Longing

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.

Page 108 of 170 · 20 per page

• From Cleanness (2020)

  There was a deck that looked out over the mountain, and on the first night we sat there late, talking and drinking, laughing in a way I only ever laughed when I was with them. It was a perfect night, he said, with the long weekend still stretching before them, when have I ever been so happy. There came over his face at this an expression of such longing I had to look away. I had been feeling this increasingly as he spoke, this desire to look away, and had resisted it, wanting him to know I was listening, that I was ready to receive whatever he offered; and this was all the more true because he so seldom looked at me, staring instead at the table, at his hands or the empty cup between them. I wanted to be present when he did look, I wanted him to see my attention, which was my way of catching him, I suppose, or that’s what I wanted it to be, I wanted to gather him up. But as he continued to speak I failed even at this, I was unable to keep my eyes on his face. I went to bed before B., he said then, we were sharing a room but he wanted to stay up a bit and I was exhausted. I thought he would wake me up when he came in, that we would talk for a little like we always did, just a few minutes the two of us by ourselves; but I slept through the night and when I woke his side of the bed was untouched. I thought maybe he had fallen asleep out on the deck, but it had gotten cold in the night and there was nobody outside. It was early, foggy and quiet, like it only ever is in the mountains, and I stood for a while at the wooden rail, looking down at the village where everything was still. He waited for them in the main room, doing nothing, he said, just waiting until he heard a noise on the upper floor and then the final member of their group came down. G. called this boy by name and for the first time I had a clear sense of the four of them, all of them students I had seen every day, more or less, with so little idea of what passed between them.

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  over again. The fact was, she had no money and no place to go. Alone, she might have bolted anyway. With me to take care of she thought she couldn’t. When I told her I’d spoken to Geoffrey, her eyes filled with tears. This was unusual for her. We were sitting at the kitchen table, where we liked to talk when we were alone in the house. Geoffrey had recently been sending my mother letters, too, but they hadn’t spoken since we left Utah. She wanted to know what he sounded like, how he was, and all manner of things I had not thought to ask him. My mother grew somber, as she often did when we talked about Geoffrey. She was afraid she’d done the wrong thing in letting him go with my father, afraid he held it against her, that and the divorce, and taking up with Roy. I mentioned Geoffrey’s idea about Choate, about the possibility of my getting a scholarship there or maybe at some other school. I was afraid of her reaction. I thought she would be hurt by my wish to go, but she liked the idea. “He actually thinks you have a chance?” she said. “He said they’ll be eating out of my hand, quote un-quote.” “I don’t know why he thinks that.” “My grades are good,” I said. “That’s true. Your grades are good. What other schools did he mention?” “St. Paul’s.” “He’s got big plans for you.” “Deerfield.” She laughed. “They’ll recognize your name, anyway. I think your father was the only boy they ever expelled.” Then she said, “Don’t get your hopes too high.” “Geoffrey said he’d talk to Dad about it. He said maybe Dad would have some ideas.” “I’m sure he will,” she said. GEOFFREY SENT THE names and addresses of the schools he had first mentioned, and also three others—Hill, Andover, and Exeter. I went to the library at school and looked them up in Vance Packard’s The Status Seekers. This book explained

• From Story of O (1954)

  When Pierre returned, he was carrying the same blindfold with which he had blindfolded her the first evening. He also had a long chain, which made a clanking noise, a chain similar to the one fastened to the wall. O had the impression that he couldn’t make up his mind whether to put the blindfold or the chain on her first. She was gazing out at the rain, not caring what they wanted from her, thinking only that René had said he would come back, that there were still five days and five nights to go, and that she had no idea where he was or whether he was alone and, if he was not alone, who he was with. But he would come back. Pierre had laid the chain on the bed and, without interrupting O’s daydream, had covered her eyes with the blindfold of black velvet. It was slightly rounded below the sockets of the eyes, and fitted the cheekbones perfectly, making it impossible to get the slightest peek or even to raise the eyelids. Blessèd darkness like unto her own night, never had O greeted it with such joy, blessèd chains that bore her away from herself.

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  in the hall she didn’t even recognize me. I wrote her long, grandiloquent letters which I then destroyed. I thought of the different ways that fate might put her in my power, so I could show her who I really was and make her love me. Most of these possibilities involved death or severe maiming for Lloyd Sly. And when, as sometimes happened, a girl my own age showed some interest in me, I treated her swinishly. I walked her home from a dance or a game, made out with her on her front steps, then cut her dead the next day. I only ever wanted what I couldn’t have. CHUCK AND THE others had better luck getting me drunk. Though liquor disagreed with me they were patient, and willing to experiment, and time was on their side. They finally broke through during a basketball game, the last game of the season. It had rained earlier and the air was steamy. The windows of the school were open, and from our gully outside we could hear the cheerleaders warming up the people in the stands while the players did their lay-up drills. Who’s the team they hate to meet? Con-crete! Con-crete! Who’s the team they just can’t beat? Con-crete! Con-crete! Huff was passing around a can of Hawaiian Punch cut with vodka. Gorilla blood, he called it. I thought it would probably make me sick but I took a swig anyway. It stayed down. In fact I liked it, it tasted exactly like Hawaiian Punch. I took another swig. I WAS UP on the school roof with Chuck. He was looking at me and nodding meditatively. “Wolff,” he said. “Jack Wolff.” “Yo.” “Wolff, your teeth are too big.” “I know they are. I know they are.” “Wolf-man.”

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  Anticipation implies that we are looking forward to something. It is an important ingredient of desire, and planning for sex helps to generate it. When Dominick prepares his osso buco, he can almost taste it in advance. He imagines Raoul’s surprise and pleasure. He hopes it will make his boyfriend feel special, and he envisions Raoul’s gratitude. Fantasy is the mortar of anticipation. It’s a way of imagining what something is going to be like. It’s a kind of foreplay that takes place outside the couple’s direct interaction. Anticipation is part of building a plot; that is why romance novels and soap operas are filled with it. I believe that longing, waiting, and yearning are fundamental elements of desire that can be generated with forethought, even in long-term relationships. When Nile and Sarah go out on Saturday, they often have a few things planned. Dinner, music, and—later—sex. In the past, an entire evening’s worth of wooing was undone the instant Sarah had to pay the babysitter. “All of a sudden, I’d be the mother again, and all that tension we worked to build up would just vanish. Now, Nile deals with the babysitter and I go straight to the bedroom. It’s an arrangement that lets me keep up the momentum.” Sarah and Nile have three kids who keep her running all day, every day. She has made it very clear to Nile that it takes a lot to get her out of that role, and very little for her to slip back in. “I used to think that it was a matter of being in the mood, but I was disabused of that idea a long time ago. Waiting for the mood is like waiting for the Second Coming. I like the planning. It gives me something to look forward to when I’m playing with Barbies and checking homework.” What Sarah looks forward to is more than the sex; it’s the ritual. Spending ample time together, woman to man, they temporarily slip out of the chains of reality. Their foreplay lasts hours. They’ve been at this for twelve years, and like a mastered discipline, they miss it when they skip it. They know that great sex generally demands more than fifteen minutes right after the eleven o’clock news. Cultivating Play When couples complain that their sex life is listless, I know it isn’t mere frequency they’re after. They may want more, but they certainly want better. For this reason, I prefer to talk about their erotic life rather than about their sex life. The physical act of sex is too narrow a subject, which easily degenerates into a conversation about numbers. Human nature abhors a vacuum of intensity. People long for radiance. They want to feel alive. If given half a chance, loving partners can fill the intensity void with transcendence.

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  It’s not by co-opting aggression but rather by owning it that sexual tension can freely romp—and can itself bring safety. Everyone Needs a Secret Garden In her landmark book The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir writes, “Eroticism is a movement toward the Other, this is its essential character.” Yet in our efforts to establish intimacy we often seek to eliminate otherness, thereby precluding the space necessary for desire to flourish. We seek intimacy to protect ourselves from feeling alone; and yet creating the distance essential to eroticism means stepping back from the comfort of our partner and feeling more alone. I suggest that our ability to tolerate our separateness—and the fundamental insecurity it engenders—is a precondition for maintaining interest and desire in a relationship. Instead of always striving for closeness, I argue that couples may be better off cultivating their separate selves. If cultivating separateness sounds harsh, let’s think of it instead as nurturing a sense of selfhood. The French psychologist Jacques Salomé talks about the need to develop a personal intimacy with one’s own self as a counterbalance to the couple. There is beauty in an image that highlights a connection to oneself, rather than a distance from one’s partner. In our mutual intimacy we make love, we have children, and we share physical space and interests. Indeed, we blend the essential parts of our lives. But “essential” does not mean “all.” Personal intimacy demarcates a private zone, one that requires tolerance and respect. It is a space—physical, emotional, and intellectual—that belongs only to me. Not everything needs to be revealed. Everyone should cultivate a secret garden. Love enjoys knowing everything about you; desire needs mystery. Love likes to shrink the distance that exists between me and you, while desire is energized by it. If intimacy grows through repetition and familiarity, eroticism is numbed by repetition. It thrives on the mysterious, the novel, and the unexpected. Love is about having; desire is about wanting. An expression of longing, desire requires ongoing elusiveness. It is less concerned with where it has already been than passionate about where it can still go. But too often, as couples settle into the comforts of love, they cease to fan the flame of desire. They forget that fire needs air. 3 The Pitfalls of Modern Intimacy Talk Is Not the Only Avenue to Closeness We have no secrets, we tell each other everything. —Carly Simon, “We Have No Secrets” WHEN MY MOTHER TALKED ABOUT relationships, she didn’t have much to say about intimacy. “You need two things in a marriage,” she told me. “You need the will to make it work and you need to be able to make compromises. It’s not hard to be right, but then you are right and alone.” My father, who was always less pragmatic than my mother, more than filled the quota for expressiveness and demonstrativeness.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  When you play the tape of this session I’d like you to listen carefully to what I just said to you. . . . I think it’s the most important thing I’ve ever said to you.” Switching cassettes, Myrna listened to the countertransference dictation again. Certain phrases struck home: “She will not relate to me, and she will not acknowledge that she doesn’t—and insists it’s not relevant anyway. . . . How many goddamn times do I have to explain why it’s important to look at our relationship? . . . Does everything possible to eliminate any shred of closeness between us. Nothing I do is good enough for her. . . . No tenderness . . . too self-focused . . . ungiving.” Perhaps Dr. Lash is right, she thought. I really never have thought about him, his life, his experience. But I can change that. Today. Right now as I drive home. But she couldn’t stay focused for more than a minute or two. To still her mind, she turned to a useful mind-quieting technique she had learned a few years before at a Big Sur meditation weekend (which in most other ways had been a rip-off). Keeping one part of her mind on the highway, with the rest she imagined a broom sweeping out every stray thought that popped in. That done, she concentrated only on her breathing, on the inhalation of cool air and on the exhalation of the air slightly heated in the nest of her lungs. Good. Her mind quieter now, she allowed Dr. Lash’s face to appear, first smiling and attentive, then frowning and turning away. Over the past several weeks, ever since she had overheard his dictation, her feelings toward him had gyrated wildly. One thing I’ve got to say for him, she thought; he’s persistent. I’ve had the poor guy on the ropes for weeks now. Making him sweat. Belting him again and again with his own words. Yet he’s taking his licks. Hanging in there. Doesn’t throw in the towel. And no weasel in him: no slinking, no crooked twists and turns, no trying to lie his way out as I’d have done. Oh, maybe a little fibbing, like denying he said “whining.” But maybe he was just trying to spare me pain. Myrna came out of her reverie just in time to take the Highway 380 turnoff and then effortlessly slipped back into fantasy. Wonder what Dr. Lash’s doing now? Dictating? Making notes of our session? Storing them in one of the desk compartments? Or maybe he’s just sitting at his desk thinking of me this very minute. That desk. Daddy’s desk. Is Daddy thinking of me now? Maybe he’s still somewhere, maybe watching me now. No, Daddy is dust. Bare shiny skull. Heap of dust. And all his thoughts about me—dust too. And his memories, his loves, his hates, his discouragement—all dust.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  It’s crazy outside, he said as he sat down, gesturing to the window beside us, it’s totally crazy, I’ve never seen anything like it, have you—but he went on before I could answer. He was sorry he was late, he said, he was supposed to go to a party but had bowed out at the last minute, and then it had been hard to persuade his roommate to go on without him. I thought I wouldn’t be able to come, R. said, and I made a noncommittal sound, feeling my annoyance return. Oh, he said, are you mad, and he wore an expression of such openness and willingness to be in the wrong that it was impossible to stay angry. I told him it was all right, that he shouldn’t worry, it was nothing. No, he said, it isn’t nothing, I hate that I can’t see you when I want to, and he made a small gesture with his hand, extending it slightly toward mine. We couldn’t touch, of course, it would be imprudent, but he flexed his fingers in a way that I knew meant desire, that though he was touching the polished wood it was me he wanted to touch. This was clear in his expression, too, when I looked at his face and he said very softly, almost mouthing it, Skupi, one of the few words of Bulgarian he had learned. It means dear or of great price, which was what I had thought on our second or third meeting as he lay naked beside me and I ran my hand along his side. I had said the word almost without intending to, Skupi, and he asked me what it meant and then drew me to him and whispered it like an affirmation in my ear. It had become our private name for each other, and I think it was then, when we first uttered the word, that I realized I was caught by him, that however things turned out they would have consequence, and I was both frightened by this and gave myself over to it, I decided I would let whatever might happen between us happen.

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  some sharpness. “Right,” he said. “I’ll take care of it.” He walked back down the aisle. I began to follow him but she said, “He’ll be right back, Thomas. Just wait here.” She put my purchases in a bag and we stood without speaking for a time. “I don’t usually keep that much cash on hand,” she finally said. I looked toward the rear of the store. I couldn’t see the man. “So how long have you been living here, Thomas?” “About six months,” I said. “And how do you like it so far?” “Okay. I mean I really like it.” “Good. I do too, it’s a nice place to live. People here are nice.” Then I saw that she was trembling, close to tears, and I knew she had betrayed me. I glanced toward the empty prescription desk again and said, “You know, I’ve got some other things to do, I’ll just come back later.” I started down the aisle. She said, “Wait, Thomas.” When I reached the door I looked around and saw that she had come from behind the counter and was following me. “Wait,” she said, holding me with her eyes as I stood there, and I saw in her eyes what I had heard in her voice earlier: sorrow. I pulled the door open and stepped outside and began walking fast down the street. I passed a few shops and then I heard her voice behind me again— “Thomas!” I quickened my pace. She kept following and calling out to me. I looked over my shoulder. She was running, slowly and clumsily, but running. I squeezed the overnight bag against my side with my elbow and broke into a run myself. The two of us ran down the street, twenty, twenty-five feet apart. I was holding back, just loping along. “Thomas!” she said, “Thomas, wait!” and every time she spoke I felt a tug from this voice so full of care. I felt she knew all of me, all my foolishness and trouble, and wanted only to take hold of me and set me right. The sidewalk was crowded. If the men and women we ran through had thought there was any reason to stop me, they would have. If she had yelled “Thief!” just once, I would have been mobbed on the spot. Everyone must have thought it was a family affair. They must have heard what I heard, the voice of a mother trying to reach her child. I turned the corner at the end of the block, and this somehow broke her hold on me. All the speed I’d been saving seemed to come to me at once. I tore down

• From Story of O (1954)

  Had she good reason to be so upset, and to be so annoyed at Natalie who, elated at the prospect of seeing O opened by someone other than Sir Stephen, was doing a kind of wild Indian dance around her and shouting: “Do you think he’ll go into your mouth too, O? You should have seen the way he was looking at your mouth! Oh, how lucky you are to be desired like that! I’m sure that he’ll whip you: he came back three times to those marks where you can see you’ve been whipped. At least you won’t be thinking about Jacqueline then!” “I’m not always thinking about Jacqueline, you silly fool,” O replied. “No! I’m not silly and I’m not a fool. I know very well you miss her,” the child said. It was true, but not completely. What O missed was not, properly speaking, Jacqueline, but the use of a girl’s body, with no restrictions attached. If Natalie had not been declared off-limits to her, she would have taken Natalie, and the only reason she had not violated the restriction was her certainty that Natalie would be given to her at Roissy in a few weeks’ time, and that, some time previously, Natalie would be handed over in her presence, by her, and thanks to her. She was burning to demolish the wall of air, of space, of—to use the only correct term—void between Natalie and her, and yet at the same time she was enjoying the wait imposed upon her. She said so to Natalie, who only shook her head and refused to believe her. “If Jacqueline were here, and were willing,” she said, “you’d caress her.” “Of course I would,” O said with a laugh. “There, you see,” the child broke in.

• From Story of O (1954)

  For today we hear seemingly normal people, even those with a level head on their shoulders, blithely speaking of love as though it were some frothy feeling of no real consequence. They say it offers many pleasures, and that this contact of two epidermises is not completely devoid of charm. They go on to say that charm or pleasure is most rewarding for the person who is capable of keeping love imaginative, capricious, and above all natural and free. Far be it from me to object, and if it’s all that simple for two people of the opposite sex (or even of the same sex) to give each other a good time, then indeed they should, they would be crazy not to. There are only one or two words in all this which disturb me: the word love, and also the word free. Needless to say, it is quite the opposite. Love implies dependence—not only in its pleasure but by its very existence and in what precedes its existence: in our very desire to exist—dependence on half a hundred odd little things: on two lips (and the smile or grimace they make), on a shoulder (and the special way it has of rising or falling), on two eyes (and their expression, a little more flirtatious or forbidding), or, when you come down to it, on the whole foreign body, with the mind and soul enclosed therein—a body which is capable at any moment of becoming more dazzling than the sun, more freezing than a tract of snowy waste. To undergo the experience is no fun, you make me laugh with your entreaties. When this body stoops down to fasten the buckle of her dainty shoe, you tremble, and you have the feeling the whole world is watching you. Rather the whip, the rings in the flesh! As for freedom … any man, or any woman, who has been through the experience will rather be inclined to rant and rave against freedom, in the vilest, most horrible language possible. No, there is no dearth of abominations in Story of O. But it sometimes seems to me that it is an idea, or a complex of ideas, an opinion rather than a young woman we see being subjected to these tortures.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  Perhaps the aching, the longing, for a mother to protect me from the brute facts of life and death. Though the aftertaste of the group meeting was still bitter, I felt closer to its source: undoubtedly my deep craving for motherly comfort, fanned by my mother’s death, had resonated mightily with Magnolia’s earth-mother image. Had I stripped away that image, secularized her, obliterated her power in an effort to face down my yearning for comfort? That song, that earth-mother song—bits of the lyrics now began to return: “Pack up your sorrows and give them all to me. You would lose them. . . . I could use them....” Silly, puerile words. I could remember only faintly the snug, bountiful, warm place into which they had once led me. Now those words no longer worked. Much as I blink at a Vasarely or an Escher illusion to reinstate the alternate image, I tried to flip my mind back to that place—but in vain. Could I do without that illusion? All my life I had sought comfort in a variety of earth mothers. I paraded them now before me: my dying mother, from whom I wanted something—I don’t know what—even as she gasped her last breaths; the many loving black housekeepers, their names long vanished from memory, who held me as infant and child; my sister, herself badly loved, offering me scraps from her dish; the harried teachers who singled me out for praise; my old analyst, who sat loyally—and silently—with me for three years. Now I understood more clearly how all these feelings—let us call them “countertransference”—had made it almost impossible for me to offer unconflicted therapeutic help to Magnolia. If I had just let her be, just basked in her warmth as Rosa had done, just settled for small goals, then I would have condemned myself for using my patient for my own comfort. As it was, I had challenged her defensive structure and now condemned myself for grandiosity and for sacrificing her for the sake of a teaching demonstration. What I could not, or did not, do was bracket all my feelings and have a real encounter with Magnolia—Magnolia the flesh-and-blood person, not the image I had imposed upon her. The day following the group meeting, Magnolia was discharged from the hospital, and I chanced to see her waiting in the hospital corridor by the window of the outpatient pharmacy. Aside from her tiny, delicate lace cap and the blue embroidered blanket (Rosa’s gift) covering her legs in the wheelchair, she looked ordinary—weary, shabby, indistinguishable from the long gray line of supplicants stretching before and behind her. I nodded to her, but she didn’t see me, and I continued on my way.

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  position, and the extra year would help me settle in at Hill and establish a strong record before applying to college. The director of admissions sent me warm regards and passed on those of the headmaster. They both looked forward to meeting me in September. I read the letter obsessively, trying out words like headmaster and fourth form. The director of admissions had enclosed an alumni bulletin filled with pictures of Gothicstyle buildings on emerald lawns, big trees in autumn color, playing fields, and the boys themselves in various attitudes of work and worship and athletic striving. Here were more words to taste. Lacrosse. Squash. Glee Club. The students looked different from the boys I knew. It wasn’t just a difference of clothes and hair style. The difference was tribal—bones, carriage, a signature set of expressions. I pondered these pictures the way I pondered pictures of Laplanders and Kurds in National Geographic. Some faces were closed to me. I could not feel the boys behind them. In others I sensed a generous, unguarded spirit. I studied each of them closely, wondering who he was and whether he would become a friend of mine. There were class notes in the back of the bulletin. “R.T. ‘Chip’ Bladeswell, ’52, recently heard the chimes at midnight with old relay partner R. Houghton ‘Howdy’ Emerson IV and his wife ‘Noddy’ (Miss Porter’s, ’55). Howdy and Noddy have set up housekeeping in the Windy City while Howdy thinks up ways to help Armour out-swift Swift. Seems Chip had ‘business’ in Oak Park the next day with one Miss Sissy Showalter-Price (Madeira, ’55). They plan to tie the knot in June. Ever since the announcement appeared, residents of Greenwich have reported widespread sounds of wailing and gnashing teeth. Hmmm . . . wunda who dat c’d be? Nuff said. Good luck, Sissy! (Hint: When last seen, Chip was handing off to Howdy on the comer of East Wacker and Lakeshore Drive, with Noddy in hot pursuit. . .) “R. S. K. Unsworth St. John, ’46, was recently named Director of Marketing Research for Newcombe Industries. Well done, Un!” There were several pages of these notes, some of them accompanied by pictures of smiling, confident men in business suits, tennis whites, golf outfits. The last page of the bulletin had nothing but pictures of babies—all boys, all sons of alumni, and all of them wearing little white sweaters with a big H on the breast. The classes of 1978 and 1979 were already starting to fill up. The director of admissions had sent me a form to complete, a straightforward

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  measuring them against the money I was making. I thought of what it would be like to own a car, to be able to just get in and go. After I’d delivered my papers one day I folded up my news bag and crossed the bridge leading out of camp, then waited with my thumb in the air until a car stopped for me. I didn’t know the man—he was a construction worker from the dam upriver. I got in and he asked me where I was going. He added, “You’re good as far as Seattle. Then you’re on your own.” Seattle. I could, if I chose, ride all the way to Seattle. I said that I was going to Concrete, which seemed far enough for now, but by the time we reached Marblemount I lost my nerve and asked the man to let me out. Within moments I caught another ride back to Chinook. This was my first time hitchhiking. As the summer went on I ranged farther and farther down the valley, to Concrete and Bird’s Eye and Van Horn and Sedro Woolley; once, just before school started, all the way to Mount Vernon. I would walk around the streets of these towns for a few minutes, waiting for something to happen, and when it didn’t I would go back to the road and stick my thumb out again. I was always home by the time Dwight and my mother got off work. No one ever missed me. Now and then I went with Arthur, but usually alone. Alone I could lie more freely and I felt more open to chance. Someday, I thought, someone would stop for me and say, “You’re good as far as Wilton, Connecticut. . .” SKIPPER WAS AWAY for only a couple of weeks. He came back, packed up his things, and was gone the next morning. I saw him occasionally after that, when he came home for Thanksgiving and Christmas or when we visited him in Seattle. He lived in little apartments with other men for a couple of years, then he got married and took another job with the power company. I sat around with him the night before his wedding. It was one of two times I ever saw him choked up. In this case the emotion was brought on not by the prospect of losing his freedom but by a song he kept playing on his new hi-fi—“The Everglades,” by the Kingston Trio. It told the story of a man who kills another man in a fight over a woman. Seeing what he has done, he takes to the glades, Where a man can hide, and never be found And have no fear of the bayin’ hound But he better keep movin’ and don’t stand still

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  Modern relationships are cauldrons of contradictory longings: safety and excitement, grounding and transcendence, the comfort of love and the heat of passion. We want it all, and we want it with one person. Reconciling the domestic and the erotic is a delicate balancing act that we achieve intermittently at best. It requires knowing your partner while recognizing his persistent mystery; creating security while remaining open to the unknown; cultivating intimacy that respects privacy. Separateness and togetherness alternate, or proceed in counterpoint. Desire resists confinement, and commitment mustn’t swallow freedom whole. At the same time, eroticism in the home requires active engagement and willful intent. It is an ongoing resistance to the message that marriage is serious, more work than play; and that passion is for teenagers and the immature. We must unpack our ambivalence about pleasure, and challenge our pervasive discomfort with sexuality, particularly in the context of family. Complaining of sexual boredom is easy and conventional. Nurturing eroticism in the home is an act of open defiance. Notes1: From Adventure to Captivity The original primordial fire: Octavio Paz. 1995. The Double Flame: Love and Eroticism. San Diego, Calif.: Harvest, p. x. Hence the division between the romantics and the realists: Ethel Spector Person. 1988. Dreams of Love and Fateful Encounters: The Power of Romantic Passion. New York: Penguin. Stephen Mitchell: Stephen A. Mitchell. 2002. Can Love Last?: The Fate of Romance over Time. New York: Norton. Anthony Giddens describes: Anthony Giddens. 1992. The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love and Eroticism in Modern Societies. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. The motivational expert Anthony Robbins: At a workshop in Fiji, 2005. As Stephen Mitchell points out: Can Love Last?, p. 44. In the words of Proust: Marcel Proust, from http://www.quotation spage.com/quote/31288.xhtml. Mark Epstein explains: Mark Epstein. 2005. Open to Desire: Embracing a Lust for Life. New York: Gotham, p. 45. 2: More Intimacy, Less Sex Love and lust: Jack Morin. 1995. The Erotic Mind. New York: HarperCollins, p. 200. Ethel Specter Person writes: Ethel Spector Person. 1988. Dreams of Love and Fateful Encounters: The Power of Romantic Passion. New York: W.W. Norton, p. 30. Dr. Patricia Love gives voice: Patricia Love and Jo Robinson. 1995. Hot Monogamy: Essential Steps to More Passionate, Intimate Lovemaking. New York: Plume. p. 95. The psychologist Michael Vincent Miller: Michael Vincent Miller. 1995. Intimate Terrorism: The Crisis of Love in an Age of Disillusion. New York: Norton, p. 39. The psychoanalyst Michael Bader: Michael J. Bader. 2002. Arousal: The Secret Logic of Sexual Fantasies. New York: St. Martin’s. The sex therapist Dagmar O’Connor: Dagmar O’Connor. 1986. How to Make Love to the Same Person for the Rest of Your Life and Still Love It. London: Virgin. The psychologist Virginia Goldner: Virginia Goldner. 2004. “Review Essay: Attachment and Eros—Opposed or Synergistic?” Psa Dialogues, 14(3), pp. 381–96. Simone de Beauvoir writes: Simone de Beauvoir. 1952. The Second Sex. New York: Knopf, p. 446.

• From Macho Sluts (1988)

  Clarissa applauded. “Oh, what a beautiful story,” she said. “I love the way your eyes sparkle when you tell it. Now tell me about the time when Mother gave you away to Aunt Jennifer and—” “Absolutely not! Up the stairs with you and into your traveling clothes. I’ve already laid the dress and shoes out on your bed. Your aunt will be here any minute now. Wear the peach satin corset that laces up the front. Hurry, while I clean up. And be sure to put on every one of your crinolines, young lady—don’t think you can fool me by stuffing one down the laundry chute! Shoo!” The Calyx of Isis During the day, the district south of Market Street in San Francisco housed winos, Hispanic families, punks, and light industry. But at night it seemed to be inhabited solely by leathermen strolling from the Brig, the Ambush, the Boot Camp, the Arena, or the Eagle to the Slot, the Caldron, the Folsom Street Hotel, the Club Baths, the Hothouse, or the Handball Express. Despite the number of these establishments, a particularly popular bar sometimes had such a hold on its clientele that they just overflowed into the street, beer bottles held against their hips at the angle of a hard cock, to converse over one another’s motorcycles or slip into side alleys for quick, rough, semi-public sex. On one block, the typical flow of traffic—the masculine bodies in their silver-studded black skins—was disrupted by a different kind of crowd: women. A mysterious lesbian heiress had used a chunk of her inheritance to purchase one of the big, red-brick warehouses on Folsom Street. After she earthquake-proofed it and brought it into compliance with the rest of the building code, she turned it into a unique establishment, the Calyx of Isis, a women’s bathhouse. The leathermen, amused and fascinated with the depth and intricacy of their own perversity, tolerated this intrusion. Some of them secretly applauded it—not being able to visualize what went on in the Calyx, but sensing they had more in common with it than with Maud’s or Amelia’s. They weren’t sure that what the women did with each other was sex, exactly, but it seemed to be important to them, and they liked the idea of their judgmental big sisters getting out of control. Others were offended and went to great lengths to avoid the Calyx, taking detours around it that increased their resentment. And a few happy clones dropped their lesbian roommates off at the Calyx before proceeding to Ringold Alley or the Trocadero Transfer, maybe stayed to chat a few minutes, and wondered if there would ever be a place where both dykes and faggots could go. There was, but few of them had ever heard of it, and the story of that place, the Catacombs, may never be written.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  From where I stood now I could see the path we had taken, my friend and I, and I remembered too how he had pointed to this beach, telling me that in summer very late at night you could find men here, that there were sheltered places in the rocks where you could go with them. I wondered if I would want that now, if there were men to be had. Shortly after R. had told me he wanted to end things I had gone to the city center, seeking I don’t know what. For almost two years I had been with no one but R., and for the past three months I hadn’t been with anyone at all; I went out in search of feeling, I suppose, or maybe the absence of feeling. I descended the flights of stairs to the bathrooms at the National Palace of Culture, though for so long I imagined I had left them behind, that I had been lifted out of them, as I was in the habit of putting it to myself, into a new life. I had thought that before, when I sat in that room in Boston with the priest, I had thought in precisely those terms, I am being lifted out of it, not by my own agency but by some intervening force: God, love, edno i sushto , one and the same. But we are never lifted out of such places, I think now, and so I went back to the bathrooms beneath NDK, I had never stopped thinking about them; even as I lay with R., flooded with love, there was a part of me untouched by him, a part that longed to be back here. My hands shook as I undid my belt at the urinals, out of excitement or dread, I felt I could hardly breathe. Almost immediately a man stepped up next to me, nineteen or twenty perhaps, very beautiful, his large cock already hard. Possibly he was a hustler, he was so eager, though he didn’t make any demands as I reached over and took him in my hand, feeling the thick warmth of him as I closed my eyes and inhaled deeply, trying to discern what I wanted, knowing how easy it would be to take him into the neighboring room with its stalls. I heard him whisper Iskash li , do you want it, and though I did want it I let him go, I hid away my own hardness and fled. It was a beautiful night, the nearly full moon casting its light upon the water, and I wanted to be with them now, these people I hardly knew who seemed so at ease with one another.

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  What Stephanie fails to see is that behind Warren’s nagging insistence is a yearning to be intimate with his wife. For him, sex is a prelude to intimacy, a pathway to emotional vulnerability. She responds to him as if he were one more needy child. She doesn’t realize that this is not just for him but for her, too. Like a lot of women, once she’s in the caretaking mode she has a hard time switching it off. She’s so mentally organized in terms of what she does for everyone else that she is unable to recognize when something is offered to her. What Warren finds intolerable is that his approach is having the opposite effect of what he intends. He is desperate for a flicker of desire from Stephanie, but he wants it just to be there, sudden and whole, the way it is for him. I explain to him that expecting our partner to be in the mood just because we are is a setup for disappointment. We take lack of desire as a personal rejection, and forget that one of the great elixirs of passion is anticipation. You can’t force desire, but you can create an atmosphere where desire might unfurl. You can listen, invite, tease, kiss. You can tempt, compliment, romance, and seduce. All these tactics help to compose an erotic substratum from which your partner can more easily be lifted. Even before Stephanie had children, her sexuality was always more receptive than initiating, and she rarely experienced spontaneous desire. In those days, Warren’s role was lavishly complementary: her coyness was dissipated by his assertiveness. He not only made her feel desired and desirable; he also made her feel desirous. He would entice her slowly, gradually awakening her senses, and she would eagerly respond. This responsiveness, so marked in the early days of their courtship, temporarily masked her characteristic lack of sexual agency (a trait shared by many women). I point out to him that she might be more receptive today if he paid attention to cultivating her desire rather than simply monitoring it. For Stephanie, love and desire are inseparable. She needs to feel intimate before she can allow the vulnerability of sex; otherwise, she feels objectified. “Sometimes it feels like he just wants a release. It has nothing to do with me,” she says. “It’s a total turn-off.” “Stephanie needs you to take the lead, but you can’t just buy her a ticket; you have to get her interested in the trip,” I tell Warren. “You play an important role as the keeper of the flame. Right now, all she feels is pressure. She experiences your come-ons as abrupt and intrusive. She thinks all you want is sex. Prove to her it’s not.” Looking for Stephanie

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  For a start, there are the passages we surveyed earlier that, taken together, contribute to the strand of thought summarized by Albert Schweitzer as “messianic woes.” Texts all the way from the eighth-century BC prophet Hosea through to the writings found at Qumran testify to a belief that final redemption would come through a time of suffering. Some texts, as we saw, imagined that this might be focused on a small group. One text, Isaiah 52:13–53:12, stated quite specifically that it would be focused on one person, the “servant” who would do for Israel what Israel could not do for itself and would thereby do for the world what (as in 49:6, perhaps echoed in 52:13) Israel had been called to do for the world. An earlier generation of scholars, seeing the damage done by decontextualized notions of vicarious suffering (paganized notions, as I am suggesting), tried to eliminate Isaiah 53 from consideration of Jesus’s vocation. I and many others, however, have remained convinced (and have argued in considerable detail) that this passage of Isaiah, seen in its full and proper context of the coming of the kingdom, the return of YHWH, and the renewal of both covenant and creation, was at the very heart of Jesus’s understanding of how his vocation would be fulfilled. He would go ahead of his people and take upon himself the suffering that would otherwise fall upon them. As we shall see in the next chapter, this theme is drawn out in particular by Luke—despite the popular impression that he has no atonement theology to speak of. But we can trace it back to Jesus himself through a number of incidents and sayings that, as far as we know, are unprecedented in the Jewish world prior to Jesus and that the early church, apart from the evangelists who report them, developed no further. There is the saying about the hen and the chicks (Luke 13:34): Jesus is longing to gather the chicks under his wings, to protect them like a mother hen, but they are refusing. There is the saying about the green tree and the dry one (Luke 23:31): Jesus is the green tree, innocent of the violent revolutionary dreams because of which the wrath of Rome will fall upon the Jewish people, but all around him are the young firebrands, zealous for revolt and so like dry sticks for the coming conflagration. This is not how the church from Paul on discerned or described or theorized about the meaning of Jesus’s death. These hints seem to have stayed in the tradition despite—or perhaps because of—being without precedent and without subsequent development.

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  Finding the One Historically, monogamy was an externally imposed system of control over women’s reproduction. “Which child is mine? Who gets the cows when I die?” Fidelity, as a mainstay of patriarchal society, was about lineage and property; it had nothing to do with love. Today, particularly in the West, it has everything to do with love. When marriage shifted from a contractual arrangement to a matter of the heart, faithfulness became a mutual expression of love and commitment. Once a social prohibition directed at women, fidelity is now a personal choice for both sexes. Conviction has replaced convention. These days, we are our own matchmakers. No longer obligated to marry who we must, we set out with a new ideal of what we want, and we want plenty. Our desiderata still include everything the traditional family was meant to provide—security, children, property, respectability—but now we also want our Joe to love us, to desire us, to be interested in us. We should be confidants, best friends, and passionate lovers. Modern marriage promises us that there is one person out there with whom all this is possible if we can just find her. So tenaciously do we hold to the idea that marriage is for everything that the disenchanted opt for divorce or affairs not because they question the institution, but because they think they chose the wrong person with whom to reach this nirvana. Next time they’ll choose better. The focus is always on the object of our love, not on our capacity to love. Hence the psychologist Erich Fromm makes the point that we think it’s easy to love, but hard to find the right person. Once we’ve found “the one,” we will need no one else. The exclusiveness we seek in monogamy has roots in our earliest experience of intimacy with our primary caretakers. The feminist psychoanalyst Nancy Chodorow writes, “This primary tendency, I shall be loved always, everywhere, in every way, my whole body, my whole being—without any criticism, without the slightest effort on my part—is the final aim of all erotic striving.” In our adult love we seek to recapture the primordial oneness we felt with Mom. The baby knows no separateness. Once upon a time, there was one person whose only role was to be there for us. In the ecstatic communion between mother and child, there is no gap. To the newborn the mother is everything, all at once, inseparable, unbounded: her skin, her breast, her voice, her smile, it is all for him. As a pink-bottomed baby, we were full and fulfilled, and somewhere deep inside we’ve never forgotten that Eden. Those of us who didn’t know this idyllic state—those with mothers who were unavailable, inconsistent, absent, or selfish—are often even more determined to find the perfect partner. The question remains: isn’t the oneness we strive to restore itself a fantasy? For the child, Mom is the be-all and end-all, but the mother has always known other people.