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 Decameron (1353)

  When the chaste and joyful greetings had been repeated three or four times A direct quotation from the opening lines of canto VII of Dante’s Purgatorio (‘Poscia che l’accoglienze oneste e liete/furo iterate tre e quattro volte’). The text of the Decameron contains many such examples of the insertion of familiar quotations from earlier poets, especially Dante, a practice later commended by the stylistic theorists of the Renaissance.10. Lerici A port in Lunigiana near the mouth of the River Magra, where travellers from Genoa and other ‘distant’ parts were accustomed to disembark en route to Tuscany and Emilia.Seventh Story1. Beminedab Thought to be based on the biblical Amminadab fleetingly mentioned in the Book of Numbers and in Saint Matthew’s Gospel, this fictitious name is used by other medieval writers to indicate an oriental ruler of an indeterminate epoch. The name has mildly humorous associations.2. Alatiel Like Beminedab, the name is fictitious, but it happens to be an anagram of La Lieta (‘The Happy Woman’), offering a possible clue to the way in which the story is intended to be read.3. the King of Algarve Algarve, from the Arabic al-Gharb, meaning ‘the West’, was a much more extensive region than the area of that name in modern Portugal. It corresponded roughly to northern Morocco, including a long stretch of the African Mediterranean coast, and the south-western part of the Iberian peninsula. Its wool was greatly prized in European markets. B.’s employers, the Compagnia dei Bardi, imported wool from Algarve via a trading post on the island of Majorca, where Alatiel’s sexual odyssey begins.4. neither he nor they could understand what the other party was saying A recurrent feature of Alatiel’s sexual encounters is her inability to communicate verbally with her various abductors. In an absorbing analysis of this particular novella, Guido Almansi argues that ‘Alatiel is not “a beautiful woman”. She is a superhuman figure; mythic, or at least closely related to a myth. Even her linguistic isolation can be read as an ambivalent sign… On the one hand, her complete ignorance of West European languages is convincing from a narrative standpoint, and serves to give special emphasis to the gesticulations of the characters… Yet her non-communication is also… a sign standing for Alatiel’s isolation, which is due to her superhuman features. Any mating with a mythic character must take place in silence, because there can exist no dialogue, no normative vocabulary, for the relationship between man and myth.’ (The Writer as Liar, p. 124.)5. Alexandrian fashion Presumably the Egyptian danse du ventre, which would explain the boosting of Pericone’s expectations.6. Corinth in the Pelopponese The Italian text reads ‘Chiarenza in Romania’. It was customary to refer to the whole of the Eastern Roman Empire as Romania. Chiarenza is an italianized form of Corinth.7. Saint Stiffen-in-the-Hand The Italian text reads ‘santo Cresa in Mari (‘Saint Grow-in-Hand’), an equivocal phallic metaphor of which the variant ‘san Cresa in Val Cava’ (‘Saint-Grow-in-Hollow-Vale’) turns up towards the end of the story (p.

• From Apprenticed to Venus: My Secret Life with Anaïs Nin (2017)

  HAVING SOLVED HER IRS CRISIS, Anaïs expected that I should also be able to manifest my desires. Whenever I saw her she’d ask, “What about your Don Juan?” grousing that I was doing something wrong by not having seduced Don. I’d come to the opposite conclusion, though. If he and I had violated our house incest taboo, it would have destabilized our commune family, and I would have missed the best two years of my life. I would have missed having genuine friendships with men and the experience of being part of a functioning family. We had embraced the ideal of community devoid of capitalism, and it had worked. Money was never a problem; we each paid less for food and shelter than before. We had the usual roommate disagreements about decorating and cleaning, and our political discussions occasionally led to shouting, especially about sexism, but I always felt a real equality and trust with the guys. I never had a steady boyfriend during my years in the Georgina house, but I never felt lonely. It was enough to be part of this intelligent, hip family with whom I shared meals and our earnest political ideals. We kept track of each other at anti-war demonstrations, boycotted grapes and Coors beer, harbored Berkeley Free Speech orator Mario Savio after his psychotic breakdown, and threw huge holiday parties that were the hot invite among the Westside’s liberal chic. On academic breaks the five of us would pile our sleeping bags into Bob’s van, bring along some joints, and take off on camping trips to Death Valley, the Santa Barbara hot springs, and the High Sierras. We rented a cabin at Lake Arrowhead where we tried acid together, confident that we would all be safe in each other’s company. We hiked, and swam in our birthday suits, and talked deep into the night under the open sky. For a latchkey kid who’d eaten alone in front of the TV and didn’t go on vacations, these were days of heaven. Then one evening I was upstairs in the ballroom working on my doctoral dissertation, which I’d changed three times already from Renaissance tragedy to Restoration comedy to women’s diaries. Actually, I had wanted to write about Anaïs’s Diaries, but my dissertation chair had objected that she was neither important enough, nor dead. He recommended I write about all women’s diaries, from the tenth-century Japanese diarists on through to the present, so I would have enough material for a “proper” PhD dissertation.

• From The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica Volume 10 (2011)

  can’t help staring at the strange, shrouded lump that is my body as Eric signs the check. “Is your wife all right?” he asks. “My wife couldn’t be better,” Eric replies. I hear an edge in his voice that the waiter probably misses. “We’re just playing a little game.” “Hide and seek?” Eric tries hard not to laugh. “Not exactly ... There you go. Thank you.” “Sure thing. Have a nice lunch.” “Oh, we will.” I’m laughing too, in relief and in joy at being alone again. I should have known that he wouldn’t risk exposing me that way. Then I think of some of our past encounters, and ’m not so sure. “I’m always torn,” says Eric as he works at undoing my bonds. “Between showing the world what a delicious slut you are, and keeping you all to myself.” I stretch out my legs and groan at the stiffness. “Sorry to keep you tied up so long. Maybe I got a bit carried away.” “T’m out of shape. Not used to this stuff anymore.” “T’]l get you whipped into shape in no time.” He hands me my sandwich with a grin. “Here. You’ve got to keep your strength up. “You know, it was so hard to decide what to take with me this time. I thought about bringing my laptop and some recent videos. We could watch them together — there’s nobody I can really share that sort of kinky stuff with except you. But then I thought we wouldn’t have the time ... One idea I had was to make a ginger fig for you — you know, a little present after not seeing you for so long. I’d love to see how you react to a spicy plug of raw ginger up your ass. But then . .” I realized that it would dry out on the trip, wouldn’t be effective . He talks on between bites of his hamburger. I’m content just to sit here in his presence, my sex still humming from my orgasms, listening to my master, face to face with him at last. After a while, though, both his food and his conversation run out, and we're there, looking at each other, wondering what comes next. “T want to see you naked,” I say finally. “Well, I want to try out that wooden ruler.” So he does, and of course, I like it. Pve always been willing to let him experiment on my body. It turns me on like nothing else, to put myself in his hands, to let him investigate the effects of various implements, positions and techniques. Sometimes the sensations are pleasurable. Even if Reunion 343 they’re not, giving myself to him sends me flying. When we’re apart I miss his voice, his hands, his humor, his intelligence, but most of all I miss the roller-coaster thrill of his taking control and his outrageous sexual imagination.

• From A Way of Being (1980)

  THE NOW—AND THE FUTURE I should stop here, but I cannot. It is always a strain for me to look backward. It is still the present and the future that concern me most. I cannot close without a quick overview of my current interests and activities. I am no longer actively engaged in individual therapy or empirical research. I am finding that after one passes the age of seventy, there are physical limitations on what one can do. I continue to engage in encounter groups when I believe they might have significant social impact. For example, I am involved in a program for the humanizing of medical education. Up to the present, more than two hundred high-status medical educators have been involved in intensive group experiences which appear to be more successful in facilitating change than we had dared hope. Perhaps more humanly sensitive physicians will be the result. Such group experiences certainly represent a new area of possible impact. I have also helped to sponsor, and have taken some part in, interracial and intercultural groups, believing that better understanding between diverse groups is essential if our planet is to survive. The most difficult group was composed of citizens of Belfast, Northern Ireland. Represented in the group were militant and less militant Catholics, militant and less militant Protestants, and English. The film of that encounter portrays the participants’ difficult and partial progress toward better understanding—a first step on a long road. I see this encounter group as a small test-tube attempt, which might be utilized in greater depth and much more widely. I continue to write. I recognize that while my whole approach to persons and their relationships changes but slowly (and very little in its fundamentals), my interest in its application has shifted markedly. No longer am I primarily interested in individual therapeutic learning, but in broader and broader social implications. As I say this, the question arises in my mind, as it often has in the past, “Am I spreading myself too thin?” Only the judgment of others can answer that question at some future date. And then I garden. Those mornings when I cannot find time to inspect my flowers, water the young shoots I am propagating, pull a few weeds, spray some destructive insects, and pour just the proper fertilizer on some budding plants, I feel cheated. My garden supplies the same intriguing question I have been trying to meet in all my professional life: What are the effective conditions for growth? But in my garden, though the frustrations are just as immediate, the results, whether success or failure, are more quickly evident. And when, through patient, intelligent, and understanding care I have provided the conditions that result in the production of a rare or glorious bloom, I feel the same kind of satisfaction that I have felt in the facilitation of growth in a person or in a group of persons.

• From A Way of Being (1980)

  WHAT ARE THE RESEARCH RESULTS? It has been truly fascinating to see research evidence pile up over the years indicating that there is some validity to the hypotheses that I so tentatively presented years ago. I wish to dwell on the evidence from education, but first, one small finding from the field of therapy. In a study of therapist-client relationships, Barrett-Lennard (1962) found that those clients who eventually showed more therapeutic change perceived more of these therapist qualities at the time of the fifth interview than did those who eventually showed less change. This finding has been corroborated in a larger group of cases by Reinhard Tausch (1978), who found that prediction could be made after only the second interview. I feel certain that this finding would hold in the classroom world as well. If we measured the teacher’s attitudes during the first five days of the school year—the attitudes as they exist in the teacher and as they are perceived by the students—we could predict which classrooms would contain learners, and which would contain prisoners. To the degree that these attitudes were held and perceived, we could predict the classrooms in which learning would be by the whole person, with its accompanying involvement and excitement. We could also predict the classrooms in which students would be passive, restless, or rebellious, in which mostly rote learning would be going on. The research that has endeavored to discover specific relationships between these attitudinal conditions and various elements of the learning process has come about largely through the efforts of Dr. David Aspy and his colleagues, although others have also contributed. There is not the space here to describe the details of the researches, but I will discuss very briefly some of the findings. To give some samples: The levels of these interpersonal conditions can be measured with reasonable objectivity. It has been shown that they are significantly and positively related to a greater gain in reading achievement in third-graders (Aspy, 1965). They are positively related to grade point average (Pierce, 1966); similarly, to cognitive growth (Aspy, 1967; Aspy, 1969; Aspy & Hadlock, 1967); to an increase in creative interest and productivity (Moon, 1966); to levels of cognitive thinking and to the amount of student-initiated talk (Aspy & Roebuck, 1970). They are related to a diffusion of liking and trust in the classroom, which in turn is related to the students’ better utilization of their abilities and greater confidence in themselves (Schrnuck, 1966).

• From A Way of Being (1980)

  THE PHYSICAL SIDE I do feel physical deterioration. I notice it in many ways. Ten years ago I greatly enjoyed throwing a frisbee. Now my right shoulder is so painfully arthritic that this kind of activity is out of the question. In my garden I realize that a task which would have been easy five years ago, but difficult last year, now seems like too much, and I had better leave it for my once-a-week gardener. This slow deterioration, with various minor disorders of vision, heartbeat, and the like, informs me that the physical portion of what I call “me” is not going to last forever. Yet I still enjoy a four-mile walk on the beach. I can lift heavy objects, do all the shopping, cooking, and dishwashing when my wife is ill, carry my own luggage without puffing. The female form still seems to me one of the loveliest creations of the universe, and I appreciate it greatly. I feel as sexual in my interests as I was at thirty-five, though I can’t say the same about my ability to perform. I am delighted that I am still sexually alive, even though I can sympathize with the remark of Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes upon leaving a burlesque house at age eighty: “Oh to be seventy again!” Yes, or sixty-five, or sixty! So, I am well aware that I am obviously old. Yet from the inside I’m still the same person in many ways, neither old nor young. It is that person of whom I will speak. ACTIVITIES New Enterprises

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  decorous construction of a common life. Within that framework, many radicals created communities where resources were shared, but on the basis of monogamous families – the sort of Hutterite village that sheltered the dying Ochino in Moravia. Their leadership remained male: a Hutterite community was called the Court of Brothers (Bruderhof). The radical Peter Riedemann, in drawing up one of the most prominent Hutterite confessional statements in 1540, set the tone of his discussion of the role of women by sounding an utterly traditional note: ‘We say, first, that since woman was taken from man, and not man from woman, man hath lordship but woman weakness, humility and submission, therefore she should be under the yoke of man and obedient to him.’ [43] Hutterite communities nevertheless boasted one distinctive feature: a reversal of the medieval Western trend to emphasize a couple’s initiative in marriage. Arrangements were taken out of the hands of a prospective couple and given to the community elders (men, naturally), so it broadened out from the ancient dynastic principle that marriages should be arranged by the fathers of bride and groom. The elders would choose a small group of eligible young people from among those of suitable age and bring together those selected; thus suitably supervised they then chose their partner, avoiding ‘the inclinations of the flesh’. Hutterite marriage custom proved one of the greatest points of internal contention in their determinedly peaceable communities. In the seventeenth century, one of their most distinguished bishops had to put a stop to widespread blatant fraud, as young lovers schemed to gerrymander the chosen group for particular wedding occasions. The dispute rumbled on until the mid-nineteenth century, when the Church authorities finally admitted defeat and gave up their prerogatives. [44] Matters were different in the Magisterial Protestant Churches, which hearkened to the Pauline epistles in emphasizing a couple’s individual choice. No doubt a consideration in this was the aspiration of clerical families to heroic marital partnerships, together with early Reformation uncertainties for Protestants in dealing with unsympathetic Catholic parents. The Reformed Protestant Church of Scotland has seldom boasted a reputation for sentimentality, but right away during the revolutionary birth of ‘the Kirk’ in 1560, when making official provision for marriage in the First Book of Discipline, it emphatically declared that the attraction between young people was ‘a work of God’ which trumped the admitted desirability of parental consent. If parents stood in the way of their children’s happiness for ‘no other cause than the common sort of men have, to wit lack of goods and because they are not so high-born as they require’, then the minister should try to win the parents round – but if that did not work, he should overrule them and go ahead with a marriage. ‘For the work of God ought not to be hindered by the corrupt affections of worldly men’: one in the eye for patriarchy, echoed elsewhere in the Reformed Protestant world.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  imperial official in Basel, she was first widow to the Basel humanist artist Ludwig Keller (Cellarius) before wedding in succession three prominent clerical Reformers: the former monk Johannes Oecolampadius (Hussgen), the first Protestant pastor of Basel; another former monk Wolfgang Capito (Köpfel), pastor in Strassburg; and finally one of the Reformation’s most eloquent propagandists for happy companionate marriage, the former friar Martin Bucer, chief pastor of Strassburg and finally Regius Professor in Cambridge. Wibrandis had been recommended to Bucer by his dying first wife Elisabeth. Oecolampadius gave her a rave review: ‘what I always wanted...She is not contentious, garrulous, or a gadabout, but looks after the household.’ Bucer wanted a little more pepper – ‘My first wife felt somewhat more free to admonish me and now I realize that that freedom of hers was not only useful but necessary.’ Many clergy were to discover that a frank but affectionate wifely perspective was helpful preparation for the inevitable critics outside the parsonage door. [21] Only gradually, as in the 1530s and 1540s Protestantism began winning the allegiance of more and more territories in and beyond the Empire, did the clergy wife begin to reflect what the new emerging Church authorities wanted in the marriages of pastors, in the manner of Fraulein Rosenblatt: a solidly respectable background in families among the middle layers of urban society. It took time for social attitudes to reflect changing realities beyond the ranks of men and women who championed clerical marriage as an ideological statement (Plate 24). In the Holy Roman Empire, it was not till 1555 that military defeat of the Habsburg Emperor and his Catholic allies and the resulting Peace of Augsburg forced the Habsburgs grudgingly to grant secure legal status to Lutheran clergy marriages and their children within the Empire. [22] In England, where a truly Protestant Reformation rapidly gained in momentum after 1547 through a regime acting in the name of the young Edward VI, the one part of their legislative programme that met prolonged obstruction from conservative nobility and bishops in Parliament was the full legalization of clerical marriage; that legislation did not finally pass till 1549. Then when a version of the Edwardian Protestant Church was restored in 1559 after the death of Catholic Queen Mary, her half-sister Queen Elizabeth showed herself untypical of Protestants in her lack of enthusiasm for clerical wives (but then Elizabeth had problems with most people’s wives). This personal idiosyncrasy could not withstand the Protestant tide even for the Supreme Governor of the Church of England, but it had one curious long-term effect that outlasted Elizabeth’s own capacity to choose her bishops; after the death of her happily married first Archbishop of Canterbury Matthew Parker in 1575, no occupant of the see of Canterbury had a wife until John Tillotson in 1691. [23] It is not surprising that an initially uncertain place in Western society encouraged clergy and their children to stick together socially, resulting in a great deal of intermarriage among clergy families.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  In the nick of time for me the war broke out between Chili and Peru: Chilian bonds dropped from 90 to 60: I saw Hamilton and assured him that Chili if left alone, could beat all South America: he advised me to wait and see. A little later Bolivia threw in her lot with Peru and Chilian bonds fell to 43 or 44. At once I went to Hamilton and asked him to buy Chilians for all I possessed on a margin of three or four. After much talk he did what I wished on a margin of ten: a fortnight later came the news of the first Chilian victory and Chilians jumped to 60 odd and continued to climb steadily: I sold at over 80 and thus netted from my first five hundred pounds over two thousand pounds and by Christmas was free once more to study with a mind at case. Hamilton told me that he had followed my lead a little later but had made more from a larger investment. The most important happening at Brighton I must now relate. I have already told in a pen-portrait of Carlyle published by Austin Harrison in the “English Review” some twelve years ago how I went one Sunday morning and called upon my hero, Thomas Carlyle in Chelsea. I told there, too, how on more than one Sunday I used to meet him on his morning walk along the Chelsea embankment, and how once at least he talked to me of his wife and admitted his impotence. I only gave a summary of a few talks in my portrait of him; for the traits did not call for strengthening by repetition; but here I am inclined to add a few details, for everything about Carlyle at his best, is of enduring interest! When I told him how I had been affected by reading Emerson’s speech to the students of Dartmouth College and how it had in a way forced me to give up my law-practice and go to Europe to study, he broke in excitedly: “I remember well reading that very page to my wife and saying that nothing like it for pure nobility had been heard since Schiller went silent. It had a great power with it.... And so that started you off and changed your way of life?... I don’t wonder ... it was a great Call.” After that Carlyle seemed to like me. At our final parting too, when I was going to Germany to study and he wished me “God speed and Goodspeed! on the way that lies before ye”, he spoke again of Emerson and the sorrow he had felt on parting with him, deep, deep sorrow and regret, and he added, laying his hands on my shoulders, “sorrowing most of all that they should see his face no more forever.” I remembered the passage and cried:

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

  The times were favorable for the development of monastic communities. If our own is the age of the laic, the mediaeval period was the age of the monk. Society was unsettled and turbulent. The convent offered an asylum of rest and of meditation. Bernard calls his monks "the order of the Peaceful." Feud and war ruled without. Every baronial residence was a fortress. The convent was the scene of brotherhood and co-operation. It furnished to the age the ideal of a religious household on earth. The epitaphs of monks betray the feeling of the time, pacificus, "the peaceful"; tranquilla pace serenus, "in quiet and undisturbed repose"; fraternae pacis amicus, "friend of brotherly peace." The circumstances are presented by Caesar of Heisterbach under which a number of monks abandoned the world, and were "converted"—that is, determined to enter a convent. Now the decision was made at a burial.538 Now it was due to the impression made by the relation of the wonderful things which occurred in convents. This was the case with a young knight, Gerlach,539 who listened to an abbot who was then visiting a castle, as he told his experiences within cloistral walls. Gerlach went to Paris to study, but could not get rid of the seed which had been sown in his heart, and entered upon the monastic novitiate. Sometimes the decision was made in consequence of a sermon.540 Caesar of Heisterbach himself was "converted" by a description given by Gerard of Walberberg, abbot of Heisterbach, while they were on the way to Cologne during the troublous times of Philip of Swabia and Otto IV. Gerard described the appearance of the Virgin, her mother Anna, and St. Mary Magdalene, who descended from the mountain and revealed themselves to the monks of Clairvaux while they were engaged in the harvest, dried the perspiration from their foreheads, and cooled them by fanning. Within three months Caesar entered the convent of Heisterbach.541 There were in reality only two careers in the Middle Ages, the career of the knight and the career of the monk. It would be difficult to say which held out the most attractions and rewards, even for the present life. The monk himself was a soldier. The well-ordered convent offered a daily drill, exercise following exercise with the regularity of clockwork; and though the enemy was not drawn up in visible array on open field, he was a constant reality.542 Barons, counts, princes joined the colonies of the spiritual militia, hoping thereby to work out more efficiently the problem of their salvation and fight their conflict with the devil. The Third Lateran, 1179, bears witness to the popularity of the conventual life among the higher classes, and the tendency to restrict it to them, when it forbade the practice of receiving motley as a price of admission to the vow.543 The monk proved to be stronger than the knight and the institution of chivalry decayed before the institution of monasticism which still survives.

• From The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica Volume 10 (2011)

  I plan to write to the company that makes my spanking machine praising them, and suggesting some additions for future models. I hope that with advances in technology, new versions will be able to speak to the user and tell her what a naughty girl she’s been, along with reading her body temperature and movements and sensing when she needs a stronger spanking, even if she’s not quite ready to request it. For now, though, I have a daily date with my spanking machine. I usually use it in the morning, when others are going to the gym to use other, slightly more masochistic machines. I walk out of my building with a grin that has everything to do with my blushing bottom and being able to’afford the best spankings money can buy. Raw Adam Berlin I craved raw fish. And like an addict, from the first time I ate perfect sushi, carefully cut, colorfully presented, dark soy sauce, green wasabi and white rice highlighting the delicate pink and pale and red fish flesh, I was smitten. It was like love. All of my money went to eating sushi. I worked and I went out to eat. I worked to go out to eat. I ate sushi until I was full and then I rested and ate more sushi until I was beyond full. Unlike other foods, the craving was back the next day and, as I plodded through my nine-to-five, I dreamed of sushi, all kinds of sushi. Plain sushi and sushi rolls, simple rolls wrapped in seaweed and inside-out rolls rolled in sesame or roe, maki tuna and yellowtail and salmon and eel and combination rolls, exotic, innovative rolls. And the more sushi J ate, the better the sushi needed to be. A ten-dollar hand of blackjack becomes dull with time and so the player bets twenty-five dollars and then a hundred dollars a hand and when he wins, he bets more, thousands of dollars just to keep the high going. A gambler who bets six figures a hand is called a whale. Fish and addiction. The addiction of fish.

• From Apprenticed to Venus: My Secret Life with Anaïs Nin (2017)

  HAVING SOLVED HER IRS CRISIS, Anaïs expected that I should also be able to manifest my desires. Whenever I saw her she’d ask, “What about your Don Juan?” grousing that I was doing something wrong by not having seduced Don. I’d come to the opposite conclusion, though. If he and I had violated our house incest taboo, it would have destabilized our commune family, and I would have missed the best two years of my life. I would have missed having genuine friendships with men and the experience of being part of a functioning family. We had embraced the ideal of community devoid of capitalism, and it had worked. Money was never a problem; we each paid less for food and shelter than before. We had the usual roommate disagreements about decorating and cleaning, and our political discussions occasionally led to shouting, especially about sexism, but I always felt a real equality and trust with the guys. I never had a steady boyfriend during my years in the Georgina house, but I never felt lonely. It was enough to be part of this intelligent, hip family with whom I shared meals and our earnest political ideals. We kept track of each other at anti-war demonstrations, boycotted grapes and Coors beer, harbored Berkeley Free Speech orator Mario Savio after his psychotic breakdown, and threw huge holiday parties that were the hot invite among the Westside’s liberal chic. On academic breaks the five of us would pile our sleeping bags into Bob’s van, bring along some joints, and take off on camping trips to Death Valley, the Santa Barbara hot springs, and the High Sierras. We rented a cabin at Lake Arrowhead where we tried acid together, confident that we would all be safe in each other’s company. We hiked, and swam in our birthday suits, and talked deep into the night under the open sky. For a latchkey kid who’d eaten alone in front of the TV and didn’t go on vacations, these were days of heaven. Then one evening I was upstairs in the ballroom working on my doctoral dissertation, which I’d changed three times already from Renaissance tragedy to Restoration comedy to women’s diaries. Actually, I had wanted to write about Anaïs’s Diaries, but my dissertation chair had objected that she was neither important enough, nor dead. He recommended I write about all women’s diaries, from the tenth-century Japanese diarists on through to the present, so I would have enough material for a “proper” PhD dissertation.

• From Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010)

  As you progress, you will notice that once a desire is fulfilled, you almost immediately start to want something else. If the object of your desire turns out to be disappointing, you become frustrated and unsettled. You soon realize that nothing lasts long. An irritation, idea, or fantasy that seemed all-consuming a moment ago tends to pass quite quickly, and before long you are distracted by a startling noise or a sudden drop in temperature, which shatters your concentration. We humans rarely sit absolutely still but are constantly shifting our position, even when we sleep. We suddenly get it into our heads to wander into another room, make a cup of tea, or find somebody to talk to. One minute we are seething over a colleague’s inefficiency; the next we are daydreaming about our summer vacation. Gradually, as you become conscious of your changeability, you will find that you are beginning to sit a little more lightly to your opinions and desires. Your current preoccupation is not really “you,” because in a few moments you will almost certainly be obsessing about something else. This calm, dispassionate appraisal of our behavior helps us to become aware that our judgments are often biased and dependent on a passing mood, and that our endless self-preoccupation brings us into conflict with people who seem to get in our way. You will notice how easily and carelessly you inflict pain on others, sighing impatiently over a minor inconvenience, grimacing when the clerk is slow at the checkout, or raising your eyebrows in derision at what you regard as a stupid remark. But you will also see how upsetting it is when somebody behaves like that to you —and, conversely, that an unexpectedly kind or helpful act can brighten the day and change your mood in an instant. Once we know that the cause of so much human pain is within ourselves, we have the motivation to change. We will find that we are happier when we are peaceful than when we are angry or restless, and that, like the Buddha, we can make the effort to cultivate these positive emotions, noticing, for example, that when we perform an act of kindness we ourselves feel better. Mindfulness should not make us anxious. Instead of being afraid of what will happen tomorrow, or wishing it was this time last week, we can learn to live more fully in the present. Instead of allowing a past memory to cloud our present mood, we can learn to savor simple pleasures—a sunset, an apple, or a joke. Mindfulness should be something that becomes habitual, but it is not an end in itself. It should segue naturally into action and could, after a few days, be profitably combined with the next step. THE SIXTH STEP Action O n arrival at the House of Studies as a recently professed nun, I discovered that my new superior was dying of cancer.

• From Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (2020)

  During the 1980s, they worked to forge closer connections with the military in order to strengthen this last bastion of American greatness. Not surprisingly, Falwell assisted in this effort. Working at the Reagan administration’s behest to point out the follies of détente, he frequently called on retired military men to help him make his case. But it was James Dobson who would play the most critical role in cementing ties between evangelicals and the military. In 1983, army chief of staff General John A. Wickham Jr. tapped Dobson—who had just been named the NAE’s “Layman of the Year” for his work in “saving the family”—to spearhead a campaign to inculcate evangelical “family values” within the military. Wickham, “a man of great faith,” had recommitted to faith and family in a foxhole in Vietnam, and as chief of staff he made it his priority to strengthen moral values throughout the army. He had learned of Dobson from two Republican congressmen, Indiana’s Dan Coats and Virginia’s Frank Wolf. Two years earlier, Coats and Wolf had attended a screening of Dobson’s Where’s Dad? They promoted the film and other Focus on the Family materials to fellow members of Congress and their families, and they thought Dobson’s film could be used to strengthen military families, too. Wickham agreed to bring Dobson on board. The two first met at a Pentagon fellowship breakfast, and Dobson told Wickham that he felt “a definite sense of camaraderie and Christian brotherhood with you and the other military leaders.” The two men began to work closely together with the purpose of strengthening “family values” among those serving in the military. The next year, Wickham invited Dobson to the Spring Commanders’ Conference at the Pentagon, where Dobson gave a talk on “the importance of traditional home-life values” for officers and their wives. The following year, Wickham arranged for the distribution of Dobson’s Where’s Dad? video throughout the army; all 780,000 active-duty soldiers were expected to view the film, and it served as the “building block” for the army’s entire “Family Action Plan.”25 The military scrubbed all overtly religious language from the video, but the family values ideology remained intact. Dobson believed that the fate of the family, and the nation, depended on men taking up proper leadership roles: “Folks, if America is going to survive, it will be because husbands and fathers begin to put their families at the highest level of priorities and reserve something of their time, effort and energy for leadership within their own homes.” Wickham concurred. “The readiness of our Army is directly related to the strength of our families,” he attested. “The stronger the family, the stronger the Army, because strong families improve our combat readiness.”26 Their partnership paid dividends for both men. Dobson was able to expand his influence throughout the military and tap new distribution networks (neither the army nor Dobson’s publisher would disclose how much the army paid for Where’s Dad?

• From Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010)

  A soothing regulatory system takes over, balancing the systems that control the response to threat and hunger, so that they can take time out and allow their bodies to repair themselves. It used to be thought that this quiescence was simply the result of the more aggressive drives zoning out, but it has now been found that this physical relaxation is also accompanied in both mammals and humans by profound and positive feelings of peace, security, and well-being. 19 Produced initially by maternal soothing, these emotions are activated by such hormones as oxytocin, which induces a sense of closeness to others and plays a crucial role in the development of parental attachment. 20 When human beings entered this peaceful state of mind, they were liberated from anxiety and could, therefore, think more clearly and have fresh insights; as they acquired new skills and had more leisure, some sought to reproduce this serenity in activities, disciplines, and rituals that were found to induce it. In Semitic languages, the word for “compassion” ( rahamanut in post-biblical Hebrew and rahman in Arabic), is related etymologically to rehem/RHM (“womb”). The icon of mother and child is an archetypal expression of human love. It evokes the maternal affection that in all likelihood gave birth to our capacity for unselfish, unconditional altruism. It may well be that the experience of teaching, guiding, soothing, protecting, and nourishing their young taught men and women how to look after people other than their own kin, developing a concern that was not based on cold calculation but imbued with warmth. We humans are more radically dependent on love than any other species. Our brains have evolved to be caring and to need care—to such an extent that they are impaired if this nurture is lacking. 21 Mother love involves affective love; it has a powerful hormonal base, but it also requires dedicated, unselfish action “all day and every day.” A mother’s concern for her child pervades all her activities. Whether she feels like it or not, she has to get up to her crying infant night after night, watch him at every moment of the day, and learn to control her own exhaustion, impatience, anger, and frustration. She is tied to her child long after he has reached adulthood; indeed, on both sides, the relationship is usually terminated only at death. Maternal love can be heartbreaking as well as fulfilling; it requires stamina, fortitude, and a strong degree of selflessness. We know from our own experience that human beings do not confine their altruistic behavior to those who carry their genes. The Confucian philosopher Mencius (c. 371–c. 289 BCE) was convinced that nobody was wholly without sympathy for other people. If you saw a child poised perilously on the edge of a well, you would immediately lunge forward to save her.

• From Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010)

  Both the Buddha and Confucius seem to have conducted discussion in a similar manner. Confucius always developed his insights in conversation with other people, because in his view we needed this friendly interaction to achieve maturity. In Chinese script, ren had two elements: the simple ideogram of a human being and two horizontal strokes indicating human relations. Ren can, therefore, be translated as “cohumanity.” 4 But this cooperation required ren ’s “softness” and “pliability,” and Confucius would probably have appreciated the ritual of the Socratic dialogue, which demanded that participants “yield” to one another instead of holding rigidly to their own opinions. In the Analects, we see him mildly scolding his pupils, pushing them to the limit of their ability but never bullying them. Easygoing, affable, and calm, Confucius listened to them carefully and was always ready to concede their point of view. He was no sage, he would protest; his only talent was an “unwearying effort to learn and unflagging patience in teaching others.” 5 The Buddha too taught his monks to converse kindly and courteously with one another. His lay disciple King Pasenadi of Kosala was extremely impressed by the friendliness of the Buddhist community, which was in marked contrast to the royal court, where everybody was on the lookout for himself and chronically quarrelsome. When he sat with his council, he complained, he was constantly interrupted and sometimes even heckled. But when he visited the Buddha, he saw monks “living together as uncontentiously as milk with water and looking at one another with kind eyes … smiling, courteous, sincerely happy … their minds remaining as gentle as wild deer.” 6 One day he told the Buddha about a conversation with his wife in which they had both admitted that nothing was more important to them than their own selves. Instead of lecturing the king on the “unskilful” nature of egotism or launching into a discussion of anatta , he entered into Pasenadi’s position, starting from where his disciple actually was rather than where the Buddha thought he ought to be. He suggested that if the king found that there was nothing dearer to him than himself, he should reflect that everybody else felt exactly the same. Therefore, the Buddha concluded, giving Pasenadi his version of the Golden Rule, “A person who loves the self should not harm the self of others.” 7 Like Socrates, the Buddha believed that knowledge was a process of self-discovery. You did not gain insight by accepting the opinions of other people but by finding the truth within yourself. Even laypeople could achieve this. The Kalamans, a tribal people living on the northernmost fringe of the Ganges basin who were trying to find their place in the new urban civilization, sent a delegation to the Buddha.

• From Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010)

  Later he would tell his monks to do the same: When your mind is filled with love, send it in one direction, then a second, a third, and a fourth, then above, then below. Identify with everything without hatred, resentment, anger or enmity. This mind of love is very wide. It grows immeasurably and eventually is able to embrace the whole world. 8 Over time, the Buddha found that by constantly activating these positive psychological states he became free of the constrictions of hostility and fear, and that his own mind expanded with the immeasurable power of love. But before you are ready to “embrace the whole world,” you must focus on yourself. Begin by drawing on the warmth of friendship (maitri) that you know exists potentially in your mind and direct it to yourself. Notice how much peace, happiness, and benevolence you possess already. Make yourself aware of how much you need and long for loving friendship. Next, become conscious of your anger, fear, and anxiety. Look deeply into the seeds of rage within yourself. Bring to mind some of your past suffering. You long to be free of this pain, so try gently to put aside your current irritations, frustrations, and worries and feel compassion (karuna) for your conflicted, struggling self. Then bring your capacity for joy (mudita) to the surface and take conscious pleasure in things we all tend to take for granted: good health, family, friends, work, and life’s tiny pleasures. Finally, look at yourself with upeksha (“even- mindedness, nonattachment”). You are not unique. You have failings, but so does everybody else. You also have talents and, like every other being on the planet, you deserve compassion, joy, and friendship. It is only in the context of a kinder attitude toward ourselves that we can consider the importance of transcending the ego. The religions often speak of putting the self to death; Buddhists believe that the self is an illusion and teach a doctrine of “no-self” (anatta). Modern neuroscientists would agree: they can find nothing in the intricate activity of the brain that they can pin down and call a “self” or a “soul.” But anatta is primarily a mythos calling Buddhists to action: we have to live as though the self did not exist, cutting through the self-obsession that causes so much pain. When the masters of the spiritual life ask us to transcend the ego, they want us to get beyond the grasping, frightened, angry self that often seeks to destroy others in order to ensure its own survival, prosperity, and success. This is indispensable to enlightenment.

• From Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010)

  If somebody had asked the ancient Greeks whether they believed that there was sufficient historical evidence for the famous story of Demeter, goddess of harvest and grain, and her beloved daughter, Persephone (Was Persephone really abducted by Hades and imprisoned in the underworld? Did Demeter truly secure her release? How could you prove that Persephone returned to the upper world each year?), they would have found these questions obtuse. The truth of the myth, they might have replied, was evident for all to see: it was clear in the way that the world came to life each spring, in the recurrent burgeoning of the harvest, and, above all, in the profound truth that death and life are inseparable. There is no new life if the seed does not go down into the ground and die; you cannot have life without death. The rituals associated with the myth, which were performed annually at Eleusis (where Demeter is said to have stayed during her search for Persephone), were carefully crafted to help people accept their mortality; afterward many found that they could contemplate the prospect of their own death with greater equanimity.1 A myth, therefore, makes sense only if it is translated into action—either ritually or behaviorally. It is comprehensible only if it is imparted as part of a process of transformation.2 Myth has been aptly described as an early form of psychology. The tales about gods threading their way through labyrinths or fighting with monsters were describing an archetypal truth rather than an actual occurrence. Their purpose was to introduce the audience to the labyrinthine world of the psyche, showing them how to negotiate this mysterious realm and grapple with their own demons. The myth of the hero told people what they had to do to unlock their own heroic potential. When Sigmund Freud and C. G. Jung charted their modern scientific exploration of the psyche, they turned instinctively to these ancient narratives. A myth could put you in the correct spiritual posture, but it was up to you to take the next step. In our scientifically oriented world, we look for solid information and have lost the older art of interpreting these emblematic stories of gods walking out of tombs or seas splitting asunder, and this has made religion problematic. Without practical implementation, a myth can remain as opaque and abstract as the rules of a board game, which sound complicated and dull until you pick up the dice and start to play; then everything immediately falls into place and makes sense. As we go through the steps, we will examine some of the traditional myths to discover what they teach about the compassionate imperative—and how we must act in order to integrate them with our own lives.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  That same morning Willie recommended to me a pension kept by a Mrs. Gregory, an Englishwoman, the wife of an old Baptist clergyman, who would take good care of me for four dollars a week. Immediately I went with him to see her and was delighted to find that she lived only about a hundred yards from Mrs. Mayhew on the opposite side of the street. Mrs. Gregory was a large, motherly woman evidently a lady, who had founded this boardinghouse to provide for a rather feckless husband and two children, a big pretty girl, Kate and a lad, a couple of years younger. Mrs. Gregory was delighted with my English accent, I believe, and showed me special favor at once by giving me a large outside room with its own entrance and steps into the garden. In an hour I had paid my bill at the Eldridge House and had moved in: I showed a shred of prudence by making Willie promise Mrs. Gregory that he would turn up each Saturday with the five dollars for my board; the dollar extra was for the big room. In due course I shall tell how he kept his promise and discharged his debt to me. For the moment everything was easily, happily settled. I went out and ordered a decent suit of ordinary tweeds and dressed myself up in my best blue suit to call upon Mrs. Mayhew after lunch. The clock crawled but on the stroke of three, I was at her door: a colored maid admitted me. “Mrs. Mayhew”, she said in her pretty singing voice, “will be down right soon: I’ll go call Miss Lily.” In five minutes Miss Lily appeared, a dark slip of a girl with shining black hair, wide laughing mouth, temperamental thick red lips and grey eyes fringed with black lashes: she had hardly time to speak to me when Mrs. Mayhew came in: “I hope you two’ll be great friends”, she said prettily; “you’re both about the same age” she added. In a few minutes Miss Lily was playing a waltz on the Steinway and with my arm round the slight, flexible waist of my inamorata I was trying to waltz. But alas! after a turn or two I became giddy and in spite of all my resolution had to admit that I should never be able to dance. “You have got very pale”, Mrs. Mayhew said, “you must sit down on the sofa a little while.” Slowly the giddiness left me: before I had entirely recovered Miss Lily with kindly words of sympathy had gone home and Mrs. Mayhew brought me in a cup of excellent coffee: I drank it down and was well at once.

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  For Chesterton, a good theory – whether scientific, ideological or religious – is to be judged by its capacity as a whole to accommodate what we see in the world around us and experience within us. Chesterton’s language echoes Plato’s view of philosophy as a theōria , an illuminating imaginative framework: ‘With this idea once inside our heads, a million things become transparent as if a lamp were lit behind them.’ Chesterton explained this point as follows: Numbers of us have returned to this belief; and we have returned to it, not because of this argument or that argument, but because the theory, when it is adopted, works out everywhere; because the coat, when it is tried on, fits in every crease… We put on the theory, like a magic hat, and history becomes translucent like a house of glass. Chesterton argued that Christianity, when seen as a complete ‘spiritual theory’, was able to offer a better account of the coherence of human history and experience than its rivals. On being asked why he was a Christian, Chesterton replied: ‘Because I perceive life to be logical and workable with these beliefs and illogical and unworkable without them.’ 25 We see here Chesterton articulating a participatory approach to theory – namely, that it creates a conceptual space within which people can generate meaning and value. Religion is primarily a way of interpreting life, creating the possibility of existential meaning and moral values. An interpretation of human existence involves trying to answer questions of meaning – who we are and why we matter. As the German philosopher Walther Dilthey once remarked, ‘we explain nature, but we understand the life of the soul.’ 26 Within what story shall I locate myself? How shall I live? Who am I, and what am I meant to be doing? We therefore turn to reflect on the role of interpretation in religion and in science, focusing on Darwin’s theory of natural selection. Scientific Interpretation: What Does Darwin’s Theory of Evolution Mean? Theories about how our world functions can be tested by the application of the scientific method; those dealing with what it means cannot. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, whose doctoral research was supervised by the philosopher Bernard Williams, made this point with particular clarity. We cannot prove that life is meaningful and that God exists. But neither can we prove that love is better than hate, altruism than selfishness, forgiveness than the desire for revenge … Almost none of the truths by which we live are provable, and the desire to prove them is based on a monumental confusion between explanation and interpretation. Explanations can be proved, interpretations cannot. 27 Scientific theories explain what we observe and discover in the world. Yet these also need to be interpreted . 28 Perhaps the most contested case of scientific interpretation concerns Darwin’s theory of evolution. What does this mean ? What are its moral and spiritual commitments ?