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 Reading the Bible from the Margins (2002)

  Which Spanish word do you think is used for the word love when referring to God? The more intimate term, Te amo , is used. To read of the love of God is to read about the intimate relationship between lovers. The English word “you,” which can be translated into Spanish as either tú or usted , also reveals how we understand God when we read the Bible in Spanish. Usted is a formal pronoun used when addressing those who occupy a higher station in life. When speaking to my employer, a political or community leader, or my mentor/ teacher, I show my respect by addressing them as usted. On the other hand, tú is an informal pronoun used among equals or for those who occupy lower social standing. Friends, coworkers, children, or employees are usually referred to as tú. Which Spanish pronoun do you think is used when referring to God? The informal tú is used, not the formal usted. By calling God tú , God is recognized as one who is in solidarity with the station of life of U.S. Hispanics.6 God too is from the margins. A HAN READING When those who are disenfranchised suffer unbearable injustices, they develop an inexpressible feeling in the pit of their stomachs. The Korean community has a name for this pang. They call it han. 7 Han encompasses the feelings of resentment, helplessness, bitterness, sorrow, and revenge that are felt deep in the victim's guts. Han becomes the daily companion of the powerless, the voiceless, the marginalized. Han , however, is not restricted to the individual. When social injustices prevail throughout the whole community for several generations without an avenue of release or cleansing, a collective han (collective unconsciousness) develops. For many who are Asians, or of Asian descent, life in this country is a han -ridden experience. Yet, it is from the han -ridden margins that the dominant culture finds its salvation. The parable of the Good Samaritan is recounted by Jesus in Luke 10:25–37. Jesus is responding to a member of the dominant culture, a promising lawyer, who is asking what he must do to inherit eternal life, salvation. Jesus narrates the story of a man who is on his way to Jericho from Jerusalem. Suddenly, he finds himself in the hands of brigands. Beaten and robbed, he is left for dead. Shortly afterward, a priest who is traveling on the same road sees the wounded man but crosses the street to avoid him. Minutes later, another holy man from the dominant culture, a Levite, comes across the wounded man, but he too crosses the street and avoids him. Eventually, a member from the margins of society, a Samaritan, a person of color, sees the wounded man, has compassion, and ministers to him. He bandages his wounds by pouring oil and wine on them. Then the Samaritan carries the wounded man to a nearby inn and pays out of his pocket for the man to be looked after.

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

  Whether love is the same as dilection?Objection 1: It would seem that love is the same as dilection. For Dionysius says (Div. Nom. iv) that love is to dilection, “as four is to twice two, and as a rectilinear figure is to one composed of straight lines.” But these have the same meaning. Therefore love and dilection denote the same thing. Objection 2: Further, the movements of the appetite differ by reason of their objects. But the objects of dilection and love are the same. Therefore these are the same. Objection 3: Further, if dilection and love differ, it seems that it is chiefly in the fact that “dilection refers to good things, love to evil things, as some have maintained,” according to Augustine (De Civ. Dei xiv, 7). But they do not differ thus; because as Augustine says (De Civ. Dei xiv, 7) the holy Scripture uses both words in reference to either good or bad things. Therefore love and dilection do not differ: thus indeed Augustine concludes (De Civ. Dei xiv, 7) that “it is not one thing to speak of love, and another to speak of dilection.” On the contrary, Dionysius says (Div. Nom. iv) that “some holy men have held that love means something more Godlike than dilection does.” I answer that, We find four words referring in a way, to the same thing: viz. love, dilection, charity and friendship. They differ, however, in this, that “friendship,” according to the Philosopher (Ethic. viii, 5), “is like a habit,” whereas “love” and “dilection” are expressed by way of act or passion; and “charity” can be taken either way. Moreover these three express act in different ways. For love has a wider signification than the others, since every dilection or charity is love, but not vice versa. Because dilection implies, in addition to love, a choice [electionem] made beforehand, as the very word denotes: and therefore dilection is not in the concupiscible power, but only in the will, and only in the rational nature. Charity denotes, in addition to love, a certain perfection of love, in so far as that which is loved is held to be of great price, as the word itself implies [*Referring to the Latin “carus” (dear)]. Reply to Objection 1: Dionysius is speaking of love and dilection, in so far as they are in the intellectual appetite; for thus love is the same as dilection. Reply to Objection 2: The object of love is more general than the object of dilection: because love extends to more than dilection does, as stated above.

• 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 Cleanness (2020)

  But she didn’t go, she stood staring at me, the movement of her tail slowing just slightly, and then she inched forward and pressed her snout against my hand, her nose wet in my palm. Still I didn’t respond, but she insisted, jerking her nose up as if to toss my hand to her head, where she wanted to be scratched. I laughed and said Okay, Mama, okay, as I raked my fingers through her fur. She whined happily and came closer, pressing her trunk against my leg and rippling her body in that puppyish movement that communicates joy better than anything we can manage, and I used both hands to scratch along her sides, feeling bits of leaf and pine needles and accumulated grime. You’re filthy, I said, but I love you, and I bent my face down to hers, touching our foreheads together and gripping her in something like a hug. She tolerated this briefly, and then she tilted her snout slightly up and quickly licked my face, her tongue wet across my lips. I pulled back, making a sound of disgust and wiping my lips clean, but then I laughed again. She pressed against me more insistently, rubbing the top of her head against my jeans. She wanted a treat, and wanted more to be let inside. She had been a house dog once, I had heard, years ago she had belonged to a foreign teacher who left her behind when he went back to the States, she loved to sleep in our houses. But we had been told it wasn’t allowed; she was almost always dirty, and though she was treated for fleas and ticks you could never be sure, she was an outdoor dog now, we shouldn’t encourage her. But there was no one around to admonish me, and so Ela , I said to her, come on, and then I stood, successfully this time, maybe because Mama kept her side pressed against me, as if to prop me up as I kept one hand braced against the brick wall of the house. She whined at the door as I fumbled the key into the lock. Okay, Mama, I said soothingly again, okay. I would take the box of treats from the cabinet above the sink, I would put towels down on the kitchen floor so she would have a soft place to lie down. She was dirty but what was a little dirt, I thought as I turned the latch, I should have let you in a long time ago, I said, I’m sorry.

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

  In yet a third way, mutual indwelling in the love of friendship can be understood in regard to reciprocal love: inasmuch as friends return love for love, and both desire and do good things for one another. Reply to Objection 1: The beloved is contained in the lover, by being impressed on his heart and thus becoming the object of his complacency. On the other hand, the lover is contained in the beloved, inasmuch as the lover penetrates, so to speak, into the beloved. For nothing hinders a thing from being both container and contents in different ways: just as a genus is contained in its species, and vice versa. Reply to Objection 2: The apprehension of the reason precedes the movement of love. Consequently, just as the reason divides, so does the movement of love penetrate into the beloved, as was explained above. Reply to Objection 3: This argument is true of the third kind of mutual indwelling, which is not to be found in every kind of love. Whether ecstasy is an effect of love?Objection 1: It would seem that ecstasy is not an effect of love. For ecstasy seems to imply loss of reason. But love does not always result in loss of reason: for lovers are masters of themselves at times. Therefore love does not cause ecstasy. Objection 2: Further, the lover desires the beloved to be united to him. Therefore he draws the beloved to himself, rather than betakes himself into the beloved, going forth out from himself as it were. Objection 3: Further, love unites the beloved to the lover, as stated above [1237](A[1]). If, therefore, the lover goes out from himself, in order to betake himself into the beloved, it follows that the lover always loves the beloved more than himself: which is evidently false. Therefore ecstasy is not an effect of love. On the contrary, Dionysius says (Div. Nom. iv) that “the Divine love produces ecstasy,” and that “God Himself suffered ecstasy through love.” Since therefore according to the same author (Div. Nom. iv), every love is a participated likeness of the Divine Love, it seems that every love causes ecstasy.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  I WOKE A FEW HOURS LATER too hot, stifling in the bedclothes. I switched on the lamp beside the bed. R. slept so deeply I never had to worry about waking him on the nights I couldn’t sleep, when I spent hours beside him reading or writing. But this time he did wake, or half wake, as I lay with a book propped on my stomach; he turned toward me and linked his arm through mine before settling back into sleep, his face pressed against my shoulder. I looked at him for a long time before going back to my book. They could make a whole life, I thought, surprised to think it, these moments that filled me up with sweetness, that had changed the texture of existence for me. I had never thought anything like it before. I WANTED TO MAKE him laugh at first, I meant it almost as a joke. We needed to laugh: it had been hard to return to Sofia after our days in Italy, more snow had fallen but by the time we arrived the city had turned gray again, the holidays were over, the cars kicked black sludge from their tires. And now it was his last night in my apartment; in the morning he would gather his things and go back to Studentski grad, his friends would arrive in the afternoon. We would return to our uncertain arrangements, emails and dates that he might break at the last minute or without any notice at all, those were the conditions, they were non-negotiable. He hated it, he said, he didn’t want to go back to hiding, and throughout the day his dread had increased and darkened, coloring everything, until by nighttime he could barely speak, he had folded in on himself as he did sometimes; it was hard for me to reach him, to have any effect on him at all. We watched a movie sitting side by side on the couch, I don’t remember what it was, something lighthearted, romantic, though he hardly laughed. We never really watched movies together, it was always a pretense, we would kiss and touch each other and then forget the movie, but now it was all I could do to get him to kiss me back. Finally he let me pull him up from the couch, I folded the computer shut and pulled him half resisting into the bedroom. He resisted less there, standing beside the bed, he opened his mouth to me, he let me draw him close and press my pelvis against his.

• 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 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 Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  What more could one ask? This was the golden period of my travels with Paula. Perhaps I should have let things remain there. But one day I looked around and observed how large the enterprise was getting—group leaders, secretarial help to transcribe summaries of intakes and meetings, teachers to meet with student observers. Such size needed capital, I decided, and began searching for research funding to keep the group afloat. Since I did not want to think of myself as being in the death profession, I had never charged any of the patients or even inquired about medical insurance. Nonetheless, I was devoting considerable energy and time to the group, and I had a moral obligation to Stanford University to help cover the salary it was paying me. I also felt that my clinical apprenticeship in leading groups of cancer patients was coming to an end; it was time to do something with this enterprise, to research it, to evaluate its effectiveness, to publish our results, to spread the word, to encourage similar programs elsewhere in the country. In short, it was time to promote it and to get promoted. A propitious opportunity appeared when the National Cancer Institute sent out a call for applications for social-behavioral breast cancer research. I applied successfully for a grant enabling me to evaluate the effectiveness of my therapeutic approach to the terminal breast cancer patient. It was a simple, straightforward project. I felt confident that my treatment approach improved the quality of life of the terminally ill patient and that I had only to develop an evaluation component—the administration of questionnaires before members entered the group and at regular intervals thereafter. Notice that I now begin to make more use of the first-person pronoun: “I decided . . . I applied . . . my treatment approach.” As I look back and sift through the ashes of my relationship with Paula, I suspect that these first-person pronouns foreshadowed the corruption of our love. But as I lived through this period, I was unaware of even the most subtle spoilage. I remember only that Paula filled me with light and that I was her rock, the haven for which she had searched before we two were lucky enough to have found each another. Of one thing I am certain: it was shortly after the funded research officially began that things started to go wrong. First small hairline cracks, then crevices began to appear in our relationship.

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

  Whether hope is a cause of love?Objection 1: It would seem that hope is not a cause of love. Because, according to Augustine (De Civ. Dei xiv, 7,9), love is the first of the soul’s emotions. But hope is an emotion of the soul. Therefore love precedes hope, and consequently hope does not cause love. Objection 2: Further, desire precedes hope. But desire is caused by love, as stated above ([1359]Q[25], A[2]). Therefore hope, too, follows love, and consequently is not its cause. Objection 3: Further, hope causes pleasure, as stated above ([1360]Q[32], A[3]). But pleasure is only of the good that is loved. Therefore love precedes hope. On the contrary, The gloss commenting on Mat. 1:2, “Abraham begot Isaac, and Isaac begot Jacob,” says, i.e. “faith begets hope, and hope begets charity.” But charity is love. Therefore love is caused by hope. I answer that, Hope can regard two things. For it regards as its object, the good which one hopes for. But since the good we hope for is something difficult but possible to obtain; and since it happens sometimes that what is difficult becomes possible to us, not through ourselves but through others; hence it is that hope regards also that by which something becomes possible to us. In so far, then, as hope regards the good we hope to get, it is caused by love: since we do not hope save for that which we desire and love. But in so far as hope regards one through whom something becomes possible to us, love is caused by hope, and not vice versa. Because by the very fact that we hope that good will accrue to us through someone, we are moved towards him as to our own good; and thus we begin to love him. Whereas from the fact that we love someone we do not hope in him, except accidentally, that is, in so far as we think that he returns our love. Wherefore the fact of being loved by another makes us hope in him; but our love for him is caused by the hope we have in him. Wherefore the Replies to the Objections are evident. Whether hope is a help or a hindrance to action?Objection 1: It would seem that hope is not a help but a hindrance to action. Because hope implies security. But security begets negligence which hinders action. Therefore hope is a hindrance to action. Objection 2: Further, sorrow hinders action, as stated above ([1361]Q[37], A[3]). But hope sometimes causes sorrow: for it is written (Prov. 13:12): “Hope that is deferred afflicteth the soul.” Therefore hope hinders action. Objection 3: Further, despair is contrary to hope, as stated above [1362](A[4]). But despair, especially in matters of war, conduces to action; for it is written (2 Kings 2:26), that “it is dangerous to drive people to despair.” Therefore hope has a contrary effect, namely, by hindering action.

• 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 Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  Sometimes they need a gentle reminder of what once was. It can be difficult for estranged or distressed couples to focus on what drew them together, but within every couple’s “creation myth” lies the key to understanding the unfolding story of their relationship. “She was beautiful.” “He was so smart and funny.” “He had pizzazz, and he exuded such self-confidence and style.” “For me it was her warmth.” “For me it was his gentleness.” “I knew she wouldn’t leave me.” “I loved his hands.” “His dick.” “Her eyes.” “His voice.” “He made great omelets.” The attributes that describe an idealized lover are always luxurious and bountiful. Love is an exercise in selective perception, even a delicious deception as well, though who cares about that in the beginning? We magnify the good qualities of those we love, and confer on them almost mythical powers. We transform them, and we in turn are transformed in their presence. “He made me laugh.” “She made me feel special, smart.” “We could talk for hours.” “I knew I could trust her.” “I felt so accepted.” “He made me feel beautiful.” Such comments highlight the magnificence of the beloved or illuminate his capacity to enlarge us, to lift us from ourselves. As the psychoanalyst Ethel Spector Person writes, “Love arises from within ourselves as an imaginative act, a creative synthesis that aims to fulfill our deepest longings, our oldest dreams, that allows us both to renew and transform ourselves.” Love is at once an affirmation and a transcendence of who we are. Beginnings are always ripe with possibilities, for they hold the promise of completion. Through love we imagine a new way of being. You see me as I’ve never seen myself. You airbrush my imperfections, and I like what you see. With you, and through you, I will become that which I long to be. I will become whole. Being chosen by the one you chose is one of the glories of falling in love. It generates a feeling of intense personal importance. I matter. You confirm my significance. As I listen to couples describe the merging that accompanies the nascence of love, I get a glimpse of the dreams that propelled them toward each other. The first stage of any encounter is filled with fantasies. It’s a stream of projections, anticipations, and stirrings that may or may not evolve into a relationship. Here you are in front of someone you barely know, and you imagine climbing Kilimanjaro together, building an Architectural Digest home, making babies, or umpteen irresistible fantasies as arbitrary as the weather. As my patients recount the exaltation they felt, I am able to take a peek beneath the rubble to see what they once had.

• 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. THE FROG KING It 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.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  Before I met Paula, I was so deeply ensconced in the medical tradition that I would not have had charitable thoughts about a therapist who ended group sessions with the members holding hands and staring silently at a candle. Yet Paula’s suggestion felt so right to the members, and to me, that we began to end each meeting in that fashion. I came to treasure those closing moments and, if I happened to be sitting next to Paula, would give her hand a warm squeeze before I relinquished it. She generally led the meditation aloud, improvising, always with great dignity. I loved her meditations, and to the end of my life, I will hear her quietly instructing us: “Let go, let go of anger, let go of pain, let go of self-pity. Reach into your center, into your quiet, peaceful depths, and open yourself up to love, to forgiveness, to God.” Heady stuff for an uptight, free-thinking, medically trained empiricist! Sometimes I wondered whether Paula had any needs beyond the need to help others. Though I often asked her what the group could do for her, I never got an answer. Sometimes I wondered about her busy pace—she visited several sick patients every day. What drives her? I asked myself, and why does she present her problems only in the past tense? She offers us only her solutions, never her unsolved problems. But I never wondered too long. After all, Paula did have advanced metastatic cancer and had outlived even the most optimistic statistics. She was energetic, widely loved, widely loving, an inspiration to everyone forced to live with cancer. What more could one ask? This was the golden period of my travels with Paula. Perhaps I should have let things remain there. But one day I looked around and observed how large the enterprise was getting—group leaders, secretarial help to transcribe summaries of intakes and meetings, teachers to meet with student observers. Such size needed capital, I decided, and began searching for research funding to keep the group afloat. Since I did not want to think of myself as being in the death profession, I had never charged any of the patients or even inquired about medical insurance. Nonetheless, I was devoting considerable energy and time to the group, and I had a moral obligation to Stanford University to help cover the salary it was paying me. I also felt that my clinical apprenticeship in leading groups of cancer patients was coming to an end; it was time to do something with this enterprise, to research it, to evaluate its effectiveness, to publish our results, to spread the word, to encourage similar programs elsewhere in the country. In short, it was time to promote it and to get promoted.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  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. We were wearing the scarves I had found when I opened the presents under the tree, which were long and knit in the same pattern, one yellow and one blue; we wouldn’t ever be boyfriends who wore the same clothes, R. said, but one shared thing was acceptable, having one shared thing was nice.

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  Beginnings are always ripe with possibilities, for they hold the promise of completion. Through love we imagine a new way of being. You see me as I’ve never seen myself. You airbrush my imperfections, and I like what you see. With you, and through you, I will become that which I long to be. I will become whole. Being chosen by the one you chose is one of the glories of falling in love. It generates a feeling of intense personal importance. I matter. You confirm my significance. As I listen to couples describe the merging that accompanies the nascence of love, I get a glimpse of the dreams that propelled them toward each other. The first stage of any encounter is filled with fantasies. It’s a stream of projections, anticipations, and stirrings that may or may not evolve into a relationship. Here you are in front of someone you barely know, and you imagine climbing Kilimanjaro together, building an Architectural Digest home, making babies, or umpteen irresistible fantasies as arbitrary as the weather. As my patients recount the exaltation they felt, I am able to take a peek beneath the rubble to see what they once had. A Hopeful State of Bliss John and Beatrice spent their first six months virtually locked up in a room in a blissful state of effervescence. John is a stockbroker who has known the glories and defeats of the dot-com revolution. When I first met him in therapy he had just witnessed his fortune wither before his eyes. He would spend days staring at his computer screen, helplessly tracking the demise of his portfolio while he drank the last of his single-malt Scotch. He had also just experienced an erotic collapse in the midst of an otherwise loving and caring relationship with a girlfriend of five years. He was in the grip of a triple crisis—emotional, professional, and financial. When he met Beatrice, it was like waking up from a coma. His sense of relief and renewal was profound. Beatrice, a Pre-Raphaelite beauty, was a graduate student in English in her mid-twenties, ten years younger than John. In the cocoon under the sheets they would talk for hours, make love, talk again, make love, and sleep (but very little). Transported as they were in this early rapture, they felt free and open. They relished the meeting of their two worlds, were endlessly curious, and luxuriated in their feelings of mutuality and warmth, free from the torments of the outside world. As the relationship between them evolved, John and Beatrice experienced a growing sense of serenity. The initial excitement matured, the real world reemerged, and hope was transformed into substance. Enter intimacy. If love is an act of imagination, then intimacy is an act of fruition. It waits for the high to subside so it can patiently insert itself into the relationship. The seeds of intimacy are time and repetition. We choose each other again and again, and so create a community of two.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  We humans do not hesitate to speak of the almost superhuman power of unconditional parental love; otherwise how could we explain the profound feelings and actions we take toward our newborns, with their slimy, wrinkled-prune bodies that know little else but to defecate, urinate and wail in ear-piercing shrieks of frantic discomfort? We gaze at them, listen, coo and smell; we hold and rock them; we become hopelessly and ridiculously smitten in love. And this, as any parent knows, is only just the beginning of trial by fire and infinite patience. Evolution has given us the most compelling of all feelings to direct and organize the critical acts of care and nurturance. The Darwinian emotions and behaviors of “love” have evolved, presumably, for the protection and care of the babies in a species bearing one offspring and compressing an eighteen-month gestation (arguably because of its large head) into nine. For these underdeveloped creatures to survive, special, extended, and therefore highly motivated caregiving behaviors were required. Such an enduring task demanded nothing short of love, perhaps the same emotion that drives soldiers in the heat of battle to rescue fallen comrades, pulling them to safety even at the supreme risk to their own lives. And love, in the final analysis, may be our collective antidote—the salvation for a species with such a penchant for senseless killing and carnage. Love is the glue that holds family, tribes, and—perhaps in times of need—even societies together. It is also the potion that binds the human animal to the divine through the highest religious and spiritual feelings of oneness and connection. Was I, at the lake’s edge, witnessing an early precursor to that love supreme in the primitive instinctual programs that so nonchalantly inhibited the adult birds from exhibiting their normal voracious competitive appetites so that their young could fill their bellies first? An Open WindowScience is our new religion and its holy water is disinfectant. —George Bernard Shaw In spite of persistent rejection of our animal nature, there was a vital and rich window of time during the twentieth century when six Nobel Prizes in Physiology or Medicine were awarded on the subject of instincts.† Darwin, a century and a half ago, emphasized just how nuanced and intelligent instincts are. In Notebook M (1838) Darwin mused, “The origin of man is now proved. He who understands baboon would do more towards metaphysics than Locke.” In this regard it was recently demonstrated that a mere one or two percentage points differentiates the human and chimpanzee genomes (with not much more distinguishing humans from other mammals). Indeed chimps can outperform college sophomores in a fairly sophisticated math exercise, and yet psychology, purportedly a natural science, still seems to favor overlooking the reality that we are, in the last analysis, animals.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  WE WENT TO BOLOGNA because it was the cheapest place we could fly: there were tickets for forty euros, a price I could afford. We packed a single carry-on each, anything else would have meant a fee, and rode in a cab to the airport’s old terminal, which the budget airlines used. It was my first time leaving the country. During breaks, when the other American teachers left for places near or far—Istanbul, Tangier, St. Petersburg—I stayed behind; I didn’t want to travel, I said, I wanted to be settled in a single place. I studied Bulgarian, I read, I wandered the streets downtown. But I did want to travel with R., to leave Sofia, where even when his friends were gone there was a pressure of secrecy, where it was too dangerous to hold hands in the streets, to kiss in public, however chastely, where everywhere we had to keep a casual distance; I wanted to be with him in a place where we could be freer with each other, a place in the West. It was my gift to him, a getaway, a bit of romance. We arrived at the airport early enough to be first in line for the unassigned seats, and sat in the front row, where there was extra room for our legs. Even so my knees almost touched those of the single attendant who sat facing us, strapped into her foldout seat. She spoke English with an accent I couldn’t place, not Bulgarian but something Eastern European, and she smiled slightly, kindly I thought, when the plane started down the runway, thrusting us all back, and R. moved his hand to cover mine where it lay on my knee. WE BOOKED THE CHEAPEST HOTEL, too, a chain a good way from the city center, with a bus stop outside for getting to town. We arrived too late for any exploring, we’d have to wait until morning to see the city. It was hard not to feel depressed by our room, which had the corporate airlessness of such places, comfort sterilized of any human touch. It was on the second floor, overlooking the parking lot. It’s not exactly a dream of Italy, I said, meaning it as an apology, but R. laughed, he drew the curtain across the glass and pulled me to the bed. Who cares about the view, he said, the bed is nice, that’s all that matters, you should care about the bed, and then we were both laughing, one on top of the other.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  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.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  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.