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 Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  Hence we conclude that the ultimate happiness of a separate substance does not consist in the knowledge whereby it knows God by its own substance: since its desire still leads it on to the substance of God. It also clearly follows from this that ultimate happiness is to be sought nowhere else but in an operation of the intellect: since no desire leads us so high as the desire of knowing the truth. For all our desires, whether of pleasure or of anything else that man wants, can be satisfied with other things: whereas the aforesaid desire rests not until it has reached God, the supreme cause and maker of all. Hence Wisdom rightly says (Ecclus. 24:7): I dwell in the highest places, and my throne is in a pillar of a cloud: and it is said (Prov. 9:3) that Wisdom by her maids inviteth to the tower. They should blush, then, who seek man’s happiness in the lowest things, whereas it is placed on such a height. CHAPTER LI HOW GOD MAY BE SEEN IN HIS ESSENCESINCE then it is impossible for a natural desire to be void;—and it would be were it impossible to arrive at understanding the divine substance; for all minds desire this naturally:—we must conclude that it is possible for the divine substance to be seen by means of the intellect; both by separate intellectual substances, and by our souls. It is sufficiently clear from what has been said, what manner of vision this is. For we have proved that the divine substance cannot be seen by the intellect in any created species. Wherefore if God’s essence be seen at all, it must be that the intellect sees it in the divine essence itself: so that in that vision the divine essence is both the object and the medium of vision. Since, however, the intellect is unable to understand any particular substance, unless it be actuated by some species informing it, that is the image of the thing understood; someone might deem it impossible for a created intellect to see the very substance of God in the divine essence as an intelligible species, inasmuch as the divine essence is self-subsistent, and we have proved in the First Book that God cannot be the form of anything.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  EJJery good-bye ain )t gone: human history reverberates with violent upheaval, uprooting, arrival and departure, hello and good-bye. Yet, I am not certain that anyone ever leaves home. When "home" drops below the horizon, it rises in one's breast and acquires the overwhelming power of menaced love. In my early years in Paris, I met and became friends with an elderly man who had left Germany in something like 1933 to become a hunted refugee because he had refused, in any way whatever, to be a part of the criminal Nazi state. I ad mired this man very much, and his pain was very vivid to me. God knows one couldn't quarrel with his reasons for leaving Germany, and yet his repudiated homeland was present in everything he said and did. The French landscape, which he loved as I did, could console, could even nearly reconcile: but it could not replace the landscape he carried in his heart. In the early fifties his mother was dying and wanted to sec her son one last time, and I took my friend to the railroad station. I never, never forgot that moment. I wondered if that was going to happen to me. I wanted to go home, I wanted to sec my mother and my brothers and my sisters and my friends-but the novel wasn't finished (it seemed, indeed, that it would neJJer be finished), and that was the only trophy I could carry home. All my lo ve was in it, and the reason for my journey. I suspect, though I certainly cannot prove it, that every lif e moves full circle-toward revelation: You begin to sec, and even rejoice to sec, what you always saw. You can even tell anguish to sit down, and shut up, you're busy right now and anguish, as you should certainly know by now, ain't to go nowhere. It might go around the corner, on a particularly EVERY GOOD- BYE AIN 'T GONE 779 bright day, and there are those days: but anguish has your number, knows, to paraphrase the song, where you live. It's a difficult relationship, but mysteriously indispensable. It teaches you. So. I could talk about the European panic, which takes so monotonous a f(>rm: but what is happening in Europe, now, to blacks, and to other, unprecedented niggers, has been hap pening for a very long time. Once I began to recover from my delirium, it was the first thing in Europe that I clearly saw: so it would be dishonest to pretend that this crisis, a global crisis, has anything to do with my motives or my movement now.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  I lay back on my bed and thought about the many lives of Charles Nantwich—the schoolboy discovering black beauty, the frivolous undergraduate beagling, drinking and ragging, the dreaming District Commissioner in the Nuba Hills, the old man who had forgotten the functions and protocol of the telephone. When I suggested an evening in Limehouse to Phil he was less than enthusiastic. ‘Why don’t you go?’ he said. ‘I am going.’ ‘Oh, right. I think I’ll stay in, though.’ He looked worried by the idea. ‘I’d have to get back here to be on duty—so I couldn’t drink or anything.’ We were in his little attic room at the hotel again, and he licked me and fiddled with my nipples as though to make me forget that this fractional disobedience was taking place. ‘I probably won’t be there very long.’ I said. Although we had been together a lot in the previous week I had privately told him nothing about the Nantwich affair. ‘I’ve just got to talk to some old man about something—I don’t imagine there’ll be much to it.’ Phil stayed silent. It would soon be time for him to go to work, and I felt him already preparing to abstract himself. Tonight this distancing gave me a little qualm, and as he sat up to get dressed I pushed him back roughly and fucked him hard and fast, his asshole still tacky with spunk and grease from our slower, longer lovemaking just before. As he cleaned up afterwards and looked out his laundered clothes there was still a reserve in his manner, nothing so strong as resentment, but the first suggestion of an independence which it was only dignified that I should allow. All the same I felt unhappy. While he sat on the end of the bed with his back turned to me and pulled on his socks, I looked baffledly at his compact physique. Then he was sitting very still and I caught his eye in the gloomy recess of the dressing-table mirror. ‘Man, I really do love you,’ he said, both as if it were a discovery and to reassure me and chide me for being silly just because he didn’t want to go on a journey to Limehouse (a journey whose only conceivable interest for him would have been that of being with me). To show goodwill he came back upstairs a few minutes after leaving and quite startled me as I stood naked looking out at the stars. He had brought me, under cover of Room Service, a tray with a smoked salmon sandwich and a glass of Drambuie—things which hardly went together, but which had touchingly been chosen for their luxuriousness.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  This is not a bitter statement. It comes, to tell the truth, out of love, for I am thinking of the children. I watch-here, for example-French and Algerian children trying to become friends with each other, reacting to, but not 77 8 OTHER ESSAYS yet understanding, the terrors of their parents, and very far indeed fr om having any notion of the terrors of the state. They have no way of knowing that the state is menaced and shaken to the degree, precisely, that they, themselves, the pre sumed victims, or at least, the wards of the state, make man ifest their identity-which is not what it might be, either for better or for worse, if they were still in Algeria. They cannot possibly know that they, ex-slave and ex-master, cannot be used as their fathers were used-that all identities, in short, arc in question, arc about to be made new. EJJery good-bye ain)t gone: human history reverberates with violent upheaval, uprooting, arrival and departure, hello and good-bye. Yet, I am not certain that anyone ever leaves home. When "home" drops below the horizon, it rises in one's breast and acquires the overwhelming power of menaced love . In my early years in Paris, I met and became friends with an elderly man who had left Germany in something like 1 933 to become a hunted refugee because he had refused, in any way whatever, to be a part of the criminal Nazi state . I ad mired this man very much, and his pain was very vivid to me. God knows one couldn't quarrel with his reasons for leaving Germany, and yet his repudiated homeland was present in everything he said and did. The French landscape, which he loved as I did, could console, could even nearly reconcile: but it could not replace the landscape he carried in his heart. In the early fifties his mother was dying and wanted to sec her son one last time, and I took my fr iend to the railroad station. I never, never forgot that moment. I wondered if that was going to happen to me. I wanted to go home, I wanted to sec my mother and my brothers and my sisters and my fr iends-but the novel wasn't finished (it seemed, indeed, that it would neJJer be finished), and that was the only trophy I could carry home.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Bergman's authority seemed, then, to come from the fact that he was reconciled to this arduous, delicate, and disciplined self exposure. Bergman and his father had not got on well when Ber gman was young. "But how do you get along now?" I had asked him. "Oh, now," he said, "we get on very well. I go to see him often." I told him that I envied him. He smiled and said, "Oh, it is always like that-when such a battle is over, fathers and sons can be friends." I did not say that such a recon ciliation had probably a great deal to do with one's attitude toward one's past, and the uses to which one could put it. But I now began to feel, as I saw my hotel glaring up out of the Stockholm gloom, that what was lacking in my movie was the American despair, the search, in our country for authority. The blue-jeaned boys on the Stockholm streets were really imit ations, so far; but the streets of my native city were filled with youn gsters searching des perately fi>r the limits which would tell them who they were, and create for them a challenge to which they could rise. What would a Bergman make of the American confus ion? How would he handle a love story occurring in New York? 12. Alas, Poor Richard I. EIGH T MEN UNLESS a writer is extremely old when he dies, in which case he has probably become a neglected institutio n, his death must always seem unt imely. This is because a real writer is always shifting and changing and searching. The world has many labels for him, of which the most treacherous is the label of Success. But the man behind the label knows defeat far more intim ately than he knows triump h. He can never be ab solutely certain that he has achieved his intention. This tension and au thori ty -the authority of the frequently defeated-are in the writer's work, and cause one to feel that, at the moment of his death, he was approaching his greatest achievements. I should think that guilt plays some part in this react ion, as well as a certain unadmitted relief. Guilt, because of our failur e in a relatio nship, because it is extremely difficult to deal with writers as people. Writers are said to be extremely egotistical and demanding, and they are indeed, but that docs not distinguish them from anyone else.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  As they talked about plans for their children, all the seemingly small parts of a child’s world that they had missed came tumbling out—swimming lessons, time to ride a bike, free play after school. All of the pleasures that had been absent from their past were apparently long remembered and were endowed with new importance. Recalling their many moves, they wanted to raise their children in one stable home in one neighborhood. Mostly they wanted their children to have protected years, which as loving parents they could relive with them and through them and enjoy vicariously. Children were also welcome because, despite their own experiences, the women and men felt that children would strengthen the marital bond. Women who missed their fathers while growing up treasured watching their husbands care for and interact with their children. Their yearning for the “dad I never had” was vanquished in part by seeing the smiles on their children’s faces as Daddy walked through the door and by the squeals of laughter that accompanied games of horsy or piggyback. For women, the decision to have a child was also mixed because it brought up again the issue of whether or not they could trust their husbands to be there. In fact, a fifth of the children were born out of wedlock, and none of the women in this group was in a stable or even a good relationship during the pregnancy. Most of these single mothers are having a very difficult time. Only a few have found stable partners and they are not working in jobs that pay well. After one or more abortions, they had decided to bring the child to term. Most had wanted a baby since early adolescence to offset their loneliness. These women spoke about their children with great love, and the ones I saw were well cared for at great sacrifice by mothers who had only a little help from their families. For the women who had children within a marriage, several obsessed about whether they should take their husband’s name because in the case of divorce, they reasoned, he might be more likely to provide support for a child that bore his name. The decision of some women to quit work full-time was also colored by their fear of relying on the continued presence of their husband to provide for the family. They also struggled with how many children to have. Most opted for one or two. A few had three. Every part of their lives—in love, marriage, and parenthood—evoked new promises and old disappointments.

• From The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us (2017)

  It is obvious that in the real world human mate choice occurs in a complex environment of individuals who vary not just in physical attributes but in personality and character. The bottom line is that the evolution of our ability to socially interact with each other in increasingly complex ways has affected the criteria that are involved in mate choice. With the origin of culture, material culture, language, and complex social relationships, a new dimension to the aesthetics of human attraction has come into being and greatly expanded—social personality. All the qualities that go into that—humor, kindness, empathy, thoughtfulness, honesty, loyalty, curiosity, self-expression, and so on—are now part of what attracts us to each other. In fact, it’s likely that such traits evolved precisely because they proved to be attractive and helped reinforce the social stability of sexual relationships. Falling in love has become more and more elaborate, not to mention emotionally intense, enjoyable, and potentially heartbreaking, because it is the result of a coevolutionary process—millions of years of aesthetic, mutual mate choice. Even though they do have social personalities, I do not think that gorillas and chimpanzees can fall in love as we do, because these species have not gone through this coevolutionary process. The evolutionary psychology concept of mating value suggests that we should be able to look at a picture of a potential mate and swipe left or right and make evolutionarily informed decisions accordingly. While this might be fun for a while, it usually fails as a long-term strategy because mating value cannot be defined on any objective scale based on superficial features. True “mating value” emerges only during the course of getting to know each other and falling in love, and it actually takes time to fall in love. For today’s young urban dwellers, time is limited and sexual choices are nearly infinite. However, for most of the last few million years of human evolution, humans lived in very small populations with few sexual choices and all the time in the world. Human mate choice evolved to function in the latter context, not the former. The real reason why there is an apparent paucity of morphological ornaments in human males is that female mate choice in human evolution has focused largely on social rather than physical traits. It makes sense that females, who until relatively recently on the evolutionary timescale were the ones charged exclusively with the care of their children, should care more about qualities that indicate the potential for relationship endurance. In the long run, women have evolved to want mates who will be good partners to them and good parents to their children. However, that does not mean that it doesn’t take some shopping around to find that mate. —

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  I took to the prison library with more duck-like promptness. It was a bizarre collection, made up almost entirely of gifts. Ordinary well-wishers and a number of voluntary bodies gave miscellaneous fiction and popular encyclopaedic works on technology and natural history; an outgoing governor had presented a collection of literary texts, some deriving from his own schooldays but also including French classical drama and the complete works of Wither in twenty-three volumes; and the Times Literary Supplement had charitably for some years sent to the prison all those books it felt no interest in reviewing, a body of work ranging from bacteriology to handbooks on historic trams. I picked on something which must have come from the ex-governor’s bequest: a schools edition of Pope, with notes by A. M. Niven, MA—one of those frustrating near-palindromes with which life is strewn. It had seen active service, and words such as ‘zeugma’ filled the margins in a round, childish script. I had not read Pope since I was a child myself, but I had a sudden keen yearning for his order and lucidity, which was connected in my mind with a vision of eighteenth-century England, and rides cut through woodland, and Polesden and all my literate country origins. The book contained the ‘Epistle to a Lady’ and various other shorter poems; of the longer works it gave only ‘The Rape of the Lock’ complete, and I fastened on this poem, and on Mr Niven’s account of how it had been designed to laugh two families out of a feud, as the flashings and gleams of a civilised world, where animosities were melted down and cast again as glittering artefacts. I determined to learn it all by heart, and put away twenty lines a day. The discipline, and the brilliance of the work itself, were a kind of invisible enrichment to me—though, lest I should feel like an actor learning a great part with no prospect of a performance, I had Bill hear my lines each time I mastered a new canto; and he seemed to enjoy it. Tempting though it was to retire into this inner world, there were always visits to look forward to—and to regret, for their cruel brevity and for the new firmness with which, afterwards, the door was shut, the walls of the cell confined one. The visitors carried their horror of the place about them and for a while after they had gone left one with an anguished vacancy of a kind I had never known before. All one’s little accommodations were laid bare. My first visit was from Taha—a ‘box-visit’, a reunion conducted through glass. I was wildly shaken to see him, so that I could not think of much to say.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  I surrendered to his doctoring, since it resembled the special kindnesses and attentions of an intimate, done for our mutual pleasure. At the same time I knew he was judging me physically and professionally, despite his look of doleful pride at having such a dangerous friend. Phil came too, each afternoon, fresh from his lunchtime breakfast. Though still hot, the weather had turned rainy and bothersome, and he wore a blue showerproof jacket with a hood. He would look lightly flushed when he came in and took it off, and he concealed his initial dismay at my appearance with a preoccupied, evasive manner. For ten days or so I hardly went out and he sweetly brought me food—tinned soups, fruit juice, bread and milk—which he unpacked on the kitchen table for me to see. But I didn’t have much appetite. His catering, out of a baffled desire to make everything better, was over-generous, and I twice found myself throwing bread away—guilty about it as I never would be about throwing out overripe fruit, an unpicked carcass of partridge or grouse. Despite the pleasant passivity of being a patient, a condition ministered to as by some perverse kind of luxury, I was profoundly shocked by what had happened. I was constantly reliving the sudden sickening panic of it. James gave me things to help me sleep, which left me drowsy and dozing through the morning, running in and out of horrible, sour little dreams. I hated it when Phil had to leave for work, and longed for him to arrive the following day. James felt that my mother at least should be told, but I was fiercely against it. She was due in town shortly to restock the deep freeze with exquiseria unavailable in Hampshire, and to buy new clothes to fit her ever-expanding figure. When she rang to fix the routine lunch in Harrods (it had to be on the spot so as to minimise the loss of spending time) I told her I would be going to stay with Johnny Carver in Scotland that week—though in fact I had not seen Johnny since the day of his crassly youthful wedding two years before. My mother said I sounded odd, and I said I had just come from the dentist—a lie nearer to the truth.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  They knew about dope, t<>r example-I didn't: but the pusher and his product were kept f.1 r away from me. I needed love so badly that I could as easily have been hit with a needle as persuaded to share a joint of marijuana. And, in tact, Beauford and the others let me smoke with them from time to time. (But there were people they warned me not to smoke with.) The only real danger with marijuana is that it can le;�d to rougher stuff� but this has to do with the person, not the weed. In my own case, it could hardly have become a prob- THE PR ICE OF THE TICKET 833 !em, since I simply could not write if I were "high." Or, rather, I could, sometimes all night long, the greatest pages the world had ever seen, pages I tore up the moment I was able to read them. Yet, I learned something about myself from these irredeem able horrors: something which I might not have learned had I not been forced to know that I was valued. I repeat that Beauf ord never gave me any lectures, but he didn't have to-he expected me to accept and respect the value placed upon me. Without this, I might very easily have become the junky which so many among those I knew were becoming then, or the Bellevue or Tombs inmate (instead of the visitor) or the Hudson River corpse which a black man I loved with all my heart was sh ortly to become. Shortly: I was to meet Eugene sometime between 194 3 and 1944 and "run" or "hang" with him until he hurled himself off the George Washington Bridge, in the winter of 1946 . We were never lovers: for what it's worth, I think I wish we had been. When he was dead, I remembered that he had, once, obliquely, suggested this possibility. He had run down a list of his girl friends: those he lik ed, those he 1·eally liked, one or two with whom he might really be in love, and, then, he said, "I wondered if I might be in love with you." I wish I had heard him more clearly: an oblique confession is al ways a plea. But I was to hurt a great many people by being unable to imagine that anyone could possibly be in love with an ugly boy like me. To be valued is one thing, the recognition of this assessment demanding, essentially, an act of the will.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  In the Southern night everything seems 204 NOBODY KNOWS MY NAME possible, the most private, unspeakable longings; but then ar rives the Southern day, as hard and brazen as the night was sotl: and dark. It brings what was done in the dark to light. It must have seemed something like this for those people who made the region what it is today. It must have caused them great pain. Perhaps the master who had coupled with his slave saw his guilt in his wife's pale eyes in the morning. And the wife saw his children in the slave quarters, saw the way his concubine, the sensual-looking black girl, looked at her-a woman, after all, and scarcely less sensual, but white. The youth, nursed and raised by the black Mammy whose arms had then held all that there was of warmth and love and desire, and still confounded by the dreadful taboos set up between himself and her progeny, must have wondered, after his first experiment with black flesh, where, under the blazing heav ens, he could hide. And the white man must have seen his guilt written somewhere else, seen it all the time, even if his sin was merely lust, even if his sin lay in nothing but his power: in the eyes of the black man. He may not have stolen his woman, but he had certainly stolen his freedom-this black man, who had a body like his, and passions like his, and a ruder, more erotic beauty. How many times has the Southern day come up to find that black man, sexless, hanging fr om a tree! It was an old black man in Atlanta who looked into my eyes and directed me into my first segregated bus. I have spent a long time thinking about that man. I never saw him again. I cannot describe the look which passed bet\veen us, as I asked him tor directions, but it made me think, at once, of Shake speare's "the oldest have borne most." It made me think of the blues: Now, when a woman gets the blues, Lord, she hangs her head and cries. But when a man gets the blues, Lord, he Jirabs a train and rides. It was borne in on me, suddenly, just why these men had so often been grabbing fr eight trains as the evening sun went down. And it was, perhaps, because I was getting on a segregated bus, and wondering how Negroes had borne this and other indignities for so long, that this man so struck me . He seemed to know what I was feeling. His eyes seemed to say that what I was feeling he had been feeling, at much higher pressure, all his life.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  I said no a lot because it made me happy to be wrapped in her formidable arms. She never tired of pulling me to her. “You can’t understand most of the important things from a distance, Bryan. You have to get close,” she told me all the time. The distance I experienced in my first year of law school made me feel lost. Proximity to the condemned, to people unfairly judged; that was what guided me back to something that felt like home. — This book is about getting closer to mass incarceration and extreme punishment in America. It is about how easily we condemn people in this country and the injustice we create when we allow fear, anger, and distance to shape the way we treat the most vulnerable among us. It’s also about a dramatic period in our recent history, a period that indelibly marked the lives of millions of Americans—of all races, ages, and sexes—and the American psyche as a whole. When I first went to death row in December 1983, America was in the early stages of a radical transformation that would turn us into an unprecedentedly harsh and punitive nation and result in mass imprisonment that has no historical parallel. Today we have the highest rate of incarceration in the world. The prison population has increased from 300,000 people in the early 1970s to 2.3 million people today. There are nearly six million people on probation or on parole. One in every fifteen people born in the United States in 2001 is expected to go to jail or prison; one in every three black male babies born in this century is expected to be incarcerated. We have shot, hanged, gassed, electrocuted, and lethally injected hundreds of people to carry out legally sanctioned executions. Thousands more await their execution on death row. Some states have no minimum age for prosecuting children as adults; we’ve sent a quarter million kids to adult jails and prisons to serve long prison terms, some under the age of twelve. For years, we’ve been the only country in the world that condemns children to life imprisonment without parole; nearly three thousand juveniles have been sentenced to die in prison. Hundreds of thousands of nonviolent offenders have been forced to spend decades in prison. We’ve created laws that make writing a bad check or committing a petty theft or minor property crime an offense that can result in life imprisonment. We have declared a costly war on people with substance abuse problems. There are more than a half-million people in state or federal prisons for drug offenses today, up from just 41,000 in 1980.

• From Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition (2004)

  42 Lecture 8: Homer—The Odyssey Telemachus at home on Ithaca. Books III and IV show Telemachus traveling to visit Nestor and Menelaus to seek news of Odysseus. Books V through VIII take up Odysseus’s own story. At the beginning of Book V , the nymph Calypso holds Odysseus captive and wants to make him her husband. At Zeus’s command, Calypso lets Odysseus go. From her island, he journeys to the Phaeacians, a people who will help him home. Books IX through XII are a fl ashback to Odysseus’s adventures from the time he left Troy until he arrived at Calypso’s island; with his arrival on Ithaca in Book XIII, the structure returns to a straightforward chronology. Odysseus himself narrates Books IX through XII, in the fi rst person. Odysseus’s most famous adventures occur here. The story shifts to third-person narration again in Book XIII. A strict chronological arrangement of the Odyssey would put Books IX through XII fi rst, followed by V through VIII, followed by XIII through XXIV . Books I through IV happen at the same time as Books V through VIII. Delaying Odysseus’s entrance for four full books lets us see how badly he is needed on Ithaca. His absence causes great problems for his family and his community. Odysseus’s family cannot know whether he is alive or dead; this means they do not know how to order their own lives. Many young suitors are courting Odysseus’s wife, Penelope. If Odysseus is dead, she should remarry, but if he is alive, she should remain faithful to him. Telemachus does not know if he should guard the kingdom for his father or assert his own rights. Odysseus’s absence causes problems for his society because Ithaca has been kingless for 20 years. Penelope’s suitors are the focal point for these troubles in both family and society. They are destroying Odysseus’s household and threatening his marriage. Apparently, whichever one of them marries Penelope will become ruler of Ithaca. Thus, they are threatening Telemachus’s rights as well. Homer starts the Odyssey at the precise moment when the situation on Ithaca is reaching crisis point. We fi rst see Odysseus himself in Book V , when Calypso tells him he may leave her island. Odysseus’s and Calypso’s interaction here foregrounds the human condition and Odysseus’s understanding of it. Calypso offers Odysseus

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  This is the reason, perhaps, thatParis for so long fails to make any mark on him; and may also be why, when the tension between the real and the imagined can no longer be supported, so many people undergo a species of breakdown, or take the first boat home. For Paris is, according to its legend, the city where everyone lo�es his_he!J.d, and h1s morals, !jv,·s tbroug-li..at--Wa&t�.:Oae-his t!!}re d'amour, ceases, quite, to arrive anywhere on time, and thumbs his nose at the Pw:.itans-thu:i.ty..;JiL.fii:u:�all be�Qmr dmoken on the fine old air of fi:ecdom .. ·This legend, in the fashion of legends, has this much to support it, that it is not at all difficult to sec how it got started. It is limited, as le ends are limited, by being-literally-unlivable, and�e ferring tO t e pas . IS per aps not amazmg, t erefore, that this legend appears to have virtuallv nothing to do with the life of Paris itself, with the lives, that is, of the natives, __ to whom the city, no less than the le end s;long .The diarm of this legen proves 1tse capable of withstanding the most 9 + NOTES OF A NATIVE SON improbable excesses of the French bureaucracy, the weirdest ,·agarics of the concierge, the fantastic rents paid ti:>r uncom t(>rtable apartments, the discomfort itselt� and, even, the great confusion and despair which is reflected in French politics and in French faces. More, the legend operates to place all of the inconveniences endured by the foreigner, to say nothing of the downright misery which is the lot of many of the na tives, in the gentle glow of the picturesque, and the absurd; so that, finally, it is perfectly possible to be enamored of Paris while remaining totally inditlerent, or even hostile to the French. And this is made possible by the one person in Paris whom the legend seems least to atlect, who is not living it at all, that is, the Parisian himsel[ He, with his impenetrable politesse, and with techniques unspeakably more direct, keeps the traveler at an unmistakable arm's length. Unlucky indeed, as well as rare, the traveler who thirsts to know the lives of the people-the people don't want him in their lives. Neither docs the Parisian exhibit the faintest personal interest, or cu riosity, concerning the life, or habits, of any stranger.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  And though this mirror, which is the human mind, reflects the likeness of God more faithfully than creatures of lower degree, yet the knowledge of God that pan be gathered from the human mind, does not surpass the knowledge gathered from sensible things: since even the soul knows what itself is through understanding the nature of sensible things, as already stated. Consequently even in this way God is not known in higher fashion than the cause is known from its effect. CHAPTER XLVIII THAT MAN’S ULTIMATE HAPPINESS IS NOT IN THIS LIFESEEING then that man’s ultimate happiness does not consist in that knowledge of God whereby he is known by all or many in a vague kind of opinion, nor again in that knowledge of God whereby he is known in science through demonstration; nor in that knowledge whereby he is known through faith, as we have proved above: and seeing that it is not possible in this life to arrive at a higher knowledge of God in His essence, or at least so that we understand other separate substances, and thus know God through that which is nearest to Him, so to say, as we have proved; and since we must place our ultimate happiness in some kind of knowledge of God, as we have shown; it is impossible for man’s happiness to be in this life. Again. Man’s last end is the term of his natural appetite, so that when he has obtained it, he desires nothing more: because if he still has a movement towards something, he has not yet reached an end wherein to be at rest. Now, this cannot happen in this life: since the more man understands, the more is the desire to understand increased in him,—this being natural to man,—unless perhaps someone there be who understands all things: and in this life this never did nor can happen to anyone that was a mere man,; seeing that in this life we are unable to know separate substances which in themselves are most intelligible, as we have proved. Therefore man’s ultimate happiness cannot possibly be in this life.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  We must now show that this explanation does not avoid the foregoing arguments. For although man is below the separate substances in the natural order, he is above irrational creatures: wherefore he attains his ultimate end in a more perfect way than they. Now these attain their last end so perfectly that they seek nothing further: thus a heavy body rests when it is in its own proper place; and when an animal enjoys sensible pleasure, its natural desire is at rest. Much more therefore when man has obtained his last end, must his natural desire be at rest. But this cannot happen in this life. Therefore in this life man does not obtain happiness considered as his proper end, as we have proved. Therefore he must obtain it after this life. Again. The natural desire cannot be void; since nature does nothing in vain. But nature’s desire would be void if it could never be fulfilled. Therefore man’s natural desire can be fulfilled. But not in this life, as we have shown. Therefore it must be fulfilled after this life. Therefore man’s ultimate happiness is after this life. Besides. As long as a thing is in motion towards perfection it has not reached its last end. Now in the knowledge of truth all men are ever in motion and tending towards perfection: because those who follow, make discoveries in addition to those made by their predecessors, as stated in 2 Metaph. Therefore in the knowledge of truth man is not situated as though he had arrived at his last end. Since then as Aristotle himself shows (10 Ethic. vii.) man’s ultimate happiness in this life consists apparently in speculation, whereby he seeks the knowledge of truth, we cannot possibly allow that man obtains his last end in this life. Moreover. Whatever is in potentiality tends to become actual: so that as long as it is not wholly actual, it has not reached its last end. Now our intellect is in potentiality to the knowledge of the forms of all things: and it becomes actual when it knows any one of them. Consequently it will not be wholly actual, nor in possession of its last end, except when it knows all, at least these material things. But man cannot obtain this through speculative sciences, by which in this life we know truth. Therefore man’s ultimate happiness cannot be in this life. For these and like reasons Alexander and Averroes held that man’s ultimate happiness does not consist in human knowledge obtained through speculative sciences, but in that which results from conjunction with a separate substance, which conjunction they deemed possible to man in this life. But as Aristotle realized that man has no knowledge in this life other than that which he obtains through speculative sciences, he maintained that man attains to happiness, not perfect, but proportionate to his capacity.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  It was a symptom of how bitterly weary I was of wandering, how I hoped to find a resting place, reconciliation, in the land where I was born. But everything that might have charmed me merely reminded me of how many were excluded, how many were suffering and groaning and dying, not far from a paradise which was itself but another circle of hell. Everything that charmed me re minded me of someplace else, someplace where I could walk and talk, someplace where I was freer than I was at home, someplace where I could live without the stifling mask-made me homesick tor a libe rty I had never tasted here, and without which I could never live or work. In America, I was free only in battl e, never free to rest-and he who finds no way to rest cannot long survive the battle. Watts doesn't immediately look like a slum, if you come from �ew York; but it docs if you drive from Beverly Hills. I have said that it is a very long drive, long and increasingly ugly; then one is in the long, flat streets of Watts, low, flat houses on either side. for a New Yorker, where the filth is piled so high that the light can never break through, Watts looks, at first, like a fine place to raise a child. There are little TO BE BAPTI ZED 4-31 patches of yard, which can be enclosed by a fence, and a tree to which one can attach a swing, and space for a barbecue pit. But, then, one looks again and sees how spare, shabby, and dark the houses are. One sees that garbage collection is scarcely more efficient here than it is in Harlem. One walks the long street and sees all that one sees in the East: the shabby pool halls, the shabby bars, the boarded-up doors and windows, the plethora of churches and lodges and liquor stores, the shining automobiles, the wine bottles in the gutter, the garbage-strewn alleys, and the young people, boys and girls, in the streets. Over it all hangs a miasma of fury and frustration, a perceptible darkening, as of storm clouds, of rage and despair, and the girls move with a ruthless, defiant dignity, and the boys move against the traffic as though they are moving against the enemy. The enemy is not there, of course, but his soldiers are, in patrol cars, armed.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  GREGORY. (Hom. xxv.) She sought the body, and found it not; she persevered in seeking; and so it came to pass that she found. Her longings, growing the stronger, the more they were disappointed, at last found and laid hold on their object. For holy longings ever gain strength by delay; did they not, they would not be longings. Mary so loved, that not content with seeing the sepulchre, she stooped down and looked in: let us see the fruit which came of this persevering love: And seeth two Angels in white sitting, the one at the head, and the other at the feet, where the body of Jesus had lain. CHRYSOSTOM. (Hom. lxxxvi. 1) As her understanding was not so raised as to be able to gather from the napkins the fact of the resurrection, she is given the sight of Angels in bright apparel, who sooth her sorrow. AUGUSTINE. (Tr. cxxi) But why did one sit at the head, the other at the feet? To signify that the glad tidings of Christ’s Gospel was to be delivered from the head to the feet, from the beginning to the end. The Greek word Angel means one who delivers news. GREGORY. (Hom. xxv. in Evang. c. 1, 14) The Angel sits at the head when the Apostles preach that in the beginning was the Word: he sits, as it were, at the feet, when it is said, The Word was made flesh. By the two Angels too we may understand the two testaments; both of which proclaim alike the incarnation, death, and resurrection of our Lord. The Old seems to sit at the head, the New at the feet. CHRYSOSTOM. (Hom. lxxxvi) The Angels who appear say nothing about the resurrection; but by degrees the subject is entered on. First of all they address her compassionately, to prevent her from being overpowered by a spectacle of such extraordinary brightness: And they say unto her, Woman, why weepest thou? The Angels forbad tears, and announced, as it were, the joy that was at hand: Why weepest thou? As if to say, Weep not. GREGORY. (Hom. fin.) The very declarations of Scripture which excite our tears of love, wipe away those very tears, by promising us the sight of our Redeemer again. AUGUSTINE. (Tr. cxxi) But she, thinking that they wanted to know why she wept, tells them the reason: She saith unto them, Because they have taken away my Lord. The lifeless body of her Lord, she calls her Lord, putting the part for the whole; just as we confess that Jesus Christ the Son of God was buried, when only His flesh was buried. And I know not where they have placed Him: it was a still greater grief, that she did not know where to go to console her grief. CHRYSOSTOM. (Hom. lxxxvi) As yet she knew nothing of the resurrection, but thought the body had been taken away.

• From Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition (2004)

  11 of exceptional status and divine parentage. Gilgamesh is king of a great city, Uruk. He is the son of a goddess, although he is part human himself. The narrative focuses largely on his relationship to Enkidu, who is created as both a rival and companion to Gilgamesh. Enkidu represents “natural man,” or man before the advent of civilization, while Gilgamesh, the king of Uruk, is ultra-civilized. The fi rst encounter of the two is a fi ght, but they then become fast friends. The plot also deals with two primary themes, the quest for fame and the quest for immortality. These are the same overriding concerns that inform the Homeric epics. Like Achilles and Odysseus after him, Gilgamesh has to confront his own and others’ mortality and the question of whether fame is a suffi cient compensation for death. Another element that the Epic of Gilgamesh has in common with the Homeric epics is its assumption of a polytheistic worldview and its associated implications. In both the Mesopotamian and the Greek religious systems, the gods were not creators outside the universe; rather, they were natural forces or elements of the universe. Mesopotamian gods were not even immortal; they could be killed. Greek gods were immortal, but they were not transcendent. The gods are gendered and reproduce sexually. This implies their ability to produce offspring with human beings. Gilgamesh himself is two-thirds divine and one-third human. Ishtar wants to marry Gilgamesh and is furious when he rebuffs her. Greek and Roman myths are notoriously fi lled with stories of gods (and goddesses) mating with human beings. But despite their sexual unions with human beings, these gods are not particularly fond of or merciful toward humans. Gilgamesh does not include a creation story for humans in general, but another Mesopotamian poem, the Atrahasis, does recount the creation of humans. The gods made humans so that they themselves could gain relief from work. Thus, humans were made to be the gods’ servants. Greek myth does not say that humans were created to serve the gods, but it does strongly imply that humans must strive to please the gods and not to anger them. These implications of ancient Mediterranean

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  Worth it, for the pavement, though.’ ‘This was before you were married.’ ‘Actually it was just about the time that P. and I started seeing each other. The irony was not lost on Cecil; he very much came from that world, and it was he who told me about Denis. Very tight lips, as you may imagine. Of course, the irony’s rather worse for you, being, you know, gay, and—I’m frightfully sorry, Will.’ ‘My dear Gavin. Anyway, I must think a whole lot more.’ I looked around my untidy bedroom, and was surprised to find I missed the invitation that the Nantwich book had offered for the past few weeks. I had played hard to get without ever envisaging an outcome such as this. ‘I’d love to see you, too. We must all get together. Now that I’m not writing a book I’ll have so much more time.’ Gavin made a miraculous little humming sound, in which sympathy and scepticism were perfectly combined. ‘He must have known gay people—he was a cultured man. What did he think he was playing at?’ ‘Well I’m too young to know. But I suspect it really was a different world—not only the law, of course, but political pressures, and we just don’t know. It’s Uncle Will. Yes, you can. Hold on, Will, I’ve got your nephew here to speak to you. Very important, right … See you soon, my dear!’ There was a plonk and a series of rustlings and a protest of ‘Daddy’ before Rupert came on the line: ‘Hello, this is Rupert,’ in his serious treble. ‘Roops, how nice to hear you. How are things.’ ‘All right, thank you. I’ve got to wait before Daddy goes out of the room.’ This took a while, as apparently he came back for something, and was, as I pictured it, being expelled from his own study and his important work on Romano-British drains. ‘It must be jolly secret,’ I said encouragingly. ‘It’s that boy,’ he hissed. ‘Arthur, you mean? Have you seen him then?’ And looking across the empty bed and out into the hazy sky, chimneypots among still trees, I felt a sudden plunging need for him, a Straussian phrase sweeping from the top to the bottom of the orchestra. ‘Yes, I have. It was in the road, yesterday.’ ‘It was jolly clever of you to spot him.’ ‘Well, I’ve been keeping my eyes peeled for him, you know.’ ‘What a good spy you are. What was he doing, did he recognise you?’