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 Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  She came towards me, and took hold of the knot to straighten it; the pulse at my throat began at once to knock against her fingers, and I started a fruitless fumbling at my hips for a pair of pockets in which to thrust my hands. ‘What a fidget you are,’ she said mildly, quite as if she were addressing Cyril; but her cheeks, I noticed, had not paled - nor was her voice, I thought, quite steady. She finished at my throat at last, then stepped away again. ‘There is just my hair,’ I said. I took two brushes and dampened them in my water-jug, and combed the hair away from my face till it was flat and sleek; then I greased my palms with macassar - I had macassar, now - and ran them over my head until the hair felt heavy, and the little, overheated room was thick with scent. And all the time, Florence leaned against the frame of the parlour door and watched me; and when I had finished, she laughed. ‘My word, what a pair of beauties!’ This was Ralph, come that moment along the passageway, with Cyril at his feet. ‘We didn’t recognise them, did we, son?’ Cyril held up his arms to Florence, and she lifted him with a grunt. Ralph put his hand upon her shoulder and said, in an altogether softer tone, ‘How fair you look, Flo. I haven’t seen you look so fair, for a year and more.’ She tilted her head, graciously; they might for a moment have been a knight and his lady, in some medieval portrait. Then Ralph looked my way, and smiled; and I didn’t know who it was that I loved more, then - his sister, or him. ‘Now, you will manage with Cyril, won’t you?’ said Florence anxiously, when she had handed the baby back to Ralph and begun to button her coat. ‘I should think I will!’ said her brother. ‘We won’t be late.’ ‘You must be as late as you like; we shall not wonder. Only mind you are careful. They are rather rough streets, that you must cross...’

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  For me, Farah Jasmine Griffin is an intellectual mother. A teacher who let me take her graduate class when I was still a teenager. An example of how to be intentionally undisciplined and accountable to legacy at the same time. A person who I have looked to over and over again in order to see myself enough to be myself in a difficult moment. When I didn’t know what to major in. Or where to go to graduate school. Or how to form words after my father died. Farah is the person who I drove across multiple states, accumulating multiple speeding tickets to see after I defended my dissertation and after she said, in front of a room of Black feminist scholars, “this is my first intellectual daughter.” Farah Griffin started reading Toni Cade Bambara’s work as a girl-child. She often tells the story of how she was drawn to the image of the beautiful Black woman on the cover of Bambara’s groundbreaking 1970 anthology The Black Woman, not only Black, but dark, with an afro, with her mouth shaped like she had something to say.55 She asked her father to buy it for her, and he agreed. If she would memorize a poem from the book and present it to the family. So in a way, Farah Griffin’s chosen relationship to the legacy of Toni Cade Bambara was a gift from her father. An opportunity to feel affirmed in her skin, a challenge to embody generations of brilliance, at home. It was not too long after this gift that Farah experienced a major loss. Her father died, while she was still a girl-child, twelve years old. And he died in a way that could have been prevented if we had the society we deserve. The police, first responders, projected their fear of Black men onto him and responded to his health emergency as if he was a threat instead of a person in dire need of medical help. And their racism, their judgment, their ineptitude cost him his life. Cost Farah and her family so much it can never be repaid. And so Farah continued to study Toni Cade Bambara, not only because Bambara was a warrior for the world we deserve, a critic of the violence of the state, a stand for stories beyond the story racism reproduces, but also because as she has continued to write and think about and teach Bambara’s work, she has extended her father’s gift into her adulthood and ours, the lives and knowing of all her students. She actualizes what the police could not understand, that her father was a necessary teacher to generations, a life with the right to continue.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  But till then - till then, Flo, can’t we go on kissing, and just be glad?’ As lovers’ vows go, this one was, I suppose, rather curious; but we were girls with curious histories - girls with pasts like boxes with ill-fitting lids. We must bear them, but bear them carefully. We should do very well, I thought, as Florence sighed and raised her hand to me at last; we should do very well, so long as the boxes stayed unspilled. Chapter 19 T hat afternoon, we put the truckle-bed back in the attic — I think its castors had got permanently skewed - and I moved my night-things to Florence’s room, and put my gown beneath her pillow. We did it while Ralph was out; and when he came home, and gazed at the place where the bed had used to be propped, and then at us, with our blushes and our shadowy eyes and swollen lips, he blinked about a dozen times, and swallowed, and sat and raised an issue of Justice before his face; but when he rose to go to his room that night, he kissed me very warmly. I looked at Florence. ‘Why doesn’t Ralph have a sweetheart?’ I said, when he had left us. She shrugged. ‘Girls don’t seem to care for him. Every tom friend of mine is half in love with him, but regular girls - well! He goes for dainty ones; the last one gave him up for the sake of a boxer.’ ‘Poor Ralph,’ I said. Then: ‘He is remarkably forbearing on the matter of your — leanings. Don’t you think?’ She came and sat on the arm of my chair. ‘He’s had a long time to get used to them,’ she said. ‘Have you always had them, then?’ ‘Well, I suppose there was always a girl or two, somewhere about the place. Mother never was able to figure it out. Janet don’t care - she says it leaves more chaps for her. But Frank’-this was the older brother, who came visiting from time to time with his family - ‘Frank never liked to see girls calling for me, in the old days: he slapped me over it once, I’ve never forgotten it. He wouldn’t be at all tickled to see you here, now.’ ‘We can pretend it’s otherwise, if you like,’ I said. ‘We can bring the truckle-bed back, and pretend -’ She leaned away from me as if I had sworn at her. ‘Pretend? Pretend, and in my own house? If Frank doesn’t like my habits, he can stop visiting. Him, and anyone else with a similar idea. Would you have people think we were ashamed?’ ‘No, no. It was only that Kitty -’ ‘Oh, Kitty! Kitty!

• From The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica Volume 10 (2011)

  “You know,” she said. Yes I knew. I would die. But awaken anew as a monster. Another freak who could only survive the madness by feeding on the blood of others. As she had done for centuries. But I loved her now. Of: that I had no doubt. And I wanted us to stay together. Forever. Now we had met, now we had come as one, neither of us could ever bear the loneliness of being apart again. “T will,’ I said. I maxxed my credit cards and we took a flight to Venice. Our hotel is a converted palazzo and from our windows we have a half glimpse of the Grand Canal and further upstream the stillness of the lagoon. Maybe I’m too much of a romantic, but I wanted it to happen in a place like this. On a day like this I have asked her to kill me so I can live forever and roam the land of death with her until the end of time, both now renegades, lovers in the blood, vampires. The Woman in his Room Saskia Walker Luke had a woman in his room. I could hear the familiar sound of his voice — gravely and seductive —as it filtered out of the partly open bedroom door. I paused on the landing and listened. There was music playing in the background, something sensual and rhythmic. Then I heard the woman’s laughter, and something inside me altered. The small part of me that was still immature balked because it was some other woman, and not me. But the part of me that was a young woman who was becoming more deeply aware of her own sexuality — the part that had been stimulated by my exposure to Luke in our home — responded altogether differently. Desire, and the sure knowledge of my own needs, flamed inside me. The crush I had been nurturing for Luke changed. It wasn’t an ethereal emotion cloaked in sighs of longing and wistful glances anymore. It was hardcore lust. And I liked it. I liked this feeling of being a woman who had physical needs that were more powerful than her daydreams. I could just as easily be that woman in Luke’s room. I wanted to be that woman, it was as simple as that. Td wanted Luke since the day he had moved in, three weeks earlier. I doubt my father would have let his business partner stay over after his wife threw him out had he known that I would develop an obsession with him. Dad thought I was far too busy at college. ‘Too busy to notice a man like Luke? No way.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  No claim of anything. Not their bodies. Not their hearts. Not their times. Not their freedoms. And maybe just maybe if you truly believe this, you can be free. No one can own you. And you are free to share your love. Share your time and body, share your wine and laughter. Share your dreams and worries. Understand the individuality and the communality as well as the commonality of life, pain, and death. And, in between, be open to love, joy, and promise. Respect the mind in its sharpness and loss. The mood in its light and darkness. The wealth in its abundance and poverty. And the mess that comes with all that. RF. In your lectures, you ask repeatedly, “Are we too scared to live?” So Zizi, are you not scared of death? The Rocca Family, in our practice, we try to encourage turning pain and guilt into accepting the pleasures that are in front of our eyes, that we don’t need to go far to seek pleasure, many bodies to feel, many hearts to get warm with, many waters to swim, we try to live and not think of living as a dream, a future plan, but to accept our existence in its simplest form. Maybe we are scared of talking about the future, because in the future there is death. In your world, is there a future? Zizi, our homelands are burning, are disappearing; does it mean we are disappearing too? Zizi. [image file=image_rsrc3M4.jpg] 98. Are you scared of death? Wildfires eating up acres of life reducing it all into ashes are fundamentally a problem of the earthly humans living near them. They lose their homes and belongings, clothes, and photographs. Maybe even lives. And that is a problem because they do not see themselves equal to the tree or to the bird or to the coyote burning, losing, rebuilding. The wildfires are rebirth. Life in death. Like in hurricanes and tsunamis. For everyone except man. Because man is arrogant. Man is separatist. What if we were all trees? We grow and experience wind and sun and rain and hunger and thirst and satisfaction; we give birth, we give shade, we offer homes, we make memories, and we burn so others can live. There is real pain in loss. Real pain in being lost. Real pain in bleeding wounds and burning skin. Real pain in unrealized dreams and broken families and hunger and rotting, untreated wounds of the flesh and of the emotion/psyche. Life brings us pains—lick them.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  Wherever you’re going, I’m already there, a tree waiting. Massaging my mother’s feet until she sleeps, I slot my knuckles between her toes, trying to tell when they’ll be tender. At the back of her heels and calves, I know each of her tendons by note. Pluck them into music, play away their pain. She once told me that a tree’s leaves are its ears: A leaf listens to the light. I want many ears growing from my skin, a whole field to listen with. When my mother farts in her sleep, I shape the steam with my hands and release it outside as fog. I remember the story she once told me about how all mountains were once hammered out of mist, and that’s how they move, how they rise and dissolve, returning to the genealogy of the sky. At night, Ben climbs over my mother’s body and nestles her head in my armpit. We kiss until our tongues can’t tell themselves apart. I dream of biting off her nipple, spitting the coin of it back into her palm. Make a wish, I say, while she flings the nipple-coin into her mouth, swallows. We wake together at the same time, our names in each other’s mouths, our heat making glue of the moon, and it means we’ve come true. Halfway through the night, we hear chirping. At first I think it’s the sky raining teeth. Ben crawls out of our tent, one hand extended like the sound is a string she can pull on, lure in. I crawl out after her, my arm slipping down the sleeve of a hole. We are beaded with mosquitos, slapping them off each other’s thighs, our hands bright with the blood we’ve stolen back from their bellies. A laced wing is cleaved to the corner of her mouth and I lean forward, lick it off. We scan the sky and the top of the fence, but both are empty. Ben says, Listen, kneeling to the soil. It’s coming from under. The sound comes from beneath our feet, a symphony of the buried. Needling my toes into the soil, I can almost feel the fester of wings. The key around Ben’s neck is the nearest light and I reach for it. A moon docking in the dark of my throat. Reaching up, Ben plucks a strand of sound from the air, follows it back to the ground where it was planted. I hold the hem of her shirt and she steers me toward the 口 where the chirping is clearest, where the sound is ambering inside our mouths.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  Dani. I met adrienne early on in college, more than twenty years ago. I felt close to her soon after meeting. We shared a love of writing, of thinking deeply about things. Our work on a labor of love, a campus literary journal called Roots and Culture took us from being acquaintances to close friends. Then we went on a random trip to Prague together, spring break of our senior year, and that sealed the deal. There has been so much in the intervening years that has been important and beautiful, through a lot of cities, partners, family changes, and just life happening. I’m an only child, but at the age of nineteen or twenty, I feel like I acquired adrienne as a sister. Jodie. I first saw Adrienne in Vancouver when she was on a speaking tour for her first book, How to Get Stupid White Men Out of Office. A year later we got to know each other at a training for environmental activists and it was there sparks flew (in the hot tub to be exact). I was starved for a justice and equity perspective in the enviro movement and adrienne brought it along with joy and laughter. Over time we became friends and comrades and I eventually moved from Vancouver to Oakland. Dani. Jodie and I moved to Oakland around the same time. The building where adrienne lived was nicknamed Melrose Place and had a patio where there was lots of ongoing hanging out with neighbors and folks in the community. I met Jodie there—she was friends with adrienne and another friend in the building, Jessamyn Sabbag. I got to know more about Jodie, and we began spending time together. Then she recruited me as part of this wild work retreat near Vancouver a few years later in September 2010. amb. I think that was the one where we got mad people of color up in the British Columbia forest and the power went out because of a squall? I had forgotten that. Dani. I got to better understand Jodie’s work and build trust with her as part of that journey, which was complex. Jodie. I remember sending adrienne off on her sabbatical—like getting her to the airport was everything. amb. Oh my god, I remember that! You took me to get a functional, grown-up suitcase.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  At his cry Florence looked up and met my gaze, and gave a gulp. She had taken the daisy from her lapel, and was turning it between her fingers. I sat beside her, and placed my arm along the back of the bench so that my hand just brushed her shoulder.‘I thought,’ I said breathlessly, ‘that I had lost you ...’She gazed at Cyril. ‘I watched you talking with Kitty.’‘Yes.’‘You said - you said she would never come back.’ She looked desperately sad.‘I’m sorry, Flo. I’m so sorry! I know it ain’t fair, that she did, and Lilian will never ...’She turned her head. ‘She really came to - ask you back to her?’I nodded. Then, ‘Would you care,’ I asked quietly, ‘if I went?’‘If you went?’ She swallowed. ‘I thought you’d gone already. I saw a look upon your face ...’‘And did you care?’ I said again. She gazed at the flower between her fingers.‘I made up my mind to leave the park and go home. There seemed nothing to stay for - not even Eleanor Marx! Then I got as far as here and thought, “What would I do at home, with you not there ... ?”’ She gave the daisy another twist, and two or three of its petals fell and clung to the wool of her skirt. I looked once about the field, then turned to face her again, and began to speak to her, low and earnestly, as if I were arguing for my life.‘Flo,’ I said, ‘you were right, what you said before, about that address I gave with Ralph. It wasn’t mine, I didn’t mean the words - at least, not then, when I said them.’ I came to a halt, then put a hand to my head. ‘Oh! I feel like I’ve been repeating other people’s speeches all my life. Now, when I want to make a speech of my own, I find I hardly know how.’‘If you are fretting over how to tell me you are leaving -’‘I am fretting,’ I said, ‘over how to tell you that I love you; over how to say that you are all the world to me; that you and Ralph and Cyril are my family, that I could never leave - even though I was so careless with my own kin.’ My voice grew thick; she gazed at me but didn’t answer, so I stumbled on. ‘Kitty broke my heart - I used to think she’d killed it! I used to think that only she could mend it; and so, for five years I’ve been wishing she’d come back. For five years I have scarcely let myself think of her, for fear that the thought would drive me mad with grief. Now she has turned up, saying all the things I dreamed she’d say; and I find my heart is mended already, by you. She made me know it. That was the look you saw on my face.’

• From My Secret Garden (1973)

  Or was I? It didn’t matter. It doesn’t, with fantasies. They exist only for their elasticity, their ability to instantly incorporate any new character, image or idea—or, as in dreams, to which they bear so close a relationship—to contain conflicting ideas simultaneously. They expand, heighten, distort or exaggerate reality, taking one further, faster in the direction in which the unashamed unconscious already knows it wants to go. They present the astonished self with the incredible, the opportunity to entertain the impossible. There were other lovers, and other fantasies. But I never introduced the two again. Until I met my husband. The thing about a good man is that he brings out the best in you, desires all of you, and in seeking out your essence, not only accepts all he finds, but settles for nothing less. He brought my fantasies back into the open again from those depths where I had prudently decided they must live—vigorous and vivid as ever, yes, but never to be spoken aloud again. I’ll never forget his reaction when timidly, vulnerable, and partially ashamed, I decided to risk telling him what I had been thinking. “What an imagination!” he said. “I could never have dreamed that up. Were you really thinking that?” His look of amused admiration came as a reprieve; I realized how much he loved me, and in loving me, loved anything that gave me more abundant life. My fantasies to him were a sudden unveiling of a new garden of pleasure, as yet unknown to him, into which I would invite him. Marriage released me from many things, and led me into others. If my fantasies seemed so revealing and imaginative to my husband, why not include them in the novel I was writing? It was about a woman, of course, and there must be other readers besides my husband, men and other women too, who would be intrigued by a new approach to what goes on in a woman’s mind. I did indeed devote one entire chapter in the book to a long idyllic reverie of the heroine’s sexual fantasies. I thought it was the best thing in the book, the stuff of which the novels I had most admired were made. But my editor, a man, was put off. He had never read anything like it, he said (the very point of writing a novel, I thought). Her fantasies made the heroine sound like some kind of sexual freak, he said. “If she’s so crazy about this guy she’s with,” he said, “if he’s such a great fuck, then why’s she thinking about all these other crazy things… why isn’t she thinking about him?”

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  During the Persian wars a monk finally brought the Christological disputes to an end. Maximus (580–662) insisted that these issues could not be settled simply by a theological formulation: “deification” was rooted in the experience of the Eucharist, contemplation, and the practice of charity. It was these communal rites and disciplines that taught Christians to see that it was impossible to think “God” without thinking “man.” If human beings emptied their minds of the jealousy and animosity that ruin their relations with one another, they could, even in this life, become divine: “The whole human being could become God, deified by the grace of God become man—whole man, soul and body, by nature and becoming whole God, soul and body by grace.” 109 Every single person, therefore, had sacred value. Our love of God was inseparable from our love of one another. 110 Indeed, Jesus had taught that the iron test of our love of God was that we love our enemies: Why did he command this? To free you from hatred, anger and resentment, and to make you worthy of the supreme gift of perfect love. And you cannot attain such love if you do not imitate God and love all men equally. For God loves all men equally and wishes them to “to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.” 111 Unlike the tyrant-bishops who vied for the emperor’s backing, Maximus became a victim, not a perpetrator, of imperial violence. Having fled to North Africa during the Persian wars, in 661 he was forcibly brought to Constantinople, where he was imprisoned, condemned as a heretic, and mutilated; he died shortly afterward in exile. But he was vindicated at the third Council of Constantinople in 680 and would become known as the father of Byzantine theology. The doctrine of deification celebrates the transfiguration of the entire human being in the here and now, not merely in a future state, and this has indeed been the living experience of individual Christians. But this spiritual triumph hardly resembles the “realized eschatology” promoted by emperors and tyrant bishops. After Constantine’s conversion, they had convinced themselves that the empire was the Kingdom of God and a second manifestation of Christ. Not even the catastrophe of the Second Council of Ephesus or the military vulnerability of their empire could shake their belief that Rome would become intrinsically Christian and win the world for Christ. In other traditions people had tried to create a challenging alternative to the systemic violence of the state, but right up to the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453, Byzantines continued to believe that the Pax Romana was compatible with the Pax Christiana. The enthusiasm with which they had greeted imperial patronage was never accompanied by a sustained critique of the role and nature of the state, or its ineluctable violence and oppression. 112 By the early seventh century, both Persia and Byzantium had been ruined by their wars for imperial dominance.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  After luncheon she drove in the Cascine. She has a little carriage with a handsome, brown English horse, and holds the reins herself. I sit behind and notice how coquettishly she acts, and nods with a smile when one of the distinguished gentlemen bows to her. As I help her out of the carriage, she leans lightly on my arm; the contact runs through me like an electric shock. She is a wonderful woman, and I love her more than ever. * * * * * For dinner at six she has invited a small group of men and women. I serve, but this time I do not spill any wine over the table-cloth. A slap in the face is more effective than ten lectures. It makes you understand very quickly, especially when the instruction is by the way of a small woman’s hand. * * * * * After dinner she drives to the Pergola Theater. As she descends the stairs in her black velvet dress with its large collar of ermine and with a diadem of white roses on her hair, she is literally stunning. I open the carriage-door, and help her in. In front of the theater I leap from the driver’s seat, and in alighting she leaned on my arm, which trembled under the sweet burden. I open the door of her box, and then wait in the vestibule. The performance lasts four hours; she receives visits from her cavaliers, the while I grit my teeth with rage. It is way beyond midnight when my mistress’s bell sounds for the last time. “Fire!” she orders abruptly, and when the fire-place crackles, “Tea!” When I return with the samovar, she has already undressed, and with the aid of the negress slipped into a white negligee. Haydée thereupon leaves. “Hand me the sleeping-furs,” says Wanda, sleepily stretching her lovely limbs. I take them from the arm-chair, and hold them while she slowly and lazily slides into the sleeves. She then throws herself down on the cushions of the ottoman. “Take off my shoes, and put on my velvet slippers.” I kneel down and tug at the little shoe which resists my efforts. “Hurry, hurry!” Wanda exclaims, “you are hurting me! just you wait—I will teach you.” She strikes me with the whip, but now the shoe is off. “Now get out!” Still a kick—and then I can go to bed. * * * * * To-night I accompanied her to a soiree. In the entrance-hall she ordered me to help her out of her furs; then with a proud smile, confident of victory, she entered the brilliantly illuminated room. I again waited with gloomy and monotonous thoughts, watching hour after hour run by. From time to time the sounds of music reached me, when the door remained open for a moment. Several servants tried to start a conversation with me, but soon desisted, since I knew only a few words of Italian.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  By this time the second couple was ready to enter the lists: which were a young baronet, and that delicatest of charmers, the winning, tender Harriet. My gentle esquire came to acquaint me with it, and brought me back to the scene of action. And, surely, never did one of her profession accompany her dispositions, for the barefaced part she was engaged to play, with such a peculiar grace of sweetness, modesty and yielding coyness, as she did. All her air and motions breathed only unreserved, unlimited complaisance without the least mixture of impudence, or prostitution. But what was yet more surprising, her spark elect, in the midst of the dissolution of a public open enjoyment, doated on her to distraction, and had, by dint of love and sentiments, touched her heart, though for a while the restraint of their engagement to the house laid him under a kind of necessity of complying with an institution which himself had had the greatest share establishing. Harriet was then led to the vacant couch by her gallant, blushing as she looked at me, and with eyes made to justify any thing, tenderly bespeaking of me the most favourable construction of the step she was thus irresistibly drawn into. Her lover, for such he was, sat her down at the foot of the couch, and passing his arm round her neck, preluded with a kiss fervently applied to her lips, that visibly gave her life and spirit to go through with the scene; and as he kissed, he gently inclined her head, till it fell back on a pillow disposed to receive it, and leaning himself down all the way with her, at once countenanced and endeared her fall to her. There, as if he had guessed our wishes, or meant to gratify at once his pleasure and his pride, in being the master, by the title of present possession, of beauties delicate beyond imagination, he discovered her breast to his own touch, and our common view; but oh! what delicious manual of love devotion; how inimitable fine moulded! small, round, firm, and excellently white; then the grain of their skin, so soothing, so flattering to the touch! and of beauty. When he had feasted his eyes with the their nipples, that crowned them, the sweetest buds touch and perusal, feasted his lips with kisses of the highest relish, imprinted on those all delicious twin-orbs, he proceeded downwards.

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

  His education being thus advanced, Beza, now twenty years old, came to Paris, there, as his father desired, to prosecute further law studies; but his reluctance to such a course was pronounced and invincible, so much so that at length he won his uncle to his side, and was allowed by his father to pursue those literary studies which afterwards accrued so richly to the Reformed Church; but at the time he had no inkling of his subsequent career. By his uncle Claudius’ influence the possessor of two benefices which yielded a handsome income, and enriched further by his brother’s death in 1541, well-introduced and well-connected, a scholar, a wit, a poet, handsome, affable, amiable, he lived on equal terms with the best Parisian society, and was one of the acknowledged leaders.1276 That he did not escape contamination he has himself confessed, but that he sinned grossly he has as plainly denied.1277 In 1544 he made in the presence of two friends, Laurent de Normandie and Jean Crespin, eminent jurists, an irregular alliance with Claudine Denosse,1278 a burgher’s daughter, and at the time declared that when circumstances favored he would publicly marry her. His motive in making a secret marriage was his desire to hold on to his benefices. But he was really attached to the woman, and was faithful to her, as she was to him; and there was nothing in their relationship which would have seriously compromised him with the company in which he lived. The fact that they lived together happily for forty years shows that they followed the leading of sincere affection, and not a passing fancy. In 1548 he published his famous collection of poems—Juvenilia. This gave him the rank of the first Latin poet of his day, and his ears were full of praises. He dedicated his book to Wolmar. It did not occur to him that anybody would ever censure him for his poems, least of all on moral grounds; but this is precisely what happened. Prurient minds have read between his lines what he never intended to put there, and imagined offences of which he was not guilty even in thought.1279 And what made the case blacker against him was his subsequent Protestantism. Because he became a leader of the Reformed Church, free-thinkers and livers and the adherents of the old faith have brought up against him the fact that in the days of his worldly and luxurious life he had used their language, and been as pagan and impure as they.

• From The New Testament (Great Courses) (1997)

  88 Lecture 16: Pauline Ethics services by trying to prove it. A good bit of chaos resulted. In 1 Corinthians 12–14, Paul deals with the problem and lays down some rules: Only two or three should speak in tongues at any service, in turns; only if an interpreter is present; and so on. But in the midst of the discussion, he deals with what is really wrong with the situation in Corinth. Those trying to exalt themselves through manifesting this gift fail to understand that the gifts are given for the sake of the community and are to be practiced out of love for others, not the desire to elevate oneself. And so, he speaks his famous words of 1 Cor. 13:1– 13: “If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a clanging gong or a crashing cymbal…” His mention of tongues, prophecies, and knowledge relate directly to the problems of the Corinthian Church. For Paul, the love commandment was À exible; it could be applied to new situations to determine how believers should live. It applied to obvious problems of personal relationships—such as whether you should defraud your brother or sister (1 Thess. 4). It also applied to less obvious problems of communal relationships—such as whether you should eat meat that had been sacri¿ ced to a pagan deity (1 Cor. 8). His solution to this is very interesting, but can be related to the “love” commandment. Paul did have other criteria of behavior, including some rooted directly in his apocalyptic theology. Paul’s apocalyptic expectation of the end had a radical impact on such areas as his views of marriage and slavery. Because the end was near, one should not change one’s social standing (1 Cor. 7). Slaves should not seek to be set free. People who were single should not get married. A person married to an unbeliever should not seek to be divorced. Even though Paul taught that salvation came apart from the Law, he did not urge lawless behavior. In fact, Paul insisted on the morality of his congregations and applied a number of criteria to ethical situations to determine what the proper mode of behavior was. The ethical injunctions of Scripture were to be followed—especially the command to love one another as oneself. The apocalyptic realities of this world were to affect how one lived one’s life. Paul’s ethics are ultimately rooted in his understanding of God’s act of salvation in Christ. In the next lecture, we will look at Paul’s fullest exposition of his doctrine of salvation, as found in his letter to the Romans. Ŷ

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

  Anthony sprang from a Christian and honorable Coptic family, and was born about 251, at Coma, on the borders of the Thebaid. Naturally quiet, contemplative, and reflective, he avoided the society of playmates, and despised all higher learning. He understood only his Coptic vernacular, and remained all his life ignorant of Grecian literature and secular science.309 But he diligently attended divine worship with his parents, and so carefully heard the Scripture lessons, that he retained them in memory.310 Memory was his library. He afterward made faithful, but only too literal use of single passages of Scripture, and began his discourse to the hermits with the very uncatholic-sounding declaration: "The holy Scriptures give us instruction enough." In his eighteenth year, about 270, the death of his parents devolved on him the care of a younger sister and a considerable estate. Six months afterward he heard in the church, just as he was meditating on the apostles’ implicit following of Jesus, the word of the Lord to the rich young ruler: "If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven; and come and follow me."311 This word was a voice of God, which determined his life. He divided his real estate, consisting of three hundred acres of fertile land, among the inhabitants of the village, and sold his personal property for the benefit of the poor, excepting a moderate reserve for the support of his sister. But when, soon afterward, he heard in the church the 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.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  No, I am merely somewhat tired, but her cruelty has enraptured me. Oh, how I love her, adore her! All this cannot express in the remotest way my feeling for her, my complete devotion to her. What happiness to be her slave! * * * * * She calls to me from her balcony. I hurry upstairs. She is standing on the threshold, holding out her hand in friendly fashion. “I am ashamed of myself,” she says, while I embrace her, and she hides her head against my breast. “Why?” “Please try to forget the ugly scene of yesterday,” she said with quivering voice, “I have fulfilled your mad wish, now let us be reasonable and happy and love each other, and in a year I will be your wife.” “My mistress,” I exclaimed, “and I your slave!” “Not another word of slavery, cruelty, or the whip,” interrupted Wanda. “I shall not grant you any of those favors, none except wearing my fur-jacket; come and help me into it.” * * * * * The little bronze clock on which stood a cupid who had just shot his bolt struck midnight. I rose, and wanted to leave. Wanda said nothing, but embraced me and drew me back on the ottoman. She began to kiss me anew, and this silent language was so comprehensible, so convincing— And it told me more than I dared to understand. A languid abandonment pervaded Wanda’s entire being. What a voluptuous softness there was in the gloaming of her half-closed eyes, in the red flood of her hair which shimmered faintly under the white powder, in the red and white satin which crackled about her with every movement, in the swelling ermine of the kazabaika in which she carelessly nestled. “Please,” I stammered, “but you will be angry with me.” “Do with me what you will,” she whispered. “Well, then whip me, or I shall go mad.” “Haven’t I forbidden you,” said Wanda sternly, “but you are incorrigible.” “Oh, I am so terribly in love.” I had sunken on my knees, and was burying my glowing face in her lap. “I really believe,” said Wanda thoughtfully, “that your madness is nothing but a demonic, unsatisfied sensuality. Our unnatural way of life must generate such illnesses. Were you less virtuous, you would be completely sane.” “Well then, make me sane,” I murmured. My hands were running through her hair and playing tremblingly with the gleaming fur, which rose and fell like a moonlit wave upon her heaving bosom, and drove all my senses into confusion. And I kissed her. No, she kissed me savagely, pitilessly, as if she wanted to slay me with her kisses. I was as in a delirium, and had long since lost my reason, but now I, too, was breathless. I sought to free myself. “What is the matter?” asked Wanda. “I am suffering agonies.” “You are suffering—” she broke out into a loud amused laughter.

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

  The oppressed condition of the church until the time of Constantine made such public demonstrations impossible or unadvisable. In the fourth century, however, we find them in the East and in the West, among orthodox and heretics,922 on days of fasting and prayer, on festivals of thanksgiving, at the burial of the dead, the induction of bishops, the removal of relics, the consecration of churches, and especially in times of public calamity. The two chief classes are thanksgiving and penitential processions. The latter were also called cross-processions, litanies.923 The processions moved from church to church, and consisted of the clergy, the monks, and the people, alternately saying or singing prayers, psalms, and litanies. In the middle of the line commonly walked the bishop as leader, in surplice, stole, and pluvial, with the mitre on his head, the crozier in his left hand, and with his right hand blessing the people. A copy of the Bible, crucifixes, banners, images and relics, burning tapers or torches, added solemn state to the procession.924 Regular annual processions occurred on Candlemas, and on Palm Sunday. To these was added, after the thirteenth century, the procession on Corpus Christi, in which the sacrament of the altar is carried about and worshipped. Pilgrimages are founded in the natural desire to see with one’s own eyes sacred or celebrated places, for the gratification of curiosity, the increase of devotion, and the proving of gratitude.925 These also were in use before the Christian era. The Jews went up annually to Jerusalem at their high festivals as afterward the Mohammedans went to Mecca. The heathen also built altars over the graves of their heroes and made pilgrimages thither.926 To the Christians those places were most interesting and holy of all, where the Redeemer was born, suffered, died, and rose again for the salvation of the world. Christian pilgrimages to the Holy Land appear in isolated cases even in the second century, and received a mighty impulse from the example of the superstitiously pious empress Helena, the mother of Constantine the Great. In 326, at the age of seventy-nine, she made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, was baptized in the Jordan, discovered the holy cross, removed the pagan abominations and built Christian churches on Calvary and Olivet, and at Bethany.927 In this she was liberally supported by her son, in whose arms she died at Nicomedia in 327. The influence of these famous pilgrims’ churches extended through the whole middle age, to the crusades, and reaches even to most recent times.928 The example of Helena was followed by innumerable pilgrims who thought that by such journeys they made the salvation of their souls more sure.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  In this interval, however, I picked out of the broken, often pleasingly interrupted account of himself, that he was, at that instant, actually on his road to London, in not a very paramount plight or condition, having been wrecked on the Irish coast for which he had prematurely embarked, and lost the little all he had brought with him from the South Seas: so that he had not till after great shifts and hardships, in the company of his fellow-traveller, the captain, got so far on his journey; that so it was (having heard of his father’s death and circumstances,) he had now the world to begin again, on a new account: a situation, which he assured me, in a vein of sincerity, that flowing from his heart, penetrated mine, gave him to farther pain, than that he had not his power to make me as happy as he could wish. My fortune, you will please to observe, I had not entered upon any overture of, reserving, to feast myself with the surprise of it to him, in calmer instants. And, as to my dress, it could give him no idea of the truth, not only as it was mourning, but likewise in a style of plainness and simplicity that I had ever kept to with studied art. He pressed me indeed tenderly to satisfy his ardent curiosity, both with regard to my past and present state of life, since his being torn away from me: but I found means to elude his questions, by answers that shewing his satisfaction at no great distance, won upon him to waive his impatience, in favour of the thorough confidence he had in my not delaying it, but for respect I should in good time acquaint him with. Charles, however, thus returned to my longing arms, tender, faithful, and in health, was already a blessing too mighty for my conception: but Charles in distress!... Charles reduced, and broken down to his naked personal merit, was such a circumstance, in favour of the sentiments I had for him, as exceeded my utmost desire; and accordingly I seemed so visibly charmed, so out of time and measure pleased at his mention of his ruined fortune, that he could account for it no way, but that the joy of seeing him again had swallowed up every other sense of concern. In the mean time, my woman had taken, all possible care of Charles’s travelling companion; and as supper was coming in, he was introduced to me, when I received him as became my regard for all of Charles’s acquaintance or friends.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  “No—” I replied,—“and yet my love for you has become a sort of madness. The thought that I might lose you, perhaps actually lose you, torments me day and night.” “But you don’t yet possess me,” said Wanda, and again she looked at me with that vibrant, consuming expression, which had already once before carried me away. Then she rose, and with her small transparent hands placed a wreath of blue anemones upon the ringletted white head of Venus. Half against my will I threw my arm around her body. “I can no longer live without you, oh wonderful woman,” I said. “Believe me, believe only this once, that this time it is not a phrase, not a thing of dreams. I feel deep down in my innermost soul, that my life belongs inseparably with yours. If you leave me, I shall perish, go to pieces.” “That will hardly be necessary, for I love you,” she took hold of my chin, “you foolish man!” “But you will be mine only under conditions, while I belong to you unconditionally—” “That isn’t wise, Severin,” she replied almost with a start. “Don’t you know me yet, do you absolutely refuse to know me? I am good when I am treated seriously and reasonably, but when you abandon yourself too absolutely to me, I grow arrogant—” “So be it, be arrogant, be despotic,” I cried in the fulness of exaltation, “only be mine, mine forever.” I lay at her feet, embracing her knees. “Things will end badly, my friend,” she said soberly, without moving. “It shall never end,” I cried excitedly, almost violently. “Only death shall part us. If you cannot be mine, all mine and for always, then I want to be your slave, serve you, suffer everything from you, if only you won’t drive me away.” “Calm yourself,” she said, bending down and kissing my forehead, “I am really very fond of you, but your way is not the way to win and hold me.” “I want to do everything, absolutely everything, that you want, only not to lose you,” I cried, “only not that, I cannot bear the thought.” “Do get up.” I obeyed. “You are a strange person,” continued Wanda. “You wish to possess me at any price?” “Yes, at any price.” “But of what value, for instance, would that be?”—She pondered; a lurking uncanny expression entered her eyes—“If I no longer loved you, if I belonged to another.” A shudder ran through me. I looked at her She stood firmly and confident before me, and her eyes disclosed a cold gleam. “You see,” she continued, “the very thought frightens you.” A beautiful smile suddenly illuminated her face.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  "How could I be jealous, when he never gave me the slightest cause. I had the key of his house, and could go there at any moment of the day or of the night. If he ever left town I invariably accompanied him. No, I was sure of his love, and therefore of his fidelity, as he likewise had also perfect faith in me. "He had, however, one great defect—he was an artist, and had an artist's lavishness in the composition of his character. Although he now gained enough to live comfortably, his concerts did not yet afford him the means to live in the princely way he did. I often lectured him on that score; he invariably promised me not to throw away his money, but, alas! there was in the web of his nature some of the yarn of which my namesake's mistress—Manon Lescaut—was made. "Knowing that he had debts, and that he was often worried with duns, I begged him several times to give me his accounts, that I might settle all his bills, and allow him to begin life afresh. He would not have me even speak of such a thing. "'I know myself,' he said, 'better than yo do; if I accept once, I'll do so again, and what will be the upshot? I'll end by being kept by you.' "'And where is the great harm?' was my reply. 'Do you think I'd love you less for it?' "'Oh! no; you perhaps might love me even more on account of the money I cost you—for we are often fond of a friend according to what we do for him—but I might be induced to love you less; gratitude is such an unbearable burden to human nature. I am your lover, it is true, but do not let me sink lower than that, Camille,' said he, with a wistful eagerness. "'See! since I knew you, have I not tried to make ends meet? Some day or other I might even manage to pay off old debts; so do not tempt me any more.' "Thereupon, taking me in his arms, he covered me with kisses. "How handsome he was just then! I think I can see him leaning on a dark-blue satin cushion, with his arms under his head, as you are leaning now, for you have many of his feline, graceful ways. "We had now become inseparable, for our love seemed to wax stronger every day, and with us 'fire never drove out fire,' but, on the contrary, it grew on what it fed; so I lived far more with him than at home. "My office did not take up much of my time, and I only remained there just long enough to attend to my business, and also to leave him some moments to practise. The remainder of the day we were together.