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 In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  Now my attention was riveted only on the image of the “predator”: the spiderweb cracks of the windshield, the beige grille of the car and the terrified face of the wide-eyed teenager. Luckily, in my self-administered first aid, I was able to return to the start of that perfect day, with the sensuous sights, sounds and smells of the precious moments before the impact. The Behavior Channel Behavior is the only channel that the therapist is able to observe directly; all others are reported by the client. Although the therapist is able to surmise much about a client’s inner life from a resonance with her own sensations and feelings, such inferences cannot take the place of the client also accessing and communicating his own sensations, feelings and images to the therapist. § The therapist can infer a client’s inner states from reading his body’s language, the unspoken language of his actions/inactions or tension patterns. For example, the therapist, in noting a particular body behavior, may direct the client to focus on what he may be experiencing in his body (Sensation). If, say, the therapist observes a slight rising of the client’s left shoulder (Behavior), she can bring the latter’s attention to this postural adjustment and allow the client to contact the sensations of the asymmetrical tension pattern. Similarly, the client may be encouraged to access the other channels of experiencing (Image, Affect or Meaning) during the execution of this postural behavior. This will be clarified by the case examples in the next chapter. Behavior occurs on different levels of awareness, ranging from the most conscious voluntary movements to the most unconscious involuntary patterns. These levels are similar to the gradations of consciousness I have examined in the sensation category. We will now briefly examine behaviors that occur in the following subsystems: gestures, emotion and posture, as well as autonomic, visceral and archetypal behaviors. Gestures The most conscious behaviors are the voluntary ones: that is, the overt gestures that people generally make with their hands and arms when they are trying to communicate. These movements are the most superficial level of behavior. People frequently use voluntary gestures to convey “pseudo-feeling” states to others. We have all seen politicians deliberately exaggerate their gestures for emphasis and effect. If you know the real thing, you can readily discern the fundamental disconnect or incongruity between one’s attempt to convey what one is trained to express (e.g., opening one’s arms to the audience or holding a hand to one’s heart) and what one is really feeling. At the same time, even volitional gestures can convey feelings, both to others and to oneself. For example, one can interpret the nonverbal communication of the clenched fist as either a threat enhancing aggression or as the setting of clear boundaries and quelling fear. Here are some common gestures to experiment with: Rub your forehead with your hand and notice how that feels. Now stroke the back of your neck.

• From Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away (2022)

  E INTERLUDE I õuitting When the World Is Watching l Capitan is the world’s most famous—and most impressive— rock. Located within Yosemite National Park, “El Cap” is massively wide, with more than seventy recognized climbing routes. From the base to the summit, it’s 3,000 vertical feet. The first ascent, in 1958, involved a team that spent forty-six days over sixteen months drilling bolts into the granite, pulling themselves up on ropes. Fifty-eight years later, in 2016, elite rock climber Alex Honnold decided to take climbing the rock formation to an insane, barely imaginable level. On an extremely difficult route called Freerider, he was going to climb “free solo.” All by himself. All in one day. From base to summit without installing or even using bolts or footholds beyond what nature made available. And without using ropes to assist his climb or, more important, to stop or limit what could happen if he fell. Honnold confided in a few folks—almost all elite climbers themselves—that he was considering free soloing via Freerider. He agreed to let his friend Jimmy Chin film his process for what Chin imagined would be an amazing documentary, not only because Honnold was one of the few climbers who would consider something so dangerous but because no one had ever tried a free solo ascent of El Capitan. Nearly all climbers use ropes for safety when rock climbing. The human body can rarely survive a fall greater than eighty feet. For rock formations hundreds or even thousands of feet in vertical height, falling means dying. Even the world’s most skilled climbers (who consider themselves “free” climbers) acknowledge and accommodate the inevitability of

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

  Reply to Objection 1: The washing of the hands is done in the celebration of mass out of reverence for this sacrament; and this for two reasons: first, because we are not wont to handle precious objects except the hands be washed; hence it seems indecent for anyone to approach so great a sacrament with hands that are, even literally, unclean. Secondly, on account of its signification, because, as Dionysius says (Eccl. Hier. iii), the washing of the extremities of the limbs denotes cleansing from even the smallest sins, according to Jn. 13:10: “He that is washed needeth not but to wash his feet.” And such cleansing is required of him who approaches this sacrament; and this is denoted by the confession which is made before the “Introit” of the mass. Moreover, this was signified by the washing of the priests under the Old Law, as Dionysius says (Eccl. Hier. iii). However, the Church observes this ceremony, not because it was prescribed under the Old Law, but because it is becoming in itself, and therefore instituted by the Church. Hence it is not observed in the same way as it was then: because the washing of the feet is omitted, and the washing of the hands is observed; for this can be done more readily, and suffices far denoting perfect cleansing. For, since the hand is the “organ of organs” (De Anima iii), all works are attributed to the hands: hence it is said in Ps. 25:6: “I will wash my hands among the innocent.” Reply to Objection 2: We use incense, not as commanded by a ceremonial precept of the Law, but as prescribed by the Church; accordingly we do not use it in the same fashion as it was ordered under the Old Law. It has reference to two things: first, to the reverence due to this sacrament, i.e. in order by its good odor, to remove any disagreeable smell that may be about the place; secondly, it serves to show the effect of grace, wherewith Christ was filled as with a good odor, according to Gn. 27:27: “Behold, the odor of my son is like the odor of a ripe field”; and from Christ it spreads to the faithful by the work of His ministers, according to 2 Cor. 2:14: “He manifesteth the odor of his knowledge by us in every place”; and therefore when the altar which represents Christ, has been incensed on every side, then all are incensed in their proper order. Reply to Objection 3: The priest, in celebrating the mass, makes use of the sign of the cross to signify Christ’s Passion which was ended upon the cross. Now, Christ’s Passion was accomplished in certain stages. First of all there was Christ’s betrayal, which was the work of God, of Judas, and of the Jews; and this is signified by the triple sign of the cross at the words, “These gifts, these presents, these holy unspotted sacrifices.”

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  great works of other achievers. We want to have more encounters with the Sublime. Nothing is more awe-inspiring than the human brain itself—its complexity, its untapped potential. We want to realize some of that potential in our lives, not wallow in the cynical slacker attitude. We see a purpose behind everything that we experience and see. In the end, what we want is to fuse the curiosity and excitement we had toward the world as children, when almost everything seemed enchanting, with our adult intelligence. The whole law of human existence consists in nothing other than a man’s always being able to bow before the immeasurably great. If people are deprived of the immeasurably great, they wil not live and wil die in despair. The immeasurable and infinite are as necessary for man as the smal planet he inhabits. —Fyodor Dostoyevsky 14 Resist the Downward Pull of the Group The Law of Conformity We have a side to our character that we are generally unaware of—our social personality, the different person we become when we operate in groups of people. In the group setting, we unconsciously imitate what others are saying and doing. We think differently, more concerned with fitting in and believing what others believe. We feel different emotions, infected by the group mood. We are more prone to taking risks, to acting irrationally, because everyone else is. This social personality can come to dominate who we are. Listening so much to others and conforming our behavior to them, we slowly lose a sense of our uniqueness and the ability to think for ourselves. The only solution is to develop self-awareness and a superior understanding of the changes that occur in us in groups. With such intelligence, we can become superior social actors, able to outwardly fit in and cooperate with others on a high level, while retaining our independence and rationality. An Experiment in Human Nature As a young boy growing up in communist China, Gao Jianhua (b. 1952) dreamed of becoming a great writer. He loved literature, and his teachers commended him for his essays and poems. In 1964 he gained admittance to the Yizhen Middle School (YMS), not far from where his family lived. Located in the town of Yizhen, several hundred miles north of Beijing, YMS was labeled a “key school”— over 90 percent of its students went on to college. It was difficult to get into and quite prestigious. At YMS, Jianhua was a quiet and studious boy; he had ambitions of graduating in six years with a top record, good enough to get into Beijing University, from where he would launch the writing career he dreamed about. Students at YMS lived on campus, and life there could be rather dull, since the Communist Party regulated almost every aspect of life in China, including education. There were daily military drills, propaganda classes, manual labor duty, and regular classes, which could be rigorous. At YMS, Jianhua developed a close friendship with a classmate

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House as Epilogue I wrote a large part of this book in rural eastern Oregon. 53 I stayed in a cabin at the edge of a playa, a lake that had mostly dried up during the summer. That part of the world is high desert country; the weather was cold at night and hot during the day. The air was so bone-dry I drank water every hour but still felt unquenchably thirsty. One morning a drop of blood plopped wetly onto my desk, and I went to the bathroom and used toilet paper to stanch the nosebleed. When I walked back I realized I’d left a pat-pat-pat trail of blood across the floor. All day I sat and watched dust devils kick up at the far edge of the once-lake. 54 I was told there was still a bit of water out there, but it would take four miles of walking to reach it. It was like an alien landscape; it made me think of the salt flats of Utah or old episodes of Star Trek. I hiked to some caves where eagles roosted and the earth below their nests was littered with a mulch of fur and bone. An owl left half a rabbit on my doorstep; in the morning, something else had dragged it away and left a streak of gore. After dinner I went out on the playa with the other residents. First we waded through a soft, undulating field of dry grasses that reached our shoulders. Then there was a rim of soil fine as confectioner’s sugar; it felt as if we were tromping through moondust. Then the soil solidified and broke into thousands, millions of pieces, beautiful, geometric patterns. As we continued to walk, the earth began to crunch in a satisfying way beneath our feet. When we had hiked out far enough, the soil got looser and softer, like the cushy rubber mulch underneath a jungle gym. After a while, the smell changed: it was a little like sulfur and a little like bleach, the scent of a linden tree, the unmistakable scent of—as I said to the other residents, regretting it even as the word was slipping from my mouth—semen. No one else agreed with me, or if they did, they didn’t admit it. I reached down and picked up a chunk of dried earth and the soil underneath was damp: the memory of the lake. A forest fire broke out on a minor mountain near our horizon. I drove past it one afternoon, watched as impossibly orange flames licked their way up the incline, leaving behind glossy, burnt sage and sticks of trees and still-flaming fence posts and, inexplicably, patches of unburnt space, where chance let something live. A helicopter dipped around like a dragonfly and dropped shimmering sheets of water down to the earth. I went into town to sit in the library’s air-conditioning. The librarian wanted to talk to me about the fire.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  [image file=image_rsrc2K0.jpg] 10. Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, Type C420.2, Taboo: not to speak about a certain happening.Dream House as NoirShe is not your first female crush, or your first female kiss, or even your first female lover. But she is the first woman who wants you in that way—desire tinged with obsession. She is the first woman who yokes herself to you with the label girlfriend. Who seems proud of that fact. And so when she walks into your office and tells you that this is what it’s like to date a woman, you believe her. And why wouldn’t you? You trust her, and you have no context for anything else. You have spent your whole life listening to your father talk about women’s emotions, their sensitivity. He never said it in a bad way, exactly—though the implication is always there. Suddenly you find yourself wondering if you’re in the middle of evidence that he’s right. All these years of telling him he’s full of bullshit, that he needs to decolonize his mind and lose the gender essentialism, and here you are learning that lesbian relationships are, somehow, different—more intense and beautiful but also more painful and volatile, because women are all of these things too. Maybe you really do believe that women are different. Maybe you owe your father an apology. Dames, right? Dream House as Queer VillainyI think a lot about queer villains, the problem and pleasure and audacity of them. I know I should have a very specific political response to them. I know, for example, I should be offended by Disney’s lineup of vain, effete ne’er-do-wells (Scar, Jafar), sinister drag queens (Ursula, Cruella de Vil), and constipated, man-hating power dykes (Lady Tremaine, Maleficent). I should be furious at Downton Abbey’s scheming gay butler and Girlfriend’s controlling, lunatic lesbian, and I should be indignant about Rebecca and Strangers on a Train and Laura and The Terror and All About Eve, and every other classic and contemporary foppish, conniving, sissy, cruel, humorless, depraved, evil, insane homosexual on the large and small screen. And yet, while I recognize the problem intellectually—the system of coding, the way villainy and queerness became a kind of shorthand for each other—I cannot help but love these fictional queer villains. I love them for all of their aesthetic lushness and theatrical glee, their fabulousness, their ruthlessness, their power. They’re always by far the most interesting characters on the screen. After all, they live in a world that hates them. They’ve adapted; they’ve learned to conceal themselves. They’ve survived.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  the role of the adviser, giving people guidance on how to live, where to put their energies, how to remain calm amid difficulties and have a sense of purpose. All the while, she was the one who was dying and dealing with severe physical restrictions. She sensed that increasing numbers of people in this world had lost their way. They could not wholeheartedly commit themselves to their work or to relationships. They were always dabbling in this or that, searching for new pleasures and distractions but feeling rather empty inside. They tended to fall apart in the face of adversity or loneliness, and they turned to her as someone solid who would be able to tell them the truth about themselves and give them some direction. As she saw it, the difference between her and these other people was simple: She had spent year after year looking death squarely in the eye without flinching. She did not indulge in vague hopes for the future, put her trust in medicine, or drown her sorrows in alcohol or addiction. She accepted the early death sentence imposed on her, using it for her own ends. For Flannery, her proximity to death was a call to stir herself to action, to feel a sense of urgency, to deepen her religious faith and spark her sense of wonder at all mysteries and uncertainties of life. She used the closeness of death to teach her what really matters and to help her steer clear of the petty squabbles and concerns that plagued others. She used it to anchor herself in the present, to make her appreciate every moment and every encounter. Knowing that that her illness had a purpose to it, there was no need to feel self-pity. And by confronting and dealing with it straight on, she could toughen herself up, manage the pain that racked her body, and keep writing. By the time she had received yet another bullet, the separation with Erik, she could regain her balance after several months, without turning bitter or more reclusive. What this meant was that she was thoroughly at home with the ultimate reality represented by death. In contrast, so many other people, including those she knew, suffered from a reality deficit, avoiding the thought of their mortality and the other unpleasant aspects of life. Focusing so deeply on her mortality had one other important advantage—it deepened her empathy and sense of connection to people. She had a peculiar relationship to death in general: It did not represent a fate reserved for her alone but rather was intimately tied to her father. Their sufferings and deaths were intertwined. She saw her own nearness to death as a call to take this further, to see that all of us are connected through our common mortality and made equal by it. It is the fate we all share and should draw us closer for that reason. It should shake us out of any sense of feeling superior or separated.

• 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 On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019)

  I am thinking of beauty again, how some things are hunted because we have deemed them beautiful. If, relative to the history of our planet, an individual life is so short, a blink of an eye, as they say, then to be gorgeous, even from the day you’re born to the day you die, is to be gorgeous only briefly. Like right now, how the sun is coming on, low behind the elms, and I can’t tell the difference between a sunset and a sunrise. The world, reddening, appears the same to me—and I lose track of east and west. The colors this morning have the frayed tint of something already leaving. I think of the time Trev and I sat on the toolshed roof, watching the sun sink. I wasn’t so much surprised by its effect—how, in a few crushed minutes, it changes the way things are seen, including ourselves—but that it was ever mine to see. Because the sunset, like survival, exists only on the verge of its own disappearing. To be gorgeous, you must first be seen, but to be seen allows you to be hunted. — I hear her call again, convinced now that it’s a heifer. Ranchers often sell off the calves at night, ferrying them away on truck beds while the mothers slept in their stalls so they wouldn’t wake up screaming for their babies. Some would wail so hard their throats would swell shut and a balloon had to be placed inside and inflated to expand the neck muscles. I get closer. The tobacco stands high. When she wails again, the sound parts the stalks and the leaves shiver. I approach the small clearing where she is. The light froths blue over the plant tips. I hear her huge lungs working for air, soft but clear as wind. I part the thick-packed plants and step forward. “Ma? Tell me the story again.” “I’m too tired, baby. Tomorrow. Back to sleep.” “I wasn’t sleeping.” It’s past ten and you’re just back from the salon. You have a towel wrapped around your hair, your skin still warm from the shower. “Come on, real quick. The one about the monkey.” You sigh, slipping under the blanket. “Alright. But get me a cigarette.” I take one from the carton on the nightstand, place it between your lips and light. You puff once, twice. I take it out, watch you. “Okay, let’s see. Once upon a time there was a Monkey King who—” “No, Ma. The real one. Come on. Tell the real-life story.” I put the cigarette back in your mouth, let you puff. “Okay.” Your eyes search the room. “Once upon a time—scoot closer, you wanna hear it or not? Once upon a time, in the old country, there were men who would eat the brains of monkeys.” “You were born in the Year of the Monkey. So you’re a monkey.” “Yeah, I guess so,” you whisper, staring far away. “I’m a monkey.”

• From Cleanness (2020)

  The road curved toward the town, following the river, and both of us looked down at the water. We had just come from Rousse, a city three hours to the north, where I had finally seen the Danube, the first river I had encountered in Europe on the scale of those I had grown up beside in America. The town had little in the way of a riverfront, just a desolate patch of green like a stain seeping from the city’s largest building, a Soviet-era hotel that stood guard on the bank. The river was swollen with summer rains, and we watched the huge weight of it slide silently past, watching too the swallows twisting above us in the darkening air; and then the river was something we felt more than saw, in the darkness it was indistinguishable from the woods on the Romanian bank. There was nothing so impressive about the Yantra, a narrow river so shallow in places it seemed barely to cover its bed; but there was a kind of drama in the winding shape it cut through the land, at one point almost looping back upon itself as it twisted among the hills that gave the city both its character and its purpose. Atop the largest of those hills sat the jagged ruins of Tsarevets, Turnovo’s main attraction, a medieval fortress that fell to the Ottomans five centuries ago, a symbol of former greatness that’s at once a source of pride and a shadow cast over the present. A view of Tsarevets, and of the rest of the town from a neighboring hill, was the primary draw of the hotel where the taxi dropped us off. It was a nice hotel, it cost more than I would usually have wanted to pay, but its luxury was like a grand gesture abandoned, the large room with its gorgeous view filled with furniture and linens in various stages of disrepair. Even so, we felt a little flare of happiness on entering it; R. dropped his bags and stepped onto the bed, jumping up and down a few times, and I laughed with him, even as I sensed, just past the edges of what we felt, a hovering dread. It was a habit of mine, to rush toward an ending once I thought I could see it, as if the fact of loss were easier to bear than the chance of it. I didn’t want that to happen with R., I struggled against it; he was worth struggling for, I thought, as was the person I found I was with him. Then R. stopped jumping and stood at the foot of the bed, throwing his arms wide, and I stepped toward him for the second half of our ritual of homecoming in these temporary homes; and as I wrapped my arms around his waist and pressed my face to his chest, I felt a flood of relief, the release of something increasingly tightly wound.

• From Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away (2022)

  Practically everyone who watches Free Solo is amazed by the difficulty of what Honnold was attempting, the danger, and the skill involved (not to mention the process of documenting it all). Obviously, as a physical feat, Alex Honnold’s free solo ascent in June 2017 was, indeed, amazing, seemingly without equal. But much less obvious was the mental feat of quitting and turning back on Pitch 6. Once he made the decision to go for it and start climbing that morning in 2016, every force—except, obviously, gravity—was pushing him to persist. He had invested months in training. His friends, in addition to investing their time and money in the effort, were literally risking their lives to film the attempt. An entire film project was at stake. Understanding what made Honnold’s decision-making so exceptional will help us gain insight into the forces that push all of us to persist too long, and the strategies that might help us become more Honnold-like in our decisions about when to stick and when to quit. SECTION II In the Losses CHAPTER 4

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  In my own practice, I’ve come to view fantasy as a valuable imaginative resource, whether it is cultivated by individuals or jointly by couples. The ability to go anywhere in our imagination is a pure expression of individual freedom. It is a creative force that can help us transcend reality. By giving us an occasional escape from a relationship, it serves as a powerful antidote to loss of libido within the relationship. Simply put, love and tenderness are enriched by the spice of imagination. Fantasies—sexual and other—also have nearly magical powers to heal and renew. They return the breasts confiscated by mastectomy, or let us walk as we did before the crippling accident. They reverse time, making us young again, and briefly allow us to be as we no longer are and maybe never were: flawless, strong, beautiful. They put us in the presence of the beloved who has died, or bring back memories of passionate lovemaking with the partner we now struggle to eroticize. Through fantasy we repair, compensate, and transform. For a few moments, we rise above the reality of life and, subsequently, the reality of death. The more I listen and probe, the more I appreciate the shrewdness of fantasy—its energy, its imaginative efficiency, its healing qualities, and its psychological force. Our fantasies combine the uniqueness of our personal history with the broad sweep of the collective imagination. Each culture uses incentives and prohibitions to convey what is sexy (American Idol! Monica Lewinsky!) and what is forbidden (altar boys! Monica Lewinsky!). Our flights of fancy bridge the gap between the possible and the permissible. Fantasy is the alchemy that turns this jumble of psychic ingredients into the pure gold of erotic arousal. In my work with couples, sexual fantasy also provides a wellspring of information about the individuals’ internal life and the relational dynamics of the couple. Fantasies are an ingenious way our creative mind overcomes all sorts of conflicts around desire and intimacy. The psychoanalyst Michael Bader (whose incisive book Arousal discusses the undercurrents of fantasy) explains that in the sanctuary of the erotic mind, we find a psychological safe space to undo the inhibitions and fears that roil within us. Our fantasies allow us to negate and undo the limits imposed on us by our conscience, by our culture, and by our self-image.

• From On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019)

  Yes, there was a war. Yes, we came from its epicenter. In that war, a woman gifted herself a new name—Lan—in that naming claimed herself beautiful, then made that beauty into something worth keeping. From that, a daughter was born, and from that daughter, a son. All this time I told myself we were born from war—but I was wrong, Ma. We were born from beauty. Let no one mistake us for the fruit of violence—but that violence, having passed through the fruit, failed to spoil it. — Paul is behind me by the gate, clipping a bushel of mint leaves to garnish the pesto. His scissors snap at the stems. A squirrel hurries down from a nearby sycamore, stops at the base, sniffs the air, then doubles back, vanishing up the branches. You’re just ahead as I approach; my shadow touches your heels. “Little Dog,” you say, without turning, the sun long gone from the garden, “come here and look at this.” You point to the ground at your feet, your voice a whisper-shout. “Isn’t this crazy?” I remember the room. How it burned because Lan sung of fire, surrounded by her daughters. Smoke rising and collecting in the corners. The table in the middle a bright blaze. The women with their eyes closed and the words relentless. The walls a moving screen of images flashing as each verse descended to the next: a sunlit intersection in a city no longer there. A city with no name. A white man standing beside a tank with his black-haired daughter in his arms. A family sleeping in a bomb crater. A family hiding underneath a table. Do you understand? All I was given was a table. A table in lieu of a house. A table in lieu of history. “There was a house in Saigon,” you told me. “One night, your father, drunk, came home and beat me for the first time at the kitchen table. You were not born yet.” — But I remember the table anyway. It exists and does not exist. An inheritance assembled with bare mouths. And nouns. And ash. I remember the table as a shard embedded in the brain. How some will call it shrapnel. And some will call it art. I am at your side now as you point at the ground where, just beyond your toes, a colony of ants pours across the dirt patch, a flood of black animation so thick it resembles the shadow of a person that won’t materialize. I can’t make out the individuals—their bodies linked to one another in an incessant surge of touch, each six-legged letter dark blue in the dusk—fractals of a timeworn alphabet. No, these are not monarchs. They are the ones who, come winter, will stay, will turn their flesh into seeds and burrow deeper—only to break through the warm spring loam, ravenous.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  R. pulled out his guidebook then, with its useless maps, he was afraid we would lose the light before we saw San Marco. He started walking more quickly while I hung back, protesting; it didn’t matter, everything was beautiful, everything was something we hadn’t seen before and wouldn’t see again. But he insisted, increasingly frustrated as the map refused to align with the streets we walked; he was better with maps than I was but not by much. He got annoyed with me for walking too slowly and stopping too often, but I wanted to take photos of everything, the buildings, the canals, the laundry hung out in the damp air to dry, the mask shop with its window of carnival grotesques, backlit through the metal grill that had been pulled down. R. was growing frantic in a way I didn’t understand. We would lose the light, he kept saying, as though he were an artist imagining a scene, I want to see it before we lose the light. So I put away my camera and walked more quickly, I kept my eyes on R. to avoid being distracted by anything else. And he did find it, finally, by luck mostly, I think, suddenly we turned and it opened out before us, after the cramped alleys the expanse of the square, beyond it the horizon of water. R. turned to me, smiling, and surely it wasn’t at that moment that the bells began to ring, it’s a trick of memory to stage it that way, but it is how I remember it, the birds flying up, everyone turning to the Campanile, as we did, its top still bright as it caught the last of the sun. Merchants were walking through the crowds, hawking toys for children, spinning tops that burst into LED color as they helicoptered up. All that was new there was evanescent, the toys, the tourists, R. and I; all that was lasting was old, worn dull with looking though still I wondered to look at it, the centuries-old basilica, the bells, the gold lion on its pedestal, the sea that would swallow it; and everywhere also the books I had read, so that look, there, I could almost convince myself of it, Aschenbach stepping from uncertain water to stone.

• 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 Cleanness (2020)

  THERE WAS SO MUCH TO SEE, too much; I walked around in a daze of looking. We moved in and out of churches crowded with paintings, huge and smoke-darkened, the ceilings crammed with color, I got tired of trying to see them. R. was full of zeal, he wanted to see everything—who knows when we’ll be back, he said. The dilemma of vacations, the exhaustion of the last chance. Everything became unremarkable, nothing moved me, it was all a blur of perfection. I wanted to get the bus back to the hotel, I wanted to rest my eyes. But just one more thing, R. said, paging through the guidebook we had bought, and he led me to a small museum, a house converted after the artist who had lived in it had died. There were just a few rooms, open and uncluttered, the walls painted mercifully white; it wouldn’t take long for R. to make his circuit. I followed him, barely looking at the paintings, which were small and unremarkable, or remarkable only for their plainness. They were quiet and unambitious, minor, I thought at first, still lifes and modest landscapes, interesting mostly for having so little to do with everything else we had seen; the painter had spent his whole life in this city but seemed indifferent to the examples it offered, to the virtuousity and gorgeousness it prized. I found myself looking longer, looking more slowly, I let R. walk on ahead. The same subjects appeared again and again, household objects, plates and bowls, not filled with flowers or fruit but empty, set against a plain background. I stopped in front of one that showed a pitcher and cups, white and gray on a tan surface, behind them a blue wall. Something held me there looking, something made me lean in to look more closely. The cups were mismatched in color and in shape, the pitcher rose oddly elongated behind them, the whole painting was eccentric, asymmetrical. There was a kind of presence in the painting, I felt, I could sense it humming at a frequency I wanted to tune myself to catch. I liked the seeming naivety of it, the way the simple figures had been simplified further, purified or idealized to geometrical forms, almost, but rendered bluntly, imperfectly. And the brushstrokes were imperfect too, visible, haphazard, the paint distributed unevenly, inexpertly; but that wasn’t right, really it was striving for something ideal, that was what I felt, the frequency I wanted to catch. What I took at first for blocks of color dissolved when I leaned in, were modulated, textured, full of movement somehow, not the movement of objects but of light, which fell across them gently, undramatically. But that’s not right either, it didn’t fall across them, there weren’t any shadows; I couldn’t locate the light at all, or tell if the scene depicted morning or noon. It was as if the objects emanated their own light, which didn’t move from one quadrant of the painting to another, as real light would, but vibrated somehow, giving a sense of movement and stillness at once. There was a promise in it, I felt, I mean a promise for me, a claim about what life could be.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  HARBOREven in the dark I liked to look at it, though the sea was never truly dark, even now in the off-season it caught the light of the moon, which hung high and almost full, and of the few restaurants and hotels that were open in the new town, so that the whole harbor shimmered with points of light. It had been months since I had seen the sea, a year, and I was hungry for it; I had stepped to the edge of the terrace to check my phone but found myself staring at the sea instead. You could lose yourself in it, that was what drew me, it was beautiful but also it was like looking at nothing, the sight of it drowned out thinking like the sound of it drowned out noise, and at first I didn’t hear the others calling me to join them. I smiled as I turned, though I resented being called back, and saw that they were standing in a circle beside the tables where they had been smoking and talking, their glasses empty. Come here, one of the American writers said, we’re playing spin the bottle, and I laughed and took my place. We were choosing partners; there would be a reading to close the festival at the end of the week, and we would read in pairs, one American, one Bulgarian. A Bulgarian writer held one of the wine bottles we had emptied; he crouched in the center of the circle and then stepped back to the periphery once he had set it spinning, which it did crazily over the cobblestones of the patio. He was the oldest of us, midfifties and handsome, a champion boxer when he was young and now a coach of some sort. All the Bulgarians had other careers, there’s no such thing as a professional writer in Bulgaria, and no writing programs, either, or almost none; they worked in business, or as journalists, one ran a satirical website all my students loved, one was a priest. And they had all published books, some of them several, so that though the program was for emerging writers it was hard to tell the difference between them and the writers still inside the restaurant, the famous writers. That wasn’t true for the Americans, who were younger and less accomplished; most were still in graduate programs for writing, or had just finished. We were boring in comparison to them, I thought as the bottle came to a stop and, to a chorus of cheers, the boxer stepped forward and shook the hand of one of the Americans. There was something a little sheepish about the pair of them, maybe the erotic overtones of the game caused them to lean away from each other as they shook hands, each staying decidedly in his own sphere. N., who ran the website, took the bottle next. He was a bigger man, not quite fat, not quite handsome, the friendliest and funniest in the group; he had made us laugh to tears over dinner and he made us laugh now, when he took his American partner by the shoulders and hugged him close, he was so happy, they would be brothers forever, a toast, he said, taking him to the table and its bottle of rakia.

• From On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019)

  I hate and love your battered hands for what they can never be. — It’s Sunday. I am ten. You open the salon door and the acetone from yesterday’s manicures immediately stings my nostrils. But our noses soon adjust, like they always do. You don’t own the salon, but it’s your task to run it each Sunday—the slowest day of the week. Inside, you switch on the lights, plug in the automated pedicure chairs, the water gurgling through pipes under the seats as I head to the breakroom to make instant coffee. You say my name without glancing up and I know to walk over to the door, unlock it, flip the Open sign back out to the street. That’s when I see her. About seventy, her hair white and windblown across a narrow face with mined-out blue eyes, she has the stare of someone who had gone beyond where she needed to go but kept walking anyway. She peers into the shop, clutching a burgandy alligator purse with both hands. I open the door and she steps inside, hobbling a bit. The wind had blown her olive scarf off her neck, and it now hangs on one shoulder, brushing the floor. You stand, smile. “How I hep you?” you ask in English. “A pedicure, please.” Her voice is thin, as if cut with static. I help her out of her coat, hang it on the rack, and lead her to the pedicure chair as you run the air jets in the foot tub, fill the bubbling water with salts and solvents. The scent of synthetic lavender fills the room. I hold her arm and help her onto the seat. She smells of dried sweat mixed with the strong sweetness of drugstore perfume. Her wrist throbs in my grip as she lowers herself into the seat. She seems even frailer than she looks. Once she eases back in the leather chair, she turns to me. I can’t hear her over the water jets but can tell by her lips that she’s saying, “Thank you.” When the jets are done, the water warm, an emerald green marbled with white suds, you ask her to lower her feet into the tub. She won’t budge. Her eyes closed. “Ma’am,” you say. The salon, usually bustling with people or music or the TV with Oprah or the news, is now silent. Only the lights hum above us. After a moment, she opens her eyes, the blue ringed pink and wet, and bends over to fiddle with her right pant leg. I take a step back. Your stool creaks as you shift your weight, your gaze fixed on her fingers. The pale veins on her hands shiver as she rolls up her pant leg. The skin is glossy, as if dipped in a kiln. She reaches lower, grabs her ankle, and, with a jerk, detaches her entire lower leg at the knee. A prosthesis.

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

  4. The first measure of every being and of every nature is God, seeing that He is the first being and canse of being to all. And since everything must be judged by its measure, that must be called natural’ to a thing whereby it is conformed to its measure, or standard. That then will be natural to a thing, which has been put into it by God. Therefore, though something further be impressed upon a thing, making it otherwise than as it was before, that is not against nature. 5. All creatures stand to God as the products of art to the artist (B. II, Chap.XXIV). Hence all nature may be called an artistic product of divine workmanship (artificiatum divinae artis). But it is not contrary to the notion of workmanship for the artist to work something to a different effect in his work, even after he has given it the first form. Neither then is it contrary to nature if God works something in natural things to a different effect from that which the ordinary course of nature involves. Hence Augustine says: “God, the Creator and Founder of all natures, does nothing contrary to nature, because to every creature that is natural which He makes so, of whom is all measure, number and order of nature. I can do all that doth become a God: Who can do more, is none. That alone doth become a God,’ which is consonant with the eide, or fixed intelligible natures of things, which are the expression of His nature as imitable beyond Himself God is “the first measure of every being and of every nature” by virtue of what He is in Himself in His own being and His own nature, not by mere virtue of His will. CHAPTER CI OF MIRACLESCHAPTER 101—THINGS that are done occasionally by divine power outside of the usual established order of events are commonly called miracles (wonders). We wonder when we see an effect and do not know the cause. And because one and the same cause is sometimes known to some and unknown to others, it happens that of the witnesses of the effect some wonder and some do not wonder: thus an astronomer does not wonder at seeing an eclipse of the sun, at which a person that is ignorant of astronomy cannot help wondering. An event is wonderful relatively to one man and not to another. The absolutely wonderful is that which has a cause absolutely hidden. This then is the meaning of the word miracle,’ an event of itself full of wonder, not to this man or that man only. Now the cause absolutely hidden to every man is God, inasmuch as no man in this life can mentally grasp the essence of God (Chap.XLVII). Those events then are properly to be styled miracles, which happen by divine power beyond the order commonly observed in nature.

• From The History of Christianity II: From the Reformation to the Modern Megachurch (2017)

  170The History of Christianity II ORIGINS õThe Mormon organization is formally known as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or the LDS Church. As the name indicates, Mormons consider themselves to be Christians, but some other Christians and scholars argue that Mormonism is not a kind of Christianity, but a brand new religion. õThe Mormon faith emerged from the spiritual hothouse of the 19 th century: the Second Great Awakening. Its founder, Joseph Smith Jr., was born in 1805 in Vermont to a poor farming family. They moved all over but ended up living in Palmyra, NY, in the heart of a region hot with the f lames of religious revival. õJoseph’s parents were interested in dreams and folk magic. They were always searching for a religion that felt right but were not finding it. Joseph Smith Jr. carried on this tradition. In the spring of 1820, when he was 14, Smith went into the woods where he could be alone, and there he had a vision. He saw a pillar of light, and God and Jesus spoke to him, mourning the state of the world and religious disagreement. õSmith didn’t immediately tell his family about his vision. He did tell a Methodist minister, who was aghast and told him there was no such thing as visions. In 1823, when he was 17, he went to his room and prayed that God would forgive his sins. Suddenly his room was filled with a bright light, and beside his bed stood an angel dressed in a white robe. This was the angel Moroni, who told Smith that God had “a work” for him to do. 171Lecture 18—The Mormons: A True American Faith õMoroni led him to uncover a book of golden plates buried in a hill near his home. Deposited with the plates were two stones fastened to a breastplate, called Urim and Thummim, described as “two smooth three cornered diamonds set in glass, and the glasses were set in silver bows.” Imagine them as a pair spectacles fastened to a knight’s chest armour. These served as seer stones that God had prepared to aid Joseph in his translation of the book. 172The History of Christianity II õMoroni didn’t actually allow Smith to remove the plates, and made him keep coming back to the same spot once a year every year for more teaching. Finally, four years later, he was allowed to borrow them.