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 My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  The army of Italy onward By the great pale arch of the Star. It was the deep historic sense of this great people that first won me and their loving admiration of their poets and artists and guides. I can never describe the thrill it gave me to find on a small house a marble plaque recording the fact that poor de Musset had once lived there, and another on the house wherein he died. Oh, how right the French are to have a Place Malherbe, and Avenue Victor Hugo, an Avenue de la Grande Armée too, and an Avenue de L’Imperatrice as well, though it has since been changed prosaically into the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne. From the Place de la Concorde I crossed the Seine and walked down the quays to the left, and soon passed the Conciergerie and Ste Chapelle with its gorgeous painted glass-windows of a thousand, years ago and there before me on the Ile de la Cité, the twin towers of Notre Dame caught my eyes and breath and finally, early in the afternoon I turned up the Boul’ Mich and passed the Sorbonne and then somehow or other lost myself in the old rue St. Jacques that Dumas père and other romance-writers had described for me a thousand times. I little tired at length having left the Luxemburg gardens far behind with their statues which I promised myself soon to study more closely, I turned into a little wine-shop restaurant kept by a portly and pleasant lady whose name I soon learned was Marguerite. After a most excellent meal I engaged a large room on the first floor looking on the street, for forty francs a month, and if a friend came to live with me, why Marguerite promised with a large smile to put in another bed for an additional ten francs monthly and supply us besides with coffee in the morning and whatever meals we wanted at most reasonable prices: there I lived gaudy, golden days for some three heavenly weeks.

• From I'm Not a Mourning Person (2023)

  By that summer, the cancer would spread to his liver, and he would be told that his disease had become terminal. “I really thought I’d be one of the 10 percent who makes it,” he shared, as he began to wrap his mind around what that actually meant, since curing was no longer an option. Suddenly, Dad found himself walking the precarious line between living fully and actively dying, between making the most of the time he had left and simultaneously winding it all down. As this new phase set in, Dad’s behavior might not have looked different to our extended circle of family and friends, but I noticed the changes. He paused longer in conversations, smiling in wonder and awe as if he were standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon, taking in the majesty of it all while he still could. Mom and I helped him create a bucket list, and I took it upon myself to be our event planner. (The recovering perfectionist in me was thrilled at the opportunity to relapse.) Dad wanted to go to Lake Placid in the Adirondacks one more time, to sit at the water’s edge and do jigsaw puzzles by the fire. To visit his brother in Cape Cod and reminisce about the old days “and have a few good chuckles.” And to celebrate his 72nd birthday on Martha’s Vineyard and my 48th “somewhere nice.” We set out to make as many memories as possible and as quickly as possible, trip by trip. That summer was “brutiful,” as Glennon Doyle would say, both beautiful and brutal. First stop: his birthday celebration in Martha’s Vineyard. This idyllic little island off the coast of Massachusetts is known for its quaint harbor towns, sandy beaches, postcard-worthy lighthouses, and lush farmland. My perfectionist was pleased. For years, Dad had casually talked about visiting the island, and we all thought that sounded lovely, but we’d never gotten around to it. Now, all our rain checks were being cashed in, all at once. We arrived a few days early to take in the sights. Mom and I wandered among the charming shops, while Dad and Brian sat outside on nearby benches, reading the local paper and shooting the breeze. We drank delicious afternoon coffees and early-evening cocktails. Roamed the wild coastline and collected shells on our walks to remember our visit. At times, it felt as if we were being given a reprieve from our worries. From being full-time patients and caregivers, to just being a normal family again. For a brief moment I even allowed myself to believe that the Vineyard might possess special powers, like a Bermuda Triangle of sorts. But instead of planes disappearing in the vortex, it made tumors vanish. Unfortunately, later that night, as Dad and I sat on the deck outside the rental house sipping our gin and tonics and watching as the sky turn orange-pink, cancer once again infiltrated.

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  I should add that during this and the following, still more crowded, still more awful Sunday afternoon sessions, I was haunted by the reverberations of certain family tales I had heard. In the early eighties, my maternal grandfather, Ivan Rukavishnikov, not finding for his sons any private school to his liking, had created an academy of his own by hiring a dozen of the finest professors available and assembling a score of boys for several terms of free education in the halls of his St. Petersburg house (No. 10, Admiralty Quay). The venture was not a success. Those friends of his whose sons he wanted to consort with his own were not always compliant, and of the boys he did get, many proved disappointing. I formed a singularly displeasing image of him, exploring schools for his obstinate purpose, his sad and strange eyes, so familiar to me from photographs, seeking out the best-looking boys among the best scholars. He is said to have actually paid needy parents in order to muster companions for his two sons. Little as our tutor’s naïve lantern-slide shows had to do with Rukavishnikovian extravaganzas, my mental association of the two enterprises did not help me to put up with Lenski’s making a fool and a bore of himself, so I was happy when, after three more performances (“The Bronze Horseman” by Pushkin; “Don Quixote”; and “Africa—the Land of Marvels”), my mother acceded to my frantic supplications and the whole business was dropped. Now that I come to think of it, how tawdry and tumid they looked, those jellylike pictures, projected upon the damp linen screen (moisture was supposed to make them blossom more richly), but, on the other hand, what loveliness the glass slides as such revealed when simply held between finger and thumb and raised to the light—translucent miniatures, pocket wonderlands, neat little worlds of hushed luminous hues! In later years, I rediscovered the same precise and silent beauty at the radiant bottom of a microscope’s magic shaft. In the glass of the slide, meant for projection, a landscape was reduced, and this fired one’s fancy; under the microscope, an insect’s organ was magnified for cool study. There is, it would seem, in the dimensional scale of the world a kind of delicate meeting place between imagination and knowledge, a point, arrived at by diminishing large things and enlarging small ones, that is intrinsically artistic.

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

  21:12–1412. Jesus saith unto them, Come and dine. And none of the disciples durst ask him, Who art thou? knowing that it was the Lord. 13. Jesus then cometh, and taketh bread, and giveth them, and fish likewise. 14. This is now the third time that Jesus shewed himself to his disciples, after that he was risen from the dead. AUGUSTINE. (Tract. cxxiii) The fishing being over, our Lord invites them to dine: Jesus saith unto them, Come and dine. CHRYSOSTOM. (Hom. lxxxvi) John does not say that He ate with them, but Luke does. He ate however not to satisfy the wants of nature, but to shew the reality of His resurrection. AUGUSTINE. (xiii. de Civ. Dei, c. xxii) The bodies of the just, when they rise again, shall need neither the word of life that they die not of disease, or old age, nor any bodily nourishment to prevent hunger and thirst. For they shall be endowed with a sure and inviolable gift of immortality, that they shall not eat of necessity, but only be able to eat if they will. Not the power, but the need of eating and drinking shall be taken away from them; in like manner as our Saviour after His resurrection took meat and drink with His disciples, with spiritual but still real flesh, not for the sake of nourishment, but in exercise of a power. And none of His disciples durst ask Him, who art Thou? knowing that it was the Lord. AUGUSTINE. (Tract. cxxii) No one dared to doubt that it was He, much less deny it; so evident was it. Had any one doubted, he would have asked. CHRYSOSTOM. (Hom. lxxxvii) He means that they had not confidence to talk to Him, as before, but sat looking at Him in silence and awe, absorbed in regarding His altered and now supernatural form, and unwilling to ask any question. Knowing that it was the Lord, they were in fear, and only ate what, in exercise of His great power, He had created. He again does not look up to heaven, or do any thing after a human sort, thus shewing that His former acts of that kind were done only in condescension: Jesus then cometh, and taketh bread, and giveth them, and fish likewise. AUGUSTINE. (Tract. cxxiii. 2) Mystically, the fried fish is Christ Who suffered. And He is the bread that came down from heaven. To Him the Church is united to His body for participation of eternal bliss. Wherefore He says, Bring of the fishes which ye have now caught; to signify that all of us who have this hope, and are in that septenary number of disciples, which represents the universal Church here, partake of this great sacrament, and are admitted to this bliss.

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  [image file=image_rsrc13E.jpg] The author aged nineteen, with his brothers and sisters, in Yalta, November 1918. Kirill is seven; Sergey (unfortunately disfigured by flaws in the picture), wearing a rimless pince-nez and the uniform of the Yalta Gymnasium, is eighteen; Olga is fifteen; Elena (firmly clasping Box II) is twelve. 111IN ORDER to reconstruct the summer of 1914, when the numb fury of verse-making first came over me, all I really need is to visualize a certain pavilion. There the lank, fifteen-year-old lad I then was, sought shelter during a thunderstorm, of which there was an inordinate number that July. I dream of my pavilion at least twice a year. As a rule, it appears in my dreams quite independently of their subject matter, which, of course, may be anything, from abduction to zoolatry. It hangs around, so to speak, with the unobtrusiveness of an artist’s signature. I find it clinging to a corner of the dream canvas or cunningly worked into some ornamental part of the picture. At times, however, it seems to be suspended in the middle distance, a trifle baroque, and yet in tune with the handsome trees, dark fir and bright birch, whose sap once ran through its timber. Wine-red and bottle-green and dark-blue lozenges of stained glass lend a chapel-like touch to the latticework of its casements. It is just as it was in my boyhood, a sturdy old wooden structure above a ferny ravine in the older, riverside part of our Vyra park. Just as it was, or perhaps a little more perfect. In the real thing some of the glass was missing, crumpled leaves had been swept in by the wind. The narrow little bridge that arched across the ghyll at its deepest part, with the pavilion rising midway like a coagulated rainbow, was as slippery after a rainy spell as if it had been coated with some dark and in a sense magic ointment. Etymologically, “pavilion” and “papilio” are closely related. Inside, there was nothing in the way of furniture except a folding table hinged rustily to the wall under the east window, through the two or three glassless or pale-glassed compartments of which, among the bloated blues and drunken reds, one could catch a glimpse of the river. On a floorboard at my feet a dead horsefly lay on its back near the brown remains of a birch ament. And the patches of disintegrating whitewash on the inside of the door had been used by various trespassers for such jottings as: “Dasha, Tamara and Lena have been here” or “Down with Austria!”

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  There was another more general change, which coincided with my ardent adolescent interest in butterflies and moths. The Victorian and Staudingerian kind of species, hermetic and homogeneous, with sundry (alpine, polar, insular, etc.) “varieties” affixed to it from the outside, as it were, like incidental appendages, was replaced by a new, multiform and fluid kind of species, organically consisting of geographical races or subspecies. The evolutional aspects of the case were thus brought out more clearly, by means of more flexible methods of classification, and further links between butterflies and the central problems of nature were provided by biological investigations. The mysteries of mimicry had a special attraction for me. Its phenomena showed an artistic perfection usually associated with man-wrought things. Consider the imitation of oozing poison by bubblelike macules on a wing (complete with pseudo-refraction) or by glossy yellow knobs on a chrysalis (“Don’t eat me—I have already been squashed, sampled and rejected”). Consider the tricks of an acrobatic caterpillar (of the Lobster Moth) which in infancy looks like bird’s dung, but after molting develops scrabbly hymenopteroid appendages and baroque characteristics, allowing the extraordinary fellow to play two parts at once (like the actor in Oriental shows who becomes a pair of intertwisted wrestlers): that of a writhing larva and that of a big ant seemingly harrowing it. When a certain moth resembles a certain wasp in shape and color, it also walks and moves its antennae in a waspish, unmothlike manner. When a butterfly has to look like a leaf, not only are all the details of a leaf beautifully rendered but markings mimicking grub-bored holes are generously thrown in. “Natural selection,” in the Darwinian sense, could not explain the miraculous coincidence of imitative aspect and imitative behavior, nor could one appeal to the theory of “the struggle for life” when a protective device was carried to a point of mimetic subtlety, exuberance, and luxury far in excess of a predator’s power of appreciation. I discovered in nature the nonutilitarian delights that I sought in art. Both were a form of magic, both were a game of intricate enchantment and deception.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  I declared I was ill and was going to England at once; I must make a new start and accumulate some more money and a few mornings later I bade Bancroft “Good-bye” and crossed the Channel and went on to my sister and father in Tenby, arriving there in a severe shivering fit with a bad headache and every symptom of ague. I was indeed ill and played out: I had taken double doses of life and literature, had swallowed all the chief French writers from Rabelais and Montaigne to Flaubert, Zola and Balzac, passing by Pascal and Vauvenargues, Renan and Hugo, a glutton’s feast for six months. Then, too, I had nosed out this artist’s studio and that; had spent hours watching Rodin at work and more hours comparing this painter’s model with that: these breasts and hips with those. My love of plastic beauty nearly brought me to grief at least once and perhaps I had better record the incident, though it rather hurt my vanity at the time. One day I called at Manet’s old studio which was rented now by an American painter named Alexander. He had real power as a craftsman but only a moderate brain and was always trying by beauty or something remarkable in his model to make up for his own want of originality. On this visit I noticed an extraordinary sketch of a young girl standing where childhood and womanhood meet: she had cut her hair short and her chestnut-dark eyes lent her a startling distinction. “You like it?” asked Alexander. “She has the most perfect figure I have ever seen!” “I like it”, I replied; “I wonder whether the magic is in the model or in your brush?” “You’ll soon see”, he retorted, a little piqued, “she’s due here already” and almost as he spoke she came in with quick, alert step. She was below medium height; but evidently already a woman. Without a word she went behind the screens to undress, when Alexander said: “Well?” I had to think a moment or two before answering. “God and you have conspired together!” I exclaimed, and indeed his brush had surpassed itself. He had caught and rendered a childish innocence in expression that I had not remarked and he had blocked in the features with superb _brio_: “It is your best work to date”, I went on, “and almost anyone would have signed it.”

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  The second unsuspected experience was also a direct result, I believe, of my sex-awakening with Lucille and the intense sex-excitement. At all events it came just after the love-passages with her that I have described and post hoc is often propter hoc. I had never yet noticed the beauties of nature; indeed whenever I came across descriptions of scenery in my reading, I always skipped them as wearisome. Now of a sudden, in a moment, my eyes were unsealed to natural beauties. I remember the scene and my rapt wonder as if it were yesterday. It was a bridge across the Dee near Overton in full sunshine; on my right the river made a long curve, swirling deep under a wooded height, leaving a little tawny sandbank half bare just opposite to me: on my left both banks, thickly wooded, drew together and passed round a curve out of sight. I was entranced and speechless—enchanted by the sheer color-beauty of the scene—sunlit water there and shadowed here, reflecting the gorgeous vesture of the wooded height. And when I left the place and came out again and looked at the adjoining cornfields, golden against the green of the hedgerows and scattered trees, the colors took on a charm I had never noticed before: I could not understand what had happened to me. It was the awakening of sex-life in me, I believe, that first revealed to me the beauty of inanimate nature. A night or two later I was ravished by a moon nearly at the full that flooded our playing field with ivory radiance, making the haystack in the corner a thing of supernal beauty. Why had I never before seen the wonder of the world? the sheer loveliness of nature all about me? From this time on I began to enjoy descriptions of scenery in the books I read and began, too, to love landscapes in painting. Thank goodness! the miracle was accomplished, at long last, and my life enriched, ennobled, transfigured as by the bounty of a God! From that day on I began to live an enchanted life; for at once I tried to see beauty everywhere, and at all times, of day and night caught glimpses that ravished me with delight and turned my being into a hymn of praise and joy. Faith had left me and with faith, hope in Heaven or indeed in any future existence: saddened and fearful, I was as one in prison with an undetermined sentence; but now in a moment the prison had become a paradise, the walls of the actual had fallen away into frames of entrancing pictures. Dimly I became conscious that if this life were sordid and mean, petty and unpleasant, the fault was in myself and in my blindness. I began then for the first time to understand that I myself was a magician and could create my own fairyland, ay and my own heaven, transforming this world into the throne-room of a god!

• From Becoming Myself: A Psychiatrist's Memoir (2017)

  CHAPTER TWENTY SOJOURN IN VIENNA V ienna had always loomed large in my consciousness because it was the birthplace of Freud and the cradle of psychotherapy. Having read through many biographies of Freud, I had a great sense of familiarity with the storied city that had housed so many of my favorite writers, including Stefan Zweig, Franz Werfel, Arthur Schnitzler, Robert Musil, and Joseph Roth. Thus, in 1970, I quickly accepted Stanford’s offer to teach undergraduate students for a summer quarter at the Stanford campus in Vienna. The move was not without complications: I had four children, then aged fifteen, fourteen, eleven, and one. We brought with us a twenty-year-old neighbor and friend of my daughter’s, who would live with us in the students’ dorm and help care for Ben, our youngest child. I welcomed the opportunity to work with Stanford undergraduates, and Marilyn, as always, loved the possibility of a European sojourn. It was wondrous to live in the center of Vienna, where Freud had lived. I plunged into his world, walking the streets he had walked, visiting his cafés, and gawking at a large unmarked five-story apartment building at Berggasse 19, Freud’s home for forty-nine years. Years later, the Sigmund Freud Foundation bought this building, turned it into the Freud Museum, prominently marked it with a large red banner, and opened it to visitors, but at the time of my visit, there was no indication whatsoever that he had ever lived and worked there. The city had placed scores of brass plaques marking the homes of prominent and not-so-prominent Viennese, including several for Mozart’s residences, but nothing to signal the lifetime dwelling of Sigmund Freud. Seeing Freud’s home and walking through the streets of his Vienna served me well thirty years later when I wrote my novel When Nietzsche Wept . I drew on these memories and the photos I took that year to create a credible visual setting for my imagined meetings of Nietzsche and the famed Viennese physician Josef Breuer, who had been Freud’s mentor. My primary teaching assignment in Vienna was a course for Stanford undergraduates on the life and work of Sigmund Freud. The forty lectures I prepared became the basis of a “Freud Appreciation” course that I taught to psychiatric residents for the next fifteen years. I always emphasized to my students that Freud was not just the creator of psychoanalysis (accounting for less than 1 percent of all the therapy offered today), but that he invented the entire field of psychotherapy: it did not exist in any form prior to Freud. Though I have my criticisms of contemporary orthodox Freudian analysis, I have always felt great respect for Freud’s creativity and courage. He is very often in my mind when I do therapy. Recently, for example, I met with a new patient who was plagued with obscene obsessions about members of his family, and I immediately thought of Freud’s observation that behind such persistent obsessions there is often rage.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  “‘Nothing of the sort, he lay there, jiggling like’, (“I guessed what she meant”, said Quain, “the poor devil in a blue funk was frigging himself to get a cock-stand.”) ‘I thought for some time’, Mrs. Carlyle went on, ‘one moment I wanted to kiss and caress him; the next moment I felt indignant. Suddenly it occurred to me that in all my hopes and imaginings of a first night, I had never got near the reality: silent, the man lay there jiggling, jiggling. Suddenly I burst out laughing: it was all too wretched! too absurd!’ “‘At once he got out of bed with the one scornful word ‘Woman!’ and went into the next room: he never came back to my bed. “‘Yet he’s one of the best and noblest men in the world and if he had been more expansive and told me oftener that he loved me, I could easily have forgiven him any bodily weakness; silence is love’s worst enemy and after all he never really made me jealous save for a short time with Lady Ashburnham. I suppose I’ve been as happy with him as I could have been with anyone yet—’ “That’s my story”, said Quain in conclusion, “and I make you a present of it: even in the Elysian Fields I shall be content to be in the Carlyles’ company. They were a great pair!” Just one scene more. When I told Carlyle how I had made some twenty-five hundred pounds in the year and told him besides how a banker offered me almost the certainty of a great fortune if I would buy with him a certain coal-wharf at Tunbridge Wells (it was Hamilton’s pet scheme), he was greatly astonished. “I want to know”, I went on, “if you think I’ll be able to do good work in literature; if so I’ll do my best. Otherwise I ought to make money and not waste time in making myself another second-rate writer.” “No one can tell you that”, said Carlyle slowly, “You’ll be lucky if you reach the knowledge of it yourself before ye die! I thought my Frederic was great work; yet the other day you said I had buried him under the dozen volumes and you may be right; but have I ever done anything that will live?—” “Sure”, I broke in, heartsore at my gibe, “Sure, your French Revolution must live and the “Heroes and Hero Worship”, and “Latter Day Pamphlets” and, and—” “Enough”, he cried, “You’re sure?” “Quite, quite sure”, I repeated. Then he said, “You can be equally sure of your own place; for we can all reach the heights we are able to oversee.” * * * AFTERWORD TO THE FIRST VOLUME OF MY LIFE’S STORY. * * * I had hardly written “Finis” at the end of this book when the faults in it, faults both of omission and commission, rose in swarms and robbed me of my joy in the work.

• From Barclay's Guide to the New Testament (2008)

  Its aim is not to give us what Jesus said, like a newspaper report, but to give us what Jesus meant. In it, the risen Christ still speaks. John is not so much The Gospel according to St John; it is rather The Gospel according to the Holy Spirit. It was not John of Ephesus who wrote the Fourth Gospel; it was the Holy Spirit who wrote it through John. The Writer of the Gospel We have one question still to ask. We can be quite sure that the mind and the memory behind the Fourth Gospel is that of John the apostle; but we have also seen that behind it is a witness who was the writer, in the sense that he was the one who actually wrote it all down. Can we find out who he was? We know from what the early Church writers tell us that there were actually two Johns in Ephesus at the same time. There was John the apostle; but there was another John, who was known as John the elder. Papias, who loved to collect all that he could find about the history of the New Testament and the story of Jesus, gives us some very interesting information. He was Bishop of Hierapolis, which is quite near Ephesus, and his dates are from about AD 70 to about AD 145. That is to say, he was actually a contemporary of John. He writes how he tried to find out `what Andrew said or what Peter said, or what was said by Philip, by Thomas, or by James, or by John, or by Matthew, or by any other of the disciples of the Lord; and what things Aristion and the elder John, the disciples of the Lord, say'. In Ephesus there was the apostle John and the elder John; and the elder John was so well-loved a figure that he was actually known as The Elder. He clearly had a unique place in the Church. Both Eusebius and Dionysius the Great tell us that even in their own days in Ephesus there were two famous tombs, the one of John the apostle and the other of John the elder. Now let us turn to the two little letters, 2 John and 3 John. The letters come from the same hand as the gospel, and how do they begin? The Second Letter begins: `The elder to the elect lady and her children' (2 John 1). The Third Letter begins: `The elder to the beloved Gaius' (3 John 1). Here we have our solution. The one who actually penned the letters was John the elder; the mind and memory behind them was the aged John the apostle, the master whom John the elder always described as `the disciple whom Jesus loved'. The Precious Gospel The more we know about the Fourth Gospel, the more precious it becomes. For seventy years, John had thought of Jesus.

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  Such things as the hot muffins and crumpets one had with one’s tea after games or the newsboys’ cockneyish cries of “Piper, piper!” mingling with the bicycle bells in the darkening streets, seemed to me at the time more characteristic of Cambridge than they do now. I cannot help realizing that, aside from striking but more or less transient customs, and deeper than ritual or rule, there did exist the residual something about Cambridge that many a solemn alumnus has tried to define. I see this basic property as the constant awareness one had of an untrammeled extension of time. I do not know if anyone will ever go to Cambridge in search of the imprints which the teat-cleats on my soccer boots have left in the black mud before a gaping goal or follow the shadow of my cap across the quadrangle to my tutor’s stairs; but I know that I thought of Milton, and Marvell, and Marlowe, with more than a tourist’s thrill as I passed beside the reverend walls. Nothing one looked at was shut off in terms of time, everything was a natural opening into it, so that one’s mind grew accustomed to work in a particularly pure and ample environment, and because, in terms of space, the narrow lane, the cloistered lawn, the dark archway hampered one physically, that yielding diaphanous texture of time was, by contrast, especially welcome to the mind, just as a sea view from a window exhilarates one hugely, even though one does not care for sailing. I had no interest whatever in the history of the place, and was quite sure that Cambridge was in no way affecting my soul, although actually it was Cambridge that supplied not only the casual frame, but also the very colors and inner rhythms for my very special Russian thoughts. Environment, I suppose, does act upon a creature if there is, in that creature, already a certain responsive particle or strain (the English I had imbibed in my childhood). Of this I had my first inkling just before leaving Cambridge, during my last and saddest spring there, when I suddenly felt that something in me was as naturally in contact with my immediate surroundings as it was with my Russian past, and that this state of harmony had been reached at the very moment that the careful reconstruction of my artificial but beautifully exact Russian world had been at last completed. I think one of the very few “practical” actions I have ever been guilty of was to use part of that crystalline material to obtain an Honours degree.

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

  BEDE. (in Marc. 3, 41) Bethany is a little village or town by the side of mount Olivet, where Lazarus was raised from the dead. But in what way He sent His disciples and for what purpose is shewn in these words, And saith unto them, Go your way into the village over against you. THEOPHYLACT. Now consider how many things the Lord foretold to His disciples, that they should find a colt; wherefore it goes on, And as soon as ye be entered into it, ye shall find a colt tied, whereon never man sat, loose him, and bring him; and that they should be impeded in taking it, wherefore there follows, And if any man say unto you, Why do ye this? say ye, The Lord hath need of him; and that on saying this, they should be allowed to take him; wherefore there follows, And straightway he will send him hither; and as the Lord had said, so it was fulfilled. Thus it goes on: And they went their way, and found the colt tied by the door without, in a place where two ways meet; and they loose him. AUGUSTINE. (de Con. Ev. ii. 66) Matthew says, an ass and a colt, the rest however do not mention the ass. Where then both may be the case, there is no disagreement, though one Evangelist mentions one thing, and a second mentions another; how much less should a question be raised, when one mentions one, and another mentions that same one and another. It goes on: And certain of them that stood there said unto them, What do ye, loosing the colt? And they said unto them even as Jesus had commanded, and they let them take it, that is, the colt. THEOPHYLACT. But they would not have allowed this, if the Divine power had not been upon them, to compel them, especially, as they were country people and farmers, and yet allowed them to take away the colt. It goes on: And they brought the colt to Jesus, and cast their garments on him; and he sat upon him.

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

  THEOPHYLACT. And because a Christian needs not only to flee evil, but to strive to obtain glory, He adds, And to stand before the Son of man. For this is the glory of angels, to stand before the Son of man, our God, and always to behold His face. BEDE. Now supposing a physician should bid us beware of the juice of a certain herb, lest a sudden death overtake us, we should most earnestly attend to his command; but when our Saviour warns us to shun drunkenness and surfeiting, and the cares of this world, men have no fear of being wounded and destroyed by them; for the faith which they put in the caution of the physician, they disdain to give to the words of God. 21:37–3837. And in the day time he was teaching in the temple; and at night he went out, and abode in the mount that is called the mount of Olives. 38. And all the people came early in the morning to him in the temple, for to hear him. BEDE. What our Lord commanded in word, He confirms by His example. For He who bid us watch and pray before the coming of the Judge, and the uncertain end of each of us, as the time of His Passion drew near, is Himself instant in teaching, watching, and prayer. As it is said, And in the day time he was teaching in the temple, whereby He conveys by His own example, that it is a thing worthy of God, to watch, or by word and deed to point out the way of truth to our neighbour. CYRIL OF ALEXANDRIA. But what were the things He taught, unless such as transcended the worship of the law? THEOPHYLACT. Now the Evangelists are silent as to the greater part of Christ’s teaching; for whereas He preached for the space nearly of three years, all the teaching which they have written down would scarcely, one might say, suffice for the discourse of a single day. For out of a great many things extracting a few, they have given only a taste as it were of the sweetness of His teaching. But our Lord here instructs us, that we ought to address God at night and in silence, but in day time to be doing good to men; and to gather indeed at night, but in the day distribute what we have gathered. As it is added, And at night he went out and abode in the mount that is called Olivet. Not that He had need of prayer, but He did this for our example.

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  In the dining room, my brother and I would be told to go on with our food. My mother, a tidbit between finger and thumb, would glance under the table to see if her nervous and gruff dachshund was there. “Un jour ils vont le laisser tomber,” would come from Mlle Golay, a primly pessimistic old lady who had been my mother’s governess and still dwelt with us (on awful terms with our own governesses). From my place at table I would suddenly see through one of the west windows a marvelous case of levitation. There, for an instant, the figure of my father in his wind-rippled white summer suit would be displayed, gloriously sprawling in midair, his limbs in a curiously casual attitude, his handsome, imperturbable features turned to the sky. Thrice, to the mighty heave-ho of his invisible tossers, he would fly up in this fashion, and the second time he would go higher than the first and then there he would be, on his last and loftiest flight, reclining, as if for good, against the cobalt blue of the summer noon, like one of those paradisiac personages who comfortably soar, with such a wealth of folds in their garments, on the vaulted ceiling of a church while below, one by one, the wax tapers in mortal hands light up to make a swarm of minute flames in the mist of incense, and the priest chants of eternal repose, and funeral lilies conceal the face of whoever lies there, among the swimming lights, in the open coffin.

• From Barclay's Guide to the New Testament (2008)

  It is here that Paul produces one of his greatest phrases. The Church is the body of Christ. The Church is to be hands to do Christ's work, feet to run his errands, a mouth to speak for him. So, we have two lines of thought in Ephesians. First, Christ is God's instrument of reconciliation. Second, the Church is Christ's instrument of reconciliation. The Church must bring Christ to the world; and it is within the Church that all the middle walls of separation must be broken down. It is through the Church that the unity of all the discordant elements must be achieved. As the New Testament scholar E. F. Scott has it: `The Church stands for that purpose of worldwide reconciliation for which Christ appeared, and in all their intercourse with one another Christians must seek to realize this formative idea of the Church.' Who but Paul? This is the thought of Ephesians. As we have seen, there are some who, thinking of the vocabulary and the style and the thought of this letter, cannot believe that Paul wrote it. E. J. Goodspeed, the American scholar, has put forward an interesting - but unconvincing - theory. The probability is that it was in Ephesus about the year AD go that the letters of Paul were first collected and sent out to the Church at large. It is Goodspeed's theory that the person responsible for that collection, some disciple of Paul, wrote Ephesians as a kind of introduction to the whole collection. Surely that theory breaks down on one obvious fact. Any imitation is inferior to the original. But, far from being inferior, Ephesians might well be said to be the greatest of all the Pauline letters. If Paul did not write it himself, we have to suggest as its writer someone who was possibly greater than Paul. E. F. Scott very relevantly demands: `Can we believe that in the Church of Paul's day there was an unknown teacher of this supreme excellence? The natural assumption is surely that an epistle so like the work of Paul at his best was written by no other man than by Paul himself.' No one ever had a greater vision of Christ than this. It sees in Christ the one centre in whom all the disunities of life are gathered into one. No one ever had a greater vision of the Church than this - a vision which sees in the Church God's instrument in that worldwide reconciliation. And we may well believe that no one other than Paul could rise to a vision like that. The Destination of Ephesians We must now return to the problem which earlier we left unsolved.

• From Amplified Holy Bible (2015)

  And I saw the souls of those who had been beheaded because of their testimony of Jesus and because of the word of God, and those who had refused to worship the beast or his image, and had not accepted his mark on their forehead and on their hand; and they came to life and reigned with Christ for a thousand years. [Dan 7:9 , 22 , 27 ] 5 The rest of the dead [the non-believers] did not come to life again until the thousand years were completed. This is the first resurrection. 6 b Blessed (happy, prosperous, to be admired) and holy is the person who takes part in the first resurrection; over these the second death [which is eternal separation from God, the lake of fire] has no power or authority, but they will be priests of God and of Christ and they will reign with Him a thousand years. [Ex 19:6 ; 1 Pet 2:5 , 9 ; Rev 1:6 ; 5:10 ] The Final Rebellion 7 And when the thousand years are completed, Satan will be released from his prison (the abyss), 8 and will come out to deceive and mislead the c nations which are in the four corners of the earth—[including] Gog and Magog—to gather them together for the war; their number is like the sand of the seashore. [Ezek 38:2 ; 39:1 , 6 ] 9 And they swarmed up over the broad plain of the earth and surrounded the camp of the saints (God’s people) and the beloved city [d Jerusalem]; but fire came down from heaven and consumed them. [2 Kin 1:10–12 ; Ezek 38:2 , 22 ] 10 And the devil who had deceived them was hurled into the lake of fire and burning brimstone (sulfur), where the beast (Antichrist) and false prophet are also; and they will be tormented day and night, forever and ever. The Final Judgment 11 And I saw a great white throne and Him who was seated upon it, from whose presence earth and heaven fled away, and no place was found for them [for this heaven and earth are passing away]. [Is 51:6 ; Matt 24:35 ; 2 Pet 3:10–12 ] 12 And I saw the dead, the great and the small, standing before the throne, and books were opened. Then another book was opened, which is the Book of Life; and the dead were judged according to what they had done as written in the books [that is, everything done while on earth]. [Jer 17:10 ; Rom 2:6 ] 13 And the sea gave up the dead who were in it, and death and Hades (the realm of the dead) surrendered the dead who were in them; and they were judged and sentenced, every one according to their deeds. 14 Then death and Hades [the realm of the dead] were thrown into the lake of fire. This is the second death, the lake of fire [the eternal separation from God].

• From I'm Not a Mourning Person (2023)

  I immediately became a voracious student of integrative health. The more I learned about the regenerative power of an anti-inflammatory diet and lifestyle, the more I shared my findings with anyone who would listen. My mind was blown . I was awestruck by how our bodies work and their enormous capacity for resilience. (We’ll nerd out on this more in Chapter 11 .) To my amazement, my passion for wellness eventually led me to make an award-winning film about my journey, which featured stories of other young women who were also living with cancer. After the film I wound up writing a series of New York Times best-selling books and launching a global online wellness community that has provided education and support to thousands of people around the world. I was also featured on Oprah several times and became a member of her Super Soul 100, “a group of 100 trailblazers whose vision and life’s work are bringing a higher level of consciousness to the world.” In so many ways, the rupture of my diagnosis led me to build a more meaningful life. (And bonus: this is where I first connected with my husband, Brian, who was the editor of my film. So in the end, the love story that was meant for me was born of my darkest moment.) Now, close to two decades later, I still live with stage IV cancer. Knock on wood, it continues to be slow growing, which has allowed me to continue figuring out how to best take care of myself and help others do the same. Change is a constant, though. Just because we have one rupture in life doesn’t mean that life will never get turned upside down again. A few years before my dad’s diagnosis, I started to realize that as amazing as my accomplishments were, and as strong as my physical health had become, deep down I was mentally and emotionally exhausted. I’d gone from the frying pan of a cancer diagnosis to the fire of nonstop achievement. For me, prolonged “busy” looked like very long hours at work, while attempting to also manage my health and try to squeeze in time with my family and close friends. This go-go pace had become like breathing to me, autonomic—reflexive, involuntary—which isn’t such a surprise. In times of rupture, staying busy can be useful—even therapeutic—because it helps us keep up or return to some sense of “normal life.” Sounds about right to me—unless “busy” becomes a knee-jerk way to avoid our own feelings or allows us to find agoraphobia just this side of glamorous. No matter how necessary, noble, or lifesaving it may seem, when busyness becomes a permanent state of being, it undoubtedly leads to burnout, health issues, and even worse—loss of joy.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  I said “Good-bye!” at the hotel and went on board the steamer by myself: my eyes set on the Golden Gate into the great Pacific and the hopes and hazards of the new life. At length I was to see the world: what would I find in it? I had no idea then that I should find little or much in exact measure to what I brought and it is now the saddest part of these Confessions that on this first trip round the world, I was so untutored, so thoughtless that I got practically nothing out of my long journeying. Like Odysseus I saw many cities of men; but scenes seldom enrich the spirit: yet one or two places made a distinct impression on me, young and hard though I was: Sidney Bay and Heights, Hong Kong, too; but above all, the old Chinese gate leading into the Chinese City of Shanghai so close to the European town and so astonishingly different. Kioto, too, imprinted itself on my memory and the Japanese men and girls that ran naked out of their hot baths in order to see whether I was really white all over. But I learned nothing worth recalling till I came to Table Bay and saw the long line of Table Mountain four thousand feet above me, a cliff cutting the sky with an incomparable effect of dignity and grandeur. I stayed in Cape Town a month or so, and by good luck I got to know Jan Hofmeyr there who taught me what good fellows the Boers really were and how highly the English Premier Gladstone was esteemed for giving freedom to them after Majuba: “we look on him with reverence” said my friend, Hofmeyr, “as the embodied conscience of England”; but alas! England could not stomach Majuba and had to spend blood and treasure later to demonstrate the manhood of the Boers to the world. But thank God, England then gave freedom and self-government again to South Africa and so atoned for her shameful “Concentration Camps.” Thanks to Jan Hofmeyr I got to know and esteem the South African Boer even on this first short acquaintance. When I went round the world for the second time twenty years later, I tried to find the Hofmeyrs of every country and so learned all manner of things worthful and strange that I shall tell of, I hope, at the end of my next volume. For the only short cut to knowledge is through intercourse with wise and gifted men. Now I must confess something of my first six months of madness and pleasure in Paris and then speak of England again and Thomas Carlyle and his incomparable influence upon me and so lead you, gentle render, to my later prentice years in Germany and Greece.

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  Thus, when the newly disclosed, fresh and trim formula of my own age, four, was confronted with the parental formulas, thirty-three and twenty-seven, something happened to me. I was given a tremendously invigorating shock. As if subjected to a second baptism, on more divine lines than the Greek Catholic ducking undergone fifty months earlier by a howling, half-drowned half-Victor (my mother, through the half-closed door, behind which an old custom bade parents retreat, managed to correct the bungling archpresbyter, Father Konstantin Vetvenitski), I felt myself plunged abruptly into a radiant and mobile medium that was none other than the pure element of time. One shared it—just as excited bathers share shining seawater—with creatures that were not oneself but that were joined to one by time’s common flow, an environment quite different from the spatial world, which not only man but apes and butterflies can perceive. At that instant, I became acutely aware that the twenty-seven-year-old being, in soft white and pink, holding my left hand, was my mother, and that the thirty-three-year-old being, in hard white and gold, holding my right hand, was my father. Between them, as they evenly progressed, I strutted, and trotted, and strutted again, from sun fleck to sun fleck, along the middle of a path, which I easily identify today with an alley of ornamental oaklings in the park of our country estate, Vyra, in the former Province of St. Petersburg, Russia. Indeed, from my present ridge of remote, isolated, almost uninhabited time, I see my diminutive self as celebrating, on that August day 1903, the birth of sentient life. If my left-hand-holder and my right-hand-holder had both been present before in my vague infant world, they had been so under the mask of a tender incognito; but now my father’s attire, the resplendent uniform of the Horse Guards, with that smooth golden swell of cuirass burning upon his chest and back, came out like the sun, and for several years afterward I remained keenly interested in the age of my parents and kept myself informed about it, like a nervous passenger asking the time in order to check a new watch. My father, let it be noted, had served his term of military training long before I was born, so I suppose he had that day put on the trappings of his old regiment as a festive joke. To a joke, then, I owe my first gleam of complete consciousness—which again has recapitulatory implications, since the first creatures on earth to become aware of time were also the first creatures to smile.