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 The Fixed Stars: A Memoir (2020)

  That summer I spent hours lying crosswise on my plastic-coated twin bed, bare feet on the wall, reading Michael Chabon’s first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh. I’d picked it up for its cover, the title written in loose jewel-toned cursive against a white backdrop, and for the author photo on the back flap, in which beautiful young Chabon appears in pensive black-and-white. His dark hair was gelled swoopily back, and his deep-set eyes were hawklike in their intensity, a sexy hawk. I didn’t really understand the book, but I loved it. Like me, I noticed, the narrator watched the world around him from a safe remove. But for one summer, the summer of the story, he somehow managed to get outside himself, to do dumb and impulsive and vitally important things. It was summer where I was too, and I could have done anything, but I didn’t know where to start. [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] That summer I met my first lesbian. Catherine worked for a catering company that my parents sometimes hired for parties. They’d gotten to know the owner of the company, and because I was interested in food, she let me work for a few months in her catering kitchen, doing prep work. The kitchen was out Wilshire Boulevard, one of the main roads through Nichols Hills. But the kitchen was east of all the money, on the part of Wilshire where the mansions gave way to empty shopping strips, warehouses, and arid fields. By mid-June, it got so hot out there that the air above the road trembled like oil in a pan. The lanes were crisscrossed with tar, repairs where the concrete had cracked. When I got out of the car, the hum of cicadas was as loud as the thunderstorms had been in spring.

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

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

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

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

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

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

• From Austerlitz (2001)

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

• From Austerlitz (2001)

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

• From Austerlitz (2001)

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

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

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

• From The Decameron (1353)

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

• From The Decameron (1353)

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

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

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

• From Austerlitz (2001)

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

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

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

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

  Maybe three or four nights a month spent in my own bed—the rest in planes, cars, trains, dogsleds, sailboats, helicopters, hotels, longhouses, tents, lodges, jungle floors. I've become some kind of traveling salesman or paid wanderer, both blessed and doomed to travel this world until I can't anymore. Funny what happens when your dreams come true. My pal A. A. Gill once suggested that the older he gets, and the more he travels, the less he knows. And I know what he means now. Seeing the planet as I'm seeing it, you are constantly reminded of what you don't know—how much more there is to see and learn, how damn big and mysterious this world is. It's both frustrating and addicting, which only makes it harder when you visit, say, China for the first time, and realize how much more of it there is—and how little time you have to see it. It's added a frantic quality to my already absurd life, and an element of both desperation and resignation. Travel changes you. As you move through this life and this world you change things slightly, you leave marks behind, however small. And in return, life—and travel—leaves marks on you. Most of the time, those marks—on your body or on your heart—are beautiful. Often, though, they hurt. When I look back on the last five years since I wrote the obnoxious, over-testosteroned memoir that transported me out of the kitchen and into a never-ending tunnel of pressurized cabins and airport lounges, it's a rush of fragments, all jostling for attention. Some good, some bad, some pleasurable—and some excruciating to remember. Much, I suspect, like the pieces in this collection. I've done a lot of writing for magazines and newspapers in the last few years, and it's the better morsels (I hope) from that work that follow. A lot of it is hopelessly dated, or obviously written for a British or Australian publication, and I've added some accompanying notes at the end by way of explanation (or apology). I've been writing this stuff for much the same reasons behind my frenetic traveling: Because I can. Because there's so little time. Because there's been so much to see and remember. Because I always think for sure the next book or the next show will tank, and I better make some fucking money while I can. It's an irritating reality that many places and events defy description. Angkor Wat and Machu Picchu, for instance, seem to demand silence, like a love affair you can never talk about. For a while after, you fumble for words, trying vainly to assemble a private narrative, an explanation, a comfortable way to frame where you've been and what's happened. In the end, you're just happy you were there—with your eyes open—and lived to see it.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  Sometimes, when the child’s heart would feel full past bearing, she must tell him her problems in small, stumbling phrases. Tell him how much she longed to be different, longed to be some one like Nelson. She would say: ‘Do you think that I could be a man, supposing I thought very hard—or prayed, Father?’ Then Sir Philip would smile and tease her a little, and would tell her that one day she would want pretty frocks, and his teasing was always excessively gentle, so that it hurt not at all. But at times he would study his daughter gravely, with his strong, cleft chin tightly cupped in his hand. He would watch her at play with the dogs in the garden, watch the curious suggestion of strength in her movements, the long line of her limbs—she was tall for her age—and the poise of her head on her over-broad shoulders. Then perhaps he would frown and become lost in thought, or perhaps he might suddenly call her: ‘Stephen, come here!’ She would go to him gladly, waiting expectant for what he should say; but as likely as not he would just hold her to him for a moment, and then let go of her abruptly. Getting up he would turn to the house and his study, to spend all the rest of that day with his books. A queer mixture, Sir Philip, part sportsman, part student. He had one of the finest libraries in England, and just lately he had taken to reading half the night, which had not hitherto been his custom. Alone in that grave-looking, quiet study, he would unlock a drawer in his ample desk, and would get out a slim volume recently acquired, and would read and re-read it in the silence. The author was a German, Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, and reading, Sir Philip’s eyes would grow puzzled; then groping for a pencil he would make little notes all along the immaculate margins. Sometimes he would jump up and pace the room quickly, pausing now and again to stare at a picture—the portrait of Stephen painted with her mother, by Millais, the previous year. He would notice the gracious beauty of Anna, so perfect a thing, so completely reassuring; and then that indefinable quality in Stephen that made her look wrong in the clothes she was wearing, as though she and they had no right to each other, but above all no right to Anna. After a while he would steal up to bed, being painfully careful to tread very softly, fearful of waking his wife who might question: ‘Philip darling, it’s so late—what have you been reading?’ He would not want to answer, he would not want to tell her; that was why he must tread very softly. The next morning, he would be very tender to Anna—but even more tender to Stephen.

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

  herself. [24] Lurking in the background of Thecla’s Acts is a confrontation with the family-centred and hierarchical message of the Pastoral Epistles, whose supporting cast of characters actually features some of the same names to be found in the Acts of Paul and Thecla . [25] Like the Protevangelium , with its obsessive exploration of Mary’s purity, the Acts is a text to make those of encratite inclination cheer. Significantly its exciting portrayal of obstinate virginity had a far greater immediate effect on early Christianity than a more plausibly circumstantial Latin account of female heroism from much the same period, the Passion of Perpetua and Felicitas , which culminates in their ghastly and pornographic martyrdom in a civic arena in North Africa, possibly in 202 CE . The Passion includes accounts of Perpetua’s visions and other experiences during imprisonment before her very public execution; these passages are one of the very few surviving pieces of extended text from the Roman world likely to have been composed by a woman. [26] One obstacle to any wider influence was that it was composed in Latin, which was not at that stage the Church’s main language, but the fact that its Greek translation made little impact is in itself significant. More of a handicap was that for all Perpetua’s heroism in representing her faith against Roman authority and her own family, she was a married woman, whose memoir pours out her anguished longing for her baby son, as well as for a younger brother who had earlier died of cancer. The fairly safely historical Perpetua and Felicity (a pregnant enslaved woman imprisoned and then killed alongside her) picked up a joint cult of modest proportions in later centuries, particularly in their native North Africa, but this was nothing like the eastern Mediterranean enthusiasm for the almost certainly fictional but reassuringly virginal Thecla. [27] * Supporting the varied texts of second-century encratism stands the remarkable appropriation of a New Testament parable from Jesus specifically for sexual themes, even though the parable itself gives no encouragement to such an interpretation. This was the Parable of the Sower: shared by all three Synoptic Gospels (Matt. 13.1–23, Mark 4.1–20, a shorter version in Luke 8.4–15) and also present in the Gospel of Thomas, it was clearly a widely popular saying from the Lord. The main burden of the story was the different fates of seed sown by the sower on the path or amid rocks or amid thorns; no grain grew from any of these, but only that sown into good ground. It was this latter productive crop that interested later commentators, since Jesus or his editor had differentiated its results into varied yields, ‘thirty and sixty and a hundredfold’. What was that about? Jesus had changed the subject at this point, so he was no help. At first, theologians with other preoccupations had not aligned the yields in the parable with sex.

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  The Latin word religio did not originally refer to a set of beliefs, but rather to a social and cultural obligation to perform certain actions, such as worshipping the gods in certain ways, or perform certain cultural obligations which were deemed ‘venerable’ or ‘appropriate’, yet which many westerners today would not regard as ‘religious’ in any sense. Religio in its classic Roman form focused on practices, rather than beliefs. The problem here is ‘essentialisation’ – the belief that ‘religion’ is a real thing which has certain fixed features that allow generalisations, both subtle and crass, to be made across the religious world. Happily, a good knowledge of history and the scientific study of religion can help correct this influential misjudgement. Religion is not a ‘natural kind’ – a grouping or categorisation that reflects the structure of the natural world, rather than the interests and actions of human beings. 2 The modern western category of ‘religion’ is clearly inadequate. In an influential study of how we should define religion and distinguish it from its alternatives, the social psychologist Jonathan Jong argues that the empirical evidence suggests there are good reasons for ‘abandoning the deep-seated and intuitive assumption that religion is a natural kind, a category with an identifiable essence.’ 3 ‘Religion’ is not a ‘thing’ that can be observed and precisely defined. Where many people hold that individual specific religions (such as Christianity, Buddhism and Hinduism) are examples of this ‘thing’, ‘religion’ as a category must be seen as fluid and historically contingent. For this reason, the anthropologist Talal Asad argues that ‘there cannot be a universal definition of religion, not only because its constituent elements and relationships are historically specific, but because that definition is itself the historical product of discursive processes.’ 4 Asad’s point about the social location of definitions of religion is reinforced by the magisterial historical analysis of the notions of ‘religion’ and ‘science’ developed by the Australian intellectual historian Peter Harrison, who points out that modern western discussions of the notions of ‘religion’ and ‘the religions’ represent an objectification or reification of what was once understood as an interior disposition. 5 To adopt an ‘essentialist’ understanding of religion is to assume that it is defined by some intrinsic qualities. Yet, as Jong points out, those qualities can also be found beyond the accepted understanding of ‘religion’. The term ‘religion’ was originally framed in terms of the possession or enactment of certain interior qualities, such as piety or devotion; yet the rationalising tendencies of the early modern period led to it being seen as referring to adherence to bodies of doctrine or knowledge. This helps us understand one core feature of the New Atheism – its ‘Americanized understanding of religion as an iteration of knowledge’. 6 Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett offer a highly cognitive view of religion, defining it virtually exclusively in terms of ‘belief in God’.

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  that I might suddenly see my father appear out of nowhere, coming towards me or stepping out of an entrance. I sat in this bar too for hours on end, trying to imagine him in his plum-colored double-breasted suit, perhaps a little threadbare now, bent over one of the café tables and writing those letters to his loved ones in Prague which never arrived. I kept wondering whether he had been interned in the half-built housing estate out at Drancy after the first police raid in Paris in August 1941, or not until July of the following year, when a whole army of French gendarmes took thirteen thousand of their Jewish fellow citizens from their homes, in what was called the grande rafle, during which over a hundred of their victims jumped out of the

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  Take away mine eyes, for they have turned me to fire. My blood is as the fire in the heart of Teide. A-a-a-y! Before I saw thee I was at peace.’ The strange minor music with its restless rhythms, possessed a very potent enchantment, so that the heart beat faster to hear it, and the mind grew mazed with forbidden thoughts, and the soul grew heavy with the infinite sadness of fulfilled desire; but the body knew only the urge towards a complete fulfilment. . . . ‘A-a-a-a-y! Before I saw thee I was at peace.’ They would not understand the soft Spanish words, and yet as they sat there they could but divine their meaning, for love is no slave of mere language. Mary would want Stephen to take her in her arms, so must rest her cheek against Stephen’s shoulder, as though they two had a right to such music, had a right to their share in the love songs of the world. But Stephen would always move away quickly. ‘Let’s go in,’ she would mutter; and her voice would sound rough, for that bright sword of youth would have leapt out between them. 5There came days when they purposely avoided each other, trying to find peace in separation. Stephen would go for long rides alone, leaving Mary to idle about the villa; and when she got back Mary would not speak, but would wander away by herself to the garden. For Stephen had grown almost harsh at times, possessed as she now was by something like terror, since it seemed to her that what she must say to this creature she loved would come as a death-blow, that all youth and all joy would be slain in Mary. Tormented in body and mind and spirit, she would push the girl away from her roughly: ‘Leave me alone, I can’t bear any more!’ ‘Stephen—I don’t understand. Do you hate me?’ ‘Hate you? Of course you don’t understand—only, I tell you I simply can’t bear it.’ They would stare at each other pale-faced and shaken. The long nights became even harder to endure, for now they would feel so terribly divided. Their days would be heavy with misunderstandings, their nights filled with doubts, apprehensions and longings. They would often have parted as enemies, and therein would lie the great loneliness of it. As time went on they grew deeply despondent, their despondency robbing the sun of its brightness, robbing the little goat-bells of their music, robbing the dark of its luminous glory. The songs of the beggars who sang in the garden at the hour when the santa noche smelt sweetest, those songs would seem full of a cruel jibing: ‘A-a-a-y! Before I saw thee I was at peace, but now I am tormented because I have seen thee.’ Thus were all things becoming less good in their sight, less perfect because of their own frustration.

• From From the Streets to the Sheets: Noire's Urban Erotic Quickies (2007)

  He moved me into the doorway of our spot and climbed on doggy-style. He started sliding his thick dick in and out of me from behind. My clit was on swole again. He reached up front and started whippin’ it from side to side, plunging deep as he could and every now and then he’d freeze . . . Mmph! Holdin’ it all the way in . . . filling me up. I wanted more. I told him to hol’ up and I went and unpacked my toys. I gave Dushawn the honor of inserting my li’l red devil tail ass plug for me. That and Big Black drove me outta my mind. “Where you learn to freak like that?” I said, “Maybe you haven’t noticed, but I haven’t asked you shit about where you been and who—oops! I mean, what you been doin’—now have I?” We laughed a little and then took turns fuckin’ the shit out of each other until the sun started to go down. Later, we decided to get some’m to eat on the pier. It was still warm outside so I threw on a scandalous burgundy suede halter and low-riders set. I pulled my hair back into a ponytail and grabbed my nicest shades. He held my hand while we walked. It felt good but I couldn’t help but think about how he had held it this way before, and then turned around and left without even sayin’ “Fuck you, bitch!” Dushawn was reading my mind. “Don’tchu wanna know where I been and why I didn’t get in touch?” I said, “Not really. I ain’t got no way of knowin’ if that shits for real. Let’s just do what we do best—fuck and forget about it.” He laughed at how I point-blanked his ass. “Anybody ever tell you how sexy you look when you mad?” “Cut the bullshit and tell me what’s up, Dushawn.” “’Member when I got popped at the park?” “How could I forget? Yo ass like to died.” “I found out who did it.” There was a lot that coulda been said, but it didn’t need to be said. That changed everything. I thought back to when Dushawn left and who came up missin’ before that. That told me all I needed to know. The Lambert brothers didn’t really bang, but they hung and slung with guys that did. If somebody fucked with any of ’em, it wasn’t over until it was done. Dushawn was a Lambert. After he spilled the details, he told me that he’d been chillin’ with his cousins in Sacramento. He said he had learned how to do electrical work from this O.G. named Jerry, and that he was ’bout to buy a house outside of Sacramento. That’s when the convo got serious. Dushawn asked what my plans were.