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 Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  Although this interaction is often presented as religious in nature, it seems clear that the importance of experience is appreciated in both spiritual and secular contexts. In October 1916, Bertrand Russell wrote to one of his lovers, the actress Constance Malleson, disclosing an inexplicable and seemingly meaningless sense of longing which haunted him. The centre of me is always and eternally a terrible pain, a curious, wild pain, a searching for something beyond what the world contains. Something transfigured and infinite. The beatific vision – God, I do not find it, I do not think it is to be found – but the love of it is my life. It the actual spring of life within me.35 Russell’s intellectual motivation to discover the grounds of a powerful and indefinable experience of ‘curious, wild pain’ – something that seemed to point beyond ‘what the world contains’ – has parallels throughout human history. We might think of Isaac Newton’s reflection, dating from late in his life, in which he imagined himself standing on the threshold of something that was signposted by this world, yet which tantalisingly lay beyond his reach: I seem to have been only like a small boy playing on the sea-shore, diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than the ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.36 William Wordsworth expressed this idea in the phrase ‘spots of time’ – rare yet precious moments of profound feeling and imaginative strength, in which individuals sense that they have grasped something of ultimate significance within or beyond themselves. I can still recall vividly such an experience when, as an Oxford scientific researcher during the 1970s, I was travelling in the depths of a moonless night towards the Iranian city of Kermān on a dilapidated coach. Its sputtering engine finally failed, leaving the passengers to stroll around the ruins of an abandoned caravanserai while the coach driver tinkered with its fuel pump. I saw the stars that night as I had never seen them before – a solemn and beautiful brilliance amid a dark and silent desert landscape. I experienced a ‘rapturous amazement’ (to borrow a phrase from Albert Einstein), an inexpressible sense of awe, the memory of which still sends shivers down my spine. I felt very small and insignificant that night in comparison with the untamed immensity of the heavens, experiencing a strange intimation of transcendence in the face of the overwhelming vastness of the natural world that I, as a scientist, had once hoped to master.

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  Scientific study of such human experiences is often predetermined by the decision to adopt the principle of the ‘Methodological Exclusion of the Transcendent’, 46 which presupposes a naturalist set of working assumptions, which inevitably focus on the mental mechanisms by which such experiences might arise, assuming that there is no transcendent referent for such experiences. The outcome of this is a premature foreclosure of a potentially important conversation, in which one possible explanation – some transcendent reality – is excluded in advance on methodological grounds. The parallels with J. B. S. Haldane’s naturalist dilemma can hardly be overlooked: ‘If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain, I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true. They may be sound chemically, but that does not make them sound logically.’ 47 One influential interpretative framework originates within the Christian tradition, which proposes a dialectic between humanity being intended to relate to God, but presently being alienated from God. In consequence, human beings experience a general sense of longing which nothing seems able to satisfy, in that this both originates from God and is designed to lead to God. 48 The eleventh-century theologian Anselm of Canterbury expresses this interpretation in one of his meditations: ‘Lord, give me what you have made me want. I praise and thank you for the desire that you have inspired. Perfect what you have begun, and grant me what you have made me long for. ’49 Other interpretations of this sense of longing are, of course, available. Richard Dawkins suggests a ‘general theory of religion as accidental by-product – a misfiring of something useful’ within our evolutionary history, in which religious experience can be explained reductively by anyone with ‘the slightest familiarity with the brain and its powerful workings.’ 50 It is a fascinating hypothesis, although lacking evidential substantiation. Yet Anselm’s reflections show the importance of a specific belief in understanding both the origins and goal of what is otherwise an undirected and inchoate experience. The Christian tradition offers a unified philosophical frame of reference which enables these puzzling experiences to be interpreted, and seen within a broader context. While the Christian ‘big picture’ was developed for reasons other than engaging the world of experience, it proved capable of offering an interpretation of this otherwise puzzling experience, locating it within a ‘landscape of desire’. Human beings experience a sense of emptiness and restlessness in this life, perhaps reflecting an impaired or impoverished relationship with God – an idea expressed in Augustine of Hippo’s fifth-century prayer: ‘You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in you.’ This framework offers an interpretation of the origins and goal of this experience. It originates from God, takes the form of a ‘homing instinct’ for God within us, and is intended to prompt us to find our way back to God.

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  30 The same empirical reality is observed, yet is interpreted – is seen – in a new way, thus leading to a transformed perception of D’s value. Murdoch helps us grasp how self-criticism and self-exploration allows us to confront our initial prejudices, thus altering our perception of a person or situation. These three examples from the worlds of science, religion and philosophy help us appreciate how beliefs shape the way we understand, envision and experience reality. Given the importance of the world of human subjectivity for many people and the growing interest in ‘emotional intelligence’, we need to reflect on how beliefs interact with feeling. Beliefs and Feelings: Connecting-up with Experience The relation of belief and emotions has long been a subject of discussion, recently given added depth through a growing scientific interest in the relation between human emotion and thought. 31 For our purposes, the important point is to affirm the interconnection of beliefs and feelings. T. S. Eliot put his finger on the critical role of great poets in helping us to discover ‘ what it feels like to hold certain beliefs.’ 32 Poetry has the ability to allow us to access, perhaps even to intensify, our most profound emotions, Eliot argues, making us ‘from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate.’ 33 Wordsworth earlier made this point in a much-quoted observation: ‘Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity.’ At times, poetry helps us to articulate certain ideas or feelings; at others, it creates them, offering us a new way of seeing and experiencing the world and our personal existence. These themes are echoed in the rise of existentialism after the Second World War, responding to a perceived neglect of the inner world and a growing anxiety about humanity’s meaninglessness. The rise of depersonalizing ideologies such as Marxism-Leninism in the 1930s and the brutality of the Second World War created a new passion for rediscovering and reaffirming the significance of the individual. During this ‘existentialist moment’, the French intellectual Jean-Paul Sartre led a wave of reaction against an excessive objectification of human beings. 34 Sartre’s protest highlights the importance of human subjectivity in the quest for meaning and truth – and the intimate connection between our beliefs and our deepest desires. We are free to choose what we consider humanity ought to be, and create ourselves as we believe we really are. Although this interaction is often presented as religious in nature, it seems clear that the importance of experience is appreciated in both spiritual and secular contexts. In October 1916, Bertrand Russell wrote to one of his lovers, the actress Constance Malleson, disclosing an inexplicable and seemingly meaningless sense of longing which haunted him. The centre of me is always and eternally a terrible pain, a curious, wild pain, a searching for something beyond what the world contains.

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  Let’s return to our imagined world, populated only with convictions that can be proved to be true. Could we live meaningfully in this environment from which beliefs about existential meaning and moral values have been excluded? The psychologist William James didn’t think so. In a lecture entitled ‘Is Life Worth Living?’ given at Harvard University in 1895,29 he gave his audience this piece of advice: ‘Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact.’ Yet James was clear that ‘scientific proof’ of this conviction was simply not possible. Life is only worth living if there exists ‘an unseen order of some kind in which the riddles of the natural order may be found explained’30 – and this is a belief which cannot be confirmed scientifically, even though James considered it reasonable and defensible. James’s point is that it is not enough to believe that a big picture of reality, or an unseen order of some kind, simply exists – you have to step into this, becoming part of it, and allowing it to shape and inform your life and thought. We both discern and create meaning, recognizing it as an external reality that needs to be internally appropriated and assimilated. We don’t observe it with a cool indifference from outside, but step inside this world of meaning and experience it. As many ancient Greek thinkers recognised, we are not simply passive observers of some grand theory of the world; we are called to become active participants within this theoretical framework, and thus create meaning in our lives through enacting this theory. I will come back to theories of meaning and their importance, as there is much more that needs to be explored. But let’s reflect on where our mental experiment has taken us in thinking about the place of belief in life, and setting up the agenda for the rest of the book. The Gradgrind Paradox: Why Facts Aren’t EnoughWhat does a world without belief look and feel like? For some, this world might be a rationalist paradise, in which we have left behind the debilitating notions of belief and faith, suitable only for the feebleminded who are unable to grasp the certainties of pure reason and the natural sciences. For others, however, this world of factual certainties is a limiting domain. It constitutes a segment of the spectrum of human knowledge, rather than defining this in its totality. Human beings yearn to go beyond the factual, opening up new worlds of meaning and values. As I see it, this move from observed facts to beliefs about life is both natural and necessary if human beings are to transition from mere physical survival to mental, social and relational flourishing – which is what our evolutionary history, both biological and cultural, suggests has happened.

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  When I met Austerlitz again for morning coffee on the boulevard Auguste Blanqui, shortly before I left Paris, he told me that the previous day he had heard, from one of the staff at the records center in the rue Geoffroy-l’ Asnier, that Maximilian Aychenwald had been interned during the latter part of 1942 in the camp at Gurs, a place in the Pyrenean foothills which he, Austerlitz, must now seek out. Curiously enough, said Austerlitz, a few hours after our last meeting, when he had come back from the Bibliothéque Nationale and changed trains at the gare d’Austerlitz, he had felt a premonition that he was coming closer to his father. »- Sim,” ae mr As I might know, he said, part of the railway network had been paralyzed by a strike last Wednesday, and in the unusual silence which, as a consequence, had descended on the gare d’Austerlitz, an idea came to him of his father’s leaving Paris from this station, close as it was to his flat in the rue Barrault, soon after the Germans entered the city. I imagined, said Austerlitz, that I saw him leaning out of the window of his compartment as the train left, and I saw the white clouds of smoke rising from the locomotive as it began to move ponderously away. After that I wandered round the deserted station half dazed, through the labyrinthine underpasses, over footbridges, up flights of steps on one side and down on the other. That station, said Austerlitz, has always seemed to me the most mysterious of all the railway terminals of Paris. I spent many hours in it during my student days, and even wrote a kind of memorandum on its layout and history. At the time I was particularly fascinated by the way the Métro trains coming from the Bastille, having crossed the Seine, roll over the iron viaduct into the station’s upper story, quite as if the fagade were swallowing them up. And I also remember that I felt an uneasiness induced by the hall behind this facade, filled with a feeble light and almost entirely empty, where, on a platform roughly assembled out of beams and boards, there stood a scaffolding reminiscent of a gallows with all kinds of

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  Adela again after the day of the funeral, he began, which was my own fault, because I did not once return to England all the time I was in Paris. And then, he continued, when I had taken up my appointment in London and went to Cambridge to see Gerald, who had now finished his studies and was beginning his research work, Andromeda Lodge had been sold and Adela had gone to North Carolina with an entomologist called Willoughby. Gerald, who at the time had rented a cottage in the tiny village of Quy not far from Cambridge airfield and had bought a Cessna with his share of the proceeds from the sale of the property, kept coming back to his passion for flying in all our conversations, whatever their ostensible subjects. I remember, for instance, said Austerlitz, that once, when we were discussing our schooldays at Stower Grange, he told me at length how after I had gone up to Oxford he spent many of the endless hours of study at the school working out an ornithological system based, as its principal criterion, on the degree of a bird’s aptitude for flight, and according to Gerald, said Austerlitz, whatever way he modified this system pigeons always led the field, not just for their speed in traveling very long distances but for their navigational abilities, which set them apart from all other living creatures. You can dispatch a pigeon from shipboard in the middle of a snowstorm over the North Sea, and if its strength holds out it will infallibly find its way home. To this day no one knows how these birds, sent off on their journey into so menacing a void, their hearts surely almost breaking with fear in their presentiment of the vast distances they must cover, make straight for their place of origin. At least, Gerald had said, the scientific explanations known to him claiming that pigeons take their bearings from the constellations, or air currents, or magnetic fields are not much more conclusive than the various theories he worked out himself as a boy of twelve, hoping that once he had solved this problem he would be able to make the pigeons fly the other way, for instance from their home in Barmouth to his place of exile in Oswestry, and he kept imagining them suddenly sailing down to him out of the sky, with sunlight filtered through the feathers of their motionless, outstretched wings, and landing with a faint coo in their throats on the sill of the window where, as he said, he often stood for hours on end. The sense of liberation he had felt when he first became aware of the lifting capacity of the air beneath him in one of the Cadet Corps planes, Gerald said, was indescribable, and he himself still remembered, added Austerlitz, how proud, indeed positively radiant Gerald had been when once, in the late summer of 1962 or 1963, they took off together from the runway of Cambridge airfield for an evening flight. The sun had set not long before we started, but as soon as we gained altitude we were surrounded once again by a glittering brightness which did not fade until we were going south,

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  at the sight of them, for some reason I could not understand, tears came to my eyes. It was on the same day, added Austerlitz, that Marie de Verneuil, who was working in the records department too and must have noticed my strange fit of melancholy, pushed a note over to me asking me to join her for a cup of coffee. In the state I was in at the time I did not stop to reflect on the unconventionality of her conduct, but nodded in silent acceptance of her invitation and went out with her, almost obediently, one might say, said Austerlitz, downstairs, across the inner courtyard, and through the library gates, down several of the streets so full of pleasant air that fresh and somehow festive morning, and over to the Palais-Royal, where we sat for a long time under the arcades beside a shop window in which, as I recollect, said Austerlitz, hundreds and hundreds of tin soldiers in the brightly colored uniforms of the Napoleonic army were drawn up in marching order and battle formation. On that first encounter, and indeed later, Marie told me very little about herself and her background, perhaps because she came from a very distinguished family, while as she probably guessed I was from nowhere, so to speak. Once we had discovered our common interests, our conversation in the café under the arcade, during which Marie alternately ordered peppermint tea and vanilla ice cream, turned mainly on subjects of architectural history, including, as I still remember very clearly, said Austerlitz, a paper mill in the Charente which Marie had visited with a cousin of hers not long before and which by her account of it was one of the strangest places she had ever seen. This enormous building, made of oak beams and sometimes groaning under its own weight, said Marie, stands half hidden among trees and bushes on the bend of a river with waters of a deep, almost unnatural green. Inside the mill two brothers, each proficient in his own skills, one of whom had a squint and the other a crooked shoulder, turn great masses of soaked paper and rags of fabric into clean sheets of blank paper, which are then dried on the racks of a large airing loft at the top of the mill. You are surrounded by a quiet twilight there, said Marie, you see the light of day outside through cracks in the slatted blinds, you hear water running gently over the weir, and the heavy turning of the millwheel, and you wish for nothing more but eternal peace. Everything Marie meant to me from then on, said Austerlitz, was summed up in this tale of the paper mill in which, without speaking of herself, she revealed her inner being to me. In the weeks and months that followed, Austerlitz continued, we often strolled together in the Jardin du Luxembourg, the Tuileries, and the Jardin des Plantes, walking up and down the esplanade between the well-pruned plane trees with the west front of the Natural History Museum now on our right and now on our left, going into the palm house and coming out of it again, tracing the convoluted paths of the Alpine garden, or traversing the dreary terrain of the old

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  wide open, and a large audience is sitting not in rows as usual at a concert, but as if they were in some sort of tavern or hotel dining room, in groups of four around tables. The chairs, probably made specially for the occasion in the carpentry workshop of the ghetto, are of pseudo-Tyrolean design with heart shapes sawn out of their backs. In the course of the performance the camera lingers in close-up over several members of the audience, including an old gentleman whose cropped gray head fills the right-hand side of the picture, while at the left-hand side, set a little way back and close to the upper edge of the frame, the face of a young woman appears, barely emerging from the black shadows around it, which is why I did not notice it at all at first. Around her neck, said Austerlitz, she is wearing a three-stringed and delicately draped necklace which scarcely stands out from her dark, high-necked dress, and there is, I think, a white flower in her hair. She looks, so I tell myself as I watch, just as I imagined the singer Agata from my faint memories and the few other clues to her appearance that I now have, and I gaze and gaze again at that face, which seems to me both strange and familiar, said Austerlitz, I run the tape back repeatedly, looking at the time indicator in the top left-hand corner of the screen, where the figures covering part of her forehead show the minutes and seconds, from 10:53 to 10:57, while the hundredths of a second flash by so fast that you cannot read and capture them. —At the beginning of this year, Austerlitz finally continued his narrative, after lapsing, as so often, into deep abstraction in the middle of it, at the beginning of this year, he said, not long after our last meeting, I went to Prague for a second time, resumed my conversations with Vera, set up a kind of pension fund at a

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  And so persistent is this urge to the ideal, above all in the presence of great disaster, that mankind, the wilful destroyer of beauty, must immediately strive to create new beauties, lest it perish from a sense of its own desolation; and this urge touched the Celtic soul of Mary. For the Celtic soul is the stronghold of dreams, of longings come down the dim paths of the ages; and within it there dwells a vague discontent, so that it must for ever go questing. And now as though drawn by some hidden attraction, as though stirred by some irresistible impulse, quite beyond the realms of her own understanding, Mary turned in all faith and all innocence to Stephen. Who can pretend to interpret fate, either his own fate or that of another? Why should this girl have crossed Stephen’s path, or indeed Stephen hers, if it came to that matter? Was not the world large enough for them both? Perhaps not—or perhaps the event of their meeting had already been written upon tablets of stone by some wise if relentless recording finger. An orphan from the days of her earliest childhood, Mary had lived with a married cousin in the wilds of Wales; an unwanted member of a none too prosperous household. She had little education beyond that obtained from a small private school in a neighbouring village. She knew nothing of life or of men and women; and even less did she know of herself, of her ardent, courageous, impulsive nature. Thanks to the fact that her cousin was a doctor, forced to motor over a widely spread practice, she had learnt to drive and look after his car by filling the post of an unpaid chauffeur—she was, in her small way, a good mechanic. But the war had made her much less contented with her narrow life, and although at its outbreak Mary had been not quite eighteen, she had felt a great longing to be independent, in which she had met with no opposition. However, a Welsh village is no field for endeavour, and thus nothing had happened until by a fluke she had suddenly heard of the Breakspeare Unit via the local parson, an old friend of its founder—he himself had written to recommend Mary. And so, straight from the quiet seclusion of Wales, this girl had managed the complicated journey that had finally got her over to France, then across a war-ravaged, dislocated country. Mary was neither so frail nor so timid as Mrs. Breakspeare had thought her.

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

  Now, my fry cook is pestering me all the time. He wants to know when he gets his "wide-screen TV, bitches and ho's." He's saving up for his own publicist—as soon as he learns to speak English. Maybe people just aren't fucking enough. There was a definite upsurge in the fortunes of chefs with the early eighties discovery that indiscriminate sexual activity can kill you. Certainly people seem to be eating more—evidence, perhaps, of sublimated desire. As chefs rushed to acquire basic communication and diplomatic skills, thighs expanded in seemingly direct proportion. "Food porn" began to take hold around the world: buyers of lavishly photographed, expensively bound cookbooks gaped longingly at pictures of people doing things on paper, or on television, that they would probably never try themselves at home. Are celebrity chefs seen as safer, nonthreatening alternatives to, say, rock and rollers, or porn stars of the past? Given the choice between having that cute, perky Jamie Oliver in your kitchen or Tommy Lee, Jamie's presence would seem less likely to lead to penetration or the theft of prescription drugs. But that can't be all, right? Maybe Rick Stein—and Nigella Lawson, for that matter—appeal to some other need, some deeper emptiness in our collective souls. Rick can honestly be called a celebrity chef. He's put in his time in professional kitchens. Like me, he's getting a little old to put in fourteen-hour shifts every day in a hot a la carte kitchen. Celebrity chefdom can be a pretty nice score, an appropriate payoff for years of toil and uncertainty. Nigella is a celebrity, no question about that, but is she a chef? Of course not. Which is fine. Her show is about eating well, not so much about cooking—about the good stuff, like pork fat and pork skin, becoming approachable, even fun. But Rick Stein and Ms. Lawson share a common and profound appeal, I think. If you're like millions and millions of others of generations X and Y, or a lingering boomer, maybe you left home for school or work when you turned eighteen, ran away to the big city, Mom and Dad an embarrassing reminder of childhood whom you occasionally phone up on holidays. As you sit in your lonely apartment, you feel a yearning, a longing for a sense of family, of belonging. Disconnected as you are from roots you still feel ambivalent about, those big family meals in movies are looking strangely good. A vestigial "nesting" impulse takes hold and you find yourself watching Rick or Nigella, thinking, "Gee, I wish he were my older brother, or dad, and he was cooking for me." Or "I wish Nigella were my sister, or mom, cooking me that slow-roasted ham. I wish that leftover scrap of pork she's nibbling on in the middle of the night were in my refrigerator."

• From The Decameron (1353)

  ‘Now, Panfilo, let us have some agreeable trifle to add to our enjoyment.’ Having promptly expressed his willingness to comply with her command, Panfilo began as follows: Madam, many are those who, whilst they are busy making strenuous efforts to get to Paradise, unwittingly send some other person there in their stead; and not very long ago, as you are now about to hear, this happy fate befell a lady living in our city. Close beside the Church of San Pancrazio, or so I have been told, there once lived a prosperous, law-abiding citizen called Puccio di Rinieri, who was totally absorbed in affairs of the spirit, and on reaching a certain age, became a tertiary in the Franciscan Order,1 assuming the name of Friar Puccio. In pursuit of these spiritual interests of his, since the other members of his household consisted solely of a wife and maidservant, which relieved him of the necessity of practising a profession, he attended church with unfailing regularity. Being a simple, well-intentioned soul, he recited his paternosters, attended sermons, went to mass, and turned up infallibly whenever lauds were being sung by the lay-members. Moreover, he practised fasting and other forms of self-discipline, and it was rumoured that he was a member of the flagellants. His wife, who was called Monna Isabetta, was still a young woman of about twenty-eight to thirty, and she was as shapely, fair and fresh-complexioned as a round, rosy apple, but because of her husband’s godliness and possibly on account of his age, she was continually having to diet, so to speak, for much longer periods than she would have wished. Thus it frequently happened, that when she was in the mood for going to bed, or, in other words, playing games with him, he would treat her to an account of the life of Our Lord, following this up with the sermons of Brother Anastasius or the Plaint of the Magdalen2 or other pieces in a similar vein. And that was how matters stood when a certain Dom Felice, a handsomely built young man who was one of the conventual monks at San Pancrazio, returned from a sojourn in Paris. This Dom Felice was a man of acute intelligence and profound learning, and Friar Puccio assiduously cultivated his friendship. And because, in addition to being very good at resolving all of Friar Puccio’s spiritual problems, Dom Felice went out of his way, knowing the sort of person he was, to give him the impression that he was exceedingly saintly, Friar Puccio formed the habit of taking him home and offering him lunch, or supper, according to the time of day. And in order to please her husband, Monna Isabetta became equally friendly with him and did all she possibly could to make him feel at home.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  It could be argued that Boccaccio is here presenting a latter-day version of the legend of Helen of Troy, but those critics, like Branca, who assert that the central theme of the novella is ‘beauty as the cause of misfortune’ are attributing too much importance to the tragic elements of the story and minimizing the tone of light-hearted banter in which even its most blood-curdling episodes are recounted. Had Boccaccio wished to tell a tale of suffering and woe, he would surely have told it differently, and located it among the stories of the Fourth Day. The heroine’s name, Alatiel, itself provides a clue to the lines along which the tale should be interpreted, for it is an anagram of ‘La Lieta’, or The Contented Lady. Here one should bear in mind the cabalistic science or superstition known as onomancy, based on the oracular principle of the nomen omen, meaning that a name conceals a prophecy. According to this ‘science’, with which Boccaccio was certainly familiar, the anagram of a proper name, a surname, or a forename may reveal the natural gifts or the destiny of a person or an institution. What the author seems to be suggesting is that the vicissitudes of Alatiel, far from arousing the emotions of pity and terror associated with tragedy, will evoke a kind of vicarious, voyeuristic pleasure, and possibly even envy, especially amongst his lady-readers. This at any rate is the clear implication of his description, at the beginning of the following tale, of the reaction of the lady members of the company to the chronicle of Alatiel’s adventures: The ladies heaved many a sigh over the fair lady’s several adventures: but who knows what their motives may have been? Perhaps some of them were sighing, not so much because they felt sorry for her, but because they longed to be married no less often than she had been. 38 In his scattered references to the lady-mernbers of the lieta brigata, the author consistently emphasizes the strength of their moral character and their adherence to Christian precepts, and thus his suggestion that their reaction to the tale of Alatiel may possibly be attributed to envy rather than to pity neatly highlights the ambivalence commonly to be found in attitudes towards sexual relationships. What he is intimating, in fact, is that the desire for a variety of sexual experiences is a natural one, even among the most upright and God-fearing of Christians, and in recounting the story of Alatiel’s adventures he gives form and consistency to the unspoken sexual fantasies of his readership. That capacity for converting fantasy into apparent reality is one of the reasons for the Decameron’s enduring popularity, for its timeless relevance to the human condition.

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

  languages beyond Latin; the lead here was taken by speakers of Anglo-Norman and Provençal versions of tongues used in Francia. Such texts were both entertainment and instruction: part of a glorification of the image of the knightly soldier, born in the age of Crusading. The word ‘nobility’ early acquired the double strands of meaning which it still possesses; it might overlap with noble birth, but it could also have origins in male character and military skill. The soldier’s deal with the authorities of the Western Church for blessing his activity in killing people included establishing ground rules for public and private conduct. There were the obvious military and feudal virtues of duty and loyalty to companions or superiors; yet also wisdom, generosity, even on occasion mercy towards the powerless – and appropriate relationships with women. Notions of appropriateness in courtly love rarely included marriage. The woman who was the object of male adoration was generally unattainable, on grounds of social rank or simply marriage to someone else. Or she was all too attainable: not simply in the school textbook sexual assault by Pamphilus, but in the adulterous tales of Tristan and Iseult or Lancelot and Guinevere – both first emerging in twelfth-century francophone texts. Still more unexpected was the emergence in the eleventh and twelfth centuries of a literature of same-sex love. It is a prominent feature in classical Arabic poetry over many centuries, and in medieval Muslim-ruled Iberia the genre spilled over into Jewish literature, then closely bound into elite Islamic culture – in both religions, that was despite much official condemnation of same-sex activity. [42] Western Christian texts on same-sex love do not seem to relate to Muslim or Jewish writing, and the genre petered out during the thirteenth century, no doubt now seeming too risky in a more intolerant official climate. Unsurprisingly it picked up themes and conventions from Roman literature; a frequent reference was the figure of Ganymede, the youthful male lover (or victim) of Jupiter, but there were also straightforwardly biblical references to David and Jonathan, a rather more equal partnership. Abelard, so terribly maltreated in the course of heterosexual love, could nevertheless explore the feelings of the biblical lovers in paraphrasing their story as a prolonged lament for Jonathan’s death. For the first time since the Classical period, some twelfth-century authors penned dialogues which are debates over the relative superiority of heterosexual versus same-sex love. [43] The prominence of officially celibate clergy and monks among the writers is not accidental. Archbishop Baldric of Dol (?1046–1130) wrote a great deal of Latin verse (as well as the first major account of the First Crusade), mostly while Benedictine Abbot of Bourgeuil in west-central France. He delighted in exploring Classical poetic genres, Ovid especially, and some of his poetry addressed to men is remarkably prone to turn to physical expression. The monk Ralph he called his ‘Other self, or myself, if two spirits may be one / And if two bodies may actually become one’.

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  While Weinberg, Carroll and Polkinghorne adopt comparable scientific explanations of the universe, they offer quite distinct interpretations of our universe, which science can neither confirm nor deny. Though all three thinkers are distinguished scientists, their interpretations of what the universe means lie beyond the horizon of the scientific method. All three can argue that their worldview is consistent with what is observed. (A more sceptical neutral observer might suggest that all three are thus equally absurd, in that none is demanded by the evidence.) This suggests we need to look further at this idea of ‘interpreting’ the universe. Interpreting Our World: A Philosophical Big PictureSusan Wolf notes that we feel a need to get involved in something ‘larger than oneself’ to secure meaningfulness. While affirming the philosophical importance of these yearnings to live meaningfully and purposefully, Wolf concedes that academic philosophers now seem to have lost interest in the question of finding meaning in life.24 Yet this philosophical disengagement with meaning is a recent development. As Pierre Hadot has pointed out, classical philosophy – both Greek and Roman – was intensely concerned about questions of meaning and value. In making this point, Hadot draws a distinction between philosophy itself and philosophical discourse. Philosophy sets out a vision of reality; philosophical discourse articulates this in words. Perhaps we need to rediscover this vision of philosophy as enabling practical wisdom, and draw a distinction between empowering and informing vision on the one hand, and its formal expression in human words on the other. Hadot argues that we need to retrieve the classical vision of philosophy as a discipline of human flourishing, which emphasises the capacity of its beliefs to inform and sustain a meaningful and fulfilling ‘way of life’.25 For example, Hadot notes that the Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius was ‘trying to do what, in the last analysis, we are all trying to do: to live in complete consciousness and lucidity, to give to each of our instants its full intensity, and to give meaning to our entire life.’26 This account helps us to understand why early Christianity was widely regarded, by both its practitioners and its critics, as a ‘philosophy’, as this term was understood in late classical antiquity.27 While philosophy can be enacted, philosophical discourse often becomes trapped within arcane technocratic echo chambers, which may be cognitively interesting, yet are generally existentially barren. But it doesn’t need to be like this. Søren Kierkegaard held that truth was not primarily something objective that we apprehend, but something that apprehends us, and so changes us inwardly.

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

  [39] From an early age, therefore, those exploring literature were exposed to ancient assumptions some of which were familiar from Christian redeployment of them (such as monogamous marriage), but some very different (such as life-stage same-sex love). However hard schoolmasters might try to channel such reading, their efforts were likely to be frustrated by the perennial energy of the young in seeking out pages fascinatingly beyond the recommended range. The tenor of Classical literature was to inject into Western culture a concern with human free will and moral responsibility, exploring how this might fit into a Christian view of heaven and earth in the control of Almighty God. This twelfth-century preoccupation can be labelled ‘humanist’ as much as the Renaissance of the fourteenth to sixteenth century, and its use in these contexts should not be confused with the common modern meaning of ‘humanism’ as the rejection of religion: it referred to those in universities who studied the humanae litterae of Classical learning, rather than the divinae litterae of theological texts. Scholarship has even extended this as far as to describe the period as witnessing ‘the discovery of the individual’ – the title of a deservedly celebrated book by the British medievalist Colin Morris – though it would have been difficult in the twelfth century to gather the vocabulary by which modern Westerners express the concept of individualism. Nevertheless, the fourth Lateran Council’s imposition of universal auricular confession made the examination of the individual self a central part of Western Christian identity. [40] Individual self-examination implies awareness of others as individuals, not least as objects of personal love. The readers of Ovid could readily make that connection, and a growing contemporary literature applied the idea of love in a remarkable variety of contexts. The most famous love story of the period is the thwarted marriage of the theologian Peter Abelard to the intellectually gifted Heloïse: mutual love arising out of his tuition of her, which led to the birth of a son, a short-lived marriage and his forcible castration by her furious relatives before both parties were sent to monastic houses. After experiencing traumatic suffering for mutual passion, Abelard broke with the general Christian tradition since the second century CE and proclaimed the moral rightness of sexual emotions: ‘It is clear, I think, from all this that no natural pleasures of the flesh should be counted as sin nor should it be considered a fault for us to have pleasure in something in which when it happened the feeling of pleasure is unavoidable.’ Abelard said this as a married priest, so for the moment it looked as if history was not on his side. The Western world, let alone Western Christianity, would take a great many centuries fully to catch up with his opinion – or indeed his passionate defence of the ordination of women.

• From Soaking Wet: Lesbian Sex Stories (2014)

  Again, that urgent desperation to connect filled me. I leaned away and drew the shirt over my head, then leaned back again, letting the fire warm my front, her supple body heat my back. I reached behind me and sank my fingers in her silky hair, waiting. Lips trailed along my neck. “Wanna fuck?” she whispered and bit my earlobe. I smiled, then shivered because her fingers plucked my nipple a little too hard. “So long as I get a taste and soon.” Soft laughter gusted against my skin, and she pulled away. I turned to watch as she stripped. She walked naked toward her backpack and drew out a long, thick dildo—one I hadn’t seen before. “I’ve been saving this.” I lay on my back and shimmied out of my jeans and panties. Watching her rub the gel-shaft around her lips as she walked to me made me wonder again whether she was seeing anyone—someone with a set of balls, because she did love cock. “Shall I?” I asked, rising on my elbows. Kari liked to be shafted while I sucked her clit. “Later. I’m going to play first.” She pressed her heel into my shoulder and shoved me to my back. Then she placed her feet on either side of my hips and squatted. “You have been way too uptight lately.” “I’ve missed you.” “You missed this, don’t you mean?” Her eyes narrowed into catlike slits. “Margot’s a grumpy girl when she doesn’t get some.” She dropped the dildo on the rug and leaned over me, the change of angle rubbing her wet pussy against my mound. The humid heat seeped into my skin; the scent of her, musky and pungent, lured my fingers down to play. Kari groaned as I slid my thumb over her clit. “No fair. I’m supposed to be the one in charge.” “You are.” I grinned. “I wouldn’t be tempted if you would quit rubbing your pussy there.” Her laugh was sharp and pained. “Fffuck!” Her eyes closed and she jerked her hips forward and back, grinding her clit on my finger while her moisture dribbled through my own pulsing lips. She gave one last sexy slide and then pushed down my body. “Did I ever tell you I love a bald pussy?” “A time or two,” I gasped. Two fingers stroked inside me, swirling and stretching my entrance. I cupped my breasts and began to rock my hips, trying to lure her deeper or seduce her into putting her mouth where I needed it most. The flat of her tongue lapped the swelling folds. “I like it almost as much as I like you.” I glanced down and caught her gaze. Her nose wrinkled. “I know I haven’t been around much. I needed to think.” “You get things figured out?”

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

  And while I love London, Edinburgh, Dublin, Melbourne, Hanoi, Salvador, Saint Petersburg, Tokyo, and Saint Sebastian like old friends, I miss my city when I'm away too long. As much as I enjoy getting lost, disappearing into another place, another culture, another cuisine, there are places and flavors, sounds, smells, and sights I begin to yearn for after three or four weeks eating fish heads and rice. When people from other cities, planning a trip to New York (or the city, as we locals are apt to call it), ask me where they should eat, where they should go, where they should drink during their stay, they are often surprised at my answers. Sure, we have some of the best high-end restaurants in the world here, but that's not what I miss when I'm wiping fermented bean paste off my chin, or trading shots of bear-bile-infused rice whiskey in Asia. When visiting Manhattan one should go for things that we do really well and the rest of the world doesn't. Example? Deli. We have it; you don't. Even Los Angeles, with no shortage of Jews, can't get it right. For whatever mysterious reasons, no city on the planet can make deli like New York deli and the first thing I start to miss when away from home too long is breakfast at Barney Greengrass, The Sturgeon King, on Amsterdam Avenue and Eighty-sixth Street. Sunday breakfast at Barney's is one of those quintessential New York things to do: a crowded, ugly dining room, unchanged for decades; wobbly tables; brusque waiters; generic coffee. But their eggs scrambled with dark, caramelized onions and lox, served with a fresh toasted bagel or bialy, are ethereal, and the home-team crowd of Upper West Siders is about as "genuine New York" as you can get. Grab a copy of the Sunday New York Times and a copy of the Post, and dig in. If your waiter seems indifferent, don't let it bother you—he's like that with everybody. You can buy some of the legendary smoked sturgeon or Nova Scotia salmon at the counter to take away, but you will surely be committing a sin against God if, after breakfast, you neglect to purchase a pound of what is far and away the best chopped liver on earth. Hand-chopped chicken livers, schmaltz (chicken fat), sauteed onions, and hard-cooked eggs . . . it's the benchmark to which all others should aspire. No visit to New York is complete without a proper pastrami sandwich, and New Yorkers will argue over who's got the best like they're fighting over Bosnian real estate. But a safe bet is Katz's Deli on East Houston for a nearly-as- big-as-your-head pile of steaming hot pastrami, sliced paper thin and stacked between fresh seeded rye bread. The appropriate beverage is a Dr. Brown's cream soda or Cel-Ray.

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  bank for her, and did what else I could to ease her life in the Sporkova. When it was not too cold out of doors we called a taxi driver, whom I had engaged to be at Vera’s disposal should she need him, to take us to some of the places she had mentioned and which she herself had not seen, as she put it, for an eternity. We looked down at the city again from the observation tower on Petrin Hill, watching the cars and trains crawling slowly along the banks of the Vitava and over the bridges. We walked for a little while through the Baumgarten by the river in the pale winter sunlight, we sat for an hour or so in the planetarium on the HoleSovice exhibition grounds, repeating the names of those heavenly constellations we could recognize, first in French and then in Czech or vice versa, and once we went out to the game park at Liboc where, surrounded on all sides by lovely meadows, there is a star-shaped house built as his summer residence by Archduke Ferdinand of the Tyrol, which Vera had told me was a favorite destination of Agata and Maximilian on their excursions out of the city. I also spent several days searching the records for the years 1938 and 1939 in the Prague theatrical archives in the Celetna, and there, among letters, files on employees, programs, and faded newspaper cuttings, I came upon the photograph of an anonymous actress who seemed to resemble my dim memory of my mother, and in whom Vera, who had already spent some time studying the face of the woman in the concert audience which I had copied from the Theresienstadt film, before shaking her head and putting it aside, immediately and without a shadow of doubt, as she said, recognized Agata as she had then been. —During this part of his tale, we walked from the cemetery behind St. Clement’s Hospital all the way back to Liverpool Street. When we took leave of each other outside the railway station, Austerlitz gave me an envelope which he had with him and which contained the photograph from the theatrical archives in Prague, as a memento, he said, for he told me that he was now about to go to Paris to search for traces of his father’s last movements, and to transport himself back to the time when he too had lived there, in one way feeling liberated from the false pretenses of his English life, but in another oppressed by the vague sense that he did not belong in this city either, or indeed anywhere else in the world. It was in September of the same year that I received a postcard from Austerlitz giving me his new address (6 rue des cinq Diamants, in the Thirteenth Arrondissement), which I knew was in the nature of an invitation to visit him as

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

  VOICES FOR CHRISTIAN WOMEN Entangled with the story of a reproductive revolution is the ongoing readjustment of gender relations and definitions between women, men and others; they offer an alternative story to a great many assumptions about these matters that have shaped three thousand years of Judaism and Christianity. The new feminism of the modern age might not have taken the shape that it has done were it not for the invention of the contraceptive pill in the mid-twentieth century, yet the expenditure of time and scientific funding on that success may have become a desirable priority precisely because gender relations in Western society were already changing. [21] Once more, the underlying patterns of demography are also important: during the first decades of the twentieth century, female excess mortality disappeared from Europe, and patterns of life expectancy tipped in favour of women over men. Partly this must have been the result of reducing serious infections, especially around childbirth, but there is also no doubt that earlier generations in Christian Europe had exercised discrimination in feeding and nurturing boys over girls. That is still the case in some other parts of the world and suggests a further complex causal relationship between the changing position of women and the biological realities of their new advantage in survival. [22] There was a low base to work from in Western social attitudes at the beginning of the twentieth century. That was exemplified in the case brought in the Westminster Court of Appeal in 1914, that for the purposes of admission as a solicitor to the Law Society of England and Wales, a woman was not a person, owing to the inherent ‘disability’ of the female sex; for the moment that decision remained the law in Great Britain. [23] In contemporary Irish Roman Catholicism, one classic history of the heroic pioneering days in early Celtic monasticism was unintentionally revealing. It back-projected present- day reality onto what was for the Jesuit historian-author Dr Ryan the problematic phenomenon of Celtic double monasteries: ‘Women religious in their turn could relieve the monks of services for which the normal male is supremely ill-fitted, such as the making of vestments and clothes, care of altar linen, and general attention to cleanliness and beauty within the church.’ [24] In various cultural settings across the anglophone world, efforts of imagination began to move on from such predictable opinions. Consistent with its ability to listen to such promptings more attentively than other British institutions, the early twentieth-century Church of England took some remarkable initiatives. The Bishop of Lincoln, Edward Hicks, headed the Church League for Women’s Suffrage before the First World War – an organization interestingly inspired by the Anglo-Catholic exploration of the Incarnation in the writings of Bishop Gore. When the Westminster Parliament and the Church set up a brand-new legislative ‘National Assembly of the Church of England’ in 1920, the Assembly achieved equal suffrage nine years before Parliament. [25] Among its deliberations over its first decade was an initiative from that same Bishop Hicks to remove an ancient peculiarity of the Anglican wedding service, in which a woman swore to ‘obey’ her husband. In Roman Catholic and Orthodox marriage liturgies, the marriage vows had never been unequal like this (despite the common patriarchal assumptions of all Churches); it was a late medieval northern European idiosyncrasy fossilized by Cranmer’s Prayer Book and imitated by English Dissent. By the early twentieth century, the obedience clause was sufficiently annoying to many clergy and people to be quietly omitted, and when the Church of England untidily acquired alternative liturgies in 1928, the change was made permanent, to widespread public approval. [26] Forty of the elected lay members at the first meeting of the Church Assembly in 1920 were female, and from their ranks, members of what had been the Church League for Women’s Suffrage (now ‘League of the Church Militant’) straight away raised the question of the ordination of women. We have seen something of the prehistory of this in the Quakers and Methodists, and after those initiatives, first-wave feminism had produced some ordinations of women to pastoral charges, first in American liberal Protestant Churches (from 1815) and then in England (1917). Nineteenth-century Germany and then England had instituted Orders of Deaconesses, though had generally firmly discouraged any exploration of their clerical character that might draw on early

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  Yet Anselm’s reflections show the importance of a specific belief in understanding both the origins and goal of what is otherwise an undirected and inchoate experience. The Christian tradition offers a unified philosophical frame of reference which enables these puzzling experiences to be interpreted, and seen within a broader context. While the Christian ‘big picture’ was developed for reasons other than engaging the world of experience, it proved capable of offering an interpretation of this otherwise puzzling experience, locating it within a ‘landscape of desire’. Human beings experience a sense of emptiness and restlessness in this life, perhaps reflecting an impaired or impoverished relationship with God – an idea expressed in Augustine of Hippo’s fifth-century prayer: ‘You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in you.’ This framework offers an interpretation of the origins and goal of this experience. It originates from God, takes the form of a ‘homing instinct’ for God within us, and is intended to prompt us to find our way back to God. But what is the status of this line of reasoning? Let’s be quite clear: this does not, and was not intended to, constitute a rational proof for God’s existence. Perhaps C. S. Lewis’s idea of a ‘supposal’ might be helpful here – a provisional assumption, proposed as a possible explanation of puzzling observations or experiences, which requires testing. Suppose there is a God, such as that which Christianity proposes. Does not this fit in well with our experience of reality? And is not this resonance indicative of the truth of the supposal? The approach is clearly not compelling; it is rather suggestive, hinting that the best way of testing a worldview might not be to assess its individual components, but to step inside the larger vision of reality that it enfolds, and test its quality and depth. One of the most important functions of a worldview is to inform and give stability to notions of meaning and purpose. In the next section, we shall consider how beliefs undergird these two important themes, which are of considerable importance to personal and social existence. Meaning: On Finding Significance and PurposeWhile some philosophers, such as Susan Wolf, appreciate the importance of the question of meaning, the most significant engagement in recent years with the pervasive human desire to find ‘meaning in life’ has come from psychology, which has sought to establish both what people understand by ‘meaning’ and the difference that this makes to their lives. The psychologists Login George and Crystal Park concluded that whether life is perceived as ‘meaningful’ or not is shaped by ‘the extent to which one’s life is experienced as making sense, as being directed and motivated by valued goals, and as mattering in the world.’51