Excitement

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 I'm Not a Mourning Person (2023)

  I immediately became a voracious student of integrative health. The more I learned about the regenerative power of an anti-inflammatory diet and lifestyle, the more I shared my findings with anyone who would listen. My mind was blown. I was awestruck by how our bodies work and their enormous capacity for resilience. (We’ll nerd out on this more in Chapter 11.) To my amazement, my passion for wellness eventually led me to make an award-winning film about my journey, which featured stories of other young women who were also living with cancer. After the film I wound up writing a series of New York Times best-selling books and launching a global online wellness community that has provided education and support to thousands of people around the world. I was also featured on Oprah several times and became a member of her Super Soul 100, “a group of 100 trailblazers whose vision and life’s work are bringing a higher level of consciousness to the world.” In so many ways, the rupture of my diagnosis led me to build a more meaningful life. (And bonus: this is where I first connected with my husband, Brian, who was the editor of my film. So in the end, the love story that was meant for me was born of my darkest moment.) Now, close to two decades later, I still live with stage IV cancer. Knock on wood, it continues to be slow growing, which has allowed me to continue figuring out how to best take care of myself and help others do the same. Change is a constant, though. Just because we have one rupture in life doesn’t mean that life will never get turned upside down again. A few years before my dad’s diagnosis, I started to realize that as amazing as my accomplishments were, and as strong as my physical health had become, deep down I was mentally and emotionally exhausted. I’d gone from the frying pan of a cancer diagnosis to the fire of nonstop achievement. For me, prolonged “busy” looked like very long hours at work, while attempting to also manage my health and try to squeeze in time with my family and close friends. This go-go pace had become like breathing to me, autonomic—reflexive, involuntary—which isn’t such a surprise. In times of rupture, staying busy can be useful—even therapeutic—because it helps us keep up or return to some sense of “normal life.” Sounds about right to me—unless “busy” becomes a knee-jerk way to avoid our own feelings or allows us to find agoraphobia just this side of glamorous. No matter how necessary, noble, or lifesaving it may seem, when busyness becomes a permanent state of being, it undoubtedly leads to burnout, health issues, and even worse—loss of joy.

• From Escape (2007)

  Twenty of us ran into the kitchen for a dinner of canned peaches and a slice of bread and butter. Those who couldn’t fit around the table ate standing up. Afterward we tried to help with the dishes, but it got so chaotic that we were sent back outside. One of my older cousins, Lee junior, was a mesmerizing storyteller. He built a fire and we all sat close so we could listen. I was captivated by the stories he told us of our religion. He began by telling us about all the gold hidden in the mountains around us. God knew how much was there but he was keeping it hidden until the last days, when he would reveal it to his chosen people. Gold had a purpose, Lee said, but it was not for making jewelry. God hid all the gold away because he felt it was being misused. Once life was purified in the last days, God would bring the gold out from hiding and we, his chosen people, would pave roads and build houses with it. My eyes widened at my cousin’s saga of the white Indians (not to be confused with the resurrected Indians). One of the earliest fundamentalist prophets, Lee said, had been taken to the Yucatán so God could show him the army of white Indians that was being trained for the end times. When God gave the order, the army of several hundred thousand would march out of the jungle. They would decide who would live and who would die by tearing off an individual’s clothes. If he or she was wearing blessed garments underneath their outer garb, they’d be spared. But those without the sacred underwear would be murdered. My cousins looked as scared on the outside as I felt on the inside. Only those who covered every inch of their bodies with blessed garments would be saved and get to live in the millennium of peace. It was sobering—especially to a six-year-old—to think that you could make it through all the different destructions but still end up dead if you didn’t wear the right clothes. My cousin spun out other stories that night around the fire. I was enthralled. It was like listening to fairy tales except that I believed every word I heard. The end times sounded frightening, except that I knew if I survived the destruction I would then live through the thousand years of peace, where there was no death. It sounded like a magic carpet ride that would whisk me away from the disappointments of this life to an enchanted world where life was perfect. I would have listened all night if I could, but Mother arrived to take me and my sisters home.

• From Opening Up by Writing It Down (2016)

  Despite the work by Freud and several contemporary psychologists, many of our colleagues have viewed the secret/confession/catharsis approach as a bit extreme and even radical. Others have found it a novel and stimulating topic. Given the polarized reception of the early work, both of us knew there was something interesting and potentially important to be explored. After conducting one of the early experiments on secrets, health, and disclosure, Jamie was thrilled by the patterns of effects he was finding. Soon after an exciting meeting with his students, Jamie waltzed in the front door of his home just as his phone rang. His brother, who is a graphic designer, called to ask what was new. Jamie excitedly told him about this new approach to studying secrets, inhibition, and disclosure and its possible links to health, psychotherapy, religion, and, well, just about everything. Not swayed by his grandiosity, his brother asked about the specifics of the emerging framework. When Jamie was finished, the phone was silent. “That’s it?” his brother finally said. “What’s the big deal? Everyone knows that.” He was, of course, right on a certain level. We do know that talking about our problems can be good for us. But we also quite often get the sense that we should put on a happy face and look at everything in a positive light. We also know that whining and complaining about our problems will nearly always get us nowhere, or even make things worse. In other words, in these days of self-help popular psychology, we often encounter pithy but contradictory bits of wisdom about how to live your life. Delve into the self-help literature and you will find that there are gurus and experts who can explain everything to make your life better. And yet their solutions often contradict one another wildly. As our scientific journey into the secret/confrontation world began, we quickly learned that some commonsense ideas were more true than others—indeed, some appeared to be completely false or mistaken. The remainder of this book will share with you some of the insights of this journey and describe some of the interesting discoveries and pitfalls we have encountered on the way. *This will be the only footnote you will see in the book. Rather than break up the story, we have included references and additional information in the Notes section at the end of the book.CHAPTER 2The Invention of the Expressive Writing ApproachIt would be so compelling to tell the story of how the first studies on expressive writing grew out of our traumatic experiences in our childhoods and how we independently discovered the healing power of writing on our own. It would be gripping, initially heartbreaking, and ultimately redemptive. But also false. The expressive writing method was actually the result of a series of serendipitous research findings. Okay, maybe not gripping, but still an interesting story. THE CASE OF TRAUMATIC SEXUAL EXPERIENCES

• From Escape (2007)

  We kept badgering Mother to let us go back to our cousins’ house. We had so much more freedom there to play and explore. In our own home, we were forbidden to play outside unless someone was watching. Mother finally agreed to let us go on a mountain hike with our cousins. When we got to their house they were still making lunches. My cousin Shannon was making sandwiches out of fried potatoes. It looked like food we called “yuck yuck.” Shannon said it was something her mother had taught her to make when there was nothing else to eat in the house. There was great discussion about where to go for a hike. No one wanted to go to the predictable places. We all wanted to go to the place that was off-limits—the ghost mountain, where some said the Gadianton robbers were buried. They were the wicked robbers who hurt the people of God in the Book of Mormon. We’d been taught that God had the power to change the entire earth at a moment’s notice. Uncle Roy used the Grand Canyon as an example of the intensity of God’s power. He said God created it on a day when he’d been extremely angry. The wicked city inhabited by the Gadianton robbers had been buried under the mountain in an instant of God’s wrath. God just picked up a mountain over in the Pine Valley area and dropped it on top of the evil city. There were several people in the community who claimed they knew that the mountain was haunted because several evil men had taken a very good man in the community up to the mountain. The mountain was opened up enough for him to see that the city inside was bursting with gold and precious jewels. He was told that if he killed Uncle Roy, the prophet of God, then he would be given all of the gold and treasure buried in the mountain. He refused and the mountain was sealed up again. My cousins said that their father was a man of God who had a lot of bills and debts. If we could find the gold buried in the mountain, it would be a huge help to him. We decided to take shovels and give it our best shot. We knew we weren’t supposed to hike on the haunted mountain, but now that it had been turned into a noble cause, no one felt terribly disobedient.

• From Escape (2007)

  Ten of us hiked to the mountain—a ragamuffin band of kids ranging in age from four to eight. But our digging didn’t produce much. We got tired quickly and it was very hot. Nor did we eat the fried potato sandwiches because they tasted as bad as they looked—yuck yuck. But we did throw them back and forth at one another. As we were hiking, we told story after story of the things that the spirits of the Gadianton robbers had done when they haunted the community before being expelled by the priesthood. Even evil spirits have to obey the priesthood. The priesthood is the way God acts in us, but the power is given only to men. Boys are initiated into the priesthood at twelve by any man in the FLDS who holds the priesthood and has kept his covenants. We believed that the priesthood was the glue that held the earth together. Without its power, the earth would fly apart. Because of this, one good man in the priesthood could turn back thousands of evil spirits, who would do whatever he ordered them to do. I’m not sure how this squared with all the destruction that was supposed to rain down on our heads. Couldn’t the good men just tell the evil ones to scram? But a six-year-old doesn’t put such thoughts together. I took it all in as the grand myth and folklore that it was. While our fundamentalist faith cast a long shadow on how we played, a lot of the things we did and the trouble we stirred up were fairly typical. It was the consequences that were more severe. One afternoon we got to go back to my cousins’ because Mother needed to do some shopping. It felt like a return to wonderland. My cousin Ray Dee was pushing the family cat around in a small doll carriage with a pacifier taped to its mouth. The cat was wearing a ruffled dress. Beverly, another cousin, was congratulating her on her new baby. When we were distracted, the cat leaped out of the carriage and ran for its life. We went looking for it and instead found our cousin Shannon. Shannon was sitting in the grass stirring a big bowl of punch. She had cups and passed out drinks to all of us. We were having a fine time, savoring our freedom and catching up with our cousins. But it was short-lived. One of the younger boys came running out with the news that Shannon had stolen the punch and that his mother, our aunt Charlotte, planned to spank everyone involved. Shannon was guilty. She’d gone to Aunt Charlotte and said she needed a package of Kool-Aid for Aunt Elaine, which was untrue. Someone squealed on her when we were spotted out in the orchard drinking punch. Now anyone with punch-stained lips might be spanked. Shannon said she didn’t care if Aunt Charlotte spanked her. “Why?” I said. I hated spankings.

• From Escape (2007)

  I didn’t start school until I was six and a half. Finally! I had watched Linda go to school every day, wishing I could go with her. Kindergarten didn’t exist in the FLDS because the belief was that children were better off spending another year at home. It didn’t do me any good. I was eager to get going. I wanted to learn. There wasn’t much stimulation at home beyond listening to my grandmother’s stories. Fairy tales were frowned upon, and we had no other children’s books at home. There was no public library in town, and I don’t remember my mother ever buying us books of our own. In 1974, a few weeks before school started, when I was counting down the days, I met Laura, who would become one of my closest friends. It was a scorching July day, one of those when the air feels too hot and dry to even want to breathe it in. I was playing paper dolls inside with Linda while Mother was sewing new dresses for our first day of school. The weather shifted suddenly; the sky darkened and then split apart in a downpour. Linda, Annette, and I stood at the kitchen window, listening to the rain pound the roof of the house and smelling its sweetness through the air conditioner. After the deluge, we begged Mama to let us go outside, and she said we could as long as we didn’t get muddy. The dirt road in front of our house had turned into a large stream of muddy water. I could think of nothing better than to run and splash in it. Linda read my mind. “Carolyn, don’t even think of it. We will all get a spanking if you do!” When my mother got mad at one of us for doing something disobedient or wrong, usually we all paid a price for her anger. What kept me on the porch wasn’t my fear of getting a spanking; it was the fear of how Linda would feel if I got her and Annette in trouble. A moment later, we heard children’s voices and suddenly saw the kids from a new polygamous family that had moved into the community. They’d come from Idaho with three wives and what seemed like two dozen children. A redheaded girl who looked about the same age as me caught my eye. She came running down the street and with a big jump and splash landed in the middle of the muddy water. All her other siblings followed her. They were laughing and splashing in the mud and having the best time. I was dying to join them but knew I couldn’t.

• From Escape (2007)

  If the state funded a charter school, it would do so based on the school’s total number of students. The rate per student was the same as it was in Phoenix. This meant that we could generate enough income from a charter school to hire competent teachers from outside the community. Win-win, it seemed to me. I told the school superintendent, Alvin Barlow, that if we used computers in the classroom, we could make them more efficient and actually help decrease class size. Some teaching could go on in the computer lab, but it could be done by a lab tech instead of a teacher. This would free up teachers to spend more time in the classroom. Kids could do math and reading drills in the computer lab that would support their classroom studies. I had taken several courses in computer programming and writing HTML—hand-coding Web sites. I knew I could develop software specific for our curriculums. Barlow was impressed. He wholeheartedly supported my idea for a charter school. I was a well-respected teacher because I had a talent for teaching any child to read. Parents whose children had reading problems would go to Barlow and ask for their child to be put in my second-grade class. Merril also thought the charter school plan was a good idea and gave me the go-ahead. I asked Merril before I started writing the proposal if we needed to run it by Uncle Rulon first. He said he’d talk to the prophet about it but didn’t see any problem. I don’t know if Merril ever did have that conversation, but several of the prophet’s wives knew I was writing the charter, so I think he knew what was going on. I worked on the proposal night and day. My cousins, Jayne and Lee Ann, both teachers, also pitched in. We got our proposal in the night before the deadline and then took a big breath. We were proud of what we’d accomplished and now had to wait and see what happened. A month later, we were invited to Phoenix to present our charter. There had been a hundred entries. Most of the presenters were school administrators or superintendents with much more experience than we had. Jayne and I felt like kids. Of the twenty proposals presented before ours, only one was given the green light. The stakes were high. Our turn finally came. We were questioned repeatedly. One of the women on the board finally put a halt to the questioning. “I want this school. It contains the best assessment plan I have ever seen.” One of her male colleagues concurred. He liked the innovative ideas we had in our proposal and wanted to see how they’d work in practice. The board had concerns about whether we could build a school the size we’d proposed over the summer. I said that would be no problem. The community was used to building things fast.

• From Girls & Sex (2016)

  I planted myself near a concession stand, where no fewer than thirty girls over the course of about fifteen minutes asked me to snap their picture beside a life-size poster of Cyrus displaying her famous tongue. A few made “duck lips” or “faux surprise” face—I’m fun! I’m ironic!—but most imitated their idol. I asked one girl, a nineteen-year-old named Emilia, to explain the appeal of the pose. “I guess it’s to say, ‘I don’t care,’” she said. “You don’t care about what?” She shrugged. “I just don’t care!” A twenty-one-year-old women’s studies major from San Francisco State University stood nearby dressed in a black-and-white striped romper, her hair wound into pigtail buns, a slash of red lipstick on her mouth. “I like Miley because she is just herself,” she explained. “I loved Hannah Montana. I’ve seen every episode. But I’m grown up now, and so is Miley. She needed to break free and show that she wasn’t the Disney star anymore.” The girl looked around the hallway. “And she did.” “She is the epitome of perfection,” enthused her friend. “And she’s not going to fit into any cultural ideal. Everyone tells you who you’re supposed to be as a girl, but Miley? She is just who she is.” The show itself was a kaleidoscope of quasi-psychedelic images. A caricatured animated Miley (conceived by Ren and Stimpy creator John Kricfalusi), bug-eyed and buck-toothed, with huge, flopping butt cheeks, cavorted on-screen as the real-life version performed with those plush stuffed dancing bears, pinching and palpating more backup dancers. A giant bed disgorged dancers of both sexes, who joined Miley in a mock orgy. She simulated intercourse with a “little person,” pantomimed fellatio on a dancer dressed as Abraham Lincoln (“party in the USA!”). She urged her audience to make out with each other, drawling, “The more tongue, the better. The dirtier, the better.” The “nastiest” couples, she said, would be projected onto Jumbotrons flanking the stage. (“Girl on girl is always appreciated,” she said with a smirk.)

• From Girls & Sex (2016)

  Holly, however, stayed both chaste and sober: a “good girl” who imagined she’d save sex for a loving relationship and alcohol until age twenty-one. When she did imagine having a boyfriend, her fantasies hewed to the romantic rather than the sexual—beaches and sunsets were usually involved. She entered college, she said, “very pure,” but campus life quickly changed her. Her fourth night at school, she made out at a party with a guy she barely knew. It was fun. A week after that, she gave the same guy a hand job, and he fondled her breasts. “It was a huge thing for me,” she recalled. “I touched a boy’s penis! He touched my boobs! I was slightly overwhelmed. Because three weeks before, I would have said no. But I wanted to be doing this, although nothing more than this.” By early October, she had happily hooked up with two more guys, making out on the dance floor and going back to their rooms. “I almost feel like I wanted the opportunity,” she said. “Because in high school I never had the opportunity to hook up with boys. And in college I have this endless opportunity to do it, so I felt like I could.” Holly met Connor, who lived on her floor, at a school football game, and the two bonded over their politics—which were more liberal than those of many of their peers—and a mutual passion for The Daily Show. They began texting, and one night Connor asked if Holly and her friends would take him to a frat party. Freshman year was tough for boys on campuses dominated by Greek life. In order to “preserve the ratio” of girls to boys at a party—keeping the odds in the hosts’ favor—frats limited the number of unaffiliated males allowed in. So unless a freshman guy was accompanied by a large enough group of women (three, four, sometimes more), he risked being turned away. Holly showed me a picture of herself on a recent night out that she’d posted to Instagram. She was dressed in what I came to think of as the sorority uniform: a tight black miniskirt, bare legs, crop top, and stilettos. Her hair was flat-ironed straight, and she wore red lipstick and dark eyeliner. She looked like a different person from the scrubbed-face girl before me. “There are few times that I feel more confident about my body than when I wear a crop top and my boobs are showing and my legs are showing and I’m wearing super high heels,” she told me. “I never feel more liberated than then. I’m proud of my body, and I like to show it off.”

• From Three Women (2019)

  She can feel his eyes moving along the length of her body, admiring her hair, her clavicle—schoolgirl parts, but parts of her all the same. For the length of the film her face is warm like it’s been resting in an open oven. She’s smiling, too, a bemused and dogged smile, as though her ears are pulling the ends of her mouth in opposite directions. She tries, a few times, to undo it by pursing her lips, and then by blinking her eyes. The first of many exhilarating moments comes on a Sunday. In the future she will think of it as the first date. Maggie is at Melani’s house. She doesn’t say anything to Melani about lovecrush. This muteness, which is virtually insufferable for a teenage girl, turns their whole friendship into a lie, because of how large lovecrush looms and how it overshadows all other things, so that when they speak about parties and classes and clothes and television, Maggie feels she is being a fake. Maggie missed going to church in the morning with her parents so she’s supposed to make it up by herself in the evening. She’s getting set to leave Melani’s for Mass when her phone double-buzzes and it’s him. What are you doing? This question, because she is simultaneously at the apex of lovecrush and unsure of his position, whereabouts, and schedule, cannot be answered truthfully. It has to be answered leaving a Grand Canyon of space. At Melani’s, doing nothing. He writes that he needs to get the book Freakonomics, and would she like to meet him at Barnes & Noble? It’s a really easy place to bump into each other without looking conspicuous. This is exactly the same as if he’d extended an invitation to Bermuda for a long weekend. She could smell the salt water and tanning oil. She pulls into the parking lot on Forty-Second Street and reapplies lip gloss with her small, beautiful hands. There’s a parallel universe where she’s in church right now. That’s where her best friend and her parents think she is. Being a part of something illicit makes Maggie feel important. She is not merely sneaking out of the house to go to a party or make out with a Coors-flavored boyfriend. She feels like an operative. She walks into the store. She shakes as she stands in front of a table displaying the bestselling children’s books. She tries to concentrate on words. He walks up behind her and she jumps. This is the first time she’s been in a nonacademic situation with him and it feels anomalous. He’s an adult man, with a wallet.

• From Open (2009)

  Then, at Lake Mead, we film several scenes against the watery backdrop. It all seems silly, goofy, but harmless. Back in Vegas we do a series of shots on the Strip, then around a swimming pool. As luck would have it, they choose the pool at good old Cambridge Racquet Club. Finally, we set up for one last shot at a Vegas country club. The director puts me in a white suit, then has me drive up to the front portico in a white Lamborghini. Step out of the car, he says, turn to the camera, lower your black sunglasses, and say, Image Is Everything. Image Is Everything? Yes. Image Is Everything. Between takes I look around and in the crowd of spectators I see Wendi, the former ballgirl, my childhood crush, all grown up. Now she’s definitely come a long way since the Alan King tournament. She’s carrying a suitcase. She’s just dropped out of college and she’s just come home. You were the first person I wanted to see, she says. She looks beautiful. Her brown hair is long, curly, and her eyes are impossibly green. She’s all I can think about while the director is ordering me around. As the sun goes down, the director yells, Cut! That’s a wrap! Wendi and I jump into my new Jeep, the doors and top off, and go roaring away like Bonnie and Clyde. Wendi says, What was that slogan they kept making you say into the camera? Image Is Everything. What’s that supposed to mean? Beats me. It’s for a camera company. WEEKS LATER I BEGIN TO HEAR this slogan twice a day. Then six times a day. Then ten. It reminds me of those Vegas windstorms, the kind that begin with a faint, ominous rustling of leaves, and ultimately turn into high-pitched, gale-force, three-day blows. Overnight the slogan becomes synonymous with me. Sportswriters liken this slogan to my inner nature, my essential being. They say it’s my philosophy, my religion, and they predict it’s going to be my epitaph. They say I’m nothing but image, I have no substance, because I haven’t won a slam. They say the slogan is proof that I’m just a pitchman, trading on my fame, caring only about money and nothing about tennis. Fans at my matches begin taunting me with the slogan. Come on, Andre—image is everything! They yell this if I show any emotion. They yell it if I show no emotion. They yell it when I win. They yell it when I lose. This ubiquitous slogan, and the wave of hostility and criticism and sarcasm it sets off, is excruciating. I feel betrayed—by the advertising agency, the Canon execs, the sportswriters, the fans. I feel abandoned. I feel the way I did when I arrived at the Bollettieri Academy.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  For nearly four decades, until his death in 1536, Erasmus’s output covered a huge field, embracing the Christian life, the theory and practice of education, the state of Church and society, and the meaning of the scriptures, besides including scholarly editions of sacred and patristic texts. Of these by far the most important was his Greek edition of the New Testament, which made the original text (albeit in imperfect form) available to Latin Christians for the first time. Erasmus made himself into a scholar with high academic standards; he was also a popularizer and a journalist who understood the importance of communication. He wanted his books to be small, handy and cheap, and he was the first writer to grasp the full potentialities of printing. He worked at speed, often in the printing shop itself, writing and correcting his proofs on the spot. He was exhilarated by the smell of printer’s ink, the incense of the Reformation. As a result, the diffusion of his works is astounding. His first success, the Adages (1500), was a collection of Latin quotations used to teach the language but also reflecting his philosophy; it was constantly reprinted and gradually expanded into a collection of over 4,000 short essays, which influenced society in the same way as the crude proverbs of his schooling had done. His Enchiridion, or layman’s handbook, first published in 1503, was reprinted in 1509 and 1515, and then every year, and by his death, had been translated into Czech, German, English, French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese. His In Praise of Folly, 1511, went into thirty-nine editions before 1536; some of these were very substantial – thus one Paris printer, hearing that the book might be suppressed, quickly ran off an edition of 24,000 copies. There were some years, it has been calculated, when between one-fifth and one-tenth of all books sold in Oxford, London and Paris were by Erasmus. In the 1530s, 300,000 copies of his Greek New Testament were circulating, and over 750,000 of his other works. He was a new phenomenon, a living world best-seller. He got so much correspondence that, when he was living in Antwerp, then the richest city in Europe, the postman used to stop at his house first, before going on to the City Hall. Erasmus was made a political counsellor by the Emperor Charles V and offered a cardinal’s hat by Pope Paul III. A number of leading European cities gave him their freedom and invited him to live there as an honoured citizen. Yet if Erasmus had sought to propound his views a generation later, he would certainly have been hounded by the Habsburgs and excommunicated by the papacy: indeed, in 1546, only a decade after his death, the Council of Trent declared his version of the New

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

  The very dynamics of power and control that can be challenging in an emotional relationship can, when eroticized, become highly desirable. In the crucible of the erotic mind, we bring the more vexing components of love—dependency, surrender, jealousy, aggression, even hostility—and transform them into powerful sources of excitement. My patient Oscar can’t stand being told what to do by his bossy wife, yet he enjoys being tossed around by her sexually. When she barks orders about the dishes, the experience takes him back to his mom’s kitchen. But he does not feel this regressive threat once the lights have been turned off. What he loathes in the domestic sphere becomes his choice in the erotic. Maxwell, who keeps a shrewd eye on his beautiful girlfriend’s many admirers, repeatedly brings them up when he makes love to her. What threatens in public becomes enchantment in private. He parlays his daily fears into nightly seductions. And Elizabeth, the take-charge woman, loves to get a break when Vito takes over sexually. She does not experience his control as oppressive. On the contrary, she feels taken care of. And she feels a renewed respect for him when, “For a change, he knows what to do.” His control offers her a safe container in which she can release her lusty self. The imbalance of power is both safe and sexy—at once protective and liberating. Subverting Power Some would say that Elizabeth’s desire for submission is nothing more than a reenactment of traditional male domination. They would claim that sexual arrangements in which one partner is dominant and controlling, the other passive and weak, are inherently hierarchical and oppressive, nothing more than a sexist replay of patriarchy. But prisoners rarely have the desire to pretend they are prisoners. Only the free can choose to make believe. To my thinking, being able to play with roles goes some way toward indicating that you’re no longer controlled by them. Play has the potential to disrupt the very notion of gender categorization. For Elizabeth, being controlled sexually is itself a subversive act that is ultimately liberating. The same is true for Marcus, who heads the research and development unit of a large international software company. He is a classic type A man: competitive, ambitious, spending more time in the air than on the ground. His tough-mindedness and aggressiveness have made him a natural leader in his highly competitive field. The word “power” is attached to many of his activities and often turns up in his conversation. He takes power walks, drinks power drinks, does power lunches, and recharges during ten-minute power naps. And in his free time, he likes a good spanking.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  “Fairly”, I said, “but why do you take all the room?” and I jostled him aside: he immediately pushed me hard and I slapped his face as I had promised. The elder boys held him back or the fight would have taken place then and there: “will you fight?” he barked at me and I replied, “as much as you like, bully!” It was arranged that the fight should take place on the next afternoon, which happened to be a Wednesday and half-holiday. From three to six would give us time enough. That evening Stackpole asked me to his room and told me he would get the Doctor to stop the fight if I wished; I assured him it had to be and I preferred to have it settled. “I’m afraid he’s too old and strong for you”, said Stackpole: I only smiled. Next day the ring was made at the top of the playing field behind the haystack so that we could not be seen from the school. All the Sixth and nearly all the school stood behind Jones; but Stackpole, while ostensibly strolling about, was always close to me. I felt very grateful to him: I don’t know why; but his presence took away from my loneliness. At first the fight was almost like a boxing-match. Jones shot out his left hand, my head slipped it and I countered with my right in his face: a moment later he rushed me but I ducked and side-stepped and hit him hard on the chin. I could feel the astonishment of the school in the dead silence: “Good, good!” cried Stackpole behind me: “that’s the way.” And indeed it was the “way” of the fight in every round except one. We had been hard at it for some eight or ten minutes when I felt Jones getting weaker or losing his breath: at once I went in attacking with all my might; when suddenly, as luck would have it, I caught a right swing just under the left ear and was knocked clean off my feet: he could hit hard enough, that was clear. As I went into the middle of the ring for the next round Jones jeered at me: “You got that, didn’t ye, Pat!” “Yes”, I replied, “but I’ll beat you black and blue for it” and the fight went on. I had made up my mind, lying on the ground, to strike only at his face. He was short and strong and my body-blows didn’t seem to make any impression on him; but if I could blacken all his face, the masters and especially the Doctor would understand what had happened.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  cabalistic theosophy to neo-Platonic cosmology. His pupil, the Hebraist Johann Reuchlin, produced the first Hebrew-Christian grammar in 1506, and tried to prevent the systematic destruction of these emerging Jewish books by the Dominican Inquisition. Thus was the New Learning first brought into conflict with the established Church. But conflict was inevitable. Men were now able to study the Greek and Hebrew texts in the original, and compared them with the received version in Latin treated as sacrosanct in the West for centuries. Valla, working from the Greek New Testament, pointed out numerous errors in St Jerome’s Vulgate – the first glimmerings of modern scriptural scholarship. And once men began to look at the texts with fresh eyes, they saw many things which made them uncomfortable or excited. The message of the New Learning was, indeed, this: through greater knowledge to a purer spiritual truth. Ficino, Pico and Reuchlin suggested that there was, as it were, a natural religion; that behind diverse philosophical and religious experiences there was a unity. Its essential truth was most perfectly expressed in Christianity. Over the centuries, accretions had obscured this truth: the new learning would rediscover it and purify it. Thus the new intellectual movement was pressed into the service of reforming the Church, something which had baffled popes, councils, bishops and kings for more than a century. Ignorance was identified with sin; knowledge with reform. The principle could be expressed in many ways: by the exposure of fraudulent documents; by the establishment of wholly accurate and authentic texts; by the re-examination of these texts in the light of new knowledge to discover their full meaning; and – the meaning of the scriptures having been finally established – by the elimination from the Church’s life and activities of all beliefs and practices which lacked biblical authority or the sanction of the early Church. The effect of this movement, if allowed to progress unchecked, was to place the well-being and future of the Church in the hands of its empirical scholars. Or perhaps, indeed, in the hands of a wider audience. The spread of the new knowledge virtually coincided with the technical development of printing. The coincidence ensured the acceleration of both. The earliest printed books in the West were produced at Mainz in 1454–7, at the time Valli was annotating the Greek New Testament. By 1500 there were seventy-three presses in Italy, fifty-one in Germany, thirty-nine in France, twenty-four in Spain, fifteen in the Low Countries and eight in Switzerland. The most important of the firms, run by Aldus Manutius in Venice, was almost entirely devoted to publishing the recovered

• From The Porn Trap: The Essential Guide to Overcoming Problems Caused by Pornography (2008)

  That was the starting point and my interest in porn continued from then on pretty much unrelenting. Every opportunity that I had to get more material, whether X-rated magazines or videos, I would take. If I was over at a friend’s house and his parents were gone I’d suggest we find his dad’s porn. By the time my parents realized I had an issue with porn, the root was already there, very strong. Their lectures were like water off a duck’s back. I’d put on the face, the façade that I was sorry and wouldn’t ever do it again—blah, blah, blah. The next day, of course, I couldn’t wait to get my hands on some more porn. The morning Brad pedaled his bike to the school playground with his brother, he had no way of knowing he would have his first exposure to a substance that would become the focus of his sexual energy as an adolescent and that would later result in compromising his sense of integrity and almost costing him his marriage. IT’S EASY FOR US TO COME IN CONTACT WITH PORN AS KIDS One of the things that surprised us most in our interviews and with our clients is just how often porn use starts in childhood or adolescence. Our first exposure may happen in many different ways, but most of us are exposed when we’re much too young. Thirty-two-year-old Tyler, for example, remembers seeing his first pornographic magazine when he was just five years old and playing at a friend’s house. “The magazine belonged to my friend’s dad and it was just sitting around their living room. The father didn’t seem to care. I remember seeing lots of pictures of women with big breasts and some of naked men and women having intercourse,” says Tyler. “I found it fascinating. Obviously, I didn’t understand anything about the mechanics of sex, but I was drawn to it because it was so new and mysterious. It’s something you don’t see every day when you’re five.” Gil, a thirty-four-year-old millworker, stumbled across a Penthouse in his father’s desk drawer one day. He was nine years old and home from school with the flu. Gil says, “I wasn’t consciously looking for anything. I just came across it. I thumbed through it. I was curious and it confused me a little. And somehow it got me thinking differently about my dad. I put the magazine back in a different place from where I found it. I think I was trying to let him know I’d seen it. But I never heard from him about it.”

• From Open (2009)

  But when I pull up to Gil’s house I realize that I might not have thought this all the way through. The car is very small, and Gil is very big. The car is so small that it makes Gil look twice as big. He contorts himself to fit into the passenger side, and even then he needs to tilt sideways, and even then his head touches the roof. The Corvette looks as if, at any moment, it might burst apart. Seeing Gil squished and uncomfortable, I’m motivated to go very fast. Of course I don’t need extra motivation in the Corvette. The car is supersonic. We crank the music and fly out of Vegas, across Hoover Dam, down toward the craggy Joshua tree forests of northwest Arizona. We decide to stop for lunch outside Kingman. The prospect of food, combined with the speed of the Corvette, and the loud music, and the presence of Gil, makes me mash the gas. We hit Mach 1. I see Gil make a face and twirl a finger. I look in the rearview mirror—a highway patrol car inches from my back fender. The patrolman quickly gives me a speeding ticket. Not my first, I tell Gil, who shakes his head. In Kingman we stop at Carl’s Jr. and eat an enormous lunch. We both love to eat, and we both have a secret weakness for fast food, so we fall off the nutrition wagon, ordering French fries, then ordering seconds, refilling our sodas. When I squeeze Gil back into the Corvette I realize we’re well behind schedule. We need to make up time. I floor it and zoom back onto U.S. 95. Two hundred miles to Scottsdale. Two hours of driving. Twenty minutes later, Gil makes the same twirling gesture. A different patrolman this time. He takes my license and registration and asks, Have you received a speeding ticket recently? I look at Gil. He frowns. Well, if you consider an hour ago recent, then yes, Officer, I have. Wait right here. He walks back to his car. One minute later, he returns. The judge wants you back in Kingman. Kingman? What? Come with me, sir. Come with—what about the car? Your friend can drive it. But, but, can’t I just follow you? Sir, you are going to listen to everything I say and do everything I say and that’s why you’re not going back to Kingman in handcuffs. You will sit in the back of my car and your friend will follow us. Now. Step out. I’m in the back of a police car, Gil following in a Corvette that fits him like a whalebone corset. We’re in the middle of nowhere and I’m hearing the crazy-ass plinking banjos from Deliverance. It takes forty-five minutes to reach Kingman Municipal Court. I follow the patrolman into a side door and find myself before the small, elderly judge, who wears a cowboy hat and a belt buckle the size of a pie tin.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  “Now, young man”, he said, “you’ll have many opportunities later, so give me my place”, and forthwith turned him out of his place and took his seat by the Vicereine, though she would barely speak to him. At length Tom Connolly said to her: “I wouldn’t have thought it of you, for you’re so kind. Fancy blaming a poor young girl the first time she yields to a man!” This response made the whole table roar and established Connolly’s fame for impudence throughout Ireland. Everyone was talking of him and I went about after him all through the gardens and whenever he spoke, my large ears were cocked to hear any word of wisdom that might fall from his lips. At length he noticed me and asked me why I followed him about. “Everybody says you can win any woman you like, Mr. Connolly”; I said half-ashamed: “I want to know how you do it, what you say to them.” “Faith, I don’t know”, he said, “but you’re a funny little fellow. What age are you to be asking such questions?” “I’m fourteen”, I said boldly. “I wouldn’t have given you fourteen, but even fourteen is too young; you must wait.” So I withdrew but still kept within earshot. I heard him laughing with my eldest brother over my question and so imagined that I was forgiven, and the next day or the day after, finding me as assiduous as ever, he said: “You know, your question amused me and I thought I would try to find an answer to it and here is one. When you can put a stiff penis in her hand and weep profusely the while, you’re getting near any woman’s heart. But don’t forget the tears.” I found the advice a counsel of perfection; I was unable to weep at such a moment; but I never forgot the words. There was a large barracks of Irish Constabulary in Ballybay and the Sub-Inspector was a handsome fellow of five feet nine or ten named Walter Raleigh. He used to say that he was a descendant of the famous courtier of Queen Elizabeth and he pronounced his name “Rolly” and assured us that his illustrious namesake had often spelt it in this way, which showed that he must have pronounced it as if written with an “o.” The reason I mention Raleigh here is that his sisters and mine were great friends and he came in and out of our house almost as if it were his own. Every evening when Vernon and Raleigh had nothing better to do, they cleared away the chairs in our back parlor, put on boxing gloves and had a set-to. My father used to sit in a corner and watch them: Vernon was lighter and smaller; but quicker; still I used to think that Raleigh did not put out his full strength against him.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  In a few minutes we were opposite three or four blazing railway carriages and the wreck of an engine. “How awful!” cried Gertie. “Let’s get over the fence”, I replied, “and go close!” The next moment I had thrown myself on the wooden paling and half vaulted, half clambered over it. But Gertie’s skirts prevented her from imitating me. As she stood in dismay, a great thought came to me: “Step on the low rail, Gertie”, I cried, “and then on the upper one and I’ll lift you over. Quick!” At once she did as she was told and while she stood with a foot on each rail hesitating and her hand on my head to steady herself, I put my right hand and arm between her legs and pulling her at the same moment towards me with my left hand, I lifted her over safely but my arm was in her crotch and when I withdrew it, my right hand stopped on her sex and began to touch it: It was larger than E…’s and had more hairs and was just as soft but she did not give me time to let it excite me so intensely. “Don’t!” she exclaimed angrily: “take your hand away!” And slowly, reluctantly I obeyed, trying to excite her first; as she still scowled: “Come quick!” I cried and taking her hand drew her over to the blazing wreck. In a little while we learned what had happened: a goods train loaded with barrels of oil had been at the top of the siding; it began to glide down of its own weight and ran into the Irish Express on its way from London to Holyhead. When the two met, the oil barrels were hurled over the engine of the express train, caught fire on the way and poured in flame over the first three carriages, reducing them and their unfortunate inmates to cinders in a very short time. There were a few persons burned and singed in the fourth and fifth carriages; but not many. Open-eyed we watched the gang of workmen lift out charred things like burnt logs rather than men and women, and lay them reverently in rows alongside the rails: about forty bodies, if I remember rightly, were taken out of that holocaust. Suddenly Gertie realised that it was late and quickly hand in hand we made our way home: “they’ll be angry with me”, said Gertie, “for being so late, it’s after midnight.” “When you tell them what you’ve seen!” I replied, “they won’t wonder that we waited.” As we parted I said, “Gertie dear, I want to thank you—” “What for” she said shortly. “You know”, I said cunningly, “it was so kind of you”—she made a face at me and ran up the steps into her house. Slowly I returned to my lodgings, only to find myself the hero of the house when I told the story in the morning.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  “Number two”, I said to myself: “is there anything else?” “Of course”, she said, “you must say that the girl you are with, is the prettiest girl in the room or in the town, in fact is quite unlike any other girl, superior to all the rest, the only girl in the world for you. All women like to be the only girl in the world for as many men as possible.” “Number three”, I said to myself: “Don’t they like to be kissed?” I asked. “That comes afterwards”, said my sister, “lots of men begin with kissing and pawing you about before you even like them. That puts you off. Flattery first of looks and dress, then devotion and afterwards the kissing comes naturally.” “Number four!” I went over these four things again and again to myself and began trying them even on the older girls and women about me and soon found that they all had a better opinion of me almost immediately. I remember practicing my new knowledge first on the younger Miss Raleigh whom, I thought, Vernon liked. I just praised her as my sister had advised: first her eyes and hair (she had very pretty blue eyes). To my astonishment she smiled on me at once; accordingly I went on to say she was the prettiest girl in the town and suddenly she took my head in her hands and kissed me, saying “You’re a dear boy!” But my great experience was yet to come. There was a very good-looking man whom I met two or three times at parties; I think his name was Tom Connolly: I’m not certain, though I ought not to forget it; for I can see him as plainly as if he were before me now: five feet ten or eleven, very handsome with shaded violet eyes. Everybody was telling a story about him that had taken place on his visit to the Viceroy in Dublin. It appeared that the Vicereine had a very pretty French maid and Tom Connolly made up to the maid. One night the Vicereine was taken ill and sent her husband up stairs to call the maid. When the husband knocked at the maid’s door, saying that his wife wanted her, Tom Connolly replied in a strong voice: “It’s unfriendly of you to interrupt a man at such a time.” The Viceroy, of course, apologized immediately and hurried away, but like a fool he told the story to his wife who was very indignant and next day at breakfast she put an aide-de-camp on her right and Tom Connolly’s place far down the table. As usual, Connolly came in late and the moment he saw the arrangement of the places, he took it all in and went over to the aide-de-camp.