Longing

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

Page 156 of 170 · 20 per page

• From City of Night (1963)

  We went to a cafeteria. As we sat there, he told me he was a student at a college, he lived with his parents. On weekends he worked at the library.... Throughout his conversation, there were subtle references to the homosexual scene, which I didnt acknowledge.... Afterwards, for about an hour, talking easily, we walked along the river. “I’d like to go to bed with you,” he said bluntly. “We could rent a room somewhere.” Remembering Pete with a sense of utter helplessness, and surprising myself because of the gentleness with which I answered this youngman, I said: “Youve got me all wrong.” In the following days (on this unfloating island with that life that never sleeps—in this city that seems to generate its energy from all the small, sleepy towns of America, sapped by this huge lodestone: the fugitives lured here by an emotional insomnia: gathered into like or complementary groups: in this dazzling disdainfully heaven-piercing city), in those following days, I discovered Third Avenue, the East 50s, in the early morning, where figures camped flagrantly in the streets in a parody stagline; the languid “Hi” floating into the dark, the feigned unconcern of the subsequent shrug when you dont stop.... And there was Howard Thomson’s restaurant on 8th Street in the near-dawn hours. They gathered then for the one last opportunity before the rising sun expelled them, bringing the Sunday families out for breakfast I discovered the bars: on the west side, the east side, in the Village; one in Queens—appropriately—where males danced with males, holding each other intimately, male leading, male following—and it was in that bar that I first saw flagrantly painted men congregate and where a queen boy-girl camped openly with a cop.... But because most of those bars attracted large numbers of youngmen who went there to meet others like themselves for a mutual, nightlong, unpaid, sexsharing—or for the prospect of an “affair”—the bars made me nervous, then; and, largely, I avoided them. The restlessness welled insatiable inside me . I discovered the jungle of Central Park—between the 60s and 70s, on the west side. In the afternoons, Sundays especially, a parade of hunters prowled that area—or they would sit or lie on the grass waiting for that day’s contact. Even in the brilliant white blaze of newyork sun, it was possible to make it, right there, in the tree-secluded areas. At night they sat along the benches, in the fringes of the park. Or they strolled with their leashed dogs along the walks.... The more courageous ones penetrated the park, around the lake, near a little hill: hoods, hobos, hustlers, homosexuals. Hunting. Young teenage gangs lurk threatening among the trees. Occasionally the cops come by, almost timidly, in pairs, flashing their lights; and the rustling of bushes precedes the quick scurrying of feet along the paths.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  At the end of this intellectual ritual, if he had responded honestly and generously, the initiate would have become a philosopher, somebody who realized that he lacked wisdom, longed for it, but knew that he was not what he ought to be. Like a mystes, he had become “a stranger to himself.” This relentless search for wisdom made a philosopher atopos, “unclassifiable.” That was why Socrates was not like other people; he did not care about money or advancement and was not even concerned about his own security. In the Symposium, Plato made Socrates describe his quest for wisdom as a love affair that grasped the seeker’s entire being until he achieved an ekstasis that was an ascent, stage by stage, to a higher state of being. If the philosopher surrendered himself to an “unstinting love of wisdom,” he would acquire joyous knowledge of a beauty that went beyond finite beings because it was being itself: “It always is and neither comes to be nor passes away, neither waxes nor wanes.” 43 It was not confined to one idea or one kind of knowledge. It is not anywhere in another thing, as in an animal, or in earth, or in heaven, or in anything else, but itself by itself with itself, it is always one in form; and all the other beautiful things share in that in such a way that when these others come to be or pass away, this does not become the least bit smaller or greater nor suffer any change. 44 It was “absolute, pure, unmixed, unique, eternal” 45 —like Brahman, Nirvana, or God. Wisdom transformed the philosopher so that he himself enjoyed a measure of divinity. “The love of the gods belongs to anyone who has given birth to true virtue and nourished it, and if any human being could become immortal, it would be he.” 46 As Socrates finished this moving explanation, Alcibiades burst in upon the company and, his tongue loosened by drink, described the extraordinary effect Socrates had upon him. He might be as ugly as a satyr, but he was like the popular effigies of the satyr Silenus that had a tiny statue of a god inside.

• From Memoirs of Fanny Hill (1749)

  I was now once more a-drift, and left upon my own hands, by a gentleman whom I certainly did not deserve. And all the letters, arts, friends, entreaties that I employed within the week of grace in my lodging, could never win on him so much as to see me again. He had irrevocably pronounced my doom, and submission to it was my only part. Soon after he married a lady of birth and fortune, to whom, I have heard he proved an irreproachable husband. As for poor Will, he was immediately sent down to the country to his father, who was an easy farmer, where he was not four months before an inn-keepers’ buxom young widow, with a very good stock, both in money and trade, fancied, and perhaps pre-acquainted with his secret excellencies, married him: and I am sure there was, at least, one good foundation for their living happily together. Though I should have been charmed to see him before he went, such measures were taken, by Mr. H....’s orders, that it was impossible; otherwise I should certainly have endeavoured to detain him in town, and would have spared neither offers nor expense to have procured myself the satisfaction of keeping him with me. He had such powerful holds upon my inclinations as were not easily to be shaken off, or replaced; as to my heart, it was quite out of the question: glad, however, I was from my soul, that nothing worse, and as things turned out, nothing better could have happened to him. As to Mr. H..., though views of conveniency made me, at first, exert myself to regain his affection, I was giddy and thoughtless enough to be much easier reconciled to my failure than I ought to have been; but as I never had loved him, and his leaving me gave me a sort of liberty that I had often longed for, I was soon comforted; and flattering myself, that the stock of youth and beauty I was going to trade with, could hardly fail of procuring me a maintenance, I saw myself under the necessity of trying my fortune with them, rather, with pleasure and gaiety, than with the least idea of despondency. In the mean time, several of my acquaintances among the sisterhood, who had soon got wind of my misfortune, flocked to insult me with their malicious consolations. Most of them had long envied me the affluence and splendour I had been maintained in; and though there was scarce one of them that did not at least deserve to be in my case, and would probably, sooner or later, come to it, it was equally easy to remark, even in their affected pity, their secret pleasure at seeing me thus discarded, and their secret grief that it was no worse with me. Unaccountable malice of the human heart! and which is not confined to the class of life they were of.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  He was like the satyr Marsyas, whose music propelled an audience into a tranced yearning for union with the gods, except that Socrates did not need a musical instrument because his words alone stirred people to the depths. He had made Alcibiades aware of how deficient he was in wisdom and how lacking in self-knowledge: “He always traps me, you see, and he makes me admit that my political career is a waste of time, while all that matters is just what I most neglect: my personal shortcomings, which cry out for the closest attention.” 47 He tried to stop his ears against Socrates’ imperative summons to virtue but simply could not keep away from him. “I swear to you, the moment he starts to speak, I am beside myself: my heart starts leaping in my chest, the tears come streaming down my face.” The logoi of Socrates filled him with the same kind of “frenzy” as the Mysteries of Dionysus; the listener felt “unhinged” (explexis) and on the brink of illumination: “I don’t know if any of you have seen him when he’s really serious. But I once caught him when he was open like Silenus’ statues, and I had a glimpse of the figures he keeps hidden within: they were so godlike—so bright and beautiful, so utterly amazing—that I no longer had a choice—I just had to do whatever he told me.” 48 For his followers, Socrates had become an incarnation of divine beatitude, a symbol of the wisdom to which his whole life was directed. Henceforth each school of Greek philosophy would revere its founding sage as an avatar of a transcendent idea that was natural to humanity but almost impossibly difficult to achieve. 49 The Greeks had always seen the gods as immanent in human excellence; now the sage would express in human form the rational idea of God that had left the old Olympian theology far behind. Despite his humanity— and Alcibiades makes it clear that he was all too human—Socrates’ unique qualities pointed beyond himself to the transcendence that informed his moral quest. This became especially evident in the manner of his death. Socrates admitted that his conflict with the polis was inevitable. He had approached each of the magistrates of the city personally, trying to persuade him “not to care for any of his belongings before caring that he himself should be as good and as wise as possible; not to care for the city’s possessions more than for the city itself, and to care for other things in the same way.”

• From City of Night (1963)

  Back in San Francisco, to North Beach, usually to the Raven bar—which, at that time, was the best scoring bar in the city—especially on weekends, when a queen would go through a parody of an opera, playing all the female parts. Market Street by the magazine store, and you stand pretending youre watching the toylike trolley swinging around to begin its weary ascent up Powell.... Pickup places scattered from the Embarcadero to the fashionable sections of the city.... Walking through North Beach one silver afternoon—a few blocks beyond a flowered park where people on their lunch-hours sit in the sun (and where another afternoon a sad drunk woman, angered when I turned down her offer of a drink, started yelling hysterically: “He tried to snatch my purse! Catch him!”), I looked up at the huge statue of a monk before a church. And I went into that church. There were only a few noon people inside. Automatically, I knelt, crossed myself with the holy water: iron-binding echoes of childhood you cant shed no matter how you try. Mechanically I said some childhood prayers. It was serene and peaceful here—yes—but it was also Empty, infinitely Empty. The painted statues with blind eyes fixed into the air were remote and distant, like that heaven which doesnt exist. Whatever was to be found was not in here. It was in the World.... I made the sign of the cross—again embarrassedly—and I walked out. If I relented now in that journey through this submerged world, whatever meaning I might have found would evade me forever. Now those three haunting faces which had invaded my life were turning a searchlight into my soul. I had to follow that penetrating glare no matter where it took me. NEIL: Masquerade 1 “WILL YOU HAVE SOME TEA?” The man who has just asked me that question is dressed like this: In black mounting police pants which cling tightly below the hips revealing squat bowlegs; boots which gleam vitreously and rise at least a foot above his ankles—silver studs forming a triangular design on the tip of each boot, then swirling about the upper part like a wayward-leafed clover. “One lump or two?” The belt—futilely trying to squeeze his large stomach (squeezing it—although he was not otherwise excessively fat—to the point where even his breathing has to come in short, sharp gasps) but actually causing it to bulge out insistently over and under it in two sagging, lumpy old tires of flesh—is also black. Looping in waves like a wildly zigzagging snake, the ubiquitous studs (and each silver stud is haloed by tiny gleaming beads) join in front at an enormous buckle at least five inches wide on which is engraved a large malevolently beaked, bead-eyed, spread eagle. “Do you take cream?”

• From City of Night (1963)

  She had just warned me that there was a man in the bar who might be a vice cop playing a score, and she was maneuvering to get a young boy away from him. In the process of catching the kid’s attention, she saw a youngman in a suit walking into the bar from the courtyard: a goodlooking youngman. evidently not a hustler, probably a masculine homosexual, neither out to score nor to be scored from; looking for a mutual partner. Sylvia followed him intently with her eyes as he stops to talk to another youngman, also in a suit, also obviously neither hustler nor score. Sylvia remained as if bound to the barstool; but her body became tense, as if, of its own volition, beyond her conscious control, it might spring toward the youngman. Together, the two youngmen approached us, standing only a few feet away. Seeing the first one clearly at last, Sylvia turned from him—as she had turned from me that first day—and she sighed in frustrated expectation. Moments later, without a word, she walked outside into the street. Through the open door, the curtain pushed back to welcome the street crowds, I saw her standing on the sidewalk, looking in all directions as if undecided which one to take, or as if it made no difference. She brought her hand to her forehead in a tight fist. Then she squared her shoulders and walked away. And at that moment I knew with certainty what I must have suspected from the very first—and I realized why it was that I returned to her constantly. 4 “Fucking queers!” the drunk man roared as two queens swished by him gayly into the head of The Rocking Times. “What the hell are you doing here if you dont like it?” Sylvia was standing before him like a black panther. “Hell,” the man said, “I dont need em. Im married, got a wife—kids.” “Not much of a wife,” Sylvia lashed, “if you have to come here to feel youre a man.” Her voice was controlled, but her face blanched. “If I had a queer in my family, I’d kill him!” the man spat venemously. Sylvia grabbed him by the shoulders. “Get out of here!” she commanded, pushing him out. And then, instantly, shockingly, it began. Like someone yearning for water—deprived of it for long hot smoldering days, Sylvia brushed past the bartender behind the bar, and she reached for a bottle of bourbon, and she poured out a glass. I could see the taut veins on her neck as she leaned her head back, welcoming the stinging amber liquid. Her hands, which had been trembling as she stared at the drunk man stumbling anxiously out of the bar, relaxed. She gulned another drink in one long thirsty swallow. The bartender is looking at her in helpless pity as if he knew what would happen now; as if perhaps he had witnessed it before.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I, however, did not know what to make of it. I couldn’t think of Gully at all: my thoughts were still with Kitty, and with that moment in the change-room, when I had felt her hand on me and seemed to feel a kind of understanding leap between us. She hadn’t looked at me since then, and now she had gone to talk to one of the boys who had brought the news of Gully’s suicide. After a moment, however, I saw her shake her head and step away, and seem to search for me; and when she saw me - waiting for her, in the shadows of the wing - she came and sighed. ‘Poor Gully. They say his heart was shot right through...’ ‘And to think,’ I said, ‘it was for Gully’s sake that I first went to Canterbury and saw you ...’ She looked at me, then, and trembled; and put a hand to her cheek, as if made weak with sorrow. But I dared not move to comfort her - only stood, miserable and unsure. When I said that we should go - since other people were now leaving - she nodded. We returned to the change-room for our coats: its jets were all flaring now, and there were white-faced women in it with handkerchiefs before their eyes. Then we stepped to the stage door, and waited while the doorman found a cab for us. This seemed to take an age. It was two o‘clock or later before we started on our journey home; and then we sat, on different seats, in silence - Kitty repeating only, now and then: ‘Poor Gully! What a thing to do!’, and I still drunk, still dazed, still desperately stirred, but still uncertain. It was a bitterly cold and beautiful night - perfectly quiet, once we had left the clamour of the party behind us, and still. The roads were foggy, and thick with ice: every so often I felt the wheels of our carriage slide a little, and caught the sound of the horse’s slithering, uncertain step, and the driver’s gentle curses. Beside us the pavements glittered with frost, and each street-lamp glowed, in the fog, from the centre of its own yellow nimbus.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  Top of the list of such récits is the modern “God,” who is omnipotent and omniscient and keeps watch over the world, working all things to his own purposes. But postmodernism is also averse to an atheism that makes absolute, totalistic claims. As Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) cautioned, we must also be alert to “theological prejudices” not only in religious contexts, where they are overt, but in all metaphysics—even those that profess to be atheist. 55 Like any postmodern philosopher, Derrida was deeply suspicious of the fixed, binary polarities that characterize modern thought, and the atheist/theist divide was, he believed, too simple. Atheists have reduced the complex phenomena of religion to formulas that suit their own ideologies—as Marx did when he called religion an opiate of the oppressed or Freud when he saw it as oedipal terror. A fixed and final denial of God on metaphysical grounds was for Derrida as culpable as any dogmatic religious “theology” (his term for a grand récit) . Derrida himself, a secularized Jew, said that though he might pass for an atheist, he prayed all the time, had a messianic hope for a better world, and inclined to the view that, since no absolute certainty is within our grasp, we should for the sake of peace hesitate to make declarative statements of either belief or unbelief. Some orthodox believers and most fundamentalists will be repelled by this unabashed relativism, but there are aspects of Derrida’s thought that recall earlier theological attitudes. His theory of deconstruction, which denies the possibility of finding a single, secure meaning in any text, is positively rabbinical. He has also been called a “negative” theologian and was greatly interested in Eckhart. What he called différance is neither a word nor a concept but a quasi-transcendental possibility—a “difference” or “otherness”—that lies within a word or idea such as “God.” For Eckhart, this différance was the God beyond God, a new but unknowable metaphysical ground that was inseparable from the human self. But for Derrida, différance was only quasi-transcendental; it is a potential, something that we cannot see but that makes us aware that we may have to qualify or even unsay anything we say or deny of God. In his later work, Derrida seemed haunted by the potential and lure of an open future. He affirmed what he calls the “undeconstructible,” which is not another absolute, because it does not exist, and yet we weep and pray for it. As he explained in his lecture “The Force of Law” (1989), justice is an undeconstructible “something” that is never fully realized in the actual circumstances of daily life but that informs all legal speculation. Justice is not what exists; it is what we desire. It calls us; it seems sometimes within our grasp but ultimately eludes us. And yet we go on trying to incarnate it in our legal systems. Derrida later went on to discuss other “undeconstuctibles”: gift, forgiveness, and friendship.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  He was very tall, even without his hat, and was dressed rather fashionably in chequered trousers and a fancy waistcoat. Across his stomach there was a golden watch-chain as thick as the tail of a rat; and more gold, I noticed, flashed from his fingers. His head was large, his hair a dull ginger; gingerish, too - and somehow at once both impressive and rather comical - were the whiskers that swept from his top lip to his ears, and his eyebrows, and the hair in his nose. His skin was as clear and shiny as a boy’s. His eyes were blue. When Kitty returned his card to him, he asked if he might speak with her a moment, and at once she stood aside to let him pass. With him in it, the little room seemed very full and hot. I rose, reluctantly, and put on my gloves and my hat, and said that I should go; and then Kitty introduced me - ‘My friend, Miss Astley,’ she called me, which made me feel a little gayer - and Mr Bliss shook my hand. ‘Tell your Mother,’ said Kitty as she showed me to the door, ‘that I shall come tomorrow, any time she likes.’ ‘Come at four,’ I said. ‘Four it is, then!’ She briefly took my hand again, and kissed my cheek. Over her shoulder I saw the flashy gentleman fingering his whiskers, but with his eyes turned, politely, away from us. I can hardly say what a curious mix of feelings mine were, the Sunday afternoon when Kitty came to call on us in Whitstable. She was more to me than all the world; that she should be visiting me in my own home, and supping with my family, seemed both a delight too lovely to be borne and a great and dreadful burden. I loved her, and could not but long to have her come; but I loved her, and not a soul must know it - not even she. It would be a torture, I thought, to have to sit beside her at my father’s table with that love within me, mute and restless as a gnawing worm. I would have to smile while Mother asked, Why didn’t Kitty have a beau? and smile again when Davy held Rhoda’s hand, or Tony pinched my sister’s knee beneath the table - when all the while my darling would be at my side, untouchable. Then again, there was the crampedness, and the dinginess - and the unmistakable fishiness - of our home to fret over.

• From City of Night (1963)

  “Oh, no, man—thats where I was born .... But I always used to see those Western flix—an, man, those cowboys, they seemed to be having a ball all the time. Thats for me, I thought. Cause, see, I didnt wanna hassle it—I jes wanted to let whatever’s gonna come, come easy an jes the way it should. I figure a ranch is the best place to let it happen. I would imagine sitting there on a fence—an ridin on a horse, looking out at the miles of sand an sky, an nothin is gonna fuck it up. You jes wait—an that way nothin happens. Easy an slow. An then I figure: I’ll get me a horse, when I wanna cut up, an jes ride away, man, like that—you know.... Like—yeah—like you got Heaven roped by the neck.” I wonder at his vision of Heaven. Not clouds. Not angels. No.... But the wide, wide plains, great hills, and uncomplicated plain cupped in the warm embrace of the golden sun.... An endless stretching beyond the great soft hills...

• From City of Night (1963)

  Chick is possibly in his middle 30s—would be almost-fat but squeezes his waist mercilessly so that he is like a caricature of Mae West. Jamey is younger. Tonight he is wearing a cowboy hat and boots, and because hes quite effeminate, despite the costume and the pose, at best he looks like a slightly masculine cowgirl. “I heard something really delicious about Lance,” Jamey said. “I heard that Lance—the beautiful Lance who wouldnt dream of falling in love—remember, Chick?—well, hes Flipped! Hes in love with this young kid.... Can you imagine, Chick? Lance—in love? ” “Frankly, no—I dont believe it. I think it’s just gossip,” said Chick, “though I will say—as much as Ive always adored Lance and still do and everyone knows it—I will say it might be the best thing that ever happened to him.” I remember the poised man I had seen that previous night—who had sat alone and walked out by himself a few minutes later—and even without knowing him, I couldnt imagine his being in love. “And have you heard about Esmeralda Drake the Third?” Jamey said. “Well, what about her?” Jamey said: “I heard shes dead.” “Why, I just saw her the other day,” Chick said. “She was hobbling along the street with her cane. If shes dead, she got run over, I bet.... Which reminds me: I went to this queen’s funeral once, and they had dressed her in drag!” “Youre too much!” protested Jamey. “It’s the truth. That was how she wanted to go: dress, high heels, gloves. It was in her will.” Then: “This kid you say Lance flipped over—do you know him?” “Oh, yes!” squealed Jamey. “And everybody’s had him. Hes one of the Hollywood Boulevard tramps—... Oh!” He covered his mouth naughtily, the cowboy hat almost falling off. “Excuse me, baby,” he said, patting my arm, “I forgot we just—uh—met you on the Boulevard,” and he grinned treacherously. “Anyway, the kid is a tramp!... Why, Chick, didnt you and I try to pick him up one night—at Coffee Andy’s?... Or was it you with me? We bought him a hamburger, then he left. Why, his name is Dean—Dean something.... No, you werent with me. I was with Rick that night, I remember. Rick liked him, I didnt.... Anyway,” he repeated, “this Dean is a tramp.” Dean? Dean.... I remember that name. “I dont believe it about Lance,” says Chick, with touching loyalty. “Youre just being bitchy, Jamey. Lance may not be as Young as he was, but hes still too special.” “All I can say,” said Jamey, “is that he certainly had his day.” “Babe,” Chick said to me now, “Lance was the handsomest boy in Hollywood.” “ I never thought he was that good,” said Jamey.

• From Birthday Girl (2018)

  —¿Alguna vez has llevado a Cole? —pregunta, subiendo los escalones. —Algunas veces mientras crecía, sí. Extiendo la mano antes que llegue a la puerta y la abra, manteniéndola abierta para que entre primero. Pero se da vuelta, mirándome antes de entrar. —Quizás puedas llevarnos a los dos la próxima vez que vayas —sugiere—. Mientras pueda conducir. No eres muy posesivo con tu camioneta, ¿verdad? —No. Una camioneta está hecha para ser usada. Adelante. Solo me pondré el cinturón de seguridad. Sonríe suavemente y me mira por un momento, algo que no puedo descifrar cruza su rostro. ¿Dije algo? La miro por un momento, notando cómo sus ojos se ven casi como una acuarela. Azul medianoche, pero cada vez más claro cuanto más se acercan a la pupila. Miro hacia otro lado, aclarando mi garganta. —¡Jordan! —grita Cole de repente desde el piso de arriba—. Nena, ¿estás en casa? ¡Ven acá! Me encuentro con su mirada otra vez, y se aleja, mostrándome una sonrisa de disculpa. —Tengo que ir a prepararme para el trabajo. Gracias por permitirme ayudar hoy. Asiento, pero me quedo en la puerta, viéndola cruzar la sala de estar y desaparecer por las escaleras. Un sentimiento extraño me invade mientras la miro. ¿Cómo es con Cole? ¿Cómo es él con ella? ¿Es bueno con ella? Me quedo junto a la puerta de entrada, escuchando la puerta del dormitorio cerrarse y sabiendo que está en la habitación con él. La casa de repente se siente pesada. Sofocante y tensa, y no puedo respirar. No quiero entrar, no importa si necesito ropa seca o no. Dejo caer mis llaves sobre la mesa a mi izquierda y veo la llave del VW allí. La tomo y retrocedo, cerrando la puerta antes de volver a bajar los escalones del porche y al garaje a la derecha de la casa. —Conseguiste unos huéspedes, ¿eh? —Escucho a alguien decir. Miro hacia el lado y veo a Kyle Cramer de pie en el porche con una taza de café en la mano, cubierto por la lluvia, que ahora es una ligera brisa.

• From Memoirs of Fanny Hill (1749)

  “But the pleasure rising as the pain subsided, I was soon reconciled to fresh trials, and before morning, nothing on earth could be dearer to me than this rifler of my virgin sweets: he was every thing to me now. “How we agreed to join fortunes: how we came up to town together, where we lived some time, till necessity-parted us, and drove me into this course of life, to which I had been long ago bettered and torn to pieces before I came to this age, as much through my easiness, as through inclination, had it not been for my finding refuge in this house: these are all circumstances which pass the mark I proposed, so that here my narrative ends.” In the order of our sitting, it was Harriet’s turn to go on. Amongst all the beauties of our sex, that I had before, or have since seen, few indeed were the forms that could dispute excellence with her’s; it was not delicate, but delicacy itself incarnate, such was the symmetry of her small but exactly fashioned limbs. Her complexion, fair as it was, appeared yet more fair, from the effect of two black eyes, the brilliancy of which gave her face more vivacity than belonged to the colour of it, which was only defended from paleness, by a sweetly pleasing blush in her cheeks, that grew fainter and fainter, till at length it died away insensibly into the overbearing white. Then her miniature features joined to finish the extreme sweetness of it, which was not belied by that of a temper turned to indolence, languor, and the pleasures of love. Pressed to subscribe her contingent, she smiled, blushed a little, and thus complied with our desires: “My father was neither better nor worse than a miller near the city of York; and both he and my mother dying whilst I was an infant, I fell under the care of a widow and childless aunt, housekeeper to my lord N..., at his seat in the county of..., where she brought me up with all imaginable tenderness. I was not seventeen, as I am not now eighteen, before I had, on account of my person purely (for fortune I had notoriously none), several advantageous proposals; but whether nature was slow in making me sensible in her favourite passion, or that I had not seen any of the other sex who had stirred up the least emotion or curiosity to be better acquainted with it, I had, till that age, preserved a perfect innocence, even of thought: whilst my fears of I did not now well know what, made me no more desirous of marrying than of dying. My aunt, good woman, favoured my timorousness, which she looked on as childish affection, that her own experience might probably assure her would wear off in time, and gave my suitors proper answers for me.

• From Ulysses (Kindle edition — verify full work) (1922)

  Though replete with revolutionary possibilities, same-gender loving is not without its ambiguities and implications. One such ambiguity, at least as it relates to this study, is that the "requisites" for same-gender loving are not clearly defined. While created by and for sexual minorities of color, it is not apparent who, in terms of race/ethnicity, can identify with or embrace samegender loving. As such, it is not clear whether relationships exclusively between sexual minorities of color constitute samegender loving, or if it also applies to same-sex relationships marked by interracial sexual intimacy between white individuals and people of color. While such uncertainty exists, my study assumes an anti-essentialist understanding of same-gender loving and thereby extends its use and application to interracial intimacies. To this end, it not only further problematizes limited notions of racialized sexualities and interracial samesex intimacy, but also expands the ways in which we conceive and theorize about the dynamics of race, gender, and sexuality.22 For, "history has a very limited reach where black/white bodies are concerned" such that it does not recall the historical racialized "events" that punctuate and bear "mark upon our sexual proclivities."23 Moreover, the "black-white polarity," as Marlon Ross avers, "continues to deny the polymorphous" (and, for that matter, polyamorous) "courses of all human desire."24 Racially conscious, same-gender loving has an etymology grounded in an Afrocentrist thinking that lends itself to a gendered/male-centeredness.25 Even in its articulation of and resistance against the essentialism of race and sexuality in the black nationalist and gay liberation movements, its very gender dynamic has not necessarily operated in the service or for the utility of (black) women. In addition to its race-conscious, gendered genesis, it also emblematizes a class-based orientation that resonates among middle - and upper-middle class blacks; and, as such, it does not divorce itself of or escape a "(homo) normative" thrust. Its emphasis on and privileging of the rhetoric "loving" emblematizes and might perpetuate a discourse or narrative that tempers, if not dictates, the terms of desire and politics of the intimate within a framework of commitment, romantic love, and/or sexual monogamy. "That might perpetuate" are the operative words, especially since in this context I do not render "love" as synonymous with a romanticism at the heart of which is the "modern concept of love" as "almost exclusively limited to the bourgeois couple and the claustrophobic confines of the nuclear family," to quote Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, who explicate their frustrations with limiting constructions of love.26

• From The Case for God (2009)

  Anything that came into contact with divinity could become holy too: a priest, a king, or a temple—even the sacred utensils of the cult. In the Middle East, people would have found it far too constricting to limit ilam to a single god; instead, they imagined a Divine Assembly, a council of gods of many different ranks, who worked together to sustain the cosmos and expressed the multifaceted complexity of the sacred. 37 People felt a yearning for the absolute, intuited its presence all around them, and went to great lengths to cultivate their sense of this transcendence in creative rituals. But they also felt estranged from it. Almost every culture has developed a myth of a lost paradise from which men and women were ejected at the beginning of time. It expressed an inchoate conviction that life was not meant to be so fragmented, hard, and full of pain. There must have been a time when people had enjoyed a greater share in the fullness of being and had not been subject to sorrow, disease, bereavement, loneliness, old age, and death. This nostalgia informed the cult of “sacred geography,” one of the oldest and most universal religious ideas. Certain places that stood out in some way from the norm—like the labyrinthine caverns of the Dordogne—seemed to speak of “something else.” 38 The sacred place was one of the earliest and most ubiquitous symbols of the divine. It was a sacred “center” that brought heaven and earth together and where the divine potency seemed particularly effective. A popular image, found in many cultures, imagined this fructifying, sacred energy welling up like a spring from these focal places and flowing, in four sacred rivers, to the four quarters of the earth. People would settle only in sites where the sacred had once become manifest because they wanted to live as closely as possible to the wellsprings of being and become as whole and complete as they had been before they were ejected from paradise. This brings us to the second principle of premodern religion. Religious discourse was not intended to be understood literally because it was only possible to speak about a reality that transcended language in symbolic terms. The story of the lost paradise was a myth, not a factual account of a historical event. People were not expected to “believe” it in the abstract; like any mythos , it depended upon the rituals associated with the cult of a particular holy place to make what it signified a reality in the lives of participants. The same applies to the creation myth that was central to ancient religion and has now become controversial in the Western world because the Genesis story seems to clash with modern science. But until the early modern period, nobody read a cosmology as a literal account of the origins of life. In the ancient world, it was inspired by an acute sense of the contingency and frailty of existence.

• From From Jesus to Constantine: A History of Early Christianity (2004)

  Ignatius was the bishop of Antioch, arrested for Christian activities, and sent to Rome to be thrown to the wild beasts. En route, he wrote six letters to various churches that had sent representatives to greet him on the way. He wrote one other letter to the Christians in Rome, urging them not to interfere with the proceedings against him once he arrived, because it was by a violent death that he would be united with Christ and, thus, “attain to God.” The longing of Ignatius for violent death may seem pathological to modern ears, but it was only logical for him: This world was of no importance to him; what mattered was the other world of God, which he could attain by imitating the martyrdom of Christ. V. It is difficult to know how many Christians actually had to face death in this way (because the writings about the martyrs presuppose so many survivors, we can assume that not many were actually killed). A. Some evidently recanted of their Christian faith—or at least pretended to do so—when put to the test. B. Others, though, submitted themselves to public torment and death, because in doing so they were escaping the real and eternal suffering that would come to non-believers in the afterlife and because in dying this way, they could imitate their Lord and master, Christ. Essential Reading: Bart Ehrman, After the New Testament, chapter 3. Everett Ferguson, Church and State in the Early Church (especially the articles by de Ste. Crois and Sherwin- White). Judith Perkins, The Suffering Self. Supplementary Reading: H. Musurillo, The Acts of the Christian Martyrs. Robert Wilken, The Christians as the Romans Saw Them. Questions to Consider: 1. Can you imagine ways in which the persecution and martyrdom of Christians may have actually helped the Christian mission? 2. Why do you suppose that such people as Perpetua or Ignatius—who presumably had so much to offer people in this world and who could have no doubt led happy lives here—were so eager to sacrifice their bodies and leave this world? 197 Lecture Thirteen—Transcript Christian Reactions to Persecution In the previous lecture, we saw some of the reasons for the violent opposition to Christians throughout the Roman Empire. Christians were seen as a threat to society because they refused to worship the state gods. Disasters that struck could be seen by pagans, then, as divine retribution for cities that harbored such atheists. Christians were called “atheists” because they didn’t worship the gods of the state. Although today, we would think of an atheist as someone who did not believe in God, in the ancient world, an atheist was someone who did not believe in sacrifice to the gods.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  We know him more intimately than any other thinker of late antiquity because of his Confessions , a memoir that revealed his fascination with the working of the human mind that is also evident in his treatise On the Trinity . Augustine fully understood the implications of the new creation doctrine that had rendered God unknowable. In one of the most famous passages of The Confessions , he made it clear that the study of the natural world could not give us information about God: Late have I loved you, Beauty so ancient and so new, late have I loved you! Behold, you were within and I was without [foris]; and there I sought you, plunging unformed as I was into the fair things that you have formed and made. You were with me, and I was not with you. I was kept from you by the things that would not have been, were they not in you. 49 God was “within” but Augustine could not find him because he was “outside himself” ( foris) . As long as he confined his quest to the external world, he remained trapped in the fragile mutability that so disturbed him. 50 When he questioned the physical world about God, the earth, the sea, the sky, and the heavenly bodies all replied, “I am not he, but it is he that made me.” 51 But when he asked, “What, then, do I love in loving my God?” 52 Augustine knew that, like the Upanishadic sages, he could only answer, “neti… neti”: No physical beauty, no temporal glory, no radiancy of light that commends itself to these eyes of mine; no sweet melody of songs tuned to every mode, no soft scent of flowers or of ointments or of perfumes, no manna, no honey, no limbs that can conceive corporal embrace. 53 But God was all these things “to my inner man. There it is that a light shines on my soul that no place can contain, a sound is uttered no time can take away, a fragrance cast that no breath of wind can disperse, a savour given forth that eating cannot blunt. … This is what I love in loving my God.” 5 4 Scripture told us that we had been made in God’s image and it was therefore possible to find an eikon within ourselves that, like any Platonic image, yearned toward its archetype. If we looked within, we would discover a triad in our minds in the faculties of memory (memoria) , understanding (intellectus) , and will or love (voluntas ) that gave us an insight into the triune life of God. Augustine was fascinated by memory.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  For I do not seek to understand in order that I may have faith [intellegere ut credam] , but I commit myself in order that I may understand [credo ut intellgam]; and what is more, I am certain that unless I so commit myself I shall not understand. 7 Anselm is still using the verb credere in its original sense: it is an affair of the “heart,” the center of the human being, rather than a purely notional act and, as for Augustine, inseparable from love. Because the word “belief” has changed its meaning since Anselm’s day, it is misleading to translate, as is often done, credo ut intellgam as: “I believe in order that I may understand.” This gives the impression that before one can have any comprehension of the loyalty and trust of faith, one must first force one’s mind to accept blindly a host of incomprehensible doctrines. Anselm is saying something quite different: religious truth made no sense without practically expressed commitment. Perhaps a better translation is “I involve myself in order that I may understand.” Anselm was trying to shake off his lethargy in prayer by engaging all his faculties, and was certain that “unless I so involve myself, I shall not understand.” So to spark his reader’s interest, he invites him to consider what has been called the “ontological proof” for the existence of God. In the second chapter of the Proslogion , he asks God to help him to understand “that you exist” in the way that he has been taught. 8 Denys would not have approved of such a project, because God could not be said to “exist” in any way that human beings could understand. But Anselm was trying to express a similar insight in the new fashionably metaphysical terminology, in a way that would excite an eleventh-century reader. He defined God as “that thing than which nothing more perfect can be thought [aliquid quo nihil maius cogitari possit].” 9 He was asking his readers to think of the greatest thing that they could imagine or conceive—but then go on to reflect that God was even greater and more perfect than that. God must transcend any “thing” that the human mind could envisage. As a Platonist, it was natural for Anselm to think that the very nature (ontos ) of God contains within it the necessity for God’s existence. “Lord my God,” he prays, “you so truly are , that it is not possible to think of you as not existing.” 10 Since thought was something that happened to the thinker, an idea in the mind was an intimate encounter with the Known, so in an intellectual world still dominated by Platonism, this was a perfectly acceptable argument.

• From From Jesus to Constantine: A History of Early Christianity (2004)

  This view can be seen most clearly in the writings of one of the first Christians known to be martyred after the New Testament period, an author whose name was Ignatius of Antioch. Ignatius was the bishop of the major city, Antioch, in the early second century. Around the year 110, roughly 90 years before Perpetua, Ignatius was arrested in Antioch, apparently for Christian activities, and he was sent off to Rome to be thrown to the wild beasts. While en route to Rome to face his own martyrdom, Ignatius wrote a number of letters, and we still have these letters. This is another, quite remarkable corpus of writings that we have, letters written by a Christian who is about to be martyred, en route to Rome, where he is to be thrown to the wild beasts. Six of these letters, he wrote to various churches, representatives of which he had met on the way. Thus, we have six letters written to various churches, in which he tells the churches how to deal with their particular problems, how to be unified, that they ought to follow their bishops, that they ought to be submissive to what their bishops say. He tried to get rid of heresy in these various churches. He was concerned about their welfare. However, one of the letters was not written to a church that had sent representatives to meet him along the way, one of the letters was written to the Christians in the city of Rome, where he was going. He wrote the Christians in Rome in order to urge them not to interfere with the proceedings against him once he arrived. He didn’t want them to stop his 206 execution, since, in his view, it was by dying a violent death that he would be united with Christ, and therefore, as he said, he would “attain to God.” We have these seven letters. These seven letters have survived through the Middle Ages, down to today, and they make for very interesting reading, especially this letter to the Romans. Let me read several parts of this letter. This may sound rather pathological to you, but one person’s pathology is another person’s common sense. This was common sense for Ignatius:

• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  It was actually the green of newly minted money. My other consolation was lunch. Each day at noon I’d walk down the street to the local travel agency and stand like Walter Mitty before the posters in the window. Switzerland. Tahiti. Moscow. Bali. I’d grab a brochure and leaf through it while eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on a bench in the park. I’d ask