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.

Page 132 of 189 · 20 per page

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  I have spent much of my life puzzling over these questions and trying, from various angles, to address and answer them. This has been exhilarating as well as challenging. Having grown up in a Christian household, and having experienced the growth and development of my own personal faith from my early years through to adulthood, I have been aware of a vocation which our present culture usually splits into two but which I persist in seeing as a single whole. I have been called to be a historian and theologian, a teacher and writer specializing in the history and thought of early Christianity, and also a pastor within the church. Sometimes I have been able to combine these two elements, the academic and the pastoral; sometimes the jobs to which I have been led have forced me to specialize in one rather than the other, leaving an imbalance which I have then tried to correct. The relevance of this autobiographical remark for the present topic should, I think, be clear: writing about Jesus has never been, for me, a matter simply of “neutral” historical study (actually, there is no such thing, whatever the topic, but we’ll leave that aside for the moment); the Jesus whom I study historically is the Jesus I worship as part of the threefold unity of the one God. But, likewise, writing about Jesus has never been a matter simply of pastoral and homiletic intent; the Jesus whom I preach is the Jesus who lived and died as a real human being in first-century Palestine. Modern western culture, especially in America, has done its best to keep these two figures, the Jesus of history and the Jesus of faith, from ever meeting. I have done my best to resist this trend, despite the howls of protest from both sides. This book is entitled Simply Jesus, in conscious succession to an earlier book of mine, Simply Christian. However, there is simplicity and simplicity. Often, when I give a public lecture and then invite questions from the audience, someone will stand up and say, “I have a very simple question.” Then out comes something like, “Who exactly is God?” or “What was there before creation?” or “If God is good, why is there evil?” As I always say to such people, the question may be simple, but the answer may well not be. In fact, if we try to give a “simple” answer, we may well oversimplify matters and end up just being quizzical. (When someone asked Augustine what God was doing before creation, he replied that God was making hell for people who ask silly questions.) Simplicity is a great virtue, but oversimplification can actually be a vice, a sign of laziness.

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

  And so I settled down at Dulwich. It was not what I had wanted to do with my life, but I had a secure job and friends. Sally and I had our own little coterie of the livelier and less conventional members of staff; we had a couple of holidays together in Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union. And I also had my North London life. I was uneasy about my inability to rise above the institutional idiocy of the school, and I was disturbed that I seemed to be wishing my life away. I spent the whole week longing for Friday, the weekend dreading Monday morning, and the whole term pining for the holidays. I knew that this was all wrong, and yet for the first time in my life I felt safe and ordinary. Nothing much happened to me during these years. I was no longer being carted off to hospital; I had no scandalously public failures; I was beginning to be like everybody else at last. And I have no doubt that, even though it was dull, this was a valuable period. It gave me some time out. I could rest and, as I thought, heal. As for prayer, God, holiness, all that seemed to have happened to somebody else. I sat through school prayers every morning in a daze of bored abstraction, incredulous that these ideas had once been so important to me. “How on earth did you stick it out in the convent?” my colleagues would ask me in astonishment. “You don’t seem religious at all!” A few members of staff were churchgoers, but they were in a minority. Many of the children I taught had never heard of basic Christian concepts. One day, my class of eighteen-year-olds seemed to be making very heavy weather of John Donne’s poem “Good Friday. 1613. Riding Westward.” Eventually, to my astonishment, one of them cried in bewilderment: “Miss Armstrong, what exactly did happen on Good Friday?” I used to look with pity at the young teacher who was the sole member of the religious department and taught only a tiny number of students at the advanced level. What a dead-end subject!

• From The Fermata (1994)

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

• From The Argonauts (2015)

  Once I wrote a book about domesticity in the poetry of certain gay men (Ashbery, Schuyler) and some women (Mayer, Notley). I wrote this book when I was living in New York City in a teeny, too-hot attic apartment on a Brooklyn thoroughfare underlined by the F train. I had an unusable stove filled with petrified mouse droppings, an empty fridge save for a couple of beers and yogurt peanut honey Balance bars, a futon on a piece of plywood unevenly balanced on milk crates for a bed, and a floor through which I could hear Standcleartheclosingdoors morning, noon, and night. I spent approximately seven hours a day lying in bed in this apartment, if that. Mostly I slept elsewhere. I wrote most everything I wrote and read most everything I read in public, just as I am writing this in public now. I was so happy renting in New York City for so long because renting—or at least the way I rented, which involved never lifting a finger to better my surroundings—allows you to let things literally fall apart all around you. Then, when it gets to be too much, you just move on. Many feminists have argued for the decline of the domestic as a separate, inherently female sphere and the vindication of domesticity as an ethic, an affect, an aesthetic, and a public. I’m not sure what this vindication would mean, exactly, though I think in my book I was angling for something of the same. But even then I suspected that I was doing so because I didn’t have a domestic, and I liked it that way. I liked Fallen Soldier because it gave me time to learn about your son’s face in mute repose: big almond eyes, skin just starting to freckle. And clearly he found some novel, relaxing pleasure in just lying there, protected by imaginary armor, while a near stranger who was quickly becoming family picked up each limb and turned it over, trying to find the wound. Not long ago, a friend came over to our house and pulled down a mug for coffee, a mug that was a gift from my mother. It’s one of those mugs you can purchase online from Snapfish, with the photo of your choice emblazoned on it. I was horrified when I received it, but it’s the biggest mug we own, so we keep it around, in case someone’s in the mood for a trough of warm milk or something. Wow, my friend said, filling it up. I’ve never seen anything so heteronormative in all my life.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  We’ve heard you’re flying her on the college grounds, and we’d love to meet her.’ She uncapped a black marker pen , wrote HELEN GOSHAWK on a whiteboard, then hesitated, turned to me. ‘Two p.m.?’ ‘Two p.m.’ She wrote the time in her elegant hand and smiled. So now the hawk eats, the conversation continues, the sun falls in pale planes on the ancient walls, the chirrups of house martins drift down from above like distant fingertips on glass, and I glory in it all. How beautiful it is here , I think, and how supremely unlikely it is that I ever got to be here at all, a state-school kid born to parents who’d never gone to university, to whom Cambridge was the mysterious haunt of toffs and spies. ‘You must be a spy,’ my father used to tell me. ‘Must be.’ He’d watched me as a child sneaking about with binoculars, hiding for hours in bushes and trees. I was the invisible girl; someone tailor-made for a secret life . ‘No, really I’m not,’ I’d say for the hundredth time. ‘I’m not!’ ‘But of course you’d say that.’ And he’d laugh delightedly, because there was no way I could persuade him otherwise. ‘It’s a job, Dad,’ I’d say, rolling my eyes. ‘I teach people English and the History of Science. I sit in a library, read books, do my research. That’s all it is. I’m not something out of a John le Carré novel.’ ‘But you could be,’ he’d say, stressing the could , and part of him not joking at all. My father had revelled in the thought that I might be a spy, for it was a life he understood, being only a hair’s breadth from his own. One day he’d handed me a miniature silver camera. ‘It takes special film,’ he said gleefully, flipping open the back and showing me where the miniature spool fitted in its matchbox-sized casing. Over the years he’d rigged up infra-red light-beams to photograph nocturnal wildlife, staked out the love-nests of cabinet ministers, tracked and photographed the movements of nuclear waste on secret midnight trains, climbed over fences, sneaked cameras into places he, and they, should not have been. Patience, detection, subterfuge and record. What historians did for a living was far more mysterious to him than the work of spies. My vision blurs. We carry the lives we’ve imagined as we carry the lives we have, and sometimes a reckoning comes of all of the lives we have lost. The summer lunch recedes. I cannot pull it back. Fog seeps in from the rugby pitch where Prideaux strode. Slow, white breaths. There’s a hush in my head; it grows louder . ‘I am not a spy , ’ I’d told my father . ‘I’m a historian.’ But watching everyone around the table, their faces entranced by my hawk, it seems I’m not even that any more.

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

  Time and again during the next twenty-four hours, I felt caught up in a world that was so familiar that I responded automatically, as though I were still a member of the community: strolling with Rebecca down the country lanes, where we had walked almost every day for three years, frightening courting couples out of their wits when they saw this weird crocodile of nuns bearing down upon them; waking at night to hear the clock of the nearby Anglican church chime every quarter; laying down my book or coffee cup at the first sound of the bell that called the nuns to prayer. I felt drawn toward the old routine. And it was all so restful. The confusions of the outside world receded, and I felt strangely at peace. And yet in other ways the convent was simply not the same. The old hushed silence had gone. Nuns stood in groups, chatting and laughing—sometimes quite loudly. They wore short utilitarian skirts and flighty little veils. Doors closed noisily, and the younger nuns often swung their arms as they walked with defiant casual-ness. Even in church there was a new restlessness. In the old habit you had to kneel perfectly still or the veil fell over your shoulders like a tent and your legs tangled and twisted the voluminous skirts. I had no romantic regrets about the old habit. It was hot, inconvenient, and unhygienic. But the modern dress gave the nuns greater freedom of movement, and I noticed that some of them fidgeted in their pews, as though the imposed stillness had become more of a strain. Or—and this was an arresting thought—perhaps I had not been the only one who had had difficulties with prayer. The next morning, I knelt with a few other seculars in the chapel for Mass, which was now said facing the people, in accordance with the directives of the Vatican Council. When the nuns processed up the aisle to receive Communion, I glanced at Rebecca and felt the shock as acutely as though I were seeing her emaciated frame for the first time. The whole decorous structure of the convent suddenly seemed a sham. The nuns who gathered together around the altar seemed an image of prayerful community, and yet they were allowing one of their number to waste away before their very eyes. They might have comfortable chairs in the community room and take more frequent baths, but the old attitudes were still in place.

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

  I got used to a house where rose trees grew in the drawing room, where walls were covered in newspaper, and where the day began with a stentorian announcement of moonrise. When I returned from the library in the evening and climbed the stairs to my room, I learned to expect Jacob’s unfailing greeting. “The Royal—” he would shout from Nanny’s room, where he was watching television. “Arms!” I would yell back as a matter of course, checking in. Soon I felt at home in a house which seemed odd enough to absorb my own strangeness. It was good to have this focus, because Oxford had become a ghost city. Life as a graduate student was very different. True, I had not made many close friends during the last eighteen months, but the crowded, cheerful life of St. Anne’s had given an illusion of sociability. There had always been somebody to have coffee with after dinner, there were tea parties almost every day, and there was usually somebody around in the Junior Common Room. But when the Michaelmas term began in October 1970, Oxford, though crowded with students, seemed deserted. Nearly all my former classmates had scattered to begin new professional lives in publishing, teaching, the civil service, or business. Very few had stayed to do graduate work. The college was now full of a new generation of undergraduates, who were complete strangers. The dons were always reminding us that we were only birds of passage in Oxford. Soon our turn would be over and we would have to leave this artificially constructed existence for the unpredictable, challenging world outside. I never wanted to hear this. I had had my fill of leaving things, places, and people, and longed for some stability. Yet one day, I too would have to face the larger world, which lurked threateningly beyond the groves of academe: unknown, dangerous, and indifferent. But right now I had another three years at Oxford, and perhaps I need never leave the academic world. I seemed to be good at scholarship, and if I did well enough, maybe I could remain in this intellectual haven. I had decided to write my doctoral thesis on Tennyson’s poetic style. Most people thought that this was a good idea, since Tennyson had been much neglected. For decades, students had been taught to dismiss his poetry as sentimental. To deride one of the chief spokesmen of the Victorian era had been a way of exorcising the influence of this crucial but conflicted period.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  When spring finally came, she went out every day to her tulip beds to watch for activity. It was an unusually dry hot spring, and she felt that she should water to give her beds a good start, but she despaired at her hose. The faucet still leaked tiresomely. The sprayer was rusty. What would make her bulbs really happy, it suddenly occurred to her, was if she could get a plumber to adapt her own Pollenex showerhead so that it would fit on the end of the hose. She needed a very light, very delicate but insistent spray for her tulips—no garden sprayer could offer that. She also thought that the hose water was much too cold—she felt that the bulbs would do better with warmer water. She realized that she wasn’t thinking all that rationally, but her idea nonetheless was: hook up the garden hose to the shower-pipe, run the hose out the bathroom window, and fix the Pollenex showerhead onto the terminal end. Other ideas of interest followed on this one; she called a plumber. The plumber was a thin derisive man with the usual plumber body-smell who rolled his eyes at her plan, told her she could have done it herself, but agreed, since he was there, to do it for her. He fitted the hose ends and the Pollenex with Gardena quick-clamp adapters so that they could be quickly reconfigured for interior showering or exterior gardening applications. The shower-pipe looked exotic when he was done, knobbed with hex nuts and adapters, but the system when tested worked quite well. And the plumber, as he cleaned up, was cheerful, pleased by now that he had built something he had never built before, and that he would be able to tell his partner about the nutty job this lady had gotten him to do. He even showed her how to use Teflon tape and was expansive about its merits over older kinds of sealant. He carried his heavy red toolbox out to his truck and drove away.

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

  Whenever Adam or Charlie visited Lamledra, Jenifer would turn the servants’ wing over to them. “Just make up all the beds,” she told me the first time. “I have no idea who is sleeping with whom.” Not only did Charlie have a number of different partners, but Adam and Mary were often otherwise engaged. This was the sexual revolution with a vengeance, and I was amazed by Jenifer’s lack of concern. Alan Ryan, Joanna’s former husband, was also a regular visitor, with his girlfriend, Katie. In addition, Jenifer and Herbert would invite their own friends. So it was a rather strange house party on that Cornish cliff, with distinguished Oxford academics living cheek by jowl with hippies and other members of the alternative society. But everybody coexisted amicably. On one evening, Herbert and Isaiah Berlin gave a spirited reading of Max Beerbohm’s “ ‘Savonarola’ Brown” in the drawing room, and had us weeping with laughter. In the hall, next door, the air was thick with marijuana, while the communards sat dreamily listening to Charlie’s guitar. I drifted between these two worlds. I had no desire to be with my contemporaries in the hall, though they would politely invite me in for a joint from time to time. I also, just as politely, declined. I did not need to cultivate exotic states of consciousness; I was able to engineer quite enough bad trips of my own, and my experience of drugs in the Warneford had given me a lifelong aversion to this type of recreation. But neither was I at home with the Oxbridge celebrities, though they too were reasonably welcoming on the few occasions when I plucked up the courage to join them. In any case, nobody took much notice of me. I was just the skivvy and, when not on duty, could wander around the house, left peacefully to my own devices. This suited me very well. I spent a lot of time on the terrace that Easter, not reading much but gazing out to sea. At night there was sometimes the extraordinary spectacle of the full moon casting a path of shining light on the ocean all the way to the horizon.

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

  It required a constant concentration of mind and heart that was in fact a type of meditation, and one that suited me far better than the Ignatian method that I had followed in the convent to so little effect. It now strikes me that while I was writing Muhammad, I was learning the disciplines of ecstasy. By this, of course, I do not mean that I fell into a trance, saw visions, or heard voices. Had I done so, I would never have got the book finished in time. The Greek ekstasis, it will be recalled, simply means “standing outside.” And “transcendence” means “climbing above or beyond.” This does not necessarily imply an exotic state of consciousness. For years I had longed to get to God, ascend to a higher plane of being, but I had never considered at sufficient length what it was that you had to climb from. All the traditions tell us, one way or another, that we have to leave behind our inbuilt selfishness, with its greedy fears and cravings. We are, the great spiritual writers insist, most fully ourselves when we give ourselves away, and it is egotism that holds us back from that transcendent experience that has been called God, Nirvana, Brahman, or the Tao. What I now realize, from my study of the different religious traditions, is that a disciplined attempt to go beyond the ego brings about a state of ecstasy. Indeed, it is in itself ekstasis. Theologians in all the great faiths have devised all kinds of myths to show that this type of kenosis, or self-emptying, is found in the life of God itself. They do not do this because it sounds edifying, but because this is the way that human nature seems to work. We are most creative and sense other possibilities that transcend our ordinary experience when we leave ourselves behind. There may even be a biological reason for this. The need to protect ourselves and survive has been so strongly implanted in us by millennia of evolution that, if we deliberately flout this instinct, we enter another state of consciousness. This is a purely personal speculation of my own. But the history of religion shows that when people develop the kind of lifestyle that restrains greed and selfishness, they experience a transcendence that has been interpreted in different ways. It has sometimes been regarded as a supernatural reality, sometimes as a personality, sometimes as wholly impersonal, and sometimes a dimension that is entirely natural to humanity, but however we see it, this ecstasy had been a fact of human life.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  Then, playing hard-to-get now that she knew she had Armande where she wanted him, she went for a blithe little walk. She was wearing a jumper printed with big loose flowers and nothing underneath. She went to her mailbox, checked that the mail had been delivered, but left it in there. She nodded to a bicyclist going by—he was wearing a kind of skin-tight black cycling shorts that she normally didn’t like, but now she didn’t mind seeing his thigh definition. She stood at the end of her driveway for several minutes with her arms crossed, breathing deep breaths of spring air and feeling peaceful and content, or playing at looking like the woman out in the garden breathing deeply and feeling content, while actually part of her was thinking over what dildic wickedness was waiting for her in her back yard. On her way back, she bent and felt a leaf of one of the peonies in the tractor tire in her front yard, very casually, giving the road the chance to appreciate her shape under her dress, and murmured to herself, “Hmm, I think it may be time to do some watering.” She went in and got the water temperature just right in her shower, and then drew the hose into the bathroom window and hooked it to the shower spigot. Outside, she turned the stopcock on (the plumber had fixed it so that she could turn the flow of water on and off at the end of the hose) and toured her side yard, sending a frolicsome misty spray from her mobile water-source over the grass and over the mock-orange leaves. She hummed “Private Dancer.” She heard a truck drive past on the road.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  Grace pulled a face, but did not seem very seriously dismayed. Mrs Milne caught my eye. ‘She might borrow it, though, mightn’t she,’ she whispered, ‘from time to time ... ?’‘She can borrow all my suits, all at once, so far as I care,’ I said; and when Grace looked up I gave her a wink, and her pale cheeks pinked a little, and her head went down.Mrs Milne gave a mild tut-tut, and folded her arms complacently. ‘I do believe that, after all, Miss Astley, you will suit us very well.’ I moved in at once. That first afternoon I passed in unpacking my few little things, with Gracie beside me exclaiming over them all, and Mrs Milne bringing tea, and then more tea, and cake. By supper-time I had become ‘Nancy’ to them both; and supper itself - which was a pie and peas and gravy, and afterwards, blancmange in a mould - was the first that I had eaten, at a family table, since my last dinner at Whitstable just over a year before.The next day, Gracie tried my suits, in every combination, and her mother clapped. There were sausages for supper, and later cake. The cake being eaten, I changed for Soho; and when Mrs Milne saw me in my serge-and-velvet, she clapped again. She had had a key cut for me, so that when I came home late I should not wake them ...It was like rooming with angels. I could keep the hours I liked, wear the costumes I chose, and Mrs Milne said nothing. I could come home in a jacket crusted, at the collar, with a man’s rash spendings - and she would only pluck it from my nervous hands, and wash it at the tap: ‘I never saw a girl so careless with her soup!’ I could wake wretched, plagued with memories, and she would pile my breakfast plate the higher, asking nothing. She was as simple, in her way, as her own simple daughter; she was good to me for Gracie’s sake, because I liked her, and was kind to her.I was patient, for example, over the issue of Grace’s interest in the colourful.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  Chapter 12 [image "017" file=wate_9781101078198_oeb_017_r1.jpg] For all the strangeness of those first few days and nights at Felicity Place, it did not take me long to settle into my role there and find myself a new routine. This was quite as indolent as the one I had enjoyed at Mrs Milne’s; the difference, of course, was that here my indolence had a patron, a lady who paid to keep me well-fed, well-dressed and rested, and demanded only that my vanity should have herself, in return, as its larger target.At Green Street I was used to waking rather early. Often Grace would bring me tea at half-past seven or so - often, indeed, she would clamber into the warm bed beside me, and we would lie and talk till Mrs Milne called us to breakfast; later I would wash, at the great sink in the downstairs kitchen, and Grace would sometimes come and comb my hair. At Felicity Place, I had nothing to rise for. Breakfast was brought to me, and I received it at Diana’s side - or in my own bed, if she had sent me from her the night before. While she was dressed I would drink my coffee and smoke a cigarette, and yawn and rub my eyes; frequently I would fall into a thin kind of slumber, and only wake again when she returned, in a coat and a hat, to slip a gloved hand beneath the counterpane and rouse me with a pinch, or a lewd caress.‘Wake up, and kiss your mistress good-bye,’ she’d say. ‘I shan’t be home till supper-time. You must amuse yourself until I return.’Then I would frown, and grumble. ‘Where are you going?’‘On a visit, to a friend.’‘Take me with you!’‘Not today.’‘I might sit in the brougham while you make your call ...’‘I would rather you were here, for me to return to.’‘You are cruel!’She would smile, then kiss me. And then she would go; and I would only sink, again, into stupidity.When I rose at last, I would call for a bath.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  Just as I resumed time after turning the Butterfly up almost to full, she noticed me looking at her, and our eyes caught and laser-locked; I tried to tell her with my look that I understood how good it felt, though she was doing a tremendous job of suppressing it, and that I was the only one in the train who could see what she was going through, and that I was very moved to be able to witness it and would make no sign to anyone else of what she was letting me see. I nodded, closing my eyes, and looked at her again: giving the nod to her approaching clasm. She looked away, up at the ads for temporary agencies over the windows, and then she looked back at me, and I watched her put her lower teeth over her upper teeth, her eyes getting bigger and browner and fuller—and (I am almost sure) she came. Then she took a deep breath and gathered her hair in an O made of her forefinger and released it and reached down again tentatively to her legs, so that I had to fermate quickly and remove the Butterfly from her and wipe it off (using several Wet Ones) and put it back in the case so that it looked unused. I put it in a blank manila envelope. Time rolling, I smiled at her again, in a wowed, foolish sort of way, and she smiled uncertainly back, not quite sure how to explain to herself what had just happened. At the Chestnut Hill stop she stood and passed where I was sitting. I said, “Excuse me?” and handed her the vibrating Butterfly in its envelope and then touched my fingers to my lips. I didn’t get off at that stop because I didn’t want to unnerve her or seem threatening; I reached home an hour later feeling that, in making gifts of two of my sex toys, I had turned the day around.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  On the other hand, my coordinator, Jenny, had not had any work for me that day, so I was free. I had been assigned to work at an architectural firm in Cambridge, but then they called and canceled and nothing else had turned up. I lay in bed for a while, took a shower, and wandered out to the back yard (my landlord’s yard, really) with a large heavy dry beach towel. I don’t know now what the date was, but I do know that it was early in the month, when I still felt full of hope (or perhaps it was so late in the month that I felt the undisturbed and imminent hope of the next month in full force), and it was sometime in the late spring. It was one of the first times I had gone out to lie in the sun that year; it was a clean, bud-popping blueout of a temperate-zone Boston weekday. A hundred very small hippopotamus-shaped clouds were on the march overhead, and though I like and respect a rigorously cloud-free morning as much as anyone—when the only possible seconds of shade you can expect out on your towel are those strangely paranormal ex-machinas when a high cruising bird (a gull on its way to inland Dumpsters) or an almost inaudible airplane comes momentarily between your eyelids and the sun, raising your consciousness of the conical geometry of umbral coincidence—given that there were all these evenly spooned-out clouds, regularly dispensing an ideal interval of coolness every five minutes or so, during which the trees regained their green depth and I had the opportunity to appreciate the heretofore-unnoticed sweat on my stomach, and given that I was nothing but a temp and lacked for the time being the one thing that kept my pride intact, which was my fermational gift, I was nonetheless quite happy with what the day had to offer. I invariably feel lucid and pleased with life after a shower anyway (there is an illusion of mental acuity that accompanies a thoroughly moistened and rejuvenated sinus-system and the sensation of wet hair-ends on the base of the neck), but seldom more pleased with life than when I can go directly from the tiley shower out to a clean warm sunlit beach towel on the lawn. I took off my watch and my glasses and set them on the edge of the towel, next to the Fieldcrest label; I took off my T-shirt and laid it gently over the portable phone, lying nestled in the grass, to keep it from overheating. I extended myself stomach-down on the towel (a blue-and-white-striped towel; the blue stripes were detectably warmer than the white ones) and let the weight on my ribcage produce a moan of utter contentment.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  “Ah,” said the doctor, “so you use both a fist grip and a finger-and-thumb grip. That’s what I wanted to know.” She tapped her lip, thinking. “I don’t want to prejudice you in favor of either one. I’m going to have to ask you to announce when you’ve switched from one to the other. It will make it easier for us to get the imaging system to keep up with you, and eventually, of course, to isolate which particular grip is distressing your nerve. In fact, do you think you would be able to offer a kind of running commentary as you masturbate? You could tell us what you are doing, what hurts, what doesn’t hurt—whatever’s going through your mind.” I said that I would certainly try. She led me to an examining room, where I changed into a hospital gown. Two nurses or technicians or post-docs painted rows of silver dots up my forearm. They painted a silver square over the inside of my wrist. Then they lifted my gown. “Should we trim him a little?” one of the technicians asked the other. She looked at me. She was Chinese. “We’re going to trim your pubic hair.” I looked down at it. “It has gotten a bit unruly.” I couldn’t remember the last time I had trimmed it; it could have been a decade earlier. They pulled on the thick tufts and snipped them off. Then one stretched my penis and painted a silver dot on its circumcision ridge. Paintbrush hovering, she became uncertain. She called in Dr. Orowitz-Rudman. The three of them conferred in low tones. The doctor put a hand on my arm and smiled at me. “Will you masturbate just a little now?” she asked. “Don’t go hog wild. We just need you to be fully erect to get the reference dots on your penis spaced properly.” “Oh, sorry. Sure. Just take a sec.” “Fine.” Dr. Orowitz-Rudman left. I stroked my yokel while the two attendants waited. I noticed with some satisfaction that they seemed to appreciate its size and girth and garish coloration. (It is, I think, a more handsome penis than I deserve.) One cradled it gently while the other painted the silver dots down the underside and the top, measuring their distances carefully. The soft contact of the brush was soothing. They brought me through the control room to the door into the scan room. “Good luck,” said Dr. Orowitz-Rudman, waving. She sat at a table with two monitors on it, a three-ring binder open before her. A window looked through some sort of fine-mesh screen into the room with the magnet in it. The technician stopped me. “Your watch has to come off.” She pointed to a poster with a number of forbidden objects pictured with red bars across them—fire extinguishers, pacemakers, watches, steel skull-plates, anything metallic, evidently.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  So we called to Mrs Dendy to give us a moment, and while Kitty changed her dress I combed and re-plaited my hair, and beat the dust from the hem of my skirt into the fireplace, and washed my hands; and then we made our way downstairs.The parlour was a very different room, now, to the one that we had sat and taken tea in on our arrival. The table had been opened out and pulled into the centre of the room, and set for dinner; more importantly, it was ringed with faces, every one of which looked up as we appeared and broke into a smile - the same quick, well-practised smile which shone from all the pictures on the walls. It was as if half-a-dozen of the portraits had come to life and stepped from behind their dusty panes to join Mrs Dendy for supper.There were eight places set - two of them vacant and waiting, clearly, for Kitty and me, but the rest all taken. Mrs Dendy herself was seated at the head of the table; she was in the process of dishing out slices from a plate of cold meats, but half rose when she saw us, to bid us make ourselves at home, and to gesture, with her fork, to the other diners - first to an elderly gentleman in a velvet waistcoat who sat opposite to her.‘Professor Emery,’ she said, without a hint of self-consciousness. ‘Mentalist Extraordinary.’The Professor rose then, too, to make us a little bow.‘Mentalist Extraordinary, ah, as was,’ he said with a glance at our landlady. ‘Mrs Dendy is too kind. It has been many years since I last stood before a hushed and gaping crowd, guessing at the contents of a lady’s purse.’ He smiled, then sat rather heavily. Kitty said that she was very pleased to know him. Mrs Dendy pointed next to a thin, red-headed boy on the Professor’s right.‘Sims Willis,’ she said. ‘Corner Man — ’‘Comer Man Extraordinary, of course,’ he said quickly, leaning to shake our hands. ‘As is.

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

  Within a few weeks, I had managed to impose a shape on my day. I had a gas ring in my room, but was allowed to use the Harts’ kitchen whenever I wished. Not that I ever attempted any elaborate cooking: it was simply a question of scrambling eggs and heating cans of soup. But even if I had been more ambitious, it would not have mattered. There was never any hint that I was in the way or interrupting family life. There was no family life, as such. This was a household of separate individuals, who shared a house cooperatively. Nanny was not the starchy Gorgon I had feared, but a sweet-faced, aging woman who battled bravely with the mounting chaos of the house. She and Jacob usually ate breakfast together, while Herbert, Jenifer, and I queued up politely for cooker or kettle, preparing our own meals. During the day, Herbert and Jenifer lunched and often dined in their respective colleges. If she was at home, Jenifer’s suppers were as perfunctory as my own, whereas Herbert enjoyed preparing experimental little messes for himself. The day would begin with a great deal of coming and going. Herbert would plunge back and forth in his dressing gown between the kitchen and his study/bedroom with mugs of coffee, which he tended to park and forget. Nanny would retrieve some of them later in the day. Jenifer would sit in the dining room, looking gaunt and weary in a brown camel-hair dressing gown that had seen better days, black National Health spectacles on her nose, studying the newspapers. Jacob chattered ceaselessly, snatching pages from his mother and reading out phrases at the top of his voice, which sounded surreal when isolated in this way. “ ‘Crisis Looms’!” he would announce portentously. “Mummy—‘The— Trend—Persists’! Persists! Karen—‘Ministers Gather! At nine o’clock.’ Nine o’clock sharp,” he would add thoughtfully. “If they don’t arrive sharply, there’ll be trouble. They might arrive bluntly. Mummy, what will happen if they don’t arrive sharply?” “Oh, I expect they will.” “But if they don’t? If they don’t?” he persisted. “Will the prime minister be very angry? Will he say, ‘You’re bad, bad ministers’? ‘Recession Imminent’! Mummy, what is recession?” Jenifer and I would look at each other helplessly. Jacob would not be fobbed off with anything less than an adequate answer, unless another phrase caught his fancy. “ ‘Moon rises’!” he would shout invariably, as soon as I arrived downstairs to make my breakfast. “Karen—‘Moon rises! Twelve forty-five a.m.’!” “What is he talking about?” I had asked Nanny on my first morning. “It’s in the paper. The time the moon rises each day. It’s the first thing he looks for every morning.” Nanny smiled into the sauce-pan of porridge. “It’s one of his little games. You’ll soon get used to us, Karen.”

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

  In the convent, I had spent most of my time in silence, but it had been too busy—noisy with tension and anxiety, anger and irritation. The constant reprimands made me hyperconscious of my own performance, and so instead of getting rid of self, I had become embedded in the egotism that I was supposed to transcend. Now I was beginning to understand that a silence that is not clamorous with vexation and worried self-regard can become part of the texture of your mind, can seep into you, moment by moment, and gradually change you. The study of texts for A History of God had become very different from the research I had done during my years in television, when I had been reading and amassing information at breakneck speed to keep one step ahead of the production team. At that time, I had remained trapped on the cerebral level, as though I were reading a guidebook or an instruction manual. Instead of allowing these images and dogmas to percolate slowly, drop by drop, into the deeper, unconscious levels of my mind, I had grasped prematurely at what I thought they meant. I had also been engaged in a crusade during my time in television. I use that word deliberately because, however well intentioned, my work had had an aggressive edge. I had wanted to show that religion was indeed bonkers, partly in order to free myself once and for all from a system that had exerted such a baleful influence on my life. I had read in order to debunk. Egged on by colleagues and friends who found the very idea of faith risible, I had too often reached for the witty, deflationary phrase or the sparkling put-down while explicating a theological point. And instead of losing myself in my work, I had been engaged in what amounted to constant self-advertisement. Even in Muhammad, when I had deliberately inhibited this habit of superficial cleverness, I had been writing a polemic and had an agenda. True, it had been a benevolent polemic, one that tried to build up rather than demolish, but an argument had constantly been in progress in my head as I anticipated the hostile point of view that I wanted to counter. I had not let the ideas speak quietly for themselves or to come to me in their own good time.

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

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