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 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?”

• From The Fermata (1994)

  All right, I think that is enough for now. I’ve been in the Fold for, let’s see, almost four hours and written eight single-spaced pages, and the problem is that if I stay in too long I’ll have jet lag tomorrow, since according to my inner clock it will be four hours later than it is. Usually I don’t spend nearly this long in a Drop. I am going to put Joyce’s clothes back in order and smooth out her dress (I would never have tied a knot in it if she wore a cotton dress, because the wrinkles would show up too much and puzzle her) and I’m going to scoot back to my desk and finish out the day. The good thing is that if she brings me a tape to do later this afternoon, I will be much more relaxed and therefore likable than if I hadn’t partially stripped her without her knowledge or consent. I will jest knowingly and winningly with her. I will compliment her on today’s scarf—which isn’t, honestly, quite as nice as the Cyrillic one. (Maybe when she was getting dressed this morning she put on this knit dress and then remembered that I had admired her scarf, and maybe she thought that wearing it again as well would be too direct a Yes from her; but then again maybe the reason she was wearing the dress, this soon again was that she had liked my complimenting her on her scarf and wanted to allude to that compliment indirectly by wearing the same dress with another scarf.) This new one is a Liberty pattern of purply grays and greens, definitely worth smiling at and even acknowledging outright. But I don’t want to get into one of those awful running-compliment patterns, where I have to mention her scarves every time she wears one. The other thing I should say is that under normal circumstances I would probably give serious thought to “poaching an egg” at this point, but because I have written all this, and because this is, I believe, going to be the very beginning of a sort of autobiography, I can’t. What a surprise, though, to find this Casio typewriter acting as chaperon! (Maybe what I will do is go ahead, but not mention it.)

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

  His approach bothered me, because I know he wouldn’t, couldn’t approach me in a grocery store or even a bar. But I’m not necessarily safer in a grocery store or bar, or my own home. Traditional pornography does degrade the male vision of women in this way. When I stand among the shelves there, I am standing in a maze of female images, shelf after shelf of them, hundreds of naked women smiling or with their eyes closed and mouths open or gasping. I am just one more image in a broken mirror. I don’t, however, want a world in which there are no images of sexually hungry and willing women. That’s precisely one reason I went to pornography in the first place. I just don’t want this image to be the only one around, any more than I want images of women as victims, mothers, or virgins to exclusively fill our eyes. And I know that if more women simply walked into this store, this world, that particular man’s vision of women would begin to change—because he would be looking at real women as well as these reflections. He would have to change, he would have no choice. Porn uses people as objects. Well, yes, it does. So much does. Can we choose to be objects in certain situations and not in others? And aren’t there lots of situations in which men allow themselves to be objects—objects of profit, harm, exploitation? I wonder at this when I watch professional football. The feminist writer Ann Snitow thinks one of the biggest mistakes about conservative feminist theories of pornography is the belief “that in a feminist world we will never objectify anyone, never take the part for the whole, never abandon ourselves to mindlessness or the intensities of feeling that link sex with childhood, death, the terrors and pleasures of the oceanic. Using people as extensions of one’s own hungry will is hardly an activity restrained within the boundaries of pornography.” One long-held western standard of obscenity and justification of censorship was to repress anything that might put a “blush on the cheek” of the archetypal innocent. A blush meant knowledge, self-knowledge, and in hearty Old Testament style, self-knowledge was thought to lead directly to corruption. (Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin seem not to realize how old-fashioned their ideas are.) Part of the assumption is that the archetypal Man is already corrupt, and archetypal porn is that which will inflame him, shatter the thin veneer of his civility. But seen in the larger context of history, when we include the ancient Greeks and the Ottoman Empire and the Egyptians and the Chinese and all the aboriginal cultures of which we have record, this standard is, of course, silly; in those cultures, a blushing cheek was valued. This American urge to protect the young is one with the urge to protect Woman, which has as much to do with real women as it does with tuna casserole.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  But these outside events were a rarity. After completing Muhammad, I had returned to my book about God. Most of my days were spent in a silence that also had a transforming effect. When I was working in television, the phone rang constantly. I had to go to endless meetings to discuss shooting schedules and talk for hours at a time with colleagues about the concept. But now, researching A History of God, I found that the telephone rarely rang, and I would sometimes go for two or three days at a time without speaking to anybody. I was alone with my books. I would get up each morning, eat breakfast, and drink a cup of coffee while I walked around my long, narrow garden, examining the plants or my elderly apple trees, and then go up to my study. The street outside my window was deserted; the clock on my desk ticked steadily, hypnotically, and nothing came between the words on the page and me. At first this silence had seemed a deprivation, a symbol of an unwanted isolation. I had resented the solitude of my life and fought it. But gradually the enveloping quiet became a positive element, almost a presence, which settled comfortably and caressingly around me like a soft shawl. It seemed to hum, gently but melodiously, and to orchestrate the ideas that I was contending with, until they started to sing too, to vibrate and reveal an unexpected resonance. After a time I found that I could almost listen to the silence, which had a dimension all of its own. I started to attend to its strange and beautiful texture, which, of course, it was impossible to express in words. I discovered that I felt at home and alive in the silence, which compelled me to enter my interior world and walk around there. Without the distraction of constant conversation, the words on the page began to speak directly to my inner self. They were no longer expressing ideas that were simply interesting intellectually, but were talking directly to my own yearning and perplexity. I was no longer just grabbing concepts and facts from my books, using them as fodder for the next interview, but learning to listen to the deeper meaning that lay quietly and ineffably beyond them. Silence itself had become my teacher.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  And so, in a way, I felt quite at home. Asceticism was certainly central to the whole Lamledra experience. Every morning after breakfast, the guests were frog-marched by Jenifer with spades and matchets to do battle with the ubiquitous nettles and thistles in the grounds. Nobody was excused from this forced labor, unless they had a physical disability or an article to write. “There goes the chain gang!” Herbert would murmur gleefully as he left the breakfast table for his room, resolutely refusing to take part. I too was exempt from the corvée, since I had housework to do. This included helping Nanny to cook lunch for the conscripts, who returned home hot, scratched, stung, and dirty—with no hope, of course, of a hot bath, since that too was regarded as a ludicrous extravagance. In the afternoon, everybody was expected to bathe from the beach at the foot of the cliff, but nobody was permitted to utter the word “cold” in case we put Jacob off. Tight lipped, with muscles clenched, we strode into the icy water, calling strangled cries of encouragement to Jacob, who showed good sense in his reluctance to join us. Sometimes he would agree to sit on an inflatable raft, which Herbert dutifully towed up and down, wading at thigh level through the freezing blue sea, his hair blowing patriarchally in the breeze. “How are you getting on?” I asked once as I swam briskly past. “I am unaware that I have legs,” he replied calmly, adjusting his spectacles. After we had dressed, each of us was required to fill one of the backpacks that we had brought down from the house with pebbles from the beach (few of us were ecologically minded in the early seventies) in order to replenish the gravel on the terrace, which was constantly being blown away by the high winds. We used to struggle up the cliffs bowed under the weight of our burdens, looking for all the world like the vainglorious who, to expiate their sin of pride, had to toil around Dante’s Mount Purgatory bent double under massive stones.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  Don’t guess, look it up!!” Well, maybe he was right—I should have looked it up. But once Fleury caught the error, he could have at least passed on the fact that the word had a g in it. I lost five minutes flipping around in a dictionary. Most of the time, though, salaried people expect so little from temps that any slight awareness of a letter or memo’s context or intent fills them with joy, and they are as a result very easy to work for. But why is it that I so like typing tapes? I’ve seen word-processing operators throw their headsets down after several hours of transcribing, shouting, “I hate doing this!” Yet I even liked typing Fleury’s tapes. For one thing, I like that I’m fairly good at it—I can, for instance, often engage in a little parallel processing, typing the sentence that just passed while listening to and storing the phrase that I’m currently hearing: I enjoy seeing how long I can go without resorting to the rewind half of the foot-pedal. But mainly I prefer doing tapes to typing handwritten documents simply because you can hear the dictator thinking. You can hear him groping for the conventional formula that will cover a slightly unusual case. You can occasionally hear undertones of irritation or affection. It is a great privilege to be present when a person slowly puts his thoughts into words, phrase by phrase, doing the best he can. Because you are traveling right along with him as he forms his sentences, making each word he says appear as a little clump of letters on your screen, you begin to feel as if you are doing the thinking yourself; you occupy some dark space in the interior of his mind as he goes about his job. It isn’t difficult to imagine an erotic aspect to all this. Sandi, a temp I discussed the subject with a year ago or so, told me she once developed an intense thing for a man she transcribed for. He was in personnel, and his job was to advise employees and retired employees on the best way to handle their pensions. He talked very slowly, she said, in an almost dreamy but loud low voice, with long bold pauses. She said he sounded a little like David Bowie in “China Girl.” He very seldom resorted to the pause switch on his machine; he just let the tape run.

• From Dante's Divine Comedy (2001)

  ©2001 The Teaching Company. 60 A. P i c c a r d a t e l l s t h e s t o r y o f h o w s h e w a s “ s t o l e n ” f r o m a c o n v e n t and given in marriage. Her relatives have been encountered in Inferno and Purgatorio. B. I n h e r s t o r y , s h e d e a l s w i t h t h e c o m p l i c a t e d i s s u e o f w h e t h e r o r n o t there are degrees of blessedness in heaven, and if there are, what that might imply about the absolute nature of happiness in heaven. C. S h e h a s o n e o f t h e f a m o u s o n e - l i n e r s i n t h e e n t i r e p o e m : “ I n h i s will is our peace.” 1. N o b o d y i n h e a v e n i s w o r r i e d a b o u t w h e r e t h e y “ r a n k . ” A l l a r e at peace with God. 2. Equality and hierarchy are not in conflict. D. H e r c o m p a n i o n , t h e E m p r e s s C o n s t a n c e , m o t h e r o f F r e d e r i c k I I , i s a member of the only other family found in all three canticles. V. B e a t r i c e i s “ q u i c k e r ” a s a g u i d e t h a n V i r g i l w a s . A. S h e a n t i c i p a t e s m a n y o f D a n t e ’ s q u e s t i o n s . B. A m o n g t h e m a t t e r s s h e d i s c u s s e s i s t h e P l a t o n i c d o c t r i n e o f metempsychosis (the transmigration of the soul). C. P l a t o i s d r i v i n g a t a t r u t h i f one takes him metaphorically rather than literally. VI. T h e d i s c u s s i o n o f f r e e d o m a n d f r e e w i l l i n t h i s c a n t o l e a d s t o a discussion of the nature and purpose of vows. A. T h e y a r e a n i m p o r t a n t w a y t o t a l k a b o u t f r e e d o m a n d f r e e w i l l . B. T h e y r a i s e t h e q u e s t i o n : H o w d i d P i c c a r d a “ f a i l ” i n h e r v o w s , given that her family dragged her out of the convent to marry her off? C. T h e b i b l i c a l e x a m p l e o f J e p h t h ah from the Book of Judges is used to talk about which vows have to be kept and which ones don’t.

• From Boys & Sex (2020)

  It was easy for boys to reel off the excesses of masculinity—they, too, had seen headlines about mass shootings, domestic violence, sexual harassment, campus rape, presidential Twitter tantrums, and Supreme Court confirmation hearings. Even a football player at a Big Ten school bandied about the term “toxic masculinity” in our conversation (“Everyone knows what that is,” he said, when I seemed surprised). They had more difficulty with another question: what they liked about being a boy. “Huh,” said Josh, a college sophomore in Washington state. “That’s interesting. I never really thought about that.” After some hemming and hawing, he landed on sports—“I love playing sports,” he said, but then again, so did his younger sister, so maybe that wasn’t a gender thing. Still, athletics—the physicality, the camaraderie, the competition, the healthy release of aggression, the pure delight in the game—was the most frequent response boys came up with, and for many what defined boyhood for them. They recalled their early days on the playing field with nostalgic, almost romantic, warmth. Then something changed and the very thing that felt sustaining became, for many, oppressive. “I’ve played lacrosse for almost twelve years,” said Eric, a high school senior in Los Angeles. “And I love it. But what I don’t love is the egotistical, ‘I’m good, and I’m an asshole’ culture.” I was struck by how many boys told me they’d dropped out of sports they enjoyed not because they didn’t have the skill to continue, but because they couldn’t stand the Lord of the Flies mentality of teammates or coaches. “I played soccer up until my junior year of high school,” said Noah, the Los Angeles–area college sophomore. “I always loved the sport, but being on a team became way too ‘bro-y’ for me. There was always that need to prove how tough, how manly, how careless you were. It made me feel like an outsider.”

• From Wild (2012)

  It was all unknown to me then, as I sat on that white bench on the day I finished my hike. Everything except the fact that I didn’t have to know. That it was enough to trust that what I’d done was true. To understand its meaning without yet being able to say precisely what it was, like all those lines from The Dream of a Common Language that had run through my nights and days. To believe that I didn’t need to reach with my bare hands anymore. To know that seeing the fish beneath the surface of the water was enough. That it was everything. It was my life—like all lives, mysterious and irrevocable and sacred. So very close, so very present, so very belonging to me. How wild it was, to let it be. ACKNOWLEDGMENTSMiigwech is an Ojibwe word I often heard growing up in northern Minnesota, and I feel compelled to use it here. It means thank you, but more—its meaning imbued with humility as well as gratitude. That’s how I feel when I think about trying to thank all of the people who helped me make this book: humbled as well as grateful. It is to my husband, Brian Lindstrom, that I owe my deepest miigwech, for he has loved me beyond measure, in both my writing and my life. Thank you, Brian. I’m indebted to the Oregon Arts Commission, the Regional Arts and Culture Council, and Literary Arts for providing me with funding and support while I wrote this book and also throughout my career; to Greg Netzer and Larry Colton of the Wordstock Festival for always inviting me to the show; and to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference for giving me meaningful support along the way. I wrote most of this book while sitting at my dining room table, but crucial chapters were written away from home. I’m grateful to Soapstone for the residencies they provided me, and especially to Ruth Gundle, the former director of Soapstone, who was particularly generous to me in the early stages of this book. A profound thank you to Sally and Con Fitzgerald, who hosted me so graciously while I wrote the final chapters of Wild in their beautiful, silent “wee house” in Oregon’s Warner Valley. Thanks also to the incomparable Jane O’Keefe, who made my time in the Warner Valley possible, and both loaned me her car and did my grocery shopping. Thank you to my agent, Janet Silver, and also to her colleagues at the Zachary Shuster Harmsworth Agency. Janet, you are my friend, champion, and literary kindred spirit. I will always be grateful to you for your support, smarts, and love.

• From Another Country (1962)

  I want that more than I’ve ever wanted anything in the world.” Then the door opened and Cass stood before them, dressed in a rusty orange frock, her hair pulled back and falling around her shoulders. She held a cigarette in one hand, with which she made a gesture of exaggerated welcome. “Come in, children,” she said, “I’m delighted to see you, but there’s absolute chaos in this house today. Everything’s gone wrong.” She closed the door behind them. They heard a child screaming somewhere in the apartment, and Richard’s voice raised in anger. Cass listened for a moment, her forehead wrinkled with worry. “That’s Michael,” she said, helplessly, “He’s been impossible all day—fighting with his brother, with his father, with me. Richard finally gave him a spanking and I guess he’s going to leave him in his room.” Michael’s screams diminished and they heard the voices of Michael and his father working out, apparently, the terms of a truce. Cass lifted her head. “Well. I’m sorry to keep you standing in the hall. Take off your things, I’ll show you into the living room and give you things to drink and to nibble on—you’ll need them, lunch is going to be late, of course. Ida, how are you? I haven’t seen you in God knows when.” She took Ida’s coat and shawl. “Do you mind if I don’t hang them up? I’ll just dump them in the bedroom, other people are coming over after lunch.” They followed her into the large bedroom. Ida immediately walked over to the large, full-length mirror and worriedly patted her hair and applied new lipstick. “I’m just fine, Cass,” she said, “but you’re the one—! You got a famous husband all of a sudden. How does it feel?” “He’s not even famous yet,” said Cass, “and, already I can’t stand it. Somehow, it just seems to reduce itself to having drinks and dinners with lots of people you certainly wouldn’t be talking to if they weren’t”—she coughed—“in the profession. God, what a profession. I had no idea.” Then she laughed. They started toward the living room. “Try to persuade Vivaldo to become a plumber.” “No, dear,” said Ida, “I wouldn’t trust Vivaldo with no tools whatever. This boy is just as clumsy as they come. I’m always expecting him to fall over those front feet he’s got. Never saw anybody with so many front feet.” The living room was down two steps and the wide windows opened on a view of the river. Ida seemed checked, but only for an instant by the view of the river. She walked into the center of the room. “This is wonderful. You people have really got some space.” “We were really very lucky,” Cass said. “The people who had it had been here for years and years and they finally decided to move to Connecticut—or someplace like that.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  And for the first time in my life I had a home of my own. Because I now had a secure job and a stable income, I had become eligible for a mortgage and was now the possessor of a tiny one-bedroom flat in Highbury, near the stadium of the Arsenal Football Club; henceforth my Saturday afternoons were punctuated with great roars from the fans who crowded into the neighborhood for the weekly match. The flat was a symbolic step. I now had a place in the world—something which had once seemed psychologically impossible. But despite all this undoubted progress, the failure of my thesis and my consequent expulsion from academia had severely wounded my confidence. I had managed to recover my equilibrium, but I had very little belief in my talents. The idea of striking out into an entirely different field was beyond me, and I was too exhausted by the struggle and drama of the recent past even to contemplate such a venture. I needed a rest. I was in a convalescent state, and was simply not fit enough for anything more ambitious. I had been fortunate to get this job, I repeated to myself over and over again, and I must just settle for what I had. Not hope to turn again. Find strength in what remains behind . Yet the location of my new flat showed that I had not really settled for this at all. Highbury, in North London, on the other side of the city, was miles from my new school. There were, I thought, sensible reasons for my choice. Because of my epilepsy, my doctors told me firmly, driving was out of the question. Southeast London is badly served by public transport: Dulwich is not connected to the underground railway, and without a car, life is very difficult there. Most of the new friends I had made during the last few months lived in North London, and, I argued, they were going to be very important to me now. If I could not have a satisfying career, at least I could have a good social life. But the real reason for choosing Highbury was that I did not want to live anywhere near the school. In the evening, as I headed north, my heart became lighter with every mile, and when the bus finally lurched into Rosebury Avenue, passed the Sadler’s Wells Theatre, and began the approach to Islington, I felt a new woman. Conversely, as the bus crept through the morning traffic, passed the Houses of Parliament, and crossed the Thames at Westminster Bridge, I felt gloomier by the minute. In one sense, it was crazy to live so far away from my work. The journey was horrendous.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  “What is the sermon like?” Herbert asked. “There are some intelligent men there, I believe.” “Don’t talk about these boring things, Karen!” Jacob yelled, bringing his fork splat down on his plate and causing a brief volcanic eruption of gravy and cabbage. “Ssh . . . It’s interesting what Karen is saying, Jacob,” Jenifer protested, wiping gravy from her cheek. “It is interesting, up to a point,” Herbert conceded. “Remarkable that reasonably educated people can go on believing in the virgin birth or the Trinity. Might as well believe in the Olympian pantheon. I mean, why Jehovah rather than Apollo? Frankly, I think Apollo might be the more appealing option.” I could see his point. Jehovah had done little enough for me. Perhaps I should give Apollo a try. “Catholicism doesn’t seem to have made you very happy,” Jenifer remarked, echoing my own thoughts and ducking as Jacob hurled a potato across the room. It spattered steamily on the large mirror, and there were exclamations of protest. “Jacob, eat up now!” “How could the Catholic Church possibly make anybody happy?” Herbert grinned at me. He enjoyed baiting me about the notorious abuses of history. “Centuries of oppression and fear. The Inquisition, the sale of indulgences . . .” “The immorality of the popes,” I threw in. “Book burning. Pogroms.” “Jesuits and equivocation!” “This conversation has been going on for too long! Talk about something else,” Jacob demanded at the top of his voice. “We don’t want to hear about churches and popes and all that stuff!” “All right.” Jenifer turned to him. “You start a conversation.” “Let’s talk about Bonfire Night.”3 Jacob relaxed now that the conversation was within his range. The fifth of November was one of the landmarks of Jacob’s year. He started looking forward to it months in advance. At first he had been terrified by the noise of the fireworks and the lurid effigies of Guy Fawkes, but Nanny and his parents had managed to coax him out of his fears by making a little festival of it. “Daddy, tell about how it will get dark and you will light the bonfire.” “And the flames will start to crackle in the twigs,” Herbert obliged. “Snap, crackle, and pop!” “And you will be so excited, Jacob,” Jenifer put in, “when the fireworks start.” “Whoosh! But Karen, you may be a little bit frightened. Just at first. But I’ll say to you, ‘Don’t worry. There’s nothing to be scared of.’ ” “Thank you, Jacob.” “Daddy! Who was Guy Fawkes?” “He was a Catholic!” Herbert shouted in glee, pushing his chair back from the table, while the meal ended in laughter. I followed the nurse down the corridor, inhaling that inimitable hospital smell, catching glimpses of other people’s dramas. Blue bedspreads, a trolley, a wheelchair. “Straight down to the end,” the nurse told me cheerily, “and your friend is in the small ward on your left.”

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  Now I was beginning to understand that a silence that is not clamorous with vexation and worried self-regard can become part of the texture of your mind, can seep into you, moment by moment, and gradually change you. The study of texts for A History of God had become very different from the research I had done during my years in television, when I had been reading and amassing information at breakneck speed to keep one step ahead of the production team. At that time, I had remained trapped on the cerebral level, as though I were reading a guidebook or an instruction manual. Instead of allowing these images and dogmas to percolate slowly, drop by drop, into the deeper, unconscious levels of my mind, I had grasped prematurely at what I thought they meant. I had also been engaged in a crusade during my time in television. I use that word deliberately because, however well intentioned, my work had had an aggressive edge. I had wanted to show that religion was indeed bonkers, partly in order to free myself once and for all from a system that had exerted such a baleful influence on my life. I had read in order to debunk. Egged on by colleagues and friends who found the very idea of faith risible, I had too often reached for the witty, deflationary phrase or the sparkling put-down while explicating a theological point. And instead of losing myself in my work, I had been engaged in what amounted to constant self-advertisement. Even in Muhammad, when I had deliberately inhibited this habit of superficial cleverness, I had been writing a polemic and had an agenda. True, it had been a benevolent polemic, one that tried to build up rather than demolish, but an argument had constantly been in progress in my head as I anticipated the hostile point of view that I wanted to counter. I had not let the ideas speak quietly for themselves or to come to me in their own good time. Now I found myself in a position where I had no agenda. There was no point in thinking up barbed remarks about a Jewish mystical idea or revealing the hopeless irrationality of a Greek Orthodox doctrine, because there was nobody to hear it. In the past, my literary agent and publishers had wanted me to be ceaselessly entertaining and topical in order to make the seriously uncool subject of religion accessible.

• From The Argonauts (2015)

  Perhaps this is why psychologist D. W. Winnicott’s notion of “feeling real” is so moving to me. One can aspire to feel real, one can help others to feel real, and one can oneself feel real—a feeling Winnicott describes as the collected, primary sensation of aliveness, “the aliveness of the body tissues and working of body-functions, including the heart’s action and breathing,” which makes spontaneous gesture possible. For Winnicott, feeling real is not reactive to external stimuli, nor is it an identity. It is a sensation—a sensation that spreads. Among other things, it makes one want to live. Some people find pleasure in aligning themselves with an identity, as in You make me feel like a natural woman—made famous by Aretha Franklin and, later, by Judith Butler, who focused on the instability wrought by the simile. But there can also be a horror in doing so, not to mention an impossibility. It’s not possible to live twenty-four hours a day soaked in the immediate awareness of one’s sex. Gendered selfconsciousness has, mercifully, a flickering nature. A friend says he thinks of gender as a color. Gender does share with color a certain ontological indeterminacy: it isn’t quite right to say that an object is a color, nor that the object has a color. Context also changes it: all cats are gray, etc. Nor is color voluntary, precisely. But none of these formulations means that the object in question is colorless. The bad reading [of Gender Trouble] goes something like this: I can get up in the morning, look in my closet, and decide which gender I want to be today. I can take out apiece of clothing and change my gender: stylize it, and then that evening I can change it again and be something radically other, so that what you get is something like the commodification of gender, and the understanding of taking on a gender as a kind of consumerism…. When my whole point was that the very formation of subjects, the very formation of persons, presupposes gender in a certain way—that gender is not to be chosen and that “performativity” is not radical choice and it’s not voluntarism…. Performativity has to do with repetition, very often with the repetition of oppressive and painful gender norms to force them to resignify. This is not freedom, but a question of how to work the trap that one is inevitably in.

• From Dante's Divine Comedy (2001)

  ©2001 The Teaching Company. 75 C. We also find that included among the souls of the blessed are many who, by the strict rules of Inferno 4, ought not to be here. Perhaps, like figures from the Old Testament, they had “implicit faith.” D. The “surprising saved” include: 1. The Emperor Trajan. Medieval legend held that the prayers of Pope Saint Gregory the Great had revived him from the dead long enough to convert. 2. The Emperor Constantine. His good intentions bore evil fruit, but he is in heaven. 3. Most interesting of all is Riphaeus of Troy, a minor character from Book II of the Aeneid whom Dante places among the saved. a. This placement is especially problematic when we consider that Virgil and Aeneas dwell in the first circle of the Inferno, among the righteous pagans. b. Why should a minor character like Riphaeus be among the blessed when neither the Aeneid’s hero nor its author belongs to that company? E. The poem is suggesting that, ultimately, this question moves us beyond what humans are capable of grasping. Neither the mercy nor the justice of God is perfectly transparent to us. F. The question is also used as a warning against complacency on the part of Christians. G. Life is not a puzzle or a technical problem to be “solved,” but a mystery to be experienced and accepted. Be slow to judge. III. The last sphere is that of Saturn, where the leading virtue, and surprisingly the highest of all in Dante’s ranking, is temperance or moderation. A. Here we meet the contemplatives. 1. Moderation is an important precondition of contemplation. 2. Contemplatives are to Paradiso what poets were to Purgatorio: We meet them at the beginning and the end. 3. The contemplatives are major paradisiacal models for Dante, just as the poets were purgatorial examples for him. B. Especially important is Peter Damian, an ascetic monk who became a cardinal. He tells his own story. Peter’s story shows how ©2001 The Teaching Company. 76 contemplative virtue can help structure an active life that bears fruits of reform. Readings: Dante, Paradiso, Cantos 18–26. John Freccero, Dante: The Poetics of Conversion, Chapter 15. Questions to Consider: 1. Why are such pagans as Trajan and Riphaeus in the Christian heaven while Plato, Aristotle, and other great pagans are assigned to limbo in hell? 2. What credentials do Peter, James, and John have to be Dante’s examiners on the theological virtues? 3. Given all the criticisms Dante has made throughout the Commedia of the Emperor Constantine, why is he in heaven? ©2001 The Teaching Company. 77 Lecture Twenty-Three Faith, Hope, Love, and the Mystic Empyrean

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  I lay back on my pillows and contemplated Jane with amusement. She seemed determined to see the whole business as an entertaining tale on which she could dine out in the future. I listened as she relived the highlights: what the ambulance men had said, what I looked like, and the sturdy disapproval of the nurses. I knew that I could never be like that. I could not habitually view events in a positive or humorous light—nor did I particularly want to. But there was something comforting that afternoon in Jane’s buoyant refusal to look on the dark side of the episode. As I watched her transform last night’s mess into a highly crafted anecdote, it occurred to me that a little of her insouciance would do me no harm. Nothing else seemed to work. Even Dr. Piet had seemed somewhat at a loss since his method had not yielded the result he had expected. If nothing could be done, maybe I should just stop fighting this peculiar malady of mine and “go with the flow,” like the hippies. My mind seemed irreparably injured in some way, and perhaps I would never be wholly normal. But if I accepted this handicap as my lot, as other disabled people did, then perhaps I would discover a source of peace and endurance within myself. There was nothing I could do about the past that had brought me to this impasse. But I could deliberately cultivate the kind of robust gladness that seemed to come quite naturally to Jane. I recalled Wordsworth’s decision, when he realized that the glory of the world that he had experienced as a boy had gone forever: We will grieve not, rather find Strength in what remains behind. Perhaps I could take that as a mantra. Jane was horrified by the idea that I should go back to the convent to recuperate. “You can’t want to do that!” she insisted. “It’s that whole rotten system that put you in here, surely? That’s the last place you should be.” I shook my head. I wouldn’t have that. The system hadn’t worked for me or for Rebecca, but it hadn’t affected the vast majority of women who had undergone its disciplines in this way. I certainly could not lay it all at the door of the nuns. “There was something in me—in my temperament, my genes, whatever— which was antipathetic to that kind of training. Antipathetic to religion, come to that,” I added gloomily. “What do you mean?” Jane was immediately interested.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  “I only do this in motels,” I would explain. “I have to have the entire bed covered with open magazines. Ideally I’d have twin beds covered, and be able to pivot back and forth between both pictorial bedspreads.” “It seems a little excessive,” Adele would say, justifiably. “Does it?” I would ask. “Expensive, anyway,” she would say. “This pile cost eighty-five dollars,” I would tell her. “So it would make me feel much better, much less wasteful, if someone else besides me got some use out of them. It’s like not wanting to drink alone.” I would tell the story of how, when I was packing to leave for college and I had to get rid of all the dirty magazines of my adolescence, I couldn’t bear to throw them away, so I took them to the park in a paper bag and left them in a place where drunks sometimes slept, figuring that they might have a second life there. “Now I know that there are bookstores that buy used magazines,” I would say. “Avenue Victor Hugo on Newbury. Now that’s a great store. Have you been there?”