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 Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica Volume 10 (2011)

  “Prick?” Jeannie offered. “Cock! And as soon as I began coming, T winnie, I started yelling, all kinds of stuff, like his name and then ‘God’ and then ‘Fucking Jesus Christ!’ I didn’t know what I was saying, not really, but it didn’t matter, it just felt good, like some of the pressure was coming out of my mouth while the rest of it was being released through my cunt. I dug my nails into his shoulders. He came then, too, but he just groaned, no words or anything. We cuddled. It was good there was a towel on the bed because I’d scratched him so hard with my nails he was bleeding.” “Wow.” “He didn’t complain. I think he liked it. We said some sweet things to each other and then we did it again. It was way better than masturbation or dry-humping or anything. You’ve gotta do it.” “Yeah,” muttered Jeannie. “I do. But with who?” Patty shrugged. “Why not with Jason? He’s really good.” 188 Madeline Moore Jeannie shrieked. “Aren’t you in love with him?” It was Patty’s turn to shriek. “Of course not. I’m in love with Pat. Or maybe Gene.” “Me too,” said Jeannie. The girls doubled over with laughter, and then, at the sound of grumpy footsteps approaching, they dove under their covers, one in her nightie and the other naked, and feigned sleep when their dad stuck his head in their door and, unfooled by their angelic faces, grumbled, “Go to sleep.” This was the first time Jeannie and Patty shared a man, but it wasn’t to be the last. Patty usually went first, weeding out the duds, and Jeannie always went last, dumping the boys with no tears and an ear deaf to their protests, but since they pretended only one of them was ever with any one boy, neither acquired the bad reputation they both deserved. The next summer, arriving at the Twin Convention was a big event for the girls. They came without their parents for the first time, and they fully intended to fuck Pat and Gene, as soon as they decided who would be fucking whom. It was Jeannie who insisted they not share the twin blonds of their affection. They discussed it for most of the drive. “These are our husbands-to-be,” Jeannie admonished her sister and, when Patty protested that as such they ought to sample both boys each before making up their minds, Jeannie put her foot down. “Absolutely not,” she said. “I will always be faithful to my husband.” ‘They both loved Gene and Pat and were sure the twin boys loved them, too, and equally. But choices needed to be made, and soon, as the car was fast approaching Twin City. Jeannie made the final decision. “It’s best you go with Gene and I go with Pat,” she said. Patty was surprised. She’d been sure her sister would go for the quiet one, but Jeannie’s reasoning was sound.

• From Apprenticed to Venus: My Secret Life with Anaïs Nin (2017)

  Mongo had a V-shaped grin that wrinkled the skin over his wide nostrils like soft black leather. Suddenly his hands were a flock of birds taking off. A trumpeter and tenor sax joined in and people started to fill the floor, hips swinging, shoulders pumping to the Afro-Cuban beat. Hugo and Anaïs rose and danced flirtatiously, apart and together. Later I learned that they had both studied flamenco dancing. That night what I saw was a couple joyfully seducing each other, sharing a secret in their movements. My feet moved under the table, and I could feel a smile on my face. Caresse, who was seated between me and Jean-Jacques, nudged us both. “See that mixed couple?” I saw a blond woman I hadn’t noticed before clasped to the chest of a black man. “That’s how Canada Lee and I were together. Sweet as hot fudge on vanilla ice cream.” My giggle caught in my throat when she hissed, “Anaïs had an affair with Canada, too. She doesn’t know that I know.” Jean-Jacques lifted a groomed eyebrow. I didn’t believe Caresse. I assumed she was jealous of Anaïs because Anaïs had Hugo who adored her, while Caresse’s husband Harry, I’d gathered, had killed himself. Caresse donned a glamorous smile when Millie, Anaïs, and Hugo returned to the table out of breath. Saying goodbye, Millie left for home, and Hugo, after pulling out Anaïs’s chair, excused himself for the toilette. Dropping her smile, Caresse leaned toward Anaïs. “While Hugo’s gone, there’s something I have to say to you.” I was afraid she was going accuse Anaïs of being with Canada Lee, but instead Caresse said, “You know that you and Hugo are always welcome at Rocca Sinibalda, but please do not bring the other one.” Anaïs paled. I wondered what Caresse meant. “I understand,” Anaïs said to Caresse and abruptly turned to me and Jean-Jacques. “Rocca Sinibalda is a castle outside Rome that Caresse purchased as a home for Women of the World Against War.” “Is that where I should write to join?” I asked Caresse. She ignored me and continued speaking to Anaïs. “Hugo isn’t passive like you think. When you’re in Los Angeles he pesters me with questions.” Anaïs came to Los Angeles, where I lived? I wanted to ask when, but Caresse kept on, “I love Hugo and can’t bear to see him hurt. You’d better watch out or somebody like me who appreciates him will grab him while you’re dallying on the other coast.” Anaïs cried, “You think I don’t appreciate Hugo? You think I don’t love him?” “You should mind your own business!” I heard the words shoot out of my mouth at Caresse.

• From Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma (1997)

  With this newly discovered aggression, Marius transforms the complex emotion of anxiety to joy and triumphant mastery. In his imagined spearing of the bear, he makes the active response that will ensure his victory; he is no longer the vanquished child. In being able, step by step, to exchange an active, aggressive response for one of being helpless and frozen, Marius renegotiates his trauma. At this point in the renegotiation, we see the establishment of an active escape (running) response in addition to an aggressive counter-attack response. In experiencing himself climbing the telephone pole and looking around, Marius finishes the renegotiation by completing the orienting response. This act allows him to uncouple additional fear from the excitement of being fully alive. Renegotiation helps to restore those resources that were diminished in the wake of trauma. The overall strategy of renegotiation is as follows: the first step is to develop a facility with the felt sense. Once this is developed, we can surrender to the currents of our feelings, which include trembling and other spontaneous discharges of energy. We can use the felt sense to uncouple the maladaptive attachment between excitement and fear. Because excitement is charged and we want to maintain that charge as free and distinct from anxiety, we must also be able to ground it. Resilient strength is the opposite of helplessness. The tree is made strong and resilient by its grounded root system. These roots take nourishment from the ground and grow strong. Grounding also allows the tree to be resilient so that it can yield to the winds of change and not be uprooted. Springiness is the facility to ground and “unground” in a rhythmical way. This buoyancy is a dynamic form of grounding. Aggressiveness is the biological ability to be vigorous and energetic, especially when using instinct and force. In the immobility (traumatized) state, these assertive energies are inaccessible. The restoration of healthy aggression is an essential part in the recovery from trauma. Empowerment is the acceptance of personal authority. It derives from the capacity to choose the direction and execution of one’s own energies. Mastery is the possession of skillful techniques in dealing successfully with threat. Orientation is the process of ascertaining one’s position relative to both circumstance and environment. In these ways the residue of trauma is renegotiated. Because every injury exists within life and life is constantly renewing itself, within every injury is the seed of healing and renewal. At the moment our skin is cut or punctured by a foreign object, a magnificent and precise series of biochemical events is orchestrated through evolutionary wisdom. The body has been designed to renew itself through continuous self-correction. These same principles also apply to the healing of psyche, spirit, and soul. II. Symptoms of Trauma 10. The Core of the Traumatic Reaction Arousa l— What Goes Up Must Come Down When we perceive danger or sense that we are threatened, we become aroused.

• From Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma (1997)

  Feelings of pleasure and expansion are evidence that the organism is moving into the healing vortex. The key to letting the healing vortex support the process of transformation lies in the ability to let go of preconceived ideas about how an event “should be” remembered. In other words, you have to be able to give the felt sense free license to communicate without censoring what it has to say. Paradoxically, this doesn’t negate the liberating significance of acknowledging “what really happened.” This truth is experienced in moving fluidly between the healing and trauma vortices. There is a deep acceptance of the emotional impact of events in our lives along with a simultaneous quality of waking up from a nightmare. One awakens from this dream with a sense of wonder and gladness. The Courage to Feel If you want to know whether an event “really” happened, all I can do is wish you well and tell you what you already know. You may have taken on an impossible task. In my view, neither this book nor anything else will help you know the truth of what you are seeking. If, on the other hand, your primary goal is to heal, there is much here that can help you. If healing is what you want, your first step is to be open to the possibility that literal truth is not the most important consideration. The conviction that it really happened, the fear that it may have happened, the subtle searching for evidence that it did happen, can all get in your way as you try to hear what the felt sense wants to tell you about what it needs to heal. By committing yourself to the process of healing, you will come to learn more about the truth behind your reactions. In spite of the fragmentation that occurs in the wake of trauma, the organism does retain associations that are connected with the events that caused its debilitation. The felt sense may reveal these events to you, or it may not. Keep reminding yourself that it doesn’t matter. Because if healing is what you want, it doesn’t matter whether you know the concrete truth. Desire and Healing The process of healing begins from within. Even before the cast is set on our broken bones, our bones begin to knit themselves back together. Just as there are physical laws that affect the healing of our bodies, there are laws that affect the healing of our minds. We have seen how our intellects can override some powerful instinctual forces of our organisms.

• From The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica Volume 10 (2011)

  didn’t do me. And we both enjoyed it. That’s all that matters.” She picked up her handbag and headed for the door. Her face was flushed with joy and triumph. I followed her and sought out her eyes, and these at least she granted me. She gave me one last puckery little kiss. I will never forget what she did next. She reached down and slapped me hard on my bare ass. Just to make sure I got the message, she slapped my butt even harder again, this time with a resounding thwack. Her bossy expression was at its bossiest, but I thought I caught just the slightest glint of compassion in her eyes. Then she opened the door and walked out of my life forever. Calendar Girl Angela Caperton Desi Palladino couldn’t take her eyes off April 1958. The calendar hung on the wall of Stu Gilbert’s tiny office at the back of the garage, where Desi brought him coffee and helped keep the books. There were calendars in the garage too, most of them with drawn or painted girls, prettier than any real woman could ever be, but the calendar on the wall of Stu’s office was the only one with photographs of real girls, one for each month of the year. “Whatcha lookin’ at, Desi?” Stu bustled through the open door, wiping his hands on a greasy rag. Stu Gilbert was pushing fifty, stocky, almost bald, but he smiled like a naughty twelve-year-old. Desi’s cheeks burned. “Nothing,” she mumbled. “Checking the delivery date for the parts you ordered last week.” Stu chuckled. “She’s somethin’, ain’t she?” He sighed and brushed his fingers over April’s bare stomach. “T thought it was against the law to show ... I mean ...” Desi’s mouth turned desert dry. “T figure somebody screwed up,” Stu said. Miss April’s ash blonde hair framed a plump face with ivory skin and pouty lips. Desi wished she had hair that color and the complexion to go with it. Her own hair fell in heavy black waves where it refused to curl over shoulders of pale olive, the gift of her father’s Sicilian blood. The calendar girl’s breasts curved in gentle slopes, pink-tipped and perfect, and her torso, where Stu’s finger twitched wistfully, looked firm, with just a hint of flesh around her stomach, then flattening down to a triangle of pale curls with the shadow of a line at its center. “T have to go, Stu,” Desi said, rising to ease past him and the scent of gasoline and tobacco he carried. He laughed as she reached the door. “If it bothers you, kid,” he chuckled, “I can skip to May.” Calendar Girl 475

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  Up the long dim road where thundered The army of Italy onward By the great pale arch of the Star. It was the deep historic sense of this great people that first won me and their loving admiration of their poets and artists and guides. I can never describe the thrill it gave me to find on a small house a marble plaque recording the fact that poor de Musset had once lived there, and another on the house wherein he died. Oh, how right the French are to have a Place Malherbe, and Avenue Victor Hugo, an Avenue de la Grande Armée too, and an Avenue de L’Imperatrice as well, though it has since been changed prosaically into the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne. From the Place de la Concorde I crossed the Seine and walked down the quays to the left, and soon passed the Conciergerie and Ste Chapelle with its gorgeous painted glass-windows of a thousand, years ago and there before me on the Ile de la Cité, the twin towers of Notre Dame caught my eyes and breath and finally, early in the afternoon I turned up the Boul’ Mich and passed the Sorbonne and then somehow or other lost myself in the old rue St. Jacques that Dumas père and other romance-writers had described for me a thousand times. I little tired at length having left the Luxemburg gardens far behind with their statues which I promised myself soon to study more closely, I turned into a little wine-shop restaurant kept by a portly and pleasant lady whose name I soon learned was Marguerite. After a most excellent meal I engaged a large room on the first floor looking on the street, for forty francs a month, and if a friend came to live with me, why Marguerite promised with a large smile to put in another bed for an additional ten francs monthly and supply us besides with coffee in the morning and whatever meals we wanted at most reasonable prices: there I lived gaudy, golden days for some three heavenly weeks.

• From Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble (2014)

  He just needs some time to get the pieces in place. The Inbound conference is right around the corner, and everybody in the marketing department is going to be overwhelmed until the conference is over. Let’s just get through Inbound, he says, and then we can circle back on this. The conference takes place over the course of four days in August, at the Hynes Convention Center in Boston. Five thousand people are here to come together, get inspired, and be remarkable. They want to learn how to crush it, how to be awesome, how to make one plus one equal three. Arianna Huffington gives a keynote speech. Dharmesh talks about being lovable. Halligan rambles on about the Grateful Dead—he’s a huge fan—and then starts playing air guitar and doing a weird hippie dance, unaccompanied by music. The dance goes on for too long. It’s painful to watch. The crowd eats it up. After the conference Sasha and I take the kids on a rafting trip in Maine, in a place so remote that there’s no cell service. We will be gone until Labor Day. I figure that in September, when everyone returns from the holiday, I will sit down with Cranium and start scoping out my project. Up in Maine we have no Internet connection, thus no tablets or laptops. We play cards and board games, cook on a fire outside the cabin, and hang our wet clothes up on the rafters to dry. The kids make new friends and go swimming and fishing. For the first time in months, Sasha is free of pain; she goes five days without having a migraine, a new record. We’re all together and enjoying one another. The kids aren’t fighting. It’s bliss. For the first time since joining HubSpot, I feel happy about my work. At the Inbound conference I gave a speech about storytelling and it went over well. Though things were rocky for the first four months, it seems that now I have figured out how to navigate the company and get what I want. Maybe I’m not so bad at this corporate stuff after all! But when I return to work after Labor Day, I get no word from Cranium. Before I can set a meeting to discuss our next steps, Zack pulls me aside. Some decisions have been made, he says. We are going to redesign the blog. Grumpy Jan is getting a promotion. Zack says maybe I can be an adviser to her. “Sure,” I say. “Sounds good. I’m going to be working on the new thing anyway. But I’m glad to help her out.” “Yeah, see, that’s the thing,” he says. “You’re still going to be working on the blog. They’re giving you your own separate section. It’s part of the redesign.”

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

  The First World War (1914–18) destroyed a generation of young men, yet many Europeans initially embraced it with an enthusiasm that shows how difficult it is to resist those emotions long activated by religion and now by nationalism, the new faith of the secular age. In August 1914 the cities of Europe were swept up in a festival atmosphere that, like the rituals of the French Revolution, made the “imaginary community” of the nation an incarnate reality. Total strangers gazed enraptured into each other’s eyes; estranged friends embraced, feeling a luminous cohesion that defied rational explanation. The euphoria has been dismissed as an outbreak of communal madness, but those who experienced it said that it was the “most deeply lived” event of their lives. It has also been called an “escape from modernity” since it sprang from a profound discontent with industrialized society, in which people were defined and classified by their function and everything was subordinated to a purely material end. 149 The declaration of war seemed a summons to the nobility of altruism and self-sacrifice that gave life meaning. “All differences of class, rank and language were flooded over at that moment by the rushing feeling of fraternity,” the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig recalled. Everyone “had been incorporated into the mass, he was a part of the people, and his person, his hitherto unnoticed person, had been given meaning.… Each one was called upon to cast his infinitesimal self into the glowing mass and there to be purified of all selfishness.” 150 There was a yearning to cast aside an identity that felt too lonely, narrow, and confining and to escape from the privacy imposed by modernity. 151 An individual “was no longer the isolated person of former times,” said Zweig. 152 “No more are we what we had been so long: alone,” declared Marianne Weber. 153 A new era seemed to have begun. “People realized that they were equal,” remembered Rudolf Binding. “No one wished to count for more than anyone else.… It was like a rebirth.” 154 It “transported the body as well as the soul into a trance-like, enormously enhanced love of life and existence,” recalled Carl Zuckmayer, “a joy of participation, of living-along-with, a feeling, even, of grace.” 155 The triviality of the “petty, aimless lounging life of peacetime is done with,” Franz Schauwecker exulted. 156 For the first time, said Konrad Haenisch, a lifelong critic of German capitalism, he could join “with a full heart, a clean conscience, and without a sense of treason in the sweeping, stormy song: Deutschland, Deutschland über alles.” 157 In the trenches, however, volunteers discovered that far from escaping industrialization, they were entirely dominated by it. Like a sinister religious revelation, the war laid bare the material, technological, and mechanical reality that twentieth-century civilization concealed.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  But to call my enjoyment of the form, of the note-after-noteness of a melody a mere critical 'judgment of right' [see below, p. 472] would really be to deny to me the power of expressing a fact of simple and intimate expression in English. It is quintessentially emotion. . . . Now there are hundreds of other bits of music . . . . which I judge to be right without receiving an iota of the emotion. For purposes of emotion they are to me like geometrical demonstrations or like acts of integrity performed in Peru." The Beethoven-rightness of which Gurney then goes on to speak, as something different from the Clementi-rightness (even when the respective pieces are only heard in idea), is probably a purely auditory-sensational thing. The Clementi-rightness also; only, for reasons impossible to assign, the Clementi form does not give the same sort of purely auditory satisfaction as the Beethoven form, and might better be described perhaps negatively as non-wrong, i.e., free from positively unpleasant acoustic quality. In organizations as musical as Mr. Gurney's, purely acoustic form gives so intense a degree of sensible pleasure that the lower bodily reverberation is of no account. But I repeat that I see nothing in the facts which Mr. Gurney cites, to lead one to believe in an emotion divorced from sensational processes of any kind.[434] In his chapter on 'Ideal Emotion,' to which the reader is referred for farther details on this subject.[435] Those feelings which Prof. Bain calls 'emotions of relativity,' excitement of novelty, wonder, rapture of freedom, sense of power, hardly survive any repetition of the experience. But as the text goes on to explain, and as Goethe as quoted by Prof. Höffding says, this is because "the soul is inwardly grown larger without knowing it, and can no longer be filled by that first sensation. The man thinks that he has lost, but really he has gained. What he has lost in rapture, he has gained in inward growth." "It is," as Prof. Höffding himself adds, in a beautiful figure of speech, "with our virgin feelings, as with the first breath drawn by the new-born child, in which the lung expands itself so that it can never be emptied to the same degree again. No later breath can feel just like that first one." On this whole subject of emotional blunting, compare Höffding's Psychologie, VI. E., and Bain's Emotions and Will. chapter IV. of the first part.[436] M. Fr. Paulhan, in a little work full of accurate observations of detail (Les Phénomènes Affectifs et les Lois de leur Apparition), seems to me rather to turn the truth upside down by his formula that emotions are due to an inhibition of impulsive tendencies. One kind of emotion, namely, uneasiness, annoyance, distress, does occur when any definite impulsive tendency is checked, and all of M. P.'s illustrations are drawn from this sort. The other emotions are themselves primary impulsive tendencies, of a diffusive sort (involving, as M. P.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  After the first ecstasy I got her to use the syringe while I watched her curiously. When she came back to bed, “No danger now”, I cried, “no danger, my love is queen!” “You darling lover!” she cried, her eyes wide as if in wonder, “my sex throbs and itches and oh! I feel prickings on the inside of my thighs: I want you dreadfully, Frank”, and she stretched out as she spoke, drawing up her knees. I got on top of her and softly, slowly let my sex slide into her and then began the love-play. When my second orgasm came, I indulged myself with quick, short strokes, though I knew that she preferred the long, slow movement, for I was resolved to give her every sensation this golden night. When she felt me begin again the long slow movement she loved, she sighed two or three times and putting her hands on my buttocks drew me close; but otherwise made little sign of feeling for perhaps half an hour. I kept right on: the slow movement now gave me but little pleasure: it was rather a task than a joy; but I was resolved to give her a feast. I don’t know how long the bout lasted: but once I withdrew and began rubbing her clitoris and the front of her sex, and panting she nodded her head and rubbed herself ecstatically against my sex, and after I had begun the slow movement again: “please, Frank!” she gasped, “I can’t stand more: I’m going crazy—choking!” Strange to say, her words excited me more than the act: I felt my spasm coming and roughly, savagely I thrust in my sex at the same time kneeling between her legs so as to be able to play back and forth on her tickler as well. “I’ll ravish you!” I cried and gave myself to the keen delight. As my seed spirted, she didn’t speak, but lay there still and white; I jumped out of the bed, got a spongeful of cold water and used it on her forehead. At once to my joy she opened her eyes: “I’m sorry”, she gasped, and took a drink of water, “but I was so tired, I must have slept. You dear heart!” When I had put down the sponge and glass, I slipped into her again and in a little while she became hysterical: “I can’t help crying, Frank love”, she sighed, “I’m so happy, dear! You’ll always love me? Won’t you? sweet!” Naturally I reassured her with promises of enduring affection and many kisses; finally I put my left arm round her neck and so fell asleep with my head on her soft breast. In the morning we ran another course, though sooth to say, Kate was more curious than passionate.

• From The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica Volume 10 (2011)

  “Fimm. Well, don’t think I’m letting you off the hook that easily,” she said with mock sternness. “You never know when Ill be wanting a repeat performance.” 172 { Kristina Wright “Sounds promising.” He retied his tie and adjusted the collar, using the vanity mirror to guide him. “Not that this wasn’t a nice surprise, but when can we spend a little more time together?” “T’ll give you a call later.” Though she was completely satiated, Charlotte couldn’t help but give him a teasing smile. “Tennis tomorrow, maybe? I’Il make you sweat to get me into bed.” “I love a challenge,” he said, leaning over to press a kiss to her forehead before he slipped out of the car. She laughed as she watched him sprint across the parking lot. At some point during their lovemaking, the sun had broken through the clouds and the squirrels had returned to their frolicking. She waited until he was gone from sight before she pulled out of the lot and headed back to the library. She was going to need an energy drink before the day was over. “T need you,” Ian growled. “That’s sweet, but ’m going out with the girls tonight,” Charlotte said as she drove through the heavy downtown traffic. “Remember?” “Ah, right, I forgot it was girls’ night,” Ian said. “I’m on call this weekend, but as long as there isn’t a five-alarm fire, maybe we can do something tomorrow.” Charlotte hesitated. “Well, I told Henry Pd play tennis with him tomorrow. I haven’t seen him in weeks.” “Fine, fine, far be it for me to come between you and your old professor. How is Grampa, anyway?” Charlotte found a parking spot on the street and maneuvered into it one-handed. “Don’t be mean. Henry is barely fifty and he’s in great shape.” “But I want my girl to myself,” Ian said. “I guess ’ll have you on Sunday.” : “Youre a darling,” Charlotte said, and meant it. “Why don’t you stay over tonight? I'll be in late, but I'll wake you when I get home and you can have me then.” “Oh, really,” Ian’s voice reflected his interest. “It’s that time, hmm?” Charlotte checked her lipstick in the vanity mirror and smiled at her reflection. She looked happy. She was happy — and hopeful. “Well, yes, but I'd still want you to stay over.” “Uh-huh,” Tan said, not sounding at all convinced. “Well, then, have a good time with the girls and hurry home.” Perfect Timing 173 Charlotte disconnected and smoothed her skirt before leaving the car. Henry wasn’t the only one who kept a change of clothes at work. She now wore a shimmery silver blouse with a red skirt. Red was ‘Terrence’s favorite color. Melissa and Wendy were already waiting at the bar for her inside the trendy bar Fringe. The décor was disco-chic and Charlotte’s silver blouse glinted in the light reflected by the mirrored tiles embedded in the walls.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  But in another moment she took the lead: “Some one might find us here,” she whispered, “I’ve let the maid go: come up to my bedroom” and she took me upstairs. I begged her to undress: I wanted to see her figure; but she only said, “I have no corsets on, I don’t often wear them in the house. Are you sure you love me, dear?” “You know I do!” was my answer. The next moment I lifted her on to the bed, drew up her clothes, opened her legs and was in her. There was no difficulty and in a moment or two I came; but went right on poking passionately; in a few minutes her breath went and came quickly and her eyes fluttered and she met my thrusts with sighs and nippings of her sex. My second orgasm took some time and all the while Lorna became more and more responsive, till suddenly she put her hands on my bottom and drew me to her forcibly while she moved her sex up and down awkwardly to meet my thrusts with a passion I had hardly imagined. Again and again I came and the longer the play lasted, the wilder was her excitement and delight. She kissed me hotly foraging and thrusting her tongue into my mouth. Finally she pulled up her chemise to get me further into her and at length with little sobs she suddenly got hysterical and panting wildly, burst into a storm of tears. That stopped me: I withdrew my sex and took her in my arms and kissed her; at first she clung to me with choking sighs and streaming eyes, but as soon as she had won a little control, I went to the toilette and brought her a sponge of cold water and bathed her face and gave her some water to drink—that quieted her. But she would not let me leave her even to arrange my clothes. “Oh, you great, strong dear,” she cried, with her arms clasping me, “oh, who would have believed such intense pleasure possible: I never felt anything like it before: how could you keep on so long! Oh, how I love you, you wonder and delight! “I am all yours,” she added gravely, “you shall do what you like with me: I am your mistress, your slave, your plaything and you are my God and my love! Oh, Darling! oh!” There was a pause while I smiled at her extravagant praise, then suddenly she sat up and got out of bed: “You wanted to see my figure”, she exclaimed, “here it is, I can deny you nothing; I only hope it may please you” and in a moment or two she showed herself nude from head to stocking.

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

  Yet in the manic pace of events over the next two or three years, Erasmus’s assertions about marriage proved as much of a hand-grenade lobbed into Europe’s controversies as his growing number of biblical commentaries. Josse Clichthove, a leading theologian in that bastion of traditional theological orthodoxy the University of Paris, went into print in 1522 to reproach him for undermining chastity by his praise of marriage. Erasmus’s reply to Clichthove was pugnacious, and he felt strongly enough to repeat what he had said about marriage and celibacy in a second work of 1526, the Institutio Christiani matrimonii. [13] This was the background conversation behind a swelling tide of clergy marriages, drawing reassuringly not merely on Erasmus’s weaponized arguments, but on the late medieval construction of loving and companionate marriage that tried to model itself on the Holy Family. There were also clerical voices to hear from a more distant past: it was while Luther was rapidly rethinking his former loyalty to Pope and Emperor in the crowded year of 1520 that he rediscovered and realized the importance of the animated little pamphlet of the late eleventh century, Epistola de continentia clericorum (above, Chapter 12). Almost from the moment that Luther’s Wittenberg protest became public in 1517, a handful of northern European priests began taking a momentous step into marriage. The first big name to cross this line in what was becoming the Reformation was a priest far to the south of Wittenberg, Huldrych Zwingli, leading a parallel reformation in the Swiss city of Zürich that was the first component of ‘Reformed’, non-Lutheran, Protestantism. Zwingli’s marriage in 1522 came as relief for his conscience, for he freely admitted that he had never succeeded in remaining celibate in his previous clerical appointments. His wife, Anna Reinhart, remained more in the background of Zwingli’s public ministry than Katharina von Bora, the spirited ex- nun who married Martin Luther three years later, but Anna still deserves honour for her pioneering role in overturning the special status and privilege of clergy upheld by the medieval Western rule on clerical celibacy. [14] It is also interesting that two of Zwingli’s reforming colleagues in Zürich, both important players in his variety of Reformation and also early entrants into marriage, were like Erasmus the illegitimate sons of priests: Leo Jud and Heinrich Bullinger. In the course of their wider work as Reformation leaders, they were righting personal injustices. [15] Clergy who had been more continent than Zwingli compounded their excitement at combating theological untruth in discovering the physical pleasure of marriage: in the case of the forty-two-year-old Martin Luther, with the glee of delayed adolescence, despite the fact that his marriage to the twenty-six- year-old Katharina had at first been a practical expedient to shelter her after her previous marriage arrangement had fallen through.

• From The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica Volume 10 (2011)

  Charley couldn’t bear it any more and swiftly rolled over on top of the very surprised Alice, who laughed out loud. Breathing raggedly, Charley practically growled as he thrust her legs up over his shoulders and buried himself inside her as deeply as he could. Alice’s eyes rolled up as she moaned happily in time with his thrusts. Charley thought his too-white bum must look a sight to that teen’s eyes but he no longer cared, instead panting as his balls slapped against Alice audibly and finally, after what seemed like forever, he could feel himself coming — it seemed to be rising up from his toes — shooting inside Alice’s quivering quim and feeling like roaring aloud to the whole of the city to trumpet the wonderful sensation of it all. He plastered Alice’s face with kisses after releasing her legs. She reached for her bag and fished out a handful of tissues, intent on cleaning them up for a hasty exit. Alice rubbed her crotch with pleasurable vigour and stroked his semi-hard cock with the bedraggled tissues. Charley grinned ruefully. He could be ready to go in another few minutes, he thought with surprise. But they would do well to skedaddle, Charley admitted, clambering to his feet and pulling his pants up. The teen voyeur had departed as far as he could tell. No one yet had come to replace her. “Let’s go to the toilets in the rose garden,” Alice said, taking his hand as they ran laughing back down the corridor. The people they passed must have thought they were drunk or mad, although they doubtless left a whiff of sex in their wake. As he washed his hands in the gents, Charley couldn’t keep himself from grinning. He had seen the raised eyebrow the American had given him after glancing at his grass-stained knees while they stood at the urinals. Rather than embarrassed, Charley felt quite good. In fact, he was hard again just thinking about it. At least he was until he started sneezing. No doubt his hay fever was going to linger, but it was worth it. 302 C. Margery Kempe Alice hadn’t come out so he stood whistling idly outside the ladies. “Charley, that you?” He turned to see Alice’s face framed at the door. “C’mere.” She beckoned with her hand. Charley grinned. Yes, definitely worth taking the afternoon off, he thought, as he walked up to the door to the ladies with a quick backward glance. He was already unzipping his trousers as Alice leaped up and wrapped her legs around him. “More,” she whispered in his ear. Charley would have no trouble complying. She Gleeked Me O'Neil De Noux

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

  families shrieked, wept and rolled on the ground in their sense of transformation, and their delight that someone – not just their Saviour, but the Revd John Wesley – cared about them. Such behaviour was liable to break out repeatedly in Methodist revivals throughout the century, provoking in the increasingly institutionalized Wesleyan leadership a mixture of alarm, embarrassment and delighted wonder at God’s power. [35] Wesley’s answer was to establish an annual ‘Conference’ of his Connexional preachers, meeting under his own direction in various cities and towns through the kingdom. Conference exercised tight central control on these preachers, whose ministry was purposefully itinerant, and who were encouraged to be celibate to make that easier – the whole organization was remarkably like a Protestant version of the Society of Jesus. [36] The awful warning as to where uncontrolled emotional release might go was the crisis that hit the Moravians in the late 1740s in the middle of their transatlantic expansion. [37] This was the Moravian ‘Sifting Time’ – an uninformative label hiding a very considerable trauma that the Church in its denominational history long sought to obscure. Moravian community life and worship were centred on joyful celebration; equally important was their free use of medieval mystical themes that re-emerged in Lutheranism during the seventeenth century, despite the fact that Luther himself had largely rejected them. Moravian concentration on the wounds of Christ produced a great deal of cringe-making reference to his ‘side-hole’, pierced on the cross by the Roman soldier’s spear, but it was a different New Testament theme, the bridal union of Christ and his Church, that fatally excited the rapidly rising emotional temperature. Many activists in the Unitas Fratrum were very young to be placed in positions of leadership. Among them was Count von Zinzendorf’s son Christian Renatus, just out of his teens when made a presbyter in the Church, together with von Zinzendorf’s son-in-law Johannes von Watteville, regarded by many as the major actor in the disaster. Not for the first time in Christian history, many believers framed their perception of Christ’s forgiveness of sins as an absolute gift that included sins still to be committed – an ‘antinomianism’ (freedom from moral law) which was a dangerously logical extension of Martin Luther’s rejection of good works in salvation. They experienced union with Christ not merely through the joys of marriage, but in extramarital sex as well – their stripping-away of gender in mystical joy further extended to same-sex kisses and embraces. Young people plunged with delight into this proof of their freely given salvation. This was a repeat of the mystical promiscuity of Swiss radicals in the 1520s, and it has not proved the last time that new groups of Christians have improvised ethical codes encouraged by leaders with more charisma than self-discipline, threatening institutional and personal collapse. In this case, von Zinzendorf himself belatedly perceived where his own enthusiasms had led his movement.

• From The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica Volume 10 (2011)

  “Yes, yes,” Larry says, as he rises and gets the condom from his jeans pocket. He sits cross-legged as he tears it open and slides it on, sheathing his prick in white. He kisses me again, a soft little kiss, my last kiss as a virgin. I am lying on my back. I spread my legs for him; open them wide into a “V”. He positions himself above me, leaning himself on his elbows to spare me his full weight. I know it is supposed to hurt but I am not prepared for the sharp slice of pain as my maidenhead rips open. “Am I hurting you too much?” he asks. I find myself taking long, deep breaths. “Its okay,” I tell him. He takes it slow and soon it doesn’t hurt much anymore. As he moves inside me, his pelvis rubs against my mound; it is as if he is rubbing my clitoris, sending sweet thrills down. I am getting wetter and wetter, going with him, lifting my hips up, pulling him deeper in. We go faster and faster, our bodies building a fire that gets hotter and hotter.’ Then it happens, the heat between us grows and grows. Our insides melt together and we come in a way we have never come before. I feel the way a shooting star looks as it streaks across the sky. I thought I would hear music like in the romance novels my mother likes to read. I don’t hear any music, not even a violin. Larry is still inside me but his prick is getting smaller. He kisses my eyes, pulls out of me and rolls over on his back. He pulls the Trojan off and puts it in the sand. With his T-shirt he gently wipes between my legs. “Ts there a lot of blood?” I ask. “Nah,” he answers, “hardly any.” But when he puts the shirt back on, there is a long red stripe across the front. “See,” he tells me, “I’m wearing your brand. Want to go for pizza?” “Sure,” I say. When I get home the family has already finished dinner. My mother is clearing the table. “You hungry?” she asks. “No,” I tell her. “I ate pizza with Larry.” She takes a good, long look at me. “All right,” she says but her . expression changes. I can’t read her. That night I am too tired to watch The Ed Sullivan Show with my family. I climb into bed and fall asleep right away. When I wake up, the first rays of faint morning light are rising in the dark sky outside 400 Tsaurah Litzky

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

  The Poor Clares of Villingen in south Germany outclassed most others by enriching their precinct with no fewer than 210 representations of places to visit in Rome and Jerusalem, and a generous papal grant gave them all benefits of indulgences just like a ‘real’ visit to these shrines (they all burst into tears with dutiful pleasure when this grant was read out to them). This was the ultimate tribute to the power of the pilgrimage. [4] Those travelling to the actual scenes of Christ’s life, death and resurrection in Jerusalem and the Holy Land had to face the reality of Muslim rule. From the beginning of the eleventh century, the growing numbers of Western pilgrims provoked rising tension, fuelled by the development of a new land-route through Hungary especially useful for northern Europeans. An unusual flashpoint occurred in 1009 when, in the course of steadily more deranged general behaviour, the Fatimid Caliph al-Hākim ordered the complete destruction of the magnificent Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, built long before in the time of the Emperor Constantine I. Even after Byzantine reconstruction in the 1030s and 1040s, the evidence of al-Hākim’s demolition was still obvious to travellers, and memories of it fed into an increasingly vocal call for revenge and for the Christian sites to be liberated from Muslim rule. [5] Loudest among those voices were monk-historians associated with Cluny’s rebranding of Benedictine life in its own image, Rodolph Glaber (‘the Bald’) and Adémar of Chabannes. They also banged the drum for the cosmic significance of the world turning its millennium of 1000 CE, a chronological detail that may not have excited those beyond Cluny’s influence quite so much. [6] The link of these themes to Cluny was no accident, given its management of pilgrimages to the westernmost extreme of Christendom at Compostela. The shrine of St James the Apostle, now safe from Muslim expansion as Christian armies successfully pushed back Muslim territory in Iberia, was itself a proof that God approved of warfare directed against the Church’s enemies. (In the Americas, where Spain and Portugal forcibly established new empires in the sixteenth century, a thousand years later James the Apostle still doubles as a symbol of the defeat of ‘Moors’ by Iberian Christians, as I have myself observed as a festal processional float passed me in rural Mexico: there was James

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

  A run of military victories for iconoclast emperors had abruptly and humiliatingly ended in the 830s: God’s favour seemed to have deserted the iconoclast cause. As regent for her son Michael III, toddler as well as Emperor, Theodora ordered a new Patriarch hand-picked for his iconophile sympathies to restore the icons to public worship. The occasion of their joyful formal reintroduction to the great church of Hagia Sophia, 11 March 843, was a decision never reversed, and it has always subsequently been celebrated in successor-Churches as the ‘Triumph of Orthodoxy’. It is possible to read this sequence of events simply as a matter of high politics and of the doctrinal statements produced by successive ecclesiastical councils and distinguished theologians (now much weighted to the iconophilic side, thanks to later censorship by the victors). Yet it is no accident that a succession of military men as emperors with strategic considerations in mind favoured the iconoclastic cause, and that two (admittedly ambitious and ruthless) women should successfully defy them and alter the future of Eastern Orthodoxy. It has been plausibly argued that the two sides represent contrasting ways of approaching the mystery of God at the heart of Christian faith, appealing to different constituencies in Byzantine society. Iconophilia became an alliance between women and monks, and the debate was about how to find holiness in this world. [35] It was a theme among iconoclasts that Christians met holiness in the particular situations where the clergy represented the Church to God, primarily in public performance of the Church’s liturgy. No one on either side was going to deny the place of the liturgy in the life of the Church, but it could perfectly well continue in its magnificence in churches without artistic representation of sacred figures. One reason for iconoclasts to reject the holiness of icons was that there was no official provision for a cleric to say a prayer of blessing over them (in the centuries since the Triumph of Orthodoxy, that has been remedied). [36] In terms of art, iconoclasts were content with rich depictions of a plain cross in their churches, some of which survive, and which might call to a soldier’s mind the humiliation brought to Christians by the Muslim seizure of Jerusalem, site of the crucifixion of Jesus and shrine to the miraculously preserved True Cross. Yet the churches and their liturgy were public space, and, by definition, they were therefore primarily male space, both for clergy and for laymen. Iconoclasts laying claim to that public space in their years of success had nothing else to offer those for whom the liturgy might have become impossibly splendid and too remote to satisfy every spiritual need, in churches that might be too crowded for quiet private devotion. That could include men: the traditional story of the Iconoclastic Controversy has been built around male iconophile theologians, of whom the most influential was the much-revered John of Damascus (c.675–c.745).

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

  It is a reminder that the reforming aspirations of a Gregorian persecuting society were complicated by the irrepressibly multiple voices of medieval Western Christendom. PLURAL VOICES IN A UNITED WEST The imaginative hold that the post-Gregorian Papacy and its focused authority enjoyed over Europe was based on its custodianship of the body of the Apostle Peter in Rome in the monumental basilica built by Constantine I, but also on the Church’s custodianship of the memory of Rome and its Empire. A genuinely Roman Emperor still ruled in the known world, but his throne was in the New Rome of Constantinople, and the language of his Church was Greek. The West was united by its use of the Latin language, all the more powerful and all-embracing because nowhere was it now anyone’s birth-tongue. It had to be taught, or absorbed through the Church’s conduct of worship, as much a common language overcoming cultural barriers as English is in modern India. Just because Latin was a language to be learned did not mean that it was not lively and creative, with a range of registers from liturgical to cheerfully scatological and lewd. It was hugely useful, but also hugely entertaining. Possession of it liberated the speaker into joining a wider world of shared experience and memory, which must be one reason why it was embraced with such enthusiasm by both Irish and Anglo-Saxons, whose own languages bore very little relation to its grammar and vocabulary. Fuelling this continent-wide conversation was the increasing circulation and range of ancient Latin texts and Latin translations of Greek texts, throwing European society open to the culture of a Mediterranean world centuries older than Christendom or Christianity itself. Like Carolingian society before it, twelfth-century Europe has been painted in colours borrowed from later centuries, as fostering a ‘Renaissance’ of Classical literature. There was no extensive equivalent in the Greek East, where, at precisely the same time, insecure imperial and ecclesiastical authorities reacted with hostility and repression towards scholars seeking to explore afresh the legacy of Aristotle and Plato in efforts to renew Byzantine society. The contrast between Western and Eastern Christianity thus deepened still further. [38] Western Latin culture was imparted through surprisingly risky teaching materials. Impressionable schoolchildren learned their Latin through that most erotic of Roman poets, Ovid: already in the tenth century the reforming Anglo-Saxon Archbishop of Canterbury Dunstan relaxed from his ecclesiastical labours by annotating his ancient manuscript copy of Ovid’s verse in his own distinctive hand. From the early thirteenth century, one of the most popular school texts in Europe (to judge by surviving manuscripts and vernacular translations) was a brief, newly written, pseudo-Ovidian comedy effectively about rape, entitled Pamphilus, de Amore: were texts like this intended to teach boys how to be men, and girls to be aware of male charm turning into male violence?

• From The Fixed Stars: A Memoir (2020)

  When I told Ash, I could see them flush under the low purple lights. You know I’ve dressed as Justin Bieber for Halloween, they confessed. Three times. Ash pulled up a split-screen picture on their phone: Bieber on the left, Ash-as-Bieber on the right. It was perfect. I cackled, doubled over. We walked to the car with our arms around each other. It was late, but there were lots of bars on this street, and people outside them to smoke. We were safe: this was the gay part of town, the urban gut of Seattle, where bass thumps from the buildings well after midnight. But when we walked down the sidewalk like this, arms draped over our shoulders like scarves, eyes met us with a gaze I wasn’t accustomed to. When I walk down the sidewalk alone, I pass for a straight woman. This is dicey enough: as a straight woman, I rarely feel entirely safe. Company helps, safety in numbers. A female friend can do the job, sort of; a male friend can make me forget myself. But in the company of Ash, I felt as though a sinkhole waited under the asphalt. Does Ash feel this all the time? Is this what it’s like in the gender of their skin? The minute the wrong person sees that Ash is not a man, they’re something even worse than a woman. [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] We went to my house, and at the front door I took their hand and led them down the hall. I switched on the lamp, kissed their upper lip first and then their lower. Ash tugged at my shirt where it knotted in the back. Under their T-shirt they wore a sports bra, and I slid a finger under the elastic in front, up where the skin rose gently, like a foothill, to Ash’s breast. They unfastened their watch, knelt to step out of their jeans. Ash’s breasts were small and neat, like a textbook drawing of breasts, two curves as tidy as the arc of a bow. I’d never felt the length of a woman’s body against me like this, nothing in between. I felt chosen, a woman chosen by a choosy creature, another woman. We were equal. I began to wonder then what we even were, women or just humans, and then I realized I didn’t care enough to finish the thought. We slept all night with our toes touching. [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] Early the next morning Ash appeared beside the bed, standing, and bent close to my face: I loved last night. Thank you. I texted them later. I loved waking up next to you, I said. I felt lucky. Ash replied with two blushing emoji faces. Are we officially dating? they asked. I think so. I hope so, I said. Please? My fingers flew over the keypad. Yes!! they replied.