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 Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  There is something which charms me utterly about this house. It is whitewashed & square & has four rooms, each of the same size. It is a house reduced to its very elements, with empty holes for windows and doors, so that one looks from one room into the next—& through that to the outside, the surrounding shacks, the clustered peaks of the huts or the bald, enigmatic rocks. The house is a kind of frame for living in or discipline for thought—so that its few furnishings, the book-case, a rather hideous rug, the photograph of the king, seem unnecessary embarrassments. I find myself quite as austere as a hermit for those hours when I am alone, & I want nothing. Or if I have been with the chiefs, eating & drinking & reciting to them, as they seem relentlessly to require, from the Thousand & One Nights, I return to this little box of shadows, to the fringed globe of the shamadan, the little folding captain’s chair, with a sense of enchantment. And Taha is waiting, never snoozing or yawning, but squatting in perfect, illiterate silence. His beauty is enhanced by his watchfulness, which is never impertinent or burdensome; it is an almost abstract form of attention, a condition of life to him. Though he only joined me for this tour I feel already with him, as I imagine long-married couples do, a complete freedom from self-consciousness, & as I sit & write, or merely gaze at the moon & stars, his eyes, which are always upon me, are weightless, demand nothing, are themselves dark globes in which lamp & stars are distantly reflected! And then I remember that he knows nothing of this, as I know nothing of him. I look across at him & smile, & after a second he smiles back, begins to rise, but I gesture to him to stay put. There is a momentary uncertainty, but as he settles again it disperses & is forgotten.

• From What Belongs to You (2016)

  And your friend, she went on, and I noted that she too was addressing me informally; before I had been Vie and gospodinut , the gentleman, but now I was set on a new footing. And this was part of her kindness, so that I felt the other side of that nuance my language doesn’t have, that if it is a loss of dignity it can be a gain of warmth, something that seemed to me now very dear. Your friend, how is he, she asked, has he been to see someone, is he getting treatment? He is, I said, though I realized I wasn’t sure if that was true, I didn’t know where the money I had given him had gone. She nodded, It’s important that he does, she said, make sure he finishes it, otherwise he won’t get better. All right, I said, I will, and she braced her palms against her thighs and stood. Come on, then, she said, let’s go to the office so you can pay and get home. I was warmed by her kindness as I made my way back to Mladost, the bus nearly empty, the evening rush still hours away. I thought of Mitko on the long ride, feeling sure my decision was the right one, and feeling too that it would be difficult to keep. When I talked to R. that evening, he told me that he had been tested in the morning and received his shot in the afternoon; and I was glad that it seemed to be something he had put behind him as he dressed to go out for dinner with friends. I was feeling better, too. I had eaten already and was sitting and reading in the main room, relaxing for a bit before bed; it had been a long day, I would go to sleep early. I didn’t have any desire to see Mitko, and when I heard the quick bleat of the buzzer I was tempted to ignore it. But he could see my light from the street, he knew I was home, and anyway it would be better to get it over with now, I thought, while I was still sure of what I had to say. I didn’t press the button to release the door or speak to him, but I did turn on the hall lights, which would be acknowledgment enough. I took my time putting on my boots and coat, wrapping a scarf around my neck; it had gotten colder again once the sun went down, but I felt I was wrapping myself up against something else, too, some inner weather against which I had to guard.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  ‘Mm—I spent all afternoon in bed,’ I replied truthfully. ‘Frightfully good lunch, though. Do you know this restaurant, James?’ ‘Where did you go?’ ‘The Crépuscule des Dieux.’ He chuckled. ‘It ought to be just up your street …’ He meant, because of Wagner, though he can’t have been unaware of the discreetly homosexual style of the whole place, the waiters in tails with long white aprons, the rich older men treating their bored and flirtatious young dolly-boys. ‘Not the food for you, though, perhaps—all swimming in blood!’ James loathed jokes of this kind but he managed a disgusted smile. He’d passed a demanding New Year at Marden once, subsisting entirely on roast potatoes and Stilton, and pretending indifference as chargers of pheasant, goose and almost raw beef were borne in by the staff. Upstairs, my grandfather remembered the name of the doorman who walked along the corridor with us, saying, just at the last moment, ‘And how’s your wife, Roy?’ (Roy being the man’s surname rather than his Christian name). ‘I’m afraid she died, my Lord,’ Roy said in a well-seasoned way. Here was a test for my grandfather, for a merely courtesy concern had turned on him and presented him with a real little tragedy. I stood and watched him pat the man on the back in a brotherly way, and nod his head impressively. ‘They’re pretty terrible, these bereavements,’ he said. ‘And it doesn’t get any better, I’m afraid.’ As Roy said, ‘No, my lord,’ he was already leaving him, having done the convincingly human thing and yet not involved himself in the least. He pulled the door to and placed us, him in the middle, and James nearer the stage. My grandfather was a Director of Covent Garden, and I had seen many operas with him from this same box. Yet I never felt it was a good point to watch the performance from: for the privacy and elevation of the box we paid the cost of seeing the orchestra, a view into the wings and an imperfect vantage on the upper stage. The privacy, anyway, was an ambiguous thing, since the eyes of the stalls dwelt on the boxes as though on the balconies of a royal residence. I was aware of the bad effect this had on me—an affected unawareness of the rest of the house, exaggerated laughter and enthralment in the remarks of my companions. I did not like myself much for this—indeed the box represented to me in some ways the penalties of exposure, discomfort and pitilessness which were paid for privilege. Tonight I sprawled over the red plush sill and let James and my grandfather talk until the lights went down.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  We were having an early May of wonderful weather, and I was already as dark as some of the half-caste boys I showered with at the Corry. My hair, though, grew lighter, and my eyes too, as I met my own glance, appeared arrestingly pale. It was that faintly depraved effect I admired in James’s thin friend at the baths. Charles laid a hand heavily on my shoulder. ‘Kind of sand-brown, isn’t it. Jolly good, jolly good.’ He also indulged the mirror’s grouping of us for a moment, his eye flinching from the stare of the taller Lewis, who hung about behind us. There was evidently a strange, and I thought pathetic, story behind all this. ‘Let’s go into the library,’ Charles said, pushing me forward as a kind of support. ‘We’ll have tea in there, Lewis, please.’ ‘You do realise I’m cleaning the silver?’ Lewis complained. ‘Well, it won’t hurt to have a break—and I’m sure you’d like a cup yourself, you know. Then you can get back to cleaning the silver; what’s left of it.’ Lewis gave him a calculating nod, and retreated without a word. We went on into the room on the left of the front door. Library seemed a grand term for a room that, like all the rooms in the house, was modest-sized; but it was stuffed with books. Some were housed in a handsome break-fronted bookcase with Gothic windows; others furnished shelves and tabletops, or were stacked up like hypocaust pillars across the floor. If the room had once been panelled, it was no more. The walls were white, and above the door a pink and grey pediment had been painted, perhaps as a trompe l’oeil relief; within it classical figures posed, and it was almost with embarrassment that I noticed that exaggerated phalluses protruded in each case from toga and tunic. ‘Funny little chaps, aren’t they?’ said Charles, who was hohumming his way towards a chair. ‘Come and sit down, my dear, and we can have some chit-chat. I’ve had no one to talk to for ages, you see.’ We sat on either side of the empty grate in which a huge jug of bulrushes and peacock feathers stood. Above the mantelpiece, with its little brass carriage clock, hung a life-size chalk drawing of a black boy, just the head and shoulders, a slight smile and large, speaking eyes conveying happiness and loyalty. ‘So, have you been at the Corinthian Club today?’ ‘No—I prefer to go in the evenings. I’ll drop in after I leave here.’ ‘Hmm. There’s more going on in the evenings, wouldn’t you say. Actually, I think it can get too crowded. And some of the people are so rude and hasty, don’t you find? Some young thug called me an old wanker the other day. What do you do—argue or try to be witty?

• From Four Days to Glory: Wrestling with the Soul of the American Heartland (2005)

  as it were. But in Dan the wrestling grip is complete. Dan was born to do this, and he knows it; he has the temperament and the smoldering fire of competitiveness, and the self-discipline to remain basically at the same weight for three years, and the strength, and the mental toughness. And he wants to wrestle probably more than he wants to do anything else in the world, even though he could refocus his intensity elsewhere. In any number of areas, Dan might be successful. But he was born to wrestle, and if you were projecting things out for years and years, you would see Dan in roughly the same shape he is in right now, in a workout room somewhere, teaching other people how to try very, very hard to make themselves into some approximation of what he was as a wrestler. Which would make him, really, Tom Brands. Or Gable. Out front of the house, Doug is taking a look around, seeing the weather ready to turn, making sure things are secure. Everything worked out in the end, really. Dan is moving on, and Nick finished up strong enough to nurse big dreams for this summer and next season, and what Chris experienced in Des Moines, the aftermath of Dan’s victory, almost surely will lock him into a wrestling track for years to come. Doug looks out over his 200 acres. It’s February. Never too early to begin thinking about making things grow. Doug’s mother puts out some things to eat and drink in the kitchen, and the kids come by and nibble on shrimp and crackers and Whoppers and carrots and celery and the like, and you are reminded again that wrestlers are not proponents of waste. They come through and take a few little things to eat, and put them on their plates, and that’s that. But maybe there is room for one more thing. As folks stand and sit in the kitchen, drinking coffee and trading stories with the grandparents, Dan pads in, in his stocking feet. Wordlessly, he pulls off the top of a plastic tub of vanilla ice cream. He selects a tall glass. He gets the ice-cream scoop, puts a couple of scoops into the glass. He reaches for a bottle of root beer, opens it. And ever so slowly, he pours a small, continuous drizzle of the root beer over the ice cream and into the glass. You figure when a dessert has been four months in the making, a few more seconds aren’t too long to wait. The float begins to take shape, there in the warm kitchen, in the old LeClere house, on the old LeClere land, in the dead of winter. Dan looks up across the kitchen and smiles. Some things probably are worth waiting for.

• From What Belongs to You (2016)

  I watched him helplessly, still kneeling, as he called out to his friend, whom he called again brat mi and who called back to him from the outer chamber. Maybe he saw that I was angry, and wanted to remind me he wasn’t alone. Straightening his clothes, running his hands down his torso to settle them properly on his frame, he smiled without guile, as if maybe he did feel he had given me what he owed. Then he unlatched the door and pulled it shut again behind him. As I knelt there, still tasting the metallic trace of sinkwater from his skin, I felt my anger lifting as I realized that my pleasure wasn’t lessened by his absence, that what was surely a betrayal (we had our contract, though it had never been signed, never set in words at all) had only refined our encounter, allowing him to become more vividly present to me even as I was left alone on my stained knees, and allowing me, with all the freedom of fantasy, to make of him what I would. II A GRAVE Not long ago I spent a weekend in Blagoevgrad, in the Pirin mountains, chaperoning a group of students to a conference on mathematical linguistics, a field in which I have little interest and no expertise. I had long hours, while they were in lectures, to explore the beautiful wooded park near our hotel, which followed a small river three kilometers or so toward the pedestrian city center, a haven of humane architecture almost untouched by the ravages of Soviet-era construction, though blemished here and there by gaudy new buildings, expensive apartments overlooking the river. It was spring, the asmi were still bare, the wooden trellises built over benches and tables for grapevines to climb, vines that for now were still withered and dry. They clung to their wooden supports, vestiges of winter in a landscape already lush with the turned year. The trees were bright with fresh leaves and with flowers of a sort I had never seen before, blossoms and buds and cones of flowers, a kind of elaborate drunkenness. Our hotel was at the edge of the town, where human habitation made a halfhearted charge farther up the mountains, getting nowhere; just past the hotel’s vigorously mowed lawn there were dense woods and thickets and, farther up, dramatic crags. Even in the park along the river, where I spent my mornings, there was a kind of romantic wildness to the path between the great shorn face of the mountain and the river, which, though small, charged from the peaks with remarkable speed, roaring as it beat against rocks already broken in its bed.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  ‘There are chaps who don’t care for them, you know. Simply can’t abide them. Can’t stand the sight of them, their titties and their big sit-upons, even the smell of them.’ He looked down the room authoritatively to where Percy was dispensing Sanatogen to a striking likeness of the older Gladstone. ‘Andrews, for instance, cannot tolerate them.’ It took me a moment to work this out. ‘In the gym?’ I said. ‘Yes, I’m not surprised—he seems very much a man’s man. You must know Andrews then,’ I lamely concluded. But I had lost my host already; I saw that he attacked questions with excitement but abandoned them within seconds. Or perhaps they abandoned him. ‘If you’ll give me a hand I do think we might go through now, so that we can get a good seat. They’re like hyenas here. They eat everything up if you’re not in there quick.’ I lifted one of his elbows as he pushed himself up with the other, his whole frame shaking with the effort. ‘Let’s have a look at the Library,’ he said, as if speaking to someone who was very deaf, winking at me in a musical-comedy way. ‘That’ll fool them,’ he explained, in a voice only slightly quieter. Then, returning the stare of a nonagenarian wild-dog in the chair nearest the door, ‘We have a history of self-abuse in duodecimo—but it’s probably out.’ The dining-room was a far finer place. There was a long collegiate table in the middle, and smaller tables, set for two or four, allowed for more private talk around the walls. Contemporary copies of Hogarth’s Rake’s Progress hung in a double rank opposite the windows, and the famous full-length Batoni of Sir Humphry Clay, Roman statuary behind him and garlands of dead game at his feet, dominated the end wall. Beneath it the dining-room staff were arranging plates, tureens and cheeses at an immense funerary sideboard. The ceiling had an Adamish rosette at its centre, and from it hung a fairly elaborate crystal chandelier which had been conspicuously converted to electricity. Yet despite the tarnished brilliance of the room, some residual public-school thing, quintessential to Clubs, infected the atmosphere. The air retained a smell of cabbage and bad cooking that made me apprehensive about lunch. ‘Here we are, splendid, splendid,’ whistled Lord Nantwich as he chose the corner table which was most sequestered and afforded the best view. ‘Not quite the first, I see; or are they still having breakfast? You can get a good breakfast here: kidneys. For me they do a black pudding—though they won’t often do it for all the old farts in here. I enjoy a good understanding with the staff. Been coming here since I was a lad, of course, and damn good tuck and tack. What do you want?’ he demanded, as a busy little waiter-boy arrived with menus that seemed to have been typed out on a pre-war Remington, with all the capital letters jumping up into the course above.

• From Don't Feed the Monkey Mind: How to Stop the Cycle of Anxiety, Fear, and Worry (2017)

  resilient to its alarms of perceived threats, you will begin to take the risks necessary to meet your larger personal goals. Things you only dreamed about doing before will begin to appear doable. Maria, as you recall, longed to travel. The values she cherished most were curiosity and spontaneity, but she was afraid to go more than ten miles or so from her doctor and her hospital. All that has changed now. First of all, Maria is delighted to report that she has far fewer uncomfortable physical sensations. This is partially because she isn’t constantly scanning her body for them anymore. It’s also because when she does happen to feel something uncomfortable, she doesn’t look it up on the Internet. When she doesn’t feed her worry, there’s less to worry about. She feels healthier and less stressed. After all her practicing tolerance for uncertainty regarding physical symptoms, Maria has noticed she is more willing to be uncertain in other areas of her life. She doesn’t second-guess her financial investments anymore, she is bold and decisive when shopping, and the number one thing she Googles now is travel locations. After years of hugging the shoreline Maria is making up for lost time. She just returned from a month in South America, a destination she would have been terrified to travel to before. Maria is living according to her own values now—explore, explore, explore! Increased Compassion and Self-Esteem Eric, like all perfectionists, held himself to an impossible standard. He wasn’t allowed to make mistakes. Trying to live this way meant he’d never succeed and predictably, he felt pretty bad about himself. But Eric’s practice has changed all that. Now that he allows himself the possibility of being wrong, Eric has become much more decisive. He’s stopped over-researching and putting off making decisions, and as a result he gets lots more done at work. He actually enjoys his job now and it shows in his interactions with others. He has become more assertive, more clear, and more honest, which makes him a better boss. Rather than avoiding interventions with his employees, he deals with them directly, nipping most problems in the bud. As he gained confidence, Eric expanded his practice to other areas of his

• From What Belongs to You (2016)

  Shte se opravish , I said, you’ll get better, and he took the money and thanked me, for the food and for my help, he said, taking my hand in his. I wanted to ask him where he would go, if he had a place to spend the night, but I was afraid he might press me to extend my generosity further than it would reach. At the door he knelt to put on his shoes, which were still damp, and drew on his thin jacket, and then he stood and opened the door, the corridor dark behind him. Thank you again, he said, and then, so quickly that I didn’t have a chance to stop him, even if I had wanted to, he placed both of his hands on my shoulders and leaned toward me, touching his lips to my cheek. He leaned back again and smiled, withdrawing his hands, but not before tousling my hair, smiling now with the unguardedness I remembered. It was a friendly gesture, unromantic, which didn’t dismiss the intimacy of his kiss but set it in a new key, and I was filled with fondness as he stepped out and pulled the door shut behind him. There was no temptation, I thought, there was no danger of his upsetting the new balance I had found, the monogamy that still had the novelty of a break from long habit. After I turned the key in its lock I stood with my hand on the door, not with the thought of opening it again but just to listen to him make his way down the hall. He had already gone down the stairs before I remembered to press the switch for the hallway light, setting the timer running though it was already past its use. On Sunday night Mitko appeared again. He buzzed up from the street this time, confident I would answer; or maybe he had gotten tired of waiting for someone to open the door. It was late, I was already in bed with a book in my hand.

• From What Belongs to You (2016)

  I remember the freedom I felt, awake far past my bedtime, and my father too was free, having set aside for once the work that filled his days and nights. He was the only one in his family who had gone to college, he studied law and moved to the city, and though it wasn’t far from where he and my mother had been born, it was a different world. He hated going back to their small town, to the poverty and dirt he had worked so hard to escape; he only visited once or twice a year, though my mother took us to see her family often, it was important to know where we came from, she said. Her family were small farmers, poor, and though I loved visiting them I knew my life would always be different from theirs, my father made sure I knew it. After the summers we spent on the farm we came back speaking like them, my brother and I, we’d say ain’t and y’all and my father would snap at us, angry in a way I didn’t understand; Don’t talk like that, he’d say, I didn’t raise you to talk like that. When we complained about how often he was gone, how much time he spent at his office or away for work, he told us to be grateful, he said we were lucky he worked so hard, we didn’t know how lucky, he was giving us a better life than what he’d had. It was rare for him to set aside his work as he did that night, lying with me in the field, when I was still young enough to be a part of him, to touch and be touched by him. It must have been summer, the night was vivid with sounds, with insects and frogs and the low murmurings of cattle; they were familiar sounds and yet every night I was surprised by them, by their density and nearness, like a heavy quilt drawn close.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  ‘Oh, up in Kentish Town. There’s a staff house there—it’s known as the Embassy. Because of all the foreign staff,’ he explained needlessly. We went along by the huge Edwardian façade of the hotel, and I glanced nervously up at its convulsed top stages: balconies, bows, gables, turrets, executed in a sickly mixture of orange brick and dully shining beige faience. Then we cut down a narrow street that sheared at an angle across the corner of the hotel site and revealed the undecorated plainness of its back parts. Phil pulled open a door with a window in it, and we penetrated into a horrible area of store-rooms, rumbling boilers and stacked wicker laundry-baskets. It was like the subterraneous parts of the worst schools we used to play matches against. There were frequent fire doors which closed the corridor into hot, brightly lit sections. When we climbed to the floor above, which was the main floor of the hotel, we were treading for a few yards on patterned hotel carpet, and there were brass wall-lamps and prints of eighteenth-century London. Then we were in the service area again. We passed by the open door of a kind of rest-room: the curtains were drawn, and there was a semi-circle of once stylish wooden-armed easychairs, of the kind where the seat cushions collapse through the supporting rubber straps, and a television, in front of which a man in the hotel’s dark blue uniform was squatting. The air was dead with smoke and there were large, bar-room ashtrays on the floor, piled high with fag-ends. ‘Hi, Pino!’ said Phil. The man looked round; he had very curly dark hair, dull, handsome Spanish looks—about thirty years old. ‘Hey Phil! How you work this thing? Is not on.’ He slapped the sides of the cabinet with the palms of his hands, as though trying to revive a drunk. Then looking round again and seeing me, he got up. ‘Pino, this is Will. He’s just a friend of mine.’ We shook hands. ‘You a friend of Phil’s?’ he asked, as though to confirm what a good fellow I must be. ‘Phil is very nice boy. Is very very nice boy.’ He rocked about grinning and laughing at this, sliding a light punch at Phil’s chest and capering backwards. ‘Phil elp me this mornin with the bang.’ Though he was much Phil’s senior, he behaved like a child in his presence, and Phil, able at last to show me a place where he belonged, responded by showing how accustomed he was to this person I did not even know. ‘You helped him with the what?’ I asked. ‘The van. I’m teaching him to drive the hotel van. But you’re not much good, are you, Pino?’

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  Bay Minette, where the hearing took place, is about thirty minutes from the beautiful beaches on the Gulf of Mexico. We had started a tradition of bringing our staff down to the beach each September, and we’d all fallen in love with the clear warm waters of the Gulf. The white sand and pleasantly underdeveloped beachfront were spectacular and soothing. The view was slightly spoiled by the massive offshore oil rigs you could see in the distance, but if you could make yourself forget about them, you’d think you were in paradise. Dolphins loved this part of the Gulf and could be spotted in the early mornings, playfully making their way through the water. I’d often thought we should move our office to right there on the beach. It was Michael’s idea to hit the beach before heading back to Montgomery. I wasn’t sure it was a good idea, but the day was warm and the coast was so close, I couldn’t resist. We jumped in the car, trailing the last hours of sunlight to the beautiful shores near Fort Morgan, Alabama. As soon as we got there, Michael changed from his suit to swim trunks and went sprinting into the ocean. I was too tired to race into the sea, so I put on some shorts and sat down at the water’s edge. It would soon be dusk, but the heat persisted. My head was full of everything that had transpired in court: I was replaying what witnesses had said and worrying about whether things had gone exactly right. I was trawling through every detail in my mind, every possible misstep, until I caught myself. It was over; there was no point in making myself crazy by overthinking it now. I decided to dive into the ocean and, for a moment at least, forget it all. Recently, stranded at the airport with nothing else to read, I had read an article about shark attacks. As I approached the waves at Fort Morgan, now lit by the sunset, I remembered that sharks feed at dusk and at dawn. I watched Michael swimming far off shore, and as fun as it looked, I knew I’d be the more vulnerable target if a shark showed up. Michael swam like a fish while I barely stayed afloat. Michael waved at me and shouted: “B-man, come on out!” I cautiously ventured into the water far enough to explain my concerns about sharks to him. He laughed at me. The water felt warm and wonderful, comforting in a way I hadn’t expected. A school of fish zipped by my legs, and I stared at them in wonder until I realized that they might be fleeing some larger predator. I carefully made my way back to the shore.

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

  There are, however, certain actions which would seem not to be for an end, such as playful and contemplative actions, and those which are done without attention, such as scratching one’s beard, and the like: whence some might be led to think that there is an agent that acts not for an end.—But we must observe that contemplative actions are not for another end, but are themselves an end. Playful actions are sometimes an end, when one plays for the mere pleasure of play; and sometimes they are for an end, as when we play that afterwards we may study better. Actions done without attention do not proceed from the intellect, but from some sudden act of the imagination, or some natural principle: thus a disordered humour produces an itching sensation and is the cause of a man scratching his beard, which he does without his mind attending to it. Such actions do tend to an end, although outside the order of the intellect. Hereby is excluded the error of certain natural philosophers of old, who maintained that all things happen by natural necessity, thus utterly banishing the final cause from things. CHAPTER III THAT EVERY AGENT ACTS FOR A GOODHENCE we must go on to prove that every agent acts for a good. For that every agent acts for an end clearly follows from the fact that every agent tends to something definite. Now that to which an agent tends definitely must needs be befitting to that agent: since the latter would not tend to it save on account of some fittingness thereto. But that which is befitting to a thing is good for it. Therefore every agent acts for a good. Further. The end is that wherein the appetite of the agent or mover is at rest, as also the appetite of that which is moved. Now it is the very notion of good to be the term of appetite, since good is the object of every appetite. Therefore all action and movement is for a good. Again. All action and movement would seem to be directed in some way to being: either for the preservation of being in the species or in the individual; or for the acquisition of being. Now this itself, being to wit, is a good: and for this reason all things desire being. Therefore all action and movement is for a good. Furthermore. All action and movement is for some perfection. For if the action itself be the end, it is clearly a second perfection of the agent. And if the action consist in the transformation of external matter, clearly the mover intends to induce some perfection into the thing moved: towards which perfection the movable tends, if the movement be natural. Now when we say a thing is perfect, we mean that it is good. Therefore every action and movement is for a good.

• From What Belongs to You (2016)

  And then she smiled too, looking first at the boy and then his grandmother, laying her hands in her lap and settling back against the bench in a peculiar way she had, as if it were all just too much for words. He’s a sweet boy, she said then, looking at the grandmother, who smiled back at her but shook her head, saying she was sorry, she didn’t speak any English. I translated what my mother had said, and the woman looked at me, a little surprised. You speak Bulgarian, she said, almost a question, and then, when I had wagged my head from side to side, Well, she said, he can be sweet and still be bad. But she was pleased, and she looked at my mother while I translated, smiling and nodding her head a little. There was a camaraderie among us now, a warmth that made us more than strangers, and the boy felt it too, I thought, so that his sense of his kingdom spread from the little seat, expanding to encompass the entire compartment. At several points during our ride, the man across from us had interrupted his reading to take a camera from the backpack beside him and step into the corridor, snapping photos through the large windows there. The boy had watched this with interest, and now, as the man took his camera out again, he went to stand before him, cocking his head a little. Do you want to see how it works, the man asked, tilting the camera so the boy could see the digital screen surrounded by switches and buttons, and the boy nodded, still shy, and then hopped up onto the bench beside him. Don’t bother him, the grandmother said, but the man shook his head at this, saying it was fine, he didn’t mind, and he and the boy examined the camera for a few minutes, scrolling through the photos, and then, with the grandmother’s blessing, they stepped together into the corridor, where the windows offered more expansive views. He’s my daughter’s child, the woman said to us, I took him to the seaside for a week, all he did was run and play, I thought he would sleep on the train, he usually does. I shook my head in sympathy, saying that it was a long trip, it was hard for a child, and really he was being very good. Is this your mother, the woman asked then, and I said yes, saying too that it was her first time in Bulgaria, her first time anywhere outside of the States. Her first time in Europe and you brought her to Bulgaria, the woman said, oh, she must think it is terrible here. I paused to translate for my mother, who gasped and leaned forward, Oh no, she said, it’s a beautiful country, I’ve had a wonderful time. Maybe the sea is nice, the woman allowed, but Sofia—and she cut off her sentence, wrinkling her nose.

• From What Belongs to You (2016)

  Mitko, I said, I should tell you, I have a friend now, and I paused, not sure how to clarify what I meant, the Bulgarian word allowing for so many possibilities; imam postoyanen priyatel , I said finally, a constant friend, the awkward phrase the best I could manage. I wanted to make things clear, to draw firm lines, but I realized even as I spoke I was taking for granted the fact that Mitko would come again to my door, that almost certainly I would let him in. Is he Bulgarian, Mitko asked, catching my meaning, and I said he wasn’t; we met here, I said, but he’s Portuguese, he lives in Lisbon, and then I stopped, feeling I shouldn’t say more. I wanted to keep my relationship with R. to myself, and the thought of him gave new urgency to Mitko’s warning. How would I forgive myself if I had infected him, if I had dragged him into the world from which (as I thought of it) he had lifted me out? Yasno , Mitko said, drawing back his hand, I get it; he seemed happy to let the subject drop. I had noticed his eyes flick once or twice, as if involuntarily, toward the pan still lying by the stove, and I stood and relit the burner, asking him if he was hungry. It wasn’t really a question, and he didn’t pretend to consider it. While the food was warming he turned back to my laptop, logging on to Facebook and, I was sure, the Bulgarian hookup site I remembered from before, and then he closed the computer and sat with me at the little table. I was surprised that I couldn’t remember our ever having shared a meal before in that way, quietly and seated and alone. We didn’t talk at first; Mitko dug into the food and I watched him eat, surprised by how happy I was to have him there. I wondered how much this feeling owed to him, to his company or the pleasure he took in the poor meal I had made, and how much it depended on some gratified notion of myself, my willingness to set aside the past and a generosity I knew he would call on before he left, which was real generosity now, I thought, since I would ask nothing in return for it.

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

  (5.) The warning that “poverty diminishes friendship,” is to be understood of involuntary poverty, which causes covetousness. This is plain by the words that follow, “while he seeks to be filled.” Satiety implies that superabundance, which they desire who are not satisfied with a little, nor are of the number of those of whom St. Paul says (1 Tim. vi. 8), “having food and wherewithal to be covered, with these we are content.” He gives the following reason for this contentment with a little, “Those who will become rich, fall into temptation and the snare of the devil”; for the desire of great wealth often causes men to fall away from justice. (6.) The words of the Gloss that “temporal possessions are not to be entirely rejected,” are to be interpreted to mean that we are to use our temporal means to procure food and clothing. This appears clearly from St. Paul’s words, “having food, and wherewith to be covered, with these we are content.” The Gloss does not mean that man can ignore all provision for temporal needs. (7.) To the seventh objection, we reply that some temporal things, such as food and clothing, are absolutely necessary for the support of life. If I have more of such things than I need, I ought to assist the destitute, but I ought not to deprive myself of necessary food or raiment. It is of such things as are acquired for our present needs that the Gloss speaks in the passage quoted in the seventh objection. But there are temporal things, such as money and property which, though not needed at present, may in the future be necessary to our support. There is no reason why perfect men should not distribute these things to the poor; for, before they are needed, God may supply the lack of them in some other way; and we are commanded in the Scriptures to trust that He will do so.

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

  1. It by no means follows that because preachers live on alms, they must necessarily be flatterers. When they preach without flattery, they often find but small favour among wicked and carnal-minded men, although they are approved of by the good; in face, sometimes they have to suffer at the hands of those whose favour they could not win without adulation. At other times they are well received by good men who do not wish to be flattered. They thus resemble Lord who, at times, had no roof to shelter Him, and at other times was entertained by many and who received the ministry of women who followed Him, as we read in Luke (viii.). Thus likewise the Apostles sometimes endured great distress; and at other times they were well supplied, behaving with discretion under both circumstances. “I know,” says St. Paul (Phil. iv. 12), “ how to abound and how to suffer want.” Vicissitudes of this description are the common experience of poor preachers in our own days. 2. Preachers, by asking for charity, do nothing that can be an occasion of avarice. Avarice is an inordinate love of possessing. It is not inordinate to wish to have necessary food and clothing. “Having what to eat, and wherewith to be clothed, with these we are content” (1 Tim. vi. 8). Hence poor men are not, by begging for the necessities of life, exposed to any danger of avarice. 3. Prewhers ought not to desire material assistance as their primary end or object. They may, however ask for such temporal goods as a secondary end, or as the means whereby they may be enabled to achieve their primary end, which is the preaching of the Gospel. Commenting on the words, “Seek first the Kingdom of God and His justice” (Matt. vi. 36), the Gloss says: “By these words, our Lord shows us that we are not to desire temporal things as our chief and most necessary good. We are to seek the Kingdom of Heaven, and to set it before us as our end, and do all things for the attainment of that end. Let us then eat in order to preach, but not preach in order to eat.”

• From Wild (2012)

  The good thing, I quickly understood, was that no matter what happened in those 334 miles, there would be fresh berries along the way. Huckleberries and blueberries, salmonberries and blackberries, all of them plump for the picking for miles along the trail. I raked the bushes with my hands as I walked, sometimes stopping to fill my hat, as I made my way leisurely through the Mount Thielsen and Diamond Peak Wildernesses. It was cold. It was hot. The tree-bark-plucked-dead-chicken flesh on my hips grew another layer. My feet stopped bleeding and blistering, but they still hurt like hell. I hiked a few half days, going only seven or eight miles in an effort to alleviate the pain, but it did little good. They hurt deep. Sometimes as I walked, it felt like they were actually broken, like they belonged in casts instead of boots. Like I’d done something profound and irreversible to them by carrying all this weight over so many miles of punishing terrain. This, and yet I was stronger than ever. Even with that tremendous pack of mine, I was capable of hammering out the big miles now, though at day’s end I was still pretty much shattered. The PCT had gotten easier for me, but that was different from it getting easy. There were pleasant mornings and lovely swaths of afternoon, ten-mile stretches that I’d glide right over while barely feeling a thing. I loved getting lost in the rhythm of my steps and the click of my ski pole against the trail; the silence and the songs and sentences in my head. I loved the mountains and the rocks and the deer and rabbits that bolted off into the trees and the beetles and frogs that scrambled across the trail. But there would always come the point in each day when I didn’t love it anymore, when it was monotonous and hard and my mind shifted into a primal gear that was void of anything but forward motion and I walked until walking became unbearable, until I believed I couldn’t walk even one more step, and I stopped and made camp and efficiently did all the tasks that making camp required, all in an effort to get as quickly as possible to the blessed moment when I could collapse, utterly demolished, in my tent.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  By this wild process, then, of failure, elimination, and re jection, I, certainly, and most of the people whom I knew got to Europe, and, roughly speaking, "settled" there. Many of us ha\'e returned, but not al l: it is important to remember that many expa triates vanish into the hes of their adopted coun try, to be flushed out only, and not al ways then, by gra\'e international emergency. This applies especially, of course, to women, who, gi,·en the pressures of raising a family, rarely have time to be homesick, or guilty about "escaping" the problems of American lif e. Their first loyalties, thank hea\'en, are to the men they married and the children they must raise. But I know American couples, too, who ha\'e made their homes in Europe quite happily, and who ha\'e no intention of returning to this country. It is worth obserYing, too, that these people are nearly always marked by a lack of spite or uneasiness concerning this country which quite fails to char acterize what I tend to think of as the "displaced" or ",·isi ble" expatriate. That is, remarkable as this may sound, it is not necessary to hate this country in order to have a good time somewhere else. In fact, the people who hate this country never manage, except physically, to leave it, and ha,·e a wretched lif e where,·er they go. And, of course, many of us ha\'e become, in effect, com muters; which is a less improbable state now than it was a decade ago. Many ha,·e neither returned nor stayed, but can be found in Village bars, talking about Europe, or in Euro pean bars, talk ing about America. Apart from the G.I .'s who remained in Europe, thought fully using up all the cheap studios, and nearly all, as it turned out, of the available good will, we, who ha,·e been described (not Yery usefully) as the "new" expatriates, began arri,·ing in Paris around '45, '+6, '+7, and '48. The character of the influx began to change very radically after that, if only because the newcomers had had the foresight to arm themseh·es with jobs: 66+ OTH ER ES SAYS American government jobs, which also meant that they had housing allowances and didn't care how much rent they paid. Neither, of course, did the French landlords, with the results that rents rose astronomically and we who had considered ourselves forever installed in the Latin Quarter found our selves living all over Paris. But this, at least for some of us, turned out to be very healthy and valuable. We were in Paris, after all, because we had presumably put down all formulas and all saf ety in favor of the chilling unpredictability of ex perience. Voyagers discover that the world can never be larger than the person that is in the world; but it is impossible to foresee this, it is impossible to be warned.

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

  Further. Since there is proportion between the end and things directed to the end, it follows that things directed differently to an end, participate in that end differently. Now vision of the divine substance is the last end of every intellectual substance, as we have shown. And intellectual substances are not all equally prepared for that end: for some are more virtuous, some less, and virtue is the way to happiness. Consequently there must be diversity in the divine vision, in that some see the divine substance more perfectly, some less perfectly. Hence in order to indicate this difference of happiness, our Lord says (Jo. 14:2): In my Father’s house there are many mansions. Hereby too is excluded the error of those who said that all rewards are equal. Again, just as the mode of vision indicates a diversity of degrees among the blessed, so the object of the vision shows that their glory is the same: for each one’s happiness consists in his seeing God’s substance, as we have proved. The same thing then makes them all happy, but they do not all derive an equal happiness therefrom. Hence it does not stand in the way of what has been said, that our Lord declares (Matth. 20.) the labourers in the vineyard to have received the same wage, a penny to wit, although they worked not equally: because the same thing is appointed as a reward to be seen and enjoyed, namely God. Wherein it must also be observed that corporal and spiritual movements are somewhat contrary to each other. For all corporal movements have the identically same first subject, but their ends are diverse: whereas spiritual movements, namely intellectual apprehensions and acts of the will, have various first subjects, but one identical end. CHAPTER LIX HOW THOSE WHO SEE THE DIVINE SUBSTANCE SEE ALL THINGSNow forasmuch as the vision of the divine substance is the last end of every intellectual substance, as we have proved; and since the appetite of everything that has obtained its last end, is at rest: it follows that the natural appetite of the intellectual substance that sees the divine substance must be entirely at rest. Now the natural desire of the intellect is to know all the genera, species and powers of things, and the whole order of the universe: as is evident from the fact that man makes a study of all these things. Therefore everyone that sees the divine substance knows all the things mentioned above.