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 Going Clear (2013)

  Hubbard claims that Old Tom would put on displays of magic by leaping fifteen feet high from a seated position and perching on the top of his teepee. Hubbard observes, “I learned long ago that man has his standards for credulity, and when reality clashes with these, he feels challenged.” A signal moment in Hubbard’s narrative is the seven-thousand-mile voyage he took in 1923 from Seattle through the Panama Canal to Washington, DC, where his father was being posted. One of his fellow passengers was Commander Joseph C. “Snake” Thompson of the US Navy Medical Corps. A neurosurgeon, a naturalist, and a former spy, Thompson made a vivid impression on the boy. “He was a very careless man,” Hubbard later recalled. “He used to go to sleep reading a book and when he woke up, why, he got up and never bothered to press and change his uniform, you know. And he was usually in very bad odor with the Navy Department.... But he was a personal friend of Sigmund Freud’s.... When he saw me—a defenseless character—and there was nothing to do on a big transport on a very long cruise, he started to work me over.” No doubt Thompson entertained the young Hubbard with tales of his adventures as a spy in the Far East. Raised in Japan by his father, a missionary, Thompson spoke fluent Japanese. He had spent much of his early military career roaming through Asia posing as a herpetologist looking for rare snakes while covertly gathering intelligence and charting possible routes of invasion. “What impressed me,” Hubbard later remarked, “he had a cat by the name of Psycho. This cat had a crooked tail, which is enough to impress any young man. And the cat would do tricks. And the first thing he did was teach me how to train cats. But it takes so long, and it requires such tremendous patience, that to this day I have never trained a cat. You have to wait, evidently, for the cat to do something, then you applaud it. But waiting for a cat to do something whose name is Psycho ...” One of Thompson’s maxims was “If it’s not true for you, it’s not true.” He told young Hubbard that the statement had come from Gautama Siddhartha, the Buddha. It made an impression on Hubbard. “If there’s anybody in the world that’s calculated to believe what he wants to believe and to reject what he doesn’t want to believe, it is I.”

• From Going Clear (2013)

  Crowley said that over a period of three days, Aiwass dictated to him an entire cosmology titled The Book of the Law , the main principle of which was, “ Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.” Nibs— Hubbard’s estranged eldest son and namesake, L. Ron Hubbard, Jr. (he later changed his name to Ronald DeWolf)—claimed that his father had read the book when he was sixteen years old and developed a lifelong allegiance to black magic. “ What a lot of people don’t realize is that Scientology is black magic just spread out over a long time period,” he contended. “Black magic is the inner core of Scientology—and it is probably the only part of Scientology that really works.” One striking parallel between Hubbard and Crowley is the latter’s assertion that “ spiritual progress did not depend on religious or moral codes, but was like any other science.” Crowley argued that by advancing through a graded series of rituals and spiritual teachings, the adept could hope to make it across “ The Abyss,” which he defined as “the gulf existing between individual and cosmic consciousness.” It is an image that Hubbard would evoke in his Bridge to Total Freedom. Although Hubbard mentions Crowley only glancingly in a lecture—calling him “ my very good friend”—they never actually met. Crowley died in 1947 at the age of seventy-two. “ That’s when Dad decided that he would take over the mantle of the Beast and that is the seed and the beginning of Dianetics and Scientology,” Nibs later said. “It was his goal to be the most powerful being in the universe.” JACK PARSONS EXPERIMENTED with Crowley’s rituals, taking them in his own eccentric direction. His personal brand of witchcraft centered on the adoration of female carnality, an interest Hubbard evidently shared. Parsons recorded in his journal that Hubbard had a vision of “ a savage and beautiful woman riding naked on a great cat-like beast.” That became the inspiration for Parsons’s most audacious mystical experiment. He appointed Hubbard to be his “scribe” in a ceremony called the “ Babalon Working.” It was based on Crowley’s notion that the supreme goal of the magician’s art was to create a “moonchild”—a creature foretold in one of Crowley’s books who becomes the Antichrist. Night after night, Parsons and Hubbard invoked the spirit world in a quest to summon up a “Scarlet Woman,” the female companion who would play the role of Parsons’s consort. The ceremony, likely aided by narcotics and hallucinogens, required Hubbard to channel the female deity of Babalon as Parsons performed the “ invocation of wand with material basis on talisman”—in other words, masturbating on a piece of parchment. He typically invoked twice a night. Parsons records that during one of these evenings a candle was forcibly knocked out of Hubbard’s hand: “ We observed a brownish yellow light about seven feet high in the kitchen. I brandished a magical sword and it disappeared.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  I embraced her knees, and covered her hand with kisses. “Yes, you must be a slave, and feel the lash, for you are not a man,” she said calmly. She said this to me with perfect composure, not angrily, not even excitedly, and it was what hurt most. “Now I know you, your dog-like nature, that adores where it is kicked, and the more, the more it is maltreated. Now I know you, and now you shall come to know me.” She walked up and down with long strides, while I remained crushed on my knees; my head was hanging supine, tears flowed from my eyes. “Come here,” Wanda commanded harshly, sitting down on the ottoman. I obeyed her command, and sat down beside her. She looked at me sombrely, and then a light suddenly seemed to illuminate the interior of her eye. Smiling, she drew me toward her breast, and began to kiss the tears out of my eyes. * * * * * The odd part of my situation is that I am like the bear in Lily’s park. I can escape and don’t want to; I am ready to endure everything as soon as she threatens to set me free. * * * * * If only she would use the whip again. There is something uncanny in the kindness with which she treats me. I seem like a little captive mouse with which a beautiful cat prettily plays. She is ready at any moment to tear it to pieces, and my heart of a mouse threatens to burst. What are her intentions? What does she purpose to do with me? * * * * * It seems she has completely forgotten the contract, my slavehood. Or was it actually only stubbornness? And she gave up her whole plan as soon as I no longer opposed her and submitted to her imperial whim? How kind she is to me, how tender, how loving! We are spending marvellously happy days. To-day she had me read to her the scene between Faust and Mephistopheles, in which the latter appears as a wandering scholar. Her glance hung on me with strange pleasure. “I don’t understand,” she said when I had finished, “how a man who can read such great and beautiful thoughts with such expression, and interpret them so clearly, concisely, and intelligently, can at the same time be such a visionary and supersensual ninny as you are.” “Were you pleased,” said I, and kissed her forehead. She gently stroked my brow. “I love you, Severin,” she whispered. “I don’t believe I could ever love any one more than you.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  I see it now. You do not despise me because I am here, do you?' "'Ah! if you could only read in my heart, and see how madly I love you, darling!' "And she looked at him with longing, passionate eyes. "'Still you think me light, don't you? I am an adulteress!' "And thereupon she shuddered, and hid her face in her hands. "He looked at her for a moment pitifully, then he took down her hands gently, and kissed her. "'You do not know how I have tried to resist you, but I could not. I am on fire. My blood is no longer blood, but some burning love-philtre. I cannot help myself,' said she, lifting up her head defiantly as if she were facing the whole world, 'here I am, do with me what you like, only tell me that you love me, that you love no other woman but me, swear it.' "'I swear,' said he, languidly, 'that I love no other woman.' "She did not understand the meaning of his words. "'But tell it to me again, say it often, it is so sweet to hear it repeated from the lips of those we doat on,' said she, with passionate eagerness. "'I assure you that I have never cared for any woman so much as I do for you.' "'Cared?' said she, disappointed. "'Loved, I mean.' "'And you can swear it?' "'On the cross if you like,' added he, smiling. "'And you do not think badly of me because I am here? Well, you are the only one for whom I have ever been unfaithful to my husband; though God knows if he be faithful to me. Still my love does not atone for my sin, does it?' "Teleny did not give her any answer for an instant, he looked at her with dreamy eyes, then shuddered as if awaking from a trance. "'Sin,' he said, 'is the only thing worth living for.' "She looked at him rather astonished, but then she kissed him again and again and answered: 'Well, yes, you are perhaps right; it is so, the fruit of the forbidden tree was pleasant to the sight, to the taste, and to the smell." "They sat down on a divan. When they were clasped again in each other's arms he slipped his hand somewhat timidly and almost unwillingly under her skirts. "She caught hold of his hand, and arrested it. "'No, Réné, I beg of you! Could we not love each other with a Platonic love? Is that not enough?'

• From Going Clear (2013)

  He later testified that Hubbard habitually kept “ great chunks of cash” within easy reach, “so that if there was any problem he could just take off right out the window.” “ Making money, I think, to Hubbard was paramount,” Hana Eltringham later speculated. “He wasn’t that interested in it for himself. He did have perks, he did have his cars, his motorbikes, his books, his good food, and things like that, and eventually he had his villas and he had his estates and so on, but the money that he wanted predominantly was for power.” For all his wealth, Hubbard spent much of his time in his cabin alone, auditing himself on the E-Meter and developing his spiritual technology. He may have been grandiose and delusional, but the endless stream of policy letters and training routines that poured from his typewriter hour after hour, day after day, attests to his obsession with the notion of creating a step-by-step pathway to universal salvation. If it was all a con, why would he bother? Hubbard and Mary Sue slept in separate staterooms. In the opinion of members of their household staff and others, by the time they boarded ship, Hubbard had lost interest in Mary Sue sexually. Yvonne Gillham had managed to get herself posted on another ship, out of range of Hubbard’s longing and Mary Sue’s wrath. For the most part, the Commodore left his female crew members alone. One exception was a tall, slender woman from Oregon. She approached Hana Eltringham with a big smile on her face and confessed that she was having an affair with Hubbard. Soon after that, Hubbard busted the woman down to deckhand and assigned Eltringham to audit her. The woman would weep through the session. Eltringham would dutifully pass along the auditing files to Hubbard for review. “ I could hear him chortling,” she recalled. The situation was much less restrained belowdecks. The Sea Org members were young and vigorous; sexual escapades were routine, and marriages quite fluid. Hubbard seemed to be oblivious, but Mary Sue was increasingly scandalized. When she learned that a crew member, who was nineteen or twenty, had slept with a fifteen-year-old girl on the ship, she got a dagger out of her cabin and held it against his throat and told him he had to be off the ship in two hours or else. In 1971, on New Year’s Eve, there was a drunken orgy of historic proportions. “ Maybe a hundred Sea Org members were having sex everywhere from the topside boatdecks to the lowest holds of the ship,” one of the participants recalled. Mary Sue had had enough. With two attractive teenage daughters of her own on the ship, she started cracking down on premarital sex. Hubbard observed that 1972 was a leap year, and said that any woman on the ship could propose to any man, leading to a sudden rash of weddings.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  "My mother shrugged her shoulders and drew down the corners of her lips disdainfully. She little guessed either my thoughts, or how bitterly I regretted the way in which I had acted towards the young man whom—well, it was useless to mince matters any longer, or to give myself the lie—I still loved. Yes, loved more than ever—loved to distraction. "On the morrow, I looked for all the papers in which his name was mentioned, and I found—it may perhaps be vanity on my part to think so—that from the very day I had ceased to attend his concerts, he had been playing wretchedly, until at last his critics, once so lenient, had all joined against him, endeavouring to bring him to a better sense of the duty he owed to his art, to the public, and to himself. "About a week afterwards, I again went to hear him play. "As he came in, I was surprised to see the change wrought in him in that short space of time; he was not only careworn and dejected, but pale, thin, and sickly-looking. He seemed, in fact, to have grown ten years older in those few days. There was in him that alteration which my mother had noticed in me on her return from Italy; but she, of course, had attributed it to the shock my nerves had just received. "As he came on, some few persons tried to cheer him by clapping their hands, but a low murmur of disapproval, followed by a slight hissing sound, stopped these feeble attempts at once. He seemed scornfully indifferent to both sounds. He sat listlessly down, like a person worn out by fever, but, as one of the musical reporters stated, the fire of art began all at once to glow within his eyes. He cast a sidelong glance on the audience, a searching look full of love and of thankfulness. "Then he began to play, not as if his task were a weary one, but as if he were pouring out his heavily-laden soul; and the music sounded like the warbling of a bird which, in its attempt to captivate its mate, pants forth its floods of rapture, resolved either to conquer or to die in profuse strains of unpremeditated art. "It is needless to say that I was thoroughly overcome, whilst the whole crowd was thrilled by the sweet sadness of his song. "The piece finished, I hurried out—frankly, in the hope of meeting him. Whilst he had been playing, a mighty struggle had been going on within myself—between my heart and my brain; and the glowing senses asked cold reason, what was the use of fighting against an ungovernable passion?

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  Well did I rest, for a considerable time, and in a state of complete tranquillity; and then, opening my eyes, it was with great pleasure I mused upon the landscape which was visible for a long distance. From out of the middle of a forest that extended upon the right, I thought I could detect, some three or four leagues from where I was, a little bell tower rising modestly into the air.... "Beloved solitude," I murmured, "what a desire I have to dwell a time in thee; and thou afar," said I, addressing the abbey, "thou must be the asylum of a few gentle, virtuous recluses who are occupied with none but God... with naught but their pious duties; or a retreat unto some holy hermits devoted to Religion alone... men who, far removed from that pernicious society where incessant crime, brooding heavily, threatfully over innocence, degrades it, annihilates it... ah! there must all virtues dwell, of that I am certain, and when mankind's crimes exile them out of the world, 'tis thither they go in that isolated place to commune with the souls of those fortunate ones who cherish them and cultivate them every day." I was absorbed in these thoughts when a girl of my age, keeper of a flock of sheep grazing upon the plateau, suddenly appeared before my eyes; I question her about that habitation, she tells me what I see is a Benedictine monastery occupied by four solitary monks of peerless devotion, whose continence and sobriety are without example. Once a year, says the girl, a pilgrimage is made to a miraculous Virgin who is there, and from Her pious folk obtain all their hearts' desire. Singularly eager immediately to go and implore aid at the feet of this holy Mother of God, I ask the girl whether she would like to come and pray with me; 'tis impossible, she replies, for her mother awaits her; but the road there is easy. She indicates it to me, she assures me the superior of the house, the most respectable, the most saintly of men, will receive me with perfect good grace and will offer me all the aid whereof I can possibly stand in need. "Dom Severino, so he is called," continues the girl, "is an Italian closely related to the Pope, who overwhelms him with kindnesses; he is gentle, honest, correct, obliging, fifty-five years old, and has spent above two-thirds of his life in France... you will be satisfied with him, Mademoiselle," the shepherdess concluded, "go and edify yourself in that sacred quiet, and you will only return from it improved."

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  CHAPTER V " Y OU have not yet told me when you met Teleny, or how your meeting was brought about." "Just have a little patience, and you will know all. You can understand that after I had seen the Countess leave his house at dawn, bearing on her face the expression of the emotions she had felt, I was anxious to get rid of my criminal infatuation. "At times I even persuaded myself that I did not care for Réné any more. Only when I thought that all my love had vanished, he had but to look at me, and I felt it gush back stronger than ever, filling my heart and bereaving me of my reason. "I could find no rest either night or day. "I thereupon made up my mind not to see Teleny again, nor to attend any of his concerts; but lovers' resolutions are like April showers, and at the last minute the slightest excuse was good enough to make me waver and change my decision. "I was, moreover, curious and anxious to know if the Countess or anybody else would go to meet him again, and pass the night with him." "Well, and were these visits repeated?" "No, the Count returned unexpectedly; and then both he and the Countess started for Nice. "A short time afterwards, however, as I was always on the watch, I saw Teleny leave the theatre with Briancourt. "There was nothing strange in that. They walked arm-in-arm, and wended their way towards Teleny's lodgings. "I lingered behind, following them step by step at some distance. I had been jealous of the Countess; I was ten times more so of Briancourt. "If he is going to pass every night with a new bed-fellow, said I to myself, why did he tell me that his heart was yearning for mine? "And still within my soul I felt sure that he loved me; that all these other loves were caprices; that his feelings for me were something more than the pleasure of the senses; that it was real, heart-sprung, genuine love. "Having reached the door of Teleny's house, both the young men stopped and began to talk. "The street was a solitary one. Only some belated home-goers were every now and then to be seen, trudging sleepily onward. I had stopped at the corner of the street, pretending to read an advertisement, but in reality to follow the movements of the two young men. "All at once I thought they were about to part, for I saw Briancourt stretch out both his hands and grasp Teleny's. I shivered with gladness. After all, I have wronged Briancourt, was the thought that came into my mind; must every man and woman be in love with the pianist?