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

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

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

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

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

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

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

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

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

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

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

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

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

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

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

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

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

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

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

  In the centuries after Christian triumph, the Christian literary imagination was transformed, as the church itself stood less as an alternative to society than an institution permeated by the world. Fiction still proved a vital medium for the expression of sexual morality and its relation to life. From Shame to Sin ends with the popular late antique tales of penitent prostitutes, stories of fallen women who repent of their sins and pursue spiritual rehabilitation. These lives are antiromances of some literary sophistication. The authors of the lives of the penitent prostitutes intentionally evoke the heroines of romance, all the more dramatically to violate the single, central rule of romance: the heroine’s corporal inviolability. The genius of this new archetype was that it allowed the authors to create allegories of sin, as a paradigm in which sexual morality has been freed from the requirements of society. These are tales of abundant moral autonomy, which dramatize the severance of sexual morality from its social moorings and place the individual eternally before the judgment of God. The stories of penitent prostitutes are the fictional analogue to the social and legal program of late antiquity, epitomized by the reforms of Justinian. The ideological correspondence between law and literature is telling of a deep transformation. Indeed, even as Christian authors perfected their new archetype, of the free sinner who repented, Justinian attacked coerced prostitution and built a monastery to serve as a refuge for reformed prostitutes. It was named, of course, Repentance.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  Nor did I see “the two twins born, so near together, that the second held the first by the heel.” But I saw a street called Myrtle Avenue, which runs from Borough Hall to Fresh Pond Road, and down this street no saint ever walked (else it would have crumbled), down this street no miracle ever passed, nor any poet, nor any species of human genius, nor did any flower ever grow there, nor did the sun strike it squarely, nor did the rain ever wash it. For the genuine Inferno which I had to postpone for twenty years I give you Myrtle Avenue, one of the innumerable bridlepaths ridden by iron monsters which lead to the heart of America’s emptiness. If you have only seen Essen or Manchester or Chicago or Levallois-Perret or Glasgow or Hoboken or Canarsie or Bayonne you have seen nothing of the magnificent emptiness of progress and enlightenment. Dear reader, you must see Myrtle Avenue before you die, if only to realize how far into the future Dante saw. You must believe me that on this street, neither in the houses which line it, nor the cobblestones which pave it, nor the elevated structure which cuts it atwain, neither in any creature that bears a name and lives thereon, neither in any animal, bird or insect passing through it to slaughter or already slaughtered, is there hope of “lubet,” “sublimate” or “abominate.” It is a street not of sorrow, for sorrow would be human and recognizable, but of sheer emptiness: it is emptier than the most extinct volcano, emptier than a vacuum, emptier than the word God in the mouth of an unbeliever. I said I did not know a word of French then, and it is true, but I was just on the brink of making a great discovery, a discovery which would compensate for the emptiness of Myrtle Avenue and the whole American continent. I had almost reached the shore of that great French ocean which goes by the name of Elie Faure, an ocean which the French themselves had hardly navigated and which they had mistaken, it seems, for an inland sea. Reading him even in such a withered language as English has become I could see that this man who had described the glory of the human race on his cuff was Father Zeus of Atlantis whom I had been searching for. An ocean I called him, but he was also a world symphony. He was the first musician the French have produced; he was exalted and controlled, an anomaly, a Gallic Beethoven, a great physician of the soul, a giant lightning rod. He was also a sunflower turning with the sun, always drinking in the light, always radiant and blazing with vitality. He was neither an optimist nor a pessimist, any more than one can say that the ocean is beneficent or malevolent. He was a believer in the human race.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  It was like a state of grace, a state of complete ignorance, of self-abnegation. Whatever was imparted to me in these moments I seem to have retained intact and there is no fear that I shall ever lose the knowledge that was gained. It was just the fact perhaps that it was not knowledge as we ordinarily think of it. It was almost like receiving a truth, though truth is almost too precise a word for it. The important thing about the sour rye discussions is that they always took place away from home, away from the eyes of our parents whom we feared but never respected. Left to ourselves there were no limits to what we might imagine. Facts had little importance for us; what we demanded of a subject was that it allow us opportunity to expand. What amazes me, when I look back on it, is how well we understood one another, how well we penetrated to the essential character of each and every one, young or old. At seven years of age we knew with dead certainty, for example, that such a fellow would end up in prison, that another would be a drudge, and another a good for nothing, and so on. We were absolutely correct in our diagnoses, much more correct, for example, than our parents, or our teachers, more correct, indeed, than the so-called psychologists. Alfie Betcha turned out to be an absolute bum; Johnny Gerhardt went to the penitentiary; Bob Kunst became a work horse. Infallible predictions. The learning we received only tended to obscure our vision. From the day we went to school we learned nothing; on the contrary, we were made obtuse, we were wrapped in a fog of words and abstractions. With the sour rye the world was what it is essentially, a primitive world ruled by magic, a world in which fear plays the most important role. The boy who could inspire the most fear was the leader and he was respected as long as he could maintain his power. There were other boys who were rebels, and they were admired, but they never became the leader. The majority were clay in the hands of the fearless ones; a few could be depended on, but the most not. The air was full of tension—nothing could be predicted for the morrow. This loose, primitive nucleus of a society created sharp appetites, sharp emotions, sharp curiosity.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  He would stand in the wings and wait for the right moment to break into the other guy’s act. He was the whole show and it was a show that contained more therapy than the whole arsenal of modern science. They ought to have paid a man like this the wages which the President of the United States receives. They ought to sack the President of the United States and the whole Supreme Court and set up a man like this as ruler. This man could cure any disease on the calendar. He was the kind of guy, moreover, as would do it for nothing, if you asked him to. This is the type of man which empties the insane asylums. He doesn’t propose a cure—he makes everybody crazy. Between this solution and a perpetual state of war, which is civilization, there is only one other way out— and that is the road we will all take eventually because everything else is doomed to failure. The type that represents this one and only way bears a head with six faces and eight eyes; the head is a revolving lighthouse, and instead of a triple crown at the top, as there might well be, there is a hole which ventilates what few brains there are. There is very little brain, as I say, because there is very little baggage to carry about, because living in full consciousness, the gray matter passes off into light. This is the only type of man one can place above the comedian; he neither laughs nor weeps, he is beyond suffering. We don’t recognize him yet because he is too close to us, right under the skin, as a matter of fact. When the comedian catches us in the guts this man, whose name might be God, I suppose, if he had to use a name, speaks up. When the whole human race is rocking with laughter, laughing so hard that it hurts, I mean, everybody then has his foot on the path. In that moment everybody can just as well be God as anything else. In that moment you have the annihilation of dual, triple, quadruple and multiple consciousness, which is what makes the gray matter coil up in dead folds at the top of the skull. At that moment you can really feel the hole in the top of the head; you know that you once had an eye there and that this eye was capable of taking in everything at once. The eye is gone now, but when you laugh until the tears flow and your belly aches, you are really opening the skylight and ventilating the brains. Nobody can persuade you at that moment to take a gun and kill your enemy; neither can anybody persuade you to open a fat tome containing the metaphysical truths of the world and read it.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  In that violet incandescent light without even the suggestion of a shadow, motion itself seemed to be absent. It was like a blaze of pure consciousness, thought become God. And God, for the first time in my knowledge, was clean-shaven. I was also clean-shaven, flawless, deadly accurate. I saw my image in the marble black lakes and it was diapered with stars. Stars, stars . . . like a clout between the eyes and all remembrance fast run out. I was Samson and I was Lackawanna and I was dying as one being in the ecstasy of full consciousness. And now here I am, sailing down the river in my little canoe. Anything you would like to have me do I will do for you—gratis. This is the Land of Fuck, in which there are no animals, no trees, no stars, no problems. Here the spermatazoon reigns supreme. Nothing is determined in advance, the future is absolutely uncertain, the past is non-existent. For every million born 999,999 are doomed to die and never again be born. But the one that makes a home run is assured of life eternal. Life is squeezed into a seed, which is a soul. Everything has soul, including minerals, plants, lakes, mountains, rocks. Everything is sentient, even at the lowest stage of consciousness. Once this fact is grasped there can be no more despair. At the very bottom of the ladder, chez the spermatozoa, there is the same condition of bliss as at the top, chez God. God is the summation of all the spermatozoa come to full consciousness. Between the bottom and the top there is no stop, no halfway station. The river starts somewhere in the mountains and flows on into the sea. On this river that leads to God the canoe is as serviceable as the dreadnought. From the very start the journey is homeward. Sailing down the river. . . . Slow as the hookworm, but tiny enough to make every bend. And slippery as an eel withal. What is your name? shouts someone. My name? Why just call me God —God the embryo . I go sailing on. Somebody would like to buy me a hat. What size do you wear, imbecile! he shouts. What size? Why size X! (And why do they always shout at me? Am I supposed to be deaf?) The hat is lost at the next cataract. Tant pis —for the hat. Does God need a hat? God needs only to become God, more and more God. All this voyaging, all these pitfalls, the time that passes, the scenery, and against the scenery man , trillions and trillions of things called man, like mustard seeds. Even in embryo God has no memory. The backdrop of consciousness is made up of infinitesimally minute ganglia, a coat of hair soft as wool. The mountain goat stands alone amidst the Himalayas; he doesn’t question how he got to the summit.

• 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 Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  From the hub of the bullfrog’s eye radiated clean white spokes of sheer lucidity not to be annotated or categorized, not to be numbered or defined, but revolving sightless in kaleidoscopic change. Hymie the bullfrog was an ovarian spud generated in the high passage between two shores: for him the skyscrapers had been built, the wilderness cleared, the Indians massacred, the buffaloes exterminated; for him the twin cities had been joined by the Brooklyn Bridge, the caissons sunk, the cables strung from tower to tower; for him men sat upside down in the sky writing words in fire and smoke; for him the anesthetic was invented and the high forceps and the Big Bertha which could destroy what the eye could not see; for him the molecule was broken down and the atom revealed to be without substance; for him each night the stars were swept with telescopes and worlds coming to birth photographed in the act of gestation; for him the barriers of time and space were set at nought and all movement, be it the flight of birds or the revolution of the planets, expounded irrefutably and incontestably by the high priests of the depossessed cosmos. Then, as in the middle of the bridge, in the middle of a walk, in the middle always, whether of a book, a conversation, or making love, it was borne in on me again that I had never done what I wanted and out of not doing what I wanted to do there grew up inside me this creation which was nothing but an obsessional plant, a sort of coral growth, which was expropriating everything, including life itself, until life itself became this which was denied but which constantly asserted itself, making life and killing life at the same time. I could see it going on after death, like hair growing on a corpse, people saying “death” but the hair still testifying to life, and finally no death but this life of hair and nails, the body gone, the spirit quenched, but in the death something still alive, expropriating space, causing time, creating endless movement. Through love this might happen, or sorrow, or being born with a club foot; the cause nothing, the event everything. In the beginning was the Word. . . . Whatever this was, the Word, disease or creation, it was still running rampant; it would run on and on, outstrip time and space, outlast the angels, unseat God, unhook the universe. Any word contained all words—for him who had become detached through love or sorrow or whatever the cause.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  Above the red point of the brazier, the heavy smoke of the incense rose; beyond it, I saw the strange creature that haunted this place. A woman, dressed in gaudy veils, was dancing wildly, throwing out her arms, jerking her head back and forth with so violent a motion that it hurt my neck to watch her. She turned her back to us and I could see her long loose hair cast wildly around her like tangled black serpents. Right at the back of the room and seated on the floor, the terrifying Negro musicians were playing. There they are, I thought, the demons! But this was only a half- hearted joke. The man who played the bagpipes, with his eyes bulging out of his head, two white spots against a coal-black background, his cheeks ready to burst, blew hard into his goatskin instrument. The tambourine-player was drunk, had reached a peak of frenzy, and kept on throwing his instrument in the air, catching it again and screaming all the time, without ceasing meanwhile to thump on the taut skin with all his strength. The cymbal player, punch- drunk, hypnotized, shook his head with the epileptic rhythm of his four metal plates. These men, I was sure, were no simulators; possessed by ancestral rhythms, they were repeating gestures and ritual that, in their childhood or in their distant homeland, had left deep marks upon them, scars on their cheeks that had been incised to impose on them, for all time, a hideous grimace. Nor would it be play when they would tear apart with their hands the live white cock, splashing the bird’s warm blood all over themselves. Nor was the woman dancing a simulator. That the musicians should be possessed in this manner was far from surprising: they were from some tribe of the deep South, a strange offshoot of Negro Africa sent out toward the Mediterranean. But the woman was a sensible housewife, with children who went to school; did she deserve my anger or my contempt for allowing herself to become hysterical, limp as a rag, a jointless doll tossed back and forth, without any conscience, in this manner? The cymbals and the bagpipes were suddenly silent and gave precedence to the tom-tom drum that began, at first in a solo, to send forth grave, slow, evenly spaced sounds that seemed to be muffled, as if rising from the ground. The dancer followed this rhythm and became more calm; she allowed her arms to fall to her sides, relaxed her legs, seized by an occasional tremor that followed the drum’s play as it urged her to leap in a single mass from the ground to the sky.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  She smiled absently at me and pointed toward the living-room. The closer I seemed to get to the heart of all this mysterious din, the more crowded it was. The women who were watching were treading on each other’s feet, almost melting into a mass of compact flesh. I had to be really rough to reach the blue-gray cloud that was so thick that I could scarcely distinguish, through the smoke, the red embers of an earthenware brazier, like a shepherd’s fire in a fog. My eyes smarted from the smoke and became clouded with soothing tears. The noise was so loud, so full, that I seemed no longer to hear anything at all. One moment, I felt I was in sheer void, with no shapes or sounds around me any longer. Then my eyes grew accustomed to it and began to distinguish with difficulty what was going on. Above the red point of the brazier, the heavy smoke of the incense rose; beyond it, I saw the strange creature that haunted this place. A woman, dressed in gaudy veils, was dancing wildly, throwing out her arms, jerking her head back and forth with so violent a motion that it hurt my neck to watch her. She turned her back to us and I could see her long loose hair cast wildly around her like tangled black serpents. Right at the back of the room and seated on the floor, the terrifying Negro musicians were playing. There they are, I thought, the demons! But this was only a half-hearted joke. The man who played the bagpipes, with his eyes bulging out of his head, two white spots against a coal-black background, his cheeks ready to burst, blew hard into his goatskin instrument. The tambourine-player was drunk, had reached a peak of frenzy, and kept on throwing his instrument in the air, catching it again and screaming all the time, without ceasing meanwhile to thump on the taut skin with all his strength. The cymbal player, punch-drunk, hypnotized, shook his head with the epileptic rhythm of his four metal plates. These men, I was sure, were no simulators; possessed by ancestral rhythms, they were repeating gestures and ritual that, in their childhood or in their distant homeland, had left deep marks upon them, scars on their cheeks that had been incised to impose on them, for all time, a hideous grimace. Nor would it be play when they would tear apart with their hands the live white cock, splashing the bird’s warm blood all over themselves.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  My thoughts too led an independent existence. Suddenly, looking at Hymie and thinking of that strange word “ovaries,” now stranger than any word in my whole vocabulary, this feeling of icy isolation came over me and Hymie sitting beside me was a bullfrog, absolutely a bullfrog and nothing more. I was jumping from the bridge head first, down into the primeval ooze, the legs clear and waiting for a bite; like that Satan had plunged through the heavens, through the solid core of the earth, head down and ramming through to the very hub of the earth, the darkest, densest, hottest pit of hell. I was walking through the Mojave Desert and the man beside me was waiting for nightfall in order to fall on me and slay me. I was walking again in Dreamland and a man was walking above me on a tightrope and above him a man was sitting in an airplane spelling letters of smoke in the sky. The woman hanging on my arm was pregnant and in six or seven years the thing she was carrying inside her would be able to read the letters in the sky and he or she or it would know that it was a cigarette and later would smoke the cigarette, perhaps a package a day. In the womb nails formed on every finger, every toe; you could stop right there, at a toenail, the tiniest toenail imaginable, and you could break your head over it, trying to figure it out. On one side of the ledger are the books man has written, containing such a hodgepodge of wisdom and nonsense, of truth and falsehood, that if one lived to be as old as Methuselah one couldn’t disentangle the mess; on the other side of the ledger things like toenails, hair, teeth, blood, ovaries , if you will, all incalculable and all written in another kind of ink, in another script, an incomprehensible, undecipherable script. The bullfrog eyes were trained on me like two collar buttons stuck in cold fat; they were stuck in the cold sweat of the primeval ooze. Each collar button was an ovary that had come unglued, an illustration out of the dictionary without benefit of lucubration; lackluster in the cold yellow fat of the eyeball each buttoned ovary produced a subterranean chill, the skating rink of hell where men stood upside down in the ice, the legs free and waiting for a bite. Here Dante walked unaccompanied, weighed down by his vision, and through endless circles gradually moving heavenward to be enthroned in his work. Here Shakespeare with smooth brow fell into the bottomless reverie of rage to emerge in elegant quartos and innuendoes. A glaucous frost of non-comprehension swept clear by gales of laughter. From the hub of the bullfrog’s eye radiated clean white spokes of sheer lucidity not to be annotated or categorized, not to be numbered or defined, but revolving sightless in kaleidoscopic change.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  Reply to Objection 5: A man may lead a solitary life for two motives. one is because he is unable, as it were, to bear with human fellowship on account of his uncouthness of mind; and this is beast-like. The other is with a view to adhering wholly to divine things; and this is superhuman. Hence the Philosopher says (Polit. i, 1) that “he who associates not with others is either a beast or a god,” i.e. a godly man. OF THE ENTRANCE INTO RELIGIOUS LIFE (TEN ARTICLES)We must now consider the entrance into religious life. Under this head there are ten points of inquiry: (1) Whether those who are not practiced in the observance of the commandments should enter religion? (2) Whether it is lawful for a person to be bound by vow to enter religion? (3) Whether those who are bound by vow to enter religion are bound to fulfil their vow? (4) Whether those who vow to enter religion are bound to remain there in perpetuity? (5) Whether children should be received into religion? (6) Whether one should be withheld from entering religion through deference to one’s parents? (7) Whether parish priests or archdeacons may enter religion? (8) Whether one may pass from one religious order to another? (9) Whether one ought to induce others to enter religion? (10) Whether serious deliberation with one’s relations and friends is requisite for entrance into religion? Whether those who are not practiced in keeping the commandments should enter religion?Objection 1: It would seem that none should enter religion but those who are practiced in the observance of the commandments. For our Lord gave the counsel of perfection to the young man who said that he had kept the commandments “from his youth.” Now all religious orders originate from Christ. Therefore it would seem that none should be allowed to enter religion but those who are practiced in the observance of the commandments. Objection 2: Further, Gregory says (Hom. xv in Ezech., and Moral. xxii): “No one comes suddenly to the summit; but he must make a beginning of a good life in the smallest matters, so as to accomplish great things.” Now the great things are the counsels which pertain to the perfection of life, while the lesser things are the commandments which belong to common righteousness. Therefore it would seem that one ought not to enter religion for the purpose of keeping the counsels, unless one be already practiced in the observance of the precepts.