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 Austerlitz (2001)

  him under the chin, they never touched the ground again. As night fell they would rise two or three miles in the air and glide there, banking now to one side, now to the other, and moving their outspread wings only occasionally, until they came back down to us at break of day.—Austerlitz had been so deeply immersed in his Welsh tale, and I in listening to him, that we did not notice how late it had grown. The last rounds had long since been poured, the last guests were gone except for the two of us. The barman had collected the glasses and ashtrays, wiped the tables with a cloth, and was now waiting to lock up after us with his hand on the light switch by the door. The way in which he wished us Good night, gentlemen, with his eyes clouded by weariness and his head tilted slightly to one side, struck me as an extraordinary mark of distinction, almost like an absolution or a blessing. And Pereira, the business manager of the Great Eastern, was equally civil and courteous when we entered the hotel foyer directly afterwards. He seemed positively expectant as he stood behind the reception desk in his starched white shirt and gray cloth waistcoat, with his hair immaculately parted, one of those rare and often rather mysterious people, as I thought on seeing him, who are infallibly to be found at their posts, and whom one cannot imagine ever feeling any need to go to bed. After I had made an appointment to meet Austerlitz the next day Pereira, having inquired after my wishes, led me upstairs to the first floor and showed me into a room containing a great deal of wine-red velvet, brocade, and dark mahogany furniture, where I sat until almost three in the morning at a secretaire faintly illuminated by the street lighting—the cast-iron radiator clicked quietly, and only occasionally did a black cab drive past outside in Liverpool Street—writing down, in the form of notes and disconnected sentences, as much as possible of what Austerlitz had told me that evening. Next morning I woke late, and after breakfast I sat for some time reading the newspapers, where I found not only the usual home and international news, but also the story of an ordinary man who was overcome by such deep grief after the death of his wife, for whom he had cared devotedly during her long and severe illness, that he decided to end his own life by means of a guillotine which he had built himself in the square concrete area containing the basement steps at the back of his house in Halifax. As a craftsman, and having taken careful stock of other possible methods, he thought the guillotine the most reliable way of carrying out his plan, and sure enough, as the short report said, he had finally been found lying with his head cut off by such an instrument of decapitation. It was of uncommonly sturdy construction, with every tiny detail neatly finished, and a slanting blade which, as the reporter remarked, two strong men could scarcely have lifted. The pincers with which he had cut through the wire operating it were still in his rigid hand. Austerlitz had come to fetch me

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  I handled the gentle, slow-motion cantering of my kitchen floor well, I thought, for a landlubber, and when the time came, the steaks joined the potatoes in the reassuringly named Competence B-300 oven until medium rare. Soon, Nancy and I, in fluffy white ResidenSea bathrobes, were sitting at our dining room table, a towering floral arrangement dead-center, eating perfectly respectable Black Angus steaks and crispy-skinned potatoes, accompanied by an astonishingly affordable bottle of Brouilly. Emboldened by this early success, I rose early the next morning and confidently made omelettes aux fines herbes, chopping the fresh herb and parsley with the delightfully sharp knives provided. I'd seen a pretty impressive selection of stinky French cheeses at Fredy's and had over-optimistically ordered an Epoisse and an Alsatian Muenster. But when I went to fold a slice of the Muenster into my omelette, it became clear that this particular cheese had seen better days. My omelette tasted like a dead man's feet, with a dreadful ammonia aftertaste, and ended up in the food disposal (which worked like a charm). Nancy, however, was very pleased with her cheese-free omelette, happily poring over the day's Times. Later, in that happy, hazy, lazy, semisunstroked state that comes with too much time spent drinking banana daiquiris (made with real bananas) poolside, I was in no shape to cook much for lunch. I padded down to Fredy's for a fresh baguette and some cold cuts. Though dress during the day was casual (there is a dress code after six), passing a few silver-haired gentlemen in crisp khakis, handmade bespoke linen shirts, and thin timepieces, I felt like Gilligan, crashing a party for the Howells. Back in my apartment, I made sandwiches, soppressata and jambon blanc for me and sliced steak (leftover from the previous night) for Nancy. Suffering from an inferiority complex while shopping in my jeans and T- shirt, I'd overcompensated by buying a bottle of Roederer Cristal to wash the sandwiches down. I may not have been rich, but I was, after all, living as if I were—if only for a few days. Feeling on top of the world as only the drunk can feel, a here-today-gone-tomorrow-what-the-hell kinda rich, I finished my sandwich and the champagne and staggered through my living area, past the couches and armchairs and cocktail table, out onto my veranda and flopped into my Jacuzzi. The perfect end, I thought, to a perfect meal. Before dinner, Nancy and I watched a video from the ship's extensive library on our big-screen TV, the wretched, incomprehensibly awful Arabesque—the only positive effect of the film being that after eighty minutes with Sophia Loren, I was in the mood for Italian.

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  I hope I'm not that. I'd rather write "habitual masturba-tor" on my visa applications than admit to that. Whatever it is I do these days, whatever you might want to call it, I do get to travel all over the world, going anywhere I want, eating what I want, meeting admired chefs who only a few years ago would have thrown me out the door had I wandered into their kitchens looking for a prep job. I get to do a lot of cool stuff that not so very long ago I never dreamed I'd live to experience. I've made friends all over the world. And I get paid for it. All I have to do is make television, maybe write about it all once in a while. Compared to cleaning spinach and draining the grease trap, it's a pretty good gig. But you don't want to hear me gloating about nibbling Iberico ham with Ferran Adria at a table in the back of a little Spanish ham shop, or describing the feel of tiny Asian feet working my back muscles in some faraway hotel, or weighing the comparative merits of Moroccan kif versus Jamaican bud. You don't really want to hear me moaning about the cheese course at Le Manoir aux Quat'Saisons, or how Dale de Groff really does make the best goddamn martini on the planet. You want to picture me crawling across a cold tile floor, coughing stomach lining into something that only the hotel manager could refer to as a toilet, begging for mercy as my brutal overlords arm-twist me into choking down yet another mouthful of "pork ring" before submitting me to some new video- friendly humiliation, right? Who wants to read about some undeserving mutt having a good time for free when you actually have to work for a living? I wouldn't, believe me. The show is produced, shot, "written" on a sort of fly-by-night basis by me, Lydia Tenaglia, and Chris Collins working for a production outfit called New York Times Television (they also produced and shot the Ruth Reichl shows). Working from a wish list (mine), we storyboard a kind of comic strip, blocking out the scenes in such a way as to incorporate the various destinations, dishes, restaurants, chefs, and cooks we seek to shoot. Assistant producers back in New York, researchers, and an on-site translator/fixer "enable" whatever unwise plan we make (often while intoxicated). Two shooters, usually Chris and Lydia, an assistant producer, and I set off to the destination, meet up with our translator, and try, as best as possible, to shoot what we need for a show. My impromptu ravings are recorded on camera, whether used in final cut or not, and a post- shoot interview serves as a basis for a later voice-over. We usually shoot about two meals a day. Each show takes about a week to shoot, anywhere from six to fourteen hours a day.

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  It was okay now, thought Michelle, knowing that Paul was thinking the same thing. All would be okay if they closed the doors to Saint Germain forever after this evening. They had seen Rob Holland at his very best. They could always tell this story and it would all be true. That they were there the night Rob Holland kicked ass like no one else they'd ever seen; that he'd shown them what a cook could be. As it turned out, they needn't have worried. Roland Schutz liked to own the things he admired. Even more, he liked to own the things other people admired. And when, after the four rounds of Louis Treize and a chocolate souffle dusted with a few grains of sea salt and the petit-fours and a single spoonful of Meyer lemon sorbet, Rob emerged from the kitchen to dazzle the girls (who were now so drunk as to be nearly unable to speak) and receive sincere thanks from Cleveland, Roland Schutz sat Rob Holland down and did what he did so well. He made a multiunit, multiyear, multimillion-dollar deal, acquiring (after the lawyers and accountants had looked things over and cleared the way of any obstacles) a 65-percent share in the soon-to-be-formed Rob Holland Group International. The Boston and Philly partners would be bought out and the restaurants closed. The airport operations would be sold (at a tidy profit) to Wolfgang Puck, who needed more locations to sell pizzas. New Rob Holland restaurants would open in Schutz-owned casinos in Las Vegas and Atlantic City, and in hotels in Miami, London, and Dubai. Trusted Holland associates Paul, Kevin, and Michelle would each head up a unit. Other loyalists would be similarly rewarded with positions suiting their skills. Even Thierry scored a position as chief of operations at the retail baking and pastry wing in the soon-to-be-erected Schutz Plaza in midtown Manhattan. Marvin accepted a very generous offer of two million five for his stake in Saint Germain, which would allow him to return to the more secure prospects of the auto body business. (Which, he had to admit these days, he'd always loved and never should have left. He'd be able to quickly open up five new stores across Long Island and become wealthier than his wildest dreams—a rare survivor of the New York restaurant industry. There was the added perk that Marvin would still be able to eat and entertain for free at Saint Germain whenever he wished.) Saint Germain, as the flagship of the new Schutz-Holland Axis, was allowed to retain its 60-percent food cost and to run even higher labor percentages as it was the showcase (and loss leader) for the whole empire.

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

  At Salisbury, what that meant was that the actual marriage took place in the new Cathedral’s extremely large north porch. Only after the couple had taken their vows, exchanged rings and been blessed by the priest, did they get the chance to process into the church itself for a nuptial Mass. On the one hand, the Church wanted to take charge of the event, which after all had been declared to be one of the seven sacraments, but, on the other, it could not bring itself to do so inside the church building. Architecturally one can see a response to Sarum in a distinctive thirteenth- and fourteenth-century development of church porches, right across England. Significantly, many of the earliest surviving porches contrast in architectural style with the main body of the building, for instance being built of wood rather than stone: that was a statement that they were part of a church, but also not part of a church. Yet the elaboration of Sarum or other cathedral Uses could only be a guide to what was possible in less well-resourced church buildings. It is noticeable that the architectural distinctiveness of church porches gradually faded, probably reflecting a changing reality in practice and their lessening role in weddings. Very few porches were as capacious as Salisbury’s; northern European weather would not be kind to the overflow of guests, and a sensible parish priest who loved his people would have seen the point that it was no way to welcome a couple on what should be the happiest day of their lives. Accordingly, during the three centuries preceding the Reformation the performance of weddings increasingly moved into the church building itself, without troubling to inform the liturgists. [58] 18. The earliest English church porches, provided to shelter weddings using the Sarum Rite, look architecturally distinct from their church building: often they were constructed of timber, not stone like the church itself, as at Offton (Suffolk), c .1300.

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

  [86] Equally interesting is Anne’s characteristic iconography, for she is generally shown as teaching her daughter to read, or at least as armed with a book, a motif unknown to the apocryphal Gospels and apparently first attested in the ninth century in a Byzantine source unlikely to have been on the radar of English theologians or artists (see Plate 22). Evidently the pious fifteenth-century Western public regarded it as perfectly natural for a girl to be instructed in basic literacy, enough at least for her to be able to say her prayers. [87] Problem aunts are also a feature of family cliché, and that role was filled for Mary and the Holy Family by a reconstructed Mary Magdalen. The reconstruction had begun quite early for the Latin West by Pope Gregory I, who, in 591, preached an unusually influential sermon that audaciously gathered into a single person three of the spare Marys in the New Testament, all as Mary Magdalen. As a result, she became a sinner from whom seven devils had been cast out, but also penitential in washing Jesus’s feet with her tears and listening to him rapt in her home in Bethany while her sister Martha bustled around with practical tasks, plus in the end becoming ‘Apostle to the Apostles’ as the first witness to the Resurrection. It was a rich mixture that in the next few centuries also annexed to itself the story of that hugely popular Eastern ex-prostitute Mary of Egypt. It also produced two successive and never wholly reconciled sets of relics of Mary Magdalen in eastern France, first at Vézelay, where they became a major prop of the Cluniac pilgrimage industry, and later at Saint-Maximin near Aix-en-Provence, watched over by the Dominicans. [88] The Magdalen was thus readily available to take her place in the construction of the Holy Family, aided by the fascinated speculations of celibate authors who added to her backstory. Jacobus de Voragine’s Golden Legend dismissed the idea that she had embraced her life of excess after being left abandoned on her wedding day, but evidently some readers felt that he was being a spoilsport. England’s early printer William Caxton expanded the story without qualification in his English translation of Voragine’s work, adding for good measure that some laid the finger of blame on no less a figure than John the Evangelist, who had jilted her to go off and become Jesus’s Beloved Disciple. At least she had been a well-born demi-mondaine , and thus a worthy patron of all those Magdalen homes for the prostitutes of Europe’s cities. In any case, it was comforting to know that within Jesus’s inner circle there was a spectacular but beloved sinner who had suitably repented, a model for all those feeling wretched about their own sins and a little wary of Our Lady’s sinlessness. Accordingly, the Magdalen’s iconography varied between showing her in her alluring finery to extreme gaunt misery worthy of the desert years of Mary of Egypt (see Plates 13–15).

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

  In the very first year of his marriage, Luther wrote a letter to his old friend Georg ‘Spalatinus’ (Burkhardt), secretary to the Elector of Saxony, apologizing for not coming to his wedding to another Katharina, but assuring him that he and von Bora would have a private marital celebration: ‘On the night that I calculate you will receive this letter, I assure you that I’ll make love to my wife, in your honour, while you’re making love to yours – a joint effort!’ [16] In rather less toe-curling vein, in later years Luther’s former convent in Wittenberg blossomed into a large family home, six children in all, enjoying a stream of guests plus student lodgers taken in to balance the domestic budget. At dinner, the guests and lodgers eagerly absorbed and jotted down unbuttoned bons mots from the great man, trivial and profound alike, and within a few years of his death anthologies were being published as Luther’s ‘Table Talk’ ( Tischreden ). Historians have gratefully quarried that engaging heap of vivid details, though they have not always assessed them judiciously, taking too seriously the stereotyped misogyny of such laddish remarks as ‘Men have broad chests and narrow hips; hence they possess wisdom. Women have narrow chests and broad hips. A woman ought to look after the house: creation itself declares (with the broad bum and hips) they should sit still.’ Luther’s beloved Katie was presiding over the well-furnished table, and her responses to this admittedly annoying teasing have not been recorded. [17] Beyond this frivolity was Luther’s gradual recasting of Augustine of Hippo’s theology of sin, sex and marriage; the framework was still that of the fifth century, and his understanding of female biology was still unthinkingly that of Aristotle, but his own happy experience of the married state brought him a warmer picture of the family in Eden and through the Fall and expulsion from Paradise. Edenic marriage involved the conception of children in sexual pleasure that was chaste and without shame, just as was the hospitality of the Luther household. Child-rearing would then have been easy and joyful. Of course, none of this had time to happen in Eden, and the Fall had reduced it all to a shadow of its potential self, but there was no radical break in sexuality, or a hint that sex had taken on the Satanic character ascribed to it by Basil the Great. In the second generation of the Reformation, John Calvin is often seen as a more thoroughgoing Augustinian as well as a more joyless character than Luther, but he was more explicitly positive about sexual intercourse: it remained a gift of God despite the Fall, and husband and wife should enjoy it, observing of course due modesty and propriety. [18] Who were the women whom these clergy married in the course of their personal liberation? Hardly surprisingly, to begin with, the majority were the partners with whom they were already living, contemptuously termed ‘concubines’ by the old Church.

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  Flourishing in an Uncertain WorldThe poet John Keats coined the term ‘negative capability’ to refer to a willingness to accept and embrace ‘being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts. While some might hastily draw firm conclusions about the significance of an idea or event, Keats encouraged remaining in a state of openness, continuing to probe and reflect on a complex reality to gain a more comprehensive understanding of it. Keats grasped the importance of a respectful contemplative musing on an object – such as a Grecian urn – without feeling compelled to arrive at a definitive and conclusive interpretation of its meaning or prematurely shutting down the process of reflection. He was willing to inhabit a realm of uncertainties, mysteries and doubts, affirming and experiencing the complexity and depth of the world rather than trying to subjugate it with the precision of logical analysis.13 This book leaves readers in a similar position. My concern has been to describe the epistemic dilemma in which we find ourselves, and to caution against prematurely dismissing some of the most significant beliefs that have shaped human culture and civilization throughout history. We can prove shallow truths, but not the profound existential, moral and spiritual beliefs that bestow dignity and significance upon human life. Some individuals may find this profoundly uncomfortable and may wish to eliminate the category of belief, or convert their own beliefs into certainties. Yet for reasons that we have explored in this book, I do not consider this to be a defensible position. Recognising that we live in a world of uncertainties, mysteries and doubts may be unsettling; however, this is surely preferable to constructing a world of imagined self-evident truths in response to our aversion to uncertainty. Though we live in a world that is existentially ambivalent and morally uninformative, beliefs make this is a profoundly habitable place by allowing us to see it (and ourselves) in a new way. Beliefs involve us, giving us the capacity to discern or create human meaning, purpose and significance, and live this out in community with others. So why believe? Because we’re human. Because it’s normal. Because it’s realistic. Belief is as natural to human beings as it is necessary for their wellbeing. We have to deal with humanity as it is, as ‘moral believing animals’,14 shaped in ways we do not fully understand by our evolutionary past and cultural present, rather than as the universalised logical or rational calculating machines envisaged by the Age of Reason, which held what turned out to be a forlorn hope of clear and certain answers to our deepest questions.

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

  [9] As a result, a great change in attitudes appeared in 1930, when the Lambeth Conference acknowledged in cautious Anglican-speak that there would be occasions when ‘a clearly felt moral obligation to limit or avoid parenthood’, and ‘a morally sound reason for avoiding complete abstinence’ would justify contraception in the light of Christian principles. The decision to use contraceptives should thus be up to the consciences of individual couples. More importantly, a majority among the bishops no longer considered birth control sinful by its nature. Some even argued that there was no real moral difference between sexual abstinence and artificial contraception, since both set out deliberately to prevent conception. [10] All through this discussion, eugenics remained significant; it was the chosen emphasis of the Church’s self-appointed expert on birth control, Theodore Woods, the Bishop of Winchester, who noted the alarming decline in birth rate among the middle and upper classes and considered that the lesser orders needed encouraging to limit their families so that the British population would be rebalanced towards the leaders of society and Empire. That argument swayed many doubters, though other speakers did say more about individual morality, and also equity for women. [11] The Anglican Communion had by whatever route become the first major Church grouping in the world to accept contraception as legitimate. The triumph of contraception in Anglicanism was sealed at the Lambeth Conference of 1958, where over three hundred bishops from forty-six countries unanimously decided that family planning was a ‘right and important factor in Christian family life’ – and it seems that where Anglicans lead, the world follows: in 2012 the United Nations declared access to family planning a universal human right. [12] Opposition to this momentous step had been still loud in the Lambeth debates in 1930. Anglo-Catholics were split, the final direction of the Conference being set from among their ranks by the moral theologian and later Bishop of Oxford Kenneth Kirk, while others in opposition echoed nineteenth-century Roman Catholic moral theology, chief among them being the veteran Anglo-Catholic leader and monk, Bishop Charles Gore of Oxford. Gore was an exceptionally clear-sighted theologian, austerely ready to call a spade a spade. He was prepared to spell out the inescapable link between contraception and homosexual sex: ‘what we used to call unnatural vice…appears to be very prevalent now.’ He insisted in classic Alexandrian fashion that there must be a connection between sex and reproduction: to separate sexual pleasure from procreation ‘justifies the philosophy of homosexuality’. Gore was of course perfectly correct, and prophetic of later developments in liberal Protestantism, as we will see. [13]

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  ‘Belief’ is now seen as relevant for both secular and religious domains, encompassing a rich spectrum of possibilities. Religious belief may be distinct in certain ways, but all human beings are ‘believers’ in some sense of the term. Both atheists and religious people can have ‘crises of meaning’ in their lives.8 The study of the process of believing is of wide and general interest, especially in understanding human flourishing. So why do we believe? The anthropologist Agustín Fuentes suggests that it is a bit like asking why human beings have five fingers. We just do. It is the way we are. It is part of the human condition, and it needs to be affirmed and embraced. We believe because we are human. Just like our large and complex brains, our ability to walk on our hind legs, our nimble fingers and hands, and our ability to make tools, the capacity for belief is part of our distinctive evolutionary history. To be human is to be able to believe.9 While nobody is really sure, we can certainly explore how both the act of believing and specific beliefs help to shape and influence the distinctive ways in which individual human beings engage with each other and the wider world. Belief is an ability to make connections that are not directly given in our observations, which open up a grander vision of our world, or to learn to see through the eyes of others, and thus extend the range of possibilities at our disposal. It is important to make a distinction between believing and beliefs. Believing is a human mental process; beliefs are the outcome of this process, often developing and changing over time, through interaction with others and exploration of our surroundings. Although we can ‘articulate’ – to use Charles Taylor’s helpful term – the intellectual content of our beliefs, they are not restricted to the realm of human reason. Beliefs actively shape the way in which we see and experience the world, and the way in which we enact our lives.10 Once a belief is acquired, a process of reflection and adjustment sets in, as the believer explores how this belief shapes their lives, often in dialogue with others who already share this belief, and have acquired a settled understanding of its implications and consequences. Let’s begin to explore the difference that belief makes to our understanding of reality, our modes of experiencing reality, and our way of living. We start by considering an aspect of believing highlighted in Colin McGinn’s stimulating study of ‘mindsight’ – the ability of certain beliefs to refocus the ‘mind’s eye’, enabling us to see the world in a new way.11

• From The Girls (2016)

  Suzanne sat cross-legged in the dirt beside me, her fingers grazing mine. Our faces cupped and attentive as tulips. —It was one of those slurry days we offered up to the shared dream, a violence in our aversion to real life; though it was all about connecting, tuning in, we told ourselves. Mitch had dropped off some acid, sourced from a lab tech at Stanford. Donna mixed it with orange juice in paper cups and we drank it for breakfast, so the trees seemed to thrum with energy, the shadows purpling and wet. It was curious, later, to think of how easily I fell into things. If there were drugs around, I did them. You were in the moment—when everything back then happened. We could talk about the moment for hours. Turn it over in conversation: the way the light moved, why someone was silent, dismantling all the layers of what a look had really meant. It seemed like something important, our desire to describe the shape of each second as it passed, to bring out everything hidden and beat it to death. Suzanne and I were working on the childish bracelets the girls had been trading among ourselves, collecting them up our arms like middle-schoolers. Practicing the V stitch. The candy stripe. I was making one for Suzanne, fat and wide, a poppy-red chevron on a field of peach thread. I liked the calm collection of the knots, how the colors vibrated happily under my fingers. I got up once to get Suzanne a glass of water, and there was a domestic gentleness in that act. I wanted to meet a need, put water in her mouth. Suzanne smiled up at me as she drank, gulping so fast I could see her throat ripple. Helen’s cousin Caroline was hanging around that day. She seemed more knowing than I had ever been at eleven. Her bracelets shook with the kiss of cheap metal. Her terry-cloth shirt was the pale yellow of a lemon slushie and showed her small stomach, though her knees were scraped and ashy like a boy’s. “Far-out,” she said when Guy tipped a paper cup of juice to her lips, and like a windup toy, she kept repeating this phrase when the acid began to hit. I’d started to detect the first signs in myself, too, my mouth filling with saliva. I thought of the flooded creeks I’d seen in childhood, the death cold of the rainwater as it came swift over the rocks. I could hear Guy spinning nonsense on the porch. One of his meaningless stories, the drug making his bluster echo. His long hair pulled into a dark knot at the base of his skull. “This fella was banging on the door,” he was saying, “shouting that he’d come to take what was his, and I was like aw, hell, big fuckin’ deal,” he droned, “I’m Elvis Presley,” and Roos was nodding along.

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  Not a single pip had been hit, except for the one shot through by Azazello. ‘That can’t be,’ insisted the cat, holding the card up to the light of the candelabra. The merry supper went on. The candles guttered in the candelabra, the dry, fragrant warmth of the fireplace spread waves over the room. After eating, Margarita was enveloped in a feeling of bliss. She watched the blue-grey smoke-rings from Azazello’s cigar float into the fireplace, while the cat caught them on the tip of a sword. She did not want to go anywhere, though according to her reckoning it was already late. By all tokens, it was getting on towards six in the morning. Taking advantage of a pause, Margarita turned to Woland and said timidly: ‘I suppose it’s time for me . . . it’s late . . .’ ‘What’s your hurry?’ asked Woland, politely but a bit drily. The rest kept silent, pretending to be occupied with the smoke-rings. ‘Yes, it’s time,’ Margarita repeated, quite embarrassed by it, and looked around as if searching for some cape or cloak. She was suddenly embarrassed by her nakedness. She got up from the table. Woland silently took his worn-out and greasy dressing-gown from the bed, and Koroviev threw it over Margarita’s shoulders. ‘I thank you, Messire,’ Margarita said barely audibly, and looked questioningly at Woland. In reply, he smiled at her courteously and indifferently. Black anguish somehow surged up all at once in Margarita’s heart. She felt herself deceived. No rewards would be offered her for all her services at the ball, apparently, just as no one was detaining her. And yet it was perfectly clear to her that she had nowhere to go. The fleeting thought of having to return to her house provoked an inward burst of despair in her. Should she ask, as Azazello had temptingly advised in the Alexandrovsky Garden? ‘No, not for anything!’ she said to herself. ‘Goodbye, Messire,’ she said aloud, and thought, ‘I must just get out of here, and then I’ll go to the river and drown myself.’ ‘Sit down now,’ Woland suddenly said imperiously. Margarita changed countenance and sat down. ‘Perhaps you want to say something before you leave?’ ‘No, nothing, Messire,’ Margarita answered proudly, ‘except that if you still need me, I’m willing and ready to do anything you wish. I’m not tired in the least, and I had a very good time at the ball. So that if it were still going on, I would again offer my knee for thousands of gallowsbirds and murderers to kiss.’ Margarita looked at Woland as if through a veil, her eyes filling with tears. ‘True! You’re perfectly right!’ Woland cried resoundingly and terribly. ‘That’s the way!’ ‘That’s the way!’ Woland’s retinue repeated like an echo. ‘We’ve been testing you,’ said Woland. ‘Never ask for anything! Never for anything, and especially from those who are stronger than you. They’ll make the offer themselves, and give everything themselves.

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  Levi opened his mouth and stared at the procurator, who said quietly: ‘It is, of course, not much to have done, but all the same I did it.’ And he added: ‘Well, and now will you take something?’ Levi considered, relented, and finally said: ‘Have them give me a piece of clean parchment.’ An hour went by. Levi was not in the palace. Now the silence of the dawn was broken only by the quiet noise of the sentries’ footsteps in the garden. The moon was quickly losing its colour, one could see at the other edge of the sky the whitish dot of the morning star. The lamps had gone out long, long ago. The procurator lay on the couch. Putting his hand under his cheek, he slept and breathed soundlessly. Beside him slept Banga. Thus was the dawn of the fifteenth day of Nisan met by the fifth procurator of Judea, Pontius Pilate. CHAPTER 27: The End of Apartment No. 50, THE MASTER AND MARGARITA CHAPTER 27 The End of Apartment No. 50 When Margarita came to the last words of the chapter—‘. . . Thus was the dawn of the fifteenth day of Nisan met by the fifth procurator of Judea, Pontius Pilate’—it was morning. Sparrows could be heard in the branches of the willows and lindens in the little garden, conducting a merry, excited morning conversation. Margarita got up from the armchair, stretched, and only then felt how broken her body was and how much she wanted to sleep. It is interesting to note that Margarita’s soul was in perfect order. Her thoughts were not scattered, she was quite unshaken by having spent the night supernaturally. She was not troubled by memories of having been at Satan’s ball, or that by some miracle the master had been returned to her, that the novel had risen from the ashes, that everything was back in place in the basement in the lane, from which the snitcher Aloisy Mogarych had been expelled. In short, acquaintance with Woland had caused her no psychic damage. Everything was as if it ought to have been so. She went to the next room, made sure that the master was soundly and peacefully asleep, turned off the unnecessary table lamp, and stretched out by the opposite wall on a little couch covered with an old, torn sheet.

• 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 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)

  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