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 Satyricon (1)

  While we were studying the labels, Trimalchio clapped his hands and cried, “Ah me! To think that wine lives longer than poor little man. Let’s fill ‘em up! There’s life in wine and this is the real Opimian, you can take my word for that. I offered no such vintage yesterday, though my guests were far more respectable.” We were tippling away and extolling all these elegant devices, when a slave brought in a silver skeleton, so contrived that the joints and movable vertebra could be turned in any direction. He threw it down upon the table a time or two, and its mobile articulation caused it to assume grotesque attitudes, whereupon Trimalchio chimed in: “Poor man is nothing in the scheme of things And Orcus grips us and to Hades flings Our bones! This skeleton before us here Is as important as we ever were! Let’s live then while we may and life is dear.” CHAPTER THE THIRTY-FIFTH. The applause was followed by a course which, by its oddity, drew every eye, but it did not come up to our expectations. There was a circular tray around which were displayed the signs of the zodiac, and upon each sign the caterer had placed the food best in keeping with it. Ram’s vetches on Aries, a piece of beef on Taurus, kidneys and lamb’s fry on Gemini, a crown on Cancer, the womb of an unfarrowed sow on Virgo, an African fig on Leo, on Libra a balance, one pan of which held a tart and the other a cake, a small seafish on Scorpio, a bull’s eye on Sagittarius, a sea lobster on Capricornus, a goose on Aquarius and two mullets on Pisces. In the middle lay a piece of cut sod upon which rested a honeycomb with the grass arranged around it. An Egyptian slave passed bread around from a silver oven and in a most discordant voice twisted out a song in the manner of the mime in the musical farce called Laserpitium. Seeing that we were rather depressed at the prospect of busying ourselves with such vile fare, Trimalchio urged us to fall to: “Let us fall to, gentlemen, I beg of you, this is only the sauce!” CHAPTER THE THIRTY-SIXTH.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Luther always regarded political authority as resting in the hands of the ruler, a perception strengthened by his stay in the Wartburg where his main contact was the Elector’s right-hand man, Spalatin. Karlstadt, by contrast, seems to have believed that the town council should be empowered to introduce the Reformation, and placed his faith in ‘the Christian city of Wittenberg’, as he termed it in his pamphlets. This was a line he had been taking since the disputation on the Mass in October 1521, when he advocated that the whole community should decide what evangelical reforms to introduce. Karlstadt’s marriage, the departure of Zwilling — who had been a leading figure advocating change, and who now left the Augustinian order altogether to preach in Eilenburg — and the arrival of the charismatic Zwickau prophets KARLSTADT AND THE CHRISTIAN CITY OF WITTENBERG 229 may all have played their part in radicalising Karlstadt.” Or perhaps it was just that, although it always took a long time to persuade Karl- stadt of anything, once convinced, he became a zealot. Another factor in Karlstadt’s enthusiasm for civic ideals may have been his experience of working closely with laypeople, and his convic- tion that a Christian community truly was being established in the town. He now signed his pamphlets as ‘A New Layman’. The coun- cil’s mandate of 24 January 1522 introducing the Reformation in Wittenberg and reorganising poor relief in line with its earlier ordin- ance reflected some of Karlstadt’s views, and may even have been written in part by him, but it was also the result of close co-operation between evangelical preachers and the town’s elite: a group of around thirty people had been meeting daily to draw it up. In addition to supporting the poor, the monies were also to be used to provide cheap loans for newly-weds and deserving craftspeople —a significant extension of the group who stood to benefit from the common chest. Old themes of civic morality joined with new Reformation ideas, as the ordinance thundered against those living ‘in unmarriage’, insisting that anyone who housed such people should be punished as well. The town brothel, essential in a university town, was to be closed.® ‘Masses’, it stated simply, ‘should not be held otherwise than as Christ instituted them at the Last Supper’: that is, laypeople should receive bread and wine, and the communicant should be allowed to ‘take the consecrated host in their hand and put it in their mouth them- selves’. Finally, three altars were to suffice for the main parish church and all images should be removed — although no date was set for this to take place.

• From Satyricon (1)

  Twaddle of this sort was being bandied about when Trimalchio came in; mopping his forehead and washing his hands in perfume, he said, after a short pause, “Pardon me, gentlemen, but my stomach’s been on strike for the past few days and the doctors disagreed about the cause. But pomegranate rind and pitch steeped in vinegar have helped me, and I hope that my belly will get on its good behavior, for sometimes there’s such a rumbling in my guts that you’d think a bellowing bull was in there. So if anyone wants to do his business, there’s no call to be bashful about it. None of us was born solid! I don’t know of any worse torment than having to hold it in, it’s the one thing Jupiter himself can’t hold in. So you’re laughing, are you, Fortunata? Why, you’re always keeping me awake at night yourself. I never objected yet to anyone in my dining-room relieving himself when he wanted to, and the doctors forbid our holding it in. Everything’s ready outside, if the call’s more serious, water, close-stool, and anything else you’ll need. Believe me, when this rising vapor gets to the brain, it puts the whole body on the burn. Many a one I’ve known to kick in just because he wouldn’t own up to the truth.” We thanked him for his kindness and consideration, and hid our laughter by drinking more and oftener. We had not realized that, as yet, we were only in the middle of the entertainment, with a hill still ahead, as the saying goes. The tables were cleared off to the beat of music, and three white hogs, muzzled, and wearing bells, were brought into the dining-room. The announcer informed us that one was a two-year-old, another three, and the third just turned six. I had an idea that some rope-dancers had come in and that the hogs would perform tricks, just as they do for the crowd on the streets, but Trimalchio dispelled this illusion by asking, “Which one will you have served up immediately, for dinner? Any country cook can manage a dunghill cock, a pentheus hash, or little things like that, but my cooks are well used to serving up calves boiled whole, in their cauldrons!” Then he ordered a cook to be called in at once, and without awaiting our pleasure, he directed that the oldest be butchered, and demanded in a loud voice, “What division do you belong to?” When the fellow made answer that he was from the fortieth, “Were you bought, or born upon my estates?” Trimalchio continued. “Neither,” replied the cook, “I was left to you by Pansa’s will.” “See to it that this is properly done,” Trimalchio warned, “or I’ll have you transferred to the division of messengers!” and the cook, bearing his master’s warning in mind, departed for the kitchen with the next course in tow. CHAPTER THE FORTY-EIGHTH.

• From Vision Quest (1979)

  Dad’s doctor is a myopic old fart who laughs like hell at me anytime I use a medical term or ask a medical question. He makes me feel about as intelligent as a grapefruit. But he set Mom straight as an arrow, so I don’t mind going to him instead of a nutritionist. I don’t know the extent to which he relies on God’s healing powers. Lucky for me I went to see him. He had this medical student with him from some place in Ohio, doing what they call a “preceptorship,” which is a brief practical introduction to the kind of medicine you intend to practice. You live with the doctor and see what it’s really like to be one. The medical student’s name was Max Mokeskey. Max was doing his preceptorship in Spokane so he could hike in the mountains and fish in the lakes and streams and hunt birds in the Palouse. I liked him. He laughed at me and told me I was full of shit and that I’d surely die if I tried to hit 147. I told him I’d already come down from 176 to the 155 I weighed then. That impressed him. We talked for a couple hours. Old Dr. Livengood wanted him to get to know patients. He said that was the essence of a successful family practice. We talked about my plans and his plans and about hiking and fishing and hunting birds. While we talked I got my physical and was informed I have a roving testicle. Max called my exobiology idea bullshit. He said few specialists in any field of medicine have time to do anything but read their journals and be present at the auditing of their taxes. He said family practice gives you at least a little time to yourself and a chance to have relationships with your patients as people instead of just diseases. He also said there were few trout streams out in space, where exobiology will be practiced when I finish med school. He didn’t actually convince me, but he sure was a lot better example of a physician than that nutritionist. I don’t know what kind of doctor I want to be. For now I’ve got to be a teratologist and study that monster Shute. Whatever kind of doctor I become, I hope I always make time to read and see movies and talk about them with my friends. I hope I meet people in college who like to do this. When I get home tonight I’ll proofread a paper I wrote on The Water-Method Man , a novel by John Irving, who is a former wrestler. The paper is for a course I’m taking by mail from Eastern Washington State College. I wrote my last one on Don Delillo’s End Zone . I got a B. The instructor wrote that my approach was too personal and that I misunderstood the book. He said it was a metaphor, not about football at all.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  This is one of Luther’s most creative insights. His positive attitude towards the body represented a major rupture from the asceticism of late medieval Christianity, which had marked him deeply. As he looked back twenty years later, and talked with his friends at table, being a monk was all about controlling one’s diet and sleep, castigating the flesh, and fighting sexual urges. Luther's original insight had been into the nature of sin and penance: human beings could not make them- selves perfect and win acceptance with God because of their good deeds — they had to accept their sinfulness, and recognise that God in his justice accepts sinners. Thus they were at one and the same time sinners and saved. 166 MARTIN LUTHER Luther’s radical Augustinianism had enabled him to come to terms with his own sinfulness. But it now also made him accept human physicality, along with emotional constitutions (which in humoral thought were allied), and here Luther went well beyond Augustine and perhaps also beyond Staupitz’s good-humoured acceptance of human imperfection. It was one of the gigantic leaps that Luther made between 1519 and 1520, and it was as much a personal transform- ation as it was intellectual. Calvin’s later solution to the dilemma of the Eucharist would be to say that Jesus was speaking symbolically, and so language did not refer to the actual thing. Such an interpretation was anathema to Luther, for whom it was vitally important that the miracle of the Mass was exactly that - a miracle. It did not need to make logical sense. This was why Luther liked to cast himself as a ‘fool’, whose foolishness was God’s wisdom — a conventional trope but one whose appeal was very deep. In theology, Luther believed, philosophy was just a distraction from the meaning of Scripture, and one must give up on attempting to find God through ‘the whore’ of reason, for the point of faith is that it exceeds rationality and reveals the distance between God and man.* The most beautiful writing from this period is Luther’s On the Freedom of a Christian, which appeared in November 1520. Written in German, it is barely thirty pages long. With delicious irony, Luther wrote it at the same time as a letter of ‘apology’ to Pope Leo, and presented the essay as a gift to the Pope along with the letter. Although the treatise is divided into thirty points — the numerals are usually omitted from modern editions in English — it is not so much a sermon as a comforting devotional tract.” There is no polemic or aggression. Deeply musical, one can almost hear Luther's voice conversing with the reader. He begins by stating a paradox: ‘A Christian is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none. A Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all.’

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  It was used in the 1546 edition cf Luther's New Testament, published by Hans Lufft, and in several volumes of Luther’s collected works on the title pages. The image also underlines the importance of the crucifix in Lutheran devotion, which Karlstadt had repudiated. had filled out. Now he became portly, and as he would wryly remark shortly before his death, soon the ‘worms would have a stout doctor to feed on’. This physical transformation created a representational problem for the evangelical movement, however: holy men were usually bony ascetics, and immune to the pleasures of the flesh. Just how difficult Luther’s followers found his appearance is revealed in Melanchthon’s biography of Luther, when he insisted that he had fasted a great deal, going for days without eating.* But Luther hardly resembled the haggard hermit and dedicated scholar Melanchthon wanted to present. Indeed, by that time a new iconography had devel- oped, showing a monumental Luther with giant boots and tiny hands, his stance powerful, rooted to the ground and clutching a Bible. Some images showed a bulky Luther on one side, and a solid Saxon Elector on the other, both kneeling with a crucifix between them, like two MARRIAGE AND THE FLESH 305 giant weights on a pair of scales: there could hardly have been a clearer demonstration of the closeness of Luther’s Reformation to the Saxon ruling house. This image prefaced editions of Luther’s Bible and of his collected works and became an almost official representation of the Reformation.” By the early 1530s, with his parents now both dead, Luther had become ‘the oldest in my family’, as well as father to a brood of children of his own. He had also become less mobile, intellectually as well as physically, as he ensconced himself in his study and held court at the table. Now a man of substance, his married life had ° transformed his theology. He had shed asceticism for a remarkably positive conception of human physicality, and a flexible, pastoral atti- tude towards the marital dilemmas of his parishioners.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Then, every evening around eight o’clock, he rose from the table and left the big parlour to go to his room where he would stand by the window, praying — ‘so earnestly and intently that we . . . keeping silent, often heard some words and were amazed’, according to his companions. Afterwards, he would turn from the window, happy, ‘as if he had put down a burden’, and talk to his associates for another quarter of an hour 400 MARTIN LUTHER before going to bed. Luther knew that he was facing death, and he talked about how ‘we old ones have to live so long that we see into the backside of the Devil, and experience so much evil, faithlessness and misery’. There was also talk at dinner about whether the dead would recognise one another, one of the very few occasions on which Luther speculated about the afterlife. He was sure that they would — just as, when Adam first met Eve, he knew at once that she was flesh of his flesh.” On the evening of 17 February, when he went to his room with his two younger sons to pray, he was suddenly taken ill once more, with chest pains and coldness. Jonas and the Mansfeld preacher Michael Coelius immediately rushed to his room, and he was again rubbed with hot cloths. Countess Anna of Mansfeld was summoned to provide unicorn horn — actually the tusk of a narwhal — believed to be a powerful restorative, and Count Albrecht himself grated some of it into a glass of wine. Conrad von Wolfframsdorf, one of Albrecht’s councillors, took a spoonful of it first — perhaps because Luther feared that he would be poisoned, perhaps because he mistrusted such medi- cine.“ At about 9 p.m., Luther lay down to nap, and slept peacefully for an hour. When he awoke, he asked those who had kept watch ‘Are you still sitting up?’, wondering if they wanted to go to bed themselves. He then walked into the next room, presumably the privy, and as he crossed the threshold, he spoke the words ‘Into your hand Icommend my spirit, You have redeemed me, God of truth.’ Returning to bed, he shook each person’s hand and wished them goodnight, telling them to pray for God and his gospel, ‘because the Council of Trent’ — the meeting of the council of the Catholic Church which initiated the Counter Reformation had finally begun in December 1545 — and the evil Pope fights bitterly with him’.® Jonas, Luther’s two sons Martin and Paul, his servant Ambrosius and other servants kept watch by the bed.

• From Satyricon (1)

  While we were studying the labels, Trimalchio clapped his hands and cried, “Ah me! To think that wine lives longer than poor little man. Let’s fill ‘em up! There’s life in wine and this is the real Opimian, you can take my word for that. I offered no such vintage yesterday, though my guests were far more respectable.” We were tippling away and extolling all these elegant devices, when a slave brought in a silver skeleton, so contrived that the joints and movable vertebra could be turned in any direction. He threw it down upon the table a time or two, and its mobile articulation caused it to assume grotesque attitudes, whereupon Trimalchio chimed in: “Poor man is nothing in the scheme of things And Orcus grips us and to Hades flings Our bones! This skeleton before us here Is as important as we ever were! Let’s live then while we may and life is dear.” CHAPTER THE THIRTY-FIFTH. The applause was followed by a course which, by its oddity, drew every eye, but it did not come up to our expectations. There was a circular tray around which were displayed the signs of the zodiac, and upon each sign the caterer had placed the food best in keeping with it. Ram’s vetches on Aries, a piece of beef on Taurus, kidneys and lamb’s fry on Gemini, a crown on Cancer, the womb of an unfarrowed sow on Virgo, an African fig on Leo, on Libra a balance, one pan of which held a tart and the other a cake, a small seafish on Scorpio, a bull’s eye on Sagittarius, a sea lobster on Capricornus, a goose on Aquarius and two mullets on Pisces. In the middle lay a piece of cut sod upon which rested a honeycomb with the grass arranged around it. An Egyptian slave passed bread around from a silver oven and in a most discordant voice twisted out a song in the manner of the mime in the musical farce called Laserpitium. Seeing that we were rather depressed at the prospect of busying ourselves with such vile fare, Trimalchio urged us to fall to: “Let us fall to, gentlemen, I beg of you, this is only the sauce!” CHAPTER THE THIRTY-SIXTH.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  With the wealth from the mines, three pocket-handkerchief-sized Renaissance castles—one painted red, one yellow, and one blue, with shared access to the chapel—were now rebuilt and restructured to form one of the best-fortified castle complexes in Germany. It was popularly believed that when one of the counts commissioned an altarpiece for the chapel depicting the Crucifixion, he had the thief on Christ’s right painted as his most hated co-ruler. True or not, the thief has the individualized features of a portrait and is unusually not naked but sports the outfit of an executioner, with garish parti-colored hose. Since executioners were shunned as dishonorable, this would have been a delicious insult. 19 2. The altarpiece at Mansfeld Castle. The Luder family lived well. 20 They particularly relished the tender meat of suckling pigs, a comparatively expensive food at a time when beef imported from central Europe was starting to become more common. They also ate songbirds that they trapped. At least one member of the family was a passionate bird-catcher, because several of the goose-bone whistles used to attract birds have survived in the midden outside the house. There was a well-stocked kitchen, amply furnished with simple green and yellow plates and crockery; there were drinking glasses, too, still a luxury in this period. 21 This was certainly a family who liked their food, enjoyed the pleasures of life, and did not have to watch the pennies. 3., 4., and 5. In the illustrations to Georg Agricola’s treatise on mining, De re metallica (1556), two buxom women pound the ore on the long tables, a method that would still be in use in the nineteenth century. Two other women sieve charcoal, while in the background of a view of the gigantic bellows, a short-skirted maid can be glimpsed going about her work. 22 In most sixteenth-century urban households, the master’s wife shared in the business of the workshop, bustling over the apprentices and journeymen, sometimes even doing the bookkeeping. But among the mine-owning class the realms of husband and wife were sharply distinct. The miners lived in their own cottages with their families and the smelter-master’s wife was not responsible for their food or upkeep. Hans Luder himself went out to work each day beyond the town walls, where he was immersed in that strange world of smoke, shafts, and tunnels, while Luther’s mother stayed at home with the servants and children. This was a separation of spheres much more like that of the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie, and very different from what was then the norm in early-modern German towns and farmsteads where women raised the poultry, grew the herbs, undertook the dairy work, and trekked to market.

• From Satyricon (1)

  My companions laughed, but I plucked up my courage and did not hesitate, but went on and examined the entire wall. There was a scene in a slave market, the tablets hanging from the slaves’ necks, and Trimalchio himself, wearing his hair long, holding a caduceus in his hand, entering Rome, led by the hand of Minerva. Then again the painstaking artist had depicted him casting up accounts, and still again, being appointed steward; everything being explained by inscriptions. Where the walls gave way to the portico, Mercury was shown lifting him up by the chin, to a tribunal placed on high. Near by stood Fortune with her horn of plenty, and the three Fates, spinning golden flax. I also took note of a group of runners, in the portico, taking their exercise under the eye of an instructor, and in one corner was a large cabinet, in which was a very small shrine containing silver Lares, a marble Venus, and a golden casket by no means small, which held, so they told us, the first shavings of Trimalchio’s beard. I asked the hall-porter what pictures were in the middle hall. “The Iliad and the Odyssey,” he replied, “and the gladiatorial games given under Laenas.” There was no time in which to examine them all. CHAPTER THE THIRTIETH. We had now come to the dining-room, at the entrance to which sat a factor, receiving accounts, and, what gave me cause for astonishment, rods and axes were fixed to the door-posts, superimposed, as it were, upon the bronze beak of a ship, whereon was inscribed: TO GAIUS POMPEIUS TRIMALCHIO AUGUSTAL, SEVIR FROM CINNAMUS HIS STEWARD. A double lamp, suspended from the ceiling, hung beneath the inscription, and a tablet was fixed to each door-post; one, if my memory serves me, was inscribed, ON DECEMBER THIRTIETH AND THIRTY FIRST OUR GAIUS DINES OUT

• From Satyricon (1)

  Philosophic dogmas concerning the brevity and uncertainty of life were ancient even in the time of Herodotus. They have left their mark upon our language in the form of more than one proverb, but in none is this so patent as “the skeleton at the feast.” In chapter lxxviii of Euterpe, we have an admirable citation. In speaking of the Egyptians, he says: “At their convivial banquets, among the wealthy classes, when they have finished supper, a man carries round in a coffin the image of a dead body carved in wood, made as life-like as possible in color and workmanship, and in size generally about one or two cubits in length; and showing this to each of the company, he says: ‘Look upon this, then drink and enjoy yourself; for when dead you will be like this.’ This is the practice they have at their drinking parties.” According to Plutarch, (Isis and Osiris, chapter 17.) the Greeks adopted this Egyptian custom, and there is, of course, little doubt that the Romans took it from the Greeks. The aim of this custom was, according to Scaliger, to bring the diners to enjoy the sweets of life while they were able to feel enjoyment, and thus to abandon themselves to pleasure before death deprived them of everything. The verses which follow bring this out beautifully. In the Copa of Virgil we find the following: “Wine there! Wine and dice! Tomorrow’s fears shall fools alone benumb! By the ear Death pulls me. ‘Live!’ he whispers softly, ‘Live! I come.’” The practical philosophy of the indefatigable roues sums itself up in this sentence uttered by Trimalchio. The verb “vivere” has taken a meaning very much broader and less special, than that which it had at the time when it signified only the material fact of existence. The voluptuaries of old Rome were by no means convinced that life without license was life. The women of easy virtue, living within the circle of their friendships, after the fashion best suited to their desires, understood that verb only after their own interpretation, and the philologists soon reconciled themselves to the change. In this sense it was that Varro employed “vivere,” when he said: “Young women, make haste to live, you whom adolescence permits to enjoy, to eat, to love, and to occupy the chariot of Venus (Veneris tenere bigas).” But a still better example of the extension in the meaning of this word is to be found in an inscription on the tomb of a lady of pleasure. This inscription was composed by a voluptuary of the school of Petronius. ALIAE. RESTITVTAE. ANIMAE. DVLCISSIMAE. BELLATOR. AVG. LIB. CONIVGI. CARISSIMAE. AMICI. DVM. VIVIMVS. VIVAMUS.

• From Satyricon (1)

  It was not long before Stychus brought a white shroud and a purple-bordered toga into the dining-room, and Trimalchio requested us to feel them and see if they were pure wool. Then, with a smile, “Take care, Stychus, that the mice don’t get at these things and gnaw them, or the moths either. I’ll burn you alive if they do. I want to be carried out in all my glory so all the people will wish me well.” Then, opening a jar of nard, he had us all anointed. “I hope I’ll enjoy this as well when I’m dead,” he remarked, “as I do while I’m alive.” He then ordered wine to be poured into the punch-bowl. “Pretend,” said he, “that you’re invited to my funeral feast.” The thing had grown positively nauseating, when Trimalchio, beastly drunk by now, bethought himself of a new and singular diversion and ordered some horn-blowers brought into the dining-room. Then, propped up by many cushions, he stretched himself out upon the couch. “Let on that I’m dead,” said he, “and say something nice about me.” The horn-blowers sounded off a loud funeral march together, and one in particular, a slave belonging to an undertaker, made such a fanfare that he roused the whole neighborhood, and the watch, which was patrolling the vicinity, thinking Trimalchio’s house was afire, suddenly smashed in the door and rushed in with their water and axes, as is their right, raising a rumpus all their own. We availed ourselves of this happy circumstance and, leaving Agamemnon in the lurch, we took to our heels, as though we were running away from a real conflagration. ETEXT EDITOR’S BOOKMARKS: Affairs start to go wrong, your friends will stand from under Doctor’s not good for anything except for a consolation Everybody’s business is nobody’s business He can teach you more than he knows himself Learning’s a fine thing, and a trade won’t starve Men are lions at home and foxes abroad No one can show a dead man a good time The loser’s always the winner in arguments Too many doctors did away with him We know that you’re only a fool with a lot of learning Whenever you learn a thing, it’s yours Believes, on the spot, every tale You can spot a louse on someone else VOLUME 3.--FURTHER ADVENTURES OF ENCOLPIUS AND HIS COMPANIONS CHAPTER THE SEVENTY-NINTH.

• From Shunned (2018)

  He embraced the magic and mystery of life and had a very tender and reverential spiritual life that showed up in his love of nature, poetry, philosophy, and art. When you combine that with his mental prowess and generous spirit, you have a very elegant man. Stories of his generosity with time and resources are legion. Becoming a stepmother was challenging for me. I was over forty and had conceded that I would not have my own children in this lifetime, a decision made easier by Bob, who did not want more kids. It took a while for me to get my bearings. Will and I warmed to each other right away. At first, Christine was not sure she liked having me in the picture, and I found her adolescent moods a bore. My stepkids were raised in privileged circumstances: private schools, tutors, music lessons, a swimming pool in the backyard, Hawaiian vacations. It was a far cry from my own upbringing and sometimes triggered judgments and resentments that I needed to let go of in order to deepen my relationship with them and their father. It was a deliberate choice that I did not assume any parenting responsibilities—these children already had two engaged parents, so that base was covered. Over the years, I assumed the role of a steady and supportive adult who loved them. We made our home in Marin County, surrounded by redwoods in a tri-story house tucked into a canyon on Mount Tam. Raven families nest in the boughs of my favorite tree while a pair of turquoise hummingbirds sustain themselves on our lavender and Mexican sage. Life and work unfolded in rich and surprising ways as I entered a period of deep peace, joy, and productivity. Like everyone, I had my share of garden-variety life challenges, but I could always find much to be grateful for. [image "Images" file=Image00000.jpg] One evening I was home alone, reading a fine book. The telephone rang, and it was my dad. I’d been married two years, but we had not spoken in over eight years. His age—now seventy— came through the receiver; his voice, scratchy from the flu, sounded dull as a used pencil. He got right to the details, like someone pressed for time. His mother, my ninety-four-year-old grandmother, had been in decline for many months, he said, and had just been admitted to a hospice home. She was in and out—but mostly out—of consciousness, and no one expected her to live more than a week or two. “It’s been a long haul,” said Dad. “Your mom is over there every day, checking in with the hospice staff. It’s starting to take its toll on all of us. We’re ready for this to be over. Grandma just needs to die.” He seemed resigned to the waiting. Growing up, I never felt a sustained closeness with Grandma T., a nickname she encouraged.

• From Shunned (2018)

  Norman took the evening shift, and Demetri was there each morning, seven days a week, as sure as the sunrise. Norman was a round and jolly soul with skin as black as the darkest shadow. He lived on the South Side and insisted on calling me Miss Linda. He often read a crumpled copy of the King James Bible as he sat behind the marbled desk, wearing a black suit and tie. Demetri liked to brag about his Sicilian heritage. His hair was sleek and shiny, like a raven, and the shaved skin of his neck bulged over the edge of his white collar. Straight-faced he looked imposing, but when he smiled, an unexpected humanity pushed through the lines on his face and he would light up, eager to break away from his Tribune and thermos of coffee to greet the residents passing through. It was all so urban . The first month of my new job, I devoted time to educating myself and getting the lay of the land. I reviewed the list of area banks and bank presidents and investigated their backgrounds. I was swimming in new waters and wanted to understand the customer experience of what I’d be selling. My days were filled with internal meetings, making the rounds to coworkers, seeing all the areas that would interact and support the client. There was a whole team of salespeople like me, and another group of managers and customer service people to handle the clients once our work was done. The other salespeople took me on calls, and the managers invited me to join them on client progress meetings. I rode along as a passenger throughout Chicagoland, further grounding myself in the territory inside and outside the city. The financial analyst helped me understand the complex pricing model, so that I’d be able to explain the revenue strategy on all proposals with an executive management committee and get their approval. All the numbers and variables were intimidating, and my head seized with information overload as I sat through my first monthly staff meeting. About twenty people, gathered around a long, rectangular table, filled a large conference room. Our chief product officer was explaining the newest iteration of pricing interchange, followed by a long question-and-answer period. The bankcard industry is a very esoteric branch of financial services that has its own unique language. The acronyms were flying left and right. “Will I ever learn all this?” I whispered to the person seated next to me. “No,” he said frankly. “I’ve been doing this for years, and trust me, it’s impossible to know it all. And it keeps changing with updates in technology. Each deal will teach you something new, you’ll see.” Despite my overwhelm, it was a very liberating time for me personally. New friends and coworkers knew only the “present” me—the single, thirty-three-year-old executive type—and whatever else I chose to reveal. Here there was no “past” of religious rules, unstudied Watchtower and Awake! magazines, or dejected family.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  As a result the history of the Reformation was profoundly distorted. Biographies were largely written with no sense of the social and cultural world of Saxony or of Wittenberg, and thus tended to reinforce the view of Luther as a lone theological hero, who stands above time and space. Even so, there have been some subversive moments. By a fine irony, the best scholarly study of Wittenberg, unmatched since, testifies to the legacy of the early women’s movement: the 1927 work by the economic and social historian Edith Eschenhagen in which she analyzed Wittenberg’s tax records. 19 All these works had a strong influence on me when I began work on this book in 2006, and reinforced my view that a sense of place was essential to understanding Luther’s reformation. I spent as much time as I could in the archives at Wittenberg, which are housed in Friedrich the Wise’s castle. During the lunch hour I wandered around the town. I visited all the places where Luther had lived before going to Wittenberg, and I often read in the archives, not so much to find out about Luther as to get a sense of the local economy and power structure. I read accounts of Luther by his contemporaries, foes as well as friends—and I discovered that his antagonists often proved surprisingly shrewd about his psychology and motivations. But it was reading his letters that gave me the greatest pleasure and the richest encounter with the man. I read them not to corroborate or date Reformation events, but as literary sources that conveyed his emotions and illuminated his relationships with others. Luther’s letters were designed to make things happen. His mistakes, slips, self-justifications, and fondness for particular words reveal much about what moved him. In the early years of the Reformation, for example, he talked constantly of invidia, or envy, attributing it to his opponents—although it is hardly likely that they would have envied a penniless, powerless monk, while he, on the other hand, had every reason to be preoccupied with those he envied. I began to reflect that many of his theological concerns were closely related to the strong conflicts that shaped his psychology. Luther’s letter-writing habits offered perhaps the most intriguing insights. Although he had had secretaries since his days as a monk, he wrote his letters himself, except when severe illness prevented him. His hand—small, neat, and well shaped—moves confidently across the page, and Luther almost always knew what size paper he would need, suggesting a remarkable ability to judge in advance how much he was going to write. Over the years his handwriting remained largely unchanged except for a tendency to become slightly smaller and more angular, the hand muscles evidently becoming more tense. Extraordinarily, in an age when letters were routinely passed from person to person, were forged or intercepted, and when every chancellery filed drafts, Luther kept no copies.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  This is one of Luther’s most creative insights. His positive attitude toward the body represented a major rupture from the asceticism of late medieval Christianity, which had marked him deeply. As he looked back twenty years later, and talked with his friends at table, being a monk was all about controlling one’s diet and sleep, castigating the flesh, and fighting sexual urges. Luther’s original insight had been into the nature of sin and penance: Human beings could not make themselves perfect and win acceptance with God because of their good deeds—they had to accept their sinfulness, and recognize that God in his justice accepts sinners. Thus they were at one and the same time sinners and saved. Luther’s radical Augustinianism had enabled him to come to terms with his own sinfulness. But it now also made him accept human physicality, along with emotional constitutions (which in humoral thought were allied), and here Luther went well beyond Augustine and perhaps also beyond Staupitz’s cheerful acceptance of human imperfection. It was one of the gigantic leaps that Luther made between 1519 and 1520, and it was as much a personal transformation as it was intellectual. Calvin’s later solution to the dilemma of the Eucharist would be to say that Jesus was speaking symbolically, and so language did not refer to the actual thing. Such an interpretation was anathema to Luther, for whom it was vitally important that the miracle of the Mass was exactly that—a miracle. It did not need to make logical sense. This was why Luther liked to cast himself as a “fool,” whose foolishness was God’s wisdom—a conventional trope but one whose appeal was very deep. In theology, Luther believed, philosophy was just a distraction from the meaning of Scripture, and one must give up on attempting to find God through “the whore” of reason, for the point of faith is that it exceeds rationality and reveals the distance between God and man.51 —THE most beautiful writing from this period is Luther’s On the Freedom of a Christian, which appeared in November 1520. Written in German, it is barely thirty pages long. With delicious irony, Luther wrote it at the same time as a letter of “apology” to Pope Leo, and presented the essay as a gift to the Pope along with the letter. Although the treatise is divided into thirty points—the numerals are usually omitted from modern editions in English—it is not so much a sermon as a comforting devotional tract.52 There is no polemic or aggression. It is deeply musical, and one can almost hear Luther’s voice conversing with the reader. He begins by stating a paradox: “A Christian is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none. A Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all.”53 [image "32. Martin Luther, Von der freyheyt eynes Christenmenschen, 1520." file=images/Rope_9780812996203_epub3_036_r1.jpg] [image "32. Martin Luther, Von der freyheyt eynes Christenmenschen, 1520." file=images/Rope_9780812996203_epub3_036_r1.jpg] 32. Martin Luther, Von der freyheyt eynes Christenmenschen, 1520.

• From Satyricon (1)

  Trimalchio was hugely tickled at this challenge. “Slaves are men, my friends,” he observed, “but that’s not all, they sucked the same milk that we did, even if hard luck has kept them down; and they’ll drink the water of freedom if I live: to make a long story short, I’m freeing all of them in my will. To Philargyrus, I’m leaving a farm, and his bedfellow, too. Carrio will get a tenement house and his twentieth, and a bed and bedclothes to boot. I’m making Fortunata my heir and I commend her to all my friends. I announce all this in public so that my household will love me as well now as they will when I’m dead.” They all commenced to pay tribute to the generosity of their master, when he, putting aside his trifling, ordered a copy of his will brought in, which same he read aloud from beginning to end, to the groaning accompaniment of the whole household. Then, looking at Habinnas, “What say you, my dearest friend,” he entreated; “you’ll construct my monument in keeping with the plans I’ve given you, won’t you? I earnestly beg that you carve a little bitch at the feet of my statue, some wreaths and some jars of perfume, and all of the fights of Petraites. Then I’ll be able to live even after I’m dead, thanks to your kindness. See to it that it has a frontage of one hundred feet and a depth of two hundred. I want fruit trees of every kind planted around my ashes; and plenty of vines, too, for it’s all wrong for a man to deck out his house when he’s alive, and then have no pains taken with the one he must stay in for a longer time, and that’s the reason I particularly desire that this notice be added: --THIS MONUMENT DOES NOT-- --DESCEND TO AN HEIR--

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  And only someone with a sense of humor, a stubborn realism, and a remarkable ability to engage the deepest loyalties of others could have avoided the martyrdom that threatened. The Reformation is often lauded as heralding the arrival of modernity, the freedom of the individual, or, alternatively, the growth of a confessional world that yoked religious to political identity. I hope to have shown that none of these views do justice to Luther or to the movement he started. Luther was not “modern,” and unless we appreciate his thought in its own unfamiliar and often uncomfortable terms, we will not see what it might have to offer us today. What Luther meant by “freedom” and by “conscience” were not what we mean by these words now. It had nothing to do with allowing people to follow their conscience; it meant our capacity to know with God, a knowledge he believed to be objective truth. Luther split the Church and ushered in the denominational era, but he was always a maverick thinker who did not believe in following rules or in devising courts to impose morality. He was a man who retained a healthy mistrust of Reason, “the whore.” B OTH M ÜNTZER AND Luther interpreted the events of the Peasants’ War as a sacred drama and drew upon apocalyptic rhetoric: The Devil was raging, presaging the Last Days. But whereas Müntzer believed that the Last Days were imminent and must be ushered in with the sword, Luther never predicted a specific date. His apocalyptic language was more of a rhetorical intensifier than a literal prediction. He imbued his own times with significance as he identified the Pope as the Antichrist, but such language paradoxically also helped make the present seem less important compared with the divine drama of the coming end of the world. It never, however, led Luther to retreat from engagement with the present, nor did it lead him to attempt to overthrow the existing order. 1 Equally, while Müntzer, at least at first, seems to have believed that the seriousness of these exceptional times demanded sexual abstinence from the godly and complete dedication to the divine, Luther drew the opposite conclusion. He decided to annoy the Devil by committing a particularly large sin: He got married. Moreover, his choice of wife was the most provocative possible, which he knew would enrage the Devil—and the Catholics—most. He married a nun. From 1523, groups of nuns, convinced by evangelical teachings against monasticism, had begun leaving their convents and arrived in Wittenberg, where it fell to Luther to find lodgings for them and even provide them with new clothes. 2 He was not entirely innocent in all this. That year, Leonhard Koppe, a businessman and a relation of his friend Amsdorf, smuggled a group of nuns out of the Nimbschen convent in Duke Georg’s territory and over the border to Wittenberg, hiding them among barrels of herrings.

• From Vision Quest (1979)

  I lay behind the bench and didn’t get up until Otto went out to wrestle. Still, the gym seemed to spin when I stood up. We were down 24–20 going into Otto’s match. If he hadn’t pinned his man we’d have lost. The pressure was really on, but pressure doesn’t bother Otto. He’d led us out for our exercises yelling, “Corega! Coreeega!” He’s been fascinated with the word ever since he discovered I use that stuff instead of regular toothpaste. Coach made him captain for both the Custer and Battleground matches. Both teams have big tough heavyweights. The worst is over for us now, though. Custer is the tougher of the two, so tomorrow night should be easier. Coach is going to have Doug Bowden wrestle in my place tomorrow night. That will give Doug some tournament experience and it will give me a little rest. Coach and I talked about it and decided missing one match wouldn’t make me lose my edge. Shute is only four days away. Otto’s down behind the Lewis and Clark bench talking to Romaine. They’ve just finished their exercises and Battleground is out on the mat. The gym’s been full all day. Most people come and go, but the really interested ones bring something to eat so they can see all the matches. I met the folks I’ll be staying with. Their kid, Chris Carpenter, drew with Schmooz in a tremendous match this afternoon. Otto stops to say hello to Romaine’s folks on his way back up to where we’re sitting. They go to all of Romaine’s matches, even road trips. Rayette smiles up at Otto and I’ll bet half the gym bristles with hard-ons. * * * I’m curled up in my sleeping bag in the Carpenter’s basement under the pool table. Rance Prokoff from L.C. is asleep on the davenport. He lost pretty bad to a state champ from Battleground tonight. We shot a game of eight-ball to see who got the davenport and Rance won. Actually, it’s pretty cozy under here. I’ve got a little desk lamp hooked up and I’m reading a book Cindy got me for Christmas. It’s called Another Roadside Attraction and it’s by a guy named Tom Robbins who lives over around Seattle. It’s funny and sexy, but the thing that blows me away the furthest about it is how it fits into the stuff I’m talking about in my senior thesis. I don’t know if I’m becoming monomaniacal or what, but everywhere I look I keep seeing things that fit. Robbins’s characters don’t believe the purpose of life is to die and be resurrected in a Christian heaven, so they aren’t terribly surprised when one of them finds the mummified body of Christ where it’s been stashed in the Vatican basement all these years. For a lot of people that knowledge would knock all the meaning or purpose out of living. But these Robbins people create their own meaning in the way they live.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  How can this be? Luther argues that we have a spiritual and a physical nature, but he does not make this distinction in order to denigrate the flesh. Rather, he argues that the inner man should have faith in God, and we cannot arrive at faith through works of the outer man. What clothes we wear, what regulations we observe—none of it matters and it cannot make us acceptable to God. We are free from doing works. Faith concerns the inner man and—using the simile he had employed to explain the Real Presence—just as the iron becomes red hot, uniting with the flame, so our inner self becomes united with faith and with God. As he continues to describe faith, Luther makes a uniquely sixteenth-century comparison. To believe someone is to consider them to be a pious, truthful person, whose word will always be pious and truthful, “which is the greatest honor which one man can do another.” In the kind of honor society in which Luther lived, and in which one’s word was binding and contracts depended on trust, honor was a fundamental value, an economic as well as a moral quality. The biblical law teaches the outer man just how sinful he is, and this recognition is essential before we can arrive at faith. Nothing, no human act, can be free of what Luther calls sin; we cannot, for example, avoid “evil desires.” This is why good deeds cannot make us pleasing to God. As externals, they cannot enter into the realm of “faith.” Luther’s gloomy assessment of human nature actually leads to an uplifting conclusion: If everything we do is tainted with sin, then it also doesn’t matter; that is just how we are, and we cannot make ourselves godly by trying to pile up good deeds.54 Throughout the tract Luther uses seemingly simple but powerful words—freedom, faith, honor. The directness of the language allows them to resonate, but they could be understood in a variety of different ways. His use of “freedom,” alongside the idea that the Christian is both lord and servant, was dynamite. By addressing all Christians as equals, be they princes or commoners, and by insisting on their freedom, he broke with social deference. Addressing his reader repeatedly with the informal du, he speaks to “alle” (“all”) and “yderman” (“everyone”). Moreover, he argues that “everyone” is entitled to make up their own mind on spiritual matters: “From what has been said, everyone can pass a safe judgment on all works and laws and make a trustworthy distinction between them and know who are the blind and ignorant pastors and who are the good and true.”55 This gave ordinary Christians the ability to decide who was preaching true Christian doctrine, rather than blindly accepting the word of the priest set over them. Scripture was clear, Luther argued, and its meaning apparent to all.