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 Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  It took quite half-an-hour for the pageant to pass; and when it had done so the people put their fingers to their lips, and whistled and cheered and clapped. Mrs Fryer wept, because her neighbour’s eldest daughter was walking in the line, dressed as a match-girl.I wished that Florence were with me, and kept looking for her damson-coloured suit and her daisy, but - though I saw just about every other unionist who had ever passed through our parlour — I did not see her once. When I found her at last, she was in the speakers’ tent: she had spent all afternoon there, listening to the lectures. ‘Have you heard?’ she said when she saw me. ‘There’s a rumour that Eleanor Marx is coming: I daren’t leave the tent, for fear of missing her address!’ It turned out she had eaten nothing since breakfast: I went off to buy her a packet of whelks from a stall, and a cup of ginger ale. When I returned I found Ralph beside her, sweating, still pulling at his collar, and paler than ever. Every seat in the tent was taken, and there were people standing, besides. It was stiflingly hot, and the heat was making everyone restless and cross. One speaker had recently made an unpopular point, and been booed from the platform.‘They won’t boo you, Ralph,’ I said; but when I saw that he was really miserable, I took his arm, left the baby with Florence, and led him from his seat into the cooler air outside. ‘Come on, come and have a fag with me. You mustn’t let the crowd see you are nervous.’We stood just beyond a flap of the tent - a couple of men from Ralph’s factory went by, and raised their hands to us - and I lit us two cigarettes. Ralph’s fingers shook as he held his, and he almost dropped it, then smiled apologetically: ‘What a fool you must think me.’‘Not at all! I remember how frightened I was on my first night; I thought I would be sick.’‘I thought I would be sick, a moment ago.’‘Everybody thinks it, and no one is’ This wasn’t quite true: I had often seen nervous artistes bent over bowls and fire-buckets at the side of the stage; but I did not, of course, tell Ralph this.‘Did you ever play before a crowd that was rather rough, Nance?’ he asked me now.‘What?’ I said. ‘At one hall - Deacon’s, in Islington - there was a poor comedian on before us and some fellows jumped on to the stage and held him upside-down over the footlights, trying to set his hair on fire.’

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

  The order of the church year is founded in part upon the history of Jesus and of the apostolic church; in part, especially in respect to Easter and Pentecost, upon the Jewish sacred year; and in part upon the natural succession of seasons; for the life of nature in general forms the groundwork of the higher life of the spirit, and there is an evident symbolical correspondence between Easter and spring, Pentecost and the beginning of harvest, Christmas and the winter solstice, the nativity of John the Baptist and the summer solstice. The Christian church year, however, developed itself spontaneously from the demands of the Christian worship and public life, after the precedent of the Old Testament cultus, with no positive direction from Christ or the apostles. The New Testament contains no certain traces of annual festivals; but so early as the second century we meet with the general observance of Easter and Pentecost, founded on the Jewish passover and feast of harvest, and answering to Friday and Sunday in the weekly cycle. Easter was a season of sorrow, in remembrance of the passion; Pentecost was a time of joy, in memory of the resurrection of the Redeemer and the outpouring of the Holy Ghost.709 These two festivals form the heart of the church year. Less important was the feast of the Epiphany, or manifestation of Christ as Messiah. In the fourth century the Christmas festival was added to the two former leading feasts, and partially took the place of the earlier feast of Epiphany, which now came to be devoted particularly to the manifestation of Christ among the Genthes. And further, in Easter the pavsca staurwvsimon and ajnastavsimon came to be more strictly distinguished, the latter being reckoned a season of joy. From this time, therefore, we have three great festival cycles, each including a season of preparation before the feast and an after-season appropriate: Christmas, Easter, and Pentecost. The lesser feasts of Epiphany and Ascension arranged themselves under these.710 All bear originally a christological character, representing the three stages of the redeeming work of Christ: the beginning, the prosecution, and the consummation. All are for the glorification of God in Christ.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  Because socialism is the only system for a fair society: a society in which the good things of the world are shared, not amongst the idlers of the world, but amongst the workers” - amongst yourselves: you, who have made the rich man rich, and been kept, for your labours, only ill and half-starved!’There was a second’s silence, then a burst of thunderous applause. I looked at Ralph - his cheeks were red, now, and his lashes wet with tears - then seized his hand, and raised it. And then, as the cheers at last died down, I looked at Florence, who had moved to join Annie and Cyril, and was watching me with her fingers at her lips.Behind us, the chairman approached to shake our hands; and when this was done we made our way off the platform, and were surrounded at once by smiles and congratulations and more applause.‘What a triumph!’ Annie called, stepping forward to greet us first. ‘Ralph, you were magnificent!’Ralph blushed. ‘It was all Nancy’s doing,’ he said self-consciously. Annie smirked, and turned to me. ‘Bravo!’ she said. ‘What a performance! If I had had a flower, I would have thrown it!’ She could not say any more, however, for behind her had come an elderly lady, who now pushed forward to catch my eye. It was Mrs Macey, of the Women’s Cooperative Guild.‘My dear,’ she said, ‘I must congratulate you! What a really splendid address! They tell me you were an actress, once ... ?’‘Do they?’ I said. ‘Yes, I was.’‘Well, we cannot afford to have such talents in our ranks, you know, and let them lie unused. Do say that you will speak for us another time. One really charismatic speaker can work wonders with an indecisive crowd.’‘I’ll gladly speak for you,’ I said. ‘But you, you know, must write the speech ...’‘Of course! Of course!’ She clasped her hands together and raised her eyes. ‘Oh! I foresee rallies and debates, even - who knows? - a lecture tour!’ At that, I gazed at her for a second in real alarm; then I felt my attention sought by a figure at my side, and turned to find Emma Raymond’s sister, Mrs Costello, looking flushed and excited.‘What a wonderful address!’ she said shyly. ‘I felt moved almost to tears by it.’ Her lovely face was indeed pale and grave, her eyes large and blue and lustrous. I thought again what I had thought before - what a shame it was that she was not a tom ... But then I remembered what Annie had said about her: how she had lost her gentle husband, and sought another.‘How kind you are,’ I said earnestly. ‘But, you know, it’s really Mr Banner who deserves your praises, for he composed the entire speech himself.’

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  149 The declaration of war seemed a summons to the nobility of altruism and self-sacrifice that gave life meaning. “All differences of class, rank and language were flooded over at that moment by the rushing feeling of fraternity,” the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig recalled. Everyone “had been incorporated into the mass, he was a part of the people, and his person, his hitherto unnoticed person, had been given meaning.... Each one was called upon to cast his infinitesimal self into the glowing mass and there to be purified of all selfishness.” 150 There was a yearning to cast aside an identity that felt too lonely, narrow, and confining and to escape from the privacy imposed by modernity. 151 An individual “was no longer the isolated person of former times,” said Zweig. 152 “No more are we what we had been so long: alone,” declared Marianne Weber. 153 A new era seemed to have begun. “People realized that they were equal,” remembered Rudolf Binding. “No one wished to count for more than anyone else.... It was like a rebirth.” 154 It “transported the body as well as the soul into a trance-like, enormously enhanced love of life and existence,” recalled Carl Zuckmayer, “a joy of participation, of living-along-with, a feeling, even, of grace.” 155 The triviality of the “petty, aimless lounging life of peacetime is done with,” Franz Schauwecker exulted. 156 For the first time, said Konrad Haenisch, a lifelong critic of German capitalism, he could join “with a full heart, a clean conscience, and without a sense of treason in the sweeping, stormy song: Deutschland, Deutschland über alles.” 157 In the trenches, however, volunteers discovered that far from escaping industrialization, they were entirely dominated by it. Like a sinister religious revelation, the war laid bare the material, technological, and mechanical reality that twentieth-century civilization concealed. 158 “Everything becomes machine-like,” one soldier wrote; “one might almost term the war an industry of professionalized human slaughter.” 159 It is a telling indictment of the loneliness and segmentation of modern society that many of these soldiers never forgot the profound sense of community they experienced in the trenches. “There enwrapped us, never to be lost, the sudden comradeship of the ranks,” T. E.

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

  Soon after this Arius, having been formally acquitted of the charge of heresy by a council at Jerusalem (A.D. 335), was to have been solemnly received back into the fellowship of the church at Constantinople. But on the evening before the intended procession from the imperial palace to the church of the Apostles, he suddenly died (A.D. 336), at the age of over eighty years, of an attack like cholera, while attending to a call of nature. This death was regarded by many as a divine judgment; by others, it was attributed to poisoning by enemies; by others, to the excessive joy of Arius in his triumph.1334 On the death of Constantine (337), who had shortly before received baptism from the Arian Eusebius of Nicomedia, Athanasius was recalled from his banishment (338) by Constantine II. († 340), and received by the people with great enthusiasm; "more joyously than ever an emperor."1335 Some months afterwards (339) he held a council of nearly a hundred bishops in Alexandria for the vindication of the Nicene doctrine. But this was a temporary triumph. In the East Arianism prevailed. Constantius, second son of Constantine the Great, and ruler in the East, together with his whole court, was attached to it with fanatical intolerance. Eusebius of Nicomedia was made bishop of Constantinople (338), and was the leader of the Arian and the more moderate, but less consistent semi-Arian parties in their common opposition to Athanasius and the orthodox West. Hence the name Eusebians.1336 Athanasius was for a second time deposed, and took refuge with the bishop Julius of Rome (339 or 340), who in the autumn of 341 held a council of more than fifty bishops in defence of the exile and for the condemnation of his opponents. The whole Western church was in general more steadfast on the side of the Nicene orthodoxy, and honored in Athanasius a martyr of the true faith. On the contrary a synod at Antioch, held under the direction of the Eusebians on the occasion of the dedication of a church in 341,1337 issued twenty-five canons, indeed, which were generally accepted as orthodox and valid, but at the same time confirmed the deposition of Athanasius, and set forth four creeds, which rejected Arianism, yet avoided the orthodox formula, particularly the vexed homoousion.1338 Thus the East and the West were in manifest conflict.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  Charles then roused me somewhat out of this ecstatic distraction, with a complaint softly murmured, amidst a crowd of kisses, at the position, not so favourable to his desires, in which I received his urgent insistance for admission, where that insistance was alone so engrossing a pleasure, that it made me inconsistently suffer a much dearer one to be kept out; but how sweet to correct such a mistake! My thighs, now obedient to the intimations of love and nature, gladly disclose, and with a ready submission, resign up the soft gateway to the entrance of pleasure: I see, I feel the delicious velvet tip!... he enters me might and main, with... oh! my pen drops from here in the extasy now present to my faithful memory! Description too deserts me, and delivers over a task, above its strength of wing, to the imagination: but it must be an imagination exalted by such a flame as mine that can do justice to that sweetest, noblest of all sensations, that hailed and accompanied the stiff insinuation all the way up, till it was at the end of its penetration, sending up, through my eyes, the sparks of the love-fire that ran all over me and blazed in every vein and every pore of me; a system incarnate of joy all over. I had now totally taken in love’s true arrow from the point up to the feather, in that part, where making no new wound, the lips or the original one of nature, which had owed its first breathing to this dear instrument, clung, as if sensible of gratitude, in eager suction round it, whilst all its inwards embraced it tenderly, with a warmth of gust, a compressive energy, that gave it, in its way, the heartiest welcome in nature; every fibre there gathering tight round it, and straining ambitiously to come in for its share of the blissful touch. As we were giving them a few moments pause to the the delectations of the senses, in dwelling with the highest relish on this intimatest point of re-union, and chewing the cud of enjoyment, the impatience natural to the pleasure soon drove us into action. Then began the driving tumult on his side, and the responsive heaves on mine, which kept me up to him; whilst, as our joys grew too great for utterance, the organs of our voices, voluptuously intermixing, became organs of the touch... how delicious!... how poignantly luscious!... And now! now I felt, to the heart of me! I felt the prodigious keen edge, with which love, presiding over this act, points the pleasure: love! that may be styled the Attic salt of enjoyment; and indeed, without it, the joy, great as it is, is still a vulgar one, whether in a king or a beggar; for it is, undoubtedly, love alone that refines, ennobles, and exalts it.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  They came, I suppose, as much for the sun as for the socialism. They spread blankets between the stalls and tents, and ate their lunches there, and lay with their sweethearts and babies, and threw sticks for their dogs. But I saw them listening, too, to the speakers at the stalls - sometimes nodding, sometimes arguing, sometimes frowning over a pamphlet, or placing their name upon a list, or fishing pennies from their pockets, to give to some cause. As I stood and looked, I saw a woman pass by with children at her skirts - it was Mrs Fryer, the poor needlewoman whom Florence and I had visited in the autumn. When I called to her, she came smiling up to me. ‘I got my place in the union, after all,’ she said. ‘Your pal persuaded me to it ...’ We stood chatting for a moment — her children had toffee-apples, and held one up for Cyril to lick. Then there came a blast of music, and people shuffled and murmured and craned their necks, and we stood together, lifting the children high, and watched the Workers’ Pageant - a procession of men and women dressed in all the costumes of all the trades, carrying union banners and flags and flowers. It took quite half-an-hour for the pageant to pass; and when it had done so the people put their fingers to their lips, and whistled and cheered and clapped. Mrs Fryer wept, because her neighbour’s eldest daughter was walking in the line, dressed as a match-girl. I wished that Florence were with me, and kept looking for her damson-coloured suit and her daisy, but - though I saw just about every other unionist who had ever passed through our parlour — I did not see her once. When I found her at last, she was in the speakers’ tent: she had spent all afternoon there, listening to the lectures. ‘Have you heard?’ she said when she saw me. ‘There’s a rumour that Eleanor Marx is coming: I daren’t leave the tent, for fear of missing her address!’ It turned out she had eaten nothing since breakfast: I went off to buy her a packet of whelks from a stall, and a cup of ginger ale. When I returned I found Ralph beside her, sweating, still pulling at his collar, and paler than ever. Every seat in the tent was taken, and there were people standing, besides. It was stiflingly hot, and the heat was making everyone restless and cross. One speaker had recently made an unpopular point, and been booed from the platform. ‘They won’t boo you, Ralph,’ I said; but when I saw that he was really miserable, I took his arm, left the baby with Florence, and led him from his seat into the cooler air outside. ‘Come on, come and have a fag with me.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  [image file=image_rsrcDZA.jpg] In 559 BCE Cyrus, a minor member of the Persian Achaemenid family, became king of Anshan in southern Iran.116 Twenty years later, after a series of spectacular victories in Media, Anatolia, and Asia Minor, he invaded the Babylonian empire and astonishingly, without fighting a single battle, was greeted by the population as a liberator. Cyrus was now the master of the largest empire the world had yet seen. At its fullest extent, it would control the whole of the eastern Mediterranean, from what is now Libya and Turkey in the west to Afghanistan in the east. For centuries to come, any ruler who aspired to world rule would try to replicate Cyrus’s achievement.117 But he was not only a pivotal figure in the politics of the region: he also modeled a more benign form of empire. Cyrus’s victory proclamation claimed that when he arrived in Babylonia, “all the people … of Sumer and Akkad, nobles and governors, bowed down before him and kissed his feet, rejoicing over his kingship, and their faces shone.”118 Why such enthusiasm for a foreign invader? Ten years earlier, shortly after Cyrus had conquered Media, the Babylonian author of the poem “The Dream of Nabonidus” had given him a divine role.119 Media had been a threat to Babylon, and Marduk, the poet said, had appeared in a dream to Nabonidus (r. 556–539), the last Babylonian king, to assure him that he was still controlling events and had chosen Cyrus to solve the Median problem. But ten years later the Babylonian Empire was in decline. Nabonidus, engaged in conquests abroad, had been absent from Babylon for several years and had incurred the wrath of the priesthood by failing to perform the Akitu ritual. During this ceremony all Babylonian kings had to swear not “to rain blows on the cheeks of the protected citizen,” but Nabonidus had imposed forced labor on the freemen of the empire. Disaffected priests announced that the gods had abrogated his rule and abandoned the city. When Cyrus marched on Babylonia, these priests almost certainly helped him to write his victory speech, which explained that when the people of Babylon had cried out in anguish to Marduk, the god had chosen Cyrus as their champion: He took the hand of Cyrus, king of the city of Anshan, and called him by name, proclaiming him aloud for the kingship over all of everything.… He ordered that he should go to Babylon. He had him take the road to [Babylon], and like a friend and companion, he walked at his side.… He had him enter without fighting or battle, right into Shuanna; he saved his city Babylon from hardship. He handed over to him Nabonidus, the king who did not fear him.120 Ritual and mythology, crucial as they were to kingship, did not always endorse state tyranny. Nabonidus was in effect deposed by the priestly establishment for his excessive violence and oppression.

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

  The Christian Sabbath is, on the one hand, the continuation and the regeneration of the Jewish Sabbath, based upon God’s resting from the creation and upon the fourth commandment of the decalogue, which, as to its substance, is not of merely national application, like the ceremonial and civil law, but of universal import and perpetual validity for mankind. It is, on the other hand, a new creation of the gospel, a memorial of the resurrection of Christ and of the work of redemption completed and divinely sealed thereby. It rests, we may say, upon the threefold basis of the original creation, the Jewish legislation, and the Christian redemption, and is rooted in the physical, the moral, and the religious wants of our nature. It has a legal and an evangelical aspect. Like the law in general, the institution of the Christian Sabbath is a wholesome restraint upon the people, and a schoolmaster to lead them to Christ. But it is also strictly evangelical: it was originally made for the benefit of man, like the family, with which it goes back beyond the fall to the paradise of innocence, as the second institution of God on earth; it was "a delight" to the pious of the old dispensation (Isa. lviii. 13), and now, under the new, it is fraught with the glorious memories and blessings of Christ’s resurrection and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. The Christian Sabbath is the ancient Sabbath baptized with fire and the Holy Ghost, regenerated, spiritualized, and glorified. It is the connecting link of creation and redemption, of paradise lost, and paradise regained, and a pledge and preparation for the saints’ everlasting rest in heaven.691 The ancient church viewed the Sunday mainly, we may say, one-sidedly and exclusively, from its Christian aspect as a new institution, and not in any way as a continuation of the Jewish Sabbath. It observed it as the day of the commemoration of the resurrection or of the now spiritual creation, and hence as a day of sacred joy and thanksgiving, standing in bold contrast to the days of humiliation and fasting, as the Easter festival contrasts with Good Friday. So long as Christianity was not recognized and protected by the state, the observance of Sunday was purely religious, a strictly voluntary service, but exposed to continual interruption from the bustle of the world and a hostile community. The pagan Romans paid no more regard to the Christian Sunday than to the Jewish Sabbath.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  The issue remained in play for another half-century, before the later Empress Theodora was freed by the death of her iconoclast husband Theophilos in 842 to emerge as a second female champion of icons. A run of military victories for iconoclast emperors had abruptly and humiliatingly ended in the 830s: God’s favour seemed to have deserted the iconoclast cause. As regent for her son Michael III, toddler as well as Emperor, Theodora ordered a new Patriarch hand-picked for his iconophile sympathies to restore the icons to public worship. The occasion of their joyful formal reintroduction to the great church of Hagia Sophia, 11 March 843, was a decision never reversed, and it has always subsequently been celebrated in successor-Churches as the ‘Triumph of Orthodoxy’. It is possible to read this sequence of events simply as a matter of high politics and of the doctrinal statements produced by successive ecclesiastical councils and distinguished theologians (now much weighted to the iconophilic side, thanks to later censorship by the victors). Yet it is no accident that a succession of military men as emperors with strategic considerations in mind favoured the iconoclastic cause, and that two (admittedly ambitious and ruthless) women should successfully defy them and alter the future of Eastern Orthodoxy. It has been plausibly argued that the two sides represent contrasting ways of approaching the mystery of God at the heart of Christian faith, appealing to different constituencies in Byzantine society. Iconophilia became an alliance between women and monks, and the debate was about how to find holiness in this world. [35] It was a theme among iconoclasts that Christians met holiness in the particular situations where the clergy represented the Church to God, primarily in public performance of the Church’s liturgy. No one on either side was going to deny the place of the liturgy in the life of the Church, but it could perfectly well continue in its magnificence in churches without artistic representation of sacred figures. One reason for iconoclasts to reject the holiness of icons was that there was no official provision for a cleric to say a prayer of blessing over them (in the centuries since the Triumph of Orthodoxy, that has been remedied). [36] In terms of art, iconoclasts were content with rich depictions of a plain cross in their churches, some of which survive, and which might call to a soldier’s mind the humiliation brought to Christians by the Muslim seizure of Jerusalem, site of the crucifixion of Jesus and shrine to the miraculously preserved True Cross. Yet the churches and their liturgy were public space, and, by definition, they were therefore primarily male space, both for clergy and for laymen. Iconoclasts laying claim to that public space in their years of success had nothing else to offer those for whom the liturgy might have become impossibly splendid and too remote to satisfy every spiritual need, in churches that might be too crowded for quiet private devotion.

• From My People (2022)

  Martin Luther King, Jr., 1929–1968.” Others had such slogans as “Black Power on Time,” “Soul Power,” “United People Power, Toledo, Ohio,” “Soul City, U.S.A.,” and “The Dirty Dozen,” on a building I figured was a dormitory. And, of course, the inevitable “Flower Power.” “I Have a Dream” stickers appeared in most places, as well as pictures of Martin Luther King—usually enshrined beside the canvas-and-wood cots inside the houses. Just as the slogans varied widely, so did the inside appearance of the houses. While many looked like the wreck of the Hesperus , in others, by 9 a.m. when the camp was opened to visitors, beds were made, clothes were hung, floors were swept, and—in several houses—plank coffee tables were adorned with greenery in tin-can vases. The Coretta King Day Care Center was perhaps the most successful unit in the camp. A local church group contributed most of the materials, including books like Alice in Wonderland, What Are You Looking At? , The Enormous Egg , and Bennett Cerf’s Pop-Up Lyrics . There were even toy cars and trucks, water colors, and jigsaw puzzles. And a hundred pairs of muddy boots. The children played games and sang songs such as “If You’re Happy and You Know It, Clap Your Hands” and, of course, “We Shall Overcome.” And they went on field trips—to the Smithsonian, the National Historical Wax Museum, and Georgetown University. Enrollment was about seventy-five. Altogether, Resurrection City never contained more than the average American city—the bare-bones necessities. Still, many people received more medical attention than ever before in their lives. A young mother left Marks, Mississippi, with a baby whose chances of survival, she had been told, were very slim. He was dying of malnutrition. After three weeks of medical care—vitamins, milk, food—he began gaining weight and life. For others, teeth were saved. Upper-respiratory infections—at one point a source of alarm to those outside the camp—were treated and curbed. And when one of the residents died while on a demonstration in the food line at the Agriculture Department, there was little doubt that it was not Resurrection City that killed him, but the lack of adequate medical attention back home. Most of the residents were also eating better. The menus were often a hodgepodge affair—sometimes consisting of beef stew, turnip greens, apple sauce, and an orange—but the food was nutritious. And you did not need food stamps to get it. Residents of Resurrection City found it difficult to understand the outside world’s reaction via the press to conditions within the camp. The stink from the toilets that filled one’s nostrils whenever a breeze stirred was, as one observer put it, “the smell of poverty.” Residents put it another way. “I appreciate the mud,” a woman from Detroit said. “It might help get some of this disease out.” The mud of Resurrection City was seen by many as unifying, if not cleansing.

• From The Art of Memoir

  of her own volition to rave about the pages and endorse their truth, as my mother had. A few months before the book came out, Lecia decided she was pissed off and stopped speaking to me. Though this was a fairly common phenomenon, it still set me back. But I also figured she’d be such a hero to anybody who read the story, she’d come around once it was published. Then a writer friend figured out a way to label the book fiction and write her out, making me an only child. No doubt my mother passed this prospect along to my sister, and not long after, the publisher’s lawyers reported that my sister had phoned to champion the book’s accuracy again. She ultimately sold copies from her car trunk and bragged her ass off about it. I can also honestly say that publishing the story freed us from our old shame somehow. My beautiful, outlaw seventy-year-old mother received marriage proposals from strangers; my sister was heralded as brave in every review. People wrote how my hard- drinking daddy was now their favorite patriarch. In my hometown, the seamier facts had been common knowledge anyway, but something about having all the bad news out in open air freed us even more. Call it aversion therapy: we seemed collectively to get over Mother’s half-century-plus lies about who she was. When she arranged a book signing at our local library, over five hundred people showed—including old beaus, far-flung cousins, and my first-grade teacher. In some ways, that day, with my mother and sister holding court, meant more than any good review I ever got—truly a life highlight. It burned away some old aura of shame, I think. Which phenomenon echoes my favorite reconciliation story from Maxine Hong Kingston. Her mother couldn’t believe how well Maxine had captured a village life she’d never lived. And when her later China Men was translated into Chinese so her father could read it, he started writing poems again in its margins, which in Chinese books are superwide to permit commentary, part of an old Confucian tradition. If Maxine was complaining about how her people devalue daughters, her father penned a poem celebrating women’s equality.

• From My Secret Garden (1973)

  So if I’m with some silent type, just lying there noiseless with him thrusting away, I remember those noisy nights as a kid in San Francisco, and within seconds I’m moaning and groaning like crazy myself, and sure enough, the old silent type picks up on it, too… and we’re off on a great loud fuck! [Conversation] NinaI am thirty-three years old, a lesbian, and have been happily “married” for the past five years. My fantasies during sex are very much a reflection of what is actually happening. Very often we will “act out” our roles as Mum and Baby, as she sucks my nipples and I sing her nursery songs. At other times she acts the male role and I describe out loud what her “cock” is like and how it is affecting me while we masturbate each other. Our lovemaking pleasure is always heightened by the use of words like “cunt,” “fuck,” etc., which we normally don’t use… only in bed. I should add that my fantasies are always about my lover, never about some other lesbian. If I did have ideas about another woman, I would never tell her, as she is terribly jealous natured. When I discovered the delights of masturbation, at the age of seven, even then I used to imagine it was my girlfriend who was rubbing between my legs. I suppose I’ve always been a lesbian and it was just a matter of time before I made these early fantasies come true. Sometimes, while masturbating as a child, I would imagine her dog was licking my cunt (which it sometimes did and which excited me greatly). However, I never fantasize about animals now. My thoughts are totally given over to my love for other women. Often, I will imagine a kind of religious orgy—lesbian, but watched by men robed as priests. There are always lots of lighted candles, vestal virgins, and a certain amount of sex on the altar with my partner. There is invariably glorious music and brilliant colors as in church. (I am a vicar’s offspring and attend church regularly, but have no guilt about being homosexual.) Every (frequent) session with my beloved partner is exciting and satisfying, all the more so because of my thoughts and our words. However, I would never talk about my fantasies to anyone. [Letter] MegWhen I am with my husband, I often think of my former lover and of the time we were on a secluded, bushy beach together and he pinned me to the ground with his legs after I’d already had one climax; he just steamrollered me and moaned and groaned when he came. That’s something else I miss—my former lover’s lovemaking noises and talk—my husband doesn’t “talk dirty” during the act to the extent my lover used to, and he’s pretty well noiseless at climax. [Taped interview]

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

  disciples, believers, brethren, saints, soon rose to five thousand. They continued steadfastly under the instruction and in the fellowship of the apostles, in the daily worship of God and celebration of the holy Supper with their agapae or love-feasts. They felt themselves to be one family of God, members of one body under one head, Jesus Christ; and this fraternal unity expressed itself even in a voluntary community of goods—an anticipation, as it were, of an ideal state at the end of history, but without binding force upon any other congregation. They adhered as closely to the temple worship and the Jewish observances as the new life admitted and as long as there was any hope of the conversion of Israel as a nation. They went daily to the temple to teach, as their Master had done, but held their devotional meetings in private houses.281 The addresses of Peter to the people and the Sanhedrin282 are remarkable for their natural simplicity and adaptation. They are full of fire and vigor, yet full of wisdom and persuasion, and always to the point. More practical and effective sermons were never preached. They are testimonies of an eye-witness so timid a few weeks before, and now so bold and ready at any moment to suffer and die for the cause. They are an expansion of his confession that Jesus is the Christ the Son of the living God, the Saviour. He preached no subtle theological doctrines, but a few great facts and truths: the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus the Messiah, already known to his hearers for his mighty signs and wonders, his exaltation to the right hand of Almighty God, the descent and power of the Holy Spirit, the fulfilment of prophecy, the approaching judgment and glorious restitution of all things, the paramount importance of conversion and faith in Jesus as the only name whereby we can be saved. There breathes in them an air of serene joy and certain triumph. We can form no clear conception of this bridal season of the Christian church when no dust of earth soiled her shining garments, when she was wholly absorbed in the contemplation and love of her divine Lord, when he smiled down upon her from his throne in heaven, and added daily to the number of the saved. It was a continued Pentecost, it was paradise restored. "They did take their food with gladness and singleness of heart, praising God, and having favor with all the people."283 Yet even in this primitive apostolic community inward corruption early appeared, and with it also the severity of discipline and self-purification, in the terrible sentence of Peter on the hypocritical Ananias and Sapphira. At first Christianity found favor with the people. Soon, however, it had to encounter the same persecution as its divine founder had undergone, but only, as before, to transform it into a blessing and a means of growth.

• From My Secret Garden (1973)

  We have tried group sex for this purpose, and in this way I have had sex with up to five men in one evening. I do not want to make too much of the panties thing, but going back to the original incident I read about, which was not only before tights but before minis too, it simply said that her dress was lifted, without any reference to whether she wore anything below, as if they were the wide-legged type that would not get in the way. But whatever, there was no obstacle, and this is very important in my fantasies. I have read of girls saying they go out every day without panties, but frankly I haven’t the nerve for this, although my husband supports the idea, so I tend to pick occasions when I feel there will be no danger, as when I am in the company of people I know will approve. Simply, I love sex, but I don’t want to be raped. I would just repeat that I get much pleasure from my fantasies, and wish you well. [Letter] FOREPLAYIn my desire to lessen the anxiety about fantasy during sex, I don’t mean to imply that if you don’t have sexual fantasies there is something wrong with you, or even that you yourself may not prefer it that way. What I am trying to do is establish a more acceptable climate for fantasy, so that women who do fantasize will not feel so alone, so estranged, and will realize that there is nothing wrong with it—that in fact, for them as well as for women still unaware of their fantasies, a more conscious use of them can add an exciting new dimension to sex. But we all respond differently to different stimuli, and some people, I realize, do not fantasize, just as there may be some rare people who do not dream. I happen to believe, however, that most do—and that while reading this book, many will, in fact, discover theirs beneath the thin skin of childhood training or prudery—call it what you will. I’ve already said why I think women’s fantasies are often far richer and more adventurous than men’s. They are a true women’s underground. But just as some people do and some do not fantasize, some fantasies are meant to be shared and others not. By opening up the underground, I am not suggesting we have to tell or act out all our fantasies to be sexually happier; just accept them without anxiety for what they are.

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

  The pagan Ammianus Marcellinus says of the councils under Constantius: "The highways were covered with galloping bishops;" and even Athanasius rebuked the restless flutter of the clergy, who journeyed the empire over to find the true faith, and provoked the ridicule and contempt of the unbelieving world. In intolerance and violence the Arians exceeded the orthodox, and contested elections of bishops not rarely came to bloody encounters. The interference of imperial politics only poured oil on the flame, and embarrassed the natural course of the theological development. The personal history of Athanasius was interwoven with the doctrinal controversy; he threw himself wholly into the cause which he advocated. The question whether his deposition was legitimate or not, was almost identical with the question whether the Nicene Creed should prevail. Eusebius of Nicomedia and Theognis of Nicaea threw all their influence against the adherents of the homoousion. Constantine himself was turned by Eusebius of Caesarea, who stood between Athanasius and Arius, by his sister Constantia and her father confessor, and by a vague confession of Arius, to think more favorably of Arius, and to recall him from exile. Nevertheless he afterwards, as before, thought himself in accordance with the orthodox view and the Nicene creed. The real gist of the controversy he had never understood. Athanasius, who after the death of Alexander in April, 328,1333 became bishop of Alexandria and head of the Nicene party, refused to reinstate the heretic in his former position, and was condemned and deposed for false accusations by two Arian councils, one at Tyre under the presidency of the historian Eusebius, the other at Constantinople in the year 335 (or 336), and banished by the emperor to Treves in Gaul in 336, as a disturber of the peace of the church. Soon after this Arius, having been formally acquitted of the charge of heresy by a council at Jerusalem (A.D. 335), was to have been solemnly received back into the fellowship of the church at Constantinople. But on the evening before the intended procession from the imperial palace to the church of the Apostles, he suddenly died (A.D. 336), at the age of over eighty years, of an attack like cholera, while attending to a call of nature. This death was regarded by many as a divine judgment; by others, it was attributed to poisoning by enemies; by others, to the excessive joy of Arius in his triumph.1334 On the death of Constantine (337), who had shortly before received baptism from the Arian Eusebius of Nicomedia, Athanasius was recalled from his banishment (338) by Constantine II. († 340), and received by the people with great enthusiasm; "more joyously than ever an emperor."1335 Some months afterwards (339) he held a council of nearly a hundred bishops in Alexandria for the vindication of the Nicene doctrine. But this was a temporary triumph. In the East Arianism prevailed.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  Thus, happy, then, by the heart, happy by the senses, it was beyond all power, even of thought, to form the conception of a greater delight than what I now am consummating the fruition of. Charles, whose whole frame was convulsed with the agitation of his rapture, whilst the tenderest fires trembled in his eyes, all assured me of a perfect concord of joy, penetrated me so profoundly, touched me so vitally, took me so much out of my own possession, whilst he seemed himself so much in mine, that in a delicious enthusiasm, I imagined such a transfusion of heart and spirit, as that coalescing, and making one body and soul with him, I was he, and he me. But all this pleasure tending, like life from its first instants, towards its own dissolution, lived too fast not to bring on upon the spur its delicious moment of mortality; for presently the approach of the tender agony discovered itself by its usual signals, that were quickly followed by my dear lover’s emanation of himself, that spun out, and shot, feelingly indeed! up the ravished indraught: where the sweetly soothing balmy titillation opened all the juices of joy on my side, which ecstatically in flow helped to allay the prurient glow, and drowned our pleasure for a while. Soon, however, to be on float again! for Charles, true to nature’s laws, in one breath, expiring and ejaculating, languished not long in the dissolving trance, but recovering spirit again, soon gave me to feel that the true mettle spring! of his instrument of pleasure, were, by love, and perhaps, by a long vacation, wound up too high to be let down by a single explosion: his stiffnesss till stood my friend. Resuming then the action afresh, without dislodging, or giving me the trouble of parting from my sweet tenant, we played over again the same opera, with the same harmony and concert: our ardours, like our love, knew no remission; and all the tide serving my lover, lavish of his stores, and pleasure-milked, he over-flowed me once more from the fulness of his oval reservoirs of the genial emulsion: whilst, on my side, a convulsive grasp, in the instant of my giving down the liquid contribution, rendered me sweetly subservient at once to the increase of joy, and to its effusions: moving me so, as to make me exert all those springs of the compressive exsuction, with which the sensitive mechanism of that part thirstily draws and drains the nipple of Love; with much such an instinctive eagerness and attachment, as to compare great with less, kind nature engages infants at the breasts, by the pleasure they find in the motion of their little mouths and cheeks, to extract the milky stream prepared for their nourishment.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  The silky hair that covered round the borders, now smoothed and re-pruned, had resumed its wonted curl and trimness; the fleshy pouting lips that had stood the brunt of the engagement, were no longer swollen or moisture-drenched; and neither they, nor the passage into which they opened, that had suffered so great a dilation, betrayed any the least alteration, outwardly or inwardly, to the most curious research, notwithstanding the laxity that naturally follows the warm bath. This continuation of that grateful stricture which is in us, to the men, the very jet of their pleasure, I owed, it seems, to a happy habit of body, juicy, plump and furnished, towards the texture of those parts, with a fullness of soft springy flesh, that yielding sufficiently, as it does, to almost any distension soon recovers itself so as to re-tighten that strict compression of its mantlings and folds, which form the sides of the passage, wherewith it so tenderly embraces and closely clips any foreign body introduced into it, such as my exploring finger then was. Finding then every thing in due tone and order, I remember my fears, only to make a jest of them to myself. And now, palpably mistress of any size of man, and triumphing in my double achievement of pleasure and revenge, I abandoned myself entirely to the ideas of all the delight I had swam in. I lay stretching out, glowingly alive all over, and tossing with burning impatience for the renewal of joys that had sinned but in a sweet excess; nor did I lose my longing, for about ten in the morning, according to expectation, Will, my new humble sweetheart, came with a message from his master, Mr. H...., to know how I did. I had taken care to send my maid on an errand into the city, that I was sure would take up time enough; and, from the people of the house, I had nothing to fear, as they were plain good sort of folks, and wise enough to mind no more other people’s business than they could well help. All dispositions then made, not forgetting that of lying in bed to receive him, when he was entered the door of my bed chamber, a latch, that I governed by a wire, descended and secured it. I could not but observe that my young minion was as much spruced out as could be expected from one in his condition: a desire of pleasing that could not be indifferent to me, since it proved that I pleased him; which, I assure you, was now a point I was not above having in view.

• From Manhunt (2022)

  Wild strawberries. A fucking pheasant in wax paper. Fran had nearly cried upon opening the door. Aside from sour apples and the occasional rabbit, she’d been eating salted meat and fruit leather for the better part of two years. The bunker had fresh food . She wanted to tip it out onto the kitchen floor and roll around in it. I will never be hungry again for as long as I live. Indi’s apartment was a far cry from their little dorm rooms. It looked more like something excised from a Korean luxury hotel, skim-coat walls and concrete floors, minimalist white furniture that would have looked right at home in Fran’s mother’s office in Watertown. A chemical toilet and recycled water shower in an immaculate black bathroom. A painting of some bold, clashing shape thingies that looked like it belonged in an advertising firm’s lobby and probably cost more than a new car. Fran plucked the balls out of the little plastic dish she’d set by the electric range and dropped them into the pan, angling it with her other hand to make sure they got an even coating of the melted butter. They sizzled, a sound like dozens of small mouths chewing at once. In the living area off the kitchenette, Beth was teaching Robbie how to play Screw, both of them slamming cards down on the coffee table and slapping at each other’s hands. Fran took a pinch of salt and sprinkled it over the testicles before turning them with a chopstick, exposing their seared and caramelized undersides. When did I become a person the quality of whose days is determined by whether she eats balls raw or fried? Tomorrow they could worry about the rest of it, the duty shifts and placement interviews, the guards and the shantytown, the look in Sophie Widdel’s big round eyes and the way Indi had come back pale and tight-lipped from her tour of her lab and gone straight in to bed, claiming she had a migraine. For now it felt good to cook, and to forget about the world outside Indi’s suite. Even Beth looked relaxed, sprawled sidelong on the couch with her bad leg up on a pillow and her cards held like a courtier’s fan over her mouth. Fran gave the balls another minute before snatching them out of the pan. Hissing in pain, she dropped one in her bowl of rice and beans and the other in Beth’s, then stuck her burned fingers in her mouth. The salty, faintly cheesy taste of her own skin made her think of being four years old in their kitchen at the Marblehead house, a sulky little boy sucking his burnt forefinger after touching the hot griddle “just to see.” To see what, [redacted]? Why had he done it?

• From My People (2022)

  When I whispered to President Ensign how impressive the room looked, now filled with the 250 members of the graduating class who were also wearing red caps and gowns, she laughed quietly and told me of the 2011 graduation, which was supposed to be held in a huge tent, except that one of the area’s frequent sandstorms had come roaring in just as the graduating seniors were assembling and had blown it down. But that didn’t stop the proceedings. Ensign told me, “We worked through the night to get our community hall ready and rented a few small tents from town—no one slept for twenty-four hours—and it ended up being a very beautiful graduation!” Soon, in this cavernous new hall, the ceremony was opened with two prayers, one from an imam and one from a Protestant minister. In another part of this enormous country of some 160 million people, guests at an awards ceremony had recently protested the singing of the United States’ national anthem before the Nigerian one, but there was no dissent in this hall, and the few who knew both joined in the singing. Then it was time for the top graduating seniors to speak—both of them young, composed women who spoke inspiringly, with confidence and humor. Halima Olajumoke Sogbesan, whose major is communications and multimedia studies, was the valedictorian. She spoke of the impact that the university’s motto—“Quality, integrity, and style”—had on her: It “made me dream of an AUN that would prepare me for a successful career in print journalism. I dreamt that from AUN, I would learn to write compelling leads, conduct intensive investigations, and grow to become an award-winning journalist. I also dreamt that in the process of getting my college degree, I was going to develop an American accent. I was a student of the American University of Nigeria, after all. As is quite evident, that didn’t really work out the way I thought.” Then she spoke of the extracurricular activities that had broadened her understanding beyond AUN: Through my experiences while serving as treasurer and secretary of the AUN Honors Society, vice president of the Women’s Leadership Council, secretary of the Muslim Students Society of Nigeria, and a member of the AUN Academic Integrity Council, I have come to realize it is difficult to induce change in organizations, no matter how small they are. These experiences have honed my knowledge of the delicate intricacies of the world. She concluded with words that further affirmed my decision to travel to Yola for this graduation: It is very wonderful to know that the next time we check our banner records, our heartbeats will be regulated. We are free! About to go into the world, to be agents of change, to glow in the dark, and to stand up for what is right. Then it was my turn to give the graduation address, although, as I told the students, I felt it was a little redundant after listening to their wise words.