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 Etched in Sand (2013)

  As we turn onto Washington Avenue and edge closer to home, I notice our new neighborhood lacks actual neighbors . This time of year, residents are either at the local beach or inside where it’s cooler, keeping to themselves. There are no kids playing ball in the street or riding bikes up and down the lane. The air is quiet and empty with no friendly conversation or laughter. The few homes we do pass sit with bare lawns and neglected landscaping in a way that suggests passers-by should simply look away and mind their own business. This we appreciate. We aren’t comfortable with eyes on us either. Isolation isn’t foreign to us. A few years earlier, we lived together in the town center of Saint James, about eight miles from here. Our apartment then, in a building at 621 Lake Avenue, was on the second floor, above a glue factory. Across the street was the Saint James Fire Department—a giant white building that looked out at us as if it were watching our every move. We lived above the intersection of three major roads, not among the storied homes in the wealthy neighborhoods that overlooked the Long Island Sound with views of Connecticut. Living separate from our better-heeled neighbors ensured that we could stay “under the radar” in Saint James. I would walk through the kitchen door out to the black tar roof of the glue factory, which served as our patio. There I’d observe the townspeople as they hurried along the quaint and preserved main street to the local butcher or Spage’s Pharmacy. No matter how long or hard I stared, just daring for someone to catch my eye, no one ever noticed me. That was actually the home where we lived together the longest as a family. At that time, Cherie was still with us. She, Camille, and I would stroll up the street to the King Kullen supermarket to collect our groceries, but there was another spot we preferred to gather our meals. A long walk led us to Cordwood Beach. To us, Cordwood Beach was an amusement park—it had a floating dock anchored offshore, and we’d swim out and jump off of it over and over again. To the left of the dock stood the curved brick wall of a hollowed-out old house that delighted us as a glorified jungle gym and play castle. But the best part was, at Cordwood Beach we got dinner for free! We’d walk home with our shirts hammocking a heavy load of clams, mussels, and onion grass, which Cherie and Camille would steam for dinner. It was a simple way to live, but we were together. That’s what was important to us. “HEY !” I HOLLER . “We’re back!” Rosie and Norman are stretched out on opposite couches, watching the news. Rosie looks up, waves to us, and turns back to the TV.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  was a precious biological commodity. But it was not a fi nite one. It was continually regenerated. It was present in snot as in semen. What mattered, for the doctors, was an equilibrium that would not unduly accelerate the inexorable pro cess of putrefaction. Roman medical advice was more interested in establishing healthy and balanced rhythms than in stemming the leak of vital fl uids. Th e doctors were, to be sure, not erotic enthusiasts. Galen could recommend sex for its hygienic eff ects, but not for its pleasures. He put forward the Cynic phi los o pher Diogenes as a model. Diogenes engaged in sexual intercourse to expel sperm, and he retained the ser vices of a courtesan for his regular evacuations. One day when she was tardy, he manually recalibrated his system. Th e lesson drawn for Galen was that the self- controlled man would view sex as the satisfaction of an urge, a necessary transaction in the maintenance of the body’s fl ux. In his estimate sex was much like the evacuation of stool or urine— a purely natural act but nothing to sentimen-talize. Unlike digestion, sex was discretionary, a voluntary pro cess that, once started, triggered an autocatalytic chain reaction. From this perspective, sex, with its perfervid internal cycles, was a mildly hazardous necessity. Th e ideally healthy man would achieve a mea sured state of self- control by regulating the consumption system of the body, amorous expenditures included. Plea sure was a valueless term in the equation of health. Overall, the attitude toward sex in the Roman medical literature is one of attentive suff erance. But it would be a mistake to treat Roman medicine as a midway point between a classical cult of the healthy body and a later obsession with sensory deprivation. What is novel about Roman medicine is less its stance on sex than its popularity. It seems likely that in the age of Aelius Aristides and Marcus Aurelius more people than ever before looked upon themselves as life- term convalescents. But the pervasiveness of medical culture in the high empire is not to be ascribed to a public mood of weariness or even a new anxiety toward the body. Th e peculiar vigilance toward the body that we encounter in Roman medicine is the product of an affl uent society. Medicine was a branch of learning that fl ourished with the support of public and private patrons in a wealthy empire. Abundance created the anxieties of imbalance that fueled an interest in medical knowledge. Th e medical literature addressed the concerns of a well- fed elite whose physical labors were few and artifi cial. Th e doctors spoke to the greying crowd, who could take comfort in hearing that wine was healthful and  F R O M S H A M E TO S I N sexual deceleration was natural. Roman medicine was neither morbid nor ascetic; it was bourgeois, and a little geriatric. Th

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  I was torn between not wanting to upset him but wanting very much for him to respond. He smiled at me. “Thanks. I appreciate your offer. But I’ll try.” As it turned out he was more than candid. He opened the door wide and let me in. “Mom was always on him about things. She was real critical of what were really his best qualities. He wanted to go out to dinner with friends and have people over to dinner. She worried about money and babysitters. When they did have people over, she’d get so tense that she’d often have a migraine by the time the company arrived. If they had a good sex life, I’d be surprised.” Gary paused and thought it over. “Let me restate that. I’d give odds that they had very little sex, if any. When I was younger I remember Dad coming home from work and trying to kiss her but she’d always be busy getting dinner on and she wouldn’t stop and greet him. After awhile, he didn’t try anymore.” “Did they have arguments or fights?” I was trying to see the interior of this marriage as Gary had experienced it. “No, they didn’t have that many actual fights. Or at least we never saw many. They were pretty restrained in what they did or said in front of us kids.” “How did their being restrained affect you kids?” I asked. “There was this feeling of tension that you could cut with a knife,” Gary replied. “As things got worse between them, there were fewer words and more and more tension. My brother and sister and I spent as much time out of the house as we could.” I was again struck by the similarity between Gary’s household and households like Karen’s where parents decide to divorce. “Things got pretty bad when I was in junior high school,” he said. “This is when I wondered if Dad would leave. Mom had always been possessive of Dad—keeping track of where he was and how he spent his time. But then she started getting real jealous. It seemed like she went out of her way to interpret what he did in the worst possible light. And then she’d blame him.” When I asked for an example, Gary told a detailed story about a birthday party he attended with his family. As they were driving home, Gary’s mother accused his father of flirting with other women. She said he only cared about pleasing himself and about being everybody’s best friend. When they pulled into their driveway, she jumped out of the car and ran into her bedroom. Gary’s father told the children to get to bed and took off in the car. He didn’t come back until late the next morning. The parents didn’t speak to each other for days. “Was that the only time this happened?”

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  Rome would be perpetuating herself in the least of the towns where magistrates strive to demand just weight from the merchants, to clean and light the streets, to combat disorder, slackness, superstition and injustice, and to give broader and fairer interpretation to the laws. She would endure to the end of the last city built by man. Humanitas, Libertas, Felicitas: those noble words which grace the coins of my reign were not of my invention. Any Greek philosopher, almost every cultured Roman, conceives of the world as I do. I have heard Trajan exclaim, when confronted by a law which was unjust because too rigorous, that to continue its enforcement was to run counter to the spirit of the times. I shall have been the first, perhaps, to subordinate all my actions to this "spirit of the times", to make of it something other than the inflated dream of a philosopher, or the slightly vague aspirings of some good prince. And I was thankful to the gods, for they had allowed me to live in a period when my allotted task consisted of prudent reorganization of a world, and not of extracting matter, still unformed, from chaos, or of lying upon a corpse in the effort to revive it. I enjoyed the thought that our past was long enough to provide us with great examples, but not so heavy as to crush us under their weight; that our technical developments had advanced to the point of facilitating hygiene in the cities and prosperity for the population, though not to the degree of encumbering man with useless acquisition; that our arts, like trees grown weary with the abundance of their bearing, were still able to produce a few choice fruits. I was glad that our venerable, almost formless religions, drained of all intransigence and purged of savage rites, linked us mysteriously to the most ancient secrets of man and of earth, not forbidding us, however, a secular explanation of facts and a rational view of human conduct. It was, in sum, pleasing to me that even these words Humanity, Liberty, Happiness, had not yet lost their value by too much misuse. I see an objection to every effort toward ameliorating man's condition on earth, namely that mankind is perhaps not worthy of such exertion. But I meet the objection easily enough: so long as Caligula's dream remains impossible of fulfillment, and the entire human race is not reduced to a single head destined for the axe, we shall have to bear with humanity, keeping it within bounds but utilizing it to the utmost; our interest, in the best sense of the term, will be to serve it.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  Can she ever break free of that role? Have Karen’s early fears of betrayal affected her marriage? Has she learned to be less serious and more light-hearted or is her grave demeanor a permanent aspect of her personality? I was especially interested to see Karen as a mom. To be honest, I was surprised by her decision to have a child so soon after her marriage. After all, she had spent so many years of her life bringing up her mother’s children. She could have said, “Been there, done that.” AS SOON AS I pulled my rental car into the driveway, Karen came out the front door and ran over to greet me. She looked different—more settled, a tiny bit heavier, still stunning. She was wearing jeans and a loose green pullover and straddled a little girl with ash-blond hair on her right hip. We embraced and then Karen threw her free arm out in a huge arc. “Look at all this. Can you believe it?” “This” was a sprawling ranch-style house with three bedrooms, large front yard, shade trees, a swing set, and a two-car garage filled with bicycles, camping gear, and other paraphernalia of a family that enjoys the outdoors, plus a spectacular garden. As I expressed my admiration for the beautiful flowers, Karen smiled, “This is the one thing I was glad to inherit from my mother. She gave me my green thumb.” A little later, after putting Maya down for a nap, she said, “You know, I hope, in fact I pray every day, that this is the only way I’m like my mother. All the years that I was growing up, I said to myself, ‘I don’t want to look like my mother, I don’t want to think like my mother, I don’t want to be angry like my mother.’” She smiled. “I guess you could say that goes double for my father. He was always finding some woman to take care of him.” “Sounds like you’ve been thinking a lot about your parents.” “It’s funny, Judy. I didn’t expect this, but my getting married makes me think about them all the time. It didn’t begin so much on my wedding day but almost immediately after, even on our honeymoon, it was like parts of them came floating around in the back of my head.” “What were you thinking?” “Well, it worries me that when they got married, they loved each other. They were both reasonably suited to each other. And then, for reasons I’ll never understand, the marriage went down the tubes.” Karen’s face showed pure frustration. “I never did understand why they divorced. It never occurred to them to discuss what happened with any of us. Sometimes I think they were just howling at the moon. The whole thing made no sense whatsoever. I’m thirty-eight years old and it’s still incomprehensible to me. Who was the divorce for? I have friends whose parents divorced and none of us understands why.

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  With Alan kicking around the idea of running for mayor in the 2001 election, I’m hesitant to stay with him the four years until then. It’s a danger to be out of law school five years without ever having practiced. My law degree is my single most worthy credential, and also my safety net—even if other opportunities aren’t available, there are always jobs in law . . . . . . but only if I start using it. While eagerly waiting for the release of Gerry’s book, I begin to look for a job where I can actually use my law degree and also make a higher income. I know this means leaving New York City politics. I’m thirty years old, living with roommates in my third Manhattan apartment. I’ve spent my whole life sharing cramped, compromised spaces that don’t feel like mine; and most of all, I need to begin making enough money to stop deferring payment on my law school loans. The public sector could never pay me enough for rent, living expenses, and a hundred and fifty thousand dollars of law school loan debt. When I can force myself not to get wistful for a connection with Rosie, even my family situation has grown well adjusted and normal. Camille and Frank now have Frankie, Maria, and Michael, and Cherie and her new husband have Johnathan and Matthew—all of whom I couldn’t love any more if they were my own. I spend my holidays with them and they join me in the city for Christmas or to watch the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. On weekends, I carve out time to see friends, movies, and Broadway shows. Nicer days are spent in Central Park, running or Rollerblading. Sundays are my favorite: I drink coffee in bed and read several papers from cover to cover. One Sunday morning close to the holidays in 1997, I’m in bed reading the paper when the phone rings. Expecting to hear Camille’s voice on the other end, I pick it up. “Hey.” “Regina, I have some mail here for you.” “Addie?” She usually only calls on holidays and birthdays . . . but her voice sounds curious, or startled; somehow strained, trying to hold back. “Okay, well just send it to me. It’s probably junk.” “I don’t think it’s junk . . . in fact, I think you may want me to open it now. It’s from a Julia Accerbi—it looks like a Christmas card.” “Well, open it!” I tell her. “What are we waiting for?” I hear the envelope rip open, then Addie begins laughing. “Regina, you won’t believe this: Her Christmas card is from the Eastern Paralyzed Veterans Association.” “Are you kidding?” I laugh. The EPVA’s main source of revenue was through selling greeting cards. “She probably paid part of my salary while I was there!” “Now that’s irony,” Addie says, giggling.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  In relation to the past, you feel a deep sense of connection to your childhood. Yes, you are constantly changing, but these changes are on the surface and create the illusion of real change. In fact, your character was set in your earliest years (see chapter 4), along with your inclinations toward certain activities, your likes and dislikes. As you get older, this character only becomes more apparent. Feeling organically connected to who you were in the past gives you a strong sense of identity. You know what you like and dislike, you know who you are. This will help you maintain your self-love, which is so critical in resisting the descent into deep narcissism and in helping you to develop empathy (see chapter 2). Also, you will pay greater attention to the mistakes and lessons of the past, which those who are locked in the present tend to repress. Like everyone, you enjoy the present and its passing pleasures. You are not a monk. You connect to the trends of the moment and to the current flow of life. But you derive even greater pleasure from reaching your long-term goals and overcoming adversity. This expanded relationship to time will have a definite effect on you. It will make you calmer, more realistic, more in tune with the things that matter. It will also make you a superior strategist in life, able to resist people’s inevitable overreactions to what is happening in the present and to see further into the future, a potential power that we humans have only begun to tap into. The years teach much which the days never know. —Ralph Waldo Emerson L 7 Soften People’s Resistance by Confirming Their Self-opinion The Law of Defensiveness ife is harsh and people competitive. We naturally must look after our own interests. We also want to feel that we are independent, doing our own bidding. That is why when others try to persuade or change us, we become defensive and resistant. To give in challenges our need to feel autonomous. That is why to get people to move from their defensive positions you must always make it seem like what they are doing is of their own free will. Creating a feeling of mutual warmth helps soften people’s resistance and makes them want to help. Never attack people for their beliefs or make them feel insecure about their intelligence or goodness—that will only strengthen their defensiveness and make your task impossible. Make them feel that by doing what you want they are being noble and altruistic—the ultimate lure.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  The house is a kind of frame for living in or discipline for thought—so that its few furnishings, the book-case, a rather hideous rug, the photograph of the king, seem unnecessary embarrassments. I find myself quite as austere as a hermit for those hours when I am alone, & I want nothing. Or if I have been with the chiefs, eating & drinking & reciting to them, as they seem relentlessly to require, from the Thousand & One Nights , I return to this little box of shadows, to the fringed globe of the shamadan , the little folding captain’s chair, with a sense of enchantment. And Taha is waiting, never snoozing or yawning, but squatting in perfect, illiterate silence. His beauty is enhanced by his watchfulness, which is never impertinent or burdensome; it is an almost abstract form of attention, a condition of life to him. Though he only joined me for this tour I feel already with him, as I imagine long-married couples do, a complete freedom from self-consciousness, & as I sit & write, or merely gaze at the moon & stars, his eyes, which are always upon me, are weightless, demand nothing, are themselves dark globes in which lamp & stars are distantly reflected! And then I remember that he knows nothing of this, as I know nothing of him. I look across at him & smile, & after a second he smiles back, begins to rise, but I gesture to him to stay put. There is a momentary uncertainty, but as he settles again it disperses & is forgotten. May 31, 1926: Terrific drama yesterday, as Taha was bitten by a scorpion … I was just coming home: the heat had become too intense & I had failed to resolve a contention between two men over a pig—a pig which had been given to one of them as a reward for his prompt payment of taxes. I was in no doubt of that, & the pig was branded, but the other chap, a rather svelte character with a distinctly flirtatious manner, said that this admirable tax payer had owed him a pig—indeed, owed him two pigs, & he thought it was only his right to take it. The whole issue will need further attention.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  Alastair, who had hyped himself into a state of dancing aggression by the time that the two of them touched their white-knuckled gloves together, moved about with wonderful deftness, rather keeping himself to himself at first, but darting in for arhythmic, chancy jabs. Like many boxers I’d seen, people like Maurice at the Club, Alastair was not physically large; his shoulderblades and scruff, uncovered by his royal blue singlet, were not packed with muscle, and his upper arms, though long and powerful, lacked the volatile, easy massing that many ordinary working boys could muster. He ambled in for a swift succession of blows, left, right, left, that sent his opponent onto the ropes, half tripping as he fell backwards. As the referee sprang between them, conjuring an eight-second standing count with the deaf-and-dumb gestures of the ring, the voices rose for Alastair—his father loud and abrupt, and the juvenile babble of his team supporters and mates. One trio of teenage stylists bawled their encouragement while grinning and chewing, selfconscious, acting manly, caring and not caring. After a little more capering about the round ended. Bill was on his feet in a second, propelled by sheer anxiety and commitment. The helmet-whiskered man was planning to do the mopping and pepping up, but Bill snatched the stool and bounded up between the ropes, pushing his boy into the corner with an awkward, forceful accolade. I looked up at them and half caught Bill’s remarks, a mixture of love and surprising complaints. ‘You’re letting him off, you’re letting him off,’ he said. ‘And don’t forget your fists’—useful advice that was followed by dogmatic, nodding one-worders, as he sponged Alastair’s flushed, upturned face, wiping brusquely at the unspoilt features, and running his sopping embrace around the boy’s shoulders and up the shorn, gold fuzz of his neck. ‘Beautiful,’ he said. ‘Great. Smashing.’ Alastair just nodded back, saying nothing, staring entranced at Bill, breathing in keenly through his nostrils. When the bell rang, Bill popped the gumshield back into his mouth, swelling and spreading the pink lips into a fierce sneer. Then, as the referee bobbed backwards to the ropes, they were off again. The second round was unspectacular at first; the St Albans boy was by no means unattractive, I decided, if of a rather slow-witted, suspicious expression—and he managed to place a couple of good body-shots under Alastair’s guard, shots that were rare in this kind of fight. Then Alastair sent through a vicious jab to the black boy’s face, where we heard not only the muffled smack of the glove but beneath it a strange, squinching little sound, as of the yielding of soft, adolescent bone and gristle. As the boy fell back Alastair followed up, before anyone could stop him, with a second blow of punitive accuracy.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  No witness takes us with him quite so vividly into the trenches of Christianization during the crucial period as the remarkable John Chrysostom. Some thousand or so of his sermons, delivered at Antioch and Constantinople, survive. In Chrysostom’s campaign to reform the morals of his congregation, we can watch one Christian leader’s efforts to hector his audience, by threat, suasion, and enticement, into a modicum of sexual decency. His delicate efforts to instill Pauline values in his flock form an object lesson on the collision between Christian norms and deeply entrenched patterns of sexual conduct. Marriage, he claimed, was originally instituted for two reasons: the creation of children and sexual self-control. The passing of time had dimmed the urgency of reproduction; the earth was full, and the promise of resurrection nullified the imperative to live through future generations. Thus, Chrysostom would argue, the prime justification for marriage was sexual restraint. But here Chrysostom dropped a surprise on his audience: it was wrong, even for a man, to have sex outside of marriage. Even with prostitutes or slaves, a married man should not have sex beyond the marriage couch. “What I am saying is a paradox, but it is true!”41 In this sermon, Chrysostom juxtaposed Christian sexual boundaries with the ordinary rules of conduct. “I am not unaware that most think it is adultery only to violate a married woman. But I say that it is a wicked and licentious adultery for a man with a wife to have an affair even with a public whore, a slave girl, or any other woman without a husband.” The preacher recognized that society’s standards, which accepted dalliances between married men and their slaves or prostitutes, found a powerful ally in Roman law. “Do not show me the laws of the outside world, which say a woman committing adultery is to be brought to a trial, but that men with wives who do it with slave girls are not considered guilty.” And if appeal to God’s law was not enough, Chrysostom invoked the traditional hopes of a peaceful house. “Your wife did not come to you, and leave behind her father and mother and her entire household in order to be humiliated.” The point bore repetition: “Thus we say a man commits adultery, if he sates his lust with a slave girl or a public whore while he has a wife.” Marital fidelity was the Christian path. “A wife (eleuthera) offers at once pleasure and security and joy and honor and order and a clean conscience.” John Chrysostom was not, of course, a great exponent of the gifts of physical “pleasure,” so his passing praise, or at least tolerance, of it here must be written down as a rhetorical effusion in an effort to persuade the crowd of the practicability of his model of Christian marriage. It is a telling concession.42

• From The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us (2017)

  What they have overlooked are the social interactions that are so critical to the mate choices we make. Indeed, social interactions are vital to how we experience sexual attraction, whom we have sex with, and how we fall in love. As new research from the field of experimental social psychology demonstrates, our social interactions with each other have the potential to override the information we take in only through our eyes. The psychologist Paul Eastwick’s work has focused on how social interactions alter perceptions of sexual attractiveness. In a series of experiments and meta-analyses, Eastwick and colleagues have shown something that we all know from experience: our perceptions of sexual attractiveness change as we get to know each other. Prior to any social interactions, people tend to agree on their initial (that is, superficial) judgments of the sexual attractiveness of others. But once they have opportunities to interact socially, they begin to diverge in their judgments and to notice features in other people’s personalities that are specifically attractive to them. Ultimately, these subjective social perceptions have a much stronger effect on what they find attractive than does physical appearance. Paul Eastwick and Lucy Hunt write, “This idiosyncrasy will prove fortuitous, as it permits nearly everyone a chance to form relationships where both partners view each other as uniquely desirable.” It is a happy thought that people are, by and large, built for finding social-sexual happiness with another despite the variations in physical attractiveness. “Mating value” is not a universal and objective measure; it is a subjective, relational experience. Interestingly, Eastwick’s studies also indicate that there is no difference between men and women in the degree to which social relationships influence their evaluation of attractiveness. The same guys that provide the data for evolutionary psychology studies on female mating value by gazing at computer screens are actually just as likely to be influenced by the qualities that emerge through social interactions as women are. Apparently, the male gaze is not a great recipe for male happiness either.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  He had just inflicted a series of defeats on the hordes of the Alani which would throw them back for a long time to come into that obscure center of Asia which they had thought to leave for good; Armenia had been saved; the reader of Xenophon was revealing himself as the emulator of that general, showing that the race of scholars who could also command and fight, if need be, was not extinct. That evening, on returning to my house in Tibur, it was with a weary but tranquil heart that I received from Diotimus' hands the incense and wine of the daily sacrifice to my Genius. While still a private citizen I had begun to buy up and unite these lands, spread below the Sabine Halls along clear streams, with the patient tenacity of a peasant who parcel by parcel rounds out his vineyard; later on, between two imperial tours, I had camped in these groves then in prey of architects and masons; a youth imbued with all the superstitions of Asia used often to urge devoutly that the trees be spared. On the return from my longest travel in the Orient I had worked in a kind of frenzy to perfect this immense stage-setting for a play then already three-quarters completed. I was coming back to it this time to end my days as reasonably as possible. Everything here was arranged to facilitate work as well as pleasure: the chancellery, the audience halls, and the court where I judged difficult cases in last appeal all saved me the tiring journeys between Tibur and Rome. I had given each of these edifices names reminiscent of Greece: the Pœcile, the Academy, the Prytaneum. I knew very well that this small valley planted with olive trees was not Tempe, but I was reaching the age when each beauteous place recalls another, fairer still, when each delight is weighted with the memory of past joys.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  The medicaments have no effect on me now; my limbs are more swollen than ever, and I sleep sitting up instead of reclining. One advantage of death will be to lie down again on a bed. It is now my turn to console Antoninus. I remind him that death has long seemed to me the most fitting solution of my own problem; as always, my wishes are finally being fulfilled, but in a slower and more indirect way than I had expected. I can be glad that illness has left me lucid to the end, and I rejoice to have escaped the trials of old age, with its hardening and stiffening, its aridity and cruel absence of desire. If my calculations are exact, my mother died at about the age which I am today; my life has already been half again as long as that of my father, who died at forty. Everything is prepared: the eagle entrusted with bearing the emperor's soul to the gods is held in reserve for the funeral ceremony. My mausoleum, on top of which they are just now planting the cypresses, designed to form a black pyramid high in the sky, will be completed about in time to receive the ashes while yet still warm. I have requested Antoninus to see that Sabina is transported there later on; at her death I did not have divine honors conferred upon her, as was after all her due; it would not be bad to have that neglect repaired. And I would like the remains of Aelius Caesar to be placed at my side. They have brought me to Baiae; in this July heat the journey has been an ordeal, but I breathe better near the sea. On the shore the waves make their murmur of rustling silk and whispered caress. I can still enjoy the pale rose light of the long evenings. But I hold these tablets now only to occupy my hands, which in spite of me agitate. I have sent for Antoninus; a courier dispatched at full speed has left for Rome. Sound of the hoofs of Borysthenes, gallop of the Thracian Rider. . . . The little group of intimates presses round my bed. Chabrias moves me to pity: tears ill become the wrinkles of age. Celer's handsome face is, as always, strangely calm; he applies himself steadily to nursing me without letting anything be seen of what might add to a patient's anxiety or fatigue. But Diotimus is sobbing, his head buried in the cushions.

• From Untrue (2018)

  Fascinated, I asked Tim about whether he and Lily had ground rules, and he laughed. “The rules have morphed over the years. You change so much as you age, and age together. What’s okay, what’s appropriate or not appropriate. We had a thing about no secrets, and no siphoning time, energy, or money from each other and the kids. That’s basic and has stayed in place. The rules at this point are nobody with children under a certain age. Nobody who has never had a child, unless they are no longer capable of having a child. That could just get way too messy.” Lily’s live-in boyfriend has no children and doesn’t want any, so these rules mostly apply to Tim. While Lily occasionally “fools around” with other men—she particularly enjoys that she is pursued by younger guys, according to Tim—she has remained committed to her marriage for more than twenty-five years, and to her boyfriend Rick for nearly a decade and a half. “It’s not like she doesn’t come sleep at home every night. She does,” he explains. Meanwhile, although Tim has had multiple relationships, he has never wanted to have anyone live with them. I asked him how his relationships in particular had changed over time. He thought for a moment. “I was fairly inappropriate, looking back on it, because it was like, Oh, this is fun, expanding into some new universe where you can pretty much do whatever you want, within those agreed upon parameters. That’s how you feel at first. But you can’t do whatever you want, because you still have to have respect for every person involved, including your wife and children, even if your wife is the catalyst for all this going on. Then there’s the person you’re involved with. It’s a lot of obligations.” “Respect” is a word that Tim uses a lot in our conversations. He mentions, at one of our meet-ups, that he has never seen Lily and Rick so much as hold hands. In fact, while the two of them go on vacation together twice a year and enjoy going to concerts together, he has never seen any physical contact between them. He explained, “She’s not a PDA person. So it’s that, but it’s partially out of respect to me, and bigger respect even for our kids. My kids don’t want to feel like they live or have ever lived in a commune. Even though they kind of do! But it doesn’t feel like that. To any of us. He’s a chef. He cooks, he takes care of our house, he drives the kids where they want to go, so for them it’s always been more like ‘Rick is our family friend.’ Whatever goes on between Rick and Lily happens offscreen.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  Other considerations came slowly to mind during the night which followed Iollas' death; life has given me much, or at least I have known how to obtain a great deal from it; in this moment as in the time of my felicity, but for wholly opposite reasons, it seems to me that existence has nothing more to offer: I am not sure, however, that I have not something more to learn from it. I shall listen for its secret instructions to the end. All my life long I have trusted in the wisdom of my body; I have tried to distinguish between and enjoy the varied sensations which this friend has provided me: I no longer refuse the death agony prepared for me, this ending slowly elaborated within my arteries and inherited perhaps from some ancestor, or born of my temperament, formed little by little from each of my actions throughout my life. The time of impatience has passed; at the point where I now am, despair would be in as bad taste as hope itself. I have ceased to hurry my death. There is still much to be done. My estates in Africa, inherited from my mother-in-law, Matidia, must be turned into models of agricultural development; the peasants of Borysthenes, the village established in Thrace in memory of a good horse, are entitled to aid after a severe winter; on the contrary, subsidies should not be granted to the rich cultivators of the Nile Valley, who are ever ready to take advantage of the emperor's solicitude. Julius Vestinus, prefect of Education, sends me his report on the opening of public grammar schools. I have just completed the revision of Palmyra's commercial code: it takes everything into account, from the entrance fees for caravans to the tax set for prostitutes. At the moment, we are assembling a congress of physicians and magistrates to determine the utmost duration of a pregnancy, thus putting an end to interminable legal squabbles. Cases of bigamy are increasing in number in the veterans' settlements; I am doing my best to persuade these men not to make wrong use of the new laws which permit them to marry, and I counsel them to abstain prudently from taking more than one wife at a time! In Athens a Pantheon is in process of construction on the model of the Pantheon in Rome; I am composing the inscription to be placed on its walls, and shall enumerate therein (as examples and commitments for the future) my services to the Greek cities and to barbarian peoples; the services rendered to Rome are matters of course.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  I liked the stones for their enigma, & stroked them, & wanted them to keep their secret for ever, illegible and dignified. They were still, naturally enough, uncomfortably hot, standing as they do all day long in the parade-ground’s shadowless glare. May 29, 1926: … These friendships … In my happiness here it never strikes me that I have no friends. There are the long monthly letters from home, but like The Times which comes, folded, yellowed and elderly, six weeks late, they seem like reports from a fictional world, improbably stuffed with circumstance. Sitting last night before dinner with a pink gin & listening to Hassan coughing & kicking round the kitchen, my strangeness here suddenly appeared to me, a kind of agoraphobia, a continent wide—just for two or three seconds I had an objective vision of myself, unsheltered by the glowing trance, aerial & romantic as the sunset then was, that at all times absorbs me. I saw how singular I must be for Hassan, & for the new houseboy, Taha. Now Taha has gone from the room & I hear his low murmur of song as he crosses the yard, & then his talk with Hassan, who will be telling him what to do & preparing to serve the supper. They talk as usual in the Nubian language—I grasp only the occasional word or name, and from here it is anyway all indistinct: it gurgles on as in England a stream might at the bottom of an orchard, easy, colloquial & yet ineffably ancient & impersonal. And then Hassan’s voice is raised, & he vents his little jealousies & proud possessiveness on the boy. Hassan, being with me so long, is part of my life, and whenever there are new boys there is trouble of some kind. It is remarkable to think that they are both of the same race—the old cook with his aquiline, sallow look, those brown betel-stained teeth, the utter absence of physical grace that somehow recommended him to me & guaranteed his honesty; and the boy, a supple, plum-black sixteen, with his quiet nervous movements, dreaming eyes & occasional smile, so inward & yet candid … Him I chose for quite contrary reasons, so that his charm, however fickle or professional, wd be an adornment to each day. And here he comes back now. He has the most lyrical hands, and as he reaches out & takes my glass to refill it the action of his long graceful fingers suggests to my woozy fancy the playing of the harp. There is something which charms me utterly about this house. It is whitewashed & square & has four rooms, each of the same size. It is a house reduced to its very elements, with empty holes for windows and doors, so that one looks from one room into the next—& through that to the outside, the surrounding shacks, the clustered peaks of the huts or the bald, enigmatic rocks.

• From The Songs of Bilitis (1894)

  Weep not for me, thou who pausest; they made me fair funeral rites; the weepers bruised their cheeks; they have laid in my tomb my mirrors and my necklaces. And now, over the pale meadows of asphodel, I walk, an impalpable shadow, and the remembrance of my earthly life is the joy of my life in the underworld. BIBLIOGRAPHY I. Bilitis’ saemmtliche Lieder zum ersten Male herausgegeben und mit einem Woerterbuche versehen, von G. Heim.--Leipzig. 1894. II. Les Chansons de Bilitis, traduites du Grec pour la première fois par P. L. Paris. 1895. III. Six Chansons de Bilitis, traduites en vers par Mme. Jean Bertheroy.--Revue pour les jeunes filles. Paris. Armand Colin. 1896. IV. Vingt-six Chansons de Bilitis, traduites en allemand par Richard Dehmel.--Die Gesellschaft. Zeitung. 1896. V. Vingt Chansons de Bilitis, traduites en allemand par le Dr. Paul Goldmann. Frankfurter Zeitung. 1896. VI. Les Chansons de Bilitis, par le Pr. von Willamovitz-Moellendorf.--Goettingsche Gelehrte--Goettingen. 1896. VII. Huit Chansons de Bilitis, traduites en tcheque par Alexandre Backovsky.--Prague. 1897. VIII. Quatre Chansons de Bilitis, traduites en suédois par Gustav Uddgren.--Nordisk Revy.--Stockholm. 1897. IX. Trois Chansons de Bilitis, mises en musique par Claude Debussy.--Paris. Fromont. 1898. NOTES AND COMMENT “Translated from the Greek.” The antique sketches here rendered in English, some of which possess great beauty, appeared first, in French, in 1894, bearing the legend “Translated from the Greek.” This feeling of translation the Author attempted to strengthen by recording, in his Index, certain “songs” marked “not translated” which, as a matter of fact, never existed. It is extremely doubtful, however, whether anyone really acquainted with the Greek Poets was misled, even for a moment. Internal evidence often points to modern thought and ideas; and a number of the pieces, if not exactly “translated” are at least adapted from epigrams by various writers of established place in the Greek Anthology. These would at once indicate “Bilitis” as an imaginary personage. In the following notes, some of the more important of the direct translations and paraphrases from antique writers have been indicated, with an occasional comment, for the convenience and interest of the reader. The English translation itself is complete and has been kept in close parallel with the French text, except for a few changes in tense which seemed advisable. M. S. B. LIFE OF BILITIS “Psappha.” No authority is evident for the statement that Sappho was known at Lesbos under the name of “Psappha.”

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  The medicaments have no effect on me now; my limbs are more swollen than ever, and I sleep sitting up instead of reclining. One advantage of death will be to lie down again on a bed. It is now my turn to console Antoninus. I remind him that death has long seemed to me the most fitting solution of my own problem; as always, my wishes are finally being fulfilled, but in a slower and more indirect way than I had expected. I can be glad that illness has left me lucid to the end, and I rejoice to have escaped the trials of old age, with its hardening and stiffening, its aridity and cruel absence of desire. If my calculations are exact, my mother died at about the age which I am today; my life has already been half again as long as that of my father, who died at forty. Everything is prepared: the eagle entrusted with bearing the emperor's soul to the gods is held in reserve for the funeral ceremony. My mausoleum, on top of which they are just now planting the cypresses, designed to form a black pyramid high in the sky, will be completed about in time to receive the ashes while yet still warm. I have requested Antoninus to see that Sabina is transported there later on; at her death I did not have divine honors conferred upon her, as was after all her due; it would not be bad to have that neglect repaired. And I would like the remains of Aelius Caesar to be placed at my side. They have brought me to Baiae; in this July heat the journey has been an ordeal, but I breathe better near the sea. On the shore the waves make their murmur of rustling silk and whispered caress. I can still enjoy the pale rose light of the long evenings. But I hold these tablets now only to occupy my hands, which in spite of me agitate. I have sent for Antoninus; a courier dispatched at full speed has left for Rome. Sound of the hoofs of Borysthenes, gallop of the Thracian Rider. . . . The little group of intimates presses round my bed. Chabrias moves me to pity: tears ill become the wrinkles of age. Celer's handsome face is, as always, strangely calm; he applies himself steadily to nursing me without letting anything be seen of what might add to a patient's anxiety or fatigue. But Diotimus is sobbing, his head buried in the cushions.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  Since everything is finally a decision of the mind, however slowly and imperceptibly made, and involves also the body's assent, I strove to attain by degrees to that state of liberty, or of submission, which is almost pure. In this effort gymnastics helped, and dialectics aided me, too. I sought at first the simple liberty of leisure moments; each life well regulated has some such intervals, and he who cannot make way for them does not know how to live. A step further, and I conceived of a liberty of simultaneity, whereby two actions or two states would be possible at the same time; I learned, for example, by modeling myself upon Caesar to dictate more than one text at a time, and to speak while continuing to read. I invented a mode of life in which the heaviest task could be accomplished perfectly without engaging myself wholly therein; in fact, I have sometimes gone so far as to propose to myself elimination of the very concept of physical fatigue. At other moments I practiced a liberty acquired by methods of alternation: feelings, thoughts, or work had all to be subject to interruption at any moment, and then resumed; the certainty of being able to summon or dismiss such preoccupations, like slaves, robbed them of all chance for tyranny, and freed me of all sense of servitude. I did a better thing: I organized the day's activities round some chosen train of thought and did not let it go; whatever would have distracted or discouraged me from it, such as projects or work of another kind, words of no import, or the thousand incidents of the day, were made to take their place around it as a vine is trained round the shaft of a column. Sometimes, on the contrary, I made infinite divisions of each thought and each fact under view, breaking and sectioning them into a vast number of smaller thoughts and facts, easier thus to keep in hand. By this method resolutions difficult to take were broken down into a veritable powder of minute decisions, to be adopted one by one, each leading to the next, and thereby becoming, as it were, easy and inevitable. But it was still to the liberty of submission, the most difficult of all, that I applied myself most strenuously. I determined to make the best of whatever situation I was in; during my years of dependence my subjection lost its portion of bitterness, and even ignominy, if I learned to accept it as a useful exercise. Whatever I had I chose to have, obliging myself only to possess it totally, and to taste the experience to the full.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  What thought and care to determine the exact site for a bridge, or for a fountain, and to give a mountain road that perfect curve which is at the same time the shortest. . . . The widening of the road to Megara transformed the shore along the Scironian Cliffs; the two thousand odd stadia of paved way, provided with cisterns and military posts, which connected Antino�polis with the Red Sea brought an era of security to the desert following an era of danger. For construction of a system of aqueducts in Troas all the revenue from five hundred cities of the province of Asia was not too high a price; an aqueduct for Carthage atoned in some part for the rigors of the Punic Wars. The erecting of fortifications was much like constructing dykes: the object was to find the line on which a shore, or an empire, can be defended, the point where the assault of waves (or barbarians) will be held back, stopped, or utterly broken. The beauty of the gulfs bore fruit with the opening of harbors. The founding of libraries was like constructing more public granaries, amassing reserves against a spiritual winter which by certain signs, in spite of myself, I see ahead. I have done much rebuilding. To reconstruct is to collaborate with time gone by, penetrating or modifying its spirit, and carrying it toward a longer future. Thus beneath the stones we find the secret of the springs. Our life is brief: we are always referring to centuries which precede or follow our own as if they were totally alien to us, but I have come close to them in my play with stone. These walls which I reinforce are still warm from contact with vanished bodies; hands yet unborn will caress the shafts of these columns. The more I have meditated upon my death, and especially upon that of another, the more I have tried to add to our lives these virtually indestructible extensions. At Rome I preferred to use our enduring brick; it returns but slowly to the earth, from which it comes, and its imperceptible settling and crumbling leave a mountainous mass even when the edifice has ceased to be visibly what it was built for, a fortress, a circus, or a tomb. In Greece and in Asia I chose the native marble, that fair substance which, once cut, stays so faithful to human measurements and proportions that the plan of an entire temple survives in each fragment of a broken column. Architecture is rich in possibilities more varied than Vitruvius' four orders would seem to allow; our great stone blocks, like our tones in music, are amenable to endless regrouping. For the Pantheon I turned to the ancient Etruria of augurs and soothsayers; the sunny temple of Venus, on the contrary, is a round of Ionic forms, a profusion of white and pale rose columns clustered about the voluptuous goddess whence sprang the race of Caesar.