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

  the opportunity arose in 1661–2 to revise Cranmer’s Prayer Book after Charles II’s restoration to the throne and the return of an episcopal Church of England, it is noticeable that one of the few wins that the triumphant bishops allowed Puritans in revising the Prayer Book was to make wedding Communion so optional as to become a dead letter; bishops were clearly not that concerned to defend it. The custom then more or less disappeared, but by then it had produced a cheering architectural consequence in the widespread preservation of medieval chancels in English parish churches, screened off as spaces for wedding Communions as well as Communions for the whole parish two or three times a year (see Plate 25). [54] Out of all this variety came the universal Protestant celebration of marriage and the family as nuanced by the progress of Reformation. Archbishop Cranmer did make one interesting innovation when he put into liturgical form a common sentiment in late medieval discussion of the family, taking it beyond Augustine’s bleak justifications of marriage as fides, proles, sacramentum (above, Chapter 9). From 1549 onwards, England’s wedding service affirmed that a major purpose of marriage was ‘for the mutual society, help, and comfort, that the one ought to have of the other’ – the Scottish First Book of Discipline was clearly in the same frame of mind. Contemporary Catholic sources would not have disagreed, and indeed echoed the idea without giving it liturgical expression. What was different with Protestants was that theologians who overwhelmingly were married were saying this, and not only without a balancing exaltation of celibacy but with every evidence of personal delight. [55] One of the most charming examples comes from mid-seventeenth-century England: Jeremy Taylor, a bishop in the Church of Ireland in the latter years of his ministry. Taylor was one of the first English Protestant theologians whose work represented that distinctive Church of England evolution of a theology consciously negotiating between Protestantism and Catholicism, what would later be called ‘Anglicanism’. Repeatedly the twice-married Taylor revealed his delight in family life: no man can tell but he that loves children, how many delicious accents make a man’s heart dance in the pretty conversation of those dear pledges; their childishness, their stammering, their little angers, their innocence, their imperfections, their necessities, are so many little emanations of joy and comfort to him that delights in their persons and society. On another occasion early in his career, Taylor preached a sermon that may have startled a dozing congregation by enthusiastically urging mothers to offer their own ‘exuberant fontinels’ to breastfeed their infants rather than relying on wet-nurses. This was not a sentiment to have enthused St Jerome. [56] THE PAPAL CHURCH: DEFENCE AND RECOVERY The hierarchy of the Western Latin Church took some time to react coherently to the explosion of protest in northern and central Europe following 1517.

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

  Many such foundations were scarcely less magnificent or wealthy than Cluny itself, but, in a radical innovation, from Spain to Scotland, they were only ‘priories’, all dependent on their mother house, which became a centre of what was for the first time called a monastic ‘Order’. The Cluniac Order was Christianity’s pioneering international corporation. That gave a particular usefulness to its elaboration of the monastic silent sign-system (above, Chapter 11), since often Cluniac monks recruited from across the continent would not have understood each other’s birth-language. [1] Cluny’s European-wide vision lay behind a variety of new initiatives in Western Christian life whose connections might otherwise seem puzzling. PILGRIMAGES, CRUSADES, A MILITANT SOCIETY The Compostela route was only part of a growing Western enterprise of mass pilgrimage, new not in character but in scale; it became one of the defining features of Western Latin devotion right up to the sixteenth-century Reformation. This search for holy places and the route to salvation that they might offer was enticingly open to anyone who chose to undertake it (that might include the growing proportion of Europeans who were serfs, or other unfree people, if they could seize or were granted the opportunity). Choice, it is true, was not always part of the package: we have already noted in Chapter 11 that, from the beginning of the new penitential discipline in Ireland or Wales, one penitential possibility was an order to go on pilgrimage to seek the forgiving power of a saint. That became standard in medieval Europe’s repertoire of penance, an early spiritual variant on the modern proposition that travel broadens the mind. [2] Pilgrimage afforded the same opportunities to women as to men, and, despite all the problems that medieval women might face in travel, they took full advantage of it; one estimate of Western pilgrim activity in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries considers that women were almost as numerous as men among those known to have undertaken pilgrimages. Naturally all this activity created its own economy of service industries for support, entertainment and accommodation, besides very considerable financial benefit for the shrine churches themselves. [3] Unusually, the devotional activism of pilgrimage put laypeople on the same footing as clergy during a devotional revolution that in so many ways gave clergy a privileged position in society. Indeed, holy travelling gave laity the advantage over monks and nuns who observed their commitment to sacred enclosure. In the fourteenth century, Geoffrey Chaucer’s pilgrim Prioress did exploit seniority to exempt herself from enclosure for her cheerful journey to Canterbury, but her sisters would have had to make do with journeys of the mind. Accordingly, some late medieval nunneries resourcefully equipped themselves with a series of pictures of goals of pilgrimage for pleasantly profitable contemplation amid their other spiritual amenities.

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

  She must have noticed my blush for she gave me another gummy smile as she picked up the artistically filled bowl and instructed me to follow her into the living room. She carried the bowl high over her head like a temple priestess. “I want you all to meet my new friend, Tristine Rainer.” Anaïs set the bowl of leaves on a table inlaid with Moroccan tiles. “She has brought us poetry from the street!” The four people in the living room exclaimed and clapped. I felt as exalted as when I’d been applauded as the lead in my high school plays. A jowled, sixtyish woman with lacquered bouffant hair intoned in a deep voice, “Street poetry is my kind of poetry.” “This is Caresse Crosby.” Anaïs smiled at me. “She is the founder of Black Sun Press. Caresse, and her deceased husband Harry, published D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Hemingway, and Henry Miller before anyone else would take a chance on them.” I had to keep myself from curtsying. “I’m so honored to meet you!” I followed Anaïs as she glided over to the older and taller of the two men in the room. “And this handsome man is my husband, Hugo Guiler.” She put her arm around his trim waist as he gave her shoulders a squeeze. I said, “But your last name is Nin.” Her laughter tinkled. “Nin is my professional name. My nom de plume.” “Of course.” I flushed over my naiveté. With the soulful mien and aristocratic bearing of a greyhound, Hugo lowered his narrow, angular head and asked if I’d like a martini, even though I was a teenager and looked like one. Then, with a kiss to Anaïs’s forehead, he strode into the kitchen. Anaïs took me by the hand and introduced me to Jean-Jacques, a short, wiry man in his thirties, expensively dressed. Though I later noticed that his French accent was heavier than hers, he used slang Americanisms with no accent at all. “How ya doin?” He reached for my hand as if to shake it but instead kissed the top, lingering so that I felt the air from his Gallic nose tickle my skin. He and Anaïs joked in French while he held onto my hand, and I cursed myself for having elected Spanish in high school. Hugo returned with Millie, who had put on a white, scalloped pinafore over her colorful dress. She carried a tray balancing a martini glass filled to the brim. Everyone watched as I lifted the glass it by its narrow stem, trying not to spill it. Successfully! Almost. Hugo rescued me from my embarrassment. “Caresse was telling us about her efforts to start a women’s world peace organization.” “Her greatest invention since the bra!” Anaïs exclaimed. “And both inventions are custom-fitted for women.” I didn’t know what she was talking about then but later learned that Caresse Crosby, as a socialite in her early twenties, had invented and patented the first brassiere.

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

  An idea suddenly came to me: spread those legs and make Barbie come. But damn, Barbie’s legs do not spread! I had never realized this — or perhaps I had, for Western Fun Barbie came with a horse (long ago lost or given to Goodwill) and no way could she ride it, except maybe sorta sidesaddle. Right now, though, I wanted to lick Barbie’s pussy, or the flat plastic patch that substituted for it. So I took her out of my mouth again and scissored her into the splits (so limber in some ways, so rigid in others), and licked and lapped at the space between her leg joints. The whimpers became a whine then, inspiring me to lick faster and faster, devoted entirely to my task and feeling like a feminist goddess giving Barbie what she has deserved all along for her suffering in an impossibly shaped body. It fed me, too, and I grew wet then wetter as I labored, until at last the whine stuttered to a ghostly “Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh” and I knew my doll was coming for me, just me; and I was giving it to her just the way she wanted it. When her orgasm noise stopped, she was not silent, however. She started making little puppy noises, like there was more she wanted, but I could not understand them. I kept licking, but the sounds did not change in timbre or volume. | put her legs back together and put them in my mouth again, but still the same urgent little sounds. I put her down in my lap for a moment because my pussy was wet and I needed to adjust my panties, and then her vocalizations grew more intense. Barbie wanted me. Who was I to keep the girl from getting exactly what she wanted? I removed my underwear, spread my legs (excuse me, Miss Lemon, don’t mind my splayed thigh in your face), and teased my clit with those lovely feet. Barbie made a high humming noise now, and it brought the delights of battery-powered vibes to mind. My frizzy- haired girl teased and played and danced on my pussy. I pressed her toes down the cleft of inner labia and back up again. Around and over, firm little plastic roaming my slick flesh until we were both whimpering together as she brought me to climax. Now she’s my constant companion, sitting on my desk as I write, on my kitchen counter while I cook, in my bathroom when I go. She sleeps on the pillow where the ex’s head rested. She never hogs the covers, she loves the way I suck, and she’s always hard for me. Oh, and even when [’m tempted to bite the toes that feed me? Barbie always forgives. The Spanking Machine Rachel Kramer Bussel

• From Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma (1997)

  The image of the ripped and bloodied pants was arousing to Marius, and his happiness was also aroused in imagining the gift of the fur pants. He was joyful when presented with this first symbol of manhood. The walk into the mountains was an initiation, a rite of passage. His pants were power objects on this “walkabout. ” In wanting to “jump for joy” early in the session, Marius activated resources in the form of motor patterns that were essential in eventually thawing his freezing response. Successful renegotiation of trauma occurs when the adaptive resources of the person increase simultaneously with the arousal. In moving from the periphery of the experience to the freezing “shock core”, his unresolved freezing patterns were neutralized by flexible and resolvable patterns as the activation increased. As I encouraged Marius to gradually track the initial, positive experience with his pants towards the traumatic, freezing, “shock core”, a joyful experience became linked to his earlier experience of defeat and rejection. This gave him new resource s— natural aggression and competence. Armed with this newly found confidence, when Marius saw the image of the rocks, his resources began to constellate. In jumping from rock to rock and finding and picking up the stick, Marius’ creative process developed these resources to propel his forward movement toward meeting the impending challenge. In being the aggressor, like the hunters, he tracked the imagined polar bear while I tracked his bodily responses. Marius had become resourced by the images and feelings of his empowered legs and the connection with the men from his village. It is with this sense of power that he sights his dangerous prey and makes the kill. Finally, approaching ecstasy, he eviscerates the imagined bear. It is of the utmost importance to understand that, even though this experience was imagined, because of the presence of the felt sense, the experience was in every way as real for Marius’ as the original one, that is, mentally, physiologically, and spiritually.

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

  Still, she had been reluctant to try intercourse with Hugo again because he was too large and would hurt her when he pounded too hard. Fortunately, he was sympathetic, and with great tenderness they found a way to share affection that worked for both of them, returning to their pattern of the first two years of their marriage, when they were both virgins. When they went to bed, they caressed, kissed, and held each other, sometimes for an hour before Hugo would roll over and go to sleep. At twenty, this kissing and cuddling had frantically aroused her, but she had not known what for, whereas now the heartbreaking past sexual disappointments with Hugo had spoiled her appetite. Reading what she had allowed her hand to write freely, she admitted to herself that she wanted to experience lovemaking with Rupert one more time. She needed to know that despite the hysterectomy, she could still feel sexual fulfillment. Only Rupert could give her that reassurance. He would intuitively respond to her desire for him to be gentle. She needed Rupert’s lovemaking to restore her. One last time. When Rupert picked her up at LAX and brought her to the cabin, the fireplace was ready to be lit, a mattress positioned in front of it, a bottle of wine and glasses set on the hearth. She felt shy. She’d forgotten how beautiful Rupert was: his golden skin, his ardent, sensitive face lit by the now-blazing fireplace. He offered her a massage, and she placed herself in his hands. Under his touch, her skin became smooth and elastic; her body came alive as he explored its curves and muscles. Her tightly knotted nerve endings released like sea anemones unfolding. He turned her over and played his hands over her breasts, her stomach, her inner thighs. As he was entering her, he called, “Anaïs, be my wife, my beautiful wife.” She tensed with guilt, but as he continued to caress her, as he moved inside her, she lost all thought. Their bodies spoke only pleasure, only desire mounting, rising, and ringing its great cathedral bell, high and low, proclaiming all the joy in the world. From the perspective of the body, this jubilee was everything, the only truth that mattered. All the rest was a lie. Rupert ran his fingers over her skin again, bringing her down. She watched the glowing embers in the fireplace. She listened to her slow, relaxed breathing and had no regrets. Rupert had given back to her the life of the body. Now she had to give back to him his whole life, to free him for what he wanted and deserved—a wife, a child. Her lies were standing in his way. Her best hope was that after she’d told him the truth, he would allow her to remain his friend, that the love between them would not be completely destroyed.

• From Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010)

  When the Dalai Lama called for a spiritual revolution on the eve of the third millennium, he explained that this did not mean embracing a particular religious creed. Rather, it would be based on a “radical reorientation away from our habitual preoccupation with self.” 9 This does not mean that we should recoil from ourselves with disgust, put ourselves down at every turn, and become hyperconscious of our faults. If we do this, there is a danger that we will simply become excessively self-conscious, mired in the insecure ego we are trying to transcend. The faith traditions agree that compassion is the most reliable way of putting the self in its proper place, because it requires us “all day and every day” to dethrone ourselves from the center of our world and put another there. As the Dalai Lama made plain, the reorientation away from self is essentially “a call to turn toward the wider community of beings with whom we are connected, and for conduct which recognizes others’ interests alongside our own.” 10 Compassion, he said, was impossible without self-restraint, because “we cannot be loving and compassionate unless at the same time we curb our own harmful impulses and desires.” 11 Saint Paul made the same point: the practice of charity is incompatible with the hurtful stratagems we devise to undermine others and inflate the ego: Love is always patient and kind; it is never jealous; love is never boastful or conceited; it is never rude or selfish; it does not take offence, and is not resentful. Love takes no pleasure in other people’s wrongdoing but delights in truth; it is always ready to excuse, to trust, to hope, and to endure whatever comes. 12 It takes courage to set the self aside. The Buddha knew that when somebody heard about anatta he was likely to panic, thinking: “I am going to be annihilated and destroyed; I will no longer exist.” 13 Yet when his disciples were introduced to this doctrine, the texts tell us that their hearts were filled with joy. 14 As soon as they started to live as though the self were nonexistent, they felt happier, freed of the dukkha that comes from excessive self- preoccupation. If we remain trapped in this greedy, needy selfishness, we will continue to be unhappy and frustrated. But as we acquire a more realistic assessment of ourselves, we learn that the envy, anger, fear, and hatred (which often spring from thwarted egotism) have little to do with us; rather, they are ancient emotions that we inherited from our earliest ancestors. “This is not what I really am,” said the Buddha; “this is not my self.” Gradually we will begin to feel more detached from these negative emotions and refuse to identify with them.

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

  In the very first year of his marriage, Luther wrote a letter to his old friend Georg ‘Spalatinus’ (Burkhardt), secretary to the Elector of Saxony, apologizing for not coming to his wedding to another Katharina, but assuring him that he and von Bora would have a private marital celebration: ‘On the night that I calculate you will receive this letter, I assure you that I’ll make love to my wife, in your honour, while you’re making love to yours – a joint effort!’ [16] In rather less toe-curling vein, in later years Luther’s former convent in Wittenberg blossomed into a large family home, six children in all, enjoying a stream of guests plus student lodgers taken in to balance the domestic budget. At dinner, the guests and lodgers eagerly absorbed and jotted down unbuttoned bons mots from the great man, trivial and profound alike, and within a few years of his death anthologies were being published as Luther’s ‘Table Talk’ (Tischreden). Historians have gratefully quarried that engaging heap of vivid details, though they have not always assessed them judiciously, taking too seriously the stereotyped misogyny of such laddish remarks as ‘Men have broad chests and narrow hips; hence they possess wisdom. Women have narrow chests and broad hips. A woman ought to look after the house: creation itself declares (with the broad bum and hips) they should sit still.’ Luther’s beloved Katie was presiding over the well-furnished table, and her responses to this admittedly annoying teasing have not been recorded. [17] Beyond this frivolity was Luther’s gradual recasting of Augustine of Hippo’s theology of sin, sex and marriage; the framework was still that of the fifth century, and his understanding of female biology was still unthinkingly that of Aristotle, but his own happy experience of the married state brought him a warmer picture of the family in Eden and through the Fall and expulsion from Paradise. Edenic marriage involved the conception of children in sexual pleasure that was chaste and without shame, just as was the hospitality of the Luther household. Child-rearing would then have been easy and joyful. Of course, none of this had time to happen in Eden, and the Fall had reduced it all to a shadow of its potential self, but there was no radical break in sexuality, or a hint that sex had taken on the Satanic character ascribed to it by Basil the Great. In the second generation of the Reformation, John Calvin is often seen as a more thoroughgoing Augustinian as well as a more joyless character than Luther, but he was more explicitly positive about sexual intercourse: it remained a gift of God despite the Fall, and husband and wife should enjoy it, observing of course due modesty and propriety. [18] Who were the women whom these clergy married in the course of their personal liberation? Hardly surprisingly, to begin with, the majority were the partners with whom they were already living, contemptuously termed ‘concubines’ by the old Church.

• From The Fixed Stars: A Memoir (2020)

  That’s not what I’m saying, Ash sputtered. I just—just, you’ve told me what your pattern was with him. How you felt like you were always taking care, like no one else would do it if you didn’t. What I really want is for you to say nothing negative to me about Brandon, I said. Ever. I can’t stand it. When I arrived in Toronto, I saw that Ash had sent a long text: You are doing so much. You’ve been flying back and forth across the country over the last month and have managed to remain a steadfast, attentive mother. You’ve survived a case of hives. You’ve managed a restaurant from afar. You are curious and caring, committed to relationship and friendship. I want you to know that I admire you. Thank you for sharing yourself with me in all of it. I see you. I’m here. [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] “When you look at yourself in the mirror,” writes author Ursula K. Le Guin, “I hope you see yourself. Not one of the myths.”39 I was trying. On a walk in our heavy coats, a friend commented: You seemed to disappear when you were dating Nora, and you haven’t with Ash. That seems like a good thing. I could feel it too. It’s weird, I said to my friend. I never fell in love with a man because he was a man, you know? I mean, I wasn’t falling in love with a penis. I loved his body because it was his. And I don’t think I was drawn to Nora because she was a woman, exactly. I don’t think I want a woman because she is a woman. Ash is not a woman in the same way I am, but they’re also not a man. And I like that so much. That they’re making their own form of person—like, this person who is themself. My friend nodded, said: I’m so happy for you. I couldn’t tell if she understood. But I was happy too. 28“I eliminated gender, to find out what was left.” This was how Le Guin explained her creation of an androgynous race of humans, the Gethenians, in her novel The Left Hand of Darkness. “Whatever was left would be, presumably, simply human.”40 I liked that so much. Of course: under gender we find the bare thing, the person themself. Of course. But what about sexual orientation? I wanted to add. What do we find under that? What is left if we eliminate orientation—or if it changes willy-nilly? Is there anything solid to me at all, anything I can count on? I’d tried to interrogate myself—had parked myself under fluorescent lights in the cinderblock room of my history, went after myself like Vincent D’Onofrio on Law & Order. I wanted a voiceover, some deep baritone: What do we make of our unreliable narrator? She would have swapped anything, even her sanity, to make sense.

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

  Pietism sought to bring a new individual and emotional commitment to enrich the parish systems inherited from the medieval Western Church and make up for much devotional variety that Protestants had lost in the Reformation. Out of Pietism came the peculiar construction of an episcopally led ‘Moravian Church’ conjured up out of the remnants of the Unitas Fratrum (‘Unity of Brothers’), an ecclesiastical shadow persisting from religious crises in the fifteenth-century kingdom of Bohemia. The Moravians’ refounding and presiding Bishop was Count Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf, an eccentric and charismatic aristocrat who was closely acquainted with some of the chief movers of Pietist Lutheranism, but who took his own path beyond them. From 1722 von Zinzendorf gathered a motley array of the religiously dissatisfied or persecuted from central Europe, first on his own extensive estates in the rural southern borders of Saxony and then in further communities reminiscent of some of the radical groupings of the Reformation such as the Hutterites. The Moravians were thus not a nationality but a newly crafted religious identity. They had an importance out of all proportion to their always relatively small numbers, because they were the first Protestant Church to commit itself to world mission with consistent passion. People who had already undergone one exile to join the Moravian family zestfully threw themselves into fresh overseas exiles to share the joy they experienced in their own reconstructed lives. Unlike the missionary outreach of Counter-Reformation religious Orders or Jesuits, they were primarily laypeople, often quite humble and uneducated folk, seeking to earn a living by their craft skills on missions that reached out to people equally disadvantaged. [33] The Moravians spread their work to the Atlantic Isles, ruled after 1714 by the German Lutheran George I (also Elector of Hanover); they met with a warm reception, which included the unprecedented ecumenical gesture of formal recognition by the British Parliament in 1749. There they became one of many influences on the brothers John and Charles Wesley. The Wesleys were priests of the Church of England; despite being sacramentalist ‘High Churchmen’ in theological outlook, they felt compelled to leave the security of church buildings in order to preach more widely (even in the open air) a ‘religion of the heart’. It was styled ‘Evangelical’ because it preached a gospel message of sin acknowledged, repented and cancelled in reconciliation to God through Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross. Evangelicalism took to itself and emphasized the universal application of the models of individual conversion provided by the stories of Paul of Tarsus and Augustine of Hippo: a profound alteration of personal identity in a new relationship with God. Thousands of converts mushroomed beyond the existing religious structures of Britain, creating mass ‘revivals’ which the tidy mind of John Wesley sought to channel into an organization, fuelled by Charles Wesley’s prolific and compelling output of hymns for crowds to learn and sing.

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

  It opens with an address to Diognetus who is described as exceedingly desirous to learn the Christian doctrine and mode of worship in distinction from that of the Greeks and the Jews. The writer, rejoicing in this opportunity to lead a Gentile friend to the path of truth, exposes first the vanity of idols (ch. 2), then the superstitions of the Jews (ch. 3, 4); after this he gives by contrasts a striking and truthful picture of Christian life which moves in this world like the invisible, immortal soul in the visible, perishing body (ch. 5 and 6),1315 and sets forth the benefits of Christ’s coming (ch. 7). He next describes the miserable condition of the world before Christ (ch. 8), and answers the question why He appeared so late (ch. 9). In this connection occurs a beautiful passage on redemption, fuller and clearer than any that can be found before Irenaeus.1316 He concludes with an account of the blessings and moral effects which flow from the Christian faith (ch. 10). The last two chapters which were probably added by a younger contemporary, and marked as such in the MS., treat of knowledge, faith and spiritual life with reference to the tree of knowledge and the tree of life in paradise. Faith opens the paradise of a higher knowledge of the mysteries of the supernatural world. The Epistle to Diognetus forms the transition from the purely practical literature of the Apostolic Fathers to the reflective theology of the Apologists. It still glows with the ardor of the first love. It is strongly Pauline.1317 It breathes the spirit of freedom and higher knowledge grounded in faith. The Old Testament is Ignored, but without any sign of Gnostic contempt. 5. Authorship and Time of composition. The author calls himself "a disciple of the Apostles,"1318 but this term occurs in the appendix, and may be taken

• From The Decameron (1353)

  And it was drained by a second little channel, through which the stream flowed out of the valley and so downwards to its lower reaches. This, then, was the place to which the young ladies came; and after they had gazed all around and extolled its marvellous beauty, seeing the limpid pool shimmering there before them they made up their minds, since it was very hot and they were in no danger of being observed, to go for a swim. And having ordered their maid to go back and keep watch along the path by which they had entered the valley, and bring them warning if anyone should come, all seven of them undressed and took to the water, which concealed their chaste white bodies no better than a thin sheet of glass would conceal a pink rose. And when they were in the water, which remained as crystal-clear as before, they began as best they could to swim hither and thither in pursuit of the fishes, which had nowhere to hide, and tried to seize hold of them with their hands. In this sport they persisted for a while, and after they had caught some of the fish, they emerged from the pool and put on their clothes again. And being unable to bestow higher praise upon the place than that which they had already accorded to it, feeling that it was time to make their way back again, they set forth at a gentle pace, talking all the while of its beauty. It was as yet quite early when they arrived at the palace, where they found the young men still playing dice in the place where they had left them, and Pampinea greeted them with a laugh, saying: ‘We have stolen a march upon you today.’ ‘What?’ said Dioneo. ‘Do you mean to say you have begun to do these things even before you talk about them?’ ‘Yes, Your Majesty,’ said Pampinea. And she gave him a lengthy description of the place from which they had come, telling him how far away it was, and what they had been doing there. On hearing her account of the place’s beauty, the king was anxious to see it for himself, and he straightway ordered supper to be served. This they all proceeded to eat with a great deal of relish, and when it was over, the three young men and their servants deserted the ladies and made their way to the Valley. None of them had been there before, and all things considered, they concluded admiringly that it was one of the loveliest sights in the world. And when they had bathed and dressed, since the hour was very late they went straight back home, where they found the ladies dancing a carole 3 to an air being sung by Fiammetta.

• From The Fixed Stars: A Memoir (2020)

  The doctor laughed merrily. Have you gone off the Pill? he asked. That’s the first step. But I don’t get a period without the Pill, I said. I don’t ovulate. Just try it, he said. Let’s not jump to conclusions. Give your body a few months off the Pill, and we’ll see what happens. My period arrived the next month. When I saw the bloody toilet paper, I yelped with surprise and scream-laughed. I wanted to run through the house waving it over my head. I was pregnant six months later. For all my difficulty imagining becoming a mother, pregnancy was easy on me. My abdomen stretched until it was round and tight, smooth as a ladybug. I couldn’t get over the fact that my skin could stretch like that, that far. Thinking about it gave me a deep, shivery kind of pleasure, like the first sip of a strong cocktail. I quietly cheered: my body was made for this. I’d had my doubts, but here we were. [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] I was nine weeks pregnant when my mother called with news: my aunt Tina, my mother’s twin sister, had been admitted to the hospital. She’d been having stomach pain for a few weeks, and more recently nausea and vomiting. A couple of days later we’d learn what it was: late-stage pancreatic cancer. She was sixty-five and looking forward to retirement, had recently bought herself a new white bicycle with upright handlebars. Tina couldn’t go back to her house, where there was no one to care for her, so my mother helped her fly to Oklahoma. Tina’s daughters and I rotated through town to help care for her. We had been through this before, too many times. We knew how to talk to doctors and nurses and how to speak the language of palliative care. But there was something about those weeks with Tina that I couldn’t penetrate. It felt wrong to be making life while Tina was leaving it. She couldn’t eat, and I was hungry. I kept a jar of peanut butter in my tote bag with a loaf of bread whose plastic wrapper crinkled as I walked down the hospital corridors. In a bathroom with fluorescent lights and a folding seat in the shower, I took photos of my pregnant belly. Tina died at my mother’s house, in a rented hospital bed like my father. The night before she died, my cousins slept on the floor beside her bed. It was early morning when her breathing changed, when they called for my mother and me. I stroked her hair, streaked silver at the temples, long and wiry like my mother’s. Their hair had always reminded me of horses’ manes, the strands coarse and distinct. I was twenty-five weeks pregnant that morning. As I leaned over Tina’s body, the aluminum rails of her bed left pink stripes across my tightening belly.

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

  The last week of his life, the saint had repeated to him again and again the 142d Psalm, beginning with the words, "I cry with my voice unto Jehovah," and also his Canticle to the Sun. He called in brothers Angelo and Leo to sing to him about sister Death.814 Elias of Cortona, who had aided the Roman curia in setting aside Francis’ original Rule, remonstrated on the plea that the people would regard such hilarity in the hour of death as inconsistent with saintship. But Francis replied that he had been thinking of death for two years, and now he was so united with the Lord, that he might well be joyful in Him.815 And so, as Thomas à Celano says, "he met death singing."816 At his request they carried him to the Portiuncula chapel. On his way he asked that his bed be turned so that once more his face might be towards Assisi. He could no longer see, but he could pray, and so he made a supplication to heaven for the city.817 At the church he broke bread with the brethren, performing the priestly service with his own lips. On Oct. 3, 1226, to use Brother Leo’s words, he "migrated to the Lord Jesus Christ whom he had loved with his whole heart, and followed most perfectly." Before the coffin was closed, great honors began to be heaped upon the saintly man. The citizens of Assisi took possession of the body, and Francis’ name has become the chief attraction of the picturesque and somnolent old town. He was canonized two years later.818 The services were held in Assisi, July 26, 1228, Gregory IX. being present. The following day, the pontiff laid the corner stone of the new cathedral to Francis’ memory. It was dedicated by Innocent IV. in 1243, and Francis’ body was laid under the main altar.819 The art of Cimabue and Giotto has adorned the sanctuary within. The statuary of the modern sculptor, Dupré, in front, represents the great mendicant in the garb of his order with arms crossed over his chest, and his head bowed. Francis was scarcely dead when Elias of Cortona made the astounding announcement of the stigmata. These were the marks which Francis is reported to have borne on his body, corresponding to the five wounds on Christ’s crucified body. In Francis’ case they were fleshy, but not bloody excrescences. The account is as follows. During a period of fasting and the most absorbed devotion, Christ appeared to Francis on the morning of the festival of the Holy Cross, in the rising sun in the form of a seraph with outstretched wings, nailed to the cross. The vision gone, Francis felt pains in his hands and side. He had received the stigmata. This occurred in 1224 on the Verna,820 a mountain on the Upper Arno three thousand feet above the sea.

• From Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010)

  But before he was permitted to practice the simplest yogic exercise, an aspiring yogi had to undergo a long apprenticeship, which amounted to a head-on collision with the Four Fs. He had to observe five “prohibitions” (yamas). Violence of any sort was forbidden: he must not swat an insect, speak unkindly, make an irritable gesture, or harm a single creature in any way. Stealing was outlawed, which also meant that he could not grab food when he was hungry but must simply accept what he was given whenever it was offered. Renouncing the acquisitive drive, he forswore avarice and greed. He was required to speak the truth at all times, not altering what he said to protect himself or serve his own interests. And, finally, he had to abstain from sex and intoxicants, which could cloud his mind and hinder his yogic training. Until his guru was satisfied that this behavior was now second nature to him, he was not even allowed to sit in the yogic position. But once he had mastered these disciplines, explained Patanjali, author of the Yoga Sutras, he would experience “indescribable joy.”17 Making a deliberate effort to transcend the primitive self-protective instincts had propelled him into a different state of consciousness. Siddhatta Gotama, the future Buddha, studied yoga under some of the best teachers of his day before he achieved the enlightenment of Nirvana. He quickly became expert, attaining the very highest states of trance. But he did not agree with the way his teachers interpreted these peak experiences. They told him that he had tasted the supreme enlightenment, but Gotama discovered that after the ekstasis had faded he was plagued by greed, lust, envy, and hatred in the same old way. He tried to extinguish these passions by practicing such fierce asceticism that he became horribly emaciated and almost ruined his health. Yet still his body clamored for attention. Finally, in a moment of mingled despair and defiance, he cried, “Surely there must be another way to enlightenment!” and at that moment a new solution declared itself to him.18 He recalled an incident from his early childhood, when his father had taken him to watch the ritual plowing of the fields before the first planting of the year. His nurse had left him under a rose-apple tree while she attended the ceremony, and little Gotama sat up and noticed that some tender shoots of young grass had been torn up by the plow and that the tiny insects clinging to them had been killed.19 He felt a pang of grief as though his own relatives had died, and this moment of empathy took him out of himself, so that he achieved a “release of the mind” (ceto-vimutti). He felt a pure joy welling up from the depth of his being, sat in the yogic position, and, even though he had never had a yoga lesson in his short life, immediately entered a state of trance.

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  Every course arrived heaped with garlic, swimming in garlic, studded with garlic, or perched atop a Himalaya of garlic. Yet, each and every dish tasted distinctively, magnificently different, devoid of any garlic-related unpleasantness. Always, the principle ingredient (the fish) spoke loudest and most freely. Gong-Gong, which translates, Seetoh said, to "stupid-stupid," was a stainless- steel serving platter of fresh whelks, steamed and sauteed in garlic. We twisted the tender, buttery-light meat out of the shells with toothpicks. Next came garlic prawns heaped with garlic stuffing and quick roasted; again, the sweet flavor of the prawns (only a few minutes ago skittering at the bottom of a fish tank) shone through, somehow beating the garlic into gentle submission. Scallops with roe, still in their shells, arrived glazed in black-bean sauce, by which time I was eating with my hands and slurping every clinging streak or drop. A steamed spotted grouper arrived—on the bone, of course. The highly prized one-and-a- half-pound fish costs about a hundred bucks a pop. I tunneled directly into a cheek, which pleased Seetoh no end. We ate frogs in "chicken essence" and a single stingray steamed with scallion, which inspired my mentor to exclaim "Shiok!" and "Steam!" meaning, I gather, "fucking goodl" in Singlish. (He explained the local dialect as "think in Chinese, speak in English" before commenting on the next course, Sin Huat's famous crab bee hoon: "Good-ah! Hot Hot!") The massive Sri Lankan hard-shell she-crab had been hacked into hunks of roe-studded goodness, crisped in hot oil, and simmered with a magical mystery sauce of home-brewed soy and stock and tossed with rice noodles, chilies, and garlic. "You eat the noodles first," Seetoh advised, his eyes getting a glazed, faraway look. By now the table was a wrecking yard of prawn shells, emptied scallops, frog femurs, fish bones, and empty Tiger bottles. Blissed out on food, beer, and what had now become a warm and welcoming environment, I became suddenly nonconversational as I sucked, slurped, and dug at my crab. "Seetoh, old buddy," I slurred, absolutely sincere, "I have eaten all over this earth. I've eaten fish most have only dreamed of. I come from a long line of French oyster fishermen. I've been to Tsukiji market in Tokyo. I've eaten two- hundred-dollar-a-pound otoro tuna off the still-quivering fish. I've had the full press treatment at Le Bernardin for Chrissakes! But this, this is the best seafood meal I've ever had!" Seetoh smiled, sucked a little crab fat out of a shell, and looked up at me indulgently.

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  Early moralists who believed that taking too much pleasure at the table led inexorably to bad character—or worse, to sex—were (in the best-case scenario, anyway) absolutely right. Everything about a restaurant setting conspires toward that end, be it the peach- colored mood lighting that makes you look more alluring and attractive, to the floral arrangements and decor, to the vigorous upselling of wines and spirits. Like rock and roll, the desired end result is to make you happy—and to get you in the sack. The same folks (or their more recent equivalents) who looked disapprovingly at unrestrained gourmandism were just as quick to identify music—particularly jazz, rhythm and blues, and rock and roll—as the enemy, an evil force likely to lead their sons and daughters to unsuitable mates, unwanted pregnancies, and "wild" behaviors. And in this too, as has long been established, they were right. Good food does lead to sex. As it should. And in a perfect world, good music does too. It is surely no coincidence, then, that the kind of music most chefs and cooks like to listen to, especially after work, is exactly the kind of stuff, heard in exactly the kind of places, that Mama was afraid of. Chefs, whose own personal appetites are rarely confined to food, have always, often notoriously, had a healthy enthusiasm for life's other pleasures. We are, after all, in the pleasure business. It is our job to give pleasure to our customers. How can we be expected, one might ask, to regularly and reliably give pleasure if we do not ourselves fully experience it and understand it—in all its strange and fabulous permutations? Perhaps you should keep that in mind next time you find yourself out late and spy a chef, after work, drunkenly and maniacally bobbing to an old AC/DC tune, well on the way to being seen in flagrante delicto with the hostess from your previous dinner. The chef isn't fooling around, or letting off steam, or even behaving inappropriately. The chef is just fulfilling a responsibility to fully understand the subject: doing research. If food can lead to sex, and if music can lead to sex, and if the three have often been seen in each other's company . . . is there a direct connection between food and music? Does the music that chefs listen to while they cook—and in their off hours when they are free to roam like the savage, unrestrained beasts we know them to be—lead in some direct way to culinary creativity? Do chefs see music and the places and lifestyle surrounding music as inspiration, or merely as release? After years of personal introspection and research, and close questioning of some of the country's more accomplished chefs, I arrived at some conclusions.

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  The bamboo is then split open lengthwise and served. Ever had unagi, the cooked, glazed freshwater eel, at sushi bars? This is better. Tender, flavorful, smoky, sweet, and hearty. We picked the delicate chunks right out of the blackened halves of bamboo, washing it down, of course, with plenty of warm Hanoi beer. A few days later, I'm back in the Old Quarter. I have to duck my head to get through the low concrete passageway to the home and kitchen of Madame Anh Tuyet and family. Up a steep flight of steps, off with the shoes, and I'm ushered into a typical old Hanoi residence: a living area facing the street, with a small balcony, dining table, vanity mirror in the corner, raised platform in front of the family shrine, which is crowded with photographs of departed loved ones, offerings of flowers, fruit, figurines. Overhead, a sleeping loft, and upstairs, a large, covered but open-to-the-street kitchen where Madame Tuyet and daughters prepare her famous ca qua quon thit, snakehead fish stuffed with pork, and ga nuong mat ong, a honey-roasted, hacked chicken that has local patrons lining up and down the street when she's open. Madame Tuyet has won numerous gold medals in countrywide culinary competitions, and she proudly shows me her certificates before hurrying to her upstairs kitchen. She fillets the snakehead fish, deep-fries the carcass and head for garnish in a wok full of simmering oil, then sets it aside. She slices the fillets paper thin on the bias, fills them with a ground pork and mushroom mixture as for paupiettes, then dips them in batter and deep-fries them before arranging around the now leaping, curved fish body—as if reassembling the creature. Her chicken, which she has butterflied up the breast bone and splayed flat, she slowly roasts in one of a row of small, carbon- and grease-blackened old electric ovens, removing them constantly to shellac with a secret honey-sugar-syrup mixture and covering them periodically with bits of lined white index cards strategically placed to prevent scorching. A daughter effortlessly fills spring rolls with shrimp and pork; fills condiment bowls with chili sauce, nuoc mam, vinegar and green papaya, salt, pepper, lime, and chilies. Suddenly there's stir-fried shrimp and vegetables, and spicy beef too, and I'm seated with Linh and the whole family at the dinner table. It being Tet, a chung cake is placed center table. No one touches it. Apparently, the chung cake is the fruitcake or panettone of Vietnam: gotta have it—but no one really eats it. We all know by now that Vietnamese food can be great. And I could describe that sensational meal at Madame Tuyet's using all the words you hear so often from travelers returning from Vietnam: fresh, flavorful, vibrant, crunchy, supernaturally bright looking and tasting.

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  Thousands of barely dressed locals were packed around a cluster of thriving barracas, basically beach shacks that serve chopp (icy-cold draft beer) and food. Oiled up with sun products, they were swaying to music, splashing around in tidal pools, riding body boards in the surf, swimming, socializing, playing soccer, practicing capoeira moves, sunbathing, sleeping, making love, flirting, eating. I grabbed a plastic chair, ordered a chopp, which came in a helpful insulated sleeve, and dug in for the afternoon. Food came at me from all directions. Vendors hawked acaraje, bolinhos, paper cones of dried shrimp, grilled fresh shrimp, paper tubes of shelled nuts, boiled quail eggs, and pastels. Others came by with a mozzarellalike cheese on skewers (for a few centavos they'd dredge it in herbs and, fanning the coals in the metal buckets they carried with them, they'd toast the skewers until the outside was brown and crispy and the inside runny delicious). People cracked open coconuts and served them with long thin straws. Spear fishermen, right out of the water, dropped still-twitching groupers, snappers, crabs, and lobsters right on the tables, offering to have them cooked up at the nearest barraca. Sitting only inches from the neighboring tables, I couldn't help but nearly join in with others' meals. People tore at whole grilled fish with their hands, handing out pieces and sharing chopps. Now and again, someone would get up to cool off under a running water pipe. Since the music was loud and seductive, and the mood bordering on orgiastic, each visitor to the shower felt compelled to do a little wriggling and dancing under the water for the amusement of the throngs. Women in white skirts and traditional headdress fried up little cakes and poured cachaca in coconuts. Couples nuzzled and hugged and kissed. Everyone was friendly, informal, a little drunk, and having a good time while their skin sizzled in the strong midday sun. The music played on. It seemed a paradise. What can one say about Rio, except that it's all true. Everything you've heard. It's stunningly beautiful. The people are gorgeous. Our hotel was located right on the beachfront in Copacabana. On the way from the airport, Michael and Matty and Taka, noses pressed to the glass, gazed longingly at the white sands and blue-green water, the verdant green rainforests, and high bluffs and clifftops, listening with horror as our unexpectedly swinish Brazilian escort tried to hard- sell us a guided bus tour. We'd barely arrived at our hotel, and Matty was headed across the street like a heat-seeking missile, peeling off his shirt and calling for caipirinhas. There was no question of going anywhere that didn't involve a beach. You know about the Corcovado, the high mountaintop sculpture of Christ with arms outstretched. You've seen Sugarloaf. I've seen the pictures too.

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  Schutz had never heard Cleveland speak so extensively on any subject. He was dismayed to hear of his prior experience with haute cuisine. He felt suddenly embarrassed about the napkin under his chin, and his own efforts with a fork, as Cleveland worked a veal cheek with lemon and saffron risotto like an aristocrat, doing the fork-knife cross-over with effortless grace, dabbing occasionally at the corners of his mouth as he savored the latest wine with the glass held elegantly by the stem, swirling it almost imperceptibly in his cheek before swallowing. "You are absolutely right," he said, hurrying to agree. "This is something truly remarkable. I've eaten around a bit too, you know. We have some of the best, the very best chefs in the world at my casinos—but this—this is something else, isn't it?" Schutz downed another glass of wine and looked across at the two girls golden in the flower of their youth, imagining they'd taste of strawberry ice cream. But how could anything taste better than this? He felt, in a rush of heat that seemed to rise from his toes to the crown of his overly coiffed head, elated, near giddy with delight. He'd have to pay more attention to what he ate in the future. He'd clearly been missing something. Marvin lingered over his third cup of coffee and pretended to listen to his wife. He hoped, of course, that Schutz would enjoy himself. That he'd tell his friends. Maybe book a Christmas party or two at Saint Germain, provide a little last- minute cash flow to keep the doors open a few more days or weeks. But who was he kidding? The prick could bail out this business with what he spends on carpet cleaning each week. But why would he? Chet, the bartender, had more measured hopes for the evening. He wished for nothing beyond a very fat tip, which the floor would carve up and of which he'd get one fifth. Signs were favorable in this department. One rich guy, bodyguard, and two good-looking women usually translated into a heavy tip meant to impress the broads as much as anything else. Chet calculated in his head the likely total, what with all the wine and the multiple courses and the likelihood of port or cognac to follow. He was thinking big. A few rounds of Louis Treize, now that would be nice. In the kitchen, Paul, Kevin, Michelle, and the rest hoped for nothing beyond what they had right now, the pure pleasure of seeing Rob Holland cook again. He was in the zone now, oblivious to the outside world, cooking and cutting and arranging and moving about in some wonderful culinary fugue state, cooking— as all the best cooks do—solely for himself now, climbing the mountain for what might well be one last, best time.