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 Fragments (7)

  For CkioiialiKh irnr dcBTCst fricnid, l^£xycst liiou % lind adriacr Ic; And, I^anysiisu do tbou Jdt mr T<d Inm IDT bcart-feh larr cxnnmBcid. CLEOBULUS (32) To CfepihuluF nrr lovr I gsre, For Qfiobuhis I imdOhr txvcu At Clcobulig otst glanfffg grsve. Anacreon CLEOBULUS (?) (13) O boy, with glance like maidens fair, I seek thy love in vain. Thou knowest not or dost not care, Yet o'er my soul dost reign. TO SMERDIES (14) The splendid soft bloom off thou hast shorn, The hair which did thy head adorn. LEUCASPIS (15) A harp of twenty strings I play. Which in my hands I hold; And more, Leucaspis, day by day, I am by thy youth enthralled. SIMALUS (16) My eyes at Simalus happened to glance. As he played his beautiful harp in the dance. 87 Lyric Songs of the Greeks MEGISTES (17) Fully ten months have from us sped, Since affable Megistes ever With willow withes has crowned his head, And drinking sweet must ceases never. MEGISTES (i8) I hate all men with manners stem, As though from 'neath the earth they came; But thou, Megistes, I did learn. Art calm of mind and e'er the same. PYTHOMANDRUS (19) And Pythomandrus once again A refuge proved for me. As he in former times had been. When I from Love did flee. ERXION (20) A cup I had, filled to the brink. To white-necked Erxion to drink. 88 Anacreon UNNAMED BOY FAVORITES (21) I long to enjoy myself with thee: Thy charming manner pleases me. (22) For those slender thighs, my friend, I this wine as pledge will spend. (23) A lovely boy thou art, And dear to many a heart. A LESBIAN MAIDEN (24) Once again with a purple sphere Eros, god with the golden hair, • Strikes me and doth a challenge bear With a maid of broidered sandals to sport. But she, who doth ip Lesbos abide. Well-built island, my hair doth chide. Blaming me for its color white. While her gazing eyes another court. 89 Lyric Songs of the Greeks A COY THRACIAN MAIDEN (25) Thracian filly, why so shyly Doest thou glance and flee from me? Knowest thou not my cunning wily, Cruel maid, to capture thee? Know full well, however wilful Thou mayest be, yet that I know How to bridle thee, am skilful With the reins to make thee go. Now, o'er meadows bounding ever. Dost thou lightly sport and feed; For not yet hast thou a clever Rider who can guide a steed. SPURN NOT OLD AGE, MAIDEN (26) Though I am old, yet maiden, to me listen. Thou, beauteous-haired, whose robe with gold doth glisten. PAST THE PRIME OF LIFE (27) I am past the prime of life, a maid forlorn ; Loss of my charms I through thy passion mourn. 90 Anacreon UNLOVED ASTERIS (28) O Asteris, I love thee not, Nor has thy love Apelles sought. I HAVE HAD ENOUGH (29) Like a cuckoo I Do me from her hie.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  There was once in the city of Brescia a gentleman called Messer Negro da Ponte Carraro, who amongst sundry other children had a daughter named Andrevuola, young and unmarried and very fair. It chanced she fell in love with a neighbour of hers, Gabriotto by name, a man of mean condition, but full laudable fashions and comely and pleasant of his person, and by the means and with the aid of the serving-maid of the house, she so wrought that not only did Gabriotto know himself beloved of her, but was many and many a time brought, to the delight of both parties, into a goodly garden of her father's. And in order that no cause, other than death, should ever avail to sever those their delightsome loves, they became in secret husband and wife, and so stealthily continuing their foregatherings, it befell that the young lady, being one night asleep, dreamt that she was in her garden with Gabriotto and held him in her arms, to the exceeding pleasure of each; but, as they abode thus, herseemed she saw come forth of his body something dark and frightful, the form whereof she could not discern; the which took Gabriotto and tearing him in her despite with marvellous might from her embrace, made off with him underground, nor ever more might she avail to see either the one or the other. At this she fell into an inexpressible passion of grief, whereby she awoke, and albeit, awaking, she was rejoiced to find that it was not as she had dreamed, nevertheless fear entered into her by reason of the dream she had seen. Wherefore, Gabriotto presently desiring to visit her that next night, she studied as most she might to prevent his coming; however, seeing his desire and so he might not misdoubt him of otherwhat, she received him in the garden and having gathered great store of roses, white and red (for that it was the season), she went to sit with him at the foot of a very goodly and clear fountain that was there. After they had taken great and long delight together, Gabriotto asked her why she would have forbidden his coming that night; whereupon she told him, recounting to him the dream she had seen the foregoing night and the fear she had gotten therefrom.

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

  2. There must be some union between those who have one end in view, as citizens in one State, and soldiers ranked together on the battlefield. But the final end to which man is led by the assistance of divine grace is the vision of God as He essentially is, which is proper to God Himself; and so God shares this final good with man. Man then cannot be led on to this end unless he is united with God by conformity of will, the proper effect of love: for it belongs to friends to like and dislike together, and to rejoice and grieve together. The grace then that constitutes the state of grace renders man a lover of God, as he is thereby guided to an end shared with him by God. 3. The grace that constitutes the state of grace must principally perfect the heart. But the principal perfection of the heart is love. The proof of that is, that every motion of the heart starts from love: for no one desires, or hopes, or rejoices, except for some good that he loves; nor loathes, nor fears, nor is sad, or angry, except about something contrary to the good that he loves. 4. The form whereby a thing is referred to any end assimilates that thing in a manner to the end: thus a body by the form of heaviness acquires a likeness and conformity to the place to which it naturally moves. But the grace that constitutes the state of grace is a form referring man to his last end, God. By grace then man attains to a likeness of God. And likeness is a cause of love. 5. A requisite of perfect work is that the work be done steadily and regularly. That is just the effect of love, which makes even hard and grievous tasks seem light. Since then the grace that constitutes the state of grace goes to perfect our works, the said grace must establish the love of God within us. Hence the Apostle says: The charity of God is spread abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost who is given to us (Rom. v, 5). CHAPTER CLIII THAT DIVINE GRACE CAUSES IN US FAITHTHE movement of grace, guiding us to our last end, is voluntary, not violent (Chap.CXLIX). But there can be no voluntary movement towards an object unless the object be known. Therefore grace must afford us a knowledge of our last end. But such knowledge cannot be by open vision in our present state (Chap.XLVIII): therefore it must be by faith.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  He was ticklish there, too, he didn’t like to be touched there. It had been a line drawn early on, when it became clear I was more adventurous in sex, had a wider palette of things that turned me on; I hope you’re not into that, he had said, laughing, it’s gross, I don’t want you to be into that. It was a difference between us, that fewer things put me off, that I could be indifferent to something and still indulge it for my partner’s sake. That was what he did now, I guess, when he let me pull his foot back to me, holding it in both hands as I kissed the sole again, the arch and then the pads at the base of his toes, each of them, and then the toes themselves. What are you doing, he said, and I couldn’t answer, I wasn’t sure what I was doing as I took the other foot in my hands and repeated what I had done with the first. I was moving slowly now, the tone had changed; I didn’t want to make him laugh anymore, I didn’t know what I wanted him to feel. I kissed his ankles next, at three points, moving from the outside in, from right to left on his right leg, from left to right on his left, which would remain my pattern. Skups, R. said, a question in the way he said it, his name for me or our name for each other. But I didn’t answer, I made another band of these kisses, slightly higher than the first, and then another; I would cover him in kisses, that was what I wanted to do, and I would do it even though I could feel R.’s impatience, even as he said again Skupi, and then, don’t be cheesy, which was his warning against too much affection, against my surfeit of feeling. I ignored it, moving up another inch. It would take a long time, I realized; when you imagine something like that you don’t think about how long it will take, how large a body is, how small a pair of lips. But I would do it, I decided, a kind of unhurriedness opened up in me, a weird wide patience I sank into. I strung kisses across him, his calves and knees, his thighs, the flesh firm in the center and giving at the sides. They were places I had never touched him before, some of them, and this gave gravity to the moment, more gravity; I whispered I love you as I kissed him, and then two kisses later I whispered it again, which became a new pattern, to whisper it again and again. His cock was soft when I reached it, as mine was, I hadn’t noticed it until then.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  It was a kind of blazon of him, of his body, I love you, I whispered again and again to him. And then, when I had laid the last line across his forehead—a garland, I thought, I had garlanded him—You are the most beautiful, I said to him, you are my beautiful boy, and he reached his arms up and pulled me down on top of him, clutching me. You are, he whispered to me, you are, you are.

• From Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away (2022)

  The Endowment Effect The endowment effect helps unlock the mystery of why Harold Staw twice would not sell his stores. In his battle with the Texas shareholders, in which his good friend and lawyer defected to the other side, he was endowed to the California stores in a way that those on the other side of the suit were not. He was unwilling to sell the California stores, stores he had created and built, to protect the value of the Texas stores, stores he had not created and built. When Fred Meyer Inc. came along and offered to buy him out, he again thought the price was too low, despite the fact that his stores were drowning in losses. At every step of the way, he viewed the business that he built from a chicken coop into an empire as worth more than those looking at the value from the outside. They saw the faltering business for what it had become in a way he could not. The endowment effect also offers insight into why Andrew Wilkinson put so much of his personal wealth into Flow. Wilkinson’s story is a particularly good illustration of the layers of cognitive debris at work in our over-persistence. Wilkinson was endowed to Flow in multiple ways. To start and most simply, Wilkinson was the actual owner of Flow. Plus, it was his idea. He thought of it. He created it. He immediately fell in love with his product and that feeling intensified when he compared it to Asana, a similar type of product that he immediately described as “ugly,” “complicated,” and “hard to use.” Flow was a beautiful, functional coffee mug, while Asana was a candy bar he wouldn’t touch. It’s hard to say whether his belief in the value of Flow was reasonable at the beginning, but it certainly wasn’t reasonable during the last several years of his commitment to the losing venture. The endowment effect was clearly causing Wilkinson to overvalue his product, but you can also see how this mixed with the sunk cost effect to create a very destructive cognitive brew. When he was at the point where he had already decided to scale back his commitment to Flow, he nevertheless turned down an offer to sell it for $6 million, because that wouldn’t allow him to recoup all of his $11 million in losses. The endowment effect adds more mass to the katamari, beyond what is already added by the sunk cost effect. As you start on a course of action and as

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

  I answer that, Satisfactory punishment has a twofold purpose, viz. to pay the debt, and to serve as a remedy for the avoidance of sin. Accordingly, as a remedy against future sin, the satisfaction of one does not profit another, for the flesh of one man is not tamed by another’s fast; nor does one man acquire the habit of well-doing, through the actions of another, except accidentally, in so far as a man, by his good actions, may merit an increase of grace for another, since grace is the most efficacious remedy for the avoidance of sin. But this is by way of merit rather than of satisfaction. on the other hand, as regards the payment of the debt, one man can satisfy for another, provided he be in a state of charity, so that his works may avail for satisfaction. Nor is it necessary that he who satisfies for another should undergo a greater punishment than the principal would have to undergo (as some maintain, who argue that a man profits more by his own punishment than by another’s), because punishment derives its power of satisfaction chiefly from charity whereby man bears it. And since greater charity is evidenced by a man satisfying for another than for himself, less punishment is required of him who satisfies for another, than of the principal: wherefore we read in the Lives of the Fathers (v, 5) of one who for love of his brother did penance for a sin which his brother had not committed, and that on account of his charity his brother was released from a sin which he had committed. Nor is it necessary that the one for whom satisfaction is made should be unable to make satisfaction himself, for even if he were able, he would be released from his debt when the other satisfied in his stead. But this is necessary in so far as the satisfactory punishment is medicinal: so that a man is not to be allowed to do penance for another, unless there be evidence of some defect in the penitent, either bodily, so that he is unable to bear it, or spiritual, so that he is not ready to undergo it.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  There was a sudden noise then, a dull crack that startled me, that startled R., too; both of us tensed as the room was filled with wind, with the noise of it and its force, it made the curtains billow, I felt it cold along my back. The window beside the bed had come open; there was a way to turn the handle that let it tilt in a few inches at the top, it must have come unlatched. The wind made a kind of accompaniment as I began to move again, a rhythm against which I moved, and as I continued fucking R. I thought of the distance from which it had come, though maybe it doesn’t make sense to think of it as having any origin at all, maybe it was pure circulation, picking things up and setting them down again willy-nilly, not just broken things but also things that seem whole, the sands of Africa or Greece; it was moving the very lands, I thought, however slowly, nothing was solid, nothing would stay put, and I held on more tightly to R. and drove into him more fiercely, drawing from him those noises of pain and of need, noises maybe of pleasure too. I wanted to root into him, even as the wind said all rootedness was a sham, there were only passing arrangements, makeshift shelters and poor harbors, I love you, I thought suddenly in that rush that makes so much seem possible, I love you, anything I am you have use for is yours.

• From Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away (2022)

  But it just so happened that my brother, Howard Lederer, had already been playing poker for ten years, earning a living in New York in high-stakes games that included some of the best players on the East Coast. He had also already achieved success on a bigger stage, having made the final table of the annual World Series of Poker Main Event in Las Vegas at the age of twenty-three, becoming, at the time, the youngest player to ever have achieved that. While I was in graduate school, he started offering to fly me out and put me up at the Golden Nugget to hang out with him during his annual trek to the World Series. I jumped at the opportunity since I obviously couldn’t afford a vacation like that on my own. It was on those trips that I first tried my hand at some low-stakes poker. Having watched my brother play for hours when I was in college, when we both lived in New York, I understood enough about the game to have some modest success. When I was abruptly forced to take a leave from academics, it was my brother who suggested that I play poker to make ends meet, until I could finish my dissertation and get back on the academic track. My circumstances imposed a lot of limits on what I could do to earn a living. I didn’t know how I was going to feel from day to day, so I needed flexible hours. I fully intended to become a professor sometime in the next year, so I also needed to do something that I could easily quit when that time came. Poker fit my needs well. If there’s a game going on, you can play or not play whenever you want. You can pick which days you work, what time you start, and when you want to leave the game. And if you want to quit poker for something else, you don’t have to give notice or worry you’re inconveniencing someone who’s depending on you. The rest of my story is pretty well known. I fell in love with the challenges of poker, even the version being played in the place I started, the smoky basement of a bar in Billings, Montana. I had been studying learning and cognition and poker was a real-life, high-stakes application of those subjects. I loved the constant test of excelling in an environment with so much uncertainty, especially figuring out how to overcome the very same biases that we’ve talked about in this book. I didn’t go back to Penn the next spring . . . or the spring after that.

• From Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away (2022)

  T Escalating Commitment oward the end of the 1930s, Harold Staw’s parents were among the millions of Americans who moved their families from the East Coast to Southern California, the latest frontier for chasing the American Dream. Shirley Posner’s family had made a similar move to Los Angeles, where she met Harold. They fell in love, married in 1940, and had two kids of their own while Harold worked in a defense plant in Los Angeles during World War II. After the war, Harold and Shirley settled in San Bernardino, along the eastern end of an area known as the Inland Empire, sixty miles from Los Angeles. The war years had been good for LA, a center for defense production. As that prosperity spread, much of the Inland Empire transitioned from farms and citrus groves to residential areas. Harold’s stepfather and mother operated a grocery store, and Harold and Shirley followed suit, purchasing a neighborhood store. They turned a small profit but after several years Harold could see the writing on the wall. Large supermarket chains were taking over and it would eventually be impossible for a mom-and-pop operation to compete. Harold needed to find a more promising business. By 1952, he noticed a unique opportunity in Fontana, ten miles to the west of San Bernardino, along the route of a new freeway that was supposed to one day reach all the way to Los Angeles. Fontana was a booming factory town. Kaiser Steel had opened a huge factory during World War II and it became even busier once the United States entered the Korean War. Harold thought all those workers—mostly new arrivals to the area who were now earning a good wage—represented a market he could sell appliances to. Because the factory’s workers all belonged to the steelworkers union, his store would sell exclusively to members of the union, like a PX on a military base. At the start, he had little beyond his idea. With the small amount of money the Staws got from selling the grocery store, Harold could only afford to lease a tiny property that had previously housed chickens. But with the help of Shirley

• From Cleanness (2020)

  I kissed his armpits again, the exposed undersides of his arms, and then (I was kneeling now, my knees on either side of him) I took his arms in my hands and moved them away from his face. He hadn’t uttered a sound in all that time, the fifteen or twenty minutes it had taken me to make my way up his body, not since the interrogative of my name, the admonition I ignored; there hadn’t been any change in his breath, or none I had noticed, and so I was surprised to see the tears on his face, two lines that fell toward his ears, he hadn’t wiped them away. He didn’t try to hide them when I moved his arm, or tried only by turning his face slightly, as if he didn’t want to meet my gaze (though his eyes were shut, there was no gaze to meet). I paused, wanting to speak, to ask him what they were for, his tears, but I knew what they were for, and so I hung over him a moment before I continued kissing him, the line of his jaw, his chin, his cheek and lips, which didn’t answer mine, which suffered themselves to be kissed, his ears, the tracks of his tears, his eyes. It was a kind of blazon of him, of his body, I love you, I whispered again and again to him. And then, when I had laid the last line across his forehead—a garland, I thought, I had garlanded him—You are the most beautiful, I said to him, you are my beautiful boy, and he reached his arms up and pulled me down on top of him, clutching me. You are, he whispered to me, you are, you are. THEY USED SOME KIND of accelerant, they must have, so that when the three children touched their torches to it (angling their bodies away, keeping the greatest distance between themselves and the fire) the flame leapt up the wood, from the base to the ridiculous crown the whole frog blazed up. And with it there was a huge explosion of sound, air horns and rattlers and little handheld bells children jingled, and above them all human voices, the crowd cheering both the fire and the New Year, which had just struck. There were hundreds of people in the square, pressed tight near the wooden barricades that held them back from the fire but more spread out near the edges, where we were; there was space here for people to toast one another, with wine in plastic cups or little glass bottles like those R. had bought for us, prosecco with a twist-off cap. After we drank I leaned toward him and cupped his face in my palm and we kissed. I moved my mouth in a way he liked, kissing first his upper lip and then his lower before I drew away, hanging my arm around his shoulder.

• From On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019)

  The time, at forty-six, when you had a sudden desire to color. “Let’s go to Walmart,” you said one morning. “I need coloring books.” For months, you filled the space between your arms with all the shades you couldn’t pronounce. Magenta, vermilion, marigold, pewter, juniper, cinnamon. Each day, for hours, you slumped over landscapes of farms, pastures, Paris, two horses on a windswept plain, the face of a girl with black hair and skin you left blank, left white. You hung them all over the house, which started to resemble an elementary school classroom. When I asked you, “Why coloring, why now?” you put down the sapphire pencil and stared, dreamlike, at a half-finished garden. “I just go away in it for a while,” you said, “but I feel everything. Like I’m still here, in this room.” The time you threw the box of Legos at my head. The hardwood dotted with blood. “Have you ever made a scene,” you said, filling in a Thomas Kinkade house, “and then put yourself inside it? Have you ever watched yourself from behind, going further and deeper into that landscape, away from you?” How could I tell you that what you were describing was writing? How could I say that we, after all, are so close, the shadows of our hands, on two different pages, merging? “I’m sorry,” you said, bandaging the cut on my forehead. “Grab your coat. I’ll get you McDonald’s.” Head throbbing, I dipped chicken nuggets in ketchup as you watched. “You have to get bigger and stronger, okay?” — I reread Roland Barthes’s Mourning Diary yesterday, the book he wrote each day for a year after his mother’s death. I have known the body of my mother, he writes, sick and then dying. And that’s where I stopped. Where I decided to write to you. You who are still alive. Those Saturdays at the end of the month when, if you had money left over after the bills, we’d go to the mall. Some people dressed up to go to church or dinner parties; we dressed to the nines to go to a commercial center off I-91. You would wake up early, spend an hour doing your makeup, put on your best sequined black dress, your one pair of gold hoop earrings, black lamé shoes. Then you would kneel and smear a handful of pomade through my hair, comb it over. Seeing us there, a stranger couldn’t tell that we bought our groceries at the local corner store on Franklin Avenue, where the doorway was littered with used food stamp receipts, where staples like milk and eggs cost three times more than they did in the suburbs, where the apples, wrinkled and bruised, lay in a cardboard box soaked on the bottom with pig’s blood that had leaked from the crate of loose pork chops, the ice long melted.

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

  I answer that, As stated above [4431](A[11]), the shedding of blood for Christ’s sake, and the inward operation of the Holy Ghost, are called baptisms, in so far as they produce the effect of the Baptism of Water. Now the Baptism of Water derives its efficacy from Christ’s Passion and from the Holy Ghost, as already stated [4432](A[11]). These two causes act in each of these three Baptisms; most excellently, however, in the Baptism of Blood. For Christ’s Passion acts in the Baptism of Water by way of a figurative representation; in the Baptism of the Spirit or of Repentance, by way of desire. but in the Baptism of Blood, by way of imitating the (Divine) act. In like manner, too, the power of the Holy Ghost acts in the Baptism of Water through a certain hidden power. in the Baptism of Repentance by moving the heart; but in the Baptism of Blood by the highest degree of fervor of dilection and love, according to Jn. 15:13: “Greater love than this no man hath that a man lay down his life for his friends.” Reply to Objection 1: A character is both reality and a sacrament. And we do not say that the Baptism of Blood is more excellent, considering the nature of a sacrament; but considering the sacramental effect. Reply to Objection 2: The shedding of blood is not in the nature of a Baptism if it be without charity. Hence it is clear that the Baptism of Blood includes the Baptism of the Spirit, but not conversely. And from this it is proved to be more perfect. Reply to Objection 3: The Baptism owes its pre-eminence not only to Christ’s Passion, but also to the Holy Ghost, as stated above. OF THE MINISTERS BY WHOM THE SACRAMENT OF BAPTISM IS CONFERRED (EIGHT ARTICLES)We have now to consider the ministers by whom the sacrament of Baptism is conferred. And concerning this there are eight points of inquiry: (1) Whether it belongs to a deacon to baptize? (2) Whether this belongs to a priest, or to a bishop only? (3) Whether a layman can confer the sacrament of Baptism? (4) Whether a woman can do this? (5) Whether an unbaptized person can baptize? (6) Whether several can at the same time baptize one and the same person? (7) Whether it is essential that someone should raise the person baptized from the sacred font? (8) Whether he who raises someone from the sacred font is bound to instruct him? Whether it is part of a deacon’s duty to baptize?Objection 1: It seems that it is part of a deacon’s duty to baptize. Because the duties of preaching and of baptizing were enjoined by our Lord at the same time, according to Mat. 28:19: “Going . . . teach ye all nations, baptizing them,” etc. But it is part of a deacon’s duty to preach the gospel. Therefore it seems that it is also part of a deacon’s duty to baptize.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  We only had ten days together, his winter vacation, which he had decided to spend in Sofia while everyone else he knew went home. Mornings were my time to work, to spend with my books and my writing, my time to be alone; I would get up soon but for now I kept looking at him, his face bearded and dark, smoothed out by sleep. It was all I could do not to touch it, as I did often when he was awake, cupping his cheek in my palm or reaching around the curve of his skull. He had shaved his head at the end of the semester, I liked to run my hand around and around it until he ducked and told me to stop, annoyed but laughing, too; even annoyance was part of the pleasure we took in each other, we were that early in love. I was still groggy with sleep when I turned into the main room, and I stood uncomprehending for a moment before I realized that R. had rearranged things in the night. He had moved the table to the middle of the room, and had placed my winter boots on top of it, beside the little tree we had bought earlier that week. Sticking up from the boots there were packages wrapped in newspaper, his Christmas gifts for me; he must have hidden them somewhere after he arrived, he must have gotten out of bed in the night, careful not to wake me, he must have been quiet as he moved the furniture. I caught my breath at it, I felt a weird pressure and heat climb my throat. I felt like my heart would burst, those were the words for it, the hackneyed phrase, and I was grateful for them, they were a container for what I felt, proof of its commonness. I was grateful for that, too, the commonness of my feeling; I felt some stubborn strangeness in me ease, I felt like part of the human race. HE HAD SEEN SNOW for the first time that winter, and he loved to be out in it, to stand with his arms outstretched as it fell, his mouth open to the sky. We went out that afternoon, the snow already tracked through but still lovely; the streets were quiet for the holiday, all the shops were closed.

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  passed up a chance like this. So what if they wanted me to call them Mom and Dad. He’d call them Jesus and Mary if it meant a chance to live in Paris. Was I afraid to leave my mother? Okay, he’d fly her to Paris every summer, I had his guarantee on it, word of honor. So what was the problem? I’d better think fast, he told me, and I’d better come up with the right answer. WHENEVER I WAS told to think about something, my mind became a desert. But this time I had no need of thought, because the answer was already there. I was my mother’s son. I could not be anyone else’s. When I was younger and having trouble learning to write, she sat me down at the kitchen table and covered my hand with hers and moved it through the alphabet for several nights running, and then through words and sentences until the motions assumed their own life, partly hers and partly mine. I could not, cannot, put pen to paper without having her with me. Nor swim, nor sing. I could imagine leaving her. I knew I would, someday. But to call someone else my mother was impossible. I didn’t reason any of this out. It was there as instinct. I felt lesser instincts at work on me too, such as alarm at my uncle’s description of his family as “well-regulated.” I didn’t like the sound of that at all. And even if my mother wouldn’t tell me what she wanted, or give any hints, I was sure that she wanted me to stay with her. I took her inscrutability as a concealment of this wish. Later she agreed that this was so, but maybe it wasn’t all that simple at the time. She still hoped this marriage would work, was ready to put up with almost anything to make it work. The idea of another failure was abhorrent to her. But she may also have dreamed of flight and freedom— unencumbered, solitary freedom, freedom even from me. Like anyone else, she must have wanted different things at the same time. The human heart is a dark forest. After a week or so I announced at dinner that I had decided not to go to Paris. “The hell you aren’t,” Dwight said. “You’re going.” “He gets to choose,” Pearl said, on my side for once. “Doesn’t he, Rosemary?” My mother nodded. “That was the deal.” “The books aren’t closed on this one,” Dwight said. “Not yet they aren’t.” He looked at me. “Why do you think you aren’t going?”

• From Reading the Bible from the Margins (2002)

  I relate that I took off my wedding ring, gave it to my wife for safekeeping, and told her that I wasn't going to wear it on my trip because we had a personal relationship. No public manifestation of that relationship is necessary to signify what is personal. You can imagine my wife's response! She reminded me that our relationship cannot be reduced to just the personal, for we also share a public, albeit intimate, relationship. The ring is not what makes me married; rather, my act of wearing a ring becomes an outward expression of an inward commitment. It becomes a symbol that publically signifies my faithfulness. Likewise, my relationship with Jesus Christ is both public and intimate. As the ring is an outward expression of an inward commitment, so too do my actions (praxis) in establishing love and justice become outward expressions of my internal Christian commitment. My praxis becomes the symbolic wedding ring signifying my union with Christ. “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples: if you have love for one another,” Jesus says in John 13:35. In fact, confining Jesus to my personal life becomes the ultimate act of religious selfishness. But then again individualism, guarding the private, is what's most celebrated and prized within the dominant U.S. culture. Probably to a greater degree than in any other nation, hyperindividuality is a salient characteristic of the U.S. ethos. According to Robert Bellah's groundbreaking sociological work, the individualism commonly expressed in the Euroamerican culture is based on two at times contradictory notions: 1) a belief in the inherent dignity and sacredness of individuals; and 2) a belief in the primary reality of the individual, with society relegated to second place. Social, political, and religious relationships are conducted with the individual at the center. A type of Christianity develops that is private, emphasizing an individually constructed spiritual experience. Hence, it is possible to speak of 275 million religions within the United States, one for each person.1 As the culture relegates its religious beliefs to a private matter, the danger that can arise is that a form of Christianity, devoid of social responsibility or action, can develop subjected to the general civil will. Eventually the collective goals of society fostered by this hyperindividuality can become interpreted as a religious mandate for all. Yet Christianity is never private. Among the English-speaking dominant culture, to be private is something to be valued and guarded, reflecting the hyperindividuality of the Euroamerican milieu. Still, among those who speak Spanish, one way of defining the word “private,” privado , is by its derivation from the word privar , “to deprive,” from where we get the word privación , which is translated as both “deprivation” and “privacy.” For the Hispanic, to be private is in fact to be deprived, deprived of family, of friends, or of community. For Latino/as, who stress a communal understanding of their relationship with Christ, terms such as “a personal relationship” can become antitheses to their cultural ethos.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  A cunning interviewer, one might say—yet “cunning” it was not. There was no duplicity: Dr. Whitehorn genuinely wanted to be taught. He was a collector and had in this manner accumulated an astounding treasure trove of factual curios over the years. “You and your patients both win,” he would say, “if you let them teach you enough about their lives and interests. Learn about their lives; you will not only be edified but you will ultimately learn all you need to know about their illness.” Fifteen years later, in the early 1970s, Dr. Whitehorn was dead, I had become a professor of psychiatry, and a woman named Paula with advanced breast cancer entered my life to continue my education. Though I didn’t know it at the time, and though she never acknowledged it, I believe that from the very beginning she assigned herself the task of mentoring me. Paula had called for an appointment after having heard from a social worker in the oncological clinic that I was interested in forming a therapy group of patients with terminal disease. When she first entered my office, I was instantaneously captivated by her appearance: by the dignity in her bearing; by her radiant smile, which gathered me in; by her shock of short, exuberantly boyish, glowing white hair; and by something I can only call luminosity that seemed to emanate from her wise and intensely blue eyes. She caught my attention with her first words: “My name is Paula West,” she said. “I have terminal cancer. But I am not a cancer patient.” And indeed, in my travels with her through many years, I never regarded her as a patient. She went on to describe in clipped, precise fashion her medical history: cancer of the breast diagnosed five years earlier; surgical removal of that breast; then cancer of the other breast, that breast also removed. Then came chemotherapy with its familiar awful entourage: nausea, vomiting, total loss of hair. And then radiation therapy, the maximum permitted. But nothing would slow the spread of her cancer—to skull, spine, and the orbits of her eyes. Paula’s cancer demanded to be fed, and though the surgeons tossed it sacrificial offerings—her breasts, lymph nodes, ovaries, adrenal glands—it remained voracious. When I imagined Paula’s nude body, I saw a chest crisscrossed with scars, without breasts, flesh, or muscle, like the rib planks of some shipwrecked galleon, and below her chest a surgically scarred abdomen, all supported by thick, ungainly, steroid-thickened hips. In short, a fifty-five-year-old woman sans breasts, adrenals, ovaries, uterus, and, I’m sure, libido. I have always relished women with firm, graceful bodies, full breasts, and a readily apparent sensuality. Yet a curious thing happened to me the first time I met Paula: I found her beautiful and fell in love with her.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  It means dear or of great price, which was what I had thought on our second or third meeting as he lay naked beside me and I ran my hand along his side. I had said the word almost without intending to, Skupi , and he asked me what it meant and then drew me to him and whispered it like an affirmation in my ear. It had become our private name for each other, and I think it was then, when we first uttered the word, that I realized I was caught by him, that however things turned out they would have consequence, and I was both frightened by this and gave myself over to it, I decided I would let whatever might happen between us happen. I remembered this when he spoke the word, and then, as if dispelling the atmosphere he had created, he turned his attention to the menu. The restaurant had an Italian name but that didn’t mean anything, nearly every restaurant in Sofia served pizza, and nearly all of them offered the same dozen or so Bulgarian dishes, meat and vegetables and eggs, or all of them I could afford. R. studied every page, and then he ordered what he always did, pointing to it mutely with a smile as he angled the menu toward the waitress: a salad of greens and strips of eggplant covered in a sweet dressing that he loved. We handed over our menus, and then R. turned his face to the glass beside us, watching the wind, which was visible both in the detritus it carried, papers and leaves and the little plastic cups coffee comes in here, and in the resistance of everything fastened down. Already the last of the light was fading, and as much as the world outside it was R.’s face I saw, which was pensive as he said again it was a crazy wind. But he was bright-faced when he turned back to me and I shifted my gaze from his reflection to the real image. He asked me about my day, and I told him something funny, I don’t remember what, something at my own expense; he liked stories in which I was a little ridiculous, in which students got the best of me. It had the effect I wanted, which was his laugh, or less his laugh than the transformation his face underwent when he smiled. It isn’t true, what I said earlier, really I think I was caught from our first meeting, or even before our meeting, from the first photographs he sent me that showed his face.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  WE HAD NO PLANS IN VENICE, had done no research. But it didn’t matter, just to be there was enough, amid the capillary water and sinking stone; there was a kind of uniform beauty to everything, a blanket wonder. Every corner we turned made R. gasp, every church we stepped into, every statue with its marble frothed up like surf, like the involutions of thought. Fuck these people, R. whispered as we stared at a painted ceiling, fuck them for getting to live in a place like this. He was smiling when I glanced at him but I knew he meant it, or half meant it. He often said that he was born in the wrong place; shitty Portugal, he would say, shitty Algarve, the shitty Azores, shitty Lisbon, it should all have been different, his life was fucked. Sometimes I could bring him out of these moods, I could kiss him and say he had a new life now, his life with me, who knew where we’d end up, in Europe or America, who knew what adventures we’d have, and sometimes he pushed me away or turned his face from mine. We don’t get to choose anything, he’d say then, we think we do but it’s an illusion, we’re insects, we get stepped on or we don’t, that’s all. When he talked like this there was nothing I could do, anything I did made it worse, whether I got angry or sad or tried to make him feel my own happiness, the happiness I felt so often just looking at him, as he slept or read, or stared into the screen of his laptop. It was an immovable force, this mood that descended on him sometimes, and I worried that it was descending on him now, that it would darken the rest of our day. But it didn’t descend. When we left the church and turned blindly around the next corner he pulled me into an alcove and kissed me, his hands on the side of my face. I can’t believe I’m here, he said, it’s like a movie, I’m in Venice with my American boyfriend. He laughed. My sister would be so jealous, she’s always wanted an American boyfriend, and I got one first. And then he was off again, dragging me by the hand behind him. He did this repeatedly, pulling me into doorways and alleys to kiss me, always somewhere a little apart, though we were still noticed, people passing would stare at us or look decidedly away. One heavy old man scowled; a young couple laughed, which I minded more. R. seemed not to notice but I noticed, it was a weird reversal: he was the more open one here, and I was hyperaware, feeling the reflexes of fear though I wasn’t afraid, I didn’t think I was afraid.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  THE FROG KINGIt was too early for there to be so much light, so that when I woke my first thought was of snow. We had pulled the drapes before sleeping but they did almost nothing to darken the room, the snow caught scraps from streetlamps and neon and cast them back up. It was bright enough to see R. still sleeping beside me, cocooned in the blanket I had bought after the first night we spent together, when I woke shivering to find him bound tight in the comforter we were sharing, swaddled beside me. He repeated the word all that day, apropos of nothing, swaddled, swaddled, he had never heard it before, the sound of it made him laugh. He would sleep for hours still, if I let him he would sleep the whole day. He loved to sleep in a way I didn’t, sliding into it at every chance, whereas almost always I slept poorly, uneasily, I woke finally with a sense of relief. He complained if I woke him—I’m on holiday, he would say, let me sleep—but he complained more if I let him sleep too long. We only had ten days together, his winter vacation, which he had decided to spend in Sofia while everyone else he knew went home. Mornings were my time to work, to spend with my books and my writing, my time to be alone; I would get up soon but for now I kept looking at him, his face bearded and dark, smoothed out by sleep. It was all I could do not to touch it, as I did often when he was awake, cupping his cheek in my palm or reaching around the curve of his skull. He had shaved his head at the end of the semester, I liked to run my hand around and around it until he ducked and told me to stop, annoyed but laughing, too; even annoyance was part of the pleasure we took in each other, we were that early in love.