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 Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures (2018)

  When we are entirely absorbed by what is happening to the characters in a film, for example, we are not necessarily thinking about ourselves and going through the exercise of relating our enjoyment to the presence of the subject. Why would one need to allocate extra processing effort to the “I”? The stable presence of a reference “I” is enough. But notice how if, at a given moment, a word or event in the film connects to your specific past experience and provokes a reaction—a thought, an emotive response, and a specific feeling—our “subject” comes forth into saliency; we momentarily co-experience the material in the screenplay and our own presence, now made more prominent in the conscious mind. This is even more likely to occur when we have complete control of the time needed to acquire the material. That is what happens when we read a novel or even a piece of absorbing nonfiction. We can pace the acquisition and the mental translation at will, something that does not happen in a film experience unless we abandon our spectator’s posture and distract ourselves from the screen. The classical film experience, as is the case with music and with reality, imposes its acquisition tempo. Turn to literature if you really want to be free. Finally, I need to point out that the images of the interior perform double duty. On the one hand, they contribute to the multimedia show of consciousness: they can be observed as part of the consciousness spectacle. On the other hand, these images contribute to the construction of feelings and as such help with the generation of subjectivity itself, the property of consciousness that allows us to be spectators in the first place. This may appear confusing, even paradoxical at first, but it is not. The processes are nested. Feelings provide the qualia element included in subjectivity. In turn, subjectivity permits feelings to be scrutinized as specific objects in conscious experience. The apparent paradox highlights the fact that we cannot discuss the physiology of consciousness without referring to feelings and vice versa. Subjectivity: The First and Indispensable Component of ConsciousnessLet us then set aside the most salient images of the conscious mind, the ones that largely make up the contents of stories, and concentrate on the images that construct the critical enabler of consciousness: subjectivity. The reason why I am able to describe anything that goes on in my mind and say colloquially that it “is in my consciousness” is that the images that populate my mind automatically become my images, images that I can attend to and inspect with greater or less effort or clarity. Without my having to lift a finger, or calling for help, I know that the images belong to me, the owner of my mind and of the body within which that mind is being fabricated, as I write, the owner of the living organism that I inhabit.

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  I remember one particular problem I had been trying to compose for months. There came a night when I managed at last to express that particular theme. It was meant for the delectation of the very expert solver. The unsophisticated might miss the point of the problem entirely, and discover its fairly simple, “thetic” solution without having passed through the pleasurable torments prepared for the sophisticated one. The latter would start by falling for an illusory pattern of play based on a fashionable avant-garde theme (exposing White’s King to checks), which the composer had taken the greatest pains to “plant” (with only one obscure little move by an inconspicuous pawn to upset it). Having passed through this “antithetic” inferno the by now ultrasophisticated solver would reach the simple key move (bishop to c2) as somebody on a wild goose chase might go from Albany to New York by way of Vancouver, Eurasia and the Azores. The pleasant experience of the roundabout route (strange landscapes, gongs, tigers, exotic customs, the thrice-repeated circuit of a newly married couple around the sacred fire of an earthen brazier) would amply reward him for the misery of the deceit, and after that, his arrival at the simple key move would provide him with a synthesis of poignant artistic delight. I remember slowly emerging from a swoon of concentrated chess thought, and there, on a great English board of cream and cardinal leather, the flawless position was at last balanced like a constellation. It worked. It lived. My Staunton chessmen (a twenty-year-old set given to me by my father’s Englished brother, Konstantin), splendidly massive pieces, of tawny or black wood, up to four and a quarter inches tall, displayed their shiny contours as if conscious of the part they played. Alas, if examined closely, some of the men were seen to be chipped (after traveling in their box through the fifty or sixty lodgings I had changed during those years); but the top of the king’s rook and the brow of the king’s knight still showed a small crimson crown painted upon them, recalling the round mark on a happy Hindu’s forehead.

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  In the fall of 1939, we returned to Paris, and around May 20 of the following year we were again near the sea, this time on the western coast of France, at St. Nazaire. There, one last little garden surrounded us, as you and I, and our child, by now six, between us, walked through it on our way to the docks, where, behind the buildings facing us, the liner Champlain was waiting to take us to New York. That garden was what the French call, phonetically, skwarr and the Russians skver, perhaps because it is the kind of thing usually found in or near public squares in England. Laid out on the last limit of the past and on the verge of the present, it remains in my memory merely as a geometrical design which no doubt I could easily fill in with the colors of plausible flowers, if I were careless enough to break the hush of pure memory that (except, perhaps, for some chance tinnitus due to the pressure of my own tired blood) I have left undisturbed, and humbly listened to, from the beginning. What I really remember about this neutrally blooming design, is its clever thematic connection with transatlantic gardens and parks; for suddenly, as we came to the end of its path, you and I saw something that we did not immediately point out to our child, so as to enjoy in full the blissful shock, the enchantment and glee he would experience on discovering ahead the ungenuinely gigantic, the unrealistically real prototype of the various toy vessels he had doddled about in his bath. There, in front of us, where a broken row of houses stood between us and the harbor, and where the eye encountered all sorts of stratagems, such as pale-blue and pink underwear cakewalking on a clothesline, or a lady’s bicycle and a striped cat oddly sharing a rudimentary balcony of cast iron, it was most satisfying to make out among the jumbled angles of roofs and walls, a splendid ship’s funnel, showing from behind the clothesline as something in a scrambled picture—Find What the Sailor Has Hidden—that the finder cannot unsee once it has been seen.

• From Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection (2013)

  12 these connections that most affected their bodies, making them healthier: Bethany E. Kok and Barbara L. Fredrickson (2010). “Upward spirals of the heart: Autonomic flexibility, as indexed by vagal tone, reciprocally and prospectively predicts positive emotions and social connectedness.” Biological Psychology 85: 432–36. See also Bethany E. Kok, Kimberly A. Coffey, Michael A. Cohn, Lahnna I. Catalino, Tanya Vacharkulksemsuk, Sara B. Algoe, Mary Brantley, and Barbara L. Fredrickson (in press). “How positive emotions build physical health: Perceived positive social connections account for the upward spiral between positive emotions and vagal tone.” Psychological Science. 12 a steady diet of love influences how people grow and change: See the randomized controlled trial that my colleagues and I presented in Fredrickson et al. (2008). 13 Your upward spirals lift you higher and faster: Lahnna I. Catalino and Barbara L. Fredrickson (2011). “A Tuesday in the life of a flourisher: The role of positive emotional reactivity in optimal mental health.” Emotion 11(4): 938–50. Stay tuned also for Lahnna Catalino’s emerging doctoral dissertation work on prioritizing positivity. 14 age, measured as time since birth, provides no guarantees for maturity or wisdom: See work by Paul B. Baltes and Ursula M. Staudinger (2000). “Wisdom: A metaheuristic (pragmatic) to orchestrate mind and virtue toward excellence.” American Psychologist 55(1): 121–136. Chapter 2 15 Love is brief, but frequently recurring: François de la Rochefoucauld (1959). Maxims. Translated by Leonard Tancock. London: Penguin Books. 16 you can revive them later through conversation: Bernard Rimé (2009). “Emotion elicits the social sharing of emotion: Theory and empirical review.” Emotion Review 1(1): 60–85. 17 or cheer at a football game: Some scholars have singled out experiences of mass euphoria as unique. Jonathan Haidt and colleagues, for instance, suggest that such experiences reveal that humans, similar to hive creatures like bees, at times follow a “hive psychology” in which they benefit from losing themselves within a much larger social organism, like the crowd at a football game, music festival, or religious revival. While I share Haidt’s appreciation of the self-transcendence that can emerge from the “group love” experienced in small or large crowds, unlike Haidt, I see this as an extension of the oneness that also emerges within micro-moments of positive connection experienced within pairs. For additional descriptions of “group love” see the 2006 book by Barbara Ehrenreich, Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy. Metropolitan Books.

• From Chasing Beauty

  Helen described Belle to a friend back home in Boston as “bright, intelligent,” also calling her “jolly and splendid” in her journal. Julia, by contrast, was a bookworm who liked to play chess. Helen and Julia knew each other before coming to Paris, and Helen thought her friend serene, open, and “as pleasing as ever.” Helen was not in the same class as Belle and Julia, being a year younger and not yet as fluent in French. But the girls immediately hit it off, so much so that Helen mused at one point: “what should I do if Julia & Isabelle were not here?” They’d sit together at the end of the day and talk. They read aloud to one another—Belle had the 1856 London editions of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, and Northanger Abbey. They compared one another’s home cities. They wrote in one another’s albums. They laughed at the other girls’ impromptu theatricals. They walked together in the garden near the school. On Mondays they couldn’t wait to tell one another about their respective adventures over the previous weekend: an evening at the opera Le Peletier; a stroll through the Palais-Royale, with its arcades of jewelry and fashion shops and crowded cafés; and concerts at the grand Notre-Dame cathedral and the église de la Madeleine, a neoclassical temple erected by Napoleon in honor of conquering armies, consecrated only a decade before as a Catholic parish. The girls sewed for the poor of Paris. They helped one another dress for parties and put up their hair, once placing all sorts of “absurd things” in their high Marie Antoinette–like poufs—three pens in Julia’s hair, an open fan in Belle’s. The Paris streets in December were filled with crowds strolling in holiday finery and elaborate equipages going up and down the Champs-Élysées, all of it illuminated in the evenings by gaslight, which gave a warming glow. On Christmas Day, Helen and her parents walked to the nearby église de la Madeleine for a service. There, they spotted Julia’s older brother, Jack Gardner, who was also in town. Jack, nineteen years old, was handsome and athletic, a little shy, but also rumored to be one of the finest American dancers in Paris. There was an emotional spaciousness in Jack Gardner. As a teenager, he’d spent Sunday evenings with his grandmother Rebecca Russell Lowell Gardner, who lived nearby on Summer Street in Boston, in a large home known for its “generous hospitality.” She loved her grandson’s genial company: “He is in the most flourishing condition,” she wrote to another grandchild, saying he looked “as well and happy as ever.” His thoughts had a habit of turning from himself to others, as shown in his letters, where he’d inquire about a long list of friends and relatives.

• From Chasing Beauty

  Jack’s father had requested his son be released from Harvard College, where he had already attended two years as a member of the class of 1858, so he could join the travels of his parents and younger sisters, Julia and little Eliza. His parents may have worried about their son being at the age of military service, given the increasing division and turmoil in American politics. He was now, on Christmas Day, looking for his mother and Julia among the large crowd. Whether he found them or not is unclear, but he did join Helen and her parents as they went on to église Saint-Roch, a nearby baroque church aglow with countless little candles for the season, its facade still bullet-ridden from the French Revolution. The next day, the three girls returned to the pension, where they read French history and practiced their singing in preparation for a large celebration set for December 30. Helen told Belle and Julia all about her weekend, possibly mentioning seeing Julia’s brother, Jack Gardner, in the crowds at the église de la Madeleine. She had also attended an evening Christmas party across the Seine, on the Left Bank, with the famous American writer and abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe, who had published her best-selling Uncle Tom’s Cabin four years before. Helen was interested in Stowe’s writings, having also read her more recent Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp. The Stowe daughters were attending another Protestant boarding school in Paris while their mother toured England and Europe. Fame had made Stowe somewhat wary, but she “appeared very pleasing particularly at the end of the evening when she was drawn out in conversation,” according to Helen’s description in her diary. New Year festivities at the school opened with the pensionnaires, outfitted in white fancy dresses and elaborate coiffures, standing in a circle around a tabletop Christmas tree with presents piled high. They sang energetically, sometimes falling into laughter, for the audience, which included Mrs. Waterston, Mr. and Mrs. Stewart, Mrs. Gardner, and Julia’s younger sister, ten-year-old Eliza Gardner. Jack is not in Helen’s list of attendees for the evening. Over the coming months, Belle, Julia, and Helen did everything together. They began referring to one another by a made-up nickname—the Vestagine, or little Virgin Vestals. They each had a secret name: Alonso Vigirato (alias Julia), Danilo Brignole (alias Belle), and Giovanni Amour (alias Helen). And they “swore by our brooches to stand by each other in troubles, scraps, & etc.”

• From Chasing Beauty

  Isabella was out of plaster by early spring, just in time to host a party of a thousand guests at Green Hill. The aim was to raise money for the Carney Hospital in South Boston, the city’s first Catholic hospital, and the Industrial School for Crippled Children (renamed the Cotting School), causes she continued to support. The party also gave her a chance to show off her gardens. Musicians serenaded the crowd, and a profusion of blooming lilacs perfumed the air. The papers particularly praised the Italian garden; one called it the afternoon’s “pièce de résistance.” Also in May she welcomed four young artists in residence to Green Hill. Isabella had long supported young artists, among others the musicians Charles Loeffler and George Proctor and the painters Dennis Bunker and Joseph Lindon Smith. But this was new: until now she had not dedicated a specific time and place to her sponsorship. Perhaps she was styling herself after the Renaissance patronesses of art. Isabella’s first group included Andreas Andersen, a young painter from Norway; Howard Cushing, a former Groton student who studied five years at the Académie Julian in Paris; John Briggs Potter, also an Académie Julian student, soon to be keeper of paintings at the Museum of Fine Arts; and Edmund C. Tarbell, the most talented of the four, a popular teacher at the Museum School and part of a newly formed group called the Ten American Painters, which included John Henry Twachtman and Childe Hassam. In the new scheme, the four artists would spend their days at Green Hill and paint in Isabella’s gardens for the entire month. (There is no record as to whether they stayed overnight.) They “chose what they want to do,” as she explained to Berenson. The artists might use her statuary as models and her gardens to spur ideas for their landscapes. She loved being with young people—young men especially—and reveled in how this group found inspiration in the verdant settings she had designed. Their accomplishments became her pleasures. “Green Hill is now American Villa Medici: the prix de Brookline instead of the prix de Rome,” she told Berenson. She set the scene or tableau and then elevated the romance of the moment. “They paint, they paint,” she wrote to Lapsley, while she worked “always in the garden, so it only needs nightingales to make it perfect.” Her commitment to this sort of formal patronage would continue on, in many forms; it would be woven into her museum’s mission, where up-and-coming artists could commune with her collection for inspiration.

• From Chasing Beauty

  But spin around is what she did best, as she began to assemble her court. Gathering in the Barbaro’s cool rooms those summer evenings were the Apthorps from Boston; the Count and Countessa Pisani, who had owned the Barbaro before selling it to the Curtises; Cardinal Agostini in his red robes as Catholic patriarch for Venice; and Isabella’s admiring friend Mrs. Bronson, whom Jack treated with a case of the very best wines he’d chosen on their travels. The musician Clayton Johns played the grand piano in the sala to everyone’s delight, especially Mrs. Jack’s. Johns, a thirty-three-year-old bachelor, had trained in Berlin in piano and composition; he was now staying at the Barbaro, after joining up with the Gardners earlier in the summer. He was indebted to Mrs. Jack for her patronage of his burgeoning career, and if that obligation colored some part of their friendship, he also found her endlessly interesting, unlike anyone he’d met before. She told him at one point, rather grandly, that instead of “building hospitals, I am going to try to make the world more beautiful.” He in turn felt enlisted in Mrs. Jack’s project. As he remembered later: “She had the power of getting the best out of each thing and person.” Otherwise, the hot August weather emptied out the city’s squares of most other travelers, and Belle was at liberty to do what she loved best—take long excursions on the water, look at art, and shop. Her purchases in Venice were recorded in the back pages of Jack’s diary. The list is long: two red velvet strips; four mirrors with candelabra; two stone statuettes; two bronze candelabra; brass gondola lanterns; a pair of small brass lions; a small bronze dog’s head; pieces of silk; blue velvet; eighty-four meters of red damask; two small picture frames; and “4 gilt wood things.” If Jack didn’t quite know how to describe that last purchase, he at least needed a record. The “4 gilt wood things” cost twenty lire. *** WHEN THE GARDNERS RETURNED HOME IN MID-OCTOBER 1890, THEY settled at Green Hill in Brookline. The glories of Belle’s gardens had faded by then, but she loved the autumn light in the tall trees. Jack left on a trip out west, to return by Thanksgiving. The mood in the city was glum. The Panic of 1890 had frightened Boston businessmen, though the losses were but a foretaste of what was to come a few years later. Other changes were afoot. Elevated train lines were being built. The city since the war had become increasingly crowded with immigrants, mostly from Ireland, but now also from Italy and Russia. The tight command exerted by the Brahmin class, which had so thoroughly dominated Boston’s various institutions, now had to compete with a far more diverse population. Boston’s first Irish mayor, Hugh O’Brien, elected in 1884, was also its first Catholic leader.

• From Open (2009)

  When I’m so hydrated that I’m pissing pure cottony white, he lets me go to sleep. The next day I come out tight. Down 1–2 in the fourth, serving, I fall behind two break points. No, no, no. I fight back to deuce. I hold. The set is now tied. Having averted disaster, I’m suddenly loose, happy. It’s so typical in sports. You hang by a thread above a bottomless pit. You stare death in the face. Then your opponent, or life, spares you, and you feel so blessed that you play with abandon. I win the fourth set and the match. I’m in the final. My first look is to Brad, who’s excitedly pointing to his watch and the digital play clock on the court. Twenty-eight minutes. On the dot. · · · MY OPPONENT IN THE FINAL is Andrei Medvedev, from Ukraine, which is not possible. It’s simply not possible. Just months ago, in Monte Carlo, Brad and I bumped into Medvedev in a nightclub. He’d suffered a heartbreaking loss that day and was drinking to numb the pain. We invited him to join us. He threw himself into a chair at our table and announced that he was quitting tennis. I can’t play this fucking game anymore, he said. I’m old. The game has passed me by. I talked him out of it. How dare you, I said. Here I am, twenty-nine, injured, divorced, and you’re bitching about being washed up at twenty-four? Your future is bright. My game is shit. So? Fix it. He asked me for tips, pointers. He asked me to analyze his game, just as I’d once asked Brad to analyze mine. And I was Brad-esque. I was brutally honest. I told Medvedev he had a huge serve, a big return, and a world-class backhand. His forehand was not his best shot, of course, that was no secret, but he could hide it, because he was big enough to push opponents around. You’re a good mover! I shouted. Get back to the basics. Keep moving, slam your first serve, and rip the backhand up the line. Ever since that night he’s followed my advice to the letter and he’s been on fire. He’s been winning consistently on the tour and dominating guys in this tournament. Each time we’ve bumped into each other in the locker room, or around Roland Garros, we’ve exchanged sly winks and waves. I never once dreamed we were on a collision course. So Gil was wrong. I haven’t been on a collision course with destiny, but with a fire-breathing dragon that I helped to build.

• From Chasing Beauty

  Whether Coolidge gave El Jaleo on the spot is impossible to confirm but not improbable. Maybe Coolidge realized that this way, El Jaleo would stay within the larger family circle, and she certainly had a very convincing way—she had given the painting an unrivaled setting. [image file=image_rsrc7AS.jpg] View of El Jaleo, Spanish Cloister, Fenway Court, Album: 152 Beacon Street and Fenway Court, 1900–1922, Thomas E. Marr and Son, 1915, gelatin silver prints on paper. She arranged a row of ten electric footlights along the floor so that the painting was lit from below, amplifying the raking light in the painting itself. She also put a large mirror on one end of the alcove, which seemed to double the space. Colorful ceramic jars, which reference Islamic Spain, were placed on the floor nearby. The whole effect was magnificent—as if the actual movement and sound, the exuberant joy of performance, spilled out into the space. The singer Nellie Melba would remember how she and Isabella would often go to the Spanish Cloister to “sit and watch” the painting as “we drank our coffee after dinner.” The other side of the Spanish Cloister evoked a quiet, almost mournful mood—life’s other side. There, a small Spanish Chapel housed a painting of the Madonna and child, The Virgin of Mercy, by Zurbarán, which had hung in Gardner’s Beacon Street boudoir. On the floor under the outside window, an effigy of a Spanish knight was laid out in eternal repose. “In Memoriam” was lettered in black paint on an inside wall, a little out of view of casual viewers. Directly across from El Jaleo, above a doorway, Isabella hung three twelfth-century stone sculptures from a French church in Parthenay, near Nantes: two figures witnessing the apocalypse and a depiction of Christ riding a donkey into Jerusalem. From temporal pleasures to eternal things—she joined the joy of the dance to the loss of her little boy and then to the promise of salvation. All through this season of rebuilding and rearranging, Isabella corresponded with Berenson about myriad things, including the Parthenay sculptures from France, miniature Persian prints, and a pair of astonishingly lifelike bear figures, approximately seven inches in height, made during China’s ancient Han imperial dynasty. Mary Berenson wrote on her husband’s behalf that the bears were really “top notch.” “Can I have them,” Isabella asked Berenson in her next letter. She could not afford the asking price of $30,000 right off, so she inquired if she could pay “à la Morgan,” referring to J. P. Morgan, or two years after the purchase agreement. When the bears arrived in March, she called them “darlings—to live with, and delight in.”

• From Chasing Beauty

  Though she announced to John Jay Chapman, with the usual glint in her eye, that she intended to live to 150 years of age, there was more letting go ahead. In April 1919, she prepared to sell Green Hill to her great nephew George Peabody Gardner Jr. and his wife, Rose Grosvenor Gardner. Isabella had transformed the property since she had first stayed there as a young bride in the 1860s, most especially its many and expansive gardens. As Hildegarde Hawthorne had observed in a 1910 article on Green Hill, “It is not as easy as it looks. An idea lies behind it.” The young couple marveled at their good fortune a year after moving in: “Rose and I love Green Hill better than we ever dreamed we could love any place and we are extremely grateful to you for giving us the opportunity of living here.” Even so, Isabella admitted to Joseph Lindon Smith that it had been “a hard year—a turning point with me.” She set her sights even more on legacy. She had suggested to the Society of Saint John the Evangelist that land in Cambridge, along the Charles River on Memorial Drive, was available, and on April 14, 1916, her seventy-sixth birthday, she gave $25,000 toward its purchase. Now, in 1919, she supplemented this gift with another $50,000 to enable the society to build Saint Francis House, a place for guests on the grounds of the monastery. On the occasion of this second gift, Father Spence Burton promised to say Mass in her honor on her birthday at Fenway Court, to express the society’s gratitude. She afterward sent him handwritten instructions for a plan for an annual service, still carried out today: “. . . in the Chapel at the end of the Long Gallery on the 14th of April each year a memorial service shall be conducted . . .” The community would call her its angel of its first fifty years—no other individual had been as generous. In Isabella’s 1919 letter to Joseph Lindon Smith, she wrote that she had long cherished the idea he would eventually direct her museum, though she realized soon enough he had other plans. Instead, she hired Morris Carter away from the Museum of Fine Arts to work with her at Fenway Court, a full-time position he began on the first of June. Though Carter was her second choice, he proved a fortuitous one. An experienced librarian, he had several different roles at the Museum of Fine Arts until his last, as assistant director. Denman Ross, a trustee at the time, was full of praise for his “intelligence, good judgement and ability.” Carter also knew Isabella very well. His first task in the summer 1919 was to catalog her enormous book collection.

• From New Testament Words (1964)

  (vi) They proclaimed a gospel It was the gospel which the preacher preached; it was good news (I Cor. 9.14). Any preaching which ultimately depresses a man is wrong, for preaching may begin by cutting a man to the heart with the sight and the realization of his sins; but it must end by leading him to the love, the forgiveness and the grace of God. The very word which is so often used for preaching shows that in the early preaching there was nothing apologetic, nothing diffident, nothing clouded with doubts and misted with uncertainties. It was preaching with authority; and the things it preached with authority are still the basis of the message of the preacher today. KATALLASSEINTHE WORD OF RECONCILIATIONThere is in the writings of Paul a group of words which are of extreme importance, because he uses them to express the central experience of the Christian faith. All these words are compound forms made from the simple verb allassein which means to change. In classical Greek allassein itself can be used to express changing shape, or colour, or appearance. It can also be used in the sense of to exchange or to barter, and it can frequently be used of taking one thing in exchange for another. It is, for instance, used of one who in misfortune exchanges one sorrow for another. This simple verb allassein is not uncommon in the NT. Stephen is charged with teaching that Jesus will change the accepted customs of the Jews (Acts 6.14). The heathen have changed the glory of God for lifeless, corrupted and polluted images (Rom. 1.23). Paul tells the people of Corinth that we shall all be changed (I Cor. 15.51). When Paul realizes the danger of perversion of the faith among the Galatians, he wishes to change his voice, and to adopt the accent of sternness and rebuke (Gal. 4.20). The word is used of changing a garment in Heb. 1.12. Allassein then can be used of almost any kind of change. This word allassein acquires certain compound forms. In ordinary classical Greek the commonest of the compound forms is the form katallassein, and katallassein is one of the great Pauline words also. But we must go on with the examination of this group of words in ordinary secular Greek before we come to their use in the NT. Katallassein in ordinary secular Greek acquires the almost technical sense of changing money, or changing into money. Plutarch tells how four Syrian brothers stole the king’s gold vessels in Corinth and how bit by bit they changed them into money (Plutarch, Aratus 18). The corresponding noun katallagē has the same sense of exchange, especially the exchange of money. Katallassein then begins to acquire a wider sense of exchanging any one thing for another. Aristotle, for instance, speaks of professional and mercenary soldiers who are willing to barter their lives for trifling gain (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1117b 20).

• From Little Women (1868)

  Bhaer stood by, watching her blush and blunder, and as he watched, his own bewilderment seemed to subside, for he was beginning to see that on some occasions, women, like dreams, go by contraries. When they came out, he put the parcel under his arm with a more cheerful aspect, and splashed through the puddles as if he rather enjoyed it on the whole. "Should we no do a little what you call shopping for the babies, and haf a farewell feast tonight if I go for my last call at your so pleasant home?" he asked, stopping before a window full of fruit and flowers. "What will we buy?" asked Jo, ignoring the latter part of his speech, and sniffing the mingled odors with an affectation of delight as they went in. "May they haf oranges and figs?" asked Mr. Bhaer, with a paternal air. "They eat them when they can get them." "Do you care for nuts?" "Like a squirrel." "Hamburg grapes. Yes, we shall drink to the Fatherland in those?" Jo frowned upon that piece of extravagance, and asked why he didn't buy a frail of dates, a cask of raisins, and a bag of almonds, and be done with it? Whereat Mr. Bhaer confiscated her purse, produced his own, and finished the marketing by buying several pounds of grapes, a pot of rosy daisies, and a pretty jar of honey, to be regarded in the light of a demijohn. Then distorting his pockets with knobby bundles, and giving her the flowers to hold, he put up the old umbrella, and they traveled on again. "Miss Marsch, I haf a great favor to ask of you," began the Professor, after a moist promenade of half a block. "Yes, sir?" and Jo's heart began to beat so hard she was afraid he would hear it. "I am bold to say it in spite of the rain, because so short a time remains to me." "Yes, sir," and Jo nearly crushed the small flowerpot with the sudden squeeze she gave it. "I wish to get a little dress for my Tina, and I am too stupid to go alone. Will you kindly gif me a word of taste and help?" "Yes, sir," and Jo felt as calm and cool all of a sudden as if she had stepped into a refrigerator. "Perhaps also a shawl for Tina's mother, she is so poor and sick, and the husband is such a care. Yes, yes, a thick, warm shawl would be a friendly thing to take the little mother." "I'll do it with pleasure, Mr. Bhaer." "I'm going very fast, and he's getting dearer every minute," added Jo to herself, then with a mental shake she entered into the business with an energy that was pleasant to behold. Mr.

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

  Accordingly, just as the soul that enjoys the sight of God will be filled with spiritual brightness, so by a kind of overflow from the soul to the body, the latter will be, in its own way, clothed with the brightness of glory. Hence the Apostle says (1 Cor. 15:18): It is sown, namely the body, in dishonour, it shall rise in glory: because now this body of ours is impervious to light, whereas then it will be full of light, according to Matth. 13:43, Then shall the just shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father. Again, the soul which, united to its last end, will enjoy the sight of God, will find its every desire fulfilled: and since the body moves in obedience to the soul’s desire, the result will be that the body’s movements will be in perfect obedience to the spirit. Hence the bodies of the blessed, after the resurrection, will be agile: and this is indicated by the Apostle (1 Cor. 15:43): It is sown in weakness, it shall rise in power. For we feel the body’s weakness, when we find it unable to satisfy the soul’s desire, in the movements and actions commanded by the soul. This weakness will then be wholly removed, because the body will receive an overflow of power from the soul united to God: wherefore again is it said of the just (Wis. 3:7) that they shall run to and fro, like sparks among the reeds. Their movements, however, will not be occasioned by need, since those who possess God need nothing, but they will be exhibitions of power. Moreover, just as the soul that enjoys God will have its desire fulfilled, through having obtained possession of all good, so also will its desire be fulfilled as to the removal of all evil, since there can be no evil where the sovereign good is. Accordingly, the body that is perfected by that soul will, in conformity with it, be free from all evil, both in act and in potentiality. In act, since in it there will be neither corruption, nor deformity, nor defect of any kind: in potentiality, because nothing will be able to do it any harm; so that it will be impassible. This impassibility, however, does not imply insensibility: for they will use their senses for such pleasures as are not incompatible with a state of incorruption. The Apostle indicates this state of impassibility, when he says (1 Cor. 15:42): It is sown in corruption, it shall rise in incorruption.

• From Little Women (1868)

  Some are naughty through mismanagment or neglect, and some lose their mothers. Besides, the best have to get through the hobbledehoy age, and that's the very time they need most patience and kindness. People laugh at them, and hustle them about, try to keep them out of sight, and expect them to turn all at once from pretty children into fine young men. They don't complain much—plucky little souls—but they feel it. I've been through something of it, and I know all about it. I've a special interest in such young bears, and like to show them that I see the warm, honest, well-meaning boys' hearts, in spite of the clumsy arms and legs and the topsy-turvy heads. I've had experience, too, for haven't I brought up one boy to be a pride and honor to his family?" "I'll testify that you tried to do it," said Laurie with a grateful look. "And I've succeeded beyond my hopes, for here you are, a steady, sensible businessman, doing heaps of good with your money, and laying up the blessings of the poor, instead of dollars. But you are not merely a businessman, you love good and beautiful things, enjoy them yourself, and let others go halves, as you always did in the old times. I am proud of you, Teddy, for you get better every year, and everyone feels it, though you won't let them say so. Yes, and when I have my flock, I'll just point to you, and say 'There's your model, my lads'." Poor Laurie didn't know where to look, for, man though he was, something of the old bashfulness came over him as this burst of praise made all faces turn approvingly upon him. "I say, Jo, that's rather too much," he began, just in his old boyish way. "You have all done more for me than I can ever thank you for, except by doing my best not to disappoint you. You have rather cast me off lately, Jo, but I've had the best of help, nevertheless. So, if I've got on at all, you may thank these two for it," and he laid one hand gently on his grandfather's head, and the other on Amy's golden one, for the three were never far apart. "I do think that families are the most beautiful things in all the world!" burst out Jo, who was in an unusually up-lifted frame of mind just then. "When I have one of my own, I hope it will be as happy as the three I know and love the best. If John and my Fritz were only here, it would be quite a little heaven on earth," she added more quietly.

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

  29. But Peter said unto him, Although all shall be offended, yet will not I. 30. And Jesus saith unto him, Verily I say unto thee, That this day, even in this night, before the cock crow twice, thou shalt deny me thrice. 31. But he spake the more vehemently, If I should die with thee, I will not deny thee in any wise. Likewise also said they all. THEOPHYLACT. As they returned thanks, before they drank, so they return thanks after drinking; wherefore it is said, And when they had sung an hymn, they went out into the mount of Olives, to teach us to return thanks both before and after our food. PSEUDO-JEROME. For by a hymn he means the praise of the Lord, as is said in the Psalms, The poor shall eat and be satisfied; they that seek after the Lord shall praise him. (Ps. 22:26, 29) And again, All such as be fat upon earth have eaten and worshipped. THEOPHYLACT. He also shews by this that He was glad to die for us, because when about to be betrayed, He deigned to praise God. He also teaches us when we fall into troubles for the sake of the salvation of many, not to be sad, but to give thanks to God, who through our distress works the salvation of many. BEDE. (ubi sup.) That hymn in the Gospel of John (John 17.) may also be meant, which the Lord sang, returning thanks to the Father, in which also He prayed, raising His eyes to heaven, for Himself and His disciples, and those who were to believe, through their word. THEOPHYLACT. Again, He went out into a mountain, that they might come to Him in a lonely place, and take Him without tumult. For if they had come to Him, whilst He was abiding in the city, the multitude of the people would have been in an uproar, and then His enemies, who took occasion against Him, should seem to have slain Him justly, because He stirred up the people. BEDE. (ubi sup.) Beautifully also does the Lord lead out His disciples, when they had tasted His Sacraments, into the mount of Olives, to shew typically that we ought through the reception of the Sacraments to rise up to higher gifts of virtue, and graces of the Holy Ghost, that we may be anointed in heart. PSEUDO-JEROME. Jesus also is held captive on the mount of Olives, whence He ascended to heaven, that we may know, that we ascend into heaven from that place in which we watch and pray; there we are bound and do not tend back again to earth.

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

  Whether the blessed in heaven will see the sufferings of the damned? Whether the blessed pity the unhappiness of the damned? Whether the blessed rejoice in the punishment of the wicked? OF THE GIFTS* OF THE BLESSED (FIVE ARTICLES) Whether any gifts should be assigned as dowry to the blessed? Whether the dowry is the same as beatitude*? [*Cf. FP, Q[12], A[7], ad 1; FS, Q[4], A[3]] Whether it is fitting that Christ should receive a dowry? Whether the angels receive the dowries? Whether three dowries of the soul are suitably assigned? OF THE AUREOLES (THIRTEEN ARTICLES) Whether the aureole is the same as the essential reward which is called the aurea? Whether the aureole differs from the fruit? Whether a fruit is due to the virtue of continence alone? Whether three fruits are fittingly assigned to the three parts of continence? Whether an aureole is due on account of virginity? Whether an aureole is due to martyrs? Whether an aureole is due to doctors? Whether an aureole is due to Christ? Whether an aureole is due to the angels? Whether an aureole is also due to the body? Whether three aureoles are fittingly assigned, those of virgins, of martyrs, and of doctors? Whether the virgin’s aureole is the greatest of all? Whether one person has an aureole more excellently than another person? OF THE PUNISHMENT OF THE DAMNED (SEVEN ARTICLES) Whether in hell the damned are tormented by the sole punishment of fire? Whether the worm of the damned is corporeal? Whether the weeping of the damned will be corporeal? Whether the damned are in material darkness? Whether the fire of hell will be corporeal? Whether the fire of hell is of the same species as ours? Whether the fire of hell is beneath the earth? OF THE WILL AND INTELLECT OF THE DAMNED (NINE ARTICLES) Whether every act of will in the damned is evil? Whether the damned repent of the evil they have done? Whether the damned by right and deliberate reason would wish not to be? Whether in hell the damned would wish others were damned who are not damned? Whether the damned hate God? Whether the damned demerit? Whether the damned can make use of the knowledge they had in this world? [*Cf. FP, Q[89]] Whether the damned will ever think of God? Whether the damned see the glory of the blessed? OF GOD’S MERCY AND JUSTICE TOWARDS THE DAMNED (FIVE ARTICLES) Whether by Divine justice an eternal punishment is inflicted on sinners? [*Cf. FS, Q[87], AA[3],4] Whether by God’s mercy all punishment of the damned, both men and demons, comes to an end? Whether God’s mercy suffers at least men to be punished eternally? Whether the punishment of Christians is brought to an end by the mercy of God? Whether all those who perform works of mercy will be punished eternally? APPENDIX 1 OF THE QUALITY OF THOSE SOULS WHO DEPART THIS LIFE WITH ORIGINAL SIN ONLY (TWO ARTICLES)

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

  BEDE. (Hom. inter Hyem. de Sanctis v.) No where in the whole course of the Old Testament do we find that the Angels who so constantly appear to the Patriarchs, came with light. This privilege was rightly kept for this time when there arose in the darkness a light to them that were true of heart. Hence it follows, and the glory of God shone round about them. (Ps. 112:4.) He is sent forth from the womb, but He shines from heaven. He lies in a common inn, but He lives in celestial light. GREEK EXPOSITOR. (Geometer.) They were alarmed at the miracle, as it follows, And they were afraid, &c. But the Angel dispels their rising fears. He not only soothes their terrors, but pours gladness into their hearts; for it follows, For, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, &c. not to the Jewish people only, but to all. The cause of their joy is declared; the new and wonderful birth is made manifest by the very names. It follows, For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord. The first of these, i. e. the Saviour, has reference to the action, the third, i. e. the Lord, to the dignity of the person. CYRIL OF ALEXANDRIA. But that which is in the middle, namely, Christ, has reference to the adoration, and signifies not the nature, but the compound substance of two natures. For on Christ our Saviour we confess the anointing to have been performed, not however figuratively, (as formerly on kings by the oil,) and as if by prophetic grace, nor for the accomplishment of any work, as it is said in Isaiah, Thus saith the Lord to his anointed, to Cyrus; (Isa. 45.) who although he was an idolater was said to be anointed, that he might by the decree of Heaven take possession of the whole province of Babylon; but the Saviour as man in the form of a servant, was anointed by the Holy Spirit, as God He Himself by His Holy Spirit anoints those that believe on Him. GREEK EXPOSITOR. (Geometer) He marks the time of our Lord’s nativity, when he says, To-day, and the place when he adds, In the city of David; and the signs thereof when it follows, And there shall be a sign, &c. Now the Angels bring tidings to the shepherds of the Chief Shepherd, as of a lamb discovered and brought up in a cave. BEDE. The infancy of the Saviour was impressed upon us, both by frequent heraldings of Angels and testimonies of Evangelists, that we might be the more deeply penetrated in our hearts by what has been done for us. And we may observe, that the sign given us of the newborn Saviour was, that He would be found not clothed in Tyrian purple, but wrapped in poor swaddling clothes, not laying on gilded couches, but in a manger.

• From Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection (2013)

  In our most recent experiment, we obtained blood samples from study volunteers before they tried out meditation for the first time. By the flip of a coin, they tried either LKM or a different style of mediation, one that does not aim to cultivate loving feelings. Before and immediately after their assigned guided meditation, we asked them to rate the extent of their positive feelings. We then processed the blood samples in my collaborator Karen Grewen’s lab at Carolina, and later shipped them to my newest collaborator, Steve Cole, the director of UCLA’s Social Genomics Core Laboratory. Using sophisticated computational techniques, Cole analyzed each person’s RNA to determine whether any differences in gene expression uniquely predicted whether people had especially positive reactions to LKM. A compelling pattern of differences emerged. While it’s too soon to say exactly what this pattern of differences means, it is consistent with the more general hypothesis that my team has been testing: that certain biomarkers, like cardiac vagal tone, inflammation, gene expression patterns, and perhaps even body mass index, can either amplify or muffle the good feelings you get when you try to cultivate love. To the extent that love in turn reshapes these biomarkers—a prediction we’re poised to test in the coming year—upward spiral dynamics ensue, in which love and health dynamically cocreate each other. How, then, your DNA gets translated into your cells next season may to some degree be up to you. By practicing healthy patterns of emotional expression, you may be able to sculpt healthy patterns of gene expression. Countless times in this book I’ve suggested that your body was designed for love’s positivity resonance and indeed cries out for it. My team is currently homing in on ever more precise statements about which of your genes, differentially expressed in your cells, contribute to this cry the loudest. Pilot Yourself How can you tune in to your body’s cravings and hear its subtle cries for love? It hardly sounds possible. Actually, becoming attuned to these cellular messages may be easier than you think. By nature’s design, you come equipped with a ready indicator of whether or not you’re meeting your body’s basic needs. Feeling good is that indicator. What’s more, the biochemistry of your brain has been carefully orchestrated by natural selection to keep close track of the contexts in which your good feelings arise, even when you’re busy thinking of other things. That’s because good feelings trigger a cascade of neurochemicals that makes you like whatever caused it. It’s as if feeling good sets off a localized firework that comes to cover the people and objects in its radius with enduring glitter dust. The new sparkle draws your eye and pulls you back toward them, impulses that operate even outside your conscious awareness. Think of this as your innate and automatic positivity-fueled navigation system. If you follow it, you’ll find yourself enticed back, time and again, to circumstances that enliven you most, including those life-giving micro-moments of positivity resonance.

• From Chasing Beauty

  The Gardners lodged: All these details come from JLG Jr. 1892 Diary, JLGJr-P. together that spring: During a four-week span, the Gardners and Whistlers dined together five times, sometimes as a foursome and sometimes as part of a larger group. JLG Jr. 1892 Diary, JLGJr-P. an impromptu lunch: For an account of this luncheon, see Nancy Whipple Grinnell, Carrying the Torch: Maud Howe Elliott and the American Renaissance (Hanover: UP of New England, 2014), 52–53. the “apostle of the”: Boston Globe, January 25, 1882. called him “fatuous”: HJ to ISG, January 23, 1882, HJ/Zorzi, 77. For Wilde’s 1882 American tour and the intersection of aestheticism and Gilded Age culture, see Mary Warner Blanchard, Oscar Wilde’s America: Counterculture in the Gilded Age (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998). It was discovered: Carter, 126. Christie, Manson & Woods, Catalogue of the Very Valuable Collection of Ancient and Modern Pictures of Frederick Richards Leyland, Esq. (London, May 28, 1892), lot 60, 14. “fierce familiarity” with: Henry James, Italian Hours (New York: Penguin Books, 1995; first published in 1909), 208. Jack’s word—“enchanting”: JLG Jr. to GPG, August 13, 1892, GFP. a music aficionado: Fanny Peabody Mason was the only daughter of William Powell Mason and Fanny Peabody Mason, sister of George Augustus Gardner’s wife, Eliza Peabody Gardner. he’d “growled about”: JLG Jr. to Theodore Dwight, July 5, 1892, ISG Papers, ISGM. the “ancient world”: HJ to ISG, April 15, 1892, HJ/Zorzi, 173. “charming open door”: HJ to ISG, April 19, 1892, HJ/Zorzi, 176. Henry James had spent time in these Barbaro rooms before, during an extended stay in 1886, but never at the same time as the Gardners. and “gazed upward”: HJ to Ariana Curtis, July 10, 1892, Letters from the Palazzo Barbaro, ed. Rosella Mamoli Zorzi (London: Pushkin Press, 1998), 121. hair “not quite ‘up’”: HJ to ISG, September 3, 1892, HJ/Zorzi, 190. “the little lady”: HJ to Ariana Curtis, July 10, 1892, Letters from the Palazzo Barbaro, 121. Jack’s 1892 diary is littered with the names of friends, many from Boston, whom they walk with, dine with, or ride with in gondolas or the faster vaporetto boats that he favored. They include Mr. and Mrs. George Howe, Theodore Dwight, Fanny Mason, and the young artist who would become a close friend—Joseph Lindon Smith. the Gardners’ itinerary: The majority of the furniture Isabella placed in Fenway Court was purchased in Venice. Jack had a stronger interest in furniture than in paintings. For related details, see Fausto Calderai and Alan Chong, Furnishing a Museum: Isabella Stewart Gardner’s Collection of Italian Furniture (Boston: ISGM, 2011). “I want to know”: HJ to ISG, July 29, 1892, HJ/Zorzi, 186. the fiery disaster: For the siege of Paris and its aftermath, see Colin Jones, Paris: The Biography of a City (New York: Penguin Books, 2004), 323–28; see also Alistair Horne, Seven Ages of Paris (New York: Vintage Books, 2002), 279–83, 296–300.