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 How the Bible Actually Works (2019)

  As it is still today indicates that whoever wrote this was living in the land of Canaan long after Moses, after God had driven the Canaanites out of the land and given the land to the Israelites. Most scholars have concluded that this was written after the establishment of the monarchy—no earlier than 1000 BCE, and likely, for other reasons, centuries later. We could go on, but I’m not writing a book on Deuteronomy. I only want to point out that Deuteronomy was written from a much later point of view than Exodus. When exactly was Deuteronomy written? The broad consensus is in the latter half of the seventh century BCE based on an earlier (perhaps eighth- century) prototype and then subject to revisions up to and including the time of the Babylonian exile and perhaps later. More specifically, scholars generally agree that Deuteronomy reflects a particular moment in Israel’s history—the Assyrian threat to the southern kingdom, Judah, in the seventh century BCE, after the deportation of the northern kingdom by the Assyrians in 722 BCE. In fact, Deuteronomy as a whole is structured like the treaties the Assyrians made with their conquered foes. That’s why the book as a whole is structured like Assyrian treaties, which begin with an overview of the sovereign’s great deeds (Deut. 1–4), followed by the stipulations of the treaty (the laws, Deut. 5–26), and the promise of blessings for obedience and curses for disobedience with both parties bearing witness (Deut. 27–28). As we glimpsed earlier, the laws of Deuteronomy in particular differ in places from those in Exodus (and Leviticus), because they are set at a different time and under different circumstances. The command to celebrate the Passover meal in the Temple (not in the people’s houses) reflects the central importance of the Temple as the national political and religious symbol of God’s presence. The overall message of Deuteronomy is that the people of Judah are to make an alliance only with their true King, Yahweh, and not with the Assyrians, despite the great threat. In other words, be faithful to Yahweh; trust him alone. And Deuteronomy is the treaty. I swear on my heart that this is so interesting, which is why I got into this line of work and needed to take out a home-equity loan to marry off my daughter and reshingle my roof. But I’m not dragging you through all this to justify my sorry existence. The bottom line is that Deuteronomy is a late revision of ancient law. And what is so striking and so vital in all of this is that whoever was responsible for Deuteronomy apparently had no hesitation whatsoever in updating older laws for new situations and still calling it the words that God spoke back then to Moses on Mt. Sinai (or Horeb, as it is called in

• From The Chronology of Water (2011)

  I know not all of you would do the tinkle dance to hang out with Kathy Acker. In fact, some of you don’t even know who she was. But to me, Kathy Acker was the shit. She was the woman who staged a break-in on culture and gender, on the prison house of language, and blew it up from the inside out. She was the female William Burroughs. And after we swam, she talked about pussy spanking. Pussy spanking, for the uninitiated, is not just foreplay. Christ, most of the women I know now have never had the pleasure, but the good ones have. When we swam in that ghoulishly green colored Best Western pool, we did laps. This was after she lifted free weights for about an hour. She swam hard. She wasn’t a superb swimmer, but she was a solid swimmer. How she looked in the water was like a human muscle beating the crap out of each lap. And when she’d turn her head to breath, if I happened to breathe her direction at the right time, her face with all that hardware gleamed. It wasn’t in the pool that the pussy revelations happened. And it wasn’t later in my blue Toyota pickup truck after we went to Rite-Aid to buy her sinus medication, where she asked me things about my body, having seen me swim. Though being asked questions about your body by Kathy Acker is definitely enough to make your car seat wet. It was later, at dinner, with 14 other people sitting around. Between bites of dinner and sips of wine she self narrated about how she didn’t much cum from penetration and loved to be spanked into orgasm. I was sitting next to her. I’ve never been that wet sitting next to someone just talking in my life. I thought I might slide off of the seat and dribble to the floor right there, sucking her ankles and whimpering on my way down, begging her to go under the table with me. I talked with her other times. People who knew her would agree with me - she was wide open mouthed about traditionally sexual things - she was precise and clear and fully descriptive. It was smaller, ordinary, human things she’d go all quiet or shy or girl about. Like an inside out woman. Like all the swollen red gushing salty complexity of a woman on the outside. Going THIS. The night after we swam together at the Best Western, after her jammed to the walls packed reading, after the take the writer out to a bar so people can drool on her and crowd her into claustrophobic hell, at approximately 4:23 a.m. I think you know what happened. I got the motherloving juice spanked out of my pussy until the bed flooded. It was not like with the photographer. I laughed. I laughed with pleasure.

• From The Chronology of Water (2011)

  YEAR ONE WE DRINK GUINNESS MOSTLY ALL THE TIME and we ride Mountain bikes around Eugene at night and we go to the Vet’s Club we go to the Vet’s club we go to the Vet’s club we go to the High Street Café hey I’ll give you my student loan wad of $700 if you kiss the guy who joined us for a drink he does we laugh we drink we fuck. We rent a house together near the traintracks we drink Guinness we paint each other’s bodies we paint the walls we paint an entire room we fuck. We go crazy loving we go crazy fucking we go crazy drinking we do performance art in Eugene him naked on stage with a bloody pig’s head me naked on stage wrapped in Saran Wrap we perform on stage we perform at school we perform a life his long black hair my long blond hair attractive dramatic people dramatically drinking we have our first yell fight me on one side of the bathroom door with a Swiss Army Knife him on the other side of the bathroom door with a kitchen knife we carve each other’s names into our arms we do I fall and break open the body of the toilet water spewing everywhere he breaks down the bathroom door we bleed we fuck septic water. Year Two we drink Bushmills we ride our bikes in summer at night to the rose garden we steal all the heads of roses we strip and ride the current down the McKenzie river we road trip from Oregon to Florida we drink mushroom tea and hallucinate in the redwoods we see a guy die on the road some terrible wreck blood everywhere stretchers with corpse side of the road gorgeous ocean cliff view blood and road flares and ambulances and bodies how you loved looking just like you loved moving deathward so Jim Morrison I wanted to be in your fire we eat ecstasy and ride our bikes on the freeway we drive and drive all the southern states redneck fuckwads laughing snakeskin boots and cowboy hats all the way to Alabama his home to Florida my parents then turn around as fast as possible back to the west to Oregon where we can be who we are the west we get married in Tahoe at the top of Harvey’s Casino with my best friends lovers Mike and Dean and my sister and my parents Oedipal fakers and his parents southern Baptist fascists and we drink with the gay boys and a casino preacher with giant hair groomed black as a record album marries us says a Native American prayer there on top of Harvey’s Casino overlooking Lake Tahoe we laugh all the way down the elevators all the way through the year all the way to rings on our fingers and bells on our toes.

• From The Chronology of Water (2011)

  The night after my gravel roll I sat at my computer with my fingers on the keys. My hands were all scraped up. My forearms and elbows, too. My chin and cheek. I was supposed to be writing my dissertation chapter on Kathy Acker, who by then I’d met. I stared at lines of hers I had typed and referenced as part of my critical discussion on the screen: Every time I talk to one of you, I feel like I’m taking layers of my own epidermis, which are layers of still freshly bloody scar tissue, black brown and red, and tearing each one of them off so more and more of my blood shoots in to your face. This is what writing is to me a woman (ES, 210). When I went to write words over the top of hers, kind of I felt like I might throw up. Instead of the dissertation chapter, I began to write a story. The first line that came out of me was: “I am a woman who talks to herself and lies.” Please understand, I loved reading literary theory - I mean I devoured the primary texts as if they were romance novels - I dove into the discourse as if its waters were mine alone - my body song swam in between currents of language and thought. But trying to write critically, academically, hurt. A lot. Why would someone do that to novels? For what purpose, other than a sadistic impulse to hush, silence, incarcerate art? It seemed like a violence to me to write that way about literature. It seemed false at best and repugnant at worst - murderous even. In my dissertation the novels I’d chosen were astonishing pieces of noisy art. White Noise and Almanac of the Dead and Empire of the Senseless - a book which I promise you, if you’ve never read it, will scrape your eyeballs. Books in which culture towered and collapsed, border identities defied the cult of good citizenship and revolutionaries turned back on their liberators with fire for hair. Wars of militarization and wars of race and wars of gender and wars of fathers and language and power and wars of just the human heart played out page after page, taking my breath away. When I set my hands to writing literary criticism - that act of writing so legitimized by white male knowledge - I felt like I was a torturer. A killer. A Betrayer. An abuser. I slept with three of my professors - two men and one woman - I think trying to get the body back into discourse. HEY! What about bodies? The noisy, wet, rule-breaking body that seemed erased by all that lofty thought. It didn’t work.

• From Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010)

  In the seventh century BCE, the sages who produced the earliest of the spiritual treatises known as the Upanishads took another important step forward. Instead of concentrating on the performance of external rites, they began to examine their interior significance. At this time Aryan society in the Ganges basin was in the early stages of urbanization.7 The elite now had time to examine the inner workings of their minds—a luxury that had not been possible before humans were freed from the all-absorbing struggle for subsistence. The Brhadaranyaka Upanishad was probably composed in the kingdom of Videha, a frontier state on the most easterly point of Aryan expansion, where Aryans mixed with tribesmen from Iran as well as the indigenous peoples.8 The early Upanishads reflect the intense excitement of these encounters. People thought nothing of traveling a thousand miles to consult a teacher, and kings and warriors debated the issues as eagerly as priests. The sages and their pupils explored the complexity of the mind and had discovered the unconscious long before Jung and Freud; they were well aware of the effortless and reflexive drives of the human brain recently explored by neuroscientists. Above all, they were bent on finding the atman, the true “self” that was the source of all this mental activity and could not, therefore, be identical with the thoughts and feelings that characterize our ordinary mental and psychological experience. “You can’t see the Seer, who does the seeing,” explained Yajnavalkya, one of the most important of the early sages. “You can’t hear the Hearer who does the hearing; you can’t think with the Thinker who does the thinking; and you can’t perceive the Perceiver who does the perceiving.”9 The sages were convinced that if they could access the innermost core of their being, they would achieve unity with the Brahman, “the All,” the indestructible and imperishable energy that fuels the cosmos, establishes its laws, and pulls all the disparate parts of the universe together.10

• From The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature (2000)

  Fisher considered Darwin’s theory of mate choice to be one vague idea worth trying to formalize. In his first paper on sexual choice in 1915, Fisher enthused that “Of all the branches of biological science to which Charles Darwin’s life-work has given us the key, few if any, are as attractive as the subject of sexual selection.” Fisher understood that to make sexual selection scientifically respectable, he had to explain the origins of sexual preferences. In particular, Darwin failed to offer any explanation for female choice. Why should females bother to select male mates for their ornaments? Fisher’s breakthrough was to view sexual preferences themselves as legitimate biological traits that can vary, that can be inherited, and that can evolve. In his 1915 paper he faced the problem squarely: “The question must be answered ‘Why have the females this taste? Of what use is it to the species that they should select this seemingly useless ornament?’ ” Later, in a 1930 book, Fisher emphasized that “the tastes of organisms, like their organs and faculties, must be regarded as the product of evolutionary change, governed by the relative advantages which such tastes confer.” While Darwin had left sexual preferences as mysterious causes of sexual selection, Fisher asked how sexual preferences themselves evolved. In thinking about the evolution of sexual preferences, Fisher developed the two major themes of modern sexual selection theory. The first idea is the more intuitive, and concerns the information conveyed by sexual ornaments. In the 1915 paper, Fisher speculated thus: Consider, then, what happens when a clearly marked pattern of bright feathers affords … a fairly good index of natural superiority. A tendency to select those suitors in which the feature is best developed is then a profitable instinct for the female bird, and the taste for this “point” becomes firmly established … Let us suppose that the feature in question is in itself valueless, and only derives its importance from being associated with the general vigor and fitness of which it affords a rough index. Fisher proposed that many sexual ornaments evolved as indicators of fitness, health, and energy. Suppose that healthier males have brighter plumage. Females may produce more and healthier offspring if they mate with healthier males. If they happen to have a sexual preference for bright plumage, their offspring will automatically inherit better health from their highly fit fathers. Over time, the sexual preference for bright plumage would become more common because it brings reproductive benefits. Then, even if bright male plumage is useless in all other respects, it will become more common among males simply because females prefer it. Fisher understood that preferences for fitness indicators could hasten the effect of natural selection, and could potentially affect both sexes. Unfortunately, Fisher’s fitness-indicator idea was forgotten until the 1960s.

• From The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature (2000)

  The controversy over Zahavi’s idea marked the true revival of sexual selection theory. Within ten years of his 1975 paper, more research was published on sexual selection than in the previous hundred years. Fisher’s fitness-indicator idea was finally in play, its share value boosted by Zahavi’s takeover bid. Soon Fisher’s runaway process attracted more intellectual capital as well. In 1980 Peter O’Donald published Genetic Models of Sexual Selection, summarizing twenty years of thinking about the mathematics of sexual selection. This inspired a spate of new mathematical modeling. In the early 1980s Russell Lande and Mark Kirkpatrick showed that Fisher’s runaway process could indeed work. The genes underlying female choice really could get swept up in a positive-feedback loop with the genes underlying male sexual ornaments. Species could even split apart into new species entirely as a result of diverging sexual preferences. Critics attacked these runaway models, leading to the kind of rapid revision and rethinking that marks the most productive epochs of science. Evolutionary controversies attract experimental biologists. For most of the 20th century, the experimental techniques existed for testing Darwin’s basic idea that females choose their mates for their ornamentation. Experimental psychology had developed sophisticated methods and statistical tests for investigating how people make choices. These could have easily been applied to animals. But the work was not done, because biologists thought that sexual selection had been dismissed by the leading theorists. Once the theorists revived the ideas of fitness indicators and runaway processes, the experimenters took a fresh look at mate choice. In species after species, females were seen to show preferences for one male over another, for beautiful ornaments over bedraggled ones, for a higher level of fitness over a lower. Female choice was observed by Linda Partridge in fruit flies, by Malte Andersson in widowbirds, and by Michael Ryan in Tungara frogs. David Buss even showed evidence of mate choice in humans. Wherever males had sexual ornaments, females seemed to show sexual choice, just as Darwin predicted. Sexual Selection TriumphantWithin a few years, sexual selection became the hottest area of evolutionary biology and animal behavior research. Before this revival, sexual selection was caught in a double bind. Nobody did experiments on mate choice because theorists doubted its existence. And nobody did theoretical work on sexual selection because there was no experimental evidence for mate choice. Once this vicious circle was broken by John Maynard Smith, George Williams, Amotz Zahavi, Robert Trivers, and other pioneers, Darwin’s favorite idea was free to succeed.

• From The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature (2000)

  Sexual selection’s revival has been swift, dramatic, and unique. It may be the only major scientific theory to have become accepted after a century of condemnation, neglect, and misinterpretation. Throughout the 1990s, sexual selection research became one of the most successful and exciting areas of biology, dominating the leading evolution journals and animal behavior conferences. Helena Cronin’s The Ant and the Peacock put sexual selection in its historical context, reminding biologists where it came from and where it might go. Malte Andersson’s 1994 textbook Sexual Selection reviewed the state of the art for a new generation of scientists. Sexual selection became the most fruitful idea in the emerging science of evolutionary psychology. After a hundred years of neglect, The Descent of Man was once more being read—and not just for what it has to say on human evolution. What Sexual Selection’s Exile Costs the Human SciencesSexual selection’s century of exile from biology had substantial costs for other sciences. Anthropologists paid little attention to human mate choice in the tribal peoples they studied for most of this century. By the time mate choice was accepted as an important evolutionary factor, most of those tribal peoples had been exterminated or assimilated. Psychologists had little evolutionary insight into human sexuality, and their discipline was dominated for decades by Freudianism. Almost all of 20th-century psychology developed without considering the possibility that sexual selection through mate choice might have played a role in the evolution of human behavior, the human mind, human culture, or human society. Following Marx, the social sciences saw a culture’s mode of production as more important than its mode of reproduction. Economists had no explanation for the importance of “positional goods” that advertise one’s wealth and rank in comparison to sexual rivals. In the other human sciences as well—archeology, political science, sociology, linguistics, cognitive science, neuroscience, education, and social policy—there was a blind spot where the theory of sexual selection should have been. When these sciences did try to trace the evolutionary roots of human behavior, they have usually come up with theories based on “survival of the fittest” and “the goods of the species.” Mate choice was simply not on the intellectual map as an evolutionary force. Darwin’s broader vision, in which most of nature’s ornamentation arises through sexual courtship, was never used to explain the ornamental aspects of human behavior and culture. For example, without sexual selection theory, 20th-century science had great difficulty in explaining the aspects of human nature most concerned with display, status, and image. Economists could not explain our thirst for luxury goods and conspicuous consumption. Sociologists could not explain why men seek wealth and power more avidly than women. Educational psychologists could not explain why students became so rebellious and fashion-conscious after puberty. Cognitive scientists could not fathom why human creativity evolved. In each case, apparent lack of “survival value” made human behavior appear irrational and maladaptive.

• From The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature (2000)

  In the early 1990s, the runaway process seemed to me ideally suited to explaining why the human brain evolved so quickly, and to such an extreme size, during a period when it seemed to make our ancestors no better at making tools or competing against other species of African hominids. It became the focus of my research and the subject of my 1993 Ph.D. thesis at Stanford, which was titled “Evolution of the Human Brain through Runaway Sexual Selection.” The human brain’s evolution clearly looked as if it was driven by some sort of positive-feedback process. Other theorists proposed other candidates for the positive feedback. In 1981, E. O. Wilson suggested that larger brains permitted more complex cultures, which in turn selected for larger brains. This could initiate an evolutionary feedback loop between brain size and cultural complexity. Richard Dawkins has supported this view, seeing the human brain as a repository of learned cultural units called “memes.” Larger brains permit more memes, which in turn favor bigger brains. Two other positive-feedback ideas have proven influential in evolutionary psychology. In 1976 Nicholas Humphrey proposed that pressures for social intelligence could have turned into a positive-feedback process that drove human brain evolution. In 1988 Andy Whiten and Richard Byrne extended this idea by focusing on the survival advantages of social deception and manipulation. Their “Machiavellian intelligence” hypothesis has been accepted by many primate researchers and psychologists interested in human social intelligence. Apart from social competition within groups, another positive-feedback possibility was competition between groups. In 1989 Richard Alexander proposed that perhaps tribal warfare turned into an arms race for ever greater technological and strategic intelligence. This military competition could drive brain size and intelligence upwards. These theories all have some validity. Cultural, social, and military selection pressures were probably significant. But these positive-feedback loops seemed too speculative. They had not been admitted into the pantheon of evolutionary forces by biologists, and were not routinely used to explain interesting traits in other species. They were slightly ad hoc hypotheses restricted to primate and human evolution. The runaway process was different: it was part of mainstream evolutionary theory, one of the leading contenders for explaining complex, costly, ornamental traits in other species. Yet it had never been proposed as the driving force behind the evolution of the human brain. This seemed a peculiar oversight in need of vigorous correction, and for several years I gave dozens of talks about the idea of human mental evolution through runaway sexual selection. Matt Ridley kindly gave the idea some attention in the final chapter of his book The Red Queen. However, I now think that the runaway brain idea is only partly successful. It has some strengths that can help account for some of the sex differences in human behavior and some of the differences between our species and other primates. However, it also has some serious problems, so it will constitute only a small part of my overall theory.

• From Chasing Beauty

  OneA New York Girl1840–55All her life, she was known for the way she moved, for her speed, for wanting to be first. She was thought to be the fastest runner at her girls’ school in New York City, and when she flew across the dance floor, queries were made: wherever did she learn to dance like that? Isabella Stewart was born on April 14, 1840, the first of four siblings, in New York City, a metropolis also on the move. Lithographs from the time show tall sailing ships crowding its waters. The city’s protected port on the south end of Manhattan and the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825 made it ideal for foreign and domestic trade. New York would more than double in population as Belle grew up, to approximately 800,000 residents by 1860. The Stewart family lived first at 142 Greene Street, and then, in 1842, they leased a red-brick mansion at 10 University Place, which crosses Eighth Street, two blocks from Broadway and Washington Square. The neighborhood was then popular with rising merchants and the city’s social elite. Belle’s sister, Adelia, was born in 1842; David Jr. six years later; and James much later, in 1858, when Belle’s mother, also named Adelia, was in her late forties.

• From Chasing Beauty

  Broadway cut a swath from the bustling lower harbor to farmland in the north, the avenue’s width a striking contrast to the city’s narrow streets laid out generations before by Dutch settlers. A contemporary writer compared the crowds and rush of Broadway to a “constant river.” Appleton’s bookstore, bakeries, fruit stands, print and dry goods shops, auction houses and art suppliers populated the avenue. The photographer Mathew Brady established his Daguerreian Miniature Gallery on lower Broadway in 1844, next to P. T. Barnum’s American Museum, which had opened a few years before. Düsseldorf Gallery, with its showings of international art, commenced business in 1849. Nearer to Washington Square, Dr. Henry Abbott, a British collector, charged twenty-five cents to see his many antiquities, over two thousand, at his large Egyptian Gallery. James Fenimore Cooper, then a New York–based writer, compared Broadway to the promenades of Europe. The abolitionist reformer Lydia Maria Child marveled at what she saw in the many large store windows that lined the avenue: “Beautiful candelabras gracefully held out their lily-cups of frosted silver, and prismatic showers of cut glass were upborne by Grecian sylphs, or knights of the middle ages, in gold armour.” After a visit in 1842, Charles Dickens would list the many ways people traveled on the crowded avenue: “hackney cabs and coaches too; gigs, phaetons, large-wheeled tilburies, and private carriages . . .” But it was women and their fashion that elicited the novelist’s exclamation. “Heaven save the ladies, how they dress! We have seen more colours in these ten minutes, than we should have seen elsewhere, in as many days.” Henry James, then a child growing up on West Fourteenth Street, not a half mile from the Stewart family, recalled the hurly-burly of the street and how enormous theater billboards “rested sociably against trees and lampposts as well as against walls and fences.” Though their families lived so close by, no record indicates these two contemporaries and later friends knew each other as children. Belle’s father, David Stewart, was a second-generation Scots American, born in 1810, the youngest son of Isabella Tod and James Stewart. When the elder James Stewart, who was a merchant in the city, died nine years after marrying in 1805, he left a wife and three young sons—James Arrott, Charles, and David. Madame Stewart never remarried.

• From Chasing Beauty

  In early spring 1857, Mr. Stewart gave Belle and her friends a copy of the recent epic by the popular dramatist and historical novelist Alexandre Dumas. “We hear it’s splendid, an immense book,” Helen wrote, but wondered “how we shall ever finish it.” The three friends at first kept the book to themselves, though the other “girls were dying to know what it was.” They wrapped it in a plain cover and gave it an innocuous-sounding title, History of France, which was not far off the mark. Dumas’s four-part serial, La Comtesse de Charny, was the fourth installment of his popular Marie Antoinette romances, which fictionalize the queen’s extravagant life, from her arrival at Versailles from Austria as a fourteen-year-old girl, to her unhappy marriage and supposed exploits at Le Petit Trianon, and finally to her execution at the end of 1793. The schoolgirls, not much older than the doomed queen and staying not far from the Palais des Tuileries, the setting of the drama, eagerly read passages aloud. Soon their classmates gathered round to hear Dumas’s descriptions, such as this one, depicting the queen after her desperate flight with the king and their children from Versailles to Paris: “The Queen had suffered in mind and heart, in love and self-esteem. Her thirty-four years were written on the poor lady’s cheeks in lines of purple and violet, which told their story of tear-filled eyes and sleepless nights, which testified the deep malady of the womanly heart, which is never entirely healed, be she queen or commoner, till it is utterly extinguished.” The novelist divulges, like the undoing of so many corset stays, all the supposed details, including the wrenching scene of the king’s farewell to the queen before his execution in January 1793. The volumes end with a moral: “As has been seen in the more romantic portion of this book, the Queen let herself be easily drawn to the picturesque side of life. She possessed a very lively imagination, which does more than temperament to make women imprudent. The Queen had been imprudent all her life, imprudent in her friendship, imprudent in her passion. Her captivity was her regeneration, in a moral point of view. She reverted to the pure and holy love of her family, from which she had been alienated by her youthful and errant inclinations.” The sweep and emotion of the story, with its youthful energy and a glamorous woman at its center, were intoxicating, particularly for Belle, with her penchant for flights of fancy and rebellion. It was way too much for the girls’ teacher, however, who feared that the story of Marie Antoinette’s flirtatiousness and frivolity would corrupt the young readers. The girls probably knew this—it was likely the reason for the plain wrapper disguising the book’s cover.

• From Chasing Beauty

  Helen recorded the ensuing tumult in her March 1857 journal. After a dinner on one particular Thursday, as was usual, the Vestagine read aloud from the novel. That night their teacher intervened and confiscated the book, arguing that while “in America we might perhaps read such a book, our manners were freer, but in France a young girl who had read such a book by Alex. Dumas would not be received into society.” The stakes were high. Helen and Julia looked “rather sheepish and all,” while Belle “looked all confounded at seeing Mademoiselle with the book in hand; she had not much time to think, for she was immediately pumped by Mademoiselle as to how she had got the book, where, etc.” When Belle answered, Mademoiselle took the book away. Helen protested, a little disingenuously, that they had not the “least idea it was a bad book.” The teachers summoned Mrs. Stewart and Mrs. Waterston to the school. Two days later, Mrs. Stewart apologized to Mademoiselle and explained that the novel had been a gift from her husband, recommended by one of Belle’s American teachers who perhaps hadn’t understood what it was all about. Mademoiselle responded in a “good-natured” way. Afterward, Belle went to her teacher to retrieve the book. Soon Helen and her mother were in their carriage, riding back to their hotel. When Helen happened to turn around, she spied Belle “holding [the book] up exultingly.” The “picturesque side of life,” what Dumas warned against in his novel even as he gave all the gritty details, was what Belle loved most. Her proud stance, upraised arm with book in hand, signaled defiance toward authority and censorship. With her mother’s help, she’d won. *** BELLE LEFT THE PENSION IN EARLY JUNE 1857, A WEEK AFTER HELEN AND Julia. The Stewart, Waterston, and Gardner families all planned further European travels. Even so, there had been a good deal of crying and carrying on as the girls said their goodbyes. Helen exclaimed: “the name of Isabella Stewart was now so dear.” Belle was good at friendship. She was always game to try things and had a gift for what Helen called “jollification.” She would later copy out part of a quotation by the British writer Walter Savage Landor about friendship between girls, which must have been a reminder of these years: “No friendship is so cordial or so delicious as that of a girl for girl . . .”

• From Chasing Beauty

  A few months later, she wrote to Berenson, from the Gardners’ Beach Hill home, of the relief she felt. “The air from the sea under my window is absolutely delicious,” she enthused, and added that “the continuous persuasion of the sea is irresistible! Do you know that sound that I mean?” But she couldn’t stay away from her gardens at Green Hill, so she traveled back and forth. Her larkspurs, foxgloves, and Canterbury bells, and Japanese irises were “raking in 1st prizes” at the Horticultural Society competitions. Isabella’s guest book gives a record of her whereabouts that summer, from the North Shore to Brookline to Newport, then Nahant, and back again to Brookline. She was giddy about her time in Newport, as expressed in a letter to Berenson: “Such festivities, such smart people, and such an open-air horse show.” From Roque Island, in early August, Belle wrote teasingly to Lapsley—“here it is wild and oh! the things that have gone on—!” She doesn’t detail exactly what she meant by “wild,” but the exclamation marks in her correspondence suggest a torrent of activity. Even she had to admit to Berenson—it was all “a little too much of everything.” *** THROUGHOUT THESE FIRST MONTHS OF 1898, WITH ALL THE FROTHY movement, Isabella was also busy with collecting. “Let us aim awfully high,” she urged Berenson. Doing so took a fortune, of course, but also luck, decisiveness, and steely nerves. She knew her own mind, knew what she wanted. She coveted her own Madonna by Raphael, the great High Renaissance painter whose exquisite powers of observation, conveyed with liquid-clear colors, inspired a reverence in viewers that was almost “semi-sacred,” in Henry James’s telling phrase. She pleaded with Berenson to be on the lookout. He finally had a Raphael to offer at the start of 1898, but it wasn’t a Madonna. Instead, he advised her to buy Raphael’s Tommaso Inghirami, a life-size portrait of the early-sixteenth-century papal scribe and librarian. The portly man sits at his desk, quill in hand and dressed in a vibrant red coat and hat. He looks heavenward, which was Raphael’s way of disguising his wandering right eye. Berenson described the painting with his usual flair, which also carried the tone of salesmanship, claiming this painting was surely “one of Raphael’s two or three best existing portraits.” They both knew that no American collection yet boasted a Raphael. He offered it to her for £15,000, saying that if she turned him down, he would be tempted to buy it himself to resell and “make my fortune.” In other words, she had to hurry up and decide.

• From Chasing Beauty

  BY MID-MAY, THE GARDNERS WERE SETTLED IN PARIS AT THE HOTEL Westminster on rue de la Paix, with the place Vendôme nearby in one direction and the opera in the other. Also conveniently close were the House of Worth and Boucheron, which by 1890 had moved from the Palais-Royal to a prime position along the turnabout that circled the Vendôme. Isabella and Jack went to the theaters and the dog shows, to the opera, and to the storied Cirque with the painter Ralph Curtis to see acrobats do tricks atop fast-moving horses in the center ring. *** THEY LEFT FOR LONDON IN TIME FOR THE DERBY. THEY PREFERRED PARIS to London, generally, but they didn’t want to miss the horse racing. Isabella wore her new wide-brimmed hat, with its enormous plumage, refusing an umbrella when the rain started. “Whoever heard,” she remembered, “of anyone’s carrying an umbrella on the way to the Derby?” The unhappy result—a ruined hat—offended Jack and, in Isabella’s phrase, his “New England conscience,” but not enough to spoil what he admitted was a most enjoyable occasion, especially given that she had placed a bet on an obscure but winning horse. They celebrated, damp but triumphant, with a dinner in Piccadilly. They returned to Paris for another short stay, then went on to visit Antwerp, Dordrecht, The Hague, Cologne, Munich, and Oberammergau, for the once-every-ten-years performance of the five-hour Passion Play, first presented in 1634 in the small village tucked away in the Bavarian Alps. Henry James had just seen the play, writing to Mrs. Jack that he thought it “intensely respectable and intensely German” and way, way too long. She didn’t mind. At Verona, she and Jack toured in the course of a single day the town’s amphitheater, Juliet’s tomb, the Giusti Garden, and, for good measure, the “most important churches.” She did not flag in stamina. Jack’s brother George described Isabella’s greediness for experience, writing to his son Georgy after a stretch of activity when they were all together in London: “Aunty Belle is a tremendously energetic person as regards sight-seeing, amusements, excursions, so that we have been pretty steadily on the go ever since she came, leaving no time for letter writing or lazily sauntering about the streets looking in the shop windows.” There was something hectic about it all, as if she feared missing something—and if she did, she would somehow be diminished. Or is it that stopping somehow meant quitting, and that was something she’d never do.

• From Chasing Beauty

  SeventeenThe Concert1892By the end of 1891, “a musical meteor,” in the words of the young musician Clayton Johns, arrived in Boston “in the person of Paderewski.” Isabella was still in mourning for her father and at a remove from the din of the social season. Even so, the arrival of the charismatic pianist and composer Ignacy Jan Paderewski could not be missed—she was determined to see him perform somehow. Preternaturally talented, dynamic, with an enormous shock of hair, Paderewski had become a highly paid international star after a celebrated Paris debut in 1888, at the age of twenty-seven. He’d studied first in Warsaw at the city’s famed music academy, where Chopin had trained, then with the foremost piano teacher in Vienna, Theodor Leschetizky. A reporter at one concert noted how the handsome young man filled the air with “flying hands and hair.” Now he was on the second of his American tours, which had brought him to New York, where he played a remarkable range of composers, including Scarlatti, Schubert, Haydn, Beethoven, Liszt, Saint-Saëns, Chopin, and Mendelssohn at brand-new Carnegie Hall. When he performed at William Merritt Chase’s Tenth Street studio, the place where Carmencita had danced, he’d had an unpleasant experience. The air was close, with many people crowding around him, and he had no elbow room for his style of play. He vowed to avoid this kind of event when he got to Boston. Isabella would not be dissuaded: she asked him to play for her alone in her spacious music room at 152 Beacon Street and offered to pay him $1,000 for a single performance. He agreed to her terms. [image file=image_rsrc79G.jpg] Ignacy Jan Paderewski, London Stereoscopic Company, 1892, albumen print on card. The other part of her plan would be told by Clayton Johns in his memoirs. “Mrs. Gardner, out of the kindness of her heart, smuggled me into an adjoining room, where I sat and listened behind the tapestries” as Paderewski played Schumann’s Fantasia, op. 17, and selections by Chopin. An intimate dinner followed the private concert. Then, to quiet the gossip that Isabella had been showing off by such an extravagance (which wasn’t entirely false), Jack Gardner paid Paderewski another $1,000 to play for a large audience of fans and Boston-based musicians at the old Music Hall Building on Winter Street. The Boston Symphony Orchestra’s Henry Higginson attended with his wife, Ida, and thanked Isabella afterward, noting how her “charming idea” of arranging a performance by Paderewski had been made “better still” by inviting “all these guests.” “As for the music,” he added, “it was wonderful . . .” ***

• From Chasing Beauty

  Henry James gives a verbal picture of Isabella in Venice, how she liked to sit in a comfortable sea-green-colored chair in one of the palazzo’s rooms, with her hair “not quite ‘up’—neither up nor down,” wrapped in her “gauze dressing-gown.” They walked along the canals together. Once, she brought him to the antiques dealer Antonio Carrer, who had a workshop near the Rialto Bridge. Carrer was restoring a set of gilded eighteenth-century chairs, first made for the Borghese Palace, which Isabella had bought at auction in Rome with the help of their mutual friend Ralph Curtis. James relayed the scene to Ralph’s mother, Ariana Curtis: “the little lady is of an energy. She showed me yesterday, at Carrer’s, her seven glorious chairs (the loveliest I ever saw); but they are not a symbol of her attitude—she never sits down.” James exaggerated for effect, of course. But he got right the spirit of her to-ing and fro-ing. She was indefatigable. She loved to go on sprees. “Went to shops; saw sights” became a common refrain in Jack’s diary. On a single day in late July, she and Jack scoured the antique shops of Venice: the atelier of the extraordinary wood-carver Valentino Besarel; the antiques dealer Moisè Dalla Torre; the Babli Palace workshop of Moses Michelangelo Guggenheim. The dealers Antonio Carrer and A. Clerle, in the Palazzo Avogadro, were also on the Gardners’ itinerary. James, who’d begun addressing his friend playfully as Donna Isabella (or Isabel), found all this dizzy acquisition seductive. From his next continental hideaway, in Switzerland, he wrote: “I want to know everything you have bought these last days—even for yourself.” *** THE TRAVEL CONTINUED: TO SAINT MORITZ, INNSBRUCK, WEIMAR, Dresden, then back to Venice for two months, then to “raw and cold” Paris for two weeks and back again to Venice for another month. When the Gardners finally returned to Paris, on Saturday, December 3, they settled into their usual accommodations at the fashionable Hotel Westminster on rue de la Paix, between the Place Vendôme and the opera. The next day they went to services at L’Oratoire du Louvre, the Protestant church Isabella had attended more than thirty years before. She hadn’t been in Paris for the holiday season since that time, when both she and Jack as teenagers were in the city with their respective families. Paris was flourishing. From the fiery disaster of the 1871 siege of Paris, at end of the Franco-Prussian War, the city had risen to be the epicenter of every form of culture—theater, literature, music, art, fashion, and food. With an optimism in the might of Europe in the realms of diplomacy and innovation and science, the French would look back at this era—nostalgically—as the belle époque, the “beautiful time.” The Gardners were having their own beautiful time. At fifty-two and fifty-five years of age, they were both healthy, though Jack was slowing down compared to his wife, who rarely did.

• From Chasing Beauty

  A WOMAN IN YELLOW AND WHITE, PEARLS AT HER THROAT AND EAR, WITH her hair drawn up, sits in profile, playing a clavichord at the back of the room. Its lid is raised and reflects a soft-colored landscape outside an unseen window at the left of the composition, with trees and clouded blue skies, much like the painting on the white wall directly above her. To her right sits a man in a brown coat, his back to us and his chair turned to the window outside the frame of Vermeer’s painting. Its light illuminates the woman’s yellow sleeve and the red rectangle that forms the back of the man’s chair. This way of lighting an image was Vermeer’s signature. A young girl stands to the man’s right, holding a paper in her left hand; her right hand makes a subtle gesture, lending expression to her song. She too is wearing pearls. Viewers’ eyes are guided inward by the geometric pattern of the black-and-white flooring, on which, in the painting’s foreground, lies a large stringed instrument. On a table covered with an oriental rug a lute is positioned. The harmony of color, composition, and form is exact. The viewer has just enough information to imagine a possible narrative—maybe a teacher with his students or a father with his daughters—but not so much as to know for sure. *** ISABELLA ARRANGED WITH HER REGULAR PARIS AGENT, FERNAND ROBERT, a scheme whereby she, a woman, could participate in the Drouot auction discreetly. That day she sat directly outside the salesroom, in a spot where he could see her. To signal interest in an object, she was to hold her white handkerchief over her mouth, but pull it away when she wanted out of the bid. The bidding was brisk. There was a lot to sell that day. Did her heart race a little as the price went up and up? Did she have a limit in mind, one she didn’t want to exceed? She got her painting for 29,000 francs ($6,000), outmaneuvering far more experienced bidders. Agents from London’s National Gallery took home a pair of Vermeers: Woman Standing at the Virginal and Woman Seated at the Virginal. The small Goldfinch sold for 5,500 francs. The Gardners ended the day with an evening at the opera, near their hotel, for a performance of Samson and Delilah by Camille Saint-Saëns, one of Isabella’s favorite composers. Sargent and Whistler joined them for the evening to raise a glass and celebrate.

• From Chasing Beauty

  Here and elsewhere in the White City, Black Americans and Indigenous peoples (men as well as women) had been shut out from the planning of the exposition’s scheme of exhibits, which was designed to herald the progress of civilization. There were no Black commissioners on the planning board, despite appeals to Congress for representation. Near the Woman’s Building, the Midway Plaisance hosted a sequence of “ethnological villages,” which displayed scenes from non-white cultures—for instance, forty Egyptians traveled to the fair to set up an elaborate Cairo street scene. Frederick Douglass, in his mid-seventies, attended the exposition not as a representative of his own country but as a commissioner for Haiti’s pavilion. Douglass and Ida B. Wells explained in their pamphlet, bluntly titled The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the World’s Columbian Exposition, that their exclusion revealed not America’s civilization but rather its barbarism. Twenty-eight years after the end of the Civil War, the reason they were shut out, Douglass said, could be answered with a single word: “Slavery.” It’s hard to know whether Isabella took any of this in. She would return to the exposition before its close at the end of October, so she could see everything fully finished. After this second visit she described the fair’s fascinations with such fervor to Ralph Curtis that he wrote in reply: “Your enthusiasm knows no bounds, and you communicate sparks to all . . .” We don’t know what else she expressed about the exposition because, like most of her letters from this time, this one to Ralph Curtis is lost. As she got older, her interests became more expansive, and she grew more curious about people who lived differently than she did. She was a strong supporter of the Society of Saint John Evangelist and their work with the Black community in Boston, both at the mission church and the day camp for children. In her travel albums and diaries she expressed respect for people in non-Western countries, especially for their daily life and religious practices. She would have recognized the Cairo exhibit for what it was—a stage set created as spectacle and entertainment—because she had seen the real place for herself. There is no record of her attitude to what was, and what was not, on display. Boston had remained a hotbed of moral abolition up to and through the Civil War, yet Isabella left no trace of commitment to this cause. If she wasn’t willfully blind to the disregard and ostracism that marred the exposition, neither did she seem to protest it. Her world was full but insular. ***

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  Collins was talking about the Baron de Charlus, a man after his own heart, he said. For almost a year now he had been staying at Le Havre, going through the money that he had accumulated during his bootlegging days. His tastes were simple—food, drink, women and books. And a private bath! That he insisted on. We were still talking about the Baron de Charlus when we arrived at Jimmie’s Bar. It was late in the afternoon and the place was just beginning to fill up. Jimmie was there, his face red as a beet, and beside him was his spouse, a fine buxom Frenchwoman with glittering eyes. We were given a marvelous reception all around. There were Pernods in front of us again, the gramophone was shrieking, people were jabbering away in English and French and Dutch and Norwegian and Spanish, and Jimmie and his wife, both of them looking very brisk and dapper, were slapping and kissing each other heartily and raising their glasses and clinking them—altogether such a bubble and blabber of merriment that you felt like pulling off your clothes and doing a war dance. The women at the bar had gathered around like flies. If we were friends of Collins that meant we were rich. It didn’t matter that we had come in our old clothes; all Anglais dressed like that. I hadn’t a sou in my pocket, which didn’t matter, of course, since I was the guest of honor. Nevertheless I felt somewhat embarrassed with two stunning-looking whores hanging on my arms waiting for me to order something. I decided to take the bull by the horns. You couldn’t tell any more which drinks were on the house and which were to be paid for. I had to be a gentleman , even if I didn’t have a sou in my pocket. Yvette—that was Jimmie’s wife—was extraordinarily gracious and friendly with us. She was preparing a little spread in our honor. It would take a little while yet. We were not to get too drunk—she wanted us to enjoy the meal. The gramophone was going like wild and Fillmore had begun to dance with a beautiful mulatto who had on a tight velvet dress that revealed all her charms. Collins slipped over to my side and whispered a few words about the girl at my side. “The madame will invite her to dinner,” he said, “if you’d like to have her.” She was an ex-whore who owned a beautiful home on the outskirts of the city. The mistress of a sea captain now. He was away and there was nothing to fear. “If she likes you she’ll invite you to stay with her,” he added. That was enough for me. I turned at once to Marcelle and began to flatter the ass off her. We stood at the corner of the bar, pretending to dance, and mauled each other ferociously. Jimmie gave me a big horse-wink and nodded his head approvingly.