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 Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  I talked to him about the argument in Washington, but he was much more interested in preparing me to hear his poem. I could tell he was nervous about whether he’d be able to do it. I cut short my report about his case so I could hear his poem. He closed his eyes to concentrate and then began to recite the lines: Roses are red, violets are blue. Soon I’ll come home to live with you. My life will be better, happy I’ll be, You’ll be like my Dad and my family. We’ll have fun with our friends and others will see, I’m a good person...uh...I’m a good person...I’m...a...good...person...uh... He couldn’t remember the last line. He looked up at the ceiling, then at the floor straining to remember. He squeezed his eyes, trying to force the last words to mind, but they wouldn’t come. I was tempted to supply him a line just to help him get through it—“so be happy for me” or “now people will see.” But I realized that creating a line for him wasn’t the right thing to do, so I just sat there. Finally, he seemed to accept that he wouldn’t remember the line. I thought he’d be upset, but when it was clear that he wouldn’t remember the last line, he just started laughing. I smiled at him, relieved. For some reason it became funnier and funnier to him that he couldn’t think of the last line—until he abruptly stopped laughing and looked at me. “Oh, wait. I think the last line...actually, uh, I think the last line is just what I said. The last line is just ‘I’m a good person.’ ” He paused, and I looked at him skeptically for several seconds. I said it before I thought about it. “Really?” I should have stopped, but I continued, “We’ll have fun with our friends and others will see, I’m a good person?” He looked at me for an instant with a serious expression, and then we both broke out simultaneously in wild laughter. I wasn’t sure I should be laughing, but Joe was laughing, which made me think it was okay. Honestly, I couldn’t help it. In a few seconds we were both in hysterics. He was rocking in his wheelchair from side to side with laughter, clapping his hands. I couldn’t stop laughing, either; I was trying hard to stop but failing. We looked at each other as we laughed. I watched Joe, who laughed like a little boy, but I saw the lines in his face and even the emergence of a few prematurely gray hairs on his head.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  Leucippe’s very name, “the white horse,” evokes the Socratic metaphor of the chariot from the Phaedrus. Like Plato, Achilles believes that eros can lift the human soul just high enough to glimpse the divine. Unlike Plato, Achilles describes eros for a girl. And yet Leucippe and Clitophon does not just present Platonic eros in heterosexual guise. For Plato, physical eros was a force sublimated in the intellectual search for wisdom, a mere image of the true form of love. It is epitomized by the pederastic mentorship. Leucippe and Clitophon, by contrast, begins with a series of failed courtships modeled on pederasty and ends with the marriage of the protagonists. The implied consummation of Leucippe and Clitophon is a deeply physical union. The ecstasy of sex is, in the imaginative universe of the novel, a profoundly embodied experience. For Achilles eros is not a force that has to be sublimated, because eros belongs to the cycle of nature. The cosmos is so contrived that the “white horse,” Leucippe, the agent of salvation, is to be had in marriage, in the same institution that reproduces life. Achilles has no doctrine, other than eros and its compatibility with the narrative arc of human life. It is the genius of his art to raise romance to heights of self-awareness that allow it to compete with philosophy. Achilles does not argue for eros. He, unlike Plato, unlike the Stoics, embraces the world, with its ceaseless cycle of rebirth and death in which eros finds its natural place. And he laughs at anyone who believes it might be otherwise. CONCLUSION: COSMOS AND EROS IN THE ROMAN EMPIREThe sexual culture of the high Roman Empire was dominated by the imperatives of social reproduction. The symphony of sexual values, in all its various movements and complex harmonies, was set to the rhythms of the material world: early marriage for women, jealous guarding of honorable female sexuality, an expansive slave system, late marriage for men, and basically relaxed attitudes toward male sexual potential, so long as it was consonant with masculine protocols and social hierarchies. Moral expectations were in tune with social roles, and social roles strictly determined both the points of release and the rigid constraints in ancient sexual culture. The value of a sexual act derived, first and foremost, from its objective location within a matrix of social relationships.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  If Roman marriage was an erotically charged institution, it is worth noting how firmly the actual practices of the Roman bedroom lay beyond explicit regulation, even among the moralists of the age. The fact is that authors like Plutarch, who goes so far as to advocate orderly sexual habits, retreat into pragmatic discretion before legislating on specific acts. So, notably, did the rabbis, who refrained from heavy-handed interference in the married couple’s sexual life. In turn we are left to glean from a largely barren field. We find in different types of evidence a distinction between the sexual acts to be expected of a wife and those to be expected of a disreputable woman. A magical papyrus casts a spell on a woman in the hopes of achieving “whorish sex,” as though that more or less summarizes a style, or intensity, of amorous encounter. Seneca, among others, counsels men not to love their wives as though they were mistresses. Fellatio is regularly assumed to be the domain of the prostitute. Still, Roman art depicts a wider range of positions and configurations than ever before, and not all of these have to involve paid professionals. Whereas late classical Greek art had tended to focus on the gratification of the man, Roman erotic art takes a far more variable perspective. Scenes of women on top, mulier equitans, focus on the reposed beauty of the woman’s body. If the representation of male fulfillment was still predominant, there was undoubtedly a new visual emphasis in Roman art on the mutual pleasure of the partners.91 Still, it can only be wondered how well women fared in the bedroom. There was an abiding prejudice against acts that were considered to pollute the mouth. Visual evidence suggests that women could turn to male prostitutes to enjoy exotic pleasures, but this cannot have been an option to many women. There are signs that sometimes the possibilities were even unknown. More often there is simply blind disgust. Galen, who was not a prude, could claim as a matter of fact, “We find cunnilingus even more repulsive than fellatio.” Cultural conventions of male dominance could be a powerful force. Or they could just act to draw a curtain around what really happened in the bedroom. The truth is that there is more discussion about female orgasms in the Roman Empire than ever before, and for a long time after. For Ovid, mutual satisfaction was a vital part of his sexual code. For the author of the Lucianic Amores, it is what recommends heterosexual love. But nothing can match Clitophon’s panegyric. For him, the climbing ecstasy of shared pleasure encapsulated the real meaning of eros. When the woman neared the “climax of Aphrodite,” she became frenzied with pleasure, and at the peak of orgasm the woman’s gasps even carried a little of her vital spirit into the mouth of her lover, where it mingled with his wandering kiss and returned to the heart.92

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  In November 2016, Florida finally released Ian Manuel. Imprisoned since he was thirteen years old, Ian spent most of his incarceration in solitary confinement. Upon his release, Ian was embraced by the woman he was convicted of shooting. They had dinner together before he came to Montgomery and joined our reentry program. A few months later, Ian performed one of his poems at EJI’s annual event in New York City, where he now writes and performs spoken word poetry. On December 1, 2017, an ecstatic Joe Sullivan, laughing and shouting in his wheelchair, was pushed out the door of a different Florida prison, thrilled to be free. Our staff embraced him and brought him to Montgomery, where he gave me five Father’s Day cards because he couldn’t decide which one he liked best. After eighteen months in our residential program, Joe moved to Joseph House, a home for formerly incarcerated people with significant disabilities, where he now resides. Ian and Joe are among dozens of clients sentenced to die in prison as children who are now free. Trina Garnett has been resentenced and is now eligible for parole. She sings with a group of women serving life sentences at Muncy State Prison in Pennsylvania, where they recently performed a song titled “This Is Not My Home.” We hope she will be paroled in the coming year. Soon, Antonio Nuñez will be eligible for release in California, where his reduced sentence has given him access to programming and educational opportunities that are denied to people serving life imprisonment without parole, even if they were arrested at fourteen. In 2012, after I argued Kuntrell Jackson’s case, Jackson v. Hobbs, and its companion case, Miller v. Alabama, at the United States Supreme Court, the Court banned mandatory life-without-parole sentences for all children seventeen and younger. Hundreds of people condemned to die in prison for crimes committed as children have been released across the country. Kuntrell was released in February 2017 and has started his career in the performing arts with an appearance in the film adaptation of Just Mercy. Henry, the man I first met on death row as a law student, is no longer on death row and hopes to be released soon. I am especially excited that we have been able to advance our work confronting America’s history of racial inequality. We have produced groundbreaking reports on slavery, lynching, and segregation in the United States, and in April 2018, we opened the Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice—the country’s first comprehensive memorial dedicated to victims of racial terror lynching—in Montgomery, Alabama. I hope you will visit our museum and memorial to learn more about our work to create greater justice in the world.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  No discipline made me feel more free, or contained me and delighted me within its own element so much as swimming. Even so, when Phil came down the spiral stairs—displaying (some well-judged vanity of his own) new trunks cut high on the hips, black behind and gold in front—I was happy to do things I normally deplore, getting in people’s way, doing handstands or swimming between his splayed and sturdy legs. For a while we gloomed Cousteau-like in the depths of the deep end, swivelling our goggled heads from side to side, searching for our locker keys which we had thrown in and left to settle, buffeted and wandering in the choppy water. Where the end wall met the floor of the bath Phil pointed out to me with slowed, speechless gestures the melancholy aperture where the water escaped, and, gathered round it, dozens of sticking-plasters, bleached clean by their long immersion and waving over the filter like albino, submarine plants. Then I saw him give out his breath, the bubbles crowding from his mouth, flooding around his head and up towards the light with baroque exuberance. He himself shot up then and I followed a second or two later. We hung on our elbows to regain our breath. The plan was to go later to the Shaft and dance and get drunk and have a wonderful time. Phil had never been there with me: our funny routine isolated us from the normal gay world, and what with one thing and another I had not been there myself for a couple of months—though for a year or more before that I was impelled towards it, without any power to resist, every Monday and Friday night. I had been an addict of the Shaft. If I was out to dinner I would grow restless towards eleven o’clock, particularly if I was away in the western districts and had several miles to travel. I would go to the opera very inappropriately got up, and had more than once exploited the privacy of the Covent Garden box to slip off during the last act as the anticipation of sex welled up inside me, rapidly distancing and denaturing the carry-on on stage into irksome nonsense. The Shaft itself I hardly ever left alone, and I had made countless taxi-journeys down the glaring, garbage-stacked wasteland of Oxford Street and along the great still darkness of the Park, a black kid, drunk, chilled in his sweat, lying against me, or secretly touching me. I took home boys from far out—from Leyton, Leytonstone, Dagenham, New Cross—who like me made their pilgrimage to this airless, electrifying cellar in the West End, but had no way, if they failed to score, at three or four a.m., of getting home. Phil took a practical attitude to his initiation, and we walked from the Corry through dusky, cooling Bloomsbury to have supper at the hotel. In Russell Square, under the planes, there was at last a perceptible breeze.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  I wanted to photograph some of our clients in order to give the life-without-parole sentences imposed on children a human face. Florida was one of the few states that would allow photographers inside a prison, so we asked prison officials if Ian could be permitted out of his solitary, no-touch existence for an hour so that the photographer we hired could take the pictures. To my delight, they agreed and allowed Ian to be in the same room with an outside photographer. As soon as the visit was over, Ian immediately wrote me a letter. Dear Mr. Stevenson: I hope this letter reaches you in good health, and everything is going well for you. The focal point of this letter is to thank you for the photo session with the photographer and obtain information from you how I can obtain a good amount of photos. As you know, I’ve been in solitary confinement approx. 14.5 years. It’s like the system has buried me alive and I’m dead to the outside world. Those photos mean so very much to me right now. All I have is $1.75 in my inmate account right now. If I send you $1.00 of that, how many of the photos will that purchase me? In my elation at the photo shoot today, I forgot to mention that today June 19th was my deceased mom’s birthday. I know it’s not a big significance, but reflecting on it afterward it seemed symbolic and special that the photo shoot took place on my mother’s birthday! I don’t know how to make you feel the emotion and importance of those photos, but to be real, I want to show the world I’m alive! I want to look at those photos and feel alive! It would really help with my pain. I felt joyful today during the photo shoot. I wanted it to never end. Every time you all visit and leave, I feel saddened. But I capture and cherish those moments in time, replaying them in my mind’s eye, feeling grateful for human interaction and contact. But today, just the simple handshakes we shared was a welcome addition to my sensory deprived life. Please tell me how many photos I can get? I want those photos of myself, almost as bad as I want my freedom. Thank you for making a lot of the positive occurrences that are happening in my life possible. I don’t know exactly how the law led you to me, but I thank God it did. I appreciate everything you and EJI are doing for me. Please send me some photos, okay? F Chapter Nine I’m Here inally, the date for Walter McMillian’s hearing had arrived. We would now have an opportunity to present Ralph Myers’s new testimony and all the exculpatory evidence we’d discovered in police records that had never been disclosed. Michael and I had gone over the case a dozen times, thinking through the best way to present the evidence of Walter’s innocence.

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

  I answer that, A man adopts someone as his son forasmuch as out of goodness he admits him as heir to his estate. Now God is infinitely good: for which reason He admits His creatures to a participation of good things; especially rational creatures, who forasmuch as they are made to the image of God, are capable of Divine beatitude. And this consists in the enjoyment of God, by which also God Himself is happy and rich in Himself—that is, in the enjoyment of Himself. Now a man’s inheritance is that which makes him rich. Wherefore, inasmuch as God, of His goodness, admits men to the inheritance of beatitude, He is said to adopt them. Moreover Divine exceeds human adoption, forasmuch as God, by bestowing His grace, makes man whom He adopts worthy to receive the heavenly inheritance; whereas man does not make him worthy whom he adopts; but rather in adopting him he chooses one who is already worthy. Reply to Objection 1: Considered in his nature man is not a stranger in respect to God, as to the natural gifts bestowed on him: but he is as to the gifts of grace and glory; in regard to which he is adopted. Reply to Objection 2: Man works in order to supply his wants: not so God, Who works in order to communicate to others the abundance of His perfection. Wherefore, as by the work of creation the Divine goodness is communicated to all creatures in a certain likeness, so by the work of adoption the likeness of natural sonship is communicated to men, according to Rom. 8:29: “Whom He foreknew . . . to be made conformable to the image of His Son.” Reply to Objection 3: Spiritual goods can be possessed by many at the same time; not so material goods. Wherefore none can receive a material inheritance except the successor of a deceased person: whereas all receive the spiritual inheritance at the same time in its entirety without detriment to the ever-living Father. Yet it might be said that God ceases to be, according as He is in us by faith, so as to begin to be in us by vision, as a gloss says on Rom. 8:17: “If sons, heirs also.” Whether it is fitting that the whole Trinity should adopt?Objection 1: It would seem unfitting that the whole Trinity should adopt. For adoption is said of God in likeness to human custom. But among men those only adopt who can beget: and in God this can be applied only to the Father. Therefore in God the Father alone can adopt. Objection 2: Further, by adoption men become the brethren of Christ, according to Rom. 8:29: “That He might be the first-born among many brethren.” Now brethren are the sons of the same father; wherefore our Lord says (Jn. 20:17): “I ascend to My Father and to your Father.” Therefore Christ’s Father alone has adopted sons.

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

  HILARY. The Angels offer daily to God the prayers of those that are to be saved by Christ; it is therefore perilous to despise him whose desires and requests are conveyed to the eternal and invisible God, by the service and ministry of Angels. AUGUSTINE. (de Civ. Dei, xxii. 29.) Or; They are called our Angels who are indeed the Angels of God. they are Gods because they have not forsaken Him; they are ours because they have begun to have us for their fellow-citizens. As they now behold God, so shall we also behold Him face to face, of which vision John speaks, We shall see him as he is. (1 John 3:2.) For by the face of God is to be understood the manifestation of Himself, not a member or feature of the body, such as we call by that name. CHRYSOSTOM. He gives yet another reason weightier than the foregoing, why the little ones are not to be despised, For the Son of Man is come to save that which was lost. REMIGIUS. As much as to say, Despise not little ones, for I also for men condescended to become man. By that which was lost, understand the human race; for all the elements have kept their place, but man was lost, because he has broken his ordained place. CHRYSOSTOM. And to this reasoning He adds a parable, in which He sets forth the Father as seeking the salvation of men, and saying, What think you, If a man have a hundred sheep. GREGORY. (Hom. in Ev. xxxiv. 3.) This refers to the Creator of man Himself; for a hundred is a perfect number, and He had a hundred sheep when He created the substance of Angels and men. HILARY. But by the one sheep is to be understood one man, and under this one man is comprehended the whole human race. He that seeks man is Christ, and the ninety and nine are the host of the heavenly glory which He left. GREGORY. (ubi sup.) The Evangelist says they were left on the mountains, to signify that the sheep which were not lost abode on high. BEDE. (ap. Anselm.) The Lord found the sheep when He restored man, and over that sheep that is found there is more joy in heaven than over the ninety and nine, because there is a greater matter for thanksgiving to God in the restoration of man than in the creation of the Angels. Wonderfully are the Angels made, but more wonderfully man restored. RABANUS. Note, that nine wants only one to make it ten, and ninety and nine the same to be a hundred. Thus members which want one only to be perfect, may be larger or smaller, but yet the unit remaining invariable, when it is added makes the rest perfect. And that the number of sheep might be made up perfect in heaven, lost man was sought on earth.

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

  ALCUIN. This is His meaning then: In the world to come, ye shall ask Me nothing: but in the mean time while ye are travelling on this wearisome road, ask what ye want of the Father, and He will give it you: Verily, verily, I say unto you, Whatsoever ye shall ask the Father in My Name, He will give it you. AUGUSTINE. (Tr. cii) The word whatsoever, must not be understood to mean any thing, but something which with reference to obtaining the life of blessedness is not nothing. That is not sought in the Saviour’s name, which is sought to the hindering of our salvation; for by, in My name, must be understood not the mere sound of the letters or syllables, but that which is rightly and truly signified by that sound. He who holds any notion concerning Christ, which should not be held of the only Son of God, does not ask in His name. But he who thinks rightly of Him, asks in His name, and receives what he asks, if it be not against his eternal salvation: he receives when it is right he should receive; for some things are only denied at present in order to be granted at a more suitable time. Again, the words, He will give it you, only comprehend those benefits which properly appertain to the persons who ask. All saints are heard for themselves, but not for all; for it is not, will give, simply, but, will give you; what follows: Hitherto have ye asked nothing in My name, may be understood in two ways: either that they had not asked in His name, because they had not known it as it ought to be known; or, Ye have asked nothing, because with reference to obtaining the thing ye ought to ask for, what ye have asked for is to be counted nothing. That therefore they may ask in His name not for what is nothing, but for the fulness of joy, He adds, Ask and ye shall receive, that your joy may be full. This full joy is not carnal, but spiritual joy; and it will be full, when it is so great that nothing can be added to it. AUGUSTINE. (1. de Trin. c. 8) And this is that full joy, than which nothing can be greater, viz. to enjoy God, the Trinity, in the image of Whom we are made.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  e ecstasy of sex is, in the imaginative universe of the novel, a profoundly embodied experience. For Achilles eros is not a force that has to be sublimated, because eros belongs to the cycle of nature. Th e cosmos is so contrived that the “white horse,” Leucippe, the agent of salvation, is to be had in marriage, in the same institution that reproduces life. Achilles has no doctrine, other than eros and its compatibility with the narrative arc of human life. It is the genius of his art to raise romance to heights of self-awareness that allow it to compete with philosophy. Achilles does not argue for eros. He, unlike Plato, unlike the Stoics, embraces the world, with its ceaseless cycle of rebirth and death in which eros fi nds its natural place. And he laughs at anyone who believes it might be otherwise. CO N C LU S I O N : CO S M O S A N D E RO S I N TH E RO M A N E M P I R E Th e sexual culture of the high Roman Empire was dominated by the imperatives of social reproduction. Th e symphony of sexual values, in all its various movements and complex harmonies, was set to the rhythms of the material world: early marriage for women, jealous guarding of honorable female sexuality, an expansive slave system, late marriage for men, and basically relaxed attitudes toward male sexual potential, so long as it was consonant with masculine protocols and social hierarchies. Moral expectations were in tune with social roles, and social roles strictly determined both the points of release and the rigid constraints in ancient sexual culture. Th e value of a sexual act derived, fi rst and foremost, from its objective location within a matrix of social relationships. Th e romances of the Roman Empire are such extraordinary witnesses to the experience of eros because they transform the exigencies of social reproduction into the workings of a cosmic destiny, they toy with the tensions between fl ux and order in the individual’s coming- to- be in the world, and in the end, they spiritualize the mysterious erotic energies that connect man to nature. In the romances, these stirrings are a constitutive source of the self. When a romancer like Achilles Tatius looked out upon the gloomy counsels of the phi los o phers, it was not as a partisan of one ideology upon another, competing for supremacy in the public mind; it was, rather, as a spokesman for life, and the timeless patterns of sexual experience, upon a T H E M O R A L I T I E S O F S E X I N T H E R O M A N E M P I R E 

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

  Objection 2: Further, the end is proportionate to the beginning. But Christ ended His life in pain, according to Is. 53:4: “Surely . . . He hath carried our sorrows.” Therefore it seems that His nativity was not without the pains of childbirth. Objection 3: Further, in the book on the birth of our Saviour [*Protevangelium Jacobi xix, xx] it is related that midwives were present at Christ’s birth; and they would be wanted by reason of the mother’s suffering pain. Therefore it seems that the Blessed Virgin suffered pain in giving birth to her Child. On the contrary, Augustine says (Serm. de Nativ. [*Supposititious]), addressing himself to the Virgin-Mother: “In conceiving thou wast all pure, in giving birth thou wast without pain.” I answer that, The pains of childbirth are caused by the infant opening the passage from the womb. Now it has been said above ([4189]Q[28], A[2], Replies to objections), that Christ came forth from the closed womb of His Mother, and, consequently, without opening the passage. Consequently there was no pain in that birth, as neither was there any corruption; on the contrary, there was much joy therein for that God-Man “was born into the world,” according to Is. 35:1,2: “Like the lily, it shall bud forth and blossom, and shall rejoice with joy and praise.” Reply to Objection 1: The pains of childbirth in the woman follow from the mingling of the sexes. Wherefore (Gn. 3:16) after the words, “in sorrow shalt thou bring forth children,” the following are added: “and thou shalt be under thy husband’s power.” But, as Augustine says (Serm. de Assumpt. B. Virg., [*Supposititious]), from this sentence we must exclude the Virgin-Mother of God; who, “because she conceived Christ without the defilement of sin, and without the stain of sexual mingling, therefore did she bring Him forth without pain, without violation of her virginal integrity, without detriment to the purity of her maidenhood.” Christ, indeed, suffered death, but through His own spontaneous desire, in order to atone for us, not as a necessary result of that sentence, for He was not a debtor unto death. Reply to Objection 2: As “by His death” Christ “destroyed our death” [*Preface of the Mass in Paschal-time], so by His pains He freed us from our pains; and so He wished to die a painful death. But the mother’s pains in childbirth did not concern Christ, who came to atone for our sins. And therefore there was no need for His Mother to suffer in giving birth.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  celebrate eros as a gift of nature; they ponder the stark mystery that replenishing the city with new generations should also be a source of the greatest plea sure. Th e romances are unhesitantly carnal: eros is the ecstatic joy of bodily friction. At the same time the eros they admire is a force that has been safely caged in matrimony— if just barely. Th e novels are conservative, but hardly frigid. Th e novels unabashedly celebrate sex itself. Th e romances are idealizing. Th e lovers are noble in blood and mien, their passion is pure and true. Even the men are usually faithful, physically; emotionally, it is imperative that they remain committed. Th e mutual attraction between two lovers, married or about to be so, represented a new space for literate cultural idealism around domestic bliss and private fulfi llment. Th e social and moral logic that underwrites the genre is shared between texts, even if the individual authors regard it with diff erent levels of reverence. Th e social logic of the romances transcends the genre; the raw material of the romance is preliterary, essentially folkloric. Structurally the romances are stories of adversity and adventure that resolve happily in marriage. In the prelude to the fi nal book of his romance, Chariton signaled the shift from misadventure to resolution in revealing terms: “No longer shall we have piracy and slavery, trials and battles, grisly suicide, war or captivity, but righ teous passions and legitimate marriages.” Th roughout the narrative the heroine faces grave dangers that call into question her status. Th e heroine of romance is a recognizable social type; her essence precedes her individuality. She is beautiful, of free and noble birth, and in the prime of her marriageable years. Preferably the heroine is superlatively beautiful and impeccably wellborn. Callirhoe, for instance, was the daughter of the leading citizen of Syracuse, and she was the “glory  F R O M S H A M E TO S I N of all Sicily,” with a “beauty that was not human but divine.” Anthia, at fourteen, was “in the very bloom of her body’s beauty,” a beauty that “was an astonishment, far beyond all the other virgins.” In Leucippe and Clitophon, we fi rst encounter Leucippe through the eyes of her lover, Clitophon, who dilates on the experience of such superhuman beauty. In Daphnis and Chloe, the drama revolves around the fact that the protagonists were exposed as infants and raised by simple peasants; Chloe, even as a sheepherder, is supremely if naively charming, but it is only in the very last sequence of the story that her true identity, as a daughter of the town’s gentry, was revealed. In fact, once she was literally scrubbed of her rural grime and properly dressed, it was indisputably obvious that her rustic parents did not in reality produce “such a maiden as that.” Th

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  Never again will it be given this way. The day of the murder it was even tastier than ever. It had a slight taste of terror in it which has been lacking ever since. And it was received with Aunt Caroline’s tacit but complete absolution. There is something about the rye bread which I am trying to fathom—something vaguely delicious, terrifying and liberating, something associated with first discoveries. I am thinking of another slice of sour rye which was connected with a still earlier period, when my little friend Stanley and I used to rifle the icebox. That was stolen bread and consequently even more marvelous to the palate than the bread which was given with love. But it was in the act of eating the rye bread, the walking around with it and talking at the same time, that something in the nature of revelation occurred. It was like a state of grace, a state of complete ignorance, of self-abnegation. Whatever was imparted to me in these moments I seem to have retained intact and there is no fear that I shall ever lose the knowledge that was gained. It was just the fact perhaps that it was not knowledge as we ordinarily think of it. It was almost like receiving a truth, though truth is almost too precise a word for it. The important thing about the sour rye discussions is that they always took place away from home, away from the eyes of our parents whom we feared but never respected. Left to ourselves there were no limits to what we might imagine. Facts had little importance for us; what we demanded of a subject was that it allow us opportunity to expand. What amazes me, when I look back on it, is how well we understood one another, how well we penetrated to the essential character of each and every one, young or old. At seven years of age we knew with dead certainty, for example, that such a fellow would end up in prison, that another would be a drudge, and another a good for nothing, and so on. We were absolutely correct in our diagnoses, much more correct, for example, than our parents, or our teachers, more correct, indeed, than the so-called psychologists. Alfie Betcha turned out to be an absolute bum; Johnny Gerhardt went to the penitentiary; Bob Kunst became a work horse. Infallible predictions. The learning we received only tended to obscure our vision. From the day we went to school we learned nothing; on the contrary, we were made obtuse, we were wrapped in a fog of words and abstractions. With the sour rye the world was what it is essentially, a primitive world ruled by magic, a world in which fear plays the most important role. The boy who could inspire the most fear was the leader and he was respected as long as he could maintain his power.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  Sometimes it was like watching an endurance contest—Ed Bauries and George Neumiller at the grand piano, each trying to wear the other out, changing places without stopping, crossing hands, sometimes falling away to plain chopsticks, sometimes going like a Wurlitzer. And always something to laugh about all the time. Nobody asked what you did, what you thought about, and so forth. When you arrived at Ed Bauries’ place you checked your identification marks. Nobody gave a fuck what size hat you wore or how much you paid for it. It was entertainment from the word go—and the sandwiches and the drinks were on the house. And when things got going, three or four pianos at once, the celesta, the organ, the mandolins, the guitars, beer running through the halls, the mantelpieces full of sandwiches and cigars, a breeze coming through from the garden, George Neumiller stripped to the waist and modulating like a fiend, it was better than any show I’ve ever seen put on and it didn’t cost a cent. In fact, with the dressing and undressing that went on, I always came away with a little extra change and a pocketful of good cigars. I never saw any of them between times—only Monday nights throughout the summer, when Ed held open house. Standing in the garden listening to the din I could scarcely believe that it was the same city. And if I had ever opened my trap and exposed my guts it would have been all over. Not one of these bozos amounted to anything, as the world reckons. They were just good eggs, children, fellows who liked music and who liked a good time. They liked it so much that sometimes we had to call the ambulance. Like the night Al Burger twisted his knee while showing us one of his stunts. Everybody so happy, so full of music, so lit up, that it took him an hour to persuade us he was really hurt. We try to carry him to a hospital but it’s too far away and besides, it’s such a good joke, that we drop him now and then and that makes him yell like a maniac. So finally we telephone for help from a police box, and the ambulance comes and the patrol wagon too. They take Al to the hospital and the rest of us to the hoosegow. And on the way we sing at the top of our lungs. And after we’re bailed out we’re still feeling good and the cops are feeling good too, and so we all adjourn to the basement where there’s a cracked piano and we go on singing and playing. All this is like some period B.C. in history which ends not because there’s a war but because even a joint like Ed Bauries’ is not immune to the poison seeping in from the periphery.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  The service was crippled, constipated, strangulated. A mule could have gotten there faster than some of the idiots I put into harness. The best thing about the new day was the introduction of female messengers. It changed the whole atmosphere of the joint. For Hymie especially it was a godsend. He moved his switchboard around so that he could watch me while juggling the waybills back and forth. Despite the added work he had a permanent erection. He came to work with a smile and he smiled all day long. He was in heaven. At the end of the day I always had a list of five or six who were worth trying out. The game was to keep them on the string, to promise them a job but to get a free fuck first. Usually it was only necessary to throw a feed into them in order to bring them back to the office at night and lay them out on the zinc-covered table in the dressing room. If they had a cosy apartment, as they sometimes did, we took them home and finished it in bed. If they liked to drink Hymie would bring a bottle along. If they were any good and really needed some dough Hymie would flash his roll and peel off a five spot or a ten spot, as the case might be. It makes my mouth water when I think of that roll he carried about with him. Where he got it from I never knew, because he was the lowest-paid man in the joint. But it was always there, and no matter what I asked for I got. And once it happened that we did get a bonus and I paid Hymie back to the last penny—which so amazed him that he took me out that night to Delmonico’s and spent a fortune on me. Not only that, but the next day he insisted on buying me a hat and shirts and gloves. He even insinuated that I might come home and fuck his wife, if I liked, though he warned me that she was having a little trouble at present with her ovaries. In addition to Hymie and McGovern I had as assistants a pair of beautiful blondes who often accompanied us to dinner in the evening. And there was O’Mara, an old friend of mine who had just returned from the Philippines and whom I made my chief assistant. There was also Steve Romero, a prize bull whom I kept around in case of trouble. And O’Rourke, the company detective, who reported to me at the close of day when he began his work. Finally I added another man to the staff—Kronski, a young medical student, who was diabolically interested in the pathological cases of which we had plenty. We were a merry crew, united in our desire to fuck the company at all costs.

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

  Reply to Objection 1: The cognitive faculty does not move except through the medium of the appetitive: and just as in ourselves the universal reason moves through the medium of the particular reason, as stated in De Anima iii, 58,75, so in ourselves the intellectual appetite, or the will as it is called, moves through the medium of the sensitive appetite. Hence, in us the sensitive appetite is the proximate motive-force of our bodies. Some bodily change therefore always accompanies an act of the sensitive appetite, and this change affects especially the heart, which, as the Philosopher says (De part. animal. iii, 4), is the first principle of movement in animals. Therefore acts of the sensitive appetite, inasmuch as they have annexed to them some bodily change, are called passions; whereas acts of the will are not so called. Love, therefore, and joy and delight are passions; in so far as they denote acts of the intellective appetite, they are not passions. It is in this latter sense that they are in God. Hence the Philosopher says (Ethic. vii): “God rejoices by an operation that is one and simple,” and for the same reason He loves without passion. Reply to Objection 2: In the passions of the sensitive appetite there may be distinguished a certain material element—namely, the bodily change—and a certain formal element, which is on the part of the appetite. Thus in anger, as the Philosopher says (De Anima iii, 15,63,64), the material element is the kindling of the blood about the heart; but the formal, the appetite for revenge. Again, as regards the formal element of certain passions a certain imperfection is implied, as in desire, which is of the good we have not, and in sorrow, which is about the evil we have. This applies also to anger, which supposes sorrow. Certain other passions, however, as love and joy, imply no imperfection. Since therefore none of these can be attributed to God on their material side, as has been said (ad 1); neither can those that even on their formal side imply imperfection be attributed to Him; except metaphorically, and from likeness of effects, as already show ([143]Q[3], A[2] , ad 2; [144]Q[19], A[11]). Whereas, those that do not imply imperfection, such as love and joy, can be properly predicated of God, though without attributing passion to Him, as said before ([145]Q[19], A[11]).

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

  Reply to Objection 1: Augustine is speaking there against such as maintained that the righteous of old were subject to penal sufferings before Christ’s descent into hell. Hence shortly before the passage quoted he says: “Some add that this benefit was also bestowed upon the saints of old, that on the Lord’s coming into hell they were freed from their sufferings. But I fail to see how Abraham, into whose bosom the poor man was received, was ever in such sufferings.” Consequently, when he afterwards adds that “he had not yet discovered what Christ’s descent into hell had brought to the righteous of old,” this must be understood as to their being freed from penal sufferings. Yet Christ bestowed something upon them as to their attaining glory: and in consequence He dispelled the suffering which they endured through their glory being delayed: still they had great joy from the very hope thereof, according to Jn. 8:56: “Abraham your father rejoiced that he might see my day.” And therefore he adds: “I fail to see that He ever departed, according to the beatific presence of His Godhead,” that is, inasmuch as even before Christ’s coming they were happy in hope, although not yet fully happy in fact. Reply to Objection 2: The holy Fathers while yet living were delivered from original as well as actual sin through faith in Christ; also from the penalty of actual sins, but not from the penalty of original sin, whereby they were excluded from glory, since the price of man’s redemption was not yet paid: just as the faithful are now delivered by baptism from the penalty of actual sins, and from the penalty of original sin as to exclusion from glory, yet still remain bound by the penalty of original sin as to the necessity of dying in the body because they are renewed in the spirit, but not yet in the flesh, according to Rom. 8:10: “The body indeed is dead, because of sin; but the spirit liveth, because of justification.” Reply to Objection 3: Directly Christ died His soul went down into hell, and bestowed the fruits of His Passion on the saints detained there; although they did not go out as long as Christ remained in hell, because His presence was part of the fulness of their glory. Whether Christ delivered any of the lost from hell?Objection 1: It would seem that Christ did deliver some of the lost from hell, because it is written (Is. 24:22): “And they shall be gathered together as in the gathering of one bundle into the pit, end they shall be shut up there in prison: and after many days they shall be visited.” But there he is speaking of the lost, who “had adored the host of heaven,” according to Jerome’s commentary. Consequently it seems that even the lost were visited at Christ’s descent into hell; and this seems to imply their deliverance.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  Grover would inquire of this one and that where they were heading for and the strange thing was that although they were all heading for their individual destinations none of them ever stopped to reflect that the one inevitable destination for all alike was the grave. This puzzled Grover because nobody could convince him that death was not a certainty, whereas anybody could convince anybody else that any other destination was an uncertainty. Convinced of the dead certainty of death Grover suddenly became tremendously and overwhelmingly alive. For the first time in his life he began to live, and at the same time the clubfoot dropped completely out of his consciousness. This is a strange thing, too, when you come to think of it, because the clubfoot, just like death, was another ineluctable fact. Yet the clubfoot dropped out of mind, or, what is more important, all that had been attached to the clubfoot. In the same way, having accepted death, death too dropped out of Grover’s mind. Having seized on the single certainty of death all the uncertainties vanished. The rest of the world was now limping along with clubfooted uncertainties and Grover Watrous alone was free and unimpeded. Grover Watrous was the personification of certainty. He may have been wrong, but he was certain. And what good does it do to be right if one has to limp along with a clubfoot? Only a few men have ever realized the truth of this and their names have become very great names. Grover Watrous will probably never be known, but he is very great just the same. This is probably the reason why I write about him—just the fact that I had enough sense to realize that Grover had achieved greatness even though nobody else will admit it. At the time I simply thought that Grover was a harmless fanatic, yes, a little “cracked,” as my mother insinuated. But every man who has caught the truth of certitude was a little cracked and it is only these men who have accomplished anything for the world. Other men, other great men, have destroyed a little here and there, but these few whom I speak of, and among whom I include Grover Watrous, were capable of destroying everything in order that the truth might live. Usually these men were born with an impediment, with a clubfoot, so to speak, and by a strange irony it is only the clubfoot which men remember. If a man like Grover becomes depossessed of his clubfoot, the world says that he has become “possessed.” This is the logic of incertitude and its fruit is misery. Grover was the only truly joyous being I ever met in my life and this, therefore, is a little monument which I am erecting in his memory, in the memory of his joyous certitude.

• From Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016)

  I was the champion of the Maryvale sports day every single year, and my mother won the moms’ trophy every single year. Why? Because she was always chasing me to kick my ass, and I was always running not to get my ass kicked. Nobody ran like me and my mom. She wasn’t one of those “Come over here and get your hiding” type moms. She’d deliver it to you free of charge. She was a thrower, too. Whatever was next to her was coming at you. If it was something breakable, I had to catch it and put it down. If it broke, that would be my fault, too, and the ass-kicking would be that much worse. If she threw a vase at me, I’d have to catch it, put it down, and then run. In a split second, I’d have to think, Is it valuable? Yes. Is it breakable? Yes. Catch it, put it down, now run. We had a very Tom and Jerry relationship, me and my mom. She was the strict disciplinarian; I was naughty as shit. She would send me out to buy groceries, and I wouldn’t come right home because I’d be using the change from the milk and bread to play arcade games at the supermarket. I loved videogames. I was a master at Street Fighter. I could go forever on a single play. I’d drop a coin in, time would fly, and the next thing I knew there’d be a woman behind me with a belt. It was a race. I’d take off out the door and through the dusty streets of Eden Park, clambering over walls, ducking through backyards. It was a normal thing in our neighborhood. Everybody knew: That Trevor child would come through like a bat out of hell, and his mom would be right there behind him. She could go at a full sprint in high heels, but if she really wanted to come after me she had this thing where she’d kick her shoes off while still going at top speed. She’d do this weird move with her ankles and the heels would go flying and she wouldn’t even miss a step. That’s when I knew, Okay, she’s in turbo mode now. When I was little she always caught me, but as I got older I got faster, and when speed failed her she’d use her wits. If I was about to get away she’d yell, “Stop! Thief!” She’d do this to her own child. In South Africa, nobody gets involved in other people’s business—unless it’s mob justice, and then everybody wants in. So she’d yell “Thief!” knowing it would bring the whole neighborhood out against me, and then I’d have strangers trying to grab me and tackle me, and I’d have to duck and dive and dodge them as well, all the while screaming, “I’m not a thief! I’m her son!”

• From Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016)

  With money, I experienced freedom on a whole new level: I went to McDonald’s. People in America don’t understand, but when an American chain opens in a third-world country, people go crazy. That’s true to this day. A Burger King opened for the first time in South Africa last year, and there was a queue around the block. It was an event. Everyone was going around saying, “I have to eat at Burger King. Have you heard? It’s from America.” The funny thing was that the queue was actually just white people. White people went bat-shit crazy for Burger King. Black people were like, whatever. Black people didn’t need Burger King. Our hearts were with KFC and McDonald’s. The crazy thing about McDonald’s is that we knew about it long before it came, probably from movies. We never even dreamed we would ever get one in South Africa; McDonald’s seemed to us like one of those American things that is exclusively American and can’t go anywhere else. Even before we ever tasted McDonald’s, we knew we’d love it, and we did. At one point South Africa was opening more McDonald’s than any other country in the world. With Mandela came freedom—and with freedom came McDonald’s. A McDonald’s had opened up just two blocks from our house not long after we moved to Highlands North, but my mom would never pay for us to eat there. With my own money I was like, Let’s do this. I went all in. They didn’t have “supersize” at the time; “large” was the biggest. So I walked up to the counter, feeling very impressed with myself, and I put down my money and said, “I’ll have a large number one.” I fell in love with McDonald’s. McDonald’s, to me, tasted like America. McDonald’s is America. You see it advertised and it looks amazing. You crave it. You buy it. You take your first bite, and it blows your mind. It’s even better than you imagined. Then, halfway through, you realize it’s not all it’s cracked up to be. A few bites later you’re like, Hmm, there’s a lot wrong with this. Then you’re done, you miss it like crazy, and you go back for more. Once I’d had a taste of America, I never ate at home. I only ate McDonald’s. McDonald’s, McDonald’s, McDonald’s, McDonald’s. Every night my mother would try to cook me dinner. “Tonight we’re having chicken livers.” “No, I’m gonna have McDonald’s.” “Tonight we’re having dog bones.” “I think I’m gonna go with McDonald’s again.” “Tonight we’re having chicken feet.” “Hmmmmm…Okay, I’m in. But tomorrow I’m eating McDonald’s.”