Love

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From The Decameron (1353)

  I myself, being one who desires to live a thoroughly honest life, have come all this way in the clothes you see me wearing, ostensibly to seek Your Holiness’s blessing for my marriage. But in reality, I have fled, taking with me a considerable part of the treasures belonging to my father, the King of England, for he was planning to marry me to the King of Scotland, who is a very old man whereas I myself am a young girl, as you can see. What caused me to run away, was not so much the King of Scotland’s age, as the fear that, once married to him, my youthful frailty might tempt me into contravening God’s laws and staining the honour of my royal-blooded father. ‘In this frame of mind, I was on my way hither when God, who alone knows best how to measure our needs, being stirred as I believe by His compassion, set before my eyes the person He decreed should be my husband. The one I refer to is the young man’ – and she pointed to Alessandro – ‘whom you see standing here at my side. It may well be that he is less pure-blooded than a person of royal birth, but both in bearing and in character he is a worthy match for any great lady. He, therefore, is the man I have taken; it is him alone that I want, and no matter what my father or anyone else may have to say on the subject, I will never accept any other. The ostensible aim of my journey has thus been removed. But I desired to complete it, for two reasons: firstly, to meet Your Holiness and visit the venerable and sacred places in which this city abounds; and secondly, so that through your good offices I could make public, before you and the whole world, the marriage that Alessandro and I have contracted with God as our only witness. What is pleasing to God and to me should not be disagreeable to you, and I therefore beg you in all humility to give us your blessing, armed with which, since you are God’s vicar, we should be more certain of His entire approval. And thus we may live our lives together, till death us do part, to the greater glory not only of God but also of yourself.’ On hearing that his wife was the daughter of the King of England, Alessandro could scarcely contain his astonishment and happiness. But the two knights were even more astonished, and they were so furious that they would have done Alessandro an injury, and possibly the lady as well, if they had been anywhere else but in the Pope’s presence. The Pope, for his part, was greatly astonished both by the lady’s attire and by her choice of a husband. But he realized there was no turning back, and decided to grant her request.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  In the city of Brescia there once lived a nobleman called Messer Negro da Pontecarraro. He had several children, including a daughter whose name was Andreuola, and although she was an exceedingly beautiful young woman, she was as yet unmarried. Andreuola chanced to fall in love with a neighbour of hers called Gabriotto, a man of low estate but full of admirable qualities, as well as being handsome and pleasing in appearance. Aided and abetted by her maidservant, the girl not only succeeded in apprising Gabriotto of her love but had him conveyed regularly into a beautiful garden in the grounds of her father’s house, to the mutual joy of the two parties concerned. And so that this delectable love of theirs should never be torn asunder save by the hand of death, they secretly became husband and wife. They continued to make love by this furtive means until one night, as she lay asleep, the girl had a dream in which she seemed to see herself in the garden with Gabriotto, giving and getting intense pleasure as she held him in her arms: and whilst they were thus occupied, she seemed to see a dark and terrible thing issuing from his body, the form of which she could not make out. The thing appeared to take hold of Gabriotto, and, by exerting some miraculous force, to tear him away from her despite all she could do to prevent it. It then vanished below ground, taking him with it, and they never set eyes upon one another again. Her sorrow was so intense that it woke her up, and although, now that she was awake, she felt relieved that she had merely been imagining all this, she was nevertheless filled with terror because of the dreadful things she had dreamt about. And for this reason, knowing that Gabriotto was anxious to visit her that evening, she did everything in her power to ensure that he stayed away. The following night, however, seeing that he was determined to come, she received him in the garden as usual. The roses were in flower, and she plucked a large number, some red and others white,1 before going to join him at the edge of a magnificent, crystal-clear fountain situated in the garden. There they disported themselves merrily together for a long while, and afterwards Gabriotto asked her why she had forbidden him to come on the previous evening, whereupon the girl explained to him about the dream she had experienced during the night before, and told him about the forebodings it had aroused in her. On hearing her explanation, Gabriotto burst out laughing and told her that it was very silly to take any notice of dreams, since they were caused either by overeating or undereating, and they invariably turned out to be meaningless. Then he said:

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

  In love has the Lord received us; for the love which he cherished towards us, Jesus Christ our Lord gave his blood for us according to the will of God, and his flesh for our flesh, and his soul for our soul."1208 Hence all his zeal for the unity of the church. "Wherefore are dispute, anger, discord, division, and war among you? Or have we not one God and one Christ and one Spirit, who is poured out upon us, and one calling in Christ? Wherefore do we tear and sunder the members of Christ, and bring the body into tumult against itself, and go so far in delusion, that we forget that we are members one of another?"1209 Very beautifully also he draws from the harmony of the universe an incitement to concord, and incidentally expresses here the remarkable sentiment, perhaps suggested by the old legends of the Atlantis, the orbis alter, the ultima Thule, etc., that there are other worlds beyond the impenetrable ocean, which are ruled by the same laws of the Lord.1210 But notwithstanding its prevailing Pauline character, this epistle lowers somewhat the free evangelical tone of the Gentile apostle’s theology, softens its anti-Judaistic sternness, and blends it with the Jewish-Christian counterpart of St. James, showing that the conflict between the Pauline and Petrine views was substantially settled at the end of the first century in the Roman church, and also in that of Corinth. Clement knows nothing of an episcopate above the presbyterate; and his epistle itself is written, not in his own name, but in that of the church at Rome. But he represents the Levitical priesthood as a type of the Christian teaching office, and insists with the greatest decision on outward unity, fixed order, and obedience to church rulers. He speaks in a tone of authority to a sister church of apostolic foundation, and thus reveals the easy and as yet innocent beginning of the papacy.1211 A hundred years after his death his successors ventured, in their own name, not only to exhort, but to excommunicate whole churches for trifling differences. The interval between Clement and Paul, and the tran-sition from the apostolic to the apocryphal, from faith to superstition, appears in the indiscriminate use of the Jewish Apocrypha, and in the difference between Paul’s treatment of scepticism in regard to the resurrection, and his disciple’s treatment of the same subject.1212 Clement points not only to the types in nature, the changes of the seasons and of day and night, but also in full earnest to the heathen myth of the miraculous bird, the phoenix in Arabia, which regenerates itself every five hundred years.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  ‘Sir,’ replied Zima, liking the sound of the nobleman’s request, ‘if you were to offer me everything you possess in the world you could not buy my palfrey: but you could certainly have it as a gift, whenever you liked, on this one condition, that before you take possession of it, you allow me, in your presence, to address a few words to your good lady in sufficient privacy for my words to be heard by her and by nobody else.’ Prompted by his avarice, and hoping to make a fool of the other fellow, the nobleman agreed to Zima’s proposal, adding that he could talk to her for as long as he liked. And having left him to wait in the great hall of his palace, he went to his wife’s room, explained to her how easy it would be to win the palfrey, and obliged her to come and listen to Zima; but she was to be very careful not to utter so much as a single word in reply to anything he said. Although she strongly resented being involved in this arrangement, nevertheless, since she was obliged to do her husband’s bidding, the lady agreed and followed him into the great hall in order to hear what Zima; had to say. Zima took the nobleman aside to confirm the terms of their agreement, then went to sit with the lady in a corner of the hall that was well beyond everyone else’s hearing. ‘Illustrious lady,’ he began, ‘since you are not imperceptive, you will undoubtedly have become well aware, long before now, that I am deeply in love with you, not only because of your beauty, which without any question surpasses that of every other woman I ever saw, but also on account of your laudable manners and singular virtues, any one of which would be sufficient to capture the heart of the noblest man alive. It is thus unnecessary for me to offer you a long-winded account of my love for you. Suffice it to say that no man ever loved any woman more deeply or more ardently, and that I shall continue to do so unfailingly for as long as life sustains this poor, suffering body of mine, and longer still; for if, in the life hereafter, people love as they do on earth, I shall love you for ever. Consequently, you may rest assured that there is nothing you possess, be it precious or trifling, that you can regard as so peculiarly your own or count upon so infallibly under all circumstances as my humble self, and the same applies to all my worldly goods. But so that you may be fully persuaded that this is so, I assure you that I would deem it a greater privilege to be commissioned by you to perform some service that was pleasing to you, than to have the whole world under my own command and ready to obey me.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  EIGHTH STORY Ferondo, having consumed a special powder, is buried for dead. The Abbot who is cavorting with his wife removes him from his tomb, imprisons him, and makes him believe he is in Purgatory. He is later resurrected, and raises as his own a child begotten on his wife by the Abbot. Emilia had thus reached the end of her story, which in spite of its length was not unfavourably received. On the contrary, they all maintained that it had been briefly told, considering the number and variety of the incidents it had touched upon. And now the queen, making her wishes evident by a brief nod in the direction of Lauretta, induced her to begin: Dearest ladies, I find myself confronted by a true story, demanding to be told, which sounds far more fictitious than was actually the case, and of which I was reminded when I heard of the man who was buried and mourned in mistake for another. My story, then, is about a living man who was buried for dead, and who later, on emerging from his tomb, was convinced that he had truly died and been resurrected – a belief that was shared by many other people, who consequently venerated him as a Saint when they should have been condemning him as a fool. * In Tuscany, then, there was and still is a certain abbey, situated, as so many of them are, a little off the beaten track. Its newly appointed abbot was a former monk who was a veritable saint of a man in all his ways except for his womanizing, a hobby that he pursued so discreetly that very few people suspected, let alone knew about it, and hence he was considered to be very saintly and upright in every respect. Now, this abbot happened to become closely acquainted with a very wealthy yeoman called Ferondo, an exceedingly coarse and unimaginative fellow whose company he suffered only because Ferondo’s simple ways were sometimes a source of amusement. From associating with Ferondo, the Abbot made the discovery that he was married to a very beautiful woman, and he fell so ardently in love with her that she occupied his thoughts day and night, and he could concentrate on nothing else. But when he further discovered that Ferondo, for all his fatuousness and stupidity in every other respect, was extremely sensible in his devotion to this wife of his, and kept a careful watch upon her, the Abbot was driven to the brink of despair. Nevertheless, being very shrewd, he managed on occasion to persuade Ferondo to bring her to the abbey, when they would all go for a pleasant stroll together in the grounds and the Abbot would converse with them in a highly polite and articulate manner about the blessedness of the life eternal and the saintly deeds of various men and women of the past.

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

  exhortation, "Take no thought for the morrow,"312 he distributed the remnant to the poor, and intrusted his sister to a society of pious virgins.313 He visited her only once after—a fact characteristic of the ascetic depreciation of natural ties. He then forsook the hamlet, and led an ascetic life in the neighborhood, praying constantly, according to the exhortation: "Pray without ceasing;" and also laboring, according to the maxim: "If any will not work, neither should he eat." What he did not need for his slender support, he gave to the poor. He visited the neighboring ascetics, who were then already very plentiful in Egypt, to learn humbly and thankfully their several eminent virtues; from one, earnestness in prayer; from another, watchfulness; from a third, excellence in fasting; from a fourth, meekness; from all, love to Christ and to fellow men. Thus he made himself universally beloved, and came to be reverenced as a friend of God. But to reach a still higher level of ascetic holiness, he retreated, after the year 285, further and further from the bosom and vicinity of the church, into solitude, and thus became the founder of an anchoretism strictly so called. At first he lived in a sepulchre; then for twenty years in the ruins of a castle; and last on Mount Colzim, some seven hours from the Red Sea, a three days’ journey east of the Nile, where an old cloister still preserves his name and memory. In this solitude he prosecuted his ascetic practices with ever-increasing rigor. Their monotony was broken only by basket making, occasional visits, and battles with the devil. In fasting he attained a rare abstemiousness. His food consisted of bread and salt, sometimes dates; his drink, of water. Flesh and wine he never touched. He ate only once a day, generally after sunset, and, like the presbyter Isidore, was ashamed that an immortal spirit should need earthly nourishment. Often he fasted from two to five days. Friends, and wandering Saracens, who always had a certain reverence for the saints of the desert, brought him bread from time to time. But in the last years of his life, to render himself entirely independent of others, and to afford hospitality to travellers, he cultivated a small garden on the mountain, near a spring shaded by palms.314 Sometimes the wild beasts of the forest destroyed his modest harvest, till he drove them away forever with the expostulation: "Why do you injure me, who have never done you the slightest harm? Away with you all, in the name of the Lord, and never come into my neighborhood again." He slept on bare ground, or at best on a pallet of straw; but often he watched the whole night through in prayer. The anointing of the body with oil he despised, and in later years never washed his feet; as if filthiness were an essential element of ascetic perfection. His whole wardrobe consisted of a hair shirt, a sheepskin, and a girdle.

• From Crazy Brave (2012)

  [image "6706.jpg" file=Image00008.jpg] [image "6709.jpg" file=Image00009.jpg] [image "6711.jpg" file=Image00010.jpg] The next thing I remember, my mother is holding my small hands in hers, jitterbugging me across her spotless kitchen floor, the sun streaming in on beams of yellow starbursts. What a beautiful being my mother was to me. I studied her endlessly, every plane of her face, the light of her spirit, the flash, fall, and rise of her heart. In those earliest years, before I was five, I thrived in the home she and my father made. He worked as an airline mechanic. She was a magician to me. She took fabric with prints of toys and baby ducks and made new clothes for me and my brother, who was eighteen months younger. She took flour, sugar, eggs, spices, fat, and a hot oven and made cookies in shapes. She made music with her voice as she sang along with the radio, as she cooked and cleaned and took care of a household. My father was more of a mystery. He lived most of the time in a farther-away realm more than he lived within the domestic universe of our home. When he was home from work, he moved through the house as if he were walking through water. I adored my father and I feared him. When he’d lift me up to the sky with a laugh, I yearned to fly. I’d try, but I always disappointed him by crying out with fear of falling. He’d put me down and walk away. Later he’d pull me to his knee and circle me close to his heart. Despite the hurt that made him tight, I knew he loved me. And in the end, I was the one to help lead him through the door of earthly life to the other side. My mother told me that one night not long after I was born she was waiting up for him in the living room. I was an infant, asleep in my bassinet. My father stumbled in the door. He was crazy drunk. He wrapped an arm around Mother’s neck in a chokehold and told her that he would kill her if she didn’t get in there and take care of the baby. She moved slowly and quietly, in shock, to pick me up. While he passed out in the bedroom she held and rocked me and sobbed quietly through the night. The next morning he had no recollection of his threat. As he begged my mother’s forgiveness, he held us both in his arms. She stayed with him and would stay with him until I was eight years old because she loved him, though that night he broke her heart. The heavy promise of snow wet the air, and my brother and I were jittery with anticipation. We wanted it to snow. We wanted our father to make it home with the Christmas tree.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  So there they met, the lady and the scholar, and as they conversed alone together, quite forgetting that this was the man she had almost conveyed to his death, she freely poured out all her troubles, told him what she desired, and begged him to come to her rescue, whereupon the scholar said: ‘Madam, it is perfectly true that magic was one of the subjects I studied in Paris. I can assure you that I learned all there is to know about it, but since it is most distasteful to God, I made a vow never to practise it, either for my own or anyone else’s benefit. However, my love for you is so intense that I find it impossible to refuse you anything, so even if I were to be consigned to Hell for this alone, I am ready to do it, since that is what you want of me. Nevertheless, I must warn you that this is a more difficult thing to achieve than perhaps you imagine, especially when a woman wishes to regain the love of a man or vice versa, for it cannot be done except by the person most closely involved. Moreover it is essential for this person to be very brave, for the operation must be carried out at night in a lonely place, with no other people present, and I do not know whether you are ready to comply with these conditions.’ Being more a slave to her love than a model of common sense, the lady replied: ‘So powerful are the promptings of Love that I would do anything to possess again the man who has so cruelly forsaken me. But tell me, why do I have to be brave?’

• From Crazy Brave (2012)

  black and knowing. He looks to me with full knowledge of his place in this story. He will soon forget it. I look at him with an unbearable love, and with troubling questions: What have I gotten myself into? How will we ever make it through? I have never felt so vulnerable. We both slept hard, the weight of chemicals heavy in our bodies. We were exhausted from the journey. When I woke early the next morning, I yearned to hold and nurse my child. I was not allowed to sit up or walk because of the possibility of paralysis (one of the drug’s side effects). When I finally got to hold my boy, the nurse stood guard as if I would hurt him. I was young and Indian and therefore ignorant. I bent my mind around her judgment and cradled my son, checking out his perfect little body. I was proud of what my body and spirit had accomplished despite the alienation of giving birth in a hospital. We left the hospital as soon as possible. My son would flourish on beans and cornbread, and on the dreams and stories we fed him. My mother-in-law blamed me for the fix her son was in. He had returned from his studies in the postgraduate program at Indian school with no job prospects and with yet another pregnant teenage wife who shifted his fortunes. I was the other woman in her life, the reason for his lack of success, for her suffering. I had the one man bound to her by blood and guilt, a sticky bond. Every man she had been with had given her a child, then abandoned her, including her son, who had left her with his daughter while he went to school in the Southwest. I was now in the way, and she took every opportunity to remind me. She threw nothing away. Every item of clothing that her children had ever worn, every toy they had ever played with, every piece of paper with their names on it, she packed into boxes she piled high in her house, to the ceiling. She would not throw away her son because of a strange, foolish girl. I wasn’t pleased about the situation either. None of this had figured into my map for a life, though I must admit the map was never clearly drawn. My path meandered according to the whim of failed adults and chance. It headed wanly toward the life of a painter, like my Aunt Lois, who traveled from the Creek Nation all over the country without the encumbrance of a husband or children and had the money to buy paint, canvas, and a car. Living as an artist was as

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  Then she threw her strong arm around his neck, and they talked together for quite a long while—not in Irish or English but in a quiet language having very few words but many small sounds and many small movements, that meant much more than words. ‘Since you went I’ve discovered a wonderful thing,’ he told her, ‘I’ve discovered that for me you are God. It’s like that some times with us humbler people, we may only know God through His human image.’ ‘Raftery,’ she murmured, ‘oh, Raftery, my dear—I was so young when you came to Morton. Do you remember that first day out hunting when you jumped the huge hedge in our big north paddock? What a jump! It ought to go down to history. You were splendidly cool and collected about it. Thank the Lord you were—I was only a kid, all the same it was very foolish of us, Raftery.’ She gave him a carrot, which he took with contentment from the hand of his God, and proceeded to munch. And she watched him munch it, contented in her turn, hoping that the carrot was succulent and sweet; hoping that his innocent cup of pleasure might be full to the brim and overflowing. Like God indeed, she tended his needs, mixing the evening meal in his manger, holding the water bucket to his lips while he sucked in the cool, clear, health-giving water. A groom came along with fresh trusses of straw which he opened and tossed among Raftery’s bedding; then he took off the smart blue and red day clothing, and buckled him up in a warm night blanket. Beyond in the far loose box by the window, Sir Philip’s young chestnut kicked loudly for supper. ‘Woa horse! Get up there! Stop kicking them boards!’ And the groom hurried off to attend to the chestnut. Collins, who had spat out his two lumps of sugar, was now busy indulging his morbid passion. His sides were swollen well-nigh to bursting—blown out like an air balloon was old Collins from the evil and dyspeptic effects of the straw, plus his own woeful lack of molars. He stared at Stephen with whitish-blue eyes that saw nothing, and when she touched him he grunted—a discourteous sound which meant: ‘Leave me alone!’ So after a mild reproof she left him to his sins and his indigestion.

• From Trash (1988)

  “Ahh well,” she drawls, her fingers still stroking my leg. “It’s not a lie.” She drags herself over, rocking the bed this time, sliding under the sheet. She arranges her body to cup my side, her toes touch my ankle and her head turns so that her mouth is close to my ear. “Not a lie, no.” One hand caresses my stomach; the other hugs my hipbone. “Goddamn you!” I try to lie still but start shaking. “Don’t be boring,” she says. I feel her tongue licking my cheek, wet and almost as rough as a cat’s tongue. My whole body goes stiff, and my hands ball up into fists. “Why do you keep coming back? Why don’t you leave me alone? You weren’t worth the trouble when you were alive and you sure aren’t doing me any good now.” I start to fight her, trying to pull away or push her away. But she is smoke only, a cloud on my skin, and I can’t escape her. “Motherfucker . . .” I give it up to cry and turn my face into the pillow of her hair. It smells so sweet and familiar, marijuana and patchouli. Katy’s shoulders ride up and down. She arches her back and slides her body over so that her belly is on top of mine. I almost scream from the intensity of the sensation. It feels so good. It feels so awful. “You loved me.” She says it right into the hollow of my ear. “You love me still. Even after you left me, you loved me. You couldn’t stand me, and you damn sure couldn’t save me. But you couldn’t stand it without me either. So here I am. Feel me.” She drums her knuckles on my hipbone. Her teeth nip my neck. I gasp and arch up into her. “I’m part of you,” she whispers. “Right down in the core of you.” I pull myself back down and lie still, giving it up. “I know.” I push my face up. My mouth covers her, tastes her. Her tongue is bitter honey, sliding between my lips, filling my mouth, pushing my own tongue up to the roof of my mouth, expanding until I think I will choke. But I do not fight. I take her in. I want to swallow her, all of her. If she is a ghost, then why not? She could melt into my bones. We could be the same creature. My hips begin to rock. My fingers curl up and try to grip her waist. A heated sweat rises all over my body. I want to rise up like steam into her, pull up right off my own bones, and become something in the air, a scent of marijuana and patchouli, something sweet and nasty and impossibly sad. But I cannot get hold of her. My very movements seem to push her up and away, the cloud of her becoming mistlike, gossamer and fading. “No!”

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  6But Mary Llewellyn was no coward and no weakling, and one night, at long last, pride came to her rescue. She said: ‘I want to speak to you, Stephen.’ ‘Not now, it’s so late—to-morrow morning.’ ‘No, now.’ And she followed Stephen into her bedroom. For a moment they avoided each other’s eyes, then Mary began to talk rather fast: ‘I can’t stay. It’s all been a heart-breaking mistake. I thought you wanted me because you cared. I thought—oh, I don’t know what I thought—but I won’t accept your charity, Stephen, not now that you’ve grown to hate me like this—I’m going back home to England. I forced myself on you, I asked you to take me. I must have been mad; you just took me out of pity; you thought that I was ill and you felt sorry for me. Well, now I’m not ill and not mad any more, and I’m going. Every time I come near you you shrink or push me away as though I repelled you. But I want us to part quickly because. . . .’ Her voice broke: ‘because it torments me to be always with you and to feel that you’ve literally grown to hate me. I can’t stand it; I’d rather not see you, Stephen.’ Stephen stared at her, white and aghast. Then all in a moment the restraint of years was shattered as though by some mighty convulsion. She remembered nothing, was conscious of nothing except that the creature she loved was going. ‘You child,’ she gasped, ‘you don’t understand, you can’t understand—God help me, I love you!’ And now she had the girl in her arms and was kissing her eyes and her mouth: ‘Mary . . . Mary. . . .’ They stood there lost to all sense of time, to all sense of reason, to all things save each other, in the grip of what can be one of the most relentless of all the human emotions. Then Stephen’s arms suddenly fell to her sides: ‘Stop, stop for God’s sake—you’ve got to listen.’ Oh, but now she must pay to the uttermost farthing for the madness that had left those words unspoken—even as her father had paid before her. With Mary’s kisses still hot on her lips, she must pay and pay unto the uttermost farthing. And because of an anguish that seemed past endurance, she spoke roughly; the words when they came were cruel. She spared neither the girl who must listen to them, nor herself who must force her to stand there and listen. ‘Have you understood? Do you realize now what it’s going to mean if you give yourself to me?’ Then she stopped abruptly . . . Mary was crying. Stephen said, and her voice had grown quite toneless: ‘It’s too much to ask—you’re right, it’s too much. I had to tell you—forgive me, Mary.’

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

  In striking contrast with the bloody cruelties practiced by Domitian, he exhorts to prayer for the civil rulers, that God "may give them health, peace, concord, and stability for the administration of the government be has given them."1205 We have here the echo of Paul’s exhortation to the Romans (Rom. 13) under the tyrant Nero. Altogether the Epistle of Clement is worthy of a disciple of the apostles, although falling far short of their writings in original simplicity, terseness, and force. III. In regard to its theology, this epistle belongs plainly to the school of Paul and strongly resembles the Epistle to the Hebrews, while at the same time it betrays the influence of Peter also; both these apostles having, in fact, personally labored in the church of Rome, in whose name the letter is written, and having left the stamp of their mind upon it. There is no trace in it of an antagonism between Paulinism and Petrinism.1206 Clement is the only one of the apostolic fathers, except perhaps Polycarp, who shows some conception of the Pauline doctrine of justification by faith. "All (the saints of the Old Testament)," says he,1207 "became great and glorious, not through themselves, nor by their works, nor by their righteousness, but by the will of God. Thus we also, who are called by the will of God in Christ Jesus, are righteous not of ourselves, neither through our wisdom, nor through our understanding, nor through our piety, nor through our works, which we have wrought in purity of heart, but by faith, by which the almighty God justified all these from the beginning; to whom be glory to all eternity." And then Clement, precisely like Paul in Romans 6, derives sanctification from justification, and continues: "What, then, should we do, beloved brethren? Should we be slothful in good works and neglect love? By no means! But with zeal and courage we will hasten to fulfil every good work. For the Creator and Lord of all things himself rejoices in his works." Among the good works he especially extols love, and describes it in a strain which reminds one of Paul’s 1 Corinthians 13: "He who has love in Christ obeys the commands of Christ. Who can declare the bond of the love of God, and tell the greatness of its beauty? The height to which it leads is unspeakable. Love unites us with God; covers a multitude of sins; beareth all things, endureth all things. There is nothing mean in love, nothing haughty. It knows no division; it is not refractory; it does everything in harmony. In love have all the elect of God become perfect. Without love nothing is pleasing to God.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  The girl was greatly prized by the King on account of her beauty, but as he was feeling somewhat indisposed, he ordered that until such time as he recovered she should be lodged with a retinue in a sumptuous villa in one of his gardens, known as La Cuba; 4 and these instructions were carried out. The girl’s abduction gave rise to a great furore in Ischia, but the worst part about it was that they had no idea who it was that had carried her off. Gianni, who was the person most deeply affected by her disappearance, knew better than to hang about waiting for news in Ischia, and, having ascertained the direction taken by her captors, he hired a frigate of his own, in which, as swiftly as possible, he scoured the whole of the coast from Cape Minerva to Scalea 5 in Calabria, making inquiries about the girl wherever he went. Finally, at Scalea, he was told she had been taken by Sicilian sailors to Palermo, and thither he made his way as speedily as he could. On discovering, after searching high and low for her, that she had been given to the King and was being kept by him in La Cuba, he was greatly perturbed and not only despaired of retrieving her but almost gave up hope of ever seeing her again. Nevertheless, sustained by Love, he sent away the frigate and remained in Palermo, for it was clear that nobody in those parts knew who he was. He frequently walked past La Cuba, and one day, to the great joy both of himself and the girl, they caught sight of each other as she was standing at a window. Seeing that the street was deserted, Gianni got as near to her as he could manage, spoke to her, and was told by the girl of the means he would have to adopt if he wanted to talk to her in greater privacy. He then went away, having first surveyed with care the surrounding area. Biding his time till long after darkness had fallen, he returned to the spot, and by climbing over a wall that would not have afforded a perch to a woodpecker, he made his way into the garden. There he found a long pole, and having, in accordance with the girl’s instructions, propped it against a window, he hauled himself up to it without any trouble. Feeling that her honour was by now as good as lost, the girl, who in the past had treated him rather cruelly in her determination to preserve it, had made up her mind to gratify his every desire, for she could think of no man who had a greater right to possess her, and moreover she was hopeful of persuading him to effect her release; she had therefore left the window open, to ensure that he had immediate access to her.

• From Crazy Brave (2012)

  percent of him was spirit and it was often unreachable, even to him. This earth can be difficult and jarring. Joy can be known only through despair here. My father was by nature sensitive. He instinctively understood cloud language, the meanings of birds and their appearances, and water. What took precedence in his expression was his father’s violent hand. My father was sent from home at a young age to a military academy. He learned anger as a method to control sensitivity. When my father asked my mother to dance, she shyly but surely entered his arms. They had just met, yet it felt like they had known each other for as far as forever can reach. When my mother first saw this man who would be my father, she knew he was the one, despite his reputation for being a man who loved women. There were many women chasing after him, buying him drinks, pulling on him to dance. They wanted to touch him for his sensual good looks. I imagine that my mother struck a light inside the deepest room in his heart. His charisma was power that had come down from the ancestors. It is something given to us to use to assist others. I was close to my father through the end. He never spoke of my mother in a negative manner. My parents danced. What dancers they were, their feet jumping in swing, together in time. My mother-to-be was fire. Those of fire move about the earth with inspiration and purpose. They are creative, and can consume and be consumed by their desires. They are looking for purpose, a place in which to create. They can be so entranced with the excitement of creation that their dreams burn up, turn to ashes. My father-to-be was of the water, and could not find a hold on the banks of earthiness. Water people can easily get lost. And they may not comprehend that they are lost. They succumb easily to the spirits of alcohol and drugs. They will always search for a vision that cannot be found on earth. Their dance was an ancient dance, one that most of us who take on breath know. It is fate setting the story into place. Within the year, I was born to earth, of water and fire. Because I came through them in this life, I would be quick to despair, and understand how to enter and emerge from ancestor realms. I had no way to translate the journey and what I would find there until I found poetry.

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

  On this instrument of torture he stretched himself at night for 8 years. The last year he affixed to it 7 sharp needles. For a long time he went through 2 penitential drills a day, beating with his fist upon the cross as it hung against his back, while the needles and nails penetrated into his flesh, and the blood flowed down to his feet. As if this were not a sufficient imitation of the flagellation inflicted upon Christ, he rubbed vinegar and salt into his wounds to increase his agony. His feet became full of sores, his legs swelled as if he had had the dropsy, his flesh became dry and his hands trembled as if palsied. And all this, as he says, he endured out of the great inner love which he had for God, and our Lord Jesus Christ, whose agonizing pains he wanted to imitate. For 25 years, cold as the winter might be, he entered no room where there was a fire, and for the same period he abstained from all bathing, water baths or sweat baths—Wasserbad und Schweissbad. But even with this list of self-mortifications, Suso said, the whole of the story was not told. In his fortieth year, when his physical organization had been reduced to a wreck, so that nothing remained but to die or to desist from the discipline, God revealed to him that his long-practised austerity was only a good beginning, a breaking up of his untamed humanity,—Ein Durchbrechen seines ungebrochenen Menschen,—and that thereafter he would have to try another way in order to "get right." And so he proceeded to macerations of the inner man, and learned the lessons which asceticisms of the soul can impart. Suso nowhere has words of condemnation for such barbarous self-imposed torture, a method of pleasing God which the Reformation put aside in favor of saner rules of piety. Other sufferings came upon Suso, but not of his own infliction. These he bore with Christian submission, and the evils involved he sought to rectify by services rendered to others. His sister, a nun, gave way to temptation. Overcoming his first feelings of indignation, Suso went far and near in search of her, and had the joy of seeing her rescued to a worthy life, and adorned with all religious virtues. Another cross he had to bear was the charge that he was the father of an unborn child, a charge which for a time alienated Henry of Nördlingen and other close friends. He bore the insinuation without resentment, and even helped to maintain the child after it was born. Suso’s chief writings, which abound in imagery and comparisons drawn from nature, are an Autobiography,480 and works on The Eternal Wisdom— Büchlein von der ewigen Weisheit — and the Truth—Büchlein von der Wahrheit. To these are to be added his sermons and letters. The Autobiography came to be preserved by chance. At the request of Elsbet Staglin, Suso told her a number of his experiences.

• From Trash (1988)

  Margaret’s face relaxes. She stands up, but then stops and leans across the table to kiss me on the cheek. “Old times,” she laughs. “I’ve had some of my best times with you, you know.” “I know.” I watch Margaret walk away and shake my head. Margaret has gotten so skinny, she almost has no ass at all anymore. When I first met her she looked just like a Botticelli virgin, all lush and pink and full. I’d flirted with her for two years until she would go to bed with me, but then we’d spent the night in giggles. “Get serious,” I’d kept insisting, but neither of us could. After a while we’d given up the idea of sex and just relaxed into cuddling and telling stories. Once every few years we try it again, but with the same result. “Maybe it’s how we smell to each other,” Margaret once suggested. “I read about that somewhere. Or maybe we just know each other too well, huh?” I’d been laughing so hard at the time, I hadn’t been able to reply. I don’t really care anymore what it is that makes us so unsuited as lovers. We’ve become the best of friends. Not like Paula and me: we’ve been snipping at each other ever since we stopped being lovers. I wonder if Paula still drinks half a glass of vodka to put herself to sleep every night and if she’s still seeing Fawn now and then. For a moment I think about all the things we never say to each other, the things we know that we don’t admit we know. Dirt. Gossip. Simple cruelty and self-righteousness. I remember the first time Jackie showed me her drawings, the fear and uncertainty in her face, the fierceness on the features of the women she had drawn. I had liked the drawings. I had loved the passion in Jackie when she held them, the way she ground her teeth together as I lifted one after the other. I had wanted to tell her it would be all right, that people would love her warrior women, that I loved the way they threw their heads back and stared out of the drawings. Jackie seemed so fragile with her drawings spread out before her, like those white mountain flowers that come up in the spring on sturdy stalks but lose their blossoms if the wind hits them too suddenly. That’s exactly what she’s like, tough and wiry and sure to stand up to violence, but just as much at risk. I wonder if she has burned the drawings that Fawn and Pris didn’t find. A Lesbian Appetite

• From Trash (1988)

  Katy gives her laugh finally, and predictably, I feel the goose bumps rise on my thighs. She settles herself so that her naked left hip is against my shoulder. Her skin is smooth, cool, and wonderful. I put my hand on her thigh, and she leans forward to sniff my cheek and rub her lips on my eyebrows. I cannot touch Katy without remembering making love to her on Danny’s couch with a dozen drunk and stoned people around the corner in the living room; the tickle of the feathers she wore laced into the small braids over her ears, and the cold chill of the knife she always pulled out of her boot and pushed under the pillows, the sheathed blade that always seemed to migrate down to the small of my back. Most of all I remember the talent with which Katy would bite me just hard enough to make me gasp, her bubbling laughter as she whispered, “Don’t make no noise. They’ll hear.” Even now, after all this time, I sometimes make love holding my breath, trying to make no sound, pretending that it is the way it always was back then, with drunk and dangerous strangers around the corner and Katy playing at trying to get me to make a sound they might hear. It was the worst sex and the best, the most dangerous and absolutely the most satisfying. No one else has ever made love to me like that—as if sex were a contest on which your life depended. No one has ever scared me so much, or made me love them so much. And no one else has ever died on me the way she did, with everything between us unsettled and aching. I slap her thigh brusquely, pushing her back. “You should have had the consideration to puke into a pot. Ruining that shirt that way. You were always careless of me and my stuff.” Katy nods. “A little. Yeah, I was.” She settles back on the mattress, cross-legged and still just touching my shoulder. “But I always made it up to you. Remember, I stole you another shirt in Atlanta.” Her hand trading the joint is transparent. I can see right through to her smoky breasts, the nipples dark and stiff. “That cotton cowboy shirt with the yellow yoke and the green embroidery. Made you look like a toked-up Loretta Lynn.” She gives her short, barking laugh. “You still got that one?” “No, I lost it somewhere.”

• From Trash (1988)

  Maybe that was the story I should have written, but it was not. By the time I got back to my big complicated household, I was working on the story of what Grandma Mattie Lee might have been like as a girl. What if? And I was in it, watching Shirley beat on the steps with that broom handle. Would I have made Mattie Lee so heroic if my own mother had not hidden her death from me, if my uncle had not spoken so brutally? Maybe. Still, what I wrote felt right on the page, and from this distance that seems the primary fact. I did a lot of things because it felt right on the page, or sounded right when read out loud in an empty room. I did not finish that story in Tallahassee. I did not finish that story till Brooklyn, fully fifteen years after my grandmother’s death. Even then, I think I finished it because I fell in love with that teenage girl, her mouth full of white and her eyes full of fire. It worked well enough that it was another of the stories my mama would never talk to me about. “Now that’s mean,” my mama said about one of the stories I sent her. She smiled and gave a little shudder when she said it. That is what I intended, I told her. I want it mean. I did not say that I also wanted the story to be about love and compassion. For that sometimes I had to dig deeper, into the muscle of character. Still, I think you can tell that I loved my impossible grandmother with my whole heart, her black brows and wide face, her bulldog glare and frank inclination to tell me things my mother never intended me to learn. I knew she worked her children the way her mother had worked her, putting them out to pick strawberries for neighboring farmers and pocketing the money to buy snuff. I knew she was quick to slap and full of desperation, but I knew also that in the context of how she had been raised and what she had survived, she was almost gentle, almost sweet-tempered. But not quite. I had sweet-tempered cousins and I saw them get ground down. I had gentle aunts and it seemed they almost disappeared out of their own lives. Is it any wonder that when I set out to write stories, I made up women like my grandmother, like my great-grandmother? Troublesome, angry, complicated women with secretive, unpredictable natures—that is who you will find in my stories—and little girls who were not me. What are these stories about? Shame and outrage, pride and stubbornness, and the vital necessity of a sense of humor. I wrote to release indignation and refuse humiliation, to admit fault and to glorify the people I loved who were never celebrated. I wrote to celebrate. I wrote to take a little revenge, and sometimes to make clear that revenge was not what I was doing. Always, I tried not to use the flat metallic language of politics and preaching, but sometimes I knew no other way to frame what I had to say.

• From Trash (1988)

  It was a lesson in the power of love. Looking back at me from between her mother’s legs, Shannon was wholly monstrous, a lurching hunched creature shining with sweat and smug satisfaction. There had to be something wrong with me I was sure, the way I went from awe to disgust where Shannon was concerned. When Shannon sat between her mama’s legs or chewed licorice strings her daddy held out for her, I purely hated her. But when other people would look at her hatefully or the boys up at Lee Highway would call her “Lard Eyes,” I felt a fierce and protective love for her as if she were more my sister than Reese. I felt as if I belonged to her in a funny kind of way, as if her “affliction” put me deeply in her debt. It was a mystery, I guessed, a sign of grace like my Catholic Aunt Maybelle was always talking about. I met Shannon Pearl on the first Monday of school the year I entered the third grade. She got on the bus two stops after Reese and me, walking stolidly past a dozen hooting boys and another dozen flushed and whispering girls. As she made her way up the aisle, I watched each boy slide to the end of his seat to block her sitting with him and every girl flinch away as if whatever Shannon had might be catching. In the seat ahead of us Danny Powell leaned far over into the aisle and began to make retching noises. “Cootie Train! Cootie Train!” somebody yelled as the bus lurched into motion and Shannon still hadn’t found a seat. I watched her face—impassive, contemptuous, and stubborn. Sweat was showing on her dress but nothing showed in her face except for the eyes. There was fire in those pink eyes, a deep fire I recognized, banked and raging. Before I knew it I was on my feet and leaning forward to catch her arm. I pulled her into our row without a word. Reese stared at me like I was crazy, but Shannon settled herself and started cleaning her bottle-glass lenses as if nothing at all was happening. I glared at Danny Powell’s open mouth until he turned away from us. Reese pulled a strand of her lank blond hair into her mouth and pretended she was sitting alone. Slowly, the boys sitting near us turned their heads and began to mutter to each other. There was one soft “Cootie Bitch” hissed in my direction, but no yelling. Nobody knew exactly why I had taken a shine to Shannon, but everyone at Greenville Elementary knew me and my family—particularly my matched sets of cousins, big unruly boys who would just as soon toss a boy as a penny against the school walls if they heard of an insult against any of us.