Love

Passages

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

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• From The Folding Star (1994)

  I will be reading The Poets of our Time in each free moment." "Good." There was a pause in which we simply looked in each other's eyes and his grin of self-congratulation seeped away and he was shifting and waiting to be dismissed. I had never seen him so childish—it was a sign of trust, maybe, that he wasn't bothering with his usual indifference, though he must have known too that keenness and high spirits won adults' hearts and persuaded them that there was goodness left in the world. Then when he turned and jogged back to the house I thought I had never seen him so manly—so broad and so slimly heavy and incontrovertibly grown. I went on towards Matt's, the street-lights warming and yellowing as the twilight fell. Chapter 6 "You re wearing a truly astonishing tie." I beamed. "Yes, what do you think?" There's no denying one's tie, no standing back from it. Mrs Vivier nodded at me to show she had taken in the phenomenon but was too polite, too little all courant with the whole tie scene, perhaps, to venture an opinion. I went towards the over-mantel mirror with the backward-leaning prance of an actor made up fat, and was more startled than I had expected by the gaudy flash of the main motif. "I'm not sure I'd want one myself," said Paul Echevin, considering it too in the mirror's safe distance. "Isn't it the wrong way round? I mean it's right in the mirror." "Oh." I squinted down at it uncertainly. "But do tell me where you got it." "A most extraordinary clothes shop in I think it's Tanners Street, aptly enough. Masses of leather, and jewellery made out of knives and forks." It was the campest thing I'd said to Echevin, but he laughed intelligently. "There's someone there who paints these artties." The dry buzz of the doorbell was heard—Mrs Vivier called out from the kitchen, and Echevin went down to let in the other guests. I was alone with my tie for a few moments, and with the pumapounce of love that made me gasp and go white and then go red.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  When I shifted my position the picture twitched uncaringly to various greenery, a nodding sapling's top, and I had to run the glasses down and across in a worried blur to find him strolling over the lawn, just beneath me it seemed, like a figure in the flattened foreground of a Japanese print. I didn't dare open the blinds further, and the picture was hazily occluded above and below by the unfocused slats. They gave an edge of mystery to the brilliant image they framed. He spread out a pale blue towel with tattered edges, an old towel kept for the beach, for tar and sun-oil. Then he paced around it in a territorial sort of way, and looked out towards the dunes. I thought for a while he might be going on to the beach instead and that I would lose my almost supernatural vantage-point. But he resolved on privacy and I saw at once his shy, clever dignity—it made me love him even more. He tugged off his jersey and lay down, reaching out for a cloth bag: I watched him take out some lotion and read the bottle before deciding he wasn't likely to get burnt; the sun was bright, though, and he put on visor sunglasses, their arms linked behind by a short embroidered band. Then he rolled on to his front and opened a book, he was looking away from me and I refined the focus over his shoulder and made out a typical page of Poets of our Time: he must have folded a pencil in as a marker, and he was soon underlining words and scoring the margin and then for about five minutes he worked on a dense, formal doodle—I think it was on a Roy Campbell page. The thing about our Time was that it was really our Fathers' Time. I wondered at my own impulse to keep him back with me in a shared childhood of unfashionable lyrics and discredited rhetoric. I studied his naked brown back more closely than I had ever studied anything—the wide plates of his shoulderblades, the slight boyish dip between as he leant on his elbows, traces of pink scratches on the shoulders, the shaped, backswept golden hair stacked in the embroidered sling of the shades-band. When I put down the binoculars to take off my trousers I was confused to find myself indoors, in another house, and not kneeling just behind his open legs ready to fuck him or tickle his feet. I came back to my vigil to find him standing up and looking around, and I thought perhaps he was giving up already. Matt was quite wrong to say he was skinny; he was lean but no more skinny than Matt was, and his chest was surprisingly big, with wide milky nipples. I knelt there teasing the air with my tongue and teeth, and working my jaw in imaginary kisses.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  Though I had become rather vain of late and conceited about my inky quiff, I tended not to consult it; but when we had a record on and I was sprawled on the sofa opposite, my eyes would dwell on the slipped horizon of the wall behind me reflected in its high ellipse—a sun-yellow wall like an empty beach reaching up to the sky of shadowed white ceiling, a birdless distance that took on splendour or desolation according to the music and the varying light of the months. It was about that time that music, which had always been around me, and was identified, through the scent of polish in the sitting-room, with the very air I breathed, gained a new and independent grip on me; I suppose it was love that made me see a Mozart concerto or a lyrical and exultant Schumann symphony not simply as a wonder in itself but as a kind of explanation of life. Like love it seemed to admit me to a new dimension of luminous purpose: music raised my expectations to an ideal level that other friends found comic or unbelievable if they weren't initiates themselves. At school we were played some bits of Janacek, which were the most convulsively life-like music I had ever heard. I gathered up the scraps of Supraphon record-sleeve information, cryptically condensed and obscured by translation, that were all that could be found out by an English boy, and was amazed by the lateness of his flowering and the fact that this bristling old gent should be the one to confirm everything I felt at seventeen about life and sex and being out at night with winds and stars. And what were my father's thoughts as he sat limply in his armchair, head back, eyes on a different distance, later on sometimes slipping into noiseless defenceless sleep? He was only fifty-five, only lately robbed by chemicals of the thick black hair we had always had in common; he hadn't reached his late phase yet. He started singing as a young man in the Navy: I imagined his mess-mates gathered round him or lying solemn in their bunks as he crooned some old salt-water ballad and their ship slid on through the moonlit toy sea of a British war-film. He must imagine those days too, I thought, rather than look forward to the final sudden crisis; but I knew he would never say. There was a beautiful accidental integrity about the galaxy of thoughts inside that listening head. Almost everything he knew and felt had never been spoken, never sung, never known to another soul. The ritual events of the summer unfolded, both more intense and more trivial than usual.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  I started pulling off his clothes in a turmoil of jealousy and pride. Luc naked—apart from his white briefs. His hard cock had a vein in it so thick that it showed in contour through the stretched cotton. I turned him round in my hands, kissed the back of his neck, stood away from him a moment as I undid my cuffs, glancing down at his legs, where the summer tanlines still palely showed. I thought, I mustn't say I love you, though they were the only words I had in my head. He looked back, swung slowly round, swallowing, wondering; there was a mastered shyness in his face, his movements had the seductive blur of drink, the sureness heightened by delay. He took my cock in his hand for a stroke or two, then hugged me again—I was kissing him adoringly, gasping a bit crazily as I worked at his mouth, confusing him; calming him too with my hands across his back, tranced arcs falling gently to his waistband—my fingers slid firmly under and he caught his breath as I furrowed through. He curled against me, then started pushing at his pants to get them down. Luc's cock—with that fat little rope of blue-grey vein that ran out along its broad back and then curved capriciously under, the tight foreskin, still with a tang of moisture under it—I kissed it and licked his blond-wisped balls just briefly, in acknowledgment, whilst his hands went softly through my hair. I stumbled him back a couple of times till he bumped the chair, he didn't quite know what was going on—he raised his foot on to the arm and I slid beneath and twisted round with my face in his arse. It was bolder and more beautiful than I expected, the flare of it as he leant forward to play clumsily with my cock. I stroked his pucker with a knuckle, longing to lick—I breathed on it, sort of whistled as if cooling something. It had a pretty, spoilt expression, a puzzled pout. I kissed all around it, decoyed my tongue all down his raised thigh, came back and tried it with a licked thumb. There was a kind of pride in him as well as me; he would take whatever I gave him. I felt for a second or two the strict obligations of the teacher's role, then doubted, as my thumb slipped in to the first, then the second knuckle, whilst he complained and jacked his cock fiercely in his hand, if he had anything left to learn.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  I had almost no idea what I was doing. I prised open the top stud of his trousers—maroon cords, just as before—yanked down the zip, pulled them round his knees. Seeing again how his cock was held in his little blue briefs I was almost sick with love, fondled it and kissed it through the soft sustaining cotton. Then down they came, and I rubbed his cock in my fist. I knew it so well, the thick, short, veined shaft. I weighed it on my tongue, took it in and felt its blunt head against the roof of my mouth, pushing into my throat. Then I let it swing, went behind him, held his cheeks apart, flattened my face between them, tongued his black, sleek, hairless slot, slobbered his asshole and slid in a finger, then two, then three. Long convulsions went through him, indrawn breaths. Tears dripped from his chin onto the stretched encumbrance of his trousers and pants. He was sniffing and gulping. Slowly I came to my senses, slid my wet fingers from his ass, stood up behind him and pulled him gently to me. ‘Baby … Arthur … sweetest … love …’ I kissed the back of his neck, half turned him against me and kissed the submerged pale filament of his scar, cool tears over a burning face. He was reaching down, tugging up his clothes again. I helped him maladroitly. He said nothing; sniffed. I felt abjectly unhappy. We leant awkwardly together in the narrow, stinking box of the lavatory, and I ran my hand soothingly up and down his back. ‘Will … I got to go. My brother’s here. He’s waiting. I got to go with him.’ He looked at me with unspeakable sadness. ‘To do stuff for him. I got to go.’ He let himself out of the lock-up and left me standing stupidly in it. Someone else was hovering to get in, saying, ‘Have you finished?’ I almost fell past him, wandered out in a torment of confusion and self-disgust into the flashing darkness of the club—and then stood, looking on, but drowning in a world of my own. This must have taken several minutes, until some outcrop of objectivity rose again from the flood. Out on the street it was surprisingly cold, and I ran a little way in both directions. There was no sign of Arthur. I was loitering, dithering, craning around at the nothing that was going on.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  All was well in Chambers, but we were awkward when alone. I was soon idolatrously in love, & I believe he was too. One afternoon in Cloister Time when the whole College was out on war work at a farm beyond St Catherine’s Hill, digging potatoes, he took me off for a walk through the fields. We walked along arm-in-arm though he was much bigger than me. I had an intense sense of privilege & occasion, though I don’t think I envisaged anything particular happening. Nor did it. He said it wd be awfully sad when he left, but he wanted to join the War, & play his part. Then he said how perfectly furious he had been when he had heard what Stanbridge had done to me. He would have done something about it, only Stanbridge’s brother being killed had made it impossible. I said I didn’t mind, really; but he said he would never have done a thing like that. When we got back to the potato field, there were remarks. Somebody said, ‘You look a bit stiff, Strong’ & somebody else said, ‘You two look fairly tweaked.’ There was a general impression that we had made love to each other, which was pruriently celebrated by the other boys, as if on the morning after a wedding. I blushed & was delighted at this. I remember sifting through the barely damped forked earth with my hands, picking out the potatoes, the dirt packing behind my nails, & not in the least minding that we hadn’t. Strong died the following year. A splinter from a shell lodged in his head, & he spent some time in a mental hospital near St Albans. I used to think about him & imagine him raving: apparently he was sometimes quite insane. And then it was read out that he’d died. About a month later I received a letter saying he’d left me £50. It wasn’t in his will, but he had told his mother when he was in hospital that he wanted me to have something, & she had suspected then that he was going to die. She came over to have tea with the Second Master, who told me all this. By then things were beginning to turn round. The worship I felt for bigger boys, the heroic ones already taking on beauty as their leaving drew near, & the glamour of the Army glowed about them, was as strong, or almost so. But by the time I was 16 my eyes swung about & saw the younger boys. The emotions were far more complex, for being senior I had power, which I could use over them & then luxuriously abdicate in making my feelings clear. The idolatry was to do with not having—it was idealised, & above lust, which was catered for anyway by incessant parties, mutual pleasurings & painings. For two years or so we were utterly abandoned.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  Papaw would sit on our porch to smoke, and I’d sit out there with him and listen to him grumble about politics or the steelworkers’ union. When I learned to read, Mom bought me my first chapter book—Space Brat —and heaped praise on me for finishing it quickly. I loved to read, and I loved to work on math problems with Papaw, and I loved the way that Mom seemed to delight in everything I did. Mom and I bonded over other things, especially our favorite sport: football. I read every word I could about Joe Montana, the greatest quarterback of all time, watched every game, and wrote fan mail to the 49ers and later the Chiefs, Montana’s two teams. Mom checked out books on football strategy from the public library, and we built little models of the field with construction paper and loose change—pennies for the defense, nickels and dimes for the offense. Mom didn’t want me to understand only the rules of football; she wanted me to understand the strategy. We practiced on our construction-paper football field, going over the various contingencies: What happened if a particular lineman (a shiny nickel) missed his block? What could the quarterback (a dime) do if no receiver (another dime) was open? We didn’t have chess, but we did have football. More than anyone else in my family, Mom wanted us to be exposed to people from all walks of life. Her friend Scott was a kind old gay man who, she later told me, died unexpectedly. She made me watch a movie about Ryan White, a boy not that much older than I was, who contracted HIV through a blood transfusion and had to start a legal fight to return to school. Every time I complained about school, Mom reminded me of Ryan White and spoke about what a blessing it was to get an education. She was so overcome by White’s story that she handwrote a letter to his mother after he died in 1990. Mom believed deeply in the promise of education. She was the salutatorian of her high school class but never made it to college because Lindsay was born weeks after Mom graduated from high school. But she did return to a local community college and earn an associate’s degree in nursing. I was probably seven or eight when she started working full-time as a nurse, and I liked to think that I had contributed in some small way: I “helped” her study by crawling all over her, and I let her practice drawing blood on my youthful veins. Sometimes Mom’s devotion to education arguably went a little too far. During my third-grade science fair project, Mom helped at every stage—from planning the project to assisting with lab notes to assembling the presentation. The night before everything was due, the project looked precisely how it deserved to look: like the work of a third-grader who had slacked off a bit.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  But Mamaw respected his loyalty and the fact that he would go to any length to protect the honor of his family. Though he murdered countless enemies and drank excessively, the only criticism she ever levied against him involved his infidelity. “He’s always sleeping around. I don’t like that.” I also saw for the first time Mamaw’s love of children, not as an object of her affection but as an observer of it. She often babysat for Lindsay’s or Aunt Wee’s young kids. One day she had both of Aunt Wee’s girls for the day and Aunt Wee’s dog in the backyard. When the dog barked, Mamaw screamed, “Shut up, you son of a bitch.” My cousin Bonnie Rose ran to the back door and began screaming over and over, “Son of a bitch! Son of a bitch!” Mamaw hobbled over to Bonnie Rose and scooped her up in her arms. “Shhh! You can’t say that or you’ll get me in trouble.” But she was laughing so hard that she could barely get the words out. A few weeks later, I got home from school and asked Mamaw how her day had gone. She told me that she’d had a great day because she’d been watching Lindsay’s son Kameron. “He asked me if he could say ‘fuck’ like I do. I told him yes, but only at my house.” Then she chuckled quietly to herself. Regardless of how she felt, whether her emphysema made it difficult to breathe or her hip hurt so badly that she could barely walk, she never turned down an opportunity to “spend time with those babies,” as she put it. Mamaw loved them, and I began to understand why she had always dreamed of becoming a lawyer for abused and neglected children. At some point, Mamaw underwent major back surgery to help with the pain that made walking difficult. She landed in a nursing home for a few months to recover, forcing me to live alone, an experience that happily didn’t last long. Every night she called Lindsay, Aunt Wee, or me and made the same request: “I hate the damned food here. Can you go to Taco Bell and get me a bean burrito?” Indeed, Mamaw hated everything about the nursing home and once asked me to promise that if she ever faced a permanent stay, I’d take her .44 Magnum and put a bullet in her head. “Mamaw, you can’t ask me to do that. I’d go to jail for the rest of my life.” “Well,” she said, pausing for a moment to reflect, “then get your hands on some arsenic. That way no one will know.” Her back surgery, it turned out, was completely unnecessary. She had a broken hip, and as soon as a surgeon repaired it, she was back on her feet, though she used a walker or cane from then on.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  Almost all of the letters I sent home asked her to “kiss the babies and tell them that I love them.” Cut off for the first time from home and family, I learned a lot about myself and my culture. Contrary to conventional wisdom, the military is not a landing spot for low-income kids with no other options. The sixty-nine members of my boot camp platoon included black, white, and Hispanic kids; rich kids from upstate New York and poor kids from West Virginia; Catholics, Jews, Protestants, and even a few atheists. I was naturally drawn to those like me. “The person I talk to most,” I wrote to my family in my first letter home, “is from Leslie County, Kentucky. He talks like he’s from Jackson. I was telling him how much bullshit it was that Catholics got all the free time they did. They get it because of the way the church schedule works. He is definitely a country kid, ’cause he said, ‘What’s a Catholic?’ And I told him that it was just another form of Christianity, and he said, ‘I might have to try that out.’” Mamaw understood precisely where he came from. “Down in that part of Kentucky, everybody’s a snake handler,” she wrote back, only partially joking. During my time away, Mamaw showed vulnerability that I’d never seen before. Whenever she received a letter from me, she would call my aunt or sister, demanding that someone come to her house immediately and interpret my chicken scratch. “I love you a big bunch and I miss you a bunch I forget you aren’t here I think you will come down the stairs and I can holler at you it is just a feeling you aren’t really gone. My hands hurt today that arthritis I guess. . . . I’ll go for now write more later love you please take care.” Mamaw’s letters never contained the necessary punctuation and always included some articles, usually from Reader’s Digest , to occupy my time. She could still be classic Mamaw: mean and ferociously loyal. About a month into my training, I had a nasty exchange with a drill instructor, who took me aside for a half hour, forcing me to alternate jumping jacks, sit-ups, and short sprints until I was completely exhausted. It was par for the course in boot camp, something nearly everyone faced at one point or another. If anything, I was lucky to have avoided it for so long. “Dearest J.D.,” Mamaw wrote when she learned of the incident, “I must say I have been waiting for them dick face bastards to start on you—and now they have. Words aren’t invented to describe how they piss me off. . . . You just keep on doing the best you can do and keep thinking about this stupid asshole with an IQ of 2 thinking he is Bobby bad ass but he wears girls underwear.

• From Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016)

  If we weren’t at school or work or church, we were out exploring. My mom’s attitude was “I chose you, kid. I brought you into this world, and I’m going to give you everything I never had.” She poured herself into me. She would find places for us to go where we didn’t have to spend money. We must have gone to every park in Johannesburg. My mom would sit under a tree and read the Bible, and I’d run and play and play and play. On Sunday afternoons after church, we’d go for drives out in the country. My mom would find places with beautiful views for us to sit and have a picnic. There was none of the fanfare of a picnic basket or plates or anything like that, only baloney and brown bread and margarine sandwiches wrapped up in butcher paper. To this day, baloney and brown bread and margarine will instantly take me back. You can come with all the Michelin stars in the world, just give me baloney and brown bread and margarine and I’m in heaven. Food, or the access to food, was always the measure of how good or bad things were going in our lives. My mom would always say, “My job is to feed your body, feed your spirit, and feed your mind.” That’s exactly what she did, and the way she found money for food and books was to spend absolutely nothing on anything else. Her frugality was the stuff of legend. Our car was a tin can on wheels, and we lived in the middle of nowhere. We had threadbare furniture, busted old sofas with holes worn through the fabric. Our TV was a tiny black-and-white with a bunny aerial on top. We changed the channels using a pair of pliers because the buttons didn’t work. Most of the time you had to squint to see what was going on. We always wore secondhand clothes, from Goodwill stores or that were giveaways from white people at church. All the other kids at school got brands, Nike and Adidas. I never got brands. One time I asked my mom for Adidas sneakers. She came home with some knockoff brand, Abidas. “Mom, these are fake,” I said. “I don’t see the difference.” “Look at the logo. There are four stripes instead of three.” “Lucky you,” she said. “You got one extra.”

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  She and Glen were dirt poor, but Marsha had always compensated for the things she couldn’t give her kids by giving them all of her heart. She read to them, talked to them, played with them, hugged and kissed them constantly, and kept them close at all times. Against all odds, she nurtured a precious family bonded by an intense love. Her older boys, even her nineteen-year-old, stayed close to her at home despite the many distractions that emerged as they finished high school. Marsha liked being a mom. It’s why she didn’t worry about having so many kids. Getting pregnant with a seventh was not what she had expected or preferred, but she would love this child as she had loved each one before. By winter, things in Baldwin County had settled down. Jobs had returned, and Glen finally found more steady work. The family was still struggling financially, but most of the kids were back in school, and it seemed as if they had survived the worst of the destruction. Marsha knew that a pregnancy at her age was very risky, but she couldn’t afford to see a doctor. She just didn’t have the money to spare. Having endured six previous deliveries, she knew what to expect and thought she’d make the best of it without prenatal care. She tried not to worry even though she’d been experiencing some pains and problems with this pregnancy that she didn’t remember having before. There had been bleeding; if she could have afforded an examination, a doctor would have found signs of placental abruption. Their old trailer sat next to the new FEMA camper and was largely uninhabitable, but it still had running water and a bathtub, which afforded Marsha a quiet getaway from time to time. One day, she wasn’t feeling well and thought a long hot bath would do her good. She settled into a tub of hot water minutes before a violent labor began. She sensed it was happening too fast and before she knew it, she’d delivered a stillborn son. She desperately tried to revive the infant, but he never took a breath. Although she’d initially fretted about the pregnancy, Marsha mourned the baby’s death and insisted on giving him a name and a family burial. They named him Timothy and buried him in a marked grave beside their small camper home. The baby’s stillbirth might have remained a private tragedy for Marsha and her family had it not been for a nosy neighbor who had long been suspicious of the Colbeys.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  Whether the contemplative life is continuous?Objection 1: It would seem that the contemplative life is not continuous. For the contemplative life consists essentially in things pertaining to the intellect. Now all the intellectual perfections of this life will be made void, according to 1 Cor. 13:8, “Whether prophecies shall be made void, or tongues shall cease, or knowledge shall be destroyed.” Therefore the contemplative life is made void. Objection 2: Further, a man tastes the sweetness of contemplation by snatches and for a short time only: wherefore Augustine says (Confess. x, 40), “Thou admittest me to a most unwonted affection in my inmost soul, to a strange sweetness . . . yet through my grievous weight I sink down again.” Again, Gregory commenting on the words of Job 4:15, “When a spirit passed before me,” says (Moral. v, 33): “The mind does not remain long at rest in the sweetness of inward contemplation, for it is recalled to itself and beaten back by the very immensity of the light.” Therefore the contemplative life is not continuous. Objection 3: Further, that which is not connatural to man cannot be continuous. Now the contemplative life, according to the Philosopher (Ethic. x, 7), “is better than the life which is according to man.” Therefore seemingly the contemplative life is not continuous. On the contrary, our Lord said (Lk. 10:42): “Mary hath chosen the best part, which shall not be taken away from her,” since as Gregory says (Hom. xiv in Ezech.), “the contemplative life begins here so that it may be perfected in our heavenly home.” I answer that, A thing may be described as continuous in two ways: first, in regard to its nature; secondly, in regard to us. It is evident that in regard to itself contemplative life is continuous for two reasons: first, because it is about incorruptible and unchangeable things; secondly, because it has no contrary, for there is nothing contrary to the pleasure of contemplation, as stated in Topic. i, 13. But even in our regard contemplative life is continuous—both because it is competent to us in respect of the incorruptible part of the soul, namely the intellect, wherefore it can endure after this life—and because in the works of the contemplative life we work not with our bodies, so that we are the more able to persevere in the works thereof, as the Philosopher observes (Ethic. x, 7). Reply to Objection 1: The manner of contemplation is not the same here as in heaven: yet the contemplative life is said to remain by reason of charity, wherein it has both its beginning and its end. Gregory speaks in this sense (Hom. xiv in Ezech.): “The contemplative life begins here, so as to be perfected in our heavenly home, because the fire of love which begins to burn here is aflame with a yet greater love when we see Him Whom we love.”

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  "Urn, have another drink," and he leant across with the bottle and I let him pour as if unaware that I had to say when. The lovely confidence of that tarnished gold liquid in my grasp, the sense of being provided for, of knowing one could come through. I plucked off my glasses to rub my eyes and saw the lamp-lit room and my friend's pale face in an intimate crepuscular blur, like a little etching by Edgard Orst. And I felt the spirit of the time that I had summoned up pouring past me like a night-wind through woods around a lonely shack or long-abandoned Nissen hut where two boys squat and banter over a ten-minute fire of twigs and rubbish. My heart was thumping with the certainty that when I put my glasses on again Dawn himself would be leaning forward from the sofa, his teenage eyes and mouth unveiled by love. "Of course, we had to get away from Lawrence Graves." "Christ, I'd quite forgotten . . ." "Old Graves was mortally put out by the whole business. I tried to make him feel wanted, and I used to have Dawn round for Bruckner and Mahler sessions in our study, but Graves got into absolute paroxysms of irritation if we even smiled at each other. He'd be conducting away and though the music was all part of it, Dawn and I could almost forget it was going on somehow, we were so full of our own latest memories and plans, and he would catch us smiling at each other . . . I think he wanted to kind of hijack our affair, take it over or blow it up." "He was in love with you himself, presumably." "Of course," I said impatiently, covering the fact that I had never quite realised that. "Of course. And it's true that Dawn was never exactly brilliant or enthralling company unless you saw the point of him. I remember coming in one day and finding he'd been waiting for me for hours. Graves was sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of him as if he was trying to mesmerise him or get him to reveal some potent but unguessable quality he had. He was really trying to get down there with him. I said later how poetic a picture it had been—poetic was one of our permitted terms of acclaim—and he turned quite nasty. 'Poetic!' he said. 'He talked prose to me all afternoon!'" Willie didn't smile. "I feel rather sorry for Graves, being left all alone at nights, being told to turn his music down by Head of House W. Turlough, whilst his best friend, actually probably his only friend, was running round naked on the cricket pitch with someone who was clearly more attractive than he was. If I'd realised at the time I'd have been nicer to him."

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  I have sometimes thought of constructing a system of human knowledge which would be based on eroticism, a theory of contact wherein the mysterious value of each being is to offer to us just that point of perspective which another world affords. In such a philosophy pleasure would be a more complete but also more specialized form of approach to the Other, one more technique for getting to know what is not ourselves. In the least sensual encounters it is still in our contacts that emotion begins, or ends: the somewhat repugnant hand of the old woman who presents me her petition, the moist brow of my father in death's agony, the wound which I wash for an injured soldier. Even the most intellectual or the most neutral exchanges are made through this system of body-signals: the sudden enlightenment on the face of a tribune to whom a maneuver is explained on the morning of battle, the impersonal salute of a subordinate who comes to attention as I pass, the friendly [Hadrian 015a.jpg] The Mondragone Antinous Paris, Louvre [Hadrian 016.jpg] The Boar Hunt Hadrianic Medallion from the Arch of Constantine, Rome The Lion Hunt Hadrianic Medallion from the Arch of Constantine, Rome [Hadrian 018.jpg] The Farnese Antinous Naples, National Archeological Museum glance of a slave at my thanks for the tray which he brings me, or the appreciative grimace of an old friend to whom a rare cameo is given. The slightest and most superficial of contacts are enough for us with most persons, or prove even too much. But when these contacts persist and multiply about one unique being, to the point of embracing him entirely, when each fraction of a body becomes laden for us with meaning as overpowering as that of the face itself, when this one creature haunts us like music and torments us like a problem (instead of inspiring in us, at most, mere irritation, amusement, or boredom), when he passes from the periphery of our universe to its center, and finally becomes for us more indispensable than our own selves, then that astonishing prodigy takes place wherein I see much more an invasion of the flesh by the spirit than a simple play of the body alone. Such views on love could lead to the career of seducer. If I have not fulfilled that role it is doubtless because I have done something else, if no better.

• From The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us (2017)

  It is possible that once our female ancestors gained enough sexual autonomy to substantially reduce or eliminate infanticide by males, they began to use mate choice to make additional gains in other areas of their ongoing sexual conflict with males. Specifically, female choice expanded from the immediately perceivable physical features of potential mates to encompass the broader social personality and social relationship experience, ultimately resulting in the evolution of male paternal investment. This transformation was accompanied by the aesthetic expansion of sexual intercourse itself to become more frequent, longer lasting, more variable and complex, more pleasurable and engaging, less related to reproduction, more obscured from paternity (through concealed ovulation), and entwined with new emotional content and meaning. Through female choice for more socially engaging, and interpersonally engaged, male partners, males gradually evolved to make new paternal investments—of food, protection, and a cooperative social relationship—in their mates and their mates’ offspring. Ultimately, male reproductive investment evolved because of male competition—that is, competition to please choosy females and thereby gain enduring sexual access and social relationships that come with the pair bond. Of course, male reproductive investment in offspring could provide decisive improvements in the health, well-being, and survival of a female’s offspring, helping them to survive until they reach their own sexual maturity and reproductive years. It could also improve a female’s survival, well-being, and fecundity, help decrease her interbirth interval (which is significantly shorter in humans than in other apes), and expand her lifetime reproductive success. This decrease is precisely why we humans managed to greatly increase our capacity for population growth over other apes. Thus, obtaining male parental care was an adaptive direct benefit to female mate choice. At this stage in human evolution, mate choice evolved to advance through a series of mutual social and emotional interactions between people, during which we gained the opportunity to scrutinize and assess the social, emotional, and even psychological attributes that are important to us individually in our search for a suitable mate. For this evolutionary reason, developing an enduring sexual bond is not the result of a hardball, legalistic negotiation dictated by game theory. This is why prenuptial agreements are so unromantic and offensive. Rather, falling in love is a deeply aesthetic experience that involves mutual social, cognitive, and physical seduction.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  CHRYSOSTOM. Note through what steps we have now ascended hither, and how He has set us on the very pinnacle of virtue. The first step is, not to begin to do wrong to any; the second, that in avenging a wrong done to us we be content with retaliating equal; the third, to return nothing of what we have suffered; the fourth, to offer one’s self to the endurance of evil; the fifth, to be ready to suffer even more evil than the oppressor desires to inflict; the sixth, not to hate him of whom we suffer such things; the seventh, to love him; the eighth, to do him good; the ninth, to pray for him. And because the command is great, the reward proposed is also great, namely, to be made like unto God, Ye shall be the sons of your Father which is in heaven. JEROME. For whoso keeps the commandments of God is thereby made the son of God; he then of whom he here speaks is not by nature His son, but by his own will. AUGUSTINE. (Serm. in Mont. i. 23.) After that rule we must here understand of which John speaks, He gave them power to be made the sons of God. One is His Son by nature; we are made sons by the power which we have received; that is, so far as we fulfil those things that we are commanded. So He says not, Do these things because ye are sons; but, do these things that ye may become sons. In calling us to this then, He calls us to His likeness, for He saith, He maketh His sun to rise on the righteous and the unrighteous. By the sun we may understand not this visible, but that of which it is said, To you that fear the name of the Lord, the Sun of righteousness shall arise; (Mal. 4:2.) and by the rain, the water of the doctrine of truth; for Christ was seen, and was preached to good as well as bad. HILARY. Or, the sun and rain have reference to the baptism with water and Spirit. AUGUSTINE. (ubi sup.) Or we may take it of this visible sun, and of the rain by which the fruits are nourished, as the wicked mourn in the book of Wisdom, The Sun has not risen for us. (Wisd. 5:6.) And of the rain it is said, I will command the clouds that they rain not on it. (Is. 5:6.) But whether it be this or that, it is of the great goodness of God, which is set forth for our imitation. lie says not, ‘the sun,’ but, His sun, that is, the sun which Himself has made, that hence we may be admonished with how great liberality we ought to supply those things that we have not created, but have received as a boon from Him.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  I was so desperate for stability during my formative years—both familial and financial—that I’m at risk of that very clichéd transgression of youth: of focusing so much on what I lacked as a kid that I sometimes fail to offer Ewan the things I did have. I knew my family loved me, even when they struggled to take care of themselves. I knew that poor people had dignity and agency, and that some of them used that agency for good and others for ill. I knew that loyalty was more important than advancement. I knew that a beat-up steelworker could be a good dad to a kid who needed it. I knew that a mother could love her son despite the grip of addiction. I knew that a sick old woman could be a mother, a caretaker, a protector, an ass chewer, a gun shooter, a grandmother, and I knew—and I needed to know it—that that woman, my Mamaw, would kill for me if she had to. Will my son know these things? I certainly hope so, but it’s not enough to teach him the right lessons. I didn’t know these things because I read something that someone else had written down. I knew these things because I saw them with my own two eyes and felt them in my bones. For all the problems and hopelessness that exists in my community, I am proudest that my grandparents were hillbillies. There’s a plot of land in Jackson, Kentucky, not far from where Mamaw grew up, that has been in our family for around one hundred years (and maybe longer). Mamaw and many of her siblings were born there, and both Mamaw and Papaw are buried there now. I joke with Usha that someday we’ll be buried there too, but at least for me, it’s not a joke. The irony of the book’s success is that it gave me the means to buy that piece of land, something I’ve wanted to do for much of my life. I bought it most of all because I want Mamaw and Papaw’s graves to be maintained for our family for generations to come. But I also bought it because I wanted a reason to take my own son back to the place that formed such a large piece of my childhood. I want Ewan to explore those hills, search for crawdads in those creeks, and feel at home there like I did. AcknowledgmentsWriting this book was among the most challenging and rewarding experiences of my life. I learned much I didn’t know about my culture, my neighborhood, and my family, and I relearned much that I had forgotten.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  Accordingly Christ willed to submit to death for our sins so that, in taking on Himself without any fault of His own the punishment charged against us, He might free us from the death to which we had been sentenced, in the way that anyone would be freed from a debt of penalty if another person undertook to pay the penalty for him. Another reason why He wished to die was that His death might be for us not only a remedy of satisfaction but also a sacrament of salvation, so that we, transferred to a spiritual life, might die to our carnal life, in the likeness of His death. This is in accord with 1 Peter 3:18: “Christ also died once for our sins, the just for the unjust, that He might offer us to God, being put to death in deed in the flesh, but enlivened in the spirit.” Christ also wished to die that His death might be an example of perfect virtue for us. He gave an example of charity, for “greater love than this no man hath, that a man lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13). The more numerous and grievous are the sufferings a person does not refuse to bear for his friend, the more strikingly his love is shown forth. But of all human ills the most grievous is death, by which human life is snuffed out. Hence no greater proof of love is possible than that a man should expose himself to death for a friend. By His death Christ also gave an example of fortitude, which does not abandon justice in the face of adversity; refusal to give up the practice of virtue even under fear of death seems to pertain most emphatically to fortitude. Thus the Apostle says in Hebrews 2:14 ff., with reference to Christ’s passion: “That through death He might destroy him who had the empire of death, that is to say, the devil, and might deliver them who through the fear of death were all their lifetime subject to servitude.” In not refusing to die for truth, Christ overcame the fear of dying, which is the reason men for the most part are subject to the slavery of sin. Further, He gave an example of patience, a virtue that prevents sorrow from overwhelming man in time of adversity; the greater the trials, the more splendidly does the virtue of patience shine forth in them. Therefore an example of perfect patience is afforded in the greatest of evils, which is death, if it is borne without distress of mind. Such tranquillity the prophet foretold of Christ: He “shall be dumb as a lamb before his shearer, and He shall not open His mouth” (Is. 53:7).

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  On the third point: this puzzle about Peter and John may be solved in several ways. Augustine, in his commentary, regards this passage as mystical, and explains that the active life signified by Peter is greater in love to God than the contemplative life signified by John, since it is more alive to the sufferings of this present life, and desires more fervently to be set free and to draw near to God; but that God loves the contemplative life the more, since he preserves it longer, for it does not end with the life of the body, as does the life of action. Others say that Peter had a greater love for Christ in his members, and that he was consequently the more loved of Christ, who for this reason commended the Church to his care; or that John had a greater love for Christ in himself, and that he was consequently the more loved of Christ, who for this reason commended his mother to his care. Others again say that it is doubtful which of them loved Christ the more with the love of charity, and doubtful which of them was destined by God ’ s love to the greater glory of eternal life. But it is said that Peter loved the more spontaneously and with the greater fervour, and that John was the more loved, on the evidence of the signs of familiarity which Christ accorded to him and not to others, on account of his youth and purity. Others again say that Christ loved Peter the more for his more excellent gift of charity, and John the more for his greater gift of intellect. If so, Peter was the better, and was the more loved, in an absolute sense, while John was the more loved conditionally. But it seems presumptuous to judge of this matter, since it is said in Prov. 16:2: “ the Lord weigheth the spirits, ” and none other than the Lord. On the fourth point: penitents are related to innocents as the exceeding to the exceeded. For those who have the more grace are better, and are loved the more, whether they be innocents or penitents. But innocence is more worthy than penitence, other things being equal. The reason why God is said to rejoice in a penitent more than in an innocent man is that penitents often arise more cautious, more humble, and more fervent. Thus Gregory says, in his comments on this passage, “ the leader in a battle rejoices more in one who turns from flight to press hard upon the enemy than in one who has neither fled nor fought bravely at any time. ” We may also say that a gift of grace is greater when bestowed on a penitent who deserves punishment than when bestowed on an innocent man who does not. A hundred marks is a greater gift when given to a pauper than when given to a king.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  On the first point: the word of our Lord must be understood through itself. Love to friends does not merit a reward in God ’ s sight when they are loved only because they are friends, as would seem to be the case when we love them in a way in which we do not love our enemies. But love to friends is meritorious when they are loved for God ’ s sake, and not merely because they are friends. The replies to the other points are plain from what we have said. The second and third argue from the reason for love. The fourth argues from the person who is loved. ARTICLE EIGHT Whether it is more Meritorious to Love One’s Neighbour than to Love God1. It seems that it is more meritorious to love one ’ s neighbour than to love God. For the apostle presumably prefers the more meritorious, and according to Rom. 9:3: he would choose to love his neighbour rather than to love God: “ For I could wish that myself were accursed from Christ for my brethren. ” It is therefore more meritorious to love one ’ s neighbour than to love God. 2. Again, it was said in the preceding article that to love a friend is in one sense less meritorious. Now God is very much a friend, since “ he first loved us, ” as I John 4:19 says. Hence it seems that to love God is less meritorious. 3. Again, what is more difficult would seem to be more virtuous and more meritorious, since “ virtue is concerned with the difficult and the good ” (2 Ethics 3). Now it is easier to love God than to love one ’ s neighbour. All things love God naturally. Moreover, there is nothing unlovable in God, which is not the case with one ’ s neighbour. Love to one ’ s neighbour is therefore more meritorious than love to God. On the other hand: “ that on account of which anything is of a certain kind is itself more so. ” Now love to one ’ s neighbour is meritorious only on account of love to God, for whose sake he is loved. Hence love to God is more meritorious than love to one ’ s neighbour.