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 Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  The short and obscene sentence of Poseidonius about the rubbing together of two small pieces of flesh, which I have seen you copy in your exercise books with the application of a good schoolboy, does no more to define the phenomenon of love than the taut cord touched by the finger accounts for the infinite miracle of sounds. Such a dictum is less an insult to pleasure than to the flesh itself, that amazing instrument of muscles, blood, and skin, that red-tinged cloud whose lightning is the soul. And I admit that the reason stands confounded in presence of the veritable prodigy that love is, and of the strange obsession which makes this same flesh (for which we care so little when it is that of our own body, and which concerns us only to wash and nourish it, and if possible to keep it from suffering) inspire us with such a passion of caresses simply because it is animated by an individuality different from our own, and because it presents certain lineaments of beauty, disputed though they may be by the best judges. Here human logic stops short, as before the revelations of the Mysteries. Popular tradition has not been wrong in regarding love always as a form of initiation, one of the points of encounter of the secret with the sacred. Sensual experience is further comparable to the Mysteries in that the first approach gives to the uninitiated the impression of a ritual which is more or less frightening, and shockingly far removed from the familiar functions of sleeping, eating, and drinking; it appears matter for jest and shame, or even terror. Quite as much as the dance of the Maenads or the frenzy of the Corybantes, love-making carries us into a different world, where at other times we are forbidden to enter, and where we cease to belong as soon as the ardor is spent, or the ecstasy subsides. Nailed to the beloved body like a slave to a cross, I have learned some secrets of life which are now dimmed in my memory by the operation of that same law which ordains that the convalescent, once cured, ceases to understand the mysterious truths laid bare by illness, and that the prisoner, set free, forgets his torture, or the conqueror, his triumph passed, forgets his glory.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  He probably thinks that you are really fighting with him and he loves you and can’t stand that.” Larry looked at me for a long minute and then said a quiet, “I gotcha.” I thought it interesting that the residue of Larry’s violent boyhood should show up in play with his son. He had been able to master his impulses in relation to women, but unbeknownst to him, the violence had crept into his relationship with the child he loved. I realized how little we know about human behavior and about the insidious legacy of family violence. On every questionnaire, Larry would have answered honestly that he had been fully able to escape being a violent person with his wife and his children. Who would have thought to ask him how he plays with his son? A Window of Opportunity I HAVE TOLD LARRY’S story in detail because it’s a remarkable account of the mind of a boy who slowly, painfully, and successfully extricates himself from his violent origins. Larry shows us how divorce can provide a window of opportunity through which the child can climb to freedom—with the proviso that the growing child must provide his or her own energy, resourcefulness, and courage to make it happen. The divorce by itself won’t do it. Larry’s moral and emotional evolution from delinquent boy to loving husband, father, and responsible citizen captures the psychological steps needed. Like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, who relies on the help of the Scarecrow in search of a brain, the Tin Woodsman in want of a heart, and the Cowardly Lion in search of courage, a child growing up in a violent family needs the full use of his intelligence, capacity to love, and courage to climb out of the lower depths to which he has been exposed. He has to put together for himself a value system that rejects violence, respects women, and places decency and human kindness at the core. In his personal relationships, he has to achieve the capacity for love and intimacy without exploitation, loyalty to his family and friends, and responsibility to his professional community and society. Counter to the system in vogue in family courts that emphasizes the importance of continuity in parent-child relationships after the divorce, the child has to find the strength within himself to reject the violent parent and the values and attitudes that that person represents. If the child continues to embrace those values, he will repeat the ugliness that he was exposed to during his most impressionable years.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

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

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  Charles was diverted by the opening of the door, and Graham’s smiling but deferential approach through the broken plinths, the imaginary colonnade of stacked and toppling books. ‘Splendid, splendid. Graham. Thank you. From silver spouts the grateful liquors glide, while China’s earth receives the smoking tide’—this last said with heavy ironic relish. ‘I’ve been rereading Pope,’ he explained, tapping what must have been a very early edition on the coffee-table. ‘Such a bitch. As one nears the end, I feel one should only read things which are really most frightfully good. I learnt the whole of the “Rape of the Lock” by heart once.’ He looked at the picture-rail as if trying to recall something, but his mind had clearly gone blank again. Graham poured the grateful liquors and withdrew. ‘I wanted to ask you about your meeting with Ronald Firbank.’ Charles looked round; he had got what he wanted. ‘Sandy Labouchère was fearfully funny about that other thing in Pope, you know, the thing that’s Waller. There used to be this place, a vespasienne in Soho he used to go to—which everyone knew as Clarkson’s Cottage, because it was just by Clarkson’s theatrical outfitters, in Wardour Street. Most of them had sort of trefoil holes in, so you could look out and check if the police were coming, or who was coming in. Not Clarkson’s Cottage, until one day, somebody hammered out a little peephole. You can guess what Sandy said.’ Charles lifted his cup, and I looked pained and dim, so that he patted it out for me: ‘Now Clarkson’s Cottage, battered and decayed, lets in new light through chinks that queens have made.’ I grinned excessively and said, ‘Of course.’ ‘I think he may have said “buggered and decayed”,’ said Charles. I sipped at my hot, weak coffee and after a bit asked, ‘Did you meet Firbank again?’ ‘You’ve read about that, then? Most extraordinary creature I ever met. Met him at the Savoy. He belongs to another age—even then he belonged to another age.’ ‘I’ve been reading him recently.’ ‘Do you find him pretty maddening?’ ‘I’m keen on him, actually. I have a friend who’s a great fan.’ ‘He always had a small following,’ explained Charles, as though this were something rather sinister. ‘I only met him once, not long before he died. He drank most frightfully and never ate a crumb. Did you want something to eat?’ ‘No, thank you.’ ‘That’s very much what he would have said. He went off abroad—he liked Africa: That’s what we were supposed to have in common. We did write to each other—just one letter each way, I think. Then I was out of the country of course. I heard about his death years later, from Gerald Berners. He was with him at the time as far as I recall.’ ‘You don’t still have his letter?’ I asked, preparing for disappointment, and disparaging the possibility in my own mind. ‘Perhaps,’ said Charles.

• From Untrue (2018)

  As I stood at the large window of the enclosure at the zoo, a bonobo knuckle-walked over to me, clearly curious. I surmised from the chart of photos I had been studying that her name was Lisa. She seated herself at the window and stared at me. I stared back. A family with a toddler and a baby in a stroller stood next to me. Lisa stuck her finger up her anus, pulled out a greenish-yellow dollop of feces, and considered it. Then she popped it into her mouth and chewed with gusto. The woman near me shouted, “Did you see that?!” She exclaimed loudly, over and over, “That monkey is disgusting!” The couple grabbed their toddler’s hand, pivoted their stroller, and rushed away, the mother announcing repeatedly that she simply couldn’t believe what she had witnessed. Eventually I couldn’t hear her anymore. I was alone, staring at Lisa, who stared at me and picked at her teeth. It occurred to me that the bonobos might be tucked away because, with all their screwing and sucking and scissoring and shit eating, they are not exactly rated-G great apes. Our very closest relatives are far from family friendly.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  The higher degrees which were later conferred upon me in the course of private talks with the Hierophant added almost nothing to that first emotion which I shared in common with the least of the pilgrims who made the same ritual ablutions and drank at the spring. I had heard the discords resolving into harmonies; for one moment I had stood on another sphere and contemplated from afar, but also from close by, that procession which is both human and divine, wherein I, too, had my place, this our world where suffering existed still, but error was no more. From such a perspective our human destiny, that vague design in which the least practiced eye can trace so many flaws, gleamed bright like the patterns of the heavens. And it is here that I can best speak of a habit which led me throughout my life along paths less secret than those of Eleusis, but after all parallel to them, namely, the study of the stars. I have always been friend to astronomers and client to astrologers. The science of the latter is questionable, but if false in its details it is perhaps true in the total implication; for if man is part and parcel of the universe, and is ruled by the same laws as govern the sky, it is not unreasonable to search the heavens for the patterns of our lives, and for those impersonal attractions which induce our successes and our errors. On autumn evenings I seldom failed to greet Aquarius to the south, that heavenly Cup Bearer and Giver of Gifts under whose sign I was born. Nor did I forget to note in each of their passages Jupiter and Venus, who govern my life, nor to measure the dangerous influence of Saturn. But if this strange refraction of human affairs upon the stellar vault preoccupied many of my waking hours, I was still more deeply absorbed in celestial mathematics, the abstract speculations to which those flaming spheres give rise. I was inclined to believe, along with certain of our more daring philosophers, that earth, too, takes part in that daily and nightly round which the sacred processions of Eleusis are intended to reproduce in human terms. In a world which is only a vortex of forces and whirl of atoms, where there is neither high nor low, periphery nor center, I could ill conceive of a globe without motion, or a fixed point which would not move. At other times I was haunted in my nightly vigils by the problem of precession of the equinoxes, as calculated long ago by Hipparchus of Alexandria.

• From The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us (2017)

  If Beauty Happens, then sexual display traits do not always improve survival, and can instead evolve to be highly costly to the individuals that have them. Each display trait is predicted to evolve to an equilibrium between its sexual advantage and its survival costs, and this equilibrium may be far from the optimum preferred by natural selection for male survival and fecundity alone. The sexual advantages of attracting mates can outweigh the survival advantages of being well adapted. In other words, a handsome, reckless, die-young James Dean–type may leave more offspring than a quiet librarian who lives to be an octogenarian. How far will beauty, and the preference for it, go to ensure sexual advantage? Pretty far. In subsequent research on the Club-winged Manakin, Kim Bostwick has provided a definitive scientific answer to an immortal question. She documented that beauty is not only skin deep, and her discovery provides profound insights into how aesthetic evolution works. Making those unusual wing songs requires more than just unusual feathers and movements. It requires major evolutionary changes in the shape and composition of the wing bones and the sizes and attachments of the wing muscles. Wing bones and muscles are surprisingly invariant among birds. Bird flight places such precise functional requirements on the structure of the wing that the birds of the world have evolved relatively minor changes to the basic design. Birds have only tinkered with the highly functional design that was perfected over 135 million years ago, when Mesozoic birds first evolved the modern flight stroke. [image "X-ray tomography images of the ulnas of (left) a male White-crowned Manakin ( Dixiphia pipra ), (center) a male Club-winged Manakin, and (right) a female Club-winged Manakin. Scale bar equals 2 mm." file=image_rsrc3N9.jpg] X-ray tomography images of the ulnas of (left) a male White-crowned Manakin (Dixiphia pipra), (center) a male Club-winged Manakin, and (right) a female Club-winged Manakin. Scale bar equals 2 mm.

• From Untrue (2018)

  But in addition to seeing that bonobos were female affiliative, socially gregarious, and very sexual, Parish quickly realized there was a clear pattern of female-on-male violence. Females swatted, chased, smacked, gouged, and bit males, who mostly seemed to know better than to annoy them. Parish had seen a male in Frankfurt with only eight digits intact, and she knew of another male who had had his penis nearly severed from his body (the vet was able to reattach it, and the male went on to have erections and successfully reproduce, though you have to wonder how good he felt about the females from then on). Parish asked her mentor, De Waal, about it. He had worked with the San Diego population in the 1980s, when they were younger, and had in fact recorded a list of injuries but didn’t recall the males being injured more often or more seriously than the females. Still, Parish asked to see records—both De Waal’s and the logs zoo veterinarians had kept of bonobo injuries over the years. Sure enough, of a total of twenty-five serious injuries, twenty-four were inflicted on males. By females. That clinched it for Parish. She realized that in spite of male philopatry, bonobos were female affiliative, female bonded, and, most extraordinarily of all, female dominant, sufficiently so that females eat first, are groomed more often, and have the authority to attack males. All this in spite of the males being physically larger and ensconced within a kin network of automatic allies. About fifteen years ago, according to news reports, a senior keeper at the San Diego Zoo, Mike Bates, experienced female-bonobo dominance and violence literally firsthand. As he signaled a pregnant female to approach for a medical assessment, she managed to reach through the bars of that section of the enclosure and catch his sleeve, pulling his hand close enough to her mouth to bite. Which she did, severing the tip of his index finger and spitting it out on the ground. Another female approached. She picked up Bates’s fingertip and held it in her own hand. As Bates headed to the hospital, his colleagues used treats to barter for the return of the digit. The price was five raisins. The fingertip was reattached, and Bates’s hand looks normal today. But if you peer closely, you see the scar that tells the story of female aggression.

• From Untrue (2018)

  How, exactly? Not only could “promiscuous” females decrease the likelihood of infanticide. They also could increase their chances of conceiving by upping their likelihood of getting high-quality sperm. They could hedge against male infertility. Multiply mating females improved their odds of heterozygosity—a good match between their egg and the sperm that fertilized it, resulting in a healthier baby. But there was more to it. It turned out there were non-procreative benefits of multiple mating for females as well. By copulating with a slew of males when she wasn’t in estrus or fertile—basically by having sex recreationally—a female primate could deplete the sperm available to rival females. She could recruit males to her social group, thus having more potential caregivers and protectors and provisioners. She could trade sex for resources or “friendship.” Of course Hrdy’s female langurs didn’t have some conscious endgame. They didn’t mate multiply because they figured, “Hmmmm, better confuse the issue of paternity and line up multiple possible ‘dads’ to protect my baby” instead of attack it. Nor did other primate females think, “Boy, would I ever like to increase my odds of heterozygosity” or “get some really good genes,” or—in species where male support is essential—get several males to care for or provision her offspring, thinking, “I need to line up several providers.” Females solicited males because they were conditioned to additional matings that might feel good. And it felt good because of the way ancestral female primates were built. This was the “legacy” we human primates inherited from ancient ancestresses living under quite different conditions than women do today. Sure, we have been portrayed not infrequently over the last centuries by science, medicine, and art as the passive, comparatively disinterested sex. But biology suggests a vastly different backstory, a tale of passionate, voluptuous pleasures and sometimes of tremendous risk-taking in the pursuit of sexual satisfaction. Our bodies are designed for sin; they are hedonists even when we’re not. We’ll Have What She’s Having: Orgasm and the ClitorisWomen, along with female chimps, bonobos, and a number of other non-human primate species, evolved a forward-facing, richly innervated clitoris. Previously thought to be a mere button, now known to be a superhighway of decadent sensation-for-the-sake-of-it, including three- to four-inch-long paired legs, the human clitoris is truly, as suggests the ancient Greek word that denotes it, “the key” when it comes to understanding the anatomical and biological underpinnings of female sexuality. It is vast, the same size as a penis, but on the inside. Yet even just the part of the clit we can see, the glans—think of it as the tip of the iceberg, or perhaps better, the mouth of a simmering volcano—has more than eight thousand nerve endings, meaning it has fourteen times the density of nerve receptor cells as the most sensitive part of a man’s penis, also called the glans. That makes the clitoris epically more responsive and excitable than the tip of the penis.

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

  e Acts are adventure stories, but unlike the pagan novels the Acts are historical romances, set against a backdrop recognizable as the Roman Empire of the fi rst century. As in the pagan romance, travel and serial endangerments hold together the structure, which is episodic, sensational. Th e apostles are miracle workers, endowed above all with the wondrous ability to resurrect the dead. Th ey are also preachers who come to be arrested by the Roman authorities. Th e apocryphal Acts, like the romances but to an even greater degree, are forensic dramas. Th e gathering tension between ap- ostolic missionizing and the Roman order inevitably resolves into a judicial confl ict. Th e apostle, in the end, is martyred, so that death substitutes for marriage as the common ending of the apostle’s story. Between the travel, miracle working, and martyrdom of the apostles, sex continually juts into the foreground of the stories. Sex functions as a primary symbolic code in the world of Christian legend, but in a radically reformulated sense. Christian romances not only preach a new model of proper sexual conduct, they also discovered a way of expressing a strikingly original romance of the eternal soul, in which this world of fl ux and regeneration is a façade and the reunion with God, through purity and death, is the ultimate consummation. “Nothing of yours endures, but all things, right down to human conventions, are transient.” As in the pagan romances, the Acts reveal deep generic similarities in the treatment of sex, so that there is a sense in which the genre speaks collectively, or at least uses a shared syntax of conventions and symbols. Even in the apostolic traditions that rely least on the manipulation of sexual protocols, certain formulas recur. Th e Acts of Peter focus principally on the rivalry between the apostle Peter and the mountebank ur- heretic, Simon Magus. Sexual tropes are not, in the Petrine legends as we have them, a dominant thread. But they do suddenly play a commanding role when the story turns abruptly from the rivalry with Simon Magus toward the death of Peter. Th e fatal sequence begins when four concubines of the prefect Agrippa hear the “teaching about purity, and all the teachings of the Lord” and withdraw their sexual favors from the powerful offi cial. Peter’s next triumph is a “a superlative beauty,” Xanthippe, the wife of a powerful man. Finally, “many other women” left their husbands, and husbands their wives, in the name of sexual purity. With so many marriage beds abandoned, Peter has put Rome in an epic stir of erotic frustration. Peter sneaks out of the city in disguise but, in a touching scene, encounters Christ and famously asks him, “Whither  F R O M S H A M E TO S I N goest thou?” Peter marches back through the gates to his certain death. Th e

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

  Leucippe’s freedom is a key to the way the novels work and the way they can guide us through the sexual landscape of the high Roman Empire. Her freedom referred at once to her social status and her subjective agency. Of course, the fact that she invokes her freedom at the exact moment when she seems most constrained underscores the extent to which the individual’s agency was limited. The novels are fatalistic romances, stories of the overpowering, divine force of erotic love. They are unusually aware of the external forces—nature and society—bearing on the individual and determining his or her fate. Here is the novels’ most authentic level of representation, and the greatest opportunity they afford to explore the relationship between erotic ideologies and social structure in the late classical period. They preserve for us something of the vitality, complexity, and chaos of sexual life in the second-century empire. Because Leucippe and Clitophon deliberately offers a panoramic vision of eros and its place in the world, we follow Achilles Tatius and consider the sexual experience of the high empire from various angles—same-sex eroticism, the expectations placed on women, the sexual life-course of men, the dynamics of marriage, the attitudes of the philosophers. Throughout, our goal is to find the interface between sexual energy and prevailing morality, the points of contact between the circulation of pleasures and the regulatory force of sexual norms. In the age of the romance, eros flourished unawares, serenely confident in its eternal powers, and if we did not know that Christianity was stirring in the hills, we might never have believed that the first icy gusts of denial could be felt sweeping across the ancient valleys.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  But over animals he had singular powers. I have watched his grizzled head approaching cautiously, though in friendly wise, toward a nest of adders, and before a lizard have seen his gnarled fingers execute a kind of dance. On summer nights he took me with him to study the sky from the top of a barren hill. I used to fall asleep in a furrow, tired out from counting meteors. He would stay sitting, gazing upward and turning imperceptibly with the stars. He must have known the systems of Philolaus and of Hipparchus, and that of Aristarchus of Samos which was my choice in later years, but these speculations had ceased to interest him. For him the stars were fiery points in the heavens, objects akin to the stones and slow-moving insects from which he also drew portents, constituent parts of a magic universe in which were combined the will of the gods, the influence of demons, and the lot apportioned to men. He had cast my horoscope. One night (I was eleven years old at the time) he came and shook me from my sleep and announced, with the same grumbling laconism that he would have employed to predict a good harvest to his tenants, that I should rule the world. Then, seized with mistrust, he went to fetch a brand from the small fire of root ends kept going to warm us through the colder hours, held it over my hand, and read in my solid, childish palm I know not what confirmation of lines written in the sky. The world for him was all of a piece; a hand served to confirm the stars. His news affected me less than one might think; a child is ready for anything. Later, I imagine, he forgot his own prophecy in that indifference to both present and future which is characteristic of advanced age. They found him one morning in the chestnut woods on the far edge of his domain, dead and already cold, and torn by birds of prey. Before his death he had tried to teach me his art, but with no success; my natural curiosity tended to jump at once to conclusions without burdening itself under the complicated and somewhat repellent details of his science. But the taste for certain dangerous experiments has remained with me, indeed only too much so. My father, Aelius Hadrianus Afer, was a man weighed down by his very virtues. His life was passed in the thankless duties of civil administration; his voice hardly counted in the Senate. Contrary to usual practice, his governorship of the province of Africa had not made him richer. At home, in our Spanish township of Italica, he exhausted himself in the settlement of local disputes.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  I have already mentioned that my titles added virtually nothing to this astonishing certitude; on the contrary, the feeling was confirmed in performing the simplest routines of my function as emperor. If Jupiter is brain to the world, then the man who organizes and presides over human affairs can logically consider himself as a part of that all-governing mind. Humanity, rightly or not, has almost always conceived of its god in terms of Providence; my duties forced me to serve as the incarnation of this Providence for one part of mankind. The more the State increases in size and power, extending its strict, cold links from man to man, the more does human faith aspire to exalt the image of a human protector at the end of this mighty chain. Whether I wished it or not, the Eastern populations of the empire already considered me a god. Even in the West, and even in Rome, where we are not officially declared divine till after death, the instinctive piety of the common people tends more and more to deify us while we are still alive. The Parthians, in gratitude to the Roman who had established and maintained peace, were soon to erect temples in my honor; even at Vologasia, in the very heart of that vast world beyond our frontiers, I had my sanctuary. Far from reading in this adoration a risk of arrogant presumption, or madness, for the man who accepts it, I found therein a restraint, and indeed an obligation to model myself upon something eternal, trying to add to my human capacity some part of supreme wisdom. To be god demands more virtues, all things considered, than to be emperor. I was initiated at Eleusis eighteen months later. In one sense this visit to Osro�s had been a turning point in my life. Instead of going back to Rome I had decided to devote some years to the Greek and Oriental provinces of the empire; Athens was coming more and more to be the center of my thought, and my home. I wished to please the Greeks, and also to Hellenize myself as much as possible, but though my motives for this initiation were in part political, it proved nevertheless to be a religious experience without equal. These ancient rites serve only to symbolize what happens in human life, but the symbol has a deeper purport than the act, explaining each of our motions in terms of celestial mechanism. What is taught at Eleusis must remain secret; it has, besides, the less danger of being divulged in that its nature is ineffable. If formulated, it would result only in commonplaces; therein lies its real profundity.

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

  The romantic elements, even in the eviscerated version of the Acts that has come down to us through Gregory, are unmistakable. The Acts of Andrew were hardly alone. In a freestanding episode in the fifth-century Lausiac History, the Christian adaptation of the romantic repertoire is even more evident. In a “very old book ascribed to Hippolytus,” Palladius found a story about a “certain maiden, most noble and extremely beautiful, in the city of the Corinthians, who was practicing the life of virginity.” In an age of persecution, she was denounced to the governor as a Christian. The “woman-mad” governor had his own designs on her, and he “tried every device [mēchanē ]” but “could not persuade the girl.” He ordered her sentenced to a brothel, where she was subjected to the usual threats. She deflected her suitors with a ruse of her own. “I have this festering sore in a hidden place, which emits the most foul stench, and I fear it will make you hate me. Hold off from me for a few days, then make your use of me, for free.” She prayed. God, seeing her chastity, sent a young man in the employ of the Roman secret service to be the instrument of her salvation. He paid the guard for a night with the girl, went in, and gave her his clothes. She escaped in disguise, “inviolate and unpolluted.” The next day “the drama was known, the agent was seized and thrown to the beasts.” He was a martyr twice over, both for his own sake and for “the blessed girl.”29

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

  THE TWILIGHT OF APOLOGETICSAs Methodius, author of the Christian Symposium, was being tried and martyred at Patara in June of 312, the armies of an ambitious western emperor were marching south through Italy. That emperor, Constantine, had recently experienced a celestial vision that he soon came to understand as a message from the Christian God. By the end of October his troops, with crosses painted on their shields, had destroyed his western rival and left Constantine as the sole ruler of the western provinces. Tolerance for Christianity, and then official favoritism, soon followed. In the aftermath of Constantine’s conversion, a small, increasingly articulate, and highly organized spiritual movement became a powerful institution, and, more gradually, a dominant social ideology in the territories ringing the Mediterranean. Among the most unusual traits of this movement was its core commitment to sexual austerity. The choice to mark out the body and its sexual potential as a domain of moral authenticity was savvy. In the cacophonous, polyglot world of the Roman Empire, the Christian message was unmistakable. Of all the competing religions and philosophies of the late classical world, this one, with its distinctive attitude toward erotic pleasure, prevailed. The anarchic pluralism of the ancient Mediterranean would gradually recede behind the universalizing orthodoxies of that extraordinary institution, the Christian church. The world would be very different if any of the alternatives had become the preferred religion of the emperors. But as it happened, Aphrodite was to be slain by the Christians—toppled “like some debauched slave-girl.”1 The Christians were little prepared for this eventuality. There was, to be sure, a stable and standardized packet of sexual norms carried by the religion wherever it insinuated itself: virginity was ideal, marriage acceptable, sex beyond marriage sinful, same-sex eros categorically forbidden. Beyond this zone of consensus there were peripheral aspects of sexual life where Christian regulation lacked definition and sharpness—the validity of remarriages, the measure of virginity’s superiority, the exact peccability of surplus marital congress. But the main drama of late antiquity was not the gradual resolution of questions outstanding. The main drama, rather, was the absorption of society by the church, the mainstreaming of the religion. The most astonishing development of late antiquity is the transformation of a radical sexual ideology, for centuries the possession of a small, strident band of vociferous dissenters, into a culture, a broadly shared public framework of values and meanings. The Christian vision of sexual humanity, incubated in the radical air of persecution, was forced, unexpectedly, into the mold of a regulatory system. Certainly Paul, who believed that the rulers of this age were “doomed to pass away,” would not have dreamed that his terse missives would become the touchstone of an entire culture.2

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

  Some people, their every movement full of mysterious resonance, are destined to become symbols. This star of the stage who repented and retired among the virgins was to launch a thousand legends. Her story was ready-made for literary adaptation, and not only because of the sheer arc of her conversion. Her legend was born at an opportune moment. She lived in the age of mass conversion, during a generation that saw the ranks of the baptized grow at a startling pace. The waters of baptism flowed over men and women who brought into the church different depths of spiritual commitment. As society trudged listlessly into the Christian church, the entry of the penitent prostitute offered crystalline sharpness. Her story of repentance struck a chord. The female body was a symbol beyond time and circumstance. Across ancient literature, the woman’s body stood as a cipher, capable of expressing the most intensely felt beliefs about the order of the world. The stark opposition between purity and pollution, between honor and shame, was endlessly reworked in the literary imagination. But the transition from one pole to the other, from purity to corruption or vice versa, was almost never compassed, precisely because the woman’s body was an objective correlative for an entire state of being. The passage of a prostitute’s body from prurience to penitence handed Christian authors a figure that not only resonated in an ancient arcade of symbols. Quite inadvertently, the penitent prostitute transcended the very logic of an immemorial symbolic architecture.2

• From The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us (2017)

  The conflict between the Hedgehogs and the Foxes in evolutionary biology continues unabated to this day. In recent decades, adherents of the thoroughly foxy, Darwinian subdisciplines of phylogeny and developmental evolution (a.k.a. evo-devo) have worked to restore their places in an evolutionary biology that has been dominated, indeed hijacked, by adaptationist Hedgehogs. In this book, I have argued that the Darwinian theory of aesthetic evolution should also be restored to evolutionary biology. Each of these Darwinian subdisciplines focuses on diversity itself—the “vast variety” of specific instances—rather than on law-like generalizations of adaptive process. — Darwin concluded The Origin of Species with an inspired and poetic evocation of the “grandeur in this view of life.” Later, in The Descent of Man, he articulated an equally moving grandeur in an aesthetic view of life. It has been my goal to revive Darwin’s theory of aesthetic evolution and to present the full, distinctive richness, complexity, and diversity of this aesthetic view of life. Here, I want to conclude by discussing how an aesthetic view of life can have a positive impact on science, on human culture, and on the development of a newly respectful and productive relationship between them. In many ways, Darwin’s idea that the aesthetic evaluations involved in mate choice among animals constitute an independent evolutionary force in nature is as radical today as it was when he proposed it nearly 150 years ago. Darwin discovered that evolution is not merely about the survival of the fittest but also about charm and sensory delight in individual subjective experience. The implications of this idea for scientists and observers of nature are profound, requiring us to acknowledge that the dawn bird song chorus, the cooperative group displays of the blue Chiroxiphia manakins, the spectacular plumage of the male Great Argus Pheasant, and many other wondrous sights and sounds of the natural world are not merely delightful to us; they are products of a long history of subjective evaluations made by the animals themselves. As Darwin hypothesized, with the evolution of sensory evaluation and choice comes the emergence of a new evolutionary agency—the capacity of individual judgments to drive the evolutionary process itself. Aesthetic evolution means that animals are aesthetic agents who play a role in their own evolution. Of course, this fact would be unsettling to a Wallacean Hedgehog who believes that the power of the idea of natural selection lies in its all sufficiency—its ability to explain everything. However, I am afraid that, to quote another passage from Hamlet, “there are more things in heaven and earth…[t]han are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  The ascent was made by night; just as for Aetna, I took with me only a small number of friends used to climbing. My purpose was not simply to accomplish a propitiatory rite in that very sacred sanctuary; I wished to see from its height the phenomenon of dawn, that daily miracle which I never have contemplated without some secret cry of joy. At the topmost point the sun brightens the copper ornaments of the temple and the faces smile in full light while Asia's plains and the sea are still plunged in darkness; for the briefest moment the man who prays on that peak is sole beneficiary of the morning. Everything was prepared for a sacrifice; we climbed with horses at first, then on foot, along perilous paths bordered with broom and shrubs which we knew at night by their pungent perfumes. The air was heavy; that spring was as burning as summer elsewhere. For the first time while ascending a mountain I had trouble breathing; I was obliged to lean for a moment on the shoulder of my young favorite. We were a hundred steps from the summit when a storm broke which Hermogenes had expected for some time, for he was expert in meteorology. The priests came out to receive us under flashes of lightning; the small band, drenched to the skin, crowded around the altar laid for the sacrifice. Just as it was to take place a thunderbolt burst above us and killed both the victim and the attendant with knife in hand. When the first moment of horror had passed, Hermogenes bent with a physician's curiosity over the stricken pair; Chabrias and the high priest cried out in admiration that the man and fawn thus sacrificed by this divine sword were uniting with the eternity of my Genius; that these lives, by substitution, were prolonging mine. Antinous gripping fast to my arm was trembling, not from terror, as I then supposed, but under the impact of a thought which I was to understand only later on. In his dread of degradation, that is to say, of growing old, he must have promised himself long ago to die at the first sign of decline, or even before. I have come to think now that that promise, which so many of us have made to ourselves but without holding to it, went far back for him, to the period of Nicomedia and the encounter at the edge of the spring. It explained his indolence, his ardor in pleasure, his sadness, and his total indifference to all future. But it was still essential that this departure should have no air of revolt, and should contain no complaint. The lightning of Mount Casius had revealed to him a way out: death could become a last form of service, a final gift, and the only one which seemed left for him to give.

• From The Songs of Bilitis (1894)

  Bilitis regarded the Nymphs with ardent piety. The sacrifices which she offered, nearly every day, were for their fountain. She often speaks of them but it seems that she never saw them, for she reports with so much veneration the accounts of an old man who, one day, had surprised them. The close of her pastoral existence was saddened by a love of which we know little, although she speaks of it at length. She ceased to sing of it when it became unhappy. Having become the mother of a child which she abandoned, Bilitis quitted Pamphylia for unknown reasons and never returned to the place of her birth. We find her again at Mytilene where she went by way of the sea along the fair coasts of Asia. She was then scarcely sixteen years old, according to the conjectures of M. Heim, who established with probability some dates in the life of Bilitis from a verse which alludes to the death of Pittakos. Lesbos was then the centre of the world. On the main road between beautiful Attica and magnificent Lydia, it had for its capital a city more elegant than Athens and more corrupt than Sardis: Mytilene, built upon a peninsula overlooking the shores of Asia. The blue sea encompassed the city. From the height of the temples one could distinguish on the horizon the white line of Atarnea which was the port of Pergamos. The narrow streets were always encumbered by a throng resplendent in many-colored stuffs, tunics of purple and of hyacinth, cyclas of transparent silks, mantles trailing in the dust of the yellow shoes. The women carried in their ears great rings of gold set with raw pearls, and on their arms massive bracelets of silver roughly chiseled in relief. The men themselves wore their hair brilliantly perfumed with rare oils. The Greeks wore sandals with the ends fastened to their bare ankles by large serpents of bright metal, while the Asiatics wore soft, tinted boots. The passers-by stood in groups before the façades of the shops where the goods for sale were on display: rugs of sombre colors, cloths worked with threads of gold, jewels of amber and of ivory, according to the quarter. The animation of Mytilene did not end with the day; there was no hour so late that one could not hear, through the open doors, the joyous sounds of instruments, the cries of women, the noise of dances. Pittakos himself, who wished to give a little order to this perpetual debauch, made a law in defense of players of the flute too young to be employed in the nocturnal festivals; but this law, like all laws that pretend to change the course of natural morals, determined the secrecy but not the observance.

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

  The apocryphal legends are a powerful expression of early Christian sexual morality, the sexual gospel of a minority movement, when the religion and its followers stood apart from mainstream society. The Christian romances reflect a configuration of sexual morality and society in which Christian austerity represented a radical freedom from the demands of the world. The stories of wandering apostles and the eager female adherents who hear the gospel of chastity were produced by the same imagination that reconceived the problem of free will around the capacity to act without encumbrance from fate or from social expectation. This body of early Christian literature adopts, wholesale, the romantic trope of feminine inviolability. But the heroine’s chastity is reoriented toward otherworldly ends rather than the reproduction of life here beneath the moon. There is something flat, compressed, about the presentation of sex in the apocryphal literature. There is a juvenile absolutism about its place in human life. No character wrestles with desire, confronts temptation, or experiences confliction. Sex is a symbol of the world, and all the more simplified by that fact. Only a religious movement that had so completely resolved to live apart from the order of society could package sex as a compact and tractable symptom of ordinary life, with its dull cycles of survival and reproduction, in contrast to the shimmering promises of an invisible order. It was a vision of sex and its pervasive role in life that the Christian authors found, with a wholly opposite purpose, in the contemporary genre of romance.39