Desire

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 Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  I could have taken just the head and walked home with it; I could have put it beside me at night, on a pillow, and made love to it. The mouth and the eyes, when they opened up, the whole being glowed from them. There was an illumination which came from some unknown source, from a center hidden deep in the earth. I could think of nothing but the face, the strange, womblike quality of the smile, the engulfing immediacy of it. The smile was so painfully swift and fleeting that it was like the flash of a knife. This smile, this face, was borne aloft on a long white neck, the sturdy, swanlike neck of the medium—and of the lost and the damned. I stand on the corner under the red lights, waiting for her to come down. It is about two in the morning and she is signing off. I am standing on Broadway with a flower in my buttonhole, feeling absolutely clean and alone. Almost the whole evening we have been talking about Strindberg, about a character of his named Henriette. I listened with such tense alertness that I fell into a trance. It was as if, with the opening phrase, we had started on a race—in opposite directions. Henriette! Almost immediately the name was mentioned she began to talk about herself, without ever quite losing hold of Henriette. Henriette was attached to her by a long, invisible string which she manipulated imperceptibly with one finger, like the street hawker who stands a little removed from the black cloth on the sidewalk, apparently indifferent to the little mechanism which is jiggling on the cloth, but betraying himself by the spasmodic movement of the little finger to which the black thread is attached. Henriette is me, my real self, she seemed to be saying. She wanted me to believe that Henriette was really the incarnation of evil. She said it so naturally, so innocently, with an almost subhuman candor—how was I to believe that she meant it? I could only smile as though to show her I was convinced. Suddenly I feel her coming. I turn my head. Yes, there she is coming full on, the sails spread, the eyes glowing. For the first time I see now what a carriage she has. She comes forward like a bird, a human bird wrapped in a soft fur. The engine is going full steam: I want to shout, to give a blast that will make the whole world cock its ears. What a walk! It’s not a walk, it’s a glide. Tall, stately, full-bodied, self-possessed, she cuts the smoke and jazz and red-light glow like the queen mother of all the slippery Babylonian whores. On the corner of Broadway just opposite the comfort station, this is happening. Broadway—it’s her realm. This is Broadway, this is New York, this is America. She’s America on foot, winged and sexed.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  Did he understand that I was weighing and measuring him like this, or possibly envisage the tingle of desire that ran up my back when I saw his brown bare insteps between turn-up and low-cut moccasin? It was hard to know if something vain and mistrustful in his look was more than the ordinary wariness of a boy with his teacher, or of people starting cold at knowing each other. To me of course he wasn't quite new, though when he took his place on the far side of the table and waited for me to begin I could hardly keep from telling him how different he was from his picture, how much odder and better. In his father's generation his features might have been thought ugly or exaggerated, though now they had come into fashion and could be admitted as wonderful in their own way; he must have taken from his father the long nose and high cheekbones which gave him the air of a blond Aztec. His eyes were narrow and colourless—his mother's lost look given a new caution and sharpness; while his long mouth seemed burdened with involuntary expressiveness, the thick lips opening, when later I twisted a smile out of him, to show strong sexy canines and high gums. His upper lip was almost too heavy, a puckering outward curl, with no downward dimple in the fingermark beneath the nose, where it had a straight edge, as if finished off impatiently with a palette-knife. There was something engrossing, even slightly repellent, about the whole feature. His mother knocked and brought two coffees in with a self-denying expression, as if to say that this would be her last intrusion on the serious work we had to do. Then the conversation made its faltering beginnings, and ran on for minute after minute, with topics artificially encouraged gaining a brief involuntary momentum before dying like an old engine in which too much confidence had been placed. We spoke about the geography of Belgium, the relative merits of the western plain and the south-easterly heights, and discussed the Flemish/Walloons question without reaching any very deep or new conclusions. It was a puzzling experience—I was fascinated by him, yet carrying on as though I'd been trapped with a bore at a cocktail party. Perhaps he really was a bore; there was no reason he shouldn't be, whatever his fretful mother had said.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  The Club often played host to these groups, and though their bored ragging was a nuisance in the pool the members by some unspoken agreement forgave them everything for their sleek brown bodies, the tiny wet leaves of their swimwear and all their posturing and tossing back of curls. I halted under a fizzing nozzle before going down to the pool and looked them over frankly. It was impossible, with my opera-goer’s Italian, to understand what they were saying, but as they took notice of me I heard their chatter sprinkled with cazzo … cazzo , slurred, whispered and then called aloud, almost chanted, so that they fell about in coarse, lazy giggles at their audacity. When I got back to the flat I was half expecting Phil to be there, and remembered as I slouched sulkily and randily around the kitchen taking a glass of Scotch in great hot nips that he had arranged a couple of nights ‘off’ to see some South African friends, and, tomorrow, to go to a leaving party at the ‘Embassy’. In the sitting-room, remote control in hand, I tripped from channel to channel on the TV, trying to find something attractive in the personnel of various sitcoms and panel games. Abandoning that forlorn pursuit, I put on the beginning of Act Three of Siegfried and conducted it wildly, with great tuggings at the cellos and stabbings at the horns, but without, after five minutes or so, having made myself feel the faintest interest in it. It was in a reluctant mood that I finally settled down at my writing-desk to read Charles’s precious document. When I untied it I found it to be, unlike anything else of his I had seen, an elegant fair copy, from which a compositor could easily have set type. Although it would have been allowed, I did not keep a journal over those six months. From the start I saw that what I wanted to say, although ‘hereafter, in a better world than this’ it might find other readers and do its good, would have brought nothing but scorn and salacity at the time. And later, long after the start, when I thought writing might earn some slight remission of my solitude and pent-up thoughts, I shunned it, mistrusted it like one of those friends to whom one is drawn and drawn again and yet each time comes away cheapened, wasted or over-indulged. My journal has always, since my childhood, been my close, silent and retentive friend, so close that when I lied to it I suffered inwardly from its mute reproach.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  He picked up his bag. It was impossible for either of us to say ‘Well, is this it, then?’; instead we found ourselves going towards the door together. A close follower of Corry form might have seen it as an interesting development—a suspicion confirmed by Michael, at the reception-desk, who said, ‘Goodnight, gentlemen’ in a tone of bitter reproach. It was about 8.30 and in the winter ‘Goodnight’ would have been the instinctive word; but Phil and I strolled out on to the street to find the sky still bright, the pavements and the buildings warm. The slow, late expanses of a high summer evening were before us. I carried on talking and, without hesitating turned not towards the station but in the direction of the Queensberry Hotel. We reacted differently to the slight panic of the occasion, he shutting up completely and looking very serious, whilst I carried on with unnatural brightness and ease. ‘Mm, it’s good to be out in the open air,’ I said. ‘What a beautiful evening!’ He seemed unable to find a reply to this. ‘It gets so crowded in there,’ I expanded. ‘Oh—yes …’ he said, catching and letting go the conversational straw. We walked on, and I came very close to him for a step or two, as one does walking with a friend: our upper arms brushed and then parted once, twice, with a gentle lurch in my stride. When we had started touching, everything would be all right, I told myself. ‘Yes,’ he added, ‘it can get very crowded.’ I turned towards him with a broad, calculated grin. ‘That’s because chaps like you hog the weights all the time.’ Perhaps because he had heard such complaints before, he seemed to take this as a genuine sarcasm. ‘No, it’s not that,’ he insisted—which, of course, it wasn’t. ‘No, it’s because they let so many new members in.’ Still I carried on grinning at him. ‘You must be on the weights a lot, though,’ I said. ‘The way you’re filling out, my dear …’ I thought it was important to drop in a casual endearment, but he showed no response to it.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  At the same time I was to have a redemptive effect on him, leading him back to the life from which fate had deflected him. I would often ask insouciant questions about him, and my brother would say, "What are you always going on about Mark Lyle for, stupid?" and my mother would say, "That poor family, I don't know . . . " She was inclined to charity work, but they seemed not quite to qualify. I imagined going down there with her, taking blankets, and meals under tinfoil. A lot of the day I was out on the common. It was harmless and healthy, and though I'd overheard remarks about leathery old Colonel Palgrave who sunbathed in the long grass by the woods with nothing on, I never had a sense of danger. Sometimes I tagged along unwelcomely with Charlie and his friends as they stumbled round complaining and calling things bummers; often I played out complex romantic games on my own, or dared myself to clamber up trees, giving instructions to an imaginary person following me. Once or twice I stumped around on the edge of a group that included Mark Lyle, ready to drift off if they got threatening. We had a huge, friendly dog at that time, who ran away if I didn't keep him on a lead, but who was a good way of meeting people. I was embarrassed to tell boys from the Flats he was called Sibelius, and pretended his name was Bach, which led to one or two jokes but by no means eased the problems of discipline. I became increasingly excited when I saw Mark Lyle, and my early troubles of manhood about that time took him as their object and even as their cause. One day he was up by the pond with some other boys and a couple of girls. They were trying to fly a kite in the intermittent breeze, but after a few dips and a few spoolings-out of the thread it would smack to earth. Then the thread got snagged in a sapling pine, and the others suddenly lost interest in the whole idea of kite-flying and sloped off. With heart thumping, and not knowing what to say, I came forward and started to disentangle the cotton line from the little tree. Mark Lyle looked at me and didn't say anything either. We worked it clumsily free, managing to ravel up the rest ofit in a series ofloops that tugged into knots as we tried to pull them straight. Still not speaking except in grunts of concentration and annoyance we bundled the whole lot up and went off to the bench to work on it. "This is a fucking game," said Mark Lyle after a bit. It was fantastic to be spoken to like that.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  I then proceeded by a succession of distinct and inexorable moves, shifting into the place between us and at the same time pushing his bag along the floor to where I had been sitting. I sensed some anxiety abour this, but he carried on looking at the screen. Next I slid my arm along the back of his seat, and as he remained immobile I made it as clear as I could in the dark that I had my cock out and was playing with it. Then I leant over him more, and ran my hand over his chest. His heart was racing, and I felt all the tension in his fixed posture between excitement and fear, and knew that I could take control of him. He had on a kind of bomber jacket, and under that a shirt. I let my hand linger at his waist, and admired his hard, ridged stomach, slipping my fingers between his shirt buttons, and running my hand up over his smooth skin. He had beautiful, muscular tits, with small, frosted nipples, quite hairless. My left hand gently rubbed the base of his thick neck; he seemed to have almost a crew-cut and the back of his head was softly bristly. I leant close to him and drooled my tongue up his jaw and into his ear. At this he could no longer remain impassive. He turned towards me with a gulp, and I felt his fingertips shyly slide on to my knee and shortly after touch my cock. ‘Oh no,’ I think he said under his breath, as he tried to get his hand around it, and then jerked it tentatively a few times. I continued stroking the back of his neck, thinking it might relax him, but he kept on feeling my dick in a very polite sort of way, so I brought pressure to bear, and pushed his head firmly down into my lap. He had to struggle around to get his stocky form into the new position, encumbered by the padded arm between our seats; but once there he took the crown of my cock into his mouth and with me moving his head puppet-like up and down, sucked it after a fashion.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  I wasn't listening to what Paul was saying and didn't know if he had registered my lapse of attention: he tended to busy on, caught up in the oblique runs of his own thoughts. But he looked across with a moment's surprise as the man drew level with a questioning smile and I let out a bold little "Hi!" My heart sped up for a while, I even fell a pace or two behind and glanced back at him moving away. It wasn't often you saw a soldier by himself. He was a natural buttocky type, like the young Dawn, though what cut into me was the glint of intelligence, the hint of witty sous-entendu his glasses lent his square, inexperienced face. And maybe we did make an enigmatic couple, me stubbly and leather-jacketed and fucked-looking, Paul, in his oddly vented paletot and broad-brimmed trilby, seeming perhaps a little fruity and mysterious, like one of those flamboyant but watchful dons who recruit discreetly for the intelligence services. When I caught him up again he stared at me for a second, and I thought his large pale eyes had never been more subtly comprehending. I felt he must know about Luc and everything, but simply, kindly held back from touching on a situation which he could only see as futile and perhaps improper. He wasn't a drunk or a gossip. I knew he cared about me. He must have read my smothered hints, my trembling unconcern at every mention of Luc and his ancient family. I looked away into the arched stillness under a bridge that the road rose and swung to cross. Almost a circle, arch and reflection crossed by the water's wintry line. I was working with nothing, I had nothing on Luc, nothing of him that mattered, nothing from him. It came over me with a certain desolate formal perfection and for the first time. "Have you been to St Vaast?" said Paul. I told him I had passed it on the evening I arrived in town, roaming about . . . "It was locked," I said, "I couldn't get in. It looked rather melancholy, I think." "I'm afraid it is. This little parish is a very poor one. The people still use the church, but they've never had the money to do it up. It had that rather wonderful porch tacked on in the seventeenth century. Since then it's been more or less left alone."

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  When Phil and I rolled about our legs or our shoulders were hanging over the edge, increasing the precariousness of the situation: there was a strangely constricting need to cling together. Then he was on the point of falling on to the floor, his stomach muscles ridged to hold himself horizontal as I hauled him back by the waist, his head lurched upwards and our skulls cracked together quite painfully. The next day I had a perceptible bruise. Things were not working out with the instinctive ease I’d imagined. But I felt it was important to get on with it, and after a while and some laughter to relax him (though it also brought back an inhibiting normality) I turned him over and started to nose around his bum. It was deeply beautiful, creamily smooth when slack and when he clenched his buttocks almost cubic with built muscle. There was still the dust of Trouble for Men on the hairs in his crack, which I oiled back with my tongue, and sniffed through the dry smell of the talc to his own rectal smell—a soft stench like stale flower-water. His asshole was a clean pale purple, and shone with my saliva. He rolled over, feet swinging above my head, and snuggled down beside me again, hugging me and resting his chin on my chest, putting off the looming fuck. My cock did look thick and threatening between his thighs, nudging its head up under his balls. Though he wanted to go through with all this he seemed baffled by some deeper incapacity. The childlike embraces were spontaneous, but the kisses, and the stroking of my cock, were acting, and made me an actor too. There followed a weird, long nothingness—perhaps an hour and a half of lying together, holding each other, barely whispering a word, occasionally shifting and rubbing against each other fiercely, but only for a few seconds. At one point blood-warm water ran suddenly from my ear and dried along my neck. Later, both our stomachs moaned at the same time: we had had nothing, couldn’t have managed anything, to eat. I felt I had lost all the command I’d had in the cinema, the certainty that made each seduction, as James drily remarked, ‘an act of Will’. Then Phil sat on the edge of the bed and said, ‘I’ve got to get ready.’ I’d been waiting for this moment, staring at the angle of the dormer embrasure, lining up the chair and the edge of the open window, first with my right eye, then with my left. I lay on the bed, and watched him put on dark socks, clean Y-fronts, a laundered white shirt, dark blue trousers with red side-tapes like the soldier I still wanted him to be. Then he took the shirt off again, and smiled at me sweetly as he put on his high-collared blue uniform jacket over his bare skin.

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

  Th is was the age of Venus, when the THE MORALITIES OF SEX IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE  seminal channels were formed and the impulse for sex began to course throughout a young man’s whole being. “Something like frenzy arises in the soul, the will is powerless, there is lust for sex however it may be had, the guile of one who is on fi re with passion and the blindness of one who is reck- less.” Th e most that could be hoped for was that the young man, in this frantic period, did nothing to impair his manhood; he needed to pass through “that slippery time” without doing permanent damage to his repu- tation. Marcus Aurelius, a little cryptically, was grateful that he had man- aged “to keep safe the bloom of youth and not to become a man before the right hour, in fact to wait a little.” In other words, he had never submitted to a lover, nor did he rush headlong into the aphrodisia at puberty, though even this dreary Stoic had given way to “erotic passions” for a time, before returning to sound control of himself.  Ethical strictures lay lightly on young men, who made use of the “mirth conceded to their age.” Th ere was an unwritten “law of youth.” “An un- timely severity is not moderation but gloominess.” Sexual exploration was “practically required training,” after which it was expected the young man would cool off and ease into a more respectable self- control and eventually marriage. Th e “natural violence of youth” was better indulged than re- pressed, for repression would inevitably fail. Th e sexual escapades of boys in their late teens and early twenties were almost completely inconsequential. By contrast, the more seasoned sexual prowess of youth in their later twen- ties was a social problem. Th e predatory sexuality of young, unmarried men was a dangerous presence in the ancient Mediterranean city; in a society where men were half a generation older than their wives, the threat of adul- tery was conceived in generational terms, as a threat emanating from below, from younger men with enough cunning to play the seducer. Th e solution was a high degree of tolerance toward sex with slaves and prostitutes. A fa- ther who sensed that his son was in love with a freeborn woman gravely counseled him to use “the venus which is public and permitted.”

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  Beyond him the cock of one of the weightlifters, radically circumcised, was in its usual ambiguous form, not quite at ease, not quite at attention. I looked obviously and lovingly at him as he turned slowly from side to side, unaware of me and lost in his serene, numerical weightlifter’s world. I couldn’t wait any longer, and at the merest word to Carlos took him dripping and giggling to the lav, where we brought each other off swiftly and greedily. How hopelessly different life must appear to Charles, I thought, as I took the train to St Paul’s. When one is beyond love, where does pleasure lie? What does one do, seeing the lustful, disrespectful world going about its business, the young up one another’s arse? Was there ever an end to it, this irresistible, normal, subnormal craving for sex? Or did it go tauntingly on? At Skinner’s Lane the door was opened by the new man. He was not unlike Lewis, a plausible ex-con, with regular good looks enlivened by a pale scar running up his left cheek almost to his eye. It touched me as a strange coincidence, today of all days. ‘Mr Beckwith?’ he said, with the complacency of one who knows just what’s going on. ‘His Lordship is expecting you.’ Charles was sitting in the library with The Times. He didn’t get up but looked jolly, and chuckled to see me. I went over to him, and he slipped his arm round my waist, as parents shelter and draw to them a tired or evasive child. ‘Can you think of anything to go in there?’ he asked. There was one word of the crossword to do, and as I had filled the whole thing in quite quickly that morning I decided I would only pretend to think for a second or two before coming out with the answer. ‘ “Hurry to start mischief in the women’s quarters”,’ I quoted. ‘Well, I should have thought it was “HAREM”, but …’ The three across answers, which gave the first, third and final letters of the word had been uncompromisingly filled in with ‘SCREW’, ‘AZALEA’ and ‘PRESURIZE’ ( sic ). ‘C blank Z blank P,’ Charles pondered. ‘I’m dashed if I can think of anything. I seem to have boxed myself in.’ ‘I don’t think some of these answers can be right,’ I said kindly. ‘ “I hear of a line in a bottle”, for instance, must be “PHIAL”.’ Charles was pleased that I had fallen for it. ‘Oh, I don’t do the clues ,’ he said, in a tone of voice and with a little downward slap of the hand which conveyed tired contempt, an almost political feeling of disaffection. ‘No, no, no,’ he smiled; ‘I do the alternative crossword, as they call things nowadays. You have to fill in words which aren’t the answers. It’s much more difficult. It’s a kind of solitaire, you see, you have to make a clean sweep of it.

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

  THEOPHYLACT. As if they said, The more you attack Him, the more will His power and reputation increase. What use then of these attempts? 12:20–2620. And there were certain Greeks among them that came up to worship at the feast. 21. The same came therefore to Philip, which was of Bethsaida of Galilee, and desired him, saying, Sir, we would see Jesus. 22. Philip cometh and telleth Andrew: and again Andrew and Philip tell Jesus. 23. And Jesus answered them, saying, The hour is come, that the Son of man should be glorified. 24. Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit. 25. He that loveth his life shall lose it, and he that hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal. 26. If any man serve me, let him follow me; and where I am, there shall also my servant be: if any man serve me, him will my Father honour. BEDE. The temple at Jerusalem was so famous, that on the feast days, not only the people near, but many Gentiles from distant countries came to worship in it; as that eunuch of Candace, Queen of the Ethiopians, mentioned in the Acts. The Gentiles who were at Jerusalem now, had come up for this purpose: And there were certain Gentiles among them who came to worship at the feast. CHRYSOSTOM. (Hom. lxvi. 2) The time being now near, when they would be made proselytes. They hear Christ talked of, and wish to see Him: The same came therefore to Philip, which was of Bethsaida of Galilee, and desired him, saying, Sir, we would see Jesus. AUGUSTINE. (Tr. li. 8) Lo! the Jews wish to kill Him, the Gentiles to see Him. But they also were of the Jews who cried, Blessed is He that cometh in the name of the Lord. So behold them of the circumcision, and them of the uncircumcision, once so wide apart, coming together like two walls, and meeting in one faith of Christ by the kiss of peace. Philip cometh and telleth Andrew. CHRYSOSTOM. (Hom. lxvii. 2) As being the elder disciple. He had heard our Saviour say, Go not into the way of the Gentiles; (Matt. 10:5) and therefore he communicates with his fellow-disciple, and they refer the matter to their Lord: And again Andrew and Philip tell Jesus.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  He stands well back from the wall and the gutter as he eases his bladder, his penis is preternaturally visible and his attitude encourages me to look at it. Sometimes he seems to drop his trousers round his knees or to undo a wide fly with buttons up both sides, like a sailor’s. In the light of day I can discern elements of many people in him, some of whom he may for a few seconds become, so that I whisper in welcome ‘O Timmy’ or ‘O Robert’ or ‘Stanley!’ At each moment he embodies a conviction of happiness, of a danger overcome. His penis is not quite that of any of the ghosts of whom he is compounded: it is not either large or small, thick or thin, pale or dark, but has an ideal quality, startling me like some work of art which, seen for the first time, outwits thought and senses and strikes in an instant at the heart. He puts his arms around my neck, and I lick his face and push back his hat, squashing it down urchin-like on his springy black curls. His features are serious and beautiful with lust. We two-step backwards into what is no longer simply the cottage but a light-filled space whose walls alter or roll away like ingenious stage machinery in a transformation scene. We make love in the drying-room at Winchester, or in a white-tiled institutional bathroom, or the white house at Talodi, bare of my scraps of furniture and revealed in all its harmonious vacancy: simple places whose very emptiness prompts desire. In one version we are in a beach shelter of poles and canvas—the sides, luminous as screens of shadow-plays, thrum in the wind, while overhead tiny white clouds are blown across the radiant blue.

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

  During such forays, my research has taken many surprising turns, directing me to topics I would never have imagined studying—such as the shockingly violent sex lives of ducks. Sometimes, my various investigations turned up connections that were entirely unexpected. For example, separate research initiatives on the coloration of bird feathers and the evolution of dinosaur feathers ultimately led to a collaborative discovery of the dramatic colors in the plumage sported by a 150-million-year-old feathered dinosaur—Anchiornis huxleyi (color plate 15). For a long time I thought that my research was just an eclectic grab bag of “stuff Rick is into.” In recent years, however, I have realized that a large portion of my research is really about one big issue—the evolution of beauty. I don’t mean beauty as we experience it. Rather, I am interested in the beauty of birds to themselves. In particular I am fascinated by the challenge of understanding how the social and sexual choices of birds have driven so many aspects of avian evolution. In various social contexts, birds observe each other, they evaluate what they’ve observed, and they make social decisions—real choices. They choose which birds to flock with, which baby bird mouths to feed, and whether or not to incubate a given clutch of eggs. And, of course, the most crucial social decision that birds make is whom to mate with. Birds use their preferences for particular plumages, colors, songs, and displays to choose their mates. The result is the evolution of sexual ornaments. And birds have a lot of them! Scientifically speaking, sexual beauty encompasses all of the observable features that are desirable in a mate. Over millions of years and among thousands of avian species, mate choice has resulted in an explosive diversity of sexual beauty in birds. Ornaments are distinct in function from other parts of the body. They do not function solely in ecological or physiological interactions with the physical world. Rather, sexual ornaments function in interactions with observers—through the way in which sensory perceptions and cognitive evaluations by other individual organisms create a subjective experience in those organisms. And by subjective experience, I mean the unobservable, internal mental qualities produced by a flow of sensory and cognitive events: like the sight of the color red, the smell of a rose, or the feeling of pain, hunger, or desire. Crucially, the function of sexual ornaments is to inspire the qualities of desire and attachment in the observer.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  Is upstairs. Is gettin is beauty-sleep.’ We shook hands again before he left me, and I heard him laugh aloud with pleasure as he went on his way. Up under the roof, in the hot, shadowy corridor, outside Phil’s door … distant traffic and a creaking floorboard making no impression on the silence, residual, anticipatory … dream echoes of childhood evenings, going up to fetch a book, drawn to the open window and the stillness of the elms … or at school, waiting for Johnny, knees under my chin on the sill of a gothic dormer, heart thumping, swallows plunging into the darkening court below … pushing open the rattling, leaded panes at Corpus Christi, the sky precipitating its blues, its darker blues … the surprising, secret moistness of the twilight, sloping down to the Swimming-Pool Library, the faint, midsummer-night illumination of a glowing cigarette … exquisite, ancient singleness in moments just before whispers, the brush of lips and love … I felt it all again, the romance of myself, for three or four seconds squeeze urgently about me, and my mouth went dry. I barely knocked, tapped with the backs of my nails. It seemed like a cowardly knock, hoping not to be heard. If he were awake he might just hear, and I listened for an answering rustle or call. But what I wanted was to come upon him as he was, to stream through the keyhole, to be with him without any prosaic ado. One morning, weeks before, when he was asleep I had pinched his key and had it copied in a heel and key bar at the station. Phil was so orderly and cautious that he always dropped the catch, and I envisaged some picaresque occasion when I might need to get in, some about-turn in a sex comedy that called for a surprise entry. I slid the key into the lock notch by notch and opened the door a fraction. There was no light on, though the last of the day still lingered and without yet going in I could see the room in the dressing-table mirror, Phil lying on the bed, the white of his underpants. He didn’t move as I came forward, silently closed the door, and stood at the end of the bed. His breathing was extremely slow and distant and he was clearly deeply asleep. He was lying face downwards, but slightly turned to one side, his left leg half-drawn up, his mouth squashed open on the pillow, his thighs apart but not widely apart, his ass slewed a little to the right. I wanted x-ray eyes for that, though the barrack-room modesty of his sleeping in his knickers was beautiful too.

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

  Whether the manner and order of the first temptation was fitting?Objection 1: It would seem that the manner and order of the first temptation was not fitting. For just as in the order of nature the angel was above man, so was the man above the woman. Now sin came upon man through an angel: therefore in like manner it should have come upon the woman through the man; in other words the woman should have been tempted by the man, and not the other way about. Objection 2: Further, the temptation of our first parents was by suggestion. Now the devil is able to make suggestions to man without making use of an outward sensible creature. Since then our first parents were endowed with a spiritual mind, and adhered less to sensible than to intelligible things, it would have been more fitting for man to be tempted with a merely spiritual, instead of an outward, temptation. Objection 3: Further, one cannot fittingly suggest an evil except through some apparent good. But many other animals have a greater appearance of good than the serpent has. Therefore man was unfittingly tempted by the devil through a serpent. Objection 4: Further, the serpent is an irrational animal. Now wisdom, speech, and punishment are not befitting an irrational animal. Therefore the serpent is unfittingly described (Gn. 3:1) as “more subtle than any of the beasts of the earth,” or as “the most prudent of all beasts” according to another version [*The Septuagint]: and likewise is unfittingly stated to have spoken to the woman, and to have been punished by God. On the contrary, That which is first in any genus should be proportionate to all that follow it in that genus. Now in every kind of sin we find the same order as in the first temptation. For, according to Augustine (De Trin. xii, 12), it begins with the concupiscence of sin in the sensuality, signified by the serpent; extends to the lower reason, by pleasure, signified by the woman; and reaches to the higher reason by consent in the sin, signified by the man. Therefore the order of the first temptation was fitting. I answer that, Man is composed of a twofold nature, intellective and sensitive. Hence the devil, in tempting man, made use of a twofold incentive to sin: one on the part of the intellect, by promising the Divine likeness through the acquisition of knowledge which man naturally desires to have; the other on the part of sense. This he did by having recourse to those sensible things, which are most akin to man, partly by tempting the man through the woman who was akin to him in the same species; partly by tempting the woman through the serpent, who was akin to them in the same genus; partly by suggesting to them to eat of the forbidden fruit, which was akin to them in the proximate genus.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  I came up dripping and panting from the pool to the changing-room. As I pushed open the swing door with its steamed-up little window designed, like those in restaurants, to prevent hurrying people from knocking each other flat, I heard the hiss of the crowded showers, and felt the warm, dense atmosphere of the place in my throat and on my skin. I sauntered along between the two files of hot jets whose spray danced up off the black tiles, shifting or suddenly cutting off as the men, naked or in their trunks, edged about, soaped a foot raised against the wall, gave their stomachs resounding smacks, or turned, as the doors to the outside world thwacked open, to see what beauty had arrived. Exchanging short greetings with a couple of chaps I scarcely knew, I chose a vacant position between a pale, ravaged-looking youth with tattoos snaking up his arms and a huge dark brown man, six foot eight tall at a guess, very round and heavy, with an enormous childish face and not a hair on his head—or, I soon found, anywhere on his body. His sleek, heavy cock, cushioned on a tight, crinkled scrotum, stuck out from beneath a roll of fat. He was soaping himself vigorously, leaving a silky smear over his smooth, plump expanses of back and belly; and with cheery unselfconsciousness singing as he went about it. I nodded to him, as if to say that I could see he was happy enough, then, and he grinned back in a way that suggested a fond, exuberant disposition. I felt that he might stroke me as a golem does some little girl who trusts him, or inadvertently crush me to death. I set down my soap box and shampoo, let the water drum on my shoulders, and looked about. At the Corry the men undress at their lockers, and then bring their towels to the duckboarded place at the end of the shower room. Often those who have swum still have their trunks on and some stud may allow a mocking minute of tension before the languid unknotting of the drawstring, and the peeling down of the tiny garment, freeing the cock and balls in one of the most mundane and heartstopping moments there is. An American guy, I thought, was doing this just now on the other side of the room; square and trim he stood breathing heavily and luxuriating under the water before turning his back and loosening his glittering briefs to reveal a firm hairless ass, milky white between the sun or sunbed-tanned zones of his back and thighs. I still had my really absurdly tiny black trunks on, and felt my cock protesting against their constraint, thickening up, and aching as it did so after the pounding it had lately been taking.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  Cleaned and swabbed for the night it tingled in the fluorescent glare as if I was drunk. It had about it the discipline of institutional life and beyond that, for all its emptiness, something of the melancholy and teeming sense of order of an Edwardian country house. Abdul, who had sauntered to the far side of the room, came back to me where I lounged wondering against a table. He put his hands on my chest and sliding them up pushed my jacket back off my shoulders; it was then I realised that I had no tie on, and could never have been admitted to the Club proper, even if Charles had been there. Abdul tugged my shirt out at the waist, and ill-temperedly opened my fly and pulled my trousers down about my knees. I saw his cock curving and buckling in his pants with anticipation before he turned me round and spread me out. It was one of those worn, foot-thick chopping tables, eaten away by incessant jointings and slicings into a deep, curved declivity. I waited greedily, and yelped as his hand came down, and again and again, tenderising my ass with wild, hard slaps. Then he crossed the room in front of me and yanked down from a shelf a catering-size drum of corn oil. It fell cold on my skin as he splashed it from a height then slicked my cheeks and slot, driving a strong unhesitating finger in. I heard the graphic rustle of his clothes, his trousers dropping to the floor with the weight of the keys in his pocket. He fucked me with a thrilling leisured vehemence, giving each long stroke, when it was in to the balls, a final questing shunt that had me gurgling with pleasure and grunting with pain, my cock chafing beneath me against the table’s furred and splintered edge. It was quickly finished, and he slurped out of me, and slapped me again. ‘Hmm,’ he said noncommittally; then, ‘Fuck off out of here, man.’ 12 I was woken by Andrews crossing the wide expanse of the bedroom and tugging back the curtains with a cruel flourish, shouting, ‘Good morning, my Lord.’ Behind him came the naked Abdul, pushing a trolley on which his cock, perhaps three feet long, was supported, curved and garnished like an eel. He wheeled it to the bedside and I looked at it anxiously: it had a dull grey-black sheen to it, and a slight pile, like wet suede. ‘I’m going to be very late,’ I said, sitting up abruptly and kicking back the bedclothes. ‘I have to give my maiden speech in the House at ten o’clock.’

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  The college boys were followed by a brief, gloomy fragment of film involving older, moustachioed types, one of them virtually bald. This broke off suddenly, and without preamble another film, very cheery and outdoors, was under way. As always with these films, though I relished the gross abundance of their later episodes, it was the introductory scenes, buoyant with expectation, the men on the street or the beach, killing time, pumping iron, still awaiting the transformation our fantasy would demand of them, that I found the most touching. Now, for instance, we were in a farmyard. A golden-haired boy in old blue jeans and a white vest was leaning in the sun against a barn door, one foot raised behind him. A close-up admired him frowning against the sun, a straw jerking between his lips. Slowly we travelled down, lingering where his hand brushed across his nipples which showed hard through his vest, lingering again at his loose but promising crotch. On the other side of the yard, a second boy, also blond, was shifting bags of fertiliser. We watched his shirtless muscular torso straining as he lifted the bags on to his shoulder, traced the sweat running down his neck and back, got a load of his chunky denim-clad ass as he bent over. The eyes of the two boys met; one close-up and then another suggested curiosity and lust. In what seemed to be very slightly slow motion the shirtless boy ambled across to the other. They stood close together, both extremely beautiful, perhaps eighteen or nineteen years of age. Their lips moved, they spoke and smiled, but as the film had no sound-track, and we heard only the cinema’s throbbing, washing music, they communicated in a dreamlike silence, or as if watched from out of earshot through binoculars. The picture was irradiated with sunlight and, being fractionally out of focus, blurred the boys’ smooth outlines into a blond nimbus. The one in the vest appeared to put a question to the other, they turned aside and were swallowed up into the darkness of the barn. Where did they get them from, I wondered, these boys more wonderful than almost everything one came across in real life? And I remembered reading somewhere that a Californian talentspotter had photographic records of three thousand or more of them ranging back over twenty or thirty years and that a youngster, after a session in the studio, mooching through the files, had found pictures of his own father, posed long before. In the meantime there were other arrivals at the cinema, though it was difficult to make them out; while the sunlit introduction had brightened up the room and cast its aura over the scattered audience in the forward rows, the sex scenes within the barn were enacted in comparative gloom, allowing the viewers a secretive darkness. I tugged my half-hard cock out through my fly and stroked it casually.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  But … you don’t know them? I thought …’ He tugged out a handkerchief from his breast pocket and ran it back and forth under his nose. ‘Most naughty and wicked boys.’ He coughed, as if discretion forbade him to say more, and then tucked the hanky away. ‘More important, what are they going to do?’ ‘Oh …’ I felt foolish, reddened a little; was annoyed too, but really peculiarly drunk. One of the boys, better-looking, I thought, was flicking at the other’s fringe with his fingertips. The other smiled woozily, and gripped himself between the legs. There was something familiar about him, some faint blur on the screen of memory. Then they turned to look into the shadows beyond, where a figure was moving, in and out of my view, dark—black. I couldn’t see him when his quiet but resonant voice was heard: ‘How’s you boys feelin’?’ ‘Want a bit?’ said the looker, with tartish expressionlessness, holding up the joint. ‘I’m stoned, baby,’ was the reply, melodious, rather stern. When he came forward nonetheless to have a pull on the last papery thumbnail’s length of the joint I knew his handsome, lined face at once, the huge, challenging, mobile eyes, the pink of his inner lips, as if at any second he would lick them clean of raspberry fool. And then of course I knew the boys. ‘Oh Abdul, Abdul,’ Charles was calling, in his most invocative and hammy voice. The chef came over, not now with the serious, solicitous manner of the Club dining-room but with a kind of flirtatious nonchalance, as if he were a fellow member. They shook hands, Charles hanging on as Abdul withdrew his long, powerful fingers. ‘All right, Charlie?’ said the black man genially, amazingly. ‘You remember my young friend William.’ ‘How are you, William.’ He shook my hand too, in a casual fashion, and gave a drugged grin. ‘Come to see the show.’ He looked along to Aldo and Bobby, who clearly needed no introduction, and closing his eyes and biting his lower lip ground his hips around slowly, as if dancing to some very sexy music in his head. I was nearly shocked by this, and dazed and gulping like an innocent. Though he was twice my age I fancied Abdul crazily, was seriously moved by him. I remembered how I had watched those places where his black, black skin disappeared into his white chef’s uniform, the wrists and the long, thick neck, and the awareness I had of his body. As he turned away I followed him with what was probably a look of stricken devotion. It was the high, haunted African brow, and the high, rolling African ass, and the long, dangling, fishing, musical hands. Staines came rattling back in at this point, carrying a camera on a tripod, its legs unsplayed making it tall and unwieldy.

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

  Such was my life, and my consuming purpose— to rape my nature.”  Mary is no damsel afl oat the winds of fate. Th e romantic heroine is a passive character, actively suff ering the whims of Fortune. Mary is lust in- carnate, the driving force in her own destiny. When she reaches the age at which a respectable girl might be contemplating the marriage market, she  FROM SHAME TO SIN careens headfi rst into a life of sexual abandonment. Most ancient literature emphasizes the lust of the male customer. Th e Life of Mary foregrounds the sexual aggression of this antiheroine. Th e story deliberately isolates Mary’s will as the true agent of her sexual depravity. She says she was poor— making barely enough to survive by selling the fl ax she could spin. (And with the mention of spinning, Mary evokes a symbol of female chastity as old as Penelope.) Despite her generosity, Mary is a prostitute. In the ancient Mediterranean, promiscuity— sexual availability, dishonor— was the es- sence of prostitution. Th e Roman lawyer Ulpian, in a legal defi nition of prostitution, claimed that sexual promiscuity was the decisive criterion of the prostitute, even more fundamental than venality. Th ere is no reason to be- lieve that the author of this Life had read his Ulpian; rather, both are pushing the defi nition of prostitution by imagining the liminal case of a woman who did not accept payment. For Ulpian shame and prostitution merge at the horizon of his conservative worldview; for the Christian author, prostitu- tion becomes, in the fi gure of Mary, pure sin.  While Mary is living her debased life in Alexandria, she sees a crowd of Libyan and Egyptian men running toward the sea. Th ey are destined for Jerusalem, travelers to a holy feast. She has an urge to go with them but lacks money for the fare. Her motives are less than pure. “I wanted to go away with them in order to have a great many lovers, ready to serve my passions.” Mary throws down her distaff and approaches a group of youths who seem a likely mark for her ambitions. Waiting to board, she unlooses a torrent of shameless words that communicate her intentions. “Tongue cannot speak, ear cannot hear the things that happened on the journey, what acts I forced upon the wretched youths, against their will.” She stows on board, confi - dent of passage: “I have a body, and they will take that as my sailing fare.” What could be a clearer inversion of the romance?