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 From the Streets to the Sheets: Noire's Urban Erotic Quickies (2007)

  Mikala just looked at him. She’d never been anybody’s freak the way she had freaked for Kareem. He’d touched her heart and given her the best sex she’d ever had, and she damn sure didn’t regret the experience. “Me too,” she finally said, refusing to front. She had a real good feeling about Kareem, and wanted to see what the future held. Borne didn’t have to be her fantasy anymore, and she could leave that Bullet under the bed and let it gather dust. Who needed fantasies anyway? Mikala had a feeling she’d found herself a real live homey-lover-friend, and his name was Kareem. CHARGE IT TO THE GAME Jamise L. Dames Flame’s body pulsed. Tensing and relaxing her muscles, she made her succulent booty clap in the mark’s face as she bent down to touch her pedicured toes, then got low with it, butterflying her legs. Bringing her knees together, then apart, she allowed him brief glimpses of her perfectly waxed, milk-chocolate-covered cherry, then flowed her deliciousness into a bobble. Gyrating her firm, round onion, she backed that thang up until her ass jiggled a few centimeters in front of Robert’s nose, then swung it like a pendulum, hypnotizing him with her rhythm. Far away enough to make him beg for more, she closed in on him to tempt him with her juicy slit and iced-out clit ring. Magically, she worked her sweetness clockwise, then rolled her jelly counterclockwise while hooking her arms through the inside of her thighs, spreading herself further. Looking back at him, she knew it was only a matter of time before she’d get what she wanted: him to sign on the dotted line so she could make enough change to take care of her fifteen-year-old sister, Mercedes, and hopefully get Enrique off her back for good. Shaking papi chulo was going to be the hardest. He wasn’t the kind of brotha you could just blow off. He was a crazy-ass kingpin from Spanish Harlem who’d put more bodies in the ground than a cemetery. Fuckin’ Power. Snaking her body, she rolled in a deep grind, winding her hips and popping her coochie. Rubbing her perfectly rounded, toffee titties under the black light, she thought about her man. Power had fucked up royally, sticking Enrique for the couple of kilos he’d fronted him. Now Flame would have to dance and fuck their way out of it until Power surfaced from a major lick he was putting down somewhere in the Carolinas. Either that, or Flame hoped his gangstaazz homeboy Whiz came through with half of the bricks in exchange for her freedom, which was unlikely because he hadn’t touched base with her in a week. In the meantime, Enrique held Flame responsible for Power’s sins. A down-ass bitch always held her nigga down.

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  There were no rocks, no platform, no path of moonlight, no Yershalaim around. The black steeds also vanished. The master and Margarita saw the promised dawn. It began straight away, immediately after the midnight moon. The master walked with his friend in the brilliance of the first rays of morning over a mossy little stone bridge. They crossed it. The faithful lovers left the stream behind and walked down the sandy path. ‘Listen to the stillness,’ Margarita said to the master, and the sand rustled under her bare feet, ‘listen and enjoy what you were not given in life—peace. Look, there ahead is your eternal home, which you have been given as a reward. I can already see the Venetian window and the twisting vine, it climbs right up to the roof. Here is your home, your eternal home. I know that in the evenings you will be visited by those you love, those who interest you and who will never trouble you. They will play for you, they will sing for you, you will see what light is in the room when the candles are burning. You will fall asleep, having put on your greasy and eternal nightcap, you will fall asleep with a smile on your lips. Sleep will strengthen you, you will reason wisely. And you will no longer be able to drive me away. I will watch over your sleep.’ Thus spoke Margarita, walking with the master towards their eternal home, and it seemed to the master that Margarita’s words flowed in the same way as the stream they had left behind flowed and whispered, and the master’s memory, the master’s anxious, needled memory began to fade. Someone was setting the master free, as he himself had just set free the hero he had created. This hero had gone into the abyss, gone irrevocably, the son of the astrologer-king, forgiven on the eve of Sunday, the cruel fifth procurator of Judea, the equestrian Pontius Pilate. Epilogue, THE MASTER AND MARGARITA Epilogue But all the same—what happened later in Moscow, after that Saturday evening when Woland left the capital, having disappeared from Sparrow Hills at sunset with his retinue? Of the fact that, for a long time, a dense hum of the most incredible rumours went all over the capital and very quickly spread to remote and forsaken provincial places as well, nothing need be said. It is even nauseating to repeat such rumours. The writer of these truthful lines himself, personally, on a trip to Feodosiya, heard a story on the train about two thousand persons in Moscow coming out of a theatre stark-naked in the literal sense of the word and in that fashion returning home in taxi-cabs. The whisper ‘unclean powers’ was heard in queues waiting at dairy stores, in tram-cars, shops, apartments, kitchens, on trains both suburban and long-distance, in stations big and small, at summer resorts and on beaches.

• From The Girls (2016)

  What do you think?” I was suspicious of her offer: she didn’t buy food for the house unless I wrote notes for her to find when she got back from group. And we hadn’t eaten meat in forever. Sal told my mother that to eat meat was to eat fear and that ingesting fear would make you gain weight. “Meatballs would be good,” I allowed. I didn’t want to notice how happy it made her. —My mother turned on the radio in the kitchen, playing the kind of slight, balmy songs that I’d loved as a child. Diamond rings, cool streams, apple trees. If Suzanne or even Connie caught me listening to that sort of music, I’d be embarrassed—it was bland and cheerful and old-fashioned—but I had a grudging, private love of those songs, my mother singing along to the parts she knew. Rosy with theatrical enthusiasm, so it was easy to get caught up in her giddiness. Her posture was shaped by years of horse shows in adolescence, smiling from the backs of sleek Arabians, arena lights catching the crust of rhinestones on her collar. She had been so mysterious to me when I was younger. The shyness I had felt watching her move around the house, shuffling in her night slippers. The drawer of jewelry whose provenance I made her describe, piece by piece, like a poem. The house was clean, the windows segmenting the dark night, the carpets plush beneath my bare feet. This was the opposite of the ranch, and I sensed I should be guilty—that it was wrong to be comfortable like this, to want to eat this food with my mother in the primness of our tidy kitchen. What were Suzanne and the others doing at that same moment? It was suddenly hard to imagine. “How’s Connie these days?” she asked, flicking through her handwritten recipe cards. “Fine.” She probably was. Watching May Lopes’s braces scum up. “You know,” she said, “she can always come over here. You guys have been spending an awful lot of time at her house lately.” “Her dad doesn’t care.” “I miss her,” she said, though my mother had always seemed mystified by Connie, like a barely tolerated maiden aunt. “We should go on a trip to Palm Springs or something.” It was clear she’d been waiting to offer this. “You could invite Connie, if you wanted.” “I don’t know.” It could be nice. Connie and I shoving each other in the sun-stifled backseat, drinking shakes from the date farm outside Indio. “Mm,” she murmured. “We could go in the next few weeks. But you know, sweetheart”—a pause. “Frank might come, too.” “I’m not going on a trip with you and your boyfriend.” She tried to smile, but I saw that she wasn’t saying everything. The radio was too loud. “Sweetheart,” she started. “How are we ever going to live together—” “What?” I hated how automatically my voice tilted bratty, cutting any authority.

• From From the Streets to the Sheets: Noire's Urban Erotic Quickies (2007)

  Monique had wanted to scream with laughter at the look on Juicy’s face. The high-maintenance bitch looked terrified as shit. As if fuckin’ fifteen or twenty stank-breath niggahs with hard dicks was gonna kill her or something. “Here,” Monique said, taking some pity on her and passing her a pill from her personal stash. “After the first ten dirty-dicked niggahs screwing and slobbering all over you, you’re gonna need this to help you get through the rest. Later, hater!” • • • “What the fuck is going on around here?” Monique caught up with Honey Dew in the dressing room a couple of days later. “Pluto didn’t bring his fat ass home last night. Some shit is up, girl. I can feel it.” “I’on’t know,” Honey Dew whispered. She pulled her shirt over her head and her butterscotch titties with thick chocolate nipples stood straight out from her body. She cupped them in her hands and thumbed her stiff buds. Monique eyed them hungrily, but she’d already fucked Honey Dew more than once. The girl was a squirter and had some real soft pussy, but right now Monique was much more interested in whatever news Honey Dew might be able to put her up on than she was on tasting her juice. “I heard they did Gino, girl. I heard Moonie telling Greco that they took him out by the airport and deaded his fuckin’ ass.” Monique nodded and smiled. Good. With Gino gone, that meant the path was all the way clear for her and Pluto to slide right into position. G had already fronted almost half the money for the state business licenses and shit, and him and Pluto was gonna ride down there together in about a week so he could pay off the cops and the people who signed off on liquor licenses. After that G said he’d drop a bucket load of bank on Monique so she could hire some girls to work the stage and the back rooms too. Monique couldn’t wait till they were heading south on the Jersey Turnpike. She’d been fucking Pluto for years, even though he smelled like a dead man and beat her ass and treated her like shit whenever he felt like it. But so what. The niggah was a loyal soldier. He was way up there on G’s team, and rolling with funky power was better than rolling with a fragrant wankster. She’d stick close to Pluto and put up with his shit-streaked drawers and nasty breath until she could get with a strong niggah like G. Maybe she’d find herself one down in the B-More. She was damn sure gonna be looking around.

• From The History of Christianity: From the Disciples to the Dawn of the Reformation (2012)

  210 mrofeR citsanom :92 erutceL life was ordered to “the four last things”: death, judgment, heaven, or hell. A freely chosen modicum of deprivation and discipline during o mortal existence seemed a small price to pay when compared to the cost of eternal misery caused by luxury and vice and far better than passing through an afterlife “purgatory.” A life dedicated to God in such an explicit fashion prepared o the monk for the only thing that really mattered: participation in eternal life in heaven. There was, for the medieval mind, nothing irrational in choosing sacrifice in this life in order to gain everlasting bliss in God’s presence. • Less explicit but no less real were the obvious material benefits that the monastic life made available, even to members of the nobility. The cloister offered safety, security, and an orderly way of life o rather than the chaos and struggle of secular existence. Diet in the monastery was better and more consistent, sleep more regular, days more meaningful, and therefore, health much improved. For women in nunneries, lack of sexual activity meant that the terrors of childbirth, infant mortality, and rapid aging were avoided. For women and men alike, life within the cloister gave access o to beauty through architecture, music, and the liturgy; the chance to practice the crafts of calligraphy and bookmaking, weaving, pottery, and gardening; the possibility of a genuine education; and the chance to hold positions of authority. • Precisely because of its great popularity during these centuries, the institution of monasticism also required constant reform. Greater numbers in communities inevitably meant that some o members were more dedicated to the implicit benefits of the life than to the explicit ideals. For some monks in every age, a comfortable pallet for sleep and meals on a regular basis trump any religious motivation.

• From The Girls (2016)

  Nothing in you but beauty.” The words worked on me, even if only temporarily. A trance overtaking me when I saw my reflection—the scooped breasts, even the soft stomach, the legs rough with mosquito bites. There was nothing to figure out, no complicated puzzles—just the obvious fact of the moment, the only place where love really existed. Afterward he’d hand me a towel to clean myself, and this seemed like a great kindness. When I returned to her purview, there was always a brief period when Suzanne was cool to me. Even her movements were stiff, as if braced, a lull behind her eyes, like someone asleep at the wheel. I learned quickly how to compliment her, how to ride by her side until she forgot to be aloof and deigned to pass her cigarette to me. It would occur to me later that Suzanne missed me when I left, her formality a clumsy disguise. Though it’s hard to tell—maybe that is only a wishful explanation. —The other parts of the ranch flash in and out. Guy’s black dog that they called by a rotating series of names. The wanderers who passed through the ranch that summer, crashing for a day or two before leaving. Denizens of the brainless dream, appearing at all hours of the day with woven backpacks and their parents’ cars. I didn’t see anything familiar in how quickly Russell talked them out of their possessions, put them on the spot so their generosity became a forced theater. They handed over pink slips to cars, bankbooks, once even a gold wedding ring, with the stunned and exhausted relief of a drowning person finally giving in to the tidal suck. I was distracted by their tales of sorrow, both harrowing and banal. Complaints of evil fathers and cruel mothers, a similarity to the stories that made us all feel like victims of the same conspiracy. —It was one of the few days it rained that summer, and most of us were indoors, the old parlor smelling damp and gray like the air outside. Blankets gridded the floor. I could hear a baseball game on the radio in the kitchen, rain dropping into the plastic bucket under a leak. Roos was giving Suzanne a hand massage, their fingers slick with lotion, while I read a years-old magazine. My horoscope from March 1967. An irritated sulk hung between us; we were not used to limitations, to being stuck anywhere. The kids did better at being indoors. They passed only briefly through our watch, trundling by on their private missions. There was the bang of a fallen chair in the other room, but no one got up to investigate. Besides Nico, I didn’t know who most of the other kids belonged to—all of them were thin wristed, like they’d gone to seed, powdered milk glazed around their mouths. I’d watched Nico for Roos a few times, had held him in my arms and felt his sweaty, pleasing weight.

• From An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness (1995)

  Graduate school was not only relative freedom for me from my illness, but it was also freedom from the highly structured existence of undergraduate studies. Although I skipped more than half of my formal lectures, it didn’t really matter; as long as one ultimately performed, the erratic ways that one took to get there were considerably less important. I was married, too, by this point, to a French artist who not only was a talented painter but an exceedingly kind and gentle person. He and I had met in the early seventies, at a brunch given by mutual friends. It was a time of long hair, social unrest, graduate school deferments, and Vietnam War protests, and I was relieved to find someone who was, for a switch, essentially apolitical, highly intelligent but unintellectual, and deeply committed to the arts. We were very different, but we liked one another immediately; we found out quickly that we shared a passionate love for painting, music, and the natural world. I was, at the time, painfully intense, rail thin, and, when not moribund, filled to the brim with a desire for an exciting life, a high-voltage academic career, and a pack of children. Photographs from that time show a tall, extraordinarily handsome, dark-haired, gentle, and brown-eyed man who, while consistent in his own appearance, is accompanied by a wildly variable woman in her midtwenties: in one picture laughing, in a floppy hat, with long hair flying; in another pensive, brooding, looking infinitely older, far more soberly and boringly dressed. My hair, like my moods, went up and down: long for a time, until an I-look-like-a-toad mood would sweep over me; thinking a radical change might help, I then would have it cut to a bob. The moods, the hair, the clothes all changed from week to week, month to month. My husband, on the other hand, was steady, and in most ways we ended up complementing one another’s temperaments. Within months of our meeting we were living together in a small apartment near the ocean. It was a quiet, normal sort of existence, filled with movies, friends, and trips to Big Sur, San Francisco, and Yosemite. The safety of our marriage, the closeness of good friends, and the intellectual latitude provided by graduate school were very powerful in providing a reasonably quiet and harbored world.

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  pale and dark rose leaves, March violets, peach blossom, saffron, melissa, and eyebright, and indeed by immersing myself in the better world of this little book, whole passages of which I still know by heart, said Austerlitz, I regained my lost sense of myself and my memory, gradually mastering the crippling physical weakness which had overcome me after my visit to the veterinary museum, so that I could soon walk on Marie’s arm down the long corridors of the Salpétriere, through the diffuse, dusty gray light which pervades everything in that institution. After I had been discharged from the fortress-like hospital, which covers a site of thirty hectares and, with its four thousand patients, represents at any given time almost the entire range of disorders from which humanity can suffer, so Austerlitz continued, we resumed our walks in the city. Among the images I have retained in my memory from these excursions is one of a little girl with a rebellious mop of hair and green eyes the color of iced water who stumbled over the hem of her raincoat, which was much too long for her, as she was playing with her skipping rope in one of the lime-white squares in the Luxembourg Gardens and grazed her right knee, a scene regarded by Marie as a déja vu because, she said, over twenty years ago just the same accident had happened to her at exactly the same place, an incident which at the time seemed to her shameful and aroused in her the first premonitions of death. Not long afterwards, one Saturday afternoon when a cold mist hung low in the air, we wandered through the half-deserted area between the tracks of the gare d’Austerlitz and the quai d’Austerlitz on the left bank of the Seine, slowly finding our way among abandoned dockyards, boarded-up warehouses, goods depots, customs halls, and a few garages and car repair shops. In one of the empty spaces not far from the station itself, the Bastiani Traveling Circus had erected its small tent, much mended and wreathed in strings of orange electric lights. By tacit agreement, we entered just as the performance was coming to a close. A few dozen women and children were seated on low stools round the ring—not that it was really a ring, said Austerlitz, rather it was a vague sort of rondelle on which a few shovelfuls of sawdust had been thrown, so hemmed in by the front row of spectators that even a pony could hardly have trotted round it in a circle. We were just in time for the last number, featuring a conjuror in a dark blue cloak who produced from his top hat a bantam cockerel with wonderfully colored plumage, not much bigger than a magpie or a raven. This brightly hued bird, obviously completely tame, went over a kind of miniature show-jumping course consisting of all manner of little steps, ladders, and other obstacles which he had to negotiate, gave the right answer to sums such as two times three or four minus one by clattering his beak when the conjurer showed him cards with the figures written on them, at a whispered command lay down

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  Consciousness left him. CHAPTER 8: The Combat Between the Professor and the Poet, THE MASTER AND MARGARITA CHAPTER 8 The Combat Between the Professor and the Poet At the same time that consciousness left Styopa in Yalta, that is, around half past eleven in the morning, it returned to Ivan Nikolaevich Homeless, who woke up after a long and deep sleep. He spent some time pondering how it was that he had wound up in an unfamiliar room with white walls, with an astonishing night table made of some light metal, and with white blinds behind which one could sense the sun. Ivan shook his head, ascertained that it did not ache, and remembered that he was in a clinic. This thought drew after it the remembrance of Berlioz’s death, but today it did not provoke a strong shock in Ivan. Having had a good sleep, Ivan Nikolaevich became calmer and began to think more clearly. After lying motionless for some time in a most clean, soft and comfortable spring bed, Ivan noticed a bell button beside him. From a habit of touching things needlessly, Ivan pressed it. He expected the pressing of the button to be followed by some ringing or appearance, but something entirely different happened. A frosted glass cylinder with the word ‘Drink’ on it lit up at the foot of Ivan’s bed. After pausing for a while, the cylinder began to rotate until the word ‘Nurse’ popped out. It goes without saying that the clever cylinder amazed Ivan. The word ‘Nurse’ was replaced by the words ‘Call the Doctor’. ‘Hm . . .’ said Ivan, not knowing how to proceed further with this cylinder. But here he happened to be lucky. Ivan pressed the button a second time at the word ‘Attendant’. The cylinder rang quietly in response, stopped, the light went out, and a plump, sympathetic woman in a clean white coat came into the room and said to Ivan: ‘Good morning!’ Ivan did not reply, considering such a greeting inappropriate under the circumstances. Indeed, they lock up a healthy man in a clinic, and pretend that that is how it ought to be! The woman meanwhile, without losing her good-natured expression, brought the blinds up with one push of a button, and sun flooded the room through a light and wide-meshed grille which reached right to the floor. Beyond the grille a balcony came into view, beyond that the bank of a meandering river, and on its other bank a cheerful pine wood. ‘Time for our bath,’ the woman invited, and under her hands the inner wall parted, revealing behind it a bathroom and splendidly equipped toilet.

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  of the bird making her long journey home alone, wondering how she had managed to reach her destination over the steep terrain, circumventing numerous obstacles, and that question, said Austerlitz, a question which still exercises my mind today when I see a pigeon in flight, is one that, against all reason, seems to me connected with the way Gerald finally lost his life-——I believe, Austerlitz went on after some considerable time, it was on the second or third parents’ visiting day that Gerald, proud of his privileged relationship with me, introduced me to his mother, Adela. She can hardly have been thirty at the time, and she was very glad that after his initial difficulties her young son had found a protector in me. Gerald had already told me about his father, Aldous, shot down over the Ardennes in the last winter of the war, and I had also heard how his mother was now living with only an old uncle and an even older great-uncle in a country house just outside the small seaside town of Barmouth. Gerald claimed that its position was the finest anywhere along the entire Welsh coast. Once Adela had discovered from Gerald that I had no parents or any family at all, I was invited to their house repeatedly, indeed constantly, even when I was doing my national service and when I was up at Oxford, and I could wish now, said Austerlitz, to have vanished without trace in the peace that always reigned there. At the very beginning of the school holidays, when we traveled westward up the Dee valley in the little steam train from Wrexham, I would feel my heart begin to lift. Bend after bend, our train followed the winding of the river, the green meadows looked in through the open carriage window, and so did the houses, stony gray or whitewashed, the gleaming slate roofs, the silver shades of the willows, the darker alder woods, the sheep pastures climbing up beyond the trees, and higher still the mountains, sometimes tinged with blue, and the sky where the clouds, coming in from the sea, always drove eastwards. Scraps of steam vapor flew past outside; you could hear the engine whistling and feel the air cool on your forehead. Never have I traveled better, said Austerlitz, than on this journey of seventy miles at the most, which took us three and a half hours. When we stopped at Bala, the halfway station, of course I could not help thinking back to my time in the manse, visible up there on its hill, yet it always seemed to me inconceivable that I had really been among its unhappy inhabitants for almost the whole of my life. And every time I set eyes on Lake Bala, particularly when its surface was churned up by the wind in winter, I remembered the story Evan the cobbler had told me, about the two headstreams of Dwy Fawr and Dwy Fach which are said to flow right through the lake, far down in its dark depths, never mingling their waters with its own. The two rivers, according to Evan, said Austerlitz, were called after the only human beings not drowned but saved from the biblical deluge in the distant past. At the

• From The History of Christianity: From the Disciples to the Dawn of the Reformation (2012)

  210 Lecture 29: monastic Reform life was ordered to “the four last things”: death, judgment, heaven, or hell. o A freely chosen modicum of deprivation and discipline during mortal existence seemed a small price to pay when compared to the cost of eternal misery caused by luxury and vice and far better than passing through an afterlife “purgatory.” o A life dedicated to God in such an explicit fashion prepared the monk for the only thing that really mattered: participation in eternal life in heaven. There was, for the medieval mind, nothing irrational in choosing sacrifice in this life in order to gain everlasting bliss in God’s presence. • Less explicit but no less real were the obvious material benefits that the monastic life made available, even to members of the nobility. o The cloister offered safety, security, and an orderly way of life rather than the chaos and struggle of secular existence. Diet in the monastery was better and more consistent, sleep more regular, days more meaningful, and therefore, health much improved. For women in nunneries, lack of sexual activity meant that the terrors of childbirth, infant mortality, and rapid aging were avoided. o For women and men alike, life within the cloister gave access to beauty through architecture, music, and the liturgy; the chance to practice the crafts of calligraphy and bookmaking, weaving, pottery, and gardening; the possibility of a genuine education; and the chance to hold positions of authority. • Precisely because of its great popularity during these centuries, the institution of monasticism also required constant reform. o Greater numbers in communities inevitably meant that some members were more dedicated to the implicit benefits of the life than to the explicit ideals. For some monks in every age, a comfortable pallet for sleep and meals on a regular basis trump any religious motivation.

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  pale and dark rose leaves, March violets, peach blossom, saffron, melissa, and eyebright, and indeed by immersing myself in the better world of this little book, whole passages of which I still know by heart, said Austerlitz, I regained my lost sense of myself and my memory, gradually mastering the crippling physical weakness which had overcome me after my visit to the veterinary museum, so that I could soon walk on Marie’s arm down the long corridors of the Salpétriere, through the diffuse, dusty gray light which pervades everything in that institution. After I had been discharged from the fortress-like hospital, which covers a site of thirty hectares and, with its four thousand patients, represents at any given time almost the entire range of disorders from which humanity can suffer, so Austerlitz continued, we resumed our walks in the city. Among the images I have retained in my memory from these excursions is one of a little girl with a rebellious mop of hair and green eyes the color of iced water who stumbled over the hem of her raincoat, which was much too long for her, as she was playing with her skipping rope in one of the lime-white squares in the Luxembourg Gardens and grazed her right knee, a scene regarded by Marie as a déja vu because, she said, over twenty years ago just the same accident had happened to her at exactly the same place, an incident which at the time seemed to her shameful and aroused in her the first premonitions of death. Not long afterwards, one Saturday afternoon when a cold mist hung low in the air, we wandered through the half-deserted area between the tracks of the gare d’Austerlitz and the quai d’Austerlitz on the left bank of the Seine, slowly finding our way among abandoned dockyards, boarded-up warehouses, goods depots, customs halls, and a few garages and car repair shops. In one of the empty spaces not far from the station itself, the Bastiani Traveling Circus had erected its small tent, much mended and wreathed in strings of orange electric lights. By tacit agreement, we entered just as the performance was coming to a close. A few dozen women and children were seated on low stools round the ring—not that it was really a ring, said Austerlitz, rather it was a vague sort of rondelle on which a few shovelfuls of sawdust had been thrown, so hemmed in by the front row of spectators that even a pony could hardly have trotted round it in a circle. We were just in time for the last number, featuring a conjuror in a dark blue cloak who produced from his top hat a bantam cockerel with wonderfully colored plumage, not much bigger than a magpie or a raven. This brightly hued bird, obviously completely tame, went over a kind of miniature show-jumping course consisting of all manner of little steps, ladders, and other obstacles which he had to negotiate, gave the right answer to sums such as two times three or four minus one by clattering his beak when the conjurer showed him cards with the figures written on them, at a whispered command lay down

• From From the Streets to the Sheets: Noire's Urban Erotic Quickies (2007)

  Rasheeda stumbled into her bathroom, laughing as she went to wash her face. The fitted sheet had been pulled off the bed and her pillows, linen, and comforter were on the floor. I didn’t have the energy to make the bed, so I got on the floor and pulled the sheet over me. Rasheeda came out of the bathroom and straddled my body. She palmed my forehead with one hand and forced me to look up at her. “Wanna taste your dick, Daddy?” she asked me enticingly. My response was a long, sloppy kiss. Rasheeda got under the sheet behind me and hugged me around the waist. I pushed back closer to her and closed my eyes, cummed dry and ready to go to sleep. “Euftis?” “Yea.” “What took you so long getting over here tonight?” I thought about Kianna, the Gilbert Avenue ho, and grinned. Rasheeda just didn’t know. When it came to getting a nut off, my big Monster wasn’t just grimy. He was grimier. THUG LOVIN’ Andrea Blackstone “Damn, Daddy. How much longer I gotta suck this dick? How about some pussy now?My knees getting tired.” I snickered out loud. Some whore done been in my boss’s office for the last thirty minutes, sucking that fool off like a Hoover vacuum cleaner. I’d started hearing those steady slurping sounds when I went to knock on his door to ask him a quick question, and after I found out that Mr. Nasty was getting his “head delivered on heels,” I decided to press my ear to the door and listen to the action. I almost laughed as he started going off on her. “Your knees tired? Standing at five foot two you should stay on your knees! If I want to be hassled over pussy I’ll call that bitch I just divorced! What kind of whore are you anyway? Who in the hell did Butch send over here? If you want that quick money I better keep feeling all tongue and no teeth. Now keep this shit rock-hard like your life depends on it! I likes my head and today I wants my head! It’s been a stressful morning. Suck up! I don’t want no used-up, loose pussy on my dick neither. I want what I want, so stop the bullshit and get down to business like you know the rules! I don’t have all damned day!” “Don’t play so mean, Daddy. I don’t mind staying on my knees. I was just asking, that’s all,” the woman said. “I’m not paying you a hundred and fifty dollars for conversation, I’m paying you to suck! Don’t stop until you suck this dick bone-dry at least twice. I paid for multiple pops, so don’t act like you forgot! Just do what you said you do, or you and Butch will both be owing me some cake. Don’t let this corner office and suit and tie fool your ass. I’m still that brotha from the hood!”

• From An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness (1995)

  Graduate school was not only relative freedom for me from my illness, but it was also freedom from the highly structured existence of undergraduate studies. […] I was married, too, by this point, to a French artist who not only was a talented painter but an exceedingly kind and gentle person. […] I was, at the time, painfully intense, rail thin, and, when not moribund, filled to the brim with a desire for an exciting life, a high-voltage academic career, and a pack of children. Photographs from that time show a tall, extraordinarily handsome, dark-haired, gentle, and brown-eyed man […] accompanied by a wildly variable woman in her midtwenties: in one picture laughing, in a floppy hat, with long hair flying; in another pensive, brooding. My hair, like my moods, went up and down […] The moods, the hair, the clothes all changed from week to week, month to month. My husband, on the other hand, was steady, and in most ways we ended up complementing one another’s temperaments. Within months of our meeting we were living together in a small apartment near the ocean. It was a quiet, normal sort of existence, filled with movies, friends, and trips to Big Sur, San Francisco, and Yosemite.

• From An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness (1995)

  So work went well and relatively smoothly. Much of my time was spent working on a textbook that I was coauthoring about manic-depressive illness, delighted with how much easier it was to read, analyze, and retain the medical literature, which, until only recently, had been a terrible struggle to comprehend. I found writing my sections of the textbook a satisfying mix of science, clinical medicine, and personal experience. I was concerned that these experiences might unduly influence—by content or emphasis—portions of what I wrote, but my coauthor was fully aware of my illness, and many other clinicians and scientists also reviewed what we wrote. Often, though, I found myself drawing upon certain aspects of what I had been through in order to emphasize a particular point of phenomenology or clinical practice. Many of the chapters I wrote—those about suicide, medication compliance, childhood and adolescence, psychotherapy, clinical description, creativity, personality and interpersonal behavior, thought disorder, perception, and cognition—were influenced by my strong belief that these were areas that had been relatively overlooked in the field. Others—such as epidemiology, alcohol and drug abuse, and assessment of manic and depressive states—were more straightforwardly a review of the existing psychiatric literature. For the clinical description chapter—the basic characterization of hypomanic and manic states, depressive and mixed states, as well as the cyclothymic features underlying these clinical conditions—I relied not only upon the work of classic clinicians such as Professor Emil Kraepelin, and the many clinical researchers who had conducted extensive data-based studies, but upon the writings of manic-depressive patients themselves. Many of the descriptions were from writers and artists who had given highly articulate and vivid descriptions of their manias, depressions, and mixed states. Most of the rest of the accounts were from my patients or passages taken from the psychiatric literature. In a few instances, however, I used my own descriptions of my experiences that I had written for teaching purposes over the years. So interspersed throughout clinical studies, symptom frequencies, and classic clinical descriptions from the European and British medical literature were excerpts from poems, novels, and autobiographical accounts written by individuals who had suffered from manic-depressive illness.

• From The History of Christianity: From the Disciples to the Dawn of the Reformation (2012)

  252 Lecture 35: Corruption and the Beginnings of Reform • Emerging first from a struggle simply to survive, Christianity grew to shape significant cultural accomplishments. o The way of life in monasteries and cathedral chapters represented an ideal of human existence ordered to the worship of God, in which “the love of learning and the desire for God” were intricately connected. o Cathedrals and the arts employed within them provided a focus for a religious form of art that has had enduring value. o The development of universities, with their study of law and theology, united the life of faith and the use of reason in a critical synthesis. • There is, finally, no question that Christianity during this period provided the setting and stimulus for men and women of great sanctity. The religious fervor involved in the Crusades, pilgrimages, monastic vows, mendicant wanderings, mystical prayer, and so on may not always have been pure but was nevertheless largely genuine and astonishingly widespread. Structural Issues in Christianity • Still, by the 14 th century, it was becoming clear that the medieval synthesis was badly in need of correction, not because of minor faults or problems but because of major and structural issues. • The Scholastic theology that developed in the cathedral and monastic schools and in the universities quickly became “scholastic” in the negative sense; it was more philosophical and academic—removed from the life of faith. o Theology used Scripture as a repository of proof texts more than as a set of compositions that could challenge or energize thinking. o Doctrinal attention, in turn, both reflected and affected shifts in piety. For some, the divinity of Christ was so greatly

• From The Girls (2016)

  “She went all the way to the flea market in Half Moon Bay to get this bar cart.” There was a brief moment I wanted to reach for him across the seat, to draw a line from myself to the man who was my father, but the moment passed. “You can pick the station,” he offered, seeming as shy to me as a boy at a dance. —The first few days, all three of us had been nervous. I got up early to make the bed in the guest room, trying to heft the decorative pillows back into completion. My life was limited to my drawstring purse and my duffel of clothes, an existence I tried to keep as neat and invisible as possible. Like camping, I thought, like a little adventure in self-reliance. The first night, my father brought home a cardboard tub of ice cream, striated with chocolate, and scooped free heroic amounts. Tamar and I just picked at ours, but my father made a point of eating another bowl. He kept glancing up, as if we could confirm his own pleasure. His women and his ice cream. Tamar was the surprise. Tamar in her terry shorts and shirt from a college I had never heard of. Who waxed her legs in the bathroom with a complicated device that filled the apartment with the humidity of camphor. Her attendant unguents and hair oils, the fingernails whose lunar surfaces she studied for signs of nutritional deficiencies. At first, she seemed unhappy with my presence. The awkward hug she offered, like she was grimly accepting the task of being my new mother. And I was disappointed, too. She was just a girl, not the exotic woman I’d once imagined—everything I’d thought was special about her was actually just proof of what Russell would call a straight world trip. Tamar did what she was supposed to. Worked for my father, wore her little suit. Aching to be someone’s wife. But then her formality quickly melted away, the veil of adulthood she wore as temporarily as a costume. She let me rummage through the quilted pouch that held her makeup, her blowsy perfume bottles, watching with the pride of a true collector. She pushed a blouse of hers, with bell sleeves and pearl buttons, onto me. “It’s just not my style anymore.” She shrugged, picking at a loose thread. “But it’ll look good on you, I know. Elizabethan.” And it did look good. Tamar knew those things. She knew the calorie count of most foods, which she recited in sarcastic tones, like she was making fun of her own knowledge. She cooked vegetable vindaloo. Pots of lentils coated with a yellow sauce that gave off an unfamiliar brightness. The roll of powdery antacids my father swallowed like candy. Tamar held out her cheek for my father to kiss but swatted him away when he tried to hold her hand. “You’re all sweaty,” she said.

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  told me had died long ago, frequently used to be seen in his time, swinging his heavy iron filled with red-hot coals through the air, these and other images, said Austerlitz, ranged themselves side by side, so that deeply buried and locked away within me as they had been, they now came luminously back to my mind as I looked out of the window. It was the same when Vera, without a word, opened the door to the room where the little couch on which I always slept when my parents were away still stood in its place, at the foot of the four-poster bed with its barley-sugar uprights and pillows piled high which, together with the rest of the furniture, she had inherited from her great-aunt. The crescent moon shone into the dark room, and there was a white blouse hanging from the catch of the half-open window just as it had always hung there in the past, I now remembered, said Austerlitz. I saw Vera as she had been then, sitting beside me on the divan telling me stories from the Riesengebirge and the Bohemian Forest, I saw her uncommonly beautiful eyes misting over in the twilight, so to speak, when after reaching the end of the story she took off her glasses and bent down to me. Later, I now remembered, while she sat in the next room over her books I liked to lie awake for a while, safe as I knew myself to be in the care of my solicitous guardian and the pale glow of the circle of light where she sat reading. With only the slightest effort of will I could conjure it all up; the hunchbacked tailor, who would now be in his own bedchamber, the moon traveling round the building, the patterns of the carpet and wallpaper, even the course traced by the hairline cracks in the tiles of the tall stove. But when I got tired of this game and wanted to go to sleep I had only to wait to hear Vera lift the next leaf of her book in the other room, and I can still feel, said Austerlitz, or perhaps it is only now that I feel again, the sense of my consciousness dissolving among the poppies and leafy tendrils etched into the opaque glass of the door before I caught the slight rustle of the page turning. On our walks, Vera continued when we were sitting in the living room again and she had given me a cup of peppermint tea with her two now unsteady hands, on our walks we hardly ever went further than the Seminar Garden, the Khotek Gardens, and the other green spaces in the Lesser Quarter. Only occasionally, in summer, did we make rather longer expeditions with my little pushchair, which as I might perhaps remember had a small colored whirligig fastened to it, going as far as Sofia Island, the swimming school on the banks of the Vlitava, or the observation platform on Petrin Hill, from which we may have spent an hour or more looking at the city spread out below us with its many towers, all of which I had known by heart, as well as the names of the seven bridges spanning the glittering river. Since I have been unable to go out of doors, so that I now see almost nothing new, said Vera, the pictures we enjoyed so much at the time come back to me with increasing

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  He clutched his head and ran back to the group of waiting companions. ‘Well, then,’ Woland addressed him from the height of his steed, ‘is your farewell completed?’ ‘Yes, it’s completed,’ the master replied and, having calmed down, looked directly and boldly into Woland’s face. And then over the hills like a trumpet blast rolled Woland’s terrible voice: ‘It’s time!!’—and with it the sharp whistle and guffaw of Behemoth. The steeds tore off, and the riders rose into the air and galloped. Margarita felt her furious steed champing and straining at the bit. Woland’s cloak billowed over the heads of the cavalcade; the cloak began to cover the evening sky. When the black shroud was momentarily blown aside, Margarita looked back as she rode and saw that there not only were no multicoloured towers behind them, but the city itself had long been gone. It was as if it had fallen through the earth—only mist and smoke were left . . . CHAPTER 32: Forgiveness and Eternal Refuge, THE MASTER AND MARGARITA CHAPTER 32 Forgiveness and Eternal Refuge Gods, my gods! How sad the evening earth! How mysterious the mists over the swamps! He who has wandered in these mists, he who has suffered much before death, he who has flown over this earth bearing on himself too heavy a burden, knows it. The weary man knows it. And without regret he leaves the mists of the earth, its swamps and rivers, with a light heart he gives himself into the hands of death, knowing that she alone can bring him peace. The magical black steeds also became tired and carried their riders slowly, and ineluctable night began to overtake them. Sensing it at his back, even the irrepressible Behemoth quieted down and, his claws sunk into the saddle, flew silent and serious, puffing up his tail. Night began to cover forests and fields with its black shawl, night lit melancholy little lights somewhere far below—now no longer interesting and necessary either for Margarita or for the master—alien lights. Night was outdistancing the cavalcade, it sowed itself over them from above, casting white specks of stars here and there in the saddened sky. Night thickened, flew alongside, caught at the riders’ cloaks and, tearing them from their shoulders, exposed the deceptions. And when Margarita, blown upon by the cool wind, opened her eyes, she saw how the appearance of them all was changing as they flew to their goal. And when, from beyond the edge of the forest, the crimson and full moon began rising to meet them, all deceptions vanished, the unstable magic garments fell into the swamp, drowned in the mists.

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  curiously remote state of mind induced by the drugs I was being given; both desolate and weirdly contented I wandered, all through that winter, up and down the long corridors, staring out for hours through one of the dirty windows at the cemetery below, where we are standing now, feeling nothing inside my head but the four burnt-out walls of my brain. Later, when there had been some improvement in my condition, I looked through a telescope given to me by one of the nurses and watched the foxes running wild in the cemetery in the gray dawn. I would see squirrels dodging back and forth, or sitting quite still, arrested, as it were, in mid-motion. I studied the faces of those solitary people who visited the graveyard now and then, or I observed the slow wingbeats of an owl in its curving flight over the tombstones at nightfall. Occasionally I talked to one of the other hospital patients, a roofer, for instance, who said he could recollect with perfect clarity the moment when, just as he was about to fix a slate in place, something that had been stretched too taut inside him snapped at a particular spot behind his forehead, and for the first time he heard, coming over the crackling transistor wedged into the batten in front of him, the voices of those bearers of bad tidings which had haunted him ever since. While I was there I also thought quite often of Elias the minister lapsing into madness, and of the stone-built asylum in Denbigh where he died. But I found it impossible to think of myself, my own history, or my present state of mind. I was not discharged until the beginning of April, a year after returning from Prague. The last doctor whom I saw at the hospital advised me to look for some kind of light physical occupation, perhaps in horticulture, she suggested, and so for the next two years, at the time of day when office staff are pouring into the City, I went out the other way to Romford and my new place of work, a council- run nursery garden on the outskirts of a large park which employed, as well as