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 Canterbury Tales (2009)

  This merchant was as careful as he was astute. He raised the money and handed the two thousand sovereigns to some Lombard bankers, who gave him a bond in recognition of full payment. Then he rode back as cheerful as a chaffinch. He knew that he had made a profit of a thousand francs on the deal. No wonder he sang and whistled as he returned home. His wife met him at the gate, as was her custom, and all that night they celebrated their good fortune with some amorous turns in bed. The merchant was out of debt. The merchant was rich. At break of day he embraced her, and began kissing her again. At the same time he fucked her hard. ‘No more,’ she pleaded with him. ‘Haven’t you had enough?’ Still she played with him for a little longer. The merchant turned on his side after she had pleased him, and whispered to her. ‘Well, wife,’ he said, ‘I am a bit annoyed with you. I don’t want to be, but I am. Do you know why? You have come between myself and my dear cousin. You have sown a little seed of division between me and John.’ ‘How? Tell me.’ ‘You never mentioned to me that he had paid back the money I lent to him. He gave you cash in hand, I believe. But he feels aggrieved that I did not know about it. As soon as I started talking about loans and repayments, I realized that there was something wrong. Yet I swear to God that I wasn’t referring to him. Do me a favour, dear wife. Always tell me, in future, if I have been repaid in my absence. Otherwise I might start asking debtors for money that they have already given me. Do not be remiss in this.’

• From The Case for God (2009)

  Aristotle’s writings are often inconsistent and contradictory, but his aim was not to devise a coherent philosophical system, rather to establish a scientific method of inquiry. His writings were simply lecture notes, and a treatise was not meant to be definitive but was always adapted to the needs of a particular group of students, some of whom would be more advanced than others and would need different material. In the Greek world, dogma (“teaching”) was not cast in stone once it was committed to writing but usually varied according to the understanding and expertise of the people to whom it was addressed. Like Plato, Aristotle was chiefly concerned not with imparting information but with promoting the philosophical way of life.68 His scientific research was not an end in itself, therefore, but a method of conducting the bios theoretikos, the “contemplative life” that introduced human beings to the supreme happiness. What distinguished men—Aristotle had little time for the female—from other animals was their ability to think rationally. This was their “form,” the end for which they were designed, so in order to achieve eudaimonia (“well-being”) they must strive to think clearly, calculate, study, and work things out. This would also affect a man’s moral health, since qualities such as courage or generosity had to be regulated by reason. “The life according to reason is best and pleasantest,” he wrote in one of his later treatises, “since reason, more than anything else, is man.”69 Like Plato, Aristotle believed that human intelligence was divine and immortal. It linked human beings to the gods and gave them the ability to grasp ultimate truth. Unlike sensual pleasure or purely practical activity, the pleasures of theoria (the “contemplation” of truth for its own sake) did not wax and wane but were a continuous joy, giving the thinker that self-sufficiency that characterized the highest life of all. “We must, therefore, in so far as we can, strain every nerve to live in accordance with the best thing in us,” Aristotle insisted. Theoria was a divine activity, so a man could practice it only “in so far as something divine is present in him.”70 His biological research was a spiritual exercise: people who were “inclined to philosophy” and could “trace the links of causation” would find that it brought them “immense pleasure”71 because, by exercising his reason, a scientist was participating in the hidden life of God.

• From The Canterbury Tales (2009)

  Palamon and Arcite humbly and gratefully assented to his terms. They asked him in turn to become their lord and protector, to which he graciously agreed. ‘In terms of royal lineage and wealth,’ he said, ‘either one of you is worthy to marry a princess or even a queen. That is obvious. If I may speak for my sister, Emily, over whom you have suffered so much strife and jealousy - well, you yourselves know well enough that she cannot marry both of you at once. You can fight for eternity but, like it or not, only one of you can be betrothed to her. The other can go whistle in the wind. Be as jealous, or as angry, as you may. That is the truth. So listen while I explain to you my plan, to find whose destiny is shaped for Emily and whose is turned the other way. This is what I have devised. It is my will, and you must make the best of it. I will listen to no argument or objection. I stipulate that both of you should go your separate ways, without ransom or hindrance, and in a year’s time that both of you should return with a company of one hundred knights fully armed and equipped for a tournament. Your men should be ready to decide the hand of Emily by dint of battle. Upon my honour, as a knight, I promise you this. I will reward whichever of you has the most strength. Whether you slay your adversary, or with your hundred companions drive him from the joust, I will give you the hand of fair Emily. Thus fortune will favour the brave. The tournament will take place here and, as God have mercy on my soul, I will be a fair and true judge of the contest. And I will allow only one conclusion. One of you will be killed or made captive. If both of you agree, then assent now and hold yourselves well served.’ Who could be more cheerful now than Palamon? Who could be more joyful than Arcite? I cannot begin to describe the rejoicing of the whole company at the decision of Theseus. He had behaved so graciously that all of them went down on their knees and thanked him. The two Thebans, in particular, expressed their gratefulness. So with heads high, and hope in their hearts, Palamon and Arcite made their way back to the ancient city of Thebes. They had a year to prepare themselves for battle. PART THREE

• From The Canterbury Tales (2009)

  Once upon a time a merchant dwelled in Saint-Denis, a town just north of Paris; he was rich enough to pass as a wise man, in the world’s eyes. He had a beautiful wife, too, who liked good company. She was gay and carefree. That sort of woman costs her husband a great deal of money. He had to spend more than she earned in compliments and admiring glances. She went to every feast and every dance, enjoying those pleasures that pass as swiftly as shadows on the wall. I feel sorry for the man who had to pay for them all. The poor husband has to clothe his wife, wrap her in furs and festoon her with jewels - and all for the sake of his own reputation! Meanwhile, she dances to her own tune. If he decides that he is not going to foot the bill, considering it to be a foolish waste of money, then the wife will just get someone else to pay. Or else she will borrow the money. And that is dangerous. This good merchant, Peter by name, had a splendid house and welcomed more guests and visitors than he could count. He was generous, and she was beautiful. Do I need to say any more? I will get on with my story. Among these guests, of all types and degrees, there was a monk. He was about thirty years old, at a guess. He was good-looking, fresh-faced and virile. He was always under the merchant’s roof. He had been invited there in the first days of their friendship, and was now treated as a familiar companion. I will tell you the reason. This young monk and this merchant had both been born in the same village. Each one claimed the other as a cousin. They proclaimed their common bond all the time, and swore eternal friendship. They said that they were brothers as much as cousins. They were as happy in each other’s company as larks on the wing. This monk, John, was generous to a fault and never failed to reward all of the servants in the house. He was agreeable to everyone, from the meanest serving-boy upwards, and spared no expense. He gave gifts all around. So of course he was always welcomed; the members of the household were as happy to see him as birds welcoming the rising of the sun. I am sure you get the idea. It so happened one day that the merchant was preparing himself for a journey to Bruges, where he had some business to arrange. He was going to purchase some fine lace, I think. So he sent a message to John, who lived in Paris, inviting him to spend a day or two with him and his wife before he set out for Bruges. ‘Come to Saint-Denis,’ he said, ‘and be entertained.’

• From The Case for God (2009)

  The German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770— 1831) remained fully committed to the Enlightenment ideal of objective knowledge but would have agreed with Blake that the externalized God must lose its lonely isolation and immerse itself in mundane reality. Human beings had thoughts and aspirations that exceeded their rational grasp, and they had traditionally expressed these in the mythos of religion. But it was now possible to reformulate these philosophically. In The Phenomenology of Mind (1807), Hegel argued that the ultimate reality, which he called Geist (“Spirit” or “Mind”), was not a being but “the inner being of the world, that which essentially is.” 84 It was, therefore, being itself. Hegel developed a philosophical vision that recalled Jewish Kabbalah. It was a mistake to imagine that God was outside our world, an addition to our experience. Spirit was inextricably involved with the natural and human worlds and could achieve fulfillment only in finite reality. This, Hegel believed, was the real meaning of the Christian doctrine of incarnation. Conversely, it was only when human beings denied the alienating idea of a separate, externalized God that they would discover the divinity inherent in their very nature, because the universal Spirit was most fully realized in the human mind. Hegel’s vision articulated the optimistic, forward-thrusting spirit of modernity. There could be no harking back to the past. Human beings were engaged in a dialectical process in which they ceaselessly cast aside ideas that had once been sacred and incontrovertible. Every state of being brings forth its opposite; these opposites clash, are integrated, and create a new synthesis. Then the whole process begins again. The world was thus continuously re-creating itself. The structures of knowledge were not fixed but were simply stages in the unfolding of a final, absolute truth. Hegel’s dialectic expressed the modern compulsion to discard recent orthodoxy. Religion, he believed, was one of those phases that human beings would leave behind as they progressed toward their ultimate fulfillment. In what with hindsight we can see to be a sinister move, Hegel identified the alienating religion that we had to reject with Judaism. Apparently unaware of the similarity of his philosophy to the Kabbalah, he blamed the Jewish people for transforming the immanent Spirit into a tyrannical external God that had estranged men and women from their own nature. In a way that would become habitual in the modern critique of faith, he had presented a distorted picture of “religion” as a foil for his own ideas, selecting one strand of a complex tradition and arguing that it represented the whole. Even though Hegel stressed the relentlessly progressive movement of reality, he, like the Romantic poets, had actually recast older ideas in a modern form. As modernization proceeded, Western people were about to enter a world that was at once enthralling and disturbing.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  Chapter 6 T he months, that year, seemed to slide by very swiftly; for, of course, we were busier now than ever. We continued to work our hit - the song about the sovereigns and the winks - all through the spring and summer, but there were always new songs, new routines to labour over and perfect, new orchestras to grow familiar with, new theatres, and new costumes. Of the latter, we acquired so many that we found we couldn’t manage them without help, and took on a girl to do my old job - to mend the suits and to help us dress in them, at the side of the stage. We grew rich - or rich, at least, as far as I was concerned. At the Star, in Bermondsey, Kitty had started on a couple of pounds a week, and I had thought my own, small dresser’s share of that quite grand enough. Now I earned ten, twenty, thirty times that figure, on my own account, and sometimes more. The sums seemed unimaginable to me: I preferred, perhaps foolishly, not to think of them at all, but let Walter worry over our wages. He, in response to our great successes, had found new agents for his other artistes and was now our manager full-time. He negotiated our contracts, our publicity, and held our money for us; he paid Kitty and she, as before, gave me whatever little cash I needed, when I asked her for it. It was rather strange with Walter, now that Kitty and I had grown so close. We saw him quite as often as we had before; we still went driving with him; we still spent long hours with him at Mrs Dendy’s piano (though the piano itself had been changed, to a more expensive one). He was as kind and as foolish as ever - but a little dimmed, somehow, a little shadowy, now that the blaze of Kitty’s charms was more decidedly turned my way. Perhaps it only seemed so to me; but I was sorry for him, and could not help but wonder what he thought. I was sure he hadn’t guessed that Kitty and I were sweethearts - for, of course, we were rather cool ourselves, in public, now. As rich as we became that year, we were never quite rich enough to be so very choosy about the kind of halls we sang in. For the whole of September we played at the Trocadero - a very smart theatre, and one of the ones that Walter had pointed out to us on our first, giddy tour of the West End, more than a year before.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  1. "I have greatly rejoiced with you in the joy you have had in our Lord Jesus Christ, in receiving those examples of true charity, and having accompanied, as it well became you, those who were bound with holy chains [Ignatius and his fellow-prisoners, Zosimus and Rufus; comp. ch. 9]; who are the diadems of the truly elect of God and our Lord; and that the strong root of your faith, spoken of in the earliest times, endureth until now, and bringeth forth fruit unto our Lord Jesus Christ, who suffered for our sins, but whom God raised from the dead, having loosed the pains of Hades [Acts 2:24]; in whom though ye see Him not, ye believe, and believing rejoice with joy unspeakable and full of glory [I Pet. 1:8]; into which joy many desire to enter; knowing that by grace ye are saved, not by works [Eph. 2:8, 9], but by the will of God through Jesus Christ. 2. "Wherefore, girding up your loins, serve the Lord in fear [1 Pet. 1:13] and truth, as those who have forsaken the vain, empty talk and error of the multitude, and believed in Him who raised up our Lord Jesus Christ from the dead, and gave him glory [1 Pet. 1:21], and a throne at His right hand [comp. Heb. 1:3; 8:1; 12:2]; to whom all things in heaven and on earth are subject. Him every spirit serves. His blood will God require of those who do not believe in Him. But He who raised Him up from the dead will raise up us also, if we do His will, and walk in His commandments, and love what He loved, keeping ourselves from all unrighteousness, covetousness, love of money, evil-speaking false-witness; not rendering evil for evil, or reviling for reviling [1 Pet. 3:9]; or blow for blow, or cursing for cursing, remembering the words of the Lord Jesus [comp. Acts 20:35] in His teaching: Judge not, that ye be not judged; forgive, and it shall be forgiven unto you; be merciful, that ye may obtain mercy; with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again [Matt. 7:1, 2; Luke 6:36–38], and once more, Blessed are the poor, and those that are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of God [Luke 6:20; Matt. 5:3, 10].

• From The Case for God (2009)

  During the last year, it has been a great delight and privilege to work with TED Conferences on the Charter for Compassion, an attempt to implement practically the thesis of this book. Thanks especially to Chris Anderson and Amy Novogratz, and to all the TED-sters who have contributed to this project with such extraordinary generosity, creativity, and awe-inspiring commitment. It has been an inspiration. Finally, a big thank-you to Eve, Gary, Stacey, and Amy Mott and to Michelle Stevenson, who make it possible for me to do my work by looking after Poppy so devotedly during my many absences. I could not have managed without any of you.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  70 Since reaching adulthood, both Wordsworth and Shelley had felt estranged from this living presence; the receptive, listening attitude had been educated out of them. But by assiduously cultivating this “wise passiveness,” Wordsworth had recovered an insight that was not dissimilar to that achieved by yogins and mystics. It was a blessed mood , In which the burthen of the mystery , In which the heavy and the weary weight Of all this unintelligible world , Is lightened:—that serene and blessed mood , In which the affections gently lead us on,— Until, the breath of this corporeal frame And even the motion of our human blood Almost suspended, we are laid asleep In body, and become a living soul: While with an eye made quiet by the power Of harmony and the deep power of joy , We see into the life of things . 71 Like some of the philosophes, Wordsworth was fascinated by the workings of the human mind; he understood that the mind deeply affected our perception of the external world but was convinced that this was a two-way process. The external world silently informed our mental processes; the human psyche was receptive as well as creative, “working but in alliance with the works which it beholds.” 72 Wordsworth’s younger contemporary John Keats (1795–1821) used the term “Negative Capability” to describe the ekstatic attitude that was essential to poetic insight. It occurred “when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.” 73 Instead of seeking to control the world by aggressive reasoning, Keats was ready to plunge into the dark night of unknowing: “I am however young writing at random— straining at particles of light in the midst of a great darkness— without knowing the bearing of any one assertion, of any one opinion.” 74 He claimed gleefully that he had no opinions at all, because he had no self. A poet, he believed, was “the most unpoetical of any thing in existence; because he has no Identity.” 75 True poetry had no time for “the egotistical sublime,” 76 which forced itself on the reader: We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us—and if we do not agree, seems to put its hands in its breeches pocket. Poetry should be great & unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one’s soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself but with its subject.—How beautiful are the retired flowers! how they would lose their beauty were they to throng into the highway crying out “admire me I am a violet! dote on me I am a primrose!”

• From Ulysses (Kindle edition — verify full work) (1922)

  Renay and Terry's sexual intimacy disrupts heterosexist sensibilities surrounding sexuality and the privileging of male desire and pleasure in heterosexual intercourse. Their sexual intimacy is marked by a delicateness and sensuality that creates in Renay intense feelings of passion, erotic desire, and orgasmic ecstasy, which differ significantly from her experiences with Jerome, as she and the narrator contend: "I didn't know it could be like that-" It had never been with [Jerome]. The hurried mounting of her, the jabbing inside her with the acrid whiskey odor heavy in her nostrils. It had always been over in seconds; then he would turn over and go to sleep. (28, original emphasis) Invested solely in his own gratification, Jerome exerts dominance and power during sex with Renay, as evidenced by his "mounting" and "jabbing inside" her, which resembles and alludes to her earlier rape (and accounts, in part, for why in their nearly seven years of marriage, Renay never experiences an orgasm with Jerome). Unlike Jerome, Terry is invested in pleasing Renay, who, during their very first sexual experience, reaches unprecedented sexual climax. In fact, when Renay assumes, during their postintercourse dialogue, that Terry had gotten "nothing out of [sex]," Terry contends instead, "Yes, yes I did. Pleasing you. In time, as we begin to know each other, we'll grow together" (28). Terry's remarks reveal not only the mutually constitutive (sexual) nature of their relationship, but also the space that exists in their blossoming romantic friendship for reciprocity in terms of sexual pleasure, accompanied by both sexual/relational growth and longevity. Juxtaposing Renay and Terry's relationship with Renay and Jerome's, Shockley privileges female desire and sexual subjectivity, while excoriating the ways in which female sexuality is confined, regulated, and/or compromised as the object of male longing and desire. She also transgresses the false notion that women's bodies are for the exclusive sexual pleasure and gratification of men.

• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  I allowed myself one delicious sidelong look at Hilliard. But to my disappointment he had no reaction. He was staring straight ahead, perfectly still. It had never really been his fight. He was just a mercenary. Coolly, he shut his briefcase, clicked the locks, and without a glance in our direction he stood and strolled out of the courtroom. WE WENT STRAIGHT to the London Grill at the Benson Hotel, not far from the courthouse. We each ordered a double and toasted James the Just. And Iwano. And ourselves. Then I phoned Penny from the pay phone. “We won!” I cried, not caring that they could hear me in all the rooms of the hotel. “Can you believe it—we won!” I called my father and yelled the same thing. Both Penny and my father asked what we’d won. I couldn’t tell them. We still didn’t know, I said. One dollar? One million? That was tomorrow’s problem. Today was about relishing victory. Back in the bar Cousin Houser and Strasser and I had one more stiff one. Then I phoned the office to find out the daily pair count. A WEEK LATER we got a settlement offer: four hundred thousand dollars. Onitsuka knew full well that a special master might come up with any kind of number, so they were seeking to move preemptively, contain their losses. But four hundred thousand dollars seemed low to me. We haggled for several days. Hilliard wouldn’t budge. We all wanted to be done with this, forever. Especially Cousin Houser’s overlords, who now authorized him to take the money, of which he’d get half, the largest payment in the history of his firm. Sweet vindication. I asked him what he was going to do with all that loot. I forget what he said. With ours, Blue Ribbon would simply leverage Bank of California into greater borrowing. More shoes on the water. THE FORMAL SIGNING was scheduled to take place in San Francisco, at the offices of a blue-chip firm, one of many on Onitsuka’s side. The office was on the top floor of a high-rise downtown, and our party arrived that day in a loud, raucous mood. We were four—me, Cousin Houser, Strasser, and Cale, who said he wanted to be present for all the big moments in Blue Ribbon history. Present at the Creation, he said, and present now for the Liberation. Maybe Strasser and I had read too many war books, but on the way to San Francisco we talked about famous surrenders through history. Appomattox. Yorktown. Reims. It was always so dramatic, we agreed. The opposing generals meeting in a train car or abandoned farmhouse, or on the deck of an aircraft carrier. One side contrite, the other stern but gracious. Then the fountain pens scratching across the “surrender instrument.” We talked about MacArthur accepting the Japanese surrender on the USS Missouri, giving the speech of a lifetime.

• From Birthday Girl (2018)

  Dejo caer las cintas sobre mostrador, y presiono mi espalda contra de él, gimiendo. Me besa y me aparta un poco solo para mirarme a los ojos. —No ha existido nadie desde que te fuiste —me dice. Parpadeo. —Lo sé. Aunque, no puedo decir lo mismo. Su rostro cae, y su mandíbula se tensa. Lo inmovilizo con ojos de arrepentimiento. —Te extrañaba, así que bebí en poco el cuatro de julio, y tuve un pequeño encuentro con la esquina del escritorio en la habitación 108 —le digo—. Fue bastante ardiente. Comienza a reír, su cuerpo temblando detrás del mío. En realidad, no hice eso, pero me sentí tentada algunas veces. Aunque, cuando cierro los ojos, solo lo veo a él, y se sentía patético masturbarse por un chico al que no sabía si me quería. Entonces, he sido casta, y ahora estoy lista para ponerme salvaje. Dándome la vuelta, me levanta, y coloco mis piernas alrededor de su cintura mientras me lleva a la cama. Dejándome caer, se saca su camisa y me mira fijamente mientras se desabrocha el cinturón. Sin embargo, de repente, un muy fuerte y rápido golpeteo, llega contra la pared detrás de nuestra cama, y estridentes gemidos y chillidos atraviesan las paredes. Ambos nos detenemos, y escuchamos mientras Peter y su princesa están en ello en la habitación de al lado, golpeando su cabecera contra la nuestra y empujándola hacia delante y hacia atrás. Sus ojos se amplían. —Oh, son ruidosos. Síp. Luego me mira, con un aire travieso en sus ojos. —Podemos acabar con ellos. —Y luego me toma de los tobillos, jalándome al final de la cama, y chillo mientras se coloca sobre mí. Un año después

• From The Case for God (2009)

  Drawing on the radical strain in the gospels, they insisted that the first should be last and the last first, that God favored the poor and unlettered. Jesus and his disciples had not had a college education, so people should not be in thrall to a learned clergy; they had the common sense to figure out the plain meaning of the scriptures for themselves. 3 These prophets mobilized the population in nationwide mass movements, making creative use of popular music and the new communications media. Instead of imposing modernity from above, as the founding fathers had intended, they created a grassroots rebellion against the rational establishment. They were highly successful. The sects founded by Smith, O’Kelly, and others amalgamated later to form the Disciples of Christ, which by 1860 had become the fifth-largest Protestant denomination in the United States with some two hundred thousand members. 4 Rooted in eighteenth-century Pietism, Evangelical Christianity led many Americans away from the cool ethos of the Age of Reason to the kind of populist democracy, anti-intellectualism, and rugged individualism that still characterizes American culture. Preachers held torchlight processions and mass rallies, and the new genre of the gospel song transported the audience to ecstasy, so that they wept and shouted for joy. Like some of the fundamentalist movements today, these congregations gave people who felt disenfranchised and exploited a means of making their voices heard by the establishment. But the Evangelical movement was not confined to the frontiers. Christians in the developing cities of the Northeast had also become disillusioned with the Deist establishment, whose revolution had signally failed to inaugurate a better world. Many of the denominations were anxious to create a “space” that was separate from the federal government. They had been deeply perturbed by the fearful stories of the French Revolution, which seemed to epitomize the dangers of untrammeled rationality, and were appalled that Thomas Paine, who had supported their own war for liberty, had published The Age of Reason (1794) when the Terror was at its height. If their democratic society was to avoid the dangers of mob rule, the people must become more Godly. “If you wish to be free indeed, you must be virtuous, temperate, well-instructed,” insisted Lyman Beecher (1775–1863), a leading Evangelical pastor of Cincinnati. 5 America was the new Israel, insisted Timothy Dwight, president of Yale; its expanding frontier was a sign of the coming Kingdom, so to be worthy of their calling, Americans must become more religious. 6 Deism was now regarded as a satanic foe, responsible for the inevitable failures of the infant nation: giving to nature the honor due to Jesus Christ, Deism would promote atheism and materialism.

• From Ulysses (Kindle edition — verify full work) (1922)

  Such interracial engagements, sexually intimate across color lines, transgress much of the overarching sensibilities, including the legal philosophies, regarding interracial intimacies. In Loving v. Virginia, the case mentioned earlier regarding the interracial marriage of Mildred (Jeter) and Richard Loving, a black woman and white man, the trial judge asserts that `Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with this arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix."43 His statement, based on a purported natural and religious order, implies that the Lovings had violated not only the state's miscegenation laws, but also the laws of nature and God; their interracial union is portrayed as not merely illegal but also unnatural and immoral. Cross-racial longing and sexual intimacy, such as that of the Lovings and that depicted in literary characterizations like that of Renay and Terry, also destabilize the doctrine of "color-blindness" that developed out of civil rights litigation and held that color, in the racial sense, ceased to be a factor or determinant in the law. The doctrine of color-blindness did not produce a postracial environment that delegitimized (white) racial dominance; instead, it resulted in a system wherein race was seemingly not instantiated, mentioned, or articulated but was, nonetheless, always already present, entrenched, and functioning systematically as a principal, and principled, determinant. As the erotic is, as Audre Lorde contends, a wellspring or source of power, and if black sexuality functions as "a vehicle for" and of "black freedom and power," then Renay's sexual encountersher very lovemaking-imbues her with liberatory subjectivity and power. With Terry, as the narratorial consciousness notes, Renay feels "alive again, living to love, loving to live" (39); and her experiences with Terry function as both impetus and affirmation for her to leave Jerome: as "[n]ow she knew she could never [be with Jerome] again, for she [had] found what she wanted and needed most. She was now aware of herself and the part she had tried to deny. So much [...] had been wasted in the past" (28). Unbeknownst to Jerome, Renay takes their daughter, Denise, and leaves him to live with Terry, her white lesbian lover. Renay's abandoning Jerome, their marriage, and nuclear family structure to live with Terry unequivocally mark her defiance of convention and established social norms through her deliberate participation in two "taboos": one, an interracial relationship; and, two, a same-sex union, both of which have greater social, sociocultural, and political implications. Reading Renay's behavior, especially along the ideological backdrop of black nationalism, illuminates the ways in which she, via her engagement in an interracial same-sex union, disrupts nationalist tenets regarding womanhood, the family, and the "nation."

• From We Were Here (2011)

  WE WERE HERE CaptionMax Page 2 3/23/2011 of the hippies. You know, and everybody-- I mean, if you had a bus ticket, it better be saying San Francisco, you know, because that was the place to come. I was the dancer. I thought I could dance better than anybody on the West Coast. Center stage, I would get up there. I’d climb up on that stage, and I’d dance myself into a frenzy every Sunday night at the tea dance. And if you got too close, you might slip off the stage because you were too close to me. (laughs) But I thought I had it goin’ on. My dad said one day that I should sell flowers. That’s a good business. And I thought, I’m gonna sell flowers in San Francisco because, you know, they got these songs, Where Have All the Flowers Gone, and If You’re Going to San Francisco, Wear a Flower in Your Hair, and so I was ready for it. A friend of mine came up in a pickup and took me right over into the Castro on Fifteenth and Noe, and I’ve been there for twenty-eight years. Hey, I’m one of the family members. You know, come buy my flowers. So I would put up these rainbow flags, and I, you know-- And you could see ‘em from a block away. If you looked down the street, you could just see that little ribbon… until all the colors faded. (laughs) 1:04:01 EILEEN (VO) I always knew I was gonna come out to the Bay Area. 1:04:04 TITLE Eileen 1:04:04 EILEEN (VO/ON) (CONT’D) And I think a lot of us came out here because we didn’t quite fit where we were. Back in college, I s- helped start the first woman’s newspaper. Uh, we started the first childcare center. Stuff like that. So I was very involved. We had a women’s center on Haight Street, so I started going to the women’s center, and we sat around and said, let’s open up a women’s clinic, and then we just did it. 1:04:31 ON-SCREEN TEXT (on banner) HAIGHT-ASHBURY WOMEN’S CLINIC 1:04:32 EILEEN (VO/ON) (CONT’D) It was the era of illegal abortions. It was a time when we as women weren’t as educated about our body. I was getting a little older, my late- later twenties, and I thought, Eileen, you’re mu- you might want a real job sometime. So I thought, I’ll just go to nursing school and see how I feel about it. And uh, I loved it. I loved bedside nursing. Once I started working in the hospital, there were all these gay men, and it was really fun, ‘cause we’d go

• From The Case for God (2009)

  Anselm did not arrive at his “proof” by means of a strictly rational, logical process. His monks had begged him for a meditation on the meaning of faith (fides), and for a long time he had struggled to find a single, self-evident argument for the reality of God. He was about to give up when an idea forced itself upon him with increasing urgency, until finally, “when I was tired out with resisting its importunity, that which I had despaired of finally came to me.”19 His biographer Eadmer said that the “proof” arrived in a moment of rapture involving both heart and head: “Suddenly one night during matins, the grace of God illumined his heart, the whole matter becoming clear in his mind, and a great joy and exultation filled his whole being.”20 Later writers would have dwelled in detail on this “experience,” but it does not seem to have interested either Anselm or Eadmer. Anselm was simply concerned with how best he could use it to help others. “It seemed to me that this thing which had given me such joy to discover would, if it were written down, give pleasure to any who might read it,” he explained. So he gave the Proslogion the subtitle fides quaerens intellectum, “Faith in Search of Understanding.”21 Anselm was not the first to attempt a “proof” of God’s existence. During the eighth and ninth centuries, the Muslims in the Abbasid Empire had enjoyed a cultural florescence, inspired by the encounter with ancient Greek, Syriac, and Sanskrit texts, which had recently been translated into Arabic. Many of these translators were local Christians. First they had tackled the more positive sciences, such as medicine and astronomy; then they had turned their attention to the metaphysical works of Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus, so that gradually the philosophical and scientific heritage of ancient Greece became available to the Arabic-speaking world—but with a scientific bias. Muslims began to study astronomy, alchemy, medicine, and mathematics with such success that they made impressive discoveries of their own and developed their own tradition of what they called falsafah (philosophy). Like the European philosophes of the eighteenth century, the faylasufs wanted to live in accordance with the rational laws that, they believed, governed the cosmos. They were scientists and mathematicians and wanted to apply what they had learned to their religion.

• From Ulysses (Kindle edition — verify full work) (1922)

  Immediately Terry was beside her again, and she was no longer alone. She closed her eyes, shuddering at the delicate kisses being showered all over her body like light rain. "You're so golden brown, so beautiful," Terry murmured in the hollow of her neck. [...] Shyly [Renay] put her arm around Terry, exploring the white body that was new to her-the downy hair like peach fuzz on Terry's back, the strength of her limbs, the small firmness of her breasts which nestled against her own like twins. When Terry's hand began feeling, exploring and kneading, [Renay] shut her eyes once more, losing herself in the gloriously strange wonderment of it, lying back and thinking nothing until the pressure of the fingers created a little fire of sensuous pain she hadn't known before [...]. [...] Then Terry was above her, moving, and just as she had known and wanted this all her life, she matched the love movements of body against body-movements which increased to such an intensity that Renay cried out, startling even herself. Cradled later in Terry's arms, [Renay] said: "It was the first time I've ever had an orgasm." (27-28) Densely loaded, this passage "legitimates" same-sex intimacy and destabilizes (heterosexist) hegemonic notions regarding sexuality. It displaces heterosexuality by foregrounding another paradigm of sexual longing and erotic desire. Emphasizing the "pigmentative" qualities of Renay's and Terry's skinRenay's golden brownness and Terry's whiteness-the narrator reiterates the interracial-ness and (racial) difference between them (Renay's black body alongside Terry's white body); yet, it locates their sameness-asserting their breasts were like "twins," signifying their commonness-especially biologically and physiologically. The narrator establishes, at once, their sameness and difference within the context of Renay and Terry's interracial same-sex union. Moreover, its emphasis on the (sexual) converging of black and white female bodies that have historically been constructed as diametrically oppositionalblack and white womanhood(s) as constructed dichotomously and contingent on myths of each other-undermines the history and tensions undergirding the social constructions of both black and white womanhood. Terry's emphasizing the beautiful blackness of Renay's body, emphasizing its racialized aesthetic beauty rather than reifying its historically pathologized status, and Renay's exploration of the whiteness of Terry's body destabilize socially constructed ideologies regarding black and white femaleness; and, too, reiterate that race-and in this case gender, as well-neither determines nor precludes sexual longing and desire. Renay's and Terry's abilities to transcend race in sexual terms/terrain, as well as the (historical) "semiotics" of black and white female bodies, exemplify the nexus of memory, meaning, and the body: that is, that once the body "forgets" (or "un-remembers") in its quest for pleasure, it, like Renay's and Terry's bodies, liberates itself from historical memory and reductive social constructions-race, gender, and sexuality-that "police" the body. What matters, as Shockley reveals, is not so much shifting social constructions but, rather, how one('s) (body) feels."

• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  Her arms were wrapped around a quilted white blanket decorated with blue baby carriages. I pushed back a corner of the blanket to reveal a head the size of a ripe grapefruit, a white stocking cap perched on top. My boy. He looked like a traveler. Which, of course, he was. He’d just begun his own trip around the world. I leaned down, kissed Penny’s cheek. I pushed away her damp hair. “You’re a champion,” I whispered. She squinted, uncertain. She thought I was talking to the baby. She handed me my son. I cradled him in my arms. He was so alive, but so delicate, so helpless. The feeling was wondrous, different from all other feelings, though familiar, too. Please don’t let me drop him. At Blue Ribbon I spent so much time talking about quality control, about craftsmanship, about delivery—but this, I realized, this was the real thing. “We made this,” I said to Penny. We. Made. This. She nodded, then lay back. I handed the baby to the nurse and told Penny to sleep. I floated out of the hospital and down to the car. I felt a sudden and overpowering need to see my father, a hunger for my father. I drove to his newspaper, parked several blocks away. I wanted to walk. The rain had stopped. The air was cool and damp. I ducked into a cigar store. I pictured myself handing my father a big fat robusto and saying, “Hiya, Grandpa!” Coming out of the store, the wooden cigar box under my arm, I bumped straight into Keith Forman, a former runner at Oregon. “Keith!” I cried. “Heya, Buck,” he said. I grabbed him by the lapels and shouted, “It’s a boy!” He leaned away, confused. He thought I was drunk. There wasn’t time to explain. I kept walking. Forman had been on the famous Oregon team that set the world record in the four-mile relay. As a runner, as an accountant, I always remembered their stunning

• From The Case for God (2009)

  You cannot learn to dance, paint, or cook by perusing texts or recipes. The rules of a board game sound obscure, unnecessarily complicated, and dull until you start to play, when everything falls into place. There are some things that can be learned only by constant, dedicated practice, but if you persevere, you find that you achieve something that seemed initially impossible. Instead of sinking to the bottom of the pool, you can float. You may learn to jump higher and with more grace than seems humanly possible or sing with unearthly beauty. You do not always understand how you achieve these feats, because your mind directs your body in a way that bypasses conscious, logical deliberation. But somehow you learn to transcend your original capabilities. Some of these activities bring indescribable joy. A musician can lose herself in her music, a dancer becomes inseparable from the dance, and a skier feels entirely at one with himself and the external world as he speeds down the slope. It is a satisfaction that goes deeper than merely “feeling good.” It is what the Greeks called ekstasis , a “stepping outside” the norm. Religion is a practical discipline that teaches us to discover new capacities of mind and heart. This will be one of the major themes of this book. It is no use magisterially weighing up the teachings of religion to judge their truth or falsehood before embarking on a religious way of life. You will discover their truth—or lack of it—only if you translate these doctrines into ritual or ethical action. Like any skill, religion requires perseverance, hard work, and discipline. Some people will be better at it than others, some appallingly inept, and some will miss the point entirely. But those who do not apply themselves will get nowhere at all. Religious people find it hard to explain how their rituals and practices work, just as a skater may not be fully conscious of the physical laws that enable her to glide over the ice on a thin blade. The early Daoists saw religion as a “knack” acquired by constant practice. Zhuangzi (c. 370–311 BCE), one of the most important figures in the spiritual history of China, explained that it was no good trying to analyze religious teachings logically. He cites the carpenter Bian: “When I work on a wheel, if I hit too softly, pleasant as this is, it doesn’t make for a good wheel. If I hit it furiously, I get tired and the thing doesn’t work! So not too soft, not too vigorous. I grasp it in my hand and hold it in my heart. I cannot express this by word of mouth, I just know it.” 6 A hunchback who trapped cicadas in the forest with a sticky pole never missed a single one.

• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  “This right here is what we should be doing with our money.” Of course everyone wanted to see his numbers, but no one more than the numbers guy, Hayes. When we discovered that the numbers didn’t add up, not one column, we started howling. Strasser took it personally. “It’s the essence I’m getting at,” he said. “Not the specifics. The essence.” The howling grew louder. So Strasser picked up his binder and threw it against the wall. “Fuck all you guys,” he said. The binder burst open, pages flew everywhere, and the laughter was deafening. Even Strasser couldn’t help himself. He had to join in. Little wonder that Strasser’s nickname was Rolling Thunder. Hayes, meanwhile, was Doomsday. Woodell was Weight. (As in Dead Weight.) Johnson was Four Factor, because he tended to exaggerate and therefore everything he said needed to be divided by four. No one took it personally. The only thing truly not tolerated at a Buttface was a thin skin. And sobriety. At day’s end, when everybody had a scratchy throat from all the abusing and laughing and problem-solving, when our yellow legal pads were filled with ideas, solutions, quotations, and lists upon lists, we’d shift ground to the bar at the lodge and continue the meeting over drinks. Many drinks. The bar was called the Owl’s Nest. I love to close my eyes and remember us storming through the entrance, scattering all other patrons. Or making friends of them. We’d buy drinks for the house, then commandeer a corner and continue laying into each other about some problem or idea or harebrained scheme. Say the problem was midsoles not getting from Point A to Point B. Round and round we’d go, everyone speaking at once, a chorale of name-calling and finger-pointing, all made louder, and funnier, and somehow clearer, by the booze. To anyone in the Owl’s Nest, to anyone in the corporate world, it would have looked inefficient, inappropriate. Even scandalous. But before the bartender gave last call, we’d know full well why those midsoles weren’t getting from Point A to Point B, and the person responsible would be contrite, and put on notice, and we’d have ourselves a creative solution. The only person who didn’t join us in these late-night revels was Johnson. He’d typically go for a head-clearing run, then retreat to his room and read in bed. I don’t think he ever set foot in the Owl’s Nest. Or knew where it was. We’d always have to spend the first part of the next morning updating him on what we’d decided in his absence. In the Bicentennial Year alone we were struggling with a number of unusually stressful problems. We needed to find a larger warehouse on the East Coast. We needed to transfer our sales-distribution center, from Holliston, Massachusetts, to a new forty-thousand-square-foot space in Greenland, New Hampshire, which