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 26 of 170 · 20 per page

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

  The lad was most graciously received and asked whence he came and what he desired. The king’s kindness made him forget all about the charges he was intending to make. Then, refreshed with the whitest of bread, he descended again to the valley. The following day he firmly believed he had actually been in heaven and eaten at the Lord’s table. This was the story he told after he had ascended the chair of Canterbury. A quarrel with his father led to Anselm’s leaving his home. He set his face toward the West and finally settled in the Norman abbey of Le Bec, then under the care of his illustrious countryman Lanfranc. Here he studied, took orders, and, on Lanfranc’s transfer to the convent of St. Stephen at Caen, 1063, became prior, and, in 1078, abbot. At Bec he wrote most of his works. His warm devotion to the monastic life appears in his repeated references to it in his letters and in his longing to get back to the convent after he had been made archbishop. In 1093, he succeeded Lanfranc as archbishop of Canterbury. His struggle with William Rufus and Henry I. over investiture has already been described (pp. 88–93). During his exile on the Continent he attended a synod at Bari, where he defended the Latin doctrine of the procession of the Holy Spirit against the Greek bishops who were present.1328 The archbishop’s last years in England were years of quiet, and he had a peaceful end. They lifted him from the bed and placed him on ashes on the floor. There, "as morning was breaking, on the Wednesday before Easter," April 21, 1109, the sixteenth year of his pontificate and the seventy-sixth of his life, he slept in peace, as his biographer Eadmer says, "having given up his spirit into the hands of his Creator." He lies buried in Canterbury Cathedral at the side of Lanfranc. Anselm was a man of spotless integrity, single devotion to truth and righteousness, patient in suffering, and revered as a saint before his official canonization in 1494.1329 Dante associates him in Paradise with Nathan, the seer, and Chrysostom, both famous for rebuking vice in high places, and with the Calabrian prophet, Joachim.1330 Writings.—Anselm’s chief works in the departments of theology are his Monologium and Proslogium, which present proofs for God’s existence, and the Cur Deus homo, "Why God became Man," a treatise on the atonement. He also wrote on the Trinity against Roscellinus; on original sin, free will, the harmony of foreknowledge and foreordination, and the fall of the devil. To these theological treatises are to be added a number of writings of a more practical nature, homilies, meditations, and four hundred and twelve letters in which we see him in different relations, as a prelate of the Church, a pastor, as a teacher giving advice to pupils, and as a friend.1331 His correspondence shows him in his human relations. His meditations and prayers reveal the

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

  How that little useless hand would shrink from the touch of the gaunt, horny, clay-coloured, begrimed workman's hand, which hard, unremitting labour has changed into a kind of hoof. Some hands are coy, others paddle you indecently; the grip of some is hypocritical, and not what it pretends to be; there is the velvety, the unctuous, the priestly, the humbug's hand; the open palm of the spendthrift, the usurer's tight-fisted claw. There is, moreover, the magnetic hand, which seems to have a secret affinity for your own; its simple touch thrills your whole nervous system, and fills you with delight. "How can I express all that I felt from the contact of Teleny's hand? It set me on fire; and, strange to say, it soothed me at the same time. How sweeter, softer, it was, than any woman's kiss. I felt his grasp steal slowly over all my body, caressing my lips, my throat, my breast; my nerves quivered from head to foot with delight, then it sank downwards into my reins, and Priapus, re-awakened, uplifted his head. I actually felt I was being taken possession of, and I was happy to belong to him. "I should have liked to have said something polite in acknowledgment for the pleasure he had given me by his playing, still what unhackneyed phrase could have expressed all the admiration I felt for him? "'But, gentlemen,' said he, 'I am afraid I am keeping you away from the music.' "'I, myself, was just going away,' quoth I. "'The concert bores you then, does it?' "'No, on the contrary; but after having heard you play, I cannot listen to any more music to-night.' "He smiled and looked pleased. "'In fact, Réné, you have outdone yourself this evening,' said Briancourt. 'I never heard you play like that before.' "'Do you know why?' "'No, unless it is that you had such a full theatre.' "'Oh, no! it is simply because, whilst I was playing the gavotte, I felt that somebody was listening to me.' "'Oh! somebody!' echoed the young men, laughing. "'Amongst a French public, especially that of a charity concert, do you really think that there are many persons who listen? I mean who listen intently with all their heart and soul. The young men are obliging the ladies, these are scrutinizing each other's toilette; the fathers, who are bored, are either thinking of the rise and fall of the stocks, or else counting the number of gas-lights, and reckoning how much the illumination will cost.' "'Still, among such a crowd there is surely more than one attentive listener,' said Odillot the lawyer.

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

  will in exercise. By the fall this beautiful harmony has been broken, and that antagonism has arisen which Paul describes in the seventh chapter of the Epistle to the Romans. (Augustine referred this passage to the regenerate state.) The rebellion of the spirit against God involved, as its natural punishment, the rebellion of the flesh against the spirit. Concupiscentia, therefore, is substantially the same as what Paul calls in the bad sense "flesh." It is not the sensual constitution in itself, but its predominance over the higher, rational nature of man.1808 It is true, however, that Augustine, in his longing after an unimpeded life in the spirit, was inclined to treat even lawful appetites, such as hunger and thirst, so far as they assume the form of craving desire, as at least remotely connected with the fall.1809 Julian attributed the strength of animal desire to the animal element in the original nature of man. Augustine answered, that the superiority of man to the brute consists in the complete dominion of reason over the sensual nature, and that therefore his approach to the brute in this respect is a punishment from God. Concupiscence then is no more a merely corporeal thing than the biblical savrx, but has its seat in the soul, without which no lust arises. We must, therefore, suppose a conflict in the soul itself, a lower, earthly, self-seeking instinct, and a higher, god-like impulse. This is the generic sense of concupiscentia: the struggle of the collective sensual and psychical desires against the god-like spirit. But Augustine frequently employs the word, as other corresponding terms are used, in the narrower sense of unlawful sexual desire. This appeared immediately after the fall, in the shame of our first parents, which was not for their nakedness itself, since this was nothing new to them, but for the lusting of the body; for something, therefore, in and of itself good (the body’s, own enjoyment, as it were), but now unlawfully rising, through the discord between body and soul. But would there then have been propagation without the fall? Unquestionably; but it would have left the dominion of reason over the sensual desire undisturbed. Propagation would have been the act of a pure will and chaste love, and would have had no more shame about it than the scattering of seed upon the maternal bosom of the earth. But now lust rules the spirit; and Augustine in his earlier years had had bitter experience of its tyranny. To this element of sin in the act of procreation he ascribes the pains of childbirth, which in fact appear in Genesis as a consequence of the fall, and as a curse from God. Had man remained pure, "the ripe fruit would have descended from the maternal womb without labor or pain of the woman, as the fruit descends from the tree."1810 6.Physical death, with its retinue of diseases and bodily pains.

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

  How ungallant these Jews are, I thought. And their God might choose more becoming expressions when he speaks of the fair sex. “The almighty Lord hath struck him, and hath delivered him into the hands of a woman,” I repeated to myself. What shall I do, so that He may punish me? Heaven preserve us! Here comes the housekeeper, who has again diminished somewhat in size overnight. And up there among the green twinings and garlandings the white gown gleams again. Is it Venus, or the widow? This time it happens to be the widow, for Madame Tartakovska makes a courtesy, and asks me in her name for something to read. I run to my room, and gather together a couple of volumes. Later I remember that my picture of Venus is in one of them, and now it and my effusions are in the hands of the white woman up there together. What will she say? I hear her laugh. Is she laughing at me? It is full moon. It is already peering over the tops of the low hemlocks that fringe the park. A silvery exhalation fills the terrace, the groups of trees, all the landscape, as far as the eye can reach; in the distance it gradually fades away, like trembling waters. I cannot resist. I feel a strange urge and call within me. I put on my clothes again and go out into the garden. Some power draws me toward the meadow, toward her, who is my divinity and my beloved. The night is cool. I feel a slight chill. The atmosphere is heavy with the odor of flowers and of the forest. It intoxicates. What solemnity! What music round about! A nightingale sobs. The stars quiver very faintly in the pale-blue glamour. The meadow seems smooth, like a mirror, like a covering of ice on a pond. The statue of Venus stands out august and luminous. But—what has happened? From the marble shoulders of the goddess a large dark fur flows down to her heels. I stand dumbfounded and stare at her in amazement; again an indescribable fear seizes hold of me and I take flight. I hasten my steps, and notice that I have missed the main path. As I am about to turn aside into one of the green walks I see Venus sitting before me on a stone bench, not the beautiful woman of marble, but the goddess of love herself with warm blood and throbbing pulses. She has actually come to life for me, like the statue that began to breathe for her creator. Indeed, the miracle is only half completed. Her white hair seems still to be of stone, and her white gown shimmers like moonlight, or is it satin? From her shoulders the dark fur flows. But her lips are already reddening and her cheeks begin to take color.

• From The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007)

  “Who was that on the bike?” he asked. “Oh, that was my dad’s best friend.” “That was a cool bike,” he said. “Vintage.” “Yeah, he just got it.” “You ride with him a lot?” “Yes,” I said. I lied. “Cool,” Roger said. “Yeah, cool,” I said. “All right, then,” he said. “I’ll see you around.” And then he walked away. Wow, he didn’t kick my ass. He was actually nice. He paid me some respect. He paid respect to Eugene and his bike. Maybe Grandma was right. Maybe I had challenged the alpha dog and was now being rewarded for it. I love my grandmother. She’s the smartest person on the planet. Feeling almost like a human being, I walked into the school and saw Penelope the Beautiful. “Hey, Penelope,” I said, hoping that she knew I was now accepted by the dog pack. She didn’t even respond to me. Maybe she hadn’t heard me. “Hey, Penelope,” I said again. She looked at me and sniffed. SHE SNIFFED! LIKE I SMELLED BAD OR SOMETHING! “Do I know you?” she said. There were only about one hundred students in the whole school, right? So of course, she knew me. She was just being a bitch. “I’m Junior,” I said. “I mean, I’m Arnold.” “Oh, that’s right,” she said. “You’re the boy who can’t figure out his own name.” Her friends giggled. I was so ashamed. I might have impressed the king, but the queen still hated me. I guess my grandmother didn’t know everything. Tears of a Clown [image file=image_rsrc4RJ.jpg] When I was twelve, I fell in love with an Indian girl named Dawn. She was tall and brown and was the best traditional powwow dancer on the rez. Her braids, wrapped in otter fur, were legendary. Of course, she didn’t care about me. She mostly made fun of me (she called me Junior High Honky for some reason I never understood). But that just made me love her even more. She was out of my league, and even though I was only twelve, I knew that I’d be one of those guys who always fell in love with the unreachable, ungettable, and uninterested. One night, at about two in the morning, when Rowdy slept over at my house, I made a full confession. “Man,” I said. “I love Dawn so much.” He was pretending to be asleep on the floor of my room. “Rowdy,” I said. “Are you awake?” “No.” “Did you hear what I said?” “No.” “I said I love Dawn so much.” He was quiet. “Aren’t you going to say anything?” I asked. “About what?” “About what I just said.” “I didn’t hear you say anything.” He was just screwing with me. “Come on, Rowdy, I’m trying to tell you something major.” “You’re just being stupid,” he said. “What’s so stupid about it?” “Dawn doesn’t give a shit about you,” he said.

• From The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007)

  I missed him. So I drew a cartoon of Rowdy and me like we used to be: Then I put on my coat and shoes, walked over to Rowdy’s house, and knocked on the door. Rowdy’s dad, drunk as usual, opened the door. “Junior,” he said. “What do you want?” “Is Rowdy home?” “Nope.” “Oh, well, I drew this for him. Can you give it to him?” Rowdy’s dad took the cartoon and stared at it for a while. Then he smirked. “You’re kind of gay, aren’t you?” he asked. Yeah, that was the guy who was raising Rowdy. Jesus, no wonder my best friend was always so angry. “Can you just give it to him?” I asked. “Yeah, I’ll give it to him. Even if it’s a little gay.” I wanted to cuss at him. I wanted to tell him that I thought I was being courageous, and that I was trying to fix my broken friendship with Rowdy, and that I missed him, and if that was gay, then okay, I was the gayest dude in the world. But I didn’t say any of that. “Okay, thank you,” I said instead. “And Happy Thanksgiving.” Rowdy’s dad closed the door on me. I walked away. But I stopped at the end of the driveway and looked back. I could see Rowdy in the window of his upstairs bedroom. He was holding my cartoon. He was watching me walk away. And I could see the sadness in his face. I just knew he missed me, too. I waved at him. He gave me the finger. “Hey, Rowdy!” I shouted. “Thanks a lot!” He stepped away from the window. And I felt sad for a moment. But then I realized that Rowdy may have flipped me off, but he hadn’t torn up my cartoon. As much as he hated me, he probably should have ripped it to pieces. That would have hurt my feelings more than just about anything I can think of. But Rowdy still respected my cartoons. And so maybe he still respected me a little bit. Hunger Pains Our history teacher, Mr. Sheridan, was trying to teach us something about the Civil War. But he was so boring and monotonous that he was only teaching us how to sleep with our eyes open. I had to get out of there, so I raised my hand. “What is it, Arnold?” the teacher asked. “I have to go the bathroom.” “Hold it.” “I can’t.” I put on my best If-I-Don’t-Go-Now-I’m-Going-To-Explode face. “Do you really have to?” the teacher asked.

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

  The goddess stands as if transfigured, and seems to bathe in the soft moonlight. Once when I was returning from my devotions by one of the walks leading to the house, I suddenly saw a woman’s figure, white as stone, under the illumination of the moon and separated from me merely by a screen of trees. It seemed as if the beautiful woman of marble had taken pity on me, become alive, and followed me. I was seized by a nameless fear, my heart threatened to burst, and instead— Well, I am a dilettante. As always, I broke down at the second stanza; rather, on the contrary, I did not break down, but ran away as fast as my legs would carry me. * * * * * What an accident! Through a Jew, dealing in photographs I secured a picture of my ideal. It is a small reproduction of Titian’s “Venus with the Mirror.” What a woman! I want to write a poem, but instead, I take the reproduction, and write on it: Venus in Furs. You are cold, while you yourself fan flames. By all means wrap yourself in your despotic furs, there is no one to whom they are more appropriate, cruel goddess of love and of beauty!—After a while I add a few verses from Goethe, which I recently found in his paralipomena to Faust. TO AMOR “The pair of wings a fiction are, The arrows, they are naught but claws, The wreath conceals the little horns, For without any doubt he is Like all the gods of ancient Greece Only a devil in disguise.” Then I put the picture before me on my table, supporting it with a book, and looked at it. I was enraptured and at the same time filled with a strange fear by the cold coquetry with which this magnificent woman draped her charms in her furs of dark sable; by the severity and hardness which lay in this cold marble-like face. Again I took my pen in hand, and wrote the following words: “To love, to be loved, what happiness! And yet how the glamour of this pales in comparison with the tormenting bliss of worshipping a woman who makes a plaything out of us, of being the slave of a beautiful tyrant who treads us pitilessly underfoot. Even Samson, the hero, the giant, again put himself into the hands of Delilah, even after she had betrayed him, and again she betrayed him, and the Philistines bound him and put out his eyes which until the very end he kept fixed, drunken with rage and love, upon the beautiful betrayer.” I was breakfasting in my honey-suckle arbor, and reading in the Book of Judith. I envied the hero Holofernes because of the regal woman who cut off his head with a sword, and because of his beautiful sanguinary end. “The almighty Lord hath struck him, and hath delivered him into the hands of a woman.” This sentence strangely impressed me.

• From The Girls (2016)

  When my father saw that I had noticed, he laughed a little but seemed embarrassed. My father was amused at our collusion. But it sometimes shook out so we were laughing at him. Once Tamar and I were talking about Spanky and Our Gang, and he chimed in. Like the Little Rascals, he figured. Tamar and I looked at each other. “It’s a band,” she said. “You know, that rock-and-roll music the kids like.” And my father’s confused, orphaned face set us off again. —They had a fancy turntable that Tamar often spoke of moving to another corner or room for varying acoustic or aesthetic reasons. She constantly mentioned future plans for oak flooring and crown moldings and even different dish towels, though the planning itself seemed to satisfy. The music she played was more slick than the ranch racket. Jane Birkin and her froggy old-man husband, Serge. “She’s pretty,” I said, studying the record cover. And she was, tan as a nut with a delicate face, those rabbit teeth. Serge was disgusting. His songs about Sleeping Beauty, a girl who seemed most desirable because her eyes were always closed. Why would Jane love Serge? Tamar loved my father, the girls loved Russell. These men who were nothing like the boys I’d been told I would like. Boys with hairless chests and mushy features, the flocking of blemishes along their shoulders. I didn’t want to think of Mitch because it made me think of Suzanne—that night had happened somewhere else, in a little dollhouse in Tiburon with a tiny pool and a tiny green lawn. A dollhouse I could look onto from above, lifting the roof to see the rooms segmented like chambers of the heart. The bed the size of a matchbox. Tamar was different from Suzanne in a way that was easier. She was not complicated. She didn’t track my attention so closely, didn’t prompt me to shore up her declarations. When she wanted me to move over, she said so. I relaxed, which was unfamiliar. Even so, I missed Suzanne—Suzanne, who I remembered like dreams of opening a door on a forgotten room. Tamar was sweet and kind, but the world she moved around in seemed like a television set: limited and straightforward and mundane, with the notations and structures of normality. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner. There wasn’t a frightening gap between the life she was living and the way she thought about that life, a dark ravine I often sensed in Suzanne, and maybe in my own self as well. Neither of us could fully participate in our days, though later Suzanne would participate in a way she could never take back. I mean that we didn’t quite believe it was enough, what we were offered, and Tamar seemed to accept the world happily, as an end point. Her planning wasn’t actually about making anything different—she was just rearranging the same known quantities, puzzling out a new order like life was an extended seating chart.

• 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 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)

  "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 Going Clear (2013)

  His family, like the Haggis family, threw themselves into theater, founding an amateur troupe of players in Ottawa. His antisocial, bullying father was a disruptive force in the family, and early one morning, when Cruise was twelve, his mother packed up her three daughters and her precocious son and fled back to America. “ We felt like fugitives,” Cruise later recalled. Spiritual questing and a tendency toward piety were already features of Cruise’s personality. He spent a year in seminary in Cincinnati, with a view toward joining the priesthood. But there was another, intensely ambitious side that was focused entirely on stardom. He went to Hollywood when he was eighteen, and managed to get a role in Endless Love , a movie starring Brooke Shields. He was a natural actor, but also persistent and choosy, quickly finding his way into memorable roles. The longing to express his spiritual side had never gone away, but it was difficult, in Hollywood, to know exactly how to fit that in. There was one church that was especially designed to resolve this dilemma. Cruise’s first wife, the actress Mimi Rogers, introduced him to Scientology in 1986. He had just finished filming Top Gun , which had made him the world’s biggest movie star. He had little incentive to publicly declare himself a Scientologist after the widespread opprobrium directed at Scientology following the FBI raids on Operation Snow White and the exposure of the church’s esoteric beliefs. Rumors of his involvement began to mount, however. For several years he managed to keep his affiliation quiet, even from church management. Using his birth name, Thomas Mapother IV, he received auditing at a small Scientology mission called the Enhancement Center in Sherman Oaks, which Rogers had started with her former husband. Rogers’s close friend, and former roommate, Kirstie Alley, did her auditing there, along with singer—and later, congressman— Sonny Bono, who had also been brought into the church by Rogers. Cruise would later credit Scientology’s study methods for helping him overcome his dyslexia. The triumph of adding Cruise to the Scientology stable was fraught with problems. Mimi Rogers was at the top of that list. Her parents had been involved with Dianetics since the early days of the movement. In 1957, when Mimi was a year old, they had moved to Washington, DC, to work for Hubbard, and her father, Philip Spickler, had briefly joined the Sea Org. But Mimi’s parents had become disaffected by the end of the seventies. They were considered “ squirrels,” because they continued to practice Scientology outside the guidance of the church. It would be one thing to have Tom Cruise as a trophy for Scientology, but it would be a disaster if he became a walking advertisement for the squirrels. When Miscavige learned of Cruise’s involvement in Scientology, he arranged to have the star brought to Gold Base, alone, at its secret desert location near Hemet, in August 1989.

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

  Peter and Paul are lost out of sight in the lurid fires of the Neronian persecution which seemed to consume Christianity itself. We know nothing certain of that satanic spectacle from authentic sources beyond the information of heathen historians.227 A few years afterwards followed the destruction of Jerusalem, which must have made an overpowering impression and broken the last ties which bound Jewish Christianity to the old theocracy. The event is indeed brought before us in the prophecy of Christ as recorded in the Gospels, but for the terrible fulfilment we are dependent on the account of an unbelieving Jew, which, as the testimony of an enemy, is all the more impressive. The remaining thirty years of the first century are involved in mysterious darkness, illuminated only by the writings of John. This is a period of church history about which we know least and would like to know most. This period is the favorite field for ecclesiastical fables and critical conjectures. How thankfully would the historian hail the discovery of any new authentic documents between the martyrdom of Peter and Paul and the death of John, and again between the death of John and the age of Justin Martyr and Irenaeus.

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

  As soon, however, as I was mistress of this unexpected fortune, I felt more than ever how dear he was to me, from its insufficiency to make me happy, whilst he was not to share it with me. My earliest care, consequently, was to endeavour at getting some account of him; but all my researches produced me no more light, than that his father had been dead for some time, not so well as even with the world; and that Charles had reached his port of destination in the South Seas, where, finding the estate he was sent to recover, dwindled to a trifle, by the loss of two ships in which the bulk of his uncle’s fortune lay, he was come away with the small remainder, and might, perhaps, according to the best advice, in a few months return to England, from whence he had, at the time of this my inquiry, been absent two years and seven months. A little eternity in love! You cannot conceive with what joy I embraced the hopes thus given me of seeing the delight of my heart again. But, as the term of months was assigned it, in order to divert and amuse my impatience for his return, after settling my affairs with much ease and security, I set out on a journey for Lancashire, with an equipage suitable to my fortune, and with a design purely to revisit my place of nativity, for which I could not help retaining a great tenderness; and might naturally not be sorry to shew myself there, to the advantage I was now in pass to do, after the report Esther Davis had spread of my being spirited away to the plantations; for on no other supposition could she account for the suppression of myself to her, since her leaving me so abruptly at the inn. Another favourite intention I had, to look out for my relations, though I had none but distant ones, and prove a benefactress to them. Then Mrs. Cole’s place of retirement lying in my way, was not amongst the least of the pleasures I had proposed to myself in this expedition.

• From Manhunt (2022)

  Another staggered and kept coming, bolt protruding from his shoulder like a cancerous growth. He got to the shooter as she struggled to reload, knocking her sprawling in the dirt and ripping out her throat with a convulsive heave of his muscled back and neck. Beth swallowed the chewed licorice root and spat a stream of dark saliva through the gap between her two front teeth, not watching where it fell. She slung her bow over her shoulder, took her walkie off her belt, and clicked the transmitter twice as the last woman’s screams rose to a glass-cracking pitch and then, abruptly, ceased. Fran looked up at the ceiling. There was a water stain above the bed, dark at its center and fading to a light yellowish-brown at the edges. Ramona had two fingers deep inside her. The pressure of it, the ecstatic too-fullness, made her want to cry in a distant, hazy kind of way. No lubricant but spit. Those short, blunt nails. Stupid tattoos on pale skin. Flowers on her collar. Sparrow on her arm. Fran had almost screamed with hysterical laughter when she saw the XX on the other woman’s forearm as it pumped between her thighs. How close is the nearest person who would kill me if she saw? Fran wondered. She bit her lip hard enough to draw blood, though she barely felt it. Is she in the front hall? Ramona’s nails scored lines along her throat. The other woman spat into her open mouth. The great room? The blotch on the ceiling seemed to have grown. That wasn’t possible. Fran took fistfuls of the starched blue cotton sheets. She was so hard it hurt. Harder than she’d been in years. A terrible ache, bone-deep and pulsating. She didn’t want to come. She felt as though her cock would tear, as though its bare head would split around the white pearl of her semen. Is she outside in the corridor, her hand on the bedroom door? Yellow water damage. Eyes? This part of the house was newer, she remembered. The Shaws had built it for the woman’s parents, who never came to stay. A guilty daughter move if ever Fran had seen one. She wondered what Mrs. Shaw had been like as a girl, and how she’d disappointed her parents. She’s inside me, she made herself think, pressing up against my prostate. Making me—making me— She let out a little sound, a quiet cry of anguish and regret. Her hips rose trembling from the sheets. Oh, God. The claymore went off with a blast that set Beth’s skull to ringing even through her big red plastic earmuffs. The pickup came apart as though a great fist had come up from the earth and punched it between cab and bed. Bands of twisted metal flew.

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

  The man accompanied her to the carriage. The light of the lamp fell full and glaringly upon an infinitely young, soft and dreamy face which I had never before seen, and played in his long, blond curls. She held out her hand which he kissed with deep respect, then she signaled to me, and immediately the carriage flew along the leafy wall which follows the river like a long green screen. * * * * * The bell at the garden-gate rings. It is a familiar face. The man from the Cascine. “Whom shall I announce?” I ask him in French. He timidly shakes his head. “Do you, perhaps, understand some German?” he asks shyly. “Yes. Your name, please.” “Oh! I haven’t any yet,” he replies, embarrassed—“Tell your mistress the German painter from the Cascine is here and would like—but there she is herself.” Wanda had stepped out on the balcony, and nodded toward the stranger. “Gregor, show the gentleman in!” she called to me. I showed the painter the stairs. “Thanks, I’ll find her now, thanks, thanks very much.” He ran up the steps. I remained standing below, and looked with deep pity on the poor German. Venus in Furs has caught his soul in the red snares of hair. He will paint her, and go mad. * * * * * It is a sunny winter’s day. Something that looks like gold trembles on the leaves of the clusters of trees down below in the green level of the meadow. The camelias at the foot of the gallery are glorious in their abundant buds. Wanda is sitting in the loggia; she is drawing. The German painter stands opposite her with his hands folded as in adoration, and looks at her. No, he rather looks at her face, and is entirely absorbed in it, enraptured. But she does not see him, neither does she see me, who with the spade in my hand am turning over the flower-bed, solely that I may see her and feel her nearness, which produces an effect on me like poetry, like music. * * * * * The painter has gone. It is a hazardous thing to do, but I risk it. I go up to the gallery, quite close, and ask Wanda “Do you love the painter, mistress?” She looks at me without getting angry, shakes her head, and finally even smiles. “I feel sorry for him,” she replies, “but I do not love him.

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

  She sat down again on the rich cushions and tried to draw me down to her side, but I softly slid down to her feet and placed my head in her lap. “Do you know I am very much in love with you to-day?” she whispered, brushing a few stray hairs from my forehead and kissing my eyes. “How beautiful your eyes are, I have always loved them as the best of you, but to-day they fairly intoxicate me. I am all—” She extended her magnificent limbs and tenderly looked at me from beneath her red lashes. “And you—you are cold—you hold me like a block of wood; wait, I’ll stir you with the fire of love,” she said, and again clung fawningly and caressingly to my lips. “I no longer please you; I suppose I’ll have to be cruel to you again, evidently I have been too kind to you to-day. Do you know, you little fool, what I shall do, I shall whip you for a while—” “But child—” “I want to.” “Wanda!” “Come, let me bind you,” she continued, and ran gaily through the room. “I want to see you very much in love, do you understand? Here are the ropes. I wonder if I can still do it?” She began with fettering my feet and then she tied my hands behind my back, pinioning my arms like those of a prisoner. “So,” she said, with gay eagerness. “Can you still move?” “No.” “Fine—” She then tied a noose in a stout rope, threw it over my head, and let it slip down as far as the hips. She drew it tight, and bound me to a pillar. A curious tremor seized me at that moment. “I have a feeling as if I were about to be executed,” I said with a low voice. “Well, you shall have a thorough punishment to-day,” exclaimed Wanda. “But put on your fur-jacket, please,” I said. “I shall gladly give you that pleasure,” she replied.