Awe

Passages

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

Page 203 of 217 · 20 per page

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  Can’t go to the movies— short a few sous. A walk then. At every movie house I stop and look at the billboards, then at the price list. Cheap enough, these opium joints, but I’m short just a few sous. If it weren’t so late I might go back and cash an empty bottle. By the time I get to the Rue Amélie I’ve forgotten all about the movies. The Rue Amélie is one of my favorite streets. It is one of those streets which by good fortune the municipality has forgotten to pave. Huge cobblestones spreading convexly from one side of the street to the other. Only one block long and narrow. The Hôtel Pretty is on this street. There is a little church, too, on the Rue Amélie. It looks as though it were made especially for the President of the Republic and his private family. It’s good occasionally to see a modest little church. Paris is full of pompous cathedrals. Pont Alexandre III. A great windswept space approaching the bridge. Gaunt, bare trees mathematically fixed in their iron grates; the gloom of the Invalides welling out of the dome and overflowing the dark streets adjacent to the Square. The morgue of poetry. They have him where they want him now, the great warrior, the last big man of Europe. He sleeps soundly in his granite bed. No fear of him turning over in his grave. The doors are well bolted, the lid is on tight. Sleep, Napoleon! It was not your ideas they wanted, it was only your corpse! The river is still swollen, muddy, streaked with lights. I don’t know what it is rushes up in me at the sight of this dark, swift-moving current, but a great exultation lifts me up, affirms the deep wish that is in me never to leave this land. I remember passing this way the other morning on my way to the American Express, knowing in advance that there would be no mail for me, no check, no cable, nothing, nothing. A wagon from the Galeries Lafayette was rumbling over the bridge. The rain had stopped and the sun breaking through the soapy clouds touched the glistening rubble of roofs with a cold fire. I recall now how the driver leaned out and looked up the river toward Passy way. Such a healthy, simple, approving glance, as if he were saying to himself: “Ah, spring is coming!” And God knows, when spring comes to Paris the humblest mortal alive must feel that he dwells in paradise. But it was not only this—it was the intimacy with which his eye rested upon the scene. It was his Paris. A man does not need to be rich, nor even a citizen, to feel this way about Paris.

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

  (3) Abraham’s faith was the faith which was looking beyond this world. The later legends believed that, at the moment of his call, Abraham was given a glimpse of the new Jerusalem. In the Apocalypse of Baruch, God says: ‘I showed it to my servant Abraham by night’ (4:4). In 2 Esdras [4 Ezra], the writer says: ‘And when they were committing iniquity in your sight, you chose for yourself one of them, whose name was Abraham; you loved him, and to him alone you revealed the end of times, secretly by night’ (3:13–14). No one ever did anything great without a vision which made it possible to face the difficulties and discouragements of the way. To Abraham there was given the vision; and, even when his body was wandering in Palestine, his soul was at home with God. God cannot give us the vision unless we allow him to; but, if we are patient and look to him, even in earth’s desert places he will send us the vision, and with it the toil and trouble of the way all become worth while. BELIEVING THE INCREDIBLE Hebrews 11:11–12 It was by faith that Sarah, too, received power to conceive and to bear a son, although she was beyond the age for it, for she believed that he who gave the promise could be absolutely relied upon. So from one man, and he a man whose body had lost its vitality, there were born descendants, as many as the stars of the sky in multitude, as countless as the sand upon the seashore. THE story of the promise of a son to Abraham and Sarah is told in Genesis 17:15–22, 18:9–15 and 21:1–8. Its wonder is that Abraham and Sarah were each 90 years old, long past the age of having children; and yet, according to the old story, that promise was made and came true. The reaction of Abraham and Sarah to the promise of God followed a threefold course. (1) It began with sheer incredulity. When Abraham heard the promise, he fell upon his face and laughed (Genesis 17:17). When Sarah heard it, she laughed to herself (Genesis 18:12). On first hearing of the promises of God, the human reaction is often that this is far too good to be true. In words from F. W. Faber’s hymn: How thou canst think so well of us, And be the God thou art, Is darkness to my intellect, But sunshine to my heart. There is no mystery in all creation like the love of God. That he should love us and suffer and die for us is something that staggers us into sheer incredulity. That is why the Christian message is the gospel, good news; it is news so good that it is almost impossible to believe it to be true. (2) It passed into dawning realization. After the incredulity came the dawning realization that this was God who was speaking; and God cannot lie.

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

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

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

  Let us then be eager to enter into that rest, lest we follow the example of the Israelites and fall into the same kind of disobedience. For the word of God is instinct with life; it is effective; it is sharper than a two-edged sword; it pierces right through to the very division of soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it scrutinizes the desires and intentions of the heart. No created thing can ever remain hidden from his sight; everything is naked to him and is compelled to meet the eyes of him with whom we have to reckon. THE point of this passage is that the word of God has come, and is such that it cannot be disregarded. The Jews always had a very special idea about words. Once a word was spoken, it had an independent existence. It was not only a sound with a certain meaning; it was a power which went out and did things. Isaiah heard God say that the word which went out of his mouth would never be ineffective; it would always do whatever he designed it to do (Isaiah 45:23). We can understand something of this if we think of the tremendous effect of words in history. A leader coins a phrase and it becomes a trumpet-call which inspires people to crusades or to crimes. Some great individual sends out a manifesto and it produces action which can make or destroy nations. Over and over again in history, the spoken word of some leader or thinker has gone out and done things. If that is so of human words, how much more is it so of the word of God? The writer to the Hebrews describes the word of God in a series of great phrases. The word of God is instinct with life. Certain issues are no longer of vital importance; certain books and words have no living interest whatever. Plato was one of the world’s supreme thinkers, but it is unlikely that there would be a huge public interest in Daily Studies in Plato. The great fact about the word of God is that it is a living issue for all people of all times. Other things may pass quietly into oblivion; other things may acquire an academic or historical interest; but the word of God is something that everyone must face, and its offer is something we must accept or reject. The word of God is effective. It is one of the facts of history that, wherever people have taken God’s word seriously, things have begun to happen. When the English Bible was produced and the word of God was made available to ordinary people, the tremendous event of the Reformation inevitably followed. When people take God seriously, they immediately realize that his word is not only something to be studied, not only something to be read, not only something to be written about; it is something to be done.

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

  In fact, this quotation, which is used to tell of the greatness of Moses, is proof of the unique position which the Jews assigned to him. ‘Moses was faithful in all his house.’ The quotation is from Numbers 12:7. Now, the point of the argument in Numbers is that Moses differs from all the prophets. To them, God makes himself known in a vision; to Moses, he speaks ‘mouth to mouth’. To the Jews, it would have been impossible to conceive that anyone ever stood closer to God than Moses did, and yet that is precisely what the writer of the Hebrews sets out to prove. He tells his hearers to fix their attention on Jesus. The word he uses (katanoein) is significant and full of meaning. It does not mean simply to look at or to notice a thing. Anyone can look at a thing or even notice it without really seeing it. The word means to fix the attention on something in such a way that its inner meaning, the lesson that it is designed to teach, may be learned. In Luke 12:24, Jesus uses the same word when he says: ‘Consider the ravens.’ He does not merely mean: ‘Look at the ravens.’ He means: ‘Look at the ravens and understand and learn the lesson that God is seeking to teach you through them.’ If we are ever to learn Christian truth, a detached glance is never enough; there must be a concentrated gaze in which we focus the mind in a determined effort to see its meaning for us. In a sense, the reason for that is implicit when the writer addresses his friends as sharers in heaven’s calling. The call that comes to Christians has a double direction. It is a calling from heaven and it is a calling to heaven. It is a voice which comes from God and calls us to God. It is a call which demands concentrated attention because of both its origin and its destination. No one can afford merely to glance without interest at an invitation to God from God. When we fix our attention on Jesus, what do we see? We see two things. (1) We see the great apostle. No one else in the New Testament ever calls Jesus an apostle. That the writer to the Hebrews does so deliberately is quite clear, because apostle is a title he never gives to any individual. He keeps it for Christ. What does he mean when he uses it in this way? The word apostolos literally means one who is sent forth. In Jewish terminology, it was used to describe the envoys of the Sanhedrin, the supreme court of the Jews. The Sanhedrin sent out apostoloi who were clothed with its authority and the bearers of its commands. In the Greek world, it frequently meant ambassador. So, Jesus is the supreme ambassador of God – and ambassadors have two supremely important and relevant characteristics.

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

  He shall make atonement for the sanctuary, and he shall make atonement for the tent of meeting and for the altar, and he shall make atonement for the priests and for all the people of the assembly. It was one great comprehensive act of atonement for all sin. It was a splendid day in which all things and all people were cleansed, so that the relationship between Israel and God should continue unbroken. To that end, it was a day of humiliation. ‘You shall deny yourselves’ (Leviticus 16:29). It was not a feast but a fast. The whole nation fasted all day, even the children; and really devout Jews prepared themselves for it by fasting for ten days beforehand. The Day of Atonement comes ten days after the start of the Jewish New Year, about the beginning of September in our calendar. It was the greatest of all days in the life of the high priest. Let us see what happened. Very early in the morning, the high priest cleansed himself by washing. He put on his gorgeous robes of office, worn only on that day. There were the white linen breeches and the long white undergarment reaching down to the feet, woven in one piece. There was the robe of the ephod. It was dark blue and was a long robe which at its foot had a fringe of blue, purple and scarlet tassels made in the form of pomegranates, interspersed with an equal number of little golden bells. Over this robe, he put the ephod itself. The ephod was probably a kind of linen tunic, embroidered in scarlet and purple and gold, with an elaborate girdle. On its shoulders were two onyx stones. The names of six of the tribes were engraved on one stone and six on the other. On the tunic was the breastplate, a span, that is about nine inches, square. On it were twelve precious stones with the names of the twelve tribes engraved upon them. So, the high priest carried the people to God on his shoulders and on his heart. In the breastplate, there was the Urim and the Thummim, which means lights and perfections (Exodus 28:30). What exactly the Urim and the Thummim was is not known. It is known that the high priest consulted it when he wished to know the will of God. It may be that it was a precious diamond inscribed with the consonants IHWH which are the consonants of Yahweh, the name of God. On his head, the high priest put the tall mitre, of fine linen; and on the mitre there was a gold plate bound by a band of blue ribbon, and on the plate were the words: ‘Holiness unto the Lord.’ It is easy to imagine what a dazzling figure the high priest must have appeared on this his greatest of all days.

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

  Not only was Jesus the perfect high priest; he was also the perfect offering . Jesus alone could open the way to God because he was the perfect high priest and he offered the one perfect sacrifice – himself . There is much in this argument which is difficult for us to understand. It speaks and thinks in terms of ritual and ceremony long since forgotten; but one eternal thing remains. Men and women seek the presence of God; their sin has put up a barrier between them and God, but they are restless until they rest in God; and Jesus alone is the priest who can bring the offering that can open the way back to God. THE WAY TO REALITY Hebrews 8:1–6 The pith of what we are saying is this – it is just such a high priest we possess, a priest who has taken his seat at the right hand of the throne of majesty in the heavens, a high priest who is a minister of the sanctuary and of the real tabernacle, which the Lord, and not man, founded. For every high priest is appointed to offer gifts and sacrifices. It is therefore necessary that he should have something which he might offer. If then he had been upon earth, he would not even have been a priest, for there already exist those who offer the gifts the law lays down, men whose service is but a shadowy outline of the heavenly order, just as Moses received instructions when he was about to complete the tabernacle – ‘See’, it says, ‘that you do everything according to the pattern that was shown to you on the mountain.’ But, as things are, he has obtained a more excellent ministry, in so far as he is also the mediator of a better covenant, a covenant which was enacted on the basis of superior promises. T HE writer to the Hebrews has finished describing the priesthood after the order of Melchizedek in all its glory. He has described it as the priesthood which is forever, without beginning and without end; the priesthood that God confirmed with an oath; the priesthood that is founded on personal greatness and not on any legal appointment or racial qualification; the priesthood which death cannot touch; the priesthood which is able to offer a sacrifice that never needs to be repeated; the priesthood which is so pure that it has no need to offer sacrifice for any sins of its own. Now he makes and underlines his great claim. ‘It is’, he says, ‘a priest precisely like that that we have in Jesus.’ He goes on to say two things about Jesus. (1) He took his seat at the right hand of the throne of majesty in the heavens. That is the final proof of his glory .

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  I should think a rich, manifold life, brought close to our eyes, would be enough without any express tendency; which, after all, is only for the intellect” The book is sustained on its own axis by the pure flux and rotation of events. Just as there is no central point, so also there is no question of heroism or of struggle since there is no question of will, but only an obedience to flow . The gross caricatures are perhaps more vital, “more true to life,” than the full portraits of the conventional novel for the reason that the individual today has no centrality and produces not the slightest illusion of wholeness. The characters are integrated to the false, cultural void in which we are drowning; thus is produced the illusion of chaos, to face which requires the ultimate courage . The humiliations and defeats, given with a primitive honesty, end not in frustration, despair, or futility, but in hunger, an ecstatic, devouring hunger —for more life. The poetic is discovered by stripping away the vestiture of art; by descending to what might be styled “a preartistic level,” the durable skeleton of form which is hidden in the phenomena of disintegration reappears to be transfigured again in the ever-changing flesh of emotion. The scars are burned away—the scars left by the obstetricians of culture. Here is an artist who re-establishes the potency of illusion by gaping at the open wounds, by courting the stern, psychological reality which man seeks to avoid through recourse to the oblique symbolism of art. Here the symbols are laid bare, presented almost as naively and unblushingly by this over-civilized individual as by the well-rooted savage . It is no false primitivism which gives rise to this savage lyricism. It is not a retrogressive tendency, but a swing forward into unbeaten areas. To regard a naked book such as this with the same critical eye that is turned upon even such diverse types as Lawrence, Breton, Joyce and Céline is a mistake. Rather let us try to look at it with the eyes of a Patagonian for whom all that is sacred and taboo in our world is meaningless. For the adventure which has brought the author to the spiritual ends of the earth is the history of every artist who, in order to express himself, must traverse the intangible gridirons of his imaginary world. The air pockets, the alkali wastes, the crumbling monuments, the putrescent cadavers, the crazy jig and maggot dance, all this forms a grand fresco of our epoch, done with shattering phrases and loud, strident, hammer strokes . If there is here revealed a capacity to shock, to startle the lifeless ones from their profound slumber, let us congratulate ourselves; for the tragedy of our world is precisely that nothing any longer is capable of rousing it from its lethargy. No more violent dreams, no refreshment, no awakening.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  About dawn it began to snow: we walked about from one quarter to another taking a last look at Paris. Passing through the Rue St. Dominique we suddenly fell upon a little square and there was the Eglise Ste.-Clotilde. People were going to mass. Fillmore, whose head was still a little cloudy, was bent on going to mass too. “For the fun of it!” as he put it. I felt somewhat uneasy about it; in the first place I had never attended a mass, and in the second place I looked seedy and felt seedy. Fillmore, too, looked rather battered, even more disreputable than myself; his big slouch hat was on assways and his overcoat was still full of sawdust from the last joint we had been in. However, we marched in. The worst they could do would be to throw us out. I was so astounded by the sight that greeted my eyes that I lost all uneasiness. It took me a little while to get adjusted to the dim light. I stumbled around behind Fillmore, holding his sleeve. A weird, unearthly noise assailed my ears, a sort of hollow drone that rose up out of the cold flagging. A huge, dismal tomb it was with mourners shuffling in and out. A sort of antechamber to the world below. Temperature about 55 or 60 Fahrenheit. No music except this undefinable dirge manufactured in the subcellar—like a million heads of cauliflower wailing in the dark. People in shrouds were chewing away with that hopeless, dejected look of beggars who hold out their hands in a trance and mumble an unintelligible appeal. That this sort of thing existed I knew, but then one also knows that there are slaughterhouses and morgues and dissecting rooms. One instinctively avoids such places. In the street I had often passed a priest with a little prayer book in his hands laboriously memorizing his lines. Idiot , I would say to myself, and let it go at that. In the street one meets with all forms of dementia and the priest is by no means the most striking. Two thousand years of it has deadened us to the idiocy of it. However, when you are suddenly transported to the very midst of his realm, when you see the little world in which the priest functions like an alarm clock, you are apt to have entirely different sensations. For a moment all this slaver and twitching of the lips almost began to have a meaning. Something was going on, some kind of dumb show which, not rendering me wholly stupefied, held me spellbound. All over the world, wherever there are these dim-lit tombs, you have this incredible spectacle—the same mean temperature, the same crepuscular glow, the same buzz and drone.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  Before the revolution Serge was a captain in the Imperial Guard; he stands six foot three in his stockinged feet and drinks vodka like a fish. His father was an admiral, or something like that, on the battleship “Potemkin.” I met Serge under rather peculiar circumstances. Sniffing about for food I found myself toward noon the other day in the neighborhood of the Folies- Bergère—the back entrance, that is to say, in the narrow little lane with an iron gate at one end. I was dawdling about the stage entrance, hoping vaguely for a casual brush with one of the butterflies, when an open truck pulls up to the sidewalk. Seeing me standing there with my hands in my pockets the driver, who was Serge, asks me if I would give him a hand unloading the iron barrels. When he learns that I am an American and that I’m broke he almost weeps with joy. He has been looking high and low for an English teacher, it seems. I help him roll the barrels of insecticide inside and I look my fill at the butterflies fluttering about the wings. The incident takes on strange proportions to me—the empty house, the sawdust dolls bouncing in the wings, the barrels of germicide, the battleship “Potemkin”—above all, Serge’s gentleness. He is big and tender, a man every inch of him, but with a woman’s heart. In the café nearby—Café des Artistes—he proposes immediately to put me up; says he will put a mattress on the floor in the hallway. For the lessons he says he will give me a meal every day, a big Russian meal, or if for any reason the meal is lacking then five francs. It sounds wonderful to me—wonderful. The only question is, how will I get from Suresnes to the American Express every day? Serge insists that we begin at once—he gives me the carfare to get out to Suresnes in the evening. I arrive a little before dinner, with my knapsack, in order to give Serge a lesson. There are some guests on hand already—seems as though they always eat in a crowd, everybody chipping in. There are eight of us at the table—and three dogs. The dogs eat first. They eat oatmeal. Then we commence. We eat oatmeal too—as an hors d’oeuvre. “Chez nous,” says Serge, with a twinkle in his eye, “c’est pour les chiens, les Quaker Oats. Ici pour le gentleman. Ça va.” After the oatmeal, mushroom soup and vegetables; after that bacon omelet, fruit, red wine, vodka, coffee, cigarettes. Not bad, the Russian meal. Everyone talks with his mouth full. Toward the end of the meal Serge’s wife, who is a lazy slut of an Armenian, flops on the couch and begins to nibble bonbons.

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

  The Jewish thinker Philo, who took his ideas from Plato, said: ‘God knew from the beginning that a fair copy could never come into being apart from a fair pattern; and that none of the objects perceivable by sense could be flawless which was not modelled after an archetype and spiritual idea, and thus, when he prepared to create this visible world, he shaped beforehand the ideal world in order to constitute the corporeal after the incorporeal and godlike pattern.’ When the Roman statesman Cicero was talking of the laws that people know and use on earth, he said: ‘We have no real and life- like likeness of real law and genuine justice; all we enjoy is a shadow and a sketch.’ The thinkers of the ancient world all had this idea that somewhere there is a real world of which this one is only a kind of imperfect copy. Here, we can only guess and feel our way; here, we can work only with copies and imperfect things. But, in the unseen world, there are the real and perfect things. When the great churchman John Henry Newman died, they erected a statue to him, and on the pedestal of it are the Latin words: Ab umbris et imaginibus ad veritatem, ‘Away from the shadows and the semblances to the truth.’ If that is so, clearly the great task of this life is to get away from the shadows and the imperfections and to reach reality. This is exactly what the writer to the Hebrews claims that Jesus Christ can enable us to do. To the Greeks, the writer to the Hebrews said: ‘All your lives, you have been trying to get from the shadows to the truth. That is just what Jesus Christ can enable you to do.’ The Jewish Background But the writer to the Hebrews also had a Jewish background. To the Jews, it was always dangerous to come too near to God. ‘No one’, said God to Moses, ‘shall see me and live’ (Exodus 33:20). It was Jacob’s astonished exclamation at Peniel: ‘I have seen God face to face, and yet my life is preserved’ (Genesis 32:30). When Manoah realized who his visitor had been, he said in terror to his wife: ‘We shall surely die, for we have seen God’ (Judges 13:23). The great day of Jewish worship was the Day of Atonement. That was the one day of the whole year when the high priest entered the Holy of Holies where the very presence of God was held to dwell.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  Sometimes I walk home alone and I follow her through the dark streets, follow her through the court of the Louvre, over the Pont des Arts, through the arcade, through the fence and slits, the somnolence, the drugged whiteness, the grill of the Luxembourg, the tangled boughs, the snores and groans, the green slats, the strum and tinkle, the points of the stars, the spangles, the jetties, the blue and white striped awnings that she brushed with the tips of her wings. In the blue of an electric dawn the peanut shells look wan and crumpled; along the beach at Montparnasse the water lilies bend and break. When the tide is on the ebb and only a few syphilitic mermaids are left stranded in the muck, the Dôme looks like a shooting gallery that’s been struck by a cyclone. Everything is slowly dribbling back to the sewer. For about an hour there is a deathlike calm during which the vomit is mopped up. Suddenly the trees begin to screech. From one end of the boulevard to the other a demented song rises up. It is like the signal that announces the close of the exchange. What hopes there were are swept up. The moment has come to void the last bagful of urine. The day is sneaking in like a leper. … One of the things to guard against when you work nights is not to break your schedule; if you don’t get to bed before the birds begin to screech it’s useless to go to bed at all. This morning, having nothing better to do, I visited the Jardin des Plantes . Marvelous pelicans here from Chapultepec and peacocks with studded fans that look at you with silly eyes. Suddenly it began to rain. Returning to Montparnasse in the bus I noticed a little French woman opposite me who sat stiff and erect as if she were getting ready to preen herself. She sat on the edge of the seat as if she feared to crush her gorgeous tail. Marvelous, I thought, if suddenly she shook herself and from her derrière there sprung open a huge studded fan with long silken plumes. At the Café de l’Avenue, where I stop for a bite, a woman with a swollen stomach tries to interest me in her condition. She would like me to go to a room with her and while away an hour or two. It is the first time I have ever been propositioned by a pregnant woman: I am almost tempted to try it. As soon as the baby is born and handed over to the authorities she will go back to her trade, she says. She makes hats. Observing that my interest is waning she takes my hand and puts it on her abdomen. I feel something stirring inside. It takes my appetite away. I have never seen a place like Paris for varieties of sexual provender.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  About dawn it began to snow: we walked about from one quarter to another taking a last look at Paris. Passing through the Rue St. Dominique we suddenly fell upon a little square and there was the Eglise Ste.-Clotilde. People were going to mass. Fillmore, whose head was still a little cloudy, was bent on going to mass too. “For the fun of it!” as he put it. I felt somewhat uneasy about it; in the first place I had never attended a mass, and in the second place I looked seedy and felt seedy. Fillmore, too, looked rather battered, even more disreputable than myself; his big slouch hat was on assways and his overcoat was still full of sawdust from the last joint we had been in. However, we marched in. The worst they could do would be to throw us out. I was so astounded by the sight that greeted my eyes that I lost all uneasiness. It took me a little while to get adjusted to the dim light. I stumbled around behind Fillmore, holding his sleeve. A weird, unearthly noise assailed my ears, a sort of hollow drone that rose up out of the cold flagging. A huge, dismal tomb it was with mourners shuffling in and out. A sort of antechamber to the world below. Temperature about 55 or 60 Fahrenheit. No music except this undefinable dirge manufactured in the subcellar—like a million heads of cauliflower wailing in the dark. People in shrouds were chewing away with that hopeless, dejected look of beggars who hold out their hands in a trance and mumble an unintelligible appeal. That this sort of thing existed I knew, but then one also knows that there are slaughterhouses and morgues and dissecting rooms. One instinctively avoids such places. In the street I had often passed a priest with a little prayer book in his hands laboriously memorizing his lines. Idiot , I would say to myself, and let it go at that. In the street one meets with all forms of dementia and the priest is by no means the most striking. Two thousand years of it has deadened us to the idiocy of it. However, when you are suddenly transported to the very midst of his realm, when you see the little world in which the priest functions like an alarm clock, you are apt to have entirely different sensations. For a moment all this slaver and twitching of the lips almost began to have a meaning. Something was going on, some kind of dumb show which, not rendering me wholly stupefied, held me spellbound. All over the world, wherever there are these dim-lit tombs, you have this incredible spectacle—the same mean temperature, the same crepuscular glow, the same buzz and drone.

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  following the white strip of the Suffolk coast, when shadows emerged from the depths of the sea, gradually rising and inclining towards us, until the last gleam of light was extinguished on the horizons of the western world. Soon the shapes of the landscape below, the woods and the pale stubble fields, could be distinguished only as shadowy outlines, and I shall never forget, said Austerlitz, how the curving estuary of the Thames emerged before us as if out of nothing, a dragon’s tail, black as cart grease, winding its way through the falling night, while the lights of Canvey Island, Sheerness, and Southend-on-Sea came on beside it. Later, as we described a wide arc over Picardy in the darkness and then turned back on course for England, if we raised our eyes from the illuminated board instruments to look through the glazed cockpit we could see the whole vault of heaven as I had never seen it before, apparently at a standstill but in truth turing slowly, with the constellations of the Swan, Cassiopeia, the Pleiades, the Charioteer, the Corona Borealis, and all the rest almost lost in the shimmering dust of the myriads of nameless stars sprinkled over the sky. It was in the autumn of 1965, continued Austerlitz, who had drifted for some time in his memories, that Gerald began developing what we now know was his trail- blazing hypothesis on the so-called Eagle Nebula in the constellation of the Serpent. He spoke of huge regions of interstellar gas which, not unlike stormclouds, became concentrated into vast, billowing forms projecting several light-years into the void, where new stars were born in a process of condensation steadily intensifying under the influence of gravity. I remember Gerald’s saying that there were positive nurseries of stars out there, a claim which I recently found confirmed in a newspaper report accompanying one of the spectacular photographs sent back to earth from the Hubble telescope on its further journey into space. At any rate, said Austerlitz, Gerald then moved from Cambridge to continue his work at an astrophysics research institute in Geneva, where I visited him several times, and as we walked out of the city together and along the banks of the lake I observed the way his ideas, like the stars themselves, gradually emerged from the whirling nebulae of his astrophysical fantasies. On one of these occasions Gerald also told me about the flights he had made over the gleaming, snow-covered mountains in his Cessna, over the volcanic peaks of the Puy-de-DoOme region, down the beautiful Garonne and on to Bordeaux. I suppose it was inevitable that he would fail to come home from one of these flights, said Austerlitz. It was a bad day when I heard that he had crashed in the Savoy Alps, and perhaps that was the beginning of my own decline, a withdrawal into myself which became increasingly morbid and intractable with the passage of time.

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

  Those who are called to the priesthood ought to be able to look back and say not: ‘I chose this work’ but rather: ‘God chose me and gave me this work to do.’ The writer to the Hebrews goes on to show how Jesus Christ fulfils the great conditions of the priesthood. (1) He takes the last one first. Jesus did not choose his task; God chose him for it. At his baptism, there came to Jesus the voice which said: ‘You are my son; today I have begotten you’ (Psalm 2:7). (2) Jesus has gone through the most bitter human experiences and understands what it is to be human with all its strength and weakness. The writer to the Hebrews has four great thoughts about him. (a) He remembers Jesus in Gethsemane. That is what he is thinking of when he speaks of Jesus’ prayers and entreaties, his tears and his cry. The word he uses for cry (kraugē) is very significant. It is an involuntary sound, a cry that is uttered in the stress of some tremendous tension or searing pain. So, the writer to the Hebrews says that there is no agony of the human spirit through which Jesus has not come. The Rabbis had a saying: ‘There are three kinds of prayers, each loftier than the preceding – prayer, crying and tears. Prayer is made in silence; crying with raised voice; but tears overcome all things.’ Jesus knew even the desperate prayer of tears. (b) Jesus learned from all his experiences because he met them all with reverence. The Greek phrase for ‘He learned from what he suffered’ is a linguistic jingle – emathen aph’ hōn epathen. And this is an idea which keeps recurring in the Greek thinkers. They are always connecting mathein, to learn, and pathein, to suffer. Aeschylus, the earliest of the great Greek dramatists, had as a kind of continual text: ‘Learning comes from suffering’ (pathei mathos). He calls suffering a kind of savage grace from the gods. Herodotus declared that his sufferings were acharista mathēmata, ungracious ways of learning. A traditional Irish proverb says of the poets: We learn in suffering what we teach in song. God speaks to us in many experiences of life, and not least in those which try our hearts and souls. But we can hear his voice only when we accept in reverence what comes to us. If we accept it with resentment, the rebellious cries of our own hearts make us deaf to the voice of God. (c) By means of the experiences through which he passed, both the Authorized and the Revised Standard Versions say that Jesus was made perfect (teleioun). Teleioun is the verb of the adjective teleios.

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

  Charles Wesley, in his great hymn ‘Hark the herald angels sing’, made this appeal: Veiled in flesh the godhead see. It was when the flesh of Christ was torn upon the cross that people really saw God. All his life showed God; but it was on the cross that God’s love really was revealed. As the tearing of the tabernacle veil opened the way to the presence of God, so the tearing of the flesh of Christ revealed the full greatness of his love and opened up the way to him. (2) Jesus is the high priest over God’s house in the heavens. As we have seen so often, the function of the priest was to build a bridge between the people and God. This means that Jesus not only shows us the way to God but also, when we get there, introduces us to his very presence. Someone might be able to direct a tourist who asks the way to Buckingham Palace and yet be very far from having the right to take that person into the presence of the Queen; but Jesus can take us the whole way. (3) Jesus is the one person who can really cleanse. In the priestly ritual, the holy things were cleansed by being sprinkled with the blood of the sacrifices. Again and again, the high priest bathed himself in the brass basin of clear water. But these things were ineffective to remove the real pollution of sin. Only Jesus can really cleanse people. His is no external purification; by his presence and his Spirit, he cleanses their innermost thoughts and desires until they are really clean. From this, the writer to the Hebrews goes on to urge three things. (1) Let us approach the presence of God. That is to say, let us never forget the duty of worship. It is given to everyone to live in two worlds – this world of space and time, and the world of eternal things. Our danger is that we become so involved in this world that we forget the other. As the day begins, as the day ends and repeatedly throughout the day’s activities, we should turn aside, if only for a moment, and enter God’s presence. We all carry with us our own secret shrine, but so many of us forget to enter it. As Matthew Arnold wrote in his poem ‘Absence’: But each day brings its petty dust Our soon-choked souls to fill; And we forget because we must, And not because we will. (2) Let us hold fast to our creed. That is to say, let us never lose our grip of what we believe.

• From The Girls (2016)

  shoulders was loose, showing a tan line from a swimsuit—I had no idea when or where my mother had been swimming. How quickly we’d become strangers to each other, like nervous roommates encountering each other in the halls. “Well,” she said. I saw, for a moment, my old mother, the cast of weary love in her face, but it disappeared when her bracelets made a tinny sound, falling down her arms. “There’s rice and miso in the fridge,” she said, and I made a noise in my throat like I might eat it, but we both knew I wouldn’t. 8 The police photos of Mitch’s house make it look cramped and spooky, as if destined for its fate. The fat splintered beams along the ceiling, the stone fireplace, its many levels and hallways, like something in the Escher lithographs Mitch collected from a gallery in Sausalito. The first time I encountered the house, I remember thinking it was as spare and empty as a coastal church. There was very little furniture, the big windows in the shape of chevrons. Herringbone floors, wide and shallow steps. From the front door, you could already see the black plane of bay spreading past the house, the dark, rocky bank. The houseboats knocking peaceably against each other, like cubes of ice. Mitch poured us drinks while Suzanne opened his refrigerator. Humming a little song as she peered at the shelves. Making noises of approval or disapproval, lifting tinfoil off a bowl to sniff at something. I was in awe of her at moments like that. How boldly she acted in the world, in someone else’s house, and I watched our reflections wavering in the black windows, our hair loose on our shoulders. Here I was, in this famous man’s kitchen. The man whose music I’d heard on the radio. The bay out the door, shining like patent leather. And how glad I was to be there with Suzanne, who seemed to call these things into being. — Mitch had a meeting with Russell earlier that afternoon—I remember noticing it was strange that Mitch had been late for it. Two o’clock had passed, and we were still waiting for Mitch. I was silent, like they all were, the quiet between us expanding. A horsefly bit at my ankle. I didn’t want to shoo it away, conscious of Russell a few feet away, perched on his chair with his eyes closed. I could hear him humming under his breath. Russell had decided it would be best for Mitch to come upon him sitting there, his girls surrounding him, Guy at his side, the troubadour with his

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

  The rite is performed by the bishop, who is the successor of the Apostles, who uses the words, "I sign thee with the sign of the cross, I confirm thee with the chrism of salvation, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost." Chrism, or sacred oil, which is the symbol of the Spirit, is applied, and the cross is signed upon the forehead, the most prominent part of the body.1653 It is there shame shows itself when young Christians lack the courage to acknowledge their profession. § 115. The Eucharist. The eucharist, called by the Schoolmen the crown of the sacraments and the sacrament of the altar, was pronounced both a sacrament and a sacrifice. In the elaboration of the doctrine, scholastic theology reached the highest point of its speculation. Albertus Magnus devoted to it a distinct treatise and Thomas Aquinas nearly four hundred columns of his Summa. In practice, the celebration of this sacrament became the chief religious function of the Church.1654 The festival of Corpus Christi, commemorating it, was celebrated with great solemnity. The theory of the transmutation of the elements and the withdrawal of the cup from the laity were among the chief objects of the attacks of the Reformers. The fullest and clearest presentation of the eucharist was made by Thomas Aquinas. He discussed it in every possible aspect. Where Scripture is silent and Augustine uncertain, the Schoolman’s speculative ability, though often put to a severe test, is never at a loss. The Church accepted the doctrines of transubstantiation and the sacrificial meaning of the sacrament, and it fell to the Schoolmen to confirm these doctrines by all the metaphysical weapons at their command. And even where we are forced by the silence or clear meaning of Scripture to regard their discussion as a vain display of intellectual ingenuity, we may still recognize the solemn religious purpose by which they were moved. Who would venture to deny this who has read the devotional hymn of Thomas Aquinas which presents the outgoings of his soul to the sacrificial oblation of the altar? Pange lingua gloriosi corporis mysterium. Sing my tongue the mystery telling.1655 The culminating point in the history of the mediaeval doctrine of the eucharist was the dogmatic definition of transubstantiation by the Fourth Lateran Council, 1215. Thenceforth it was heresy to believe anything else. The definition ran that "the body and blood of Christ are truly contained in the sacrament of the altar under the forms of bread and wine, the bread being transubstantiated into the body and the wine into the blood by divine power."1656 The council did not foist upon the Church a new doctrine. It simply formulated the prevailing belief.

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

  It is the most beautiful adventure in life.’ An old scholar who was dying turned to his friends: ‘Do you realize’, he said, ‘that in an hour or two I will know the answers for which we have been searching all our lives?’ To these, death is the adventure of supreme discovery. (8) Above all, there are those, like Enoch, who have seen death as an entering into the nearer presence of the one with whom they have lived for so long. If we have lived with Christ, we may die in the certainty that we go to be forever with our Lord. In this passage, the writer to the Hebrews lays down, in addition, the two great foundation acts of faith of the Christian life. (1) We must believe in God. There can be no such thing as religion without that belief. Religion began when men and women became aware of God; it ceases when they live a life in which for them God does not exist. (2) We must believe that God is interested. As the writer to the Hebrews put it, we must believe that God is the rewarder of those who diligently seek him. There were those in the ancient world who believed in the gods, but they believed that they lived out in the spaces between the worlds, entirely unaware of human life. ‘God’, said the philosopher Epicurus as a first principle, ‘does nothing.’ There are many who believe in God but do not believe that he cares. It has been said that no astronomer can be an atheist; but it has also been said that an astronomer is bound to believe that God is a mathematician. But a God who is a mathematician need not care. God has been called the First Principle, the First Cause, the Creative Energy, the Life Force. These are the statements of people who believe in God, but not in a God who cares. When the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius was asked why he believed in the gods, he said: ‘True, the gods are not discernible by human sight, but neither have I seen my soul and yet I honour it. So, I believe in the gods and I honour them, because again and again I have experienced their power.’ It was not logic but life that convinced him of the gods.

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

  A crisis was precipitated in 1208 by the murder of Peter of Castelnau by two unknown assassins.1099 Again, the supreme pontiff fulminated the sentence of excommunication against the Tolosan count, and made the expulsion of all heretics from his dominions the condition of withdrawing suspicion against him as the possible murderer of Peter.1100 Nowhere else was the intrepid energy of Innocent more signally displayed! A crusade was announced. The connections of Raymund with France through his uncle, Louis VII., and with Aragon through Pedro, whose sister he had married, interposed difficulties. And the crusade went on. The Cistercians, at their General Chapter, decided to preach it. Princes and people from France, Flanders, and even Germany swelled the ranks. The same reward was promised to those who took the cross against the Cathari and Waldenses, as to those who went across the seas to fight the intruder upon the Holy Sepulchre. In a general epistle to the faithful, Innocent wrote: — "O most mighty soldiers of Christ, most brave warriors; Ye oppose the agents of anti-Christ, and ye fight against the servants of the old serpent. Perchance up to this time ye have fought for transitory glory, now fight for the glory which is everlasting. Ye have fought for the body, fight now for the soul. Ye have fought for the world, now do ye fight for God. For we have not exhorted you to the service of God for a worldly prize, but for the heavenly kingdom, which for this reason we promise to you with all confidence."1101 Awed by the sound of the coming storm, Raymund offered his submission and promised to crush out heresy. The humiliating spectacle of Raymund’s penance was then enacted in the convent church of St. Gilles. In the vestibule, naked to the waist, he professed compliance with all the papal conditions. Sixteen of the count’s vassals took oath to see the hard vow was kept and pledged themselves to renew the oath every year, upon pain of being classed with heretics. Then holding the ends of a stole, wrapped around the penitent’s neck like a halter, the papal legate led Raymund before the altar, the count being flagellated as he proceeded.1102 Raymund’s submission, however, did not check the muster of troops which were gathering in large numbers at Lyons.1103 In the ranks were seen the archbishops of Rheims, Sens, and Rouen; the bishops of Autun, Clermont, Nevers, Baseur, Lisieux, and Chartres; with many abbots and other clergy. At their side were the duke of Burgundy, the counts of Nevers, St. Pol, Auxerre, Geneva, and Poitiers, and other princes. The soldier, chosen to be the leader, was Simon de Montfort. Simon had been one of the prominent leaders of the Fourth Crusade, and was a zealous supporter of the papacy. He neglected not to hear mass every day, even after the most bloody massacres in the campaigns in Southern France. His contemporaries hailed him as another Judas Maccabaeus and even compared him to Charlemagne.1104