Joy

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

Page 101 of 299 · 20 per page

• From Cleanness (2020)

  It’s not exactly a dream of Italy, I said, meaning it as an apology, but R. laughed, he drew the curtain across the glass and pulled me to the bed. Who cares about the view, he said, the bed is nice, that’s all that matters, you should care about the bed, and then we were both laughing, one on top of the other. The hotel’s one luxury was the breakfast we found the next morning, a buffet of eggs and sliced meats, yogurt and fruit, a table overloaded with cakes and tarts. It was early still—we had set our alarms, we wanted the whole day for the city—and I needed coffee first, which meant a complicated machine with a digital screen, then waiting for the paper cup to fill. When I turned back, I saw that R. had covered our table with little plates, a sample from each of the sweets. He hadn’t left any room for me, and I waited while he tried to clear a space for my coffee, shifting the plates around until one almost tipped onto the floor, he caught it just in time. I made a little noise, exasperated and amused, and he looked up at me and shrugged. He would take a single bite from each plate, then move it to one side or the other, sorting out the things he liked. I watched him for a while, and then Skups, I said, my tone half question, half disbelief, making a gesture that took in the table with its plates, the room, the other people eating. He shrugged again, glancing around at the assortment of other travelers, businessmen mostly, a few couples. Who cares, he said, using his fork to dig into another piece of something, they don’t know me, we’ll never see them again, why should I care what they think? I remembered this later, waiting for the bus that would take us to town. We were the only people in the little shelter at the stop, huddling together against the wind, which was sharper than I had expected; it wasn’t very cold but it was cold enough for our coats, for the scarves we had draped around each other before heading out. Then R. stepped up onto the bench, he grabbed my shoulders and turned me to face him. Now I’m the taller one, he said, and bent down to kiss me, not a chaste kiss, he gripped my hair and tilted my head farther back to probe my mouth with his tongue. I tried to pull away, laughing: it was a busy road, we were in full view of the passing cars.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  AN EVENING OUTZ. had emptied half the carton of juice, and now I was holding it as he poured the vodka into the plastic funnel at the top. We had laughed at the way he threw his head back and drank, sucking the juice down even as he grimaced at the taste, which was sickly sweet. He refused to dump it in the gutter: My grandfather was Russian, he said, we never waste anything. And that too had made us laugh, though he was serious now as he poured, tilting the plastic flask to let the barest ribbon of liquid thread perfectly into the carton. He didn’t want to waste that, either, and I was so absorbed in holding the carton still—and absorbed in Z., too, who stood close to me, our shoulders almost touching—that I had nearly forgotten about N. when I heard the click of his phone as it took a picture of us. What are you doing, I said, and I’m sure there was a note in my voice of real concern at the thought of the image shared with others, but we had already drunk enough that the concern was distant, and N. laughed it off. I’m sorry, he said, it’s just too epic, we’ve been waiting for this for so long. He laughed again when I warned him not to post it on Facebook. I’ll hunt you down, I said, one of the phrases I had used often in my seven years as a teacher. He held up his hands, smiling broadly. Don’t worry, he said, I won’t, I just want to remember this forever.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  R. had already turned his attention to his food, salting it and then rotating his plate until its arrangement pleased him. I loved to watch him eat, which he did with a kind of joyful absorption, and I left my pizza untouched as I watched him lift the first bite to his mouth and close his eyes with pleasure, only then returning his attention to me. After class it was a boring day, he said, M. and I went back to our room and slept, but then the Polish girl woke us up, the annoying one, remember, I told you about her. I did remember, though I had forgotten her name; she had pursued R. since they arrived, more and more aggressively, until one night shortly after he and I met he let her take him back to her room. They had been dancing at one of the clubs in Studentski grad, a part of the city named for the many schools and dormitories there, though it was the least studious quarter in Sofia, full of discotheques and casinos and bars; it was where my own students spent their weekends. R. told me this story at our second meeting, while we were lying in bed together, an intimacy I was surprised to find I wanted; usually after sex I was eager to be alone. I was drunk, he said, but that wasn’t why I went, I wanted to know if I liked it, I’ve only ever been with guys but I thought maybe I like girls too, I wanted to try. They had kissed and taken off their clothes and lain down together, he told me, and he didn’t respond at all; it was awful, he said, even when she gave me a blowjob I couldn’t get hard, it was like I was dead down there. She told me not to worry, I was just too drunk, but that’s not true, I can get hard when I’m drunk, I can always get hard. I guess this really is what I am, he said. We had been lying next to each other while he spoke, both on our backs, not touching, but after he said this he rolled toward me and put his hand on my chest, and then he laid his head on top of his hand.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  I do tell them that, I said, I believe it. I took a breath. He has a talent, I said, I think he’s lucky to have found it, and yes, I think he should follow what he loves and build his life around it. I paused. I had been wringing my hands beneath the table, knitting and unknitting my fingers, and now I laid them flat on top of it. I worry about N. in law school, I said, I worry that he will keep doing badly. I think, and here I tried to make my voice lighter somehow, I think he should do what he feels called to do, I think he should study what he wants. She sat very still as I spoke, her tight smile unchanging. Yes, she said again, it’s very beautiful what you say, very inspiring. And what does he do then, she said, after he studies what he wants, what does he do when he has to get a job? Things are different here, Gospodine, maybe in America what you say is true; you try something there and if you fail it is no problem, you try something else, Americans love starting over, you say it’s never too late. But for us it is always too late, she said. When N. gets his diploma he has to find a job, right away, a good job in England, if he doesn’t he has to come back here, and if he comes back here it will be very hard for him to leave again, do you understand, if he comes back here he will be trapped. I know you care about him, she said, settling back in her chair, I know your heart, and she hesitated, groping for the phrase, your heart is in the right place, but what you say isn’t true for us, please, you must help him see that. N. groaned when I repeated this to him the next morning at school. You see, he said, she won’t listen, it’s impossible to talk to her. It’s because she loves you, I said, it’s a way of loving you, and he sighed and looked away. Well, N. said at the restaurant table, lowering his hands before Z. interrupted him—Listen up, Gospodine, he said, you’re going to like this. N. smiled at me. No more law school, he said, I’m transferring, in the fall I’ll be doing literature. There was a cheer around the table, as several students said Chestito, congratulations, and all of us raised our glasses. But what about your mother, I asked after we drank, how did you convince her? N.’s smile widened. It was easy, he said, I just failed all my classes, and everyone laughed. I don’t approve of your methods, I said, though I was laughing too, and Z. raised his glass and said To whatever works, and we toasted again.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  He was smiling when I glanced at him but I knew he meant it, or half meant it. He often said that he was born in the wrong place; shitty Portugal, he would say, shitty Algarve, the shitty Azores, shitty Lisbon, it should all have been different, his life was fucked. Sometimes I could bring him out of these moods, I could kiss him and say he had a new life now, his life with me, who knew where we’d end up, in Europe or America, who knew what adventures we’d have, and sometimes he pushed me away or turned his face from mine. We don’t get to choose anything, he’d say then, we think we do but it’s an illusion, we’re insects, we get stepped on or we don’t, that’s all. When he talked like this there was nothing I could do, anything I did made it worse, whether I got angry or sad or tried to make him feel my own happiness, the happiness I felt so often just looking at him, as he slept or read, or stared into the screen of his laptop. It was an immovable force, this mood that descended on him sometimes, and I worried that it was descending on him now, that it would darken the rest of our day. But it didn’t descend. When we left the church and turned blindly around the next corner he pulled me into an alcove and kissed me, his hands on the side of my face. I can’t believe I’m here, he said, it’s like a movie, I’m in Venice with my American boyfriend. He laughed. My sister would be so jealous, she’s always wanted an American boyfriend, and I got one first. And then he was off again, dragging me by the hand behind him. He did this repeatedly, pulling me into doorways and alleys to kiss me, always somewhere a little apart, though we were still noticed, people passing would stare at us or look decidedly away. One heavy old man scowled; a young couple laughed, which I minded more. R. seemed not to notice but I noticed, it was a weird reversal: he was the more open one here, and I was hyperaware, feeling the reflexes of fear though I wasn’t afraid, I didn’t think I was afraid. Our only principle was to stay away from the crowds of other tourists who moved in migratory flocks, following the little pennant or flag the guides all held above their heads, tiny bright triangles on long stems.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  We collected Topps baseball cards of our favorite players and traded them and flipped them and scaled them down against the wall at Turner’s Bar. In the spring we dug up worms and went fishing with Bobby Zimmer. I made a Morse code set with Castiglia, stringing the telegraph wires across the street to his house. We did science experiments with his chemistry set and Bobby and I played red-light-green-light on summer nights when Mom was taking the clothes off the line. And when it got dark my sister Sue and I chased fireflies with glass jars. In the fall we played touch football in the streets and raked the summer leaves that had turned brown and fallen from the trees. We and our fathers swept them and piled them and packed them into wire baskets by the sides of our houses, burning them and watching the bright embers swirl in the wind. And the trees again stood naked in the back yard like they did every fall and winter and the air became fresh and cold and soon there was ice on the puddles in the streets outside our houses. We’d all go back to school and for me it was always a frightening experience. I could never understand what was happening there. I remember once they called my mother and told her I had been staring out the window. I tried to listen to them, and sit in the chair behind the desk like they told me to, but I kept looking out that window at the trees and the sky. I couldn’t wait until the last day of school when we all ran out of our classrooms, jumping up and down, throwing our books in the air, singing and shouting “No more pencils, no more books, no more teachers’ dirty looks!” We were free. And another summer vacation began for all of us on the block. When the first snow came we’d get our sleds out of the basement and belly-whop on sheets of ice out on Lee Place in front of Richie’s house. We had snowball fights and built snow forts and snowmen. Castiglia and I and Bobby Zimmer used to grab the back bumpers of cars and see how far we could slide down the street on our shoes. Kenny and I would hide in Parkside Woods plastering the cars that passed along the boulevard with ice balls, then get Bobby and Pete and the rest of the guys and go down to Suicide Hill, a tremendous steep hill by the woods, frozen like glass, with a tree stump at the bottom you had to swerve around. Me and Bobby would head straight for it, and just before we were about to hit it, I’d jam the wooden steering bar with my foot, throwing up sparks and ice, just missing the stump by inches.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  Within the channels allowed by social dictates, eros flourished in the high empire. The history of sex in antiquity is not a linear story of gradual repression. The Roman moralists did not act as forerunners, preparing the way for the Christian revolution. The gloomy tribe of Stoic brethren have been allotted too much say. In a confident, prosperous, urban empire, old patterns of lassitude prevailed, and even intensified within an economy that delivered pleasures with unusual efficiency. Yes, the sexual culture of the Roman Empire had its own complexion. Erotic life was caught up in the great sciences of the day—medicine, astrology, physiognomics—to a new extent; the body’s sexual capacity became part of broader conversations about fate, free will, and the physical constitution of the self. But eros thrived. If there was a new anxiety, it was the anxiety of affluence, and the anxiety of an existentially serious culture, not a morbid or world-weary anxiety. The visual record alone is a stark correction to the odd stern moralist who groused about the power of the aphrodisia. Consider just the culture of erotic lamps. The use of erotic art on this humble domestic instrument reaches its pitch of expressiveness, variety, and popularity in second and third centuries, and only withers in the late fourth or very early fifth century. Pace Veyne, the Romans not only had sex with the lamps on—they had sex by the flickering light of lamps that had images of them having sex by lamplight on them!10

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  no one was going to get hurt. Skip and I moved as close to the speakers’ platform as we could and Skip lifted me out of my chair and laid me on my cushion. People were streaming into the Ellipse from all around us—an army of everyday people. There was a guy with a stereo tape deck blasting out music, and dogs running after Frisbees on the lawn. The Hari Krishna people started to dance and the whole thing seemed like a weird carnival. But there was a warmth to it, a feeling that we were all together in a very important place. A young girl sat down next to me and handed me a canteen of cool water. “Here,” she said, “have a drink.” I drank it down and passed it to Skip who passed it to someone else. That was the feeling that day. We all seemed to be sharing everything. We listened as the speakers one after another denounced the invasion of Cambodia and the slaying of the students at Kent State. The sun was getting very hot and Skip and I decided to move around. We wanted to get to the White House where Nixon was holed up, probably watching television. We were in a great sea of people, thousands and thousands all around us. We finally made it to Lafayette Park. On the other side of the avenue the government had lined up thirty or forty buses, making a huge wall between the people and the White House. I remember wondering back then why they had to put all those buses in front of the president. Was the government so afraid of its own people that it needed such a gigantic barricade? I’ll always remember those buses lined up that day and not being able to see the White House from my wheelchair. We went back to the rally for a while, then went on down to the Reflecting Pool. Hundreds of people had taken off their clothes. They were jumping up and down to the beat of bongo drums and metal cans. A man in his fifties had stripped completely naked. Wearing only a crazy-looking hat and a pair of enormous black glasses, he was dancing on a platform in the middle of hundreds of naked people. The crowd was clapping wildly. Skip hesitated for a moment, then stripped all his clothes off, jumping into the pool and joining the rest of the people. I didn’t know what all of this had to do with the invasion of Cambodia or the students slain at Kent State, but it was total freedom. As I sat there in my wheelchair at the edge of the Reflecting Pool with everyone running naked all around me and the clapping and the drums resounding in my ears, I wanted to join them. I wanted to take off my clothes like Skip and the rest of them and wade into the pool and rub my body with all those others. Everything seemed to be hitting me all at once. One part of me was upset that people were swimming naked in the national monument and the other part of me completely understood

• From Combating Cult Mind Control: The Guide to Protection, Rescue and Recovery from Destructive Cults (1988)

  There were no problems at the airport, and we boarded without incident. In situations like this an unexpected, crazy thing might happen. But this time we were lucky. No cult members showed up at the gate to haul Margaret away. On the plane ride home, I told Margaret that I had a few friends who were former members of the Children of God. But I decided that I wasn’t going to explain my role until a couple of weeks had passed, so she would have time to stabilize. When Margaret walked into her parents’ house for the first time in ten years, she saw balloons and a huge WELCOME HOME! sign hanging from the ceiling. The house was filled with relatives and friends. Tears streamed down her face. She had forgotten how wonderful life had been for her there. She told me later that she felt like a prisoner of war who had just been released from ten years of captivity. So many people had grown up and changed. The neighborhood had changed a lot. And she was totally unaware of the national and world events of the last decade. She had plenty of catching up to do. Within a couple of days I arranged for her to sit down with some former Children of God members. I was lucky enough to locate someone she had known while in the group. Margaret improved dramatically, day by day. She put on weight, started to make jokes, and had color and expression in her face once again. Her children adapted quickly and joyfully to their new life. Arrangements were made later to help her husband, with the support of his family. No one can come out of a long-term experience like that without emotional problems, and she was no exception. Not all cases, though, are successful. Especially in the early years of my counseling work, I took on several cases in which I was not able to help the person to leave the cult. In retrospect, some cases had just too many factors going against success, but I tried anyway. Some cases involved the psychopathology of the individual in the group, or in family members themselves. Other cases involved families who neglected to tell me everything about their family history, while in others, there was intentional sabotage by one of the family members. Alan Brown and the Foundation for Human Understanding166 Herbert and Julia Brown’s son Alan had been involved in Roy Masters’ group, the Foundation for Human Understanding, for over two years. Masters is a professional hypnotist who, in 1961, began one of the first national radio talk shows called How Your Mind Can Keep You Well. Masters is still doing radio and has even published a book.

• From Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016)

  I was dumbfounded. I had no idea how to talk to a girl that beautiful. She was shy and didn’t speak much, either. There was a bit of an awkward pause. Luckily Tom’s a guy who just talks and talks. He jumped right in and smoothed everything over. “Trevor, this is Babiki. Babiki, Trevor.” He went on and on about how great I was, how much she was looking forward to the dance, when I would pick her up for the dance, all the details. We hung out for a few, and then Tom needed to get going so we headed out the door. Babiki turned and smiled at me and waved as we left. “Bye.” “Bye.” We walked out of that building and I was the happiest man on earth. I couldn’t believe it. I was the guy at school who couldn’t get a date. I’d resigned myself to never getting a date, didn’t consider myself worthy of having a date. But now I was going to the matric dance with the most beautiful girl in the world. Over the following weeks we went down to Hillbrow a few more times to hang out with Babiki and her sisters and her friends. Babiki’s family was Pedi, one of South Africa’s smaller tribes. I liked getting to know people of different backgrounds, so that was fun. Babiki and her friends were what we call amabhujua. They’re as poor as most other black people, but they try to act like they’re not. They dress fashionably and act rich. Amabhujua will put a shirt on layaway, one shirt, and spend seven months paying it off. They’ll live in shacks wearing Italian leather shoes that cost thousands. An interesting crowd. Babiki and I never went on a date alone. It was always the two of us in a group. She was shy, and I was a nervous wreck most of the time, but we had fun. Tom kept everyone loose and having a good time. Whenever we’d say goodbye, Babiki would give me a hug, and once she even gave me a little kiss. I was in heaven. I was like, Yeah, I’ve got a girlfriend. Cool. — As the dance approached, I started getting nervous. I didn’t have a car. I didn’t have any decent clothes. This was my first time taking out a beautiful girl, and I wanted it to be perfect.

• From Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016)

  Then there was black church. There was always some kind of black church service going on somewhere, and we tried them all. In the township, that typically meant an outdoor, tent-revival-style church. We usually went to my grandmother’s church, an old-school Methodist congregation, five hundred African grannies in blue-and-white blouses, clutching their Bibles and patiently burning in the hot African sun. Black church was rough, I won’t lie. No air-conditioning. No lyrics up on Jumbotrons. And it lasted forever, three or four hours at least, which confused me because white church was only like an hour—in and out, thanks for coming. But at black church I would sit there for what felt like an eternity, trying to figure out why time moved so slowly. Is it possible for time to actually stop? If so, why does it stop at black church and not at white church? I eventually decided black people needed more time with Jesus because we suffered more. “I’m here to fill up on my blessings for the week,” my mother used to say. The more time we spent at church, she reckoned, the more blessings we accrued, like a Starbucks Rewards Card. Black church had one saving grace. If I could make it to the third or fourth hour I’d get to watch the pastor cast demons out of people. People possessed by demons would start running up and down the aisles like madmen, screaming in tongues. The ushers would tackle them, like bouncers at a club, and hold them down for the pastor. The pastor would grab their heads and violently shake them back and forth, shouting, “I cast out this spirit in the name of Jesus!” Some pastors were more violent than others, but what they all had in common was that they wouldn’t stop until the demon was gone and the congregant had gone limp and collapsed on the stage. The person had to fall. Because if he didn’t fall that meant the demon was powerful and the pastor needed to come at him even harder. You could be a linebacker in the NFL. Didn’t matter. That pastor was taking you down. Good Lord, that was fun. Christian karaoke, badass action stories, and violent faith healers—man, I loved church. The thing I didn’t love was the lengths we had to go to in order to get to church. It was an epic slog. We lived in Eden Park, a tiny suburb way outside Johannesburg. It took us an hour to get to white church, another forty-five minutes to get to mixed church, and another forty-five minutes to drive out to Soweto for black church. Then, if that wasn’t bad enough, some Sundays we’d double back to white church for a special evening service. By the time we finally got home at night, I’d collapse into bed.

• From Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016)

  “Why don’t I take medicine,” I said, “and then pray to Jesus to thank him for giving us the doctors who invented medicine, because medicine is what makes you feel better, not Jesus.” “You don’t need medicine if you have Jesus. Jesus will heal you. Pray to Jesus.” “But is medicine not a blessing from Jesus? And if Jesus gives us medicine and we do not take the medicine, are we not denying the grace that he has given us?” Like all of our debates about Jesus, this conversation went nowhere. “Trevor,” she said, “if you don’t go to church you’re going to get worse. You’re lucky you got sick on Sunday, because now we’re going to church and you can pray to Jesus and Jesus is going to heal you.” “That sounds nice, but why don’t I just stay home?” “No. Get dressed. We’re going to church.” [image file=image_rsrc2UX.jpg] [image file=image_rsrc2UY.jpg] MY MOTHER’S LIFEOnce I had my hair cornrowed for the matric dance, I started getting attention from girls for the first time. I actually went on dates. At times I thought that it was because I looked better. At other times I thought it was because girls liked the fact that I was going through as much pain as they did to look good. Either way, once I found success, I wasn’t going to mess with the formula. I kept going back to the salon every week, spending hours at a time getting my hair straightened and cornrowed. My mom would just roll her eyes. “I could never date a man who spends more time on his hair than I do,” she’d say. Monday through Saturday my mom worked in her office and puttered around her garden dressed like a homeless person. Then Sunday morning for church she’d do her hair and put on a nice dress and some high heels and she looked like a million bucks. Once she was all done up, she couldn’t resist teasing me, throwing little verbal jabs the way we’d always do with each other. “Now who’s the best-looking person in the family, eh? I hope you enjoyed your week of being the pretty one, ’cause the queen is back, baby. You spent four hours at the salon to look like that. I just took a shower.” She was just having fun with me; no son wants to talk about how hot his mom is. Because, truth be told, she was beautiful. Beautiful on the outside, beautiful on the inside. She had a self-confidence about her that I never possessed. Even when she was working in the garden, dressed in overalls and covered in mud, you could see how attractive she was. —

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

  10:21–2221. In that hour Jesus rejoiced in spirit, and said, I thank thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes: even so, Father; for so it seemed good in thy sight. 22. All things are delivered to me of my Father: and no man knoweth who the Son is, but the Father; and who the Father is, but the Son, and he to whom the Son will reveal him. THEOPHYLACT. As a loving father rejoices to see his sons do right, so Christ also rejoices that His Apostles were made worthy of such good things. Hence it follows, In that hour, &c. CYRIL OF ALEXANDRIA. He saw in truth that through the operation of the Holy Spirit, which He gave to the holy Apostles, the acquisition of many would be made, (or that many would be brought to the faith.) He is said therefore to have rejoiced in the Holy Spirit, that is, in the results which came forth through the Holy Spirit. For as one who loved mankind He considered the conversion of sinners to be a subject for rejoicing, for which He gives thanks. As it follows, I give thanks unto thee, O Father. BEDE. Confessing (confiteor) does not always signify penitence, but also thanksgiving, as is frequently found in the Psalms. (Ps. 18:49; 30:12; 52:9.) CYRIL OF ALEXANDRIA. Now here, say they whose hearts are perverted, the Son gives thanks to the Father as being inferior. But what should prevent the Son of the same substance with the Father from praising His own Father, who saves the world by Him? But if you think that because of His giving thanks He shews Himself to be inferior, observe, that He calls Him His Father, and the Lord of heaven and earth. TITUS BOSTRENSIS. (non occ.) For all other things have been produced by Christ from nothing, but He alone was incomprehensibly begotten of His Father; Who therefore of the Only-begotten alone, as a true Son, is by nature the Father. Hence He alone says to His Father, I give thanks to thee, O Father, Lord, &c. that is, I glorify thee. Marvel not that the Son glorifies the Father. For the whole substance of the Only-begotten is the glory of the Father. For both those things which were created, and the Angels, are the glory of the Creator. But since these are placed too low in respect of His dignity, the Son alone, since He is perfect God like His Father, perfectly glorifies His Father.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  And suddenly for no reason at all, when I think of her returning to her nest, I remember Sunday mornings in the little old house near the cemetery. I remember sitting at the piano in my nightshirt, working away at the pedals with bare feet, and the folks lying in bed toasting themselves in the next room. The rooms opened one on the other, telescope fashion, as in the good old American railroad flats. Sunday mornings one lay in bed until one was ready to screech with well-being. Toward eleven or so the folks used to rap on the wall of my room for me to come and play for them. I would dance into the room like the Fratellini Brothers, so full of flame and feathers that I could hoist myself like a derrick to the topmost limb of the tree of heaven. I could do anything and everything singlehanded, being double-jointed at the same time. The old man called me “Sunny Jim,” because I was full of “Force,” full of vim and vigor. First I would do a few handsprings for them on the carpet before the bed; then I would sing falsetto, trying to imitate a ventriloquist’s dummy; then I would dance a few light fantastic steps to show which way the wind lay, and zoom! like a breeze I was on the piano stool and doing a velocity exercise. I always began with Czerny, in order to limber up for the performance. The old man hated Czerny, and so did I, but Czerny was the plat du jour on the bill of fare then, and so Czerny it was until my joints were rubber. In some vague way Czerny reminds me of the great emptiness which came upon me later. What a velocity I would work up, riveted to the piano stool! It was like swallowing a bottle of tonic at one gulp and then having someone strap you to the bed. After I had played about ninety-eight exercises I was ready to do a little improvising. I used to take a fistful of chords and crash the piano from one end to the other, then sullenly modulate into “The Burning of Rome” or the “Ben Hur Chariot Race” which everybody liked because it was intelligible noise. Long before I read Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus I was composing the music to it, in the key of sassafras. I was learned then in science and philosophy, in the history of religions, in inductive and deductive logic, in liver mantic, in the shape and weight of skulls, in pharmacopeia and metallurgy, in all the useless branches of learning which give you indigestion and melancholia before your time. This vomit of learned truck was stewing in my guts the whole week long, waiting for it to come Sunday to be set to music.

• From Combating Cult Mind Control: The Guide to Protection, Rescue and Recovery from Destructive Cults (1988)

  He explained that Satan controlled the world after he had deceived Adam and Eve into disobeying God. Now God’s children had to deceive Satan’s children into following God’s will. He said, “Stop thinking from fallen man’s viewpoint. Think about God’s viewpoint. He wants to see His creation restored to His original ideal—the Garden of Eden. That’s all that matters.” (Later, it became evident that this “heavenly deception” was used in all aspects of the organization, including recruiting, fundraising, and public relations. Since members are so focused on meeting their assigned goals, there is no room for the “old morality.” The group even uses the Bible to “show” that God condoned deception several times in history in order to see His plan accomplished.32) By accepting the way in which I was deceived, I set myself up to begin deceiving others. Although the workshop was almost identical in content to the one I had taken the previous week, I felt that this time I needed to listen with an open mind and take notes. “Last weekend I was too cynical,” I said to myself. This time Miller added a lecture on Communism. He explained that Communism was Satan’s version of God’s ideal plan, yet it denied the existence of God. It was therefore Satan’s own religion on Earth and must be vehemently opposed. He said the final World War would be fought within the next three years between communism and democracy (at that time, by 1977), and that if members of the movement didn’t work hard enough, incredible suffering would result. By the end of those three days, the Steve Hassan who had walked into the first workshop was gone, replaced by a new “Steve Hassan.” I was elated at the thought that I had been “chosen” by God, and that I knew what I needed to do with my life. I experienced a wide range of other feelings, too: I was shocked and honored that I had been singled out for leadership, scared at how much responsibility rested on my shoulders, and emotionally high on the thought that God was actively working to bring about the Garden of Eden. No more war, no more poverty, no more ecological destruction. There was hope! Also love, truth, beauty, and goodness. At that point, I was still aware of a muffled voice deep within me that was warning me to watch out, to keep questioning everything. After that workshop, I returned to Queens. I was advised to move into the local Moonie house for a few months to get a feel for the lifestyle and to study the Divine Principle before I made a lifetime commitment. Within the first few weeks of my residence there, I met a powerful leader, Takeru Kamiyama, a Japanese man in charge of the Unification Church throughout New York City. 33I was instantly drawn to him. He struck me as having a very spiritual, humble character. I wanted to learn everything I could from him.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  Leucippe’s very name, “the white horse,” evokes the Socratic metaphor of the chariot from the Phaedrus. Like Plato, Achilles believes that eros can lift the human soul just high enough to glimpse the divine. Unlike Plato, Achilles describes eros for a girl. And yet Leucippe and Clitophon does not just present Platonic eros in heterosexual guise. For Plato, physical eros was a force sublimated in the intellectual search for wisdom, a mere image of the true form of love. It is epitomized by the pederastic mentorship. Leucippe and Clitophon, by contrast, begins with a series of failed courtships modeled on pederasty and ends with the marriage of the protagonists. The implied consummation of Leucippe and Clitophon is a deeply physical union. The ecstasy of sex is, in the imaginative universe of the novel, a profoundly embodied experience. For Achilles eros is not a force that has to be sublimated, because eros belongs to the cycle of nature. The cosmos is so contrived that the “white horse,” Leucippe, the agent of salvation, is to be had in marriage, in the same institution that reproduces life. Achilles has no doctrine, other than eros and its compatibility with the narrative arc of human life. It is the genius of his art to raise romance to heights of self-awareness that allow it to compete with philosophy. Achilles does not argue for eros. He, unlike Plato, unlike the Stoics, embraces the world, with its ceaseless cycle of rebirth and death in which eros finds its natural place. And he laughs at anyone who believes it might be otherwise. CONCLUSION: COSMOS AND EROS IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE The sexual culture of the high Roman Empire was dominated by the imperatives of social reproduction. The symphony of sexual values, in all its various movements and complex harmonies, was set to the rhythms of the material world: early marriage for women, jealous guarding of honorable female sexuality, an expansive slave system, late marriage for men, and basically relaxed attitudes toward male sexual potential, so long as it was consonant with masculine protocols and social hierarchies. Moral expectations were in tune with social roles, and social roles strictly determined both the points of release and the rigid constraints in ancient sexual culture. The value of a sexual act derived, first and foremost, from its objective location within a matrix of social relationships.

• From Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016)

  We picked up right where we’d left off, which was him treating me exactly the way he’d treated me as a thirteen-year-old boy. Like the creature of habit he was, my father went straight back into it. “Right! So where were we? Here, I’ve got all your favorites. Potato Rösti. A bottle of Sprite. Custard with caramel.” Luckily my tastes hadn’t matured much since the age of thirteen, so I tucked right in. While I was eating he got up and went and picked up this book, an oversized photo album, and brought it back to the table. “I’ve been following you,” he said, and he opened it up. It was a scrapbook of everything I had ever done, every time my name was mentioned in a newspaper, everything from magazine covers to the tiniest club listings, from the beginning of my career all the way through to that week. He was smiling so big as he took me through it, looking at the headlines. “Trevor Noah Appearing This Saturday at the Blues Room.” “Trevor Noah Hosting New TV Show.” I felt a flood of emotions rushing through me. It was everything I could do not to start crying. It felt like this ten-year gap in my life closed right up in an instant, like only a day had passed since I’d last seen him. For years I’d had so many questions. Is he thinking about me? Does he know what I’m doing? Is he proud of me? But he’d been with me the whole time. He’d always been proud of me. Circumstance had pulled us apart, but he was never not my father. I walked out of his house that day an inch taller. Seeing him had reaffirmed his choosing of me. He chose to have me in his life. He chose to answer my letter. I was wanted. Being chosen is the greatest gift you can give to another human being. Once we reconnected, I was overcome by this drive to make up for all the years we’d missed. I decided the best way to do it was to interview him. I realized very quickly that that was a mistake. Interviews will give you facts and information, but facts and information weren’t really what I was after. What I wanted was a relationship, and an interview is not a relationship. Relationships are built in the silences. You spend time with people, you observe them and interact with them, and you come to know them—and that is what apartheid stole from us: time. You can’t make up for that with an interview, but I had to figure that out for myself.

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  She smiled at him on the crowded street and they yelled cheerfully back and forth. He was busy, very busy, writing art criticism for three publications, teaching part-time and painting. She was doing free-lance journalism, and was currently huddled in a cranny of stability as a part-time editor for a slick literary quarterly. They linked arms and went for coffee. “God,” he said, hunching over his tiny brown cup of espresso, “it’s good to see a new face. For weeks I’ve seen nobody but friends of Emily’s who’ve come in from Dallas—these really incredible women who’re all painters, all in their forties, incredibly intelligent and—would you believe it?—all single . They’re great, but I feel like I have to constantly be telling them how attractive and talented they are—and they are attractive! They’re incredibly attractive!—because they’re in their forties, and they’re not married, and they’re not successful.” “What makes you think you always have to tell them how great they are?” “You just do. It’s obvious.” He lifted the little brown cup in his big hands and delicately inserted the tip of his tongue, put it down and played with his napkin. “You wouldn’t have to tell me that if I was forty.” He didn’t respond to this, but stared fixedly into a corner for several seconds and then said, “So, whose heart are you laying waste to now?” “You mean who’s trashing me these days? I’m not so extreme anymore, Franklin.” Franklin smiled in the sly, flatly pleased way he contrived when she simultaneously ridiculed and accepted his flattery. “Actually, I have a girlfriend.” She picked up her croissant as if she were going to bat her eyelashes from behind it. “We’ve been together for a year and a half. We live together.” “Connie, that’s great. That’s really super. Is this a new predilection?” “No, it’s always been there. This is just more serious than usual.” “You know, if she were a boy, I think I’d be jealous. Where’d you meet her?” They burrowed into a conversation that skimmed over the present, then tunneled back through the five years since they’d met in a proofreading booth, where exhausted, languid Connie would sleep on the floor beneath her desk, using Franklin’s balled-up sweater as a pillow. They had nested in that booth every weekend for months, surrounded by literary supplements, plastic take-out containers, boxes of cookies and notebooks in which they furiously scribbled between jobs.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  Sleep, when one has no worries, tastes like honey. We woke up without haste, and found ourselves in a morning filled with an unusual happiness. We stayed longer in bed, where Father helped us perform complicated acrobatics. Then, once we had annoyed Father and driven him out of bed, we stared at the world upside down, with our heads down and our legs propped against the wall, enjoying the exquisite vertigo that made us dizzy. Oh, these Saturday mornings! In our room, through the wide-open window, the blue stretches of sky with their slow white clouds and the streaming sunlight, the sun swimming in the limitless universe as in those dreams where I felt myself rise and rise in the open sky, my heart and my breast so brimful... So far away, I still suffer whenever I think of Saturday mornings. All my life, the bitter and oily odor of the narcissus, their fresh explosion of gold in the transparent glass of the bowl, will remain rich with implications of holiday.

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  It was a beautiful Halloweenlike night, and there were exuberant people on the streets. She walked happily, admiring faces and haircuts. She looked at people, dogs, cars and buildings, and everything pleased her. She stopped at a Korean grocery store and looked at the fruit. She was struck by how neat and beautiful it was in its organized, traditional piles. She thought of herself coming here every week and buying fruit, vegetables, bread, cereal and milk, and it seemed like a wonderful idea. She bought herself an apple, and walked home eating it. SecretaryThe typing and secretarial class was held in a little basement room in the Business Building of the local community college. The teacher was an old lady with hair that floated in vague clouds around her temples and Kleenex stuck up the sleeve of her dress for some future, probably nasal purpose. She held a stopwatch in one old hand and tilted her hip as she watched us all with severe, imperial eyes, not caring that her stomach hung out. The girl in front of me had short, clenched blond curls sitting on her thin shoulders. Lone strands would stick straight out from her head in cold, dry weather. It was a two-hour class with a ten-minute break. Everybody would go out in the hall during the break to get coffee or candy from the machines. The girls would stand in groups and talk, and the two male typists would walk slowly up and down the corridor with round shoulders, holding their Styrofoam cups and looking into the bright slits of light in the business class doors as they passed by. I would go to the big picture window that looked out onto the parking lot and stare at the streetlights shining on the hoods of the cars. After class, I’d come home and put my books on the dining room table among the leftover dinner things: balled-up napkins, glasses of water, a dish of green beans sitting on a pot holder. My father’s plate would always be there, with gnawed bones and hot pepper on it. He would be in the living room in his pajama top with a dish of ice cream in his lap and his hair on end. “How many words a minute did you type tonight?” he’d ask. It wasn’t an unreasonable question, but the predictable and agitated delivery of it was annoying. It reflected his way of hoarding silly details and his obsessive fear I would meet my sister’s fate. She’d had a job at a home for retarded people for the past eight years. She wore jeans and a long army coat to work every day. When she came home, she went up to her room and lay in bed. Every now and then she would come down and joke around or watch TV, but not much.