrence is variously described and is not without serious difficulties. Lactantius, the earliest witness, some three years after the battle, speaks only of a dream by night, in which the emperor was directed (it is not stated by whom, whether by Christ, or by an angel) to stamp on the shields of his soldiers "the heavenly sign of God," that is, the cross with the name of Christ, and thus to go forth against his enemy.18 Eusebius, on the contrary, gives a more minute account on the authority of a subsequent private communication of the aged Constantine himself under oath—not, however, till the year 338, a year after the death of the emperor, his only witness, and twenty-six years after the event.19 On his march from Gaul to Italy (the spot and date are not specified), the emperor, whilst earnestly praying to the true God for light and help at this critical time, saw, together with his army,20 in clear daylight towards evening, a shining cross in the heavens above the sun) with the inscription: "By this conquer,"21 and in the following night Christ himself appeared to him while he slept, and directed him to have a standard prepared in the form of this sign of the cross, and with that to proceed against Maxentius and all other enemies. This account of Eusebius, or rather of Constantine himself, adds to the night dream of Lactantius the preceding vision of the day, and the direction concerning the standard, while Lactantius speaks of the inscription of the initial letters of Christ’s name on the shields of the soldiers.

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  Pantheon in a line directly prolonged from the portal; as governor of a new omnipotence it was set even above the royal coat of arms and the motto Endracht maakt macht. The movements of all travelers could be surveyed from the central position occupied by the clock in Antwerp Station, and conversely all travelers had to look up at the clock and were obliged to adjust their activities to its demands. In fact, said Austerlitz, until the railway timetables were synchronized the clocks of Lille and Liége did not keep the same time as the clocks of Ghent and Antwerp, and not until they were all standardized around the middle of the nineteenth century did time truly reign supreme. It was only by following the course time prescribed that we could hasten through the gigantic spaces separating us from each other. And indeed, said Austerlitz after a while, to this day there is something illusionistic and illusory about the relationship of time and space as we experience it in traveling, which is why whenever we come home from elsewhere we never feel quite sure if we have really been abroad. From the first I was astonished by the way Austerlitz put his ideas together as he talked, forming perfectly balanced sentences out of whatever occurred to him, so to speak, and the way in which, in his mind, the passing on of his knowledge seemed to become a gradual approach to a kind of historical metaphysic, bringing remembered events back to life. I shall never forget how he concluded his comments on the manufacture of the tall waiting-room mirrors by wondering, glancing up once more at their dimly shimmering surfaces as he left, combien des ouvriers périrent, lors de la manufacture de tels miroirs, de malignes et funestes affectations a la suite de l’inhalation de vapeurs de mercure et de cyanide. And just as Austerlitz had broken off with these words that first evening, so he continued his observations the following day, for which we had arranged a meeting on the promenade beside the Schelde. Pointing to the broad river sparkling in the morning sun, he spoke of a picture painted by Lucas van Valckenborch towards the end of the sixteenth century during what is now called the Little Ice Age, showing the frozen Schelde from the opposite bank, with the city of Antwerp very dark beyond it and a strip of flat countryside stretching towards the sea. A shower of snow is falling from the lowering sky above the tower of the cathedral of Our Lady, and out on the river now before us some four hundred years later, said Austerlitz, the people of Antwerp are amusing themselves on the ice, the common folk in coats of earthy brown colors, persons of greater distinction in black cloaks with white lace ruffs round their necks. In the foreground, close to the right-hand edge of the picture, a lady has just fallen. She wears a canary-yellow dress, and the cavalier bending over her in concern is clad in red breeches, very conspicuous in the pallid light. Looking at the river now, thinking of that painting and its tiny figures, said Austerlitz, I feel as if the

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  its own. Otherwise, all I remember of the denizens of the Nocturama is that several of them had strikingly large eyes, and the fixed, inquiring gaze found in certain painters and philosophers who seek to penetrate the darkness which surrounds us purely by means of looking and thinking. I believe that my mind also dwelt on the question of whether the electric light was turned on for the creatures in the Nocturama when real night fell and the zoo was Closed to the public, so that as day dawned over their topsy-turvy miniature universe they could fall asleep with some degree of reassurance. Over the years, images of the interior of the Nocturama have become confused in my mind with my memories of the Salle des pas perdus, as it is called, in Antwerp Centraal Station. If I try to conjure up a picture of that waiting room today I immediately see the Nocturama, and if I think of the Nocturama the waiting room springs to my mind, probably because when I left the zoo that afternoon I went straight into the station, or rather first stood in the square outside it for some time to look up at the facade of that fantastical building, which I had taken in only vaguely when I arrived in the morning. Now, however, I saw how far the station constructed under the patronage of King Leopold II exceeded its purely utilitarian function, and I marveled at the verdigris-covered Negro boy who, for a century now, has