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 Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  Anita I was demoted back to being a kid, and Maria would literally pinch my cheeks and roll her eyes as though to remind us that kids will say the darnedest things. Anita was not only on the school staff but also toured with a company versed in the Graham technique, all to earn money to send her sister to graduate school and to support a widowed mother. Her family responsibilities somehow neutralized her lurid status as a lesbian. Although I pretended to be sophisticated and could listen to tales of erotic mayhem without blinking, privately I still considered us all damned. This disparity between my surface smile and inner anguish condemned me to savoring my guilt in silence, a guilt I couldn’t expiate since it was thoroughly secular. Back in my white room after the weekend, Maria stopped playing the big sister. Now that we’d lived together for five days, we’d pressed beyond a border into companionable silence. Much as we might protest our devotion to each other, until now our bodies, tense, edgy animals, had stayed on guard. On this fifth day, they sighed and lay down to sleep side by side like two cats who’ve finally stopped prowling and hissing their rival claims to the sewing basket and squabbling over precedence at the water bowl. Now we sprawled on the bed, smoking and reading and listening to Bartók. One afternoon we started kissing. In a second we’d undressed. Maria thrashed with shocking passion in my arms and in my ear her smoky mouth breathed with short, voiced gasps. She was so fragile, so supple in contrast to all the big clumsy men I’d known. I’d thought a heterosexual man must weary of always having to instigate things, but there was no question of aggression and passivity, we were both swept like lovers into a tempest that raged around us, and, yes, for us. We were its victims. Maria stayed two more days. When we’d go to the student union, I’d cast hungry looks at the boys and yearn to escape Maria and reenter this anarchic fraternity which had, instead of secret handshakes, matched taps on the toilet floor, and instead of one hell night, endless nights of perverse pleasure and excruciating remorse. Once we were alone again I’d forget these distractions, and Maria and I would lie on white sheets fading to blue in the long, late May evening light. I asked her if she’d marry me, and she laughed, rubbed my cheek with the back of her cool hand, and whispered, “My child groom ...” She sketched me as I wrote. In the warm summer rain we walked through the night. We sat for hours in a booth at the back of a Chinese restaurant. I told her how I was convinced the Buddhists were right, that the self is an illusion, and yet as a writer and even as a person (in that order) I responded to the individuality of everyone I met.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  When I read I squirreled away tidbits I hoped I’d be able to repeat. I read more and more just to entertain her. She thought I was brilliant, but my only brilliance was my ability to appreciate her. Not as a woman perhaps, for I dimly sensed there was a passionate woman hidden in this slim body, housing an appetite capable of rapture and even violence. I felt awed by this force, but I didn’t know how to make use of it. The rest of her I understood perfectly, with the best kind of devotion, the wide-awake kind. Nothing in Maria was wasted on me—that was the sole extent of my brilliance. That spring Maria and I went on long walks together through the grounds of the school, past a pool stocked with fat ornamental carp, up to the Edwardian mansion of the Founders (maintained in sealed-wax splendor), down a hill toward the artificial lake on which the girls’ school was floated. Then up along a wild tumbling brook to the Greek theater where plays were given in the summer. Now it was deserted. Behind the small amphitheater lay an atrium built around a rectangular pool, and there she told me shocking things—that she thought Jackson Pollock was a fraud, that she imagined we’d all be killed by the proletariat, that she considered the life of one African mine worker worth more than the Sistine Chapel. I didn’t know whether I liked Maria or I loved her. One day in her studio we sat around talking about our futures. The window was open a crack, and just outside a branch of bright yellow forsythia was preening. Maria was wearing an old, tan canvas hunting jacket that had belonged to her grandfather; she wore it over a beige turtleneck sweater. An empty Hills Brothers coffee can nestled sideways in another one which was upright on the ledge under the window. From where I sat I could look into the upper can. Its grooved interior seemed a distillery for changing watery light into sparkling eau de vie. Her black pants were bright with daubs of white paint and had fainter comet tails where her hand had smudged them. She’d penciled her plucked eyebrows in very black today, as black as the dots of her small nostrils. “I can’t believe you actually want to be famous,” she said. “Famous as what? A writer?” “I suppose,” I said, “or an actor, or a general, or—” “General!” She unnested the coffee cans and used the top one as an ashtray. “So you’d do anything, anything at all to be famous.” She looked me in the eye suddenly, as though to surprise the answer there. “But why?” “Freud says the writer writes for fame, money, and the love of beautiful women.” “Or men,” Maria added. My heart stopped. Was she enlarging the definition to include the goals of women writers or was she suggesting I wanted beautiful men?

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  As we went into the kitchen, where the shower stall stood, raised high and narrow as a sentry box, Sean said, “Do you think I look gay?” “No, of course not.” “Why not?” “Because gay types are stiff. They make a beeline down the street with their arms clamped to their sides and their legs as close together as possible.” We stepped into the shower, pulled the tan plastic curtain shut, and looked each other in the eye. Blue flames from the stove burners provided the only light in the room, two soft penumbras glowing on the tan curtain, picking out a wet lower lip, the curve of Sean’s chest, the shiny back of his hand in motion. He washed me all over, turned me around, scrubbed me with a fiber mitten. Then we embraced and the water discovered a new body for me to lave and love, as though we’d been immortalized in marble. Since my love preferred static myth to changing history, eternity to time, marble suited me perfectly—a marble fountain, the static figures fixed in an eternal embrace but the water providing the illusion of movement. A week later I was sitting at my desk thinking of Sean. An acquaintance who worked down the hall had stopped in to confide in me about her new boyfriend, and I’d wanted half a dozen times to say, “Yes, that’s right. That’s just the way it is with me and my guy.” But I didn’t dare. I knew I had to hide my sexuality from most people, even though I was so proud of Sean, so pleased when we walked down the street bumping shoulders. I couldn’t remember exactly why we had to be ashamed. “Hello, Bunny? This is Lou.” There was a pause over the phone, and my visitor mimed a farewell kiss and left me, pulling my door shut behind her. “Lou! How are you? How was your trip to Chicago?” “... ” “Did you meet Ava’s parents?” Silence. “They must have met yours, huh? A big family pow-wow?” Silence. I decided I would keep fooling around until I hit paydirt. “It must have been gruesome.” Despite the silence, I flew blind into: “I don’t know why you went out there. Seeing your own parents is bad enough ...” But what if the trip was a success? I let a long therapeutic silence spread itself out between us. Lou whistled. “That’s Miles Davis’s ‘Funny Valentine.’ ” “Oh?” “My ... funny ... val ...” Starting all over again, I said softly, with exactly the endearing, breathy, formal but tender lilt Lou could give the phrase, as though he’d just coined it, “How nice to hear your voice.” “Thank you, Bunny.... They were terrible people.” “Ava’s parents?” “Do you know what her mother said to me?” “No, what?” “She asked me if there were any other children. ‘Are there any siblings?’ I said I had a brother who’d committed suicide.

• From Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (2017)

  First and foremost, the elite must “establish some sort of relationship between those who need help and those who can render help.” Not only did she not take this relationship as given, but she insisted, “[A]pparent differences must not be emphasized.”69 This proclamation was not a facile attempt to gloss over class differences or relations of power. Rather, she called for a total shift in racial thinking around charitable work: “Many of us must unlearn many things that we have already learned as to social questions.” For instance, “[I]t is important that we should learn that sociality is a very different thing from ‘society’ as we ordinarily understand the term.” Whereas society “differentiates the world of humanity into infinite groups or companies for social intercourse … as the essence of high living,” sociality denoted “a means of sisterhood and brotherhood based on something deeper than selfish preferences.”70 She did not reject notions of “society,” which she used synonymously with class, but she did call for a racial focus on sociality. Sociality was “divine” and grew out of a “larger element of love,” which consequently gave “peculiar value to woman’s work.”71 By making this shift from a notion of society to sociality, women would be able to ascertain needs and “apply the remedies” to the causes of misfortune. “Thus,” she concludes, “do we begin to feel the difference between the old and new philosophy of social relationships.”72 This “new philosophy of social relationships” should emerge, not from class-driven sentiment, but rather from a sense of love, kinship (“brotherhood and sisterhood”), and connectedness to one’s fellow human beings. Women would bear the primary responsibility to cultivate this new sociality. Williams rejected a notion of “natural” and essentialist racial unity as the basis for Black racial affinity. Rather, she believed in what I refer to as a cultivated and intentional racial sociality born out of love for one’s fellow wo/man and radical empathy for members of one’s race. In multiple places, she argued that race unity was not an automatic byproduct of the experiences of slavery and racism. Racial identity was not “natural” but rather contingent, and conceived through an active process of community organizing and knowledge making. It was a product not of shared essence, but rather an increasing commitment to a kind of social relationship based on acknowledgement of a shared set of social conditions, namely “race prejudice.” Her ideas about “racial sociality” add an important dimension to critical theories of race at the turn of the century by both rejecting notions of biological essentialism or automatic affinity and yet retaining a deeply embodied sense of racial connectivity, which I will turn to momentarily. The focus on racial sociality upends the narrative of the uncritical elitism of the clubwomen and suggests that they both acknowledged class differences and thought in complex—though critically insufficient—ways about how to ameliorate the effects of those differences through their race work.

• From Becoming Myself: A Psychiatrist's Memoir (2017)

  Several years later while I was teaching at Stanford, a close member of his family contacted me saying that John Whitehorn had referred him to me for psychotherapy, and I was pleased to be able to offer him help in a few months of therapy. And then, in 1974, fifteen years after my last face-to-face contact with him, I received a phone call from John Whitehorn’s daughter, whom I had never met. She told me that her father had had a massive stroke, was near death, and had very specifically asked for me to visit him. I was entirely dumbfounded. Why me? What could I offer him? But of course I did not hesitate, and the following morning I flew across the country to Washington, where, as always, I stayed with my sister, Jean, and her husband, Morton. I borrowed their car, picked up my mother, who always enjoyed a car ride, and drove to a convalescent hospital just outside of Baltimore. I arranged comfortable seating for my mother in the lobby and took the elevator to Dr. Whitehorn’s room. He appeared much smaller than I recalled. He was paralyzed on one side of his body and had expressive aphasia, which greatly impaired his ability to speak. How shocking it was to see the most gloriously articulate person I had ever known now drooling saliva and grubbing for words. After a few false starts, he finally managed to utter, “I’m… I’m… I’m scared, so damned scared.” And I was scared, too, scared by the sight of a great statue felled and lying in ruins. Dr. Whitehorn had trained two generations of psychiatrists, a great many of whom were now chairmen at leading universities. I asked myself, “Why me? What could I possibly do for him?” I ended up not doing much. I behaved like any nervous visitor, searching desperately for words of comfort. I reminded him of my days with him at Hopkins and told him how much I had treasured our Fridays together, how much he had taught me about interviewing patients, how I had taken his advice and had become a university professor, how I tried to emulate him in my work by treating patients with dignity and interest, how, following his advice, I let patients teach me. He made sounds but could not formulate words, and finally, after thirty minutes, he fell into a deep sleep. I left shaken and still puzzled about why he had called for me. Later I learned from his daughter that he died two days after my visit. The question “Why me?” ran through my mind for years. Why call for an agitated, self-doubting son of a poor immigrant grocer? Perhaps I was a stand-in for the son he had lost in World War II. Dr. Whitehorn died such a lonely death. If only I could have given him more. Many times I wished for a second chance.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  Before entering the coffee shop, we looked in through Tex’s windows. Gone were those glossy new novels and records, the plush carpet, the spotlights. Now nothing but concrete floors, dangling wires, and on the door a bankruptcy notice. Where was Tex now? Morris? Who was fleshing out the cop’s domestic expenses? Tex, like a torch singer, had ruined himself for love. He’d hocked his jewels to win one more smile from the policeman with the jug ears. Once Tex had said to me, very sister-to-sister, “Aren’t we mad, we gay boys, starving ourselves to sylphlike fragility, all so we can attract a straight cop with a beer belly?” As Maria and I sat in the coffee-shop window and drank hot cider, I told her about my friendship with Tex. Something about the passionate opera music stirred me; this scene was scored for confession. Just as the betrayed Des Grieux sang, “Be silent, you’re breaking my heart,” I spoke up. “I don’t know what you’d think if I told you, uh, that guy next door? Tex? was a little weird?” Des Grieux was singing “Nell’occhio tuo profondo io leggo il mio destin” as I looked into Maria’s eyes for my destiny, her scorn or disgust. “Are you trying to say your friend Tex is homosexual?” “Yes.” “These are my kisses,” the lovers sang, “this is my love,” as I added, “So am I.” “So am I, Dumpling,” Maria replied with a puzzled smile. “I thought that was the whole idea. I thought we were both gay.” “But what about Sam?” I asked, naming her bearded ex-lover. “Oh, I have a faiblesse for men,” she confessed. “I even prefer making love with men, but I only fall in love with women.” Her thoughts went on silently until a sigh replaced her jaunty smile and she said, “Alas. Women are no damn good.” Maria sketched in her gay past. “Women are so impossible, always hurtling about in station wagons and Pendleton shirts and swearing drunken vengeance on Cuddles or Babs. And then this fatal attraction to the country—you can’t get the farm out of the girl. And no fashion sense. Nothing wrong with a dyke that couldn’t be cured by six months in finishing school.” She went on talking in the lightest, most frivolous terms, concocting a heady mix of diesel dykes and sulfurous femmes damnées (“Damn women, as Baudelaire said”). Although her lesbianism relieved my anxiety, the ease with which she apparently went from men to women dismayed me, as did the glamour of her milieu. There was nothing glamorous about my time in the toilets, that long sentence I was serving. Although I was appalled by the hair fetishist who slipped his questionnaire under the partition, at least his tastes were specific enough to be fulfillable, whereas mine were raging but shifting, leaving me no peace. I couldn’t find the answer because I couldn’t phrase the question.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  Memory gave us intimations of infinity, but to encounter the divine, it had to strain beyond itself to the intellectus, the place where the soul could encounter God in deepest intimacy. When Augustine spoke of “intellect,” he meant something different from a modern intellectual. Intellectus was not simply the faculty of logic, calculation, and argument.56 In the ancient world, people saw “reason” as a hinterland, bounded on the one hand by our powers of discursive rationality (ratio) and on the other by intellectus, a kind of pure intelligence, which in India was called buddhi. So intellect was higher than reason, but without it we would not be able to reason at all. Left to itself, the human mind was incapable of looking dispassionately at the mutable beings of our world and making any kind of valid judgment about them, because it was itself fraught with impermanence and change. Augustine had only been able to recognize the inconstancy and impermanence of the world that had so troubled him before his conversion, because the Platonists told him that he had within him an innate standard of stability, a light within, “unchangeable and true that was above my changeable mind.”57 There was, therefore, a realm in the psyche where the mind was able to reach beyond itself. That was the intellect, the mind’s acies, its “cutting edge,”58 and scintilla (“spark”).59 So when Augustine looked into the depths of his mind, he saw that it was modeled on the Trinity, the archetype of all being. In the human mind, memory generates the intellect, as the Father begets a Word that expresses the Father’s essential nature. In the human mind, the intellect seeks out and loves the self it finds in the caverns of the memory that generated it, just as memory seeks out and loves the self-knowledge encapsulated in the intellect. This activity in our own minds is a pale reflection of the Spirit, the bond of love between Father and Son. As in God, the three different faculties—memory, understanding, and love—constitute “one life, one mind, and one essence” within ourselves.60 For Augustine, the Platonist, “knowing” was not an activity that he had initiated but something that happened to his mind. Knowledge was not a matter of assessing, defining, and manipulating an external object; the Known drew the thinker into an intimate relationship with itself.61 In Augustine’s Trinity, knowledge of God was inseparable from love of God. But Augustine did not expect his readers simply to take his word for all this; they too must undertake the introspection and meditation that had led to him to adopt this theology and make it a reality for themselves, otherwise, like any mythos, it would remain incredible.

• From Becoming Myself: A Psychiatrist's Memoir (2017)

  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 her 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, and 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 the most curious thing happened to me the first time I met Paula: I found her quite beautiful and fell in love with her. Paula agreed to join a small group with three other dying patients. The five of us met for ninety minutes in a comfortable group room in the psychiatry building. I began by saying simply that all the members were dealing with cancer and that I believed we could help one another by sharing our thoughts and feelings. One of the members was Sal, a thirty-year-old man in a wheelchair who, like Paula, was larger than life. Though he had advanced multiple myeloma (a painful invasive bone cancer causing many fractured bones) and was encased in a full body cast from neck to thigh, his spirit was indomitable. The imminence of death had flooded his life with a new sense of meaning and so transformed him that he now thought of his illness as a ministry. He agreed to join the group hoping to help the others find similar deliverance. Although Sal entered our group six months too early—when it was still too small to give him the audience he sought—he found other platforms, primarily high schools, where he addressed troubled teenagers. I heard him deliver his message to them in a thundering voice. You want to corrupt your body with drugs? Want to kill it with booze, with grass, with cocaine? You want to smash your body in autos? Kill it? Throw it off the Golden Gate Bridge? You don’t want it? Well, then, give me your body! Let me have it. I need it. I’ll take it—I want to live! I trembled when I heard him speak. The force of his delivery was augmented by the particular power we always give to the words of the dying. The high school students listened in silence, sensing, as I did, that he was speaking truly, that he no longer had time for game playing or pretense.

• From Another Country (1962)

  He came back to the bed and sat down; and he said, “Well. Listen. I know about Richard. I don’t altogether believe you when you say that I don’t have anything to do with what’s happening between you and Richard, because obviously I do, I do now, anyway, if only because I’m here.” She started to say something, but he raised his hand to silence her. “But that’s all right. I don’t want to make an issue out of that, I’m not very well placed to defend—conventional morality.” And he smiled. “Something is happening between us which I don’t really understand, but I’m willing to trust it. I have the feeling, somehow, that I must trust it.” He took her hand and raised it to his unshaven cheek. “But I have a lover, too, Cass; a boy, a French boy, and he’s supposed to be coming to New York in a few weeks. I really don’t know what will happen when he gets here, but”—he dropped her hand and rose and paced his room again—“he is coming, and we have been together for over two years. And that means something. Probably, if it hadn’t been for him, I would never have stayed away so long.” And he turned on her now all of his intensity. “No matter what happens, I loved him very much, Cass, and I still do. I don’t think I’ve ever loved anyone quite like that before, and”—he shuddered—“I’m not sure I’ll ever love anyone quite like that again.” She felt not at all frightened by his lover. She remembered the name written in the margin: Yves. But it was better for the name of his lover to fall from his lips. She felt very strangely moved, as though she might be able to help him endure the weight of the boy who had such power over him. “He sounds very remarkable,” she said. “Tell me his name, tell me about him.” He came back to the bed and sat down. His drink was finished, and he sipped from hers. “There isn’t much to tell. His name is Yves.” He paused, “I can’t imagine what he’ll think of the States.” “Or of all of us,” she said. He assented, with a smile. “Or of all of us. I’m not sure I know what I think.” They laughed; she took a sip of her highball; the atmosphere between them began to be easier, as though they were friends. “But—I’m responsible for him when he gets here. He wouldn’t be coming if it weren’t for me.” He looked at her. “He’s the son of somebody he can scarcely remember at all, and his mother runs a bistro in Paris. He hates his mother, or thinks he does.”

• From Another Country (1962)

  The question hung in the room, like the smoke which wavered between Eric and Vivaldo. The question was as thick as the silence in which Vivaldo looked down, away from Eric, searching his heart for an answer. He was frightened; he looked up at Eric; Eric was frightened, too. They watched each other. “I’m in love with Ida,” Vivaldo said. Then, “And sometimes we make it, beautifully, beautifully. And sometimes we don’t. And it’s hideous.” And he remained where he was, in the doorway, still. “I, too, am in love,” said Eric, “his name is Yves; he’s coming to New York very soon. I got a letter from him today.” He stood up and walked to his desk, picked up the play and opened it and took out an airmail envelope. Vivaldo watched his face, which had become, in an instant, weary and transfigured. Eric opened the letter and read it again. He looked at Vivaldo. “Sometimes we make it, too, and it’s beautiful. And when we don’t, it’s hideous.” He sat down again. “When I was talking before about accepting or deciding, I was thinking about him.” He paused, and threw his letter on the bed. There was a very long silence, which Vivaldo did not dare to break. “I,” said Eric, “must understand that if I dreamed of escape, and I did—when this thing with Cass began, I thought that perhaps here was my opportunity to change, and I was glad—well, Yves, who is much younger than I, will also dream of escape. I must be prepared to let him go. He will go. And I think”—he looked up at Vivaldo—“that he must go, probably, in order to become a man.” “You mean,” said Vivaldo, “in order to become himself.” “Yes,” said Eric. And silence came again. “All I can do,” said Eric, at last, “is love him. But this means—doesn’t it?—that I can’t delude myself about loving someone else. I can’t make any promise greater than this promise I’ve made already—not now, not now, and maybe I’ll never make any greater promise. I can’t be safe and sorry, too. I can’t act as though I’m free when I know I’m not. I’ve got to live with that, I’ve got to learn to live with that. Does that make sense? or am I mad?” There were tears in his eyes. He walked to the kitchen door and stared at Vivaldo. Then he turned away. “You’re right. You’re right. There’s nothing here to decide. There’s everything to accept.” Vivaldo moved from the door, and threw himself face down on the bed, his long arms dangling to the floor. “Does Cass know about Yves?” “Yes. I told her before anything happened.” He smiled. “But you know how that is—we were trying to be honorable. Nothing could really have stopped us by that time; we needed each other too much.”

• From The Decameron (1353)

  [Footnote 420: _i.e._ we must see what is to be done.] Biancofiore, getting wind of this and hearing that the merchandise he had presently brought with him was worth good two thousand florins, without reckoning what he looked for, which was valued at more than three thousand, bethought herself that she had flown at too small game and determined to restore him the five hundred florins, so she might avail to have the greater part of the five thousand. Accordingly, she sent for him and Salabaetto, grown cunning, went to her; whereupon, making believe to know nothing of that which he had brought with him, she received him with a great show of fondness and said to him, 'Harkye, if thou wast vexed with me, for that I repaid thee not thy monies on the very day....' Salabaetto fell a-laughing and answered; 'In truth, madam, it did somewhat displease me, seeing I would have torn out my very heart to give it you, an I thought to pleasure you withal; but I will have you hear how I am vexed with you. Such and so great is the love I bear you, that I have sold the most part of my possessions and have presently brought hither merchandise to the value of more than two thousand florins and expect from the westward as much more as will be worth over three thousand, with which I mean to stock me a warehouse in this city and take up my sojourn here, so I may still be near you, meseeming I fare better of your love than ever lover of his lady.'

• From Another Country (1962)

  “Oh, but you are my life—you and the children. What would I do, what would I be, without you? I’m just as self-centered as anybody else. Can’t you see that?” He grinned and rubbed his hand roughly over her head. “No. And I’m not going to argue about it any more.” But, after a moment, he persisted. “I didn’t love Rufus, not the way you did, the way all of you did. I couldn’t help feeling, anyway, that one of the reasons all of you made such a kind of—fuss—over him was partly just because he was colored. Which is a hell of a reason to love anybody. I just had to look on him as another guy. And I couldn’t forgive him for what he did to Leona. You once said you couldn’t, either.” “I’ve had to think about it since then. I’ve thought about it since then.” “And what have you thought? You find a way to justify it?” “No. I wasn’t trying to justify it. It can’t be justified. But now I think—oh, I just don’t know enough to be able to judge him. He must—he must have been in great pain. He must have loved her.” She turned to him, searching his face. “I’m sure he loved her.” “Some love,” he said. “Richard,” she said, “you and I have hurt each other—many times. Sometimes we didn’t mean to and sometimes we did. And wasn’t it because—just because—we loved—love—each other?” He looked at her oddly, head to one side. “Cass,” he said, “how can you compare it? We’ve never tried to destroy each other—have we?” They watched each other. She said nothing. “I’ve never tried to destroy you. Have you ever tried to destroy me?” She thought of his face as it had been when they met; and watched it now. She thought of all they had discovered together and meant to each other, and of how many small lies had gone into the making of their one, particular truth: this love, which bound them to one another. She had said No, many times, to many things, when she knew she might have said Yes, because of Richard; believed many things, because of Richard, which she was not sure she really believed. He had been absolutely necessary to her—or so she had believed; it came to the same thing—and so she had attached herself to him and her life had taken shape around him. She did not regret this for herself. I want him, something in her had said, years ago. And she had bound him to her; he had been her salvation; and here he was. She did not regret it for herself and yet she began to wonder if there were not something in it to be regretted, something she had done to Richard which Richard did not see. “No,” she said, faintly. And then, irrepressibly, “But I wouldn’t have had to try.” “What do you mean by that?”

• From Another Country (1962)

  “That’s very touching.” Eric pulled the sheet up to his navel. Vivaldo watched him. “You’re going to be very lonely,” he said, suddenly. Eric looked over at Vivaldo, and shrugged. “So are you, if it comes to that. If it comes to that,” he added, after a moment, “I’m lonely now.” Vivaldo was silent for a moment. When he spoke, he sounded very sad and gentle. “Are you? Will you be—when your boy gets here?” Then Eric was silent. “No,” he said, finally. He hesitated. “Well—yes and no.” Then he looked at Vivaldo. “Are you lonely with Ida?” Vivaldo looked down. “I’ve been thinking about that—or I’ve been trying not to think about that—all morning.” He raised his eyes to Eric’s eyes. “I hope you don’t mind my saying—well, hell, anyway, you know it—that I’m sort of hiding in your bed now, hiding even in your arms maybe—from Ida, in a way. I’m trying to get something straight in my mind about my life with Ida.” He looked down again. “I keep feeling that it’s up to me to resolve it, one way or another. But I don’t seem to have the guts. I don’t know how. I’m afraid to force anything because I’m afraid to lose her.” He seemed to flounder in the depths of Eric’s silence. “Do you know what I mean? Does it make any sense to you?” “Oh, yes,” said Eric, bleakly, “it makes sense, all right.” He looked over at Vivaldo with a smile, and dared to say, “Maybe, at this very moment, while both of us are huddled here, hiding from things which frighten us—maybe you love me and I love you as well as we’ll ever love, or be loved, in this world.”

• From Becoming Myself: A Psychiatrist's Memoir (2017)

  Her words motivated me to reconsider the role of love in my own profession. I became aware that I have never, not once, used the word love or compassion in my discussions of the practice of psychotherapy. It is a huge omission, which I wish now to correct, for I know that I regularly experience love and compassion in my work as a therapist and do all I can to help patients liberate their love and generosity toward others. If I do not experience these feelings for a particular patient, then it is unlikely I will be of much help. Hence I try to remain alert to my loving feelings or absence of such feelings for my patients. V ery recently, I began working with Joyce, a depressed, angry young woman recovering from extensive surgery for a life-threatening cancer. As soon as she entered my office, I sensed her terror, and my heart went out to her. Yet in our first sessions, I did not feel close to her. Though she was obviously tormented, she also emanated the message that she had it all under control. And I felt confused by her vacillating complaints: one week she spoke bitterly of the irritating habits of her neighbors and friends, and the next week she bemoaned her isolation. Something was off, and each week as I thought about our next session, I could feel myself wince. I sometimes considered referring her to another therapist. But I nixed that idea because she had read many of my books, and she had emphasized from the very start that she had seen many therapists and I was her last resort. During our third session, something odd happened: it suddenly dawned on me that she had a remarkable physical resemblance to Aline, a good friend’s wife, and on several occasions I had the fleeting, uncanny experience of thinking I was speaking to Aline, not Joyce. Each time that happened, I had to jerk myself back to reality. Though I was now on good terms with Aline, I had, at first, found her smug and off-putting. Had she not been the wife of a good friend, I would have avoided her. Was it possible, I began to wonder, if, in some strange fashion, my unconscious had transmitted some of my Aline irritation to Joyce? Joyce began our fourth session uncharacteristically. After a brief silence, she said, “I don’t know where to start.” Knowing that it was imperative for us to focus on our problematic relationship, I responded, “Tell me how you felt at the end of our previous meeting.” She had previously skirted such inquiries, but today she startled me: “Exactly the same way I felt after each of our sessions: I felt awful. Totally confused. I suffered for hours afterwards.” “I’m so sorry to hear that, but say more, Joyce. Suffered how?” “You know so much. You write all those books. That’s why I contacted you. You’re wise. And I feel so inferior.

• From Another Country (1962)

  “It’s all just about as messy as it can possibly be,” Eric said, after a moment, “Richard’s talking about suing for divorce and getting custody of the children.” “Yes, and he’s probably gone out shopping for a brand with the letter A on it and if he could, he’d arrange for Cass to peddle her ass in the streets and drop dead of syphilis. Slowly. Because the cat’s been wounded, man, in his self-esteem.” “Well,” said Eric, slowly, “he has been wounded. You haven’t got to be—admirable—in order to feel pain.” “No. But I think that perhaps you can begin to become admirable if, when you’re hurt, you don’t try to pay back.” He looked at Eric and put one hand on the back of Eric’s neck. “Do you know what I mean? Perhaps if you can accept the pain that almost kills you, you can use it, you can become better.” Eric watched him, smiling a strange half-smile, with his face full of love and pain. “That’s very hard to do.” “One’s got to try.” “I know.” He said, very carefully, watching Vivaldo, “Otherwise, you just get stopped with whatever it was that ruined you and you make it happen over and over again and your life has—ceased, really—because you can’t move or change or love any more.” Vivaldo let his hand fall. He leaned back. “You’re trying to tell me something. What is it that you’re trying to tell me?” “I was talking about myself.” “Maybe. But I don’t believe you.” “I just hope,” said Eric, suddenly, “that Cass will never hate me.” “Why should she hate you?” “I can’t do her much good. I haven’t done her much good.” “You don’t know that. Cass knew what she was doing. I think she had a much clearer idea than you—because you, you know,” and he grinned, “you aren’t very clear-headed.” “I think I was hoping—perhaps we were hoping—that Richard would never find out and that Yves would get here—before——” “Yes. Well, life isn’t ever that tidy.” “You’re very clear-headed,” Eric said. “Naturally.” He grinned and reached out and pulled Eric to him. “And you must do the same for me, baby, when I’m in trouble. Be clear-headed.” “I’ll do my best,” said Eric, gravely. Vivaldo laughed. “No one could ever hate you. You’re much too funny.” He pulled away. “What time are you meeting Cass?” “At four. At the Museum of Modern Art.” “God. How’s she going to get away? Or is Richard coming along?” Eric hesitated. “She isn’t sure that Richard’s coming back today.” “I see. I think, maybe, we’d better have a cup of coffee—? I’m going to the john.” And he leapt out of bed and slammed the bathroom door behind him.

• From Another Country (1962)

  Then they lay together, close, hidden and protected by the sound of the rain. The rain came down outside like a blessing, like a wall between them and the world. Vivaldo seemed to have fallen through a great hole in time, back to his innocence, he felt clear, washed, and empty, waiting to be filled. He stroked the rough hair at the base of Eric’s skull, delighted and amazed by the love he felt. Eric’s breath trembled against the hairs of his chest; from time to time he touched Vivaldo with his lips. This luxury and this warmth made Vivaldo heavy and drowsy. He slowly began drifting off to sleep again, beams of light playing in his skull, behind his eyes, like the sun. But beneath this peace and this gratitude, he wondered what Eric was thinking. He wanted to open his eyes, to look into Eric’s eyes, but this was too great an effort and risked, furthermore, shattering his peace. He stroked Eric’s neck and back slowly, hoping that his joy was conveyed by his fingertips. At the same time he wondered, and it almost made him laugh, after all that shit I was talking last night, what he was doing, in this bed, in the arms of this man? who was the dearest man on earth, for him. He felt fantastically protected, liberated, by the knowledge that, no matter where, once the clawing day descended, he felt compelled to go, no matter what happened to him from now until he died, and even, or perhaps especially, if they should never lie in each other’s arms again, there was a man in the world who loved him. All of his hope, which had grown so pale, flushed into life again. He loved Eric: it was a great revelation. But it was yet more strange and made for an unprecedented steadiness and freedom, that Eric loved him. “Eric—?” They opened their eyes and looked at each other. Eric’s dark blue eyes were very clear and candid, but there was a terrible fear in their depth, too, waiting. Vivaldo said, “It was wonderful for me, Eric.” He watched Eric’s face. “Was it for you?” “Yes,” Eric said, and he blushed. They spoke in whispers. “I suppose that I needed it, more than I knew.” “It may never happen again.” “I know.” There was a silence. Then, “Would you like it to happen again?” Then Vivaldo was silent, feeling frightened for the first time. “I don’t know how to answer that,” he said. “Yes—yes and no. But, just the same, I love you, Eric, I always will, I hope you know that.” He was astonished to hear how his voice shook. “Do you love me? Tell me that you do.”

• From Amplified Holy Bible (2015)

  21 And this commandment we have from Him, that the one who loves God should also [unselfishly] love his brother and seek the best for him. 1 John 5 Overcoming the World 1 E VERYONE WHO believes [with a deep, abiding trust in the fact] that Jesus is the Christ (the Messiah, the Anointed) is born of God [that is, reborn from above—spiritually transformed, renewed, and set apart for His purpose], and everyone who loves the Father also loves a the child born of Him. 2 By this we know [without any doubt] that we love the children of God: [expressing that love] when we love God and obey His commandments. 3 For the [true] love of God is this: that we habitually keep His commandments and remain focused on His precepts. And His commandments and His precepts are not difficult [to obey]. 4 For b everyone born of God is victorious and overcomes the world; and this is the victory that has conquered and overcome the world—our [continuing, persistent] faith [in Jesus the Son of God]. 5 Who is the one who is victorious and overcomes the world? It is the one who believes and recognizes the fact that Jesus is the Son of God. 6 This is He who came through water and blood [His baptism and death], Jesus Christ—not by the water only, but by the water and the blood. It is the [Holy] Spirit who testifies, because the Spirit is the truth. [He is the essence and origin of truth itself.] 7 For there are three witnesses: 8 the Spirit and the water and the blood; and these three are in agreement [their testimony is perfectly consistent]. 9 If we accept [as we do] the testimony of men [that is, if we are willing to take the sworn statements of fallible humans as evidence], the testimony of God is greater [far more authoritative]; for this is the testimony of God, that He has testified regarding His Son. 10 The one who believes in the Son of God [who adheres to, trusts in, and relies confidently on Him as Savior] has the testimony within himself [because he can speak authoritatively about Christ from his own personal experience]. The one who does not believe God [in this way] has made Him [out to be] a liar, because he has not believed in the evidence that God has given regarding His Son. 11 And the testimony is this: God has given us eternal life [we already possess it], and this life is in His Son [resulting in our spiritual completeness, and eternal companionship with Him]. 12 He who has the Son [by accepting Him as Lord and Savior] has the life [that is eternal]; he who does not have the Son of God [by personal faith] does not have the life.

• From Confessions of the Flesh (The History of Sexuality, Vol. 4) (2021)

  The virgin is a fiancée and a wife. This theme is quite ancient in Christianity. Tertullian formulates it several times. In the Resurrection of the Flesh, he quickly evokes the voluntary eunuchs and the virgins “married to Christ.”63 In the treatise addressed To His Wife, he praises the widows who are “enrolled in the militias of Christ” and who instead of remarriage prefer “to be wedded to God. With him they live; with him they converse, by day and by night; to the Lord they assign their prayers as dowries […] Wives of God while on earth, they are already counted as belonging to the angelic family.”64 The idea also appears in the next-to-last chapter of On the Veiling of Virgins. Wear the full garb of woman, to preserve the standing of virgin. Tertullian not only approves of the wearing of the veil, which was the traditional mark of marriage, but he wants it to be the norm even for unmarried women: it will be the sign of marriage with Christ. A sign with a dual function: to hide, as must be hidden those who belong only to their husbands; and to manifest the fact of this belonging, as it must be manifested. “Hide some of your inward consciousness, in order to exhibit the truth to God alone. And yet you do not belie yourself in appearing as a bride. For wedded you are to Christ: to him you have surrendered your flesh; to him you have espoused your maturity. Walk in accordance with the will of your Espoused. Christ is he who bids the wives and future wives of others veil themselves; and of course, he desires the practice that much more when it comes to his own.”65 But Tertullian’s purpose with this whole text, as we’ve seen, is not to give virginity a special status; on the contrary, it’s a matter of entering it into a general discipline among the different forms of continence and chastity.66

• From Confessions of the Flesh (The History of Sexuality, Vol. 4) (2021)

  Later, though, the status of wife of Christ will be reserved for virginity alone, not only as a privilege, but as an experience defined by a particular content. With two possible meanings, however: the virgin promised to Christ is the entire Virgin Church, or it is the individual soul of one who has renounced the world. The Hymn that concludes Methodius’s Banquet is significant in this regard. The company of virgins sing the chorus, each on her own account and for all the others: “I keep myself pure for You, O Bridegroom, and holding a lighted torch I go to meet You!” But they are also the attendants of the Virgin Church, and their song heralds the coming of Christ who will marry her: “O blessed spouse of God, we attendants of the Bride honor You, O undefiled virgin Church of snow-white form, dark haired, chaste, spotless, beloved.”67 It seems that the theme of the individual soul, which, in the experience of virginity, becomes the bride of Christ, separates off from the church theme without the latter disappearing—far from it—and without ending the symbolic references back and forth between the two. In any case, the virgin as the Lord’s fiancée is constantly present in the authors of the fourth century, whether in Gregory of Nyssa—“she lives with the incorruptible Spouse”;68 Basil of Ancyra;69 Eusebius of Emesa—“virgins are not the servants of men; they are the wives of Christ”;70 Ambrose—“among the candidates to the heavenly realm, you have advanced as if to marry the king…”;71 or Chrysostom—“there is no spouse that is similar or equal to him; no one approaches him even a little.”72 Historians are well aware of the scope that this theme will take on throughout the development of Christian doctrine, and of how it will dominate an entire aspect of it.

• From Confessions of the Flesh (The History of Sexuality, Vol. 4) (2021)

  This tension is clearly evident in certain passages such as that of the third Homily on marriage, which speaks of the life force that draws together a young man and a young woman, and of the firmness of the bond that forms between them. Until then, birth and a long habit of shared living had bonded the children to their parents.8 And then all of a sudden, placed in each other’s presence, a boy and a girl, forgetting those attachments, feel a stronger tie forming, in spite of all the years of family existence. In this there is something like a replay of what occurred in early childhood, when the infant learned to acknowledge its parents: “Thus the two spouses, without anyone moving them closer, exhorting them, instructing them in their duties, only have to see one another to be united.”9 And, as if they themselves recognized the imperious character and the high value of this sudden bond, the parents don’t experience “any regret, or rancor, or pain” as a result; far from it, they give thanks. And referring to the Epistle to the Ephesians, Chrysostom adds: “Paul remarking on all this, considering that the two spouses leave their parents to attach themselves to each other and that such a long experience then has less influence than this fortuitous decision, reflecting more and more that this isn’t a human occurrence […], Paul, consequently, wrote: This is a great mystery.”10 A mystery of which one of the Homilies on the Epistle to the Ephesians clearly indicates the three visible forms. It has to do with a force that is stronger than all the other forces in nature: more imperious, more tyrannical than those connecting other men or making us desire things: epithumia that paradoxically joins two ordinarily incompatible qualities: duration and vivacity.11 And further, it is a force that, though it appears suddenly, was hidden deep inside us; it is “lurking in our nature,” and we’re not conscious of it.12 Finally, to designate the nature of this connection, Chrysostom employs two terms at once, that one finds either together or separately in many of his texts: sundesmos, the tie, the chain that binds together two individuals through constraint or at least obligation (Chrysostom often uses the word desmos in connection with the theme of servitude); and sumplokê, the intertwining, the blending, that joins two substances and two bodies and tends to form a new entity. How could a force that prevails over nature itself have managed to slip into our own nature without our knowledge? In this love that draws a man and a woman together to constitute a lasting union, in this “mystery” that Saint Paul spoke of, Chrysostom sees the mark of God’s will.