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 Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  Recovered out of my entrancement, I found myself in my charmer’s arms, but in the parlour, surrounded by a crowd which this event had gathered round us, and which immediately, on a signal from the discreet landlady, who currently took him for my husband, cleared the room, and desirably left us alone to the raptures of this reunion; my joy at which had like to have proved, at the expense of my life, its power superior to that of grief at our fatal separation. The first object then, that my eyes opened on, was their supreme idol, and my supreme wish, Charles, on one knee, holding me fast by the hand and gazing on me with a transport of fondness. Observing my recovery, he attempted to speak, and give vent to his patience of hearing my voice again, to satisfy him once more that it was I; but the mightiness and suddenness of the surprise continuing to stun him, choked his utterance: he could only stammer out a few broken, half-formed, filtering accents, which my ears greedily drinking in, spelt, and put together, so as to make out their sense: “After so long!... so cruel an absence!... my dearest Fanny!... can it?... can it be you?...” stifling me at the time with kisses, that, stopping my opening mouth, at once prevented the answer that he panted for, and increased the delicious disorder in which all my senses were rapturously lost. However, amidst this crowd of ideas, and all blissful ones, there obtruded only one cruel doubt that poisoned nearly all the transcendant happiness: and what was it, but my dread of its being too excessive to be real? I trembled now with my fear of its being no more than a dream, and of waking out of it into the horrors of finding it one. Under this fond apprehension, imagining I could not make too much of the present prodigious joy, before it would vanish and leave me in the desert again, nor verify its reality too strongly, I clung to him, I clasped him, as if to hinder him from escaping me again: “Where have you been?... how could you... could you leave me?... Say you are still mine... that you still love me... and thus! thus!” (kissing him as if I would consolidated lips with him) “I forgive you... forgive my hard fortune in favour of this restoration.”

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

  She smiled; presently the maid brought in the tea equipage, and I just huddled my clothes on, when in waddled my mistress. I expected no less than to be told of, if not chid for, my late rising, when I was most agreeably disappointed by her compliments on my pure and fresh looks. I was “a bud of beauty” (this was her style), “and how vastly all the fine men would admire me!” to all which my answers did not, I can assure you, wrong my breeding; they were as simple and silly as they could wish, and, no doubt, flattered them infinitely more than had they proved me enlightened by education and a knowledge of the world. We breakfasted, and the tea things were scarce removed, when in were brought two bundles of linen and wearing apparel: in short, all the necessaries for rigging me out, as they termed it, completely. Imagine to yourself, Madam, how my little coquet heart fluttered with joy at the sight of a white lutestring, flowered with silver, scoured indeed, but passed on me for spick and span new, a Brussels lace cap, braited shoes, and the rest in proportion, all second-hand finery, and procured instantly for the occasion, by the diligence and industry of the good Mrs. Brown, who had already a chapman for me in the house, before whom my charms were to pass in review; for he had not only, in course, insisted on a previous sight of the premises, but also on immediate surrendering to him, in case of his agreeing for me; concluding very wisely, that such a place as I was in, was of the hottest to trust the keeping of such a perishable commodity in, as a maidenhead. The care of dressing and tricking me out for the market, was then left to Phœbe, who acquitted herself, if not well, at least perfectly to the satisfaction of everything but my impatience of seeing myself dressed. When it was over, and I viewed myself in the glass, I was no doubt, too natural, too artless, to hide my childish joy at the change: a change, in the real truth, for much the worse, since I must have much better become the neat easy simplicity of my rustic dress than the awkward, untoward, tawdry finery that I could not conceal my strangeness to.

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

  We now return to the life of Basil. After finishing his studies in Athens he appeared in his native city of Caesarea as a rhetorician. But he soon after (A.D. 360) took a journey to Syria, Palestine, and Egypt, to become acquainted with the monastic life; and he became more and more enthusiastic for it. He distributed his property to the poor, and withdrew to a lonely romantic district in Pontus, near the cloister in which his mother Emmelia, with his sister Macrina, and other pious and cultivated virgins, were living. "God has shown me," he wrote to his friend Gregory, "a region which exactly suits my mode of life; it is, in truth, what in our happy jestings we often wished. What imagination showed us in the distance, that I now see before me. A high mountain, covered with thick forest, is watered towards the north by fresh perennial streams. At the foot of the mountain a wide plain spreads out, made fruitful by the vapors which moisten it. The surrounding forest, in which many varieties of trees crowd together, shuts me off like a strong castle. The wilderness is bounded by two deep ravines. On one side the stream, where it rushes foaming down from the mountain, forms a barrier hard to cross; on the other a broad ridge obstructs approach. My hut is so placed upon the summit, that I overlook the broad plain, as well as the whole course of the Iris, which is more beautiful and copious than the Strymon near Amphipolis. The river of my wilderness, more rapid than any other that I know, breaks upon the wall of projecting rock, and rolls foaming into the abyss: to the mountain traveller, a charming, wonderful sight; to the natives, profitable for its abundant fisheries. Shall I describe to you the fertilizing vapors which rise from the (moistened) earth, the cool air which rises from the (moving) mirror of the water? Shall I tell of the lovely singing of the birds and the richness of blooming plants? What delights me above all is the silent repose of the place. It is only now and then visited by huntsmen; for my wilderness nourishes deer and herds of wild goats, not your bears and your wolves. How would I exchange a place with him? Alcmaeon, after he had found the Echinades, wished to wander no further."1949

• From Between Us

  Japanese students saw “more emotion” when the Japanese athlete was pictured with their teammates; for American students, it was the other way around. For Japanese, emotions were OURS; for Americans, they were MINE. Winning athletes arguably do not have a large range of emotions (they presumably won’t be sad!), but in another study, we found that Japanese students see OURS and Western students MINE emotions for a wider range of emotions. In the early 2000s, Phoebe Ellsworth, one of my mentors at the University at Michigan, asked me to list the cultural topics that I considered worthy of studying by emotion psychologists. I had become interested in the notion that Japanese conceive of their emotions as between people, rather than within. Ellsworth had a very creative graduate student, Taka Masuda, now himself a professor at the University of Alberta. Masuda was of Japanese origin, and my idea resonated with him. We started to collaborate. FIGURE 2.2 Japanese and American athletes (Copyright © 2008, American Psychological Association) Masuda designed and drew a cartoonish task, based on the classic paradigm of emotional perception tasks to which I referred in chapter 1. The stimulus material for this perception task showed one of two boys: a Caucasian boy whom we called Jon and an Asian boy to whom we referred as Taro. In each picture, Jon/Taro was depicted as having one of three emotions: happiness, anger, or sadness. Jon/Taro was surrounded by other people who also showed an emotion. In some of the pictures, the surrounding people’s emotions were the same as Jon’s, but in many cases, they were different. We asked our participants, U.S. American and Japanese college students, what the middle person (Jon or Taro) was feeling. FIGURE 2.3 Happy Jon/Taro with angry others Different from the earlier study with athletes, our study examined which emotions the participants perceived, not just how many. Asked what Jon or Taro felt, our American college students gauged Jon’s or Taro’s expression exclusively. If Jon (Taro) looked happy, they rated him to be happy. If Jon (Taro) looked angry, they rated him as angry; etc. American students perceived MINE emotions: their ratings were tied to the expression of the middle person. The Japanese college students saw OURS emotions. They looked at the middle person’s expression as well, but in contrast to our American participants, they also looked at the expressions of the other figures in the cartoon: The Japanese respondents rated Taro (or Jon) as happiest if the other people’s expressions were happy as well. They judged Taro (Jon) to be less happy when the other people in the picture looked angry, but moreover, they judged Taro (Jon) to be angrier in that case. To Japanese, the emotion was inferred from all the people in the picture; the emotion was not just inside the person—in Taro or Jon—but also in the other people in the picture.

• From Between Us

  My upbringing has seeped into the way I experience happiness as an adult. When my son Oliver’s baseball team played well (or the other team made mistakes in the his team’s favor), the happiness of the other mothers at the sideline seemed strong and undiluted. They cheered and celebrated without reservation. I too felt happy when my son’s team played well, but I would never have cheered in the same way, and in fact, I was concerned about hurting the feelings of the six- and seven-year- old boys on the other team, who also tried to play their best. My happiness was less blissful, and I was more reticent to cheer. This is just to say that we do not need to go to “exotic” cultures to find a different attitude towards—and a different experience of—happiness. And if Amsterdam still sounds exotic, then author Barbara Ehrenreich’s description of American settlers may bring home that happiness has not always been, and is not universally, sought out. The predecessor of America’s present culture of happiness was nothing short of an unhappiness culture: The Calvinism brought by white settlers to New England could be described as a system of socially imposed depression. Its God was “utterly lawless” . . . , an all-powerful entity who “reveals his hatred of his creatures, not his love for them. . . .” The task for the living was to constantly examine “the loathsome abominations that lie in his bosom,” seeking to uproot the sinful thoughts that are a sure sign of damnation. Calvinism offered only one form of relief from this anxious work of self-examination, and that was another form of labor— clearing, planting, stitching, building up farms and business. Anything other than labor of either industrious or spiritual sort—idleness or pleasure seeking—was a contemptible sin. We were not there to measure the everyday happiness of American settlers, but we have been able to compare everyday feelings of happiness in East Asian and contemporary white American cultures. To this end, psychologists have used a method called experience sampling, where they ask people several times a day how they are feeling. Using this method, we have found that Japanese and Asian American college students consistently report less happiness (and more unhappiness) than their white American counterparts. They experience happiness less often, and when they experience happiness, it is less intense. Clearly, then, the value attached to happiness has an effect on its prevalence in everyday life. But even if happiness is not cherished to the same extent, would it not be universally motivating? The answer is no. If happiness informs and facilitates action in WEIRD cultures, in the majority of the world’s cultures, people act according to their societal roles as well as the decisions and desires of others, rather than pursuing their own individual happiness.

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

  This bred a pause of action, a pleasure stop, whilst that delicate glutton, my nether mouth, as full as it could hold, kept palating, with exquisite relish, the morsel that so deliciously ingorged it. But nature could not long endure a pleasure that it so highly provoked without satisfying it: pursuing then its darling end, the battery recommenced with redoubled exertion; nor lay I inactive on my side, but encountering him with all the impetuosity of motion I was mistress of, the downy cloth of our meeting mount was now of real use to break the violence of the tilt; and soon, indeed! the highwrought agitation, the sweet urgency of this to-and-fro friction, raised the titillation on me to its height; so that finding myself on the point of going, and loath to leave the tender partner of my joys behind me, I employed all the forwarding motions and arts my experience suggested to me, to promote his keeping me company to our journey’s end. I not only then tightened the pleasure-girth round my restless inmate, by a secret spring of friction and compression that obeys the will in those parts, but stole my hand softly to that store bag of nature’s prime sweets, which is so pleasingly attached to its conduit pipe, from which we receive them; there feeling, and most gently indeed, squeezing those tender globular reservoirs, the magic touch took instant effect, quickened, and brought on upon the spur the symptoms of that sweet agony, the melting moment of dissolution, when pleasure dies by pleasure, and the mysterious engine of it overcomes the titillation it has raised in those parts, by plying them with the stream of a warm liquid, that in itself the highest of all titillations, and which they thirstily express and draw in like the hot natured leach, which, to cool itself, tenaciously extracts all the moisture within its sphere of execution. Chiming then to me, with exquisite consent, as I melted away, his oily balsamic injection, mixing deliciously with the sluices in flow from me, sheathed and blunted all the stings of pleasure, whilst a voluptuous languor possest, and still maintained us motionless, and fast locked in one another’s arms.

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

  What was this new thing that I thus learned? That I did not realize, but the consciousness of this indefinite state filled me with joy. In that state there was no room for jealousy. The same faces, and among them he and my wife, I saw in a different light. This music transported me into an unknown world, where there was no room for jealousy. Jealousy and the feelings that provoke it seemed to me trivialities, nor worth thinking of. “After the presto followed the andante, not very new, with commonplace variations, and the feeble finale. Then they played more, at the request of the guests,—first an elegy by Ernst, and then various other pieces. They were all very well, but did not produce upon me a tenth part of the impression that the opening piece did. I felt light and gay throughout the evening. As for my wife, never had I seen her as she was that night. Those brilliant eyes, that severity and majestic expression while she was playing, and then that utter languor, that weak, pitiable, and happy smile after she had finished,—I saw them all and attached no importance to them, believing that she felt as I did, that to her, as to me, new sentiments had been revealed, as through a fog. During almost the whole evening I was not jealous. “Two days later I was to start for the assembly of the Zemstvo, and for that reason, on taking leave of me and carrying all his scores with him, Troukhatchevsky asked me when I should return. I inferred from that that he believed it impossible to come to my house during my absence, and that was agreeable to me. Now I was not to return before his departure from the city. So we bade each other a definite farewell. For the first time I shook his hand with pleasure, and thanked him for the satisfaction that he had given me. He likewise took leave of my wife, and their parting seemed to me very natural and proper. All went marvellously. My wife and I retired, well satisfied with the evening. We talked of our impressions in a general way, and we were nearer together and more friendly than we had been for a long time.” CHAPTER XXIV. “Two days later I started for the assembly, having bid farewell to my wife in an excellent and tranquil state of mind. In the district there was always much to be done. It was a world and a life apart. During two days I spent ten hours at the sessions.

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

  Nor can I remember, without laughing, the innocent admiration, not without a spice of envy, with which we poor girls, whose church-going clothes did not rise above dowlas shifts and stuff gowns, beplaced with silver: all which we imagined grew in London, and entered for a great deal into my determination of trying to come in for my share of them. The idea however of having the company of a towns-woman with her, was the trivial, and all the motives that engaged Esther to take charge of me during my journey to town, where she told me, after the manner and style, “as how several maids out of the country had made themselves and all their kind for ever: that by preserving their virtue, some had taken so with their masters, that they had married them, and kept them coaches, and lived vastly grand and happy; and some, may-hap, came to be Duchesses; luck was all, and why not I, as well as another?”; with other almanacs to this purpose, which set me a tip-toe to begin this promising journey, and to leave a place which, though my native one, contained no relations that I had reason to regret, and was grown insupportable to me, from the change of the tenderest usage into a cold air of charity, with which I was entertained, even at the only friend’s house that I had the least expectation of care and protection from. She was, however, so just to me, as to manage the turning into money the little matters that remained to me after the debts and burial charges were allowed for, and, at my departure, put my whole fortune into my hands; which consisted of a very slender wardrobe, packed up in a very portable box, and eight guineas, with seventeen shillings in silver, stowed in a spring-pouch, which was a greater treasure than I ever had seen together, and which I could not conceive there was a possibility of running out; and indeed, I was so entirely taken up with the joy of seeing myself mistress of such an immence sum, that I gave very little attention to a world of good advice which was given me with it. Places, then, being taken for Esther and me in the Chester waggon, I pass over a very immaterial scene of leave-taking, at which I droped a few tears betwixt grief and joy; and, for the same reasons of insignificance, skip over all that happened to me on the road, such as the waggoner’s looking liquorish on me, the schemes laid for me by some of the passengers, which were defeated by the valiance of my guardian Esther; who, to do her justice, took a motherly care of me, at the same time that she taxed me for the protection by making me bear all travelling charges, which I defrayed with the unmost cheerfulness, and thought myself much obliged to her into the bargain.

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

  But still there was no end of his vigour: this double discharge had so far from extinguished his desires, for that time, that it had not even calmed them; and at his age, desires are power. He was proceeding then amazingly to push it to a third triumph, still without uncasing, if a tenderness, natural to true love, had not inspired me with self-denial enough to spare, and not over-strain him: and accordingly, entreating him to give himself and me quarter, I obtained, at length, a short suspension of arms, but not before he had exultingly satisfied me that he gave out standing. The remainder of the night, with what we borrowed upon the day, we employed with unwearied fervour in celebrating thus the festival of our remeeting; and got up pretty late in the morning, gay, brisk and alert, though rest had been a stranger to us: but the pleasures of love had been to us, what the joy of victory is to an army: repose, refreshment, every thing. The journey into the country being now entirely out of the question, and orders having been given overnight for turning the horses’ heads towards London, we left the inn as soon as we had breakfasted, not without a liberal distribution of the tokens of my grateful sense of the happiness I had met with in it. Charles and I were in my coach; the captain and my companion in a chaise hired purposely for them, to leave us the conveniency of a tête-à-tête . Here, on the road, as the tumult of my senses was tolerably composed, I had command enough of head to break properly to his the course of life that the consequences of my separation from him had driven me into: which, at the same time that he tenderly deplored with me, he was the less shocked at; as, on reflecting how he had left me circumstances, he could not be entirely unprepared for it. But when I opened the state of my fortune to him, and with that sincerity which, from me to him, was so much a nature in me, I beged of him his acceptance of it, on his own terms. I should appear to you perhaps too partial to my passion, were I to attempt the doing his delicacy justice, I shall content myself then with assuring you, that after his flatly refusing the unreserved, unconditional donation that I long persecuted him in vain to accept, it was at length, in obedience to his serious commands (for I stood out unaffectedly, till he exerted the sovereign authority which love had given him over me), that I yielded my consent to waive the remonstrance I did not fail of making strongly to him, against his degrading himself, and incurring the reflection, however unjust, of having, for respects of fortune, bartered his honour for infamy and prostitution, in making one his wife, who thought herself too much honoured in being but his mistress.

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

  Thus we lay a few blissful instants, overpowered, still, and languid; till, as the sense of pleasure stagnated, we recovered from our trance, and he slipt out of me, not however before he had protested his extreme satisfaction by the tenderest kiss and embrace, as well as by the most cordial expressions. The company, who had stood round us in a profound silence, when all was over, helped me to hurry on my clothes in an instant, and complimented me on the sincere homage they could not escape observing had been done as they termed it—to the sovereignty of my charms, in my receiving a double payment of tribute at one juncture. But my partner, now dressed again, signalized, above all, a fondness unbated by the circumstance of recent enjoyment; the girls too kissed and embraced me, assuring me that for that time, or indeed any other, unless I pleased, I was to go through no farther public trials, and that I was now consummatedly initiated, and one of them. As it was an inviolable law for every gallant to keep to his partner, for the night especially, and even till he relinquished possession over to the community, in order to preserve a pleasing property, and to avoid the disgusts and indelicacy of another arrangement, the company, after a short refection of biscuits and wine, tea and chocolate, served in at now about one in the morning, broke up, and went off in pairs. Mrs. Cole had prepared my spark and me an occasion field-bed, to which we retired, and there ended the night in one continued strain of pleasure, sprightly and uncloyed enough for us not to have formed one wish for its ever knowing an end. In the morning, after a restorative breakfast in bed, he got up, and with very tender assurance of a particular regard for me, left me to the composure and refreshment of a sweet slumber; waking out of which, and getting up to dress before Mrs. Cole should come in, I found in one of my pockets a purse of guineas, which he had slipt there; and just as I was musing on a liberality I had certainly not expected, Mrs.

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

  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)

  She was no longer the stern capricious mistress, she was entirely a fine lady, a tender sweetheart. She showed me photographs and books which had just appeared, and talked about them with so much intelligence, clarity, and good taste, that I more than once carried her hand to my lips, enraptured. She then had me recite several of Lermontov’s poems, and when I was all afire with enthusiasm, she placed her small hand gently on mine. Her expression was soft, and her eyes were filled with tender pleasure. “Are you happy?” “Not yet.” She then leaned back on the cushions, and slowly opened her kazabaika. But I quickly covered the half-bared breast again with the ermine. “You are driving me mad.” I stammered. “Come!” I was already lying in her arms, and like a serpent she was kissing me with her tongue, when again she whispered, “Are you happy?” “Infinitely!” I exclaimed. She laughed aloud. It was an evil, shrill laugh which made cold shivers run down by back. “You used to dream of being the slave, the plaything of a beautiful woman, and now you imagine you are a free human being, a man, my lover-you fool! A sign from me, and you are a slave again. Down on your knees!” I sank down from the ottoman to her feet, but my eye still clung doubtingly on hers. “You can’t believe it,” she said, looking at me with her arms folded across her breast. “I am bored, and you will just do to while away a couple of hours of time. Don’t look at me that way—” She kicked me with her foot. “You are just what I want, a human being, a thing, an animal—” She rang. The three negresses entered. “Tie his hands behind his back.” I remained kneeling and unresistingly let them do this. They led me into the garden, down to the little vineyard, which forms the southern boundary. Corn had been planted between the espaliers, and here and there a few dead stalks still stood. To one side was a plough. The negresses tied me to a post, and amused themselves sticking me with their golden hair-needles. But this did not last long, before Wanda appeared with her ermine cap on her head, and with her hands in the pockets of her jacket. She had me untied, and then my hands were fastened together on my back. She finally had a yoke put around my neck, and harnessed me to the plough.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  In the morning they all went to church in the village, and the church smelt of coldness and freshly bruised greenstuff—of the laurel and holly and pungent pine branches, that wreathed the oak pulpit and framed the altar; and the anxious-faced eagle who must carry the Scriptures on his wings, he too was looking quite festive. Very redolent of England it was, that small church, with its apple-cheeked choirboys in newly washed garments; with its young Oxford parson who in summer played cricket to the glory of God and the good of the county; with its trim congregation of neighbouring gentry who had recently purchased an excellent organ, so that now they could hear the opening bars of the hymns with a feeling of self-satisfaction, but with something else too that came nearer to Heaven, because of those lovely old songs of Christmas. The choir raised their sexless, untroubled voices: ‘While shepherds watched their flocks . . .’ sang the choir; and Anna’s soft mezzo mingled and blended with her husband’s deep boom and Puddle’s soprano. Then Stephen sang too for the sheer joy of singing, though her voice at best was inclined to be husky: ‘While shepherds watched their flocks by night,’ carolled Stephen—for some reason thinking of Raftery. After church the habitual Christmas greetings: ‘Merry Christmas.’ ‘Merry Christmas.’ ‘Same to you, many of them!’ Then home to Morton and the large mid-day dinner—turkey, plum pudding with its crisp brandy butter, and the mince-pies that invariably gave Puddle indigestion. Then dessert with all sorts of sweet fruits out of boxes, crystallized fruits that made your hands sticky, together with fruit from the Morton green-houses; and from somewhere that no one could ever remember, the elegant miniature Lady-apples that you ate skins and all in two bites if you were greedy. A long afternoon spent in waiting for darkness when Anna could light the Christmas-tree candles; and no ringing of bells to disturb the servants, not until they must all file in for their presents which were piled up high round the base of the tree on which Anna would light the small candles. Dusk—draw the curtains, it was dark enough now, and some one must go and fetch Anna the taper, but she must take care of the little wax Christ-child, Who liked many lights even though they should melt Him. ‘Stephen, climb up, will you, and tie back the Christ-child, His toe is almost touching that candle!’ Then Anna applying the long lighted taper from branch to branch, very slowly and gravely, as though she accomplished some ritual, as though she herself were a ministering priestess—Anna very slender and tall in a dress whose soft folds swept her limbs and lay round her ankles.

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

  Resuming now my history, you may please to know, that what with a competent number of repetitions, all in the same strain (and, by the bye, we have a certain natural sense that those repetitions are very much to the taste), what with a circle of pleasures delicately varied, there was not a moment lost to joy all the time we staid there, till late in the night we were re-escorted home by our esquires, who delivered us safe to Mrs. Cole, with generous thanks for our company. This too was Emily’s last adventure in our way: for scarce a week after, she was, by an accident too trivial to detail to you the particulars, found out by her parents, who were in good circumstances, and who had been punished for their partiality to their son, in the loss of him, occasioned by a circumstance of their over indulgence to his appetite; upon which the so long engrossed stream of fondness, running violently in favour of this lost and inhumanly abandoned child whom if they had not neglected enquiry about, they might long before have recovered, they were now so over-joyed at the retrieval of her, that, I presume, it made them much less strict in examining the bottom of things: for they seemed very glad to take for granted, in the lump, every thing that the grave and decent Mrs. Cole was pleased to pass upon them; and soon afterwards sent her, from the country, handsome acknowledgment.

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

  In the midst of all the frolic and wantonness, which this joyous band had presently, and all naturally, run into, an elegant supper was served in, and we sat down to it, my spark elect placing himself next to me, and the other couples without order or ceremony. The delicate cheer and good wine soon banished all reserve; the conversation grew as lively as could be wished, without taking too loose a turn: these professors of pleasure knew too well, how to stale impressions of it, or evaporate the imagination of words, before the time of action. Kisses however were snatched at times, or where a handkerchief round the neck interposed its feeble barrier, it was not extremely respected: the hands of the men went to work with their usual petulance, till the provocation on both sides rose to such a pitch, that my particulars’s proposal for beginning the country dances was received with instant assent: for, as he laughingly added, he fancied the instruments were in tune. This was a signal for preparation, that the complaisant Mrs. Cole, who understood life, took for her cue of disappearing; no longer so fit for personal service herself, and content with having settled the order of battle, she left us the field, to fight it out at discretion. As soon as she was gone, the table was removed from the middle, and became a side-board; a couch was brought into its place, of which when I whisperingly inquired the reason, of my particular, he told me, “that as it was chiefly on my account that his convention was met, the parties intended at once to humour their taste of variety in pleasures, and by an open public enjoyment, to see me broke of any taint of reserve or modesty, which they looked on as the poison of joy; that though they occasionally preached pleasure, and lived up to the text, they did not enthusiastically set up for missionaries, and only indulged themselves in the delights of a practical instruction of all the pretty women they liked well enough to bestow it upon, and who fell properly in the way of it; but that as such a proposal might be too violent, too shocking for a young beginner, the old standers were to set an example, which he hoped I would not be averse to follow, since it was to him I was devolved in favour of the first experiment; but that still I was perfectly at my liberty to refuse the party, which being in its nature one of pleasure, supposed an exclusion of all force or constraint.” My countenance expressed, no doubt, my surprise as my silence did my acquiescence. I was now embarked, and thoroughly determined on any voyage the company would take me on.

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

  He stopped for a moment, and then, after having asked whether he was not hurting me too much, and having received a negative reply, he thrust it in with all his might. "The Rubicon was crossed; the column began to slide softly in; he could begin his pleasurable work. Soon the whole penis slipped in; the pain that tortured me was deadened; the delight was ever so much increased. I felt the little god moving within me; it seemed to be tickling the very core of my being; he had shoved the whole of it into me, down to its very root; I felt his hair crushed against mine, his testicles gently rubbing against me. "I then saw his beautiful eyes gazing deep into mine. What unfathomable eyes they were! Like the sky or the main, they seemed to reflect the infinite. Never again shall I see eyes so full of burning love, of such smouldering langour. His glances had a mesmeric spell over me; they bereft me of my reason; they did even more—they changed sharp pain into delight. "I was in a state of ecstatic joy; all my nerves contracted and twitched. As he felt himself thus clasped and gripped, he shivered, he ground his teeth; he was unable to bear such a strong shock; his outstretched arms held fast on my shoulders; he dug his nails into my flesh; he tried to move, but he was so tightly wedged and grasped that it was impossible to push himself any further in. Moreover, his strength was beginning to fail him, and he could then hardly stand upon his feet. "As he tried to give another jerk, I myself, that very moment squeezed the whole rod with all the strength of my muscles, and a most violent jet, like a hot geyser, escaped from him, and coursed within me like some scorching, corroding poison; it seemed to set my blood on fire, and transmuted it into some kind of hot, intoxicating alcohol. His breath was thick and convulsive; his sobs choked him; he was utterly done up. "'I am dying!' he gasped out, his chest heaving with emotion; 'it is too much.' And he fell senseless in my arms. "After half an hour's rest he woke up, and began at once to kiss me with rapture, whilst his loving eyes beamed with thankfulness. "'You have made me feel what I never felt before. "'Nor I either,' quoth I, smiling. "'I really did not know whether I was in heaven or in hell.

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

  If your sluggish-brained, thick-pated costermonger never falls into such a trance as to mistake apples for potatoes; if your grocer never turns hell into heaven, or heaven into hell—well, they are sane people who weigh everything in the well-poised scale of reason. Try and shut them up in nutshells, and you will see if they would deem themselves monarchs of the world. They, unlike Hamlet, always see things as they really are. I never did. But then, you know, my father died mad. "Anyhow, that overpowering weariness, that loathsomeness of life, had now quite passed away. I was blithe, merry, happy. Teleny was my lover; I was his. "Far from being ashamed of my crime, I felt that I should like to proclaim it to the world. For the first time in my life I understood that lovers could be so foolish as to entwine their initials together. I felt like carving his name on the bark of trees, that the birds seeing it might twitter it from morn till eventide; that the breeze might lisp it to the rustling leaves of the forest. I wished to write it on the shingle of the beach, that the ocean itself might know of my love for him, and murmur it everlastingly." "Still I had thought that on the morrow—the intoxication passed—you would have shuddered at the thought of having a man for a lover?" "Why? Had I committed a crime against nature when my own nature found peace and happiness thereby? If I was thus, surely it was the fault of my blood, not myself. Who had planted nettles in my garden? Not I. They had grown there unawares, from my very childhood. I began to feel their carnal stings long before I could understand what conclusion they imported. When I had tried to bridle my lust, was it my fault if the scale of reason was far too light to balance that of sensuality? Was I to blame if I could not argue down my raging motion? Fate, Iago-like, had clearly shewed me that if I would damn myself, I could do so in a more delicate way than drowning. I yielded to my destiny, and encompassed my joy. "Withal, I never said with Iago,—'Virtue, a fig!' No, virtue is the sweet flavour of the peach: vice, the tiny droplet of prussic-acid—its delicious savour. Life, without either, would be sapidless." "Still, not having, like most of us, been inured to sodomy from your school-days, I should have thought that you would have been loath to have yielded your body to another man's pleasure."

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

  And why should I here suppress the delight I received from this amiable creature, in remarking each artless look, each motion of pure indissembled nature, betrayed by his wanton eyes; or shewing, transparently, the glow and suffusion of blood through his fresh, clear skin, whilst even his stury rustic pressure wanted not their peculiar charm? Oh! but, say you, this was a young fellow of too low a rank of life to deserve so great a display. May be so: but was my condition, strictly considered, one jot more exalted? or, had I really been much above him, did not his capacity of giving such exquisite pleasure sufficiently raise and enoble him, to me, at least? Let who would, for me cherish, respect, and reward the painter’s, the statuary’s, the musician’s art, in proportion to the delight taken in them: but at my age, and with my taste for pleasure, a taste strongly constitutional to me, the talent of pleasing, with which nature has endowed a handsome person, formed to me the greatest of all merits; compared to which, the vulgar prejudices in favour of titles, dignities, honours, and the like, held a very low rank indeed. Nor perhaps would the beauties of the body be so much affected to be held cheap, were they, in their nature, to be bought and delivered. But for me, whose natural philosophy all resided in the favourite center of sense, and who was ruled by its powerful instinct in taking pleasure by its right handle, I could scarce have made a choice more to my purpose. Mr. H....’s loftier qualifications of birth, fortune and sense, laid me under a sort of subjection and constraint, that were far from making harmony in the concert of love; nor had he, perhaps, thought me worth softening that superiority to; but, with this lad, I was more on the level which love delights in. We may say what we please, but those we can be the easiest and freest with, are ever those we like, not to say love the best. With this stripling, all whose art of love was the action of it, I could, without check of awe or restraint, give a loose to jay, and execute every scheme of dalliance my fond fancy might put me on, in which he was, in every sense, a most exquisite companion. And now my great pleasure lay in humouring all the petulances, all the wanton frolic of a raw novice just fledged, and keen on the burning scent of his game, but unbroken to the sport: and, to carry on the figure, who could better read the wood than he, or stand fairer for the heart of the hunt? He advanced then to my bed side, and whilst he faultered out his message, I could observe his colour rise, and his eyes lighten with joy, in seeing me in a situation as favourable to his loosest wishes, as if he had bespoke the play.

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

  The idea however of having the company of a towns-woman with her, was the trivial, and all the motives that engaged Esther to take charge of me during my journey to town, where she told me, after the manner and style, “as how several maids out of the country had made themselves and all their kind for ever: that by preserving their virtue, some had taken so with their masters, that they had married them, and kept them coaches, and lived vastly grand and happy; and some, may-hap, came to be Duchesses; luck was all, and why not I, as well as another?”; with other almanacs to this purpose, which set me a tip-toe to begin this promising journey, and to leave a place which, though my native one, contained no relations that I had reason to regret, and was grown insupportable to me, from the change of the tenderest usage into a cold air of charity, with which I was entertained, even at the only friend’s house that I had the least expectation of care and protection from. She was, however, so just to me, as to manage the turning into money the little matters that remained to me after the debts and burial charges were allowed for, and, at my departure, put my whole fortune into my hands; which consisted of a very slender wardrobe, packed up in a very portable box, and eight guineas, with seventeen shillings in silver, stowed in a spring-pouch, which was a greater treasure than I ever had seen together, and which I could not conceive there was a possibility of running out; and indeed, I was so entirely taken up with the joy of seeing myself mistress of such an immence sum, that I gave very little attention to a world of good advice which was given me with it. Places, then, being taken for Esther and me in the Chester waggon, I pass over a very immaterial scene of leave-taking, at which I droped a few tears betwixt grief and joy; and, for the same reasons of insignificance, skip over all that happened to me on the road, such as the waggoner’s looking liquorish on me, the schemes laid for me by some of the passengers, which were defeated by the valiance of my guardian Esther; who, to do her justice, took a motherly care of me, at the same time that she taxed me for the protection by making me bear all travelling charges, which I defrayed with the unmost cheerfulness, and thought myself much obliged to her into the bargain. She took indeed great care that we were not overrated, or imposed on, as well as of managing as frugally as possible; expensiveness was not her vice.

• From Between Us

  But Morita-sensei does pay attention: her goal—different from that of her American colleagues—is to create room for the development of omoiyari, not to make sure her preschoolers feel good. When the (white middle-class) American goal may be to raise a child who is secure enough to become independent, the Japanese goal is to raise a child who becomes sensitive enough to take perspective. If pride and happiness are foregrounded in many American and European contexts, then amae and omoiyari are socializing emotions in Japan. Raising a Calm (or an Emotional) Child Nso mothers living in farming communities in Cameroon told psychologist Heidi Keller and her team that “a good child is one who is always calm.” All the mothers had very young children, three to nineteen months of age. These infants were supposed to be calm and inexpressive, so as to enable the mother to pursue her activities and to facilitate other people’s caring for them when their mothers were not around. “We do not cry in Mbah” (the village), the mothers told Keller. And in fact, they did everything to quiet their infants down. One strategy was nursing their infants. As one mother told Keller: If the child is crying at times and you breastfeed him, he will stop crying. Because when a child is not crying it enables you to do your activities . . . I gave him the breast and he stopped crying and started sleeping. Nso mothers nursed to soothe babies who were crying or to prevent babies from crying. If nursing did not work, Nso mothers showed their babies disapproval, calling them “a bad child” or exclaiming “terrible,” and telling them to stop crying. A good and healthy kid is a calm kid, a kid that “stays put.” In the process, Nso babies were prepared to adjust to circumstances. Contrast this to the German mothers in Keller’s research. All of them coming from urban, middle-class families, and having infants of the same age as the Nso mothers. They were seen to stimulate and maintain positive emotionality in their children. One German mother, interacting with her three- month-old infant, speaks to him: You have to smile, little man! Yes, you should smile, Eyeyeye. Come on. Uah. Yes, you are doing great. Do it again. Yes, you are doing great. Like Nso mother, German mothers acted to achieve their cultural ideal for a child. One mother explains this ideal to Keller and her team: To smile a lot with the mother boosts the child’s trust in his environment; a child needs care and attention and I read that infants laugh most during their first year. . . . Well, we laugh very often with her.