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 Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982)

  I remember the openness of our loving that was a measurement against which I held up whatever was called love; and which I came to recognize as a legitimate demand between all lovers . Muriel and I loved tenderly and long and well, but there was no one around to suggest that perhaps our intensity was not always too wisely focused. Each one of us had been starved for love for so long that we wanted to believe that love, once found, was all-powerful. We wanted to believe that it could give word to my inchoate pain and rages; that it could enable Muriel to face the world and get a job; that it could free our writings, cure racism, end homophobia and adolescent acne. We were like starving women who come to believe that food will cure all present pains, as well as heal all the deficiency sores of long standing. Zami: A New Spelling of My Name: A Biomythography 27 In that golden summer of 1955 we were very busy and full of light. During the week I worked at the library and Muriel built beds across town for Mick and Cordelia. On the weekends, we wrote and read and studied Chinese calligraphy and went to the beach and the bars. Jonas Salk announced his new vaccine for polio at my sister Helen’s graduation from City College, and since so many of the girls I knew from Hunter High School had varying degrees of disabilities from polio, this news had a personal meaning. Life had so many different pieces. Jet was a girlie magazine trying to be a Black newsmagazine which I borrowed from my brother-in-law Henry on my infrequent visits to the Bronx, read avidly on the long subway ride downtown, and then surreptitiously dropped onto the next seat as I got off. When I mentioned at the library that I wrote poetry, somebody was bound to mention Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s Gift from the Sea , the runaway bestseller that year. It had no more to do with my work than a scallop to a whale. Spurred on by Muriel, I sent some of my poems to The Ladder , a magazine for lesbians published by the Daughters of Bilitis. Their prompt and unaccompanied return crushed me. I supplemented our reading from the library with a steady trade in the used bookstores over on Fourth Avenue.

• From The City of God

  I have judged it right to mention this, because some are of opinion that charity or regard (dilectio) is one thing, love (amor) another. They say that dilectio is used of a good affection, amor of an evil love. But it is very certain that even secular literature knows no such distinction. However, it is for the philosophers to determine whether and how they differ, though their own writings sufficiently testify that they make great account of love (amor) placed on good objects, and even on God Himself. But we wished to show that the Scriptures of our religion, whose authority we prefer to all writings whatsoever, make no distinction between amor, dilectio, and caritas; and we have already shown that amor is used in a good connection. And if any one fancy that amor is no doubt used both of good and bad loves, but that dilectio is reserved for the good only, let him remember what the psalm says, "He that loveth (diligit) iniquity hateth his own soul;" [664] and the words of the Apostle John, "If any man love (diligere) the world, the love (dilectio) of the Father is not in him. " [665]Here you have in one passage dilectio used both in a good and a bad sense. And if any one demands an instance of amor being used in a bad sense (for we have already shown its use in a good sense), let him read the words, "For men shall be lovers (amantes) of their own selves, lovers (amatores) of money. " [666]

• From Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982)

  We fell back together upon her bed. My lungs expanded and my breath deepened with the touch of her warm dry skin. My mouth finally against hers, quick-breathed, fragrant, searching, her hand entwined in my hair. My body took charge from her flesh. Shifting slightly, Eudora reached past my head toward the lamp above us. I caught her wrist. Her bones felt like velvet and quicksilver between my tingling fingers. “No,” I whispered against the hollow of her ear. “In the light.” Sun poured through the jacarandas outside Eudora’s window. I heard the faint and rhythmical whirr-whoosh of Tomas’s scythe as he cut back the wild banana bushes from the walk down by the pool. I came fully awake with a start, seeing the impossible. The junebug I had squashed with a newspaper at twilight, so long before, seemed to be moving slowly up the white-painted wall. It would move a few feet up from the floor, fall back, and then start up again. I grabbed for my glasses from the floor where I had dropped them the night before. With my glasses on, I could see that there was a feather-thin line of ants descending from the adobe ceiling down the wall to the floor where the junebug was lying. The ants, in concert, were trying to hoist the carcass straight up the vertical wall on their backs, up to their hole on the ceiling. I watched in fascination as the tiny ants lifted their huge load, moved, lost it, then lifted again. I half-turned and reached over to touch Eudora lying against my back, one arm curved over our shared pillow. The pleasure of our night flushed over me like sun on the walls of the light-washed colorful room. Her light brown eyes opened, studying me as she came slowly out of sleep, her sculptured lips smiling, a little bit open, revealing the gap beside her front teeth. I traced her mouth with my finger. For a moment I felt exposed, unsure, suddenly wanting reassurance that I had not been found wanting. The morning air was still dew-damp, and the smell of our loving lay upon us. As if reading my thoughts, Eudora’s arm came down around my shoulders, drawing me around and to her, tightly, and we lay holding each other in the Mexican morning sunlight that flooded through her uncovered casement windows. Tomas, the caretaker, sang in soft Spanish, keeping time with his scythe, and the sounds drifted in to us from the compound below. “What an ungodly hour,” Eudora laughed, kissing the top of my head and jumping over me with a long stride. “Aren’t you hungry?”

• From Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982)

  One more minute and we would have to stand in line with the boys. There was just time for a hurried hug and a kiss over the washbowl, as Ginger brushed out the tangles in her hair that had become unbraided during the night. Charlie dropped us off on the other side of the railroad tracks, a block away from the plant. Ginger stopped in and bought buttered rolls and coffee for us in the luncheonette across the street from Keystone. “We gonna need something to keep us awake today after last night,” she grunted, then grinned, nudging me under the cover of pushing through the mob at the entrance to the plant building. We winked at each other as we waited in the crowd for the freight elevator to take us up into hell. All day, I watched Ginger carefully for a lead as to how we were going to treat the extraordinary events of the night before. A piece of me was invested in her image of me as the gay young blade, the seasoned and accomplished lover from the big city. (Later, Ginger told me that it was my questioning why she always had to make school lunch for the boys every morning before her work that made Cora conclude one day, “She’s got to be a bulldagger!”) I enjoyed paying court to Ginger, and being treated, in private, like a swain. It gave me a sense of power and privilege that was heady, if illusory, since I knew on another level it was all play-acting. On one level it was play-acting for Ginger, too, because she would not allow herself to regard a relationship between two women as anything other than a lark. She could not consider it important, even as she sought it and cherished it. At the same time, on a true and deeper level, Ginger and I met as two young Black women in need of each other’s warmth and blood-assurance, able to share the passions within our bodies, and no amount of pretending that we were pretending could change that. Yet, we were both very much invested in the denial of our importance to each other. For different reasons, we both needed to pretend we didn’t care. Each of us was very busy being cool, ignoring and misnaming the passionate intensity with which we came together wherever possible, usually on that old brass bed in the insulated sunporch, that drafty haven on Walker Road which we turned tropical with the heat of our young bodies’ wildness. As long as I convinced myself that I wasn’t really involved emotionally with Ginger, I could delight in this new experience.

• From The City of God

  271 Lecture 13—Metaphysics of Creation and Evil (Book 11) „ Despite our distance from the consummation of creation in the last days, it is still possible to be blessed now, to live a sanctified life: Some morning knowledge can today be ours. We can participate in blessedness now, in several ways. ›First, we are potentially better off than Adam was before the fall. Adam’s immediate happiness was much happier than anyone’s today can be, but he did not yet have the promise of eschatological consummation given us in the People Israel and Christ. In this way, the redeemed and blessed today are much happier, though theirs is an anticipatory happiness. ›Second, even in our present we have intimations of the joy to come. Book 11 climaxes in a vision of how what we can affirm about the ultimate endpoint of God’s creation teaches us something about the nature of God. Informed by the story of Creation and the promises of God as contained in scripture, we can participate in God now, seeing God’s work in the world and ourselves. „We can come to know God through reflecting on ourselves, on our loves. In loving, we see three different kinds of love: a love of existence, of the bare thing that we love; a love of knowledge of the loved and of learning more about it; and a love of love: the delight we take in the fact of our loving. „Terror, fear, even anxiety may exist in love, but none totally effaces its core meaning, which is recognition that we can love another and value the beloved in a way that does not reduce to merely self-interest or merely a projection of ourselves. „By recognizing that we partake in this love, we can recognize we partake in the basic dynamic of love and are coming to know God. For God is love. 272 Books That Matter: The City of God Questions to Consider 1. What does Augustine say is the topic of the second half of The City of God? How does that topic appear relevant to what he discusses in book 11? 2. In book 11, Augustine spends a great deal of time discussing the importance of Christ and of faith in Christ as crucial for human salvation. Thus Christianity is the one true religion. Why is Christianity so important to Augustine? Why does he conceive of salvation as coming only through Christianity?

• From The City of God

  Chapter 3. --That the Platonists, Though Knowing Something of the Creator of the Universe, Have Misunderstood the True Worship of God, by Giving Divine Honor to Angels, Good or Bad. This being so, if the Platonists, or those who think with them, knowing God, glorified Him as God and gave thanks, if they did not become vain in their own thoughts, if they did not originate or yield to the popular errors, they would certainly acknowledge that neither could the blessed immortals retain, nor we miserable mortals reach, a happy condition without worshipping the one God of gods, who is both theirs and ours. To Him we owe the service which is called in Greek latreia, whether we render it outwardly or inwardly; for we are all His temple, each of us severally and all of us together, because He condescends to inhabit each individually and the whole harmonious body, being no greater in all than in each, since He is neither expanded nor divided. Our heart when it rises to Him is His altar; the priest who intercedes for us is His Only-begotten; we sacrifice to Him bleeding victims when we contend for His truth even unto blood; to Him we offer the sweetest incense when we come before Him burning with holy and pious love; to Him we devote and surrender ourselves and His gifts in us; to Him, by solemn feasts and on appointed days, we consecrate the memory of His benefits, lest through the lapse of time ungrateful oblivion should steal upon us; to Him we offer on the altar of our heart the sacrifice of humility and praise, kindled by the fire of burning love. It is that we may see Him, so far as He can be seen; it is that we may cleave to Him, that we are cleansed from all stain of sins and evil passions, and are consecrated in His name. For He is the fountain of our happiness, He the end of all our desires. Being attached to Him, or rather let me say, re-attached,--for we had detached ourselves and lost hold of Him,--being, I say, re-attached to Him, [378] we tend towards Him by love, that we may rest in Him, and find our blessedness by attaining that end. For our good, about which philosophers have so keenly contended, is nothing else than to be united to God. It is, if I may say so, by spiritually embracing Him that the intellectual soul is filled and impregnated with true virtues. We are enjoined to love this good with all our heart, with all our soul, with all our strength. To this good we ought to be led by those who love us, and to lead those we love. Thus are fulfilled those two commandments on which hang all the law and the prophets:"Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy mind, and with all thy soul;" and "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. " [379]For, that man might be intelligent in his self-love, there was appointed for him an end to which he might refer all his actions, that he might be blessed. For he who loves himself wishes nothing else than this. And the end set before him is "to draw near to God. " [380]And so, when one who has this intelligent self-love is commanded to love his neighbor as himself, what else is enjoined than that he shall do all in his power to commend to him the love of God? This is the worship of God, this is true religion, this right piety, this the service due to God only. If any immortal power, then, no matter with what virtue endowed, loves us as himself, he must desire that we find our happiness by submitting ourselves to Him, in submission to whom he himself finds happiness. If he does not worship God, he is wretched, because deprived of God; if he worships God, he cannot wish to be worshipped in God's stead. On the contrary, these higher powers acquiesce heartily in the divine sentence in which it is written, "He that sacrificeth unto any god, save unto the Lord only, he shall be utterly destroyed. " [381]

• From Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982)

  Zami: A New Spelling of My Name: A Biomythography 13 In my first year at Hunter, there were three other Black girls in my term, although not in my class. One of them was very proper, and she avoided all The Branded with great care. The other two girls came from the same school in Queens and they hung together in self-protection. In the middle of my freshman year, two more Black girls came to Hunter. One was sister to Yvonne Grenidge, who had dated my cousin Gerry. This brought my totally separate worlds of school and home threateningly close together. I was accustomed to thinking of them as separate planets. The other girl was Gennie. Gennie was the beginning of a double life for me at Hunter; actually, it was a triple life. There was The Branded, with whom I held seances and raised the ghosts of Byron and Keats. There was Maxine, my shy piano-playing Jewish friend with whom I roamed the locker rooms after curfew, and who later had a nervous breakdown because she was afraid she was dying of leprosy. And there was Gennie. Each part of my school life was separate from the other, with no connection except through me. None of the other people involved would have anything at all to do with each other. Maxine thought The Branded were too dangerous, and Gennie too flamboyant. The Branded thought Maxine was a mama’s baby, and Gennie, a snob. Gennie thought they were all bores, and said so loudly at any provocation. “You surely do hang around with some funny people. They act like they think the stars are their garters.” I laughed as she stuffed her toeshoes with lambswool and tied them around her ankles. Gennie was always either coming from or going to dance class. I shared classes and lunchtime with The Branded, some lunches and after-school time with Maxine, and study periods, and every other chance I could get, with Gennie. She was the only one I saw on weekends. Suddenly life became an exciting game of how much time I could spend with the people I wanted to spend it with. We learned to appreciate each other’s softness behind the lockers, calling it all different kinds of names and games—from touch tag, to how-does-that-feel, to I-can-hit-harder-than-you. Until Gennie said to me one day, “Is that the only way you know how to make friends?” and right then and there I began to learn other ways. I learned how to feel first and ask questions afterward. I learned how to cherish first the facade and then the fact of being an outlaw. That spring term, Gennie and I did things that I thought made The Branded look like kindergarten kids.

• From House of Holes: A Book of Raunch (2011)

  Zilka reappeared. “Director Lila is ready to talk to you,” she said to Shandee. Together they went into the inner office. There was an oscillating fan going. Director Lila was on the phone, toying with a banana in a fruit bowl. “Well then,” she was saying, “we’ll just suck it all out. If we have to we have to.” She hung up. “Shandee, sweetheart, I’m sorry it’s so hectic today. And this must be Dave’s arm. Yes, yes. Aren’t you cute together. May I?” Shandee handed Lila the arm, and Lila pressed Dave’s hand against her face. “Mmmm, gentle touch he has.” “I think I’m a bit in love,” said Shandee, “and the weird thing is I don’t know what Dave looks like, or what his voice is like, or what his personality is like, or anything.” “Ain’t that the way it is sometimes,” Lila said. “You don’t know a damn thing about them and yet you love them to pieces.” Lila gave Dave’s arm a pat, sighing, and handed it back. “There are times when I just don’t know why I’m doing all this,” she confided. “It’s not easy for you, I would imagine,” said Shandee. “No, it isn’t. The sex happiness of so many people—it weighs on you. We have our fun, sure, but we have our problems, too. The Pearloiner has been on a spree lately, stealing clits. She is one sick bitch. Zilka got her clit stolen clean away.” “That’s terrible,” said Shandee. Lila leaned forward. “That’s why she’s so vague sometimes. She’s lost her focus. And yet life does go on. You see that light?” Lila pointed to a small red light that blinked above the words PLEASURE FIRST. “Every time somebody has an orgasm somewhere in the House of Holes that light lights up. Whenever that light lights up I feel happy. I was working in hospital administration—I was seeing my friends get old, my life go by. Now I’m living. Don’t you wish you were having an orgasm right this second?” “I guess so,” said Shandee. “Well I do. After I have an orgasm I get so darn much work done. However.” She thought briefly, tapping her pen lightly on her nose. “Do you know how to fly an airplane?” “I’m sorry, I don’t.” Shandee waited. “That’s too bad.” She clicked a button. “Zilka. Could you bring those three arrivals in from the waiting room?” Shandee thought she should bring the conversation around. “So how do you think I should best go about searching for my Dave?” she asked. “Let me muse on that further,” said Lila, taking off her bifocals. “I’ll need to hold the dear one again.” She sniffed Dave’s arm’s knuckles and pressed his hand lightly on her breast. “Hmmm. Let me just consider awhile. Mmm.” Zilka opened the door for Hax, Ruzty, and Dune.

• From The City of God

  Besides, this too has to be inquired into, whether, if the good angels made their own will good, they did so with or without will? If without, then it was not their doing. If with, was the will good or bad? If bad, how could a bad will give birth to a good one? If good, then already they had a good will. And who made this will, which already they had, but He who created them with a good will, or with that chaste love by which they cleaved to Him, in one and the same act creating their nature, and endowing it with grace? And thus we are driven to believe that the holy angels never existed without a good will or the love of God. But the angels who, though created good, are yet evil now, became so by their own will. And this will was not made evil by their good nature, unless by its voluntary defection from good; for good is not the cause of evil, but a defection from good is. These angels, therefore, either received less of the grace of the divine love than those who persevered in the same; or if both were created equally good, then, while the one fell by their evil will, the others were more abundantly assisted, and attained to that pitch of blessedness at which they became certain they should never fall from it,--as we have already shown in the preceding book. [533]We must therefore acknowledge, with the praise due to the Creator, that not only of holy men, but also of the holy angels, it can be said that "the love of God is shed abroad in their hearts by the Holy Ghost, which is given unto them. " [534] And that not only of men, but primarily and principally of angels it is true, as it is written, "It is good to draw near to God. " [535]And those who have this good in common, have, both with Him to whom they draw near, and with one another, a holy fellowship, and form one city of God--His living sacrifice, and His living temple. And I see that, as I have now spoken of the rise of this city among the angels, it is time to speak of the origin of that part of it which is hereafter to be united to the immortal angels, and which at present is being gathered from among mortal men, and is either sojourning on earth, or, in the persons of those who have passed through death, is resting in the secret receptacles and abodes of disembodied spirits. For from one man, whom God created as the first, the whole human race descended, according to the faith of Holy Scripture, which deservedly is of wonderful authority among all nations throughout the world; since, among its other true statements, it predicted, by its divine foresight, that all nations would give credit to it. [533] C. 13. [534] Rom. v. 5.

• From Augustine: A New Biography (2005)

  Severus, to the venerable and desirable bishop Augustine, whom I would embrace wholly in the bosom of love… …You know best how greedy I am for you: but still I do not grumble because I cannot do as much as I want, since I do no less than I can. Thanks be to god, sweetest brother, things are good for me when I am close to you, indeed clinging to you as tightly as possible, my one and only. I take in the abundance of your breasts and grow stronger, if I can just grasp and squeeze those breasts, so that whatever they protect and shut up secretly within—well, if I just take away the skin they give to the suckling to suck on, then maybe they can pour out their innermost essence to me. I want that essence poured out to me, I say: your innermost essence, your essence fat with heavenly stuffing and flavored with every spiritual sweetness; your essence, pure innermost essence, essence simple but crowned by the twofold bond of double love; your essence, innermost essence drenched in the light of truth and making the truth shine back from within. I place myself under what drips from them, what comes back from them, so that my darkness may grow weak in the presence of your light, so we can both walk together in the brightness of day. O truly cunning honeybee of god, building honeycombs filled with divine nectar, dripping with mercy and truth, through which my soul runs with delight, and whatever it finds it lacks or wherever it feels weak, it struggles to fortify and support itself with your life-giving food.187 And at one point, in the Confessions, Augustine remembers for a moment what it was like to laugh, in a passage where he grieves for a dead friend: There were other things about friends that captivated us: talking and laughing and doing each other kindnesses, reading together sweet-speaking books, being silly together and being serious together. Sometimes we could quarrel without any hostility, the way you argue with yourself, and that rare disagreement was the spice to all our many hours of harmony. We’d teach each other and learn from each other, miss each other with a little sadness and greet one another on return with pleasure. It was a thousand little signs like this, our expressions, our words, the look in our eyes, our gestures, that spread a single flame among our minds and in the blaze that followed made us feel as though we were all one.188

• From The City of God

  But if the Creator is truly loved, that is, if He Himself is loved and not another thing in His stead, He cannot be evilly loved; for love itself is to be ordinately loved, because we do well to love that which, when we love it, makes us live well and virtuously. So that it seems to me that it is a brief but true definition of virtue to say, it is the order of love; and on this account, in the Canticles, the bride of Christ, the city of God, sings, "Order love within me. " [841]It was the order of this love, then, this charity or attachment, which the sons of God disturbed when they forsook God, and were enamored of the daughters of men. [842]And by these two names (sons of God and daughters of men) the two cities are sufficiently distinguished. For though the former were by nature children of men, they had come into possession of another name by grace. For in the same Scripture in which the sons of God are said to have loved the daughters of men, they are also called angels of God; whence many suppose that they were not men but angels. [840] Or, according to another reading, "Which I briefly said in these verses in praise of a taper. " [841] Cant. ii. 4. [842] See De Doct. Christ. i. 28.

• From Jesus and the Disinherited (1949)

  It may be hazardous, but you must do it.” For the Negro it means that he must see the individual white man in the context of a common humanity. The fact that a particular individual is white, and therefore may be regarded in some over-all sense as the racial enemy, must be faced; and opportunity must be provided, found, or created for freeing such an individual from his “white necessity.” From this point on, the relationship becomes like any other primary one. Once an attack is made on the enemy status and the individual has emerged, the underprivileged man must himself be status free. It may be argued that his sense of freedom must come first. Here I think the answer may be determined by the one who initiates the activity. But in either case love is possible only between two freed spirits. What one discovers in even a single experience in which barriers have been removed may become useful in building an over-all technique for loving one’s enemy. There cannot be too great insistence on the point that we are here dealing with a discipline, a method, a technique, as over against some form of wishful thinking or simple desiring. Once the mutual discovery is made that the privileged is a man and the underprivileged is a man, or that the Negro is a man and the white man is a man, then the normal desire to make this discovery inclusive of all brings one to grips with the necessity for working out a technique of implementation. The underprivileged man cannot get to know many people as he knows one individual, and yet he is in constant contact with many, in ways that deepen the conflict. Is there some skill which may be applied at a moment’s notice that will make a difference even in the most casual relationships? Such a technique may be found in the attitude of respect for personality. Preliminary to any discussion of the significance of this attitude, some urgent word of caution must be given. For the most part the relationship between the weak and the strong is basically amoral, or it is characterized by a facile use of the mood of “the exception.” It is easy to say about a particular individual, “He is different,” or, “He is exceptional,” and to imply that the general rule or the general attitude does not apply. This mood of exception operates in still another way. A whole group may be regarded as an exception, and thus one is relieved of any necessity to regard them as human beings. A Negro may say: “If a man is white, he may be automatically classified as one incapable of dealing with me as if he were a rational human being.” Or it may be just the reverse. Such a mood, the mood of exception, operates in all sorts of ways. A Republican may say the same thing about a Socialist. The deadly consequences of this attitude are evident.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  African Americans were more skilled in this ecstatic spirituality, though later, as we shall see, some white Pentecostalists would fall into unhealthy and nihilistic states of mind. In its infancy, the movement emphasized the importance of love and compassion, which provided its own discipline. Seymour used to say: “If you get angry or speak evil, or backbite, I care not how many tongues you have, you have not the baptism with the Holy Spirit.” 46 “God sent this latter rain to gather up all the poor and outcast, and make us love everybody,” explained D. W. Myland, an early interpreter of Pentecostalism, in 1910. “God is taking the despised things, the base things, and being glorified in them.” 47 The stress on inclusiveness and compassionate love was in marked contrast to the divisiveness of fundamentalist Christianity. If charity is the final test of any religiosity, at this point the Pentecostalists were pulling ahead. As the American scholar Harvey Cox has argued in an illuminating study of Pentecostalism, the movement was an attempt to recover many of the experiences that the modern West had rejected. 48 It can be seen as a grassroots rebellion against the modern cult of reason. Pentecostalism took hold at a time when people were beginning to have doubts about science, and when religious people were becoming uncomfortably aware that a reliance upon reason alone had worrying implications for faith, which had traditionally depended on the more intuitive, imaginative, and aesthetic mental disciplines. While fundamentalists were trying to make their Bible-based religion entirely reasonable and scientific, Pentecostalists were returning to the core of religiousness, defined by Cox as “that largely unprocessed nucleus of the psyche in which the unending struggle for a sense of purpose and significance goes on.” 49 Where fundamentalists, by identifying faith with rationally proven dogma, were confining the religious experience to the outermost cerebral rim of the mind, Pentecostalists were delving back into the unconscious source of mythology and religiousness. While fundamentalists stressed the importance of the Word and the literal, Pentecostalists bypassed conventional speech and tried to access the primal spirituality that lies beneath the credal formulations of a tradition. Where the modern ethos insisted that men and women focus pragmatically only upon this world, Pentecostalists demonstrated the human yearning for ecstasy and transcendence. The meteoric explosion of this form of faith showed that by no means everybody was enthralled by the scientific rationalism of modernity.

• From A Greek-English Lexicon (Liddell-Scott) (1957)

  φιλία, Ion. -ty, ἡ, (φιλέω) friendly love, affectionate regard, fondness, Sriendship, distinct from ἔρως, as Lat. amicitia from amor, first in Theogn., then in Hdt., Eur., etc. (never in Aesch. and Soph.), etc.; ἡ ψυχῆς φ.; διὰ τὸ ἁγνὴ εἶναι κτλ. Xen. Symp. 8, 15, cf. Plat. Symp. 179 C, Phaedr. 237 C, 255 E, etc.; opp. to ἔχθρα, μῖσος, Isocr. g B, Antid. § 130; used of the regard between gods and men, Plat. Symp. 188 C; of all kinds of family affections, Xen. Hier. 3, 7, Arist. Poét. 14, 9; of the regard of dependents towards their superiors, Xen. An. 1. 6, 3, cf. Isocr. 352 B; but most commonly of friendship between equals, ἄνδρεσσι κακοῖς συν- θέμενοι φ. Theogn. 306, cf. Andoc. 27. 10; φ. ἐπαγγέλλεσθαι Hdt. 7. 130; φ. ποιεῖσθαι πρός τινα Xen. Mem. 2. 6, 29; φ. εἰς ἀλλήλους ava- κίρνασθαι Eur. Hipp. 253; φ. λαβεῖν or κτήσασθαι παρά τινος Xen. Cyr. 8.1, 28; διὰ φ. ἰέναι τινί Id. An. 3. 2, 8; εἰς φ. ἰέναι, ἔρχεσθαι Plat. Phaedr. 237 C, Lys. 214 D; φ. ἀνανεώσασθαι Isocr. 424 A; opp. to τὴν φ. προλιπεῖν, Theogn. 1102; λιπεῖν Eur. Alc. 930; διαλύεσθαι Isocr. 302 E; τῆς φ. ἐῤξίστασθαί τινι Lys. 114. 2; ἀφέσθαι Isocr. 118 B; of the friendship between States, ἐχρημάτισε περὶ φιλίας τοῖς ᾿Αθηναίοις Thuc. 5. 5, cf. 6. 34, 73:—with Preps., διὰ φιλίας Plat. Polit. 304 E, μετὰ φιλίας Xen. Mem. 1. 2, 10; διὰ φιλίαν, v. infr. ; κατὰ φιλίαν Plat. Legg. 823 B:—the person is commonly expressed by πρός τινα, Isocr. 88 Ὁ, 100 C, etc.; more rarely εἴς τινα, Eur. 1. c.; also by object. gen., διὰ φιλίαν αὐτοῦ through friendship for him, Thuc. 1. g1; so, ἡμετέρη φ. friendship with us, Theogn. 600, 1102; φιλία ἡ ἐμή, ἡ σή Xen. An. 7.7, 29, Eur. Or. 138, etc. ;—in pl., φ. ἰσχυραί Hdt. 3. 82, Plat. Symp. 182 Ο. 2. friendliness, kindliness, without any affection, Arist. tli Neva e730 1A, 5: 8. of sexual love, like ἔρως, LXxX (Prov. 5. 19). 4. with regard to things, fondness for, κέρδους Plat. Rep. 581 A; τῶν ἀρχῶν Arist. Cael. 3. 7, Io. 5. regarded as the natural force which unites discordant elements and movements, as νεῖκος is the force which keeps them apart, Emped. ap. Arist. Phys. 8. I, 3, Gen. et Corr. 2. 6, 7, Metaph. 1. 4, 2, cf. Isocr. Antid. § 287 (= 269). IT. fem. of φίλιος, v. sub φίλιος. φίλιάζω, to be or become a friend, τινί LXx (Sirac. 37.1, al.); εἴς Twa cited from Achmes :—gtAtacrns, οὔ, 6, a reconciler, Hesych. φιλιατρέω, to be a friend of the art of medicine, Diosc. Alex. praef., Plut. 2. 58 A, etc. φιλίατρος, ov, a friend of the art of medicine, Galen. 13. 998.

• From The Things They Carried (1990)

  And so in the spring of 1956, when we were in the fourth grade, I took her out on the first real date of my life—a double date, actually, with my mother and father. Though I can't remember the exact sequence, my mother had somehow arranged it with Linda's parents, and on that damp spring night my dad did the driving while Linda and I sat in the back seat and stared out opposite windows, both of us trying to pretend it was nothing special. For me, though, it was very special. Down inside I had important things to tell her, big profound things, but I couldn't make any words come out. I had trouble breathing. Now and then I'd glance over at her, thinking how beautiful she was: her white skin and those dark brown eyes and the way she always smiled at the world—always, it seemed—as if her face had been designed that way. The smile never went away. That night, I remember, she wore a new red cap, which seemed to me very stylish and sophisticated, very unusual. It was a stocking cap, basically, except the tapered part at the top seemed extra long, almost too long, like a tail growing out of the back of her head. It made me think of the caps that Santa's elves wear, the same shape and color, the same fuzzy white tassel at the tip. Sitting there in the back seat, I wanted to find some way to let her know how I felt, a compliment of some sort, but all I could manage was a stupid comment about the cap. "Jeez," I must've said, "what a cap." Linda smiled at the window—she knew what I meant—but my mother turned and gave me a hard look. It surprised me. It was as if I'd brought up some horrible secret. For the rest of the ride I kept my mouth shut. We parked in front of the Ben Franklin store and walked up Main Street toward the State Theater. My parents went first, side by side, and then Linda in her new red cap, and then me tailing along ten or twenty steps behind. I was nine years old; I didn't yet have the gift for small talk. Now and then my mother glanced back, making little motions with her hand to speed me up. At the ticket booth, I remember, Linda stood off to one side. I moved over to the concession area, studying the candy, and both of us were very careful to avoid the awkwardness of eye contact. Which was how we knew about being in love. It was pure knowing. Neither of us, I suppose, would've thought to use that word, love, but by the fact of not looking at each other, and not talking, we understood with a clarity beyond language that we were sharing something huge and permanent. Behind me, in the theater, I heard cartoon music.

• From The Things They Carried (1990)

  On April 16, when Lee Strunk drew the number 17, he laughed and muttered something and went down quickly. The morning was hot and very still. Not good, Kiowa said. He looked at the tunnel opening, then out across a dry paddy toward the village of Than Khe. Nothing moved. No clouds or birds or people. As they waited, the men smoked and drank Kool- Aid, not talking much, feeling sympathy for Lee Strunk but also feeling the luck of the draw. You win some, you lose some, said Mitchell Sanders, and sometimes you settle for a rain check. It was a tired line and no one laughed. Henry Dobbins ate a tropical chocolate bar. Ted Lavender popped a tranquilizer and went off to pee. After five minutes, Lieutenant Jimmy Cross moved to the tunnel, leaned down, and examined the darkness. Trouble, he thought—a cave-in maybe. And then suddenly, without willing it, he was thinking about Martha. The stresses and fractures, the quick collapse, the two of them buried alive under all that weight. Dense, crushing love. Kneeling, watching the hole, he tried to concentrate on Lee Strunk and the war, all the dangers, but his love was too much for him, he felt paralyzed, he wanted to sleep inside her lungs and breathe her blood and be smothered. He wanted her to be a virgin and not a virgin, all at once. He wanted to know her. Intimate secrets: Why poetry? Why so sad? Why that grayness in her eyes? Why so alone? Not lonely, just alone—riding her bike across campus or sitting off by herself in the cafeteria—even dancing, she danced alone—and it was the aloneness that filled him with love. He remembered telling her that one evening. How she nodded and looked away. And how, later, when he kissed her, she received the kiss without returning it, her eyes wide open, not afraid, not a virgin's eyes, just flat and uninvolved. Lieutenant Cross gazed at the tunnel. But he was not there. He was buried with Martha under the white sand at the Jersey shore. They were pressed together, and the pebble in his mouth was her tongue. He was smiling. Vaguely, he was aware of how quiet the day was, the sullen paddies, yet he could not bring himself to worry about matters of security. He was beyond that. He was just a kid at war, in love. He was twenty-four years old. He couldn't help it. A few moments later Lee Strunk crawled out of the tunnel. He came up grinning, filthy but alive. Lieutenant Cross nodded and closed his eyes while the others clapped Strunk on the back and made jokes about rising from the dead. Worms, Rat Kiley said. Right out of the grave. Fuckin’ zombie. The men laughed. They all felt great relief. Spook city, said Mitchell Sanders.

• From The Things They Carried (1990)

  On that first night they set up house in one of the bunkers along the perimeter, near the Special Forces hootch, and over the next two weeks they stuck together like a pair of high school steadies. Almost disgusting, Rat said, the way they mooned over each other. Always holding hands, always laughing over some private joke. All they needed, he said, were a couple of matching sweaters. But among the medics there was some envy. This was Vietnam, after all, and Mary Anne Bell was an attractive girl. Too wide in the shoulders, maybe, but she had terrific legs, a bubbly personality, a happy smile. The men genuinely liked her. Out on the volleyball court she wore cut-off blue jeans and a black swimsuit top, which the guys appreciated, and in the evenings she liked to dance to music from Rat's portable tape deck. There was a novelty to it; she was good for morale. At times she gave off a kind of come-get-me energy, coy and flirtatious, but apparently it never bothered Mark Fossie. In fact he seemed to enjoy it, just grinning at her, because he was so much in love, and because it was the sort of show that a girl will sometimes put on for her boyfriend's entertainment and education. Though she was young, Rat said, Mary Anne Bell was no timid child. She was curious about things. During her first days in-country she liked to roam around the compound asking questions: What exactly was a trip flare? How did a Claymore work? What was behind those scary green mountains to the west? Then she'd squint and listen carefully while somebody filled her in. She had a good quick mind. She paid attention. Often, especially during the hot afternoons, she would spend time with the ARVNs out along the perimeter, picking up little phrases of Vietnamese, learning how to cook rice over a can of Sterno, how to eat with her hands. The guys sometimes liked to kid her about it—our own little native, they'd say—but Mary Anne would just smile and stick out her tongue. "I'm here," she'd say, "I might as well learn something." The war intrigued her. The land, too, and the mystery. At the beginning of her second week she began pestering Mark Fossie to take her down to the village at the foot of the hill. In a quiet voice, very patiently, he tried to tell her that it was a bad idea, way too dangerous, but Mary Anne kept after him. She wanted to get a feel for how people lived, what the smells and customs were. It did not impress her that the VC owned the place. "Listen, it can't be that bad," she said. "They're human beings, aren't they? Like everybody else?" Fossie nodded. He loved her.

• From The Things They Carried (1990)

  Even now I can see her walking down the aisle of the old State Theater in Worthington, Minnesota. I can see her face in profile beside me, the cheeks softly lighted by coming attractions. The movie that night was The Man Who Never Was. | remember the plot clearly, or at least the premise, because the main character was a corpse. That fact alone, I know, deeply impressed me. It was a World War Two film: the Allies devise a scheme to mislead Germany about the site of the upcoming landings in Europe. They get their hands on a body—a British soldier, I believe; they dress him up in an officer's uniform, plant fake documents in his pockets, then dump him in the sea and let the currents wash him onto a Nazi beach. The Germans find the documents; the deception wins the war. Even now, I can remember the awful splash as that corpse fell into the sea. I remember glancing over at Linda, thinking it might be too much for her, but in the dim gray light she seemed to be smiling at the screen. There were little crinkles at her eyes, her lips open and gently curving at the corners. I couldn't understand it. There was nothing to smile at. Once or twice, in fact, I had to close my eyes, but it didn't help much. Even then I kept seeing the soldier's body tumbling toward the water, splashing down hard, how inert and heavy it was, how completely dead. It was a relief when the movie finally ended. Afterward, we drove out to the Dairy Queen at the edge of town. The night had a quilted, weighted-down quality, as if somehow burdened, and all around us the Minnesota prairies reached out in long repetitive waves of corn and soybeans, everything flat, everything the same. I remember eating ice cream in the back seat of the Buick, and a long blank drive in the dark, and then pulling up in front of Linda's house. Things must've been said, but it's all gone now except for a few last images. I remember walking her to the front door. I remember the brass porch light with its fierce yellow glow, my own feet, the juniper bushes along the front steps, the wet grass, Linda close beside me. We were in love. Nine years old, yes, but it was real love, and now we were alone on those front steps. Finally we looked at each other. "Bye," I said. Linda nodded and said, "Bye."

• From The Things They Carried (1990)

  "Yeah, right." Rat looked off to the west, scanning the mountains, as if expecting something to appear on one of the high ridgelines. After a second he shrugged. "Anyhow, maybe two months later I ran into Eddie Diamond over in Bangkok—I was on R&R, just this fluke thing—and he told me some stuff I can't vouch for with my own eyes. Even Eddie didn't really see it. He heard it from one of the Greenies, so you got to take this with a whole shakerful of salt." Once more, Rat searched the mountains, then he sat back and closed his eyes. "You know," he said abruptly, "I loved her." "Say again?" "A lot. We all did, I guess. The way she looked, Mary Anne made you think about those girls back home, how pure and innocent they all are, how they'll never understand any of this, not in a billion years. Try to tell them about it, they'll just stare at you with those big round candy eyes. They won't understand zip. It's like trying to tell somebody what chocolate tastes like." Mitchell Sanders nodded. "Or shit." "There it is, you got to taste it, and that's the thing with Mary Anne. She was there. She was up to her eyeballs in it. After the war, man, I promise you, you won't find nobody like her." Suddenly, Rat pushed up to his feet, moved a few steps away from us, then stopped and stood with his back turned. He was an emotional guy. "Got hooked, I guess," he said. "I loved her. So when I heard from Eddie about what happened, it almost made me ... Like you say, it's pure speculation." "Go on," Mitchell Sanders said. "Finish up." What happened to her, Rat said, was what happened to all of them. You come over clean and you get dirty and then afterward it's never the same. A question of degree. Some make it intact, some don't make it at all. For Mary Anne Bell, it seemed, Vietnam had the effect of a powerful drug: that mix of unnamed terror and unnamed pleasure that comes as the needle slips in and you know you're risking something. The endorphins start to flow, and the adrenaline, and you hold your breath and creep quietly through the moonlit nightscapes; you become intimate with danger; you're in touch with the far side of yourself, as though it's another hemisphere, and you want to string it out and go wherever the trip takes you and be host to all the possibilities inside yourself. Not bad, she'd said. Vietnam made her glow in the dark. She wanted more, she wanted to penetrate deeper into the mystery of herself, and after a time the wanting became needing, which turned then to craving.

• From Shunned (2018)

  I could fly in and out of Portland on the same day, with time to spare. That would be more than enough time to drive from the airport, get my bearings in the old neighborhood, visit Grandma, and have a bite to eat. I’d rent a car, I assured him, and didn’t expect anyone to show me around. If someone gave me the address of the hospice home, I’d locate it on my own. Bob would join me later to attend the memorial service, whenever that was, but I would make this first trip alone. Dad set the phone aside and succinctly recited my plan to Mom. There was a pause while she took it in, then a muffled reply. Back on the phone, Dad said that would be fine, except Mom had to work that day and he remained sick with the flu, quarantined from seeing Grandma. Again, I assured him I could manage alone. I never expected them to spend time with me. Dad had explained in his phone call the day before that Mom was still working part-time at a commercial insurance agency. Between that work, attending meetings at the Kingdom Hall, and keeping in daily communication with the hospice workers, she was at the outer limits of what she could take on. I had accepted the possibility I wouldn’t see her at all and predicted the memorial service would be our next encounter. Dad insisted I come by the house, where, he said, he would give me directions. I was excited to see him and hoped we would have some time alone together. I saw the day unfolding in my mind: after a brief visit with Dad, I’d drive alone to the nearby hospice home and pay my respects to Grandma. I would offer to pick up some warm soup, eat lunch with my father, and then be off to the airport in time for my five o’clock flight home. The next day, I arose at dawn to catch the early flight to Portland. As I dressed in brown slacks and a crisp blue blouse, I thought I could just as easily have been headed to a business meeting in the city. I slipped on my coat, grabbed an umbrella, and headed out the door. A faint yet persistent restlessness hung over me, a hollow anticipation that comes whenever I have to speak in front of a group, when there is nothing to do but hang out and wait, every cell of your being ready to begin. I had last been to my parents’ home six years prior, when I had traveled to Portland to attend the wedding of a girlfriend’s daughter. Coincidentally, it was within a week of my parents’ wedding anniversary. Following the protocol my mother established years earlier, I mailed them a letter informing them of my plans and my desire to stop in and pay my respects.