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 An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness (1995)

  Richard and I moved into a house in Georgetown and quickly confirmed what our common sense should have told us: we could not have been more different. He was low-key, I was intense; things that cut me to the quick he was able to sail by with scarcely a notice; he was slow to anger, I quick; the world registered gently upon him, sometimes not at all, whereas I was fast to feel both pleasure and pain. He was, indeed, in most ways and at most times, a man of moderation; I was quicker to slight, quicker to sense, and perhaps quicker to reach out and attempt to heal hurts we inevitably caused one another. Concerts and opera, mainstays of my existence, were torture to him, as were long, extended talks or vacations lasting more than three days. We were a complete mismatch. I was filled with a thousand enthusiasms or black despair; Richard, who for the most part maintained an even emotional course, found it difficult to handle—or, worse yet, take seriously—my intensely mercurial moods. He had no idea what to do with me. If I asked him what he was thinking, it was never about death, the human condition, relationships, or us; it was, instead, almost always about a scientific problem or, occasionally, about a patient. He pursued his science and the practice of medicine with the same romantic intensity that was integral to the way I pursued the rest of life. He was not, it was clear, going to gaze meaningfully into my eyes over long dinners and fine wines, nor discuss literature and music over late-night coffee and port. He, in fact, couldn’t sit still very long, had a scarcely measurable attention span, didn’t drink much, never touched coffee, and wasn’t particularly interested in the complexities of relationships or the affirmations of art. He couldn’t abide poetry and was genuinely amazed that I seemed to spend so much of my day just wandering around, rather aimlessly, going to the zoo, visiting art galleries, walking my dog—a sweet, wholly independent, morbidly shy basset hound named Pumpkin—or meeting friends for lunch and breakfast. Yet not once in the years we have been together have I doubted Richard’s love for me, nor mine for him. Love, like life, is much stranger and far more complicated than one is brought up to believe. Our common intellectual interests—medicine, science, and psychiatry—are very strong ones, and our differences in both substance and style have allowed each of us a great deal of independence, which has been essential and which, ultimately, has bound us very close to one another over the years. My life with Richard has become a safe harbor: an extremely interesting place, filled with love and warmth and always a bit open to the outer sea. But like all safe harbors that manage to retain fascination as well as safety, it was less than smooth sailing to reach.

• From From the Streets to the Sheets: Noire's Urban Erotic Quickies (2007)

  If I hadn’t discovered by the time I was thirteen that I preferred to play hide-and-go-get-it with little girls over little boys, after taking one look at my sexy Samantha I would have definitely lost my appetite for dick and taken on a new craving for pussy. But lucky for me, I never had to even entertain the thought of fuckin’ around with a bunch of hood niggas only to discover that no-sized dick is worth putting up with them and their bullshit. All it took was growing up with Naomi Kensington—aka, my moms—and living the life she subjected me to, to know that I preferred pussy over dick any day. “Honey,” I heard Sam call from the shower. “Come join me. Wash my back.” I loved washing Sam’s back, from her shoulders to the small of her waist. I loved it. With me standing a little under a foot taller than her, towering over her made me feel so protective of her, like she was mine, really mine, unable to function without me. I know damn sure I’m unable to function without her. I love me some Sam, and not just because she was my first and only piece of ass, the woman I learned how to please a woman with, the woman I learned how it felt to be pleased with. It was because she was there when I was sixteen, out on the streets and needing that mother figure, any mother figure, to show me love. Being five years older than me, Sam was twenty-one when I was sixteen, and she was living with some thug-ass nigga named Detail who didn’t do nothing but beat her and fuck her, and usually in that order. He would clock on her over any little thing. If the toast was too brown, if the bed wasn’t made right or she missed a spot when she dusted, he’d get all up in that ass. He demanded perfection. That’s how he got the name Detail. He was meticulous about everything. His car had to be wiped down just right. The bed had to be made to his standard, tight like a hospital bed. Towels had to be hung in a tri-fold manner. I mean, nothing got past that fucker’s eyes. He was a real stickler for detail, to the point where, if you ask me, it was a sickness.

• From From the Streets to the Sheets: Noire's Urban Erotic Quickies (2007)

  “Hey, baby,” Keita replied in her sultry voice. “I miss you, lover man.” Keita was my boo. My down-ass chick that I held above all the others. Now, I was a stone-cold dog, but even a dog needed a main bitch. For me, that was Keita. I had met her about a year ago at All Star Weekend in Denver. She was with her girls and I was with my niggaz, but when our eyes met there was no one else in the room. We got to politicking and I found out that she was from the Bronx. We spent the whole weekend together and by the time we got back to New York I had already decided that I was gonna make her my wifey. “I miss you too, my one and only,” I said, sounding like a real clown-ass nigga. I was a lion at heart, but when it came to Keita, I was a pussycat. As hard as I was, Keita was my only weakness. The bastard in me warned against it, but the heart makes you crazy. “You still at work?” she asked. “Nah, baby, I got off early. I’m on my way uptown to meet Benny and them.” “I’m glad, sweetie. Sometimes I don’t understand you, Dante. You make good money at the car dealership, so why do you continue slaving for UPS at night?” By now, you’re probably confused, so let me explain it to you. Chocolate is what my niggaz and these tricks call me, but my given name is Dante Burton. The part about me working at a car dealership during the day was true, but I had quit my night job at UPS months ago. I never bothered to tell Keita, because it was a good alibi for the odd hours I kept with my tricks. I’ve found that I could make way more money slinging dick than loading trucks. “I know, ma, but you know a nigga gotta hustle. How else are we gonna get that big house?” “Baby, you’re too sweet. I’m lucky to have a man like you,” she said in a most sincere tone. Sometimes I felt bad about misleading Keita, but whenever a bitch broke me off a wad of cash, my conscience flew out the window. “You know it’s all about us, Keita. What you got going on tonight?” “Nothing much. Me and my girls might go to Envy.” “You better not be in there letting them scumbag niggaz grind all up on your ass.” I said seriously. I was very possessive when it came to Keita. “Boy, stop acting crazy. You know I don’t know how to do nothing but the two-step.” She laughed. I loved to hear Keita laugh. It always reminded me of bells, and all things happy. “I hear that hot shit. You just remember what the fuck I said.” “Okay, Daddy,” she sang. “You want me to pick you up afterward so we can go get something to eat?”

• From Saint Augustine (Penguin Lives) (1999)

  We should never undertake the task of chiding another’s sin unless, cross-examining our own conscience, we can assure ourselves, before God, that we are acting from love. If reproaches or threats or injuries, voiced by the one you are calling to account, have wounded your spirit, then, for that person to be healed by you, you must not speak till you are healed yourself, lest you act from worldly motives, to hurt, and make your tongue a sinful weapon against evil, returning wrong for wrong, curse for curse. Whatever you speak out of a wounded spirit is the wrath of an avenger, not the love of an instructor. Act as you desire, so long as you are acting with love. Then there will be no meanness in what may sound mean, while you are acutely aware that you are striving with the sword of God’s word to free another from the grip of sin. And if, as often happens, you begin some course of action from love, and are proceeding with it in love, but a different feeling insinuates itself because you are resisted, deflecting you from reproach of a man’s sin and making you attack the man himself—it were best, while watering the dust with your tears, to remember that we have no right to crow over another’s sin, since we sin in the very reproach of sin if anger at sin is better at making us sinners than mercy is at making us kind. He also used the formula in a sermon on the First Letter of John, that broad treatment of love (JL 7.8): Because of varying circumstances, we see one man looking harsh because he loves and another looking pleasant because of vice. The father gives a son blows, the whoremonger gives blandishments. Consider them in themselves, blows or blandishments—who wouldn’t take the blandishments and duck the blows? But look at the motives—they are the blows of love, the blandishments of vice. You see my point, that human acts should be judged by their basis in love. Many things have a surface appearance of good, but are not based on love—like blossoms on a thorn plant. Other things look hard, look forbidding, but they instill a discipline informed by love. Once again, to put it simply: Act as you desire, so long as you act with love. If you are silent, be silent from love. If you accuse, accuse from love. If you correct, correct from love. If you spare, spare from love. Let love be rooted deep in you, and only good can grow from it.

• From Comrade Loves of the Samurai (1972)

  He was jealous of the two friends' love, and contrived all sorts of devices to calumniate them, and tried to separate them by the agency of treacherous persons. But one dark night the two lovers met and killed these persons. Then they fled in a boat and hid themselves for a long time, and finally came to Yedo. There they lived as Guards, concealing their true condition. Mondo was now sixty-three years old, and Hayemon sixty-six; and through all these years their hearts had not changed. They had never taken any interest in a woman. They had been genuine pederasts. Hayemon continued to consider Mondo as his young lover. He arranged his thin hair with his own hands in the Style of a page's hair, using much perfumed oil. Mondo's brow was like that of a woman, and he took great care of his person; he polished his nails with aromatic wood, and shaved himself carefully. There is no doubt that these two old men continued their amorous encounters up to an advanced age. Male love is essentially different from the ordinary love of a man and a woman; and that is why a Prince, even when he has married a beautiful Princess, cannot forget his pages. Woman is a creature of absolutely no importance; but sincere pederastic love is true love. Both of these men detested woman as a vile garden worm. They never associated with their neighbours, and when a near-by husband and wife quarrelled and Started breaking the crockery and the doors, these two old men did not try to reconcile them: on the contrary, they encouraged the husband, crying: 'Be brave, O man, and Strong! Kill her, beat her to death! Drive her from your house, and take a handsome man instead of her! 'They used to shake their fists at the woman, and thought the man feeble and lacking in courage. In the spring Mount Uyeno is thronged with visitors who come to see the cherry trees loaded with blossom, and at such time people drink excellent wines, and many get drunk. As the folk passed Hayemon's house, he used to distinguish the women's voices from the men's. When he heard men's voices, he ran out in the hope of seeing some beautiful youth: but when he heard women's voices, he shut his door and remained perfectly indifferent. One day it Started to rain, and several women who were making a pleasure party were caught in the shower. They all ran for shelter beneath the eaves of Hayemon's house, and chattered together: 'If we knew who lived here, we could get ourselves invited to tea and rest till the evening; and perhaps they would lend us umbrellas. They might even invite us to an agreeable supper. It is a great pity that we are not their friends.'One of them, who was older, bolder and less scrupulous than the rest, dared to open the door a little and cast a glance into the house.

• From From the Streets to the Sheets: Noire's Urban Erotic Quickies (2007)

  “No,” she said, hurriedly. “I’m the designated driver tonight. Tell you what, though, why don’t you meet me at my place and we can eat each other.” “Sounds like a plan,” I said, thinking of her warm mouth on me. “Okay, so I’ll see you later, Daddy. I love you.” “I love you too, ma.” With a great deal of reluctance, I ended the call. I loved Keita to the point where it sometimes hurt me physically. Damn this thing called love for making me so fucking weak! My boys thought I was bugging for falling for a chick so quickly, but they didn’t understand. I had been with a lot of bitches in my day, but none of them ever quite measured up. They were always lacking in one area or another, either not being pretty enough, or smart enough. My baby girl was the total package. Keita was five-four, with medium-length black hair that she usually wore in a wrap, and honey-colored skin. Whenever she smiled, you couldn’t help but to smile back. She just had that effect on people. Keita was an independent woman who got up and went to work every morning, and hardly asked for anything other than my time and affection. She was hood, but she wasn’t ghetto. I could have just as much fun with her at a black-tie affair as I could at a Rucker’s game in the summertime. She could move in either circle. My girl liked to go out and have a good time, but she knew how to conduct herself. Though I was insanely jealous, I never had to worry about her stepping out on me. It just wasn’t her way. Keita’s mother was heavy into the church and had instilled that in all four of her daughters. Hell or high water, my boo was in service every Sunday morning. Having Keita in my corner made me feel like the luckiest dude on earth. Most of you are probably wondering: If this girl is so special then why the hell do I step out on her? To put it simply, it’s just the nature of my species. Sometimes the thrill of the hunt is even greater than the prize. • • • Mochas was our spot. It had been since they opened their doors about four or five years ago. It was a small but cool lounge on Eighth Avenue in Harlem. During the week you could go there for drinks and possibly a comedy show, but on the weekends they brought in the DJ and everybody got their groove on.

• From An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness (1995)

  These comings and goings, this grace and godlessness, have become such a part of my life that the wild colors and sounds now have become less strange and less strong; and the blacks and grays that inevitably follow are, likewise, less dark and frightening. “Beneath those stars,” Melville once said, “is a universe of gliding monsters.” But, with time, one has encountered many of the monsters, and one is increasingly less terrified of those still to be met. Although I continue to have emergences of my old summer manias, they have been gutted not only of most of their terror, but of most of their earlier indescribable beauty and glorious rush as well: sludged by time, tempered by a long string of jading experiences, and brought to their knees by medication, they now coalesce, each July, into brief, occasionally dangerous cracklings together of black moods and high passions. And then they, too, pass. One comes out of such experiences with a more surrounding sense of death, and of life. Having heard so often, and so believably, John Donne’s bell tolling softly that “Thou must die,” one turns more sharply to life, with an immediacy and appreciation that would not otherwise exist. We all build internal sea walls to keep at bay the sadnesses of life and the often overwhelming forces within our minds. In whatever way we do this—through love, work, family, faith, friends, denial, alcohol, drugs, or medication—we build these walls, stone by stone, over a lifetime. One of the most difficult problems is to construct these barriers of such a height and strength that one has a true harbor, a sanctuary away from crippling turmoil and pain, but yet low enough, and permeable enough, to let in fresh seawater that will fend off the inevitable inclination toward brackishness. For someone with my cast of mind and mood, medication is an integral element of this wall: without it, I would be constantly beholden to the crushing movements of a mental sea; I would, unquestionably, be dead or insane. But love is, to me, the ultimately more extraordinary part of the breakwater wall: it helps to shut out the terror and awfulness, while, at the same time, allowing in life and beauty and vitality. When I first thought about writing this book, I conceived of it as a book about moods, and an illness of moods, in the context of an individual life. As I have written it, however, it has somehow turned out to be very much a book about love as well: love as sustainer, as renewer, and as protector. After each seeming death within my mind or heart, love has returned to re-create hope and to restore life. It has, at its best, made the inherent sadness of life bearable, and its beauty manifest. It has, inexplicably and savingly, provided not only cloak but lantern for the darker seasons and grimmer weather.

• From Saint Augustine (Penguin Lives) (1999)

  Augustine argued, in his treatment of the Genesis story, that Adam committed his sin deliberately in order to maintain his “bond of company” (socialis necessitudo, CG 14.11) with Eve. In the book First Meanings in Genesis, which he began while finishing The Testimony, he wrote of Adam’s misguided gallantry (11.59): After Eve had eaten from the forbidden tree and offered him its fruit to eat along with her, Adam did not want to disappoint her, when he thought she might be blighted without his comforting support, banished from his heart to die sundered from him. He was not overcome by disordered desire of the flesh, which he had not yet experienced as a thing in his body at odds with his mind, but by a kind of amicable desire for another’s good [amicali quadam benivolentia], which often happens, making us sin against God so as not to turn a friend [amicus] against us. Augustine’s point is that Adam helps neither Eve nor himself by trying to separate off a lower love from the Source of love. That is the lesson he finds in his own courting of favor from his fellow thieves in the pear orchard. He sees here his own distant echo of Adam’s sin, the primordial sin, the quest for love by motion away from the one place where it can be found. To find the Genesis narrative coming alive in his own past is a continuing surprise for Augustine in The Testimony. We have seen that already in the story of his father and the public baths, when he was “clothed” in Adam’s shame. We shall see it in other key episodes of the book, including the death of his friend and his prayer with Monnica at Ostia. Genesis haunts the whole work. Augustine began, in book 2 (6), the account of his sexual activity at sixteen, only to break it off in his concentration on the pear episode. He resumes the sexual story at the beginning of book 3, which O’Donnell (2.145) rightly calls “recapitulative,” though it is marked by his arrival in Carthage. It is in book 3 that he first mentions his concubine. But O’Donnell (2.207) draws an interesting conclusion from the age of Augustine’s son: Adeodatus was [almost fifteen] at the time of his baptism in the spring of 387 . . . and [aged sixteen] at the dramatic date of The Teacher not long after; on this calculation he was born 371/72, when Augustine was perhaps seventeen . . . or perhaps even 370, thus apparently probably in the first years of study at Carthage but conceivably during the years of indolence recorded at 2, 3.5–6 (the philoprogenitive optimism of Patricius did not have so long to wait). Adeodatus’ mother was dismissed from Milan and returned to Africa in 385/6 . . . and thus shared his entire adulescentia.

• From An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness (1995)

  Sometimes, in the midst of one of my dreadful, destructive upheavals of mood, I feel Richard’s quietness nearby and am reminded of Byron’s wonderful description of the rainbow that sits “Like Hope upon a death-bed” on the verge of a wild, rushing cataract; yet, “while all around is torn / By the distracted waters,” the rainbow stays serene: Resembling, ’mid the torture of the scene, Love watching Madness with unalterable mien. But if love is not the cure, it certainly can act as a very strong medicine. As John Donne has written, it is not so pure and abstract as one might once have thought and wished, but it does endure, and it does grow. Part Four [image file=image_rsrcW2.jpg] AN UNQUIET MINDSpeaking of Madness [image file=image_rsrcW1.jpg] Not long before I left Los Angeles for Washington, I received the most vituperative and unpleasant letter that anyone has ever written me. It came not from a colleague or a patient, but from a woman who, having seen an announcement of a lecture I was to give, was outraged that I had used the word “madness” in the title of my talk. I was, she wrote, insensitive and crass and very clearly had no idea at all what it was like to suffer from something as awful as manic-depressive illness. I was just one more doctor who was climbing my way up the academic ranks by walking over the bodies of the mentally ill. I was shaken by the ferocity of the letter, resented it, but did end up thinking long and hard about the language of madness. In the language that is used to discuss and describe mental illness, many different things—descriptiveness, banality, clinical precision, and stigma—intersect to create confusion, misunderstanding, and a gradual bleaching out of traditional words and phrases. It is no longer clear what place words such as “mad,” “daft,” “crazy,” “cracked,” or “certifiable” should have in a society increasingly sensitive to the feelings and rights of those who are mentally ill. Should, for example, expressive, often humorous, language—phrases such as “taking the fast trip to Squirrel City,” being a “few apples short of a picnic,” “off the wall,” “around the bend,” or “losing the bubble” (a British submariner’s term for madness)—be held hostage to the fads and fashions of “correct” or “acceptable” language?

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  May the liar’s vile tongue be cut out! Follow me, my reader, and me alone, and I will show you such a love! No! The master was mistaken when with bitterness he told Ivanushka in the hospital, at that hour when the night was falling past midnight, that she had forgotten him. That could not be. She had, of course, not forgotten him. First of all let us reveal the secret which the master did not wish to reveal to Ivanushka. His beloved’s name was Margarita 1 Nikolaevna. Everything the master told the poor poet about her was the exact truth. He described his beloved correctly. She was beautiful and intelligent. To that one more thing must be added: it can be said with certainty that many women would have given anything to exchange their lives for the life of Margarita Nikolaevna. The childless thirty-year-old Margarita was the wife of a very prominent specialist, who, moreover, had made a very important discovery of state significance. Her husband was young, handsome, kind, honest, and adored his wife. The two of them, Margarita and her husband, occupied the entire top floor of a magnificent house in a garden on one of the lanes near the Arbat. A charming place! Anyone can be convinced of it who wishes to visit this garden. Let them inquire of me, and I will give them the address, show them the way—the house stands untouched to this day. Margarita Nikolaevna was not in need of money. Margarita Nikolaevna could buy whatever she liked. Among her husband’s acquaintances there were some interesting people. Margarita Nikolaevna had never touched a primus stove. Margarita Nikolaevna knew nothing of the horrors of life in a communal apartment. In short . . . she was happy? Not for one minute! Never, since the age of nineteen, when she had married and wound up in this house, had she known any happiness. Gods, my gods! What, then, did this woman need?! What did this woman need, in whose eyes there always burned some enigmatic little fire? What did she need, this witch with a slight cast in one eye, who had adorned herself with mimosa that time in the spring? I do not know. I have no idea. Obviously she was telling the truth, she needed him, the master, and not at all some Gothic mansion, not a private garden, not money. She loved him, she was telling the truth. Even I, the truthful narrator, though an outsider, feel my heart wrung at the thought of what Margarita endured when she came to the master’s little house the next day (fortunately before she had time to talk with her husband, who had not come back at the appointed time) and discovered that the master was no longer there. She did everything to find out something about him, and, of course, found out nothing.

• From The Girls (2016)

  “He’s not mad at you,” she said. Keeping a steady simmer of eye contact. “He knows you wouldn’t say anything.” And it was true: I hadn’t said anything. My silence keeping me in the realm of the invisible. I had been frightened, yes. Maybe you could pin some of the silence on that fear, a fear I could call up even later, after Russell and Suzanne and the others were in jail. But it was something else, too. The helpless thoughts of Suzanne. Who had sometimes colored her nipples with cheap lipstick. Suzanne, who walked around so brutish, like she knew you were trying to take something from her. I didn’t tell anyone because I wanted to keep her safe. Because who else had loved her? Who had ever held Suzanne in their arms and told her that her heart, beating away in her chest, was there on purpose? My hands were sweating, but I couldn’t wipe them on my jeans. I tried to make sense of this moment, to hold an image of Suzanne in my mind. Suzanne Parker. The atoms reorganizing themselves the first time I’d seen her in the park. How her mouth had smiled into mine. No one had ever looked at me before Suzanne, not really, so she had become my definition. Her gaze softening my center so easily that even photographs of her seemed aimed at me, ignited with private meaning. It was different from Russell, the way she looked at me, because it contained him, too: it made him and everyone else smaller. We had been with the men, we had let them do what they wanted. But they would never know the parts of ourselves that we hid from them—they would never sense the lack or even know there was something more they should be looking for. Suzanne was not a good person. I understood this. But I held the actual knowledge away from myself. How the coroner said the ring and pinky fingers of Linda’s left hand had been severed because she had tried to protect her face. Suzanne seemed to look at me as if there could be some explanation, but then a slight movement behind the shrouded windshield of the bus caught her attention—even then, she was alert to Russell’s every shift—and a businesslike air came over her. “Okay,” she said, urged by the tick of an unseen clock. “I’m taking off.” I had almost wanted a threat. Some indication that she might return, that I should fear her or could draw her back with the right combination of words. I only ever saw her again in photographs and news reports. Still. I could never imagine her absence as permanent. Suzanne and the others would always exist for me; I believed that they would never die. That they would hover forever in the background of ordinary life, circling the highways and edging the parks. Moved by a force that would never cease or slow.

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

  philosophy and Eastern religion, that the Divinity was well pleased with the sacrifices, the speculations, the tortures of man; it was to St. John that it was left to teach in all its fulness that the one sign of God’s children is ’the love of the brethren.’ And as it is Love that pervades our whole conception of his teaching, so also it pervades our whole conception of his character. We see him—it surely is no unwarranted fancy—we see him declining with the declining century; every sense and faculty waxing feebler, but that one divinest faculty of all burning more and more brightly; we see it breathing through every look and gesture; the one animating principle of the atmosphere in which he lives and moves; earth and heaven, the past, the present, and the future alike echoing to him that dying strain of his latest words, ’We love Him because He loved us.’ And when at last he disappears from our view in the last pages of the sacred volume, ecclesiastical tradition still lingers in the close: and in that touching story, not the less impressive because so familiar to us, we see the aged apostle borne in the arms of his disciples into the Ephesian assembly, and there repeating over and over again the same saying, ’Little children, love one another;’ till, when asked why he said this and nothing else, he replied in those well known words, fit indeed to be the farewell speech of the Beloved Disciple, ’Because this is our Lord’s command and if you fulfil this, nothing else is needed.’ " § 42. Apostolic Labors of John. John in the Acts. In the first stadium of Apostolic Christianity John figures as one of the three pillars of the church of the circumcision, together with Peter and James the brother of the Lord; while Paul and Barnabas represented the Gentile church.581 This seems to imply that at that time he had not yet risen to the full apprehension of the universalism and freedom of the gospel. But he was the most liberal of the three, standing between James and Peter on the one hand, and Paul on the other, and looking already towards a reconciliation of Jewish and Gentile Christianity. The Judaizers never appealed to him as they did to James, or to Peter.582 There is no trace of a Johannean party, as there is of a Cephas party and a party of James. He stood above strife and division.

• From From the Streets to the Sheets: Noire's Urban Erotic Quickies (2007)

  When we got to our cars, Dushawn gave me one last strong hug and kiss I’ll remember ’til I die. I blurted, “You think Camille’s gonna hate my ass?” He looked at me like I had sprouted another head and said, “Naw. I’ll talk to her. She used to tell me all the time how cool you was. She told me I needed to dump them skank-ass hoes and get wit a girl that really cared about me. She knew that meant you, La La.” We hugged and kissed again. It wasn’t the XXX hug we had shared in the old factory but I could feel it was real. When I tried to let go, he tightened his hold and gave me a long deep kiss that reached down to my seriously satisfied pussy. I didn’t want it to end. I said, “I got one question.” He said, “Ask.” “When the shit went down about my diary. Did your mama talk to you first?” “Yeah.” “Didn’t you tell her we wasn’t doin’ nothin’?” “Yeah.” “She didn’t believe you, or what?” “Prolly not, ’cause she had caught me with my draws around my ankles more than a few times,” he laughed. “Come on, Dushawn. I know you had to tell her some’m else for her to be that mad. What’d you tell her?” “I’ll tell you if you promise to see me again,” he teased. “Promise!” He pulled me closer and whispered, “The truth—I told her you was wifey material and that when I was ready to settle down, you was definitely on my list.” All I could say was, “Mmph! Mmph! Mmph!” • • • The next year was the best and worst in my life. Me and Cami got tighter than ever. Her mama still hated my ass but bein’ that we was grown-ass bitches on our own, it wasn’t nuthin’ she could really do. I finished cosmetology school and got my license. Camille had a baby with Tarik Jackson and moved to North Long Beach. We still talked every day, but her baby girl slowed her way down. I was by myself. Breast cancer had taken my momma after I graduated from high school. We barely had a chance to say good-bye. One minute she was complaining of a little bump under her titty, and a few months later she was gone. I was lonelier than I’d ever been in my life. I hadn’t heard shit from Dushawn since the day we kicked a hole in it. Camille told me that he moved up north to go to school. I didn’t hold it against him too much. He had already told me what the deal was, besides, I had all kinds a men steppin’ my way, if I wanted them. I looked good, I smelled good, I dressed good, and I had my own thang poppin’ at my hair and nail shop called Tight. • • •

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  I’d stay with you right now, but I’d rather not do it that way. I don’t want it to remain for ever in his memory that I ran away from him in the middle of the night. He’s never done me any wrong . . . He was summoned unexpectedly, there was a fire at the factory. But he’ll be back soon. I’ll talk with him tomorrow morning, I’ll tell him that I love another man and come back to you for ever. Or maybe you don’t want that? Answer me.” ‘ “Poor dear, my poor dear,” I said to her. “I won’t allow you to do it. Things won’t go well for me, and I don’t want you to perish with me.” ‘ “Is that the only reason?” she asked, and brought her eyes close to mine. ‘ “The only one.” ‘She became terribly animated, she clung to me, put her arms around my neck and said: ‘ “I’m perishing with you. In the morning I’ll be here.” ‘And so, the last thing I remember from my life is a strip of light from my front hall, and in that strip of light an uncurled strand of hair, her beret and her eyes filled with determination. I also remember the black silhouette in the outside doorway and the white package. ‘ “I’d see you home, but it’s beyond my strength to come back alone. I’m afraid.” ‘ “Don’t be afraid. Bear with it for a few hours. Tomorrow morning I’ll be here.” ‘Those were her last words in my life . . . Shh! . . .’ the patient suddenly interrupted himself and raised a finger. ‘It’s a restless moonlit night tonight.’ He disappeared on to the balcony. Ivan heard little wheels roll down the corridor, someone sobbed or cried out weakly. When everything grew still, the guest came back and announced that room 120 had received an occupant. Someone had been brought, and he kept asking to be given back his head. The two interlocutors fell anxiously silent, but, having calmed down, they returned to the interrupted story. The guest was just opening his mouth, but the night was indeed a restless one. There were still voices in the corridor, and the guest began to speak into Ivan’s ear, so softly that what he told him was known only to the poet, apart from the first phrase: ‘A quarter of an hour after she left me, there came a knock at my window . . .’ What the patient whispered into Ivan’s ear evidently agitated him very much. Spasms repeatedly passed over his face.

• From An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness (1995)

  At no time during either of the dinner parties was manic-depressive illness discussed; it was, in fact, the very normality of the evenings that was so reassuring and so important to me. Being introduced to such “normal” men, both from a world much like the one I had known as a child, was one of David’s many intuitive acts of kindness. “It is the history of our kindnesses that alone makes this world tolerable,” wrote Robert Louis Stevenson. “If it were not for that, for the effect of kind words, kind looks, kind letters … I should be inclined to think our life a practical jest in the worst possible spirit.” After knowing David, I never again saw life in its worst possible spirit. I left London with a terrible sense of apprehension, but David wrote and called often. In the late fall we spent time together in Washington, and, as I finally was feeling myself again, I enjoyed life in ways that I hadn’t for years. Those November days remain in my memory as a gentle yet intensely romantic swirl of long walks in the cold, visits to old houses and yet older churches, light snows covering the eighteenth-century gardens of Annapolis, and icy rivers threading their way out of and beyond the Chesapeake Bay. The evenings were filled with dry sherry and meandering dinner conversations about almost everything; the nights were filled with wonderful lovemaking and much-sought, long-absent, untroubled sleep. David returned to London; I returned to Los Angeles; we wrote and spoke often, missed one another, and threw ourselves into our respective lives of work. I went back to England in May, and we had two weeks of long, warm pre-summer days in London, Dorset, and Devon. One Sunday morning, after church, we walked up into the hills to listen to the ringing of the church bells, and I noticed that David had stopped, was standing still, and breathing heavily. He joked about getting too much strenuous exercise at night, we both laughed, and left it at that.

• From Comrade Loves of the Samurai (1972)

  But since they could not meet openly, because of the Lord, they waited for a suitable opportunity. It was the custom to give the palace a thorough cleaning on the thirteenth of December, and for the courtiers to change their old clothes for new and spotless garments. On that day, following a plan conceived by Korin's servant, Sohatjiro was introduced into the palace in a big bamboo basket, in which Korin had already sent some new soft robes to his mother. They succeeded in carrying Sohatjiro into the room adjoining the Lord's bedroom. Korin pretended that he had pains in the stomach, and kept the screen doors well oiled so as to be able to open them easily in the night. The first time Korin went out of the room, the Lord complained of the noise he made; but, as the night advanced, the latter fell into a deep sleep and started to snore very loudly. Then Korin, thinking that the moment had come when he might join his love, crept into the next room. The two lovers embraced and swore a faithful and changeless love until their deaths. They spoke very quietly, in a whisper, of their amorous pleasures; but by ill luck it happened that the Lord was wakened by their voices. He shouted: 'There is someone in the next room, and he shall not escape.'He grasped a spear, which was renting against his pillow, and rushed upon Sohatjiro as he turned to run away. But Korin seized him by the sleeve and said: 'It is not worthy of you, Lord, to agitate yourself in this way. Be caI beg you. There was no one here but I. I was only uttering certain complaints because of my pain. Forgive me, Lord, for having disturbed your sleep.' At that moment Sohatjiro Started to climb over the wall by the help of a large branch, and the Lord saw him. He Sternly questioned Korin; but the other denied everything. Then, since he had great love for Korin, the Lord thought that this was perhaps another evil badger haunting the garden, and he calmed himself. But one of the sentinels, Shinroku Kanai, came and said to the Lord: 'I saw the track of a man in this room, and himself with my own eyes in the garden. His hair was disordered and his actions were Strange. It must be Korin's secret lover. I advise the Lord to watch Korin.'But Korin answered bravely: 'My dear one has given me his life. He is my faithful lover. Even if I must die, I will not tell his name. I have already said this many times to my Lord.'He was calm and serene. Two days later Korin was led into the guard-room of the palace, and the Lord said to him: 'I myself will execute you, Korin, as a warning to my courtiers not to deceive me. Prepare to die.'And he took a halberd in his hands.

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

  Love grows with our apprehension of God’s love. As the soul contemplates the cross it is itself pierced with the sword of love, as when it is said in the Canticles, II. 5. "I am sick from love." Love towards God has its reward, but love loves without reference to reward. True love is sufficient unto itself. To be fully absorbed by love is to be deified.1433 As the drop of water dropped into wine seems to lose its color, and taste, and as the iron held in the glowing flame loses its previous shape and becomes like the flame, and as the air, transfused by the light of the sun, becomes itself like the light, and seems to be as the sun itself, even so all feeling in the saint is wholly transfused by God’s will, and God becomes all and in all. In Bernard’s eighty-six Sermons on the Song of Solomon, we have a continuous apostrophe to love, the love of God and the soul’s love to God. As sermons they stand out like the Petite Carême of Massillon among the great collections of the French pulpit. Bernard reached only the first verse of the third chapter. His exposition, which is written in Latin, revels in the tropical imagery of this favorite book of the Middle Ages. Everything is allegorized. The very words are exuberant allegories. And yet there is not a single sensual or unchaste suggestion in all the extended treatment. As for the historical and literal meaning, Bernard rejects all suggestion of it as unworthy of Holy Scripture and worthy only of the Jews, who have this veil before their faces.1434 The love of the Shulamite and her spouse is a figure of the love between the Church and Christ, though sometimes the soul, and even the Virgin Mary, is put in the place of the Shulamite. The kiss of SS. 1:2 is the Holy Spirit whom the second person of the Trinity reveals.1435 The breasts of the bride, 4:5, are the goodness and longsuffering which Christ feels and dispenses, Rom. 2:4. The Canticles are a song commemorating the grace of holy affection and the sacrament of eternal matrimony.1436 It is an epithalamial hymn; no one can hear who does not love, for the language of love is a barbarous tongue to him who does not love, even as Greek is to one who is not a Greek.1437 Love needs no other stimulus but itself. Love loves only to be loved again. Rhapsodic expressions like these welled up in exuberant abundance as Bernard spoke to his audiences at different hours of the day in the convent of Clairvaux. They are marked by no progress of thought. Aphoristic statement takes the place of logic. The same spiritual experiences find expression over and over again. But the treatment is always devout and full of unction, and proves the justice of the title, "the honey-flowing doctor,"—doctor mellifluus — given to the fervid preacher.

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

  3. In his statement of the doctrine of the Trinity, Abaelard laid himself open to the charge both of modalism and Arianism. It called forth Bernard’s severest charges. Abaelard made no contribution to the subject. The idea of the Trinity he derived from God’s absolute perfections. God, as power, is the Father; as wisdom, He is the Son; as love, the Spirit. The Scriptures are appealed to for this view. The Father has put all things in His power, Acts 1:7. The Son, as Logos, is wisdom. The Holy Spirit is called good, Ps. 143:10, and imparts spiritual gifts. The figure gave much umbrage, by which he compared the three persons of the Trinity to the brass of which a seal is made, the form of the seal, and the seal itself proceeding from, or combining the brass and the form. "The brass itself which is the substance of the brazen seal, and the seal itself of which the brass is the substance, are essentially one; yet the brass and the seal are so distinct in their properties, that the property of the brass is one, and the property of the brazen seal another." These are ultimately three things: the brass, aes, the brass capable of sealing, sigillabile, and the brass in the act of sealing, sigillans. 4. In his treatment of the atonement, Abaelard has valuable original elements.1384 Strange to say, he makes no reference to Anselm’s great treatise. Man, Abaelard said, is in the power of the devil, but the devil has no right to this power. What rights does a slave have over another slave whom he leads astray? Christ not only did not pay any price to the devil for man’s redemption, he also did not make satisfaction to divine justice and appease God’s wrath. If the fall of Adam needed satisfaction by the death of some one, who then would be able to satisfy for the death of Christ? In the life and death of the Redeemer, God’s purpose was to manifest. His love and thus to stir up love in the breast of man, and to draw man by love back to Himself. God might have redeemed man by a word, but He chose to set before man an exhibition of His love in Christ. Christ’s love constitutes the merit of Christ. The theory anticipates the modern moral influence theory of the atonement, so called. 5. Abaelard’s doctrine of sin likewise presents features of difference from the view current in his time.1385 The fall occurred when Eve resolved to eat the forbidden fruit, that is, after her desire was aroused and before the actual partaking of the fruit.1386

• From Comrade Loves of the Samurai (1972)

  7 They Loved Each Other even to Extreme Old Age T HERE WAS A LITTLE SHOP IN A STREET OF the Yanaka district of Yedo, with a narrow bill hung in the doorway which read: 'We have a remedy for superfluous hairs. It is equally good for many other ailments.'Copybooks for Students were also sold there; but since these were written by the hand of an old man, no one bought them. A bamboo blind hung between the worn and dirty screens. The trade of that shop was negligible, and the proprietor did not make enough out of it to live by. A graceful pine tree rose above the sloping roof; summer chrysanthemums flourished in the garden, and there was a well of pure water and a pail on the end of a pole. Sometimes birds came and perched on the pail. The owner of the shop was an old samurai, who had abandoned his career as a samurai when he was Still young. He lived on the money he had obtained by the sale of his former garments and his precious family heirlooms. He had only one intimate friend, who was of the same age as himself; and they very often played chess together. His only other companion was a little dog. He had no other visitors, except his few rare customers. Once, at the end of a hot summer day, he removed his clothes, which were soaked with sweat, and took a bath in his garden. His friend wept at the sight of his worn old body, and tenderly caressed the poor bent back. With his voice full of tears he said, as he washed his friend's wrinkled and bony shoulders: 'A certain great Chinese poet said in one of his poems: "A fine young man proudly sang the beauty of his body, admiring himself in a mirror. But that was yesterday. To-day, alas! he is no more than a poor old man worn out with wrinkles, and his head is covered with grey hair." That is exactly our own Story. We have sung together hand in hand without a care when we were young. But now it is only a distant memory and a dream.'Then the two old men joined hands and wept tears of regret for their past, while the hot water in the little tub grew cold. These two men were samurais who had been born in the Province of Tjikuzen. The younger's name was Mondo Tamashima, and he had been celebrated for the beauty of his face. Many people took him for a young Princess. The elder was called Hayemon Toyoda, and was a skilful marksman. He fell in love with Mondo, who returned his love sincerely. Mondo was sixteen years old and Hayemon nineteen when their love began. They were Strongly devoted to each other, and vowed an affection deeper than the sea. But another samurai loved Mondo.

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

  She regretted not to die in a foreign land, because she was not far from God, who would raise her up at the last day. "Bury my body anywhere," was her last request, "and trouble not yourselves for it; only this one thing I ask, that you remember me at the altar of my God, wherever you may be."2150 Augustine, in his Confessions, has erected to Monica the noblest monument that can never perish. If ever there was a thorough and fruitful conversion, next to that of Paul on the way to Damascus, it was that of Augustine, when, in a garden of the Villa Cassiciacum, not far from Milan, in September of the year 386, amidst the most violent struggles of mind and heart—the birth-throes of the new life—he heard that divine voice of a child: "Take, read!" and he "put on the Lord Jesus Christ" (Rom. xiii. 14). It is a touching lamentation of his: "I have loved Thee late, Thou Beauty, so old and so new; I have loved Thee late! And lo! Thou wast within, but I was without, and was seeking Thee there. And into Thy fair creation I plunged myself in my ugliness; for Thou wast with me, and I was not with Thee! Those things kept me away from Thee, which had not been, except they had been in Thee! Thou didst call, and didst cry aloud, and break through my deafness. Thou didst glimmer, Thou didst shine, and didst drive away, my blindness. Thou didst breathe, and I drew breath, and breathed in Thee. I tasted Thee, and I hunger and thirst. Thou didst touch me, and I burn for Thy peace. If I, with all that is within me, may once live in Thee, then shall pain and trouble forsake me; entirely filled with Thee, all shall be life to me."