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.

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• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  Still watching the sleigh, I saw it stop at Treumann’s (writing implements, bronze baubles, playing cards). Presently, my mother came out of this shop followed by the footman. He carried her purchase, which looked to me like a pencil. I was astonished that she did not carry so small an object herself, and this disagreeable question of dimensions caused a faint renewal, fortunately very brief, of the “mind dilation effect” which I hoped had gone with the fever. As she was being tucked up again in the sleigh, I watched the vapor exhaled by all, horse included. I watched, too, the familiar pouting movement she made to distend the network of her close-fitting veil drawn too tight over her face, and as I write this, the touch of reticulated tenderness that my lips used to feel when I kissed her veiled cheek comes back to me—flies back to me with a shout of joy out of the snow-blue, blue-windowed (the curtains are not yet drawn) past. A few minutes later, she entered my room. In her arms she held a big parcel. It had been, in my vision, greatly reduced in size—perhaps, because I subliminally corrected what logic warned me might still be the dreaded remnants of delirium’s dilating world. Now the object proved to be a giant polygonal Faber pencil, four feet long and correspondingly thick. It had been hanging as a showpiece in the shop’s window, and she presumed I had coveted it, as I coveted all things that were not quite purchasable. The shopman had been obliged to ring up an agent, a “Doctor” Libner (as if the transaction possessed indeed some pathological import). For an awful moment, I wondered whether the point was made of real graphite. It was. And some years later I satisfied myself, by drilling a hole in the side, that the lead went right through the whole length—a perfect case of art for art’s sake on the part of Faber and Dr. Libner since the pencil was far too big for use and, indeed, was not meant to be used.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  And it is one not of self-discipline but of self-abnegation. The dichotomy between the spiritual and the political is also false, resulting from an incomplete attention to our erotic knowledge. For the bridge which connects them is formed by the erotic—the sensual—those physical, emotional, and psychic expressions of what is deepest and strongest and richest within each of us, being shared: the passions of love, in its deepest meanings. Beyond the superficial, the considered phrase, “It feels right to me,” acknowledges the strength of the erotic into a true knowledge, for what that means is the first and most powerful guiding light toward any understanding. And understanding is a hand-maiden which can only wait upon, or clarify, that knowledge, deeply born. The erotic is the nurturer or nursemaid of all our deepest knowledge. The erotic functions for me in several ways, and the first is in providing the power which comes from sharing deeply any pursuit with another person. The sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic, or intellectual, forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared between them, and lessens the threat of their difference. Another important way in which the erotic connection functions is the open and fearless underlining of my capacity for joy. In the way my body stretches to music and opens into response, hearkening to its deepest rhythms, so every level upon which I sense also opens to the erotically satisfying experience, whether it is dancing, building a bookcase, writing a poem, examining an idea. That self-connection shared is a measure of the joy which I know myself to be capable of feeling, a reminder of my capacity for feeling. And that deep and irreplaceable knowledge of my capacity for joy comes to demand from all of my life that it be lived within the knowledge that such satisfaction is possible, and does not have to be called marriage , nor god , nor an afterlife . This is one reason why the erotic is so feared, and so often relegated to the bedroom alone, when it is recognized at all. For once we begin to feel deeply all the aspects of our lives, we begin to demand from ourselves and from our life-pursuits that they feel in accordance with that joy which we know ourselves to be capable of. Our erotic knowledge empowers us, becomes a lens through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence, forcing us to evaluate those aspects honestly in terms of their relative meaning within our lives. And this is a grave responsibility, projected from within each of us, not to settle for the convenient, the shoddy, the conventionally expected, nor the merely safe.

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

  Suddenly as I went on, I felt her move and then again; plainly she was showing me where my touch gave her most pleasure: I could have died for her in thanks; again she moved and I could feel a little mound or small button of flesh right in the front of her sex, above the junction of the inner lips: of course it was her clitoris. I had forgotten all the old Methodist doctor’s books till that moment; this fragment of long forgotten knowledge came back to me: gently I rubbed the clitoris and at once she pressed down on my finger for a moment or two. I tried to insert my finger into the vagina; but she drew away at once and quickly, closing her sex as if it hurt, so I went back to caressing her tickler. Sudden the miracle ceased. The cursed organist had finished his explanation of the new plain chant, and as he touched the first notes on the piano, E… drew her legs together; I took away my hand and she stepped down from the chair: “You darling, darling”, I whispered; but she frowned, and then just gave me a smile out of the corner of her eye to show me she was not displeased. Ah, how lovely, how seductive she seemed to me now, a thousand times lovelier and more desirable than ever before. As we stood up to sing again, I whispered to her: “I love you, love you, dear, dear!” I can never express the passion of gratitude I felt to her for her goodness, her sweetness in letting me touch her sex. E… it was who opened the Gates of Paradise to me and let me first taste the hidden mysteries of sexual delight. Still, after more than fifty years I feel the thrill of the joy she gave me by her response, and the passionate reverence of my gratitude is still alive in me. This experience with E… had the most important and unlooked for results. The mere fact that girls could feel sex pleasure “just as boys do” increased my liking for them and lifted the whole sexual intercourse to a higher plane in my thought. The excitement and pleasure were so much more intense than anything I had experienced before that I resolved to keep myself for this higher joy. No more self-abuse for me; I knew something infinitely better. One kiss was better, one touch of a girl’s sex.

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  To him, in a way, I owe the ability to continue for another stretch along my private footpath which runs parallel to the road of that troubled decade. When, in July 1906, the Tsar unconstitutionally dissolved the Parliament, a number of its members, my father among them, held a rebellious session in Viborg and issued a manifesto that urged the people to resist the government. For this, more than a year and a half later they were imprisoned. My father spent a restful, if somewhat lonesome, three months in solitary confinement, with his books, his collapsible bathtub, and his copy of J. P. Muller’s manual of home gymnastics. To the end of her days, my mother preserved the letters he managed to smuggle through to her—cheerful epistles written in pencil on toilet paper (these I have published in 1965, in the fourth issue of the Russian-language review Vozdushnïe puti, edited by Roman Grynberg in New York). We were in the country when he regained his liberty, and it was the village schoolmaster who directed the festivities and arranged the bunting (some of it frankly red) to greet my father on his way home from the railway station, under archivolts of fir needles and crowns of bluebottles, my father’s favorite flower. We children had gone down to the village, and it is when I recall that particular day that I see with the utmost clarity the sun-spangled river; the bridge, the dazzling tin of a can left by a fisherman on its wooden railing; the linden-treed hill with its rosy-red church and marble mausoleum where my mother’s dead reposed; the dusty road to the village; the strip of short, pastel-green grass, with bald patches of sandy soil, between the road and the lilac bushes behind which walleyed, mossy log cabins stood in a rickety row; the stone building of the new schoolhouse near the wooden old one; and, as we swiftly drove by, the little black dog with very white teeth that dashed out from among the cottages at a terrific pace but in absolute silence, saving his voice for the brief outburst he would enjoy when his muted spurt would at last bring him close to the speeding carriage.

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  We walked under the white lacery of berimed avenues in public parks. We huddled together on cold benches—after having removed first their tidy cover of snow, then our snow-incrusted mittens. We haunted museums. They were drowsy and deserted on weekday mornings, and very warm, in contrast to the glacial haze and its red sun that, like a flushed moon, hung in the eastern windows. There we would seek the quiet back rooms, the stopgap mythologies nobody looked at, the etchings, the medals, the paleographic items, the Story of Printing—poor things like that. Our best find, I think, was a small room where brooms and ladders were kept; but a batch of empty frames that suddenly started to slide and topple in the dark attracted an inquisitive art lover, and we fled. The Hermitage, St. Petersburg’s Louvre, offered nice nooks, especially in a certain hall on the ground floor, among cabinets with scarabs, behind the sarcophagus of Nana, high priest of Ptah. In the Russian Museum of Emperor Alexander III, two halls (Nos. 30 and 31, in its northeastern corner), harboring repellently academic paintings by Shishkin (“Clearing in a Pine Forest”) and by Harlamov (“Head of a Young Gypsy”), offered a bit of privacy because of some tall stands with drawings—until a foul-mouthed veteran of the Turkish campaign threatened to call the police. So from these great museums we graduated to smaller ones, such as the Suvorov, for instance, where I recall a most silent room full of old armor and tapestries, and torn silk banners, with several bewigged, heavily booted dummies in green uniforms standing guard over us. But wherever we went, invariably, after a few visits, this or that hoary, blear-eyed, felt-soled attendant would grow suspicious and we would have to transfer our furtive frenzy elsewhere—to the Pedagogical Museum, to the Museum of Court Carriages, or to a tiny museum of old maps, which guidebooks do not even list—and then out again into the cold, into some lane of great gates and green lions with rings in their jaws, into the stylized snowscape of the “Art World,” Mir Iskusstva—Dobuzhinski, Alexandre Benois—so dear to me in those days.

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  3In the course of my twenty years of exile I devoted a prodigious amount of time to the composing of chess problems. A certain position is elaborated on the board, and the problem to be solved is how to mate Black in a given number of moves, generally two or three. It is a beautiful, complex and sterile art related to the ordinary form of the game only insofar as, say, the properties of a sphere are made use of both by a juggler in weaving a new act and by a tennis player in winning a tournament. Most chess players, in fact, amateurs and masters alike, are only mildly interested in these highly specialized, fanciful, stylish riddles, and though appreciative of a catchy problem would be utterly baffled if asked to compose one. Inspiration of a quasi-musical, quasi-poetical, or to be quite exact, poetico-mathematical type, attends the process of thinking up a chess composition of that sort. Frequently, in the friendly middle of the day, on the fringe of some trivial occupation, in the idle wake of a passing thought, I would experience, without warning, a twinge of mental pleasure as the bud of a chess problem burst open in my brain, promising me a night of labor and felicity. It might be a new way of blending an unusual strategic device with an unusual line of defense; it might be a glimpse of the actual configuration of men that would render at last, with humor and grace, a difficult theme that I had despaired of expressing before; or it might be a mere gesture made in the mist of my mind by the various units of force represented by chessmen—a kind of swift dumb show, suggesting new harmonies and new conflicts; whatever it was, it belonged to an especially exhilarating order of sensation, and my only quarrel with it today is that the maniacal manipulation of carved figures, or of their mental counterparts, during my most ebullient and prolific years engulfed so much of the time I could have devoted to verbal adventure.

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  3To fix correctly, in terms of time, some of my childhood recollections, I have to go by comets and eclipses, as historians do when they tackle the fragments of a saga. But in other cases there is no dearth of data. I see myself, for instance, clambering over wet black rocks at the seaside while Miss Norcott, a languid and melancholy governess, who thinks I am following her, strolls away along the curved beach with Sergey, my younger brother. I am wearing a toy bracelet. As I crawl over those rocks, I keep repeating, in a kind of zestful, copious, and deeply gratifying incantation, the English word “childhood,” which sounds mysterious and new, and becomes stranger and stranger as it gets mixed up in my small, overstocked, hectic mind, with Robin Hood and Little Red Riding Hood, and the brown hoods of old hunchbacked fairies. There are dimples in the rocks, full of tepid seawater, and my magic muttering accompanies certain spells I am weaving over the tiny sapphire pools. The place is of course Abbazia, on the Adriatic. The thing around my wrist, looking like a fancy napkin ring, made of semitranslucent, pale-green and pink, celluloidish stuff, is the fruit of a Christmas tree, which Onya, a pretty cousin, my coeval, gave me in St. Petersburg a few months before. I sentimentally treasured it until it developed dark streaks inside which I decided as in a dream were my hair cuttings which somehow had got into the shiny substance together with my tears during a dreadful visit to a hated hairdresser in nearby Fiume. On the same day, at a waterside café, my father happened to notice, just as we were being served, two Japanese officers at a table near us, and we immediately left—not without my hastily snatching a whole bombe of lemon sherbet, which I carried away secreted in my aching mouth. The year was 1904. I was five. Russia was fighting Japan. With hearty relish, the English illustrated weekly Miss Norcott subscribed to reproduced war pictures by Japanese artists that showed how the Russian locomotives—made singularly toylike by the Japanese pictorial style—would drown if our Army tried to lay rails across the treacherous ice of Lake Baikal.

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

  We may, in support of what we have said, quote the words of Prosper. “Lest we should act not devoutly but unwillingly. For the necessity which proceeds from divine love does not diminish love, but increases it.” And St. Augustine, in his epistle (127) to Armentarius and Paulina, shows that this necessity is desirable and praiseworthy. “Since,” he says, “you now have bound yourself, it is not lawful for you to act otherwise. Before you were under a vow, you were free to do as you wouldst: now, however, you art subject to your vow. Nevertheless, liberty is not a matter of congratulation, since it renders man debtor for what he cannot repay with money. But now that your promise is made to God, I do not invite you to great justice (i.e. to the chastity which you have vowed), but I warn you against great iniquity. For, if you do not perform what you have vowed, you will not remain as you were before your vow. Before your vow you were lower than at present, not worse; now, if (which God forbid) you break your faith with Him, you will be as much the more accursed as you will be blessed if you dost keep your vow. Repent not of your promise to God; but rather rejoice that now it is no longer lawful for you to do that which formerly, to your detriment, was permissible to you. Act firmly and fulfil in deed what you have promised by word. He will help you who asks for your vows. Blessed necessity which constrains us to better things.” From these words we see, how erroneous is the doctrine, that persons are not bound to keep a vow that they may have made to go into religion. CHAPTER XIII

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

  Reply to Objection 1: Punishment has not to be equal to fault as to the amount of duration as is seen to be the case also with human laws. We may also reply with Gregory (Dial. xliv) that although sin is temporal in act, it is eternal in will. Reply to Objection 2: The degree of intensity in the punishment corresponds to the degree of gravity in the sin; wherefore mortal sins unequal in gravity will receive a punishment unequal in intensity but equal in duration. Reply to Objection 3: The punishments inflicted on those who are not altogether expelled from the society of their fellow-citizens are intended for their correction: whereas those punishments, whereby certain persons are wholly banished from the society of their fellow-citizens, are not intended for their correction; although they may be intended for the correction and tranquillity of the others who remain in the state. Accordingly the damnation of the wicked is for the correction of those who are now in the Church; for punishments are intended for correction, not only when they are being inflicted, but also when they are decreed. Reply to Objection 4: The everlasting punishment of the wicked will not be altogether useless. For they are useful for two purposes. First, because thereby the Divine justice is safeguarded which is acceptable to God for its own sake. Hence Gregory says (Dial. iv): “Almighty God on account of His loving kindness delights not in the torments of the unhappy, but on account of His justice. He is for ever unappeased by the punishment of the wicked.” Secondly, they are useful, because the elect rejoice therein, when they see God’s justice in them, and realize that they have escaped them. Hence it is written (Ps. 57:12): “The just shall rejoice when he shall see the revenge,” etc., and (Is. 66:24): “They,” namely the wicked, “shall be a loathsome sight* to all flesh,” namely to the saints, as a gloss says. [*”Ad satietatem visionis,” which St. Thomas takes to signify being satiated with joy; Cf.[5176] Q[94], A[3]]. Gregory expresses himself in the same sense (Dial. iv): “The wicked are all condemned to eternal punishment, and are punished for their own wickedness. Yet they will burn to some purpose, namely that the just may all both see in God the joys they receive, and perceive in them the torments they have escaped: for which reason they will acknowledge themselves for ever the debtors of Divine grace the more that they will see how the evils which they overcame by its assistance are punished eternally.” Reply to Objection 5: Although the punishment relates to the soul accidentally, it relates essentially to the soul infected with guilt. And since guilt will remain in the soul for ever, its punishment also will be everlasting.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  From day to day she appeared natural, easy, affable, and industrious, attending diligently and faithfully to her household duties, assisting in the general work of the family as a faithful, prudent daughter might be supposed to do, singing, reading, or conversing as opportunity offered, upon all matters of private or general interest to the family." The so-called Mary whilst at the Roffs' would sometimes 'go back to heaven,' and leave the body in a 'quiet trance,' i.e., without the original personality of Lurancy returning. After eight or nine weeks however, the memory and manner of Lurancy would sometimes partially, but not entirely, return for a few minutes. Once Lurancy seems to have taken full possession for a short time. At last, after some fourteen weeks, comformably to the prophecy which 'Mary' had made when she first assumed 'control,' she departed definitively and the Lurancy-consciousness came back for good. Mr. Roff writes: "She wanted me to take her home, which I did. She called me Mr. Roff, and talked with me as a young girl would, not being acquainted. I asked her how things appeared to her—if they seemed natural. She said it seemed like a dream to her. She met her parents and brothers in a very affectionate manner, hugging and kissing each one in tears of gladness. She clasped her arms around her father's neck a long time, fairly smothering him with kisses. I saw her father just now (eleven o'clock). He says she has been perfectly natural, and seems entirely well." Lurancy's mother writes, a couple of months later, that she was "perfectly and entirely well and natural. For two or three weeks after her return home, she seemed a little strange to what she had been before she was taken sick last summer, but only, perhaps, the natural change that had taken place with the girl, and except it seemed to her as though she had been dreaming or sleeping, etc. Lurancy has been smarter, more intelligent, more industrious, more womanly, and more polite than before. We give the credit of her complete cure and restoration to her family, to Dr. E. W. Stevens, and Mr. and Mrs. Roff, by their obtaining her removal to Mr. Roff's, where her cure was perfected. We firmly believe that, had she remained at home, she would have died, or we would have been obliged to send her to the insane asylum; and if so, that she would have died there; and further, that I could not have lived a short time with the care and trouble devolving on me. Several of the relatives of Lurancy, including ourselves, now believe she was cured by spirit power, and that Mary Roff controlled the girl." Eight years later, Lurancy was reported to be married and a mother, and in good health. She had apparently outgrown the mediumistic phase of her existence. [319] On the condition of the sensibility during these invasions, few observations have been made.

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

  CHRYSOSTOM. Or He said, Receive ye the Holy Spirit, that He might make them fit to receive it, or indicated as present that which was to come. AUGUSTINE. (de Trin. 15. c. 26.) Or the Lord after His resurrection gave the Holy Spirit twice, once on earth, because of the love of our neighbour, and again from heaven, because of the love of God. 24:50–5350. And he led them out as far as to Bethany, and he lifted up his hands, and blessed them. 51. And it came to pass, while he blessed them, he was parted from them, and carried up into heaven. 52. And they worshipped him, and returned to Jerusalem with great joy: 53. And were continually in the temple, praising and blessing God. Amen. BEDE. Having omitted all those things which may have taken place during forty-three days between our Lord and His disciples, St. Luke silently joins to the first day of the resurrection, the last day when He ascended into heaven, saying, And he led them out as far as to Bethany. First, indeed, because of the name of the place, which signifies “the house of obedience.” For He who descended because of the disobedience of the wicked, ascended because of the obedience of the converted. Next, because of the situation of the same village, which is said to be placed on the side of the mount of Olives; because He has placed the foundations, as it were, of the house of the obedient Church, of faith, hope, and love, in the side of that highest mountain, namely, Christ. But He blessed them to whom He had delivered the precepts of His teaching; hence it follows, And he lifted up his hands, and blessed them. THEOPHYLACT. Perhaps pouring into them a power of preservation, until the coming of the Spirit; and perhaps instructing them, that as often as we go away, we should commend to God by our blessing those who are placed under us. ORIGEN. But that He blessed them with uplifted hands, signifies that it becomes him who blesses any one to be furnished with various works and labours in behalf of others. For in this way are the hands raised up on high. CHRYSOSTOM. But observe, that the Lord submits to our sight the promised rewards. He had promised the resurrection of the body; He rose from the dead, and conferred with His disciples for forty days. It is also promised that we shall be caught up in the clouds through the air; this also He made manifest by His works. For it follows, And it came to pass, while he blessed them, he was parted, &c. THEOPHYLACT. And Elias indeed was seen, as it were, to be taken up into heaven, but the Saviour, the forerunner of all, Himself ascended into heaven to appear in the Divine sight in His sacred body; and already is our nature honoured in Christ by a certain Angelic power.

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

  This joy, and this belief I want to impart to others more than almost anything else, for this has been to me a new Gospel of courage and resolve and certain reward, a man’s creed teaching that as you grow in wisdom and courage and kindness, all good things are added unto you. I find that I am outrunning my story and giving here a stage of thought and belief that only became mine much later; but the beginning of my individual soul-life was this experience, that I had been blind to natural beauty and now could see; this was the root and germ, so to speak, of the later faith that guided all my mature life, filling me with courage and spilling over into hope and joy ineffable. Very soon the first command of it came to my lips almost every hour: “Blame your own blindness! always blame yourself!” * * * FROM SCHOOL TO AMERICA. Chapter IV. Early in January there was a dress rehearsal of the Trial Scene of “The Merchant of Venice.” The Grandee of the neighborhood who owned the great park, Sir W. W. W., some M.P.’s, notably a Mr. Whalley who had a pretty daughter and lived in the vicinity, and the Vicar and his family were invited, and others whom I did not know; but with the party from the Vicarage came Lucille. The big schoolroom had been arranged as a sort of theatre and the estrade at one end where the Head-Master used to throne it on official occasions, was converted into a makeshift stage and draped by a big curtain that could be drawn back or forth at will. The Portia was a very handsome lad of sixteen named Herbert, gentle and kindly, yet redeemed from effeminacy by the fact that he was the fleetest sprinter in the school and could do the hundred yards in eleven and a half seconds. The “Duke” was, of course, Jones and the merchant “Antonio” a big fellow named Vernon, and I had got Edwards the part of “Bassanio” and a pretty boy in the Fourth Form was taken as “Nerissa.” So far as looks went the cast was passable; but the “Duke” recited his lines as if they had been imperfectly learned and so the “Trial Scene” opened badly. But the part of “Shylock” suited me intimately and I had learned how to recite. Now before E… and Lucille, I was set on doing better than my best. When my cue came I bowed low before the “Duke” and then bowed again to left and right of him in silence and formally, as if I, the outcast Jew, were saluting the whole court; then in a voice that at first I simply made slow and clear and hard, I began the famous reply: “I have possessed your Grace of what I purpose; And by our Holy Sabbath have I sworn To have the due and forfeit of my bond.”

• From Survival of the Prettiest: The Science of Beauty (1999)

  Galton did not follow up on his discovery of the beauty of blends, probably because attractive criminals did not illustrate any point he wished to make. He traveled by rail with a map in his coat pocket and some pins, composing a “beauty map” of the U.K. Pricking his map whenever he saw a good-looking person, he made London a pincushion but left Aberdeen, Scotland, unpricked. The map did not lead to further scientific discoveries. But the composite photography he introduced lived on. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries it was popular with college graduating classes, families, and groups of friends who took delight in seeing themselves blended into a single person. As one woman said on viewing a composite, “It is charming to enjoy the society of somebody who is all one’s intimate friends at once.” We search them to parse resemblance, dis-embed features, and entertain alternate identities. If Galton was right, we are also fascinated by composites because they are scenes stolen from mental life, glimpses of our otherwise invisible mental images. Scientists can now merge hundreds of digitized images on the computer, and in laboratories in Europe, the United States, and Japan they are using digitized composites to test the beauty of averages. The many people who participate in these studies agree with Galton: averaged faces are usually more attractive than individual faces. Combining two or four faces produces small improvements, combining thirty-two faces makes the composite face much more attractive than the individual faces. Very few individuals are more attractive than the composites (some are, but we will return to this interesting minority later). Most people do not conjure up the word “average” when they see a good-looking face. But average in this context means average in shape, not average in beauty. In a world of short noses and long noses, almond eyes and round eyes, oval faces and round faces, thick lips and thin lips, overbites and underbites, the eye does its statistics, takes its sums, divides by the numbers, and arrives at a mean value. The beauty of such averages may reflect our sensitivity to nature’s optimal designs. In nature, average proportions often signal good health and good design. Measures of birds killed during storms find a high number with unusually long or short wings. Survivors of the storm have average wingspans that give them the best liftoff and control of flight. Human babies who are born larger or smaller than average (about eight pounds) are less likely to survive. The equation between averageness and healthiness is so strong in the natural world that physiologist Johan Koeslag believes that preferences for the average are stamped into mating animals. He calls it “koinophilia,” from the Greek word “koinos,” meaning the usual, and “philos” meaning “love.”

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

  So inconstant is the human will that it has become customary not to believe what men say they will do for one another, unless they confirm their words by promise, and further ratify those promises by lawful safeguards. Now we owe more to ourselves, especially in the affairs of our spiritual wellbeing, than we owe to other people. This we are taught by the words of Sirach 30:24 [23], “Have pity on your own soul, pleasing God.” Now by reason of the inconstancy of his will, a man may neglect to perform something that he intended for the temporal advantage of his neighbour; he therefore provides against this possible omission by confirming his promise by some oath or pledge. How much more fittingly then may he not bind, himself by oath or vow to carry out some good resolution which he has made? Hence St. Augustine says, in his epistle to Paulina and Armentarius, “Having made a vow, you have bound yourself, and cannot act otherwise.” And he further adds: “Never regret your vow, but rather rejoice that it is now no longer lawful for you to do what, to your detriment, you were able to do before.” It is further to be remembered that a work of lesser intrinsic worth is rendered more meritorious, if it is inspired by some motive of superior virtue. Thus, abstinence is more meritorious if it is practised from charity, and the merit is further increased if the motive be latria, which is of greater value than abstinence. Now a vow is an act of latria. It is a promise made to God, concerning those things which relate to His worship. Hence Isaiah says (19:21), “The Egyptians shall know the Lord in that day, and shall worship Him with sacrifices and offerings, and they shall make vows to the Lord, and perform them.” Thus we see that fasting will be more meritorious and more praiseworthy, if it is performed under vow. A counsel or command concerning this matter is given us in the words of Ps 75:12: “Vow, and pay to the Lord your God!” This command or exhortation would be futile, were not a good work done under vow more meritorious than one done without such an obligation.

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

  I returned to my chair to think, and soon found the solution. Next day I again crouched before the girl’s legs, choking with emotion. I put my pencil near her toes, and reached round between her legs with my left hand as if to get it, taking care to touch her calf. She shrieked, and drew back her legs, holding my hand tight between them, and cried: “What are you doing there!” “Getting my pencil”, I said humbly, “it rolled.” “There it is”, she said, kicking it with her foot. “Thanks” I replied, overjoyed, for the feel of her soft legs was still on my hand. “You’re a funny little fellow”, she said, but I didn’t care; I had had my first taste of Paradise and the forbidden fruit—authentic heaven! I have no recollection of her face: it seemed pleasant; that’s all I remember. None of the girls made any impression on me but I can still recall the thrill of admiration and pleasure her shapely limbs gave me. I record this incident at length, because it stands alone in my memory, and because it proves that sex-feeling may show itself in early childhood. One day about 1890 I had Meredith, Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde dining with me in Park Lane and the time of sex-awakening was discussed. Both Pater and Wilde spoke of it as a sign of puberty; Pater thought it began about 13 or 14 and Wilde to my amazement set it as late as 16. Meredith alone was inclined to put it earlier. “It shows sporadically”, he said, “and sometimes before puberty.” I recalled the fact that Napoleon tells how he was in love before he was five years old with a school-mate called Giacominetta, but even Meredith laughed at this and would not believe that any real sex-feeling could show itself so early. To prove the point, I gave my experience as I have told it here, and brought Meredith to pause: “very interesting”, he thought, “but peculiar!” “In her abnormalities”, says Goethe, “Nature reveals her secrets”; here is an abnormality, perhaps as such, worth noting. I hadn’t another sensation of sex till nearly six years later when I was eleven, since which time such emotions have been almost incessant. My exaltation to the oldest class in arithmetic got me into trouble by bringing me into relations with the headmistress, Mrs. Frost, who was very cross and seemed to think that I should spell as correctly as I did sums. When she found I couldn’t, she used to pull my ears and got into the habit of digging her long thumb-nail into my ear till it bled. I didn’t mind the smart; in fact, I was delighted, for her cruelty brought me the pity of the elder girls who used to wipe my ears with their pocket-handkerchiefs and say that old Frost was a beast and a cat.

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

  We covered about thirty miles a day: Bob sat in the wagon and drove the four mules, while Bent and Charlie made us coffee and biscuits in the morning and cooked us sow-belly and any game we might bring in for dinner and supper. There was a small keg of rye whisky on the wagon; but we kept it for snake-bite or some emergency. I became the hunter to the outfit, for it was soon discovered that by some sixth sense I could always find my way back to the wagon on a bee-line, and only Bob of the whole party possessed the same instinct. Bob explained it by muttering “No Americano!” The instinct itself which has stood me in good stead more times than I can count, is in essence inexplicable: I feel the direction; but the vague feeling is strengthened by observing the path of the sun and the way the halms of grass lean, and the bushes grow. But it made me a valuable member of the outfit instead of a mere parasite midway between master and man, and it was the first step to Bob’s liking which taught me more than all the other haps of my early life. I had bought a shotgun and and a Winchester rifle and revolver in Kansas City and Reece had taught me how to get weapons that would fit me and this fact helped to make me a fair shot almost at once. But soon to my grief I found that I would never be a great shot; for Bob and Charlie and even Dell could see things far beyond my range of vision. I was shortsighted in fact through astigmatism and even glasses I discovered later, could not clear my blurred sight. It was the second or third disappointment of my life the others being the conviction of my personal ugliness and the fact that I should always be too short and small to be a great fighter or athlete. As I went on in life I discovered more serious disabilities but they only strengthened my deep-seated resolve to make the most of any qualities I might possess and meanwhile the life was divinely new and strange and pleasureful. After breakfast, about five o’clock in the morning, I would ride away from the wagon till it was out of sight and then abandon myself to the joy of solitude, with no boundary between plain and sky.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  All my friends lived close by, and by the time I was seven or eight I could ride my bike to their houses and we’d go all over to town together. I just remember being outside as much as I could. There was a huge old live oak tree in our backyard and we’d spend hours in it, pretending to be explorers or astronauts. My best friend Eric had a tree house in his yard and we used to build magnificent forts and whoop it up with war games that drove our moms crazy. That of course was the point. Another friend’s house was right on a creek. When we got older we took great hikes up the canyon. We just were outside and going as much as we could. I remember how tough it was to come in for dinner, not to mention to have to stay in and do homework!” He laughed, obviously enjoying sharing his memories. As I listened to Gary describe what it was like to play in his backyard, it struck me that children from divorced families do not talk this way. In all the hours I have talked with Karen through all the years, she never spontaneously turned to the subject of play. It turns out that children raised in very unhappy intact families also don’t recall playing with friends, but we’ll get to that in Chapter 7. As Gary remembered the forts that he and his friends built, how they screamed at each other like banshees, how they could have given Geronimo lessons, I realized that these were happy, sunlit memories. These were, as one novelist wrote, “those early amorphous years when memory has only begun, when life is full of beginnings and no ends and everything was forever.” 2 Gary and his friends were playing the games that children have invented since the beginning of time. Of course the rough-and-tumble life of the school and playground has its heavy disappointments and its share of physical and emotional injuries. Children can be cruel. Those excluded from the inner circles suffer a lot. But as an adult, Gary remembered with amusement how he fell learning to ride a bike and his first soccer match when he ran down the field the wrong way and everyone made fun of him. When children of divorce did remember playing with friends as an important experience of childhood, the memories were from before the divorce. No doubt many of them rode bicycles, climbed trees, and fooled around in backyards, but they did not mention it. Carefree play was not what came to mind when I talked with them at the time or when they reflected back on their younger years, in elementary school. Instead of caring about who finds who in a game of hide-and-seek or who is at bat in the local softball game, children of divorce have other, more pressing concerns.

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  He still came, almost daily, however, to spar or fence with my father. I would dash, with my fur coat half on, through the green drawing room (where an odor of fir, hot wax and tangerines would linger long after Christmas had gone), toward the library, from which came a medley of stamping and scraping sounds. There, I would find my father, a big, robust man, looking still bigger in his white training suit, thrusting and parrying, while his agile instructor added brisk exclamations (“Battez!” “Rompez!”) to the click-clink of the foils. Panting a little, my father would remove the convex fencing mask from his perspiring pink face to kiss me good morning. The place combined pleasantly the scholarly and the athletic, the leather of books and the leather of boxing gloves. Fat armchairs stood along the book-lined walls. An elaborate “punching ball” affair purchased in England—four steel posts supporting the board from which the pear-shaped striking bag hung—gleamed at the end of the spacious room. The purpose of this apparatus, especially in connection with the machine-gunlike ra-ta-ta of its bag, was questioned and the butler’s explanation of it reluctantly accepted as true, by some heavily armed street fighters who came in through the window in 1917. When the Soviet Revolution made it imperative for us to leave St. Petersburg, that library disintegrated, but queer little remnants of it kept cropping up abroad. Some twelve years later, in Berlin, I picked up from a bookstall one such waif, bearing my father’s ex libris. Very fittingly, it turned out to be The War of the Worlds by Wells. And after another decade had elapsed, I discovered one day in the New York Public Library, indexed under my father’s name, a copy of the neat catalogue he had had privately printed when the phantom books listed therein still stood, ruddy and sleek, on his shelves. 3He would replace his mask and go on with his stamping and lunging while I hurried back the way I had come. After the warmth in the entrance hall, where logs were crackling in the large fireplace, the outdoor air gave an icy shock to one’s lungs. I would ascertain which of our two cars, the Benz or the Wolseley, was there to take me to school. The first, a gray landaulet, manned by Volkov, a gentle, pale-faced chauffeur, was the older one. Its lines had seemed positively dynamic in comparison with those of the insipid, noseless and noiseless, electric coupé that had preceded it; but, in its turn, it acquired an old-fashioned, top-heavy look, with a sadly shrunken bonnet, as soon as the comparatively long, black English limousine came to share its garage.

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

  He was very quick and throwing his head aside, escaped the full force of the blow; still the seam of the new ball grazed his cheek-bone and broke the skin: everyone stood amazed: only people who know the strength of English conventions can realise the sensation. Jones himself did not know what to do but took out his handkerchief to mop the blood, the skin being just broken. As for me, I walked away by myself. I had broken the supreme law of our schoolboy honor: never to give away our dissensions to a master, still less to boys and masters from another school; I had sinned in public, too, and before everyone; I’d be universally condemned. The truth is, I was desperate, dreadfully unhappy, for since the breakdown of the fags’ revolt the lower boys had drawn away from me and the older boys never spoke to me if they could help it and then it was always as “Pat.” I felt myself an outcast and was utterly lonely and miserable as only despised outcasts can be. I was sure, too, I should be expelled and knew my father would judge me harshly; he was always on the side of the authorities and masters. However, the future was not to be as gloomy as my imagination pictured it. The Mathematical Master was a young Cambridge man of perhaps six and twenty, Stackpole by name: I had asked him one day about a problem in algebra and he had been kind to me. On returning to the school this fatal afternoon about six, I happened to meet him on the edge of the playing field and by a little sympathy he soon drew out my whole story. “I want to be expelled. I hate the beastly school”, was my cry. All the charm of the Irish schools was fermenting in me: I missed the kindliness of boy to boy and of the masters to the boys; above all the imaginative fancies of fairies and “the little people” which had been taught us by our nurses and though only half believed in; yet enriched and glorified life,—all this was lost to me. My head in especial, was full of stories of Banshees and fairy queens and heroes, half due to memory, half to my own shaping, which made me a desirable companion to Irish boys and only got me derision from the English. “I wish I had known that you were being fagged”, Stackpole said when he had heard all, “I can easily remedy that”, and he went with me to the schoolroom and then and there erased my name from the fags’ list and wrote in my name in the First Mathematical Division. “There”, he said with a smile, “you are now in the Upper School where you belong. I think”, he added, “I had better go and tell the Doctor what I’ve done. Don’t be down-hearted, Harris”, he added, “it’ll all come right.”

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  Her stunning blue eyes had a new twinkle that flashed as we greeted each other warmly. I told her how lovely she looked and congratulated her on her forthcoming marriage. “Who’s the lucky man?” “We’re both lucky,” she said, settling on the sofa. “Gavin and I did everything differently compared to how I lived my life before.” And she launched into her story. Within months of our last meeting, she had moved out of the apartment she shared with Nick and said good- bye. As she had anticipated, he was devastated, begged her to come back, wailed, and made her feel guiltier than ever. “How were you able to leave?” I asked, aware of her long-standing difficulty in turning away anyone who needed her care. She was silent and then answered slowly, her face pale. “I felt like I was dying. It has to be the hardest thing I’ve ever done and it took all my courage.” She described how she would come home after work and find her partner lying on the couch, waiting for her to take charge. It was just like taking care of her mom. At that point, she realized she had to get out. Her escape took her to the East Coast, graduate school, and ultimately into a dream job—directing a regional public health program for handicapped children in five southern states. It was there that Karen met her fiancé, Gavin. As she told me about him, I smiled and said, “I remember when you thought you didn’t have choices. It looks like you’ve made quite a few recently.” “You mean, how did I decide to marry Gavin?” She blushed ever so slightly. “It’s a long story. We met at a party not long after I moved to Chapel Hill and he called to say that he would love to get together. He’s an assistant professor of economics at Duke and even though I knew absolutely nothing about his field, we hit it off instantly. I wanted to see him again right away but I waited a discreet week and then I called him back. Well, we were together every day from then on and about six months later I moved in with him. He says that the day I moved in was, in his eyes, the day we married, but I didn’t see it that way. I wasn’t ready quite yet. I was scared.” “So you were hesitating. Was it about Gavin or about marriage?” “About marriage. About being happy. You see, it’s not all behind me. Part of me is always waiting for disaster to strike. I keep reminding myself that I’m doing this to myself, but the truth is that I live in dread that something bad will happen to me.