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.

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• From A Grief Observed (1961)

  I don’t believe God set it me at all. The fruition of God. Reunion with the dead. These can’t figure in my thinking except as counters. Blank cheques. My idea—if you can call it an idea— of the first is a huge, risky extrapolation from a very few and short experiences here on earth. Probably not such valuable experiences as I think. Perhaps even of less value than others that I take no account of. My idea of the second is also an extrapolation. The reality of either—the cashing of either cheque— would probably blow all one’s ideas about both (how much more one’s ideas about their relations to each other) into smithereens. The mystical union on the one hand. The resurrection of the body, on the other. I can’t reach the ghost of an image, a formula, or even a feeling, that combines them. But the reality, we are given to understand, does. Reality the iconoclast once more. Heaven will solve our problems, but not, I think, by showing us subtle reconciliations between all our apparently contradictory notions. The notions will all be knocked from under our feet. We shall see that there never was any problem. And, more than once, that impression which I can’t describe except by saying that it’s like the sound of a chuckle in the darkness. The sense that some shattering and disarming simplicity is the real answer. It is often thought that the dead see us. And we assume, whether reasonably or not, that if they see us at all they see us more clearly than before. Does H. now see exactly how much froth or tinsel there was in what she called, and I call, my love? So be it. Look your hardest, dear. I wouldn’t hide if I could. We didn’t idealize each other. We tried to keep no secrets. You knew most of the rotten places in me already. If you now see anything worse, I can take it. So can you. Rebuke, explain, mock, forgive. For this is one of the miracles of love; it gives—to both, but perhaps especially to the woman—a power of seeing through its own enchantments and yet not being disenchanted. To see, in some measure, like God. His love and His knowledge are not distinct from one another, nor from Him. We could almost say He sees because He loves, and therefore loves although He sees. Sometimes, Lord, one is tempted to say that if you wanted us to behave like the lilies of the field you might have given us an organization more like theirs. But that, I suppose, is just your grand experiment. Or no; not an experiment, for you have no need to find things out. Rather your grand enterprise.

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

  She steps toward me. She takes another lick of the black sap from her bowl, and then she kisses me, tasting of acrid electricity. My knees almost buckle, but I hold myself up as she backs me toward the bisabuela tree. She slides her shorts down and presses against me, reaching for my fly. Out of nowhere the iguana appears at my feet, its thick hide identical to the tree’s bark, and it winds its way around my ankles; I can’t distinguish between its tail and the roots. “Grandmother looked just like me on the day she passed over and passed on the gift. Though some call it a curse. My own mother refused it. Fled to a new country. These souls, they’re hollow, but heavy. I’m tired, too, Click.” Her bracelets echo my name as her hand slides up and down, a friction, a fissure broken open. I’m naked. Inside her. I can’t tell where the tree behind me ends and Kiara, enveloping me, begins. , ip. To be like this, always. Poicmie the reich I stand in one place, for all eternity, welcomed into the bosom of her family, waiting for her to come to me for her sustenance, knowing someday I'll be wrapped in her arms forever. No longer scurrying after her, a rat sniffing her scraps. My boughs forever extend out to her in eternal welcome. My obvolute fingers caress her as she strokes me. She needs me as never before, to nourish her. Me, the key ingredient to her molé — spectral treacle. She stands with her chattering sisters, the azul beach framed behind her. Tourists spy her under the protective canopy. Look! they cry. Kiara! Kiara, who had retired and gone underground in search of peace, quiet, family. She graciously poses for them, still looking like a girl of twenty, standing against a tree, a babe cradled in her arms. The infant looks up at the swaying branches as at a cooing father. The tourists snap her picture. Click. There I am. At last. I’m in the frame. Like the others, my mouth will be open. Not in horror, but in joy. In the Absence of Motion Peter Baltensperger Bernard fell in love with the statue the moment he saw her at the back of the park. He had just moved into a new neighborhood on the outskirts of the city and was just starting to explore the area around the apartment building. He was following a small stream running along the edge of a field when he came to a secluded park surrounded by old trees. Walking along the path leading into the park between the trees, he immediately noticed the statue at the back. Without a moment’s hesitation, he walked across the grass until he stood right in front of her.

• From A Grief Observed (1961)

  But I find that this question, however important it may be in itself, is not after all very important in relation to grief. Suppose that the earthly lives she and I shared for a few years are in reality only the basis for, or prelude to, or earthly appearance of, two unimaginable, supercosmic, eternal somethings. Those somethings could be pictured as spheres or globes. Where the plane of Nature cuts through them—that is, in earthly life—they appear as two circles (circles are slices of spheres). Two circles that touched. But those two circles, above all the point at which they touched, are the very thing I am mourning for, homesick for, famished for. You tell me, ‘she goes on.’ But my heart and body are crying out, come back, come back. Be a circle, touching my circle on the plane of Nature. But I know this is impossible. I know that the thing I want is exactly the thing I can never get. The old life, the jokes, the drinks, the arguments, the lovemaking, the tiny, heartbreaking commonplace. On any view whatever, to say, ‘H. is dead,’ is to say, ‘All that is gone.’ It is a part of the past. And the past is the past and that is what time means, and time itself is one more name for death, and Heaven itself is a state where ‘the former things have passed away.’ Talk to me about the truth of religion and I’ll listen gladly. Talk to me about the duty of religion and I’ll listen submissively. But don’t come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect that you don’t understand. Unless, of course, you can literally believe all that stuff about family reunions ‘on the further shore,’ pictured in entirely earthly terms. But that is all unscriptural, all out of bad hymns and lithographs. There’s not a word of it in the Bible. And it rings false. We know it couldn’t be like that. Reality never repeats. The exact same thing is never taken away and given back. How well the spiritualists bait their hook! ‘Things on this side are not so different after all.’ There are cigars in Heaven. For that is what we should all like. The happy past restored. And that, just that, is what I cry out for, with mad, midnight endearments and entreaties spoken into the empty air.

• From Cultish (2021)

  Dedication For my dad—the optimist Contents Cover Title Page Dedication Note from the Author Part 1: Repeat After Me . . . i. ii. iii. iv. v. Part 2: Congratulations—You Have Been Chosen to Join the Next Evolutionary Level Above Human i. ii. iii. iv. v. Part 3: Even YOU Can Learn to Speak in Tongues i. ii. iii. iv. v. vi. Part 4: Do You Wanna Be a #BossBabe? i. ii. iii. iv. v. vi. Part 5: This Hour Is Going to Change Your Life . . . and Make You LOOK AWESOME i. ii. iii. iv. v. vi. Part 6: Follow for Follow i. ii. iii. Acknowledgments Notes About the Author Also by Amanda Montell Copyright About the Publisher Note from the Author Some names and identifying details have been changed to protect sources’ privacy. Part 1 Repeat After Me . . . i. It started with a prayer. Tasha Samar was thirteen years old the first time she heard the bewitching buzz of their voices. It was their turban-to-toe white ensembles and meditation malas that first caught her eye, but it was how they spoke that beckoned her through the front door. She heard them through the open window of a Kundalini yoga studio in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “The prayers were so strange, all in another language,” Tasha, now twenty-nine, tells me over macadamia milk lattes at an outdoor café in West Hollywood. We’re less than a few miles away from the epicenter of the sinister life she led until only three years ago. Judging by her crisp cream button-down and satiny blowout, you’d never guess she could once tie a turban as naturally as any other young woman in this courtyard could toss her hair into a topknot. “Yeah, I could still do it now, if I had to,” Tasha assures me, her meticulous acrylics clack-clack-clacking on her porcelain mug. Tasha, a first-generation Russian American Jew who experienced an agonizing lack of belonging her entire childhood, was struck by this yoga group’s sense of closeness, so she peeked her head into the lobby and asked the receptionist who they were. “The front-desk girl started telling me the basics; the phrase ‘the science of the mind’ was used a lot,” Tasha reflects. “I didn’t know what it meant, I just remember thinking, ‘Wow, I really want to try that.’” Tasha found out when the next yoga class would be, and her parents let her attend. You didn’t need to be a permanent member of the group to take a class—the only requirement was an “open heart.”

• From Cultish (2021)

  “It gives you what religion gives you, which is the feeling that your life matters,” Chani Green, a twenty-six-year-old actress and die-hard SoulCycler living in Los Angeles, told me of the exercise craze. “The cynicism we have now is almost antihuman. We need to feel connected to something, like we’re put on earth for a reason other than just dying. At SoulCycle, for forty-five minutes, I feel that.” For those who bristle at the idea of comparing workout classes to religion, know that as tricky as it is to define “cult,” scholars have been arguing even harder for centuries over how to classify “religion.” You might have a feeling that Christianity is a religion, while fitness is not, but even experts have a tough time distinguishing exactly why. I like Burton’s way of looking at it, which is less about what religions are and more about what religions do, which is to provide the following four things: meaning, purpose, a sense of community, and ritual. Less and less often are seekers finding these things at church. Modern cultish groups also feel comforting in part because they help alleviate the anxious mayhem of living in a world that presents almost too many possibilities for who to be (or at least the illusion of such). I once had a therapist tell me that flexibility without structure isn’t flexibility at all; it’s just chaos. That’s how a lot of people’s lives have been feeling. For most of America’s history, there were comparatively few directions a person’s career, hobbies, place of residence, romantic relationships, diet, aesthetic—everything—could easily go in. But the twenty-first century presents folks (those of some privilege, that is) with a Cheesecake Factory–size menu of decisions to make. The sheer quantity can be paralyzing, especially in an era of radical self-creation, when there’s such pressure to craft a strong “personal brand” at the very same time that morale and basic survival feel more precarious for young people than they have in a long time. As our generational lore goes, millennials’ parents told them they could grow up to be whatever they wanted, but then that cereal aisle of endless “what ifs” and “could bes” turned out to be so crushing, all they wanted was a guru to tell them which to pick. “I want someone to tell me what to wear every morning. I want someone to tell me what to eat,” Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s thirty-three-year-old character confesses to her priest (the hot one) in season 2 of her Emmy-winning series Fleabag . “What to hate, what to rage about, what to listen to, what band to like, what to buy tickets for, what to joke about, what not to joke about. I want someone to tell me what to believe in, who to vote for, who to love, and how to tell them.

• From A Grief Observed (1961)

  But presumably all lovers are. She once said to me, ‘Even if we both died at exactly the same moment, as we lie here side by side, it would be just as much a separation as the one you’re so afraid of.’ Of course she didn’t know, any more than I do. But she was near death; near enough to make a good shot. She used to quote ‘Alone into the Alone.’ She said it felt like that. And how immensely improbable that it should be otherwise! Time and space and body were the very things that brought us together; the telephone wires by which we communicated. Cut one off, or cut both off simultaneously. Either way, mustn’t the conversation stop? Unless you assume that some other means of communication—utterly different, yet doing the same work—would be immediately substituted. But then, what conceivable point could there be in severing the old ones? Is God a clown who whips away your bowl of soup one moment in order, next moment, to replace it with another bowl of the same soup? Even nature isn’t such a clown as that. She never plays exactly the same tune twice. It is hard to have patience with people who say, ‘There is no death’ or ‘Death doesn’t matter.’ There is death. And whatever is matters. And whatever happens has consequences, and it and they are irrevocable and irreversible. You might as well say that birth doesn’t matter. I look up at the night sky. Is anything more certain than that in all those vast times and spaces, if I were allowed to search them, I should nowhere find her face, her voice, her touch? She died. She is dead. Is the word so difficult to learn? I have no photograph of her that’s any good. I cannot even see her face distinctly in my imagination. Yet the odd face of some stranger seen in a crowd this morning may come before me in vivid perfection the moment I close my eyes tonight. No doubt, the explanation is simple enough. We have seen the faces of those we know best so variously, from so many angles, in so many lights, with so many expressions—waking, sleeping, laughing, crying, eating, talking, thinking—that all the impressions crowd into our memory together and cancel out into a mere blur. But her voice is still vivid. The remembered voice—that can turn me at any moment to a whimpering child. Chapter Two For the first time I have looked back and read these notes. They appall me. From the way I’ve been talking anyone would think that H.’s death mattered chiefly for its effect on myself. Her point of view seems to have dropped out of sight.

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

  Silence and quiet meditation were law and pleasure to him."1972 Nothing but love to his parents restrained him from entire seclusion, and induced him, contrary to talent and inclination, to assist his father in the management of his household and his property. But he soon followed his powerful bent toward the contemplative life of solitude, and spent a short time with Basil in a quiet district of Pontus in prayer, spiritual contemplations, and manual labors. "Who will transport me," he afterwards wrote to his friend concerning this visit,1973 "back to those former days, in which I revelled with thee in privations? For voluntary poverty is after all far more honorable than enforced enjoyment. Who will give me back those songs and vigils? who, those risings to God in prayer, that unearthly, incorporeal life, that fellowship and that spiritual harmony of brothers raised by thee to a God-like life? who, the ardent searching of the Holy Scriptures, and the light which, under the guidance of the Spirit, we found therein?" Then he mentions the lesser enjoyments of the beauties of surrounding nature. On a visit to his parents’ house, Gregory against his will, and even without his previous knowledge, was ordained presbyter by his father before the assembled congregation on a feast day of the year 361. Such forced elections and ordinations, though very offensive to our taste, were at that time frequent, especially upon the urgent wish of the people, whose voice in many instances proved to be indeed the voice of God. Basil also, and Augustine, were ordained presbyters, Athanasius and Ambrose bishops, against their will. Gregory fled soon after, it is true, to his friend in Pontus, but out of regard to his aged parents and the pressing call of the church, he returned to Nazianzum towards Easter in 362, and delivered his first pulpit discourse, in which he justified himself in his conduct, and said: "It has its advantage to hold back a little from the call of God, as Moses, and after him Jeremiah, did on account of their age; but it has also its advantage to come forward readily, when God calls, like Aaron and Isaiah; provided both be done with a devout spirit, the one on account of inherent weakness, the other in reliance upon the strength of him who calls." His enemies accused him of haughty contempt of the priestly office; but he gave as the most important reason of his flight, that he did not consider himself worthy to preside over a flock, and to undertake the care of immortal souls, especially in such stormy times.

• From Cultish (2021)

  Abbie was hungry to learn more, but extended meditation retreats were expensive. So when an instructor told her about the opportunity to spend three months with Shambhala for free, working and living in a small pastoral town, it seemed like just the “journey” she was looking for. Shambhala had dozens of meditation centers and retreats all over the world; Vermont was one of their largest. Abbie couldn’t wait to get out of the city. She booked her ticket. Right away, there was a lot to love about Shambhala—the camaraderie, the teachings of generosity and acceptance, even the trees seemed too good to be true. “I remember when I first landed in Vermont, I had never seen so many shades of green,” Abbie told me over coffee, two years after defecting. Shambhala was founded in the 1970s by Tibetan monk and meditation guru Chögyam Trungpa. Largely responsible for bringing Tibetan Buddhism to the West, Trungpa had studied comparative religion at Oxford and earned a reputation, even among many non-Shambhalans, as an enlightened genius. He counted among his pupils the poet Allen Ginsberg, author John Steinbeck, David Bowie, and Joni Mitchell. “I’m confused now how to feel about him because his books are amazing,” Abbie confessed. “He was a master of language. A poet.” But Trungpa also had a raging alcohol problem, which everyone knew and quietly accepted. Complications from alcohol abuse are what ultimately led to his death in 1987 at the age of forty-eight, after which his son, known as the Sakyong, took his place. Trungpa didn’t try to hide his addiction; in fact, he found ways to work it into his teachings. Notoriously, Shambhala celebrations overflowed with booze and debauchery. “In the Buddhism world, the Shambhalas are known as the party Buddhists,” Abbie recounted with ambivalence. Trungpa also famously slept with many of his students, some of whom became Abbie’s teachers. “There was no way that stuff was all consensual,” she winced. “But everyone was just like, ‘Oh, it was the seventies.’” Trungpa was the nucleus of the Shambhala “mandala.” This was the organization’s chain of command: a sea of plebeian practitioners and a pecking order of teachers above them. Trungpa was obsessed with militaries and hierarchies, especially after his stint in England, so he infused his rhetoric with war metaphors; followers learned to call themselves “warriors of Shambhala.” A pyramid of power is very anti-Buddhist, however, so Trungpa disguised it as a circle, a mandala, with no “top” but a cozy center instead. If members had a question or concern, there was no skipping rank. Abbie remembers an acharya (a high-ranking teacher) toward the mandala’s center, a wealthy white man whose wife was, in Abbie’s words, “a total asshole.”

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

  ‘Then Kiara lost me again, as I knew she would. I’m sure she, too, was shaken when the photo hit the checkout stands, and she realized I'd tracked her without the calculated hints she left for me throughout the rest of the year. ’'d sniffed her out despite no phone bills left in her garbage, listing calls to her next destination. She knew I’d cropped out the only evidence that paired her with the wan prince. Along with the digital shots I take for the pimps who sell my work to the highest bidder, I shoot film — high and low speed, 35 mm and 4x5, color and b/w, long and short exposures — for my experiments. I pondered Prince Icechip’s frozen image under my Agfa Lupe. Why him? Anodyne, disinherited scion, won’t be missed. No thorough inquiry. Lost himself on the rocks. A shrug, case closed. Still, a poor specimen. Kiara has slipped, skittering over the edge with an elbow called tame at her back. She resurfaced in LA for the gala, once again looking as if she’d bedded Father Time, nudging back his hands. So gentle, turning The Strangler Fig 87 over this mythic, snoring bed partner without waking him, so that he doesn’t know he’s rolled back the clock in his sleep. Dark in her new tan, even her eyes seemed darker, the whites tinted, like her image had steeped too long in fixer bath. Stiletto-heeled starlets, starving over salads and suffering under the knife, clutch skinny soy lattes by her poolside, begging for her secret. She confesses with that impish, ever modest smile, that she’s blessed by her genetics. A little relaxation, a little amarosa, and food of the soul, a recipe passed down from her ancestors — and here she pauses over her enchilada, smothered in mOlé, the traditional dark sauce that Latina grandmothers take three days to make with a hundred secret ingredients — all work wonders for an overworked girl. She could say goddess. Say star. But she says girl, as if she were still a waitress in Cleveland who had need of a surname and a phone book listing. She knows I’m there, watching through my telephoto, her shadow at noontime, underfoot but unseen. But not today. She doesn’t know I’ve finally tracked her to this filthy Mexican town. So this is where she goes when she ditches me every year. I wait in the cemetery, City of the Dead. La Ciudad de los Muertos, I say out loud, killing the time, but I make a hash of it, as usual. I cannot master my own tongue, much less her adopted one. The words are clear in my head, but they tumble out of my mouth like scree down a talus of shale, all clatter and squawk.

• From Cultish (2021)

  These digital gurus fulfill modern America’s renewed demand for New Age ideas with images of tarot readings, updates on the cosmos, and abstract talk of frequency fields and galactic perspectives. Their high-octane feeds provide just as much eye candy as a beauty or “lifestyle” influencer, but the promises are far greater. The Instagram mystic doesn’t operate on a business model but a spiritual mission; they aren’t just selling spon con and merch, but transcendent wisdom. Double-tap and subscribe, and you’ll obtain access to higher vibrations, alternate dimensions, even life beyond death. “I’ve asked myself, if Buddha or Jesus lived today, would they have a Facebook page?” Bentinho Massaro posed in a 2019 interview, adding that he finds that Instagram lends itself particularly well to the divine. “The pictures have an energy,” he told the reporter, his glacial eyes glittering. Brent Wilkins’s suicide was a rare and concretely tragic example of the fate that can befall a seeker who submerges too deeply in the warped “reality” of an online guru. But for most people, someone like Massaro is just another account to thumb past. Unlike the cults of the ’70s, we don’t even have to leave the house for a charismatic figure to take hold of us. With contemporary cults, the barrier to entry is the simple frisson of tapping Follow. Not every spiritual influencer is hazardous; in fact, many provide what I’d classify as a largely positive experience, offering inspiration, validation, and solace, even if just for a moment mid-scroll. In 2018, I investigated the growing phenomenon of “Instagram witches” for Cosmopolitan.com, and what I found was a diverse coalition of millennial women and nonbinary people growing devoted digital followings with whom they attentively engaged over recipes for plant-based tinctures and astrological insights. This community of online witches seemed like a haven for many LGBTQ+ and BIPOC folks who felt unwelcome in so many old-school religious spaces. They’d be practicing their craft either way; Instagram simply gave them a platform to share it and make a real living out of it. Almost everyone I investigated seemed genuinely motivated by helping people above anything else, and no one used the thought-terminating clichés, circuitous euphemisms, or other intentionally deceptive tactics that we now know constitute the worst kind of cultish language. But inevitably, the clout-hungry always find their way to social media—a machine that works to fuel our scammiest, most narcissistic tendencies. Reporter Oscar Schwartz wrote for the Guardian that as far as algorithms are concerned, “there is little difference between the genuine and pernicious guru.”

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

  “Walk me out,” she said. I walked her downstairs, out the front to the entryway to the building. I lit her cigarette on the steps. We kept having one more kiss. She was going to be very late to meet her husband. But he would probably be relieved, his ordeal was over. He would make rules next time, communicate better, draw lines in the sand. There would be no sleep-over nights with the next boyfriend. No boys in the house when he came home. But for the foreseeable future he would have to hear about me and comfort his wife while she romanticized our love and cried in his arms. You concentrate on your time alone, you never think about how hard it 1s to be in bed with someone else, thinking about you, she said once. She opened the gate and stepped onto the sidewalk and the rain hit her immediately. It blew horizontally in sharp little beads. I ran down the stairs and grabbed the gate and watched her walk to the corner. I waited for her to turn around. She never looked back. She crossed south and then the light changed and she walked east in front of the housing projects toward the station and the train, which would take her home. Plasticity Salome Wilde I was one of those children that always had something in my mouth. The tit first, of course, though I’d happily chew the nipples of bottles even when they were empty, also fingers, pacifiers, toys, or food. As I grew, so did my repertoire: knuckles, the pad of my thumb, earpieces of eyeglasses, key fobs, pussy, cock. I wouldn’t call myself indiscriminate — I know what I’m sucking, licking, and chewing on when I’m sucking, licking, and chewing on it; but I’m rarely empty- mouthed. And when I am? ’m’wishing my mouth was full. Mood doesn’t temper the fixation, though it can alter the objects of choice. Good nervous energy — the kind that inspires me to take new risks, work harder, explore self or world in fresh directions — makes me eat. Starting a new piece of writing, for instance, means food. Baby carrots are great: I like to hold them between my back teeth and press down, suck them, then hold the end with my hand and scrape my teeth like a grater over and over and eat them in shredded layers, finally snapping the twig at the end and crunching the little core. Such ornate pleasures, however, do not keep me from wolfing down Dreamsicles (yes, I chew on the wooden stick afterwards until it begins to soften and splinter) and digging into pot-pies with equal aplomb.

• From A Way of Being (1980)

  driven life seems very sad to me. It certainly bears little resemblance to my motivation. I know that Abraham Maslow, in the years before his death, had a different urge. He experienced a great deal of internal pressure because he felt there was so much he had to say that was still unsaid. This urge to get it all down kept him writing to the end. My view is quite different. My psychoanalyst friend, Paul Bergman, wrote that no person has more than one seminal idea in his or her lifetime; all writings by that person are simply further explications of that one theme. I agree. I think this describes my products. Certainly, one reason for writing is that I have a curious mind. I like to see and explore the implications of ideas—mine and others’. I like to be logical, to pursue the ramifications of a thought. I am deeply involved in the world of feeling, intuition, nonverbal as well as verbal communication, but I also enjoy thinking and writing about that world. Conceptualizing the world clarifies its meaning for me. Yet there is, I believe, a much more important reason for my writing. It seems to me that I am still—inside—the shy boy who found communication very difficult in interpersonal situations: who wrote love letters which were more eloquent than his direct expressions of love; who expressed himself freely in high school themes, but felt himself too “odd” to say the same things in class. That boy is still very much a part of me. Writing is my way of communicating with a world to which, in a very real sense, I feel I do not quite belong. I wish very much to be understood, but I don’t expect to be. Writing is the message I seal in the bottle and cast into the sea. My astonishment is that people on an enormous number of beaches—psychological and geographical—have found the bottles and discovered that the messages speak to them. So I continue to write. LEARNINGS Taking Care of Myself

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

  I remember one evening I had waited for Jessie and she never came and just before going to bed, I went up into the bow of the ship where one was alone with the sea and sky, and swore to myself this great oath, as I called it in my romantic fancy: whatever I undertook to do, I would do it to the uttermost in me. If I have had any success in life or done any good work, it is due in great part to that resolution. I could not keep my thoughts from Jessie; if I tried to put her out of my head, I’d either get a little note from her, or Ponsonby would come begging me to leave him the cabin the whole day: at length in despair I begged her for her address in New York, for I feared to lose her forever in that maelstrom. I added that I would always be in my cabin and alone from one to half past if she could ever come. That day she didn’t come, and the old gentleman who said he would adopt me, got hold of me, told me he was a banker and would send me to Harvard, the University near Boston; from what the Doctor had said of me, he hoped I would do great things. He was really kind and tried to be sympathetic, but he had no idea that what I wanted chiefly was to prove myself, to justify my own high opinion of my powers in the open fight of life. I didn’t want help and I absolutely resented his protective airs. Next day in the cabin came a touch on the door and Jessie all flustered was in my arms. “I can only stay a minute”, she cried, “Father is dreadful, says you are only a child and won’t have me engage myself and he watches me from morning to night, I could only get away now because he had to go down to the machine-room.” Before she had finished, I had locked the cabin door. “Oh, I must go”, she cried, “I must really; I only came to give you my address in New York, here it is”, and she handed me the paper that I put at once in my pocket. And then I put both my arms under her clothes and my hands were on her warm hips, and I was speechless with delight; in a moment my right hand came round in front and as I touched her sex our lips clung together and her sex opened at once, and my finger began to caress her and we kissed and kissed again. Suddenly her lips got hot and while I was still wondering why, her sex got wet and her eyes began to flutter and turn up. A moment or two later she tried to get out of my embrace.

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

  Sometimes she’d put in an appearance, and sometimes she wouldn’t. (Mondays and Thursdays, I discovered, were the most reliable nights.) On the nights she didn’t show, I’d feel foolish and confused. I’d mope outside my truck in the gathering gloom, smoke a few cigarettes and ask myself a whole succession of harsh, prosecutorial questions. How could I justify, for instance, being a furniture stripper, especially since the job paid dirt and I didn’t even care about furniture? What was that methylene chloride doing to my brain? Why hadn’t I gone to college? Why hadn’t I moved on to a real city at least, with real opportunities and amenities? Most of all, as the minutes collected on me like the bumps on a rash, I wondered what kind of moron would spend his evening loitering in an ill-lit parking lot outside an empty supermarket waiting for nothing. One time, in a burst of frustration, I flung a roll of Tums about fifty yards into the dark, an act which itself made my stomach hurt. Of course, on the nights the girl did appear, all this negativity went somewhere else. Life was good. I could temporarily forget who, what and where I was, and I could abandon myself to what was happening within the four borders of that pink-glowing window. For me, the experience wasn’t sexual, or wasn’t primarily sexual. It was more about having a peek into an alternate universe — about seeing something that logically shouldn’t be occurring but was. The experience spoke of alien possibilities, of fabulous new dreams and vistas that were dancing, just as the girl was dancing, in plain view before me, but ever so slightly out of my reach. As I often brooded about myself, I likewise puzzled over the girl. Who was she? What was her name? And what did she do besides 356 Greg Fenkins entertain me? Was she a secretary? A nurse? Maybe she was a student at the community college. I didn’t see her as an up-and- coming executive; she was too young, for one thing, and her general demeanor didn’t hint of one who was bent on crashing through some corporate glass ceiling. Petersburg was a small town, and I was positive that plenty of people knew her, or knew of her at any rate. But at the same time I was wary about asking around. One night I was gaping up at her, murmuring wistfully to myself, when suddenly a male voice spoke up from just beside me. “Man, that’s something, ain’t it?” the voice said, and I almost collapsed in fright. Was it a cop? Worse, was it the dancer’s boyfriend? Her husband?

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

  As the time drew on to the day when the boat was to start, Sophy grew thoughtful. I got her a pretty corn-colored dress that set off her beauty as golden sunlight a lovely woodland, and when she thanked and hugged me, I wanted to put my hand up her clothes for she had made a mischievous, naughty remark that amused me and reminded me we had driven all the previous day and I had not had her. To my surprise she stopped me: “I’ve not washed since we came in”, she explained. “Do you wash so often?” “Shuah,” she replied, fixing me. “Why?” I asked, searching her regard. “Because I’m afraid of nigger-smell,” she flung out passionately— “What nonsense!” I exclaimed. “’Tain’t either”, she contradicted me angrily, “My mother took me once to negro-church and I near choked: I never went again; I just couldn’t: when they get hot, they stink—pah!” and she shook her head and made a face in utter disgust and contempt. [Illustration] “That’s why you goin’ to leave me”, she added after a long pause, with tears in her voice; “if it wasn’t for that damned nigger blood in me, I’d never leave you: I’d just go on with you as servant or anything: ah God, how I love you and how lonely this Topsy’ll be!” and the tears ran down her quivering face. “If I were only all white or all black,” she sobbed: “I’m so unhappy!” My heart bled for her. If it had not been for the memory of Smith’s disdain, I would have given in and taken her with me. As it was, I could only do my best to console her by saying: “a couple of years, Sophy, and I’ll return; they’ll pass quickly: I’ll write you often, dear!” But Sophy knew better and when the last night came, she surpassed herself. It was warm and we went early to bed: “it’s my night!” she said: “you just let me show you, you dear! I don’t want you to go after any whitish girl in those Islands till you get to China and you won’t go with those yellow, slit-eyed girls—that’s why I love you so, because you keep yourself for those you like:—but you’re naughty to like so many—ma man!” and she kissed me with passion: she let me have her almost without response, but after the first orgasm she gripped my sex and milked me, and afterwards mounting me made me thrill again and again till I was speechless and like children we fell asleep in each other’s arms, weeping for the parting on the morrow.

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

  my crimes. Jesus has forgiven me and I want to be with my new friends here. Their hands are all over me, rejoicing over me. I am one of them. ‘That is the miracle, that I can be one of them, even someone like me. Iam ordinary. Amen. I must find kuschelbaer, I must tell him the good thing that has happened. I want him to see me and be proud of me, and we can be together now. We will have a baby too and be a family like any family. I will get a job in the Wal-Mart store. I don’t see him in the crowd standing around me. He has either fled or doesn’t know all this hubbub is over a person he knows. I scramble to my feet and feel terribly weak and even hungry. Hungry. What do I eat? What is it my body really wants? If I eat food, will I be sick in front of these people? Will they see me despair and weep blood tears? I run through my feelings, touching and searching inside to see who it is, who is the real me, and who is doing this searching and what is it I am looking for? What is the urge I am feeling, what does it want? Blood? Food? I am a shadow standing at the edge of a dark shore. , Where is he? Peering over the*heads of the crowd, looking for his shiny blue jacket. He must be outside. But the people, suddenly they are all over me. Ruby is hugging me. Her husband, people from everywhere — see them! They’re weeping for me. Some of them, hands up in prayer, praising God, praising Jesus and I want to praise Jesus too and find some way, I don’t know how yet, some good work to do to show him I’m not a sinner anymore and he has invested his miracle wisely. It frightens me to think, what shall I do?’To be only human? When Jesus healed the lepers, did they feel this way, did they have to learn how not to go about being sick and shunned anymore? Did they have to learn how to be only healthy men just like anyone? When Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead, was he like me? Did he have to learn how to inhabit the world again and to forget what he had learned from death? I want to see Daniel. It is the only thing I know for sure. I move away from the crowd and they begin the clapping and the music and the jumping as the preacher returns to his little pulpit, mission accomplished. I want to pray but I don’t know how. I only know how to curse God. I don’t know how to talk to Him.

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

  In spite of bodily weakness and the protest of his nobles, Louis sailed in 1270.476 The fleet steered for Tunis,477 probably out of deference to Charles of Anjou, now king of Naples, who was bent upon forcing the sultan to meet his tributary obligations to Sicily.478 Sixty thousand men constituted the expedition, but disaster was its predestined portion. The camp was scarcely pitched on the site of Carthage when the plague broke out. Among the victims was the king’s son, John Tristan, born at Damietta, and the king himself. Louis died with a resignation accordant with the piety which had marked his life. He ordered his body placed on a bed of ashes; and again and again repeated the prayer, "Make us, we beseech thee, O Lord, to despise the prosperity of this world and not to fear any of its adversities." The night of August 24 his mind was upon Jerusalem, and starting up from his fevered sleep, he exclaimed, "Jerusalem! Jerusalem! we will go." His last words, according to the report of an attendant, were, "I will enter into thy house, O Lord, I will worship in thy holy sanctuary, I will glorify Thy name, O Lord."479 The next day the royal sufferer passed to the Jerusalem above. His body was taken to France and laid away in St. Denis.480 In 1297 the good king was canonized, the only one of the prominent participants in the Crusades to attain to that distinction, unless we except St. Bernard. § 58. The Last Stronghold of the Crusaders in Palestine. With Louis the last hope of Christian tenure of any part of Palestine was gone. At his death the French army disbanded. In 1271 Edward, son and heir of Henry III. of England, reached Acre by way of Tunis. His expedition was but a wing of Louis’s army. A loan of 30,000 marks from the French king enabled him to prepare the armament. His consort Eleanor was with him, and a daughter born on the Syrian coast was called Joan of Acre. Before returning to England to assume the crown, he concluded an empty treaty of peace for ten years. Attempts were made to again fan the embers of the once fervid enthusiasm into a flame, but in vain. Gregory X., who was in the Holy Land at the time of his election to the papal chair, carried with him westward a passionate purpose to help the struggling Latin colonies in Palestine. Before leaving Acre, 1272, he preached from Ps. 137:5, "If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth." His appeals, issued a day or two after his coronation, met with little response. The Council of Lyons, 1274, which he convened, had for its chief object the arrangements for a Crusade. Two years later Gregory died, and the enterprise was abandoned.

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

  Naturally I enquired about the Vidals; but no one seemed to have heard of them and though I did my best, the weeks passed without my finding a trace of them. I wrote, however, to the address Gloria had given me before leaving Chicago so that I might be able to forward any letters; but I had left Texas before I heard from her: indeed her letter reached me in the Fremont House when I got back to Chicago. She simply told me that they had crossed the Rio Grande and had settled in their hacienda on the other side, where perhaps, she added coyly, I would pay them a visit some day. I wrote thanking her and assuring her that her memory transfigured the world for me—which was the bare truth: I took infinite pains to put this letter into good Spanish though I fear that in spite of Bob’s assistance it had a dozen faults. But I’m outrunning my story. Rapidly the herd was got together. Early in July we started northwards driving before us some 6000 head of cattle which certainly hadn’t cost five thousand dollars. That first year everything went well with us; we only saw small bands of Plain Indians and we were too strong for them. The Boss had allowed me to bring 500 head of cattle on my own account: he wished to reward me, he said, for my incessant hard work; but I was sure it was Reece and Dell who put the idea into his head.

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

  I opened the door to my building, on the way out to have some drinks, and there she was, sitting on the stairs. I saw the back of her first. Her hair, more gold than blonde, fell halfway down her back, the backs of her arms were thin and graceful, and her posture was perfect. I’m a jaded man, but I have to admit she stopped me. Of course I knew, even as I stopped, how easy it was to be beautiful from the back. Chances were this woman on my stoop wouldn’t live up. I’d walk down the stairs, take a glance at her face, confirm that her features were not as perfectly proportioned, her skin not as smooth, her mouth not as mysterious and her eyes not as mesmerizing as ’'d hoped, and then I’d walk on and get my first drink and my second and my third and soon pretty much everyone would be pretty much beautiful. So I walked down the steps. I glanced at her face. And I stopped again. She had the kind of quiet beauty I dreamed about. Models, movie stars and high-class hookers roamed Manhattan’s streets, especially at night, but their beauty was obvious. You saw them and you knew what they did. This woman, sitting quietly, looking across the street with eyes so far away she could have been gazing at the other side of the world, was different. If Td already downed my third or fourth drink, I would have spoken to her immediately. I would have worked to get her up the stairs and into my bed, to open her up and fuck her, and in fucking her she would lose some of her beauty and then I wouldn’t fall in love. I preferred my day-to-days steady and slightly numb. And I preferred my nights full of easy highs that had nothing to do with love. I'd drink, live my pretend-adventure, wake with a hangover in some stranger’s bed and sneak out. The early morning Yoo-Hoos I sipped while walking to the nearest subway coated my stomach. And like the birds chirping optimistically about the sun’s imminent rise, Royal TF

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  In fact, it is said, the Hamas rank-and-file lived not for “politics, nor ideology, nor religion … but rather an ecstatic camaraderie in the face of death ‘on the path of Allah.’ ” 94 Life under occupation held little attraction for many of the volunteers; their bleak life in Gaza’s refugee camps made the possibility of a blissful hereafter and a glorious reputation here on earth powerfully alluring. But then all communities throughout history have praised the warrior who gives his life for his people. Palestinians also honor those who are killed involuntarily in the conflict with Israel; they too are shahid, because as the ahadith made clear, any untimely death was a “witness” to both human finitude and the nation’s plight. 95 It further complicates the question of faith and terrorism that the suicide killer has been revered as a hero in other religious traditions as well. In the story of Samson, the judge who died pulling the Temple of Dagon down upon the Philistine chieftains, the biblical author does not agonize over his motives but simply celebrates his courage. 96 Samson “heroically hath finished a life heroic,” the devout Puritan John Milton likewise concluded in Samson Agonistes: 97 Nothing is here for tears, nothing to wail Or knock the breast; no weakness, no contempt, Dispraise or blame; nothing but well and fair, And what may quiet us in a death so noble. 98 Far from inspiring horror, Samson’s end left those who witnessed it with a sense of “peace and consolation … and calm of mind, all passion spent.” 99 Not coincidentally, Israel calls its nuclear capacity “the Samson Option,” regarding a strike that would inevitably result in the destruction of the nation to be an honorable duty and a possibility that the Jewish state has freely chosen. 100 The anthropologist Talal Asad has suggested that the suicide bomber is simply acting out this same appalling scenario on a smaller scale and can therefore “be seen to belong to the modern Western tradition of armed conflict for the defense of the free political community. To save the tradition (or to found its state) in confronting a dangerous enemy, it may be necessary to act without being bound by ordinary moral constraints.” 101 We are absolutely right to condemn the suicide bomber’s targeting of innocent civilians and mourn his victims. But as we have seen, in war the state also targets such victims; during the twentieth century, the rate of civilian deaths rose sharply and now stands at 90 percent.