Awe

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

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• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  It can even be regarded as the admission of some sort of failure. And yet on my third birthday a professional marionette troupe performed Sleeping Beauty in our living room before an audience of my mother’s lady friends’ children, imported for the occasion. The plates from which we kids had eaten cake and vanilla ice cream were collected and the curtains drawn, creating night in day, a magic trick I associated only with afternoon naps. It was a warm, sniffling, giggling audience. A little raised stage framed in blue cloth had been erected at one end of the room. The toe of a big brown shoe protruding from beneath the hem of the proscenium draperies kept in mind real dimensions only for a few more minutes; soon the reduced scale of the stage had engulfed me, as though I’d been precipitated through a beaker and sublimated into another substance altogether. I had never heard the story before. The curse of Carabosse, the Princess’s mishap in the Rose Garden, her long sleep and the funny, frozen postures of the courtiers, the arrival of the Prince and the joyous nuptials all transported me to a world of boldly modeled faces from which character could be readily deduced, a world in which menace foreshadowed disaster, evil was defeated and love crowned. In this lighted cube my emotions coalesced because they were given a firm bounding line and because things devolved with the logic of art, not life. For if the imaginary playmates were insubstantial, the overly material people who surrounded me were opaque. Now only these miniature figures—with a hooked nose punctuated by a wart, a skein of lustrous blond hair, lace cuffs, velvet trains—only they seemed lit from within and legible as they floated up out of the bottomless floor, gestured wildly, gazed as though blind in only the general direction of an interlocutor, shook with tearless sobs, growled or piped, then flew at one another for hearty, back-slapping embraces until they were whipped up into the wings. That was the secret of the imagination—its creations were feeble only to the maker but stronger than life itself to the observer. When the curtains were opened again and the puppeteers—balding husband and bespectacled wife—emerged with shy grins and joined the party, a deep sadness sounded inside me. When I was seven my mother divorced my father. My sister and I, aroused by the declamatory tone of the grownups downstairs, sat in pajamas on the front stairs and listened to the speeches. How odd and thrilling that where we’d live and go to school could be decided in this manner.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  And I awakened to the idea that a great world existed in which things happened and people changed, took risks—more, took notice: a world so sensitive, like a grand piano, that even a step or a word could awaken vibrations in its taut strings. Since the house was built on a very steep hill, the basement wasn’t underground, though its cinderblock walls did smell of damp soil. There were only two rooms in the basement. One was a “rumpus room” with a semicircular glass-brick bar that could be lit from within by a pink, a green and an orange bulb (the blue had burned out). The other room was long and skinny, the wall facing the lake broken by two large windows. Ordinarily a Ping-Pong table was set up in here, its green net never quite taut. Under the overhead lamp my father would lunge and swear and shout and slam or stretch to the very edge of the net to tap the ball delicately into the enemy’s court (for his opponent was inevitably “the enemy,” challenging his wind, strength, skill, prowess). Whenever my sister, a champion athlete, was at the cottage, she enjoyed this interesting power over Dad, while my stepmother and I sat upstairs and read, curled up in front of the fire with Herr Pogner the Persian cat (named after my harpsichord teacher). The cat dozed, feet tucked under her chest, though her raised ears, thin enough to let the lamplight through, twitched and cocked independently of one another with each “Damn!” or “Son of a bitch!” or “Gotcha, young lady, got you there” floating up through the hot-air vents in the floor. My sister’s fainter but delighted reproaches (“Oh, Daddy,” or “Really, Daddy”) didn’t merit even the tiniest adjustment of those feline ears. My stepmother, deep in her Taylor Caldwell or Jane Austen (she was a compulsive, unselective reader), was never too mesmerized by the page not to know when to hurry to the kitchen to present the inevitable victor—drawn, grinning—with his pint of peach ice cream and box of chocolate grahams, which my father would eat in his preferred way, a pat of cold butter on each cracker. Tonight there was no game. The grown-ups were sitting around the fire sipping highballs. Downstairs the table had been replaced by three cots for us boys. Kevin’s parents sent their sons to bed but I was allowed to stay up for another half hour. I was even given a weak highball of my own, though my stepmother murmured, “I’m sure he would rather have orange juice.” “For Chrissake,” my father said, smiling, “give the fella a break.” I was grateful for this unusual display of chumminess and, to please him, said nothing and nodded a lot at what the others said. Kevin’s parents, especially his mother, were unlike any other grown-ups I’d met. They were both Irish, she by origin, he by derivation. He drank till he became drunk, his eyes moist, his laugh general.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  And yet on my third birthday a professional marionette troupe performed Sleeping Beauty in our living room before an audience of my mother’s lady friends’ children, imported for the occasion. The plates from which we kids had eaten cake and vanilla ice cream were collected and the curtains drawn, creating night in day, a magic trick I associated only with afternoon naps. It was a warm, sniffling, giggling audience. A little raised stage framed in blue cloth had been erected at one end of the room. The toe of a big brown shoe protruding from beneath the hem of the proscenium draperies kept in mind real dimensions only for a few more minutes; soon the reduced scale of the stage had engulfed me, as though I’d been precipitated through a beaker and sublimated into another substance altogether. I had never heard the story before. The curse of Carabosse, the Princess’s mishap in the Rose Garden, her long sleep and the funny, frozen postures of the courtiers, the arrival of the Prince and the joyous nuptials all transported me to a world of boldly modeled faces from which character could be readily deduced, a world in which menace foreshadowed disaster, evil was defeated and love crowned. In this lighted cube my emotions coalesced because they were given a firm bounding line and because things devolved with the logic of art, not life. For if the imaginary playmates were insubstantial, the overly material people who surrounded me were opaque. Now only these miniature figures—with a hooked nose punctuated by a wart, a skein of lustrous blond hair, lace cuffs, velvet trains—only they seemed lit from within and legible as they floated up out of the bottomless floor, gestured wildly, gazed as though blind in only the general direction of an interlocutor, shook with tearless sobs, growled or piped, then flew at one another for hearty, back-slapping embraces until they were whipped up into the wings. That was the secret of the imagination—its creations were feeble only to the maker but stronger than life itself to the observer. When the curtains were opened again and the puppeteers—balding husband and bespectacled wife—emerged with shy grins and joined the party, a deep sadness sounded inside me.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  Fred, it turned out, owned the store. He was a tall man with ragged red hair streaked prematurely gray and acne-pitted skin and workclothes that weren’t quite clean and hundreds of scraps of odd knowledge he stored in his head just as he secreted (in the pockets of his faded blue shirt or his baggy chinos or the blue vest from one secondhand suit or the brown jacket from another) tiny slips of paper on which he jotted notes for his stories. The slips were of five different pastel shades; whether this variety followed a system or merely injected random color into cerebrations so exalted they would otherwise have been uniformly gray I have no way of knowing—certainly at that age I had no way of judging him, only of gazing at him with awe. His eyes, magnified by thick glasses, never met mine. When he spoke to me he scrutinized a point precisely a foot to the left of my head. His voice was so soft and low and expressionless that one might have ignored him had Marilyn not listened to him with such deference. Since everything she did was theatrical, “listening” also had to be pantomimed: she stood like a schoolgirl and her hands, pointing down, were pressed together in inverted prayer. Her mouth was pursed, her head lowered; at a certain moment in Fred’s mutterings her head would start to bob wildly and those strange tones of assent that can only be transcribed as “Mmnn” would issue forth from her throat on a high, surprised note and then on lower, affirming ones—even, finally, on a very low grunt that bore the unintentionally rude message “Of course. Everyone knows that. Get on with it.” None of this was subtle. It was really quite ridiculously overdone—or would have been had Marilyn been concerned at all with the impression she was making on other people. As it happened, she wanted only to conform to a role she was simultaneously writing and reciting. The exact dimensions of that role became clear only as the years went by. She saw herself, I was to learn, as the grisette in a nineteenth-century opera—as Mimi or Violetta or Manon. Like them she was impulsive, warm-hearted, immoral and pious.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  The teacher they’d selected for me was a part-time professor at the university. He lived in one room in a huge pile thrown up as faculty and graduate-student housing. He had a double bed that pulled down out of the wall; by day it hid behind two white doors with cut-glass doorknobs. When he greeted me for my first lesson I was overwhelmed by his size. He was six foot four and brawny and I looked up into chestnut hair sprouting from his nostrils; my hand was lost in his. He was at once formal and hearty and spoke with a strong German accent. Our lessons followed an exact system and began and ended at fixed times without interludes or chitchat. By the same token the professor bounded about in a shirt open to his navel, his sleeves rolled up above his massive biceps, and on his desk I saw a photograph of him in a swim-suit at the beach holding his girl friend aloft with just one hand. Like many athletes he found it impossible to sit still, and his grammatical points and pronunciation tips were underscored with a ceaseless tattoo. He slapped his knees. He rocked back and forth in his straight-backed chair. He shot his hand up in a menacing Sieg Heil—but only to reach back to scratch between his shoulder blades, a difficult feat for someone so muscle-bound. As I sat beside him (I almost said within him, so totally did he surround me) I became more and more feeble. He’d stride up and down the small room, kicking the baseboard of each wall when he reached it as if to protest the insult of such a small cage for such a mighty lion. Before I met him I could have imagined someone huge and stupid and taciturn; I could just as readily have pictured a brilliant tiny chatterbox, bald pate and soft curls fringing it, a midget dynamo who read everything and played the cello when depressed. But a giant with calluses on his palms at the base of each finger, someone who breathed in a conscious, voluntary way as I tentatively recited my lesson and who stood and folded a huge paw over his jaw before delivering a judgment about my performance—such a man was so new to me that he confused me, he thrilled me.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  In his letters to Rachel, Father Burke argued in page after page of his effortlessly flowing script against her longing to leave DeQuincey. Once she even showed me an excerpt from Burke’s latest: “Nor, my daughter, can you leave your husband any more than Our Lord can abandon the sinner or God the prodigal. In a very special, very private sense DeQuincey is your Cross and your marriage is your Calvary. Don’t imagine for a moment, my child, that I am insensitive to your plight. I know what sort of man DeQuincey is, and I know how little he is suited to you in the way the world thinks. What, then, could have been God’s plan in linking you to such a man with an eternal vow except to purify you through pain? Rather than despising and fleeing our sufferings, we should treasure them and thank the Lord for them, since we are each given the exact sort of suffering we require to break our will and to increase our spirit, as though the will were the seed’s hull and the spirit its germinating embryo.” Something in me thrilled to this talk. Certainly such a religion raised our flat, squirming little lives into the high static relief of allegory. The Church had set aside its legal and political ambitions in order to ensure its continued colonization of dailiness. This invasion advanced into every last corner of consciousness by virtue of a flair for drama. Reality isn’t dramatic but the mind is; the Church accommodates itself accordingly to mental physiology rather than to the anatomy of the real. For the Scotts the medieval ring to Father Burke’s style made it all the more seductive. Far from impressing them as a drawback, the farfetched nature of his language and his insistence on its literal truth had for them all the appeal of the antique. They belonged to that generation of humanists who found the advances of science alarming and who imagined the atelier and the chapel must defend themselves against the laboratory. To me this view of things seemed quaint; I was content to accept every truth science might establish, though at the same time I recognized that what most interested me science couldn’t address: subjectivity. The Scotts weren’t willing to reduce the claims of the spirit. They wanted to vaunt the “higher” truth of religion and art over the somehow mechanical or merely factual truth of science. Father Burke, clearly intelligent, erudite and dedicated, thrilled them when he insisted on the literal miracle of the Virgin Birth and the actual existence of hell, although in his version hell got improved, its status as fiery real estate changed to a cold, unreal state in which the degree of damnation is measured by the soul’s distance from God. “Hell is God’s absence,” he told me.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  The question turned out to be, well, academic. My father chose a school for me merely because it was on the route between his winter and summer houses, a convenient stopover on the long trip for him. Right after Christmas he drove me to the deserted campus, the buildings shrouded in snow like chairs in holland cloth, the rectilinear paths treacherously iced over, the wide-open square, originally designed to resemble a piazza, now an arctic court where the snow played handball with itself, white sports whirling up off the pavement and racing to slam glittering explosions on brick walls tenoned in ice. The architecture of the school had been conceived by a famous Finn and built by an army of Scots who’d stayed on as gardeners and maintenance men (they outnumbered the teachers). The school was nothing but reminiscence—of an Italian hill town, a French abbey, an English academy, the different sources improbably but convincingly melded into a fantasy about the classic sites of Europe as imagined by exiles from cold peripheral lands, nostalgia for someone else’s past. Because the school was a fantasy and not a reality, its architecture alternated as in a dream between vague, featureless expanses of wall, the ectoplasmic surround of the action, and by contrast the places the dreamer looks at, concentrates on: maniacally detailed ornaments, chiseled gargoyle heads peering down out of the odd niche, tiled Moorish arches framing a rose garden, scriptural and classical mottoes spelled out in stone along the backs of benches. Those benches circled a deep basin surmounted by a fountain as wide as a barber pole and much taller on which was balanced a stone pineapple that expressed, depending on how literally one took the conceit, either juice or water. The headmaster of Eton (yes, the name, too, had been borrowed) was a great shaggy and strangely yellowed man. He wore tweeds and smoked a pipe and had pale, glutinous hands—really as sticky and shiny as the gluten in kneaded bread—and yellowing white hair that shot straight back from his liver-spotted brow and huge yellow teeth that looked useless for eating though effective enough for polite baring in interviews with intimidated parents. He was tall and unctuous and unintelligent and lived in a rambling “cottage” with fieldstone walls, low black eaves that curled back under on themselves like ingrown toenails, and leaded panes that rattled decoratively in the winter winds in front of solid, modern, cryptically sealed storm windows.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  In his letters to Rachel, Father Burke argued in page after page of his effortlessly flowing script against her longing to leave DeQuincey. Once she even showed me an excerpt from Burke’s latest: “Nor, my daughter, can you leave your husband any more than Our Lord can abandon the sinner or God the prodigal. In a very special, very private sense DeQuincey is your Cross and your marriage is your Calvary. Don’t imagine for a moment, my child, that I am insensitive to your plight. I know what sort of man DeQuincey is, and I know how little he is suited to you in the way the world thinks. What, then, could have been God’s plan in linking you to such a man with an eternal vow except to purify you through pain? Rather than despising and fleeing our sufferings, we should treasure them and thank the Lord for them, since we are each given the exact sort of suffering we require to break our will and to increase our spirit, as though the will were the seed’s hull and the spirit its germinating embryo.” Something in me thrilled to this talk. Certainly such a religion raised our flat, squirming little lives into the high static relief of allegory. The Church had set aside its legal and political ambitions in order to ensure its continued colonization of dailiness. This invasion advanced into every last corner of consciousness by virtue of a flair for drama. Reality isn’t dramatic but the mind is; the Church accommodates itself accordingly to mental physiology rather than to the anatomy of the real. For the Scotts the medieval ring to Father Burke’s style made it all the more seductive. Far from impressing them as a drawback, the farfetched nature of his language and his insistence on its literal truth had for them all the appeal of the antique. They belonged to that generation of humanists who found the advances of science alarming and who imagined the atelier and the chapel must defend themselves against the laboratory. To me this view of things seemed quaint; I was content to accept every truth science might establish, though at the same time I recognized that what most interested me science couldn’t address: subjectivity. The Scotts weren’t willing to reduce the claims of the spirit. They wanted to vaunt the “higher” truth of religion and art over the somehow mechanical or merely factual truth of science. Father Burke, clearly intelligent, erudite and dedicated, thrilled them when he insisted on the literal miracle of the Virgin Birth and the actual existence of hell, although in his version hell got improved, its status as fiery real estate changed to a cold, unreal state in which the degree of damnation is measured by the soul’s distance from God. “Hell is God’s absence,” he told me.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  Except when he sang. Then he was free, that is, constrained by the ceremony of performance, the fiction that the entertainer is alone, that he is expressing grief or joy to himself alone. Tom would close his eyes and tip his head back. Squint lines would stream away from his eyes, his forehead would wrinkle, the veins would stand out along his throat and when he held a high note his whole body would tremble. One time he proudly showed me the calluses he’d earned by playing the guitar; he let me feel them. Sometimes he didn’t play at all but just sounded notes as he worked something out. He had forgotten me. He thought he was alone. He’d drop the slightly foolish smile he usually wore to disarm adolescent envy or adult expectation and he looked angry and much older: I took this to be his true face. As a folk singer Tom was permitted to wail and shout and moan and as his audience I was permitted to look at him. His father invited me to go sailing. I accepted, although I warned him I was familiar only with powerboats and had had no experience as a crew member. Everything about dressing the ship—unshrouding and raising the sails, lowering the keel, installing the rudder, untangling the sheets—confused me. I knew I was in the way and I stood, one hand on the boom, trying to inhale myself into nonexistence. I heard Mr. Wellington’s quick sharp breaths as reproaches. The day was beautiful, a cold, constant spring wind swept past us, high towers of clouds were rolling steadily closer like medieval war machines breaching the blue fortress of sky. Light spilled down out of the clouds onto the choppy lake, gray and cold and faceted, in constant motion but going nowhere. Hundreds of boats were already out, their sails pivoting and flashing in the shifting beams of sunlight. A gull’s wings dropped like the slowly closing legs of a draftsman’s compass.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  The question turned out to be, well, academic. My father chose a school for me merely because it was on the route between his winter and summer houses, a convenient stopover on the long trip for him. Right after Christmas he drove me to the deserted campus, the buildings shrouded in snow like chairs in holland cloth, the rectilinear paths treacherously iced over, the wide-open square, originally designed to resemble a piazza, now an arctic court where the snow played handball with itself, white sports whirling up off the pavement and racing to slam glittering explosions on brick walls tenoned in ice. The architecture of the school had been conceived by a famous Finn and built by an army of Scots who’d stayed on as gardeners and maintenance men (they outnumbered the teachers). The school was nothing but reminiscence—of an Italian hill town, a French abbey, an English academy, the different sources improbably but convincingly melded into a fantasy about the classic sites of Europe as imagined by exiles from cold peripheral lands, nostalgia for someone else’s past. Because the school was a fantasy and not a reality, its architecture alternated as in a dream between vague, featureless expanses of wall, the ectoplasmic surround of the action, and by contrast the places the dreamer looks at, concentrates on: maniacally detailed ornaments, chiseled gargoyle heads peering down out of the odd niche, tiled Moorish arches framing a rose garden, scriptural and classical mottoes spelled out in stone along the backs of benches. Those benches circled a deep basin surmounted by a fountain as wide as a barber pole and much taller on which was balanced a stone pineapple that expressed, depending on how literally one took the conceit, either juice or water. The headmaster of Eton (yes, the name, too, had been borrowed) was a great shaggy and strangely yellowed man. He wore tweeds and smoked a pipe and had pale, glutinous hands—really as sticky and shiny as the gluten in kneaded bread—and yellowing white hair that shot straight back from his liver-spotted brow and huge yellow teeth that looked useless for eating though effective enough for polite baring in interviews with intimidated parents. He was tall and unctuous and unintelligent and lived in a rambling “cottage” with fieldstone walls, low black eaves that curled back under on themselves like ingrown toenails, and leaded panes that rattled decoratively in the winter winds in front of solid, modern, cryptically sealed storm windows.

• From The Sexual Outlaw (1977)

  Survive! If the earth shrugs and thrusts this glorious city into the ocean, the rest of the country will follow, with hurricanes, tornadoes, fires, tidal waves, and killer winds. 5:12 P.M. Hollywood Boulevard. H E PARKS ON A side street. He's wearing Levi's and cowboy boots, no shirt. Sunglasses. Though his muscles have lost their pump from the morning's workout, they are beginning to ache deliciously, a signal of the body's rite of resurrection. Traffic jammed, Hollywood Boulevard is at its trashiest under a stoned white sun. This street—a tattered crazy old woman, sweet at times, dangerous at times—is clashing rows of tawdry clothes shops, smelly quick-food counters, mangy arcades, patchy stores, movie theaters. Beyond the tops of frayed buildings, palmtrees look away disdainfully. Periodically, campaigns will be mounted to clean up the boulevard. Merchants will call for a return to its former elegance. Yet no one can remember when Hollywood Boulevard, unworthy symbol of glamor, was elegant. Even stars’ names nobly engraved in bronze into the sidewalks have turned gray and sullen. Castouts from the American myth glorified by films have taken over like locusts. Without even noticing it, the outcasts step on the names of the great stars. This is the exiles’ turf now, fought for in blood skirmishes with merchants, cops, citizens’ groups. The outcasts endure on the carnival street. Jim walks shirtless along it. Even when the weather is cool, he wears little—partly discipline of his body, partly proud exhibitionism. He nods to other outlaws. Other malehustlers. Though on the beach he cruised only for excitement, on the boulevard—and on Selma, the tacky side street he will soon move into—he will hustle for money; then he will most often pretend to be “straight”—uncomfortably rationalizing the subterfuge by reminding himself that those attracted to him will usually—though certainly not always—want him to be that, like the others of his breed. They stand now, his breed, in clusters outside the Gold Cup Coffee Shop, the Pioneer Chicken. Youngmen— younger certainly than he, he knows, though he doesn't show his age—who recognize him easily as one of them and feeling the bond of exiles nod and say, What's goin on? Masculine men with shifting eyes, watching for clients and cops. Jim may pause for a few words, but not for long; he's an outsider among outsiders. At Highland and Hollywood, the queens, awesome, defiant Amazons, are assuming their stations. The white queens are bleached and pale, the black ones shiny and purple. Extravagant in short skirts, bouffant hairdos, luminous unreal mouths and eyes. The transsexuals are haughty in their new credentials. “Ummmm- ummmmm ,” a black queen approves Jim's bare muscles as he moves toward Selma.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  I began to rise. I drew back for an instant, startled, but then I gave in: I was determined to be adequate to the miraculous. I rose and rose, not pneumatically as a swami might but imaginatively, that is, really. I was being enisled, the lotus rising out of the mud, and now I was being drawn, molten and blossoming, up through the void until we (for I was no longer alone)—until we entered a ring of the eager faces of infants called away from their games to this curved window from which they peered with mild pleasure, meaty hands pressed to the glass, moist lips open, eyes filmy with wonder. Their whispering was being dialed in, now amplified, and I was losing my whiteness and taking on a gold color, warm as a new tan. Shortly before Easter I managed to become friendly with my gym teacher, Mr. Pouchet. He was French Canadian and a recent Olympics competitor in track who’d come to our school as a coach and math teacher for the lower formers. He was very good with those kids. He lived in their dorm. They could be seen hanging onto him wherever he went, which he seemed to like in his shy, melancholy way though he pretended to find them tiresome (“What a pain,” he’d mutter as yet another giggler leaped onto his back). At twelve and thirteen the boys alternated between being babies and being brutes, sometimes clinging sulkily to his waist, sometimes socking him and screaming. He couldn’t keep them out of his room. They were always finding an excuse to sidle in and to look once again at his sports photographs and medals. I avoided talking to him about his medals, for his success had been neither major nor minor—in fact his was exactly the sort of ambiguous success calculated to invite regret.

• From The Sexual Outlaw (1977)

  In the city, you stepped out and tasted the ashes, felt them on your face. The odor of fire singed your senses. Behind smoky clouds, the sun was an incandescent balloon. When the fire was over, the residents returned doggedly to rebuild their homes in the exact areas scorched, and they braced for the rains, recalling the months-long storm in the sixties when an avalanche of mud swallowed the rebuilt houses. In Southern California. Shaped on the map like a coffin—center of prettydeath, flowers already here for the burial, or miraculous recovery. Death or purification. By fire, water, quivering earth. Shaped too on the map like a twisted handmirror— world center of narcissism. The silver, colored movies, the golden weather, the white beaches from Zuma to Laguna invite the glorious burnt bodies to perform a ritual of exhibitionism under the adoring sun. And until the impotent citizens rose in wrath to ban it, a nude beach beyond sand and craggy rocks nestled under steep cliffs. Nude men. Nude women. (The male outlaws climbed the rocks farther on, to dangerous secluded caves just barely above the roaring tide threatening to enter. Against the rocks bodies meshed with bodies under the promiscuous sun.) City of lost angels. Death, narcissism, and fire. Health cults and criminal smog. Sick cops and saintly sinners. Beach and forest. Paradise and hell. Hot Santa Ana winds pant into the city. The city that thrives on disaster. A huge street painting at the corner of Santa Monica and Butler depicts its collapse—truncated freeways, ocean flooding the desert. Daily, radio stations document freeway disasters: truck jackknifed, car overturned, pedestrian wandering on freeway. … The reports have the rhythm of a song, and the unspoken refrain is: Survive! Life is lived at least seven degrees—to choose a number—more fully here than elsewhere. Los Angeles is a metaphor for the future. It will happen here first, the best and the worst. After all, isn't this the last frontier?—here that all the expectations bunched tightly and seeded—when there was no more land to push into. Here that the country ends, its energy now electrified by intimations of disaster. Beyond— is suicide, where the country plunges into the waiting ocean. Survive! Fire swallows, the earth rumbles, mudslides crush. Homes collapse like toys. But new houses and lives are rebuilt on the brink. SLIDE AREA—signs along the awesome coast boast proudly. Jagged cliffs challenge along the ocean: Survive! SCIENTISTS PREDICT MASSIVE EARTHQUAKE IN L.A. WITHIN YEAR, the newspaper proclaims. You incorporate the knowledge and live life eight degrees more fully now. At the corner of Highland and Franklin, when Hollywood traffic is a crush of metal and chrome in the sweating sun, skinny shirtless boys take turns standing on their heads on a crumbling stone wall—exhibitionistically breaking records before the involuntarily captive audience.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  If in like manner thou wouldst be assured of all the rest, take way with thy sight after my words, circling above along the blessed wreath. This next flaming issueth from the smile of Gratian, 5 who gave such aid to the one and the other forum, as is acceptable in Paradise. The other who doth next adorn our choir, was that Peter who, with the poor widow, offered his treasure unto Holy Church. 6 The fifth light, 7 which amongst us is most fair, doth breathe from such a love that all the world down there thirsteth to know the news of it; within there is the lofty mind, to which a wisdom so profound was granted, that, if the truth be true, 8 no second ever rose to such full vision. Next look upon that taper’s light, which, in the flesh below, saw deepest into the angelic nature and its ministry. 9 In the next little light laugheth that pleader for the Christian times, with whose discourse Augustine fortified him. 10 Now if thou drawest thy mind’s eye from light to light, following my praises, already for the eighth thou art athirst. In seeing every good therein rejoiceth the sainted soul, 11 which unmasketh the deceitful world to whoso giveth it good hearing. The body whence it was chased forth, lieth down below in Cieldauro, 12 and itself from martyrdom and exile came unto this peace. See flaming next the glowing breath of Isidor, of Bede, and of Richard, 13 who, in contemplating, was more than man. The one from which thy glance returneth unto me, is the light of a spirit who, in weighty thoughts, him seemed went all too slowly to his death; it is the light eternal of Sigier who, lecturing in the Vicus Straminis, syllogized truths that brought him into hate.” 14 Then as the horologue, that calleth us, what hour the spouse of God 15 riseth to sing her matins to her spouse that he may love her, wherein one part drawing and thrusting other, giveth a chiming sound of so sweet note, that the well-ordered spirit with love swelleth; so did I see the glorious wheel revolve and render voice to voice in harmony and sweetness that may not be known except where joy maketh itself eternal. 1. Note the special frequency of reference to the Trinity in this and the next following cantos. Also the emphasis laid on the procession of the Holy Ghost pom the Son as well as from the Father. The filioque controversy was one of the chief sources of the alienation between the East and West, which, after widening for centuries, resulted at last in the great schism of 1054 by which the Greek and Latin Churches were severed. 2. At the first point of Aries and at the first point of Libra the Equator and the Zodiac cross on the heavenly sphere.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  And he stretched upwards one wing and the other, between the middle and the three and three bands, so that he did hurt to none by cleaving. 13 So high they rose that they were not seen; his members had he of gold, so far as he was a bird, and the others white mingled with vermilion. 14 Not only Africanus, nor in sooth, Augustus, e’er rejoiced Rome with a car so fair, 15 but that of the sun would be poor beside it, that of the sun, which straying was consumed at the devout prayer of the earth, when Jove was mysteriously just. 16 Three ladies came dancing in a round by the right wheel; one so red that hardly would she be noted in the fire; the next was as if her flesh and bone had been made of emerald; the third seemed new-fallen snow; and now seemed they led by the white, now by the red, and from the song of her the others took measure slow and quick. 17 By the left wheel, four clad in purple, made festival, following the lead of one of them, who had three eyes in her head. 18 After all the group described, I saw two aged men, unlike in raiment, but like in bearing, and venerable and grave: one showed him to be of the familiars of that highest Hippocrates whom nature made for the creatures she holds most dear; the other showed the contrary care, with a sword glittering and sharp, such that on this side the stream it made me afeard. 19 Then saw I four 20 of lowly semblance; and behind all an old man solitary, coming in a trance, with visage keen. 21 And these seven were arrayed as the first company; but of lilies around their heads no garland had they, Rather of roses and of other red flowers; one who viewed from short distance would have sworn that all were aflame above the eyes. 22 And when the car was opposite to me, a thunder clap was heard; and those worthy folk seemed to have their further march forbidden, and halted there with the first ensigns. 1. “Blessed is he whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered” (Ps. xxxii. 1). 2. Cf. Par. xix, note 2. 3. With this invocation to the Muses, cf. Inf. ii and xxxii; Purg. i; Par. i, ii and xviii.—Helicon was in reality a mountain in Bœotia, sacred to the Muses (from which sprang two fountains associated with them—Aganippe and Hippocrene). Urania—the Muse of astronomy and heavenly things. 4. “And being turned, I saw seven golden candlesticks ... and the seven candlesticks ... are the seven churches” (Rev. i. 12, 20) ... “and there were seven lamps burning before the throne, which are the seven Spirits of God” (Rev. iv. 5). Dante seems to have amalgamated these two passages for the purpose of his allegory. See, too, Conv. iv.

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

  Th e man taking his wife to bed shared a little of the awesome power of the creator of the universe. “In this man becomes a likeness of God— man, co- worker in the creation of man.”  Th e power of creation imposed grave responsibilities, and adamantine limits, on the use of sex. Clement emerges as a meticulous exponent of pro- creationist sex. “Procreation is the aim of those who have married, and fruitfulness is the aim of procreation.” Th e continuance of the species de- pended on the “vital soil” of the woman’s womb. But the man looking to farm his conjugal fi elds had to know that “the seed is not to be cast upon stony places, nor is it to be contemned, since it is the origin of generation and has the order of nature dispersed within it.” Seed was to be sown “at the proper moments.” Clement, following Philo, believed that the thicket of Mosaic purity regulations in reality pointed to a deeper procreationist ethic. Moses prohibited men from approaching their wives during menstruation, so that what was “shortly to be a human would not be polluted in a stream of fi lthy matter.” Moses prohibited the violation of captive women, or the THE WILL AND THE WORLD  use of hired professionals, because they were not “exclusively for the pro- duction of children.” Following Philo, Clement took the command not to eat the meat of the hare or hyena as a cryptic sexual command against fruit- less intercourse. In one of those passages that sent Victorian translators scurrying to the decent obscurity of a learned language, the hyena was taken as a symbol of misused orifi ces. Various modes of same- sex intercourse are abused, but in a world with only the most primitive technologies of contra- ception, this tirade was no small infringement on conjugal liberty either. “Sex not intended to produce children is a rape of nature.”  Th is imaginative allegorization was ready to hand in the writings of the idiosyncratic Philo, who did the pioneering work of squaring Plato with Moses. But it is too easy to soften Clement’s radicalism by ascribing it to the infl uence of Philo or, even more distantly, Plato and the Pythagoreans. Clement shares, or at least deploys, a certain reverence for human seed, but he is never overwhelmed by fears of spermatorrhea. Th e architecture of his thought is neither Philonic nor Pythagorean. Clement’s procreationism is much closer to that of Athenagoras, and it was born out of the same exeget- ical tensions. Th e deepest principle of Clement’s sexual ideology is not pro- creationism but rather the transcendence of desire.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  Arrian of Nicomedia, one of the best minds of our time, likes to recall to me the beautiful lines of ancient Terpander, defining in three words the Spartan ideal (that perfect mode of life to which Lacedaemon aspired without ever attaining it): Strength, Justice, the Muses. Strength was the basis, discipline without which there is no beauty, and firmness without which there is no justice. Justice was the balance of the parts, that whole so harmoniously composed which no excess should be permitted to endanger. Strength and Justice together were but one instrument, well tuned, in the hands of the Muses. All forms of dire poverty and brutality were things to forbid as insults to the fair body of mankind, every injustice a false note to avoid in the harmony of the spheres. In Germany construction or renovation of camps, fortifications, and roads detained me for nearly a year; new bastions, erected over a distance of seventy leagues, reinforced our frontiers along the Rhine. This country of vineyards and rushing streams was wholly familiar to me: there I recrossed the path of the young tribune who had borne news to Trajan of his accession to power. There, too, beyond our farthest fort, built of logs from the spruce forests, lay the same dark, monotonous horizon, the same world which has been closed to us from the time of the imprudent offensive launched by Augustus' legions, the ocean of trees and that vast reserve of fair-haired men. When the task of reorganization was finished, I descended to the mouth of the Rhine along the Belgian and Batavian plains. Desolate dunes cut by stiff grasses made up this northern landscape; at the port of Noviomagus the houses raised on piles stood abreast ships moored at their doors; seabirds perched on their roofs. I liked those forlorn places, though they seemed hideous to my aides, the overcast sky and the muddy rivers channeling their way through a land without form or visible spark, where no god has yet shaped the clay. I crossed to the Isle of Britain in a ship which was flat as a barge. More than once the wind threw us back toward the coast from which we had sailed: that difficult passage afforded some wonderfully vacant hours. Gigantic clouds rose out of a heavy sea roiled by sand and incessantly stirred in its bed. As formerly in the land of the Dacians and the Sarmatians I had venerated the goddess Earth, I had here a feeling for the first time of a Neptune more chaotic than our own, of an infinite world of waters. In Plutarch I had read a mariner's legend concerning an island in those regions which border the Arctic Sea, where centuries ago the victorious Olympians are said to have exiled the vanquished Titans.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  Except when he sang. Then he was free, that is, constrained by the ceremony of performance, the fiction that the entertainer is alone, that he is expressing grief or joy to himself alone. Tom would close his eyes and tip his head back. Squint lines would stream away from his eyes, his forehead would wrinkle, the veins would stand out along his throat and when he held a high note his whole body would tremble. One time he proudly showed me the calluses he’d earned by playing the guitar; he let me feel them. Sometimes he didn’t play at all but just sounded notes as he worked something out. He had forgotten me. He thought he was alone. He’d drop the slightly foolish smile he usually wore to disarm adolescent envy or adult expectation and he looked angry and much older: I took this to be his true face. As a folk singer Tom was permitted to wail and shout and moan and as his audience I was permitted to look at him. His father invited me to go sailing. I accepted, although I warned him I was familiar only with powerboats and had had no experience as a crew member. Everything about dressing the ship—unshrouding and raising the sails, lowering the keel, installing the rudder, untangling the sheets—confused me. I knew I was in the way and I stood, one hand on the boom, trying to inhale myself into nonexistence. I heard Mr. Wellington’s quick sharp breaths as reproaches. The day was beautiful, a cold, constant spring wind swept past us, high towers of clouds were rolling steadily closer like medieval war machines breaching the blue fortress of sky. Light spilled down out of the clouds onto the choppy lake, gray and cold and faceted, in constant motion but going nowhere. Hundreds of boats were already out, their sails pivoting and flashing in the shifting beams of sunlight. A gull’s wings dropped like the slowly closing legs of a draftsman’s compass.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  C A N T O X X I Beatrice and Dante have risen to Saturn, now in the constellation of Leo, and there Beatrice smiles not (lest her beauty should shatter Dante’s mortal senses as Jove’s undisguised presence burned Semele to ashes) but bids him gaze upon that which shall be revealed to him. The joy it gives him to obey her behests is compensations even for the withdrawal of his eyes from her countenance, whereon they feasted; and he sees the golden Jacob’s ladder stretch up from Saturn; while a throng of splendours descends, as though all heaven bad been emptied, and splashes in light upon a certain step of the ladder. Dante addresses the light that arrests itself nearest to him, first with silent thought, then, when Beatrice gives him leave, with open speech; and asks why he more than others has approached him, end why the harmony of heaven is no longer heard. The spirit answers that Dante’s senses are not yet sufficiently inured to bear the divine music in this higher sphere; and that he has approached to welcome him not because he has greater love than others, but because the divine love, to which all eagerly respond, has assigned that office to him. Dante though satisfied by the answer within its limits, yet pushes his demand further and asks why God assigned this office just to his interlocutor and no other. Hereon the spirit whirls and glows, rapt into such immediate and intense communion with God as to see his very essence, and yet declares that neither be nor the highest of the Seraphim sees the answer to this question, which lies unfathomably deep in the being of God. Let Dante warn the world, with its smoke-dimmed faculties, not to presume henceforth to attempt a problem which even in heaven is insoluble. Appalled by this reply, Dante now bashfully requests to know who it is that has thus checked his presumptuous enquiry, and he learns that it is Peter Damiani, who called himself Peter the Sinner, and who had dwelt in the now degenerate convent of Fonte Avellana, and in that of S. Maria in Pomposa. In connection with his reception, shortly before his death, of the Cardinal’s hat he denounces she pomp and obesity of the Church dignitaries, whereupon there comes whirling down a throng of flames that group themselves round him and raise a cry which so stuns Dante that he understands not what it says. ALREADYWERE mine eyes fixed on my Lady’s countenance again, and my mind with them, from all other intent removed; and she smiled not, but: “Were I to smile,” she began, “thou wouldst be such as was Semele, when she turned to ashes; for my beauty, which, along the steps of the eternal palace kindleth more, as thou hast seen, the higher the ascent, were it not tempered, so doth glow as that thy mortal power, at its flash, would be like foliage that the thunder shattereth.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  WHEN, COUNTER to the present life of wretched mortals the truth had been revealed by her who doth emparadise my mind; as in the mirror a taper’s flame, kindled behind a man, is seen of him or ere itself be in his sight or thought, and he turneth back to see whether the glass speak truth to him, and seeth it accordant with it as song-words to their measure; so doth my memory recall it chanced to me, gazing upon the beauteous eyes whence love had made the noose to capture me; and when I turned, and mine own were smitten by what appeareth in that volume whene’er upon its circling the eye is rightly fixed, 1 a point 2 I saw which rayed forth light so keen, needs must the vision that it flameth on be closed because of its strong poignancy; and whatever star from here appeareth smallest, were seen a moon neighboured with it, as star with star is neighboured. Perhaps as close as the halo seemeth to gird the luminary that doth paint it, whenso the vapour which supporteth it is thickest, 3 at such interval around the point there wheeled a circle of fire so rapidly it had surpassed the motion which doth swiftest gird the universe; and this was by a second girt around, that by a third, and the third by a fourth, by a fifth the fourth, then by a sixth the fifth. Thereafter followed the seventh, already in its stretch so far outspread that were the messenger of Juno 4 made complete, it were too strait to hold it. And so the eighth and ninth; and each one moved slower according as in number it was more remote from unity; and that one had the clearest flame, from which the pure spark was least distant; because, I take it, it sinketh deepest into the truth thereof. 5 My Lady, who beheld me in toil of deep suspense, said: “From that point doth hang heaven and all nature. 6 Look on that circle which is most conjoint thereto, and know its movement is so swift by reason of the enkindled love whereby ’tis pierced.” And I to her: “Were the universe disposed in the order I behold in these wheelings, then were I satisfied with what is set before me. But in the universe of sense we may see the circlings more divine as from the centre they are more removed.