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 Cleanness (2020)

  THE BUS LEFT US in the Piazza Maggiore, where there was a huge wooden statue in the center of the square, a cylinder painted an uneven green. The bottom half was featureless, the top carved into the torso of a frog, regal and upright, his lips drawn back in an expression at once benevolent and severe. Two arms crossed at his stomach, four long fingers hanging down from each; above the half-lidded eyes there was a crown with four prongs. Cables stretched down from its midsection, securing it to the pavement; wooden barriers marked off a space around it. It would be burned, the man working at reception told us back at the hotel when we asked, it was the tradition, the old year burned at the turn of the new. I remembered something I had seen in a movie, Fellini maybe, a stuffed witch on a pile of kindling and old furniture, the trash of the past, the promise of an uncluttered future. I wondered why we didn’t do it in the States, where we love to pretend to start afresh, where we love to burn things down. There was nothing like it in Bulgaria either, where New Year’s was celebrated at home; families gathered in apartments and at midnight they set off fireworks from their balconies. It had frightened me my first year, the sound ricocheting off the walls as the little bombs fell into the streets below, where everyone knew not to be, they were impassible for a good half hour. Which was the opposite of clearing away: all over the city the explosions came down and nobody swept them up, the wrappers and casings littered the streets until the heavy spring rains. It wasn’t a traditional statue, the man told us, there was a competition each year, artists submitted designs and the winner had his work displayed there, in the center of the city, for a week before it was burned. For us the frog is a symbol, the man said, it means poverty, here in Bologna, in Italy, so it means to burn poverty. You know the crisis is very hard here, he said, the austerity is very hard, it would be good to burn it away. He had apologized for his English, but it was very good, less stiff than he seemed in his jacket and tie; he was young, midtwenties, a college student in a university town. You should go, he said, it’s a party, there will be music and lots of people and you can watch the fire, it’s something you should see.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  Once you become a real schizerino flying is the easiest thing in the world; the trick is to fly with the etheric body, to leave behind in Bloomingdale’s your sack of bones, guts, blood and cartilage; to fly only with your immutable self which, if you stop a moment to reflect, is always equipped with wings. Flying this way, in full daylight, has advantages over the ordinary night-flying which everybody indulges in. You can leave off from moment to moment, as quick and decisive as stepping on a brake; there is no difficulty in finding your other self, because the moment you leave off you are your other self, which is to say, the so-called whole self. Only, as the Bloomingdale experience goes to prove, this whole self, about which so much boasting has been done, falls apart very easily. The smell of linoleum, for some strange reason, will always make me fall apart and collapse on the floor. It is the smell of all the unnatural things which were glued together in me, which were assembled, so to say, by negative consent. It is only after the third meal that the morning gifts, bequeathed by the phony alliance of the ancestors, begin to drop away and the true rock of the self, the happy rock sheers up out of the muck of the soul. With nightfall the pinhead universe begins to expand. It expands organically, from an infinitesimal nuclear speck, in the way that minerals or star clusters form. It eats into the surrounding chaos like a rat boring through store cheese. All chaos could be gathered together on a pinhead, but the self, microscopical at the start, works up to a universe from any point in space. This is not the self about which books are written, but the ageless self which has been farmed out through millenary ages to men with names and dates, the self which begins and ends as a worm, which is the worm in the cheese called the world. Just as the slightest breeze can set a vast forest in motion so, by some unfathomable impulse from within, the rocklike self can begin to grow, and in this growth nothing can prevail against it. It’s like Jack Frost at work, and the whole world a windowpane. No hint of labor, no sound, no struggle, no rest; relentless, remorseless, unremitting, the growth of the self goes on. Only two items on the bill of fare: the self and the not-self. And an eternity in which to work it out. In this eternity, which has nothing to do with time or space, there are interludes in which something like a thaw sets in. The form of the self breaks down, but the self, like climate, remains. In the night the amorphous matter of the self assumes the most fugitive forms; error seeps in through the portholes and the wanderer is unlatched from his door.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  I remember too that in a dressmaker’s shop on the first floor of one of these strange houses there was a bust in the window with a tape measure slung around the neck and I know that I was greatly moved by this sight. There was snow on the ground but the sun was out strong and I recall vividly how about the bottoms of the ash barrels which had been frozen into the ice there was then a little pool of water left by the melting snow. The whole street seemed to be melting in the radiant winter’s sun. On the bannisters of the high stoops the mounds of snow which had formed such beautiful white pads were now beginning to slide, to disintegrate, leaving dark patches of the brownstone which was then much in vogue. The little glass signs of the dentists and physicians, tucked away in the corners of the windows, gleamed brilliantly in the noonday sun and gave me the feeling for the first time that these offices were perhaps not the torture chambers which I knew them to be. I imagined, in my childish way, that here in this neighborhood, in this street particularly, people were more friendly, more expansive, and of course infinitely more wealthy. I must have expanded greatly myself though only a tot, because for the first time I was looking upon a street which seemed devoid of terror. It was the sort of street, ample, luxurious, gleaming, melting which later, when I began reading Dostoevski, I associated with the thaws of St. Petersburg. Even the churches here were of a different style of architecture; there was something semi-Oriental about them, something grandiose and warm at the same time, which both frightened me and intrigued me. On this broad, spacious street I saw that the houses were set well back from the sidewalk, reposing in quiet and dignity, and unmarred by the intercalation of shops and factories and veterinary stables. I saw a street composed of nothing but residences and I was filled with awe and admiration. All this I remember and no doubt it influenced me greatly, yet none of this is sufficient to account for the strange power and attraction which the very mention of Humboldt Street still evokes in me. Some years later I went back in the night to look at this street again, and I was even more stirred than when I had looked upon it for the first time. The aspect of the street of course had changed, but it was night and the night is always less cruel than the day. Again I experienced the strange delight of spaciousness, of that luxuriousness which was now somewhat faded but still redolent, still assertive in a patchy way as once the brownstone bannisters had asserted themselves through the melting snow. Most distinct of all, however, was the almost voluptuous sensation of being on the verge of a discovery.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  As Methodius, author of the Christian Symposium, was being tried and martyred at Patara in June of 312, the armies of an ambitious western emperor were marching south through Italy. That emperor, Constantine, had recently experienced a celestial vision that he soon came to understand as a message from the Christian God. By the end of October his troops, with crosses painted on their shields, had destroyed his western rival and left Constantine as the sole ruler of the western provinces. Tolerance for Christianity, and then official favoritism, soon followed. In the aftermath of Constantine’s conversion, a small, increasingly articulate, and highly organized spiritual movement became a powerful institution, and, more gradually, a dominant social ideology in the territories ringing the Mediterranean. Among the most unusual traits of this movement was its core commitment to sexual austerity. The choice to mark out the body and its sexual potential as a domain of moral authenticity was savvy. In the cacophonous, polyglot world of the Roman Empire, the Christian message was unmistakable. Of all the competing religions and philosophies of the late classical world, this one, with its distinctive attitude toward erotic pleasure, prevailed. The anarchic pluralism of the ancient Mediterranean would gradually recede behind the universalizing orthodoxies of that extraordinary institution, the Christian church. The world would be very different if any of the alternatives had become the preferred religion of the emperors. But as it happened, Aphrodite was to be slain by the Christians—toppled “like some debauched slave-girl.”1 The Christians were little prepared for this eventuality. There was, to be sure, a stable and standardized packet of sexual norms carried by the religion wherever it insinuated itself: virginity was ideal, marriage acceptable, sex beyond marriage sinful, same-sex eros categorically forbidden. Beyond this zone of consensus there were peripheral aspects of sexual life where Christian regulation lacked definition and sharpness—the validity of remarriages, the measure of virginity’s superiority, the exact peccability of surplus marital congress. But the main drama of late antiquity was not the gradual resolution of questions outstanding. The main drama, rather, was the absorption of society by the church, the mainstreaming of the religion. The most astonishing development of late antiquity is the transformation of a radical sexual ideology, for centuries the possession of a small, strident band of vociferous dissenters, into a culture, a broadly shared public framework of values and meanings. The Christian vision of sexual humanity, incubated in the radical air of persecution, was forced, unexpectedly, into the mold of a regulatory system. Certainly Paul, who believed that the rulers of this age were “doomed to pass away,” would not have dreamed that his terse missives would become the touchstone of an entire culture.2

• From Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016)

  Whenever the principal would hit me, it was like he was afraid to do it too hard. One day I was getting a hiding and I thought, Man, if only my mom hit me like this, and I started laughing. I couldn’t help it. The principal was quite disturbed. “If you’re laughing while you’re getting beaten,” he said, “then something is definitely wrong with you.” That was the first of three times the school made my mom take me to a psychologist to be evaluated. Every psychologist who examined me came back and said, “There’s nothing wrong with this kid.” I wasn’t ADD. I wasn’t a sociopath. I was just creative and independent and full of energy. The therapists did give me a series of tests, and they came to the conclusion that I was either going to make an excellent criminal or be very good at catching criminals, because I could always find loopholes in the law. Whenever I thought a rule wasn’t logical, I’d find my way around it. The rules about communion at Friday mass, for example, made absolutely no sense. We’d be in there for an hour of kneeling, standing, sitting, kneeling, standing, sitting, kneeling, standing, sitting, and by the end of it I’d be starving, but I was never allowed to take communion, because I wasn’t Catholic. The other kids could eat Jesus’s body and drink Jesus’s blood, but I couldn’t. And Jesus’s blood was grape juice. I loved grape juice. Grape juice and crackers—what more could a kid want? And they wouldn’t let me have any. I’d argue with the nuns and the priest all the time. “Only Catholics can eat Jesus’s body and drink Jesus’s blood, right?” “Yes.” “But Jesus wasn’t Catholic.” “No.” “Jesus was Jewish.” “Well, yes.” “So you’re telling me that if Jesus walked into your church right now, Jesus would not be allowed to have the body and blood of Jesus?” “Well…uh…um…” They never had a satisfactory reply. One morning before mass I decided, I’m going to get me some Jesus blood and Jesus body. I snuck behind the altar and I drank the entire bottle of grape juice and I ate the entire bag of Eucharist to make up for all the other times that I couldn’t. In my mind, I wasn’t breaking the rules, because the rules didn’t make any sense. And I got caught only because they broke their own rules. Another kid ratted me out in confession, and the priest turned me in. “No, no,” I protested. “You’ve broken the rules. That’s confidential information. The priest isn’t supposed to repeat what you say in confession.” They didn’t care. The school could break whatever rules it wanted. The principal laid into me. “What kind of a sick person would eat all of Jesus’s body and drink all of Jesus’s blood?” “A hungry person.”

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  FOREWORD BY BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN In 1978 I was on a cross-country drive with a friend when we stopped at a small-town drugstore. There, in a book rack, I found Ron Kovic’s Born on the Fourth of July. I devoured it on the way to Los Angeles, caught in its unrelenting power, and was still under its spell when we pulled into the Sunset Marquis hotel, a rocker’s hideaway on Alta Loma Road. Over the next few days I noticed a young man in a wheelchair sitting poolside. One afternoon he approached me and said, “Hi, I’m Ron Kovic. I wrote a book called Born on the Fourth of July.” I couldn’t believe it. I told him I’d just finished his book and felt it was one of the most powerful I’d ever read. We talked about the plight of Vietnam vets who’d returned stateside and he offered to take me to the Venice vet center. A few days later we made the trip and I was introduced to many young men who were struggling with their own difficulties coming home. It was unforgettable and sparked my interest in veterans’ affairs that led to our concert in support of Vietnam veterans at the Memorial Sports Arena in Los Angeles in August 1981. Ron’s book, his passion, and his friendship have stayed with me to this day. Here’s Born on the Fourth of July. Read it and rejoice. Read it and weep.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  I saw beneath the superficial physiognomy of skin and bone the indestructible world which man has always carried within him; it was neither old nor new, really, but the eternally true world which changes from moment to moment. Everything I looked at was palimpsest and there was no layer of writing too strange for me to decipher. When my companions left me of an evening I would often sit down and write to my friends the Australian bushmen or the Mound Builders of the Mississippi Valley or to the Igorots in the Philippines. I had to write English, naturally, because it was the only language I spoke, but between my language and the telegraphic code employed by my bosom friends there was a world of difference. Any primitive man would have understood me, any man of archaic epochs would have understood me: only those about me, that is to say, a continent of a hundred million people, failed to understand my language. To write intelligibly for them I would have been obliged first of all to kill something, secondly, to arrest time. I had just made the realization that life is indestructible and that there is no such thing as time, only the present. Did they expect me to deny a truth which it had taken me all my life to catch a glimpse of? They most certainly did. The one thing they did not want to hear about was that life is indestructible. Was not their precious new world reared on the destruction of the innocent, on rape and plunder and torture and devastation? Both continents had been violated; both continents had been stripped and plundered of all that was precious—in things . No greater humiliation, it seems to me, was meted out to any man than to Montezuma; no race was ever more ruthlessly wiped out than the American Indian; no land was ever raped in the foul and bloody way that California was raped by the gold diggers. I blush to think of our origins—our hands are steeped in blood and crime. And there is no letup to the slaughter and the pillage, as I discovered at first hand traveling throughout the length and breadth of the land. Down to the closest friend every man is a potential murderer. Often it wasn’t necessary to bring out the gun or the lasso or the branding iron—they had found subtler and more devilish ways of torturing and killing their own. For me the most excruciating agony was to have the word annihilated before it had even left my mouth. I learned, by bitter experience, to hold my tongue; I learned to sit in silence, and even smile, when actually I was foaming at the mouth. I learned to shake hands and say how do you do to all these innocent-looking fiends who were only waiting for me to sit down in order to suck my blood.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  The subject of this chapter is the fate of Christian attitudes toward the aphrodisia in the period of triumph. The purpose of this exploration is to trace the contours of that profound transformation, between the reigns of Constantine (AD 306–337) and Justinian (AD 527–565), which saw the transition of Christianity from cult to culture, and in particular to search for the zones of tension and change as Christian sexual ideology was disseminated on an ever greater scale. An investigation of such a daunting topic must necessarily be selective, and what is sought after here is the place of sexual ethics within the shifting configuration of church, state, and society. The Christian model of sexual morality, with its specific prohibitions and allowances and its distinctive logic, came to overlay an ancient and deeply entrenched culture of sexual morality rooted in the machinery of social reproduction. The church gradually absorbed that machinery, with its considerable pluralism and inherent chaos, a process that had considerable feedback effects on the shape of Christian sexual morality itself. In short, as the church was forced to accommodate itself to the world, there were both frontiers of intense conflict and peaceful assimilation, and the church’s sexual ideology was reshaped by protracted war against inveterate habits as much as gradual reconciliation with the order of state and society. The grand ascetic experiments that are such a stunning feature of late antiquity have, naturally, attracted enormous interest. Here we will deliberately look away from the monks, partly in the name of a scholarly division of labor, in the belief that absolute sexual renunciation has garnered such considerable notice already that the marginal returns will be greater elsewhere. But more profoundly, the focus on ascetic extremism threatens to produce a stilted and partial view of the Christianization of sexual culture. The ascetic extremism that originated in the desert and then hurtled itself across the Mediterranean in late antiquity was certainly the most flamboyant, but not necessarily the most consequential, front in a broader assault on eros that swept up society as a whole. An imbalanced focus on the most radical practices and institutions of sexual renunciation is liable to suggest that “the rest,” the ordinary baptized Christians, formed a “silent majority” who could more or less carry on life as normal, marrying and breeding without great inconvenience from any newfound religious scruples. Such a conception of sexual culture in late antiquity, often implicit, has been quietly underwritten by the unsustainable view that Greco-Roman society was already well on the path toward sexual prudery by the time of Constantine’s vision. Not only does this narrative entirely misunderstand the high erotic charge of conjugal sex in pre-Christian culture, it simply ignores the vitality and anarchy of eros in a society where the hard sexual rules were essentially economic rather than repressive. The ostentatious deprivations of the desert draw our eyes away from the main drama in late antiquity, which occurs squarely in the middle of the ancient city.5

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  Th is story, with its intricate knowingness, promises the ability to confront the theodicy that underlies literature, through literature.  Th e Ethiopian Tale of Heliodorus makes equally canny use of the generic conventions underlying the inviolability of the heroine’s body. Th e Ethio- pian Tale is as self- aware as Leucippe and Clitophon, but the eff ect achieved by the author’s consciousness is an air of baroque grandeur rather than keen lightness. Th e Ethiopian Tale is the latest of the erotic romances that sur- vive, and there are compelling reasons to place it sometime in the second half of the fourth century. Th e Ethiopian Tale deliberately builds an aura of latest and greatest. All of the conventional themes are allowed to unravel, in stately fashion. By far the longest of the erotic romances, it is unique in weaving two story patterns into a single narrative. At one level it is the story of Th eagenes and Charicleia, their separation and endurance, their eventual union. Th e Ethiopian Tale is also a homeward journey for Charicleia, who gradually discovers her true identity as the princess of Ethiopia. In the so- phistication of its narrative architecture, Th e Ethiopian Tale is without peer among the ancient novels. But it is also distinctive in its fi xation on male bodily purity, and in general its chilly tone toward the pleasures of the fl esh. Th e Ethiopian Tale very consciously redeploys the traditional armory of the erotic romance, but in the ser vice of a hieratic vision of human life.  Heliodorus reworks the conventions of romance to serve his own pur- poses. Th eagenes and Charicleia fi nd themselves enslaved at the palace of a Persian satrap, whose wife has sensual designs on Th eagenes. Th reats to the hero are not uncommon in romance, but this scene is far removed from its direct parallel in Leucippe and Clitophon, which has Clitophon indulge the harmless desires of his seductress, Melite. For Heliodorus, the bodily purity of Th eagenes is supremely important. Earlier in the story he has sworn that he is innocent of experience with a woman. At the end of the story, he too will undergo a virginity test (in fact, a test to ensure that he is pure, so that he can be the victim of a human sacrifi ce!).

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  Th e providential rescue of the girl’s chastity is familiar, as is the high- pitched self- awareness of the episode as a “drama.” Th e atmospherics of the story deliberately arouse the expectations of a ro- mance, so the departures from the traditional script are all the more reso- nant. In the Christian version, the story is not set against a timeless Medi- terranean but a distinctly recognizable Roman Empire. Th e heroine relies not on the implicit order of the fi ctional cosmos to rescue her but on the Christian God. Her chastity is saved, but not as a precondition for marriage. Instead, it is an end in itself. And her rescuer suff ers the ultimate penalty for securing her salvation. Th e Christian story ends not with marriage and re- generation but with the double martyrdom of virginity and death. Th e spirit of eros has been evicted, replaced by a grim sexual austerity that dic- tates the shape of the narrative quite as much as the fervent sensuality of the classical romance ever did.  Th ese stories of Christian girls who escaped from the brothel are minor but revealing marks of a closely shared imaginative space, and they point to the central place of sex in the fi ctional economy of both traditions. Th e writings known, somewhat unhappily, under the moniker of the apocry- phal Acts of the apostles, bear a telling family resemblance to contemporary Greek novelistic writing. Th e apocryphal Acts are the primary vehicle of early Christian romance. Th e apostles, the wandering heroes of early Chris- tianity, were an endlessly fertile source of Christian legend. Close to the divine presence, the aura of the miraculous clung to them. Th e institutional church claimed descent from them. Th e canonical scriptures testifi ed to their historicity but left ample room to the imagination. An enormous body of Christian legend, continuously reshaped, came to attach to the heroic ROMANCE IN THE LATE CLASSICAL WORLD  generation. Th e Acts are adventure stories, but unlike the pagan novels the Acts are historical romances, set against a backdrop recognizable as the Ro- man Empire of the fi rst century. As in the pagan romance, travel and serial endangerments hold together the structure, which is episodic, sensational. Th e apostles are miracle workers, endowed above all with the wondrous ability to resurrect the dead. Th ey are also preachers who come to be arrested by the Roman authorities. Th e apocryphal Acts, like the romances but to an even greater degree, are forensic dramas. Th e gathering tension between ap- ostolic missionizing and the Roman order inevitably resolves into a judicial confl ict. Th e apostle, in the end, is martyred, so that death substitutes for marriage as the common ending of the apostle’s story. Between the travel, miracle working, and martyrdom of the apostles, sex continually juts into the foreground of the stories.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  The cosmology of Marcus, which is so important to his ethical outlook, was inseparable from orthodox Stoic determinism. “The peculiar quality of the good man is to love and to embrace whatever things have been bestowed and allotted to him.” At its deepest spiritual core, Roman Stoicism assumed that moral action was made possible by a benevolent providence. What is truly astonishing is how close Dio, Epictetus, and Marcus each come to realizing that this was materially not tenable, and how each retreats from more disturbing conclusions: Dio by focusing on the civic body rather than the dishonored, Epictetus by insisting on absolute internal freedom, and Marcus by the sheer assertion of divine justice. “The gods do exist, and human affairs are a concern to them. They have dispensed to man the power not to fall into anything that is truly evil.” Theodicy is not a demonstration of Stoic philosophy, it is an assumption, perhaps its deepest assumption.106 The providence of Stoicism was part of the religious atmosphere of the high empire, and it is here that philosophy draws closest to literature. The fatalism of Leucippe and Clitophon was just as conscious and overt as that of the Stoic philosophers. For Achilles, as for the Stoics, the individual was the plaything of destiny, which made kings and slaves alike. Achilles is just as close as Dio—perhaps even closer—to realizing the dark side of fate. His nameless, faceless prostitute, the foil of Leucippe, is the corollary of Dio’s searching examination of the social dynamics of sex, which cannot ultimately cross to consider the moral position of the enslaved. Yet the surface similarities between Stoicism and the romance are hardly a sign of influence or agreement. Stoicism and narrative fiction breathed the same air, and they addressed themselves to the deepest spiritual questions of the age. Stoicism and the erotic novel, in fact, give diametrically opposite answers to precisely the same questions. Marcus was a near contemporary of Achilles, and it would be hard to find more incompatible attitudes toward sex: for Marcus sex was a type of excretion, for Achilles it was an ecstatic communion with the “mystic fire” in the experience of erotic consummation. For Achilles, marriage is the end, the resolution; on an individual scale, it offered salvation and completion.107

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  His focused stare was unnerving. A young boy who was about twelve had wheeled him into the church, probably his grandson or a relative. I noticed that the man occasionally directed the boy to fetch things for him. He would wordlessly nod his head, and the boy seemed to know that the man wanted a fan or a hymnal. After I finished speaking, the group sang a hymn to end the session. The older man didn’t sing but simply closed his eyes and sat back in his chair. After the program, people came up to me; most folks were very kind and expressed appreciation for my having taken the time to come and talk to them. Several young black boys walked up to shake my hand. I was pleased that people seemed to value the information I shared. The man in the wheelchair was waiting in the back of the church. He was still staring at me. When everyone else had left, he nodded to the young boy, who quickly wheeled him up to me. The man’s expression never changed as he approached me. He stopped in front of me, leaned forward in his wheelchair, and said forcefully, “Do you know what you’re doing?” He looked very serious, and he wasn’t smiling. His question threw me. I couldn’t tell what he was really asking or whether he was being hostile. I didn’t know what to say. He then wagged his finger at me, and asked again. “Do you know what you’re doing?” I tried to smile to defuse the situation but I was completely baffled. “I think so….” He cut me off and said loudly, “I’ll tell you what you’re doing. You’re beating the drum for justice!” He had an impassioned look on his face. He said it again emphatically, “You’ve got to beat the drum for justice.” He leaned back in his chair, and I stopped smiling. Something about what he said had sobered me. I answered him softly, “Yes, sir.” He leaned forward again and said hoarsely, “You’ve got to keep beating the drum for justice.” He gestured and after a long while said again, “Beat the drum for justice.” He leaned back, and in an instant he seemed tired and out of breath. He looked at me sympathetically and waved me closer. I did so, and he pulled me by the arm and leaned forward. He spoke very quietly, almost a whisper, but with a fierceness that was unforgettable. “You see this scar on the top of my head?” He tilted his head to show me. “I got that scar in Greene County, Alabama, trying to register to vote in 1964. You see this scar on the side of my head?” He turned his head to the left and I saw a four-inch scar just above his right ear. “I got that scar in Mississippi demanding civil rights.”

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  He doesn’t propose a cure—he makes everybody crazy. Between this solution and a perpetual state of war, which is civilization, there is only one other way out—and that is the road we will all take eventually because everything else is doomed to failure. The type that represents this one and only way bears a head with six faces and eight eyes; the head is a revolving lighthouse, and instead of a triple crown at the top, as there might well be, there is a hole which ventilates what few brains there are. There is very little brain, as I say, because there is very little baggage to carry about, because living in full consciousness, the gray matter passes off into light. This is the only type of man one can place above the comedian; he neither laughs nor weeps, he is beyond suffering. We don’t recognize him yet because he is too close to us, right under the skin, as a matter of fact. When the comedian catches us in the guts this man, whose name might be God, I suppose, if he had to use a name, speaks up. When the whole human race is rocking with laughter, laughing so hard that it hurts, I mean, everybody then has his foot on the path. In that moment everybody can just as well be God as anything else. In that moment you have the annihilation of dual, triple, quadruple and multiple consciousness, which is what makes the gray matter coil up in dead folds at the top of the skull. At that moment you can really feel the hole in the top of the head; you know that you once had an eye there and that this eye was capable of taking in everything at once. The eye is gone now, but when you laugh until the tears flow and your belly aches, you are really opening the skylight and ventilating the brains. Nobody can persuade you at that moment to take a gun and kill your enemy; neither can anybody persuade you to open a fat tome containing the metaphysical truths of the world and read it. If you know what freedom means, absolute freedom and not a relative freedom, then you must recognize that this is the nearest to it you will ever get. If I am against the condition of the world it is not because I am a moralist—it is because I want to laugh more. I don’t say that God is one grand laugh: I say that you’ve got to laugh hard before you can get anywhere near God. My whole aim in life is to get near to God, that is, to get nearer to myself. That’s why it doesn’t matter to me what road I take. But music is very important. Music is a tonic for the pineal gland. Music isn’t Bach or Beethoven; music is the can opener of the soul.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  Just a generation or two later, a Stoic named Philopator— the teacher of Galen’s teacher— was making important advances in the Stoic concept of “what is under our control” within the framework of a causal universe. Selective preservation makes the Roman Stoa appear more con- cerned with ethics than physics or metaphysics. But the problem of fate permeated imperial Stoicism because it was a pervasive issue in the intel- lectual culture of the Roman Empire. “In the fi rst two centuries AD every philosophical school and every sect of thinkers . . . had their say on fate, determinism, and freedom somewhere in their works.” Th ere are an aston- ishing number of tracts on fate, from gnostics and Christians, Platonists and Aristotelians, Stoics and Epicureans, dating to the high empire. Fate was a topic equally suited for public declamation or Lucianic satire. Th e tensions between destiny and autonomy lie at the foundation of the great literary creation of the Roman Empire, the novel. Th e Christians did not pilfer and debase a Stoic doctrine. Rather, both Christians and Stoics were responding to a broad and urgent fascination with the problem of man’s place is the cosmos. Cosmology, and its moral ramifi cations, became a cul- tural problem in the Roman Empire as never before; the intellectual atmo- sphere in which Christian sexual morality took shape was deeply concerned about the nature of the cosmos and the place of humanity in it.  Th e science of astronomy was part and parcel of this cultural fascination. Th e inhabitants of the Roman Empire had discovered the secrets of the stars. Th eir beautiful regularity was a sign of cosmic order. Astronomical science fi rst spread into the Mediterranean world in the Hellenistic period. Under Roman rule, it reached new heights, and it became, in the form of THE WILL AND THE WORLD  astrology, a pop u lar obsession. Th e scraps of papyri remaining today off er a highly suggestive proxy for pop u lar interest in astrology. Th e earliest fi rm date for a horoscope on a papyrus is from 10 BC. Th ereafter, growth rapidly ensues and peaks in the late second century. No less a scientist than Ptol- emy composed a handbook for learned practitioners to be able to cast horo- scopes with exactitude. His Te t r a b i b l o s makes it obvious that sexual phe- nomena were an abiding preoccupation of astral prognostication. Th e stars exerted no random or arbitrary force. Life here beneath the moon was pushed and pulled by the heavenly bodies according to scrutable patterns.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  Carol’s appearance was particularly unsettling: she had exquisite, nearly perfect facial features but almost no covering flesh. Looking at her, sometimes I saw the face of an astonishingly beautiful child, sometimes a grinning skull. Last there was Magnolia, an unkempt, obese seventy-year-old black woman whose legs were paralyzed and whose paralysis was a medical mystery. Her thick gold-rimmed spectacles had been mended with a small piece of adhesive tape, and a tiny, delicate lace cap was pinned to her hair. I was struck, when she introduced herself, by the way she held my gaze with her creamy brown eyes and by the dignity in her soft Southern drawl. “Ah’m very pleased to meet you, Doctah,” she said. “Ah heah good things about you.” The nurses had told me that Magnolia, then sitting quietly and patiently in her wheelchair, was often agitated and tore at imaginary insects crawling on her skin. My first step was to move the members into a circle and to ask the three residents to sit behind the patients, out of their immediate line of vision. I started the meeting in my usual manner by attempting to orient the members to group therapy. I introduced myself, suggested we use first names, and informed them that I would be there for the next four days. “After that, the two residents”—whom I named and pointed out—”will lead the group. The group’s purpose,” I went on, “is to help each of you learn more about your relationships with others.” As I glanced at the human devastation before me—Martin’s withered limbs, Carol’s death-mask grin, the intravenous bottles feeding Rosa and Carol the vital nutrients they refused to take by mouth, Dorothy’s urine bottle holding the urine siphoned from her paralyzed bladder, Magnolia’s paralyzed legs—my words seemed puny and foolish. These people needed so much, and “help with relationships” seemed so pitifully little. But what was the point of pretending that groups could do more than they could? Remember your mantra, I kept reminding myself: small is beautiful. Small is beautiful —small goals, small successes. I referred to my inpatient group as the “agenda group” because I always began a meeting by asking each member to formulate an agenda—to identify some aspect of themselves that they wished to change. The group worked better if its members’ agendas pertained to relationship skills—especially to something that could be worked on in the here-and-now of the group. Patients who were hospitalized for major life problems were always puzzled by the focus on relationships and failed to see the relevance of the agenda task. I always answered, “I know that troubled relationships may not have been the reason for your hospitalization, but I’ve found over the years that everyone who has encountered significant psychological distress can profit by improving their mode of relating to others. The important point is that we can get the most out of this meeting by focusing on relationships because that’s what groups do best.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  It was a potpourri of forgotten melodies spiced with aloes and the juice of porcupines, played sometimes in three keys at once and pivoting always like a waltzing mouse around the immaculate conception. Later, when I went to hear Prokofiev, I understood what was happening to him; I understood Whitehead and Russell and Jeans and Eddington and Rudolf Eucken and Frobenius and Link Gillespie; I understood why, if there had never been a binominal theorem, man would have invented it; I understood why electricity and compressed air, to say nothing of Sprudel baths and fango packs. I understood very clearly, I must say, that man has a dead louse in his blood, and that when you’re handed a symphony or a fresco or a high explosive you’re really getting an ipecac reaction which was not included in the predestined bill of fare. I understood too why I had failed to become the musician I was. All the compositions I had created in my head, all these private and artistic auditions which were permitted me, thanks to St. Hildegarde or St. Bridget, or John of the Cross, or God knows whom, were written for an age to come, an age with less instruments and stronger antennae, stronger eardrums too. A different kind of suffering has to be experienced before such music can be appreciated. Beethoven staked out the new territory—one is aware of its presence when he erupts, when he breaks down in the very core of his stillness. It is a realm of new vibrations—to us only a misty nebula, for we have yet to pass beyond our own conception of suffering. We have yet to ingest this nebulous world, its travail, its orientation. I was permitted to hear an incredible music lying prone and indifferent to the sorrow about me. I heard the gestation of the new world, the sound of torrential rivers taking their course, the sound of stars grinding and chafing, of fountains clotted with blazing gems. All music is still governed by the old astronomy, is the product of the hothouse, a panacea for Weltschmerz . Music is still the antidote for the nameless, but this is not yet music . Music is planetary fire, an irreducible which is all sufficient; it is the slate-writing of the gods, the abracadabra which the learned and the ignorant alike muff because the axle has been unhooked. Look to the bowels, to the unconsolable and ineluctable! Nothing is determined, nothing is settled or solved. All this that is going on, all music, all architecture, all law, all government, all invention, all discovery—all this is velocity exercises in the dark, Czerny with a capital Zed riding a crazy white horse in a bottle of mucilage. One of the reasons why I never got anywhere with the bloody music is that it was always mixed up with sex. As soon as I was able to play a song the cunts were around me like flies.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  I turned my eyes away from the stage and beheld the marble staircase which I should take to go to my seat in the balcony. I saw a man slowly mounting the steps, his hand laid across the balustrade. The man could have been myself, the old self which had been sleepwalking ever since I was born. My eye didn’t take in the entire staircase, just the fews steps which the man had climbed or was climbing in the moment that I took it all in. The man never reached the top of the stairs and his hand was never removed from the marble balustrade. I felt the curtain descend, and for another few moments I was behind the scenes moving amidst the sets, like the property man suddenly roused from his sleep and not sure whether he is still dreaming or looking at a dream which is being enacted on the stage. It was as fresh and green, as strangely new as the bread and cheese lands which the Biddenden maidens saw every day of their long life joined at the hips. I saw only that which was alive! the rest faded out in a penumbra. And it was in order to keep the world alive that I rushed home without waiting to see the performance and sat down to describe the little patch of staircase which is imperishable. It was just about this time that the Dadaists were in full swing, to be followed shortly by the surrealists. I never heard of either group until some ten years later; I never read a French book and I never had a French idea. I was perhaps the unique Dadaist in America, and I didn’t know it. I might just as well have been living in the jungles of the Amazon for all the contact I had with the outside world. Nobody understood what I was writing about or why I wrote that way. I was so lucid that they said I was daffy. I was describing the New World—unfortunately a little too soon because it had not yet been discovered and nobody could be persuaded that it existed. It was an ovarian world, still hidden away in the Fallopian tubes. Naturally nothing was clearly formulated: there was only the faint suggestion of a backbone visible, and certainly no arms or legs, no hair, no nails, no teeth. Sex was the last thing to be dreamed of; it was the world of Chronos and his ovicular progeny. It was the world of the iota, each iota being indispensable, frighteningly logical, and absolutely unpredictable. There was no such thing as a thing , because the concept “thing” was missing. I say it was a New World I was describing, but like the New World which Columbus discovered it turned out to be a far older world than any we have known.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  There is no fundamental, unalterable difference between things: all is flux, all is perishable. The surface of your being is constantly crumbling; within however you grow hard as a diamond. And perhaps it is this hard, magnetic core inside you which attracts others to you willy-nilly. One thing is certain, that when you die and are resurrected you belong to the earth and whatever is of the earth is yours inalienably. You become an anomaly of nature, a being without shadow; you will never die again but only pass away like the phenomena about you. Nothing of this which I am now recording was known to me at the time that I was going through the great change. Everything I endured was in the nature of a preparation for that moment when, putting on my hat one evening, I walked out of the office, out of my hitherto private life, and sought the woman who was to liberate me from a living death. In the light of this I look back now upon my nocturnal rambles through the streets of New York, the white nights when I walked in my sleep and saw the city in which I was born as one sees things in a mirage. Often it was O’Rourke, the company detective, whom I accompanied through the silent streets. Often the snow was on the ground and the air chill and frosty. And O’Rourke talking interminably about thefts, about murders, about love, about human nature, about the Golden Age. He had a habit, when he was well launched upon a subject, of stopping suddenly in the middle of the street and planting his heavy foot between mine so that I couldn’t budge. And then, seizing the lapel of my coat, he would bring his face to mine and talk into my eyes, each word boring in like the turn of a gimlet. I can see again the two of us standing in the middle of a street at four in the morning, the wind howling, the snow blowing down, and O’Rourke oblivious of everything but the story he had to get off his chest. Always as he talked I remember taking in the surroundings out of the corner of my eye, being aware not of what he was saying but of the two of us standing in Yorkville or on Allen Street or on Broadway. Always it seemed a little crazy to me, the earnestness with which he recounted his banal murder stories in the midst of the greatest muddle of architecture that man had ever created.

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  The four girls stared at him. Two sat up and smiled, holding their purses with tight fingers, their legs pinched together at the knees. A beautiful black-haired girl, with jutting cheekbones and a lush, full mouth, lolled in an orange beanbag chair, her long legs sprawled rudely on the floor, half open and tenting her tight silk dress so you could almost see between her legs. She gawked at him with open disgust. “Sit up, Jasmine,” snapped the stretch-pants woman through her smile. She held out her freckled hands toward the last girl, who sat with one leg tucked underneath her, looking out the window. “And this is Lisette.” The girl wore a short red-and-black-checked dress, white ankle socks and black pumps. Her bobbed brown hair was curly. When she turned to face him, her expression was mildly friendly and normal; she could’ve been looking at anybody or anything. The strangeness of it all delighted and fascinated him: the falsely gentle voice, the helpless contempt, the choosing of a bored, unknown girl sitting on her ankle, looking out the window. “Do you see a lady who you’d like to visit with?” “I’ll see Lisette.” The girl stood up and walked toward him as if he were a dentist, except she was smiling. The room was pale green. The air in it was bloated with sweat and canned air freshener. There was a bed table set with a plastic container sprouting damp Handi Wipes, a radio, an ashtray, a Kleenex box and a slimy bottle of oil. The bed was covered by a designer sheet patterned with beige, brown and tan lions lazing happily on the branches of trees or swatting each other. There was an aluminum chair. There was a glass-covered poster for an art exhibit. There was a fish tank with a Day-Glo orange fish castle in it. He lay on the bed naked, waiting for her to join him. He turned on the radio. It was tuned to one of those awful disco stations. “I specialize in love,” sang a woman’s voice. “I’ll make you feel like new. I specialize in love—let me work on you.” He smiled as he listened to the music. It evoked the swirling lights of dance floors he’d never been on, the tossing hair and sweat-drenched underwear of girls who danced and drank all night, girls he never saw except in commercials for jeans. He anticipated Lisette as he imagined her, the grip of her blunt- fingered hands, her curly head on his shoulder. Did she dance in places like that, in her white socks and pumps? She came in with a white sheet under her arm. She clipped across the floor, sharp heels clacking. She turned off the radio.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  “his heart, amber and spunk.” Maybe at the same time, or thereabouts, while Jarry was saying “in eating the sound of moths,” and Apollinaire repeating after him “near a gentleman swallowing himself,” and Breton murmuring softly “night’s pedals move uninterruptedly,” perhaps “in the air beautiful and black” which the lone Jew had found under the Southern Cross another man, also lonely and exiled and of Spanish origin, was preparing to put down on paper these memorable words: “I seek, all in all, to console myself for my exile, for my exile from eternity, for that unearthing (destierro ) which I am fond of referring to as my unheavening. . . . At present, I think that the best way to write this novel is to tell how it should be written. It is the novel of the novel, the creation of creation. Or God of God, Deus de Deo.” Had I known he was going to add this, this which follows, I would surely have gone off like a bomb. . . . “By being crazy is understood losing one’s reason. Reason, but not the truth, for there are madmen who speak truths while others keep silent. . . .” Speaking of these things, speaking of the war and the war dead, I cannot refrain from mentioning that some twenty years later I ran across this in French by a Frenchman. O miracles of miracles! “II faut le dire, il y a des cadavres que je ne respecte qu’à moitié.” Yes, yes, and again yes! O, let us do some rash thing—for the sheer pleasure of it! Let us do something live and magnificent, even if destructive! Said the mad cobbler: “All things are generated out of the grand mystery, and proceed out of one degree into another. Whatever goes forward in its degree, the same receives no abominate.” Everywhere in all times the same ovarian world announcing itself. Yet also, parallel with these announcements, these prophecies, these gynecological manifestoes, parallel and contemporaneous with them new totem poles, new taboos, new war dances. While into the air so black and beautiful the brothers of man, the poets, the diggers of the future, were spitting their magic lines, in this same time, O profound and perplexing riddle, other men were saying: “Won’t you please come and take a job in our ammunition factory. We promise you the highest wages, the most sanitary and hygienic conditions. The work is so easy that even a child could do it.” And if you had a sister, a wife, a mother, an aunt, as long as she could manipulate her hands, as long as she could prove that she had no bad habits, you were invited to bring her or them along to the ammunition works.