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.

Page 327 of 344 · 20 per page

• From The City of God

  13. _Concerning the love of praise, which, though it is a vice, is reckoned a virtue, because by it greater vice is restrained._ Wherefore, when the kingdoms of the East had been illustrious for a long time, it pleased God that there should also arise a Western empire, which, though later in time, should be more illustrious in extent and greatness. And, in order that it might overcome the grievous evils which existed among other nations, He purposely granted it to such men as, for the sake of honour, and praise, and glory, consulted well for their country, in whose glory they sought their own, and whose safety they did not hesitate to prefer to their own, suppressing the desire of wealth and many other vices for this one vice, namely, the love of praise. For he has the soundest perception who recognises that even the love of praise is a vice; nor has this escaped the perception of the poet Horace, who says, "You're bloated by ambition? take advice: Yon book will ease you if you read it thrice."[203] And the same poet, in a lyric song, hath thus spoken with the desire of repressing the passion for domination: "Rule an ambitious spirit, and thou hast A wider kingdom than if thou shouldst join To distant Gades Lybia, and thus Shouldst hold in service either Carthaginian."[204] Nevertheless, they who restrain baser lusts, not by the power of the Holy Spirit obtained by the faith of piety, or by the love of intelligible beauty, but by desire of human praise, or, at all events, restrain them better by the love of such praise, are not indeed yet holy, but only less base. Even Tully was not able to conceal this fact; for, in the same books which he wrote, _De Republica_, when speaking concerning the education of a chief of the state, who ought, he says, to be nourished on glory, goes on to say that their ancestors did many wonderful and illustrious things through desire of glory. So far, therefore, from resisting this vice, they even thought that it ought to be excited and kindled up, supposing that that would be beneficial to the republic. But not even in his books on philosophy does Tully dissimulate this poisonous opinion, for he there avows it more clearly than day. For when he is speaking of those studies which are to be pursued with a view to the _true good_, and not with the vainglorious desire of human praise, he introduces the following universal and general statement: "Honour nourishes the arts, and all are stimulated to the prosecution of studies by glory; and those pursuits are always neglected which are generally discredited."[205] 14. _Concerning the eradication of the love of human praise, because all the glory of the righteous is in God._

• From The Chronology of Water (2011)

  “Severe,” he agreed. Why did I do that. Why did I. I got butkus. Then it just sort of came out of my mouth as, “I think I did it because I was hurting. I think I wanted to mark that hurt on the outside. I think I wanted to be someone else. But I didn’t know who yet.” It almost sounded aware. “I see,” he said, “and who are you now?” Goddamn this guy just goes straight for the kill. Aren’t guys his age supposed to be shallow insensitive arrogants? So I said, “I’m your teacher.” We both cracked up. The kind of laughter that reveals a gaping fault line big enough to drive a U-haul through. Then it just got ridiculous - I couldn’t stop watching his lips move and I couldn’t shut down the electricity creeping up my spine and then it became impossible to maintain the teacher student charade when he took off of his sun glasses for a moment and I took off mine and I swear he performed some kind of sly guy Marlon Brando like from Streetcar eye hoodoo on me. Still, I gave him my written comments on his work like a professional should and sent him away. But he already knew my weakness. “ Um, Dr. Lidia? Don’t you need a ride home?” I know you are not used to women saying this, but I wanted him to drive down into me and eat me alive. Ecstatic State OUR FIRST “DATE” ANDY SAID HE WANTED TO GO SWIMMING with me. He knew all about the swimmer of me from reading my stories, which he’d apparently gone home and looked up that night. Also from stories he’d been told. Now that I look back at it, it was a brave move. He wasn’t that great a swimmer. He was great at other things - but not swimming. So that must have taken some man guts. And he was mildly allergic to chlorine. When he dipped himself in chlorine for long periods, his nose ran. Non-stop. Still he asked to come swim with me. No one has ever done that. No one. So we swam. In a little Y pool near my rented one bedroom house in Ocean Beach a block from the sea. In the pool he fought the water with all his might. Six foot three and built like a tree his body was meant for land. But he swam with me. Lap after lap. I lapped him a dozen times. Still he swam. His nose ran. He stayed with me in the water. When I finally stopped, he looked me right in the eye. Chlorine smell between us. His eyes were bloodshot because he refused to wear goggles. He was more present than anyone in my entire life had ever been. He smiled. Snot running down his mouth. I smiled back. Fear in my chest. You can’t order a highball in the pool to calm the fuck down.

• From The Chronology of Water (2011)

  The second date he took me to a ratty little hole in the wall Ocean Beach gym where he hit the heavy bag and did mixed martial arts things I’d never seen, nearly making me cream my jeans and pass out. I know. How not evolved of me. How not feminist and Ph.D. and university professor. I’m just saying. You could have hosed me down and carried me out on a stretcher. Then he wrapped and wrapped and wrapped my hands and put the red gloves on me and took me over to a smaller weenier bag and tried to show me how to hit it. Everything smelled like man and sweat and leather and socks. I was the only woman there, and I was not young and hot. I was 38 and he was 28 and it looked that way. But I put my fists up. For him. For him, I tried to find some game. It was going OK, but mostly I bat at it like a girl. Not because I couldn’t bring something harder, I was an athlete back in the day after all. But I was COMPLETELY UTTERLY STUPIDLY RIDICULOUSLY SELF CONSCIOUS. Middle-aged woman with hot guy in an O.B. gym. At one point he tried to help me improve my jabs by having me put both gloves up in front of my face - I didn’t realize I was supposed to protect my face, I was intently staring dreamily at his, hoping to look at least minimally sexy. So when he jabbed at my little red paws? I ended up punching myself out. My eyes watered and my nose went numb for a bit. But I stayed. And I hit the bag harder and harder. And when I hit it as hard as I could? It felt good. Um, really good. I hit it and hit it and hit it. I hit it like I was hitting my own past. Then he hit the heavy outdoor bag and knocked it off its metal moorings. So, yeah. You know those illustrated Karma Sutra books? Here’s a brief run-down: stimulations of desire, types of embraces, caressing and kisses, marking with nails, biting and marking with teeth, on copulation (positions), slapping by hand and corresponding moaning, virile behavior in women, superior coition and oral sex, preludes and conclusions to the game of love. Oh and it describes 64 types of sexual acts (10 chapters).

• From The Chronology of Water (2011)

  I went instantaneously deaf. I mean I didn’t hear one word of her famous hour long photographer talk. It was like being underwater. Occasionally I was able to wrestle my eyes away from her to look at the stream of photos behind her, but not often. My breathing began to go wrong in my lungs. Sweat formed in lines underneath my tits and between my legs. My face got hot. My scalp felt as if it was leaving my head. My mouth filled with spit. I wished everyone in the room dead. By the time her talk was over and I’d made my way down and through the idiotic academic sycophantic throngs, by the time I penetrated the clone army and reached my hand out to shake hers, to introduce myself, to look at what my body was begging for, I already knew. She was the same age as my mother. A few hands before mine I noticed that she wiped her hand off vigorously enough on her pant leg to create the beginning of what would be a stain when she got back to her hotel for the night. A stain on the thigh of her pants from the multitudes of greedy hands. I felt a tinge of shame. I gripped her hand a little too tightly, as I recall. Desperately thinking inside my skull don’t be desperate don’t be desperate don’t be fucking desperate. When she looked at me she had that glazed look of a speaker handling the hands and faces of adoring morons. When she let go my hand I thought, that’s that, I’m an adoring moron. Probably I’m drooling. Her hand in mine was wet. Wet from the effort it takes to speak to a desiring crowd when you are meant to be off gloriously and unapologetically alone in the world with your only beloved: a camera. Point and shoot. Wet with all of our slobbering projections of who we wanted her to be dripping from her hands. Wet with the sweat of hundreds of numskulls just like me. I don’t know why I did it, I just know I couldn’t not. While I was holding her hand I leaned in close to her face and said my name is Lidia. I am a writer. Which I said exactly to the scar underneath her eye, letting my eyes and voice travel down her skin. I saw stars as I let go. Her hair smelled like rain. I remember leaving the campus feeling like I was exactly like anyone. But it would not be the last time I touched her. I didn’t know yet that desire comes and goes wherever it wants. I didn’t know yet that sexuality is an entire continent. I didn’t know yet how many times a person can be born. Mother.

• From The Chronology of Water (2011)

  Before I met her in that auditorium in Eugene, Oregon, I’d been to exactly three SM play parties in Eugene. Wanna know how? Because my former best friend who went on the little beach excursion got me invited. At the SM play parties I saw some awesome things happen. Once I saw a man wrapped in plastic wrap with nothing but his mouth and dick unwrapped. Sometimes he got drops of water in his mouth. Mostly he got his dick whipped until it was red as a screaming infant. I saw a woman ample as a Michelangelo cherub with her wrists bound and hung above her head get her twat whipped for over an hour while her pussy swelled and reddened and purpled until even the air shuddered and felt faint. I went back. I saw a woman’s thighs pierced with tiny blue capped needles - 20 up one thigh and 20 down the other - her eyes streaming with tears, her endorphin rush coming at those around her like a tsunami, her cunt gushing. I saw reddened welts rise on a woman’s ass like swollen railroad tracks from caning, I saw a tranny pierce her cheek with what looked like a barbeque skewer all the way through to the other cheek without blinking, I saw a man hang from giant meat hooks carefully puncturing his back slabs. I saw bondage in 300 varieties, fistings, bloodsport, dungeons, crossbeams, strange wands shooting out electricity anywhere you wanted. Some of which I began to let happen to me. Watching pain and feeling pain mattered on my skin more than anything had since I was a child. Unlike drinking. Unlike drugs. I could feel it. I could more than feel it. But I wanted to feel it more. Harder. “ Tell me what you want.” That’s how it began. If I said something dumb like, I’d like a kiss, she’d say, “No, that’s not right, Angel.” And lightly sting my skin with a riding crop or this crop with thornish things dangling from it in a kind of tassel. “Try again,” she’d say. I’d try again. And again. Until I said what it was I really wanted. What I really wanted was to be taken to whatever the edge of self was. To a death cusp. Maybe not literally. But maybe literally. I suppose it’s good I was in the hands of a professional. A calm sadist. An intellectual. Because she took my request and made it deeper. “Can you take the pain and go somewhere? Can you make it a journey?” I don’t know why, but I thought of my mother - who was under hypnosis during my birth. “Dorothy? Do you have pain? Where is the pain?” At first I didn’t know what she meant by “journey.” I just wanted to be with her. I just wanted her to hurtpleasure me. So when she asked me that, it was annoying. It involved thinking. Can’t we just do it?

• From The Chronology of Water (2011)

  I looked around at all the earnest grad student folks at orientation and felt kind of like I had a big red “A” on my chest due to my checkered academic past. Flunked out of undergraduate school in Lubbock. Quit undergraduate school in Eugene. Went back with a pile of D’s and F’s and clawed my way up to the pretty people. Then I saw a guy who looked equally out of place and very uncomfortable with astonishingly beautiful long black hair and eyelashes. I watched him. He kept looking at the door. And fidgeting like he didn’t fit in the seat. I didn’t hear an orientation thing. After the orientation I sort of sauntered up next to him and without looking at me he said, “I feel like I might get arrested here,” and I replied without looking at him, “Do you think they can tell I’m not wearing underwear,” and we went straight from the orientation meeting to a bar and didn’t stop drinking for 11 years, so you might say I was perfectly primed to cross his path. This man was gorgeous. I’m mentioning this because women live their lives secretly waiting for their lives to become movies. We act like men are the ones shallow enough to desire an unending stream of beautiful women but really, if a charismatic narcissist beautiful bad boy man actually desires us, seems to choose us, we go to pieces. We suddenly feel like we are finally in that movie rather than a life. Just what we always wanted. To be chosen by the best looking man in the room. Rhett Butler. Even though we are of course smarter and more mature and more together than to ever want that. Or admit it. Honestly I remember feeling shocked every time he walked up to my Toyota pickup truck and got in. I always expected him to veer off at the last moment, get into someone else’s vehicle. Or bed. Or house. Or life. Our love, was liquid. Turned out we both loved drinking more than almost anything else. The anything else turned out to be fucking. Drinking in bathrooms and kitchens and alleys and hallways and bars and cars. Drinking all the way to the coast and all night at a bar and in the morning with eggs and oyster shooters in some crappy run-down motel and all the way back to Eugene. Drinking before, during, and after classes. Drinking in beds and in baths and at the rivers and in the rose garden and in the graveyard next to U of O and on top of Prince Lucien Campbell Hall. We drank Guinness. We drank cheap turn your teeth purple wine. We drank Chivas, because he had a thing about Jim Morrison. We drank vodka, because of… well, me. We drank everything his favorite poet drank - Bukowski - and like Bukowski’s women, I matched him drink for drink. We drank each other blind.

• From The Chronology of Water (2011)

  Am I beautiful? Love is a lifedeath. My Lover, Writing I KIND OF DON’T WANT TO TELL YOU THIS. I mean I was going to write this whole book not telling you. I left words out. On purpose. But I know why I was hiding words from you. Ask me about my life as a sexualized, gendered body, and I can tell you tales. Endless stories of a woman who was me and is also all of us. Our bodies the flesh metaphor for all human experience. This. This happened to me. This is where I failed. Where I went blind. Where I opened my legs. Where I chewed off my hand. Where I tried to off myself, or offer myself up as useful, or deigned to ask for love, or ventured into pleasure or pain. Or just got drunk and fucked up. Again. Here are the scars. I am a swimmer. My shoulders are broad. My eyes, are blue. Ask me about writing, well, that’s a fierce private. Writing, she is the fire of me. Where stories get born from that place where life and death happened in me. She carries me and will be the death of me. So when I tell you this, a little bit it makes me want to bite you. Really hard. Some people say that words can’t “happen” to you. I say they can. One of my last nights with Devin I got all hopped up on mushrooms and went for a walk by the train tracks. We lived next to the tracks in Eugene-in a neighborhood where you would find needles in the alley but also yuppies trying to buy and restore their way to better. I was supposed to be writing a dissertation. That night we sat down on the ground. We drank Chivas from a flask. Then a train slow rolled by, and I jumped up and chased it laughing, and then I hopped it. I have no idea why. I looked back at the image of husband getting smaller and smaller until I couldn’t see him. I loved that receding him. Maybe it was our last good night. The wind felt excellent. The motion of a self riding to nowhere for all she was worth took my breath away. Of course somewhere around five minutes later I snapped out of it and thought AHHHH what am I doing and thought JUMP IDIOT and so I did, I jumped off, and military rolled through some ground gravel until I came to a scraped to shit stop, laughing and laughing the high of organics and free. I walked home. Devin was exactly where I’d left him, kind of passed out like a giant drunk Caucasian Buddha.

• From The Chronology of Water (2011)

  Sienna Torres was always late to practice but the much more important thing was that she was always the last one to get dressed. No matter how slowly I dressed, no matter how much I tried to comb and blow-dry my fuzzy white non hair (which took about 20 seconds), I was always dressed light years ahead of her. This meant that all I got was Sienna Torres in my Mom’s rearview sauntering out of the building where a couple of boymen would be loitering. Sienna Torres getting smaller and smaller in the rearview until she was gone, and I was just a stupid kid in the back seat of a car I couldn’t drive. My hands shoved between my legs. My face red. Sienna Torres was 17 and came to practice with vodka on her breath. I knew it was vodka because her face and skin smelled like my mother’s minus the Estée Lauder. Plus I’d see a flask in her swim bag sometimes. Also black lace panties and a black silk bra and a curling iron and mascara and car keys and cigarettes and Diet Pepsi and tampons and lip gloss and a Walkman and Certs and a very large … hairbrush. I was 12. I was 13. I was 15. I was 35. See? I can’t even remember just from writing about her. She made my breath jackknife every time I was anywhere near her. She made my mouth water. She made me dizzy. Then a miracle happened. Coming out of the pool and on the way to the locker rooms one evening, I slipped and fell on my ass, spraining my ankle. Not bad enough to alert medics, but bad enough to get attention. A lot. Think about this. Not only did I have every girl swimmer in locker room heaven taking care of me, helping me to shower and get dressed, but when they finally believed I could handle the rest on my own, there were only two of us left in the entire locker room. Uh huh, that’s right. Me and Sienna Torres. Sienna Torres was still in the shower, and all I had left was my shoes. So while I tied the slowest, like retard slow, most careful giant looped bow on one of my sneakers, over and over again, I watched Sienna Torres shave her pussy in the shower. Soaping up the triangle, her hand making circles where I wanted to put my face. One foot up on the shower stand, her toes curled around the faucet, a palm sized peach peeking out from between her legs. A razor making paths through the white drifts of suds, then nothing but skin folding inward to that dark and daring other mouth. I’m pretty sure at some point I went cross-eyed.

• From The Chronology of Water (2011)

  WHEN I FIRST MET HANNAH IN GRADUATE SCHOOL I WAS a woman gone numb. I would do anything. Anytime. Anywhere. I was using my body as a sexual battering ram. On anyone and anything available. In fact, you might say I sexualized my entire existence. It seemed to work a lot like alcohol and drugs. If you did it enough, you didn’t have to think or feel anything but MMMMM good. Hannah was one of those lesbians who looks like a beautiful boy - hazel eyes, that cool short curtain of hair hanging over one eye, broad shoulders, little hips, barely there titties. More like M&M S. Hannah played basketball and softball and soccer when she wasn’t being a Eugene lesbo and English grad student. She used to wait for me by my blue Toyota pickup truck between classes and hijack me and drive me to the coast, where we’d stay up all night getting it on in the back of my truck, drinking Heinekens and waiting for the sun to come up. Then we’d drive back and go to class. Or I would. Hannah thought grad school was kind of lame. She much preferred sex and club dancing. So when Hannah captured me and my best friend Claire in the hall after our 18th- Century Women Writers seminar by grabbing our wrists and pulling us toward the wall, I already knew it would be something sly. She smiled her sly Hannah smile and whispered, “Wanna go to the coast? I got us a room.” Claire blinked so blankly her eyes looked like a doll’s, and I think I coughed academically. But I have to admit it. My crotch went messy pretty much that instant. Listen, you probably think you wouldn’t, but I’m telling you, if Hannah said get in my truck we’re going to the coast, raising her little trickster eyebrow and putting her hand right underneath your breast and against your first couple of ribs, going, I dare you, you’d go. Women go the See Vue Inn because of the themed rooms. The Secret Garden Suite (private garden). The Crow’s Nest (nautical). The Salish (Native American). Princess and the Pea (weirdly medieval). Mountain Shores (rustica). Far Out West (cowgirl). The Cottage (you get the “house” to yourself). We had The Cottage. The little cottage sported a fireplace, so I said don’t do anything without me and drove off to get firewood. When I got back, the door was open. I went in. The two of them were in bed with the covers pulled up just underneath their tits - Hannah’s M&M S and Claire’s glorious pendulous globes, smiling like Cheshire cats. Cheshire cats who had licked pussy. And in the middle of the bed was a little suitcase that Hannah brought - filled with toys. I immediately dropped the wood on the floor, shut the door, and stripped, launching myself onto the bed like superwoman.

• From The Chronology of Water (2011)

  Look I’m trying to say I didn’t have little girl crushes like you are imagining. And I didn’t have the cliché swimmers are all dykes deal - though lots of swimmer girls regularly spanked twinkies, I was to learn later - no, it was much more serious. I mean I was in pain. Whatever blue balls were, I was pretty sure I had them. Every day at practice, in the showers, with all that girl stuff right in front of my face. All the soaped up torsos and boobs, all the uninhibited washing of you know whats, the bubbles sliding down their asses and legs. If a kid could coronary from want, I’d be a dead woman. No, I didn’t want to have a slumber party. I didn’t want to go to the mall. I wanted to use my hair brush and rubberbands and make someone ... whimper. I did consider girls my age. Evie Kosenkranius had a kid sister my age. Tina Kosenkranius. I … christ. Will you look at those names? I can’t even look at those names today without going all porno in my head - hey, Evie Kosenkranius has a sister. I mean my god, why couldn’t I just be a 16 year old blond boy with raging hormones and a spanky new flagpole that everyone wants to sit on? But I wasn’t. I was me, a painfully shy girl kid with a hidden girl bomb in her panties not knowing what the hell to do with it who really, really wanted to … eat someone. OF COURSE I tried the neighborhood girls my age. I’d invite them into my room to play doctor and they’d just lie there, letting me do anything, sometimes giggling, until they clamped their legs shut. The best I could get out of the deal was to put a blanket over us so the smell would intensify. Something like hay and apples. Then they’d get dressed and want to go do something dumb that girls do. Like ice skating or talking on the phone or mall bullshit. What I needed was a girl who was older than me. Bigger. Sienna Torres was a troublemaker young woman from a troubled household making trouble wherever she went. She broke the rules at school, she broke them at home, she broke them at Albertson’s and Nordstrom and 7-Eleven, and she broke them at swim practice. She came late, she skipped laps, she got swatted with a kickboard in what was perversely known as “licks” for her rebelliousness. I was terrified of her. The missing ingredient.

• From The Chronology of Water (2011)

  Terror takes strange shape in a horny girl. It weaves it way up her boy butt and up the V of her torso and settles in her shoulders and jaw so she can’t act right or talk without twitching. After Sienna finished and dried off and put most of her clothes on and blow dried her hair and put rings back on her fingers, when I finished tying the one shoe and tucked the shoe laces in on the other and then pretended my swim bag had something confounded in it, I hop hobbled over to her. She was pulling her hoodie down over her black bra. She was running her ringed fingers through her blow-dried feathered hair. She was turning her head to look at me - only a few inches down from her. Her quadruple pierced ears staring at me going, what? I may have been excruciatingly shy but I had a gushing in me the size of a swimming pool and I was smart - smart as any of those goddamned boys loitering outside the building-who I suddenly wished were dead - so I said, not quite believing my mouth would even work, “Um, can you help me?” Holding one foot slightly off the ground. Sienna putting all her crap in her bag not looking at me. Me waiting in the dead air like a little lost comma. Sienna taking a hit off of her flask, then without warning, pushing it over at me, saying “This will cut the pain, I bet.” Smiling her Sienna Torres smile. “Can you handle it?” You have no fucking idea how close I came to lunging at her leg and humping it like a little monkey. You have no idea how close I came to sucking on her hip bone and crying “mamma.” But I didn’t do those things. Sometimes you grow up in the space of a minute. I quite calmly took a big old swig of vodka viper’s flask just like my genetic code knew I could, and I never took my eyes off of her watching me, and I liked it, her watching I mean, because it certainly wasn’t the taste of vodka, which though I didn’t show it, like at all, tasted like what I suspected Estée Lauder must taste like if you drank it. Then she said, “Being bad is good, huh.” And laughed. I bit the inside of my cheek trying not to cough or barf. Trying to be bad, good. And then Sienna Torres put her arm around my waist. And I put my arm around her shoulders and neck. And I could smell her skin. I didn’t bite her or anything. I didn’t hump her like a little monkey. And she helped me all the way to my mom’s car which miraculously didn’t kill me with embarrassment, bypassing the boymen waiting for her as always.

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

  36. And he said unto them, What would ye that I should do for you? 37. They said unto him, Grant unto us that we may sit, one on thy right hand, and the other on thy left hand, in thy glory. 38. But Jesus said unto them, Ye know not what ye ask: can ye drink of the cup that I drink of? and be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with? 39. And they said unto him, We can. And Jesus said unto them, Ye shall indeed drink of the cup that I drink of; and with the baptism that I am baptized withal shall ye be baptized: 40. But to sit on my right hand and on my left hand is not mine to give; but it shall be given to them for whom it is prepared. CHRYSOSTOM. (v. Chrys. ubi sup.) The disciples hearing Christ oftentimes speaking of His kingdom, thought that this kingdom was to be before His death, and therefore now that His death was foretold to them, they came to Him, that they might immediately be made worthy of the honours of the kingdom: wherefore it is said, And James and John, the sons of Zebedee, came unto him, saying, Master, we would that thou shouldest do for us whatsoever we shall desire. For ashamed of the human weakness which they felt, they came to Christ, taking Him apart from the disciples; but our Saviour, not from ignorance of what they wanted to ask, but from a wish of making them answer Him, puts this question to them; And he said unto them, What would ye that I should do for you? THEOPHYLACT. Now the abovementioned disciples thought that He was going up to Jerusalem, to reign there, and then to suffer what He had foretold. And with these thoughts, they desired to sit on the right and the left hand; wherefore there follows, They said unto him, Grant unto us that we may sit, one on thy right hand, the other on thy left hand, in thy glory. AUGUSTINE. (de Con. Evan. ii. 64) Matthew has expressed that this was said not by themselves, but by their mother, since she brought their wishes to the Lord; wherefore Mark briefly implies rather that they themselves, than that their mother, had used the words. CHRYSOSTOM. (ubi sup.) Or we may fitly say that both took place; for seeing themselves honoured above the rest, they thought that they could easily obtain the foregoing petition; and that they might the more easily succeed in their request, they took their mother with them, that they might pray unto Christ together with her. AUGUSTINE. (ubi sup.) Then the Lord both according to Mark, and to Matthew, answered them rather than their mother. For it goes on, But Jesus said unto them, Ye know not what ye ask.

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  Let me also evoke the hawkmoths, the jets of my boyhood! Colors would die a long death on June evenings. The lilac shrubs in full bloom before which I stood, net in hand, displayed clusters of a fluffy gray in the dusk—the ghost of purple. A moist young moon hung above the mist of a neighboring meadow. In many a garden have I stood thus in later years—in Athens, Antibes, Atlanta—but never have I waited with such a keen desire as before those darkening lilacs. And suddenly it would come, the low buzz passing from flower to flower, the vibrational halo around the streamlined body of an olive and pink Hummingbird moth poised in the air above the corolla into which it had dipped its long tongue. Its handsome black larva (resembling a diminutive cobra when it puffed out its ocellated front segments) could be found on dank willow herb two months later. Thus every hour and season had its delights. And, finally, on cold, or even frosty, autumn nights, one could sugar for moths by painting tree trunks with a mixture of molasses, beer, and rum. Through the gusty blackness, one’s lantern would illumine the stickily glistening furrows of the bark and two or three large moths upon it imbibing the sweets, their nervous wings half open butterfly fashion, the lower ones exhibiting their incredible crimson silk from beneath the lichen-gray primaries. “Catocala adultera!” I would triumphantly shriek in the direction of the lighted windows of the house as I stumbled home to show my captures to my father. 6The “English” park that separated our house from the hayfields was an extensive and elaborate affair with labyrinthine paths, Turgenevian benches, and imported oaks among the endemic firs and birches. The struggle that had gone on since my grandfather’s time to keep the park from reverting to the wild state always fell short of complete success. No gardener could cope with the hillocks of frizzly black earth that the pink hands of moles kept heaping on the tidy sand of the main walk. Weeds and fungi, and ridgelike tree roots crossed and recrossed the sun-flecked trails. Bears had been eliminated in the eighties, but an occasional moose still visited the grounds. On a picturesque boulder, a little mountain ash and a still smaller aspen had climbed, holding hands, like two clumsy, shy children. Other, more elusive trespassers—lost picnickers or merry villagers—would drive our hoary gamekeeper Ivan crazy by scrawling ribald words on the benches and gates. The disintegrating process continues still, in a different sense, for when, nowadays, I attempt to follow in memory the winding paths from one given point to another, I notice with alarm that there are many gaps, due to oblivion or ignorance, akin to the terra-incognita blanks map makers of old used to call “sleeping beauties.”

• From Chasing Beauty

  In July he wrote her a cheery, chatty letter, this time with an offer of three paintings from the famed Hope Collection of Deepdene, from an estate in England: The Storm on the Sea of Galilee and A Lady and a Gentleman by Rembrandt and A Lesson on the Theorbo by Gerard ter Borch. There was steep competition for the trio. “As there are at least six buyers waiting for these same pictures, you can imagine my difficulties, and my rejoicing.” He added that he did “love to give you the chance of getting the best that the world offers.” “I have just got your letter about those wonderful pictures,” she wrote back as soon as she got his letter. She desperately wanted them, saying that his description of The Storm had made her “fairly ache for it.” Jack was away, but when he returned she would show him the photographs of the paintings that Berenson had sent. Soon after, she wired Berenson YES to all three pictures. Then everything seemed to unravel, as explained by Isabella a month later in a very serious letter to Berenson. “My dear friend,” she began, “you must understand what I write and why I write it. There is a terrible row about you. Undoubtedly, you have heard it all before, and many times. I have been sorry always when I have heard of disparaging things about you; but now the vile things have been said to Mr. Gardner. That is why I am writing. They say (there seem to be many) that you have been dishonest in your money dealings with people who have bought pictures.” She relayed that when Jack heard this, he immediately brought up the Raphael picture. She apologized for writing to tell him of her suspicions, but she felt she had to, adding that in reference to the three paintings from the Hope Collection, “Mr. G says ‘now we shall see if he is honest.’” She was discomfited by the situation, but also worried, warning Berenson to “always be on your guard.”

• From Chasing Beauty

  Isabella hurried back to Europe in July 1899, her first overseas travel without Jack. Ella Lavin, her trusted longtime maid, accompanied her, as did Lena Little, an amateur singer, until she was called away to a family emergency. As plans for the museum became clearer, so did the need to procure more architectural elements: antiques from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and reproductions that Gardner could order from Italian workrooms. She met Berenson for dinner at the Savoy on her arrival in London at the end of July, and they talked not of architectural elements but of paintings and business. This time he told her about a Titian masterpiece, Sacred and Profane Love, part of the Borghese collection in Rome. She wanted it very badly, she said, given how much she thought about her Europa. But the price was a staggering £160,000, almost three-quarters of a million dollars. She knew that George Peabody Gardner, one of the trustees of Jack Gardner’s estate, would think that the price was “insanity,” requiring her to pull funds from the principal of the estate. Finally, in late August from the Palazzo Barbaro, she declined Berenson’s offer, blaming her nephew’s cautious ways. (The painting was not sold to a private buyer. Its owner, Prince Borghese, decided to give his entire collection to his country.) The London dinner with Berenson may have been a smoothing over of their relationship after the tumultuous spring concerning the Holbein portraits and another painting—Botticelli’s The Virgin and the Child with an Angel, also called the Chigi Botticelli, after the Italian prince who owned it. The luminous painting showed all of Botticelli’s early genius for color and composition and delicate feeling. Richard Norton had alerted Isabella to its sale for an eye-popping $30,000 in late 1898, and she quickly consulted Berenson over the painting’s true worth. He replied that he didn’t think Prince Chigi was ready to part with it. She persevered, though the route to purchasing the masterpiece would prove incredibly circuitous. As the historian Patricia Lee Rubin relates, the cast of characters included a “cagey prince, rival dealers, named and unnamed intermediaries, the Italian government, the Russian and German emperors (offstage), and a Rothschild.” Berenson played his familiar hidden role, pretending to Isabella that he played no part in the syndicate with Colnaghi, who was handling the sale of the picture. But for all the machinations, Gardner finally secured the masterpiece for £14,500, or $70,000; she would wait another two years for its delivery to Boston. ***

• From Chasing Beauty

  It wasn’t just the social whirl that drew the Gardners to London. Frederick Leyland’s magnificent collection of old masters and contemporary art was scheduled for auction at Christie, Manson and Woods in Saint James’s Square at the end of May. They knew of Leyland via Whistler—the shipping magnate had commissioned Whistler for design work in his large London townhouse fifteen years before. Relations had soured between the two men because of a complicated dispute involving artistic choice and compensation, but Whistler’s achievement in the mansion’s dining room, what came to be known as the Peacock Room after the artist’s depiction of warring peacocks on one of its walls, was widely acknowledged. The Gardners had a chance to see the room themselves on the day of the Leyland auction; Isabella would proudly keep sketches of Whistler’s designs for the room tucked between his letters, photograph, and bamboo walking stick in a display case named after him in the Long Gallery. Up for sale were paintings by Rembrandt, Tintoretto, and Botticelli, among others. Isabella bought two. The first, Love’s Greeting, by the Pre-Raphaelite artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti, depicts the courtly love rituals described in the poetry Isabella knew well—Dante’s Divine Comedy. The second purchase was the Virgin and Child with a Swallow, attributed at the time of the sale to the Florentine master Fra Filippo Lippi. Isabella had collected photographic reproductions of Lippi’s work in that year’s travel album, as if schooling herself on his oeuvre. It was discovered later in her lifetime that the painter of her Virgin and Child was the equally admired Francesco Pesellino, also of mid-fifteenth-century Florence. What attracted her was the painting’s subject matter of mother and son, rendered with the charming, humanizing realism of the High Renaissance—the baby’s arm appears solid, boylike, as he holds tight to the swallow, a symbol of resurrection. [image file=image_rsrc79H.jpg] Virgin and Child with a Swallow, Francesco Pesellino, about 1453–57, tempera on panel, via Bridgeman Art Library. The Gardners didn’t stay in one place for long. They’d go next to northern Italy, via Paris and Basel, Switzerland. They spent several early June days in Bologna, then many more in the Byzantine city of Ravenna. Isabella filled page after page in her album with purchased photographs of the beautiful sixth-century Basilica San Vitale, shaped as an octagon, with walls covered in exquisite mosaics. She was besotted too with the frescoes by Giotto in Saint Francis’s church in Assisi, the way the thirteenth-century master conveyed what Henry James called Giotto’s “fierce familiarity” with his figures. [image file=image_rsrc79J.jpg] Hallway in the Palazzo Barbaro, Venice, Isabella Stewart Gardner or John L. Gardner Jr., Travel Album: Europe and the United States, about 1897, gelatin silver print. By the time Isabella and Jack arrived in Venice, after several days in Florence, they were hot and worn out. The Palazzo Barbaro awaited them. Its high, cool rooms would prove once again to be—in Jack’s word—“enchanting.”

• From Chasing Beauty

  Her interest in the arts of Asia had started early during the months-long travels with Jack Gardner through that region of the world in the mid-1880s. Ongoing conversations with friends such as William Sturgis Bigelow and Okakura further shaped her deepening fascination, although Okakura apparently did not help her with any purchases, as Bigelow had done with the three large Buddhas. Chinese antiquities were more and more available for purchase in the art market. Berenson was eager to be of help—he had already announced to Edith Wharton several years before that the “tide of my interests is flowing fast and strong eastward.” In the spring of 1914, he wrote to Isabella of a magnificent votive stele made of sixth-century limestone, which he called the “finest thing that thus far has come out of China.” She did not hesitate, and knew just where to place it—in the new Chinese Loggia, adjacent to the Spanish Cloister and near the steps leading to the submerged Buddha room. Having this great work—her most important piece of Chinese art—whetted her appetite for more. She told Berenson, “I only wish I had more Chinese masterpieces” after he had written, “Now promise to save all your money, and let me make you as fine a Chinese collection as you have of Italian.” [image file=image_rsrc7AT.jpg] Votive Stele, maker unknown, 543 CE, limestone. Isabella wrote out copious notes and lists to keep track of her ever-changing collection. On the pages of a version of the museum catalog, she spelled out specific changes in the galleries. Her notes, written in her distinctive script, also reveal her involvement at every stage of the process: from collection to design; from building to furnishing and installation. “From the Raphael Room,” she wrote, “you pass through the Short Gallery, where are etchings, portraits and textiles to the Tapestry Room. Here are two sets of Flemish Tapestries. On [a] table in [a] window a painting of Santa Eugracia by Bermjelo. Backing it, [a] portrait of Innocent X by Velasquez.” She placed her grand piano at the far end of the Tapestry Room, near an enormous limestone fireplace from a medieval French chateau, the new stage for lectures and musical performances. Isabella switched objects around in other rooms as well—for the Dutch Room she mapped out which pieces she wanted where on a large sheet of paper. She transformed the original Chinese Room at the top of the stairs on the second floor into an Early Italian Room. Here she put Piero’s Hercules, one of the works that had given her so much trouble with the federal tax agents, against a textile with flame-stitched embroidery of vibrant oranges, greens, yellows. Here too is the jewel-like Dormition and Assumption of the Virgin by the Florentine master Fra Angelico, which she bought in 1899, soon after Jack’s death. She placed it on a side wall close to an outside window, so it could be seen clearly, even on the cloudiest New England day.

• From The City of God

  "Porsenna there, with pride elate, Bids Rome to Tarquin ope her gate; With arms he hems the city in, Æneas' sons stand firm to win."[195] At that time it was their greatest ambition either to die bravely or to live free; but when liberty was obtained, so great a desire of glory took possession of them, that liberty alone was not enough unless domination also should be sought, their great ambition being that which the same poet puts into the mouth of Jupiter: "Nay, Juno's self, whose wild alarms Set ocean, earth, and heaven in arms, Shall change for smiles her moody frown, And vie with me in zeal to crown Rome's sons, the nation of the gown. So stands my will. There comes a day, While Rome's great ages hold their way, When old Assaracus's sons Shall quit them on the myrmidons, O'er Phthia and Mycenæ reign, And humble Argos to their chain."[196] Which things, indeed, Virgil makes Jupiter predict as future, whilst, in reality, he was only himself passing in review in his own mind things which were already done, and which were beheld by him as present realities. But I have mentioned them with the intention of showing that, next to liberty, the Romans so highly esteemed domination, that it received a place among those things on which they bestowed the greatest praise. Hence also it is that that poet, preferring to the arts of other nations those arts which peculiarly belong to the Romans, namely, the arts of ruling and commanding, and of subjugating and vanquishing nations, says, "Others, belike, with happier grace, From bronze or stone shall call the face, Plead doubtful causes, map the skies, And tell when planets set or rise; But Roman thou, do thou control The nations far and wide; Be this thy genius, to impose The rule of peace on vanquished foes, Show pity to the humbled soul, And crush the sons of pride."[197]

• From The City of God

  Wherefore let us go on to consider what virtues of the Romans they were which the true God, in whose power are also the kingdoms of the earth, condescended to help in order to raise the empire, and also for what reason He did so. And, in order to discuss this question on clearer ground, we have written the former books, to show that the power of those gods, who, they thought, were to be worshipped with such trifling and silly rites, had nothing to do in this matter; and also what we have already accomplished of the present volume, to refute the doctrine of fate, lest any one who might have been already persuaded that the Roman empire was not extended and preserved by the worship of these gods, might still be attributing its extension and preservation to some kind of fate, rather than to the most powerful will of God most high. The ancient and primitive Romans, therefore, though their history shows us that, like all the other nations, with the sole exception of the Hebrews, they worshipped false gods, and sacrificed victims, not to God, but to demons, have nevertheless this commendation bestowed on them by their historian, that they were "greedy of praise, prodigal of wealth, desirous of great glory, and content with a moderate fortune."[193] Glory they most ardently loved: for it they wished to live, for it they did not hesitate to die. Every other desire was repressed by the strength of their passion for that one thing. At length their country itself, because it seemed inglorious to serve, but glorious to rule and to command, they first earnestly desired to be free, and then to be mistress. Hence it was that, not enduring the domination of kings, they put the government into the hands of two chiefs, holding office for a year, who were called consuls, not kings or lords.[194] But royal pomp seemed inconsistent with the administration of a ruler (_regentis_), or the benevolence of one who consults (that is, for the public good) (_consulentis_), but rather with the haughtiness of a lord (_dominantis_). King Tarquin, therefore, having been banished, and the consular government having been instituted, it followed, as the same author already alluded to says in his praises of the Romans, that "the state grew with amazing rapidity after it had obtained liberty, so great a desire of glory had taken possession of it." That eagerness for praise and desire of glory, then, was that which accomplished those many wonderful things, laudable, doubtless, and glorious according to human judgment. The same Sallust praises the great men of his own time, Marcus Cato, and Caius Cæsar, saying that for a long time the republic had no one great in virtue, but that within his memory there had been these two men of eminent virtue, and very different pursuits. Now, among the praises which he pronounces on Cæsar he put this, that he wished for a great empire, an army, and a new war, that he might have a sphere where his genius and virtue might shine forth. Thus it was ever the prayer of men of heroic character that Bellona would excite miserable nations to war, and lash them into agitation with her bloody scourge, so that there might be occasion for the display of their valour. This, forsooth, is what that desire of praise and thirst for glory did. Wherefore, by the love of liberty in the first place, afterwards also by that of domination and through the desire of praise and glory, they achieved many great things; and their most eminent poet testifies to their having been prompted by all these motives:

• From The History of Sexuality, Vol. 3: The Care of the Self (1984)

  Musonius indicates in another passage how this form of unity has been inscribed by Nature in each individual. The treatise Is Marriage a Handicap for the Pursuit of Philosophy? evokes the original division brought about in the human species between men and women.4 Musonius reflects on the fact that after having separated the two sexes, the Creator wished to bring them back together. Now, Musonius notes, he brought them together again by implanting in each of them a “strong desire,” a desire that was both for “association” and for “union”—homilia and koinōnia. Of the two terms, the first seems in fact to refer to sexual intercourse, the second to community life. What should be understood, then, is that there is a certain fundamental and original desire in human beings, and that this desire is directed toward physical intimacy as well as toward the sharing of existence. A thesis that has this double consequence: that the extreme intensity of desire is not characterized simply by the movement that leads to the conjoining of the sexes, but also by the movement that conduces to the sharing of lives; conversely, that the relationship between the sexes belongs to the same rational scheme as the relations that bind two individuals to one another through interest, affection, and community of souls. It is the same natural inclination that leads, with an equal intensity and a rationality of the same type, to the coupling of existences and to the joining of bodies. For Musonius, then, what founds marriage is not that it is situated at the point of intersection of two heterogeneous predilections, one of which is physical, the other rational and social. It is rooted in a single, primitive tendency that aims directly toward it as an essential goal and hence, through it, toward its two intrinsic effects: the formation of a common progeny and companionship in life. One understands how Musonius can say that nothing is more desirable (prosphilosteron) than marriage. The naturalness of the latter is not due merely to the consequences that one can derive from its practice; its naturalness is already declared by the existence of an original predilection, which establishes it as a desirable objective. Hierocles, in a rather similar way, founds marriage on the “binary” nature of man. For him, humans are “conjugal” animals (syndyastikoi).5 The notion was already present in the Naturalists: they distinguished between animals that herd together (synagelastikoi) and those that live in pairs (syndyastikoi). Moreover, Plato had referred to this distinction in a passage of the Laws. He recommended to humans the example of those animals that are chaste so long as they are living in a band but pair off and become “conjugal” when the mating season arrives. Aristotle had likewise spoken of the “syndastic” character of human beings, in order to define the relations of the master with the slave as well as relations between spouses.6