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 The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  Now is the time, if ever, once and for all, to alter the patterns of isolation. Remember that nice lady down the street whose son you used to cross at the light and who was always saying, “Now if there’s ever anything I can do for you, just let me know.” Well, her boy’s got strong muscles and the lawn needs mowing. I am not ashamed to let my friends know I need their collective spirit—not to make me live forever, but rather to help me move through the life I have. But I refuse to spend the rest of that life mourning what I do not have. If living as a poet—living on the front lines—has ever had meaning, it has meaning now. Living a self-conscious life, vulnerability as armor. I spend time every day meditating upon my physical self in battle, visualizing the actual war going on inside my body. As I move through the other parts of each day, that battle often merges with particular external campaigns, both political and personal. The devastations of apartheid in South Africa and racial murder in Howard Beach feel as critical to me as cancer. Among my other daily activities I incorporate brief periods of physical self-monitoring without hysteria. I attend the changes within my body, anointing myself with healing light. Sometimes I have to do it while sitting on the Staten Island Ferry on my way home, surrounded by snapping gum and dirty rubber boots, all of which I banish from my consciousness. I am learning to reduce stress in my practical everyday living. It’s nonsense, however, to believe that any Black woman who is living an informed life in america can possibly abolish stress totally from her life without becoming psychically deaf, mute, and blind. ( News item: Unidentified Black man found hanging from a tree in Central Park with hands and feet bound. New York City police call it a suicide. ) I am learning to balance stress with periods of rest and restoration. I juggle the technologies of eastern medicine with the holistic approach of anthroposophy with the richness of my psychic life, beautifully and womanfully nourished by people I love and who love me. Balancing them all. Knowing over and over again how blessed I am in my life, my loves, my children; how blessed I am in being able to give myself to work in which I passionately believe. And yes, some days I wish to heaven to Mawu to Seboulisa to Tiamat daughter of chaos that it could all have been easier. But I wake in an early morning to see the sun rise over the tenements of Brooklyn across the bay, fingering through the wintered arms of the raintree Frances and I planted as a thin stick seventeen years ago, and I cannot possibly imagine trading my life for anyone else’s, no matter how near termination that life may be. Living fully—how long is not the point. How and why take total precedence.

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  In the summer of 1953, at a ranch near Portal, Arizona, at a rented house in Ashland, Oregon, and at various motels in the West and Midwest, I managed, between butterfly-hunting and writing Lolita and Pnin, to translate Speak, Memory, with the help of my wife, into Russian. Because of the psychological difficulty of replaying a theme elaborated in my Dar (The Gift), I omitted one entire chapter (Eleven). On the other hand, I revised many passages and tried to do something about the amnesic defects of the original—blank spots, blurry areas, domains of dimness. I discovered that sometimes, by means of intense concentration, the neutral smudge might be forced to come into beautiful focus so that the sudden view could be identified, and the anonymous servant named. For the present, final, edition of Speak, Memory I have not only introduced basic changes and copious additions into the initial English text, but have availed myself of the corrections I made while turning it into Russian. This re-Englishing of a Russian re-version of what had been an English re-telling of Russian memories in the first place, proved to be a diabolical task, but some consolation was given me by the thought that such multiple metamorphosis, familiar to butterflies, had not been tried by any human before. Among the anomalies of a memory, whose possessor and victim should never have tried to become an autobiographer, the worst is the inclination to equate in retrospect my age with that of the century. This has led to a series of remarkably consistent chronological blunders in the first version of this book. I was born in April 1899, and naturally, during the first third of, say, 1903, was roughly three years old; but in August of that year, the sharp “3” revealed to me (as described in “Perfect Past”) should refer to the century’s age, not to mine, which was “4” and as square and resilient as a rubber pillow. Similarly, in the early summer of 1906—the summer I began to collect butterflies—I was seven and not six as stated initially in the catastrophic second paragraph of Chapter 6. Mnemosyne, one must admit, has shown herself to be a very careless girl.

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  By then, an excellent modern court had been built at the end of the “new” part of the park by skilled workmen imported from Poland for that purpose. The wire mesh of an ample enclosure separated it from the flowery meadow that framed its clay. After a damp night the surface acquired a brownish gloss and the white lines would be repainted with liquid chalk from a green pail by Dmitri, the smallest and oldest of our gardeners, a meek, black-booted, red-shirted dwarf slowly retreating, all hunched up, as his paintbrush went down the line. A pea-tree hedge (the “yellow acacia” of northern Russia), with a midway opening, corresponding to the court’s screen door, ran parallel to the enclosure and to a path dubbed tropinka Sfinksov (“path of the Sphingids”) because of the hawkmoths visiting at dusk the fluffy lilacs along the border that faced the hedge and likewise broke in the middle. This path formed the bar of a great T whose vertical was the alley of slender oaks, my mother’s coevals, that traversed (as already said) the new park through its entire length. Looking down that avenue from the base of the T near the drive one could make out quite distinctly the bright little gap five hundred yards away—or fifty years away from where I am now. Our current tutor or my father, when he stayed with us in the country, invariably had my brother for partner in our temperamental family doubles. “Play!” my mother would cry in the old manner as she put her little foot forward and bent her white-hatted head to ladle out an assiduous but feeble serve. I got easily cross with her, and she, with the ballboys, two barefooted peasant lads (Dmitri’s pug-nosed grandson and the twin brother of pretty Polenka, the head coachman’s daughter). The northern summer became tropical around harvest time. Scarlet Sergey would stick his racket between his knees and laboriously wipe his glasses. I see my butterfly net propped against the enclosure—just in case. Wallis Myers’ book on lawn tennis lies open on a bench, and after every exchange my father (a first-rate player, with a cannonball service of the Frank Riseley type and a beautiful “lifting drive”) pedantically inquires of my brother and me whether the “follow-through,” that state of grace, has descended upon us. And sometimes a prodigious cloudburst would cause us to huddle under a shelter at the corner of the court while old Dmitri would be sent to fetch umbrellas and raincoats from the house. A quarter of an hour later he would reappear under a mountain of clothing in the vista of the long avenue which as he advanced would regain its leopard spots with the sun blazing anew and his huge burden unneeded.

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

  Unlike Karen, who wrestled over the decision to have a child, Gary took marriage and fatherhood totally for granted. The fact that his mother and father had troubles in their marriage in no way affected his decision to have children of his own. Indeed, this is one of the major differences between those raised in good or “good enough” intact families like Gary’s and children of divorce. 1 Gary and his peers felt that becoming parents was a natural step and discussed having children as part of their courtship. They knew that their parents wanted to be grandparents and were happy to oblige them. But in another respect, Karen and Gary were very much alike as parents. Their children were central to the marriage. They wanted what was best for their children and were willing to make sacrifices on their behalf. For example, Gary explained that he got an offer from a national chain to buy out the family hardware store. The deal meant he’d make a lot more money, but he’d have to relocate the family to company headquarters in Seattle. “That’s a very nice city and a really good offer but I said no,” he explained. “It wasn’t because of me or even Sara. We would have enjoyed a big rise in our standard of living. And we would have stayed close enough to my folks and hers to see them pretty often. But I wanted the stability for my children that I enjoyed as a child. I want them to feel that they have roots. I still feel like I have two homes—ours and my folks’.” I heard several similar stories from children of divorce who turned down career opportunities if it meant moving the children away from their familiar surroundings. For example, Jonathan was a rising star in cancer research who turned down an offer from Harvard University because his school-age children were well settled in their California suburb and he didn’t want to disrupt their lives. “You have to know your priorities,” he told me. In thinking about these stories, I realized that the family home is a symbol for both children of divorce and children raised in intact families—but for different reasons. For one it’s a symbol of continuity. For the other it’s a symbol of what has been lost. For those raised in intact families, the childhood home is a symbol of family history. It’s the storehouse of good, bad, funny, and bitter memories—a place children can leave when they feel ready and know it will be there when they come back. Considering how much Americans move around, it’s interesting that the family home has retained its traditional meaning for these young people and that a couple like Gary and Sara were willing to make sacrifices to preserve it. I found it interesting that adults raised in intact families recognized the importance of stability for them and their children.

• 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 Speak, Memory (1966)

  Owing to the limited circulation of their works abroad, even the older generation of émigré writers, whose fame had been solidly established in pre-Revolution Russia, could not hope that their books would make a living for them. Writing a weekly column for an émigré paper was never quite sufficient to keep body and pen together. Now and then translations into other languages brought in an unexpected scoop; but, otherwise, grants from various émigré organizations, earnings from public readings and lavish private charity were responsible for prolonging elderly authors’ lives. Younger, less known but more adaptable writers supplemented chance subsidies by engaging in various jobs. I remember teaching English and tennis. Patiently I thwarted the persistent knack Berlin businessmen had of pronouncing “business” so as to rhyme with “dizziness”; and like a slick automaton, under the slow-moving clouds of a long summer day, on dusty courts, I ladled ball after ball over the net to their tanned, bob-haired daughters. I got five dollars (quite a sum during the inflation in Germany) for my Russian Alice in Wonderland. I helped compile a Russian grammar for foreigners in which the first exercise began with the words Madam, ya doktor, vot banan (Madam, I am the doctor, here is a banana). Best of all, I used to compose for a daily émigré paper, the Berlin Rul’, the first Russian crossword puzzles, which I baptized krestoslovitsï. I find it strange to recall that freak existence. Deeply beloved of blurbists is the list of more or less earthy professions that a young author (writing about Life and Ideas—which are so much more important, of course, than mere “art”) has followed: newspaper boy, soda jerk, monk, wrestler, foreman in a steel mill, bus driver and so on. Alas, none of these callings has been mine.

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  She loved all games of skill and gambling. Under her expert hands, the thousand bits of a jigsaw puzzle gradually formed an English hunting scene; what had seemed to be the limb of a horse would turn out to belong to an elm and the hitherto unplaceable piece would snugly fill up a gap in the mottled background, affording one the delicate thrill of an abstract and yet tactile satisfaction. At one time, she was very fond of poker, which had reached St. Petersburg society via diplomatic circles, so that some of the combinations came with pretty French names—brelan for “three of a kind,” couleur for “flush,” and so on. The game in use was the regular “draw poker,” with, occasionally, the additional tingle of jackpots and an omnivicarious joker. In town, she often played poker at the houses of friends until three in the morning, a society recreation in the last years before World War One; and later, in exile, she used to imagine (with the same wonder and dismay with which she recalled old Dmitri) the chauffeur Pirogov who still seemed to be waiting for her in the relentless frost of an unending night, although, in his case, rum-laced tea in a hospitable kitchen must have gone a long way to assuage those vigils. One of her greatest pleasures in summer was the very Russian sport of hodit’ po gribï (looking for mushrooms). Fried in butter and thickened with sour cream, her delicious finds appeared regularly on the dinner table. Not that the gustatory moment mattered much. Her main delight was in the quest, and this quest had its rules. Thus, no agarics were taken; all she picked were species belonging to the edible section of the genus Boletus (tawny edulis, brown scaber, red aurantiacus, and a few close allies), called “tube mushrooms” by some and coldly defined by mycologists as “terrestrial, fleshy, putrescent, centrally stipitate fungi.” Their compact pilei—tight-fitting in infant plants, robust and appetizingly domed in ripe ones—have a smooth (not lamellate) under-surface and a neat, strong stem. In classical simplicity of form, boletes differ considerably from the “true mushroom,” with its preposterous gills and effete stipal ring. It is, however, to the latter, to the lowly and ugly agarics, that nations with timorous taste buds limit their knowledge and appetite, so that to the Anglo-American lay mind the aristocratic boletes are, at best, reformed toadstools.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  Besides, if I really wanted hot dogs or anything croquettes badly enough, I could steal some money from my father’s pocket and buy them in the school lunch[room]. “Mother, let’s have souse,” I’d say, and never even stop to think about it. The anticipated taste of the soft spicy meat had become inseparable in my mind from the tactile pleasures of using my mother’s mortar. “But what makes you think anybody can find time to mash up all that stuff?” my mother would cut her hawk-grey eyes at me from beneath their heavy black brows. “Among you children never stop to think, you know,” and she’d turn back to whatever it was she had been doing. If she had just come from the office with my father, she might be checking the day’s receipts, or she might be washing the endless piles of dirty linen that always seemed to issue from the rooming houses they managed. “Oh, I’ll pound the garlic, Mommy!” would be my next line in the script written by some ancient and secret hand, and off I’d go to the cabinet to get down the heavy wooden mortar and pestle. I would get a head of garlic out from the garlic bottle in the icebox, and breaking off ten or twelve cloves from the head, I would carefully peel away the tissue lavender skin, slicing each stripped peg in half lengthwise. Then I would drop them piece by piece into the capacious waiting bowl of the mortar. Taking a slice from a small onion, I would put the rest aside, to be used later on over the meat, and cutting the slice into quarters, I would toss it into the mortar also. Next came the coarsely ground fresh black pepper, and then a lavish blanketing cover of salt over the whole. Last, if we had any, a few leaves from the top of a head of celery would be thrown in. My mother would sometimes add a slice of green pepper to be mashed in also, but I did not like the textures of the pepper skin under the pestle, and preferred to add it along with the sliced onion later on, leaving it all to sit over the seasoned and resting meat. 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.

• From Heptaméron (1559)

  The gentleman, who thought it a pretty good bar- gain, paid him forthwith a ducat for the horse, and then the remainder for the cat, and had his two purchases taken home. The man, on his side, went off with the money to his mistress, who was delighted to get it, and failed not to bestow on the poor Mendicants, according to her husband's intentions, the ducat for which the horse had been sold, and kept the rest to provide for her own wants and those of her family. Don't you think she was wiser than her husband, and did she not take more care of the fortune of her family than of his conscience } " I believe she loved her husband," said Parlamente ; "but seeing that most men wander in their wits on their death-bed, and knowing his intentions, she interpreted them to the advantage of her children ; and in this, I think, she showed laudable prudence." " Do you not think it a great fault," said Geburon, " to contravene the last wishes of our deceased friends .■" " "A very great one," replied Parlamente, "when the testator is in his sound senses, and not raving." "Do you call it raving," returned Geburon, "to bC' queath one's property to the Church and to the poor Mendicants .-* " 29 45 o THE HEPTAMERON OF 7 HE [A'oi'e/ 5^. " I do not call it raving," she answered, " to give to the poor what God has given to us ; but to give awa\' as alms what belongs to another appears to me no great proof of good sense. How commonly you see the great- est usurers in the world erecting the finest and most sumptuous chapels, as thinking to make their peace with God for a hundred thousand ducats' worth of robbery by ten thousand ducats' worth of building, just as though God did not know how to count."

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  Rainy weather would bring out these beautiful plants in profusion under the firs, birches and aspens in our park, especially in its older part, east of the carriage road that divided the park in two. Its shady recesses would then harbor that special boletic reek which makes a Russian’s nostrils dilate—a dark, dank, satisfying blend of damp moss, rich earth, rotting leaves. But one had to poke and peer for a goodish while among the wet underwood before something really nice, such as a family of bonneted baby edulis or the marbled variety of scaber, could be discovered and carefully teased out of the soil. On overcast afternoons, all alone in the drizzle, my mother, carrying a basket (stained blue on the inside by somebody’s whortleberries), would set out on a long collecting tour. Toward dinnertime, she could be seen emerging from the nebulous depths of a park alley, her small figure cloaked and hooded in greenish-brown wool, on which countless droplets of moisture made a kind of mist all around her. As she came nearer from under the dripping trees and caught sight of me, her face would show an odd, cheerless expression, which might have spelled poor luck, but which I knew was the tense, jealously contained beatitude of the successful hunter. Just before reaching me, with an abrupt, drooping movement of the arm and shoulder and a “Pouf!” of magnified exhaustion, she would let her basket sag, in order to stress its weight, its fabulous fullness. Near a white garden bench, on a round garden table of iron, she would lay out her boletes in concentric circles to count and sort them. Old ones, with spongy, dingy flesh, would be eliminated, leaving the young and the crisp. For a moment, before they were bundled away by a servant to a place she knew nothing about, to a doom that did not interest her, she would stand there admiring them, in a glow of quiet contentment. As often happened at the end of a rainy day, the sun might cast a lurid gleam just before setting, and there, on the damp round table, her mushrooms would lie, very colorful, some bearing traces of extraneous vegetation—a grass blade sticking to a viscid fawn cap, or moss still clothing the bulbous base of a dark-stippled stem. And a tiny looper caterpillar would be there, too, measuring, like a child’s finger and thumb, the rim of the table, and every now and then stretching upward to grope, in vain, for the shrub from which it had been dislodged.

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  Once, in 1908 or 1909, Uncle Ruka became engrossed in some French children’s books that he had come upon in our house; with an ecstatic moan, he found a passage he had loved in his childhood, beginning: “Sophie n’était pas jolie …” and many years later, my moan echoed his, when I rediscovered, in a chance nursery, those same “Bibliothèque Rose” volumes, with their stories about boys and girls who led in France an idealized version of the vie de château which my family led in Russia. The stories themselves (all those Les Malheurs de Sophie, Les Petites Filles Modèles, Les Vacances) are, as I see them now, an awful combination of preciosity and vulgarity; but in writing them the sentimental and smug Mme de Ségur, née Rostopchine, was Frenchifying the authentic surroundings of her Russian childhood which preceded mine by exactly one century. In my own case, when I come over Sophie’s troubles again—her lack of eyebrows and love of thick cream—I not only go through the same agony and delight that my uncle did, but have to cope with an additional burden—the recollection I have of him, reliving his childhood with the help of those very books. I see again my schoolroom in Vyra, the blue roses of the wallpaper, the open window. Its reflection fills the oval mirror above the leathern couch where my uncle sits, gloating over a tattered book. A sense of security, of well-being, of summer warmth pervades my memory. That robust reality makes a ghost of the present. The mirror brims with brightness; a bumblebee has entered the room and bumps against the ceiling. Everything is as it should be, nothing will ever change, nobody will ever die. [image file=image_rsrc133.jpg] Dmitri Nikolaevich Nabokov, the author’s grandfather (1827–1904), Minister of Justice (1878–1885). [image file=image_rsrc134.jpg] The author’s paternal grandmother, Baroness Maria von Korff (1842–1926) in the late eighteen-fifties. 41THE kind of Russian family to which I belonged—a kind now extinct—had, among other virtues, a traditional leaning toward the comfortable products of Anglo-Saxon civilization. Pears’ Soap, tar-black when dry, topaz-like when held to the light between wet fingers, took care of one’s morning bath. Pleasant was the decreasing weight of the English collapsible tub when it was made to protrude a rubber underlip and disgorge its frothy contents into the slop pail. “We could not improve the cream, so we improved the tube,” said the English toothpaste. At breakfast, Golden Syrup imported from London would entwist with its glowing coils the revolving spoon from which enough of it had slithered onto a piece of Russian bread and butter. All sorts of snug, mellow things came in a steady procession from the English Shop on Nevski Avenue: fruitcakes, smelling salts, playing cards, picture puzzles, striped blazers, talcum-white tennis balls.

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  She loved all games of skill and gambling. Under her expert hands, the thousand bits of a jigsaw puzzle gradually formed an English hunting scene; what had seemed to be the limb of a horse would turn out to belong to an elm and the hitherto unplaceable piece would snugly fill up a gap in the mottled background, affording one the delicate thrill of an abstract and yet tactile satisfaction. At one time, she was very fond of poker, which had reached St. Petersburg society via diplomatic circles, so that some of the combinations came with pretty French names—brelan for “three of a kind,” couleur for “flush,” and so on. The game in use was the regular “draw poker,” with, occasionally, the additional tingle of jackpots and an omnivicarious joker. In town, she often played poker at the houses of friends until three in the morning, a society recreation in the last years before World War One; and later, in exile, she used to imagine (with the same wonder and dismay with which she recalled old Dmitri) the chauffeur Pirogov who still seemed to be waiting for her in the relentless frost of an unending night, although, in his case, rum-laced tea in a hospitable kitchen must have gone a long way to assuage those vigils. One of her greatest pleasures in summer was the very Russian sport of hodit’ po gribï (looking for mushrooms). Fried in butter and thickened with sour cream, her delicious finds appeared regularly on the dinner table. Not that the gustatory moment mattered much. Her main delight was in the quest, and this quest had its rules. Thus, no agarics were taken; all she picked were species belonging to the edible section of the genus Boletus (tawny edulis, brown scaber, red aurantiacus, and a few close allies), called “tube mushrooms” by some and coldly defined by mycologists as “terrestrial, fleshy, putrescent, centrally stipitate fungi.” Their compact pilei—tight-fitting in infant plants, robust and appetizingly domed in ripe ones—have a smooth (not lamellate) under-surface and a neat, strong stem. In classical simplicity of form, boletes differ considerably from the “true mushroom,” with its preposterous gills and effete stipal ring. It is, however, to the latter, to the lowly and ugly agarics, that nations with timorous taste buds limit their knowledge and appetite, so that to the Anglo-American lay mind the aristocratic boletes are, at best, reformed toadstools.

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

  “What’s the matter with her?” I asked, and the Indian told me she had rubbed her ear raw where it joins the head and the flies had got on it and plagued her: I went to the house and got Peggy, the mulatto cook to fill a bucket with warm water and with this bucket and a sponge I entered the loose box: Blue Devil came for me and nipped my shoulder but as soon as I clapped the sponge with warm water on her ear, she stopped biting and we soon became friends. That same afternoon, I led her out in front of the ranch saddled and bridled, got on her and walked her off as quiet as a lamb. “She’s yours!” said Reece; “but if she ever gets your foot in her mouth, you’ll know what pain is!” It appeared that that was a little trick she had, to tug and tug at the reins till the rider let them go loose and then at once she would twist her head round, get the rider’s toes in her mouth and bite like a fiend. No one she disliked could mount her; for she fought like a man with her fore-feet; but I never had any difficulty with her and she saved my life more than once. Like most feminine creatures she responded immediately to kindness and was faithful to affection. * * * 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.

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  4In our childhood we know a lot about hands since they live and hover at the level of our stature; Mademoiselle’s were unpleasant because of the froggy gloss on their tight skin besprinkled with brown ecchymotic spots. Before her time no stranger had ever stroked my face. Mademoiselle, as soon as she came, had taken me completely aback by patting my cheek in sign of spontaneous affection. All her mannerisms come back to me when I think of her hands. Her trick of peeling rather than sharpening a pencil, the point held toward her stupendous and sterile bosom swathed in green wool. The way she had of inserting her little finger into her ear and vibrating it very rapidly. The ritual observed every time she gave me a fresh copybook. Always panting a little, her mouth slightly open and emitting in quick succession a series of asthmatic puffs, she would open the copybook to make a margin in it; that is, she would sharply imprint a vertical line with her thumbnail, fold in the edge of the page, press, release, smooth it out with the heel of her hand, after which the book would be briskly twisted around and placed before me ready for use. A new pen followed; she would moisten the glistening nib with susurrous lips before dipping it into the baptismal ink font. Then, delighting in every limb of every limpid letter (especially so because the preceding copybook had ended in utter sloppiness), with exquisite care I would inscribe the word Dictée while Mademoiselle hunted through her collection of spelling tests for a good, hard passage. 5Meanwhile the setting has changed. The berimed tree and the high snowdrift with its xanthic hole have been removed by a silent property man. The summer afternoon is alive with steep clouds breasting the blue. Eyed shadows move on the garden paths. Presently, lessons are over and Mademoiselle is reading to us on the veranda where the mats and plaited chairs develop a spicy, biscuity smell in the heat. On the white window ledges, on the long window seats covered with faded calico, the sun breaks into geometrical gems after passing through rhomboids and squares of stained glass. This is the time when Mademoiselle is at her very best.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  I take a one-and-a-half-hour class daily in curative eurhythmy with a tiny East Indian woman named Dilnawaz who was raised in Rudolf Steiner schools in India, trained in Germany, and speaks fluent English and German as well as her native tongue. Eurhythmy is a combination of sustained rhythmical body movements and controlled breathing, based upon vowel and consonant sounds. As I learn and practice the stylized movements, they remind me of tai chi and feel like a complement to the Simonton visualization work I’ve been doing for a while. My body feels relaxed and good after eurhythmy, and my mind, too. There is a part of me that wants to dismiss everything here other than Iscador as irrelevant or at least not useful to me, even before I try it, but I think that is very narrow and counterproductive and I don’t want to do it. At least not without first giving myself fully to it, because that is why I came all this way and what do I have to lose at this point? Dilnawaz stresses that the treatment of any disease, and of cancer in particular, must be all of a piece, body and mind, and I am ready to try anything so long as they don’t come at me with a knife. Dilnawaz is the most human, the most friendly, and the most real person I’ve met here, as well as the most spiritual. She is also the most lonely. She is very friendly and helpful toward everyone, and people respond to her with considerable respect, but there is still an air of isolation about her that says to me she is not quite a part. She lives alone in Arlesheim town, and her sister is coming from Germany to spend Christmas with her. I wonder how she feels as a woman of Color among all these white ethnocentric Swiss. She is very cautious about what she says, but she does talk of how reluctant most northern europeans are to give themselves to eurhythmy. I find her a touch of emotional color within a scene of extraordinary blandness. Dilnawaz seems to be relieved to see me, too. I think she knows I have a deep respect for the spiritual aspect of our lives and its power over us. That is something most of the rationalists here do not have, despite their adherence to Steiner’s anthroposophy. It seems they can only deal with spirituality if it comes with rigid rules imposed from the outside, i.e., Steiner, with his insistence upon the basic rule of a Christian god. It is limiting. I take a class in painting and color theory according to Steiner. Afterward, an oil dispersion bath which alternates with a massage (also according to Steiner), then lunch, a hot yarrow liver poultice, and a two hour rest period. Then I am free until dinner, unless there are medical consultations or tests. This is when Frances and I get to see each other privately for a while.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  The same year that he married, James signed on with Henry Holt to create what would have been his first notable published work - a textbook in psychology. However, James seemingly drifted away from the field of psychology and into the study of philosophy, as evidenced by his membership in Harvard's Metaphysical Club. Other notable faces that were part of the club during James' time were Oliver Wendell Holmes and Charles Sanders Pierce, who was a founder of pragmatism in America. James became fond of philosophy and, in particular, of pragmatism. This is a philosophical approach to assessing the truth of the meaning behind a theory or belief via its successful practical application. One of the doctrines that came about from pragmatism was radical empiricism, which was actually proposed by James. It states that experience has to be viewed both at the physical level as well as how meaning or values can arise as a result of that experience. He became deeply involved with this idea, and it would frequently be seen in his writings. In 1879, James began teaching a philosophy class at Harvard, attaining professorship in the subject just a year later. His first contribution to the field was an article entitled "The Sentiment of Rationality," which was published in 1880. One of his main points in the essay makes the claim that sentiments are the mark of rationality. The essay was meant to be applicable to both the sciences and everyday life. In it, he also delves into some aspects of materialism and idealism, proposing a compromise between the two. He gained an affinity for the idea that one could feel something intimate with the universe, as proposed by idealists, while the universe could also be unpredictable and wild, as proposed by materialists. With the initial publication "The Sentiment of Rationality," he became a full-fledged professor in psychology in the year 1889. A year later, he finally published one of his most famous works entitled Principles of Psychology. It includes many of the initial founding principles of the field of study and goes into great detail about the methodologies he used to reach conclusions. A few of the chapters he included were inspired by some of the physiology classes he taught at Harvard, as well as the anatomy lessons he gave, drawing connections between the physical and psychological workings of the body. Many of the chapters in the book were highly influential to the future of the study of psychology, with other psychologists building off of these principles. In fact, many modern principles of psychology are based off of these initial teachings and continue to be relevant in the current field of study.

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

  The air was brisk and dry, as exhilarating as champagne and even when the sun reached the zenith and became blazing hot, the air remained lightsome and invigorating. Mid Kansas is 2000 odd feet above sea-level and the air is so dry that an animal when killed, dries up without stinking and in a few months the hide’s filled with mere dust. Game was plentiful, hardly an hour would elapse before I had got half a dozen ruffed grouse or a deer and then I would walk my pony back to the midday camp with perhaps a new wildflower in hand whose name I wished to learn. After the midday meal I used to join Bob in the wagon and learn some Spanish words or phrases from him or question him about his knowledge of cattle. In the first week we became great friends: I found to my amusement that Bob was just as voluble in Spanish as he was tongue-tied in English, and his command of Spanish oaths, objurgations and indecencies was astounding. Bob despised all things American with an unimaginable ferocity and this interested me by its apparent unreason. Once or twice on the way down we had a race; but Reece on a big Kentucky thoroughbred called ‘Shiloh’ won easily. He told me however, that there was a young mare called ‘Blue Devil’ at the ranch which was as fast as Shiloh and of rare stay and stamina: “You can have her, if you can ride her,” he threw out carelessly and I determined to win the ‘Devil’ if I could. In about ten days we reached the ranch near Eureka; it was set in five thousand acres of prairie, a big frame dwelling, that would hold twenty men; but it wasn’t nearly so well-built as the great, brick stable, the pride of Reece’s eye, which would house forty horses and provide half a dozen with good loose boxes besides, in the best English style. The house and stable were situated on a long billowy rise perhaps three hundred yards away from a good-sized creek which I soon christened Snake-Creek for snakes of all sorts and sizes simply swarmed in the brush and woodland of the banks. The big sitting-room of the ranch was decorated with revolvers and rifles of a dozen different kinds and pictures, strange to say, cut out of the illustrated papers: the floor was covered with buffalo and bear rugs and rarer skins of mink and beaver hung here and there on the wooden walls. We got to the ranch late one night and I slept in a room with Dell, he taking the bed while I rolled myself in a rug on the couch. But I slept like a top and next morning was out before sunrise to take stock so to speak. An Indian lad showed me the stable and as luck would have it Blue Devil in a loose box, all to herself and very uneasy.

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

  b. Against bitterness; They shall call the people to the mountain; there shall they sacrifice the victims of justice; they shall suck as milk the abundance of the sea and the hidden treasures of the sands. Deut. 33:19. The men of the city said to Eliseus, Behold the situation of this city is very good, as thou, my lord, seest; but the waters are very bad and the ground barren. And he said, Bring me a new vessel and put salt into it. And when they had brought it, he went out to the spring of the waters and cast the salt into it, and said, Thus saith the Lord, I have healed these waters, and there shall be in them no more death or barrenness. And the waters were healed to this day, according to the word of Eliseus which he spoke. 4 Kings 2:19–22. They stoned Stephen, invoking and saying, Lord Jesus, receive my spirit. And falling on his knees he cried with a loud voice, saying, Lord, lay not this sin to their charge. And when he had said this he fell asleep in the Lord. Acts 7:58, 59. c. Against sadness; After ten days their faces appeared fairer and fatter than all the children that ate of the king’s meat. Dan. 1:15. A glad heart maketh a cheerful countenance. Prov. 15:13. Now this I say, he who soweth sparingly shall also reap sparingly; and he who soweth in blessings shall also reap of blessings, every one as he hath determined in his heart: not with sadness or of necessity, for God loveth a cheerful giver. 2 Cor. 9:6, 7. (3) The effect; a. Forgiveness; Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our sins. St. Luke 11:3. b. Healing; This is the bread that cometh down from Heaven; that if any man eat of it he may not die. St. John 6:50. c. The Body of Christ; We being many are one bread, one body, all who partake of that one bread. 1 Cor. 10:17. Thanksgiving

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  Down a slope, a flagged path stepped cautiously, putting the same foot first every time, through an iris garden; under beeches; and then was transformed into a fast-moving earthy trail patterned with rough imprints of horse hooves. The gardens and parks seemed to move ever faster as our child’s legs grew longer, and when he was about four, the trees and flowering shrubs turned resolutely toward the sea. Like a bored Stationmaster seen standing alone on the speed-clipped platform of some small station at which one’s train does not stop, this or that gray park watchman receded as the park streamed on and on, carrying us south toward the orange trees and the arbutus and the chick-fluff of mimosas and the pâte tendre of an impeccable sky. Graded gardens on hillsides, a succession of terraces whose every stone step ejected a gaudy grasshopper, dropped from ledge to ledge seaward, with the olives and the oleanders fairly toppling over each other in their haste to obtain a view of the beach. There our child kneeled motionless to be photographed in a quivering haze of sun against the scintillation of the sea, which is a milky blur in the snapshots we have preserved but was, in life, silvery blue, with great patches of purple-blue farther out, caused by warm currents in collaboration with and corroboration of (hear the pebbles rolled by the withdrawing wave?) eloquent old poets and their smiling similes. And among the candy-like blobs of sea-licked glass—lemon, cherry, peppermint—and the banded pebbles, and the little fluted shells with lustered insides, sometimes small bits of pottery, still beautiful in glaze and color, turned up. They were brought to you or me for inspection, and if they had indigo chevrons, or bands of leaf ornament, or any kind of gay emblemata, and were judged precious, down they went with a click into the toy pail, and, if not, a plop and a flash marked their return to the sea. I do not doubt that among those slightly convex chips of majolica ware found by our child there was one whose border of scrollwork fitted exactly, and continued, the pattern of a fragment I had found in 1903 on the same shore, and that the two tallied with a third my mother had found on that Mentone beach in 1882, and with a fourth piece of the same pottery that had been found by her mother a hundred years ago—and so on, until this assortment of parts, if all had been preserved, might have been put together to make the complete, the absolutely complete, bowl, broken by some Italian child, God knows where and when, and now mended by these rivets of bronze.

• From Heptaméron (1559)

  The end of the matter was that the neighbour went home much more disposed to wish that she had such a husband than to pity her good friend. When the uphol- sterer came home, his wife repeated to him the whole conversation she had had with her neighbour. " It is well for you, my dear," he replied, "that you are a good and sensible woman ; but for that we should have been separated long ago. But I trust that by God's grace we shall love each other in time to come as much as we have in the past, and that to His glory, and to our own comfort and satisfaction." " Amen, my dear," said the good woman. " I hope, too, that you will never find me fail to do my part to- wards maintaining the good understanding between us.* * Dunlop thinks that this novel was probably taken from the fabliau of some Trouveur, who had obtained it from the East, as it corresponds with the story of the Shopkeeper's Wife in Nakshebi's Persian tales, known bv the name of Tooti Nameh, or Tales of a Parrot. The Queen of Navarre's version of the story has beeq 396 THE HEPTAMERON OF THE {Ncroel 45 One must be very incredulous, ladies, if, after hearing so true a story, one were of opinion that there was as much wickedness in you as in men ; though, to say the truth, without wronging anyone, one cannot help coming to the conclusion with regard to tlie man and woman in question, that neither the one nor the other was good for anything. 1 " This man was prodigiously wicked," said Parla- mente ; " for on the one hand he deceived his wife, and on the other his servant." " You cannot have rightly understood the story," said Hircan; "for it states that he satisfied them both in one morning : a great feat, considering the contrariety of their interests." " In that respect, he was doubly a knave," replied Parlamente, " to satisfy the simplicity of the one by a lie, and the malice of the other by an act of vice. But I am quite aware that such as these will always be par- doned when they have such judges as you." " I assure you, however," rejoined Hircan, " that I will never undertake anything so great or so difficult, for provided I satisfy you, my day will not have been ill employed." " If mutual love does not content the heart," returned Parlamente, "all the rest cannot do so." " That is true," said Simontault. " I am persuaded imitated by Lafontaine, under the title of La Servante Justifi^e. He was particularly struck by an exceedingly comic reiteration of the phrase, ' It was I, gossip," in the dialogue between the sfmple-witted wife and her neighbour, and says in his opening lines :