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 House of Holes: A Book of Raunch (2011)

  Then she drove slowly back on it. A long low guttural cry was hauled out of her. “Fuck me, oh, my god, it’s been too long. Oh, yes.” She bit her lips and felt his hands burning on her back, and then she began to feel a lifting that began at her asshole and swirled and whorled up through her skin and into his hands. “I must use my penis to pry the ink away under my hands,” he said. He drew himself slowly out of her pussy, and then she felt his slickened seedstick slide up over the cleavage of her ass and, directed by her slippery crack, begin bumping against his hands. “I have an opening,” he said. “I’m going to fuck your tattoo free now. Uh. Uh. Fuck it away, uh.” He slid in and out from under his hands. At first she felt nothing, and then suddenly she could detect all the tiny microampules of ink withdrawing themselves from thousands of tiny holes in her skin. “Ahhhhh!” he said, “it stings, it hurts, it’s okay, ouch.” And then he lifted his hands. “Your back is finally nude now.” He held a mirror and she saw. “Oh, baby,” she said and she turned. The butterfly was gone. “I’m so free. I’m so clean.” She held his dick in both her hands and spoke things to it. “You’ve made me new, you lovely dick. I’m going to suck you off, and I’m going to feel you come.” And so she did. She opened her mouth and let all of his big tattooed dick inside, teasing the hole, and then she pulled back and pumped him several times and felt the come splash over her, and then she collapsed in a happy heap of complete artless pubic-hairy bliss. “My tattoo-removing wizard, how can I thank you?” “Just tell people: Stop hiding, stop disguising, be naked for once. Be hairy down in the punany.” He took her to Lila’s office. “All gone?” asked Lila. “Gone,” said Jessica. “But so are my feelings for the artist, I’m afraid. He didn’t want to paint me the way I really looked, and that bothers me. I really want to see more of Hax.” “Well, that’s unfortunate, because Bosco paid for your tattoo removal by having a voluntary head detachment.” “That’s not good.” “He reveres you, but his head is, for the moment, physically separated from his body.” “Oh, dear,” said Jessica. “How awful for him.” Wade Presses the Sex Now Button and Koizumi Visits Wade woke up in his hotel room and pressed W, for woman, on the Sex Now button of his remote control. Then he dozed off.

• From House of Holes: A Book of Raunch (2011)

  “No, you absolutely cannot fuck me, no,” she said. “But you can fuck my field. Stuff a bit of the blanket down that mole hole and then put your big cock in it. I want to watch your assbuns clench. Drive your cock into my field. Root yourself. I need to show you my whole pussy now. You want to see it?” She scooted so that Dave’s face, when he arched his neck up, was inches from her cuntgash. He listened to the luscious squelching at close range as she pulled the folds away from her clit. He closed and opened his eyes, and each time he opened them her succulent stovetop filled his vision, being stretched one way and another by her questing and well-practiced fingers. Supporting himself on his one arm, he guided his dick into the prickly wool of the blanket. He sank in deep. “I’m fucking the hole,” Dave said, and he saw her gaze travel to his assclenching maximus cheeks. She said, “Here’s all of me, Dave, nurse on my big clit so I can come.” He smelled her radiating vadge, and then, opening his soft lips, he slopped and slobbered his whole face into her pussy. He rolled his eyes up to look at her. Her head was thrown back. She was feeling good. He smiled into her pussy and then took a breath. “Look up at these great clouds,” he said, “while I suck your pussy and fuck the planet earth.” Chilli breathed. “I love this,” she said. She looked down at Dave’s mouth at her lettuce patch and watched his tongue do its wonderful work. “Edge us as close as you can, loverman.” Dave said, “Gluddle-luddle-luddle-luddle-luddle-luddle-luddle, mmmm.” “Take it out of the earth and milk your huge cock off for me. I want to see it. Please milk it off.” Dave pulled out of the crumbling earth hole and knelt close to her. “Here you go, sweet woman,” he said. “Haaahh!” Five days’ worth of sperm flowered out all over her stomach and breasts. “Now me,” Chilli said. “Jab that wicked tongue back inside me—that’s the way.” She held his head and moved her cuntal hand in slow connoisseurial ovals, and then, making her fingers rigid, she DJ’d herself, as if her clit was a scratch record. “Nnnnn, nnnn,” she said, frowning down at her frigging self. Her hips lifted off the blanket. “Oh, that’s good! Oh, shit, Dave, I’m a pornstar! Oh, juice it, juice it, I’M COMING!” [image "decoration" file=image_rsrc2SW.jpg] Ned Undergoes a Voluntary Head Detachment [image "decoration" file=image_rsrc2SX.jpg] Ned the golfer had incurred terrible debts at the House of Holes, and he was called into the main office. “Let’s see your body, please,” said Lila. Ned removed his shirt and pants. “Very nice,” she said. “And the underpants, please.” He stepped out of them with a smile, his jig swaying. She looked at him for a long time, tapping a pen on the arm of her chair.

• From House of Holes: A Book of Raunch (2011)

  “Is it toxic?” asked Henriette. “It’s inert,” said Krock. “But still, I wouldn’t drink it if I were you. It’s just there to make the bottom half of your body feel good.” Henriette nodded. “I’m ready. Thanks for the lovely date, Ned. It gave me a new perspective.” “My pleasure,” said Ned. “I’m glad you got to see the zebras.” Krock tightened a final strap on Henriette’s harness. “So—are you ready to feel some deep lake love on your pussy?” he asked. Henriette swallowed and nodded. There was a whir and a clunk and she was airborne, sitting on a small U-shaped fiberglass support, sliding down the long curving cable. She went fairly fast at first, her skirt fluttering. The air was warm, and the sky was a startling blue, and she said, “Wheee!” She swerved around a pylon tower and then turned down into the mountain valley, in the midst of which stretched an enormous white lake. She could see several other cables that swept down toward the lake, and she watched the other pussysurfers slow just before touchdown. She dipped down the last length of the incline and swooshed and splashed and slowed on a level liquid plain of dazzling white. The lake was warmer than she expected. It had the consistency of hand lotion but with tiny gold flecks. The lucky liquids burbled and creamed over her hydroplaning vulva and, as she slowed, churned purposefully over her clitoris. Then the harness lifted her back in the air for a moment and swung her dripping in a long laughing kicky hemicurve past the pontooned restaurant with blue tablecloths and waiters wearing white tuxedo vests. All at once, out of the lake rose a hugely gigantic phallocentric dick-shaped monster cock. It stood for a moment, thirty feet in the air, and then toppled with an enormous splash and disappeared into the white water. A group of about twenty Deprivos were following Henriette’s progress with binoculars. They gestured entreatingly—down here, down here! She landed in their midst and climbed out of the harness, dripping. She knelt, breathing the rich air, feeling better than she had in months, listening to the rustle of stroking men around her. “Come all over me, guys,” she said. One man jizzed on her cheek, another on her shirt, two on her lips, one on her nose, one on her shoulder, and another—a cute guy with blond spiky hair—came politely into her cupped hand. Krock appeared with a towel. “How are you?” he asked. “How am I? I’m a jizm-covered princess, and I’ve just pussysurfed the lake!” she said, laughing and crying at the same time. She went to her room and had a shower and slept for hours, feeling her revived clit glowing like a summer firefly. [image "decoration" file=image_rsrc2SW.jpg] Dennis Explores Mindy’s Purse

• From House of Holes: A Book of Raunch (2011)

  Suddenly, Glenn’s orgasm slammed into gear, and he threw the first hot clot of a busted nutload of jizzling twizzlering sperm up inside her. Shandee let out a ragged joyous screamy cry of pure consummated cockfuckedfulness. Then she said to Dave, “Dave, I’m ready to tug you off onto my lips. Come on these lips, these Terranova lips that will always be true to you.” She saw his eyes meet hers and felt both his hands—the one she knew and the one she didn’t—hold her head. She said, “I’m going to jack off your beautiful real Dave cock onto my face now—oh, my god, it’s never been this good.” And suddenly Dave bucked in her hands, and she felt a Tuileries Garden of manly Dave-jizm leap onto her forehead and then again on her cheek and her neck. She was dripping with one perfect man’s cockjuice, and she loved it so much that when Glenn touched her clit with his thumb she wonked down full force on his restored dickitude, and that was enough to start the Atlas-shrug shudderation of arrival that made her shiver her way through the seven, eight, nine, twelve seconds of worldwide interplanetary flux of orgasmic strobing happy unmatched tired coughing ebbing thrilled spent ecstasy. [image "decoration" file=image_rsrc2SW.jpg] Lila Says It’s Almost Time to Go [image "decoration" file=image_rsrc2SX.jpg] Lila stood on the dais, her arms raised. “Thank you all for coming,” she said. “I hope you’ll be back next year.” A deep foaming whirlpool had formed in the middle of the White Lake. Some of the guests were beginning to paddle their boats toward it. It was the group exit portal, and it made a distant roaring sound. “One last event, though,” Lila said. “Cardell, are you here? Will you please come up?” Cardell leapt the three steps up to the stage. “Is that an egg in your pocket, hon?” “Yes, it is, as a matter of fact,” Cardell said. “A silver egg. From my friend Jackie.” He handed it to Lila, who set it down on a folded washcloth. “Now let’s let it hatch,” said Lila. “The egg of love, ladies and gentlemen. Farewell.” [image "decoration" file=image_rsrc2SW.jpg] The Silver Egg Hatches [image "decoration" file=image_rsrc2SX.jpg] Gallanos woke up curled in what he later found out was a small egg made of silver. Around him was a woman. Their heads were sometimes at opposite ends of the egg, and sometimes they stared at each other, blinking their silver luminous eyes. They floated in a shadowy fluid. They drank it, they breathed it. Their bodies were dull silver. Gallanos seemed to have forgotten how to talk. He re-membered that he’d had a former life—that there was a space for him somewhere that wasn’t a silver person sharing an egg, but he had no details. He couldn’t recollect what had happened.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  So saying, he embraced her and kissed her; then, rising up, he betook himself with Griselda, who wept for joy, whereas the daughter, hearing these things, sat all stupefied, and tenderly embracing her and her brother, undeceived her and many others who were there. Thereupon the ladies arose from table, overjoyed, and withdrew with Griselda into a chamber, where, with happier augury, pulling off her mean attire, they clad her anew in a magnificent dress of her own and brought her again to the saloon, as a gentlewoman, which indeed she appeared, even in rags. There she rejoiced in her children with wonder-great joy, and all being overjoyed at this happy issue, they redoubled in feasting and merrymaking and prolonged the festivities several days, accounting Gualtieri a very wise man, albeit they held the trials which he had made of his lady overharsh, nay, intolerable; but over all they held Griselda most sage. The Count of Panago returned, after some days, to Bologna, and Gualtieri, taking Giannucolo from his labour, placed him in such estate as befitted his father-in-law, so that he lived in honour and great solace and so ended his days; whilst he himself, having nobly married his daughter, lived long and happily with Griselda, honouring her as most might be. What more can here be said save that even in poor cottages there rain down divine spirits from heaven, like as in princely palaces there be those who were worthier to tend swine than to have lordship over men? Who but Griselda could, with a countenance, not only dry,[483] but cheerful, have endured the barbarous and unheard proofs made by Gualtieri? Which latter had not belike been ill requited, had he happened upon one who, when he turned her out of doors in her shift, had let jumble her furbelows of another to such purpose that a fine gown had come of it." [Footnote 483: _i.e._ unwetted with tears.] * * * * *

• From Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982)

  It was in Mexico City those first few weeks that I started to break my life-long habit of looking down at my feet as I walked along the street. There was always so much to see, and so many interesting and open faces to read, that I practiced holding my head up as I walked, and the sun felt hot and good on my face. Wherever I went, there were brown faces of every hue meeting mine, and seeing my own color reflected upon the streets in such great numbers was an affirmation for me that was brand-new and very exciting. I had never felt visible before, nor even known I lacked it. I had not made any friends in Mexico City, although I existed quite happily on part-English, part-Spanish conversations with the chambermaid about the weather, my clothes, and the bidet; with the señora from whom I bought my daily evening meal of two hot tamales wrapped in cornhusks and a bottle of blue-labeled milk; and with the day clerk of the small second-class hotel where I had my tiny room. At the end of my first week, I went out to the new bemuraled University City and registered for two courses in the history and ethnology of Mexico, and in folklore. I began to think of looking around for cheaper and more permanent living accommodations. Even with eating inexpensive foods bought from street vendors, not being able to cook was cutting into my small store of money. It also restricted my diet greatly, since I ate only those foods I could be sure would not give me the diarrhea which was the visitors’ downfall in Mexico City. One day, after two weeks in and around the District, I traveled south to Cuernavaca by bus to see Frieda Mathews and her young daughter Tammy. Frieda’s name had been given to me by a friend of Rhea’s who had been a nurse with Frieda in the Lincoln Brigade during the Spanish Civil War. I had been visiting museums and pyramids, wandering the streets of the city, and generally satisfying my hunger and curiosity for the feel of this new place. Although I was feeling more and more at home, I began to feel the need for someone to talk to in English. Classes at Ciudad Universitaria began the following week. Cuernavaca was a garden spot south of the District and closer to sea level, in the Morelos Valley about forty-five miles from Mexico City. When I telephoned, Frieda greeted me warmly and immediately invited me down to Cuernavaca to spend the day.

• From Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982)

  Gennie lived with her mother in a one-bedroom kitchenette apartment on 119th Street between Eighth and Morningside Avenues. Gennie had the bedroom, and her mother, Louisa, slept on a wide couch in the living room. Louisa went to work every day. I woke Gennie up whatever time I came over, cutting summer school, and we spent the next few hours deciding what she would wear, and who we were going to be for the world on that particular day. If we did not have something suitable, we stitched and pinned an assortment of wide skirts and kerchiefs into place. Since Gennie was slimmer than I, we often had to alter things on the spot to fit me, but always in such a way that it could be easily restored. We took hours and hours attiring each other, sometimes changing entire outfits at the last minute to become two different people, complimenting each other always. We blossomed forth, finally, after hours of tacking and pinning and last-minute ironing-board decisions. That summer all of New York, including its museums and parks and avenues, was our backyard. What we wanted and couldn’t afford, we stole money from our mothers for. Bandits, Gypsies, Foreigners of all degree, Witches, Whores, and Mexican Princesses—there were appropriate costumes for every role, and appropriate places in the city to go to play them all out. There were always things to do to match whomever we decided to be. When we decided to be workers, we wore loose pants and packed our shoe-dyed lunchboxes, and tied red bandannas around our throats. We rode up and down Fifth Avenue on the old open double-decker omnibuses, shouting and singing union songs at the tops of our lungs. Solidarity foreverrrrr, the Union makes us strong! When the unions’ inspiration through the workers’ blood shall run… When we decided to be hussies we wore tight skirts and high heels that hurt, and followed handsome respectable-looking lawyer types down Fifth and Park Avenues, making what we thought were salacious worldly comments about their anatomies, in loud voices. “What a beautiful behind he has.” “I bet he sleeps bare-angle.” That was a Hunter euphenism for naked. “He’s pretending not to hear us, foolish boy.” “No, he’s just too embarrassed to turn around.” When we were African we wrapped our heads in gaily printed skirts and talked our own made-up language in the subway on our way down to the Village. When we were Mexican, we wore full skirts and peasant blouses and huaraches and ate tacos, which we bought at a little stall in front of Fred Leighton’s on MacDougal Street. Once, we exchanged the word “fucker” for “mother” in a whole day’s conversation, and got put off the Number 5 bus by an irate driver.

• From The City of God

  331 Lecture 16—The Two Cities and the Two Loves (Book 14) emotions and their different judgments about the right affective orientation to take toward the world. „Christians can know they are mistaken from an entirely different authority than philosophical argument—the example of scripture. Jesus is represented as being profoundly moved in episodes in his life; and of course he suffers the Passion, the ultimate experience of the world affecting him. „Paul, too, exemplifies the good human life, and in doing so exhibits the full emotional range, from the deepest despair to the heights of exultation and joy. All of them are good, for Paul’s emotions are ordered to the glory of God, not his own anxious self-interest; his fear, his jealousy, his anger are all holy emotions. „Augustine’s critique of the Stoics tacitly answers a fundamental question: What does proper human life look like? ›Proper life, he says, was undisturbed love and gladness and a smooth and easy emotional life marked by happiness, tranquility, gratitude, and awe—before the Fall. ›There were no negative emotions because there were no evils to prompt such emotions, no sources of suffering or pain outside the self, and no incoherence or rebellion within it. „The instability and constant flux of our emotional life is due to our rebellion against God. But the punishment is not the affections themselves, only the anarchic way they course through our everyday life. „We have to come to know ourselves as distinct from ourselves in a way. That splitting, that incoherence: that is sin. Grief and fear and pain arise directly from our bad judgments and actions and indirectly from the disordered relations between the soul and the body. The punishment, then, fits the crime perfectly.

• From Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982)

  I brought out all my Mexican rugs and rebozos , and decorated the walls and the chairs and the couch with bright colors. The house looked and smelled holiday happy. That night, I announced that I had made up my mind to register for college at night in the spring term. Muriel and I kept Christmas on Christmas Eve, such keeping as we did. We exchanged our presents, grumbled a lot, and prepared to go our separate families’ ways the next day. We wrapped their presents, and worried about what we could wear home that would not be too uncomfortable, yet appropriate enough to forestall questions and comments. On Christmas Day, with many kisses and long goodbyes, Muriel went to Stamford and I went up to the Bronx to my sister Phyllis’s home to have dinner with her and Henry and the children, along with my mother and Helen. Phyllis had a family and a real house, not an apartment, so it was tacitly agreed that she keep Christmas. It relieved me of another direct confrontation with my mother’s house, and gave me a chance to enjoy my two nieces, whom I loved but did not often see. I made a big project of inviting them down to Seventh Street afterward, but they never came. Christmas we gave to our families; New Year’s we kept for ourselves. They were two separate worlds. My family knew that I had a roommate named Muriel. That was about all. My mother had met Muriel, and as usual, since I had left her house, knew it was wise to make no comment about my personal life. But my mother could make “no comment” more loudly and with more hostility than anyone else I knew. Muriel and I had been to Phyllis’s house for dinner once, and whatever Phyllis and Henry thought about our relationship, they kept it to themselves. In general, my family only allowed themselves to know whatever it was they cared to know, and I did not push them as long as they left me alone. On New Year’s Eve, Muriel and I went to a party at Nicky and Joan’s house. They lived in a brownstone in the eighties near Broadway. Nicky was a writer who worked on a fashion newspaper and Joan was a secretary at Metropolitan Life. Nicky was tiny and tight; Joan was lean and beautiful, with dark spaniel eyes. Unlike Muriel and I, they looked very proper and elegant in their straight clothes, and for that reason, and because they lived so far uptown, it felt like they lived a far more conventional life than we did. In some ways, this was true, for Nicky in particular.

• From House of Holes: A Book of Raunch (2011)

  When she got home that afternoon, she washed the hand carefully in the sink and then took him back to her room and dimmed the lights and put on Appleseed’s “When Are We Going (to Do It).” She said, “I’m ready for you to hold me now, any way you want.” His hand brushed over her lips—she was wearing Terranova again—and she opened her mouth and tasted his fingers, and he circled her tongue and tweaked it, and then as she steadied him he crawled down. She put her feet together and let her knees fall open. His hand found her stash and she looked down and saw his fingers half buried in her folds, and then she felt a warm filling feeling as first one, then two of Dave’s fingers slid inside. She held his arm and helped him angle his fingers in and then pull them out. Then she pulled him up to her clitty and he circled it. “Oh, that’s nice,” she said. Just before she came, he stopped and held his hand up to her mouth. “What is it, baby?” she asked. His fingers made the O and then he pushed the O shape to her mouth. She put her tongue through it, and her mind and neck and body stretched until they were very long and flowed through his fingers, and then his fingers flowed with her. She was pulled in a whoosh of wispiness, and she landed and condensed. Before her was a sign in the grass: “Welcome to the House of Holes.” She looked down at her hands. They were still holding Dave’s arm. [image "decoration" file=image_rsrc2SW.jpg] Ned Gets Sniffed [image "decoration" file=image_rsrc2SX.jpg] Ned tapped the ball on the seventh green, using his new teryllium putter. It made an odd tight circle around the hole and then dropped in. “Did you see that weirdness?” said Ned, looking around for his golfer friends. But they were talking and hadn’t seen it. No matter. Ned leaned to pull out the ball and heard strange sounds coming from the hole. He got down on his stomach to listen better. A woman’s voice said, “Hi, Ned, my name is Tendresse. Come talk to me at the House of Holes.”

• From House of Holes: A Book of Raunch (2011)

  This dick! This dick! How can you possibly give up this massive dick, it feels so fucking full in my cunt canal, aaaaaaaaaaaaah, shit, shit, oh, shit, Glenn, unbelievable!” She caught her breath for a moment and looked around the room. Daggett, balls a-waggle, was slamming himself into Lanasha, and Jason was doing Zilka. Betsy had her legs hooched and the beardwater sprayer-wand up her ass and was jiggling it lasciviously. Suddenly, Glenn’s orgasm slammed into gear, and he threw the first hot clot of a busted nutload of jizzling twizzlering sperm up inside her. Shandee let out a ragged joyous screamy cry of pure consummated cockfuckedfulness. Then she said to Dave, “Dave, I’m ready to tug you off onto my lips. Come on these lips, these Terranova lips that will always be true to you.” She saw his eyes meet hers and felt both his hands—the one she knew and the one she didn’t—hold her head. She said, “I’m going to jack off your beautiful real Dave cock onto my face now—oh, my god, it’s never been this good.” And suddenly Dave bucked in her hands, and she felt a Tuileries Garden of manly Dave-jizm leap onto her forehead and then again on her cheek and her neck. She was dripping with one perfect man’s cockjuice, and she loved it so much that when Glenn touched her clit with his thumb she wonked down full force on his restored dickitude, and that was enough to start the Atlas-shrug shudderation of arrival that made her shiver her way through the seven, eight, nine, twelve seconds of worldwide interplanetary flux of orgasmic strobing happy unmatched tired coughing ebbing thrilled spent ecstasy. Lila Says It’s Almost Time to Go Lila stood on the dais, her arms raised. “Thank you all for coming,” she said. “I hope you’ll be back next year.” A deep foaming whirlpool had formed in the middle of the White Lake. Some of the guests were beginning to paddle their boats toward it. It was the group exit portal, and it made a distant roaring sound. “One last event, though,” Lila said. “Cardell, are you here? Will you please come up?” Cardell leapt the three steps up to the stage. “Is that an egg in your pocket, hon?” “Yes, it is, as a matter of fact,” Cardell said. “A silver egg. From my friend Jackie.” He handed it to Lila, who set it down on a folded washcloth. “Now let’s let it hatch,” said Lila. “The egg of love, ladies and gentlemen. Farewell.” The Silver Egg Hatches Gallanos woke up curled in what he later found out was a small egg made of silver. Around him was a woman. Their heads were sometimes at opposite ends of the egg, and sometimes they stared at each other, blinking their silver luminous eyes. They floated in a shadowy fluid. They drank it, they breathed it.

• From The City of God

  342 Books That Matter: The City of God xylophone, from the deepest despair to the highest heights of exultation and joy. And all of those emotions can be good; and they are good for Paul, for Paul’s emotions are properly ordered to the glory of God, not his own anxious self-interest; his fear, his jealousy, his anger, they are all ordered to God’s ends, and so they are all, Augustine says, holy emotions. Augustine’s critique of the Stoics here tacitly answers a fundamental question. What does proper human life look like? And can we get it back? Proper life, Augustine says, was undisturbed—there’s a kind of quasi-Stoic moment—undisturbed love and gladness, a smooth and easy emotional life—so there is how it’s not Stoic—marked by happiness, tranquility, gratitude and awe. There was no violent turbulence in our soul; Augustine and the Stoics agree with that. We never lost sleep; we never woke up grumpy; we never felt jealous of one another’s successes in Eden. It’s not that we did not feel emotions—and here is the disagreement with the Stoics—but the emotions we had were rightly ordered. They were properly attuned to whatever prompted them in the world. In Eden, our first parents felt grateful awe at the beauty of the created world, and they were uplifted in joy and gratitude when they reflected on God’s expressed purposes in creating them in the divine image and likeness. There were no negative emotions before the Fall since there were no evils to prompt such emotions, no sources of suffering or pain outside the self, and no incoherence or rebellion within it, either. But after the Fall, as the example of Paul teaches, such emotions—anger, fear, jealousy—these emotions can be holy, too. Our basic problem is really due to our fall. The instability and constant flux of our emotional life are due to our rebellion against God. But the punishment is not the affections themselves, but only the anarchic way that they course through us, they surge through our everyday life. We have to come to know ourselves as other people, as distinct from

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

  AUGUSTINE. (de Con. Ev. lib. iii. c. 25.) For they walked not with their eyes shut, but there was something within them which did not permit them to know that which they saw, which a mist, darkness, or some kind of moisture, frequently occasions. Not that the Lord was not able to transform His flesh that it should be really a different form from that which they were accustomed to behold; since in truth also before His passion, He was transfigured in the mount, so that His face was bright as the sun. But it was not so now. For we do not unfitly take this obstacle in the sight to have been caused by Satan, that Jesus might not be known. But still it was so permitted by Christ up to the sacrament of the bread, that by partaking of the unity of His body, the obstacle of the enemy might be understood to be removed, so that Christ might be known. THEOPHYLACT. But He also implies another thing, that the eyes of those who receive the sacred bread are opened that they should know Christ. For the Lord’s flesh has in it a great and ineffable power. AUGUSTINE. (ut sup.) Or because the Lord feigned as if He would go farther, when He was accompanying the disciples, expounding to them the sacred Scriptures, who knew not whether it was He, what does He mean to imply but that through the duty of hospitality men may arrive at a knowledge of Him; that when He has departed from mankind far above the heavens, He is still with those who perform this duty to His servants. He therefore holds to Christ, that He should not go far from him, whoever being taught in the word communicates in all good things to him who teaches. (Gal. 6:6.) For they were taught in the word when He expounded to them the Scriptures. And because they followed hospitality, Him whom they knew not in the expounding of the Scriptures, they know in the breaking of bread. For not the hearers of the law are just before God, but the doers of the law shall be justified. (Rom. 2:13.) GREGORY. (ut sup.) Whoever then wishes to understand what he has heard, let him hasten to fulfil in work what he can now understand. Behold the Lord was not known when He was speaking, and He vouchsafed to be known when He is eating. It follows, And he vanished out of their sight. THEOPHYLACT. For He had not such a body as that He was able to abide longer with them, that thereby likewise He might increase their affections. And they said one to another, Did not our hearts burn, within us while he talked with us by the way, and while he opened to us the scriptures? ORIGEN. By which is implied, that the words uttered by the Saviour inflamed the hearts of the hearers to the love of God.

• From Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953)

  Then, in silence, they came to the wide crossing where the tramline ran. A lean cat stalked the gutter and fled as they approached; turned to watch them, with yellow, malevolent eyes, from the ambush of a dustbin. A grey bird flew above them, above the electric wires for the tram line, and perched on the metal cornice of a roof. Then, far down the avenue, they heard a siren, and the clanging of a bell, and looked up to see the ambulance speed past them on the way to the hospital that was near the church. ‘Another soul struck down,’ murmured Sister McCandless. ‘Lord have mercy.’ ‘He said in the last days evil would abound,’ said Sister Price. ‘Well, yes, He did say it,’ said Praying Mother Washington, ‘and I’m so glad He told us He wouldn’t leave us comfortless.’ ‘When ye see all these things, know that your salvation is at hand,’ said Sister McCandless. ‘A thousand shall fall at thy side, and ten thousand at thy right hand—but it ain’t going to come nigh thee. So glad, amen, this morning, bless my Redeemer.’ ‘You remember that day when you come into the store? ’ ‘I didn’t think you never looked at me. ’ ‘Well — you was mighty pretty. ’ ‘Didn’t little Johnny never say nothing,’ asked Praying Mother Washington, ‘to make you think the Lord was working in his heart?’ ‘He always kind of quiet,’ said Elizabeth. ‘He don’t say much.’ ‘No,’ said Sister McCandless, ‘he ain’t like all these rough young ones nowadays— he got some respect for his elders. You done raised him mighty well, Sister Grimes.’ ‘It was his birthday yesterday,’ Elizabeth said. ‘No!’ cried Sister Price. ‘How old he got to be yesterday?’ ‘He done made fourteen,’ she said. ‘You hear that?’ said Sister Price, with wonder. ‘The Lord done saved that boy’s soul on his birthday!’ ‘Well, he got two birthdays now,’ smiled Sister McCandless, ‘just like he got two brothers—one in the flesh, and one in the Spirit.’ ‘Amen, bless the Lord!’ cried Praying Mother Washington. ‘What book was it, Richard? ’ ‘Oh, I don’t remember. Just a book. ’ ‘You smiled. ’ ‘You was mighty pretty. ’ She took her sodden handkerchief out of her bag, and dried her eyes; and dried her eyes again, looking down the avenue. ‘Yes,’ said Sister Price, gently, ‘you just thank the Lord. You just let the tears fall.

• From The City of God

  465 Heaven: The Self Redeemed (Book 22) A nd so at last—and after our recent quick trip to Hell it couldn’t come more welcomely—we come to Augustine’s account of heaven, his vision of the final fulfilled state of the human, of Creation, and the full realization of God. Here Augustine offers to tell us as much as we can know now about this final state to which all creation tends, and for which it longs. What does the blessed state of the saved look like at the end of time? What does seeing God amount to? What exactly do the blessed do in heaven? And when the blessed are resurrected, are the scars and marks that they suffered in life entirely erased from their bodies? What, if anything, happens in heaven? What is the nature of the human condition there? And is the eschatological Kingdom of God fundamentally a restoration of Eden, or something else altogether? And finally, what do the answers to all these questions tell us about Christian life in this world today? In answering these questions, Augustine is using them to expose and explore one of the deepest, if not the deepest, puzzle of Christian theology, the question of the tension between now and then, here and there, earth and heaven. Note that he does not think, as many Christians seem to do today, that the full and final state of heaven begins right after the individual died. Augustine would probably see that as deeply mistaken. For him, our individual demises, as dramatic as they might seem to us, are in no way the same thing as the Kingdom of God. The state in which the blessed subsist as dead is not the full state of ecstatic joy promised to the blessed in paradise; it’s rather a vague and vaguely pleasant Lecture 22 Transcript

• From The City of God

  463 Lecture 22—Heaven: The Self Redeemed (Book 22) › After the grace of Christ has been received it becomes possible for humans not to sin. ›After the Second Coming, when history has reached its end and the souls of the blessed rest with all the company of heaven in perfect love of God, human wills will be strengthened in such a way that it is no longer possible for humans to sin. „The blessed will be fully liberated from the slavery to sin to which all humans are manifestly captive. That enslavement splits the will and thereby sunders our integrity. When we are liberated, the singular goodness of God will not simply be the primary good—it will be the obvious good. „Augustine draws a picture of idealized agency where the center is not a wide range of options, but no options at all—human agency whose flourishing lies wholly in the complete and unimpeded engagement of the whole person in the dynamic joy of paradise. For him, true, fully achieved human agency is one where “choice” plays no role, where one is wholly and willingly engaged—but where one seems to have no choice. „To characterize this end in a more straightforwardly positive way Augustine offers a powerful single sentence that sums up so much of his eschatological imagination: “There we shall rest and see, see and love, love and praise. Behold, this is what shall be in the end without end. For what other end is there for us, but to arrive at the kingdom which has no end?” „Augustine’s claim that eternity is being co-present to all moments of time offers some comfort. If that is the case, each instant of life is ultimately no less real than every other instant. That means that Augustine knows well the Beatitude, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” 464 Books That Matter: The City of God redemption, when it happens, happens to every instant. It’s not that the course of one’s life is a runway and the soul lifts off like an airplane at the moment of death; but that the whole course of your life is gathered into God each and every moment. Questions to Consider 1. Is t he eschatological kingdom of God fundamentally a restoration of Eden or something else altogether for Augustine? What does the answer tell us about Christian life in our world today? 2. What does August ine think are the four stages of human freedom? Why are they ordered in this way? Do you think this account of freedom makes sense? 3. What does seeing God amount to, for August ine? 4. What does a r esurrected body look like? If I have a scar on my knee from arthroscopic surgery, is it still there in my resurrected flesh?

• From Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982)

  And Rhea turned back to the dishes, shaking her head, trying to find some correlation between my loving Muriel and her own painful love affairs. She did not dare to see the similarities and so she could not see the differences. And the words were never spoken. I was too chicken to come right out and say, “Hey, look, Rhea, Muriel and I are lovers.” Rhea could not bear the heartbreak of her affair with Art, and began to make plans to move to Chicago later in the spring. The idea that I would soon have the apartment all to myself delighted me. I made up my mind that I would never live with anyone else again, unless we were lovers. Muriel and I were beginning to envision the world together. I didn’t know how I was going to bring my personal and political visions together, but I knew it had to be possible because I felt them both too strongly, and knew how much I needed them both to survive. I did not agree with Rhea and her progressive friends when they said that this was not what the revolution was about. Any world which did not have a place for me loving women was not a world in which I wanted to live, nor one which I could fight for. One Friday night, Muriel and I spent the evening making love on my studio couch in the middle room of the apartment. Dusk crept away from the window on the air shaft and night came in. We were just resting briefly when we heard Rhea’s key in the front door in the kitchen. Muriel and I lay curled into each other’s arms on the now-familiar single couch. Without moving much, we simply pulled the covers up over us, closed our eyes, and pretended to be asleep. We heard Rhea come into the kitchen and turn on the light. I could feel the glow of the sudden brightness from the room next door as it shined through the arched doorway and along the floor of my room, parallel to where the two of us lay. Rhea entered, proceeding across my room to hers at the front of the house. Her footsteps stopped beside the bed where Muriel and I were, our eyes squeezed shut like children. She stood there for a moment looking down at our supposedly sleeping figures under the covers entwined within the narrow space, lit by the dim reflected light from the kitchen. And then, without warning, Rhea burst into tears. She stood over us sobbing wildly as if her heart was being broken by what she saw. She wept over us for at least two minutes while we both lay there, our arms around each other and our eyes closed tightly.

• From House of Holes: A Book of Raunch (2011)

  The cock shape grew longer and pushed into her, and then the whole tree seemed to branch into her core and out her arms and legs and lift her far above the earth. “Hold on!” called Jason, as she was swept up on a high bough impaled on old boreal growth. She looked out from her high-splayed vantage, and she said, “I’m a treefucking woman!” Dappled sunlight shone and emptied itself onto her. She squeezed her Kegeling love muscle around the smooth, thickened branch within, and when the wind came up again all the leaves twittered and shook. The tree itself shuddered: It was having some kind of orgasm. The new growth of penisbranches fell off. Panting and quivering, Luna climbed down. Jason hugged her, then gathered the fallen branches. “I’ll polish and stain these tomorrow,” he said. “Dendro dildos?” “Yes, inspired by you.” “Can I come back and get one?” “Please do,” said Jason. “I’ll make a salad for you.” Henriette Goes for a Wal k H enriette decided to take her new extra-big ass on a walk to the noisy quay where the Masturboats docked. She wanted to feed the gulls and see what was up. First she got in the shower to wash herself so that she could be clean all day and the world wouldn’t know what a totally freaky, filthy-minded, cocksucking whore of a princess she actually was. She washed her hair and her face and her body, and last of all she washed her pussy and her huge deep asscrack. Her pussy she washed by holding it spread open with her right hand and splashing water up at it a bunch of times, and her asscrack she washed by jamming the cold soap between her pleasantly joggling cheeks and working it around a few times. Washing the asscrack wasn’t really that difficult; rinsing was trickier. Soap could burn later if you didn’t rinse every bit of it away, Henriette knew from experience—burn like a bastard—and you couldn’t just rely on the water that was coursing down your back to do the job . So Henriette employed what she thought of as the Aswan Dam method. She cupped her left hand in the shape of a C, and then she pressed this C below her anus, but before her pussyhole, in the no-man’s-land known as the perineum, which is a word that comes from the Greek word for “pine barrens.” She cupped her left hand there and made a seal against her asscheeks so that the water as it coursed down her back would be caught in this temporary well or spillway that she had created. She had in effect dammed her ass temporarily. When her hand was full she began agitating it, still keeping the seal intact—steadily slooshing the water in waves against her anus for ten seconds or so.

• From Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982)

  I then pass into another room of my parents’ home—their bedroom, the room in which I am now asleep. It is dark and silent. There is a watermelon shaped like an egg on the bureau. I lift the fruit up and it drops down upon the linoleum floor. The melon splits open, and at the core is a brilliant hunk of turquoise, glowing. I see it as a promise of help coming for me . Rhea is asleep, still, in my parents’ large bed. She is in great danger. I must save her from the great and nameless evil in this house, left here by the hickory-faced devils. I take her hand. It is white and milky in the half-dark . And then suddenly I realize that in this house of my childhood I am no longer welcome. Everything is hostile to me. The doors refuse to open. The glass cracks when I touch it. Even the bureau drawers creak and stick when I try to close them. The light bulbs blow out when I switch on the light. The can-opener won’t turn; the eggbeater jams mysteriously . This is no longer my home; it is only of a past time . Once I realize this, I am suddenly free to go, and to take Rhea with me . Zami: A New Spelling of My Name: A Biomythography 26 In March, I got a job as a library clerk in the New York Public Library Children’s Services, and I was truly delighted. Not only was I relieved to be making money again, but I loved libraries and books, and was so pleased to be able to do work which I enjoyed. Muriel and I saw each other as often as we could now, and we began to discuss her coming back to New York to live. When she was animated, with her tousled dark hair and her round monkish head, Muriel reminded me of a chrysanthemum, always slightly bent over upon itself. She talked incessantly about her “sickness” of the years before, and about what being schizophrenic meant. I listened but did not know enough to realize that, out of her love, she was also warning me. On the few occasions that we smoked reefer together, she waxed most eloquent and I was most open. “Electric shock treatments are like little deaths,” Muriel said, reaching across me for the ashtray. “They broke into my head like thieves with official sanction and robbed me of something precious that feels like it’s gone forever.” Sometimes she sounded angry, and sometimes she sounded curiously flat, but however she sounded it made my arms ache to hold her.

• From Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982)

  They never spoke as they passed my house on their way to the cars or the pool. I knew one of them had a shop in town called La Señora, which had the most interesting clothes on the Square. “Haven’t you heard, only mad dogs and englishmen go out in the noonday sun?” I shaded my eyes so I could see her better. I was more curious than I had realized. “I don’t burn that easily,” I called back. She was framed in the large casement window, a crooked smile on her half-shaded face. Her voice was strong and pleasant, but with a crack in it that sounded like a cold, or too many cigarettes. “I’m just going to have some coffee. Would you like some?” I stood, picked up the blanket upon which I’d been lying, and accepted her invitation. She was waiting in her doorway. I recognized her as the tall grey-haired woman called La Periodista. “My name’s Eudora,” she said, extending her hand and holding mine firmly for a moment. “And they call you La Chica, you’re here from New York, and you go to the new university.” “Where did you find all that out?” I asked, taken aback. We stepped inside. “It’s my business to find out what goes on,” she laughed easily. “That’s what reporters do. Legitimate gossip.” Eudora’s bright spacious room was comfortable and disheveled. A large easy chair faced the bed upon which she now perched crosslegged, in shorts and polo shirt, smoking, and surrounded by books and newspapers. Maybe it was her direct manner. Maybe it was the openness with which she appraised me as she motioned me towards the chair. Maybe it was the pants, or the informed freedom and authority with which she moved. But from the moment I walked into her house, I knew Eudora was gay, and that was an unexpected and welcome surprise. It made me feel much more at home and relaxed, even though I was still feeling sore and guilty from my fiasco with Bea, but it was refreshing to know I wasn’t alone. “I’ve been drinking for a week,” she said, “and I’m still a little hung-over, so you’ll have to excuse the mess.” I didn’t know what to say. Eudora wanted to know what I was doing in Mexico, young, Black, and with an eye for the ladies, as she put it. That was the second surprise. We shared a good laugh over the elusive cues for mutual recognition among lesbians.