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.

Page 95 of 189 · 20 per page

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  Gayle carried herself as one betrayed into an inferior version of life. The articles of this betrayal remained unpublished, but it was understood that Cal was to blame; also, to some degree, Arthur. Mrs. Gayle was disappointed. Every couple of weeks she dulled her disappointment by shopping in Mount Vernon with Liz Dempsey, a friend of hers from another Founding Family. They got all dressed up and had boozy lunches and bought things. Mostly they bought useless little things Mrs. Gayle called notions, but sometimes they concluded more serious purchases. I was in the house one night when Mrs. Gayle came back with an expensive lamp that had at its base a rickshaw pulled by a grinning coolie whose legs churned furiously when you pressed down on his hat. The two women took Arthur and me along on a couple of their sprees. I enjoyed listening to Mrs. Gayle talk about other people in the camp, impaling them with a word or phrase so uncanny I could never see them afterward without remembering it. She knew that I admired her tongue. She liked me for that, and for the fact that my brother Geoffrey was a student at Princeton. She said the words Ivy League often, and tenderly. I was a big snob myself, so we got along fine. Arthur’s disappointment was more combative. He refused to accept as final the proposition that Cal and Mrs. Gayle were his real parents. He told me, and I contrived to believe, that he was adopted, and that his real family was descended from Scottish liege men who had followed Bonnie Prince Charlie into exile in France. I read the same novels Arthur read, but managed not to notice the correspondences between their plots and his. And Arthur in turn did not question the stories I told him. I told him that my family was descended from Prussian aristocrats—“Junkers,” I said, pronouncing the word with pedantic accuracy—whose estates had been seized after the war. I got the idea for this narrative from a book called The Prussians . It was full of pictures of Crusaders, kings, castles, splendid hussars riding to the attack at Waterloo, cold-eyed Von Richthofen standing beside his triplane. Arthur was a great storyteller. He talked himself into reveries where every word rang with truth. He repeated ancient conversations. He rendered the creak of oars in their oarlocks. He spoke in the honest brogue of the crofter, the despicable whine of the traitor. In Arthur’s voice the mist rose above the loch and the pipes skirled; bold deeds were done, high words of troth plighted, and I believed them all. I was his perfect witness and he was mine. We listened without objection to stories of usurped nobility that grew in preposterous intricacy with every telling. But we did not feel as if anything we said was a lie. We both believed that the real lie was told by our present unworthy circumstances.

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  Skipper’s car was a 1949 Ford that Dwight had gotten a deal on from some rube in Marblemount. Dwight bought it so Skipper could take girls out and go hunting and fishing without borrowing his own car, but Skipper put it in a corrugated iron shed at the edge of camp and commenced taking it to pieces. It had been in pieces for over a year when I moved up to Chinook, and it was still in pieces six months later when Skipper graduated from Concrete High. Skipper didn’t leave Chinook when he graduated, but took a job with the power company and continued living at home so he could put all his money into the car. Sometimes at night I dropped by to look at it while I was out collecting from my subscribers. At home Skipper took little notice of me, but in the shed he became hospitable. He turned off whatever tool he happened to be plying at the time and raised his goggles to his forehead. He gave me Cokes to drink while he explained what the various parts of the car were and what he planned to do with them. I nodded as if I understood, and really believed that one day this mess would put itself together again. Though Skipper was supposed to start at the University of Washington in September, he didn’t give any sign of leaving. Dwight began to ride him. He wanted to know where Skipper expected to live, and how he was going to pay for his education. He wanted to know what the plan was. Skipper said he had it all worked out. Dwight kept at him, but Skipper just smiled his polite uninterested smile and did as he pleased. And then, late that summer, the car began to come together just as Skipper had said it would. I was in the shed the night he and his friends put the rebuilt engine in. Skipper had installed racing carbs and bored out the cylinders to make it more powerful, then he’d had it chromed. It was beautiful. His friends wrestled it in with a block and tackle while Skipper shouted orders at them, and within an hour he had it roaring. The body looked beyond saving. It was dented, dull, and full of holes from the ornaments Skipper had stripped off. He leaded in the holes, fiberglassed the dents, laid on a coat of primer, sanded it smooth, and put on sixteen coats of

• From Cleanness (2020)

  Our only principle was to stay away from the crowds of other tourists who moved in migratory flocks, following the little pennant or flag the guides all held above their heads, tiny bright triangles on long stems. It meant not seeing the important things but I didn’t care, their edges were rubbed smooth by too much looking, there was nothing for my attention to catch on in them. I liked the dark streets we turned into better, the narrow paths beside the canals. Even here there were restaurants and shops, nowhere on that island is indifferent to tourists, money from elsewhere is the blood of the place. We stopped on the footbridges and looked at the boats bundled up on either side of the canals, trussed in canvas, their wooden hulls deep shades of blue and green, their reflections darker shadows in the water. It wasn’t late but it was getting dark already, at least where we were, the sun had abandoned the narrow alleys to an afternoon dusk. We had left the grand palazzos behind, the churches; where we were now there were plastic shopping bags filled with trash beside the doors. This is where the people live, R. said, a trick of English making him sound like a revolutionary. Then he laughed and pointed ahead, at a bright yellow bag with the letters BILLA on it, its red handles tied off in a bow. It was the store we went to all the time in Mladost, our neighborhood store. I knew it was a big chain, that you could find them everywhere in Europe, and still it felt like a bit of good fortune to stumble across it here.

• From Post Office (1971)

  And underneath all that, the fish, the poor fish fighting each other, eating each other. We’re like those fish, only we’re up here. One bad move and you’re finished. It’s nice to be a champion. It’s nice to know your moves.” I took out a cigar and lit it. “‘nother drink, Mary Lou?” “All right, Hank.” 5There was this place. It stretched over the sea, it was built over the sea. An old place, but with a touch of class. We got a room on the first floor. You could hear the ocean running down there, you could hear the waves, you could smell the ocean, you could feel the tide going in and out, in and out. I took my time with her as we talked and drank. Then I went over to the couch and sat next to her. We worked something up, laughing and talking and listening to the ocean. I stripped down but made her keep her clothes on. Then I carried her over to the bed and while crawling all over her, I finally worked her clothing off and I was in. It was hard getting in. Then she gave way. It was one of the best. I heard the water, I heard the tide going in and out. It was as if I were coming with the whole ocean. It seemed to last and last. Then I rolled off. “Oh Jesus Christ,” I said, “Oh Jesus Christ!” I don’t know how Jesus Christ always got into such things. 6The next day we picked up some of her stuff at this motel. There was a little dark guy in there with a wart on the side of his nose. He looked dangerous. “You going with him?” he asked Mary Lou. “Yes.” “All right. Luck.” He lit a cigarette. “Thanks, Hector.” Hector? What the hell kind of name was that? “Care for a beer?” he asked me. “Sure,” I said. Hector was sitting on the edge of the bed. He went into the kitchen and got three beers. It was good beer, imported from Germany. He opened Mary Lou’s bottle, poured some of the bottle into a glass for her. Then he asked me: “Glass?” “No, thanks.” I got up and switched bottles with him. We sat drinking the beer in silence. Then he said, “You’re man enough to take her away from me?” “Hell, I don’t know. It’s her choice. If she wants to stay with you, she’ll stay. Why don’t you ask her?” “Mary Lou, will you stay with me?” “No,” she said, “I’m going with him.” She pointed at me. I felt important. I had lost so many women to so many other guys that it felt good for the thing to be working the other way around. I lit a cigar. Then I looked around for an ashtray. I saw one on the dresser.

• From Paul and Matthew Among Jews and Gentiles: Essays in Honor of Terence L. Donaldson (2021)

  47 R. Bultmann famously stated, “For the believer who is ‘in Christ’ the decisive event has already happened” in History and Eschatology (Edinburgh: University Press, 1957), 43. Bultmann makes this claim on different grounds than do I. For Bultmann, Paul has reinterpreted apocalyptic on the basis of his anthropology (41) and has “modified the current eschatology” (42). For Paul “the New Aeon is already reality” (42). In this way Paul solved the problem of the delay of Christ’s return (47). 85 Two-Age Dualism 85 already (resurrection), but will be part of him in one of his most important events; for they are in him. As Paul declares in the midst of his most extensive description of the eschaton, “in Christ shall all be made alive.” Conclusion At the beginning of the last century, A. Deissmann described Paul as conceiving of believers as being “rescued into … the one sphere of salvation, Christ.” 48 My investigation has come to a similar conclusion, though it has been focused on different questions. The apostle’s writing is most simply and directly explained as evidence that he thought the ongoing present evil age need have no power over believers. In words from Paul’s mature thought, believers have been raised with Christ and their life is with Christ in God (Col 3:1–3). If Paul came to Christ with an inherited two-age dualism, he did much more than modify it. He transcended it. Believers do not live in the new age or in the overlap of the ages. They live in union with Christ. Paul gives no evidence of eschatological tension but only of eschatological certainty. Paul cal s those in Christ to recognize the truth of their life: they are in Christ alone. 48 Deissmann, Paul, 298f. Deissmann diagrammed life in God in Jesus Christ as being entirely separate from that of being without God in the world (299). 86 86 87 5 Remapping Paul within Jewish Ideologies of Inclusion Matthew Thiessen In her wonderful book, The Invention of World Religions, Tomoko Masuzawa explores the way in which the academic discourse of religious studies developed in Western universities.1 The Invention of World Religions belongs within a steady stream of books that helpful y interrogate the way in which the concept of religion has taken shape, and for this reason is a must-read for biblical scholars who often work with a concept of religion that is undertheorized. One of the most salient points her work makes is that, in the earliest efforts to undertake comparative religious studies in the 1800s, academics repeatedly succumbed to the temptation to use Christianity as the standard for what religion ought to look like. As part of this project, these scholars frequently described Christianity as the one truly universal religion, while describing all other religions as ethnic. 2 Christianity is a world religion, while all others are merely national or regional religions. 3

• From On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019)

  I was on the spear crew, where the shorter workers were. Our task was to pick up the fallen crop, their leaves already shriveled in the sun. We split into teams of three harvesters each, two pickers and one piercer. As a piercer, all you had to do was stand by the spearing horse (a cart with a removable spear attached to it) and run the plants through the spear until the plank filled up. Then you’d remove the spear tip, and one of the pickers would carry the full plank to an idling tractor, where a loader would rack the plank. The piercer would then take another plank from a holster, attach the steel spear tip, and continue filling the new rack. When the tractor was at capacity, it would be driven back to the barns, where dozens of men, usually the tallest ones, would pass the racks, one by one, to each other up the rafters to dry. Since you could fall from as high as forty feet, the barn was the most dangerous place to work. There were stories the men told, from other farms, how the sound won’t leave their ears, the thud of a body—someone humming or talking of the weather or complaining of a woman, the price of gas in Modesto, then the abrupt silence, the leaves shifting where the voice had been. That first day, I stupidly refused the pair of gloves offered by Manny. They were too big and ran nearly to my elbows. By five o’clock, my hands were so thick and black with sap, dirt, pebbles, and splinters, they resembled the bottom of a pan of burned rice. The crows floated over the field’s wrinkled air as we worked the hours bare, their shadows swooping over the land like things falling from the sky. The jackrabbits dipped in and out of the rows, and once in a while a machete would come down on one and you could hear, even through the clink of blades, the shrill yelp of a thing leaving the earth we stood on. But the work somehow sutured a fracture inside me. A work of unbreakable links and collaboration, each plant cut, picked, lifted, and carried from one container to another in such timely harmony that no stalk of tobacco, once taken from the soil, ever touches ground again. A work of myriad communications, I learned to speak to the men not with my tongue, which was useless there, but with smiles, hand gestures, even silences, hesitations. I made out people, verbs, abstractions, ideas with my fingers, my arms, and by drawing in the dirt. Manny, brow furrowed, his mustache almost grey from dried sweat, nodded as I cupped my hands into a blossom to indicate your name, Rose. —

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  Their unconditional love and utter devotion infuse our lives with a heightened sense of meaning. The problem arises when we turn to them for what we no longer get from each other: a sense that we’re special, that we matter, that we’re not alone. When we transfer these adult emotional needs onto our children, we are placing too big a burden on them. In order to feel safe, kids need to know that there are limits to their power, and to what is surreptitiously asked of them. They need us to have our own loving relationships, in whatever form they take. When we are emotionally and sexually satisfied (at least reasonably so; let’s not get carried away here), we allow our children to experience their own independence with freedom and support. If Warren and Stephanie are going to get their groove back, they need to free themselves, both emotionally and practically, from the disproportionate focus on their kids. Spontaneity is desirable, but the reality of family life demands planning. Couples without kids can initiate sex on a whim, but parents need to be more practical. Be it a regular date night, a weekend away every few months, or an extra half hour in the car, what matters is that couples cordon off erotic territory for themselves. When Warren and Stephanie balk at the idea of premeditated sex, I respond, “Planning can seem prosaic, but in fact it implies intentionality, and intentionality conveys value. When you plan for sex, what you’re really doing is affirming your erotic bond. It’s what you did when you were dating. Think of it as prolonged foreplay—from twenty minutes to two days.” Planning has proved to be most useful for Stephanie. She elaborates, “Warren’s idea of a date is this: he approaches me for sex at eleven on Tuesday, and when I turn him down he says, ‘Can we have a date tomorrow night?’ I’ve had to explain to him that, for me, scheduled intercourse is not a date. I need to go out. I want food that someone else has cooked, on dishes that someone else is going to wash. When we go out, we talk, we kiss, we joke. We can finish a sentence without being interrupted. He pays attention to me, and it makes me feel sexy.” Not only do their rendezvous help maintain the emotional connection so critical for Stephanie; they also help her to make the transition from full-time mom to lover. “For so long, my thinking about sex was about how to avoid it. Knowing that Warren and I have a date has helped me to anticipate it instead. I pamper myself. I take a shower, shave my legs, put on makeup. I make a special effort to block the negativity and to give myself permission just to be sexual.” The story of Stephanie and Warren is typical of the effect of parenthood on eroticism, but it is only one among many.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  Paula’s golden period was a time for intense personal exploration: she had dreams of wandering through enormous halls and discovering in her house new, unused rooms. And it was a time of preparation: she had dreams of cleaning her house from basement to attic and of reorganizing bureaus and closets. She prepared her husband efficiently and lovingly. There were times, for example, when she felt strong enough to shop and cook but deliberately refrained in order to train him to be more self-sufficient. Once she told me that she was very proud of him because he had for the first time referred to “my” rather than “our” retirement. At such times I sat wide-eyed in disbelief. Was she on the level? Did such virtue really exist outside the Dickensian world of Peggotty, Little Dorrit, Tom Pinch, and the Boffins? Psychiatric texts rarely discuss the personality trait of “goodness” except to label it a defense against darker impulses, and at first I questioned her motives while poking around as unobtrusively as possible for flaws and chinks in the facade of saintliness. Finding none, I eventually concluded that it was no facade and, calling off my search, allowed myself to bask in Paula’s grace. Preparation for death, Paula believed, is vital and requires explicit attention. Upon learning that her cancer had spread to her spine, Paula prepared her thirteen-year-old son for her death by writing him a letter of farewell that moved me to tears. In her final paragraph she reminded him that the lungs in the human fetus do not breathe, nor do its eyes see. Thus, the embryo is being prepared for an existence it cannot yet imagine. “Are we not, too,” Paula suggested to her son, “being prepared for an existence beyond our ken, beyond even our dreams?” I have always been baffled by religious belief. As long as I can remember, I have regarded it as self-evident that religious systems develop in order to provide comfort and soothe the anxieties of our human condition. One day when I was twelve or thirteen and working in my father’s grocery store, I talked of my skepticism about the existence of God with a World War II soldier who had just returned from the European front. In response, he gave me a crinkled, faded picture of the Virgin Mary and Jesus that he had carried with him throughout the Normandy invasion. “Turn it over,” he said. “Read the back. Read it aloud.” “’There are no atheists in foxholes,’” I read. “Right! There are no atheists in foxholes,” he repeated slowly, shaking his finger at me with every word. “Christian God, Jew God, Chinese God, any other God—but some god, by God! Can’t do without it.”

• From On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019)

  After the room went black for a few seconds, Lan said, “What? It’s only three shots.” Her voice came from the exact place where she was sitting. She hadn’t even flinched. “Is it not? Are you dead or are you breathing?” Her clothes rustled against her skin as she waved us over. “In the war, entire villages would go up before you know where your balls were.” She blew her nose. “Now turn the light back on before I forget where I left off.” With Lan, one of my tasks was to take a pair of tweezers and pluck, one by one, the grey hairs from her head. “The snow in my hair,” she explained, “it makes my head itch. Will you pluck my itchy hairs, Little Dog? The snow is rooting into me.” She slid a pair of tweezers between my fingers, “Make Grandma young today, okay?” she said real quiet, grinning. For this work I was paid in stories. After positioning her head under the window’s light, I would kneel on a pillow behind her, the tweezers ready in my grip. She would start to talk, her tone dropping an octave, drifting deep into a narrative. Mostly, as was her way, she rambled, the tales cycling one after another. They spiraled out from her mind only to return the next week with the same introduction: “Now this one, Little Dog, this one will really take you out. You ready? Are you even interested in what I’m saying? Good. Because I never lie.” A familiar story would follow, punctuated with the same dramatic pauses and inflections during moments of suspense or crucial turns. I’d mouth along with the sentences, as if watching a film for the umpteenth time—a movie made by Lan’s words and animated by my imagination. In this way, we collaborated. As I plucked, the blank walls around us did not so much fill with fantastical landscapes as open into them, the plaster disintegrating to reveal the past behind it. Scenes from the war, mythologies of manlike monkeys, of ancient ghost catchers from the hills of Da Lat who were paid in jugs of rice wine, who traveled through villages with packs of wild dogs and spells written on palm leaves to dispel evil spirits.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  He lit another cigarette. For some time as he spoke he hadn’t been smoking, but now he took a deep drag and again I saw him relax as he exhaled. But really everything was fine, he said, I still had my place with my friends and I still had my friendship with B., I could do without the rest of it. B. dated a few girls, so did I, and it didn’t mean much more to him than to me, we were still the same thing to each other, all four of us, and now for the first time G. named the third member of the group, the female friend, what he had said about her to that point hadn’t been enough for me to be sure who she was. She was a beautiful girl, smart, kind, one of my favorite students; she was undemanding, by which I mean that she had never been a source of the worry that makes up so much of teaching, she was a student you could be sure of. Everything was fine, he said again, and this year was our big year, we were finally seniors. We’d been looking forward to it for so long, the trips we would take, the parties. There was a tradition of these celebrations, I knew, one each quarter and then a final post-prom bacchanalia at the seaside that lasted, for some of them, until they left for university in the fall.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  They were easy with one another in a way he had never been before, he told me, he had never been part of a group like that; he had always held himself apart from others, it was his nature to hold himself apart. I felt lucky, he said, I expected the whole time that I would mess it up, that our friendship would burn out the way my friendships always burn out; I don’t have any friends from before the College, he said, they slip away from me somehow. Or maybe those weren’t the phrases he used, burn out and slip away, maybe I’ve supplied them just now, though I’m fairly certain of the shape of what he said as we sipped our second cups of coffee, as I kept pouring more sugar into mine, packet after packet. But they didn’t slip away, he continued, they stuck. We met at the same place every morning before classes and then again for lunch, after school we took the bus together, on weekends we went to the park or the mall. Even during vacations we were together, we went to the mountains for winter break and spent summer at the seaside, our families became friends, we all traveled together. They’re not like me, they had lots of friends, they’ve always been popular, but we were still a special group, I always had my place. I had what I wanted, for the first time I didn’t want anything else, do you understand, and I nodded; I understood him entirely, and it seemed to me the intimacy he had drawn between us deepened further, becoming a sort of kinship, which I greeted with both welcome and dread. There were more people in the restaurant now, and G. lowered his voice as the booths around us filled and the air grew thick with smoke. I was leaning forward to hear him, and it occurred to me that he had brought me here for the added privacy of it, the privacy of the booth and his lowered voice but also the privacy of the language; at any of the brighter cafés on the boulevards we would have heard English but here no one else was speaking it, we were alone in that way too. I didn’t think of B. as special then, not really, he said, speaking of the boy who was also in my class, whom I thought of as G.’s particular friend; we were all equally friends, the four of us, but B. and I had always been in the same classes, in eighth and ninth grade, and then the next year they put us in different sections. It shouldn’t have mattered, he said, we were good students, we didn’t talk in class or fool around, and we still had our time together as a group.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  The town had little in the way of a riverfront, just a desolate patch of green like a stain seeping from the city’s largest building, a Soviet-era hotel that stood guard on the bank. The river was swollen with summer rains, and we watched the huge weight of it slide silently past, watching too the swallows twisting above us in the darkening air; and then the river was something we felt more than saw, in the darkness it was indistinguishable from the woods on the Romanian bank. There was nothing so impressive about the Yantra, a narrow river so shallow in places it seemed barely to cover its bed; but there was a kind of drama in the winding shape it cut through the land, at one point almost looping back upon itself as it twisted among the hills that gave the city both its character and its purpose. Atop the largest of those hills sat the jagged ruins of Tsarevets, Turnovo’s main attraction, a medieval fortress that fell to the Ottomans five centuries ago, a symbol of former greatness that’s at once a source of pride and a shadow cast over the present. A view of Tsarevets, and of the rest of the town from a neighboring hill, was the primary draw of the hotel where the taxi dropped us off. It was a nice hotel, it cost more than I would usually have wanted to pay, but its luxury was like a grand gesture abandoned, the large room with its gorgeous view filled with furniture and linens in various stages of disrepair. Even so, we felt a little flare of happiness on entering it; R. dropped his bags and stepped onto the bed, jumping up and down a few times, and I laughed with him, even as I sensed, just past the edges of what we felt, a hovering dread. It was a habit of mine, to rush toward an ending once I thought I could see it, as if the fact of loss were easier to bear than the chance of it.

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  We no longer plow the land together; today we talk. We have come to glorify verbal communication. I speak; therefore I am. We naively believe that the essence of who we are is most accurately conveyed through words. Many of my own patients wholeheartedly embrace this assumption when they complain, “We’re not close. We never talk.” In our era of communication, intimacy has been redefined. No longer is it the deep knowledge and familiarity that develop over time and can be cultivated in silence. Instead, we think of intimacy primarily as a discursive process, one that involves self-disclosure, the trustful sharing of our most personal and private material—our feelings. Of course, it is as much about listening as it is about telling. The receiver of these revelations must be a loving, accepting, nonjudgmental partner—a “good listener,” empathetic and validating. We want to feel completely known, deeply recognized, and fully accepted for who we are; and we expect our sharing to be reciprocated. It is no coincidence that the emergence of modern intimacy, with its emphasis on speech, arose alongside the growing economic independence of women. When women were no longer financially bound to their husbands, nor socially obligated to endure an unhappy union, they began to expect more from marriage. Nonnegotiable drudgery became unacceptable. It was replaced with the expectation of a mutually satisfying emotional connection. The ben efits applied to men as well, who were themselves no longer required to be the sole financial providers (it’s own form of drudgery). In our contemporary model of committed coupledom, the female influence is unmistakable. At a time when society needed new narratives of connection, women brought their well-developed communicative resourcefulness. Much ink has been spilled to explain women’s superior verbal ability in the emotional arena. For our purposes, suffice it to say that centuries of limited access to power have made us experts in relationship-building. The socialization of girls continues to emphasize the development of relational skills. More than ever, the lives we lead require tremendous adaptability. We must be able to maintain the connective tissue of our relationships despite the constant pressures of our hectic lives. The feminization of intimacy, with its emphasis on open and honest dialogue, provides the resources necessary to meet the demands of modern relationships. And the Word Didn’t Become Flesh This having been said, the emphasis on “talk intimacy” is nonetheless problematic, for a number of reasons. The hegemony of the spoken word has veered into a female bias that has, for once, put men in a position of inferiority. Men are socialized to perform, to compete, and to be fearless. The capacity to express feelings is not a prized attribute in the making of American manhood. Dare I say it’s not even considered a desirable one?—at least, not yet. When it comes to loving relationships, “talk intimacy” inevitably leaves many men at a loss. In this regime, they suffer from a chronic intimacy deficiency that needs ongoing repair.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  They were easy with one another in a way he had never been before, he told me, he had never been part of a group like that; he had always held himself apart from others, it was his nature to hold himself apart. I felt lucky, he said, I expected the whole time that I would mess it up, that our friendship would burn out the way my friendships always burn out; I don’t have any friends from before the College, he said, they slip away from me somehow. Or maybe those weren’t the phrases he used, burn out and slip away, maybe I’ve supplied them just now, though I’m fairly certain of the shape of what he said as we sipped our second cups of coffee, as I kept pouring more sugar into mine, packet after packet. But they didn’t slip away, he continued, they stuck. We met at the same place every morning before classes and then again for lunch, after school we took the bus together, on weekends we went to the park or the mall. Even during vacations we were together, we went to the mountains for winter break and spent summer at the seaside, our families became friends, we all traveled together. They’re not like me, they had lots of friends, they’ve always been popular, but we were still a special group, I always had my place. I had what I wanted, for the first time I didn’t want anything else, do you understand, and I nodded; I understood him entirely, and it seemed to me the intimacy he had drawn between us deepened further, becoming a sort of kinship, which I greeted with both welcome and dread. There were more people in the restaurant now, and G. lowered his voice as the booths around us filled and the air grew thick with smoke. I was leaning forward to hear him, and it occurred to me that he had brought me here for the added privacy of it, the privacy of the booth and his lowered voice but also the privacy of the language; at any of the brighter cafés on the boulevards we would have heard English but here no one else was speaking it, we were alone in that way too. I didn’t think of B. as special then, not really, he said, speaking of the boy who was also in my class, whom I thought of as G.’s particular friend; we were all equally friends, the four of us, but B. and I had always been in the same classes, in eighth and ninth grade, and then the next year they put us in different sections. It shouldn’t have mattered, he said, we were good students, we didn’t talk in class or fool around, and we still had our time together as a group.

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  They came out of this experience wanting to charge at life with a vengeance and to make the most of each day. They both felt that they had been granted a unique gift: living life again. My parents were unusual, I think. They didn’t just want to survive; they wanted to revive. They possessed a thirst for life, thrived on exuberant experiences, and loved to have a good time. They cultivated pleasure. I know absolutely nothing about their sexual life except that they had two children, my brother and me. But by the way they lived, I sensed that they had a deep understanding of eroticism. Though I doubt that they ever used this word, they embodied its mystical meaning as a quality of aliveness, a pathway to freedom—not just the narrow definition of sex that modernity has assigned to it. It is this expanded understanding that I bring to bear on my discussion of eroticism in this book. There is yet another powerful influence that has helped shape this project. My husband is the director of the International Trauma Studies Program at Columbia University. His work is devoted to assisting refugees, children of war, and victims of torture as they seek to overcome the massive trauma they’ve experienced. By restoring their sense of creativity and their capacity for play and pleasure, these survivors are ultimately helped to reconnect with life and the hope that fuels it. My husband deals with pain; I deal with pleasure. They are intimately acquainted. The individuals I write about do not appear in the acknowledgments, though I owe them a great deal. Their stories are authentic and almost verbatim, but their identities are masked. Throughout this project, I’ve shared excerpts with them in the spirit of collaboration. Many of my ideas were developed through my work, and not the other way around. My ideas also draw on the wealth of careful considerations made by many professionals and authors who have previously tackled the ambiguities of love and desire. Every day in my work I am confronted with the detailed realities that hide behind statistics. I see people who are such good friends that they cannot sustain being lovers. I see lovers who hold so tenaciously to the idea that sex must be spontaneous that they never have it at all. I see couples who view seduction as too much work, something they shouldn’t have to do now that they’re committed. I see others who believe that intimacy means knowing everything about each other. They abdicate any sense of separateness, then are left wondering where the mystery has gone. I see wives who would rather carry the label “low sexual desire” for the rest of their lives than suffer explaining to their husbands that foreplay needs to be more than a prelude to the real thing.

• From Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928)

  The man lay in a mysterious stillness. What was he feeling? What was he thinking? She did not know. He was a strange man to her, she did not know him. She must only wait, for she did not dare to break his mysterious stillness. He lay there with his arms round her, his body on hers, his wet body touching hers, so close. And completely unknown. Yet not unpeaceful. His very stillness was peaceful. She knew that, when at last he roused and drew away from her. It was like an abandonment. He drew her dress in the darkness down over her knees and stood a few moments, apparently adjusting his own clothing. Then he quietly opened the door and went out. She saw a very brilliant little moon shining above the afterglow over the oaks. Quickly she got up and arranged herself; she was tidy. Then she went to the door of the hut. All the lower wood was in shadow, almost darkness. Yet the sky overhead was crystal. But it shed hardly any light. He came through the lower shadow towards her, his face lifted like a pale blotch. "Shall we go, then?" he said. "Where?" "I'll go with you to the gate." He arranged things his own way. He locked the door of the hut and came after her. "You aren't sorry, are you?" he asked, as he went at her side. "No! No! Are you?" she said. "For that! No!" he said. Then after a while he added: "But there's the rest of things." "What rest of things?" she said. "Sir Clifford. Other folks. All the complications." "Why complications?" she said, disappointed. "It's always so. For you as well as for me. There's always complications." He walked on steadily in the dark. "And are you sorry?" she said. "In a way!" he replied, looking up at the sky. "I thought I'd done with it all. Now I've begun again." "Begun what?" "Life." "Life!" she re-echoed, with a queer thrill. "It's life," he said. "There's no keeping clear. And if you do keep clear you might almost as well die. So if I've got to be broken open again, I have." She did not quite see it that way, but still.... "It's just love," she said cheerfully. "Whatever that may be," he replied. They went on through the darkening wood in silence, till they were almost at the gate. "But you don't hate me, do you?" she said wistfully. "Nay, nay," he replied. And suddenly he held her fast against his breast again, with the old connecting passion. "Nay, for me it was good, it was good. Was it for you?" "Yes, for me too," she answered, a little untruthfully, for she had not been conscious of much. He kissed her softly, softly, with the kisses of warmth. "If only there weren't so many other people in the world," he said lugubriously. She laughed. They were at the gate to the park. He opened for her.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  Z. stumbled again, this time falling toward N., who caught him and kept him on his feet. N. looked at me and laughed as Z. stood up again, closing his eyes and swaying; both of us put our hands on his shoulders to keep him upright. I looked at N. and tilted my head toward the entrance. We should go, I shouted, and he weaved his head from left to right. We each took one of Z.’s arms. We had to walk sideways and single file to make it through the crowd, though people tried to make room for us, smiling and moving out of our way as best they could. We must have been a familiar sight, two friends helping a third, and again I had the feeling of belonging with them, which was warm and present and drowned out my premonition of shame. We climbed the stairs and pushed out into the night, nodding at the two bouncers who didn’t acknowledge us, and I sucked in great breaths as if I had been starving for air. Z. stumbled again, leaning hard against me, and we sat on the stairs to wait for the cab N. had called. Z. bent forward, his elbows propped on his knees, and moaned, and N. and I laughed at him. Mnogo si slab, be, I said, you’re very weak, I expected better, and I gripped his shoulder to pull him to me. But then he slipped or lost his balance and fell across my lap, and a single fluent stream of vomit struck the pavement beside my shoes. He stayed in that position, draped across my lap, and I bent over him, as if to shield him from something, and rubbed his back, the fabric of his shirt damp with sweat. Ne se chuvstvam dobre, he said, pushing himself upright, I don’t feel well, and N. told him not to worry, they were going home, he would sleep it off. They would go to Z.’s apartment, which was somewhere nearby, the studio his family kept and that Z. had claimed as his own, a place to take girls and have small gatherings, it was only big enough for five or six people, he had told me. He was still slumped against me, I could feel his heat against my side. When the cab came we stood, N. and I pulling Z. up and leading him to the car. Will you be okay, I asked as Z. pulled his legs in, half lying across N.’s lap. But you’re coming, N. said, don’t you want to come with us, we can hang out at Z.’s place, and Z. echoed him, saying Yes, come, Gospodine, his voice slurred with drink. I stood with my hand on the car, hesitating, wanting to join them and imagining what might still happen, the possibilities of privacy with Z., I was tempted to try them. But I stepped back instead. No, I said, I have to go home, it’s too late already. But thank you for tonight, I said, I had so much fun, thank you. It was a great night, Z. said, letting his head fall as I swung the door shut.

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  When they move in together, John and Beatrice are introduced to each other’s tastes and preferences, and become more acquainted with each other’s quirks. John likes his coffee black. No sugar. And he needs his first cup as soon as he gets out of bed. Beatrice likes hers with cream, no sugar, but she likes to have a glass of water first. Some of these wants are met with ease and tenderness; some they must learn to accept; and some are annoying, offensive, or downright disgusting. They wonder how they’ll ever live with…(name the three most revolting habits of your own partner). They enter into each other’s world of habit, and this familiarity reassures them. It creates routine, which in turn fosters a sense of security. Growing familiarity also signals freedom from ceremony and constraint. Yet this unceremoniousness, which is a welcome feature of intimacy, is a proven antiaphrodisiac as well. Of course, familiarity is but one manifestation of intimacy. Our continued discovery of another person extends far beyond surface habits into an interior world of thoughts, beliefs, and feelings. We penetrate our partner mentally. We talk, we listen, we share, and we compare. We disclose certain parts of ourselves, while we adorn, fiddle with, and conceal others. Sometimes I learn something about you because you tell me: your history, your family, your life before we met. But just as often my understanding comes from watching you, intuiting, and making associations. You present the facts, I connect the dots, and an image is formed. Your singularities are gradually revealed to me, openly or covertly, intentionally or not. Some places inside of you are easy to reach; others are encrypted and laborious to decode. Over time, I come to know your values, and your fault lines. By witnessing how you move in the world, I come to know how you connect: what excites you, what presses your buttons, and what you’re afraid of. I come to know your dreams and your nightmares. You grow on me. And all this, of course, happens in two directions. As John settles into this new relationship, he stops talking about it in therapy, and I assume that no talk means no problems. So when, after a year, he brings it up again, I pay close attention. “Things are going well. We’ve moved in together. We get along great. She’s beautiful, she’s funny, she’s smart. I really love her. We don’t have sex.” Intimacy Begets Sexuality…or Does It? The prevailing belief of couples therapy in America today is that sex is a metaphor for the relationship—find out what’s going on emotionally and you can infer what’s going on in the bedroom. If couples are caring and nurturing—if they have good communication, mutual respect, fairness, trust, empathy, and honesty—you can reliably assume an ongoing, pulsing erotic bond. In her book Hot Monogamy, Dr. Patricia Love gives voice to these ideas:

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  The Visceral ReceptorsThe fourth subsystem, which provides the deepest level of interoception, derives from our viscera and blood vessels. In Chapter 6 I described the vagus nerve, which connects the brain stem to most of our internal organs. This massive nerve is second only to the spinal cord in total number of neurons. Over 90% of these nerve fibers are afferent: that is, the vagus nerve’s main function is to relay information from our guts upward to our brains. Thus, the colloquialisms “gut instinct,” “gut feelings” and even “gut wisdom” have a robust anatomical and physiological basis. Visceral sensations also originate from receptors in the blood vessels—as sufferers from migraines know all too well, the abrupt dilation of blood vessels (after strong constriction) causing their excruciating pain. However, we are also receiving all sorts of other ambient information from our blood vessels. We feel relaxed and open when our blood vessels and viscera gently pulse like jellyfish, causing sensations of warmth and goodness to surge through our bodies. When the vessels and viscera are constricted, we feel cold and anxious. The Image ChannelWhile image commonly refers to visual representation, I use it more generally to refer to all types of external sense impressions, which originally come from stimuli that arise from outside the body and that we have also incorporated into the brain as sense memory. These external (“special”) senses include sight, taste, smell, hearing and the tactile sense.‡ Counter to common parlance, I use the same word—Image—to categorize all of these external senses. Indeed, the I in the SIBAM model could refer, equally, to any of the externally generated Impressions (i.e., visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory, etc.). For example, if a person is physically touched by another person, he or she will experience both the external impression of being touched as well as the internal (interoceptive) sensation of his or her response to that touch. So if we have been touched inappropriately, it will be necessary to separate the actual tactile impression from our internal response to this stimulus in each new situation in order to free ourselves from reflexively reacting from past experience.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  I remembered this when he spoke the word, and then, as if dispelling the atmosphere he had created, he turned his attention to the menu. The restaurant had an Italian name but that didn’t mean anything, nearly every restaurant in Sofia served pizza, and nearly all of them offered the same dozen or so Bulgarian dishes, meat and vegetables and eggs, or all of them I could afford. R. studied every page, and then he ordered what he always did, pointing to it mutely with a smile as he angled the menu toward the waitress: a salad of greens and strips of eggplant covered in a sweet dressing that he loved. We handed over our menus, and then R. turned his face to the glass beside us, watching the wind, which was visible both in the detritus it carried, papers and leaves and the little plastic cups coffee comes in here, and in the resistance of everything fastened down. Already the last of the light was fading, and as much as the world outside it was R.’s face I saw, which was pensive as he said again it was a crazy wind.