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 On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019)

  “I got lucky,” Buford said. “Three legs be damned, those things can kill ya.” In the backyard, Trevor and I sat on the grass, passing a joint sprinkled with crushed Oxy. With the back blown clean off, only the legs remained of the bench. Four legs, without a body. — A week after the first time, we did it again. His cock in my hand, we began. My grip tightened around the covers. And that inertia of his skin, damp-tight against my own, made the task feel, not merely of fucking, but of hanging on. The inside of his cheek, where the flesh was softest, tasted like cinnamon gum and wet stones. I reached down and felt the cockslit. When I rubbed the warming globe, he shivered against himself. Out of nowhere, he grabbed my hair, my head jerked back in his grip. I let out a clipped yelp, and he stopped, his hand hovering beside my face, hesitant. “Keep going,” I said, and leaned back, offering it all. “Grab it.” I can’t make sense of what I felt. The force and torque, of pain gathered toward a breaking point, a sensation I never imagined was a part of sex. Something took over and I told him to do it harder. And he did. He lifted me nearly off the bed by the roots of my follicles. With each slam, a light turned on and off inside me. I flickered, like a bulb in a storm, seeking myself in his steering. He let go of my hair only to put his arm under my neck. My lips brushed his forearm and I could taste the salt concentrated there. Recognition flinched inside him. This is how we were going to do it from now on. What do you call the animal that, finding the hunter, offers itself to be eaten? A martyr? A weakling? No, a beast gaining the rare agency to stop. Yes, the period in the sentence—it’s what makes us human, Ma, I swear. It lets us stop in order to keep going. Because submission, I soon learned, was also a kind of power. To be inside of pleasure, Trevor needed me. I had a choice, a craft, whether he ascends or falls depends on my willingness to make room for him, for you cannot rise without having something to rise over. Submission does not require elevation in order to control. I lower myself. I put him in my mouth, to the base, and peer up at him, my eyes a place he might flourish. After a while, it is the cocksucker who moves. And he follows, when I sway this way he swerves along. And I look up at him as if looking at a kite, his entire body tied to the teetering world of my head.

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

  Trevor pulled me by the arm to my feet. We stepped out of the oil lamp’s gold circle, leaving it empty and perfect again. He led me, along the barn, his grip tight. The moths dipped in and out between us. When one hit my forehead and I stopped, he yanked and I stumbled behind him. We reached the other side, then through the door, into the night. The air was cool and starless. In the sudden dark, I made out only his pale back, grey-blue in the un-light. After a few yards, I heard the water. The river’s current, although gentle, frothed white around his thighs. The crickets grew louder, lush. The trees rustled unseen in the massed shadows across the river. Then Trevor let go, dipped under, before quickly surfacing. Droplets ran down his jaw, tinkled around him. “Clean yourself,” he said, his tone oddly tender, almost frail. I pinched my nose and dunked under, gasping from the cold. In an hour, I’ll be standing in our dim kitchen, the river still damp in my hair, and Lan will shuffle into the glow of the night-light above the stove. I won’t tell anyone you been at sea, Little Dog. She will put her finger over her lips and nod. This way, the pirate spirits won’t follow you. She will take a dishrag and dry my hair, my neck, pausing over the hickey that, by then, will be the shade of dried blood under my jaw. You been far away. Now you home. Now you dry, she will say as the floorboards creak under our shifting weight. The river up to my chest now, I waved my arms to keep steady. Trevor put his hand on my neck and we stood, quiet for a moment, our heads bent over the river’s black mirror. He said, “Don’t worry about that. You heard?” The water moved around me, through my legs. “Hey.” He did that thing where he made a fist under my chin and tilted my head up to meet his gaze, a gesture that would usually get me to smile. “You heard me?” I just nodded, then turned to shore. I was only a few steps ahead of him before I felt his palm push hard between my shoulders, leaning me forward, my hands instinctually braced on my knees. Before I could turn around, I felt his stubble, first between my thighs, then higher. He had knelt in the shallows, knees sunk in river mud. I shook—his tongue so impossibly warm compared to the cold water, the sudden, wordless act, willed as a balm to my failure in the barn. It felt like an appalling second chance, to be wanted again, in this way.

• From Another Bullshit Night in Suck City: A Memoir (2004)

  The carpenter, who recently moved out on his wife and two kids so he can sit outside a tent in the state park under a kerosene lamp each night and kill a bucket of beer in peace, just looks at me and rolls his eyes when I mention that I’m thinking of not going. Don’t be an asshole , he tells me, you have your whole life to work. Two weeks later, hungry to learn after two mind-numbing years, I’m sitting in a classroom, wrapping my brain around King Lear—Who is it that can tell me who I am? Does Lear walk thus? Speak thus? I hold on to my job with Keith, going home every other weekend and holidays. If there were an opening on a boat I’d leave school in a heartbeat.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  These writers described timeless elements of human nature, but without judging or directing the audience to what they should feel or think. Take that as the model for whatever you produce. Keep in mind the following: the more active our imagination becomes, the greater the pleasure we derive from it. When we were children, if we were given a game with explicit instructions and rules, we quickly lost interest. But if the game was something we invented or was loosely structured, allowing us to inject our own ideas and fantasies, we could sustain our interest for much longer. When we view an abstract painting that evokes dreams or fantasies, or see a film that is not easily interpreted, or hear a joke or advertisement that is ambiguous, we are the ones who do the interpreting, and we find it exciting to be able to exercise our imagination in this way. Through your work you want to stimulate this pleasure for people to the maximum degree. Create rivalries of desire. Human desire is never an individual phenomenon. We are social creatures and what we want almost always reflects what other people want. This stems from our earliest years. We saw the attention that our parents could give us (the object we first coveted) as a zero-sum game. If our siblings received a lot of attention, then there would be less for us. We had to compete with them and with others to get attention and affection. When we saw our siblings or friends receive something—a gift or a favor—it sparked a competitive desire to have the same thing. If some object or person was not desired by others, we tended to see it as something indifferent or distasteful—there must be something wrong with it. This becomes a lifelong pattern. For some it is more overt. In relationships they are interested only in men or women who are already taken, who are clearly desired by a third party. Their desire is to take away this loved object, to triumph over the other person, a dynamic that most certainly has roots in their childhood. If other people are making money through some new gimmick, they want not only to participate but to corner the market. For others it is subtler. They see people possessing something that seems exciting, and their desire is not to take but to share and participate in the experience. In either direction, when we see people or things desired by others, it drives up their value. You must learn how to exploit this. If you can somehow create the impression that others desire you or your work, you will pull people into your current without having to say a word or impose yourself. They will come to you. You must strive to surround yourself with this social aura, or at least create the illusion.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  His title previously had been the Duke of Brunswick and Elector of Hanover. When Queen Anne of England died in 1714, George was her closest living Protestant relative. But the moment he ascended the throne his new subjects found him not to their liking. He spoke English with a horrific accent, and his manners were so coarse, and he was always avid for more money. Despite his advanced age he was constantly chasing after women other than his wife, none of whom were particularly attractive. In the first years of his reign there were several coup attempts, and the public might have welcomed the change if they had succeeded. George desperately wanted to prove to his new subjects that he could be a great king, in his own way. What he hated most of all was the crushing debts the government had incurred before he ascended the throne. George had an almost allergic reaction to any kind of debt, as if his own blood were being leeched. Now here was Blunt offering him the chance to cancel the debt and bring prosperity to England, strengthening the monarchy in the process. It was almost too good to be true, and he threw his full weight behind the proposal. He assigned the chancellor of the exchequer, John Aislabie, the task of presenting the proposal to Parliament in January 1720. Parliament would have to approve it in the form of a bill. Almost immediately Blunt’s proposal stirred up fierce opposition among several MPs, some of whom found it ludicrous. But in the weeks after Aislabie’s speech, opponents of the bill watched in dismay as support for their side slowly withered away. Advance shares in the venture had been virtually gifted to the wealthiest and most powerful Englishmen, including prominent members of Parliament, who, sensing the sure profits they personally would gain, now gave their approval to the bill. When the bill passed in April of that year, King George himself showed up at the South Sea House and deposited £100,000 for shares in the new venture. He wanted to display his confidence in it, but such a step was hardly necessary, as the buildup to the bill’s passage had captured the public and interest in South Sea Company shares had already reached a fever pitch. The center of activity was an area of London known as Exchange Alley, where almost all stocks were sold. Now the narrow streets in and around the alley were clogged with traffic growing thicker by the day. At first it was mostly the wealthy and influential who came in their fancy coaches to buy up shares. Among the buyers were also artists and intellectuals—including John Gay, Alexander Pope, and Jonathan Swift. Soon Sir Isaac Newton felt the pull and invested a good chunk of his savings, £7,000. A few weeks later, however, he felt doubt.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House as an Exercise in Point of View You were not always just a You. I was whole—a symbiotic relationship between my best and worst parts—and then, in one sense of the definition, I was cleaved: a neat lop that took first person—that assured, confident woman, the girl detective, the adventurer—away from second, who was always anxious and vibrating like a too-small breed of dog. I left, and then lived: moved to the East Coast, wrote a book, moved in with a beautiful woman, got married, bought a rambling Victorian in Philadelphia. Learned things: how to make Manhattans and use starchy pasta water to create sauces and keep succulents alive. But you. You took a job as a standardized-test grader. You drove seven hours to Indiana every other week for a year. You churned out mostly garbage for the second half of your MFA. You cried in front of many people. You missed readings, parties, the supermoon. You tried to tell your story to people who didn’t know how to listen. You made a fool of yourself, in more ways than one. I thought you died, but writing this, I’m not sure you did. Dream House as Inciting Incident You meet her on a weeknight, at dinner with a mutual friend in a diner in Iowa City where the walls are windows. She is sweaty, having just come from the gym, her white-blonde hair pulled back in a short ponytail. She has a dazzling smile, a raspy voice that sounds like a wheelbarrow being dragged over stones. She is that mix of butch and femme that drives you crazy. You and your friend are talking about television when she arrives; you have been complaining about men’s stories, men’s stories, how everything is men’s stories. She laughs, agrees. She tells you she’s freshly transplanted from New York, drawing unemployment insurance and applying to MFA programs. She’s a writer too. Every time she speaks, you feel something inside you drop. You will remember so little about the dinner except that, at the end of it, you want to prolong the evening and so you order tea of all things. You drink it—a mouthful of heat and herb, scorching the roof of your mouth—while trying not to stare at her, trying to be charming and nonchalant while desire gathers in your limbs. Your female crushes were always floating past you, out of reach, but she touches your arm and looks directly at you and you feel like a child buying something with her own money for the first time.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House as Confession She was short and pale and rail-thin and androgynous, with fine blonde hair about which she was inordinately vain. Blue eyes, an easy smile. You are embarrassed now to say that you were impressed by her in a very strange, old-fashioned way. Despite being from Florida, she had a distinctly upper-class, New England air. She had gone to Harvard, looked dapper in a blazer, and carried a leather-encased hip flask preppier than any accessory you’ve ever seen. You have always suspected that you are shallow when it comes to desire, and there it was: all of those factors flipped your brain inside out and turned your cunt to pudding. Maybe you were always some kind of hedonist-cum-social climber-cum-cummer and you just never knew it. Despite the fact that you were the same age, you felt like she was older than you: wiser, more experienced, worldlier. She’d worked in publishing, she’d lived abroad, she spoke fluent French. She’d lived in New York and been to launch parties for literary magazines. And, it turned out, she had a weakness for curvy-to-fat brunettes in glasses. God herself couldn’t have planned it better. Dream House as Dreamboat You love writing across from her, the two of you tapping away with verve and purpose, and occasionally peeking over the edges of your laptops at each other with goofily contorted faces. When you go out to dinner, she orders tuna sashimi and insists on placing it on your tongue. It is sturdy, labial. It melts there. She orders dirty vodka martinis and you come to love their brine. She reads your stories, marvels at the beauty of your sentences. You listen to her read an old essay about how her parents never let her eat sugary cereal. You tell her, often, how hysterically funny she is. Dream House as Luck of the Draw Part of the problem was, as a weird fat girl, you felt lucky. She did what you’d wished a million others had done—looked past arbitrary markers of social currency and seen your brain and ferocious talent and quick wit and pugnacious approach to assholes. When you started writing about fatness—a long time ago, in your LiveJournal—a commenter said to you that you were pretty and smart and charming, but as long as you were zaftig you’d never have your choice of lovers. You remember feeling outrage, and then processing the reality, the practicality, of what he’d said. You were so angry at the world. You wondered, when she came along, if this was what most people got to experience in their lives: a straight line from want to satisfaction; desire manifested and satisfied in reasonable succession. This had never been the case before; it had always been fraught. How many times had you said, “If I just looked a little different, I’d be drowning in love”? Now you got to drown without needing to change a single cell. Lucky you.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  Secretly most of us feel bothered or crushed by all of these constraints on our physical and mental movement. We yearn for what is transgressive and beyond the limits that are set for us. We can easily be pulled toward that repressed no or yes. You want to associate your object with something ever so slightly illicit, unconventional, or politically advanced. Chanel did this with her overt androgynous appeal and flouting of gender roles. The fight between generations is always ripe material for this. What you offer is in bold contrast to the stodgy previous generation. John F. Kennedy did this by setting himself off against the 1950s and the Eisenhower era—a time of stultifying conformity. By contrast, voting for him meant youth, vigor, and a lost masculinity. In essence he played to the secret resentment of the father figure and the transgressive desire to get rid of him. This desire is always tacitly out there among the young, and it always has a taboo element attached. One illicit desire that almost all people share is voyeurism. To peek inside the private lives of others violates strict social taboos on privacy, and yet everyone feels the pull to see what is going on behind people’s doors. Theater and film depend upon these voyeuristic desires. They put us inside people’s rooms, and we experience this almost as if we were literally spying on people. You can incorporate this into your work by giving the impression you are revealing secrets that should really not be shared. Some will be outraged but everyone will be curious. These could be secrets about yourself and how you accomplished what you did, or it could be about others, what happens behind the closed doors of powerful people and the laws that they operate by. In any event, what you offer should be new, unfamiliar, and exotic, or at least presented as such. The contrast to what is out there, so numbingly conventional, will create a covetous pull. Finally, dangle in front of people the prospect of grasping the unattainable or the impossible. Life is full of all kinds of irritating limits and difficulties. To become wealthy or successful requires great effort. We are locked inside our own character (see chapter 4) and cannot become someone else. We cannot recover our lost youth or the health that went with it. Every day brings us closer to death, the ultimate limit. Your object, however, offers the fantasy of a quick path to wealth and success, of recovering lost youth, of becoming a new person, and even of conquering death itself.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  The demand to hear her story was so intense that she decided to issue a printed booklet in which she described in great detail her possession, her most intimate thoughts, and the miracle that had occurred. At her death in 1665, the head of Jeanne des Anges, as she was now known, was decapitated, mummified, and placed in a silver-gilt box with crystal windows. It was displayed next to the anointed chemise for those who wanted to see it, at the Ursuline house in Loudun, until its disappearance during the French Revolution. • • • Interpretation: In her earliest years, Jeanne de Belciel displayed an insatiable appetite for attention. She wearied her parents, who finally got rid of her by sending her to a convent in Poitiers. There she proceeded to drive the nuns insane with her sarcasm and incredible air of superiority. Sent off to Loudun, it seemed she decided to try a different approach to gaining the recognition she so desperately needed. Given books on spirituality, she determined she would excel all others in her knowledge and pious behavior. She made a complete show of both and gained the good favor of the prioress. But as head of the house, she felt bored, and the attention she now received inadequate. Her dreams of Grandier were a mix of fabrication and autosuggestion. Soon after the exorcists arrived, she was given a book on demonology, which she devoured, and knowing the various ins and outs of devil inhabitation, she proceeded to give herself all of the most dramatic traits, which would be picked up by the exorcists as sure signs of possession. She became the star of the public spectacle. While possessed, she went further than all others in her degradation and lewd behavior. After Grandier’s gruesome execution, which profoundly affected the other nuns, who certainly felt guilt at the part they had played in the death of an innocent man, Jeanne alone felt the sudden lack of attention as unbearable and so she upped the ante by refusing to let go of the demons. She had become a master at sensing the weaknesses and hidden desires of those around her—first the prioress, and then the exorcists, and now Father Surin. He wanted so badly to be the one to redeem her that he would fall for the simplest of miracles. As for the stigmata, some later speculated that she had etched these names with acid, or traced them through colored starch. It seemed odd that they appeared only on her left hand, where it would be easy for her to write them out. It is known that in extreme hysteria the skin becomes particularly sensitive, and a fingernail can do the trick. As someone who had long experimented in concocting herbal remedies, it was easy for her to apply fragrant drops.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Every time she speaks, you feel something inside you drop. You will remember so little about the dinner except that, at the end of it, you want to prolong the evening and so you order tea of all things. You drink it—a mouthful of heat and herb, scorching the roof of your mouth—while trying not to stare at her, trying to be charming and nonchalant while desire gathers in your limbs. Your female crushes were always floating past you, out of reach, but she touches your arm and looks directly at you and you feel like a child buying something with her own money for the first time. Dream House as Memory PalaceFrom the street, here is the house. There is a front door, but you never go in the front door.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  There is a theory about time travel called the Novikov self-consistency principle, wherein Novikov asserts that if time travel were possible, it would still be impossible to travel back in time and alter events that have already taken place. If present-day you could return to the past, you could certainly make observations that felt new—observations that had the benefit of real-time hindsight—but you’d be unable to, say, prevent your parents from meeting, since that, by definition, had already happened. To do so, Novikov says, would be as impossible as jumping through a brick wall. Time—the plot of it—is fixed. No, Novikov’s time traveler is the tragic dupe who realizes too late her trip to the past is what sealed the very fate she’d meant to prevent. Maybe you mistook your future voice shouting through the walls for something else: a heartbeat pacing and then rapid with want, a purr. Dream House as a Stranger Comes to TownOne day, she texts you to ask if you can give her a ride to the Cedar Rapids airport. She needs to pick up her girlfriend, Val, who is visiting from out of town. You agree because, of course. Historically you’ve done just about anything for a beautiful woman. (Years ago, when you lived in California, your stunningly gorgeous coworker called you at seven in the morning because she needed help jump-starting her car. You were out of bed and on your way in ten minutes, and when you opened the hood of her car you made a point of contemplating the machinery below you, as if you had any idea what it meant.) In the car, you are so busy talking you miss the exit—blowing past a strip club, Woody’s, and the sign for the airport. When you finally arrive and park your car, you walk to the baggage claim and watch these two beautiful, tiny women run at each other. One brunette, one blonde; like Jane Russell and Marilyn Monroe. The blonde sits and the brunette crawls in her lap; they laugh and kiss. (You would love that version of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.) You turn away and examine a poster for the University of Iowa very closely. In the car, the brunette laughs easily and openly at all of your jokes. You watch her surreptitiously in the rearview mirror. You drop them off back in town. A few days later, you’re talking to your mutual friend. “I think she likes you,” she says. “She’s really hot,” you say. “But she’s seeing someone. I just, like, literally picked up her girlfriend from the airport.” “Oh yeah,” your friend says. “They’re in an open relationship, though. That’s what she told me. I’m just saying.” She throws up her hands with mock innocence. “She’s mentioned you a bunch.” Your heart launches itself against your rib cage like an animal.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House as Lesbian Cult ClassicYou arrange to hang out at her house. You are going to watch The Brave Little Toaster, a movie you haven’t seen since childhood but that you remember loving and being terrified of. You sit inches from each other on a green velvet couch, drinks sweating on the coffee table. When your favorite number is on—the junkyard cars singing bleakly of their erstwhile lives, reminding you that they are now worthless and about to die—her index finger drifts against your hand, and you feel a clench of desire. You know this move. You’ve done this move a thousand times: I am too shy to turn to you and tell you what I want; instead, I will pretend that I am not quite in control of this single, nomadic digit. The movie ends, and you both sit there in the dark. You start to nervously chatter about trivia—“Did you know the story this movie is based on won a Nebula Award? It—” She kisses you. Upstairs, you both tumble onto her bed. She never kisses you in the same place twice. Then she says, “I’d like to take your shirt off. May I?” And you nod, and she does. She slides her hand around your bra clasp. “Is this all right?” she asks. The room smells like lavender, or maybe you just remember that because her comforter was lavender. Every time her hand moves somewhere else, she whispers, “May I?” and the thrill of saying yes, yes, is like the pulsing of the tide over your face, and you would gladly drown that way, giving permission. Dream House as Famous Last Words“We can fuck,” she says, “but we can’t fall in love.”2 [image file=image_rsrc2K0.jpg] 2. Stith Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature: A Classification of Narrative Elements in Folktales, Ballads, Myths, Fables, Mediaeval Romances, Exempla, Fabliaux, Jest-Books, and Local Legends (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1955–1958), Type T3, Omens in love affairs.Dream House as ConfessionShe was short and pale and rail-thin and androgynous, with fine blonde hair about which she was inordinately vain. Blue eyes, an easy smile. You are embarrassed now to say that you were impressed by her in a very strange, old-fashioned way. Despite being from Florida, she had a distinctly upper-class, New England air. She had gone to Harvard, looked dapper in a blazer, and carried a leather-encased hip flask preppier than any accessory you’ve ever seen. You have always suspected that you are shallow when it comes to desire, and there it was: all of those factors flipped your brain inside out and turned your cunt to pudding. Maybe you were always some kind of hedonist-cum-social climber-cum-cummer and you just never knew it.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  We talked. We talked about God and ethics and history and school; his marriage; the sexual assault in my freshman year that I couldn’t excise from my brain. He gave me permission to swear in front of him, which I did, profusely. “Fuck that fucking fuck,” I’d yell, new to profanities. “That asshole. That shitty asshole.” Joel watched me meditatively from his office chair, rocking against its hinges. Once, I sat down on the floor, and he joined me there, our knees touching. “Sometimes you just need a change of perspective,” he told me. Eventually, he insisted on meeting outside work. He gave me his cell number, and when I called he met me wherever I asked him to go. I felt a strange rush of pleasure at this development. We’d moved past the default scenes and settings of ministry. He met with parishioners during office hours, with the door standing open. But he met with me at diners at two in the morning, and I saw his face in the reflection of darkened windows. I drove to his house and waited for him to get dressed so we could go out. If his wife wasn’t home, he’d change in front of his open door as I looked and didn’t look, and then we’d drive to local restaurants and he’d buy me potstickers or grilled cheese sandwiches and I’d try not to cry too loudly. Once, I fell asleep in the booth, and he waited for me to wake up. My mother didn’t like that I called Joel by his first name. “It’s inappropriate,” she said. “He should be ‘Pastor Jones.’” What I couldn’t explain to her—what I barely understood myself—was that Joel wasn’t just my pastor. The boundaries that should have been up between us—minister/congregant, adult/teenager—had completely dissolved. We were friends. We were real, honest-to-goodness friends, and I did not have a lot of those. Joel rarely mentioned my age, but when he did I could see the gulf of time between us, and I hated it. His words were a mantra that I repeated in my head. It’s going to be okay. It’s not your fault. You’re not a bad person. God loves you. God loves you even though you’re not perfect. I love you. And I wanted him. On top of all of this, I wanted him. I knew he was married, but it didn’t seem to matter. He told me that his wife couldn’t get pregnant, and they’d stopped having sex altogether. Maybe that was what I sensed in him: something caged, unfulfilled. He radiated desire. I wanted to kiss him, I wanted him to hold me, I wanted to associate sex with something besides fear and guilt. I wanted my life to be shaken up, to go from being who I was to someone renewed.

• From The History of Christianity II: From the Reformation to the Modern Megachurch (2017)

  26The History of Christianity II THEOLOGY AND HENRY VIII õWhile Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin were arguing, England was undergoing a Reformation of its own. The roots of the English Reformation trace back to the 1520s, when Henry VIII was on the English throne. õAs late as 1521, England seemed firmly in the Catholic fold. Henry VIII even wrote a pamphlet denouncing Martin Luther, and the pope rewarded him with the title Defender of the Faith. õBut Henry had some personal problems. Like most monarchs, his primary worry was ensuring his own legacy, mainly by securing the succession of a legitimate male heir to his throne. By the late 1520s, his only legitimate child was his daughter Mary, and his wife, Catherine of Aragon, was getting on in years. Meanwhile, he was falling in love with someone who hung around the royal court, Anne Boleyn. õHenry wanted to divorce Catherine and demanded permission to do so from the pope. The pope refused. In retaliation, Henry VIII began to separate from Rome in the early 1530s and to assert his own authority over the English church. REFORM COMES TO ENGLAND õParliament’s Act of Supremacy in 1534 formally declared Henry the head of the English church. But even though this marked a clear break from Rome, it quickly became apparent that Henry was no theological radical. He didn’t really want Catholic worship to change much. His Protestant advisers bided their time. õHenry VIII did finally have a son, but not by Anne Boleyn. She gave birth solely to a girl, Elizabeth, and ended up beheaded on charges of adultery, incest with her brother, and treason. Henry’s son was born to a later wife named Jane Seymour, who died during childbirth. 27Lecture 3—Zwingli, Calvin, and the Reformed Tradition õWhen Henry himself died in 1547, this son, Edward VI, succeeded him. He was young and in perpetual ill health, but he was a confirmed Protestant, and so were the nobles who were in charge of things until Edward came of age. 28The History of Christianity II õThe archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, had long been consulting with reformed Christians on the continent. Now he wasted no time in inviting reformed refugees from various parts of Europe to come to England and help him draft a new, much more reformed Book of Common Prayer to guide the Church of England. õBut Cranmer and his colleagues left the basic structure of the church unchanged; bishops still had a lot of power, and one needed a license from a bishop to preach. They also tried to make room for local traditions and ancient holy days.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  an orphan with little or no resources in life. She realized in her early twenties that her calling was to design clothes and to start her own apparel line. She desperately needed guidance, however, particularly when it came to the business side. She looked for people who could help her find her way. At the age of twenty-five she met the perfect target, a wealthy older English businessman named Arthur “Boy” Capel. She was attracted to his ambition, his well- rounded experience, his knowledge of the arts, and his ruthless practicality. She latched onto him with great vehemence. He was able to instill in her the confidence that she could become a famous designer. He taught her about business in general. He offered her tough criticisms that she could accept because of her deep respect for him. He helped guide her in her first important decisions in setting up her business. From him she developed a very honed sense of purpose that she retained her entire life. Without his influence, her path would have been too confusing and difficult. Later in life, she kept returning to this strategy. She found other men and women who had skills she lacked or needed to strengthen—social graciousness, marketing, a nose for cultural trends—and developed relationships that allowed her to learn from them. In this case, you want to find people who are pragmatic and not merely those who are charismatic or visionaries. You want their practical advice, and to absorb their spirit of getting things done. If possible, collect around you a group of people from different fields, as friends or associates, who have similar energy. You will help elevate one another’s sense of purpose. Do not settle for virtual associations or mentors. They will not have the same effect. Create a ladder of descending goals. Operating with long-term goals will bring you tremendous clarity and resolve. These goals—a project or business to create, for instance—can be relatively ambitious, enough to bring out the best in you. The problem, however, is that they will also tend to generate anxiety as you look at all you have to do to reach them from the present vantage point. To manage such anxiety, you must create a ladder of smaller goals along the way, reaching down to the present. Such objectives are simpler the further down the ladder you go, and you can realize them in relatively short time frames, giving you moments of satisfaction and a sense of progress. Always break tasks into smaller bites. Each day or week you must have microgoals. This will help you focus and avoid entanglements or detours that will waste your energy. At the same time, you want to continually remind yourself of the larger goal, to avoid losing track of it or getting too mired in details. Periodically return to your original vision and imagine the immense satisfaction you will have when it comes to fruition. This will give you

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

  “I got lucky,” Buford said. “Three legs be damned, those things can kill ya.” In the backyard, Trevor and I sat on the grass, passing a joint sprinkled with crushed Oxy. With the back blown clean off, only the legs remained of the bench. Four legs, without a body. — A week after the first time, we did it again. His cock in my hand, we began. My grip tightened around the covers. And that inertia of his skin, damp-tight against my own, made the task feel, not merely of fucking, but of hanging on. The inside of his cheek, where the flesh was softest, tasted like cinnamon gum and wet stones. I reached down and felt the cockslit. When I rubbed the warming globe, he shivered against himself. Out of nowhere, he grabbed my hair, my head jerked back in his grip. I let out a clipped yelp, and he stopped, his hand hovering beside my face, hesitant. “Keep going,” I said, and leaned back, offering it all. “Grab it.” I can’t make sense of what I felt. The force and torque, of pain gathered toward a breaking point, a sensation I never imagined was a part of sex. Something took over and I told him to do it harder. And he did. He lifted me nearly off the bed by the roots of my follicles. With each slam, a light turned on and off inside me. I flickered, like a bulb in a storm, seeking myself in his steering. He let go of my hair only to put his arm under my neck. My lips brushed his forearm and I could taste the salt concentrated there. Recognition flinched inside him. This is how we were going to do it from now on. What do you call the animal that, finding the hunter, offers itself to be eaten? A martyr? A weakling? No, a beast gaining the rare agency to stop. Yes, the period in the sentence—it’s what makes us human, Ma, I swear. It lets us stop in order to keep going. Because submission, I soon learned, was also a kind of power. To be inside of pleasure, Trevor needed me. I had a choice, a craft, whether he ascends or falls depends on my willingness to make room for him, for you cannot rise without having something to rise over. Submission does not require elevation in order to control. I lower myself. I put him in my mouth, to the base, and peer up at him, my eyes a place he might flourish. After a while, it is the cocksucker who moves. And he follows, when I sway this way he swerves along. And I look up at him as if looking at a kite, his entire body tied to the teetering world of my head.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  It was painstaking persistence over several years that allowed Thomas Edison to invent the proper form of the lightbulb, and Marie Curie to discover radium. They simply continued where others had given up. Over the course of ten years, it was through continual thought experiments, day and night, exploring every possible solution, that Albert Einstein finally came up with the theory of relativity. In the spiritual realm, the great eighteenth-century Zen master Hakuin was able to finally reach full enlightenment, and revive a dying branch of Zen, because he applied himself to the task with relentless persistence over the course of some twenty years. This is aggressive energy, undivided from within, aimed with laser focus at a problem or resistance. It is because the infant or the scientist or the aspiring practitioner of Zen wants something so badly that nothing will deter them. They understand the power of persistence, and so it becomes a self- fulfilling prophecy—knowing its value, they are able to summon up the energy and self-belief to solve the problem. They are adopting Hannibal’s motto: “I will either find a way, or make a way.” You must do the same. The trick is to want something badly enough that nothing will stop you or dull your energy. Fill yourself with the requisite desire to reach a goal. Train yourself to not give up as easily as you did in the past. Keep attacking from new angles, in new ways. Drop the background doubts and continue striking with full force, knowing that you can break through anything if you don’t let up. Once you sense the power in this form of attack, you will keep returning to it. Fearlessness: We are bold creatures by nature. As children, we were not afraid to ask for more or assert our will. We were remarkably resilient and fearless in so many ways. Timidity is a quality we generally acquire. It is a function of our mounting fears as we get older and a loss of confidence in our powers to get what we want. We become overly concerned with how people perceive us and worry what they will think if we stand up for ourselves. We internalize their doubts. We become afraid of any kind of conflict or confrontation, which will churn up emotions and lead to consequences we cannot predict or control. We develop the habit of backing down. We don’t say what we feel even when it would be appropriate, and we fail to set boundaries to people’s harmful behavior. We find it hard to ask for a raise or a promotion or the respect due to us. Losing our bold spirit, a positive form of aggression, is losing a deep part of our self, and it is inevitably painful. You must try to recover the fearlessness you once possessed, through incremental steps.

• From The Boys of My Youth (1998)

  Frank immediately starts filling us in on how much work he got done during the day. I feel vaguely guilty about the magnitude of my afternoon nap. Somehow the quality of the light has changed on the terrace, there’s a dangerous peach glow coming over the horizon. The new guy is introducing himself to a group of people. There are handshakes around. Today Frank finished a painting and started two new ones. Stasia says that you don’t burn your feet because the coals are too light. The new guy looks over in this direction. It’s like when you put your hand in a hot oven; the coals are almost light as air, they’re hot but have very made density so they don’t burn you. I can feel the frayed edge of his denim jacket and he’s standing all the way over there. I look at my hand. Frank asks me how the boys of my youth are doing. “They’re boring,” I say absently. Here he comes. Pertinent details. Blond poet. A slightly jaded and weary air about him. Something recognizable in the sideways glance, the set of the shoulders. He’s sober now, but from what I can tell the former bad boy is buried in a shallow grave. The color of his eyes escapes me but not the quality of the gaze. He appears to be fully and alarmingly present at all times. I have to get out of here. He leaves me a note on the mail table, full of charming misspellings. We meet and walk, describe our lives. He puts his hand on my arm as we cross a street and continues listening, offering kindness and advice. I have a sudden overwhelming desire to touch his face. I put my hands in the pockets of my jeans. It feels crowded inside my bell jar; condensation forms and I begin weeping. He watches calmly, one foot on the bumper of a car. At some point he reaches out, lightly touches my face. I take to wearing a Walkman and earphones everywhere I go, piping music directly into my head. The phone booth is the only place it doesn’t work. “I can only talk for a minute,” I tell her. My days are numbered here; I feel a longing for my empty living room, for the grizzled face of Sheba the dog. The blue enamel breakfast table, the rug with a picture of New Zealand on it, the bird’s nest we found outside the country place years ago, made from hair shed by my old dead heroic-hearted collie. I’m tired of being here. I miss my stuff. “I’m sick of my stuff,” she says. “I want all new everything.” I want I want I want. I want to go home. “What’s going on?” she asks. After a short pause a lightbulb goes on over her head. “Uh-oh,” she says. Yeah. “Heck,” she says cheerfully. “That’s good. Is he nice?”

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  At about drinks time I began to want to do something. I wrapped up my trunks in a towel, flung them in my sports bag with my goggles and soap-box and an American ‘gay thriller’ I had been loaned by Nigel the pool attendant, and trotted off out. The pavements and gardens were exuding their summer smells, and as I approached the Tube station I walked against the current of people coming home, youngsters in pinstripes from the City fanning out from the gates, jackets here and there hooked over a shoulder, smart clippety-clop of old-fashioned City shoes. They were quite handsome, some of these boys, public-school types with peachy complexions and contemptuous eyes. Already they commanded substantial salaries, took long, overpriced lunches, worked out perhaps in private City gyms. In many ways they were like me; yet as they ambled home in the benign and ordered vastness of the evening, as I fleetingly caught their eye or felt them for a moment aware of me, they were an alien breed. And then I was a loafer who had hardly ever actively earned money, and they were the eager initiates, the coiners of the power and the compromise in which I had unthinkingly been raised. My disaffected mood persisted in the sweaty train. Goldie was one of the poorer accessions of the swimming-pool library. It was not, alas, about the Cambridge second eight, but about rent-boys, blackmail and murder in Manhattan; Goldie was the gay police officer who got to buy the favours of the chief suspect, and seemed bound to fall in love with him before the sorry end. The book’s formula was to alternate blocks of fast, bloodthirsty action with exhaustive descriptions of sexual intercourse. Nigel, night-sighted in the pool’s subterranean gloom, had said it was a good one; but I resented its professional neatness and its priapic attempts to win me over. The trouble was that, as attempts, they were half-successful: something in me was pained and removed; but something else, subliterate, responded to the book’s bald graffiti. ‘Fuck me again, Goldie,’ the slender, pleading Juan Bautista would cry; and I thought, ‘Yeah, give it to him! Give it to him good ’n’ hard!’

• From Dirty Pretty Things (2014)

  Teach Me Such pretty things you said to me — Unbutton me some more. For I am yours to take tonight upon this forest floor. Let’s make a bed in autumn leaves, and leave no leaf unturned. Beneath these trees please teach me, please — To learn a love unlearned. Bedtime Story I love the moment when your eyes close and your lips open in slow motion. She Said “Romance is all well and good, but . . . it’s just that I am not in the mood for whispered sweet nothings or your fingers running softly through my hair. What I want, more than anything, is for you to treat me like your own personal sex doll. “Don’t kiss me — make me bite my lip.” Spellbound The very suggestion of your words, she said — bind my wrists tighter than any rope. Understatement “Unbutton, unzip, unclip, untie, undo, undress.” “Understood,” she replied. Encore I love to watch you touch yourself, on rainy afternoons. The wandering hands. The soft little moans. Hips twitching. Wet fingers fucking. A solo show, performed for one. Dirty You make me feel a little dirty, she said, and I fucking love it. Curious Girl She was a curious girl, who loved the smell of old books, chasing butterflies, and touching herself under the covers. By the Sea I dreamt of us last night, living in the little stone cottage by the sea, the one you promised me. Our love held together by wrinkled hands as we slowly walked across ever-sinking sands. Each languid step taking us closer toward our very last sunset. It wasn’t until I was fully awake that I truly woke up. I suddenly realized it’s no coincidence the two middle letters of life are if . For every action we make, there is a reaction. The outcome often beyond our control, fragile and fraught with ruinous consequences. Like a soap bubble made real by a gentle breath only to be taken by it. If you had stayed here, in my trembling arms, would our fingers not be pricked by the thorns of red roses? And what if our love could have stood up to the storm, standing strong, like our cottage by the sea? If only . . . Without You There is a quiet beauty in a miserable gray, with leaden skies and brooding hue, this gentle rain a reminder of you, tracing silent tears on a windowpane. From a changing tide to an empty beach, a broken wave writes a lonely line, a crashing metaphor captured in time, of a memory found on this forgotten shore. Your Smile Your smile is a beautifully written line I hope to write some day. Tongue-Tied Love I cannot speak the words, that haven’t already been said. A well-thumbed thesaurus, gathering dust, inside my head.