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 Untrue (2018)

  When I was a young girl in Grand Rapids, Michigan, we played a game in our backyards and on the school playground as we sang a song called “The Farmer in the Dell.” We stood, a whole big group of us, holding hands in a circle, with one boy in the middle. “The farmer in the dell, the farmer in the dell, hi-ho the derry-o the farmer in the dell,” we sang at him. Then, as we sang, “The farmer takes a wife, the farmer takes a wife,” the boy who had been transformed into the farmer in the dell chose a girl to stand in the middle of the circle with him. She was thus transformed into the wife. Next we sang, “The wife takes a child, the wife takes a child,” and another of us was chosen. The child took a nurse. The nurse took a cow. The cow took a dog. The dog took a cat. The cat took a rat. And so on. Soon, several children stood within the diminished circle. The group inside might look like a collective, but it was clear that the farmer and his wife and the child were its conceptual center. We ourselves, the players, had been reorganized along the lines of a song, one about a farm, about agriculture. As we played this game, we rehearsed and repeated the social reorganization of our ancestors and the birth of the peculiar and novel family form that we lived in—pair-bonded, presumably monogamous parents and their offspring alone together. We reinforced for ourselves its naturalness, its righteousness, its normativity, every time we recited the words and acted them out. It was child’s play, literally, and it was an education. It is a measure of the power of the plough that every single one of us longed to be chosen, to stand within the warmth of the circle. The boys wanted to be the farmer. The girls wanted to be the farmer’s wife, the child, the pet, even the vermin, because we were all, in some deep sense, farmers’ daughters.

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

  It is abundantly clear, that the human heart is more intensely attracted to one object, in proportion as it is withdrawn from a multiplicity of desires. Therefore, the more a man is delivered from solicitude concerning temporal matters, the more perfectly he will be enabled to love God. Hence St. Augustine says (Lib. 83. Quaest.) that, the hope of gaining, or keeping, material wealth, is the poison of charity; that, as charity increases, cupidity diminishes; and that, when charity becomes perfect, cupidity ceases to exist. Hence, all the counsels which call man to perfection tend to withdraw his affections from temporal objects; so that, his soul is enabled the more freely to turn to God by contemplating Him, loving Him, and fulfilling His will. CHAPTER VII OF THE FIRST MEANS OF PERFECTION, VIZ.: THE RENUNCIATION OF EARTHLY POSSESSIONSTHE first among the material possessions to be renounced are those extrinsic goods that we call riches. Our Lord counselled us to relinquish them when He said, “If thou wilt be perfect, go, sell all that thou hast and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in Heaven; and come, follow me” (Matt. 19:21). The utility of this counsel is evident. First, we have the evidence of a fact. For, when the young man who was inquiring about perfection heard the words of Christ, he went away sad. And “Behold,” says St. Jerome in his commentary on St. Matthew, “the cause of this sadness. He had many possessions, which, like thorns and briars, choked the seed of the Lord’s words.” St. Chrysostom, writing on the same passage, says that, “they who possess but little, and they that abound in riches, do not encounter the same obstacles; for the renunciation of wealth enkindles a more mighty fire and causes avarice to grow greater.” St. Augustine likewise says, in his epistle to Paulinus and Therasia, that, “When earthly things are inordinately loved, those that we already possess fetter us more closely than those that we desire; for why did this young man go away sad, save because he had great possessions? For, it is one thing not to be anxious to acquire the things that we lack, but quite another to be ready to divest ourselves of those that we possess. For the things that are not ours we can repudiate as extrinsic to ourselves, but our own possessions are dear to us as the limbs of our body.”

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

  ORIGEN. (t. xxxii. 19.) But may there not be a deeper meaning in the words, yet a little while &c. After a little while He was not with them. In what sense not with them? Not because He was not with them according to the flesh, in that He was taken from them, was brought before Pilate, was crucified, descended into hell: but because they all forsook Him, fulfilling His prophecy: All ye shall be offended because of Me this night. He was not with them, because He only dwells with those who are worthy of Him. But though they thus wandered from Jesus for a little while, it was only for a little while; they soon sought Him again. Peter wept bitterly after his denial of Jesus, and by his tears sought Him: and therefore it follows, Ye shall seek Me, and as I said unto the Jews, whither I go, ye cannot follow Me now. To seek Jesus, is to seek the Word, wisdom, righteousness, truth, all which is Christ. To His disciples therefore who wish to follow Him, not in a bodily sense, as the ignorant think, but in the way He ordains, Whosoever doth not bear his cross, and come after Me, cannot be My disciple. Our Lord saith, Whither I go ye cannot follow Me now. For though they wished to follow the Word, and to confess Him, they were not yet strong enough to do so; The Spirit was not yet given to them, because that Jesus was not yet glorified. (supra c. 7) AUGUSTINE. (Tr. lxiv. 4) Or He means that they were not yet fit to follow Him to death for righteousness’ sake. For how could they, when they were not ripe for martyrdom? Or how could they follow our Lord to immortality, they who were to die, and not to rise again till the end of the world? Or how could they follow Him to the bosom of the Father, when none could partake of that felicity, but they whose love was perfected? When He told the Jews this, He did not add now. But the disciples, though they could not follow Him then, would be able to do so afterwards, and therefore He addsc, So now I say to you. ORIGEN. (t. xxxii. 19.) As if He said, I say it to you, but with the addition of now. The Jews, who He foresaw would die in their sins, would never be able to follow Him; but the disciples were unable only for a little time.

• From Untrue (2018)

  The pre-contact Wyandot and Tahitians were no noble savages, and their lifestyle was not some exemplary Eden. In an ecology that favored hunting and gathering, in a context where women were primary producers, cooperative breeding was in fact efficacious, and being generous—with one’s food, capacity for child-rearing, and sexuality—was in everyone’s individual best interest. Selflessness was, in a sense, selfish as it went the distance to ensure group cohesion, safety, and a degree of security, social and child support, and ease that present-day mothers, isolated in our suburban homes or apartments with bored children, can only dream of. And a lifestyle that anthropologists tell us was characterized by radical egalitarianism and “deliberate social intensity” meant that if men attempted to be violent, coercive, or even unreasonably possessive toward women, others would be there to see and to eventually intervene. A woman in a dense kin network could also always “vote with her feet,” to use anthropologist Sarah Hrdy’s phrase, and simply leave a partner she no longer wanted. In stark contrast, in cultures more intensely agrarian than the Wyandot and their aboriginal predecessors, a woman was likely to leave the support system of her own family to live with an unrelated man—her husband—and his kin. And live in a situation of more or less privacy with him and his kin network. Today, nearly 70 percent of agricultural and post-agricultural societies are patrilocal. Under the watchful eye of these strangers, far from the protections of parents and siblings and aunts and uncles, female sexuality was also reorganized, as women got a clear message: you’d better behave. With the notion of property in place, and in concert with these other shifts, it was a short leap in logic to the belief that women were the property of men, and that having sex with a married woman, or a married woman having sex outside her marriage, was an act of “trespass” against her husband. Isolated from their families of origin and invested alloparents, with higher fertility rates and more dependent children than their non-farming ancestors, women had every reason to conform to these beliefs and to yield to implicit and explicit rules about female propriety. And in contexts where couples broke from larger groups to live on their own, yet another layer of protection was stripped away, rendering women more dependent than ever on the goodwill and support of their male partners. Even worse, much of the time no one with her best interests in mind was there to see. Privacy cloaked male actions, freeing men of supervision and releasing them from direct accountability to a greater social unit.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  There I meditated on those men, of whom I knew nothing but from whom I sprang, and whose race would end with me. In Rome they were enlarging my mausoleum, since Decrianus had cleverly redrawn the plans; they are still at work upon it, even now. The idea for those circular galleries came from Egypt, and likewise the ramps descending to underground chambers; I had conceived of a colossal tomb to be reserved not for myself alone, or for my immediate successors, but as the eventual resting-place of future emperors for centuries to come; princes yet to be born have thus their places already marked in this palace of death. I saw also to the ornamentation of the cenotaph erected on the Field of Mars in memory of Antinous; a barge from Alexandria had discharged its loads of sphinxes and obelisks for this work. A new project long occupied me, and has not ceased to do so, namely, the construction of the Odeon, a model library provided with halls for courses and lectures to serve as a center of Greek culture in Rome. I made it less splendid than the new library at Ephesus, built three or four years before, and gave it less grace and elegance than the library of Athens, but I intend to make this foundation a close second to, if not the equal of, the Museum of Alexandria; its further development will rest with you. In working upon it I often think of the library established by Plotina in Trajan's Forum, with that noble inscription placed by her order over its door: Dispensary to the Soul. The Villa was near enough completion to have my collections transported to it, my musical instruments and the several thousand books purchased here and there in the course of my travels. I gave a series of banquets where everything was assembled with care, both the menu for the repasts and the somewhat restricted list of my guests. My goal was to have all in harmony with the calm beauty of these gardens and these halls, to have fruits as exquisite as the music, and the sequence of courses as perfect as the chasing on the silver plates. For the first time I took an interest in the choice of foods, giving orders that the oysters must come from Lucrinus and the crayfish be taken from the rivers of Gaul. My dislike of the combined pomposity and negligence which too often characterize an emperor's table led me to rule that all viands be shown to me before they were presented to any of my guests, even to the least of them.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  Hymie the bullfrog was an ovarian spud generated in the high passage between two shores: for him the skyscrapers had been built, the wilderness cleared, the Indians massacred, the buffaloes exterminated; for him the twin cities had been joined by the Brooklyn Bridge, the caissons sunk, the cables strung from tower to tower; for him men sat upside down in the sky writing words in fire and smoke; for him the anesthetic was invented and the high forceps and the Big Bertha which could destroy what the eye could not see; for him the molecule was broken down and the atom revealed to be without substance; for him each night the stars were swept with telescopes and worlds coming to birth photographed in the act of gestation; for him the barriers of time and space were set at nought and all movement, be it the flight of birds or the revolution of the planets, expounded irrefutably and incontestably by the high priests of the depossessed cosmos. Then, as in the middle of the bridge, in the middle of a walk, in the middle always, whether of a book, a conversation, or making love, it was borne in on me again that I had never done what I wanted and out of not doing what I wanted to do there grew up inside me this creation which was nothing but an obsessional plant, a sort of coral growth, which was expropriating everything, including life itself, until life itself became this which was denied but which constantly asserted itself, making life and killing life at the same time. I could see it going on after death, like hair growing on a corpse, people saying “death” but the hair still testifying to life, and finally no death but this life of hair and nails, the body gone, the spirit quenched, but in the death something still alive, expropriating space, causing time, creating endless movement. Through love this might happen, or sorrow, or being born with a club foot; the cause nothing, the event everything. In the beginning was the Word . . . . Whatever this was, the Word , disease or creation, it was still running rampant; it would run on and on, outstrip time and space, outlast the angels, unseat God, unhook the universe. Any word contained all words—for him who had become detached through love or sorrow or whatever the cause. In every word the current ran back to the beginning which was lost and which would never be found again since there was neither beginning nor end but only that which expressed itself in beginning and end.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  But among the ancient poets Antimachus especially won me: I liked his rich but abstruse style, his ample though highly concentrated phrases, like great bronze cups filled with a heavy wine. I preferred his account of Jason's expedition to the more romantic Argonautica by Apollonius: Antimachus understood better the mystery of voyages and horizons, and how ephemeral a shadow man throws on this abiding earth. He had wept passionately over the death of his wife, Lydia, and had given her name to a long poem made up of all manner of legends of grief and mourning. That Lydia, whom perhaps I should have taken no notice of as a living being, became a familiar figure for me, dearer than many a feminine face in my own existence. Such poems, though almost forgotten, were little by little restoring to me my faith in immortality. I revised my own works, the love poems, the occasional pieces, and the ode to the memory of Plotina. One day, perhaps, someone would wish to read all that. A group of obscene verses were matter for hesitation, but I ended, after all, by including them. Our best and most cultivated men write such things. They make a game of it; I should have preferred mine to be more than that, to reflect exactly the naked truth. But there as elsewhere the commonplace entraps us; I was beginning to understand that it takes more than audacity of mind to free us from banality, and that the poet triumphs over routines or imposes his thought upon words by efforts quite as long and persevering as those of my work of emperor. For my part I could aspire only to the rare good luck of the amateur: it would already be considerable if from all this rubble two or three verses were to survive. At about this time, however, I outlined a rather ambitious work, half in prose, half in verse, wherein I intended to include the curious facts observed in the course of my life, together with my meditations and certain dreams, mingling the serious and the ironic; all this would have been bound together by the merest thread, a sort of Satyricon, but harsher. In it I should have set forth a philosophy which had become my own, the Heraclitean idea of change and return. But I have put aside that project as far too vast. In that same year I held several conversations with the priestess who had formerly initiated me at Eleusis (and whose name must remain secret) in order to discuss and establish details of the cult of Antinous, one by one.

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  But when I upped the ante in my letters to her, they stopped sending me anything at all. The Disney Studio must have had a kind of secret service that monitored Mousketeer Mail for inappropriate sentiments and declarations. When my name went off the mailing list, it probably went onto some other list. But Alice had taught me about coyness. I kept writing Annette and began to imagine a terrible accident in front of her house that would almost but not quite kill me, leaving me dependent on her care and sympathy, which in time would turn to admiration, love . . . As soon as she appeared on the show—Hi, I’m Annette!—Taylor would start moaning and Silver would lick the screen with his tongue. “Come here, baby,” he’d say, “I’ve got six inches of piping hot flesh just for you.” We all said things like that—It was a formality—then we shut up and watched the show. Our absorption was complete. We softened. We surrendered. We joined the club. Taylor forgot himself and sucked his thumb, and Silver and I let him get away with it. We watched the Mousketeers get all excited about wholesome projects and have wimpy adventures and talk about their feelings, and we didn’t laugh at them. We didn’t laugh at them when they said nice things about their parents, or when they were polite to each other, or when they said, “Hey, gang . . .” We watched every minute of it, our eyes glistening in the blue light, and we went on staring at the television after they had sung the anthem and faded away into commercials for toothpaste and candy. Then, blinking and awkward, we would rouse ourselves and talk dirty about Annette. Sometimes, when The Mickey Mouse Club was over, we went up to the roof. Silver’s apartment building overlooked California Avenue. Though the street was busy we chose our targets carefully. Most days we didn’t throw anything at all. But now and then someone would appear who had no chance of getting past us, like the man in the Thunderbird. Thunderbirds had been out for only a year now, since ‘55, and because they were new and there weren’t that many of them they were considered somewhat cooler than Corvettes. It was early evening. The Thunderbird was idling before a red light at the intersection, and from our perch behind the parapet we could hear the song on the radio—“Over the Mountains and across the Seas”—and hear too, just below the music, the full-throated purr of the engine. The black body glistened like obsidian. Blue smoke chugged from the twin exhausts. The top was rolled back. We could see the red leather upholstery and the blond man in the dinner jacket sitting in the driver’s seat. He was young and handsome and fresh. You could almost smell the Listerine on his breath, the Mennen on his cheeks. We were looking right down at him.

• From The History of World Literature (2007)

  106 Lecture 25: Cao Xueqin’s The Story of the Stone sensitive, poetic, beautiful, and insecure (to the point of neurosis). The cousins have been in love since childhood, but they always misunderstand each other. Dai-yu dies of consumption on the day Bao-yu, having suffered a complete nervous breakdown, is tricked into marrying another cousin: the plump, healthy, and practical Bao-chai. Most of the novel’s story is hung on this love triangle. The story of the novel is, like Monkey, framed by a cosmic story about a stone brought to consciousness to repair the vault of heaven. The stone is later carried to earth by a Buddhist monk and a Taoist priest. Ages later another Taoist comes upon the stone, on which is inscribed the story of the novel. Bao-yu (whose name means “Precious Jade”) is the incarnation of that stone. Dai-yu is also from heaven: a heavenly À ower which had been watered by the stone and which has vowed to repay its kindness with a “debt of tears.” Everything that happens in the novel is a story within a story, which throws its events into an ironic light. The frame becomes even more complicated. The story on the stone begins with Zhen Shi-yin, who dreams of a Buddhist monk and a Taoist priest carrying a stone, which occurs at about the time that Bao-yu and Dai-yu are passing from heaven into “The Land of Illusion.” Zhen Shi-yin wakes up to treasure his little daughter, who is later kidnapped and reappears in the Jia compound as the concubine of an unattractive man; Zhen Shi-yin, meanwhile, loses everything else that he has. One day a Taoist priest shows up; by now Zhen Shi-yin understands the illusory nature of earthly life and goes off with the priest. The point of the frame is to remind us that everything that happens in the novel happens in “The Land of Illusion.” Bao-yu seems to accept this point at the novel’s end, when he disappears forever arm-in-arm with a Buddhist monk and a Taoist priest. The Story of the Stone teaches the lessons of Buddhism and Taoism: detachment from the world and its desires. We have already encountered these lessons in Chuang Tzu, The Tale of Genji, and Monkey. This of¿ cial doctrine and reading, however, is constantly undermined by the attention the novelist gives to the details of everyday life, making the recurrent appearances of the

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  Veronica was married to a sawyer who worked at a mill near Everett and came home only on the weekends. She had two fat little girls who wandered the wreckage of the house in their underpants, whining for their mother’s attention and eating potato chips from economy packs almost as big as they were. Veronica was crazy about Chuck. If he wasn’t in the mood, she would try to get him in the mood by walking around in short-shorts and high heels, or by sitting in his lap and sticking her tongue in his ear. We hung around the house all afternoon, playing cards and reading Veronica’s detective magazines. Now and then I tried to play games with the little girls, but they were too morose to pretend or imagine anything. At three o’clock I walked back up to Concrete High to catch my bus home. * * * CHUCK AND THE others knew a lot of women like Veronica, and girls on their way to being like Veronica. When they found a new one they shared her. They tried to fix me up with some of them, but I always backed out. I didn’t know what these girls expected; I did know I was sure to disappoint them. Their availability unmanned me. And I didn’t want it to be like that, squalid and public, with a stranger. I wanted it to be with the girl I loved. This was not going to happen, because the girl I loved never knew I loved her. I kept my feelings secret because I believed she would find them laughable, even insulting. Her name was Rhea Clark. Rhea moved to Concrete from North Carolina halfway through her junior year, when I was a freshman. She had flaxen hair that hung to her waist, calm brown eyes, golden skin that glowed like a jar of honey. Her mouth was full, almost loose. She wore tight skirts that showed the flex and roll of her hips as she walked, clinging pastel sweaters whose sleeves she pushed up to her elbows, revealing a heartbreaking slice of creamy inner arm. Just after Rhea came to Concrete I asked her to dance with me during a mixer in the gym. She nodded and followed me out onto the floor. It was a slow dance. When I turned to face her she moved into my arms as no other girl had ever done, frankly and fully. She melted against me and stayed against me, pliant to my least motion, her legs against mine, her cheek against mine, her fingers brushing the back of my neck. I understood that she didn’t know who I was, that all of this was a new girl’s mistake. But I felt justified in taking advantage of it. I thought we were meeting rightly, true self to true self, free of the accidents of age. After a while she said, “Y’all don’t know how to party.” Her voice was throaty and deep.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  They sat in the corner of the bar, watching the mayor and all the politicians. And Tommy tried to keep the drunken Legion members from hanging all over him and telling him their war stories. The tall commander, who was now very drunk, came over asking Tommy and him if they wanted a ride back home in the Cadillac. Tommy said they were walking home, and they left the American Legion hall and the drunks in the bar, with Tommy pushing his wheelchair, walking back through the town where they had grown up, past the baseball field at Parkside School where they had played as kids, back to Hamilton Avenue, where they sat together in front of Peter Weber’s house almost all night, still not believing they were together again. I AM WATCHING the young couple walk along the beach. They are walking on the wet sand just where the waves wash up to the shore. The girl is holding his hand and she is laughing. Oh I want so badly to be that guy with her. I want to feel, I want to feel again, I want to walk with a woman, I want to be just like that guy who is walking with her along the beach. Please God, I say, I want it back so bad. I will give anything, anything, just to be inside a woman again. I think of approaching them. It would be so difficult. What could I say? “Excuse me, would you like to pull my chair across the sand? Or maybe you’d like to carry me over your shoulders and I could hold your hand laughing . . .” NO NO NO NO, that’s not right! That’s not fair! I want it back! They have taken it, they have robbed it, my penis will never get hard anymore. I didn’t even have time to learn how to enjoy it and now it is gone, it is dead, it is as numb as the rest of me. I watch the other women now. I see their long slim legs standing pretty. I start to get excited, my mind racing with fantasies, and then the hurt comes. . . . Oh God, I never dreamed that this could possibly happen, that this part of me that had made me feel so good when I was young, that this wonderful thing that no one ever seems to want to talk about . . . has gone, has suddenly disappeared. It has happened so fast, so quickly. What can I do, how can I ever get it back? Everyone says it is such an important thing, but nobody wants to talk about it. The Church says if you play with it, it is a sin. Now I can’t even roll on top of a basketball, I can’t do it in the bathtub or against the tree in the yard. It is over with. Gone. And it is gone for America.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  roughout, our goal is to fi nd the interface between sexual energy and prevailing morality, the points of contact between the circulation of pleasures and the regulatory force of sexual norms. In the age of the romance, eros fl ourished unawares, serenely confi dent in its eternal powers, and if we did not know that Christianity was stirring in the hills, we might never  F R O M S H A M E TO S I N have believed that the fi rst icy gusts of denial could be felt sweeping across the ancient valleys. TH E C U R R E NT FA S H I O N : S A M E - S E X E RO S I N TH E H I G H E M P I R E Around the age of nineteen, Clitophon’s cousin Leucippe came to live with him and his family in Tyre. He fell in love with her at fi rst sight. Paralyzed by his infatuation, he took his troubles to his cousin Clinias, only two years his elder but already “an initiate of eros.” Clinias quickly became his trusty counselor. Th e passions of Clinias were for a meirakion, a boy somewhere in his later teens, and his coaching is meant to be understood in terms of pederastic norms. Th e ancient novels are, both superfi cially and in their deep structure, stories of heterosexual love, but same- sex amours still fi nd an important place. In fact, the fi rst two books of Leucippe and Clitophon are framed by the traditional assumptions of classical Greek pederasty, transposed onto a heterosexual plot. Clinias claimed that “boy and maiden” alike shared a sense of shame; seduction, he argued, required the lover to draw out the beloved’s consent by the most delicate rituals of courtship, slowly wearing down the beloved’s guard without making startling moves. Th en, Clinias advised, “when you have a tacit understanding that the next step is the big deed, even those who are ready to surrender prefer the appearance of compulsion, to let the façade of force defl ect the shame of consent.” Couched in terms of a plot to seduce Leucippe, Clinias lays bare the central contradiction of classical pederastic norms: it required from the younger partner forms of consent that were intrinsically disgraceful. One of the more unlikely misprisions to have prevailed among historians of antiquity is the view that modes and practices of same- sex contact withered in the high empire. In Veyne’s words, ancient bisexuality disappeared.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  Among the earliest competitors to the Life of Th ais is the story of Pelagia, a prostitute and actress of Antioch. Th anks only to the brief aside in the sermon of Chrysostom do we know that there is a kernel of historicity in the story of a glamorous celebrity who converted to the ascetic life. We cannot say how far legendary material had accreted around her by the time the author of the life, sometime in the fi fth century, elaborated the written version that survives. We can only say that the author, who purports to be a deacon named Jacob, was a highly literate spirit, one of those soldiers of Christian culture who remade the ancient tradition in a Christian mold.  Th e Life of Pelagia is highly conscious of its status as an antiromance. It counterposes its hero, an ascetic bishop named Nonnos, and its heroine, the redoubtable Pelagia, in the symmetrical fashion of the Greek novel. Th e story begins as Nonnos and other bishops have gathered at Antioch at the behest of the bishop of the great city. One day the visitors were sitting together outside the shrine of the martyr Julian when Pelagia, “fi rst lady of the An- tiochene stage,” rode by with her cortege. No detail of the fantasia is omit- ted. Pelagia rides on a donkey, head uncovered, attended by a great throng of slaves, all of whom are bedecked with gold, gems, and pearls. Th e aro- matics of her passing entourage could stun the unwary soul. Th e bishops avert their gaze, except for Nonnos, who holds her in his mind with his eyes. He is struck by her beauty, but his interest is not prurient. He is fi red with envy by the care she takes to make herself pleasing to men; he wishes he could take such care to prepare his soul for God. Her glorious physical charms, in good Platonic fashion, remind Nonnos of the “inconceivable beauty” (to amēchanon kallos) at which even the cherubim dare not gaze, which the Christian will fi nd in heaven!  Th is fi rst encounter between Nonnos and Pelagia is layered with mean- ing. As has been noticed, it mimics the scenes of love at fi rst sight between the heroes and heroines of romance. Carnal eros has been displaced by spiritual yearning. Nonnos’s anguish and weeping are drawn directly from ROMANCE IN THE LATE CLASSICAL WORLD  the stock of romantic tropes. By the time the Life was written, stylized en- counters between holy men and prostitutes had become a regular part of the fi ctional repertoire. Th e true holy man— monks like John the Dwarf or Serapion, even rabbis like Hanina and Meir— could stand face- to- face with the prostitute, unfazed by her charm. Th ese scenes assume, and defy, the serious physics of the gaze that are essential to romance.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  Again I was strongly aware of my mother’s presence, of the big puffy sleeves of her fur coat, of the cruel swiftness with which she had whisked me through the street years ago and of the stubborn tenacity with which I had feasted my eyes on all that was new and strange. On the occasion of this second visit I seemed to dimly recall another character out of my childhood, the old housekeeper whom they called by the outlandish name of Mrs. Kicking. I could not recall her being taken ill but I did seem to recall the fact that we were paying her a visit at the hospital where she was dying and that this hospital must have been near Humboldt Street which was not dying but which was radiant in the melting snow of a winter’s noon. What then had my mother promised me that I have never since been able to recall? Capable as she was of promising anything, perhaps that day, in a fit of abstraction, she had promised something so preposterous that even I with all my childish credulity could not quite swallow it. And yet, if she had promised me the moon, though I knew it was out of the question, I would have struggled to invest her promise with a crumb of faith. I wanted desperately everything that was promised me, and if, upon reflection I realized that it was clearly impossible, I nevertheless tried in my own way to grope for a means of making these promises realizable. That people could make promises without ever having the least intention of fulfilling them was something unimaginable to me. Even when I was most cruelly deceived I still believed; I believed that something extraordinary and quite beyond the other person’s power had intervened to make the promise null and void. This question of belief, this old promise that was never fulfilled, is what makes me think of my father who was deserted at the moment of his greatest need. Up to the time of his illness neither my father nor my mother had ever shown any religious inclinations. Though always upholding the church to others, they themselves never set foot in a church from the time that they were married. Those who attended church too regularly they looked upon as being a bit daffy. The very way they said—“so and so is religious”—was enough to convey the scorn and contempt, or else the pity, which they felt for such individuals. If now and then, because of us children, the pastor called at the house unexpectedly, he was treated as one to whom they were obliged to defer out of ordinary politeness but whom they had nothing in common with, whom they were a little suspicious of, in fact, as representative of a species midway between a fool and a charlatan.

• From Combating Cult Mind Control: The Guide to Protection, Rescue and Recovery from Destructive Cults (1988)

  In retrospect, I realize that Mr. Kamiyama appealed to me because he was very different from my father. He was a visionary. He had a great deal of power and status. My father, a simple businessman, had repeatedly told me that no one person could ever change the world. Kamiyama very much believed that one person could make a huge difference. He was very religious and emotionally expressive. My father, a sincere, intense man in his own quiet way, was not. In looking back and analyzing the relationship, I see that Kamiyama became a surrogate father figure. The verbal approval and physical affection I wanted from my father was given to me by this man, who used this emotional leverage to motivate and control me. As it turned out, I was the first new person to join the center in Queens. Just a month earlier, the big center in Manhattan had been divided into eight satellite centers spread out in different boroughs. Since I was the first, Mr. Kamiyama said it was a sign that I was meant to become a great leader. He made me one of his 12 American disciples and oversaw everything I did. I never attended a 7-, 21- or 40-day workshop—the normal sequence. I was groomed very carefully by Kamiyama and Moon. Although I had never liked being in groups before, my elite status in this group made me feel special. Because of my relationship with Kamiyama, I would even have access to the Messiah himself—Sun Myung Moon—who was a projection of the ultimate father figure. Life With “Father”: Get Closer To Moon Sun Myung Moon was a short, stocky man who had more than the average share of charisma. He was born in 1920 in what is now North Korea. He carried himself like a small sumo wrestler in a extremely expensive business suit. He was a shrewd manipulator and communicator, particularly with those who were indoctrinated to believe he was the greatest man ever to walk the face of the Earth. Moon usually spoke either Korean or Japanese and used a translator. I was told he did so for “spiritual” reasons. During my membership, I was present at more than 100 of his lectures and participated in about 25 leadership meetings with him.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  So, on the ovarian trolley there was this voyage of man and bullfrog composed of identical stuff, neither better nor less than Dante but infinitely different, the one not knowing precisely the meaning of anything, the other knowing too precisely the meaning of everything, hence both lost and confused through beginnings and endings, finally to be deposited at Java or India Street, Greenpoint, there to be carried back into the current of life, so-called, by a couple of sawdust molls with twitching ovaries of the well-known gastropod variety. What strikes me now as the most wonderful proof of my fitness, or unfitness, for the times is the fact that nothing people were writing or talking about had any real interest for me. Only the object haunted me, the separate, detached, insignificant thing . It might be a part of the human body or a staircase in a vaudeville house; it might be a smokestack or a button I had found in the gutter. Whatever it was it enabled me to open up, to surrender, to attach my signature. To the life about me, to the people who made up the world I knew, I could not attach my signature. I was as definitely outside their world as a cannibal is outside the bounds of civilized society. I was filled with a perverse love of the thing-in-itself—not a philosophic attachment, but a passionate, desperately passionate hunger, as if in this discarded, worthless thing which everyone ignored there was contained the secret of my own regeneration. Living in the midst of a world where there was a plethora of the new I attached myself to the old. In every object there was a minute particle which particularly claimed my attention. I had a microscopic eye for the blemish, for the grain of ugliness which to me constituted the sole beauty of the object. Whatever set the object apart, or made it unserviceable, or gave it a date, attracted and endeared it to me. If this was perverse it was also healthy, considering that I was not destined to belong to this world which was springing up about me. Soon I too would become like these objects which I venerated, a thing apart, a non-useful member of society. I was definitely dated, that was certain. And yet I was able to amuse, to instruct, to nourish. But never to be accepted, in a genuine way. When I wished to, when I had the itch, I could single out any man, in any stratum of society, and make him listen to me. I could hold him spellbound, if I chose, but, like a magican, or a sorcerer, only as long as the spirit was in me. At bottom I sensed in others a distrust, an uneasiness, an antagonism which, because it was instinctive, was irremediable. I should have been a clown; it would have afforded me the widest range of expression. But I underestimated the profession.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  I wanted to hear it all over again, in minute detail. Nothing that I had read about Europe seemed to match this glowing account from my friend’s own lips. It seemed all the more miraculous to me in that we had sprung out of the same environment. He had managed it because he had rich friends—and because he knew how to save his money. I had never known any one who was rich, who had traveled, who had money in the bank. All my friends were like myself, drifting from day to day, and never a thought for the future. O’Mara, yes, he had traveled a bit, almost all over the world—but as a bum, or else in the army, which was even worse than being a bum. My friend Ulric was the first fellow I had ever met who I could truly say had traveled. And he knew how to talk about his experiences. As a result of that chance encounter on the street we met frequently thereafter, for a period of several months. He used to call for me in the evening after dinner and we would stroll through the park which was nearby. What a thirst I had! Every slightest detail about the other world fascinated me. Even now, years and years since, even now, when I know Paris like a book, his picture of Paris is still before my eyes, still vivid, still real. Sometimes, after a rain, riding swiftly through the city in a taxi, I catch fleeting glimpses of this Paris he described; just momentary snatches, as in passing the Tuileries, perhaps, or a glimpse of Montmartre, of the Sacré Cœur, through the Rue Laffitte, in the last flush of twilight. Just a Brooklyn boy! That was an expression he used sometimes when he felt ashamed of his inability to express himself more adequately. And I was just a Brooklyn boy, too, which is to say one of the last and the least of men. But as I wander about, rubbing elbows with the world, seldom it happens that I meet any one who can describe so lovingly and faithfully what he has seen and felt. Those nights in Prospect Park with my old friend Ulric are responsible, more than anything else, for my being here today. Most of the places he described for me I have still to see; some of them I shall perhaps never see. But they live inside me, warm and vivid, just as he created them in our rambles through the park. Interwoven with this talk of the other world was the whole body and texture of Lawrence’s work. Often, when the park had long been emptied, we were still sitting on a bench discussing the nature of Lawrence’s ideas. Looking back on these discussions now I can see how confused I was, how pitifully ignorant of the true meaning of Lawrence’s words. Had I really understood, my life could never have taken the course it did.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  From where I stood now I could see the path we had taken, my friend and I, and I remembered too how he had pointed to this beach, telling me that in summer very late at night you could find men here, that there were sheltered places in the rocks where you could go with them. I wondered if I would want that now, if there were men to be had. Shortly after R. had told me he wanted to end things I had gone to the city center, seeking I don’t know what. For almost two years I had been with no one but R., and for the past three months I hadn’t been with anyone at all; I went out in search of feeling, I suppose, or maybe the absence of feeling. I descended the flights of stairs to the bathrooms at the National Palace of Culture, though for so long I imagined I had left them behind, that I had been lifted out of them, as I was in the habit of putting it to myself, into a new life. I had thought that before, when I sat in that room in Boston with the priest, I had thought in precisely those terms, I am being lifted out of it, not by my own agency but by some intervening force: God, love, edno i sushto , one and the same. But we are never lifted out of such places, I think now, and so I went back to the bathrooms beneath NDK, I had never stopped thinking about them; even as I lay with R., flooded with love, there was a part of me untouched by him, a part that longed to be back here. My hands shook as I undid my belt at the urinals, out of excitement or dread, I felt I could hardly breathe. Almost immediately a man stepped up next to me, nineteen or twenty perhaps, very beautiful, his large cock already hard. Possibly he was a hustler, he was so eager, though he didn’t make any demands as I reached over and took him in my hand, feeling the thick warmth of him as I closed my eyes and inhaled deeply, trying to discern what I wanted, knowing how easy it would be to take him into the neighboring room with its stalls. I heard him whisper Iskash li , do you want it, and though I did want it I let him go, I hid away my own hardness and fled. It was a beautiful night, the nearly full moon casting its light upon the water, and I wanted to be with them now, these people I hardly knew who seemed so at ease with one another.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  He had accepted it, but more and more he was dreaming and thinking about walking. He prayed every night after the visitors left. He closed his eyes and dreamed of being on his feet again. Sometimes the American Legion group from his town came in to see him, the men and their wives and their pretty daughters. They would all surround him in his bed. It would seem to him that he was always having to cheer them up more than they were cheering him. They told him he was a hero and that all of Massapequa was proud of him. One time the commander stood up and said they were even thinking of naming a street after him. But the guy’s wife was embarrassed and made her husband shut up. She told him the commander was kidding—he tended to get carried away after a couple of beers. After he had been in the hospital a couple of weeks, a man appeared one morning and handed him a large envelope. He waited until the man had gone to open it up. Inside was a citation and a medal for Conspicuous Service to the State of New York. The citation was signed by Governor Rockefeller. He stuck the envelope and all the stuff in it under his pillow. * * * None of the men on the wards were civilian yet, so they had reveille at six o’clock in the morning. All the wounded who could get on their feet were made to stand in front of their beds while a roll call was taken. After roll call they all had to make their beds and do a general clean-up of the entire ward—everything from scrubbing the floors to cleaning the windows. Even the amputees had to do it. No one ever bothered him, though. He usually slept through the whole thing. Later it would be time for medication, and afterward one of the corpsmen would put him in a wheelchair and push him to the shower room. The corpsman would leave him alone for about five minutes, then pick his body up, putting him on a wooden bench, his legs dangling, his toes barely touching the floor. He would sit in the shower like that every morning watching his legs become smaller and smaller, until after a month the muscle tone had all but disappeared. With despair and frustration he watched his once strong twenty-one-year-old body become crippled and disfigured. He was just beginning to understand the nature of his wound. He knew now it was the worst he could have received without dying or becoming a vegetable. More and more he thought about what a priest had said to him in Da Nang: “Your fight is just beginning. Sometimes no one will want to hear what you’re going through. You are going to have to learn to carry a great burden and most of your learning will be done alone. Don’t feel frightened when they leave you.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  I guess all of us, the whole country, watched it like a big football game. Down the street the black horses came and his little boy saluting the way he did, the perfect way he did. Soon after he died there was a memorial picture of him that went up in the candy store down the block. At the bottom of it it said he had been born in 1917 and had died in 1963. It stayed up in the candy store on the wall for a long time after we all went to the war. * * * That spring before I graduated, my father took me down to the shopping center in Levittown and made me get my first job. It was in a supermarket not far from the marine recruiting station. I worked stacking shelves and numbing my fingers and hands unloading cases of frozen food from the trucks. Working with Kenny each day after school, all I could think of, day after day, was joining the marines. My legs and my back ached, but I knew that soon I would be signing the papers and leaving home. I didn’t want to be like my Dad, coming home from the A&P every night. He was a strong man, a good man, but it made him so tired, it took all the energy out of him. I didn’t want to be like that, working in that stinking A&P, six days a week, twelve hours a day. I wanted to be somebody. I wanted to make something out of my life. I was getting older now, I was seventeen, and I looked at myself in the mirror that hung from the back of the door in my room and saw how tall and strong I had suddenly become. I took a deep breath, flexing my muscles, and stared straight into the mirror, turning to the side and looking at myself for a long time. * * * In the last month of school, the marine recruiters came and spoke to my senior class. They marched, both in perfect step, into the auditorium with their dress blue uniforms and their magnificently shined shoes. It was like all the movies and all the books and all the dreams of becoming a hero come true. I watched them and listened as they stood in front of all the young boys, looking almost like statues and not like real men at all. They spoke in loud voices and one of them was tall and the other was short and very strong looking. “Good afternoon men,” the tall marine said. “We have come today because they told us that some of you want to become marines.” He told us that the marines took nothing but the best, that if any of us did not think we were good enough, we should not even think of joining.