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 Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  GREGORY. (Hom. 10. in Ev.) By the word which is heard the spirit is kindled, the chill of dulness departs, the mind becomes awakened with heavenly desire. It rejoices to hear heavenly precepts, and every command in which it is instructed, is as it were adding a faggot to the fire. THEOPHYLACT. Their hearts then were turned either by the fire of our Lord’s words, to which they listened as the truth, or because as He expounded the Scriptures, their hearts wore greatly struck within them, that He who was speaking was the Lord. Therefore were they so rejoiced, that without delay they returned to Jerusalem. And hence what follows, And they rose up the same hour, and returned to Jerusalem. They rose up indeed the same hour, but they arrived after many hours, as they had to travel sixty stades. AUGUSTINE. (de Con. Ev. l. iii. c. 25.) It had been already reported that Jesus had risen by the women, and by Simon Peter, to whom He had appeared. For these two disciples found them talking of these things when they came to Jerusalem; as it follows, And they found the eleven gathered together, and them that were with them, saying, The Lord is risen indeed, and hath appeared to Simon. BEDE. It seems that our Lord appeared to Peter first of all those whom the four Evangelists and the Apostle mention. CHRYSOSTOM. For He did not shew Himself to all at the same time, in order that He might sow the seeds of faith. For he who had first seen and was sure, told it to the rest. Afterwards the word going forth prepared the mind of the hearer for the sight, and therefore He appeared first to him who was of all the most worthy and faithful. For He had need of the most faithful soul to first receive this sight, that it might be least disturbed by the unexpected appearance. And therefore He is first seen by Peter, that he who first confessed Christ should first deserve to see His resurrection, and also because he had denied Him He wished to see him first, to console him, lest he should despair. But after Peter, He appeared to the rest, at one time fewer in number, at another more, which the two disciples attest; for it follows, And they told what things were done by the way, and how he was known of them in breaking of bread. AUGUSTINE. (ut sup.) But with respect to what Mark says, that they told the rest, and they did not believe them, whereas Luke says, that they had already begun to say, The Lord is risen indeed, what must we understand, except that there were some even then who refused to believe this? 24:36–4036. And as they thus spake, Jesus himself stood in the midst of them, and saith unto them, Peace be unto you. 37. But they were terrified and affrighted, and supposed they had seen a spirit.

• From A History of God (1993)

  4 Trinity: The Christian GodIN ABOUT 320 a fierce theological passion had seized the churches of Egypt, Syria and Asia Minor. Sailors and travelers were singing versions of popular ditties that proclaimed that the Father alone was true God, inaccessible and unique, but that the Son was neither coeternal nor uncreated, since he received life and being from the Father. We hear of a bath attendant who harangued the bathers, insisting that the Son came from nothingness, of a money changer who, when asked for the exchange rate, prefaced his reply with a long disquisition on the distinction between the created order and the uncreated God, and of a baker who informed his customer that the Father was greater than the Son. People were discussing these abstruse questions with the same enthusiasm as they discuss football today.1 The controversy had been kindled by Arius, a charismatic and handsome presbyter of Alexandria, who had a soft, impressive voice and a strikingly melancholy face. He had issued a challenge which his bishop, Alexander, found impossible to ignore but even more difficult to rebut: how could Jesus Christ have been God in the same way as God the Father? Arius was not denying the divinity of Christ; indeed, he called Jesus “strong God” and “full God,”2 but he argued that it was blasphemous to think that he was divine by nature: Jesus had specifically said that the Father was greater than he. Alexander and his brilliant young assistant Athanasius immediately realized that this was no mere theological nicety. Arius was asking vital questions about the nature of God. In the meantime, Arius, a skillful propagandist, had set his ideas to music, and soon the laity were debating the issue as passionately as their bishops.

• From American Swing (2008)

  - ALTHEA, HIS WIFE... - ALTHEA, HIS WIFE. ...PULLED HER SHIRT UP. OH, MAN, HOW COULD I FORGET HIS NAME? HE'S A WRITER-- HUGH HEFNER'S FRIEND, HE COMMITTED SUICIDE... JERZY KOSINSKI. MUCH OF THE CAST OF "SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE." WHAT'S HIS NAME? DREYF-- RICHARD DREYFUSS. HE NEVER CAME DOWN WITH A LADY. AGAIN HE WAS INVITED TO STAY. Hanson: DAN PASTORINI WAS HAVING A BIG YEAR WITH THE HOUSTON OILERS. AND THE MEN RECOGNIZE HIM. AND THE MEN STARTED, "IT'S DAN PASTORINI! IT'S DAN PASTORINI!" AND JUST IMMEDIATELY GRABBING THEIR WIVES AND JUST-- YOU KNOW, "FUCK DAN PASTORINI!" Reporter: WHY DID YOU DECIDE IN EARLY 1973 TO GO UNDERGROUND? THERE WAS NO WAY THAT I COULD POSSIBLY GET A FAIR TRIAL. Smith: ABBIE HOFFMAN WAS UNDERGROUND, RUNNING FROM THE FBI, BASICALLY. AND ONE OF THESE TIMES I GOT A PHONE CALL FROM HIM SAYING, "I'M IN TOWN. AND I'VE BEEN READING ALL ABOUT PLATO'S IN YOUR COLUMN IN THE 'VOICE' AND I WANT TO GO TO PLATO'S RETREAT." AND I SAID, "ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR MIND?" ( slurring ) THIS IS WHERE WE'RE WORKING ON THE NEW CONSTITUTION. - ( giggles ) - Smith: AND HE SAID, "NO NO NO, I GOTTA GO. I GOTTA GO. I GOTTA GO THERE. I GOTTA SEE IT. I CAN'T MISS THIS." HE COMES OVER AFTER AWHILE AND HE SAYS, "CAN'T I TELL THEM WHO I AM? I MEAN, THEY-- THEY-- THEY JUST WALK AWAY FROM ME. I THOUGHT YOU SAID EVERYBODY GETS LAID HERE." I SAID, "GO AHEAD, BUT I THINK IT'S REALLY DANGEROUS." ABBIE WAS ONE OF THE FIRST PEOPLE THAT I KNEW THAT COULDN'T GET LAID AT PLATO'S. I PROBABLY WOULDN'T HAVE GONE AS MANY TIMES AS I DID, BUT FRIENDS FROM CALIFORNIA KEPT ASKING ME TO WALK THEM IN. I WAS WONDERING, DO YOU GET A LOT OF CURIOSITY SEEKERS, PEOPLE THAT JUST LIKE TO GO AND WATCH? - Man: YES, VOYEURS, DEFINITELY. - LIKE ME. YES, THERE'S NO PRESSURE, THERE'S NO OBLIGATION AND NO COMMITMENT TO DO ANYTHING AT OUR CLUB. AND I'M POSITIVE IT'S THE SAME WAY AT LARRY'S CLUB. Woman: I COME FOR... SEX, GOOD CONVERSATION, INTELLECT. Michael: THE ONLY RULE, ACTUALLY, IN THE ENTIRE CLUB WAS NO. IF SOMEBODY SAID NO, THAT WAS IT. BUT IF THEY ALLOWED IT, ANYTHING WENT. FEMALES FIRST. THEY SET THE RULE. IF THEY WANT TO BE TOUCHED, THAT'S FINE. THEY DON'T WANT TO BE TOUCHED, THEY'RE NOT GONNA BE TOUCHED. IF SHE WANTS TO WALK AROUND WITH HER TOP OFF... SHE WALKS AROUND WITH HER TOP OFF. THAT WAS IT. I THINK AT PLATO'S IT WAS KIND OF INTERESTING THAT WOMEN WERE REALLY IN A POSITION TO BE ASSERTIVE, TO APPROACH MEN FOR SEX, TO KIND OF TRY OUT A LOT OF THE THINGS THAT WE HAD BEEN ON THE RECEIVING END OF. IT WAS YUMMY. WHY LET THEM HAVE ALL THE PLEASURE?

• From Little Women (1868)

  "I always do take a walk toward evening, and I don't know why I should give it up, just because I happen to meet the Professor on his way out," said Jo to herself, after two or three encounters, for though there were two paths to Meg's whichever one she took she was sure to meet him, either going or returning. He was always walking rapidly, and never seemed to see her until quite close, when he would look as if his short-sighted eyes had failed to recognize the approaching lady till that moment. Then, if she was going to Meg's he always had something for the babies. If her face was turned homeward, he had merely strolled down to see the river, and was just returning, unless they were tired of his frequent calls. Under the circumstances, what could Jo do but greet him civilly, and invite him in? If she was tired of his visits, she concealed her weariness with perfect skill, and took care that there should be coffee for supper, "as Friedrich—I mean Mr. Bhaer—doesn't like tea." By the second week, everyone knew perfectly well what was going on, yet everyone tried to look as if they were stone-blind to the changes in Jo's face. They never asked why she sang about her work, did up her hair three times a day, and got so blooming with her evening exercise. And no one seemed to have the slightest suspicion that Professor Bhaer, while talking philosophy with the father, was giving the daughter lessons in love. Jo couldn't even lose her heart in a decorous manner, but sternly tried to quench her feelings, and failing to do so, led a somewhat agitated life. She was mortally afraid of being laughed at for surrendering, after her many and vehement declarations of independence. Laurie was her especial dread, but thanks to the new manager, he behaved with praiseworthy propriety, never called Mr. Bhaer 'a capital old fellow' in public, never alluded, in the remotest manner, to Jo's improved appearance, or expressed the least surprise at seeing the Professor's hat on the Marches' table nearly every evening. But he exulted in private and longed for the time to come when he could give Jo a piece of plate, with a bear and a ragged staff on it as an appropriate coat of arms. For a fortnight, the Professor came and went with lover-like regularity. Then he stayed away for three whole days, and made no sign, a proceeding which caused everybody to look sober, and Jo to become pensive, at first, and then—alas for romance—very cross. "Disgusted, I dare say, and gone home as suddenly as he came. It's nothing to me, of course, but I should think he would have come and bid us goodbye like a gentleman," she said to herself, with a despairing look at the gate, as she put on her things for the customary walk one dull afternoon. "You'd better take the little umbrella, dear.

• From American Swing (2008)

  ♪ AT PLATO'S RETREAT ♪ ♪ YOU CAN MAKE YOUR DREAMS COME TRUE ♪ ♪ FULFILL YOUR WILDEST FANTASIES ♪ ♪ WE'VE GOT THEM ALL FOR YOU... ♪ SHE WAS NUTS, ABSOLUTELY WILD. SHE GOES, "OOOH, PUSSY LOVES COCK. PUSSY LOVES COCK." UNBELIEVABLE-- A MANIAC. I SAID, "THIS IS MY KIND OF PLACE." ♪ THE PLEASURE AND THE FUN ♪ ♪ WILL KEEP YOU FEELING YOUNG ♪ ♪ IT'S FOR YOU ♪ ♪ IT'S FOR YOU... ♪ I WAS A YOUNG GOOD-LOOKING KID, I GUESS, AND SEVERAL GIRLS CAME ON TO ME AND THEIR BOYFRIENDS WEREN'T THAT ATTRACTIVE. AND IF YOU HAD TO GO WITH ONE-- YOU HAD TO TRADE OFF. ( laughs ) AND SHE YELLED AT ME, SHE SCREAMED AT ME, AND I SAID, "JUST DO IT! JUST DO IT." YOU KNOW? AND... WE DIDN'T TALK MUCH AFTER THAT. ♪ THE PLEASURE AND THE FUN ♪ ♪ WILL KEEP YOU FEELING YOUNG ♪ ♪ IT'S FOR YOU ♪ ♪ IT'S FOR YOU... ♪ HE WAS A WONDERFUL LOVER. AND I SAID TO MYSELF, "PEOPLE WHO COME TO PLATO'S RETREAT MUST BE PRETTY GOOD LOVERS," BECAUSE THIS MAN HAD BEEN. UM... ♪ IT'S FOR YOU! ♪ I WANTED TO TELL THE PEOPLE I GREW UP WITH, LIKE, NO, I CAME FROM A NEIGHBORHOOD IN QUEENS, NEW YORK. BUT YOU COULDN'T TELL-- YOU COULDN'T TALK ABOUT THAT KIND OF THING WITH GUYS FROM THE NEIGHBORHOOD BECAUSE THEY WOULDN'T BELIEVE YOU. TO BE HONEST, IT WAS GOING OUT ON AN EDGE FOR ME. IT WAS A VERY EDGY THING TO DO TO... YOU KNOW, SPEND AN EVENING IN PLATO'S RETREAT. THERE WAS THIS ATTRACTIVE MULATTO WOMAN GOING DOWN ON HER MAN WITH HER ASS UP IN THE AIR. I SAT DOWN ON THE MATTRESS NEXT TO HER AND STARTED STROKING HER. NO OPPOSITION, SO I-- I GUESS, YOU KNOW, STUCK MY COCK IN HER PUSSY AND SCREWED HER. AND SHE DIDN'T EVEN LOOK BACK. SHE WAS TOO BUSY BLOWING HER BOYFRIEND. I HOPE I'M NOT BEING TOO VULGAR. THE MINISTER AND I... DID HOOK UP SOMETIME DURING THAT EVENING. BUT I DON'T REMEMBER WHEN. - WHICH IS TELLING. - Larry: PHIL? YEAH-- YES, LARRY LEVENSON, PLATO'S RETREAT. I CAN SPEAK FOR PLATO'S AND WE GET ABOUT 50% NEW COUPLES EVERY NIGHT. WE HAVE DISCO DANCING-- IN FACT WE HAVE A SONG ABOUT PLATO'S RETREAT THAT'S NUMBER SIX IN THE COUNTRY RIGHT NOW. Abigail: I MET PEOPLE YEARS LATER WHO SAID THINGS LIKE, "OH, I WENT IN THERE. I WENT TO PLATO'S." I WENT TO PLATO'S, YOU KNOW? IT BECAME PART OF THE MEMOIR. YOU KNOW? THAT WAS EXCITING IN ITSELF. WE HAD JUDGES, LAWYERS, POLICE-- - SENATORS. - SENATORS. Ferrato: ROBIN LEACH WHO WAS... HE WAS THERE JUST TO LOOK. STUDENTS MET THEIR PROFESSORS, GUYS MET THEIR EX-WIVES, FUTURE WIVES. SAMMY DAVIS, JR. ON THE DANCE FLOOR AT PLATO'S RETREAT, IT WAS A TREAT. THEY'D TELL ME THIS GUY WAS A BIG STAR-- FRANK SINATRA'S FRIEND, YOU KNOW.

• From Saint Augustine (Penguin Lives) (1999)

  Archaeological finds show that there was a flourishing paganism in Madauros—the town had profited from the reign of the neopagan emperor Julian, whose life ended just three years before Augustine went there (Lepelley 1.98–101, 2.128–29). With the exception of Julian’s brief reign (361–363), the empire had been formally Christian since Constantine’s decree of toleration in 313. But pagan offices and titles survived—Augustine’s friend and patron in Thagaste, Romanian, held the pagan title of priest (flamen). Education for all those who aspired to influence was still in the pagan classics, a situation later deplored by Augustine but accepted without question by his parents. The result was a curious mixture of religious sensibilities. As historian Arnoldo Momigliano put it: “Adam and Eve and what followed [in the Bible] had in some way to be presented in a world populated by Deucalion, Cadmus, Romulus, and Alexander the Great.” For many, this religio-mythical mixture never did get sorted out. When Augustine was bishop he had to rebuke members of his congregation who could say: “Just because I frequent idols and get advice from visionaries and fortune tellers, that does not mean I have left the church—I am a Catholic!” (P 88.2.14). It is against such confusion that we must read Augustine’s harsh criticism of his teachers and his parents for bringing him into the pagan system of myths and poetry during his boyhood. He received them eagerly: “My ears were inflamed for pagan myths, and the more they were scratched the more they itched” (T 1.16). He was assigned such inflammatory tales, not only to read but to enact—he had to impersonate Juno in a public declamation of his own composition. Though he was told the situation was fictitious, he was supposed to make the goddess’s passions as realistic as possible. It was all too real for him. He loved Virgil, and wrote of him in The City of God (1.3): It is hard to aerate minds brimmed with him in impressionable years, as Horace says: A cask’s first wine, into it fit, Long afterwards will breathe of it. He suffered with Dido, his fellow African, when she was deserted by Aeneas—as Augustine was abandoned by the parents who sent him off to Madauros. He could direct Dido’s call for vengeance (Aeneid 4.625) to the teachers who beat him for not learning Greek: “Rise from my ashes some avenging Wrath.” The adolescent Augustine entered so ardently into the mythical system of Virgil that he convinced at least one sophisticated pagan in Madauros that he, too, was a pagan. This older man, an intimate of Augustine’s during his sojourn in Madauros, wrote to Augustine after the latter’s conversion, noting that he now paid homage to mumbo-jumbo Christian martyrs like Miggin and Namphano.

• From Saint Augustine (Penguin Lives) (1999)

  Book 3 of The Testimony tells us nothing of Augustine’s intellectual development during his first two years in Carthage. But then, when he was nineteen, he came across Cicero’s dialogue Hortensius (now lost) in the course of his rhetorical studies, and what follows is presented in a neat scheme: converted to “philosophy” by Cicero, Augustine goes to the Christian Scriptures for wisdom but is repelled by their crudity, so he explores the philosophy offered by Manicheism. This makes retrospective sense as Augustine arranges the three moral philosophies available to him at the time: pagan rationalism, Christian “superstition,” Manichean mysticism. But he did not go seeking for Manichean doctrines from scratch. Later passages make it clear that he had come to know a very attractive group of young Manicheans from early in his stay at Carthage (perhaps when using the introductions of Romanian to influential people). These Manicheans, intellectual but fun-loving, exercised a counterattraction, more humane and learned, to the rakish glamour of the Subversives. Here is Augustine’s description of his graduate-school fellows: Their other qualities [other than their doctrine] more compelled my heart—conversation and laughter and mutual deferrings; shared readings of sweetly-phrased books, facetiousness alternating with things serious; heated arguing (as if with oneself), to spice our general agreement with dissent; teaching and being taught by turns; the sadness at anyone’s absence, and the joy of return. Reciprocated love uses such semaphorings—a smile, a glance, a thousand winning acts—to fuse separate sparks into a single glow, no longer many souls, but one. (T 4.17) This jeunesse dorée is described with all the intoxicated warmth of Evelyn Waugh’s Oxford memories. No other aspect of Augustine’s heretical past is recalled with so little censure—and no wonder. Properly Christianized, that Carthaginian circle would become the model for Augustine’s monastic ideal—a community of friends engaged in mutual intellectual enrichment. Though Augustine knew at least some of these people before he became a Manichean himself, one thing he would not have acquired from them—any sense of asceticism. Although Manicheism, like most late-antique systems of thought, made detachment from the body a condition of philosophical enlightenment, only the Elect embraced the full rigor of the teaching. “Hearers,” like Augustine’s friends, served the Elect without sharing their full vocation to otherworldly enlightenment. They resembled Christians who put off baptism.

• From Saint Augustine (Penguin Lives) (1999)

  It was the siren song of asceticism that pierced Augustine’s soul when he read Hortensius: “I was elevated by that language, I was enkindled, I was aflame” (T 3.8). Cicero’s dialogue, it is clear from the fragments preserved by Augustine and others, was a motivational exercise (protrepticon) urging the reader to pursue wisdom by renunciation of ambition and pleasure—and even of rhetoric (Grilli 24–25). Augustine would later quote from it the grim comparison of the soul’s manacling to its body with the Etruscan pirates’ torture of prisoners by strapping a dead corpse to them, buckled face to face (Grilli 52). The call to tame one’s body as one would a wild horse had great appeal to Augustine—in theory. It was from this, his nineteenth year, that Augustine began aspiring to chastity—but not yet. Cicero’s dialogue embodied a paradox that Augustine would later live out himself, of the great rhetorician rhetorically dismissing rhetoric. Not the least part of its appeal to Augustine was no doubt the dialogue form. Unable to read Plato’s more sinewy Socratic dialogues, Augustine loved Cicero’s urbane tone, the high-minded exchange of views between interlocutors (exemplified in all Cicero’s extant dialogues). Augustine’s Manichean friends were, in that respect at least, Ciceronians. All Augustine’s own earlier works would be dialogues, reflections of his view that all thought is an effort best pursued with others. Even when pastoral pressures made him give up the more leisurely dialogue form, there was a contrapuntal quality to his exchanges with a congregation in sermons, or his exchanges with God in prayer forms like The Testimony. Given this immersion in the sophisticated conversation of Cicero, it is not surprising that Augustine was offended by the brutal directness of the Jewish Scriptures he turned to when impelled to seek wisdom by Hortensius. There was no dialoguing with Yahveh. He did not explain his demands to Job or Isaac. He was as imperious and punitive as Augustine’s own father. It is usually assumed that Augustine missed the verbal felicity of Ciceronian style in the African Latin of the translated Bible. What he actually says is that the scriptural approach (modus) fell below Cicero’s seriousness (dignitas, T 3.9). The long passage that follows, rehearsing Manichean criticisms of the Bible, shows that it was the “childish” stories of the Old Testament that seemed unworthy of a classical seeker after lofty doctrine (T 3.13–18).

• From Saint Augustine (Penguin Lives) (1999)

  Manicheism, by contrast, offered a rational cosmology and a higher knowledge, preached by its martyr-founder, Mani. The sect did not suffer from the disadvantage Augustine felt in Cicero—an ignorance of Christ’s name, which still had some obscure hold on Augustine from his childhood. Manicheism was a Christian heresy (B and S 94–118). It treated Christ as the second person of its trinity—he was the Light, communicating the Father to those below. The third person was Mani himself, dispatched into the world by the Light. Manicheans believed that they contained exiled God-particles in them that had to be wrestled free from an enveloping and caliginous power of evil. This element of psychodrama fit Augustine’s sense of his own internal contradictions. Manicheism gave Augustine categories for explaining himself to himself—much as Freud’s hypostatized triad of superego, ego, and id served as a model for self-explanation to later generations. Manicheism gave Augustine his first experimental tools for psychological self-examination. Though Augustine dates his “conversion” to Manicheism after his nineteenth year and the reading of Hortensius, and says he stayed with the sect for nine years, there is reason to suppose he omits a penumbra of engagement at the beginning as well as at the end. By the time Monnica came to stay with him in Carthage, he was already a Manichean, and it is hard to imagine that she had waited very long to see her grandson. Patrick had died in 371, Augustine’s first year in Carthage. Monnica might have visited even before then, but her move to stay was delayed by a scruple about living under the same roof with a heretic (O’Donnell 2.198–99). It is significant that she does not have the same problem about living with Una. She consulted a bishop about her problem. It seems more likely that she returned to Thagaste, where her own bishop knew both her and her son—and only then moved in with Augustine in his establishment at Carthage.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  of this diversity, and thus he can be presented as a Hellenist or a rabbi, a mystic or a chiliast, even as a gnostic. He was well-equipped to be the apostle of universalism, but behind the Janus-face and the varying tactics of the professional evangelist there was a terrific consistency of inner doctrine and purpose. Indeed, when he arrived at the Jerusalem Council in AD 49 to present his case for complete freedom of action for his gentile mission, his teaching was assuming its mature form. It was based not merely on direct communication from God but illuminating experience in the field. And Paul and his companion could and did point vociferously to the success of their presentation. He had found a Church which believed in baptism, had a Last Supper rite, and a belief that Jesus’s death and resurrection was a fulfilment of prophecy; but it was also inclined to hold that circumcision was linked to salvation and that a great deal of the Mosaic law was still valid – perhaps all of it. This was not a programme for gentile converts, even though it raised no difficulties for diaspora Jews. Gentiles regarded circumcision as distasteful; it was associated in their minds with the objectionable features of a nation Tacitus called ‘enemies of the human race’. More important, however, was that Paul found he could not explain the nature of Jesus’s doctrine without using concepts and terms comprehensible to those nurtured in the Graeco-Roman world. Jesus foresaw his passion but had not explained it. Paul had to explain it, to a Greek-speaking, Greek-thinking audience. The act of salvation had to be wider than the mere messianism of the Jews, which sounded to Greeks like local politics, and bounded in time as well as geography. What was Judea to them? Paul found it hard to explain why Jesus was a Jew, let alone why he had to be a Jew. Thus the circumstances which led up to his crucifixion were irrelevant, and he omits them. The historical Jesus he simply identified with the pre-existent son of God, and he interprets the crucifixion as a divine action with salvationist intent, and of cosmic significance. And of course, the more Paul preached along these lines, the more clear it became to him that his Hellenized gospel was closer to the truth as he understood it than the restriction imposed by the narrowing vision of Jewish Christianity – if, indeed, it could be called Christianity at all. The Hellenic world could accept Jesus as a deity but Judaism placed a gulf of absolute difference between God and man. And there was nothing in Jewish literature which suggested the idea of an incarnated saviour of mankind who redeemed by virtue of his own sacrificial death. Paul’s gospel, as it evolved, could be seen to be alien to traditional Jewish thinking

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

  Ryan said nothing at the time, but he was shocked. “How was I supposed to know she felt that way? She always looked happy enough to me. I thought she had what she wanted. I thought I was the only one feeling restless.” Now, he was divided. On one hand he was angry that she hadn’t lived up to his expectations; on the other, he was anxious about what her polemic said about him. “In my mind, she’s a rock, I’m the squirmy one. I’ve had to work hard at being who I thought she wanted me to be, creating this life together. I felt put down. If she feels trapped, mired in drudgery, what does that make me?” “Do you need her to acknowledge your hard work?” I asked. “I guess so. Somehow her doubts diminished the value of my efforts. But then, this weird thing happened.” He paused before speaking again. “I started to like it.” “Explain,” I said. “It’s like I did a complete 180. I couldn’t interrupt her, which I probably would have done if we’d been alone—not that she would ever say this stuff to me, anyway. Besides, I was intrigued. She felt just like I did; she was saying the very same things I didn’t dare say. She wanted more. She was hungry, too. She missed her freedom. She kept becoming more interesting to me, more foreign. The wine really loosened her tongue.” “What else did she say?” I, too, was curious. The actor in him couldn’t resist playing her part. “‘ I feel like we’re just stuck together,’” he said, again imitating her voice. “‘Sometimes I fantasize about other lives, other men. Not any one man in particular—I just imagine a clean slate, unencumbered, no history, no problems. Someone I could be different with. I get so resentful that I am stuck in this house, in this family, inside my body. All I want to say is leave me alone, don’t bother me.’” Ryan shared with me the unexpected denouement of the evening. “I started out shocked and then defensive and then angry. But, weirdly, the more she was going on and on, the more I wanted her. She was on fire. At first I thought, oh, just quit the diatribe; but then I was captivated by her, I identified with her, and in a strange way I felt closer to her and more turned on than I had in a long time. My fascination with Barbara vanished. And I knew that if I’d married Barbara I’d be longing for Christine.” “And you didn’t have to work for it,” I say. “I couldn’t have sent you home with an assignment that would have had this kind of result.” I explain to him that his renewed desire came from her reassertion of her separateness and her dreams. When she voiced her unrequited longings, she gave Ryan permission to unleash his.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  I became the most appalling falconry bore. On wet afternoons after school my mum’d be writing up news stories for the local paper – court reports, local fêtes, planning committees – fingers hammering away on her typewriter in the dining room. There’d be a pack of Benson & Hedges on the table, a cup of tea, a shorthand notebook, and a daughter standing next to her reeling off imperfectly remembered sentences from nineteenth-century falconry books. It seemed crucial to explain to my mother that while dog leather was the best leather for hawk-leashes, it was almost impossible to get these days. That the problem with merlins was that they’re prone to carry their quarry; and also did she know that saker falcons, hailing from desert areas, are unreliable performers in English climatic conditions? Lining up another yellow piece of copy paper, fiddling with the carbons so they didn’t slip, she’d nod and agree, drag on her cigarette, and tell me how interesting it all was in tones that avoided dismissiveness with extraordinary facility. Soon I was an expert on falconry the way the carpet salesman who used to come into the bookshop where I once worked was an expert on the Greco-Persian Wars. Shy, crumpled, middle-aged, and carrying with him the air of some unspoken defeat, he rubbed his face anxiously when he ordered books at the till. He wouldn’t have lasted long, I think, on a battlefield. But he knew everything about the wars, knew each battle intimately, knew exactly where the detachments of Phocian troops were stationed on high mountain paths. I knew falconry like this. When I got my first hawk, years later, I was astounded by the reality of the thing. I was the carpet salesman at the battle of Thermopylae. It is summer 1979 and I am an eight-year-old girl in a bookshop. I’m standing under a skylight with a paperback in my hand and I am extremely puzzled. What is an eighteenth-century story of seduction? I had no idea. I read the words on the back cover again: The Goshawk is the story of a concerted duel between Mr White and a great beautiful hawk during the training of the latter – the record of an intense clash of wills in which the pride and endurance of the wild raptor are worn down and broken by the almost insane willpower of the schoolmaster falconer. It is comic; it is tragic; it is all absorbing. It is strangely like some of the eighteenth-century stories of seduction.

• From Henry Miller on Writing (1964)

  Never daunted by the ifs and buts, I would regard such a letter as a bona fide pledge, a commission. Good! So I was at liberty, let us say, to write something about Coney Island in winter. If they liked it it would appear in print, my name would be signed to it, and I could show it to my friends, carry it about with me, put it under my pillow at night, read it surreptitiously, over and over, because the first time you see yourself in print you’re beside yourself, you’ve at last proved to the world that you really are a writer, and you must prove it to the world, at least once in your life, or you will go mad from believing it all by yourself. And so to Coney Island on a wintry day. Alone, of course. It wouldn’t do to have one’s reflections and observations diverted by a trivial-minded friend. A new pad in my pocket and a sharp pencil. It’s a long, dreary ride to Coney Island in midwinter. Only convalescents and invalids, or demented ones, seem to be trekking there. I feel as though I were slightly mad myself. Who wants to hear about a Coney Island which is all boarded up? I must have put this theme down in a moment of exaltation, believing that nothing could be more inspiring than a picture of desolation. Desolate is hardly the word for it. As I walk along the boardwalk, the icy wind whistling through my breeches, everything closed tight, it dawns on me that I couldn’t possibly have chosen a more difficult subject to write about. There is absolutely nothing to take note of, unless it be the silence. I see it better through Ulrich’s eyes than my own. An illustrator might have a good time of it here, what with the bleak, crazy, tumbling edifices, the snarling piles and planks, the still, empty Ferris wheel, the noiseless roller coasters, rusting under a feeble sun. Just to assure myself that I am on the job, I make a few notes about the crazy look of the razzle-dazzle, the yawning mouth of George C. Tilyou, and so forth…. A hot frankfurter and a cup of steaming hot coffee would do me good, I think. I find a little booth open on a side street off the boardwalk. There is a shooting gallery open a few doors away. Not a customer in sight: the owner is shooting at the clay pigeons himself, for practice, no doubt. A drunken sailor comes lurching along; a few feet away from me he doubles up and lets go. (No need to take note of this.) I go down to the beach and watch the sea gulls. I’m looking at the sea gulls and thinking about Russia. A picture of Tolstoy seated at a bench mending shoes obsesses me.

• From Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990)

  Title : Gender Trouble (Routledge Classics) Author: Butler, Judith Description: One of the most talked-about scholarly works of the past fifty years, Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble is as celebrated as it is controversial. Arguing that traditional feminism is wrong to look to a natural, 'essential' notion of the female, or indeed of sex or gender, Butler starts by questioning the category 'woman' and continues in this vein with examinations of 'the masculine' and 'the feminine'. Best known however, but also most often misinterpreted, is Butler's concept of gender as a reiterated social performance rather than the expression of a prior reality. Thrilling and provocative, few other academic works have roused passions to the same extent. Gender Trouble‘Gender Trouble is a classic in the best sense: rereading this book, as well as reading it for the first time, reshapes the categories through which we experience and perform our lives and bodies. To be troubled in this way is an intellectual pleasure and a political necessity. Butler’s lucid, witty and very smart classic is more than critique of gender-making apparatuses; it is generative of possibilities for promising monsters who may yet reconfigure what can count as natural.’ Donna Haraway ‘The most authoritative attack to date on the “naturalness” of gender. This is a brilliant and innovative book.’ Sandra Lee Bartky ‘Indispensable for feminist theory.’ Hypatia ‘At times brilliant, always groundbreaking, Gender Trouble is bound to make some trouble of its own.’ Outweek ‘A tremendously sophisticated and well-argued book, a very exciting read.’ Women and Politics [image file=image_rsrc22N.jpg] Routledge Classics contains the very best of Routledge publishing over the past century or so, books that have, by popular consent, become established as classics in their field. Drawing on a fantastic heritage of innovative writing published by Routledge and its associated imprints, this series makes available in attractive, affordable form some of the most important works of modern times. For a complete list of titles visit www.routledge.com/classics Judith Butler Gender TroubleFeminism and the Subversion of Identity With an introduction by the author [image "Logo: Published by Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group, London and New York. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa business." file=image_rsrc22P.jpg] First published 1990 by Routledge Second edition published 1990 by Routledge First published in Routledge Classics 2006 by Routledge 270 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 Simultaneously published in the UK by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Reprinted 2007, 2008 (twice), 2010 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 1990, 1999, 2006 Routledge, 2007 Gender Trouble was originally published in the Routledge book series Thinking Gender, edited by Lind J. Nicholson. Typeset in Joanna by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ International Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall

• From The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us (2017)

  One day in 2007, the Yale paleontology professor Derek Briggs and his graduate student Jakob Vinther walked into my office in New Haven. They wanted to show me a picture that Jakob had taken—a scanning electron microscope image of a feather at twenty thousand times magnification. The grayscale image showed dozens of tiny, sausage-shaped objects lying roughly parallel to one another. “What do these look like to you?” they asked. “Those look like melanosomes,” I responded. “I told you so!” Jakob exclaimed triumphantly to Derek. Apparently, something important was at stake here. Melanosomes are the microscopic packages of melanin pigments that give feathers their black, gray, or brown coloration. What Jakob and Derek hadn’t told me at first was that the electron microscope image was taken from the feather of a fossil bird from the Early Eocene Fur Formation in Denmark. If these were melanosomes, they were about fifty-five million years old. The melanin pigments in bird feathers are synthesized by special melanin-producing pigment cells and packed into tiny membrane-bound organelles, which are called melanosomes. Similar to the pigmentation of human hair, in birds the melanin pigment cells transfer completed melanosomes into individual feather cells during feather development. As the feather cells mature, the melanosomes are walled into the hard beta-keratin protein of the feather to produce the color of the mature feather. Melanins are ancient pigments and are produced by almost all animals. Melanins are also diverse in chemical structure. For example, the plumage colors of a black American Crow (Corvus brachyrhynchos) and the color of human black hair are made by eumelanin molecules. The rufous brown plumage color of a Wood Thrush (Hylocichla mustelina) and the color of human red hair are made by the distinctive molecule pheomelanin. Paleontologists had been examining fossil feathers with scanning electronic microscopes since the early 1980s. They had observed these cylindrical objects and even confirmed that they were made of carbon-containing organic molecules unlike the surrounding rock. However, paleontologists are mostly bone people, and they have not traditionally thought a lot about cell biology. So, based on the shape and size of these objects, they concluded that these structures were fossil bacteria that had consumed the feather during its fossilization. Because paleontologists are keenly interested in the specific mechanisms by which different fossils are preserved, this was treated like an important discovery. However, the hypothesis never made a lot of sense. For example, why were bacteria more commonly preserved while eating the dry, nearly indigestible feathers and never found consuming all the juicy, appetizing bits of the decomposing body? In any case, the bacterial hypothesis became an accepted fact in paleontology. Jakob’s discovery presented an exciting opportunity to challenge this dogma.

• From The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us (2017)

  To test whether these microscopic fossil structures were indeed bacteria or melanosomes, we needed an indisputable example of a fossil feather with a melanin pigment pattern preserved. Luckily, Derek Briggs has an encyclopedic knowledge of extraordinarily well-preserved fossils from the museums of the world, and he remembered a gorgeous horizontally striped fossil feather from the Crato Formation of Brazil, approximately 108 million years old, in the geology museum of the University of Leicester. The fossil preserved amazing details of feather structure, including the finest filaments of the feather barbules. Furthermore, the striped color pattern on the feather exhibited distinct characteristics of the natural pigment patterns of feathers and could not be confused with fossil bacteria. With an electron microscope, we confirmed that the black stripes on the feather contained abundant tiny “sausages” a few microns long and about one hundred to two hundred nanometers wide, which strongly resemble the eumelanosomes from the feathers of living birds. In contrast, the white stripes on the fossil feather were entirely devoid of any such structures at all. Clearly, the best explanation is that the microscopic structures are preserved melanosomes from the original feather itself. Somehow, under the right conditions, melanosomes fossilize beautifully and can endure for hundreds of millions of years, preserving aspects of the original color pattern of these ancient animals. [image "Melanin pigmentation in fossil and living bird feathers. (a) A fossil feather from the Crato Formation, Early Cretaceous, Brazil, showing black and light bands. (b) Dark bands reveal melanosomes. (c) Light areas reveal only the rock matrix. (d) Melanosomes from the feather of a modern Red-winged Blackbird ( Agelaius phoeniceus ) are nearly identical in form to those preserved in the fossil. Scale bars: (a) 3 mm, insert 1 mm; (b) 1 µm; (c) 10 µm; (d) 1 µm. From Vinther et al. (2008)." file=image_rsrc3NA.jpg] Melanin pigmentation in fossil and living bird feathers. (a) A fossil feather from the Crato Formation, Early Cretaceous, Brazil, showing black and light bands. (b) Dark bands reveal melanosomes. (c) Light areas reveal only the rock matrix. (d) Melanosomes from the feather of a modern Red-winged Blackbird (Agelaius phoeniceus) are nearly identical in form to those preserved in the fossil. Scale bars: (a) 3 mm, insert 1 mm; (b) 1 µm; (c) 10 µm; (d) 1 µm. From Vinther et al. (2008).

• From The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us (2017)

  Back in New Haven, electron microscopy of the different samples revealed that some had well-preserved melanosomes, others preserved impressions of melanosomes, and some areas had no preserved melanosomes at all. Our next innovation was to compare the size, shape, and density of the melanosomes from the Anchiornis fossil with those of living birds. It turns out that eumelanosomes from black and gray feathers tend to be long and sausage shaped, whereas pheomelanosomes from rufous or red-brown feathers are more rounded and jelly bean shaped. By comparing measurements from Anchiornis melanosomes with those of living birds, we could diagnose the color of the fossil feathers. Because we had sampled many places from all across the specimen, we could reconstruct the color of nearly its entire plumage. One of the most exciting moments in my scientific career was watching the plumage of Anchiornis come to life as I mapped the newly diagnosed colors—black, gray, rufous brown, and plain white—from the sample numbers back onto their anatomical positions in the animal’s plumage. The resulting picture was more stunning than we could ever have imagined! Describing the plumage coloration of Anchiornis huxleyi was like writing the very first entry in the Field Guide to Jurassic Dinosaurs. As a child, I had been inspired by field guides to go out into the world and study birds. Now, as a scientist, I had the opportunity to reimagine them in an entirely new way. What did Anchiornis huxleyi look like? Its body plumage was largely dark gray with black on the forewings (color plate 15). The long crest feathers on the top of the head were rufous brown. Most striking of all, the long feathers on both its forelimbs and its hind limbs were white with black tips, or spangles—like the modern breed of Spangled Hamburg chicken. The effect of these black spangled limb feathers was to boldly highlight the trailing edge of the feather and to produce a series of black bars on the wings. Interestingly, the long limb feathers on Anchiornis were not asymmetrical in shape, like modern avian flight feathers. So, it is not clear that this creature used its limbs as gliding “wings” at all. Furthermore, Anchiornis was heavily feathered all the way down to its toes and lacked the scaly legs and toes of most living birds. Discovering the color of a dinosaur is more than just fun; it raises a host of fundamentally new questions about dinosaur biology and about the origins of what we think of as bird biology. The bold and complex plumage pigment patterns of Anchiornis were obviously used as sexual or social signals. Thus, the evolution of aesthetic plumage ornaments originated not within birds but way back in terrestrial theropod dinosaurs. The dinosaurs coevolved to be beautiful—beautiful to dinosaurs themselves—long before one exceptional lineage of dinosaurs evolved to become flying birds. The rich aesthetic history of the birds goes all the way back to their theropod roots in the Jurassic age. —

• From The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us (2017)

  For some reason—a reason that I would not understand until years later—there were many more males in the flock than females. Among the two dozen or so birds, there were only five or six females. I was enjoying the scene, watching them as they dove underwater to feed and then popped back up to the surface, when suddenly a male thrust his head upward and then snapped it back to touch his rump—a display known as the head throw. With his head in this awkward position, he briefly opened his beak toward the sky, after which he brought his head back to its normal position with a slight side-to-side waggle. Soon, other males joined in, and the males in the flock were boiling over with bravado, jockeying for position around the females, and chasing each other. If I had been closer to the action that day, I would have heard the raspy two-note call the male Goldeneye makes during the head-throw display. The male Goldeneyes performed various other displays, too, which have been given suitably nautical names like the bowsprit and the masthead. The bowsprit involves cruising around with the head and beak pointed up and forward, while the masthead is performed with the head raised, then lowered and cast forward along the surface of the water. Despite the freezing weather, this gathering of Goldeneyes was engaged in courtship displays. They would continue wooing the females with these displays throughout the winter months, before returning to their nesting grounds on wooded lakes in northern Canada. That memorable outing was my introduction into the complex social world of ducks. Across the entire waterfowl family, males engage in similarly showy courtship behavior. The displays vary among species, but they generally consist of a series of highly distinctive postures and gestures, each lasting only a few seconds. The males may repeat them over and over, but the basic elements are pretty simple, and because almost all duck displays take place on the water, they always involve a lot of churning, cruising, and splashing. [image "The head-throw display sequence of the male Common Goldeneye." file=image_rsrc3NE.jpg] The head-throw display sequence of the male Common Goldeneye.

• From The Ice Storm (1994)

  She was getting out of the house in a hurry and I was in the driveway trying to get the chain back on the bike, and then, because of the rain, I went back in the garage— Mike pointed at a spot on her chest, right in the center of her poncho, and she looked down. He chucked her under the chin with his index finger. HA! HA! HA! HA! He always did that. —Freezing my ass off out here, she said. —Don’t bum out, Charles. The light was failing. The precipitation had turned to snow. Or something close to it, fierce nuggets of precipitation. Precipitation like an insult. But the anticipation of licentiousness thrilled Wendy, worked that tantric magic on her. Winter didn’t trouble her. She could have waded miles in the slush and ice, like a superhero. The basement of the Williams house was unused and lonely. She had seen, in the frugal architecture of local churches—Congregational and Episcopalian and Presbyterian; her mom could never make up her mind about denomination—those small altars where just prior to communion the minister arrayed himself in his professional garment, and where the sacred vessels moldered. Sacristy? This was how she thought of the Williamses’ basement, as she straddled the seat of Mikey’s bike (he pedaled standing up), and held fast onto his waist. It was an uphill ride and they left her own house behind—on the far edge of Silver Meadow—that ramshackle place of dark brown, full of drafts and ancient hinges, the former home of Mark Staples, Republican assemblyman and Episcopal minister of New Canaan from 1871 to 1879. And then up the hill, up the hill. Mike downshifted angrily, as though the incline were a challenge to his burgeoning manhood. The Williamses’ place was white and squarish with columns in front. An American flag usually hung limply there, but not this afternoon. Mourning doves wailed in the backyard. The steep backyard that tumbled headlong down into the creek there. (Down where Wendy lived the creek ran right under the living room patio.) There was always wildlife strutting around Mikey’s backyard—raccoons, muskrats, and rabbits. The wildlife of the suburbs. It was practically like Mutual of Goddam Omaha back there. The Silvermine River teemed with inflatable canoes. Mike dumped his bike on the grass by the garage door, never mind the rain. They snuck in through the porch, downstairs. In the ritual of their congress, Wendy insisted on silence. No getting-to-know-you chatter. Some conversation was inevitable, the table-setting, the hors d’oeuvres, but a silence was more dignified. Around them, the dusty packing crates full of gum were like the faceless sentries that protected some imperial decay, like the Easter Island statues in this book the boys at school had lately been passing around, Chariots of the Gods . The Bermuda Triangle. The basement was a neglected precinct of the Williamses’ place. The Ping-Pong table sagged in the middle of the room, like a rotting sea vessel.

• From What Do Women Want?: Adventures in the Science of Female Desire (2013)

  Deen—who’d chosen his name and its spelling himself—was a porn star who’d shot two thousand scenes over the last eight years, scenes in which a delivery man is asked inside for a blow job, in which a principal teaches a lesson to a new high school teacher, in which a chained and gagged blonde submits or a MILF has her way, scenes made, like most of the films produced by the thirteen-billion-dollar-a-year porn industry, with men in mind. But the scenes had caught on among teenage girls. Teens and young women seemed to make up most of his tens of thousands of Twitter followers. They watched him on PornHub and Brazzers and Kink.com; they traded his images, set their computers to pick up any mention of his name, sent him proposals of marriage. A profile on Nightline—“the young man your teenage girl may be secretly watching,” the introduction intoned, “a porn star for the Facebook generation”—added to the craze. GQ, the New York Observer, the Guardian in England swarmed next. Some fans said they were attracted by his boy-next-door looks, some by the way he held a woman’s eyes amid doing everything else, but along with his slender build and the possibility that he gave slightly more eye contact than the average porn stud, the basics were the basics: a maximally sized erection, a minimum of dialogue, a dose of violence (“I’ve been into rough sex pretty much my whole life,” he told one interviewer, “so I’m not, like, bad at it”), lots of female moaning, many genital close-ups. Like Deen’s popularity, Suki Dunham’s nascent success as an entrepreneur pointed to changes taking place. In her case, the changes ranged over age groups. In a New Hampshire town of four thousand, in a farmhouse bordered by a white picket fence, with a tree house out back for her two kids, Dunham designed state-of-the-art vibrators like the Freestyle and the Club Vibe 2.OH. The predecessors to her devices had been around for over a century—initially as aids to doctors and nurses who believed they needed to massage patients to “paroxysm” as a cure for hysteria—but during the last few decades the percentage of women saying they’ve used a vibrator has gone from one to over fifty, and a few years ago vibrators appeared on the shelves at Walmart, at CVS, at Duane Reade. Trojan spotted an opportunity, entered the market, advertised its Tri-Phoria on TV, and watched sales leap in a period of cataclysmic economic decline. Durex, another condom maker, did the same and had the same results. And Dunham, who grew up in a coal-mining town in Pennsylvania, the daughter of a man who ran a small excavation outfit, was developing a high-end niche.