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 The Confessions of Saint Augustine (354)

  But that heaven of heavens was for Thyself, O Lord; but the earth which Thou gavest to the sons of men, to be seen and felt, was not such as we now see and feel. For it was invisible, without form, and there was a deep, upon which there was no light; or, darkness was above the deep, that is, more than in the deep. Because this deep of waters, visible now, hath even in his depths, a light proper for its nature; perceivable in whatever degree unto the fishes, and creeping things in the bottom of it. But that whole deep was almost nothing, because hitherto it was altogether without form; yet there was already that which could be formed. For Thou, Lord, madest the world of a matter without form, which out of nothing, Thou madest next to nothing, thereof to make those great things, which we sons of men wonder at. For very wonderful is this corporeal heaven; of which firmament between water and water, the second day, after the creation of light, Thou saidst, Let it be made, and it was made. Which firmament Thou calledst heaven; the heaven, that is, to this earth and sea, which Thou madest the third day, by giving a visible figure to the formless matter, which Thou madest before all days. For already hadst Thou made both an heaven, before all days; but that was the heaven of this heaven; because In the beginning Thou hadst made heaven and earth. But this same earth which Thou madest was formless matter, because it was invisible and without form, and darkness was upon the deep, of which invisible earth and without form, of which formlessness, of which almost nothing, Thou mightest make all these things of which this changeable world consists, but subsists not; whose very changeableness appears therein, that times can be observed and numbered in it. For times are made by the alterations of things, while the figures, the matter whereof is the invisible earth aforesaid, are varied and turned. And therefore the Spirit, the Teacher of Thy servant, when It recounts Thee to have In the Beginning created heaven and earth, speaks nothing of times, nothing of days. For verily that heaven of heavens which Thou createdst in the Beginning, is some intellectual creature, which, although no ways coeternal unto Thee, the Trinity, yet partaketh of Thy eternity, and doth through the sweetness of that most happy contemplation of Thyself, strongly restrain its own changeableness; and without any fall since its first creation, cleaving close unto Thee, is placed beyond all the rolling vicissitude of times. Yea, neither is this very formlessness of the earth, invisible, and without form, numbered among the days. For where no figure nor order is, there does nothing come, or go; and where this is not, there plainly are no days, nor any vicissitude of spaces of times.

• From Worried about Everything Because I Pray about Nothing (2022)

  But if your idea of safety is a god you can keep on a leash, then no, Jesus is not safe, any more than taking a lion on a walk would be. And prayer isn’t either. In prayer, we interact with the untamed and untamable God who created the universe, who sent Jesus to die in our place, who can and does do miracles, who knows us better than we know ourselves, and who has absolutely no problem getting all up in our business. In this chapter, I want to look at a few prayers that I call dangerous prayers. These are prayers such as commitment, surrender, dedication, repentance, transparency, and prayer for your enemies. They are dangerous because they will take you places you might not have anticipated—but you won’t regret them. Prayer isn’t safe. But it is good. 1. NOT MY WILL, BUT YOURS. Remember that iconic line in The Princess Bride that Wesley would repeat to the princess: “As you wish”? The last time he said the phrase, it was more like, “AS YOU WIIIIIIIIIISH,” because Wesley was shouting it while he tumbled down a hillside into the fire swamp. This was the climactic moment where the princess realized her true love had returned. And she had pushed him off a cliff. True love hurts, apparently. True love also surrenders itself to another. Not in a toxic, blind, codependent way, but in a faithful way. A covenant way. A trusting way. It says, “As you wish,” as part of a mutual surrender. God wants us to surrender to Him this way. Why? Because He’s a despot? Some celestial tyrant bent on control? No. Because He loves us, and we love Him. This is a mutual surrender, in a sense—God has already promised to be with us, to care for us, to listen to us, to respond to us. He has chosen to link himself to us, which is a crazy thought. We are in a committed relationship, and if that relationship is going to survive fire swamps, rodents of unusual size, and the ups and downs of regular life, there needs to be trust. Surrender means giving up control or ownership of something. If you have ever prayed the Lord’s Prayer (in the last chapter, for example), then you’ve asked God, “Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” That is surrender, at least in a general sense. Surrender, however, needs to be a lot more personal than just a blanket prayer for an entire planet. It involves asking God to do His will in the practical, day-to-day decisions you make—finances, marriage, career, character, friendships. It is a surrender motivated by love and trust. Jesus prayed this way.

• From The Confessions of Saint Augustine (354)

  Nor dost Thou by time, precede time: else shouldest Thou not precede all times. But Thou precedest all things past, by the sublimity of an ever-present eternity; and surpassest all future because they are future, and when they come, they shall be past; but Thou art the Same, and Thy years fail not. Thy years neither come nor go; whereas ours both come and go, that they all may come. Thy years stand together, because they do stand; nor are departing thrust out by coming years, for they pass not away; but ours shall all be, when they shall no more be. Thy years are one day; and Thy day is not daily, but To-day, seeing Thy To-day gives not place unto to-morrow, for neither doth it replace yesterday. Thy To-day, is Eternity; therefore didst Thou beget The Coeternal, to whom Thou saidst, This day have I begotten Thee. Thou hast made all things; and before all times Thou art: neither in any time was time not. At no time then hadst Thou not made any thing, because time itself Thou madest. And no times are coeternal with Thee, because Thou abidest; but if they abode, they should not be times. For what is time? Who can readily and briefly explain this? Who can even in thought comprehend it, so as to utter a word about it? But what in discourse do we mention more familiarly and knowingly, than time? And, we understand, when we speak of it; we understand also, when we hear it spoken of by another. What then is time? If no one asks me, I know: if I wish to explain it to one that asketh, I know not: yet I say boldly that I know, that if nothing passed away, time past were not; and if nothing were coming, a time to come were not; and if nothing were, time present were not. Those two times then, past and to come, how are they, seeing the past now is not, and that to come is not yet? But the present, should it always be present, and never pass into time past, verily it should not be time, but eternity. If time present (if it is to be time) only cometh into existence, because it passeth into time past, how can we say that either this is, whose cause of being is, that it shall not be; so, namely, that we cannot truly say that time is, but because it is tending not to be?

• From The Chronology of Water (2011)

  I believe in art the way other people believe in god. I say that because books and paintings and music and photography gave me an alternate world to inhabit when the one I was born into was a dead zone. I say it because if you, even inside whatever terror itches your skin, pick up a pen or a paintbrush, a camera or clay or a guitar, you already have what you are afraid to choose. Volition. It was already in you. Just be that-what moves inside you. It’s already there, waiting: Hush for the line Crouched like the touch of dreams in your fingertips She is coming with a vengeance. Copyright ©2010 Lidia Yuknavitch Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hawthorne Books & Literary Arts All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and-retrieval systems, without prior permission in writing from the Publisher, except for brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. Yuknavitch, Lidia. The chronology of water : a memoir / Lidia Yuknavitch. p. cm. eISBN : 978-0-983-30490-6 1. Yuknavitch, Lidia. I. Title PS3575.U35Z46 2011 813’.546 - DC22 [B] 2010041860 9 2201 Northeast 23rd Avenue 8 3rd Floor 7 Portland, Oregon 97212 6 hawthornebooks.com 5 Form: 4 Adam McIsaac, Bklyn, NY 3 2 d_r0 [image file=image_rsrc26B.jpg]

• From Worried about Everything Because I Pray about Nothing (2022)

  God’s greatest delight is to be with you and me, with us, His children. And we have a need hardwired into our soul to be with Him. Amid the worries and the hustle of life, we sometimes forget the healing power of simply being with God. When we sense His closeness, everything changes. Our fears fade away, our minds clear, our hearts become calm. THE FELT PRESENCE OF GOD The idea of God’s presence is found throughout the Bible. God is, of course always present. He’s omnipresent, meaning He is everywhere, all the time. Paul, writing about Jesus, says, “He is before all things, and in him all things hold together” (Colossians 1:17). God is the life-force that keeps the universe humming. On a more personal level, the author of Hebrews, speaking for God, says, “Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you” (13:5). God doesn’t just hold all of creation together; He holds us in His arms. He remains with us no matter what. God’s presence in the universe and in our lives never changes. But there is another element of His presence that we find in the Bible and in our walk with Him. It’s His “felt presence,” for lack of a better term. It’s that sudden, unexplainable, thrilling awareness that He is, quite literally, in the room. You can’t explain it. It might include emotion, but it’s deeper than any human feeling. It might cause goosebumps or tears or laugher, but it’s more than superficial reactions. It might be specific words or thoughts that drop into your heart, but it goes beyond mere imagination. You just know that God showed up. And His presence changes everything. Prayer facilitates this felt presence of God. It opens your mind and spirit to receive from God. I’m not saying you’ll have some dramatic experience every time you pray, but you’ll often feel or sense something. You should expect it, look for it, and welcome it. Don’t make experience the goal of prayer, but don’t reduce prayer to a mental exercise either. Prayer is both an act of faith and an experience. It is both words and emotions. It is both talking and listening. It is mind and spirit and will and body together, experiencing God in a tangible way. God can show up whenever and however He wants. He loves to interact with us. He wants to be found by us. As He told Israel, “You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart” (Jeremiah 29:13). He’s here with us all the time, after all, and He loves us deeply—doesn’t it make sense that He would want to reveal himself to us? Speak to us? Comfort us? Lead us?

• From Worried about Everything Because I Pray about Nothing (2022)

  Moses conversed with God in front of a burning bush and again on a mountaintop. (Exodus 3–4; 33) Israel experienced God’s presence in a pillar of fire and cloud. (Exodus 13:21–22) Deborah received marching orders from God and delivered Israel. (Judges 4–5) Solomon consecrated the temple and God’s glory filled it. (2 Chronicles 5–7) Elijah heard God’s voice as a whisper while he was hiding in a cave. (1 Kings 19:12–13) Daniel was accompanied by an angel, who shut the mouth of lions. (Daniel 6:22) Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego were joined by God in the fiery furnace. (Daniel 3) Mary was visited by an angel announcing the birth of Jesus. (Luke 1:26–38) Peter, James, and John saw Jesus transfigured and glorious on a mountain. (Matthew 17:1–2) Mary Magdalene encountered Jesus in a garden the morning of the resurrection. (John 20) Paul was knocked to the ground and his life changed on the way to Jerusalem. (Acts 9) John had a series of apocalyptic dreams that reveal God’s ultimate victory. (Revelation) I could go on, but you get the picture. God has a long history of visiting humanity in very creative ways. And He hasn’t stopped. Apparently, He likes being with us. CHOOSING WHAT IS BETTER In the chaos and craziness and pain and pressure of life, prayer helps us slow down. It creates a space for us to listen to God’s voice. One day, Jesus stopped by the house of two sisters named Mary and Martha. This is probably the same Mary and Martha whose brother Lazarus was later raised from the dead by Jesus. Luke tells us that Mary “sat at the Lord’s feet listening to what he said” (10:39). Martha, on the other hand, was “distracted by all the preparations that had to be made” (verse 40). Martha needed help in the kitchen, and she expected Mary to do her part. I can imagine Martha gesturing to Mary when Jesus wasn’t watching. Coughing and sighing loudly from the kitchen. Whispering menacingly into Mary’s ear. Dropping passive-aggressive hints every time she hurried in with another bowl of snacks about “how hot it is in the kitchen” and “how much work there is left to do.” Mary blissfully ignored her. At some point, Martha couldn’t take it anymore, and she lost it. She complained to Jesus: “Lord, don’t you care that my sister has left me to do the work by myself? Tell her to help me!” (verse 40). Gently but firmly, Jesus refused. “Martha, Martha,” the Lord answered, “you are worried and upset about many things, but few things are needed—or indeed only one. Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her” (verses 41–42). Notice the two postures contrasted here: sitting versus serving . Sitting at a teacher’s feet was the customary place of a disciple.

• From The Lives of Great Christians (2007)

  G. Although some monks live in large monasteries, others live in groups of small houses of two or three monks, while still others live as hermits. 1. There is no equivalent in the East to the Rule of St. Benedict. 2. There is a greater variety of lifestyles—or, as we might better say, monastic vocations—in the East than in the West. V. The most important and influential idea to come from the Athonite monks is that of hesychasm, a form of mystical prayer. A. Although its origins predate the monastic communities, we associate hesychasm primarily with monks. B. Hesychasm was the quest for spiritual ascent to God. 1. One of the most common hesychast practices is the repetition of the Jesus Prayer: “Lord Jesus, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” 2. Some hesychasts also use physical positions and even rhythmic breathing as part of their spiritual exercises. 3. This form of prayer is largely a matter of stripping away or leaving behind what the senses record in order to bask in the uncreated light of God. 4. The most widely used texts for those who practice hesychasm are found in a collection called the Philokalia, written beginning in the 4 th century. C. In the 14th century, a Western-trained abbot in Constantinople condemned hesychasm. 1. He objected to certain theological presuppositions of hesychasm. 2. Being trained in Scholastic thought, he believed that knowledge of God came from more intellectual activity. D. The great defender of hesychasm was the 14th-century monk of Mount Athos, St. Gregory Palamas. 1. Two councils held in Constantinople ultimately gave official sanction to hesychasm, which remains an important element of the Orthodox faith today. 2. This way of prayer to God is best known today in the West through The Way of the Pilgrim, the writing of an anonymous 19th-century Russian monk. ©2007 The Teaching Company. 88 Essential Reading: Graham Speake, Mount Athos: Renewal in Paradise. Supplementary Reading: Gregory Palamas, The Triads. Basil Pennington, The Monks of Mount Athos: A Western Monk’s Extraordinary Spiritual Journey on Eastern Holy Ground. Questions to Consider: 1. Why would anyone today leave the world in such a radical way in order to seek God as a monk on Mount Athos? 2. Is monastic life an escape from the world and its problems or a beacon of light and hope to Christians who live thoroughly “in the world”? 3. Can people not living the monastic life benefit from the kinds of prayer developed and written about by the monks of Mount Athos? ©2007 The Teaching Company. 89 Lecture Twenty Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Maximilian Kolbe

• From Wild (2012)

  I walked east along a lush green corridor, the roadbed of the long-abandoned Columbia River Highway, which had been made into a trail. I could see patches of concrete in places, but the road had mostly been reclaimed by the moss that grew along the rocks at the road’s edge, the trees that hung heavy and low over it, the spiders who’d spun webs that crossed its expanse. I walked through the spiderwebs, feeling them like magic on my face, pulling them out of my hair. I could hear but not see the rush of automobiles on the interstate to my left, which ran between the river and me, the ordinary sound of them, a great whooshing whine and hum. When I emerged from the forest, I was in Cascade Locks, which unlike so many towns on the trail was an actual town, with a population of a little more than a thousand. It was Friday morning and I could feel the Friday morningness emanating from the houses I passed. I walked beneath the freeway and wended my way along the streets with my ski pole clicking against the pavement, my heart racing when the bridge came into view. It’s an elegant steel truss cantilever, named for a natural bridge that was formed by a major landslide approximately three hundred years ago that had temporarily dammed the Columbia River. The local Native Americans had called it the Bridge of the Gods. The human-made structure that took its name spans the Columbia for a little more than a third of a mile, connecting Oregon to Washington, the towns of Cascade Locks and Stevenson on either side. There’s a tollbooth on the Oregon side and when I reached it the woman who worked inside told me I could cross the bridge, no charge. “I’m not crossing,” I said. “I only want to touch it.” I walked along the shoulder of the road until I reached the concrete stanchion of the bridge, put my hand on it, and looked down at the Columbia River flowing beneath me. It’s the largest river in the Pacific Northwest and the fourth largest in the nation. Native Americans have lived on the river for thousands of years, sustained by its once-bountiful salmon for most of them. Meriwether Lewis and William Clark had paddled down the Columbia in dugout canoes on their famous expedition in 1805. One hundred and ninety years later, two days before my twenty-seventh birthday, here I was. I had arrived. I’d done it. It seemed like such a small thing and such a tremendous thing at once, like a secret I’d always tell myself, though I didn’t know the meaning of it just yet. I stood there for several minutes, cars and trucks going past me, feeling like I’d cry, though I didn’t.

• From Justine (Alexandria Quartet vol. 1) (1957)

  But here at least in the oasis one had the illusion of a beatitude which eluded one in town life. We rose early and worked on the chapel until the heat of the day began, when Nessim retired to his business papers in the little observatory and Justine and I rode down the feathery dunes to the sea to spend our time in swimming and talking. About a mile from the oasis the sea had pushed up a great coarse roundel of sand which formed a shallow-water lagoon beside which, tucked into the pectoral curve of a dune, stood a reed hut roofed with leaves, which offered the bather shade and a changing-place. Here we spent most of the day together. The news of Pursewarden’s death was still fresh, I remember, and we discussed him with a warmth and awe, as if for the first time we were seriously trying to evaluate a character whose qualities had masked its real nature. It was as if in dying he had cast off from his earthly character, and taken on some of the grandiose proportions of his own writings, which swam more and more into view as the memory of the man itself faded. Death provided a new critical referent, and a new mental stature to the tiresome, brilliant, ineffectual and often tedious man with whom we had had to cope. He was only to be seen now through the distorting mirror of anecdote or the dusty spectrum of memory. Later I was to hear people ask whether Pursewarden had been tall or short, whether he had worn a moustache or not: and these simple memories were the hardest to recover and to be sure of. Some who had known him well said his eyes had been green, others that they had been brown.… It was amazing how quickly the human image was dissolving into the mythical image he had created of himself in his trilogy God is a Humorist. Here, in these days of blinding sunlight, we talked of him like people anxious to capture and fix the human memory before it quite shaded into the growing myth; we talked of him, confirming and denying and comparing, like secret agents rehearsing a cover story, for after all the fallible human being had belonged to us, the myth belonged to the world. It was now too that I learned of him saying, one night to Justine, as they watched Melissa dance: ‘If I thought there were any hope of success I would propose marriage to her tomorrow. But she is so ignorant and her mind is so deformed by poverty and bad luck that she would refuse out of incredulity.’ But step by step behind us Nessim followed with his fears. One day I found the word ‘Beware’ [image file=image_rsrc1AU.jpg] written in the sand with a stick at the bathing-place. The Greek word suggested the hand of Panayotis but Selim also knew Greek well.

• From The Chronology of Water (2011)

  I thought, this is how writing is supposed to be. I thought, man oh man, she’s good. I thought, I want that. Literally. I wanted that chapter. See the protocol at workshop is that we bring in pages, hand them out, read them out loud, and then go around the table for comments. After that, we collect the pages, which by then are theoretically covered with highly useful notes. Work does not leave the room. We never take home anyone’s pages. They don’t let scientists take home uranium in their pockets after a day at Los Alamos. That’s the deal. But I wanted that chapter. I wanted to take it home so I could read it again and again. I’d never felt like that about anyone else’s work, ever. I considered stealing it. I could pretend to put it in the stack as the pages were collected, but then palm it off the table onto my lap and slip it onto the floor into my open purse. I didn’t want to ask her for it. She already thought we were all perverts, the way we kept checking out her chest. I decided to play it cool. We went around the table, all of us giving feedback, happy, exhausted, delighted that she didn’t suck. I tried not to blather, counting on the fact that there would be more, more writing, more Lidia. It worked. She came back. The next week. Amazing! She workshopped that book, and this memoir. And the more I’ve learned about her, the more in awe I am. To start, she isn’t really from Texas. She just went to college there, which is a totally different thing. She does have nice knockers. For the other stuff, you’ll have to read the book. I’m just looking forward to getting a copy I can keep. Tell all the Truth but tell it slant - - EMILY DICKINSON Happiness? Happiness makes crappy stories. - KEN KESEY Here lies one whose name was writ in water. -JOHN KEATS I. Holding Breath The Chronology of Water THE DAY MY DAUGHTER WAS STILLBORN, AFTER I HELD the future pink and rose-lipped in my shivering arms, lifeless tender, covering her face in tears and kisses, after they handed my dead girl to my sister who kissed her, then to my first husband who kissed her, then to my mother who could not bear to hold her, then out of the hospital room door, tiny lifeless swaddled thing, the nurse gave me tranquilizers and a soap and sponge. She guided me to a special shower. The shower had a chair and the spray came down lightly, warm. She said, That feels good, doesn’t it. The water. She said, you are still bleeding quite a bit. Just let it. Ripped from vagina to rectum, sewn closed. Falling water on a body.

• From Justine (Alexandria Quartet vol. 1) (1957)

  He walked slowly down through the arches towards them. The marble stones were barred with moonlight and shadow like a zebra. They were sitting on a marble sarcophagus-lid while somewhere in the remorseless darkness of the outer court someone was walking up and down on the springy turf lazily whistling a phrase from an aria of Donizetti. The gold cigales at Justine’s ears transformed her at once into a projection from one of his dreams and indeed he saw them both dressed vaguely in robes carved heavily of moonlight. Balthazar in a voice tortured by the paradox which lies at the heart of all religion was saying: ‘Of course in one sense even to preach the gospel is evil. This is one of the absurdities of human logic. At least it is not the gospel but the preaching which involves us with the powers of darkness. That is why the Cabal is so good for us; it posits nothing beyond a science of Right Attention.’ They had made room for him on their marble perch but here again, before he could reach them the fulcrum of his vision was disturbed and other scenes gravely intervened, disregarding congruence and period, disregarding historic time and common probability. He saw so clearly the shrine the infantry built to Aphrodite of the Pigeons on that desolate alluvial coast. They were hungry. The march had driven them all to extremities, sharpening the vision of death which inhabits the soldier’s soul until it shone before them with an unbearable exactness and magnificence. Baggage-animals dying for lack of fodder and men for lack of water. They dared not pause at the poisoned spring and wells. The wild asses, loitering so exasperatingly just out of bowshot, maddened them with the promise of meat they would never secure as the column evolved across the sparse vegetation of that thorny coast. They were supposed to be marching upon the city despite the omens. The infantry marched in undress though they knew it to be madness. Their weapons followed them in carts which were always lagging. The column left behind it the sour smell of unwashed bodies — sweat and the stale of oxen: Macedonian slingers-of-the-line farting like goats.

• From Wild (2012)

  We played it while planting and maintaining a garden that would sustain us through the winter in soil that had been left to its own devices throughout millennia, and while making steady progress on the construction of the house we were building on the other side of our property and hoped to complete by summer’s end. We were swarmed by mosquitoes as we worked, but my mother forbade us to use DEET or any other such brain-destroying, earth-polluting, future-progeny-harming chemical. Instead, she instructed us to slather our bodies with pennyroyal or peppermint oil. In the evenings, we would make a game of counting the bites on our bodies by candlelight. The numbers would be seventy-nine, eighty-six, one hundred and three. “You’ll thank me for this someday,” my mother always said when my siblings and I complained about all the things we no longer had. We’d never lived in luxury or even like those in the middle class, but we had lived among the comforts of the modern age. There had always been a television in our house, not to mention a flushable toilet and a tap where you could get yourself a glass of water. In our new life as pioneers, even meeting the simplest needs often involved a grueling litany of tasks, rigorous and full of boondoggle. Our kitchen was a Coleman camp stove, a fire ring, an old-fashioned icebox Eddie built that depended on actual ice to keep things even mildly cool, a detached sink propped against an outside wall of the shack, and a bucket of water with a lid on it. Each component demanded just slightly less than it gave, needing to be tended and maintained, filled and unfilled, hauled and dumped, pumped and primed and stoked and monitored. Karen and I shared a bed on a lofted platform built so close to the ceiling we could just barely sit up. Leif slept a few feet away on his own smaller platform, and our mother was in a bed on the floor below, joined by Eddie on the weekends. Every night we talked one another to sleep, slumber-party style. There was a skylight window in the ceiling that ran the length of the platform bed I shared with Karen, its transparent pane only a few feet from our faces. Each night the black sky and the bright stars were my stunning companions; occasionally I’d see their beauty and solemnity so plainly that I’d realize in a piercing way that my mother was right. That someday I would be grateful and that in fact I was grateful now, that I felt something growing in me that was strong and real. It was the thing that had grown in me that I’d remember years later, when my life became unmoored by sorrow. The thing that would make me believe that hiking the Pacific Crest Trail was my way back to the person I used to be.

• From Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection (2013)

  A second cue is the frequency with which you each use open and friendly hand gestures to refer to each other, like your outstretched palm. (Hostile hand gestures, like pointing or finger-wagging, are by definition excluded from this category of gestures.) A third cue is how often you each lean in toward each other, literally bringing your hearts closer together. The fourth cue is how often you each nod your head, a sign that you affirm and accept each other. Taken together, these four nonverbal cues—smiles, gestures, leans, and nods—both emanate from a person’s inner experiences of love and are read by others as love. Love, displayed in this way, also matters. It has force. It forecasts not only the social support people feel in their relationships but also how they deliver direct criticism, which (as I describe in a later section) has been found to predict the long-term stability of loving relationships. These four nonverbal gestures are thus a dependable and consequential sign of love. Other nonverbal gestures can also reveal love—literally if the timing is right. For instance, when people come together and connect, their actions often come into sync, so that their hand movements and facial expressions mirror each other to a certain degree. Spontaneously synchronized gestures like these can make two separate individuals come to look like one well-orchestrated unit. This phenomenon extends beyond pairs: Just as birds migrate in flocks and fish swim in schools, large groups of people at times spontaneously move in synchronized ways. You can begin to appreciate how a football game or a concert can trigger positivity resonance on a grand scale. Through intense synchronized cheers, chants, marches, or dance, these and other ways of keeping in time together forge deep feelings of group solidarity—even throughout an entire arena. I experienced this powerfully when I attended my first major college football game, late in August 1995, in one of the world’s largest outdoor stadiums, the University of Michigan’s beloved “Big House,” which seats more than one hundred thousand. I was new to the University of Michigan faculty and not a sports fan of any sort. Even so, a colleague of mine urged my husband and me to attend the opening game of the football season, because “that’s what we do here.” So we went, not expecting anything in particular. The game—the Pigskin Classic against the University of Virginia and debut for new head coach Lloyd Carr—turned out to be one for the record books. Although Michigan had been favored, well into the fourth quarter, the Virginia Cavaliers had the Wolverines shut out at 0–17.

• From The Confessions of Saint Augustine (354)

  And Thou, O God, sawest every thing that Thou hadst made, and, behold, it was very good. Yea we also see the same, and behold, all things are very good. Of the several kinds of Thy works, when Thou hadst said “let them be,” and they were, Thou sawest each that it was good. Seven times have I counted it to be written, that Thou sawest that that which Thou madest was good: and this is the eighth, that Thou sawest every thing that Thou hadst made, and, behold, it was not only good, but also very good, as being now altogether. For severally, they were only good; but altogether, both good, and very good. All beautiful bodies express the same; by reason that a body consisting of members all beautiful, is far more beautiful than the same members by themselves are, by whose well-ordered blending the whole is perfected; notwithstanding that the members severally be also beautiful. And I looked narrowly to find, whether seven, or eight times Thou sawest that Thy works were good, when they pleased Thee; but in Thy seeing I found no times, whereby I might understand that Thou sawest so often, what Thou madest. And I said, “Lord, is not this Thy Scripture true, since Thou art true, and being Truth, hast set it forth? why then dost Thou say unto me, ‘that in Thy seeing there be no times’; whereas this Thy Scripture tells me, that what Thou madest each day, Thou sawest that it was good: and when I counted them, I found how often.” Unto this Thou answerest me, for Thou art my God, and with a strong voice tellest Thy servant in his inner ear, breaking through my deafness and crying, “O man, that which My Scripture saith, I say: and yet doth that speak in time; but time has no relation to My Word; because My Word exists in equal eternity with Myself. So the things which ye see through My Spirit, I see; like as what ye speak by My Spirit, I speak. And so when ye see those things in time, I see them not in time; as when ye speak in time, I speak them not in time.”

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  He smiles and points his finger. “I know that look of yours; you squeeze your eyes, I know, it’s like you have a question mark on your forehead.” “A big question mark,” I say, amused. “I’m glad that you didn’t miss it.” “Let me tell you what happened,” he explains. “I was riding my bike here and suddenly I heard people screaming and running away from something. I came closer and saw a big guy hitting another, smaller guy. I thought he was going to kill him. And then suddenly the big guy grabbed the smaller one and held a knife to his throat. It all happened fast. It looked like they were fighting over a parking spot and it got out of control. I didn’t think and just jumped right in to try to help.” I keep silent. “It’s my instinct, you know what I mean?” Ben is trying to explain. “People shouldn’t fight like that; it’s crazy. I came toward the big guy and said, ‘Man, give me the knife, you don’t want to kill someone over a parking spot, believe me, I’m helping you here, give me the knife.’ The guy dropped the knife and I quickly stood between them and told the smaller guy, ‘Get right into your car. Now!’ That guy knew I had saved his life and he ran to the car and drove away as fast as he could. ‘Stay safe,’ I said to the bigger guy and got on my bike and left. I’m sorry I was late.” I take a deep breath. “That’s a good excuse, what can I tell you?” I say, half joking but in fact very serious. “It’s hard to argue with a dramatic incident like that. I can see that something made you go right in and not back off. You said this hadn’t happened to you for years. Is it possible that it happened now because it is somehow related to getting closer to something emotional here, in therapy? Is it related to us ‘getting there’?” Ben doesn’t look surprised or even irritated by my questions. He nods. “I think you are right. I went there because I was looking for something. ” I don’t fully know yet what we are talking about, but I understand that Ben needs to get closer to some unprocessed emotional experience filled with aggression, danger, maybe even murder. “I needed to get in touch with something that I’d rather forget,” he says, “but it’s haunting me. During the last few nights, I’ve woken up frightened. Suddenly, I’m having flashbacks.” I look at him and realize that there is still much I don’t know about his army operations. Ben covers his face. I see him thinking, and then he says, “You were right, Doctor, I remember you once telling me that pride is our enemy.

• From Justine (Alexandria Quartet vol. 1) (1957)

  These are the moments which possess the writer, not the lover, and which live on perpetually. One can return to them time and time again in memory, or use them as a fund upon which to build the part of one’s life which is writing. One can debauch them with words, but one cannot spoil them. In this context too, I recover another such moment, lying beside a sleeping woman in a cheap room near the mosque. In that early spring dawn, with its dense dew, sketched upon the silence which engulfs a whole city before the birds awaken it, I caught the sweet voice of the blind muezzin from the mosque reciting the Ebed — a voice hanging like a hair in the palm-cooled upper airs of Alexandria. ‘I praise the perfection of God, the Forever existing’ (this repeated thrice, ever more slowly, in a high sweet register). ‘The perfection of God, the Desired, the Existing, the Single, the Supreme: the perfection of God, the One, the Sole: the perfection of Him who taketh unto himself no male or female partner, nor any like Him, nor any that is disobedient, nor any deputy, equal or offspring. His perfection be extolled.’ The great prayer wound its way into my sleepy consciousness like a serpent, coil after shining coil of words — the voice of the muezzin sinking from register to register of gravity — until the whole morning seemed dense with its marvellous healing powers, the intimations of a grace undeserved and unexpected, impregnating that shabby room where Melissa lay, breathing as lightly as a gull, rocked upon the oceanic splendours of a language she would never know. * * * * * Of Justine who can pretend that she did not have her stupid side? The cult of pleasure, small vanities, concern for the good opinion of her inferiors, arrogance. She could be tiresomely exigent when she chose. Yes. Yes. But all these weeds are watered by money. I will say only that in many things she thought as a man, while in her actions she enjoyed some of the free vertical independence of the masculine outlook. Our intimacy was of a strange mental order. Quite early on I discovered that she could mind-read in an unerring fashion. Ideas came to us simultaneously. I remember once being made aware that she was sharing in her mind a thought which had just presented itself to mine, namely: ‘This intimacy should go no further, for we have already exhausted all its possibilities in our respective imaginations: and what we shall end by discovering, behind the darkly woven colours of sensuality, will be a friendship so profound that we shall become bondsmen forever.’ It was, if you like, the flirtation of minds prematurely exhausted by experience which seemed so much more dangerous than a love founded in sexual attraction.

• From Justine (Alexandria Quartet vol. 1) (1957)

  Capitally, what is this city of ours? What is resumed in the word Alexandria? In a flash my mind’s eye shows me a thousand dust-tormented streets. Flies and beggars own it today — and those who enjoy an intermediate existence between either. Five races, five languages, a dozen creeds: five fleets turning through their greasy reflections behind the harbour bar. But there are more than five sexes and only demotic Greek seems to distinguish among them. The sexual provender which lies to hand is staggering in its variety and profusion. You would never mistake it for a happy place. The symbolic lovers of the free Hellenic world are replaced here by something different, something subtly androgynous, inverted upon itself. The Orient cannot rejoice in the sweet anarchy of the body — for it has outstripped the body. I remember Nessim once saying — I think he was quoting — that Alexandria was the great winepress of love; those who emerged from it were the sick men, the solitaries, the prophets — I mean all who have been deeply wounded in their sex. * * * * * Notes for landscape-tones.… Long sequences of tempera. Light filtered through the essence of lemons. An air full of brick-dust — sweet-smelling brick-dust and the odour of hot pavements slaked with water. Light damp clouds, earth-bound yet seldom bringing rain. Upon this squirt dust-red, dust-green, chalk-mauve and watered crimson-lake. In summer the sea-damp lightly varnished the air. Everything lay under a coat of gum. And then in autumn the dry, palpitant air, harsh with static electricity, inflaming the body through its light clothing. The flesh coming alive, trying the bars of its prison. A drunken whore walks in a dark street at night, shedding snatches of song like petals. Was it in this that Anthony heard the heart-numbing strains of the great music which persuaded him to surrender for ever to the city he loved? The sulking bodies of the young begin to hunt for a fellow nakedness, and in those little cafés where Balthazar went so often with the old poet of the city,* the boys stir uneasily at their backgammon under the petrol-lamps: disturbed by this dry desert wind — so unromantic, so unconfiding — stir, and turn to watch every stranger. They struggle for breath and in every summer kiss they can detect the taste of quicklime.… * * * * *

• From Less (2017)

  As the van rounds the corner of an agave grove, he is aware of an enormous structure, with the sun pulsing behind it and striping it in shadows of green and indigo: the Temple of the Sun. “It is not the Temple of the Sun,” Fernando informs him. “That is what the Aztecs thought it was. It is most probably the Temple of the Rain. But we know almost nothing about the people who built it. The site was long abandoned by the time the Aztecs came through. We believe they burned their own city to the ground.” A cold blue silhouette of a long-lost civilization. They spend the morning climbing the two massive pyramids, the Temple of the Sun and the Temple of the Moon, walking the Avenue of the Dead (“It is not the Avenue of the Dead, really,” Fernando informs him, “and it is not the Temple of the Moon”), imagining all of it covered in painted stucco, miles and miles, every wall and floor and roof in the ancient city that once held hundreds of thousands of people, about whom literally nothing is known. Not even their names. Less imagines a priest covered in peacock feathers walking down the steps as in an MGM musical, or a drag show, arms spread wide, as music plays from conch shells all around and Marian Brownburn, standing at the top, holds the beating heart of Arthur Less. “They chose this spot, we think, because it was far from the volcano that destroyed villages in ancient times. That volcano there,” Fernando said, pointing to a peak barely visible in the morning haze. “Is it still active, that volcano?” “No,” Fernando says sadly, shaking his head. “It is closed.” What was it like to live with genius? Like living alone. Like living alone with a tiger.

• From Justine (Alexandria Quartet vol. 1) (1957)

  ‘We were still almost a couple of hours’ steaming distance before land could possibly come into sight when suddenly my companion shouted and pointed at the horizon. We saw, inverted in the sky, a full-scale mirage of the city, luminous and trembling, as if painted on dusty silk: yet in the nicest detail. From memory I could clearly make out its features, Ras El Tin Palace, the Nebi Daniel Mosque and so forth. The whole representation was as breath-taking as a masterpiece painted in fresh dew. It hung there in the sky for a considerable time, perhaps twenty-five minutes, before melting slowly into the horizon mist. An hour later, the real city appeared, swelling from a smudge to the size of its mirage.’ [image file=image_rsrc1AY.jpg] The two or three winters we have spent in this island have been lonely ones — dour and windswept winters and hot summers. Luckily, the child is too young to feel as I do the need for books, for conversation. She is happy and active. Now in the spring come the long calms, the tideless, scentless days of premonition. The sea tames itself and becomes attentive. Soon the cicadas will bring in their crackling music, background to the shepherd’s dry flute among the rocks. The scrambling tortoise and the lizard are our only companions. I should explain that our only regular visitant from the outside world is the Smyrna packet which once a week crosses the headland to the south, always at the same hour, at the same speed, just after dusk. In winter, the high seas and winds make it invisible, but now — I sit and wait for it. You hear at first only the faint drumming of engines. Then the creature slides round the cape, cutting its line of silk froth in the sea, brightly lit up in the moth-soft darkness of the Aegean night — condensed, but without outlines, like a cloud of fireflies moving. It travels fast, and disappears all too soon round the next headland, leaving behind it perhaps only the half-uttered fragment of a popular song, or the skin of a tangerine which I will find next day, washed up on the long pebbled beach where I bathe with the child.

• From Wild (2012)

  When I tossed the peach pit, I saw that I was surrounded by hundreds of azaleas in a dozen shades of pink and pale orange, a few of their petals blowing off in the breeze. They seemed to be a gift to me, like the peach, and Kyle singing “Red River Valley.” As difficult and maddening as the trail could be, there was hardly a day that passed that didn’t offer up some form of what was called trail magic in the PCT vernacular—the unexpected and sweet happenings that stand out in stark relief to the challenges of the trail. Before I stood to put Monster on, I heard footsteps and turned. There was a deer walking toward me on the trail, seemingly unaware of my presence. I made a small sound, so as not to startle her, but instead of bolting away she only stopped and looked at me, sniffing in my direction before slowly continuing toward me. With each step, she paused to assess whether she should continue forward, and each time she did, coming closer and closer until she was only ten feet away. Her face was calm and curious, her nose extending as far as it dared in my direction. I sat still, watching her, not feeling even a little bit afraid, as I’d been weeks before when the fox had stood to study me in the snow. “It’s okay,” I whispered to the deer, not knowing what I was going to say until I said it: “You’re safe in this world.” When I spoke, it was as if a spell had been broken. The deer lost all interest in me, though she still didn’t run. She only lifted her head and stepped away, picking through the azaleas with her delicate hooves, nibbling on plants as she went. I hiked alone the next few days, up and down and up again, over Etna Summit and into the Marble Mountains on the long hot slog to Seiad Valley, past lakes where I was compelled by mosquitoes to slather myself in DEET for the first time on my trip and into the paths of day hikers who gave me reports about the wildfires that were raging to the west, though still not encroaching on the PCT.