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 City of Night (1963)

  I had expected, because of the urgency of the telegram, to find the Professor in a state of desperation. He wasnt: He lay smiling on the bed. “Ah, child, child, you did come.... No, I wasnt asleep—I had just adjusted my hearing aid—I dont want to miss out on any of its fitful morning gossip!... I am Delighted you came. Not that I didnt expect you to show up. I can tell sincerity just as I can guess weights, ages, heights—you see, I have not lived these sixty-odd years without learning something—and I must pass on to you some of the things I have learned of this ambiguous existence we call life. Now bring your chair and sit near me.” He reaches for a pastel cigarette—feels with the other hand about his back, touching frantically. “Larry!” he calls desperately. “Larry!” And when the malenurse appeared, the Professor pleaded breathlessly: “Where is my tape-measure?” I saw it lying on the floor, beside the bed. I picked it up and started to hand it to him. Before the Professor could take it, the malenurse snatched it from me and gave it to him himself. “Ah, thank you, child,” the Professor says, to me, ignoring the malenurse, “you have saved—...My Life—and I will explain how—soon—during one of our future interviews—...You may go now, Larry, I have to interview this young—angel!” Now he drapes the tape-measure familiarly about himself, and I notice the chubby fingers searching out a certain place on it. His eyes are nailed to it momentarily—he moves the red marker. “Ah!” He held his fingers on the mark, as if he were praying a rosary....

• From Amplified Holy Bible (2015)

  50 This is my comfort in my affliction, That Your word has revived me and given me life. [Rom 15:4 ] 51 The arrogant utterly ridicule me, Yet I do not turn away from Your law. 52 I have remembered [carefully] Your ancient ordinances, O LORD , And I have taken comfort. 53 Burning indignation has seized me because of the wicked, Who b reject Your law. 54 Your statutes are my songs In the house of my pilgrimage. 55 O LORD , I remember Your name in the night, And keep Your law. 56 This has become mine [as the gift of Your grace], That I observe Your precepts [accepting them with loving obedience]. ח Heth. 57 The LORD is my portion; I have promised to keep Your words. 58 I sought Your favor with all my heart; Be merciful and gracious to me according to Your promise. 59 I considered my ways And turned my feet to [follow and obey] Your testimonies. 60 I hurried and did not delay To keep Your commandments. 61 The cords of the wicked have encircled and ensnared me, But I have not forgotten Your law. 62 At midnight I will rise to give thanks to You Because of Your righteous ordinances. 63 I am a companion of all who [reverently] fear You, And of those who keep and honor Your precepts. 64 The earth, O LORD , is full of Your lovingkindness and goodness; Teach me Your statutes. ט Teth. 65 You have dealt well with Your servant, O LORD , according to Your promise. 66 Teach me good judgment (discernment) and knowledge, For I have believed and trusted and relied on Your commandments. 67 Before I was afflicted I went astray, But now I keep and honor Your word [with loving obedience]. 68 You are good and do good; Teach me Your statutes. 69 The arrogant have forged a lie against me, But I will keep Your precepts with all my heart. 70 Their heart is insensitive like fat [their minds are dull and brutal], But I delight in Your law. 71 It is good for me that I have been afflicted, That I may learn Your statutes. 72 The law from Your mouth is better to me Than thousands of gold and silver pieces. י Yodh. 73 Your hands have made me and established me; Give me understanding and a teachable heart, that I may learn Your commandments. 74 May those who [reverently] fear You see me and be glad, Because I wait for Your word. 75 I know, O LORD , that Your judgments are fair, And that in faithfulness You have disciplined me. [Heb 12:10 ] 76 O may Your lovingkindness and graciousness comfort me, According to Your word (promise) to Your servant. 77 Let Your compassion come to me that I may live, For Your law is my delight.

• From Vox (1992)

  He dried the fork with a paper towel, and the rough places on the fork tore the paper, and that was too much for him, he almost felt like throwing the fork away, and he went to bed very dejected, wondering what the point of it all was. Okay? Now in this same city there was a jewelry store, that some might say was a little bit too trendy, but that was still a very nice place—they didn’t sell diamonds or emeralds or conventional big-ticket items like that, in fact it was called ‘Harvey’s Semi-Precious,’ after Harvey, the owner—and mostly it sold artisan stuff and collectibles. And you got a job there.” “I did?” she said. “What happened was, you went to a program in a university, and you got a masters in silversmithing, with some postgraduate work in pendant mounting and bead drilling, and you found that you had a very good eye, and you really were able to make bracelets and earrings and especially necklaces that looked good on people, not that looked good in the display case, in fact sometimes your work even looked a little strange, a little knobby and unsure of itself in the display case, but on the human form—divine. So you graduate from the program and it’s time to make a living, and you take your best work around to various jewelry places, and you get a mixed reaction, frankly, the world isn’t quite ready for you, and finally you take it to Harvey’s Semi-Precious, which you’ve avoided because in a way it’s a little down-market—it started as a head shop in fact, and Harvey’s this fairly old guy now with a big collection of fancy cigarette cases from the twenties that you find saddens you, and he’s got what you might call an old-world smell, but you interview with him, and he seems nice, and he’s very encouraging about your work, and you decide what the hay. But the only stipulation is, if you work for Harvey, you have to work in the store, in this small glass enclosure that kind of projects from one of the windows so that people walking by on the street can watch you work. You’re a little hesitant about that, but he draws the curtain open, tells you to take a seat, and it’s this nice little room, with many many small wooden drawers that are handy on either side, and a whole set of silversmithing tools that are mounted on little spring clips, and a nice flame there, a nice blue flame, with a yellow tip, and it really seems very cozy, and yet of course visible from the street, and so you start work. And Harvey could not be nicer—he treats you with kindly irony, and when you make a piece he especially likes, he is very appreciative.

• From Vox (1992)

  22 not just superficially but with new hidden pockets of order in it, and I waited until the midafternoon to have a shower, and I did not masturbate, because the illicit- ness of calling in sick without justification made me want to be pure and virtuous all day long, and I had an early dinner of Carr's Table Water crackers with cream cheese and sliced pieces of sweet red kosher peppers on them, just delicious, and I did not turn on the TV but instead I turned on the stereo, which I haven't used much lately. It's a very fancy stereo." "Yes?" "I think I spent something like fourteen hundred dol lars on it," she said. "I bought it from someone who was buying an even fancier system. It was true insanity. I had a crush on this person. He liked the Thompson Twins and the S.O.S. Band and, gee, what were the other groups he liked so much? The Gap Band was one. Mid night Star. And Cameo. This was a while ago. He was not a particularly intelligent man, in fact in a way he was a very dimwitted narrow-minded man, but he was so infectiously convinced that what he liked everyone would like if they were exposed to it. And good-looking. For about four months, while I was in his thrall, I really listened to that stuff. I gave my life up to it. My own taste in music stopped evolving in grade school with the Beatles, the early early Beatles—in fact I used to dislike any song that didn't end—you know, end with a chord, but simply faded out."

• From Amplified Holy Bible (2015)

  [Is 57:13c ] 10 For yet a little while and the wicked one will be gone [forever]; Though you look carefully where he used to be, he will not be [found]. [Heb 10:36 , 37 ; Rev 21:7 , 8 ] 11 But the humble will [at last] inherit the land And will delight themselves in abundant prosperity and peace. [Ps 37:29 ; Matt 5:5 ] 12 The wicked plots against the righteous And gnashes at him with his teeth. 13 The Lord laughs at him [the wicked one—the one who oppresses the righteous], For He sees that his day [of defeat] is coming. 14 The wicked have drawn the sword and bent their bow To cast down the afflicted and the needy, To slaughter those who are upright in conduct [those with personal integrity and godly character]. 15 The sword [of the ungodly] will enter their own heart, And their bow will be broken. 16 Better is the little of the righteous [who seek the will of God] Than the abundance (riches) of many wicked (godless). [1 Tim 6:6 , 7 ] 17 For the arms of the wicked will be broken, But the LORD upholds and sustains the righteous [who seek Him]. 18 The LORD knows the days of the blameless, And their inheritance will continue forever. 19 They will not be b ashamed in the time of evil, And in the days of famine they will have plenty and be satisfied. 20 But the wicked (ungodly) will perish, And the enemies of the LORD will be like the c glory of the pastures and like the fat of lambs [that is consumed in smoke], They vanish—like smoke they vanish away. 21 The wicked borrows and does not pay back, But the righteous is gracious and kind and gives. 22 For those blessed by God will [at last] inherit the land, But those cursed by Him will be cut off. [Is 57:13c ] 23 The steps of a [good and righteous] man are directed and established by the LORD , And He delights in his way [and blesses his path]. 24 When he falls, he will not be hurled down, Because the LORD is the One who holds his hand and sustains him. 25 I have been young and now I am old, Yet I have not seen the righteous (those in right standing with God) abandoned Or his descendants pleading for bread. 26 All day long he is gracious and lends, And his descendants are a blessing. 27 Depart from evil and do good; And you will dwell [securely in the land] forever. 28 For the LORD delights in justice And does not abandon His saints (faithful ones); They are preserved forever, But the descendants of the wicked will [in time] be cut off. 29 The righteous will inherit the land And live in it forever. 30 The mouth of the righteous proclaims wisdom, And his tongue speaks justice and truth.

• From Vox (1992)

  43 store, that some might say was a little bit too trendy, but that was still a very nice place—they didn't sell diamonds or emeralds or conventional big-ticket items like that, in fact it was called 'Harvey's Semi-Precious,' after Harvey, the owner—and mostly it sold artisan stuff and collecti bles. And you got a job there. " "I did?" she said. "What happened was, you went to a program in a university, and you got a masters in silversmithing, with some postgraduate work in pendant mounting and bead drilling, and you found that you had a very good eye, and you really were able to make bracelets and earrings and especially necklaces that looked good on people, not that looked good in the display case, in fact sometimes your work even looked a little strange, a little knobby and unsure of itself in the display case, but on the human form—divine. So you graduate from the program and it's time to make a living, and you take your best work around to various jewelry places, and you get a mixed reaction, frankly, the world isn't quite ready for you, and finally you take it to Harvey's Semi-Precious, which you've avoided because in a way it's a little down-market—it started as a head shop in fact, and Harvey's this fairly old guy now with a big collection of fancy cigarette cases from the twenties that you find saddens you, and he's got what you might call an old-world smell, but you inter view with him, and he seems nice, and he's very encour aging about your work, and you decide what the hay. But

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  Many of my arty, bohemian friends from school had also moved to New York, and we went out together almost every night, usually to sit in a vast room on Bleecker Street. It had been a music hall in the nineteenth century and still possessed a rickety balcony and a ceiling chandelier with etched glass shades to screen the gas jets. No one went up to the balcony or lit the chandelier. The two old ladies with motherly vulgar voices (“What’ll it be, hon?”) seemed to be looking through us to earlier, more prosperous times. They wore bedroom slippers and nylons rolled below their knees, but above the neck they were impeccable: plucked eyebrows and glowing ruby lips. A few folding screens quarantined off most of the shadowy hall and surrounded half a dozen tables lit by the red neon letters in the window. There we sat for hours, warmed only by the beer, listening to Barbra Streisand’s melancholy record of “Happy Days Are Here Again” and the first Dionne Warwick songs. All around us an adult world was revolving quite indifferent to us; we didn’t realize that it existed, much less that it excluded us. Exposed to nothing but the classics and confined to a provincial campus until now, we knew very little about the latest books and artistic trends; the “young” who represented the newest tastes were thirty, not twenty. A few of the women in our crowd were sleeping their way up into more sophisticated spheres, and if I’d been handsome or socially ambitious I might have done the same. We were so dazed by the speed with which we were changing that we mistook this virtuosity for insincerity. My fellow workers had no idea what I did with my evenings. The married men commuted to their families on Long Island; the single women lived cooped up together on the East Side in doorman buildings. Nor did my school friends know that I walked up and down Greenwich Avenue sometimes till three in the morning looking for sex, dressed in “collegiate clothes” I’d never have worn in college. We were all leftists, of course, although we favored Cuba and China and felt vaguely uneasy about Russia. We’d never examined our socialism, which was composed of sympathy, rebellion, and enthusiasm, no economics, little history, and a total absence of political experience. For us, socialism was primarily social, since everyone we liked was on our side—the poor young (but not the indigent old), foreign peasants (but not bigoted American farmers), the Eastern European proletariat (but not Detroit auto workers), the inspired mad (but not the merely crazy), oppressed Negroes (but not white trash). Homosexuals we would never have thought of as a political entity, or if at all then as decadent sons of the haute bourgeoisie, the parasitical element every socialist state had had to execute or expel. I was able to prove my seriousness as a socialist precisely by not even mentioning homosexuals.

• From Vox (1992)

  109 off later. She half pretended to be startled out of reading an article when I clicked the TV on, with no volume, and she said something about Arsenio Hall. But the ir relevance of what she said made her smile, because she was sitting on the couch, and now the TV was on, and that tiny super high-pitched sound of electrically charged picture-tube glass, that sound that you can sometimes hear even if you're walking along the street, if windows are open, that is the TV giving itself away, declaring itself, even with the volume off, that sound that your ear seems to be able to hear better and better in the evening, or appreciate better, that means privacy and at-homeness and closed curtains and secrecy too, because it's like when you snuck downstairs at six in the morning to watch The Three Stooges and kept the sound extremely low so your parents wouldn't detect it, but you always worried that even though super high-pitched sounds don't carry well at all, you thought it might travel upstairs and the knowledge that you were up and watching The Three Stooges would trouble their dreams—that sound was in the room with me and Emily, and even though it was just faces at a press conference on C-SPAN, we knew what it really meant. She pointed at her tea and she said, 'On second thought, could you maybe plop a little bour bon or something in this?' So I did. I put the tape in, and the VCR made its little swallowing sound, and I turned the sound up, and then there was, without even an FBI warning or anything, there was the logo, this blue word

• From Vox (1992)

  Go ahead!’ and sits down near the register, staring straight ahead. He’s pissed. You say to the guy, ‘I’ll have it for you by noon.’ And you go back into your area in the window. You take up the piece you’ve been working on. It’s some kind of brooch, and it isn’t turning out very well. You’ve lost your inspiration to some degree, since Harvey hasn’t sold your best effort. You look at the fork sitting there, and then you become conscious of a presence outside the window, and you look up, and it’s the same guy. You give him a questioning expression, and he moves his arms to say, ‘Don’t mind me.’ But he doesn’t walk away. You look down at the brooch again, but you don’t like it, you don’t want Mr. Fork to see it and think of it as representative of your work. And so you set it aside and you clamp the injured fork in several delicate vises, and you put on your insulated gloves, and you start playing the flame of the torch over the nicked parts. Repair is Harvey’s area, so you don’t get much of a chance to do this, but you find now that in small doses it’s a very satisfying and soothing activity. Naturally you can’t restore the fork to mint condition—you melt the roughnesses until they subside, and what you’re left with is a lovely irregular mottled very shiny surface. You’re glad you have your dark welder’s goggles on: you look up covertly, with just your eyes, not lifting your head, and you see the fork man standing there sort of slumped , looking at you do those things to his fork. He’s melting, he’s smitten, he’s silversmitten. You plunge the fork into a tray of water. He smiles. He goes back into the shop. You come out of your enclosure. Harvey looks up. You hand the fork to Harvey and Harvey looks at it and says, ‘Twelve dollars.’ Mr. Fork pays the twelve dollars and takes the repair job and says thank-you to Harvey. Then he says, ‘I was just curious how it was done. I’m sorry to have taken up her time.’ And then he asks, ‘You say she’s an artist. Can you show me some things she’s done?’ Slowly, slowly Harvey walks over to the display case, unlocks it, sighs. The guy leans very close to the jewelry, his head is practically in the case. You’re watching all this. You notice for the first time that he’s got his hair in a kind of ponytail. And then he points to the necklace and he says, ‘May I take a look at that?’ Harvey looks at you, he’s got this almost pleading look, but you don’t say anything. So Harvey seems to decide something, and he says sadly, ‘That’s the best thing in the store.’

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

  and the church year. Finally: the earlier feast of Epiphany afforded a substitute. The artistic religious impulse, however, which produced the whole church year, must sooner or later have called into existence a festival which forms the groundwork of all other annual festivals in honor of Christ. For, as Chrysostom, some ten years, after the introduction of this anniversary in Antioch, justly said, without the birth of Christ there were also no baptism, passion, resurrection, or ascension, and no outpouring of the Holy Ghost; hence no feast of Epiphany, of Easter, or of Pentecost. The feast of Epiphany had spread from the East to the West. The feast of Christmas took the opposite course. We find it first in Rome, in the time of the bishop Liberius, who on the twenty-fifth of December, 360, consecrated Marcella, the sister of St. Ambrose, nun or bride of Christ, and addressed her with the words: "Thou seest what multitudes are come to the birth-festival of thy bridegroom."718 This passage implies that the festival was already existing and familiar. Christmas was introduced in Antioch about the year 380; in Alexandria, where the feast of Epiphany was celebrated as the nativity of Christ, not till about 430. Chrysostom, who delivered the Christmas homily in Antioch on the 25th of December, 386,719 already calls it, notwithstanding its recent introduction (some ten years before), the fundamental feast, or the root, from which all other Christian festivals grow forth. The Christmas festival was probably the Christian transformation or regeneration of a series of kindred heathen festivals—the Saturnalia, Sigillaria, Juvenalia, and Brumalia—which were kept in Rome in the month of December, in commemoration of the golden age of universal freedom and equality, and in honor of the unconquered sun, and which were great holidays, especially for slaves and children.720 This connection accounts for many customs of the Christmas season, like the giving of presents to children and to the poor, the lighting of wax tapers, perhaps also the erection of Christmas trees, and gives them a Christian import; while it also betrays the origin of the many excesses in which the unbelieving world indulges at this season, in wanton perversion of the true Christmas mirth, but which, of course, no more forbid right use, than the abuses of the Bible or of any other gift of God. Had the Christmas festival arisen in the period of the persecution, its derivation from these pagan festivals would be refuted by the then reigning abhorrence of everything heathen; but in the Nicene age this rigidness of opposition between the church and the world was in a great measure softened by the general conversion of the heathen. Besides, there lurked in those pagan festivals themselves, in spite of all their sensual abuses, a deep meaning and an adaptation to a real want; they might be called unconscious prophecies of the Christmas feast.

• From Vox (1992)

  40 comes on very very gradually, over about twenty min utes. It starts off in a very deep orange phase. I very seldom have time to watch it, of course, with my hectic schedule. But when I do, it really is quite beautiful. It's so gradual that you're not quite sure whether it's the light coming on and shining a little more brightly, or if the sky has darkened—of course it's both, but you can't tell which is overtaking the other, and then there's this mo ment, about five minutes from now, when the streetlight is exactly the same color as the sky, I mean exactly the same green-violet-yellow whatever, so that it seems as if there's a hole in the middle of the tree across the street, in the branches, where the sky, which is really the light on this side of the street, shows through." There was a pause. "Listen," she said. "This is getting expensive, at a dollar a minute or whatever it is." "Ninety-five cents per half minute, I think." "So give me your number and I'll call you back," she said. "All right. But." "Yes?" "But then you'll have to turn your light on again to write my number down," he said. "What do you mean? I have a good memory for num bers." "Oh, I'm sure it's much better than mine. But what if in this one isolated case the number slips your mind?" 41 "Okay, to be safe I'll turn on the light and write it down." "But what if you write it down wrong, just because this is such an unusual sort of occasion, and you reverse two numbers, the first time you've ever done it?" "Sexual dyslexia." "Right! Or what if you hang up and you get another Diet Coke and then you decide, no, this is crazy, I don't want to call him back? How do I know you won't just not call?" "I'm going to call you back," she said. "I'm enjoying this. I'm going to call." "Okay, but what if you do call, but because of the break, even that one-minute break, when we aren't con nected, what if fate shifts, and we're suddenly awkward with each other, and we're never quite able to resume the intimacy that we seemed to hit so easily the first time?" "All right, you convinced me. Don't give me your number." "Really I think two dollars a minute is cheap for this. I need this. I'd spend twenty dollars a minute for this. And there isn't a time limit on this line, either—at least my ad says NO TIME LIMIT in big letters." "Okay," she said. "Okay, and in return for your indulgence, I'm going to try to do something with your heirlooms there, on your dining-room table. Let me see. All right, once there was a guy who had a big party, a big dinner party for a dozen

• From Vox (1992)

  21 forks. No teaspoons at all. One of the dinner forks from my great aunt's set fell into the dishwasher once when I was visiting her and it got badly notched by that twirly splasher in the bottom, and someone at work was telling me he knew a jeweler who fixed hurt silverware, so I'm planning to have that fixed, it's all ready to go. And I even got together all my broken sets of beads—I sorted them all out—the sight of all those beads jumbled to gether on my bedside table was making me unhappy every morning, and now they're ready to be restrung, the pink ones in one envelope, and the green ones in one envelope, and the parti-colored Venetian ones in one envelope—and I have them on my dining-room table too, ready to go. " "The same jeweler who fixes silverware restrings beads?" he asked. "Yes!" "How did your beads get broken?" "They seem to break in the morning when I'm rushing to get dressed. They catch on something. The jade ones, my favorite set, which my father gave me, caught on the open door of the microwave when I was standing up too quickly after picking a piece of paper up off the floor. That was the latest tragedy. And of course my sister's babe yanked one set off my neck. But they can all be repaired and they will all be repaired." "Good going." "Anyway, this apartment is transformed, I mean it,

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  I, on the other hand, quoting Wilde, had said of the recently widowed mother of one of my junior-high-school friends, “I hear her hair has turned quite gold with grief,” and Kathy Becker, the class sweetheart who always wore baby blue cashmere, shook her head and said, “I feel sorry for you—you’re sick.” That Wilde was broken and Rimbaud driven into exile only seemed the reasonable price society demanded for such splashy transgressions. The lurid decadence of nineteenth-century Europe, with its mauve glasses and moth-eaten velvets, its melancholy lords and suitably untouchable ladies—that was a world I pined after, not this Detroit of behemoth cars, beetling their way through snow, these peppy renditions of novelty songs (Rosemary Clooney singing “If I’d Knowed You Was A-Comin’ I’d’ve Baked a Cake”). I felt a real nausea whenever I faced America’s frumpy cuteness, the Red Nosed Reindeer stamped out of dirty white plastic, the Hit Parade singers on TV dressed up to look like little kids, grown women in nylon Gretchen braids. But Maria turned this dross to gold by touching it, by holding it out and looking at it. She suggested it was sufficiently distant from her to appreciate. Rather startled, I said, “You mean you actually like this music?” “Little snob,” she laughed, her eyes tearing in some paradox of affection I couldn’t quite understand, “such a snob,” and she kissed me on the cheek as if I were some wonderfully stuffy old man. Her flat-chested torso shook soundlessly. With the back of her hand she slowly nudged the tears out of her eyes. And then I did relax. I cautiously admitted to myself that I liked this tiled restaurant and the teenage cook with the paper hat perched on his greased-back hair. I liked the idle pleasure of sitting over a third coffee with a friend, saying whatever came into my head, then lapsing back into a daydream, listening to snow chains on the street outside. Maria and I decided to collaborate on a best-seller. We took turns elaborating a plot about riches in Detroit, romance in Rio, broken heart in Paris, drug addiction in New York. We’d both burst into a new episode at the same time, laugh, insist the other one speak first. Maria deleted anything highbrow or arty. “We want this one to sell,” she said. Until now I’d divided the world into either philistines or aesthetes. The pretensions of the aesthetes convinced no one, me least of all, since most of the jocks who attracted me were philistines. Or perhaps I felt that over here, in America, the aesthetes were weakened, languishing, having strayed too far from the mother ship of Europe.

• From Amplified Holy Bible (2015)

  [2 Kin 6:8–23 ; Ps 18:1 ; 145:20 ] 8 O taste and see that the LORD [our God] is good; How blessed [fortunate, prosperous, and favored by God] is the man who takes refuge in Him. [1 Pet 2:2 , 3 ] 9 O [reverently] fear the LORD , you His saints (believers, holy ones); For to those who fear Him there is no want. 10 The young lions lack [food] and grow hungry, But they who seek the LORD will not lack any good thing. 11 Come, you children, listen to me; I will teach you to fear the LORD [with awe-inspired reverence and worship Him with obedience]. 12 Who is the man who desires life And loves many days, that he may see good? 13 Keep your tongue from evil And your lips from speaking deceit. 14 Turn away from evil and do good; Seek peace and pursue it. 15 The eyes of the LORD are toward the righteous [those with moral courage and spiritual integrity] And His ears are open to their cry. 16 The face of the LORD is against those who do evil, To cut off the memory of them from the earth. [1 Pet 3:10–12 ] 17 When the righteous cry [for help], the LORD hears And rescues them from all their distress and troubles. 18 The LORD is near to the heartbroken And He saves those who are crushed in spirit (contrite in heart, truly sorry for their sin). 19 Many hardships and perplexing circumstances confront the righteous, But the LORD rescues him from them all. 20 He keeps all his bones; Not one of them is broken. [John 19:33 , 36 ] 21 Evil will cause the death of the wicked, And those who hate the righteous will be held guilty and will be condemned. 22 The LORD redeems the soul of His servants, And none of those who take refuge in Him will be condemned. Psalm 35 Prayer for Rescue from Enemies. A Psalm of David. 1 C ONTEND, O LORD , with those who contend with me; Fight against those who fight against me. 2 Take hold of shield and buckler (a small shield), And stand up for my help. 3 Draw also the spear and javelin to meet those who pursue me. Say to my soul, “I am your salvation.” 4 Let those be ashamed and dishonored who seek my life; Let those be turned back [in defeat] and humiliated who plot evil against me. 5 Let them be [blown away] like chaff before the wind [worthless, without substance], With the angel of the LORD driving them on. 6 Let their way be dark and slippery, With the angel of the LORD pursuing and harassing them. 7 For without cause they hid their net for me; Without cause they dug a pit [of destruction] for my life.

• From Henry Miller on Writing (1964)

  The streets were everything to me, as they must be to every man who is lost in a big city. Walking through them again with my countryman I congratulated myself silently that I had begun my life in Paris behind the scenes, as it were. If I had led a Bohemian life, as some imagine, it was through bitter necessity. A Bohemian life! What a strange phrase that is when you think of it! There is so little that is Bohemian about it. In any case, the important thing is that in the Rue de Vanves I touched bottom. Like it or not, I was obliged to create a new life for myself. And this new life I feel is mine, absolutely mine, to use or to smash, as I see fit. In this life I am God, and like God I am indifferent to my own fate. I am everything there is—so why worry? Just as a piece of matter detaches itself from the sun to live as a wholly new creation so I have come to feel about my detachment from America. Once the separation is made a new orbit is established, and there is no turning back. For me the sun had ceased to exist; I had myself become a blazing sun. And like all the other suns of the universe I had to nourish myself from within . I speak in cosmological terms because it seems to me that is the only possible way to think if one is truly alive. I think this way also because it is just the opposite of the way I thought a few years back when I had what is called hopes. Hope is a bad thing. It means that you are not what you want to be. It means that part of you is dead, if not all of you. It means that you entertain illusions. It’s a sort of spiritual clap, I should say. Before this inward change came about I used to think that we were living in extraordinarily difficult times. Like most men I thought that our time was the worst possible time. And no doubt it is—for those, I mean, who still say “our time.” As for myself, I’ve thrown away the calendar by which one reckons the lean and the fat years. For me it is all gravy, one continuous, marvelous stream of time without beginning or end. Yes, the times are bad, permanently bad—unless one becomes immune, becomes God . Since I have become God I go the whole hog always. I am absolutely indifferent to the fate of the world: I have my own world and my own private fate. I make no reservations and no compromises. I accept. I am— and that is all. That is why, perhaps, when I sit at my typewriter I always face East. No backward glances over the shoulder.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  I got a job. I had to wait until the second week of September to start work and I wasn’t paid until six weeks after that, but at least I had a small purchase on this island. Lou staked me until I received my first check, for he was writing copy now for a top vodka account in a small agency. We both moved out of the Y into apartments, he into six rambling rooms on the Upper West Side, I into a tiny three-room railroad flat in the Village, on MacDougal above Houston. At school I’d already grown used to assuming and shedding disguises. In New York the costume ball continued. At work I wore a coat and tie and behaved with circumspection, but in the Village I dressed as a “hipster” (the new word). Lou had already taught me the hip vocabulary, but the old jazz hipster was being replaced by the image of someone young, white, innocent, loving, and permissive, someone who drank wine and smoked pot but avoided heroin, someone who put into spiritual practice the socialist injunctions against owning personal property; like the flowers in the field, this child toiled not. This evolution in style seemed to me a purely local phenomenon. I knew that the Detroit and Chicago of my childhood would never change. They represented the eternal, if distasteful, verities. I was sure that what was happening was only a new eruption of the old bohemian spirit. I’d found a job as a writer trainee for a national magazine. During the first six months I had to rotate from one department to the next, working first as a researcher in the library, then as an expediter in the mailroom or the production department. At last I was permitted to write a single caption, edited by three different hands before the picture was dropped in the final layout at press time. By the end of the year I had been given my own cubicle and phone and a door that closed. I was still researching and writing the odd caption.

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  “DO YOU LIKE ALWAYS moving around?” Lori asked me. “Of course I do!” I said. “Don’t you?” “Sure,” she said. It was late afternoon, and we were parked outside of a bar in the Nevada desert. It was called the Bar None Bar. I was four and Lori was seven. We were on our way to Las Vegas. Dad had decided it would be easier, as he put it, to accumulate the capital necessary to finance the Prospector if he hit the casinos for a while. We’d been driving for hours when he saw the Bar None Bar, pulled over the Green Caboose—the Blue Goose had died, and we now had another car, a station wagon Dad had named the Green Caboose—and announced that he was going inside for a quick nip. Mom put on some red lipstick and joined him, even though she didn’t drink anything stronger than tea. They had been inside for hours. The sun hung high in the sky, and there was not the slightest hint of a breeze. Nothing moved except some buzzards on the side of the road, pecking over an unrecognizable carcass. Brian was reading a dog-eared comic book. “How many places have we lived?” I asked Lori. “That depends on what you mean by ‘lived,’” she said. “If you spend one night in some town, did you live there? What about two nights? Or a whole week?” I thought. “If you unpack all your things,” I said. We counted eleven places we had lived, then we lost track. We couldn’t remember the names of some of the towns or what the houses we had lived in looked like. Mostly, I remembered the inside of cars. “What do you think would happen if we weren’t always moving around?” I asked. “We’d get caught,” Lori said. • • • When Mom and Dad came out of the Bar None Bar, they brought us each a long piece of beef jerky and a candy bar. I ate the jerky first, and by the time I unwrapped my Mounds bar, it had melted into a brown, gooey mess, so I decided to save it until night, when the desert cold would harden it up again.

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  “Looks like you hit the jackpot and got something extra,” she’d say with a wink. We always left the Owl Club so stuffed we could hardly walk. “Let’s waddle home, kids,” Dad would say. The barite mine where Dad worked had a commissary, and the mine owner deducted our bill and the rent for the depot out of Dad’s paycheck every month. At the beginning of each week, we went to the commissary and brought home bags and bags of food. Mom said only people brainwashed by advertising bought prepared foods such as SpaghettiOs and TV dinners. She bought the basics: sacks of flour or cornmeal, powdered milk, onions, potatoes, twenty-pound bags of rice or pinto beans, salt, sugar, yeast for making bread, cans of jack mackerel, a canned ham or a fat slab of bologna, and for dessert, cans of sliced peaches. Mom didn’t like cooking much—“Why spend the afternoon making a meal that will be gone in an hour,” she’d ask us, “when in the same amount of time, I can do a painting that will last forever?”—so once a week or so, she’d fix a big cast-iron vat of something like fish and rice or, usually, beans. We’d all sort through the beans together, picking out the rocks, then Mom would soak them overnight, boil them the next day with an old ham bone to give them flavor, and for that entire week, we’d have beans for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. If the beans started going bad, we’d just put extra spice in them, like the Mexicans at the LBJ Apartments always did. We bought so much food that we never had much money come payday. One payday Dad owed the mine company eleven cents. He thought it was funny and told them to put it on his tab. Dad almost never went out drinking at night like he used to. He stayed home with us. After dinner, the whole family stretched out on the benches and the floor of the depot and read, with the dictionary in the middle of the room so we kids could look up words we didn’t know. Sometimes I discussed the definitions with Dad, and if we didn’t agree with what the dictionary writers said, we sat down and wrote a letter to the publishers. They’d write back defending their position, which would prompt an even longer letter from Dad, and if they replied again, so would he, until we stopped hearing from the dictionary people. Mom read everything: Charles Dickens, William Faulkner, Henry Miller, Pearl Buck. She even read James Michener—apologetically—saying she knew it wasn’t great literature, but she couldn’t help herself. Dad preferred science and math books, biographies and history. We kids read whatever Mom brought home from her weekly trips to the library. Brian read thick adventure books, ones written by guys like Zane Grey. Lori especially loved Freddy the Pig and all the Oz books.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  I finally got out of that shitty gay life.” Yet it didn’t seem so shitty just now. We maintained, of course, the premise that we were sick, that our experience was limited, that we were missing out on the good things of life, and that our old age would be lonely. Worse, we anticipated a steady effeminization with the years. I knew I’d end up a seventy-year-old waiter, hair peroxided, camping with my gay customers and eyeing with hatred all the women customers I didn’t already know and share beauty secrets with, a wizened old bird lined from excessive dieting and unwilling to go out at night for fear of hoodlums. But just now that seemed a long way off. With Sean, of course, I pretended to be very studious and serious and even unfamiliar with gay life, but on nights when I was free I went out cruising. After the World’s Fair cleanup, gay bars started opening again, every month a new one. The Village gay life, which until now had collected along Greenwich Avenue, began to seep slowly down Christopher Street. Spring came, and boys were sitting on stoops almost all the way down to the Hudson. Every day I’d arrive at work later and later. We were supposed to be there at ten, but I never arrived before eleven. No one said anything. I had my captions to write, then whole paragraphs, but the company was so overstaffed that we were given two weeks to write a hundred lines. We typed on lined paper that gave the exact character count, but it didn’t matter, since every textblock was rewritten by all those idle editors over us. I closed my door and fell asleep on my desk, called all my friends, took two-hour lunches, had my shoes shined by a man who went from floor to floor with his kit and who once even offered to bump off anyone I wanted for two hundred dollars. I lived for my nights. I’d rush home and fall asleep in my clothes. Hours later I’d awaken, eat cottage cheese out of the carton and a whole tomato, then I’d dress for cruising and head out into the night. The appeal of gay life for me was that it provided so many glancing contacts with other men. At the gym I was becoming an old hand, and now I was the one to show the new guys how to work the lat machine or do heavy squats without injuring the back, but I never knew their names. At the bar I would buy drinks for “friends” and they for me, but again we seldom knew each other’s names.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  By three in the morning the President’s Punch had been delivered as the coup de grace to the few survivors. On every buttoned leather couch, unconscious men sprawled, as “totaled” as the cars they liked to wreck. Some of the brothers sat bolt upright, mouths open, ties and shoelaces undone. Their snoring bleated and gasped antiphonally from room to room. The lights on all four floors were blazing. I was the only one awake. No. There was one other person, another pledge, Mick, a guy who grinned too much and who talked about weapons and physical fitness with a creepy enthusiasm, as though everyone must agree that hacking through the ice to swim in Lake Michigan was a self-evident pleasure as was the prospect of parachuting out of a plane into enemy-occupied territory. Like certain religious fanatics who supply their own chorus of assent (“That’s right, by golly, Lord knows”), he murmured to himself all the affirmation he needed. Mick was from the South. Everything about him was glossy. Each hair on his head looked as though it had been individually dipped and twirled in hot mink oil. His prominent temples, his bony jaw, the machine-tooled grooves of his ears, his sealskin eyebrows all threw off highlights, and his big black eyes looked like the reservoirs of that lubrication, just as his shiny black nipples looked like the controls. He wasn’t “masculine” with the full pachydermal weight that word carried back then. He was more like a ferret—quick, intent. And a loner. He was always alone, backing out of rooms with a grin and that nearly subvocal chorus of yea-saying (“Yessiree, better get crackin’ if I’m going to make ROTC”). He’d hang on the witticisms of the older guys with that huge grin. It was hard to look at it since there was no scrim over it, and only if someone teased him (“Stop eatin’ shit, Mick”) did he become conscious of his smile. Then he used it defensively; he’d dial it bigger and brighter, rotate and beam it into every corner. The brothers didn’t think he was a “face man” only because he wasn’t given to an eye-batting awareness of his own beauty. But he did have the sort of good regular looks that go with a parade uniform. One could picture his features under a helmet, deep-set eyes sunk into the shadow cast by the brim. He had a girlfriend whom he never stopped touching when he was with her—fingering her sash, stroking her hair, massaging her neck, guiding her through the door by patting her shoulder. They were always the first to hit the dimmed make-out room at a dance and the last to leave in complete dishevelment. She wasn’t a “Greek.” In fact, she had no distinction in our eyes except as Mick’s girl. Mick seemed much less complicated than everyone else about sex; he didn’t talk about cunnilingus for hours and didn’t vomit on his date.