Contentment

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 Wild (2012)

  “My name’s Bud,” the man behind the counter said when I asked for a room. He had a hangdog expression and a smoker’s cough. Tan jowls hung off the sides of his wrinkled face. When I told him about hiking the PCT, he insisted on washing my clothes. “I can just throw them in with the sheets and towels, darling. It ain’t nothing at all,” he said when I protested. I went to my room, stripped, and put on my rainpants and raincoat, though it was a hot June day; then I walked back to the office and handed my little pile of dirty clothes shyly over to Bud, thanking him again. “It’s ’cause I like your bracelet. That’s why I offered,” said Bud. I pulled up the sleeve of my raincoat and we looked at it. It was a faded silver cuff, a POW/MIA bracelet my friend Aimee had clamped onto my wrist as we said goodbye on a street in Minneapolis weeks before. “Let me see who you got there.” He reached across the counter and took my wrist and turned it so he could read the words. “William J. Crockett,” he said, and let go. Aimee had done some research and told me who William J. Crockett was: an air force pilot who’d been two months shy of his twenty-sixth birthday when his plane was shot down in Vietnam. She’d worn the bracelet for years without ever taking it off. Since the moment she’d given it to me, neither had I. “I’m a Vietnam vet myself, so I keep my eyes out for that sort of thing. That’s also why I gave you the only room we got that has a tub,” said Bud. “I was there in ’63, when I was barely eighteen. But now I’m against war. All kinds of war. One hundred percent against it. Except in certain cases.” There was a cigarette burning in a plastic ashtray nearby that Bud picked up but didn’t bring to his lips. “So I’m gonna assume you know there’s a lot of snow up there on the Sierra Nevada this year.” “Snow?” I asked. “It’s been a record year. Entirely socked in. There’s a BLM office here in town if you want to call them and ask about conditions,” he said, and took a drag. “I’ll have your clothes ready in an hour or two.” I returned to my room and took a shower and then a bath. Afterwards, I pulled back the bedspread and lay on the bedsheets. My room didn’t have an air conditioner, but I felt cool anyway. I felt better than I’d ever felt in all of my life, now that the trail had taught me how horrible I could feel. I got up, rummaged through my pack, then reclined on the bed and read As I Lay Dying while Bud’s words about the snow thrummed through me.

• From The Confessions of Saint Augustine (354)

  And to Thee is nothing whatsoever evil: yea, not only to Thee, but also to Thy creation as a whole, because there is nothing without, which may break in, and corrupt that order which Thou hast appointed it. But in the parts thereof some things, because unharmonising with other some, are accounted evil: whereas those very things harmonise with others, and are good; and in themselves are good. And all these things which harmonise not together, do yet with the inferior part, which we call Earth, having its own cloudy and windy sky harmonising with it. Far be it then that I should say, “These things should not be”: for should I see nought but these, I should indeed long for the better; but still must even for these alone praise Thee; for that Thou art to be praised, do show from the earth, dragons, and all deeps, fire, hail, snow, ice, and stormy wind, which fulfil Thy word; mountains, and all hills, fruitful trees, and all cedars; beasts, and all cattle, creeping things, and flying fowls; kings of the earth, and all people, princes, and all judges of the earth; young men and maidens, old men and young, praise Thy Name. But when, from heaven, these praise Thee, praise Thee, our God, in the heights all Thy angels, all Thy hosts, sun and moon, all the stars and light, the Heaven of heavens, and the waters that be above the heavens, praise Thy Name; I did not now long for things better, because I conceived of all: and with a sounder judgment I apprehended that the things above were better than these below, but altogether better than those above by themselves. There is no soundness in them, whom aught of Thy creation displeaseth: as neither in me, when much which Thou hast made, displeased me. And because my soul durst not be displeased at my God, it would fain not account that Thine, which displeased it. Hence it had gone into the opinion of two substances, and had no rest, but talked idly. And returning thence, it had made to itself a God, through infinite measures of all space; and thought it to be Thee, and placed it in its heart; and had again become the temple of its own idol, to Thee abominable. But after Thou hadst soothed my head, unknown to me, and closed mine eyes that they should not behold vanity, I ceased somewhat of my former self, and my frenzy was lulled to sleep; and I awoke in Thee, and saw Thee infinite, but in another way, and this sight was not derived from the flesh.

• From Wild (2012)

  I thought about this as I walked into my sixth week on the trail beneath the humid shade of ponderosa pines and Douglas firs. The trail’s gravelly surface was palpable to the soles of my feet through the bottoms of my thin sandals. The muscles of my ankles felt strained without my boots to support them, but at least my sore toes weren’t bumping up against my boots with each step. I hiked until I came to a wooden bridge that spanned a creek. Unable to find a flat spot nearby, I pitched my tent right on the bridge, which was the trail itself, and slept hearing the delicate thunder of the small waterfall beneath me all night long. I woke at first light and hiked in my sandals for a few hours, climbing nearly 1,700 feet while catching an occasional view of Burney Mountain to the south when I emerged from the shade of the fir and pine forests I was passing through. When I stopped to eat lunch, I reluctantly untied my boots from my pack, feeling I had no choice but to put them on. I’d begun to see evidence of what the authors of The Pacific Crest Trail, Volume 1: California had noted in their introduction to the section describing the miles between Burney Falls and Castle Crags. They’d written that the trail in this section was so ill-maintained that it was “little better than cross-country hiking” in places, and though I hadn’t yet seen that, such a warning didn’t bode well for my sandals. Already, they’d begun to give out, their bottoms splitting apart and flapping beneath me with each step, catching small twigs and pebbles as I went. I forced my feet back into my boots and continued on, ignoring the pain as I ascended past an eerie pair of electrical towers that made otherworldly crackling sounds. A few times throughout the day, I saw Bald Mountain and Grizzly Peak to the northwest—dark green and brown mountains covered with smatterings of scraggly windblown trees and bushes—but mostly I walked in a bushy forest, crossing an increasing number of primitive roads cut with the deep treads of tractors. I passed old clear-cuts that were slowly coming back to life, great fields of stumps and roots and small green trees that stood no higher than me, where the trail became untenable in places, difficult to track among the litter of blown-down trees and branches. The trees were the same species as those I’d hiked past often on the trail, but the forest felt different, desultory and somehow darker, in spite of the intermittent expansive views.

• From Little Women (1868)

  It never was a fashionable school, and the Professor did not lay up a fortune, but it was just what Jo intended it to be—'a happy, homelike place for boys, who needed teaching, care, and kindness'. Every room in the big house was soon full. Every little plot in the garden soon had its owner. A regular menagerie appeared in barn and shed, for pet animals were allowed. And three times a day, Jo smiled at her Fritz from the head of a long table lined on either side with rows of happy young faces, which all turned to her with affectionate eyes, confiding words, and grateful hearts, full of love for 'Mother Bhaer'. She had boys enough now, and did not tire of them, though they were not angels, by any means, and some of them caused both Professor and Professorin much trouble and anxiety. But her faith in the good spot which exists in the heart of the naughtiest, sauciest, most tantalizing little ragamuffin gave her patience, skill, and in time success, for no mortal boy could hold out long with Father Bhaer shining on him as benevolently as the sun, and Mother Bhaer forgiving him seventy times seven. Very precious to Jo was the friendship of the lads, their penitent sniffs and whispers after wrongdoing, their droll or touching little confidences, their pleasant enthusiasms, hopes, and plans, even their misfortunes, for they only endeared them to her all the more. There were slow boys and bashful boys, feeble boys and riotous boys, boys that lisped and boys that stuttered, one or two lame ones, and a merry little quadroon, who could not be taken in elsewhere, but who was welcome to the 'Bhaer-garten', though some people predicted that his admission would ruin the school. Yes, Jo was a very happy woman there, in spite of hard work, much anxiety, and a perpetual racket. She enjoyed it heartily and found the applause of her boys more satisfying than any praise of the world, for now she told no stories except to her flock of enthusiastic believers and admirers. As the years went on, two little lads of her own came to increase her happiness—Rob, named for Grandpa, and Teddy, a happy-go-lucky baby, who seemed to have inherited his papa's sunshiny temper as well as his mother's lively spirit. How they ever grew up alive in that whirlpool of boys was a mystery to their grandma and aunts, but they flourished like dandelions in spring, and their rough nurses loved and served them well. There were a great many holidays at Plumfield, and one of the most delightful was the yearly apple-picking. For then the Marches, Laurences, Brookes and Bhaers turned out in full force and made a day of it. Five years after Jo's wedding, one of these fruitful festivals occurred, a mellow October day,

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Thus Athanasius first appears as archdeacon of Alexandria at the council of Nice, clothed with important influence; and upon the death of the latter he succeeds to the patriarchal chair of Alexandria. The office of Deaconess, which, under the strict separation of the sexes in ancient times, and especially in Greece, was necessary to the completion of the diaconate, and which originated in the apostolic age,466 continued in the Eastern church down to the twelfth century. It was frequently occupied by the widows of clergymen or the wives of bishops, who were obliged to demit the married state before entering upon their sacred office. Its functions were the care of the female poor, sick, and imprisoned, assisting in the baptism of adult women, and, in the country churches of the East, perhaps also of the West, the preparation of women for baptism by private instruction.467 Formerly, from regard to the apostolic precept in 1 Tim. v. 9, the deaconesses were required to be sixty years of age.468 The general council of Chalcedon, however, in 451, reduced the canonical age to forty years, and in the fifteenth canon ordered: "No female shall be consecrated deaconess before she is forty years old, and not then without careful probation. If, however, after having received consecration, and having been some time in the service, she marry, despising the grace of God, she with her husband shall be anathematized." The usual ordination prayer in the consecration of deaconesses, according to the Apostolic Constitutions, runs thus: "Eternal God, Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, Creator of man and woman, who didst fill Miriam and Deborah and Hannah and Huldah with the Spirit, and didst not disdain to suffer thine only- begotten Son to be born of a woman; who also in the tabernacle and the temple didst appoint women keepers of thine holy gates: look down now upon this thine handmaid, who is designated to the office of deacon, and grant her the Holy Ghost, and cleanse her from all filthiness of the flesh and of the spirit, that she may worthily execute the work intrusted to her, to thine honor and to the praise of thine Anointed; to whom with thee and the Holy Ghost be honor and adoration forever. Amen."469 The noblest type of an apostolic deaconess, which has come down to us from this period, is Olympias, the friend of Chrysostom, and the recipient of seventeen beautiful epistles from him.470 She sprang from a respectable heathen family, but received a Christian education; was beautiful and wealthy; married in her seventeenth year (A.D. 384) the prefect of Constantinople, Nebridius; but in twenty months after was left a widow, and remained so in spite of the efforts of the emperor Theodosius to unite her with one of his own kindred. She became a deaconess; lived in rigid asceticism; devoted her goods to the poor; and found her greatest pleasure in doing good.

• From Get Out of Your Head: Stopping the Cycle of Anxious Thoughts (2020)

  Complacency rewrites that script entirely. The Allure of Complacency Complacency is finding comfort in mediocrity, in accepting things as they are, clinging to the status quo. It’s behind our tendency to check out, to zone out, to numb. If our highest aim in life is simply not rocking the boat, then why not eat the whole pizza, drink the whole bottle of wine, finish off the half-gallon tub of ice cream, play Candy Crush for three hours straight, or stay in bed all day? The questions driving our thought patterns are no longer How will God use me today? and How can I give Jesus to someone? Instead, we’re focused on… What do I want? What do I need? How will I get what I want and need? What do I feel like doing? What will make me happier? What will make me more comfortable? What will make me look good? What will make me sound smart? What will protect me from getting hurt or from taking all the blame? What will make me feel content? That’s the question around which all the others revolve. I imagine few things bring the devil greater satisfaction than our comfort-seeking ways. We present no threat to him when we’re wholly preoccupied with the things of this world. As theologian and emeritus professor D. A. Carson has observed, People do not drift toward holiness. Apart from grace-driven effort, people do not gravitate toward godliness, prayer, obedience to Scripture, faith, and delight in the Lord. We drift toward compromise and call it tolerance; we drift toward disobedience and call it freedom; we drift toward superstition and call it faith. We cherish the indiscipline of lost self-control and call it relaxation; we slouch toward prayerlessness and delude ourselves into thinking we have escaped legalism; we slide toward godlessness and convince ourselves we have been liberated.1 The apostle Paul gives us the weapon of truth that frees us from the velvet-covered chains of complacency: “Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth.”2 Why? Because as those who have been buried in Christ and raised in faith, we have already died to the things of this world. Our real life is bound up with Christ. My husband always says that the definition of leadership is “taking initiative for the good of others.” When we reject passivity and lean into the needs around us, we see our minds set on the things of God. God is never passive. God is always working for our good and His glory. LIE : I can do whatever I want. TRUTH : God has set me free to serve others, not indulge myself.

• From Get Out of Your Head: Stopping the Cycle of Anxious Thoughts (2020)

  He was excited about them. As Zac tucked him in tonight, out of the blue Cooper said, “Dad, I didn’t want to get the shoes all the cool kids have. I feel like Jesus wouldn’t want me to wear shoes that say ‘Look at me.’ I can still be cool with these. Not super cool, but cool enough.” Oh, that you and I would align our thoughts not so our lives would say “Look at me” but so everything about us would declare “Look at You, Jesus!” My prayer for myself—and also for you—is that we’d be utterly dependent on God. That we’d seek Him and find Him and learn from Him and lean into Him, that we’d be in this world as Jesus Himself was. That we’d accept every invitation into humility, prizing others’ needs above our own. That we wouldn’t despise that which will grow us up by reminding us to bow lower, and lower still. “Every Christian virtually passes through these two stages in his pursuit of humility,” said our good friend Andrew Murray. In the first he fears and flees and seeks deliverance from all that can humble him…. He prays for humility, at times very earnestly; but in his secret heart he prays more, if not in word, then in wish, to be kept from the very things that will make him humble…. It has not yet become his joy and only pleasure. He cannot yet say, “Most gladly do I glory in weakness, I take pleasure in whatever humbles me.” But can we hope to reach the stage in which this will be the case? Undoubtedly. And what will it be that brings us there? That which brought Paul there—a new revelation of the Lord Jesus. 18 To “take pleasure in whatever humbles me.” Man. Such a lofty goal. Such a freed-up way of thinking about our circumstances and the people around us. “Father, help me choose the pleasure of humility today.” It’s a place to start. [image file=Image00046.jpg] 13 Not Overcome I Choose to Be Grateful My good friend Brooke was disillusioned and frustrated. She had a college degree and believed there had to be something that suited her skills better than a job on her feet all day, working retail.

• From Talk Dirty to Me: An Intimate Philosophy of Sex (1994)

  My own healthy appreciation for the power of sex to drive behavior means that one way I read this precept is to examine that drive. Of all aspects of human experience, sex is the one that most resists containment. Sex dovetails and invades many parts of our lives. Can you draw a line and say, “This is sex, and this is not sex”? We all struggle to step out of our own point of view far enough to grasp the point of view of another. To step far enough out that we realize each of us feels normal to ourselves; this is a way of meeting ourselves. To come to terms with what exactly is at work in our own psyche is a useful task, because sexual identity and conduct never exist in a vacuum. Like every other part of ourselves, our sexual self is changing and impermanent. To think of one’s self as being this or that from now on may not lead to happiness. Prepare for surprise. A lot has changed in my body in twenty years, and I still fret now and then about my thoughts. But I don’t worry much about sex anymore. It just is there—sometimes close and sometimes far away. There’s mine, and there’s yours, and I don’t worry too much about yours. Sex is just being human. I have always been struck by one trope of pornography that seems to succinctly expose something crucial about sex. How often someone cries out yes—like Molly Bloom, urgent, they cry yes, yes yes! What is that yes? We have all cried out yes—or no—or please. Such a cry is a question, an answer, a wish, a declaration, a dream. You don’t have to have sex at all to discover that yes in your body and in your life. It is the yes of the world. I [image file=image_rsrc10C.jpg] Desire1We talk about sex all the time, we moderns. We see sex all the time—raw, explicit images everywhere we look. There is “sex” in the media and “sex” in our culture; we argue over “sex education” and discuss our “sexual disorders.” But “sex” always seemed less concrete than this to me, more disobedient. Sex troubled me—troubled me in proportion to how much I tried over the years to separate sex from the rest of my life, to manage and define it, to speak of sex as something that began, ended, lived separately from me. Sex demanded my close attention even when I would have preferred to attend to almost anything else.

• From Talk Dirty to Me: An Intimate Philosophy of Sex (1994)

  So I’m a woman, and I hope to stay that way. I like almost everything about womanhood. And I’m raising a daughter, and though I don’t know who she’ll turn out to be, I’m obliged to attempt a sometimes ticklish transition of knowledge. I can hardly define womanhood for myself, but I must teach it to her. After raising two sons, my relationship to her feels ontologically easy, a fetal unfolding into the self, at one and the same time that it feels difficult and important. (At least with my boys, I knew what I thought men should be. One of the ways I teach my daughter to be female is to talk to her about what it seems to mean to be male.) I give womanhood to my daughter by showing her how I am a woman—and I don’t always know how to be one, and occasionally wonder how well I’m doing. I used to think I was beyond caring what gender my children were, that I’d treat them each the same, be as close to one as to the other. I was kidding myself. I may not necessarily be closer to my daughter just because she’s a girl, but there is between us a particular comfort. What would change between us if she turned out to be that rare thing, that “apparent” girl who becomes a boy? Or decides, as a woman, to become a man? Would she still be—herself? We are all, or almost all, either male or female, more or less masculine or feminine, more or less heterosexual or homosexual. But of course nothing of the sort is true; sex makes mincemeat of rigid definitions. Binary biological systems are based in reproduction and the exchange of genetic material, which works well enough for orchids, raccoons, and black widow spiders. But the binary system breaks down utterly on the rocks of human desire. Everything from homosexuality to a rubber fetish to masturbation deny reproduction as the penultimate sexual motive. Funny how most biologists squirm when confronted with pleasure. It has no utility, they say, no determining importance; therefore all these sexual aberrations must somehow be explained by physical or psychological malfunctions. Some of us might argue that pleasure is utility, that human pleasure is part of evolution in the first place. It’s certainly a potent manipulator of behavior, and behavior influences nature, so why can’t the pursuit of pleasure ultimately affect the evolution of the race? The human organism has had tens of thousands of years to play around in. Maybe romance is just another of DNA’s little tricks, but that still doesn’t explain masturbation.

• From The Argonauts (2015)

  I didn’t have a real or fake animal, and so I just sweated as we went around the room. When it got to me, I burped out otter. Which was a form of true. It was important to me back then to feel, to be wily. To feel small, slick, quick, amphibious, dexterous, capable. I didn’t know then Barthes’s book The Neutral, but if I had, it would have been my anthem—the Neutral being that which, in the face of dogmatism, the menacing pressure to take sides, offers novel responses: to flee, to escape, to demur, to shift or refuse terms, to disengage, to turn away. The otter was thus a complex sort of stand-in, or fake-out, another identity I felt sure I could shimmy out of. But whatever I am, or have since become, I know now that slipperiness isn’t all of it. I know now that a studied evasiveness has its own limitations, its own ways of inhibiting certain forms of happiness and pleasure. The pleasure of abiding. The pleasure of insistence, of persistence. The pleasure of obligation, the pleasure of dependency. The pleasures of ordinary devotion. The pleasure of recognizing that one may have to undergo the same realizations, write the same notes in the margin, return to the same themes in one’s work, relearn the same emotional truths, write the same book over and over again—not because one is stupid or obstinate or incapable of change, but because such revisitations constitute a life. “Many people doing all kinds of work are able to take pleasure in aspects of their work,” Sedgwick once wrote, “but something different happens when the pleasure is not only taken but openly displayed. I like to make that different thing happen.” One happy thing that can happen, according to Sedgwick, is that pleasure becomes accretive as well as autotelic: the more it’s felt and displayed, the more proliferative, the more possible, the more habitual, it becomes.

• From Another Country (1962)

  They rose and left Benno’s and walked west to Harold’s pad. He lived in a narrow dark street near the river, on the top floor. The climb was discouraging, but the apartment was clean and not too disordered—it was not at all the kind of apartment one would have expected Harold to have—with carpets on the floor and burlap covering the windows. There was a hi-fi set, and records; and science-fiction magazines lay scattered about. Vivaldo flopped down on the narrow couch against the wall, in a kind of alcove formed by two bookcases. Belle sat on the floor near the window. Lorenzo went to the john, then to the kitchen, and returned with a quart bottle of beer. “You forgot to bring glasses,” Belle told him. “So who needs glasses? We’re all friends.” But he obediently returned to the kitchen. Harold, meanwhile, like a meticulous and scientific host, was busily preparing the weed. He seated himself at the coffee table, near Vivaldo, and placed on a sheet of newspaper tweezers, cigarettes, cigarette papers, and a Bull Durham sack full of pot. “It’s great stuff,” he told Vivaldo, “chick brought it in from Mexico only yesterday. And, baby, this shit travels well!” Vivaldo laughed. Lorenzo returned with the glasses and looked worriedly over at Vivaldo. “You feeling all right?” “I feel fine. Just quiet. You know.” “Groovy.” He set a glass of beer carefully on the floor near Vivaldo, and poured a glass for Harold. “He’s going to feel just swinging,” said Harold, as happy and busy as bees, “just as soon as he connects with old Mother Harold’s special recessed filter-tips. Baby! Are you going to wail!” Lorenzo poured a glass of beer for Belle, and set the bottle on the floor beside her. “How about some sides?” “Go, baby.” Vivaldo closed his eyes, feeling an anticipatory languor and lewdness. Lorenzo put on something at once bell-like and doleful, by the Modern Jazz Quartet. “Here.” He looked up. Harold stood above him with a glowing stick. He sat up, smiling vaguely, and carefully picked up his beer from the floor before taking the stick from Harold. Harold watched him, smiling intensely, as he took a long, shaky drag. He took a swallow of his beer and gave the stick back. Harold inhaled deeply and expertly, and rubbed his chest. “Come on over to the window,” Belle called. Her voice sounded high and pleased, like a child’s. And, exactly as though he were responding to a child, Vivaldo, though he preferred to remain alone on the sofa, walked over to the window. Harold followed him. Belle and Lorenzo sat on the floor, sharing a stick between them, and staring out at the New York rooftops. “It’s strange,” Belle said. “It’s so ugly by day and so beautiful at night.” “Let’s go up on the roof,” said Lorenzo. “Oh! What a groovy idea!”

• From Talk Dirty to Me: An Intimate Philosophy of Sex (1994)

  When we were high school students, Terry was befriended by Linda, our biology teacher. She remained a friend of Terry’s long after Terry graduated, and after his surgery, they married. When I went to see Terry and Linda not long ago, they showed me around their split-level and told me about their five long-term foster children, none of whom they’ve been allowed to adopt because of Terry’s background. Terry and I flipped through yearbooks, gossiped about old friends, listened to old music. He looks almost the same. He is almost as she was, but for the unmistakable male-pattern baldness and a few crow’s-feet around his pale eyes. If anything is missing, it is tension; if anything is new, it is his peace. No one knows the origin of the transsexual’s plight. There are cases of transsexual brothers and sisters who become sisters and brothers, of husbands and wives who have switched genders and become wives and husbands. The biology and sociology literatures both tend to claim social factors are stronger than any biological ones, a somewhat silly claim given that no one knows if there are biological factors at work, let alone social ones. A lot of these theories of causation are suspiciously similar to traditional ideas about how men “become gay” as children—domineering mother, weak or absent father, and so on. They rely on the psychoanalytical standards that began with Eve. That most transsexuals are men who want to become women (MTF, or male-to-female) is perhaps the most commn stereotype about transsexualism. There is a dearth of information in the professional literature regarding women who become men (FTM, female-to-male), although according to current research, at least a quarter of all transsexuals are FTM and the ratio is increasing.

• From Wild (2012)

  The good thing, I quickly understood, was that no matter what happened in those 334 miles, there would be fresh berries along the way. Huckleberries and blueberries, salmonberries and blackberries, all of them plump for the picking for miles along the trail. I raked the bushes with my hands as I walked, sometimes stopping to fill my hat, as I made my way leisurely through the Mount Thielsen and Diamond Peak Wildernesses. It was cold. It was hot. The tree-bark-plucked-dead-chicken flesh on my hips grew another layer. My feet stopped bleeding and blistering, but they still hurt like hell. I hiked a few half days, going only seven or eight miles in an effort to alleviate the pain, but it did little good. They hurt deep. Sometimes as I walked, it felt like they were actually broken, like they belonged in casts instead of boots. Like I’d done something profound and irreversible to them by carrying all this weight over so many miles of punishing terrain. This, and yet I was stronger than ever. Even with that tremendous pack of mine, I was capable of hammering out the big miles now, though at day’s end I was still pretty much shattered. The PCT had gotten easier for me, but that was different from it getting easy. There were pleasant mornings and lovely swaths of afternoon, ten-mile stretches that I’d glide right over while barely feeling a thing. I loved getting lost in the rhythm of my steps and the click of my ski pole against the trail; the silence and the songs and sentences in my head. I loved the mountains and the rocks and the deer and rabbits that bolted off into the trees and the beetles and frogs that scrambled across the trail. But there would always come the point in each day when I didn’t love it anymore, when it was monotonous and hard and my mind shifted into a primal gear that was void of anything but forward motion and I walked until walking became unbearable, until I believed I couldn’t walk even one more step, and I stopped and made camp and efficiently did all the tasks that making camp required, all in an effort to get as quickly as possible to the blessed moment when I could collapse, utterly demolished, in my tent.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  During the periods when I have full Fold-powers, however, these difficulties are easily solved. As soon as I hear an “Arno, hi!” I can do a Drop and check wallet or purse ID and then greet whoever it is properly. It makes such a difference. I don’t feel cringey and can lose myself in the pleasure of the reunion: for I really do like most of the people I have worked with over the years; almost all of them have some lovable feature. And if someone asks me how to get to a place that I should know perfectly well how to get to and don’t, I can freeze his inquiring expression and check a map. (I carry one in my briefcase, as well as my old bottle of contact-lens solution, in case someone finds herself in ocular distress.) Of course, I could pull out the map while he looks on, but I hate to see that shifty, clouded look come into his eyes as he thinks to himself, This guy doesn’t have a clue—I should have asked one of the others. Also, when I pull out a map to help a tourist, especially an Asian tourist, I inevitably end up giving it to him, because impulsive generosity is such a high—and those maps are ridiculously expensive. I’m not being quite fair to myself, then, when I say that the Fold is just a sexual aid. It is primarily that—my Fold-energies seem to be a direct by-product of my appetite for nakedness. I doubt that I would have wormed my way into the Fermata even once if I had not been motivated primarily by the desire to take women’s clothes off. But I don’t want to ignore or depreciate the range of nonsexual uses that I have put it to. I have, for example, relied on it for things like last-minute Christmas shopping; it’s nice to browse in utter silence. When I’m irritable at work, and I know that the people around me don’t deserve my misanthropy, I can stop them all until I’m fond of them again. If someone makes a revealing comment in passing, I can take time out to think about its hidden implications and check the expressions of others who have heard it, all while I’m right there and it is fresh in my mind.

• From The Erotic Engine (2011)

  “If we were to assume that the people who were doing it can’t get laid in real life and that’s why they are there, because it’s their only sexual outlet, well then celebrate it,” she said. “Even if we are to go with that conceit, isn’t that a lovely, lovely thing that they can find an outlet for their sexuality in a safe environment?” Regardless what one thinks of netsex, there is no denying its technological impact. All it takes is to accept conceptually that a significant number of people have adopted emerging technologies so as to forge powerful new forms of sexual and emotional intimacy. Childerhose’s story is both telling and typical. The Internet, virtual worlds and sexuality formed a virtuous circle—each fed into the other and spurred development, innovation and creativity. Bandwidth and processor speed increased. Computer graphics improved. Crashes became less frequent. Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau developed the World Wide Web in 1990, making it easier for people who weren’t computer programmers to make sense of the Internet. The first graphic browsers were developed in the early nineties, though they took some time to spread. The more arcane Internet applications, such as telnet (used to log on to another computer remotely through the Internet), FTP (a means of moving large electronic files from one computer to another) and of course Usenet, donned user-friendly disguises. Point-and-click, plug-and-play and WYSIWYG became household words. You no longer had to do battle with the technology in order to do basic computing and navigation of the Internet. And at every step along the way, sex and pornography were creating a constant demand for faster, cheaper and easier tools, driving us to the age of instantaneous gratification and graphic detail we enjoy today. One of the other major forces spurring innovation was the games industry itself. When people were not engaging in erotic chat in virtual worlds, they actually were interested in racing, shooting, questing and puzzle solving. Video games make greater demands on computer technology than almost any other medium. They too create demand for better video cards, faster Internet connections and so on. They are a driving force of technological improvement to be sure, but in the early stages, they still paled beside erotica’s influence. Brenda Brathwaite said that the games industry alone, though “would not have been able to push broadband out as fast because there was simply not country-wide demand for it. But pornography, there is country-wide demand for that. I really think that massively multi-player online games are able to use the amount of graphics that we can use, in part because pornography paved the way.” PART THREE The Modern Pornography Industry [image file=image_rsrc1FT.jpg] TWELVE [image file=image_rsrc1FU.jpg] The Commercialization of the InternetAs more and more people found reasons to go online, the Internet approached a critical juncture. The vast majority of usage was still sexual in nature, but the medium was starting to show signs of making it big in the mainstream.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  The scanner stood in the middle of a large empty room. It was an enormous white edifice, like a very thick wall, with a large hole running through it into which patients were slid on a gantry. Something was making a great deal of fairly unpleasant noise. I removed my gown and lay down on the pad. A dummy computer keyboard was placed on my stomach and I was slid headfirst into the bore of the superconducting magnet. “Can you hear me, Arno?” I heard Dr. Orowitz-Rudman say through the intercom. I said that I could. “Good. Give us a few minutes to get things set in here before you start. Are you comfortable?” “I am. It’s very vaginal in here, doctor, in a smooth-muscle sort of way. Is the magnet on?” “Yes, it’s always on,” she said. “I expected to feel claustrophobic, but oddly, I’m not. There was this guy in college … excuse me—I’ll shut up while you get set up.” “No, go on,” said Dr. Orowitz-Rudman. “The technicians are getting set up—I’m just observing at this point.” “What is all this tiresome noise?” I asked. “That’s the coolant. The magnet has to be kept very cool, and the coolant has to be pumped around.” “I see. Well, there was this guy in college—” There was this guy in college, I said, who used to mime inserting one finger in a woman’s vadge, then two, then four, saying, “Yeah, baby. Really? More?” Then the whole hand would go in, then his arm up to the elbow, then up to the shoulder; then he would slide his other arm in, still saying, “More? You sure, baby? Okay.” He would place his head at the opening of the imaginary vadge and strainingly push up, turning his face, and suddenly his grimacing head would slide in alongside his arms, and finally he would squirm as much of his body into the vaginal canal as he could fit. “I feel a little like I’ve just done that,” I explained. “I’m in this huge electrovagnet. It isn’t womblike,” I babblingly hastened to qualify. “It’s purely vaginal.” “Interesting,” I heard Dr. Orowitz-Rudman say absently. She hadn’t been listening. She said something I couldn’t catch to one of her associates, then I heard her say, “We are? Okay.” Then she addressed me in her pleasant Susan Stamberg voice: “All right, Arno. First we’re going to get you to use the keyboard a little bit. I’m going to read you a sentence, and you type it. Ready?” I said I was ready. “ ‘The cure …’ ” she read. I typed. “Okay.” “ ‘… for the greatest part …’ ” I typed. “Got it.” “ ‘… of human miseries …’ ” I typed. “Okay.” “ ‘… is not radical …’ ” “Yep.” “ ‘… but palliative.’ Period. Good. Thanks. That’s our baseline sentence. Now, Arno, I want you to go ahead and use the keyboard for about five minutes to warm up the nerve.”

• From The Fermata (1994)

  No thoughts of unclothed women disturbed my awareness; and it was not so late in the sunny season that lightweight, mothlike hopping creatures were liable to land annoyingly on my legs; I felt only how lucky I was that after a little rooting around, a little trial and error, the groundward side of my face was able to find, within immediate neck-flex range, as it always eventually did find, a conjunction of several sod-humps or dolmens that cradled my cheekbone fairly comfortably through the insulation of the sun-warmed towel. As when I took a seat in the older-style dentist’s chairs and discovered that the weight of my entire head was to be supported by two swiveling occipital cups that determined exactly how far back I would have to slide my ass, so my location on the lawn now became with this satisfactory cheekbone settlement suddenly unarbitrary: I was home, my eyes closed, breathing easily because of the recent shower, still damp here and there not yet with perspiration but with cleanliness, and able to hear, if I concentrated, pressing my headbones deep into Fieldcrest’s plush-blurred pattern, the lonely toils of a beetle or a grub somewhere very near my ear, chewing and pushing on some futile mission in the thatch. Was the weight of my head making life more difficult for the grub? Was there a grub there at all, or was it only the sound of the untenanted thatch itself adjusting to my weight? I couldn’t know, but I was sorry if I was causing trouble for any living thing. I plucked a few blades of grass with my fingers; I heard the muffled sounds of the breakage transmitted through the underreaching rhizomes. I felt calm, thoughtful, at rest—serenely unproductive.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  And it was brave and friendly of Joyce to compliment me that way about my glasses. I always melt instantly when I’m praised for features about which I have private doubts. I first got glasses in the summer after fourth grade. (Incidentally, fourth grade is also the year I first dropped into the Fold—my temporal powers have always been linked in a way I don’t pretend to understand with my sense of sight.) I wore them steadily until about two years ago, when I decided that I should at least try contact lenses. Maybe everything would be different if I got contacts. So I did get them, and I enjoyed the rituals of caring for them—caring for this pair of demanding twins that had to be bathed and changed constantly. I liked squirting the salt water on them, and holding one of them in an aqueous bead on the tip of my finger and admiring its Saarinenesque upcurve, and when I folded it in half and rubbed its slightly slimy surface against itself to break up the protein deposits, I often remembered the satisfactions of making omelets in Teflon fry-pans. But though as a hobby they were rewarding, though I was as excited in opening the centrifugal spin-cleaning machine I ordered for them as I would have been if I had bought an automatic bread baker or a new kind of sexual utensil, they interfered with my appreciation of the world. I could see things through them, but I wasn’t pleased to look at things. The bandwidth of my optical processors was being flooded with “there is an intruder on your eyeball” messages, so that a lot of the incidental visual haul from my retina was simply not able to get through. I wasn’t enjoying the sights you were obviously meant to enjoy, as when you walked around a park on a windy day watching people’s briefcases get blown around on their arms.

• From The Erotic Engine (2011)

  Stag films were essentially a local industry due to the cumbersome nature of the technology. Peeps and VCRs made adult movies a national concern, with some cross-border trade. The Internet opened up a truly global market with producers, distributors and especially customers in every country on the planet. The international pornography market was a reminder that the language of love is not actually universal. Michael Kaplan’s company, Trigeminal Software, specializes in internationalizing and localizing software and other media, so that people around the world do not have to learn English in order to enjoy the full range of contemporary utilities and entertainment. His clients have included software giants like Microsoft and Adobe, as well as many adult film companies. His work in subtitling and captioning means his market also includes people who are hearing impaired. “It’s a very rich area because the technology is slowly coming along,” Kaplan said. “I’ve found it’s being driven much faster by the adult industry than by mainstream. Honestly, people seem to put up with a lot more outside of the adult industry: things don’t work as well, languages aren’t supported as well, whereas in the adult films people just want stuff to work. They don’t want to have to think about it.” Some of the challenges are the same for any subtitling, adult or otherwise. Subtitles need to be easily readable without obscuring the images. You can’t put white text against a white background. Because reading is slower than listening, some information will be lost in the subtitling process. There is also the challenge of ensuring that the closed-captioning (which is in the same language as the film and is aimed at the hearing impaired) does not interfere with the subtitling (which is in a different language from the film and is aimed at foreign speakers). Kaplan says the innovations that the adult industry are driving are not so much aimed at improving the sophistication of subtitles and captions as they are at making the process cheaper and easier. The most expensive part of subtitling is the manual effort that goes into placement and colour adjustment on the screen—there is an art to adapting text to the content without creating a jarring reading experience for viewers. Kaplan’s company is developing better ways to automate this process, reducing the overall costs of adding subtitles to a film. Porn distributors, he says, “want to be able to sell their movies anywhere. They don’t want language to be the blocker. Maybe they don’t speak Hindi or Japanese or Romanian, but the words should be there so they don’t have to think about them. So if it’s easy and it’s cheap, then it’s, ‘Yeah we want to add it to our movie.’” The cheap and easy innovations created for the pornography industry will of course make it simpler for mainstream movies to follow suit and access similar global markets.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  “Just give us another second to tune the gate-and-correlate software. You see,” she explained, “we have to be able to stay fixed on precisely the same cross-section of one tiny region in your arm, no matter how fast you move or how you turn, which is no easy task. We do it with the help of an entirely separate optical tracking system. The optical system, by the way, incorporates some hardware that was originally developed by Martin Marietta for one of the Defense Department’s target recognition programs. It does two hundred and fifty compares a second, which is very fast—it should be fast enough for this application.” “So I wouldn’t be here naked, doing this, if it weren’t for the Department of Defense?” I said. “There you go. Who says military research doesn’t have humanitarian payoffs?” “Bear with us for just a little longer, Arno,” said Dr. Orowitz-Rudman. I gave my richard a couple of maintenance strokes every fifteen seconds or so. Finally I heard her say, “Okay, we’re set. You may start actual masturbation at any time.” “Okay, I’m starting,” I said. “I’m back to the Kokomo grip. It doesn’t feel all that great yet—I’m doing it because I know it will feel good very shortly. There is some definite tingling-action in my fingers. I’ll give you a play-by-play. This is great to be allowed to jerk off in a fucking mega-magnet like this. I just know I’m going to be a different person after I come in this big-mama magnet. Focus it right on my big dick. Pardon my language: if you want me to talk while I do it, I’m going to have to talk dirty. You know what it reminds me of? Zardoz. Zardoz is a movie with Sean Connery. These superior beings bring Connery into their ship, and the woman superior being who is in charge of researching him tries to find out what makes his heart beat faster. They project various sexual images on a screen in the spaceship to see how he will react—a pair of breasts being soaped up, for example. His brain-wave levels remain utterly calm and unmoved. And then Connery looks straight at her, at the woman researcher, and instantly the EEG oscilloscopes start hopping and beeping right off the chart. So it’s the superior being who gets him wild. Now, it seems a little implausible to me that the soaped-up breasts would do nothing at all for Connery—they certainly did something for me when I saw this movie back in the seventies. I haven’t seen it since and yet I remember it as the finest footage of soaped-up breasts I’ve ever seen, partly because it was so teasingly quick.” “Arno—the pain in your arm,” said Dr. Orowitz-Rudman. “What is its status?”