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

  force, and the wash of its warm ecstasy was experienced as a communion with Dionysus. It is hard for us to appreciate the invisible but ubiquitous eff ects of wine in the Roman Empire. In his list of inputs and outputs that will have to be modulated to maintain a healthy equilibrium, Galen notably puts wine fi rst and sex last. Th e Romans were alive to wine’s eff ects on the body, attributing its disinhibiting qualities not to altered consciousness so much as to greater heat. Wine was an accelerant. Wine was especially healthy for older men, whose bodies were cold, and especially dangerous for younger ones, whose bodies were already hot. Wine was “Aphrodite’s milk”; it was, in the words of Achilles Tatius, “sex fuel.” Youth, gassy foods, wine, exposure to beauty: all precipitated the buildup of heat and the production of semen that spurred sexual desire. On the other side of the ledger, sex itself was an expenditure— a highly elaborate and particularly costly one. Th e sexual act set all the parts of the body to work simultaneously, “as in a dance,” pulling semen through the body’s channels. Seminal fl uid was blood packed with pneuma culled from the entire body; the pneuma discharged during sex included the precious and especially fi ne psychic pneuma , the medium of the soul itself. Blood and pneuma were brought to boil in the testes. Th en, the convulsive plea sure of orgasm was like a brief epilepsy that left the body depleted. Heat and moisture were expelled. For the Roman doctor, the most revealing part of sex was not the ecstasy but the aftermath— the immediate exhaustion, the languid body. Sex was a negative term on the body’s energy balance sheet and, for some doctors, ipso facto deleterious. For most, though, sex was simply one output among others that could be integrated within a balanced regimen. Th e amount of sex to be prescribed varied case by case, with age and individual constitution. Especially for the young in the prime of life, whose bodies were warm and moist, sex was salubrious. At any age, excessive indulgence left the body cold, dry, and withered. But abstinence had its own dangers too. Lovesickness was a very real pathology in the Roman Empire, and no less a scientist than Galen was able to diagnose its symptoms. Too little sex might slow the body’s natural cycles, leaving the person dull and melan-cholic. Unfulfi lled desire could lead to nausea, fever, and poor digestion. Th e retention of seed was unhealthy. Modern historians have been fi xated on the idea of sex as a loss of vital spirit, a notion that is certainly present in Roman medical literature. It is true that sex was a costly enterprise. Pneuma T H E M O R A L I T I E S O F S E X I N T H E R O M A N E M P I R E 

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  Enter very calmly, Henry, and keep your eyes peeled! And I enter as per instructions on velvet toes, checking my hat and urinating a little as a matter of course, then slowly redescending the stairs and sizing up the taxi girls all diaphanously gowned, powdered, perfumed, looking fresh and alert but probably bored as hell and leg weary. Into each and every one of them, as I shuffle about, I throw an imaginary fuck. The place is just plastered with cunt and fuck and that’s why I’m reasonably sure to find my old friend MacGregor here. The way I no longer think about the condition of the world is marvelous. I mention it because for a moment, just while I was studying a juicy ass, I had a relapse. I almost went into a trance again. I was thinking, Christ help me, that maybe I ought to beat it and go home and begin the book. A terrifying thought! Once I spent a whole evening sitting in a chair and saw nothing and heard nothing. I must have written a good-sized book before I woke up. Better not to sit down. Better to keep circulating. Henry, what you ought to do is to come here some time with a lot of dough and just see how far it’ll take you. I mean a hundred or two hundred bucks, and spend it like water and say yes to everything. The haughty looking one with the statuesque figure, I bet she’d squirm like an eel if her palm were well greased. Supposing she said—twenty bucks! and you could say Sure! Supposing you could say—Listen, I’ve got a car downstairs . . . let’s run down to Atlantic City for a few days. Henry, there ain’t no car and there ain’t no twenty bucks. Don’t sit down . . . keep moving . At the rail which fences off the floor I stand and watch them sailing around. This is no harmless recreation . . . this is serious business. At each end of the floor there is a sign reading “No Improper Dancing Allowed.” Well and good. No harm in placing a sign at each end of the floor. In Pompeii they probably hung a phallus up. This is the American way. It means the same thing. I mustn’t think about Pompeii or I’ll be sitting down and writing a book again. Keep moving, Henry. Keep your mind on the music . I keep struggling to imagine what a lovely time I would have if I had the price of a string of tickets, but the more I struggle the more I slip back. Finally I’m standing knee deep in the lava beds and the gas is choking me. It wasn’t the lava that killed the Pompeians, it was the poison gas that precipitated the eruption. That’s how the lava caught them in such queer poses, with their pants down, as it were.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  He linked his hands behind his back again but almost immediately reached up to cup my balls in one hand, the first time he had actually touched me, my bare skin; I drew my breath in through my teeth at the shock, which was neither pleasure nor pain, but sensation, pure and unmarked. With his other hand he gripped the shaft and moved it to the right and left, up and down, not erotically, but as if examining it, I thought, like a physician; and maybe he was examining it, in part, looking for signs of disease though he claimed not to care about disease, I don’t know. My first American cock, he said then, looking up at me and smiling, my first cut cock; his English was remarkable, he spoke flawlessly the language of hook-up sites and porn. He gripped more tightly as he pulled up the shaft, milking me, and at the tip there appeared a small drop, opalescent, almost clear. I should have stopped him as he leaned forward, I was giving him too free a rein, but I let him touch the tip of his tongue to the drop, not gathering it up but tasting it, and then he pulled back, so that it stretched out gossamer between us. He closed his eyes, his tongue still extended, and I felt again that he was acting something out, that he had slipped into a fantasy that had very little, had possibly nothing, to do with me. He was posing, inhabiting a scene, something out of porn, some image in which he was a star. He made these images, he would tell me later, they were his main source of income, he performed on webcam sites for men who paid him to do whatever they wanted. I love it, he said, all those guys watching me and jerking off, I love it. There were dozens of guys sometimes, once nearly a hundred, a little counter on the screen told him how many, they would urge him on as he brought out his toys, ever larger dildos and plugs. It was never much money, he said, unless a guy wanted a private show, and then they could leave the site and go to Skype, and he might earn thirty or forty euro. But I don’t really do it for the money, he said.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  He was dulling my pleasure, I thought, not removing it entirely but taking off its edge. But he didn’t take off its edge, not really, and when there was a slackening in the leash I lunged forward, like the dog he called me. There wasn’t anything special about his cock, it was solid and sizeable and thick, but none of these to a remarkable degree, and he had shaved himself as all men here do, which I hate, the bareness of it is obscene somehow, I can’t accustom myself to it. But I was eager, and as I took him in my mouth I felt the gratitude I nearly always feel in such moments, not so much to him as to whatever arrangement of things had allowed me what as a child I thought I would always be denied. It was large enough that I didn’t try to take all of it at once; eager as I was there are certain preparations required, the relaxation and lubrication of passages, a general warming up. But immediately his hand was on my head again, forcing me down, and when it was clear that the passage was blocked, he used both of his hands to hold me, at once pulling me to him and jerking his hips forward in short, savage thrusts, saying Dai gurloto , give me your throat, an odd construction I had never heard before. This was painful, and not only for me, it must have hurt him too. But I did give my throat, I found an angle that gave him access, and soon enough I relaxed and there was a rush of saliva and he could move however he wanted, as he did for a while, maybe there was pleasure for him after all. As there was for me, the intense pleasure I’ve never been able to account for, that can’t be accounted for mechanically; the pleasure of service, I’ve sometimes thought, or more darkly the pleasure of being used, the exhilaration of being made an object that had been lacking in sex with R., though that had had its own pleasures, pleasures I longed for but that had in no way compensated for the lack of this. I want to be nothing, I had said to him, and it was a way of being nothing, or next to nothing, a convenience, a tool. He stopped moving then, taking his hands from my head and even from the chain, which fell superfluous and cold down my back. Kuchkata , he said, not kuchko anymore, the vocative that had softened the word and made it tender to my ears; no longer addressing me but speaking of the object I had become, he said Let the bitch do it herself.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  When I began to rise he snapped Dolu , stay down, and I moved across the space on all fours, the carpet featureless and gray and coarse. When I reached him he took my hair in his hand and lifted me up onto my knees, not roughly, maybe just as a means of communication more efficient than speech. I had told him I wasn’t Bulgarian in one of our online chats, warning him that when we met there might be things I wouldn’t understand, but he had asked none of the usual questions, he seemed not to care why I had come to his country, where so few come and fewer still stay long enough to learn the language, which is spoken nowhere else, which even here, as the country shrinks, is spoken by fewer people each day; it’s not difficult to imagine it disappearing altogether, the language and the country both. We’ll understand each other, he had said, don’t worry, and maybe it was just to ensure this understanding that he had taken me in hand, firmly but not painfully guiding me to my knees. He let go of my hair then, freeing his hand to move down the side of my face, almost stroking it before he cupped it in his palm. It was a tender gesture, and his voice was tender too as he said Kuchko , addressing me as if solicitously and tilting my head so that we gazed at each other face to face; his fingers flexed against my cheek, almost in a caress. I leaned my head into him, resting it on his palm as he spoke again in that tone of tenderness or solicitude, Tell me, kuchko , tell me what you want. And I did tell him, at first slowly and with the usual words, reciting the script that both does and does not express my desires; and then I spoke more quickly and more searchingly, drawn forward by the tone of his voice, what seemed like tenderness although it was not tenderness, until I found myself suddenly in some recess or depth where I had never been.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  Isn’t she beautiful, he said, taking my hand in his, but he answered the question himself, she is, isn’t she, I think she’s beautiful. WE WENT TO BOLOGNA because it was the cheapest place we could fly: there were tickets for forty euros, a price I could afford. We packed a single carry-on each, anything else would have meant a fee, and rode in a cab to the airport’s old terminal, which the budget airlines used. It was my first time leaving the country. During breaks, when the other American teachers left for places near or far—Istanbul, Tangier, St. Petersburg—I stayed behind; I didn’t want to travel, I said, I wanted to be settled in a single place. I studied Bulgarian, I read, I wandered the streets downtown. But I did want to travel with R., to leave Sofia, where even when his friends were gone there was a pressure of secrecy, where it was too dangerous to hold hands in the streets, to kiss in public, however chastely, where everywhere we had to keep a casual distance; I wanted to be with him in a place where we could be freer with each other, a place in the West. It was my gift to him, a getaway, a bit of romance. We arrived at the airport early enough to be first in line for the unassigned seats, and sat in the front row, where there was extra room for our legs. Even so my knees almost touched those of the single attendant who sat facing us, strapped into her foldout seat. She spoke English with an accent I couldn’t place, not Bulgarian but something Eastern European, and she smiled slightly, kindly I thought, when the plane started down the runway, thrusting us all back, and R. moved his hand to cover mine where it lay on my knee. WE BOOKED THE CHEAPEST HOTEL , too, a chain a good way from the city center, with a bus stop outside for getting to town. We arrived too late for any exploring, we’d have to wait until morning to see the city. It was hard not to feel depressed by our room, which had the corporate airlessness of such places, comfort sterilized of any human touch. It was on the second floor, overlooking the parking lot.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  We had been chatting for several days by then, emailing back and forth on a dating site, though it wasn’t for dating so much as for sex, which at first was all we thought we wanted. And anyway he was twenty-one, too young to take seriously; it might be a bit of fun, I thought when I looked at his profile, a bit of fun but nothing more. His pictures didn’t show very much, mostly his torso, which was thick and unsculpted, a little heavy in a way I liked. In his second email he sent a link to a video that showed what most men must have wanted to see: he was naked, exposing himself, turning to give a full view before he jerked himself off. There was something dispiriting about it, the faceless body too starkly displayed, turning as if on a dais; it shamed me a little to enjoy it. He waited several days before he showed me more, and only after I had promised to be discreet; he wasn’t out, he told me, not even to his closest friends, and so it was a pledge of trust to send the photo in which finally I saw his face. He was at a club, there were other people behind him in the dark, but he was the only one looking at the camera. The glare of the flash was bright on his skin, and he seemed gripped by joy, there’s no other way to say it, his eyes were shut and his mouth stretched impossibly wide, revealing teeth that were large and imperfect, an upper one in front just slightly skewed. When I saw it I knew I wanted to be smiled at like that. I would never get tired of it, I thought in the restaurant, each time he smiled it filled me with a happiness I had never felt before, a happiness that was particularly his to give. He told me about his day then, which was less regimented than mine, the day of a student. He was in Sofia as part of a program that shuttled college students around the EU, an attempt to stitch up the union though in R.’s case it hadn’t worked; he hated Bulgaria, he said, almost as much as he hated his own country.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  The music changed as we set our glasses down, there was a sudden assault of gaidi, the mountain bagpipes ubiquitous in Balkan folk music, and then a syncopated rush of drums that made both of us grin. It was a song we knew well, one of the big hits of Z.’s senior year, and we lifted our glasses again, toasting each other and the song and the memory of it we had. With the glass still at his lips Z. began to dance, he extended his other arm away from his body and twisted slightly from side to side, and though it was half ironic it made me feel a kind of pang, since it was for me, his dance, I was his only audience, it could only be for me. After a few seconds, he put his glass down, dropping his other arm too, abandoning his performance. But I raised my own arms, awkward and un-American, I shuffled a step toward him and he was in it again. It was like I had given him permission to dance, to be foolish in front of me, since I was so much more foolish, without his beauty or his youth, I was an old man in this place. But he smiled at me and I smiled back and we were dancing with each other, after a fashion, we made a little orbit together, a center of gravity. At one point I reached over and put my hand on his shoulder, a friendly gesture, casual, avuncular maybe, and then I let my hand slide down his arm and, as I felt him flex his bicep, that reflexive preening, I curled my fingers around the muscle there and squeezed, feeling how solid it was. I knew the gesture wasn’t casual anymore, that it showed too much, I was touching him as I had never allowed myself to touch a student before. But he wasn’t my student, I told myself, for one night we could face each other without all that, I could touch his arm and have all of that fall away. Or maybe that’s not what I thought, maybe I’m adding it now, maybe then all I felt was a seam or line drawn taut from my throat to my groin, a circuit that came alive in contact with him. He smiled and bent his arm at the elbow, pumping the muscle, and I let my other hand join the first, linking my fingers around his arm to take in the full span of it. I had stopped dancing, I realized, and I dropped my hands as I felt the embarrassment of admiring him for too long. But he didn’t seem embarrassed, he didn’t stop smiling, though he wasn’t dancing anymore, either; he stopped to slide his hand into the front pocket of his jeans, which were tight, my eyes followed as he worked his fingers in and slid out his phone.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  He raised his arms for me to pull his shirt up and off, and I felt the mood shifting already, it lightened as his passivity became a game almost, his passivity and my insistence as I struggled with the buckle of his belt, the button on his jeans; I could feel him almost smile as I kissed him, as he answered me back more in his kisses, his tongue pressing against mine. I pushed his jeans and underwear down, breaking our kiss to kneel and hold them at his ankles while he pulled his legs free, kissing his cock, which wasn’t hard yet, just once before I rose again. He moved to kiss me again but I pulled away, then shoved him back, not hard, he could have resisted but he didn’t, he fell backward onto the bed. Onto our bed, I thought, which was what it had become in those days, not a lonely place but a place that belonged to both of us, a loving place; it was something I could think to myself but not say out loud. I took off my own clothes quickly and then launched myself on top of him, which made him flinch and laugh, just once and as if against his will. I caught myself with my hands and when he reached out his own hands, bracing them against my chest, I grabbed them one by one at the wrist and pinned them above his head. He made a noise at this, a little growl, interested and interrogative, as I ground against him, his cock harder now, mine fully hard. I lowered my face but dodged his kiss again, teasing him, and instead kissed his collarbone, first one side and then the other, and then the inside of his arm, just below the elbow, where I knew he was ticklish, and then I licked the pit of his arm, slowly, because I loved the taste of him, first the right and then the left, and he growled again.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  Or maybe that’s not what I thought, maybe I’m adding it now, maybe then all I felt was a seam or line drawn taut from my throat to my groin, a circuit that came alive in contact with him. He smiled and bent his arm at the elbow, pumping the muscle, and I let my other hand join the first, linking my fingers around his arm to take in the full span of it. I had stopped dancing, I realized, and I dropped my hands as I felt the embarrassment of admiring him for too long. But he didn’t seem embarrassed, he didn’t stop smiling, though he wasn’t dancing anymore, either; he stopped to slide his hand into the front pocket of his jeans, which were tight, my eyes followed as he worked his fingers in and slid out his phone. His face was studious in the light cast by the screen, and then he held it up and I saw that he had typed in all caps IRON MAN. He expected me to laugh but I didn’t laugh, I looked at him, past the glare of the phone which must have been lighting my face now, letting him read whatever he could see there, I looked and shook my head from right to left in affirmation; Da , I said, though he couldn’t hear me or the tone in which I said it, which was a serious tone, grave, Da . He slid the phone back in his pocket, smiling more broadly, and took a step toward me. He squared himself off, facing me and planting both his feet, like a challenge, and then he balled one of his hands into a fist and struck his own stomach twice, hard, showing off the muscles there, too, before he opened his hand to make a welcoming gesture, jerking his head up in invitation. He wanted me to try, and when I didn’t immediately strike him he reached out and grabbed my wrist, pulling it toward his stomach. I made a fist and let him strike himself with it, he was like iron, I thought, or like something more precious, like marble, and when he gestured for me to hit him again, harder, I did hit him, not very hard but hard enough to satisfy him. I left my hand there, my knuckles flush with his abdomen, and then I opened my hand and laid my palm flat against his stomach, the cotton of his shirt just slightly damp with sweat, and let my fingers trace the muscles there, risen in their rows as he clenched them, I curved the ends of my fingers around them and pressed against them as long as I dared. Then I released my grip and smiled and brushed his stomach quickly up and down with the back of my hand, as if to erase the trace of how I had touched him.

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  They eventually gained admission and roamed the three floors of the club, greedily looking around. Joel drank one paper cup of watered-down alcohol after another and stared at the moiling sweat-dampened crowd with an attitude of wistful contempt. They were coiffed like Dr. Seuss characters and dressed like children in their parents’ clothes. At one time he had wanted to be like them. Now he thought they were stupid, although he still liked to look at them. He saw a girl standing alone at a bar, dressed like a twelve-year-old’s idea of a hooker. Tight black bodice, short flared ballerina skirt. She was small, she stood with her ankles together. He edged along the wall, pretending to study the material hung up as art. He remembered the blow-up doll he had once hung up in his Ann Arbor apartment as a party decoration. It wore Sara’s clothes and bore, with Scotch tape, a sign that read “Hurt Me Beat Me Fuck Me.” Wilson had said, “Joel, come on. This is too much. It’s not funny.” Joel continued toward the girl at the bar, fighting the anxious crimp in his shoulders. The terse conversation with her didn’t result in her phone number on a piece of paper in his pocket. He found the lawyers again and stalked around with them, making jokes. They couldn’t find Jerry, so the three of them got into a cab and left together, a trio of masculine shoulders filling the paned-in back seat with gruff laughter and blurted comments. He entered his dark, narrow-halled apartment in a grainy mental state. He stopped briefly before the toilet on his way to bed. He stripped off his clothes and dropped them in the middle of the floor. He lay on his back and put one hand on his cock. He imagined dozens of intriguing images, perusing the possible nuance of each circumstance. There was Cecilia. There was the girl at the bar. There was Sara. “Get my belt,” he had said to her. She hesitated. “Don’t you think you deserve it?” He masturbated watching spread-legged Sara arch her neck and rub her injured-looking vagina. He finished. He mopped his abdomen with a “snot rag.” A memory separated from the fantasy and lingered. “I love you,” said Sara. “It’s not real,” he said. “It’s puppy love.” “No. I love you.” She nuzzled his cheek with her nose and lips, and her tenderness pierced him. The image became tiny and unnaturally white, was surrounded by darkness, then faded like the picture on a turned-off TV.

• From Untrue (2018)

  Sarah was smitten with Paul’s easy confidence and charm, and by his interest in her. He was the first man she had encountered in years who really seemed curious about her, who asked her questions about herself and her life and her thoughts, and who seemed fascinated by her answers. “I felt like someone worth knowing around him” is how she put it. “I felt wanted and exciting. Whereas with [my husband]…there was no mystery or…” She searched for the right word and then said, “discovery.” Sarah wanted to be discovered. She wanted to be new to someone, and be with a new someone. She wanted to know all about Paul too. “I fell for him hard,” she explained simply, wiping the beads of water off the side of her glass. Within several months of meeting, Paul and Sarah decided to act on their mutual attraction and arranged to meet at a hotel one late afternoon. Sarah thrummed with erotic energy in the week leading up to their date, feeling ebullient at work and at home as she thought about what she and Paul would do. But she was also a nervous wreck and felt tremendously guilty. “I had the voice in my head saying, This is wrong and you know it.” Still, Sarah told me, for reasons she couldn’t exactly articulate, she felt she deserved to follow through on her attraction to this man. Maybe it was that she felt she had been taking care of not just her kids but her husband for years. Maybe it was that she worked hard and felt she deserved some fun. Maybe it was just curiosity and lust. Whatever was motivating Sarah to step out and allowing her to justify it to herself, she was “probably the best wife and mother I’ve ever been, whatever that means, in the days before my meet-up with Paul.” She paused and thought for a moment, then explained, “I felt happy and desirable—that’s the best way I can describe it.” And being in the nimbus of being desired by Paul buffered her from frustration with her marriage and the day-to-day stresses of mothering. But, Sarah told me with a shake of her head, she hadn’t dared to cross the line once the two of them were alone. She just felt too nervous and guilty. When she began to cry, Paul told her not to worry and seemed to understand her anxiety about having sex. But in the end, he felt wounded and perhaps rejected, she surmised after the fact, or maybe just annoyed, because he cut off all contact with Sarah. Two years later, she still missed him in her inbox and in her life.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  You know, it all went so quick I couldn’t tell what I felt . . . I don’t think I even put my finger inside you. I must have just touched the outside—that’s about all. Listen, sit down here on the couch . . . let’s be friends again.” I pulled her down beside me—she was melting visibly—and I put my arm around her waist, as though to console her more tenderly. “Has it always been like that?” I asked innocently, and I almost laughed the next moment, realizing what an idiotic question it was. She hung her head coyly, as though we were touching on an unmentionable tragedy. “Listen, maybe if you sat on my lap . . .” and I hoisted her gently on to my lap, at the same time delicately putting my hand under her dress and resting it lightly on her knee . . . “maybe if you sat a moment like this, you’d feel better . . . there, that’s it, just snuggle back in my arms . . . are you feeling better?” She didn’t answer, but she didn’t resist either; she just lay back limply and closed her eyes. Gradually and very gently and smoothly I moved my hand up her leg, talking to her in a low, soothing voice all the time. When I got my fingers into her crotch and parted the little lips she was as moist as a dishrag. I massaged it gently, opening it up more and more, and still handing out a telepathic line about women sometimes being mistaken about themselves and how sometimes they think they’re very small when really they’re quite normal, and the longer I kept it up the juicier she got and the more she opened up. I had four fingers inside her and there was room inside for more if I had had more to put in. She had an enormous cunt and it had been well reamed out, I could feel. I looked at her to see if she was still keeping her eyes shut. Her mouth was open and she was gasping but her eyes were tight shut, as though she were pretending to herself that it was all a dream. I could move her about roughly now—no danger of the slightest protest. And maliciously perhaps, I jostled her about unnecessarily, just to see if she would come to. She was as limp as a feather pillow and even when her head struck the arm of the sofa she showed no sign of irritation. It was as though she had anesthetized herself for a gratuitous fuck.

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

  Th e place of ped- erasty in Leucippe and Clitophon, which is important enough to frame the fi rst quarter of the novel, helps us to situate contemporary attitudes to ped- erasty in terms of high imperial culture, rather than in comparison to clas- sical Greece. A heightened and almost impolitic insistence on the physical essence of love, an awareness that the beloved’s consent could not be squared with social honor, and narratives of eros that sought to understand the place of mankind’s sexual instincts within the cosmos: these, rather than disapproval or disinvestment, make up the story of pederasty in the Roman Empire.  Th e Greeks and Romans of this period believed that beauty resided in the male as well as the female body, and they were never surprised when the sight of a beautiful body aroused sexual desire. “Did you never feel eros for someone, for a boy or girl, slave or free?” A farcical tale of travel to the after- life imagined that on the Isle of the Blessed, “all the wives are shared in common without jealousy . . . and the boys all submit to their pursuers without re sis tance.” Pastoral poetry, meant to evoke an idealized harmony between man and nature, made boys the object of erotic attraction, from Virgil (who was said to be more fond of boys than of women) to Nemesia- nus, a court poet of the late third century. Marcus Aurelius, who learned from his adoptive grandfather to “cease all things concerned with the love of youths,” thanked the gods that he had touched “neither Th eodotus nor Benedicta”— the casual indiff erence to the gender of the erotic object is what is telling. Th e traditional myths still held that even the gods were sexually THE MORALITIES OF SEX IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE  indiscriminate: Zeus became a swan for Leda, but an ea gle for Ganymede: “some think one or the other is greater, but they’re equal to me.”  Age dynamics were at the core of acceptable same- sex love in the Roman world. Th e “short season of rejoicing” was the span of time between early adolescence and the growth of the fi rst beard. In the wry words of a witty courtesan, “boys are beautiful so long as they look like females.” Th e physi- ological boundaries of pederasty were fl exible, if inexorable, indeed a sym- bol of evanescence: “time, which lays waste to beauty.” Sixteen to eigh teen were the canonically acceptable years, propriety decreasing by degrees with distance from this window, without fi rm breaks. A mischievous poet from the age of Hadrian was indiscreetly precise: the age of seventeen marked a sort of perfection reserved for Zeus himself; after that, he said, there was a risk the boy might turn the tables. It was a traditional charge: by twenty, when the boy had a bristling chin, there was too much suspicion of alter- nating sexual roles.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  Or as God would look to man if the devil had given him wings. And with it all, in the fixed, close intimacy of a night without end she was radiant, jubilant, an ultra-black jubilation streaming from her like a steady flow of sperm from the Mithraic Bull. She was double barreled, like a shotgun, a female bull with an acetylene torch in her womb. In heat she focused on the grand cosmocrator, her eyes rolled back to the whites, her lips a-slaver. In the blind hole of sex she waltzed like a trained mouse, her jaws unhinged like a snake’s, her skin horripilating in barbed plumes. She had the insatiable lust of a unicorn, the itch that laid the Egyptians low. Even the hole in the sky through which the lackluster star shone down was swallowed up in her fury. We lived glued to the ceiling, the hot rancid fumes of the everyday life steaming up and suffocating us. We lived at marble heat, the ascending glow of human flesh warming the snakelike coils in which we were locked. We lived riveted to the nethermost depths, our skins smoked to the color of a gray cigar by the fumes of worldly passion. Like two heads carried on the pikes of our executioners we circled slowly and fixedly over the heads and shoulders of the world below. What was life on the solid earth to us who were decapitated and forever joined at the genitals? We were the twin snakes of Paradise, lucid in heat and cool as chaos itself. Life was a perpetual black fuck about a fixed pole of insomnia. Life was Scorpio conjunction Mars, conjunction Mercury, conjunction Venus, conjunction Saturn, conjunction Pluto, conjunction Uranus, conjunction quicksilver, laudanum, radium, bismuth. The grand conjunction was every Saturday night, Leo fornicating with Draco in the house of brother and sister. The great malheur was a ray of sunlight stealing through the curtains. The great curse was Jupiter, king of the fishes, that he might flash a benevolent eye. The reason why it is difficult to tell it is because I remember too much. I remember everything, but like a dummy sitting on the lap of a ventriloquist. It seems to me that throughout the long, uninterrupted connubial solstice I sat on her lap (even when she was standing) and spoke the lines she had taught me. It seems to me that she must have commanded God’s chief plumber to keep the black star shining through the hole in the ceiling, must have bid him to rain down perpetual night and with it all the crawling torments that move noiselessly about in the dark so that the mind becomes a twirling awl burrowing frantically into black nothingness. Did I only imagine that she talked incessantly, or had I become such a marvelously trained dummy that I intercepted the thought before it reached the lips?

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  It was at once disconcerting and weirdly attractive. Her appearance otherwise was not pleasing. He couldn’t quite put his finger on why this was. Perhaps it was the suggestion of meekness in her dress, of a desire to be inconspicuous, or worse, of plain thoughtlessness about how clothes looked on her. He had met her at a party during the previous week. She immediately reminded him of a girl he had known years before, Sharon, a painfully serious girl with a pale, gentle face whom he had tormented off and on for two years before leaving for his wife. Although it had gratified him enormously to leave her, he had missed hurting her for years, and had been half-consciously looking for another woman with a similarly fatal combination of pride, weakness and a foolish lust for something resembling passion. On meeting Beth, he was astonished at how much she looked, talked and moved like his former victim. She was delicately morbid in all her gestures, sensitive, arrogant, vulnerable to flattery. She veered between extravagant outbursts of opinion and sudden, uncertain halts, during which she seemed to look to him for approval. She was in love with the idea of intelligence, and she overestimated her own. Her sense of the world, though she presented it aggressively, could be, he sensed, snatched out from under her with little or no trouble. She said, “I hope you are a savage.” He went home with her that night. He lay with her on her sagging, lumpy single mattress, tipping his head to blow smoke into the room. She butted her forehead against his chest. The mattress squeaked with every movement. He told her about Sharon. “I had a relationship like that when I was in college,” she said. “Somebody opened me up in a way that I had no control over. He hurt me. He changed me completely. Now I can’t have sex normally.” The room was pathetically decorated with postcards, pictures of huge-eyed Japanese cartoon characters, and tiny, maddening toys that she had obviously gone out of her way to find, displayed in a tightly arranged tumble on her dresser. A frail model airplane dangled from the light above the dresser. Next to it was a pasted-up cartoon of a pink-haired girl cringing open-mouthed before a spire-haired boy-villain in shorts and glasses. Her short skirt was blown up by the force of his threatening expression, and her panties showed. What kind of person would put crap like this up on her wall? “I’m afraid of you,” she murmured. “Why?” “Because I just am.” “Don’t worry. I won’t give you any more pain than you can handle.” She curled against him and squeezed her feet together like a stretching cat. Her socks were thick and ugly, and her feet were large for her size. Details like this could repel him, but he felt tenderly toward the long, grubby, squeezed-together feet. He said, “I want a slave.” She said, “I don’t know.

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

  Objection 2: Further, the rational powers, according to the Philosopher (Metaph. viii, 2), extend to opposite things. But the will is a rational power, because, as he says (De Anima iii, 9), “the will is in the reason.” Therefore the will extends to opposite things, and therefore it is determined to nothing of necessity. Objection 3: Further, by the will we are masters of our own actions. But we are not masters of that which is of necessity. Therefore the act of the will cannot be necessitated. On the contrary, Augustine says (De Trin. xiii, 4) that “all desire happiness with one will.” Now if this were not necessary, but contingent, there would at least be a few exceptions. Therefore the will desires something of necessity. I answer that, The word “necessity” is employed in many ways. For that which must be is necessary. Now that a thing must be may belong to it by an intrinsic principle—either material, as when we say that everything composed of contraries is of necessity corruptible—or formal, as when we say that it is necessary for the three angles of a triangle to be equal to two right angles. And this is “natural” and “absolute necessity.” In another way, that a thing must be, belongs to it by reason of something extrinsic, which is either the end or the agent. On the part of the end, as when without it the end is not to be attained or so well attained: for instance, food is said to be necessary for life, and a horse is necessary for a journey. This is called “necessity of end,” and sometimes also “utility.” On the part of the agent, a thing must be, when someone is forced by some agent, so that he is not able to do the contrary. This is called “necessity of coercion.” Now this necessity of coercion is altogether repugnant to the will. For we call that violent which is against the inclination of a thing. But the very movement of the will is an inclination to something. Therefore, as a thing is called natural because it is according to the inclination of nature, so a thing is called voluntary because it is according to the inclination of the will. Therefore, just as it is impossible for a thing to be at the same time violent and natural, so it is impossible for a thing to be absolutely coerced or violent, and voluntary. But necessity of end is not repugnant to the will, when the end cannot be attained except in one way: thus from the will to cross the sea, arises in the will the necessity to wish for a ship.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  It was my first fuck, by Jesus, and it had to be that a train would come along and shower hot sparks over us. Lola was terrified. It was her first fuck too, I guess, and she probably needed it more than I, but when she felt the sparks she wanted to tear loose. It was like trying to hold down a wild mare. I couldn’t keep her down, no matter how I wrestled with her. She got up, shook her clothes down, and adjusted the bun at the nape of her neck. “You must go home,” she says. “I’m not going home,” I said, and with that I took her by the arm and started walking. We walked along in dead silence for quite a distance. Neither of us seemed to be noticing where we were going. Finally we were out on the highway and up above us were the reservoirs and near the reservoirs was a pond. Instinctively I headed toward the pond. We had to pass under some low-hanging trees as we neared the pond. I was helping Lola to stoop down when suddenly she slipped, dragging me with her. She made no effort to get up; instead she caught hold of me and pressed me to her, and to my complete amazement I also felt her slip her hand in my fly. She caressed me so wonderfully that in a jiffy I came in her hand. Then she took my hand and put it between her legs. She lay back completely relaxed and opened her legs wide. I bent over and kissed every hair on her cunt; I put my tongue in her navel and licked it clean. Then I lay with my head between her legs and lapped up the drool that was pouring from her. She was moaning now and clutching wildly with her hands; her hair had come completely undone and was lying over her bare abdomen. To make it short, I got it in again, and I held it a long time, for which she must have been damned grateful because she came I don’t know how many times—it was like a pack of firecrackers going off, and with it all she sunk her teeth into me, bruised my lips, clawed me, ripped my shirt and what the hell not. I was branded like a steer when I got home and took a look at myself in the mirror. It was wonderful while it lasted, but it didn’t last long. A month later the Niessens moved to another city, and I never saw Lola again. But I hung her sporran over the bed and I prayed to it every night. And whenever I began the Czerny stuff I would get an erection, thinking of Lola lying in the grass, thinking of her long black hair, the bun at the nape of her neck, the groans she vented and the juice that poured out of her.

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

  For him, the climbing ecstasy of shared plea sure encapsulated the real meaning of eros. When the woman neared the “climax of Aphrodite,” she became frenzied with plea sure, and at the peak of orgasm the woman’s gasps even carried a little of her vital spirit into the mouth of her lover, where it mingled with his wandering kiss and returned to the heart.  Th is description of the woman’s plea sure, the reader of the romance re- members, is delivered by a young man whose experiences, on his own ad- mission, have been limited to professional women. Part of us may wonder if Clitophon has not himself been sold a convincing act, but that is to bring a modern cynicism into the picture. Achilles is a sly author, to be sure, but his rendering of female plea sure is integral to the whole conception of eros in the novel. Th e novels embrace the physical power of eros and celebrate its potential to be reconciled within the order of married life and the city- state. Th e Greeks and Romans recognized eros as a wild, destructive force. Th e novels present a cosmos where the feral power of eros is harnessed by mar- riage, not dampened by it. For Achilles, marriage itself exists as part of na- ture, or at least on an indistinct border between wild nature and human civilization. Th e novels are about the ending, about marriage, but they are not sermons or po liti cal pamphlets on behalf of marriage. In the world of the novel, civilization does not repress eros. For the novelist, the fi res of sexual love gave warmth and meaning to human life. Civilization is nour- ished by absorbing eros into its most vital institution. THE GLOOMY ONES: THE PHI LOS O PHERS AND SEXUALITY In the very opening scene of Leucippe and Clitophon, the “author” sails to Sidon and meets Clitophon in a temple of the goddess Astarte. Th e topic of eros arises and the two descend to a nearby grove bordered by a clear cold stream; the rest of the novel is Clitophon’s fi rst- person account of his expe- riences. Th e story of Clitophon and Leucippe’s romance is an afternoon conte in the cool shade of the plane trees. Th e ancient reader would have known immediately that we have been placed in the surroundings of Plato’s Phaedrus, one of the Athenian’s most celebrated dialogues on eros, in which THE MORALITIES OF SEX IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE  Socrates extols the power of love to draw humans toward the divine. It was by design an ambitious place to set an erotic story. From the beginning Achilles Tatius evokes the atmosphere of philosophy and the possibility of a rivalry between philosophy and art. Th e novel presents a narrative of eros that is permeated at every turn by the concerns of contemporary philoso- phy. Leucippe and Clitophon is a philosophical novel, though not a dogmatic one.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  There are cunts which laugh and cunts which talk; there are crazy, hysterical cunts shaped like ocarinas and there are planturous, seismographic cunts which register the rise and fall of sap; there are cannibalistic cunts which open wide like the jaws of the whale and swallow alive; there are also masochistic cunts which close up like the oyster and have hard shells and perhaps a pearl or two inside; there are dithyrambic cunts which dance at the very approach of the penis and go wet all over in ecstasy; there are the porcupine cunts which unleash their quills and wave little flags at Christmas time; there are telegraphic cunts which practice the Morse code and leave the mind full of dots and dashes; there are the political cunts which are saturated with ideology and which deny even the menopause; there are vegetative cunts which make no response unless you pull them up by the roots; there are the religious cunts which smell like Seventh Day Adventists and are full of beads, worms, clamshells, sheep droppings and now and then dried bread crumbs; there are the mammalian cunts which are lined with otter skin and hibernate during the long winter; there are cruising cunts fitted out like yachts, which are good for solitaries and epileptics; there are glacial cunts in which you can drop shooting stars without causing a flicker; there are miscellaneous cunts which defy category or description, which you stumble on once in a lifetime and which leave you seared and branded; there are cunts made of pure joy which have neither name nor antecedent and these are the best of all, but whither have they flown? And then there is the one cunt which is all, and this we shall call the super-cunt, since it is not of this land at all but of that bright country to which we were long ago invited to fly. Here the dew is ever sparkling and the tall reeds bend with the wind. It is here that the great father of fornication dwells, Father Apis, the mantic bull who gored his way to heaven and dethroned the gelded deities of right and wrong. From Apis sprang the race of unicorns, that ridiculous beast of ancient writ whose learned brow lengthened into a gleaming phallus, and from the unicorn by gradual stages was derived the late-city man of which Oswald Spengler speaks. And from the dead cock of this sad specimen arose the giant skyscraper with its express elevators and observation towers. We are the last decimal point of sexual calculation; the world turns like a rotten egg in its crate of straw. Now for the aluminum wings with which to fly to that far-off place, the bright country where Apis, the father of fornication, dwells. Everything goes forward like oiled clocks; for each minute of the dial there are a million noiseless clocks which tick off the rinds of time.