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 Combating Cult Mind Control: The Guide to Protection, Rescue and Recovery from Destructive Cults (1988)

  We saw believers as people searching for God, or looking for spiritual meaning in their lives. They typically would tell us about their spiritual experiences—dreams, visions and revelations. For the most part, these people were “wide open,” and often recruited themselves. It was always amazing to me to realize how many people told us they had just been praying to God to reveal to them what He wanted them to do with their lives. Many believed they were spiritually led to meet one of our members. With them it was simply a matter of sharing our testimonies and we would convince them they had been led to us by God. Contrary to public perception, most of the people we recruited did not fall into the believer category. Most were either feelers or doers. Many of the so-called thinkers eventually became leaders within the organization. With this one simple personality model to guide recruiters, and hundreds of front groups to operate behind, the Moon organization cast a broad recruitment net that drew in diverse range of people.65 Indeed, members regard themselves as “fishers of men,” a term taken from Jesus’ metaphor for describing his disciples in the New Testament. Unfortunately, four decades later, the methods of mind control used by many cults are far more nuanced and sophisticated—and potentially far more damaging. The recruiter’s work is made considerably easier because most people have no idea how deep the pockets of major cults can be. Many of the larger ones have grown hugely wealthy through public fundraising techniques, as well as by tapping their own members’ bank accounts and property. They reinvest a huge part of their capital into recruiting more members.66 Today, it is also quite common for some cult groups to spend huge sums of money on public relations firms and marketing specialists. They pay top dollar to experts to help present a positive image and design recruitment campaigns.67 The average person doesn’t understand mind control; doesn’t know how cults operate, doesn’t know what questions to ask and what behaviors to watch out for, and doesn’t believe they could ever be sucked in. That’s why so many ordinary people are prime candidates for cult recruiters. Why Do Cults Have So Much Success? Why is there so much complacency about the threat of mind control cults? First, accepting that mind control can be effectively used on almost anybody challenges the age-old notion that human beings are rational, and responsible for (and in control of) all their actions. Such a worldview does not allow for any concept of mind control. Second, we all have a belief in our own invulnerability. It is too scary to think that someone could take control of our minds. We all want to have a belief in our own ability to completely control our lives.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  The bloody machine wouldn’t stop, that was the difficulty. I was not only in the middle of the current but the current was running through me and I had no control over it whatever. I remember the day I brought the machine to a dead stop and how the other mechanism, the one that was signed with my own initials and which I had made with my own hands and my own blood slowly began to function. I had gone to the theater nearby to see a vaudeville show; it was the matinee and I had a ticket for the balcony. Standing on line in the lobby, I already experienced a strange feeling of consistency. It was as though I were coagulating, becoming a recognizable consistent mass of jelly. It was like the ultimate stage in the healing of a wound. I was at the height of normality, which is a very abnormal condition. Cholera might come and blow its foul breath in my mouth—it wouldn’t matter. I might bend over and kiss the ulcers of a leprous hand, and no harm could possibly come to me. There was not just a balance in this constant warfare between health and disease, which is all that most of us may hope for, but there was a plus integer in the blood which meant that, for a few moments at least, disease was completely routed. If one had the wisdom to take root in such a moment, one would never again be ill or unhappy or even die. But to leap to this conclusion is to make a jump which would take one back further than the old stone age. At that moment I wasn’t even dreaming of taking root; I was experiencing for the first time in my life the meaning of the miraculous. I was so amazed when I heard my own cogs meshing that I was willing to die then and there for the privilege of the experience. What happened was this. . . . As I passed the doorman holding the torn stub in my hand the lights were dimmed and the curtain went up. I stood a moment slightly dazed by the sudden darkness. As the curtain slowly rose I had the feeling that throughout the ages man had always been mysteriously stilled by this brief moment which preludes the spectacle. I could feel the curtain rising in man . And immediately I also realized that this was a symbol which was being presented to him endlessly in his sleep and that if he had been awake the players would never have taken the stage but he, Man, would have mounted the boards. I didn’t think this thought—it was a realization, as I say, and so simple and overwhelmingly clear was it that the machine stopped dead instantly and I was standing in my own presence bathed in a luminous reality.

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

  faces trial and execution, but she is miraculously rescued. Finally she and Paul part ways, and she journeys to Seleucia, her fi nal resting place. Th e apocryphal legends are a powerful expression of early Christian sexual morality, the sexual gospel of a minority movement, when the religion and its followers stood apart from mainstream society. Th e Christian romances refl ect a confi guration of sexual morality and society in which Christian austerity represented a radical freedom from the demands of the world. Th e stories of wandering apostles and the eager female adherents who hear the gospel of chastity were produced by the same imagination that reconceived the problem of free will around the capacity to act without encumbrance from fate or from social expectation. Th is body of early Christian literature adopts, wholesale, the romantic trope of feminine inviolability. But the heroine’s chastity is re oriented toward otherworldly ends rather than the reproduction of life here beneath the moon. Th ere is something fl at, compressed, about the pre sen ta tion of sex in the apocryphal literature. Th ere is a juvenile absolutism about its place in human life. No character wrestles with desire, confronts temptation, or experiences confl iction. Sex is a symbol of the world, and all the more simplifi ed by that fact. Only a religious movement that had so completely resolved to live apart from the order of society could package sex as a compact and tractable symptom of ordinary life, with its dull cycles of survival and reproduction, in contrast to the shimmering promises of an invisible order. It was a vision of sex and its pervasive role in life that the Christian authors found, with a wholly opposite purpose, in the contemporary genre of romance. TH E V I RG I N I N TH E B ROTH E L , TH E TO R A H I N TH E WO R L D Th e pervasiveness of romantic conventions, and the shared symbolic vocabulary of late classical literature, is underscored by the appearance of familiar novelistic tropes in Jewish legend. Like the Christians, the Jews of the Roman Empire developed a body of legend that both drew from and subverted the models of contemporary romance. Like the Christians, the Jews of the Roman Empire liked to imagine their heroes as defi ant victims  F R O M S H A M E TO S I N of Roman power. Among these heroes was Rabbi Hanina ben Teradion, a Tanna of the third generation, martyred by the Roman authorities at the apex of Roman hegemony in the second century. He was canonized as one of the Ten Martyrs. Th e most complete account of his martyrdom is pre-

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

  uncanny mixture of whim and providence, of fl ux and order, is within the mainstream of religious currents in the high empire. Th e Fortune of the novels is no mere literary ornamentation. She is the same awesome divinity who was worshipped, in cult, across the Mediterranean, like never before in the Roman Empire— a syncretistic, cosmological goddess in a syncretistic, cosmological age. Th e romances were, like the temples where Fortune was worshipped, monuments built in awe of her supervenient power over human aff airs. Th e Fortune who presides over the romances is a literary spirit. Over and over again, Fortune is said to be a dramatist. One character tells Chareas, “Fortune loves invention, and you have been cast in an unhappy drama.” Not just the authors of romance, but also the characters are aware that their lives have the shape of literature. Clitophon launches on his story with the refl ection, “I was nineteen years of age when Fortune began her drama.” Later he laments yet another bad turn. “Fortune as usual has set upon me and contrived a new drama.” In Th e Ethiopian Tale the characters experience the “ceaseless turning of the human lot, full of twists.” In despair Th eagenes wonders if he and Charicleia should not just submit to the “destiny that everywhere chased” them by surrendering. Th e gods’ vendetta was “making us into playthings, as though our aff airs were a drama on a stage.” Charicleia, by contrast, counsels re sis tance. In the fi nal scenes, the king and his people alike marvel at the “theatrics of Fortune.” Th e literary pretensions of Fortune are part of the high- pitched aesthetic self- awareness of the romances. But given the real place of Fortune in the imperial pantheon, it would be misleading to dismiss these comparisons as empty authorial self- aggrandizement. R O M A N C E I N T H E L AT E C L A S S I C A L WO R L D  Th e canny allusions to life as literature manifest themselves in a revealing meta phor that recurs across the romances. When Anthia is enslaved in the brothel, she laments her fate, but she steels her resolve and decides to fi nd “some contrivance” for protecting her chastity: the feigned fi t of epilepsy. After she survives and is re united with her lover, she attributes her chastity to the fact that she contrived “every device” for the protection of virtue. Similarly, in Th e Ethiopian Tale, the protagonist can rely, in the most hopeless of circumstances, on “some contrivance” that will allow escape. Th e word for “contrivance,” mēchanē, is a rich word, alluding broadly to man-made devices that illustrate human resourcefulness. But mēchanē can also have the more narrow sense of a stage device, a theatrical machine especially used to produce sudden apparitions of the gods. Th e ploys of the girls

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  So alluringly still and guileless was it that one could drown in it, one could go down into it, body and all, like a diver, and nevermore return. Until the eyes opened upon the world she would lie like that, thoroughly extinguished and gleaming with a reflected light, like the moon itself. In her deathlike trance of innocence she fascinated even more; her crimes dissolved, exuded through the pores, she lay coiled like a sleeping serpent riveted to the earth. The body, strong, lithe, muscular, seemed possessed of a weight unnatural; she had a more than human gravity, the gravity, one might almost say, of a warm corpse. She was like one might imagine the beautiful Nefertiti to have been after the first thousand years of mummification, a marvel of mortuary perfection, a dream of flesh preserved from mortal decay. She lay coiled at the base of a hollow pyramid, enshrined in the vacuum of her own creation like a sacred relic of the past. Even her breathing seemed stopped, so profound was her slumber. She had dropped below the human sphere, below the animal sphere, below the vegetative sphere even: she had sunk down to the level of the mineral world where animation is just a notch above death. She had so mastered the art of deception that even the dream was powerless to betray her. She had learned how not to dream: when she coiled up in sleep she automatically switched off the current. If one could have caught her thus and opened up the skull one would have found it absolutely void. She kept no disturbing secrets; everything was killed off which could be humanly killed. She might live on endlessly, like the moon, like any dead planet, radiating an hypnotic effulgence, creating tides of passion, engulfing the world in madness, discoloring all earthly substances with her magnetic, metallic rays. Sowing her own death she brought everyone about her to fever pitch. In the heinous stillness of her sleep she renewed her own magnetic death by union with the cold magma of the lifeless planetary worlds. She was magically intact. Her gaze fell upon one with a transpiercing fixity: it was the moon-gaze through which the dead dragon of life gave off a cold fire. The one eye was a warm brown, the color of an autumn leaf; the other was hazel, the magnetic eye which flickered like a compass needle. Even in sleep this eye continued to flicker under the shutter of the lid; it was the only apparent sign of life in her. The moment she opened her eyes she was wide awake. She awoke with a violent start, as if the sight of the world and its human paraphernalia were a shock. Instantly she was in full activity, lashing about like a great python. What annoyed her was the light! She awoke cursing the sun, cursing the glare of reality.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  I would be speaking at noon with a couple of other people. * * * The VVAW sent me to do a lot of speeches after that and soon I was on television all the time. On one network there was a big argument with a producer who didn’t want a disfigured veteran on her show. “We’ve seen enough of that,” she told me over the phone. “Every night for the last couple of years people have seen it on the six o’clock news and they’re tired of it.” She tried to be nice and told me that she had read a book called Johnny Got His Gun , so she knew what I was all about, but she didn’t think it would be tasteful at all to let the people of L.A. see a crippled kid on a Sunday morning. I was at a rally a few weeks later when Donald Sutherland began to read the last couple of pages of the book the woman had talked to me about, the one about the kid in World War I who gets blown to hell like myself and loses almost everything, he’s just a hulk, a slab of meat. Sutherland began to read the passage and something I will never forget swept over me. It was as if someone was speaking for everything I ever went through in the hospital. It was as if the book was speaking about me, my wound and the hell it had been coming back and learning to live with it. I began to shake and I remember there were tears in my eyes. Just before Sutherland was finished I found myself pushing my chair toward the stage and telling them that I wanted to be lifted up the steps. “I have a poem,” I told them. “I have a poem I wrote about the vets who threw their medals away and I want to read it.” They broke all the rules and hoisted my chair up on the stage. I went up to the microphone and started reading. The crowd cheered when I was finished and again I had tears in my eyes. I said a couple of words I can’t remember. For the next couple of weeks the phone wouldn’t stop ringing. There were all sorts of clubs and schools wanting to hear me speak. I wrote the names and addresses down on pieces of paper and all over the walls of the apartment. * * * I went totally into speaking out against the war after that. I went into it the same way I’d gone into everything else I’d wanted to do in my life—the way I’d gone into pole vaulting or baseball or the marines. But this was something that meant much more than being an athlete or a marine.

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

  small reformation movement. But somewhere in the city where Achilles lived, there lurked the germ of a new ideology, one that could envision still-ing the timeless patterns of life itself, and whose rules would reorder the experience of sexuality. Achilles at times seems aware of this radical movement, but he never deigns to mention it explicitly. It is in that context, as a dark horse in the chaotic, competitive atmosphere of the high empire, that the early Christians, with their highly distinctive sexual gospel, need to be imagined. C H A P T E R T WO Th e Will and the World in Early Christian Sexuality TO SOA R C LO S E TO A N G E L S In the romance of Achilles Tatius, the heroine Leucippe personifi es the white horse of Plato’s chariot, capable of lifting the soul to the loftiest heights; it was an ambitious vision of conjugal eros, in which the most profound stirrings of the body not only connected man with the divine forces that replenished the earth but also off ered personal transcendence. A little more than a century after Achilles Tatius wrote his novel, Plato’s chariot of the soul reappears, now in a dialogue written by a Christian. Methodius, bishop of Olympus in Lycia, wrote the Christian answer to Plato’s Symposium, in which the indulgent symposiasts of classical Athens have been replaced by ten female virgins. Th e Christian symposium of Methodius is a discussion circle on the surpassing merits on virginity, “something that is great, marvelous, wondrous, and exceedingly honorable.” For Methodius, the chariot of the soul, far from being pulled by the power of erotic attraction, could soar above the horizon only by lifting over the swamp of physical pleasures. Th e pure body might carry the virgin’s soul to the vault of T H E W I L L A N D T H E WO R L D  heaven, where she could glimpse from afar “the vales of immortality.” After such a revelation, she would come to regard as trifl es the things of this life, “wealth, honor, birth, marriages.” Marriage, on this view, is not sinful, but its merits shrink to invisibility in the blinding glory of sexual abstinence. Th e star of this Christian Symposium is Th ecla, the semilegendary travel- ing companion of Paul, who makes an eff ective mouthpiece for the sexual teaching of her apostolic mentor. Behind the imagery and mystical hierarchy of a Platonic cosmos, the ideological framework on which the Symposium rests is thoroughly Pauline. Th e compressed words of Paul in his fi rst

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

  Indeed, the absolutist model of free will was the doctrine of a persecuted minority, ca- pable of rejecting the world and, more importantly, imagining itself and its morality apart from the world. Th e discussion of early Christian sexuality is, in its way, as selective as the sketch of Greco- Roman sexuality as a whole, and some of the choices might arouse disagreement. Th e focus is on the development of orthodox, Pauline sexuality, because it is the style of Christian thought that ultimately triumphed. Th ere is legitimate debate about when, and to what extent, it attained dominance even within the diff use galaxy of little groups who identifi ed with the gospel of Jesus. We have come to appreciate that early Christian sexuality developed not just through friction with the outside world but through the internal strife among Christians, and the victory of Paul’s authority, much less the meaning of his message, was not a foregone conclusion. Th at strife is perhaps given short shrift in this book, but the limits are both necessary and defensible. We have had to mute the compet- ing noises in favor of the specifi c harmonies that are later worked into the full arrangement of ecclesiastical sexuality.  Chapter 3 turns to the age of Christian triumph and the gradual transfor- mation of sexual preaching within the context of an expansionary church. Remonstrance, step by step, became regulation. Far from receiving a world prepared for its dream of austerity, the Christian leadership in late antiquity found itself at the helm of a hostile takeover. It was an eventuality for which there was no prepared script. Th e two pillars of the church’s power were the threats of its penitential regime and the megaphone of its public preaching. Th ese were limited and uncertain sources of power, and only gradually did Christian values prevail as shared public culture. Even more slow and piece- meal was the pro cess by which these values became the inspiration for public law. But prevail Christian norms eventually did. Th e tradition of frank eroticism withers, and the visual depictions of lovemaking slowly re- INTRODUCTION  cede. Gone is the warm eroticism of the Pompeian fresco, vanished is the charmed sensuality of the Greek romance. Th e protean energy of human desire resisted being corralled, but marriage, inexorably, became the only legitimate venue of erotic fulfi llment. Freudian intuitions, or simple experi- ence, may lead us to expect that if Christianity was a signal victory for the superego, the id endured, driven underground, searching for its own quiet quarters out of ecclesiastical view, or sublimated into religious ecstasy. But the transformation was epochal. Th e story of same- sex love in the centuries between Constantine and Justinian unfolds with fi erce predictability.

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

  e Egyptian desert, in late antiquity, was to prove the birthplace of new archetypes of human spirituality. With its barren horizons, the simple ecol-ogy of life on the edges of civilization provided a rarefi ed backdrop. Here men— and some women— wrestled with sin, stared down the dev il, and sought internal transformation. In the desert tales of penitent prostitutes, the features of the moral landscape are simple. Th e women themselves are R O M A N C E I N T H E L AT E C L A S S I C A L WO R L D  sketched in little detail. Th e focus of the brief encounter is the father— his steadfastness, his grace. Th e tales are monastic from start to fi nish; even in the prostitute’s lair, the monk brings with him the whiff of the desert. Th e chief elements of the drama are sin and repentance. We are in a world where sin is inextricable from the machinations of the dev il and his demons. In this setting, the signifi cance of the girl’s prostitution is not that it places her outside of respectable society. It is, rather, that it arrays her with the forces of evil. Her repentance is not just the recovery of a most abandoned sinner. A victory over fornication is a defeat over Satan’s legions. Th e monks who induce the conversion of the prostitute are like a modern sports team that courts away its rival’s most valuable player. Th e desert tales of penitent prostitutes are allegories of sin and salvation, played out against the grander cosmic battle between good and evil. Th e literary side is only one half of her story, for in the same period, in the late fourth and then more explosively in the fi fth century, the penitent prostitute, modeled on the “sinful woman” in the Gospel of Luke, becomes a pop u lar subject for Christian preachers. Her tearful repentance proved congenial to homilists in an age of mass conversion. Th e currency of these legends, already in the late fourth century, is also confi rmed in a most unlikely source: the rhetorical handbook of the pagan sophist of Antioch, Libanius. In one of his training exercises, Libanius creates a penitent pagan prostitute. She represents the cross- pollination of Christianity and philosophical paganism in the fourth century. Th e word “repentance” is glaringly absent (instead she “becomes chaste”), but the mood is entirely Christian. “I purify my mind. I fl ee Aphrodite, I prefer the clemency of Athena.” Th e speech spoke of prostitution in terms of “pollution,” and there was a clear religious subtext to the speech: the prostitute fl ed Aphrodite, preferring chaste Athena. Even so, Libanius could not resist insinuating that Aphrodite was wrongfully accused of perversion. Th e prostitute wanted to set up a law tell-

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  “You know, something I’ve noticed since I’ve gotten older is my sensitivity to nature,” said Anne. “When I was very young—a teenager—the sight of a sunset or a mountain scene was so deeply moving to me, I would get the chills.” She looked at Magdalen and shivered her shoulders. “And then, as I entered my twenties, I lost that sensitivity.” “Well, I’m sure it wasn’t lost. You just had to concentrate on other things,” said Virginia. “I suppose,” said Anne. “But there came a point when I hardly responded to nature at all. I still liked it, but it didn’t move me. Now that I’m on the verge of becoming an old lady, I’m starting to respond to nature again, to be stirred by the great outdoors.” She looked at Jarold with vulnerable eyes, her glasses down on her nose. “That’s wonderful,” he said. “It shows you’re still excited by life. And that’s the most important thing to keep through the years, more important than money or success. A lot of us lose it.” “I believe that,” said Anne. “That’s why I enjoy working with old folks. It’s marvelous to watch some of them blossom again, especially the ones who’ve been in those horrible nursing homes. They can be like kids with the openness—it’s exciting to give them another chance to experience it.” “You’re a very giving person,” said Jarold. He looked at Anne with tender, protective awe, a little shamed, as if he knew that giving was beyond his ability but he was glad that somebody was there to do it. It was strange to Virginia. When they were young, Jarold thought Anne was silly and too serious and a frump besides. Now here he was, thirty years later, looking at her like that. “The steaks are ready,” said Jarold. Magdalen put the steaks on the plates. Anne and Virginia arranged servings of salad and pasta. They all sat in lawn chairs and ate from the warm plates in their laps. The steak was good and rare; its juices ran into the salad and pasta when Virginia moved her knees. A light wind blew loose hairs around their faces and tickled them. The trees rustled dimly. There were nice insect noises. Jarold paused, a forkful of steak rising across his chest. “Like heaven,” he said. “It’s like heaven.” They were quiet for several minutes. [image "Penguin Random House publisher logo." file=image_rsrc269.jpg] What’s next on your reading list?Discover your next great read! Get personalized book picks and up-to-date news about this author. Sign up now. _152034947_

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

  Th e fi ctional word is an essential complement to the injunctions of the moralists and the dictates of law. Lit- erature is capable of expressing, in a way more intimate than mere com- mands, the shape of sexual morality, when actually projected onto the fur- rowed plane of human life. Pagans, Christians, and Jews alike used stories as vehicles to express their deepest beliefs about the relationships between the sexual body, the mechanics of society, and the nature of the cosmos. Th e Christian transformation of sex can be retraced in the history of litera- ture, which mirrors quite sensitively the passage from a public sexual ideol- ogy or ga nized around the imperatives of social reproduction to a mentality founded in ecclesiastical norms. In short, the history of literature recapitu- lates the passage from shame to sin. Chapter 4 is focused on one of the central preoccupations of ancient fi c- tion, female chastity. Feminine purity was a transcendent symbol, capable of bearing the most consequential meanings. Th e authors of the imperial romances invested no small part of their talents in contriving elaborate threats to the chastity of their heroines. Th ese scenes, looked at across the genre, provide direct access to the ideological code of romance. Th e ro- mances are stories in which essence precedes existence. What is most re- markable about the imperial romances is the extent to which they are explic- itly built on an acute awareness that forces beyond the individual’s control shape his or her life. Fate furnishes us with moral ends, and more instru- mentally, society constitutes us as selves. Th e romances make their most daring approaches to the inscrutable mysteries of fate in the image of the heroine’s endangered chastity. Th e romances fl irt with the possibility of her violation, because the transgression of her body would mark a visceral con- travention of the social and cosmic order. Th ese typological scenes are very INTRODUCTION  near the deep theology of the romance. In the end, she is always rescued, and the deeper order of the cosmos prevails against the fl ux and frustration that is experienced in human time. Th e heroine is reserved, by the will of the gods, for marriage. Th ere is salvation in the cycle of nature, which im- parts to us the gift of eros within its mysterious order. Christians and Jews would rework these very scenes of feminine imperil- ment to express their deepest reservations about the world and the place of eros in the constitution of the self. Already in the primitive phases of the religion, Christian authors were adept at reformulating the fi ctional tropes of Greco- Roman literature.

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

  But somewhere in the city where Achilles lived, there lurked the germ of a new ideology, one that could envision still- ing the timeless patterns of life itself, and whose rules would reorder the experience of sexuality. Achilles at times seems aware of this radical move- ment, but he never deigns to mention it explicitly. It is in that context, as a dark horse in the chaotic, competitive atmosphere of the high empire, that the early Christians, with their highly distinctive sexual gospel, need to be imagined.  TO SOAR CLOSE TO ANGELS In the romance of Achilles Tatius, the heroine Leucippe personifi es the white horse of Plato’s chariot, capable of lifting the soul to the loftiest heights; it was an ambitious vision of conjugal eros, in which the most pro- found stirrings of the body not only connected man with the divine forces that replenished the earth but also off ered personal transcendence. A little more than a century after Achilles Tatius wrote his novel, Plato’s chariot of the soul reappears, now in a dialogue written by a Christian. Methodius, bishop of Olympus in Lycia, wrote the Christian answer to Plato’s Sympo- sium, in which the indulgent symposiasts of classical Athens have been re- placed by ten female virgins. Th e Christian symposium of Methodius is a discussion circle on the surpassing merits on virginity, “something that is great, marvelous, wondrous, and exceedingly honorable.” For Methodius, the chariot of the soul, far from being pulled by the power of erotic attrac- tion, could soar above the horizon only by lifting over the swamp of physi- cal pleasures. Th e pure body might carry the virgin’s soul to the vault of CHAPTER TWO Th e Will and the World in Early Christian Sexuality THE WILL AND THE WORLD  heaven, where she could glimpse from afar “the vales of immortality.” After such a revelation, she would come to regard as trifl es the things of this life, “wealth, honor, birth, marriages.” Marriage, on this view, is not sinful, but its merits shrink to invisibility in the blinding glory of sexual abstinence.  Th e star of this Christian Symposium is Th ecla, the semilegendary travel- ing companion of Paul, who makes an eff ective mouthpiece for the sexual teaching of her apostolic mentor. Behind the imagery and mystical hierar- chy of a Platonic cosmos, the ideological framework on which the Sympo- sium rests is thoroughly Pauline. Th e compressed words of Paul in his fi rst epistle to the Christians of Corinth determine the boundaries between the ideal, the permissible, and the forbidden throughout the dialogue.

• 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 Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  In the last light of the horizon Castor and Pollux gleamed faintly; the Serpent gave way to the Archer; next the Eagle mounted toward the zenith, wings widespread, and beneath him appeared the constellation at that time unnamed by astronomers, but to which I have since given that most cherished of names. The night, which is never so black as people think who live and sleep indoors, was at first more dark, and then grew lighter. The fires, left burning to frighten the jackals, went out; their dying coals made me think of my grandfather warming himself as he stood in his vineyard, and of his prophecies, which by then had become the present, and were soon to be the past. I have tried under many a form to join the divine, and have known more than one ecstasy; some of these have been atrocious, others overpoweringly sweet, but the one of the Syrian night was strangely lucid. It inscribed within me the heavenly motions with greater precision than any partial observation would ever have allowed me to attain. I know exactly, at the hour of this writing, what stars are passing here at Tibur above this stuccoed and painted ceiling; and elsewhere, far away, over a tomb. Some years later it was death which was to become the object of my constant contemplation, the thought to which I was to give every faculty of my mind not absorbed by the State. And who speaks of death speaks also of that mysterious world to which, perhaps, we gain access by death. After such long reflection, and so many experiments, some of them reprehensible, I still know nothing of what goes on behind death's dark curtain. But the Syrian night remains as my conscious experience of immortality. SAECULUM AUREUM The summer following my meeting with Osroës was passed in Asia Minor: I made a stop in Bithynia in order to supervise in person the annual felling in the State forests there. At Nicomedia, that lustrous, well-ordered, and learned city, I stayed with the procurator of the province, Cneius Pompeius Proculus, who lived in the ancient palace of King Nicomedus, where voluptuous memories of the young Julius Caesar abound. Breezes from the Propontis fanned those cool, shaded rooms. Proculus was a man of taste; he arranged some readings for my pleasure. Some visiting sophists and several small groups of students and poetry-lovers met together in the gardens, beside a spring consecrated to Pan. From time to time a servant would dip a great jar of porous clay into the cooling waters; even the most limpid verses lacked the sparkle of that clear stream.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  The lights were acting out some mounting drama, it was hard to say precisely what. The hill, which had at first been illuminated quadrant by quadrant, was now swept by red and blue lights, first in one direction and then the other. It must have meant the clashing of armies, though which were the virtuous Bulgarian forces and which the victorious Turks was lost on me, despite the narration of two children who stood on the rearmost bench, whispering excitedly to each other Turtsite! Turtsite! at each sweep of the lights. Whatever was happening a climax was approaching, it was clear in the martial lament of the music and also in the lights, which were mounting ever higher, toward the citadel itself and its reconstructed tower, though the effect was dampened by an anachronistic line of vehicles, the opera trucks at the fore, making its way down the hill. Then, from the tower, beams of light shot out, first in one direction, then in the other, then in both directions at once. What could it possibly mean, I wondered; it was clear it meant something, even the children were rapt, everyone sat transfigured. At the far end of one of the benches I saw that an old man had bent his head and covered his face with his hands, and that his shoulders were shaking as he wept. Then the lights went dark, and the speakers behind us fell silent, and from the hill itself in front of us rolled the slow sound, unamplified, of bells. There were many of them ringing together in the darkness, their tolling layered and fluid, the most affecting music of the evening, I thought, plangent and bare. And then, as they continued to ring, the hill was suddenly ablaze with light, not the colored floods of the warring sides but a white light, unsparing, so that every tree stood out and every stone was exposed, the ineffective walls, the whole much-repaired skeleton of it laid out at once grievous and proud. I heard R. make a little gasping sound beside me of marvel or dismay, and suddenly I was inside it, the wonder of the place, for a brief time at least I felt it too. Then the hill went dark again, and silent, and in the pause before anyone spoke or moved to leave I leaned toward R., wanting to feel him beside me, and for a moment he pressed warm against me in the dark. III

• From Cleanness (2020)

  I took the whole length of him, and I felt his hand rise and fall again, this time more gently, and since I had warning it didn’t interrupt the motion I had fallen into, it became a part of that motion; we fell into a rhythm together, and as his strokes grew quicker and more intense so did my own. Soon enough I was in real pain, my back had grown tender, and I realized that I had begun making noises, little whimpers and cries, and they too became part of the rhythm we had fallen into, his arm rising and falling and my own movement forward and back, and with that movement the swinging of the smaller chain at my chest, the ache that had grown dull but that shifted as I swayed. Then he broke our rhythm, suddenly pulling me to him and thrusting his hips forward at the same time, his grip tight, and as he ground me against him he struck me several times quickly and very hard, and I cried out with real urgency, an animal objection. But I couldn’t cry out, the passage was blocked, and with the effort I began to choke, the mechanism failed and I struggled against him; I tried to wrench my head away, I even brought my hands to his thighs but he held me firm. He struck me five or six times in this way, or maybe seven or eight, they were indistinct as I struggled, moving incoherently, at once pushing myself back from him and flinching at the blows. Then he was still, and though he didn’t release me he drew back, letting me breathe and grow calm again. Dobra kuchka , he said, again not addressing me but praising me to the air, and his hands were gentle as he held me, not constraining but steadying, a comfort for which I felt again that strange, inappropriate gratitude. I was cold as I knelt there, I had broken out in a sweat. The man was breathing heavily too, he had exerted himself, the rest was as much for him as for me. He knew what he was doing, I thought with sudden admiration; he knew how far to push and when to ease off, and I was excited at the thought of being taken further by him, into territories I had only glimpsed or had intimations of. Then, still keeping one hand on my head, he reached down and very quickly removed first one and then the other clamp from my chest, at which there was a quick flare of pain, making me cry out again, and then a flood of extraordinary pleasure, not sexual pleasure exactly but something like euphoria, a lifting and lightness and unsteadiness, as with certain drugs. He returned his hand to my head and gripped me firmly again, still not moving, having grown very still; even his cock had softened just slightly, it was large but more giving in my mouth.

• 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.