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.

Page 137 of 184 · 20 per page

• From Justine (Alexandria Quartet vol. 1) (1957)

  ‘Ah! but if you had seen her then as I did in her humbler, gentler moments, remembering that she was only a child, you would not have reproached me for cowardice. In the early morning, sleeping in my arms, her hair blown across that smiling mouth, she looked like no other woman I could remember: indeed like no woman at all, but some marvellous creature caught in the Pleistocene stage of her development. And later again, thinking about her as I did and have done these past few years I was surprised to find that though I loved her wholly and knew that I should never love anyone else — yet I shrank from the thought that she might return. The two ideas co-existed in my mind without displacing one another. I thought to myself with relief “Good. I have really loved at last. That is something achieved”; and to this my alter ego added: “Spare me the pangs of love requited with Justine.” This enigmatic polarity of feeling was something I found completely unexpected. If this was love then it was a variety of the plant which I have never seen before. (“Damn the word” said Justine once. “I would like to spell it backwards as you say the Elizabethans did God. Call it evol and make it a part of ‘evolution’ or ‘revolt’. Never use the word to me.”)’ * * * * * These later extracts I have taken from the section of the diary which is called Posthumous Life and is an attempt the author makes to sum up and evaluate these episodes. Pombal finds much of this banal and even dull; but who, knowing Justine, could fail to be moved by it? Nor can it be said that the author’s intentions are not full of interest. He maintains for example that real people can only exist in the imagination of an artist strong enough to contain them and give them form. ‘Life, the raw material, is only lived in potentia until the artist deploys it in his work. Would that I could do this service of love for poor Justine.’ (I mean, of course, ‘Claudia’.) ‘I dream of a book powerful enough to contain the elements of her — but it is not the sort of book to which we are accustomed these days. For example, on the first page a synopsis of the plot in a few lines. Thus we might dispense with the narrative articulation. What follows would be drama freed from the burden of form. I would set my own book free to dream.’

• From The Chronology of Water (2011)

  These hairy women - they were - they were mythic. As a kid, I had no idea what they were in real life - students, girlfriends of something, females who used hand-held hairdryers, people who shopped at the mall with purses and drove cars around - but at the pool and in the locker rooms they were mythic. I think that’s why I remember so many of their names, these larger than life to a kid women - Jo Harshbarger and Evie Kosenkranius and Karen Moe and Shirley Babashoff. Lynn Collella Bell. I used to walk around the locker rooms and toddle dreamily out to my mom’s car looking up at the sky with LynnCollellaBellLynnCollelaBellLynnCollellaBell making song loops in my skull. LynnColllelaBell with the broadest shoulders and teeniest hips I’d ever seen. Making me hippoventate. Is it any wonder that by the time I was 12 I could barely keep from biting one of them? All that flesh and wet. Me standing forever in the hot shower staring and staring and I’m pretty sure drooling … it’s a wonder I didn’t pass out in all the dreamy steam and crack my skull open. For a long time I thought there was something wrong with me that I wanted to lunge at one of them and hump them like a little monkey. At home, in bed, alone, I’d get on my stomach and butterfly kick my bed to death. Or maul a pillow grinding my hips and clenching my knees around it. Finally it got so frustrating - this whatever it was I had in me - I had to resort to hair care items like brushes and combs and rubber bands. Snap. Yeah? Have you ever tried it? Then shut up. You know, now that I’m thinking of it, it didn’t even occur to me to put something UP IN THERE. I didn’t get my period until I was much older due to my athlete body, and no one, not my mother, not my sister, not any of my friends, not my swim coach bothered to explain the manwoman sex thing to me. I mean of course I figured it out later, what with television and film and so forth, and my slutty friend Kelly Gates who explained it to me while I barfed a little in my own mouth, but for a good long while, and you know, even today if I sit too close to one, I thought I might die from wanting to rub myself raw on a girl.

• From Justine (Alexandria Quartet vol. 1) (1957)

  But by some curious paradox it was these very defects of character — these vulgarities of the psyche — which constituted for me the greatest attraction of this weird kinetic personage. I suppose in some way they corresponded to weaknesses in my own character which I was lucky to be able to master more thoroughly than she could. I know that for us love-making was only a small part of the total picture projected by a mental intimacy which proliferated and ramified daily around us. How we talked! Night after night in shabby sea-front cafés (trying ineffectually to conceal from Nessim and other common friends an attachment for which we felt guilty). As we talked we insensibly drew nearer and nearer to each other until we were holding hands, or all but in each other’s arms: not from the customary sensuality which afflicts lovers but as if the physical contact could ease the pain of self-exploration. Of course this is the unhappiest love-relationship of which a human being is capable — weighed down by something as heartbreaking as the post-coital sadness which clings to every endearment, which lingers like a sediment in the clear waters of a kiss. ‘It is easy to write of kisses’ says Arnauti, ‘but where passion should have been full of clues and keys it served only to slake our thoughts. It did not convey information as it usually does. There was so much else going on.’ And indeed in making love to her I too began to understand fully what he meant in describing the Check as ‘the parching sense of lying with some lovely statue which was unable to return the kisses of the common flesh which it touches. There was something exhausting and perverting about loving so well and yet loving so little.’

• From The Chronology of Water (2011)

  Once Michael came to visit when Philip and I still lived in Eugene. After the baby died. Philip and I were nothing about each other. I had already begun a new chapter with Devin in a house across town. Philip worked at Smith Family Bookstore by day, and by night he painted in a one-room efficiency somewhere else. The plan was that Michael would visit Phillip for a few days, and then spend a couple with me. But on the second day Michael showed up on my doorstep at three in the morning. I opened the door. He looked like ass. He had his suitcase with him. He said, “I can’t stay in that fucking efficiency. It reeks. There’s cat piss and shit and oil paint everywhere. The guy doesn’t live like a human.” And I let him in. It was then that I knew that we had both loved Phillip. Together. Deeply. And that both of us left Phillip. Divorced him. Forever. Unable to understand how to live with his brilliant, passive hands. It was a sacred truth between us. After Devin and I divorced, Devin went to visit Michael and Dean in Seattle, I guess wanting to feel like they were still his friends. I hated knowing he was there. My Michael and Dean. Goddamn you, Devin. But then Mike called and told me, “All he wants to talk about is how many times a day he fucks the womanchild. I don’t give a shit how many times he screws the infant. GAWD. It’s so juvenile.” The next day he called again and said, “Devin drank all the alcohol in the house while we were at work. I think he stole one of our pans. And some of Dean’s CDs. He’s never staying here again.” I know it’s petty. Idiotic. But I loved him so much for telling me that. When Andy and I were first getting together, it was hard. Andy was still married. So we had a couple of rendezvous out side of San Diego. One of them was in Seattle where Mike and Dean lived. They had moved there from Dallas sometime after my baby died. They moved there for work, I’m sure - both of them are astonishingly talented graphic designers. But to me it seemed that Mike had moved to Seattle to be closer to me. I mean I wished it was true. I wished the moment when he said one afternoon “We should live closer together,” the afternoon we downed 12 beers in a row in my house in Eugene, was somehow why he was near. It’s the wish of a child.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  It was dry and limp, and its petals were brown at the edges and coming loose; and it was rather flat, because I had slept many nights with it beneath my pillow.‘When you threw this to me,’ I said to her, ‘my life changed. I think I must have been - asleep - till that moment: asleep, or dead. Since I met you, I’ve been awake - alive! Do you think I could give that up, now, so easily?’My words startled her - as well they might, for I had never spoken like this before, to her or to anyone. She looked away from me, about the room, and ran her tongue over her lips. ‘And all of them, downstairs?’ she said, nodding towards the door. ‘Your mother and father, your brother, Alice, Freddy?’ As she spoke there came a shout, and the sound of voices raised in friendly argument.They mean nothing to me, I wanted to say, compared with you ... But I only shrugged, and smiled.She smiled then, too. ‘And so you really will come? We must leave on Sunday, you know - a week from today. It doesn’t give you long.’I said it would be long enough; and she placed the faded rose upon the bed, and seized my hands and squeezed them hard.‘Oh Nan! My dear Nan! We’ll have such times together, I promise you!’ As she spoke, she flung my hands aside and gripped me in a fierce embrace, and laughed with pleasure, so that I felt her body shudder in my arms.Then, all too soon, she stepped away, and I had only empty air to clutch at.There was more noise from below, then the sound of a door opening, followed by the thud of feet upon the staircase, and a cry: ‘Nancy!’ It was Alice. She paused outside the bedroom door, but was too polite - or fearful - to turn the handle. ‘Everyone is leaving,’ she called. ‘Mother says will Miss Butler just step down for a moment, please, for them to say good-bye.’I looked at Kitty. ‘You go on,’ I said, ‘without me, and I shall come down in a minute. And don’t,’ I added in a lower voice, ‘say anything to them about - our plans. I’ll talk to them about it, later on.’She nodded, and gave my hand another squeeze; then she opened the door and joined Alice on the landing, and I heard them step below, together.I stood in the gathering shadows and put my trembling fingers before my face.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  We had lived and slept and laboured, side by side, for half a year; but there had been a kind of veil between us, that our cries and whispers of the night before had quite torn down. She looked flushed, washed - new-born; so that I could hardly press her skin, for fear of marking it - so that I feared, almost, to kiss her lips again in case they bruised.But I did kiss them; and then I lay, quite at my leisure, and watched as she splashed water on her face and arms, and fastened on her underclothes and frock, and buttoned her shoes. As she worked at her hair I lit a cigarette: I struck the match and let it burn almost to my fingers, gazing at the flame as it ate its way along the wood. I said, ‘When I first knew you, I used to think that, whenever I thought of you, I was all lit up, like a lamp. I was afraid that people would see...’ She smiled. I gave the match a shake. ‘Didn’t you know,’ I said then, ‘didn’t you know, that I loved you?’‘I’m not sure,’ she answered; then she sighed. ‘I didn’t like to think of it.’‘Why not?’She shrugged. ‘It seemed easier to be your friend ...’‘But Kitty, that’s just what I thought! And oh! wasn’t it terribly hard! But I thought, that if you knew I liked you as a, as a sweetheart - well, I never heard of such a thing before, did you?’She moved to the glass to work again at the pins in her plait, and now, without turning, she said, ‘It’s true I never cared for any other girl, like I care for you ...’ As she said it I saw her neck and ears grow pink, and felt myself grow weak and warm and silly in response; but I caught a glimpse of something, too, behind her words.‘It has happened before, then,’ I said flatly, ‘with you...’ She grew redder than ever, but would make me no reply; and I fell silent. But the fact was, I loved her too much to want to fret for very long about the other girls she might have kissed before me. ‘When was it,’ I asked next, ‘that you began to think of me like ...

• From Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection (2013)

  People everywhere need others to lean on. Social support is a lifeline. My guess, though, is that when you visualize offering social support to someone, you imagine another person as weak or suffering in some manner. In your mind’s eye, you might visualize your friend in the hospital, your neighbor’s child having just fallen off his bicycle, or your coworker near tears under the strain of crushing demands. Yet the latest research documents that offering social support when things go right is a more efficient way to build relationships than offering it when things go wrong. In fact, it’s precisely those moments in which you celebrate another’s good fortune that let him or her know you truly care and instill faith that you’ll lend a hand during tougher times ahead. It can take practice, however, to recognize and respond to others’ good fortune in this healthy, life-giving and relationship-strengthening way. You may need, after all, to break long-standing habits of resentment, self-diminishment, or indifference. Try the next activity to open your heart to celebratory love. Try This Meditation Practice: Celebratory Love Find a location where you can sit undisturbed. Place your feet flat on the floor and adjust your position and posture until your body feels both alert and open. Lengthen your spine as if it were an antenna. Lift your heart as if you were offering it up as a gift. Take a few slow and deep breaths, bringing your awareness to each as it rises and falls. Then bring your awareness to your intention for this practice session. Perhaps it’s to learn to be an even better friend, or to reduce pernicious envy and instead learn to celebrate others’ successes. Know that good events—both seemingly minor and major—are abundant in other people’s lives. Sometimes, all it takes is to awaken from the trance of self-absorption to see this abundance pouring forth. Throughout the session, bring your awareness to your heart region from time to time. Take time to notice how your practice is affecting your body, even your face. As ever, the sentiments and bodily sensations you create are more important than the particular phrases you repeat to yourself.

• From Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection (2013)

  If you have difficulty summoning your good qualities, try sidestepping this obstacle by imagining how those who care for you might see you. Be like Saint Francis to the sow. Imagine for a moment stopping the busy pace of your daily life. See yourself stopped, freeze-frame, in the midst of your daily activities. Now imagine: Approaching you in this freeze-framed moment is someone who cares for you, someone who, at one time or another, has appreciated you and shown you warmth. This could be a mentor or a dear friend, your partner, parent, or another loving relative, either alive now, or long gone. Imagine that this person’s intention is to remind you of your long-forgotten loveliness. Perhaps like Saint Francis, he or she rests a hand on your brow and reminds you, in words and in touch, of your good qualities. What would he or she say? What would you remember? What image of yourself would emerge? Try This Meditation Practice: See Yourself as the Target of Others’ Love You can circumnavigate your own particular obstacles to self-love by visualizing the cherished people in your life themselves engaged in the well- wishing that typifies LKM, whether or not they have actually practiced this technique formally. Imagine all your beloved mentors and friends, all your treasured family members, standing in a circle around you. You are now the center of each one’s attention and loving regard, the hub of this imagined social gathering. Just as, in LKM, you extend your own wishes for each of them to feel safe, happy, healthy, and at ease, the feeling is often mutual. These other people wish for you to feel safe, happy, healthy, and at ease. Visualize how it is that you might be represented in each of their minds and hearts. On to which of your good qualities would they shine a light? Gently hold those descriptions of you that surface in your mind and let them soak in. Recall your many actions that underlie these characterizations of you. Allow yourself to see those actions as deep indicators of your worth. Draw sustenance from the positive regard in which these cherished others hold you. Relax yourself into its warmth, feeling the safety and security it offers you. Now visualize the unfurling of good wishes emanating from each person’s heart to yours. Like the spokes of a wheel, these wishes connect the outer ring of your circle of supporters to you, its hub. At this point, you might visualize all of those gathered speaking the classic phrases of LKM in unison, with your own name inserted: May you, [your name here], feel safe and protected. May you, [your name], feel happy and peaceful. May you, [your name], feel healthy and strong.

• From Wild (2012)

  We’d married so young, so uncharacteristically, even our parents asked why we couldn’t just live together. We couldn’t just live together, even though I was only nineteen and he twenty-one. We were too wildly in love and we believed we had to do something wild to demonstrate that, so we did the wildest thing we could think of and got married. But even married, we didn’t think of ourselves as married people—we were monogamous, but we had no intention of settling down. We packed our bicycles into boxes and flew with them to Ireland, where a month later, I turned twenty. We rented a flat in Galway and then changed our minds and moved to Dublin and got a matching pair of restaurant jobs—he in a pizza place, me in a vegetarian café. Four months later, we moved to London and walked the streets so destitute we searched for coins on the sidewalk. Eventually, we returned home, and not long after that my mother died and we did all the things that we did that led us here, to Val’s office. Paul and I had clutched each other’s hands beneath the table, watching Val as she methodically examined our do-it-yourself no-fault divorce documents. She inspected one page and then the next, and on and on through fifty or sixty, making sure we’d gotten everything right. I felt a kind of loyalty rear up in me as she did this, unified with Paul against whatever contrary claim she might make, as if we were applying to be together for the rest of our lives instead of the opposite. “It all looks good,” she said at last, giving us a reticent smile. And then she went back through the pages again, at a brisker clip this time, pressing her giant notary public stamp against some and sliding dozens of others across the table for us to sign. “I love him,” I blurted when we were nearly through, my eyes filling with tears. I thought about pulling up my sleeve and showing her the square of gauze that covered my brand-new horse tattoo, as proof, but I only stammered on. “I mean, this is not for lack of love, just so you know. I love him and he loves me …” I looked at Paul, waiting for him to interject and agree and declare his love too, but he remained silent. “Just so you know,” I repeated. “So you won’t get the wrong idea.” “I know,” Val said, and pushed the pink hank of her hair aside so I could see her eyes fluttering nervously from the papers up to me and then down to the papers again. “And it’s all my fault,” I said, my voice swelling and shaking. “He didn’t do anything. I’m the one. I broke my own heart.”

• From Wild (2012)

  They got into the front and we drove. I looked out the window, at the towering trees whipping past, thinking of Eddie. I felt a bit guilty that I hadn’t mentioned him when the women asked about my parents. He’d become like someone I used to know. I loved him still and I’d loved him instantly, from the very first night that I met him when I was ten. He wasn’t like any of the men my mother dated in the years after she divorced my father. Most of those men had lasted only a few weeks, each scared off, I quickly understood, by the fact that allying himself with my mother meant also allying himself with me, Karen, and Leif. But Eddie loved all four of us from the start. He worked at an auto parts factory at the time, though he was a carpenter by trade. He had soft blue eyes and a sharp German nose and brown hair that he kept in a ponytail that draped halfway down his back. The first night I met him, he came for dinner at Tree Loft, the apartment complex where we lived. It was the third such apartment complex we’d lived in since my parents’ divorce. All of the apartment buildings were located within a half-mile radius of one another in Chaska, a town about an hour outside of Minneapolis. We moved whenever my mom could find a cheaper place. When Eddie arrived, my mother was still making dinner, so he played with Karen, Leif, and me out on the little patch of grass in front of our building. He chased us and caught us and held us upside down and shook us to see if any coins would fall from our pockets; if they did, he would take them from the grass and run, and we would run after him, shrieking with a particular joy that had been denied us all of our lives because we’d never been loved right by a man. He tickled us and watched as we performed dance routines and cartwheels. He taught us whimsical songs and complicated hand jives. He stole our noses and ears and then showed them to us with his thumb tucked between his fingers, eventually giving them back while we laughed. By the time my mother called us in to dinner, I was so besotted with him that I’d lost my appetite.

• From Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection (2013)

  The love you crave lies within momentary experiences of connection. Other concepts that go by the word love in our shared cultural vocabulary—the all-consuming desire, the exclusive bonds, the commitments to loyalty, the unconditional trust—are best viewed as key players within the larger positivity system that surrounds love. Each in fact grows stronger as your moments of love accumulate: When you’ve truly connected with someone else, your trust in that person expands, your relationship and loyalty deepen, and you want to spend more good times together. But that’s only half the story. The causal arrow also runs in the other direction: Each of these players within the larger positivity system—the desire, bonds, commitments, and trust—also triggers subsequent moments of loving connection. Put simply, it’s far easier to connect with another person, when your desire, bond, commitment, or trust is present and strong. So these players are both cause and consequence of loving connections. This is what sustains the complex and dynamic positivity system that forges your often inexplicable ties to family, friends, and community. Love energizes this whole system and sets it into motion. There’s a lot going on here. It’s no wonder that love puzzles us. Adding to the confusion, the word love is commonly affixed to different parts of the system. So when you tell someone that you love him, you may well be invoking a range of different, albeit closely related concepts. You might, for instance, mean to say that you crave the time you two spend together. Alternatively, you could mean to say that you trust that person and intend to be loyal yourself. Or perhaps professing your love to another serves as a way to elevate that particular relationship as an especially important one in your life, a way to invite or secure that person within your innermost circle. And perhaps most often, your declaration of “I love you” is meant to convey “all of the above.” From a practical standpoint, there’s certainly nothing wrong with that. I wouldn’t ask you to upgrade your vision of love if I didn’t see a big payoff for doing so. When we unravel love in chapter 2, you’ll begin to understand it in terms that your body knows. For now, suffice it to say that although you may subscribe to a whole host of definitions of love, your body subscribes to just one: Love is that micro-moment of warmth and connection that you share with another living being.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  We were teenagers, preoccupied with how we looked and with what others thought of us. Special-unit boys were our omnipotent superheroes, the most desirable men, and our society worshiped them. I knew that this was Ben’s victory, that he felt recognized and had compensated for his family’s “inferiority” with his new sense of superiority, of pride. We lived in the midst of the paradox of going to war and being in love with love. Love was everywhere and we lived an intensity that only the combination of hormones and war could produce. We held each other tight because we didn’t know what tomorrow would bring. It was now or never. I remember those nights when we performed for hundreds of soldiers who had not been home for weeks. I was too young to understand what I felt, that tension in the air, an energy that I don’t think I’ve ever experienced before or since. It was the time we performed for the Golani Brigade unit that I remember most vividly. We were invited to perform on their last day of training. The musical group performed every day and we usually didn’t know in advance who our audience would be. The production unit took care of the practicalities. We just met every day at noon. Duchan, our military driver, waited for us to load the musical and sound equipment on the bus, and we drove, to the south, to the north, or to the east. We didn’t really care where and we didn’t mind his wild driving, thinking that if we had an accident we would finally get a chance to skip that evening’s show. The Golani base was all the way in the north, about three hours’ drive from our base. We were tired and took naps on the bus. When we got there, it was almost evening and we had only two hours to put the stage together, eat something, and start the show. We looked around. The place seemed empty. “Where is everyone?” we asked. “They have to finish something and will come to your concert right after,” someone answered. I remember thinking, They can come whenever they want, or come late, or not come at all. I helped the drummer put his drum set together and then checked the microphones. “The soldiers are really looking forward to it,” someone else said. “We are too,” we lied. It was our second year performing the same show every night. At that point we didn’t even like one another anymore, and we could sing those songs in our sleep. But we felt it was not appropriate to complain. After all, we went home almost every night. “Can you play the songs faster today?” we asked the drummer. “It’s already late and the soldiers are not here yet. We won’t get home till late tonight. ” Sometimes, when we played songs we didn’t like, the drummer actually did play them faster and we all thought it was funny.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  Many of my patients come to see me because of my professional writing and teaching on the subject of sexuality. I see men and women who feel destroyed by a partner’s affair, others who had or are having affairs, and those who are lovers of married people. Their stories are different and their motivations are diverse, but all these people reveal themselves to be tortured as they struggle with their own secrets or with the secrets of the people in their lives. While I am aware of the transactional aspect of every relationship, I also believe in love. I believe in the power of attachment between two people, in loyalty as one of the basic foundations of trust, and I consider destructive and creative forces to be part of every relationship. We love and at times we also hate the people we love; we trust them but are also afraid of the injuries and hurt they might cause us. One of the goals associated with growth is the ability to integrate positive and negative feelings: to hate lovingly, to love while recognizing moments of disappointment and anger. The more we can know and own our destructive urges, the more able we become to love fully. Life, to some degree, is always about that tension between the wish to destroy—ruin the love, goodness, and life itself—and Eros, which represents not only sex, but also the urge to survive, create, produce, and love. That tension exists in every aspect of our lives, including in our relationships. Psychological awareness helps us to identify and bring those urges and wishes into consciousness, and to question our choices and the choices of the people who came before us. When it comes to affairs, that work is multilayered, and the distinction between destruction and death, and survival and life isn’t always obvious. One significant reason why people come to therapy is to search for unknown truths about themselves. That investigation starts with a wish to know who we truly are and who our parents were, and it always includes the dread of knowing. Why does Eve have this relationship with Josh? Why now? What part of it is about a need to survive and bring herself back to life, and what part is attached to death and destruction? In what way is her present life a reflection of the lives of the women who came before and an attempt to heal not only herself, but also her wounded mother and her dying grandmother?

• From The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir (2004)

  He rejects gossip, refuses photographs, and eschews the love note. He is not a romantic, he is a practitioner of the here and now. He acts like a man unafraid of death—or else joyously defiant. I, however, am mortified by my mortality, and so I scribble on and on, searching for evidence, creating evidence, of our affair. He says he doesn’t need devotion. He says he doesn’t even really need to be listened to. If he isn’t heard the first time, he’ll say it again. What he does want, he says, is the adventure, the ride together, the opportunity to enter a time warp with someone. A-Man is a man with many tools. He can hang a mirror with toggle bolts, clean a skylight, grill a rack of lamb, pose naked in the garden like a Rodin sculpture, and fuck my ass. He’s a doer, not a thinker, and he openly admits that he wants a woman to be smarter than he is. I have never before met a guy brave enough to want that. It is the confidence of a man who owns his cock and knows exactly what to do with it and where to put it. Thinkers, in my experience, can’t fuck; they’re too busy with the meaning and the metaphors, too busy avoiding their tool, afraid of entering a hole without a clearly marked exit. He is an underthinker—and overfucker. A-Man leaves the meaning of the metaphors to me. He has given me almost no material gifts. Except one. A twelve-pack stack of yellow legal pads. I am writing on one now. Smart guy. Why him? Four things: 1) He loves me. 2) He knows how to fuck me. 3) He doesn’t take me seriously. 4) He is not afraid of me. one else had all four. Most only had the first, and even that was usually merely a sentiment, not a course of action. If you love me you shall fuck me without fear. I don’t want to be a whore to a man’s insecurities. I want to be a whore to my own. STATISTICS Enough—for now—of my story. What about yours? I am not alone, you know, in my sometimes unlawful obsession. Despite the landmark 2003 Supreme Court decision Lawrence v. Texas that renders all antisodomy laws unconstitutional and unenforceable, the statutes are still on the books in twenty-two states and Puerto Rico (and I suspect that Disneyland has an ordinance somewhere in the fine print). Every state in the Union had an antisodomy law until 1962, when Illinois became the first state to repeal the law.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  When did you begin to think that you might learn to - to love me?’ Now she did turn, and smiled. ‘I remember a hundred little times,’ she said. ‘I remember how you made my dressing-room so nice and neat; I remember your blushes as I kissed you good-night. I remember how you opened an oyster for me at your father’s table - but then, I think I loved you then, already. Indeed, I’m ashamed to say, that it must have been that moment, at the Canterbury Palace, when I first smelled the oyster-liquor on your fingers, that I began to think of you as - as I shouldn’t have.’ ‘Oh!’ ‘And I’m even more ashamed to say,’ she went on in a slightly different tone, ‘that it wasn’t until last night - when I saw you larking with that boy, and was so jealous - that I learned how much, how much ...’ ‘Oh, Kitty...’ I swallowed. ‘I’m glad you learned it, at last.’ She looked away, then came to me and took my fag, and gave me one brisk kiss. ‘So am I.’ After that she bent to rub with a cloth at the leather of her boots, and I found myself yawning: I was weary, and rather sick from the champagne and the excitements of the night. I said, ‘Must we really get up?’ and Kitty nodded. ‘We must - for it’s almost eleven, and Walter will be here soon. Had you forgotten?’ It was a Sunday, and Walter was coming, as usual, to take us driving. I had not forgotten - but had had no time and no desire, yet, to think of ordinary things. Now, at the mention of Walter’s name, I grew thoughtful. It would be rather hard on him, now that this had happened. As if Kitty knew what I was thinking, she said, ‘You will be sensible with Walter, won’t you, Nan?’ Then she repeated what she had said the night before upon the bridge: ‘You won’t let on, will you, to anyone? You will be careful - won’t you?’ I silently cursed her for being so prudent; but took her hand and kissed it. ‘I have been being careful since the first minute I saw you. I am the Queen of Carefulness. I shall go on being careful for ever, if you like - so long as I might be a bit reckless, sometimes, when we are quite alone.’ Her smile, when she gave it, was a little distracted. ‘After all,’ she said, ‘things have not changed, so very much.’

• From Justine (Alexandria Quartet vol. 1) (1957)

  A policeman had appeared in the doorway, obviously troubled about the abandoned car. That was the first time I saw the great house of Nessim with its statues and palm loggias, its Courbets and Bonnards — and so on. It was both beautiful and horrible. Justine hurried up the great staircase, pausing only to transfer her olivepit from the pocket of her coat to a Chinese vase, calling all the time to Nessim. We went from room to room, fracturing the silences. He answered at last from the great studio on the roof and racing to him like a gun-dog she metaphorically dropped me at his feet and stood back, wagging her tail. She had achieved me. Nessim was sitting on the top of a ladder reading, and he came slowly down to us, looking first at one and then at the other. His shyness could not get any purchase of my shabbiness, damp hair, tin of olives, and for my part I could offer no explanation of my presence, since I did not know for what purpose I had been brought here. I took pity on him and offered him an olive; and sitting down together we finished the tin, while Justine foraged for drinks, talking, if I remember, of Orvieto where neither of us had been. It is such a solace to think back to that first meeting. Never have I been closer to them both — closer, I mean, to their marriage; they seemed to me then to be the magnificent two-headed animal a marriage could be. Watching the benign warmth of the light in his eye I realized, as I recalled all the scandalous rumours about Justine, that whatever she had done had been done in a sense for him — even what was evil or harmful in the eyes of the world. Her love was like a skin in which he lay sewn like the infant Heracles; and her efforts to achieve herself had led her always towards, and not away from him. The world has no use for this sort of paradox I know; but it seemed to me then that Nessim knew and accepted her in a way impossible to explain to someone for whom love is still entangled with the qualities of possessiveness. Once, much later, he told me: ‘What was I to do? Justine was too strong for me in too many ways. I could only out-love her — that was my long suit. I went ahead of her — I anticipated every lapse; she found me already there, at every point where she fell down, ready to help her to her feet and show that it did not matter. After all she compromised the least part of me — my reputation.’

• From Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection (2013)

  Consider, too, whether you might benefit from making your self-reflections more formal, by using the positivity tracking tools I’ve made available on the website that accompanies this book, at www.PositivityResonance.com. In any case, be ready to see changes. Your potential for love is virtually unbounded. I see at least two reasons for this. First, positive emotions are ubiquitous. Despite the hardwired human habit of scanning current circumstances for sources of danger and negativity, positive emotions are what most people feel most frequently. This tendency toward positivity reflects the reassuring fact that most moments are indeed benign. Right in this moment, for instance, as you are reading this sentence, I suspect that you’re sitting fairly comfortably and that no one is inserting pins into your eyes. So what’s not to like about the present moment? Relax and enjoy it. Look around and you’ll come to realize that you can increase your ratio of positive to negative emotions even further by becoming more attuned to the sources of positive emotion in your midst, be they a welcomed sense of safety, a shimmer of beauty, or a small gesture of kindness. The second reason your potential for love is nearly limitless is that social interactions are also ubiquitous. Like bees and ants, we humans are ultrasocial creatures. Your life is embedded within increasingly vast networks of relationships, social ties, and broader communities. Just count up the number of people you see or communicate with on any given day. Your tally includes not only family and friends after all but also team members and other work associates, neighbors, and acquaintances, the employees and fellow customers at any business you happen to visit, and more. Love can infuse and nourish all of these connections—even whole networks of people—just as it infuses and nourishes your own body and mind. At the heart of love is a feeling—a feeling with both physical as well as mental components. Physically, your whole body feels relaxed, with a warmth and openness in your chest, as if your heart were stretching open to let in or embrace another being. This is the feeling that makes you want to move in closer, to listen and observe more carefully. Mentally, you yearn for good fortune for others. You wish them well with great sincerity. You also wish to show how much you care, to enact tenderness and concern. We’ve all experienced love like this at one time or another. It’s that warm and tender feeling you have when you first hold a newborn, or greet a cherished friend after many months, or even years, apart. Some of this tenderness, along with its associated impulse to show care and concern, is even released when you come across a kitten, puppy, or other baby animal. Think here of a time when some small creature drew a slow “Awwww . . .” out of you. If you’re like many people, you recognize this tender feeling rolling through you mostly when you’re with loved ones.

• From The Confessions of Saint Augustine (354)

  But they who by Thy Spirit see these things, Thou seest in them. Therefore when they see that these things are good, Thou seest that they are good; and whatsoever things for Thy sake please, Thou pleasest in them, and what through Thy Spirit please us, they please Thee in us. For what man knoweth the things of a man, save the spirit of a man, which is in him? even so the things of God knoweth no one, but the Spirit of God. Now we (saith he) have received, not the spirit of this world, but the Spirit which is of God, that we might know the things that are freely given to us of God. And I am admonished, “Truly the things of God knoweth no one, but the Spirit of God: how then do we also know, what things are given us of God?” Answer is made me; “because the things which we know by His Spirit, even these no one knoweth, but the Spirit of God. For as it is rightly said unto those that were to speak by the Spirit of God, it is not ye that speak: so is it rightly said to them that know through the Spirit of God, ‘It is not ye that know.’ And no less then is it rightly said to those that see through the Spirit of God, ‘It is not ye that see’; so whatsoever through the Spirit of God they see to be good, it is not they, but God that sees that it is good.” It is one thing then for a man to think that to be ill which is good, as the forenamed do; another, that that which is good, a man should see that it is good (as Thy creatures be pleasing unto many, because they be good, whom yet Thou pleasest not in them, when they prefer to enjoy them, to Thee); and another, that when a man sees a thing that it is good, God should in him see that it is good, so, namely, that He should be loved in that which He made, Who cannot be loved, but by the Holy Ghost which He hath given. Because the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost, Which is given unto us: by Whom we see that whatsoever in any degree is, is good. For from Him it is, who Himself Is not in degree, but what He Is, Is.

• From Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection (2013)

  It lassos the fuller dynamic system in which love and other positive emotions operate. Positive emotions are the tiny engines that drive this intricate, ever-churning positivity system. They are the active ingredients that set the rest in motion. Yet when I step back from the proverbial microscope to examine the larger system that orbits around your positive emotions, I see how positive emotions knit you into the fabric of life, the social fabric that unites you with others, and how they orchestrate the ways you grow and rebound through changing circumstances. I needed a new word to encompass that broader system, and that’s positivity. Keeping an eye on this fuller positivity system enables a more precise definition of love, which I provide in chapter 2 . Love—like all the other positive emotions—follows the ancestral logic of broaden and build : Those pleasant yet fleeting moments of connection that you experience with others expand your awareness in ways that accrue to create lasting and beneficial changes in your life. The love you crave lies within momentary experiences of connection. Other concepts that go by the word love in our shared cultural vocabulary—the all-consuming desire, the exclusive bonds, the commitments to loyalty, the unconditional trust—are best viewed as key players within the larger positivity system that surrounds love. Each in fact grows stronger as your moments of love accumulate: When you’ve truly connected with someone else, your trust in that person expands, your relationship and loyalty deepen, and you want to spend more good times together. But that’s only half the story. The causal arrow also runs in the other direction: Each of these players within the larger positivity system—the desire, bonds, commitments, and trust—also triggers subsequent moments of loving connection. Put simply, it’s far easier to connect with another person, when your desire, bond, commitment, or trust is present and strong. So these players are both cause and consequence of loving connections. This is what sustains the complex and dynamic positivity system that forges your often inexplicable ties to family, friends, and community. Love energizes this whole system and sets it into motion. There’s a lot going on here. It’s no wonder that love puzzles us. Adding to the confusion, the word love is commonly affixed to different parts of the system. So when you tell someone that you love him, you may well be invoking a range of different, albeit closely related concepts. You might, for instance, mean to say that you crave the time you two spend together. Alternatively, you could mean to say that you trust that person and intend to be loyal yourself. Or perhaps professing your love to another serves as a way to elevate that particular relationship as an especially important one in your life, a way to invite or secure that person within your innermost circle. And perhaps most often, your declaration of “I love you” is meant to convey “all of the above.”

• From Justine (Alexandria Quartet vol. 1) (1957)

  We slept, and I was only woken by the dry click of Hamid’s key turning in the lock and by his usual evening performance. For a pious man, whose little prayer mat lay rolled and ready to hand on the kitchen balcony, he was extraordinarily superstitious. He was as Pombal said, ‘djinn-ridden’, and there seemed to be a djinn in every corner of the flat. How tired I had become of hearing his muttered ‘Destoor, destoor’, as he poured slops down the kitchen sink — for here dwelt a powerful djinn and its pardon had to be invoked. The bathroom too was haunted by them, and I could always tell when Hamid used the outside lavatory (which he had been forbidden to do) because whenever he sat on the water-closet a hoarse involuntary invocation escaped his lips (‘Permission O ye blessed ones!’) which neutralized the djinn which might otherwise have dragged him down into the sewage system. Now I heard him shuffling round the kitchen in his old felt slippers like a boa-constrictor muttering softly. I woke Justine from a troubled doze and explored her mouth and eyes and fine hair with the anguished curiosity which for me has always been the largest part of sensuality. ‘We must be going’ I said. ‘Pombal will be coming back from the Consulate in a little while.’ I recall the furtive languor with which we dressed and silent as accomplices made our way down the gloomy staircase into the street. We did not dare to link arms, but our hands kept meeting involuntarily as we walked, as if they had not shaken off the spell of the afternoon and could not bear to be separated. We parted speechlessly too, in the little square with its dying trees burnt to the colour of coffee by the sun; parted with only one look — as if we wished to take up emplacements in each other’s mind forever. It was as if the whole city had crashed about my ears; I walked about in it aimlessly as survivors must walk about the streets of their native city after an earthquake, amazed to find how much that had been familiar was changed. I felt in some curious way deafened and remember nothing more except that much later I ran into Pursewarden and Pombal in a bar, and that the former recited some lines from the old poet’s famous ‘The City’ which struck me with a new force — as if the poetry had been newly minted: though I knew them well. And when Pombal said: ‘You are abstracted this evening. What is the matter?’ I felt like answering him in the words of the dying Amr:* ‘I feel as if heaven lay close upon the earth and I between them both, breathing through the eye of a needle.’ PART II