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 Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  Secondly, a man may, of himself, know something, and with certainty; and in this way no one can know that he has grace. For certitude about a thing can only be had when we may judge of it by its proper principle. Thus it is by undemonstrable universal principles that certitude is obtained concerning demonstrative conclusions. Now no one can know he has the knowledge of a conclusion if he does not know its principle. But the principle of grace and its object is God, Who by reason of His very excellence is unknown to us, according to Job 36:26: “Behold God is great, exceeding our knowledge.” And hence His presence in us and His absence cannot be known with certainty, according to Job 9:11: “If He come to me, I shall not see Him; if He depart I shall not understand.” And hence man cannot judge with certainty that he has grace, according to 1 Cor. 4:3,4: “But neither do I judge my own self . . . but He that judgeth me is the Lord.” Thirdly, things are known conjecturally by signs; and thus anyone may know he has grace, when he is conscious of delighting in God, and of despising worldly things, and inasmuch as a man is not conscious of any mortal sin. And thus it is written (Apoc. 2:17): “To him that overcometh I will give the hidden manna . . . which no man knoweth, but he that receiveth it,” because whoever receives it knows, by experiencing a certain sweetness, which he who does not receive it, does not experience. Yet this knowledge is imperfect; hence the Apostle says (1 Cor. 4:4): “I am not conscious to myself of anything, yet am I not hereby justified,” since, according to Ps. 18:13: “Who can understand sins? From my secret ones cleanse me, O Lord, and from those of others spare Thy servant.” Reply to Objection 1: Those things which are in the soul by their physical reality, are known through experimental knowledge; in so far as through acts man has experience of their inward principles: thus when we wish, we perceive that we have a will; and when we exercise the functions of life, we observe that there is life in us. Reply to Objection 2: It is an essential condition of knowledge that a man should have certitude of the objects of knowledge; and again, it is an essential condition of faith that a man should be certain of the things of faith, and this, because certitude belongs to the perfection of the intellect, wherein these gifts exist. Hence, whoever has knowledge or faith is certain that he has them. But it is otherwise with grace and charity and such like, which perfect the appetitive faculty.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  There is a deep serenity here, relaxing and sometimes uncomfortable. The adjustable hospital bed is covered with a voluptuous down comforter under which a hot-water bottle had been slipped the first night I arrived. And six red rosebuds in a cut-glass vase. On the other side of the bedside table is an easy chair, and then a wide window and a glass door opening onto terraces that run the length of each of the tiered three stories of the building. The tiers provide plenty of sunlight on each floor. There are opaque dividers for privacy between the doors leading onto the terrace, and then a common strollway open to the sky. Beneath the terraces is a carefully tended european garden, sculptured stone steps cut into one side winding back and forth through the low bushes and plantings throughout the grounds. In the grassy clearing in front of the terraces stands a red granite statue of a robed person with what I have come to think of as the Steiner look, blunt and massive, one arm upraised in the eurhythmic position for the vowel i which is considered in all languages to be the sound representing the affirmation of self in living. On a slight knoll, the statue is silhouetted against the green trees or the leaden sky. At the foot of the statue and to one side is a large oval whirlpool fountain of red granite also, its perennial gurgle of softly flowing water a soothing counterpoint whenever the terrace door is opened, or when walking through the grounds. A quite lovely pastel painting of a sunrise hangs on one wall of the room, executed according to the Rudolf Steiner theory of color and healing. It is the only wall decoration in the room, whose walls are painted a sunny yellow and peach. Most of the patients are middle-aged Swiss and Germans, with two French women and myself. We all wear our own clothes. There is a large sitting room that contains a library, and a chapel, of course, and appropriate Steiner reading materials [are] always available. Everyone who works with patients gives off a similar affect: it is calm, kind, and helpful, but also completely dogmatic. Staff, patients, and visitors eat lunch and dinner together in a spacious, well-draped but sunny dining room with real linens and individualized embroidered napkins. We are seated at tables holding six to ten diners, amid signs of the zodiac and planets sculpted from various kinds of european bedrock, also done in the Steiner artistic tradition of massive, solid lines. Meals are a real chore for me, since it is difficult for me to eat anyway and I loathe eating around strangers. The feeling in the dining room is genteel, cultivated, and totally formal.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  After all the ingredients were in the bowl of the mortar, I would fetch the pestle and placing it into the bowl, slowly rotate the shaft a few times, working it gently down through all the ingredients to mix them. Only then would I lift the pestle, and with one hand firmly pressed around the carved side of the mortar caressing the wooden fruit with my aromatic fingers, I would thrust sharply downward, feeling the shifting salt and the hard little pellets of garlic right up through the shaft of the wooden pestle. Up again, down, around, and up, so the rhythm would begin. The thud push rub rotate and up, repeated over and over; the muted thump of the pestle on the bed of grinding spice, as the salt and pepper absorbed the slowly yielded juices of the garlic and celery leaves and became moist; the mingling fragrances rising from the bowl of the mortar; the feeling of the pestle held between my fingers and the rounded fruit of the mortar’s outside against my palm and curving fingers as I steadied it against my body; all these transported me into a world of scent and rhythm and movement and sound that grew more and more exciting as the ingredients liquefied. Sometimes my mother would look over at me with that amused annoyance which passed for tenderness with her, and which was always such a welcome change for me from the furious annoyance which was so much more usual. “What you think you making there, garlic soup? Enough, go get the meat now.” And I would fetch the lamb hearts, for instance, from the icebox and begin to prepare them. Cutting away the hardened veins at the top of the smooth firm muscles, I would divide each oval heart into four wedge-shaped pieces, and taking a bit of the spicy mash from the mortar with my fingertips, I would rub each piece with the savory mix. The pungent smell of garlic and onion and celery would envelop the kitchen.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  As I had guessed, her figure was slight and lissom, with narrow hips but she had a great bush of hair on her Mount of Venus and her breasts were not so round and firm as Jessie’s: still she was very pretty and well-formed with the fines attaches (slender wrists and ankles) which the French are so apt to over-estimate. They think that small bones indicate a small sex; but I have found that the exceptions are very numerous, even if there is any such rule. After I had kissed her breasts and navel, and praised her figure, she disappeared in the bathroom but was soon with me again on the sofa which we had left an hour or so before. “Do you know” she began, “my husband assured me that only the strongest young man could go twice with a woman in one day? I believed him; aren’t we women fools? You must have come a dozen times?” “Not half that number”, I replied smiling. “Aren’t you tired?” was her next question, “even I have a little headache” she added: “I never was so wrought up: at the end it was too intense: but you must be tired out.” “No,” I replied, “I feel no fatigue, indeed I feel the better for our joy ride!” “But surely you’re an exception?” she went on; “most men have finished in one short spasm and leave the woman utterly unsatisfied, just excited and no more.” “Youth”, I said, “that, I believe, makes the chief difference.” “Is there any danger of a child?” she went on, “I ought to say ‘hope’,” she added bitterly, “for I’d love to have a child, your child” and she kissed me. “When were you ill last?” I asked. “About a fortnight ago”, she replied, “I often thought that had something to do with it.” “Why?” I asked: “tell truth!” I warned her and she began: “I’ll tell you anything; I thought the time had something to do with it for soon after I am well each month my ‘pussy’ that’s what we call it, often burns and itches intolerably; but after a week or so I’m not bothered any more till next time. Why is that?” she added. “Two things I ought to explain to you” I said, “your seed is brought down into your womb by the menstrual blood: it lives there a week or ten days and then dies and with its death your desires decrease and the chance of impregnation. But near the next monthly period, say within three days, there is a double danger again; for the excitement may bring your seed down before the usual time and in any case, my seed will live in your womb about three days, so if you wish to avoid pregnancy, wait for ten days after your monthly flow is finished and stop say four days before you expect it again, then the danger of getting a child is very slight.”

• From Heptaméron (1559)

  Thereupon Hircan, Geburon, Simontault, and Saffre- dent vowed that they had all married in that very spirit, and that accordingly they had never repented of the act. Whether that was true or not, the ladies whom it con- cerned were nevertheless so pleased with the declaration, that, being of opinion they could hear nothing better than Fourth day.\ QUEEN OF NA VARRE. 35 1 it, they rose to go and give thanks for it to God, and found that the monks were ready for the vesper service. Their devotions ended, they supped, but not without reverting to the subject of marriage, everyone recountmg his own experience whilst wooing his wife. But as they inter- rupted each other, it was not possible to make a full record of their several stories, which was a pity, for they were not less agreeable than those they had recounted in the meadow. This conversation was so interesting that bed-time arrived before they were aware of it. Madame Oisille was the first to perceive that it was time to retire, and her example was followed by the rest. All went to bed in the gayest humour, and I do not think the married couples slept more than the others, but spent a part of the night in talking over their affections in times past, and giving each other evidences of its present existence. Thus the night passed agreeably away. 1 3 5 2 THE HEPTAMERON OF THE [ A 'ovd ^ i . FIFTH DAY. Madame Oisille, as soon as day had dawned, pre- pared for them a spiritual breakfast of such good savour, that it fortified their minds and bodies aUke ; and the company were so attentive to it, that it seemed that they never heard a sermon to more advantage. The second bell for mass having rung, they went to meditate on the good things they had heard. After mass they took a little walk while waiting for dinner, anticipating as agreeable a day as the preceding one. Saffredent said that he was so charmed with the good cheer they made and the recreation they enjoyed, that he could wish it might be a month yet before the bridge was finished ; but as it was no comfort to the abbot to live along with so many respectable people into whose pres- ence he durst not bring his usual female pilgrims, he urged the workmen to make all possible speed. When the company had rested awhile after dinner, they returned to their usual pastime, and everyone being seated, they asked Parlamente who should begin. "It strikes me," she said, " that Saffredent would do very well, for his face does not seem to me adapted to make us cry."

• From Blue Nights (2011)

  I assumed, incorrectly, that it had something to do with movement, traveling, checking in and out of hotels, going to and from the airport. I tried this. A week after placing the ashes in the wall at St. John the Divine, I flew to Boston and back to New York and then to Dallas and back to New York and then to Minneapolis and back to New York, doing promotion for The Year of Magical Thinking . The following week, again doing promotion and still under the misapprehension that momentum was about traveling, I flew to Washington and back and then to San Francisco and Los Angeles and Denver and Seattle and Chicago and Toronto and finally to Palm Springs, where I was to spend Thanksgiving with my brother and his family. From various points on this itinerary, over the course of which I began to grasp that just going to and from the airport might be insufficient, that some further effort might be required, I spoke by telephone to Scott Rudin, and agreed that I should write and he should produce and David Hare should direct a one-character play, intended for Broadway, based on The Year of Magical Thinking . The three of us, Scott, David, and I, met for the first time on this project a month after Christmas. A week before Easter, in a tiny theater on West Forty-second Street, we watched the first readings of the play. A year later it opened, starring Vanessa Redgrave in its single role, at the Booth Theater on West Forty-fifth Street. As ways of maintaining momentum go this one turned out to be better than most: I remember liking the entire process a good deal. I liked the quiet afternoons backstage with the stage managers and electricians, I liked the way the ushers gathered for instructions downstairs just before the half-hour call. I liked the presence of Shubert security outside, I liked the weight of the stage door as I opened it against the wind through Shubert Alley, I liked the secret passages to and from the stage. I liked that Amanda, who ran the stage door at night, kept on her desk a tin of the cookies she baked. I liked that Lauri, who managed the Booth for the Shubert Organization and was doing graduate work in medieval literature, became our ultimate authority on a few lines in the play that involved Gawain. I liked the fried chicken and cornbread and potato salad and greens we brought in from Piece o’ Chicken, a kitchen storefront near Ninth Avenue. I liked the matzo-ball soup we brought in from the Hotel Edison coffee shop.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  BEDE. (in Marc. i. 10) Even after working a miracle in that city, the Lord retires into the desert, to shew that He loves best a quiet life, and one far removed from the cares of the world, and that it is on account of this desire, He applied Himself to the healing of the body. CHAPTER 2 2:1–121. And again he entered into Capernaum after some days; and it was noised that he was in the house. 2. And straightway many were gathered together, insomuch that there was no room to receive them, no, not so much as about the door: and he preached the word unto them. 3. And they came unto him, bringing one sick of the palsy, which was borne of four. 4. And when they could not come nigh unto him for the press, they uncovered the roof where he was: and when they had broken it up, they let down the bed wherein the sick of the palsy lay. 5. When Jesus saw their faith, he said unto the sick of the palsy, Son, thy sins be forgiven thee. 6. But there were certain of the Scribes sitting there, and reasoning in their hearts, 7. Why doth this man thus speak blasphemies? who can forgive sins but God only? 8. And immediately when Jesus perceived in his spirit that they so reasoned within themselves, he said unto them, Why reason ye these things in your hearts? 9. Whether is it easier to say to the sick of the palsy, Thy sins be forgiven thee; or to say, Arise, and take up thy bed, and walk? 10. But that ye may know that the Son of man hath power on earth to forgive sins, (he saith to the sick of the palsy,) 11. I say unto thee, Arise, and take up thy bed, and go thy way into thine house. 12. And immediately he arose, took up the bed, and went forth before them all; insomuch that they were all amazed, and glorified God, saying, We never saw it on this fashion. BEDE. (in Marc. 1. 10) Because the compassion of God deserts not even carnal persons, He accords to them the grace of His presence, by which even they may be made spiritual. After the desert, the Lord returns into the city; wherefore it is said, And again he entered into Capernaum, &c.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  The other difficulty attaches to works of virtue as to interior acts: for instance, that a virtuous deed be done with promptitude and pleasure. It is this difficulty that virtue solves: because to act thus is difficult for a man without virtue: but through virtue it becomes easy for him. In this respect the precepts of the New Law are more burdensome than those of the Old; because the New Law prohibits certain interior movements of the soul, which were not expressly forbidden in the Old Law in all cases, although they were forbidden in some, without, however, any punishment being attached to the prohibition. Now this is very difficult to a man without virtue: thus even the Philosopher states (Ethic. v, 9) that it is easy to do what a righteous man does; but that to do it in the same way, viz. with pleasure and promptitude, is difficult to a man who is not righteous. Accordingly we read also (1 Jn. 5:3) that “His commandments are not heavy”: which words Augustine expounds by saying that “they are not heavy to the man that loveth; whereas they are a burden to him that loveth not.” Reply to Objection 1: The passage quoted speaks expressly of the difficulty of the New Law as to the deliberate curbing of interior movements. Reply to Objection 2: The tribulations suffered by those who observe the New Law are not imposed by the Law itself. Moreover they are easily borne, on account of the love in which the same Law consists: since, as Augustine says (De Verb. Dom., Serm. lxx), “love makes light and nothing of things that seem arduous and beyond our power.” Reply to Objection 3: The object of these additions to the precepts of the Old Law was to render it easier to do what it prescribed, as Augustine states [*De Serm. Dom. in Monte i, 17,21; xix, 23,26]. Accordingly this does not prove that the New Law is more burdensome, but rather that it is a lighter burden. OF THOSE THINGS THAT ARE CONTAINED IN THE NEW LAW (FOUR ARTICLES)We must now consider those things that are contained in the New Law: under which head there are four points of inquiry: (1) Whether the New Law ought to prescribe or to forbid any outward works? (2) Whether the New Law makes sufficient provision in prescribing and forbidding external acts? (3) Whether in the matter of internal acts it directs man sufficiently? (4) Whether it fittingly adds counsels to precepts?

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  Lou had been sober for the last few months. Ava had left him, not because of the boys, but because of the drugs and booze. He’d passed out in the corridor of his building. Neighbors (he didn’t know which) had dragged him into his apartment and left an Alcoholics Anonymous leaflet on his chest. He joined that day. His sponsor in A.A., an eighty-year-old crime novelist, told him that she thought shrinks were for shit. She said it was obvious to her that despite whatever psychological problems might have triggered his drinking (such as growing up in a totally alcoholic family), the disease was now self-perpetuating and created the problems it pretended to solve. When Lou told her that he was afraid sobriety would make him a square, she suggested he add a new vice to his life, one irrelevant to drink, but totally unacceptable. Lou had turned to prostitution. Although he was now earning over a hundred thousand dollars a year in advertising and was in his late thirties, he could still look like a dumb teenage drifter. After a full day of pitching a campaign, he’d change into a T-shirt and jeans right out of the dryer and a corny cowboy hat of the sort never seen west of Jersey. Then he’d stand, skinny and forlorn on Third Avenue and Fifty-first, and be picked up by married men in cars. I met him at the hotel just off Times Square. Our customers were already drunk and playing a tape of Beethoven’s Fifth they’d doctored with trippy insertions of Joni Mitchell’s talkative ballads. Lou and I knew who Joni Mitchell was, but we pretended we’d never heard of Beethoven. Our clients winked at each other over our heads. I had to put on a leather harness, stick a swan feather up my john’s ass, and call him “Pretty Peacock” as he strutted proudly about, cocking his head from side to side like a bird while wanking off in an all-too-human way. Fifty bucks for me and seventy for Lou who, after all, had organized the party. Afterward Lou and I drifted down toward the Village. We didn’t despise our johns. In fact, I was flattered that I’d been able to sell it at my advanced age (I was twenty-nine). I felt for now at last as though I were one of those tough guys I’d admired at Riis Park and here at the Stonewall. The night was hot. We gay guys had taken over all of Christopher Street; even the shops were gay. Although the bars were owned by the Mafia, we somehow thought of them as ours. Just as this street, this one street in a city of ten thousand streets, felt like ours. Of course, stories of police violence still circulated.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  That same morning Willie recommended to me a pension kept by a Mrs. Gregory, an Englishwoman, the wife of an old Baptist clergyman, who would take good care of me for four dollars a week. Immediately I went with him to see her and was delighted to find that she lived only about a hundred yards from Mrs. Mayhew on the opposite side of the street. Mrs. Gregory was a large, motherly woman evidently a lady, who had founded this boardinghouse to provide for a rather feckless husband and two children, a big pretty girl, Kate and a lad, a couple of years younger. Mrs. Gregory was delighted with my English accent, I believe, and showed me special favor at once by giving me a large outside room with its own entrance and steps into the garden. In an hour I had paid my bill at the Eldridge House and had moved in: I showed a shred of prudence by making Willie promise Mrs. Gregory that he would turn up each Saturday with the five dollars for my board; the dollar extra was for the big room. In due course I shall tell how he kept his promise and discharged his debt to me. For the moment everything was easily, happily settled. I went out and ordered a decent suit of ordinary tweeds and dressed myself up in my best blue suit to call upon Mrs. Mayhew after lunch. The clock crawled but on the stroke of three, I was at her door: a colored maid admitted me. “Mrs. Mayhew”, she said in her pretty singing voice, “will be down right soon: I’ll go call Miss Lily.” In five minutes Miss Lily appeared, a dark slip of a girl with shining black hair, wide laughing mouth, temperamental thick red lips and grey eyes fringed with black lashes: she had hardly time to speak to me when Mrs. Mayhew came in: “I hope you two’ll be great friends”, she said prettily; “you’re both about the same age” she added. In a few minutes Miss Lily was playing a waltz on the Steinway and with my arm round the slight, flexible waist of my inamorata I was trying to waltz. But alas! after a turn or two I became giddy and in spite of all my resolution had to admit that I should never be able to dance. “You have got very pale”, Mrs. Mayhew said, “you must sit down on the sofa a little while.” Slowly the giddiness left me: before I had entirely recovered Miss Lily with kindly words of sympathy had gone home and Mrs. Mayhew brought me in a cup of excellent coffee: I drank it down and was well at once.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  I’m compelled to notice that if I tell the other happenings in this eventful year at as great length as I’ve told the incidents of the fortnight that brought me from Chicago to the ranch at Eureka, I’d have to devote at least a volume to them, so I prefer to assure my readers that one of these days if I live, I’ll publish my novel “On the Trail” which gives the whole story in great detail. Now I shall content myself with saying that two days after reaching the ranch we set out, ten men strong and two wagons filled with our clothes and provender and dragged by four mules each, to cover the twelve hundred miles to Southern Texas or New Mexico where we hoped to buy 5000 or 6000 head of cattle at a dollar a head and drive them to Kansas City, the nearest train point. * * * * * When we got on the Great Trail a hundred miles from Fort Dodge, the days passed in absolute monotony. After sunset a light breeze usually sprang up to make the night pleasantly cool and we would sit and chat about the camp-fire for an hour or two. Strange to say the talk usually turned to bawd or religion or the relations of capital and labor. It was curious how eagerly these rough cattle-men would often discuss the mysteries of this unintelligible world, and as a militant sceptic I soon got a reputation among them; for Dell usually backed me up and his knowledge of books and thinkers seemed to us extraordinary. These constant evening discussions, this perpetual arguing, had an unimaginable effect on me. I had no books with me and I was often called on to deal with two or three different theories in a night: I had to think out the problems for myself and usually I thought them out when hunting by myself in the daytime. It was as a cowpuncher that I taught myself how to think:—a rare art among men and seldom practised. Whatever originality I possess comes from the fact that in youth, while my mind was in process of growth, I was confronted with important modern problems and forced to think them out for myself and find some reasonable answer to the questionings of half a dozen different minds.

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  He still came, almost daily, however, to spar or fence with my father. I would dash, with my fur coat half on, through the green drawing room (where an odor of fir, hot wax and tangerines would linger long after Christmas had gone), toward the library, from which came a medley of stamping and scraping sounds. There, I would find my father, a big, robust man, looking still bigger in his white training suit, thrusting and parrying, while his agile instructor added brisk exclamations (“Battez!” “Rompez!”) to the click-clink of the foils. Panting a little, my father would remove the convex fencing mask from his perspiring pink face to kiss me good morning. The place combined pleasantly the scholarly and the athletic, the leather of books and the leather of boxing gloves. Fat armchairs stood along the book-lined walls. An elaborate “punching ball” affair purchased in England—four steel posts supporting the board from which the pear-shaped striking bag hung—gleamed at the end of the spacious room. The purpose of this apparatus, especially in connection with the machine-gunlike ra-ta-ta of its bag, was questioned and the butler’s explanation of it reluctantly accepted as true, by some heavily armed street fighters who came in through the window in 1917. When the Soviet Revolution made it imperative for us to leave St. Petersburg, that library disintegrated, but queer little remnants of it kept cropping up abroad. Some twelve years later, in Berlin, I picked up from a bookstall one such waif, bearing my father’s ex libris. Very fittingly, it turned out to be The War of the Worlds by Wells. And after another decade had elapsed, I discovered one day in the New York Public Library, indexed under my father’s name, a copy of the neat catalogue he had had privately printed when the phantom books listed therein still stood, ruddy and sleek, on his shelves. 3He would replace his mask and go on with his stamping and lunging while I hurried back the way I had come. After the warmth in the entrance hall, where logs were crackling in the large fireplace, the outdoor air gave an icy shock to one’s lungs. I would ascertain which of our two cars, the Benz or the Wolseley, was there to take me to school. The first, a gray landaulet, manned by Volkov, a gentle, pale-faced chauffeur, was the older one. Its lines had seemed positively dynamic in comparison with those of the insipid, noseless and noiseless, electric coupé that had preceded it; but, in its turn, it acquired an old-fashioned, top-heavy look, with a sadly shrunken bonnet, as soon as the comparatively long, black English limousine came to share its garage.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  The Fremont House, Kendrick’s hotel was near the Michigan Street Depot. In those days when Chicago had barely 300,000 inhabitants, it was an hotel of the second class. Mr. Kendrick had told me that his uncle, a Mr. Cotton really owned the House, but left him the chief share in the management, adding “What uncle says, goes always.” In the course of time, I understood the nephew’s loyalty; for Mr. Cotton was really kindly and an able man of business. My duties as night-clerk were simple; from eight at night till six in the morning, I was master in the office and had to apportion bedrooms to the incoming guests and give bills and collect the monies due from the outgoing public. I set myself at once to learn the good and bad points of the hundred odd bedrooms in the house and the arrival and departure times of all the night trains. When guests came in, I met them at the entrance, found out what they wanted and told this or that porter or bellboy to take them to their rooms. However curt or irritable they were, I always tried to smooth them down and soon found I was succeeding. In a week Mr. Kendrick told me that he had heard golden opinions of me from a dozen visitors. “You have a dandy night-clerk,” he was told; “Spares no pains … pleasant manners … knows everything ... “_some_” clerk; yes, sir!” My experience in Chicago assured me that if one does his very best, he comes to success in business in a comparatively short time; so few do all they can. Going to bed at six, I was up every day at 1 o’clock for dinner as it was called and after dinner I got into the habit of going into the billiard-room at one end of which was a large bar. By five o’clock or so, the billiard-room was crowded and there was no one to superintend things, so I spoke to Mr. Kendrick about it and took the job on my own shoulders. I had little to do but induce newcomers to await their turn patiently and to mollify old customers who expected to find tables waiting for them. The result of a little courtesy and smiling promises was so marked that at the end of the very first month the bookkeeper, a man named Curtis, told me with a grin that I was to get sixty dollars a month and not forty dollars as I had supposed. Needless to say the extra pay simply quickened my desire to make myself useful. But now I found the way up barred by two superiors, the bookkeeper was one and the steward, a dry taciturn Westerner named Payne was the other. Payne bought everything and had control of the dining-room and waiters while Curtis ruled the office and the bell-boys. I was really under Curtis; but my control of the billiard-room gave me a sort of independent position.

• From Blue Nights (2011)

  As ways of maintaining momentum go this one turned out to be better than most: I remember liking the entire process a good deal. I liked the quiet afternoons backstage with the stage managers and electricians, I liked the way the ushers gathered for instructions downstairs just before the half-hour call. I liked the presence of Shubert security outside, I liked the weight of the stage door as I opened it against the wind through Shubert Alley, I liked the secret passages to and from the stage. I liked that Amanda, who ran the stage door at night, kept on her desk a tin of the cookies she baked. I liked that Lauri, who managed the Booth for the Shubert Organization and was doing graduate work in medieval literature, became our ultimate authority on a few lines in the play that involved Gawain. I liked the fried chicken and cornbread and potato salad and greens we brought in from Piece o’ Chicken, a kitchen storefront near Ninth Avenue. I liked the matzo-ball soup we brought in from the Hotel Edison coffee shop. I liked the place to sit we set up backstage, the little improvised table with the checked tablecloth and the electrified candle and the menu that read “Café Didion.” I liked watching the performance from a balcony above the lights. I liked being up there alone with the lights and the play. I liked it all, but most of all I liked the fact that although the play was entirely focused on Quintana there were, five evenings and two afternoons a week, these ninety full minutes, the run time of the play, during which she did not need to be dead. During which the question remained open. During which the denouement had yet to play out. During which the last scene played did not necessarily need to be played in the ICU overlooking the East River. During which the bells would not necessarily sound and the doors would not necessarily be locked at six. During which the last dialogue heard did not necessarily need to concern the vent. Like when someone dies, don’t dwell on it. 31On the evening late in August when the play closed Vanessa took the yellow roses provided for her curtain calls and laid them on the stage, beneath the photograph of John and Quintana on the deck in Malibu that was the closing drop of the set Bob Crowley had designed for the production. The theater cleared. I was gratified to see how slowly it cleared, as if the audience shared my wish not to leave John and Quintana alone. We stood in the wings and drank champagne. Before I left that evening someone pointed out the yellow roses Vanessa had laid on the stage floor and asked if I wanted to take them. I did not want to take the yellow roses. I did not want the yellow roses touched.

• From I'm Not a Mourning Person (2023)

  You won’t lose yourself, or if you do (temporarily), it’s because you needed to process what wasn’t working in order to heal. Now, this doesn’t mean that you’ll be over the situation—the loss of your job, your health, or a loved one. Or that you condone any abuse or betrayal. It just means that you’re willing to be restored so that you can carry on “with your one wild and precious life,” as the poet Mary Oliver would say. CHAPTER 6 ACCEPTANCE The boundary to what we can accept is the boundary of our freedom. — TARA BRACH If the word acceptance makes you feel uncomfortable or defeated, you’re not alone. Years ago, I remember hanging out backstage before delivering a keynote at a wellness conference when another speaker leaned over and asked me what the subject of my talk was. “The healing power of acceptance,” I cheerfully shared. She paused. “Oh. So you teach people how to give up?” she asked, with a furrowed brow. Ugh. There was a reason I’d chosen this topic, hoping to untangle common misconceptions about acceptance with my audience (and now here with you). Before we dive into acceptance and how it can help us in difficult times, let’s clear up a few things. Acceptance isn’t giving up, settling, or denying the situation. Acceptance isn’t being hunky-dory about what happened, either. As it relates to grief and loss, acceptance is about recognizing that life has changed, and we can no longer go back to what was. While we don’t have to like it, here we are in a newly emerging reality. Acceptance helps us find a way forward that honors our unique journey and well-being. Acceptance isn’t passive; it’s defiant. It’s a way to rebel against shutting down, living in a destructive fantasyland, or losing hope. In a world that encourages quick fixes and black-and-white thinking, acceptance teaches us the expansive and revolutionary power of embracing the gray and all that comes with it. If you can do that, you can do anything, my friend. Think about it. When we spend all our time fighting or avoiding what is, we waste a lot of valuable energy—energy that could be channeled in a more fulfilling and productive direction. By accepting something challenging, we become more willing to roll up our sleeves and work with what we’ve got, as opposed to just sitting and stewing over the way we think things should be. Like it or not, life won’t always be sunny. It’s not supposed to be. Yuck, I know! In our society, especially in the United States, there’s a relentless emphasis on the many ways to find happiness by chasing something “out there.” Sell your house and move overseas, lose 20 pounds and become a YouTuber, get thee to an ashram so you can find your bliss, hustle to conquer another brag-worthy achievement, and so on.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  Objection 3: The more one has to do, the more difficult it is. But the New Law is something added to the Old. For the Old Law forbade perjury, while the New Law proscribed even swearing: the Old Law forbade a man to cast off his wife without a bill of divorce, while the New Law forbade divorce altogether; as is clearly stated in Mat. 5:31, seqq., according to Augustine’s expounding. Therefore the New Law is more burdensome than the Old. On the contrary, It is written (Mat. 11:28): “Come to Me, all you that labor and are burdened”: which words are expounded by Hilary thus: “He calls to Himself all those that labor under the difficulty of observing the Law, and are burdened with the sins of this world.” And further on He says of the yoke of the Gospel: “For My yoke is sweet and My burden light.” Therefore the New Law is a lighter burden than the Old. I answer that, A twofold difficult may attach to works of virtue with which the precepts of the Law are concerned. One is on the part of the outward works, which of themselves are, in a way, difficult and burdensome. And in this respect the Old Law is a much heavier burden than the New: since the Old Law by its numerous ceremonies prescribed many more outward acts than the New Law, which, in the teaching of Christ and the apostles, added very few precepts to those of the natural law; although afterwards some were added, through being instituted by the holy Fathers. Even in these Augustine says that moderation should be observed, lest good conduct should become a burden to the faithful. For he says in reply to the queries of Januarius (Ep. lv) that, “whereas God in His mercy wished religion to be a free service rendered by the public solemnization of a small number of most manifest sacraments, certain persons make it a slave’s burden; so much so that the state of the Jews who were subject to the sacraments of the Law, and not to the presumptuous devices of man, was more tolerable.”

• From Blue Nights (2011)

  The thought of an unstructured encounter between Arcelia and a State of California social worker had presented spectral concerns from the outset, imagined scenarios that kept me awake at four in the morning and only multiplied as the date of the visit approached: what if the social worker were to notice that Arcelia spoke only Spanish? What if the social worker were to happen into the question of Arcelia’s papers? What would the social worker put in her report if she divined that I was entrusting the perfect baby to an undocumented alien? The social worker remarked, in English, on the fine weather. I tensed, fearing a trap . Arcelia smiled, beatific, and continued watering. I relaxed. At which point Arcelia, no longer beatific but dramatic, flung the hose across the lawn and snatched up Quintana, screaming “Víbora!” The social worker lived in Los Angeles, she had to know what víbora meant, víbora in Los Angeles meant snake and snake in Los Angeles meant rattlesnake. I was relatively certain that the rattlesnake was a fantasy but I nonetheless guided Arcelia and Quintana inside, then turned to the social worker. It’s a game, I lied. Arcelia pretends she sees a snake. We all laugh. Because you can see. There is no snake. There could be no snake in Quintana Roo’s garden. Only later did I see that I had been raising her as a doll. She would never have faulted me for that. She would have seen it as a logical response to my having been handed, out of the blue at St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica, the beautiful baby girl, herself. At the house after her christening at St. Martin of Tours Catholic Church in Brentwood we had watercress sandwiches and champagne and later, for anyone still around at dinner time, fried chicken. The house we were renting that spring belonged to Sara Mankiewicz, Herman Mankiewicz’s widow, who was traveling for six months, and although she had packed away the china she did not want used along with Herman Mankiewicz’s Academy Award for Citizen Kane (you’ll have friends over, she had said, they’ll get drunk, they’ll want to play with it) she had left out her Minton dinner plates, the same pattern as the Minton tiles that line the arcade south of Bethesda Fountain in Central Park, for me to use. I had not used the Minton dinner plates before the christening but I put them on a buffet table that night for the fried chicken.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  Reply to Objection 3: Peace gives calm and unity to the appetite. Now just as the appetite may tend to what is good simply, or to what is good apparently, so too, peace may be either true or apparent. There can be no true peace except where the appetite is directed to what is truly good, since every evil, though it may appear good in a way, so as to calm the appetite in some respect, has, nevertheless many defects, which cause the appetite to remain restless and disturbed. Hence true peace is only in good men and about good things. The peace of the wicked is not a true peace but a semblance thereof, wherefore it is written (Wis. 14:22): “Whereas they lived in a great war of ignorance, they call so many and so great evils peace.” Reply to Objection 4: Since true peace is only about good things, as the true good is possessed in two ways, perfectly and imperfectly, so there is a twofold true peace. One is perfect peace. It consists in the perfect enjoyment of the sovereign good, and unites all one’s desires by giving them rest in one object. This is the last end of the rational creature, according to Ps. 147:3: “Who hath placed peace in thy borders.” The other is imperfect peace, which may be had in this world, for though the chief movement of the soul finds rest in God, yet there are certain things within and without which disturb the peace. Whether peace is the proper effect of charity?Objection 1: It would seem that peace is not the proper effect of charity. For one cannot have charity without sanctifying grace. But some have peace who have not sanctifying grace, thus heathens sometimes have peace. Therefore peace is not the effect of charity. Objection 2: Further, if a certain thing is caused by charity, its contrary is not compatible with charity. But dissension, which is contrary to peace, is compatible with charity, for we find that even holy doctors, such as Jerome and Augustine, dissented in some of their opinions. We also read that Paul and Barnabas dissented from one another (Acts 15). Therefore it seems that peace is not the effect of charity. Objection 3: Further, the same thing is not the proper effect of different things. Now peace is the effect of justice, according to Is. 32:17: “And the work of justice shall be peace.” Therefore it is not the effect of charity. On the contrary, It is written (Ps. 118:165): “Much peace have they that love Thy Law.”

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  The toilets were separate from the bathrooms, and the oldest among them was a rather sumptuous but gloomy affair with some fine panelwork and a tasseled rope of red velvet, which, when pulled, produced a beautifully modulated, discreetly muffled gurgle and gulp. From that corner of the house, one could see Hesperus and hear the nightingales, and it was there that, later, I used to compose my youthful verse, dedicated to unembraced beauties, and morosely survey, in a dimly illuminated mirror, the immediate erection of a strange castle in an unknown Spain. As a small child, however, I was assigned a more modest arrangement, rather casually situated in a narrow recess between a wicker hamper and the door leading to the nursery bathroom. This door I liked to keep ajar; through it I drowsily looked at the shimmer of steam above the mahogany bath, at the fantastic flotilla of swans and skiffs, at myself with a harp in one of the boats, at a furry moth pinging against the reflector of the kerosene lamp, at the stained-glass window beyond, at its two halberdiers consisting of colored rectangles. Bending from my warm seat, I liked to press the middle of my brow, its ophryon to be precise, against the smooth comfortable edge of the door and then roll my head a little, so that the door would move to and fro while its edge remained all the time in soothing contact with my forehead. A dreamy rhythm would permeate my being. The recent “Step, step, step,” would be taken up by a dripping faucet. And, fruitfully combining rhythmic pattern with rhythmic sound, I would unravel the labyrinthian frets on the linoleum, and find faces where a crack or a shadow afforded a point de repère for the eye. I appeal to parents: never, never say, “Hurry up,” to a child.

• From The Surprising Lives of Christian Saints Course Guidebook (2023)

  21. Padre Pio: The Science of Miracles 162 had planned a march, alongside which there was a counterdemonstration. Weapons were brandished, two bombs went off, and troops fired on the Socialists, killing 11 farm workers. Shortly afterward, Giuseppe Caradonna, a decorated veteran and activist and the first Fascist deputy elected in the south of Italy, made a special visit to San Giovanni Rotondo. One of Padre Pio’s devoted followers invited him to visit the friar, who gave Caradonna a warm welcome. It’s unclear whether Pio fully understood the political implications of the relationship. Their meeting inspired more than a personal connection between the two men. From then on, a veritable Fascist guard was mounted outside the monastery. They proved such a menacing threat that both church and civic authorities were dissuaded, again and again, from plans to move Padre Pio to another region of the country. Pio’s Hospital and Later Years In the postwar years, Padre Pio turned his attentions to fundraising. His modest clinic, founded in the 1920s, was now to become a modern hospital—the first in the Gargano peninsula. Southern Italy was in desperate need of renewed public health initiatives. The United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration was convinced to devote substantial sums of money to supplement the gifts of the faithful. Construction took 9 years, and when it was complete, the five-story hospital towered above the monastery. While under construction, it was referred to as the Fiorello La Guardia Clinic, after the New York mayor and former UNRR A director general whose ancestors had emigrated from Apulia and whose supporters were instrumental in directing the funds to San Giovanni. It has been known ever since as the Casa Sollievo della Sofferenza. Interestingly, the hospital also presented a conundrum: Who was to own its shares? Rather than allocating it to a congregation of lay Franciscans, Padre Pio requested that he be absolved of his vow of poverty in order to control and own the hospital directly, and his request was granted. 163 21. Padre Pio: The Science of Miracles