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

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

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  Judaism, from which Christianity emerged during the first century, has a simple affirmation of faith in God known as the ‘Shema’ – but not a detailed list of specific beliefs. 31 The main forms of Roman and Greek religion at this time do not appear to have felt the need for formal declarations of faith. Yet while Christianity is not typical in its use of public statements of faith, all religious traditions (and, of course, their secular counterparts) rest on certain beliefs, whether these are publicly affirmed or personally appropriated. The so-called Apostles’ Creed is thought to have emerged gradually within early Christian communities, particularly in Rome, apparently in response to the need for brief personal articulations of faith on the part of people who presented themselves for baptism. The Creeds set out the Christian vision of reality in dull, terse statements, each of which encapsulates an aspect of this greater vision that cannot be proved to be true, but which was found to be true and made to be meaningful by a community of people, who have passed down in the Creeds their collective witness to what they discovered. Back in the 1980s, the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor introduced his idea of ‘articulation’. Every attempt to live a good life or develop a viable moral system depends on a set of background assumptions which need to be identified and put into words. ‘Articulation’ is about the ‘bringing to light of that which is unspoken but presupposed’. 32 Taylor’s point is that we need to put into words the grander vision of reality which shapes the way we think and live, despite the obvious inability of words to do justice or fully express this vision. A similar point is made by William James, who argued that religious doctrines are subsidiary to the way that religious people experienced the universe and felt about their place within it. 33 The way we imagine the world – whether socially, morally, politically or religiously – needs to be expressed; yet paradoxically that very act of expression both diminishes and restricts that vision, precisely because it is a rich imaginative reality that cannot be reduced to words. These statements – such as ‘I believe in God’ – are too easily misunderstood as purely (and uninterestingly) propositional , when they are really descriptions of something that is to be encountered and explored, a map of a new territory to be inhabited, both intellectually and socially. For Christians, faith is thus not a half-hearted hope that there might be a God, but a luminous vision of a God who brings meaning, coherence and joy. It is about ‘getting’ what things are all about in an epiphanic moment of seeing a oneness at the heart of things, allowing us to put everything together. Faith is about existential commitment. This is what I believe to be right and trustworthy. This is how I see the world.

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

  They took me into a room where there was a coin. I put my hand in the coffin & felt something so queer. It frightened me unpleasantly. I found something dead wrapped in a silk h'd'k'f so carefully. It must have been a body that had had vitality. ... I did not like to venture to examine the body for I was confounded.[398] I lately saw a boy of five (who had been told the story of Hector and Achilles) teaching his younger brother, aged three, how to play Hector, while he himself should play Achilles, and chase him round the walls of Troy. Having smiled themselves, Achilles advanced, shouting "Where's my Patroklos?" Whereupon the would-be Hector piped up, quite distracted from his rôle, "Where's my Patroklos? I want a Patroklos! I want a Patroklos! "—and broke up the game. Of what kind of a thing a Patroklos might be he had, of course, no notion—enough that his brother had one, for him to claim one too.[399] In 'The Nation' for September 3, 1886, President G. S. Hall has given some account of a statistical research on Boston school-boys, by Miss Wiltse, from which it appears that only nineteen out of two hundred and twenty-nine had made no collections.[400] Quoted in Lindsay, 'Mind in Lower animals,' vol. ii. p. 151.[401] Cf. Flint, Mind, vol. I. pp. 330-333; Sully, ibid. p. 567. Most people probably have the impulse to keep bits of useless finery, old tools, pieces of once useful apparatus, etc.; but it is normally either inhibited at the outset by reflection, or, if yielded to, the objects soon grow displeasing and are thrown away.[402] Der Menschliche Wille, p. 205.[403] Professor Lazarus (Die Reize des Spieles. Berlin, 1883, p. 44) denies that we have an instinct to play, and says the root of the matter is the aversion to remain unoccupied, which substitutes a sham occupation when no real one is ready. No doubt this is true; but why the particular forms of sham occupation? The elements of all bodily games and of ceremonial games are given by direct excite-motor stimulations—just as when puppies chase one another and swallows have a parliament.[404] Inquiries into Human Faculty, p. 72.[405] Expression of the Emotions (New York, 1873), p. 330.[406] "The certainty that we are well dressed," a charming woman has said, "gives us a peace of heart compared to which that yielded by the consolations of religion is as nothing."[407] Thackeray, in his exquisite Roundabout Paper, 'On a Chalk-Mark On the Door,' says: "You get truth habitually from equals only; so, my good Mr. Holyshade, don't talk to me about the habitual candor of the young Etonian of high birth, or I have my own opinion of your candor or discernment when you do. No.

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

  Let us now call the pleasure for the sake of which the act may be done the pursued pleasure. If follows that, even when no pleasure is pursued by an act, the act itself may be the pleasantest line of conduct when once the impulse has begun, on account of the incidental pleasure which then attends its successful achievement and the pain which would come of interruption. A pleasant act and an act pursuing a pleasure are in themselves, however, two perfectly distinct conceptions, though they coalesce in one concrete phenomenon whenever a pleasure is deliberately pursued. I cannot help thinking that it is the confusion of pursued pleasure with mere pleasure of achievement which makes the pleasure-theory of action so plausible to the ordinary mind. We feel an impulse, no matter whence derived; we proceed to act; if hindered, we feel displeasure; and if successful, relief. Action in the line of the present impulse is always for the time being the pleasant course; and the ordinary hedonist expresses this fact by saying that we act for the sake of the pleasantness involved. But who does not see that for this sort of pleasure to be possible, the impulse must be there already as an independent fact? The pleasure of successful performance is the result of the impulse, not its cause. You cannot have your pleasure of achievement unless you have managed to get your impulse under headway beforehand by some previous means. It is true that on special occasions (so complex is the human mind) the pleasure of achievement may itself become a pursued pleasure; and these cases form another point on which the pleasure-theory is apt to rally. Take a foot-ball game or a fox-hunt. Who in cold blood wants the fox for its own sake, or cares whether the ball be at this goal or that? We know, however, by experience, that if we can once rouse a certain impulsive excitement in ourselves, whether to overtake the fox, or to get the ball to one particular goal, the successful venting of it over the counteracting checks will fill us with exceeding joy. We therefore get ourselves deliberately and artificially into the hot impulsive state. It takes the presence of various instinct-arousing conditions to excite it; but little by little, once we are in the field, it reaches its paroxysm; and we reap the reward of our exertions in that pleasure of successful achievement which, far more than the dead fox or the goal-got ball, was the object we originally pursued. So it often is with duties. Lots of actions are done with heaviness all through, and not till they are completed does pleasure emerge, in the joy of being done with them. Like Hamlet we say of each such successive task, "O cursed spite, That ever I was born to set it right!"

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

  Cana in Galilee (John 2.1–11): far from being a visit to the synagogue or the Temple in Jerusalem, the wedding at Cana was a big post-contract party in a convenient local house, where the main concern was the quality of the wine. After that, the similarities end: Judaism and Graeco-Roman society were at odds about the nature of marriage, and the Christian future lay not with Judaism, but with Hellenism. The positive feature of sexual teaching in Judaism, from the Abrahamic covenantal promises onwards, has been its exuberant celebration of marriage and children, not to mention the generous catering that sustains large families in celebratory mood. It is a consequent duty for every man to marry, and Judaism shows strikingly little cultural approval of celibacy, that option which was eventually to become almost overwhelming in Christianity (below, Part Two). What Christians find less easy to deal with in their inheritance from Judaism is the fact that the Jewish emphasis on marriage and the family long included the option of polygyny – as, indeed, is the case in the great majority of human societies in history. [36] Husbands can find multiple wives expensive, and so polygyny is generally a practice for elites (or for those who regularly travel long distances between their centres of operation, like traders). The stand-out case in the Hebrew Bible is King Solomon, with his collection of seven hundred wives, plus three hundred concubines. These ladies are not portrayed with approval in 1 Kings 11.3, not because of their polygynous character, but because many of them were foreign and led the ageing monarch into spiritual faithlessness. No such stigma attached to the earlier polygynous patriarchs such as Abraham, the most respected figures in Judaic history. This became a great difficulty in interpreting scripture for Christians, who inherited the patriarchs while deciding to reject polygyny (below, Chapter 4), but it was no problem for Jews, since polygyny continued to be a reality in the time of Jesus and for at least a millennium more. An exceptionally lucky archaeological find in Israel in the 1960s revealed, in a bag of papyri, the personal archive of a wealthy woman named Babatha, who lived about a century after Jesus, and may have died in the last Judaean stand against Rome in 135 CE. Included were legal papers relating to her remarriage after the death of her first husband to a man called Judah, who still had a living wife and daughter. Not all went smoothly thereafter, hence documents from lawsuits among Babatha’s papers. [37] A thousand years more passed before rabbis prohibited polygyny, a ban first recorded in the German city of Mainz, and hence no doubt a defensive reaction to the unsympathetically monogamous eleventh-century Christian society surrounding European Jewish communities. Jewish polygyny could linger later still in Muslim-ruled territories. [38] This is one of the starkest contrasts between Judaism and Graeco-Roman society. Jewish acceptance of polygyny needs little explaining, since it represents the norm in ancient west Asia.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  mass grave discovered in eleventh-century Cologne, probably explains Ursula’s crowd of butchered ladies, but more important was the framework that this pious fiction created for Merici’s reality. [71] A host of inspired celibate women did indeed mushroom out of her initial idea: again like the Beguines, a gift to the Western Church that its male leadership had not sought. [72] The Ursulines began working among the poor and teaching children in settings which men either did not want to or should not enter. In 1544, Pope Paul III supplied a Rule moulding them into something more like a traditional religious Order, but its model was still the free-form adaptability of the Augustinian Canons in the twelfth century. Crucially, the Ursulines made no provision for central direction, so it was difficult for the Church authorities to enforce a single pattern on Ursuline groups. The official Counter-Reformation attitude to the female religious life ran on the same lines as its enforcement of universal clerical celibacy: it sought to bring reality to medieval directives, in this case the papal decree Periculoso of 1298 ordering enclosure for all monastic women, which the Council of Trent reaffirmed in 1563. Where the hierarchy could enforce this, it did, for instance in the jurisdiction of the classic episcopal micromanager Carlo Borromeo, Archbishop of Milan, where Ursulines became yet another Order of enclosed nuns. Elsewhere matters were not so straightforward, and, in the discreetly orchestrated confusion that continued in Ursuline history, the Society of Jesus was a crucial ally. The Jesuits could see the potential of such an energetic movement as a complementary partner in their own very varied enterprises, especially work among women that they had decided compromised their own mission. In the late sixteenth century, they took on spiritual direction of the Ursulines; they both fostered Ursuline expansion and took a major voice in how that expansion could operate. They encouraged choices among the originally varied aims of the Ursulines, steering them away from their work among the sick and the poor and promoting their interest in education, for which the sisters need not move around so much in the ordinary world. Ursulines had in the early decades normally been humble women and girls with little education: that began to change, as the Jesuits encouraged their aristocratic patronesses to send their daughters into the work, and in turn to educate daughters of the wealthy and powerful, just as the Society did for their sons. That usually did indeed mean building convents to house the ladies (predictably, usually paid for by a wealthy woman), but that had the appearance of chiming with the purpose of the Council of Trent, and the Society was as ready to adapt in this as in everything else. Yet in other circumstances, still in partnership with the Jesuits, foundations in an Ursuline style took other forms.

• From Soaking Wet: Lesbian Sex Stories (2014)

  It’s a funny thing. Your face screws up when you’re coming and you roll your eyes and make uncouth noises and if you’ve seen yourself at that moment you probably think you look ridiculous. Still, there is absolutely no vision as glorious as the face of someone you’re crazy about when she’s in the throes of orgasm. When Elle began to shudder and her face transformed like that, right before she began to cry out, I started coming too, and it was the sight of her face, not my hands or the dildo or the original fantasy that sparked us, that pushed me to ecstasy. Eventually—after a romp in the backyard and another in the shower—we settled down to fall asleep in each other’s arms. Just as we were drifting off, Elle began chuckling. “What is it?” I mumbled. It was hard to be grumpy after coming approximately forty-seven times over the course of the night, but I’d almost been asleep. “I didn’t tell you whose partner I was covering for tonight.” She’d already explained that she’d only been scheduled to work until nine-thirty. She had, in fact, engineered the whole thing to act on our new fantasies. “Oh my god!” I said. “You got stuck with MacIntyre!” “Talk about the longest evening in history.” She moaned dramatically, the back of her hand against her forehead. “Every so often I’d catch him looking at me, and he’d see that I saw, and he’d go all red again. To make it worse, we had to patrol the beach parking lot.” I laughed. “So, did you catch anyone in the act?” She pulled me closer. “Only you, Destiny. Only you.” ABOUT THE AUTHORS RACHEL KRAMER BUSSEL is a senior editor at Penthouse Variations, and formerly wrote the “Lusty Lady” column in the Village Voice. She is the editor of Naughty Spanking Stories from A to Z and coeditor of Up All Night: Adventures in Lesbian Sex. Her writing has been published in more than fifty erotic anthologies, including Best Lesbian Erotica (2001, 2004, and 2005) and Best American Erotica 2004, as well as AVN, Bust, Curve, Diva, Girlfriends, On Our Backs, Penthouse, Punk Planet, Rockrgrl, the San Francisco Chronicle, Velvetpark, and other publications. Learn more about her at www.rachelkramerbussel.com. From East Anglia, England, LEE CAIRNEY writes about the imaginative loophole sex creates out of the boring contract of everyday life. “Cruising” is her first foray into the dirty and demanding twilight world, or so she likes to imagine it, of women’s erotica. DELILAH DEVLIN (DelilahDevlin.com) is an author with a rapidly expanding reputation for writing deliciously edgy stories with complex characters. SOPHIE MOUETTE is the pseudonym of two professional writers who also publish solo work in erotica, science fiction/ fantasy and other genres under other names. Sophie’s publications include an erotica novel, Cat Scratch Fever, and short fiction in the anthologies Best Women’s Erotica 2005, Sex… in the Sports Club, Sex…in the Kitchen, Sex…in Uniform and Sex…on the Move.

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

  Raw fish also gave us a nice, clean, healthy protein buzz that went well with all the liquor we'd likely been swilling and made us feel better about the ravages of our various lifestyle choices. Over the years, chefs have accumulated many happy experiences at counters. We liked them. We wished we could have one for ourselves. Maybe the earliest, loudest shot across the bow—and the one that caused the widest ripples—was the opening of L'Atelier de Joel Robuchon in Paris. Robuchon, of course, is one of the very best chefs on the planet, one of the French masters, and L'Atelier was, then, a radical departure. The elegant but casual space in Saint-Germain is almost entirely kitchen, with counter space and seats snaking at angles around its perimeters. Black-clad counter "help" act as combination server-sommeliers, clearing and setting, suggesting and pouring wines, and chatting informally with customers, as one would expect at a favorite diner. The precisely plated and delicious food would be perfectly at home in the dining room of a traditional three-star restaurant, but in fact benefits from the more comfortable ambiance. I recently sat alone and had a nine-course menu decouverte and never felt the awkwardness of the solitary diner. The servers were friendly and talkative, and the usually jaded, seen-it-all Parisians on both sides and across from me were positively effervescing with pleasure, as if recently released from prison. Eating jewel-like fare such as La Langoustine dans un ravioli truffe au choux vert, Le Cepe en creme legere sur un oeuf cocotte au persil plat, and Cochon de lait en cotelettes dories (accompanied by Robuchon's ethereal yet butter-loaded mashed potatoes)—even an ironic tribute to the classic Le Riz rond—was a joy. Gone was the stodginess, the ceremony, the invisible straitjacket that usually accompanies a meal like this. Customers felt free to tear at bread from the baskets placed above them on the sushi-style display case and mop sauce with abandon. It felt liberating. I left feeling as if I'd seen the future. (Or at least very much hoping I had.) I've been a fan of Paul Kahan's Blackbird in Chicago for years. Unlike some of the Second City's other practitioners, the place never seemed full of itself, as much a bar with surprisingly good food as a destination restaurant. With the opening of Avec next door, however, Kahan and his chef de cuisine Koren Grieveson moved into even more customer-friendly territory. The long, honey- colored cedar-walled room holds five communal tables and a long wine bar designed to encourage a "convivial atmosphere."

• From Soaking Wet: Lesbian Sex Stories (2014)

  It’s a funny thing. Your face screws up when you’re coming and you roll your eyes and make uncouth noises and if you’ve seen yourself at that moment you probably think you look ridiculous. Still, there is absolutely no vision as glorious as the face of someone you’re crazy about when she’s in the throes of orgasm. When Elle began to shudder and her face transformed like that, right before she began to cry out, I started coming too, and it was the sight of her face, not my hands or the dildo or the original fantasy that sparked us, that pushed me to ecstasy. Eventually—after a romp in the backyard and another in the shower—we settled down to fall asleep in each other’s arms. Just as we were drifting off, Elle began chuckling. “What is it?” I mumbled. It was hard to be grumpy after coming approximately forty-seven times over the course of the night, but I’d almost been asleep. “I didn’t tell you whose partner I was covering for tonight.” She’d already explained that she’d only been scheduled to work until nine-thirty. She had, in fact, engineered the whole thing to act on our new fantasies. “Oh my god!” I said. “You got stuck with MacIntyre!” “Talk about the longest evening in history.” She moaned dramatically, the back of her hand against her forehead. “Every so often I’d catch him looking at me, and he’d see that I saw, and he’d go all red again. To make it worse, we had to patrol the beach parking lot.” I laughed. “So, did you catch anyone in the act?” She pulled me closer. “Only you, Destiny. Only you.” ABOUT THE AUTHORS RACHEL KRAMER BUSSEL is a senior editor at Penthouse Variations, and formerly wrote the “Lusty Lady” column in the Village Voice. She is the editor of Naughty Spanking Stories from A to Z and coeditor of Up All Night: Adventures in Lesbian Sex. Her writing has been published in more than fifty erotic anthologies, including Best Lesbian Erotica (2001, 2004, and 2005) and Best American Erotica 2004, as well as AVN, Bust, Curve, Diva, Girlfriends, On Our Backs, Penthouse, Punk Planet, Rockrgrl, the San Francisco Chronicle, Velvetpark, and other publications. Learn more about her at www.rachelkramerbussel.com. From East Anglia, England, LEE CAIRNEY writes about the imaginative loophole sex creates out of the boring contract of everyday life. “Cruising” is her first foray into the dirty and demanding twilight world, or so she likes to imagine it, of women’s erotica. DELILAH DEVLIN (DelilahDevlin.com) is an author with a rapidly expanding reputation for writing deliciously edgy stories with complex characters. SOPHIE MOUETTE is the pseudonym of two professional writers who also publish solo work in erotica, science fiction/ fantasy and other genres under other names. Sophie’s publications include an erotica novel, Cat Scratch Fever, and short fiction in the anthologies Best Women’s Erotica 2005, Sex… in the Sports Club, Sex…in the Kitchen, Sex…in Uniform and Sex…on the Move.

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

  The perfect mixture of pleasure and pain. I feel strangely in competition with David. They say "never let them see you sweat," but it's way too late for that. We're both in full lather. David swallows another slice of kidney, rubs his solar plexus, and grimaces, and I feel—to my shame—gratified by his pain. I'm surviving Szechuan. I'm making it through this most incendiary of incendiary meals in the fire capital of the world. And I'm loving it. The effect of all the peppers is almost narcotic in its endorphin- producing qualities. In fact, early hotpot chefs were rumored to lace their concoctions with opium, to keep customers coming back. It wasn't necessary. Those who survive their initial exposure to the dish can't help but return to it, like a beautiful but bad girlfriend. (Later, when I return to the States, I'll secrete two kilos of those magical hua jiao in my luggage, wanting never to be separated from them again.) The next day, at Chen Ma Po Dou Fu (which translates loosely to "Pockmarked Granny's Tofu"), I happily submit to another glorious if painful scourging and devour the restaurant's namesake dish: a bowl of meat and spice- stippled tofu awash in more palm oil, named for its likeness to its creator. I pick cautiously through a Szechuan chicken that is easily 80 percent dried chilies (one tries to pick around them) and 20 percent chicken, and, like so much of local fare, awash in yet more pepper-infused palm oil. As David said, even knowing my inevitable unpleasant gastroenterological destiny, I don't care. It's too good. My palate—if it doesn't burn out of my skull entirely—will never be the same again. The relatively friendly flavors of Beijing are a welcome change. And I concentrate, in the limited time I have, on what the capital city is best known for: duck. Duck so crispy, flavorful, juicy, and unctuous that it will ruin you for "Peking Duck" anywhere else. Li Qun Roast Duck Restaurant, located in an old hutong neighborhood near Tiananmen Square, is a crowded, ramshackle home turned eatery. Eager customers are squeezed around a central courtyard, jammed into small former bedrooms, their tables brimming with stacked plates of food. In the kitchen, the chef carefully positions head-on ducks over open peachwood flame in an ancient brick oven, turning them and moving them constantly to expertly crisp the skin. The meat is sliced and presented with the de rigueur pancakes, sliced scallion, and hoisin sauce—but it's better, much better, eaten straight and unadorned.

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

  But I won't. Vietnamese food can be great in Texas, or Minneapolis. But Vietnamese food in Vietnam, when outside the window it's Hanoi—a slice of an apartment building with faded, peeling facade just visible across the street; women hanging out laundry; the chatter of noodle and fruit vendors coming from one flight down; the high, throaty vibrations of countless motorbikes; Madame's two daughters giggling upstairs, perhaps laughing about the freakishly tall, unbelievably hungry American who sits downstairs, ineptly struggling to eat Mom's still-bone-in chicken with chopsticks—at such times, Vietnamese food tastes even better. Linh is happy. We're getting into shots of nep moi now, the vicious, delicious Hanoi rice vodka, and everybody at the table is in a festive holiday mood. Chris and Lydia finally put down their cameras and join us hungrily at the table. When we are finished with this, there will be tea, and Madame's award-winning blend of fresh roasted coffee, and 555 cigarettes, and Madame's lighter-than-air, crunchy coconut macaroons. Tonight, as the camera crew and I sit in comfortable rattan chairs at the Bamboo Bar of the drenched-in-history Metropole Hotel, drinking vermouth cassis and reviewing the day's events, we will all smile, and nod silently to one another—maybe uttering an occasional "Oh yeah!" to commemorate the day's events. We know we've got it good. We're happy to be alive. And still in Vietnam. DECODING FERRAN ADRIA EVERYBODY WANTS IT. "It's the most magnificent book you can find—anywhere in the world," says Eric Ripert, chef of Le Bernardin in Manhattan. He's talking about Spanish chef Ferran Adria's mammoth cookbook El Bulli 1998-2002, the first of three volumes that will track backward the development of recipes and procedures at the famed Spanish three-star restaurant. Currently available only in Spanish and Catalan, costing about one hundred seventy-five euros and weighing in at nearly ten pounds (with its accompanying guidebook and CD-ROM), it seems more the mysterious black monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey than a cookbook. It is also the most talked-about, sought-after, wildly impressive and intimidating collectible in the world of professional chefs and cookbook wonks. If you're a hotshot chef, even if you can't read it, every minute without it is misery. Science-fiction and space-travel metaphors come up frequently when discussing it. "There's no cookbook like it. I love the fact that it's like Star Wars," says Wylie Dufresne, an unabashed fan of Adria whose WD-50 menu in New York was unapologetically created under the controversial Catalonian chef's influence. "He's going backward!" (The next book will cover the years 1994 to 1997.) "We're all looking at Spain. And Adria's ground zero." For years now, I'd been hearing from chef friends about their experiences at El Bulli.

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  Everything went giddy with joy in Varenukha’s head, his face beamed, and, not knowing what he was saying, he began to murmur: ‘Verily . . . that is, I mean to say . . . Your ma . . . right after dinner . . .’ Varenukha pressed his hands to his chest, looking beseechingly at Azazello. ‘All right. Home with you!’ the latter said, and Varenukha dissolved. ‘Now all of you leave me alone with them,’ ordered Woland, pointing to the master and Margarita. Woland’s order was obeyed instantly. After some silence, Woland said to the master: ‘So it’s back to the Arbat basement? And who is going to write? And the dreams, the inspiration?’ ‘I have no more dreams, or inspiration either,’ replied the master. ‘Nothing around me interests me, except her.’ He again put his hand on Margarita’s head. ‘I’m broken, I’m bored, and I want to be in the basement.’ ‘And your novel? Pilate?’ ‘It’s hateful to me, this novel,’ replied the master, ‘I went through too much because of it.’ ‘I implore you,’ Margarita begged plaintively, ‘don’t talk like that. Why do you torment me? You know I put my whole life into this work.’ Turning to Woland, Margarita also added: ‘Don’t listen to him, Messire, he’s too worn out.’ ‘But you must write about something,’ said Woland. ‘If you’ve exhausted the procurator, well, then why not start portraying, say, this Aloisy . . .’ The master smiled. ‘Lapshennikova wouldn’t publish that, and, besides, it’s not interesting.’ ‘And what are you going to live on? You’ll have a beggarly existence.’ ‘Willingly, willingly,’ replied the master, drawing Margarita to him. He put his arm around her shoulders and added: ‘She’ll see reason, she’ll leave me . . .’ ‘I doubt that,’ Woland said through his teeth and went on: ‘And so, the man who wrote the story of Pontius Pilate goes to the basement with the intention of settling by the lamp and leading a beggarly existence?’ Margarita separated herself from the master and began speaking very ardently: ‘I did all I could. I whispered the most tempting thing to him. And he refused.’ ‘I know what you whispered to him,’ Woland retorted, ‘but it is not the most tempting thing. And to you I say,’ he turned, smiling, to the master, ‘that your novel will still bring you surprises.’ ‘That’s very sad,’ replied the master. ‘No, no, it’s not sad,’ said Woland, ‘nothing terrible. Well, Margarita Nikolaevna, it has all been done. Do you have any claims against me?’ ‘How can you, oh, how can you, Messire! . . .’ ‘Then take this from me as a memento,’ said Woland, and he drew from under the pillow a small golden horseshoe studded with diamonds. ‘No, no, no, why on earth!’ ‘You want to argue with me?’ Woland said, smiling. Since Margarita had no pockets in her cloak, she put the horseshoe in a napkin and tied it into a knot.

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

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