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 The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  In the showers he was all I cd have hoped for, flawed only by a little appendicitis scar; but he was selfconscious—not, I realised, about nudity, but about showering with whites. He was like other American negro servicemen I’ve seen in the Corry, used to segregation & despite their often transcendent beauty & presence somehow cowed or fearful of rejection. The regulars, however, were impressed, & Fox was very pointedly doing his ‘Get a bunk on last night, Charlie?’ patter, while young Andrews lathered his conversation with my Lord this and my Lord that—which of course impressed Roy in turn. I took him back to Brook St & opened a bottle of champagne. Taha looked at me very knowingly before going off to see his uncle, & then, having the place to myself, I more or less did what I wanted. There was a statutory preamble of remarks about girlfriends and what-have-you, but that out of the way we started kissing & stroking each other pretty uninhibitedly, & stripped off & had it away on the sofa & then on the floor three or four times. I must say he was absolute bliss, with that kind of innocence that so appeals to me, & very manly & friendly—nothing affected or girly about it. I’ve never known anyone ejaculate such quantities. Even the last time, when I brought him off by hand, it shot right up into his face. September 27: In a moment of foolishness I’d given Roy my telephone number. I was out most of the morning & didn’t return home until 5 or so, when I asked Taha if there had been any calls & he said ‘No Sir’ with a noticeably self-satisfied air. It wd have been wonderful to have had Roy again, but I found I was glad not to, & decided that if he shd get in touch I wd not see him. Any repetition wd lack the spontaneity & beauty of yesterday, & I wd rather remember it as one of those rare & wonderful days when two strangers come together in deliberate ignorance of each other for their mutual pleasure.

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

  The inviolability of the heroine’s sexual integrity is the deep premise of the ancient romance. Leucippe was said to have endured “every indignity and outrage against her body, except one.” It went without saying what single disgrace she had been spared. The physical integrity of the female protagonist was the convention, in a genre of conventions. The great literary critic Northup Frye has observed of the genre, that “with romance it is much harder to avoid the feeling of convention, that the story is one of a family of similar stories. Hence in the criticism of romance we are led very quickly from what the individual work says to what the entire convention it belongs to is saying through the work.” The insight is crucial, but it requires an important amendment. Frye simply underestimated the sophistication of some ancient romances. To compare, for example, naive texts like the Ephesian Tale with more artful confections like Leucippe and Clitophon, without recognizing the entirely different literary registers of the texts, is to miss the supreme command of the medium that authors like Achilles Tatius display. The Ephesian Tale and Leucippe and Clitophon use the same set of conventions but use them to vastly different effect. What they share is a generic syntax, out of which the meaning of the individual work is created.8 The ancient romances are stories of eros, a consuming physical passion that binds two beautiful lovers, a young man and young woman, in mutual attraction. The protagonists are unfailingly of high birth, born into the civic aristocracies of a broadly Hellenic Mediterranean. The stories are set against the backdrop of a physically familiar but temporally irreal Greek past, what Bakhtin called “adventure time.” Eros is the driving force of the story: a force of nature that, unbeckoned, guides human destiny. The novels celebrate eros as a gift of nature; they ponder the stark mystery that replenishing the city with new generations should also be a source of the greatest pleasure. The romances are unhesitantly carnal: eros is the ecstatic joy of bodily friction. At the same time the eros they admire is a force that has been safely caged in matrimony—if just barely. The novels are conservative, but hardly frigid. The novels unabashedly celebrate sex itself. The romances are idealizing. The lovers are noble in blood and mien, their passion is pure and true. Even the men are usually faithful, physically; emotionally, it is imperative that they remain committed. The mutual attraction between two lovers, married or about to be so, represented a new space for literate cultural idealism around domestic bliss and private fulfillment. The social and moral logic that underwrites the genre is shared between texts, even if the individual authors regard it with different levels of reverence. The social logic of the romances transcends the genre; the raw material of the romance is preliterary, essentially folkloric.9

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

  This description of the woman’s pleasure, the reader of the romance remembers, is delivered by a young man whose experiences, on his own admission, have been limited to professional women. Part of us may wonder if Clitophon has not himself been sold a convincing act, but that is to bring a modern cynicism into the picture. Achilles is a sly author, to be sure, but his rendering of female pleasure is integral to the whole conception of eros in the novel. The novels embrace the physical power of eros and celebrate its potential to be reconciled within the order of married life and the city-state. The Greeks and Romans recognized eros as a wild, destructive force. The novels present a cosmos where the feral power of eros is harnessed by marriage, not dampened by it. For Achilles, marriage itself exists as part of nature, or at least on an indistinct border between wild nature and human civilization. The novels are about the ending, about marriage, but they are not sermons or political pamphlets on behalf of marriage. In the world of the novel, civilization does not repress eros. For the novelist, the fires of sexual love gave warmth and meaning to human life. Civilization is nourished by absorbing eros into its most vital institution. THE GLOOMY ONES: THE PHILOSOPHERS AND SEXUALITYIn the very opening scene of Leucippe and Clitophon, the “author” sails to Sidon and meets Clitophon in a temple of the goddess Astarte. The topic of eros arises and the two descend to a nearby grove bordered by a clear cold stream; the rest of the novel is Clitophon’s first-person account of his experiences. The story of Clitophon and Leucippe’s romance is an afternoon conte in the cool shade of the plane trees. The ancient reader would have known immediately that we have been placed in the surroundings of Plato’s Phaedrus, one of the Athenian’s most celebrated dialogues on eros, in which Socrates extols the power of love to draw humans toward the divine. It was by design an ambitious place to set an erotic story. From the beginning Achilles Tatius evokes the atmosphere of philosophy and the possibility of a rivalry between philosophy and art. The novel presents a narrative of eros that is permeated at every turn by the concerns of contemporary philosophy. Leucippe and Clitophon is a philosophical novel, though not a dogmatic one. Indeed, Achilles Tatius was one of those creative spirits whose prime conviction was the superiority of art over doctrine as a vehicle for representing deep human truths.93

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  and even though my brother’s the only person in the whole house who doesn’t have to share a bedroom, he still appears mindful that it’s his sisters who taught him survival. In an effort to make up for the year we lost, the five of us do everything together. After school we take walks to Branch Brook Elementary’s playground and spend hours swaying gently on the swings and talking, or squealing as we balance the weight of all five of us between both sides of the seesaw. On cold or rainy days we take advantage of the fact that Mom has yet to find enough abandoned furniture to fill our house. We set up our radio inside what Mom calls “the great room”—our step-down giant living room with floor-to-ceiling mirrors—and dance like maniacs as the songs on Casey Kasem’s Top 40 countdown echo off the hardwood floor. When Frankie Valli’s “Swearin’ to God” comes on, we crowd around the radio to listen carefully to all the words and scribble them down. Mom always wants to be the first person she knows to memorize all the lyrics to the new Four Seasons songs. She says she has a special connection to them from her time as a go-go dancer when they were just an up-and-coming band from New Jersey playing the Long Island club circuit. One day she arrives home from work and nonchalantly invites us out to the front lawn to help her unload the car, where we find three bikes, and a new Big Wheel for Norm, in the front yard. ”Mom, wow!” we exclaim, instantly taking off for the park on our new rides. We whiz past Karl, who’s standing there, quietly beaming with his hands in his pockets. I shout over my shoulder, “Karl, thanks!” He shouts back: “You got it, kiddo!” This is when Mom suddenly gets wrapped up planning a new project: having a portrait taken of her with her five kids. As a hobby, she’s started sewing dresses for all of us, having purchased cotton fabric with raised crushed velvet in yellow, pink, and blue. She sits in concentration at her sewing machine, creating tea-length dresses with scooped necks and dome sleeves. She grows so possessed by the endeavor that when she hears us walking past where her sewing machine’s set up in the dining room, hints of the old Cookie begin to reveal themselves. “Stay the hell outta there!” she shouts. This is my cue to begin spending my afternoons in the school library. That old familiar undercurrent of uncertainty is back. Mom insists that Cherie’s and Camille’s hair remain straight and long like Marcia and Jan Brady, while my natural waves are styled in a trendy shag—short at the ears, long in the back. Mom cuts Norman’s hair to highlight his intense almond-shaped eyes and chiseled cheekbones. Rosie’s wispy blond locks are always in little pigtails.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  There I thought again of Licinius Sura, the statesman devoting his scant leisure to study of the marvels of hydraulics. They had told me much of the curious colors of dawn on the Ionian Sea, when beheld from the heights of Aetna. I decided to make the ascent of the mountain. We passed from the region of vines to the beds of lava, and on to the snow; the agile youth fairly ran on those steep slopes, but the scientists who went with me climbed by muleback. At the summit a shelter had been built for us to await the dawn. It came: an immense rainbow arched from horizon to horizon; on the icy crest strange fires blazed; earth and sea spread out to view as far as Africa, within sight, and as Greece, which we merely guessed at. That was truly an Olympian height in my life. All was there, the golden fringe of cloud, the eagles, and the cupbearer of immortality. Halcyon seasons, solstice of my days. . . . Far from exaggerating my former happiness, I must struggle against too weak a portrayal; even now the recollection overpowers me. More sincere than most men, I can freely admit the secret causes of this felicity: that calm so propitious for work and for discipline of the mind seems to me one of the richest results of love. And it puzzles me that these joys, so precarious at best, and so rarely perfect in the course of human life, however we may have sought or received them, should be regarded with such mistrust by the so-called wise, who denounce the danger of habit and excess in sensuous delight, instead of fearing its absence or its loss; in tyrannizing over their senses they pass time which would be better occupied in putting their souls to rights, or embellishing them. At that period I paid as constant attention to the greater securing of my happiness, to enjoying and judging it, too, as I had always done for the smallest details of my acts; and what is the act of love, itself, if not a moment of passionate attention on the part of the body? Every bliss achieved is a masterpiece; the slightest error turns it awry, and it alters with one touch of doubt; any heaviness detracts from its charm, the least stupidity renders it dull. My own felicity is in no way responsible for those of my imprudences which shattered it later on; in so far as I have acted in harmony with it I have been wise. I think still that someone wiser than I might well have remained happy till his death.

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

  In a similar way, I think that reframing aesthetic philosophy to remove humans from the organizing center of the discipline—to fully encompass the aesthetic productions of both human and nonhuman animals—can only enhance our appreciation of the marvelous diversity, complexity, aesthetic richness, and variable social functions of the human arts. By adopting a post-human aesthetic philosophy that places us, and our artworlds, in context with other animals, we will have a much deeper understanding of how we came to be and what is truly special about being human. — On a foggy late June morning in 1974, I stood in a large lobster boat eagerly gripping my binoculars as we pulled out of the harbor of West Jonesport, Maine. We were on our way to Machias Seal Island, at that time the southernmost nesting colony of the Atlantic Puffin (Fratercula arctica). The fog began to clear as we entered the deep water of the Bay of Fundy, and Captain Barna Norton was soon pointing out Greater Shearwaters, Sooty Shearwaters, and Wilson’s Storm Petrels—smaller relatives of the great oceangoing albatrosses—as they skimmed over the gray water. The sun broke through as we approached the grassy fifteen-acre island with its rocky shore and white postcard-ready lighthouse. Nesting in the grass along the boardwalks that crossed the island were thousands of Common Terns. Mixed in among them were a couple hundred Arctic Terns, distinguished from the Common Terns by their entirely bloodred beaks, silvery wings, shorter red legs, grayer breasts, and longer white tail plumes. In just six weeks, these Arctic Terns would begin their epic migration—the longest of any organism—down through the southern Atlantic to spend their winter in the Antarctic Ocean, only to return to breed here next summer. As we walked along the boardwalks through the tern colony, we instigated a traveling wave of consternation. Pairs of terns took turns screaming and diving down to attack our heads with their needle-sharp beaks. Being only twelve at the time, I was one of the shortest people in the group. So, the terns conveniently swooped down on the taller members of our party, and I escaped the brunt of these attacks.

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

  Abel was quick. Good Lord, he was fast. The ringleader had made a dash for it and was trying to climb over a wall. Abel grabbed him, pulled him down, and dragged him back. Then he stripped a branch off the tree, a switch, and started whipping him. He whipped the shit out of him, and I loved it. I have never enjoyed anything as much as I enjoyed that moment. Revenge truly is sweet. It takes you to a dark place, but, man, it satisfies a thirst. Then there was the strangest moment where it flipped. I caught a glimpse of the look of terror in the boy’s face, and I realized that Abel had gone past getting revenge for me. He wasn’t doing this to teach the kid a lesson. He was just beating him. He was a grown man venting his rage on a twelve-year-old boy. In an instant I went from Yes, I got my revenge to No, no, no. Too much. Too much. […] Dear God, what have I done? […] Looking in that boy’s eyes, I realized how much he and I had in common. He was a kid. I was a kid. He was crying. I was crying. He was a colored boy in South Africa, taught how to hate and how to hate himself.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  Some people had come all innocently in shorts, and on the floor a trio of black boys had already removed their singlets, which swung, like waiters’ towels, from the loops of their jeans. I propelled Phil to the bar for the sharp, gassy lager, not in itself pleasant, which was the economy fuel of the place. We leant together at the counter, his arms bulgingly crossed, and I splurged my tongue up his jaw and into his ear—he turned to me with a grin and gave me, too close to be in focus, a look of the tenderest trust. We perched for a while by a little shelf, drinking quite fast, feet rocking to the music, more or less silent though I pointed people out to him and he looked and nodded in a factual sort of way, not feeling, perhaps, that it was quite right to rave adulterously about other men. Even so, he was enthralled when Sebastian Smith moved through the crowd at the heart of his own little crowd, who touched, supported and congratulated him. He had come fresh, exhausted, from Sadler’s Wells, was still on the serene, unpunctured high of adoration and acclaim, still sustained, as in some sugary Spanish Assumption, by the pink clouds of triumph and the tumbling black putti of his entourage. Still wearing, too, his leotards (though now with little patent, winking pumps), his torso rising in a naked black triangle to the glitter-sprinkled, ballerina-hefting shoulders. Everyone wanted him to dance, and he came forward, considering it, to the floor’s edge—one foot set before the other as if on a gym bar, the long, taut thighs chafing, all the effort instinctively keeping his body steady, as though it were his discipline to carry a glass of water on his head or to propel without obscene lurching the contents of his high, prancing basket. But he decided against it, paced back to a darkened corner, leaving me with a faint ache of adulation and inadequacy. Phil I found had that look of relished, vulgar curiosity which from time to time reminded me that he was as prone to sudden lusts as the next man. Not for you, dear, I thought, as I gestured ‘Let’s dance’, he carefully finished his drink, and we felt our way through the gay throng. I turned, we sculpted out a little area on the edge of the mass of dancers, and were drunk enough to be dancing already, Phil too (who I thought might selfconsciously jiggle), going into a kind of mood, hardly looking at me and swivelling chunkily to left and right in a tight, fashionable style he must have picked up somewhere.

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

  Zimmerman, Toni Schindler, Kristen E. Holm, Katherine C. Daniels, and Shelley A. Haddock. 2002. “Barriers and Bridges to Intimacy and Mutuality: A Critical Review of Sexual Advice Found in Self-Help Bestsellers.” Contemporary Family Therapy, 24, pp. 289–311. Searchable TermsAdele and Alan, security and erotic vitality and Against Love (Kipnis) aggression. See domination and submission Alan and Adele, security and erotic vitality and Alberoni, Francesco Amanda and Nat, fantasy and Amber, parenthood and anchor and wave, security and Andrew and Serena, intimacy and Anger, excitement and Arlene, fidelity and Arousal (Bader) autonomy fidelity and love and self and others and Bachelard, Gaston Bader, Michael Barthes, Roland Beatrice and John, intimacy and Ben, work ethic and Benjamin, Jessica Bliss (film) Boccio, Frank Jude body-mind continuum Buñuel, Luis Candace and Jimmy, intimacy and Can Love Last? (Mitchell) Carla and Leo, parenthood and Charlene, parenthood and Charles and Rose, security and erotic vitality childhood lessons, about balancing self and others autonomy and James and Stella ruthlessness and selfishness and children. See parenthood Chodorow, Nancy Christine and Ryan, work ethic and comfort love Coral and Jed, domination and cultural values domination and submission and intimacy and parenthood and Puritanism and hedonism and de Beauvoir, Simone democracy in relationships. See domination and submission domination and submission cultural values and Elizabeth and Vito and hate and love and Jed and Coral and Marcus and power and sadomasochism and Dominick and Raoul, intentionality and Doug and Zoë and Naomi, fidelity and Dylan, childhood and desire Eddie and Noriko, intimacy and Elizabeth and Vito, domination and emotional space entrapment, intimacy and Epstein, Mark equality. See domination and submission Eric and Jaxon, fidelity and erotic vitality, security and Adele and Alan and anchor and wave and Charles and Rose and fidelity and need for romantics and realists and uncertainty and Eyes Wide Shut (film) familiarity, intimacy and family influences. See childhood lessons fantasies changing attitudes toward forms of Joni and Ray and lack of communication about Nat and Amanda and sharing of the Third and Feeling Strong (Person) Fiddler on the Roof (film) fidelity autonomy and disclosures of infidelity Doug and Zoë and Naomi and new meanings of reasons for infidelity security and the Third and Fisher, Helen Frank, Katherine Franklin, Benjamin Friday, Nancy Fromm, Erich Gafni, Mordechai Giddens, Anthony goals. See work ethic Godwin, Gail Goldner, Virginia Gopnik, Adam Guillebaud, Jean-Claude hate, love and hedonism, Puritanism and cultural ambivalence about sexuality and Maria and Nico and Ratu and teenage sexuality and “himbos” “hooking up” Hoover, J. Edgar Hot Monogamy (Love) Huizinga, Johan Ian and Marguerite, fidelity and independence economic emotional infidelity. See fidelity intentionality, marriage and intimacy, pitfalls of modern See also intimacy, sexuality and cultural changes and Eddie and Noriko and mind-body continuum and Mitch and Laura and “talk” intimacy and intimacy, sexuality and. See also intimacy, pitfalls of modern entrapment and familiarity and Jimmy and Candace and John and Beatrice and separateness and Jacqueline and Philip, marriage and James and Stella, childhood and

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  An intoxicating, almost deranging mood possessed us. Of course there were one or two men who never joined in, who slept or pretended to sleep whilst the rest of us writhed round in passionate couplings or orgiastic free-for-alls. A boy called Carswell was our Lord of Misrule, an incredibly lusty little chap. We looked forward to night-time like some kind of animal that sits out the day, listless & almost blind; then as we undressed for bed a light came into our eyes. Not that we didn’t frig in the day-time too. Our conversation was as salty as we could make it, and there was excitement to be had in seizing brief opportunities for lust in ever more public places. The occasional exposures, as when Carswell was conspicuously brought off in Chapel, must have opened the eyes of the dons, if they didn’t know already, to the occupational depravity of the College men. Oh there will never again be a time of such freedom. It was the epitome of pleasure. When I sink back into the mood of those days, & then think of what happened afterwards, I am amazed. Those who were not killed are running the country & the empire, examples of righteousness, & each of them knowing they have done these unspeakable things. I suppose it is a part of the tacit lore of manhood, like going with whores or getting drunk, which are not incompatible with respectability and power. Webster was not a College man—he was in Phil’s—so my infatuation with him was bound to be more poetic. He was a well-made little fellow, smooth & brown, with luxuriant curly hair, & he had a beautiful sad expression. His father was a wealthy rum-distiller from Tobago, & his mother was English, & had aspired to give him the best education she could. He was the first negro I had ever known, & in the beginning I suspected he must be slow. Later I found he had a sophisticated, literary mind: he was inclined to be solitary & read a great deal. In his first summer I saw him one day at Gunner’s Hole, lying on the bank in his swimming-drawers, buried in some history book. His colour, among the trees, the green water & the faded grass struck me like a Gauguin. I found that he went to swim whenever the school’s stiff regimen allowed, and if the weather was fine.

• From Untrue (2018)

  When I got up to explore, I learned there was less group sex than there had been in New York; in a room piled high with pillows, five couples were using vibrators, going down on one another, and enjoying what I now couldn’t help but think of as G-to-G contact. In another bedroom, three women were attending to each other in the dim light with such singular focus, precision, and stillness that they looked like a statue. I sat down on a sofa with a beautiful brunette, who turned out to be a mom of several kids; at her husband’s urging, she had come hundreds of miles for the party. Like me, she was a writer, and we traded stories about our work as we walked, with a real estate developer, out to the sidewalk to our respective Ubers. It had been an evening of sororal pleasures in every sense, and I wished Parish had been there to witness it with me. Dr. Lisa Diamond is a University of Utah professor of psychology and gender studies. She coined the term “female sexual fluidity” and spoke at a New York Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Study Center workshop the same week as the Manhattan Skirt Club party I had attended. In a room filled to capacity, Diamond—who has spiky black hair and wore glasses with bright red frames—discussed the term “homopossibility” and the underlying idea that while we may be born gay or straight, our environment plays a role in what we do and what we “become,” sexually speaking. And that this suggests, in turn, that our sexualities can sometimes morph. Indeed, over the course of a two-decade longitudinal study that began with nearly one hundred women who had had involvements with women, Diamond discovered that the fairer sex is also changeable, or “fluid,” with desires that are sometimes contingent on circumstances, opportunities, and context as they are on our sexual orientation and the gender of the other person. For example, an intense female-female friendship may render a woman more likely to consider being with another woman. So might being in an environment where being with someone of the same sex is destigmatized—a city or a clique free of homophobia, for example, or an all-girls school, or a summer community like the Hamptons, where women stay out for the whole season while their husbands remain in the city, showing up only on the weekends. Or a woman might find her desires changing with her life stages. I interviewed someone who told me about a friend’s daughter, who went to college straight, had a boyfriend her freshman year, a girlfriend her sophomore year, and then two more boyfriends. She ended up marrying a woman. Diamond’s work suggests that we have to rethink our deepest assumptions about same-sex desires being fixed and our sexual identities necessarily being forever.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  State, local, and national media outlets were crowded outside the courthouse when I arrived the next morning. Dozens of Walter’s family members and friends from the community were there to greet him when he came out. They had made signs and banners, which surprised me. They were such simple gestures, but I found myself deeply moved. The signs gave a silent voice to the crowd: “Welcome Home, Johnny D,” “God Never Fails,” “Free at Last, Thank God Almighty, We Are Free at Last.” I went down to the jail and brought Walter his suit. I told him that a celebration was planned at his house after the hearing. The prison had not allowed Walter to bring his possessions to the courthouse, refusing to acknowledge that he might be released, so we would have to go back to Holman Prison to get his things before the homecoming at his house. I also told him that I’d reserved a hotel room for him in Montgomery and that it would probably be safest to spend the next few nights there. I reluctantly talked to him about my conversation with Minnie. He seemed surprised and hurt but didn’t linger on it. “This is a really happy day for me. Nothing can really spoil getting your freedom back.” “Well, y’all should talk at some point,” I urged. I went upstairs to find Tommy Chapman waiting for me in the courtroom. “After we’re done, I’d like to shake his hand,” he told me. “Would that be all right?” “I think he’d appreciate that.” “This case has taught me things I didn’t even know I had to learn.” “We’ve all learned a lot, Tommy.” There were deputy sheriffs everywhere. When Bernard arrived, we consulted briefly at the counsel table before a bailiff asked us to go back to the judge’s chambers. Judge Norton had retired weeks before the ruling from the Court of Criminal Appeals. The new judge, Pamela Baschab, greeted me warmly. We made small talk and then discussed what would happen during the hearing. Everyone was strangely pleasant. “Mr. Stevenson, if you’ll just present the motion and provide a brief summary, I don’t need any arguments or statements, I intend to grant the motion immediately so you all can get home. We can get this done quickly.” We went into the courtroom. There seemed to be more black deputies in the courtroom for this hearing than I’d ever seen in my appearances in that courthouse. There was no metal detector, no menacing dog. The courtroom was packed with Walter’s family members and supporters. There were more cheering black folks outside the courthouse who couldn’t get in. A horde of television cameras and journalists spilled out of the crowded courtroom.

• From Untrue (2018)

  Female bonobos manage to dominate males because they form coalitions of two or more whenever they perceive a male is challenging them. It doesn’t take males long to stop trying and to realize who’s in charge. But how are these females, who are unrelated and who disperse from their kin, able to form coalitions? Why is the species the only exception to the trend of male philopatry leading to male dominance in the first place? It’s the sex, Parish told me. “They choose what feels good, and what feels especially good is having sex with other females, probably because of the front-facing, relatively exposed, innervated clitoris.” In fact, Parish told me, when a female bonobo is solicited simultaneously by a female and a male, she will nearly always pick the female (other primatologists have observed this preference as well). On my second day observing the bonobos with Parish, then-three-year-old Belle sat directly in front of us, right up against the glass. She had a long piece of grass looped around her torso, like a necklace. Her legs were splayed, and she poked between them with one finger. She was playing with her clitoris, which was about the size of a large pencil eraser. Clearly, she was enjoying herself. Another day, Parish and I watched Belle mount her big sister Maddie, who was lying on her back; they indulged in some G-to-G swishing back and forth. Bonobos don’t just reduce tension with sex. Females are grinding and G-to-G-ing their way to establishing goodwill and connectedness, or reinforcing goodwill and connectedness already in place, using sex to build a sisterhood of sorts. And bonobo sisterhood is powerful. “We don’t see infanticide or females being sexually coerced, and we don’t see males being aggressive to females in any way,” Parish explained. “But we cannot ignore female bonobo violence toward males and female dominance among bonobos.” Parish observes that for a long time there was resistance to her discoveries. Not everyone was as sanguine and open-minded as her mentor, De Waal, who quickly agreed with Parish. Other primatologists insisted that bonobos didn’t have a dominance hierarchy at all or that bonobos were “egalitarian” or, my favorite, that bonobo males “allowed” females to think they were dominant. Why the refusal to see what Parish saw? After all, other researchers have documented females using G-to-G contact for reconciliation, tension regulation, and other forms of bonding. “Females showing males aggression is written off as exceptional because of our powerful narrative of what’s natural,” Parish told me when I asked her over dinner one night in downtown San Diego. She had never expected her findings to be controversial, she said. A careful scientist and self-described “Darwinian feminist,” Parish is patient in the face of resistance and bias, focusing on the data and the big picture that primatology, like primates, has evolved over time.

• From Sin: The Early History of an Idea (2012)

  For the time being, Israel is the “enemy of the gospel” for the sake of the gentiles. (Most English translations, unconscionably, render this phrase as “enemies of God,” but Paul’s Greek has no such construction: he nowhere mentions “God” here, 11.28.) But Israel’s election was never in doubt, their status as “beloved” always secure. This is because Israel—all Israel—rests upon the promises that God made long ago to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, “the fathers,” and God is constant, his promises sure. “The gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable,” Paul asserts, and Just as you [gentiles] were once disobedient to God but now have received mercy through their disobedience, so they, now disobedient, may receive mercy now on account of the mercy shown you. For God has imprisoned all in disobedience, so that he may show mercy to all. (Rm 11.30–31) At the thought of this universal redemption, Paul breaks out in praise: O the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How inscrutable his judgments, how unsearchable his paths! For who has known the mind of the Lord? Who has been his counselor? Who has given him a gift in order to receive a gift back from him? From him and through him and to him are all things. Glory to him forever! (Rm 11.33–36) From this peak statement of happy conviction, Paul moves into instructions on behavior to the Roman community: love and support one another, and bless those who persecute you (Romans 12); respect state authorities, pay taxes; love your neighbor in order to fulfill the law (a nod to Leviticus 19.18), and do not act like idol-worshiping gentiles (no “reveling and drunkenness, debauchery and licentiousness, quarreling and jealousy,” Romans 13.13). Do not be judgmental about who eats what: community is what matters (Romans 14). Then, heading toward his conclusion, Paul summons once again the authority of Jewish scripture, “written in former days for our instruction, so that through the steadfastness and encouragement of the scriptures, we may have hope” (Rm 15.4). In one deft sentence he then sums up the argument of chapters 9 to 11: “Christ became a servant to the circumcision [Israel] in order to show God’s truthfulness, to confirm the promises that he made to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob [regarding the redemption of Israel], and so that the gentiles would glorify God for his mercy” (15.8). Paul then chants a catena of biblical verses that celebrate the gentiles’ turning to God, their worshiping together with Israel, and their subordination to God’s messiah (the “root of Jesse,” 15.12). He ends his letter with the image of (baptized) gentiles as the sanctified sacrifice that he will bring to Jerusalem.

• From Sin: The Early History of an Idea (2012)

  But Christ had done more than come in the flesh, and die in the flesh: to redeem the flesh, he had also been raised in the flesh and—more astonishingly still—he had ascended into heaven with his flesh (City of God 18.46). Heaven, too, is the goal of the resurrected Christian. In defiance both of traditions of Christian millenarianism (which had expected a terrestrial redemption) and of the scientific thinking of his day (the weight of the elements, 13.18; the organization of the cosmos, 22.4; 22.11), Augustine insists that final redemption will not come on earth. It will be in heaven, to which will ascend the saints in their restored and perfected bodies—“possessing the substance of the flesh, but untainted by any carnal corruption.” There they will experience the greatest possible joy: the unmediated knowledge of God. No more words. No more books. No more interpretation. In eternity, no more time: “Knowledge without error, entailing no toil! For we shall drink of God’s Wisdom [Christ] at its very source, with supreme felicity, without any difficulty” (22.24). In heaven, flesh without sin. Humanity will have moved from Adam’s first state, being equally able to sin (posse peccare) and not to sin (posse non peccare), through Adam’s fallen state, not being able not to sin (non posse non peccare), to possessing a greater degree of freedom than Adam ever did, not being able to sin (non posse peccare)—not because the will is not free, Augustine insists, but because the will “will be the freer in that it is freed from a delight in sin and immovably fixed in a delight of not sinning” (22.30). As for Origen, then, and as for the traditions of Greek moral philosophy that both draw on, so also for Augustine: the truly free will chooses only the good. Much still distinguishes their respective views of eternal redemption. For Origen, redeemed rational beings form a radically egalitarian “society,” since the scrupulously fair God had made all souls in the atemporal beginning “out of one lump,” with the selfsame ability to freely choose (see p. 108). Augustine’s heavenly society has gender, ranks, and status. People who were virgins, or who were martyrs, will have a higher “grade of honor” than those who were not. The eschatological miracle will be that no one feels envy of the higher-ups: unlike in the old earthly city, “organization will be harmonious” (22.30). The scope of redemption is much wider for Origen, who reckons the whole embodied higher cosmos, not only humanity, as the object of Christ’s saving mission; for Augustine, the sole focus of Christ’s mission was humanity alone.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  I talked to him about the argument in Washington, but he was much more interested in preparing me to hear his poem. I could tell he was nervous about whether he’d be able to do it. I cut short my report about his case so I could hear his poem. He closed his eyes to concentrate and then began to recite the lines: Roses are red, violets are blue. Soon I’ll come home to live with you. My life will be better, happy I’ll be, You’ll be like my Dad and my family. We’ll have fun with our friends and others will see, I’m a good person...uh...I’m a good person...I’m...a...good...person...uh... He couldn’t remember the last line. He looked up at the ceiling, then at the floor straining to remember. He squeezed his eyes, trying to force the last words to mind, but they wouldn’t come. I was tempted to supply him a line just to help him get through it—“so be happy for me” or “now people will see.” But I realized that creating a line for him wasn’t the right thing to do, so I just sat there. Finally, he seemed to accept that he wouldn’t remember the line. I thought he’d be upset, but when it was clear that he wouldn’t remember the last line, he just started laughing. I smiled at him, relieved. For some reason it became funnier and funnier to him that he couldn’t think of the last line—until he abruptly stopped laughing and looked at me. “Oh, wait. I think the last line...actually, uh, I think the last line is just what I said. The last line is just ‘I’m a good person.’ ” He paused, and I looked at him skeptically for several seconds. I said it before I thought about it. “Really?” I should have stopped, but I continued, “We’ll have fun with our friends and others will see, I’m a good person?” He looked at me for an instant with a serious expression, and then we both broke out simultaneously in wild laughter. I wasn’t sure I should be laughing, but Joe was laughing, which made me think it was okay. Honestly, I couldn’t help it. In a few seconds we were both in hysterics. He was rocking in his wheelchair from side to side with laughter, clapping his hands. I couldn’t stop laughing, either; I was trying hard to stop but failing. We looked at each other as we laughed. I watched Joe, who laughed like a little boy, but I saw the lines in his face and even the emergence of a few prematurely gray hairs on his head.

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

  If Roman marriage was an erotically charged institution, it is worth noting how firmly the actual practices of the Roman bedroom lay beyond explicit regulation, even among the moralists of the age. The fact is that authors like Plutarch, who goes so far as to advocate orderly sexual habits, retreat into pragmatic discretion before legislating on specific acts. So, notably, did the rabbis, who refrained from heavy-handed interference in the married couple’s sexual life. In turn we are left to glean from a largely barren field. We find in different types of evidence a distinction between the sexual acts to be expected of a wife and those to be expected of a disreputable woman. A magical papyrus casts a spell on a woman in the hopes of achieving “whorish sex,” as though that more or less summarizes a style, or intensity, of amorous encounter. Seneca, among others, counsels men not to love their wives as though they were mistresses. Fellatio is regularly assumed to be the domain of the prostitute. Still, Roman art depicts a wider range of positions and configurations than ever before, and not all of these have to involve paid professionals. Whereas late classical Greek art had tended to focus on the gratification of the man, Roman erotic art takes a far more variable perspective. Scenes of women on top, mulier equitans, focus on the reposed beauty of the woman’s body. If the representation of male fulfillment was still predominant, there was undoubtedly a new visual emphasis in Roman art on the mutual pleasure of the partners.91 Still, it can only be wondered how well women fared in the bedroom. There was an abiding prejudice against acts that were considered to pollute the mouth. Visual evidence suggests that women could turn to male prostitutes to enjoy exotic pleasures, but this cannot have been an option to many women. There are signs that sometimes the possibilities were even unknown. More often there is simply blind disgust. Galen, who was not a prude, could claim as a matter of fact, “We find cunnilingus even more repulsive than fellatio.” Cultural conventions of male dominance could be a powerful force. Or they could just act to draw a curtain around what really happened in the bedroom. The truth is that there is more discussion about female orgasms in the Roman Empire than ever before, and for a long time after. For Ovid, mutual satisfaction was a vital part of his sexual code. For the author of the Lucianic Amores, it is what recommends heterosexual love. But nothing can match Clitophon’s panegyric. For him, the climbing ecstasy of shared pleasure encapsulated the real meaning of eros. When the woman neared the “climax of Aphrodite,” she became frenzied with pleasure, and at the peak of orgasm the woman’s gasps even carried a little of her vital spirit into the mouth of her lover, where it mingled with his wandering kiss and returned to the heart.92

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  In November 2016, Florida finally released Ian Manuel. Imprisoned since he was thirteen years old, Ian spent most of his incarceration in solitary confinement. Upon his release, Ian was embraced by the woman he was convicted of shooting. They had dinner together before he came to Montgomery and joined our reentry program. A few months later, Ian performed one of his poems at EJI’s annual event in New York City, where he now writes and performs spoken word poetry. On December 1, 2017, an ecstatic Joe Sullivan, laughing and shouting in his wheelchair, was pushed out the door of a different Florida prison, thrilled to be free. Our staff embraced him and brought him to Montgomery, where he gave me five Father’s Day cards because he couldn’t decide which one he liked best. After eighteen months in our residential program, Joe moved to Joseph House, a home for formerly incarcerated people with significant disabilities, where he now resides. Ian and Joe are among dozens of clients sentenced to die in prison as children who are now free. Trina Garnett has been resentenced and is now eligible for parole. She sings with a group of women serving life sentences at Muncy State Prison in Pennsylvania, where they recently performed a song titled “This Is Not My Home.” We hope she will be paroled in the coming year. Soon, Antonio Nuñez will be eligible for release in California, where his reduced sentence has given him access to programming and educational opportunities that are denied to people serving life imprisonment without parole, even if they were arrested at fourteen. In 2012, after I argued Kuntrell Jackson’s case, Jackson v. Hobbs, and its companion case, Miller v. Alabama, at the United States Supreme Court, the Court banned mandatory life-without-parole sentences for all children seventeen and younger. Hundreds of people condemned to die in prison for crimes committed as children have been released across the country. Kuntrell was released in February 2017 and has started his career in the performing arts with an appearance in the film adaptation of Just Mercy. Henry, the man I first met on death row as a law student, is no longer on death row and hopes to be released soon. I am especially excited that we have been able to advance our work confronting America’s history of racial inequality. We have produced groundbreaking reports on slavery, lynching, and segregation in the United States, and in April 2018, we opened the Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice—the country’s first comprehensive memorial dedicated to victims of racial terror lynching—in Montgomery, Alabama. I hope you will visit our museum and memorial to learn more about our work to create greater justice in the world.