Nostalgia

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.

Page 39 of 45 · 20 per page

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  ** From a poem by Dr. Gloria Joseph.*Unpublished paper by Samella Lewis.* From “Letters from Black Feminists, 1972–1978” by Barbara Smith and Beverly Smith in Conditions: Four (1979).* From The I Ching.** From “Nigger” by Judy Dothard Simmons in Decent Intentions (Blind Beggar Press, P.O. Box 437, Williamsbridge Station, Bronx, New York 10467, 1983).* From The I Ching.* This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color edited by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua (Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, New York, 1984).* From The I Ching.* From “Every Woman Ever Loved A Woman” by Bernice Johnson Reagon, song performed by Sweet Honey in the Rock.* From The I Ching.Grenada Revisited: An Interim Report*THE FIRST TIME I came to Grenada I came seeking “home,” for this was my mother’s birthplace and she had always defined it so for me. Vivid images remained of what I saw there and of what I knew it could become. • Grand Anse Beach was a busy thoroughfare in the early, direct morning. Children in proper school uniforms carrying shoes, trying to decide between the lure of a coco palm adventure to one side and the delicious morning sea on the other, while they are bound straightforward to well-worn chalky desks. • The mended hem of the print dress the skinny old woman wore, swinging along down the beach, cutlass in hand. Oversized, high rubber boots never once interfering with her determined step. Her soft shapeless hat. Underneath, sharp, unhurried eyes snapped out from chocolate skin dusted grey with age. • Another woman, younger, switch held between elbow and waist, driving seven sheep that look like goats except goats carry their tails up and sheep down. • The Fat-Woman-Who-Fries-Fish-In-The-Market actually did, and it was delicious, served on the counterboards with her fragrant chocolate-tea in mugs fashioned from Campbell’s Pork ’n Beans cans with metal handles attached. • The full moon turning the night beach flash green. I came to Grenada for the first time eleven months before the March 13, 1979 bloodless coup of the New Jewel Movement which ushered in the People’s Revolutionary Government (PRG) of Grenada under Prime Minister Maurice Bishop. This brought an end to twenty-nine years of Sir Eric Gairy’s regime — wasteful, corrupt, and United States sanctioned.

• From The Erotic Mind (1995)

  Lorna:I don’t really have sexual fantasies.Jack:You mentioned you were necking with Mike last week and you felt aroused. What was going through your mind then?Lorna:Nothing in particular. Just feeling nice—warm and tingly.Jack:Did you notice any thoughts or feelings along with those wonderful sensations?Lorna:(after a long silence) Well, I vaguely remember noticing how muscular and hard his back was as I held on. I’ve always liked his muscles.Jack:What about them?Lorna:Oh, you know, I like remembering how masculine he was when we first met. He was hairy and big and I soft and naive. I’ve always liked the contrast.Jack:Did that memory help turn you on?Lorna:I suppose it did. The differences are still there, even though I’m not as naive anymore.Jack:Lorna, you may not think so, but what you just described to me is a fantasy. It all took place in your mind.Sexy thoughts that aren’t considered fantasy are especially common among women. In Lorna’s case, recognizing that she had fantasies allowed her to focus on the images that turned her on, which in turn gradually increased her arousal and thus her lubrication. As with many people, Lorna’s fantasies were mere snippets of erotic thought, although these fragments grew richer as she acknowledged their existence. Eventually, she discovered that if she imagined herself, innocent and naive, being taken by a strong and virile Mike, her arousal would intensify—quite impressive for a woman who didn’t fantasize! The amazing capacity of the CET to encapsulate an incredible amount of detail is one reason that Lorna didn’t readily perceive herself as a fantasizer. Her experience demonstrates the importance of erotic cues in our CETs. These cues are extremely subtle and specific, perhaps a particular gesture, a stance, the shape of a single body part, or a certain look. Whenever Lorna focused on Mike’s muscles and hairy body, these characteristics served as a supercondensed shorthand for her fascination with the contrast between masculinity and femininity. EXPLORING YOUR CET WITH FANTASYMen and women with active fantasy lives are usually quite familiar with the sorts of partners and situations likely to electrify them. In most cases exceptionally exciting fantasies are closely related to a person’s CET. The challenge is to discover the links between these fantasies and the unfinished emotional business they’re trying to resolve. Although we’ll focus on just a handful of specific themes in this chapter, it is not my intention to limit what you might discover for yourself. After all, the possibilities are practically limitless.6 I’ve chosen examples that I hope will both pique your interest and demonstrate how the erotic mind is involved in all spheres of life.

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  The possibilities of living in Russia seem very different in some respects, yet the people feel so Western European (so American, really) outside of Tashkent. And the afternoons in Moscow are so dark and gloomy . I The flight to Moscow was nine hours long, and from my observations on the plane, Russians are generally as unfriendly to each other as Americans are and just about as unhelpful. There was a marvelously craggy-faced old blue-eyed woman in her seventies wearing a babushka, with a huge coat roll. On the plane everyone had one kind of huge coat roll or another except me. When I stepped out into the Moscow weather I realized why. But this woman was sitting in the seat right in front of me. She was traveling alone and was too short to wield her roll easily. She tried once, and she tried twice, and finally I got up and helped her. The plane was packed: I’d never seen a plane quite so crowded before. The old woman turned around and looked at me. It was obvious she did not speak English because I had muttered something to her with no reply. There was in her eyes a look of absolutely no rancor. I thought with a quick shock how a certain tension in glances between American Black and white people is taken for granted. There was no thank you either, but there was a kind of simple human response to who I was. And then as she turned to sit back down, under her very dowdy cardigan I saw on her undersweater at least three military-type medals, complete with chevrons. Hero of the Republic medals, I learned later. Earned for hard work. This is something that I noticed all over: the very old people in Russia have a stamp upon them that I hope I can learn and never lose, a matter-of-fact resilience and sense of their place upon the earth that is very sturdy and reassuring. I landed on September 10th about 3:30 P.M . Moscow time and stepped out into a very raw, familiar greyness. There was a winter smell to the air; almost nostalgic. The trees were Thanksgiving-turned and the sky had that turkey-laden grey-pumpkin color. I saw three large, square-faced women arm-in-arm, marching across the airfield laughing and joking as they came.

• From The Erotic Mind (1995)

  All reminiscences, sexual or otherwise, are shaped by the way your memory sorts and stores information.5 Vivid recollections are enlivened by what I call memorability factors—characteristics that make any event stand out. Typically, memorability factors are the most readily identifiable aspects of an experience, the special particulars and circumstances that first come’ to mind when you think about it. Consider the memorable encounters you’re recalled thus far. Which specific situational details contributed to your arousal? We’re not looking for penetrating analysis here, just the obvious facts that helped make the experience notable. Record your observations in your journal. Next note the specific details that stand out in your favorite fantasies. You’ll probably notice important differences between the details that excite you in real life compared to those that are exciting in fantasy. In actual encounters, for instance, arousing details often appear to be strokes of luck, opportunities you happily seize even though they aren’t necessarily of your own creation. By contrast, in fantasy you select and control all the exciting events. In the realm of the erotic imagination you are the creator as well as the director, with the power to make everything turn out exactly as you wish. These memorability factors appear in The Group’s stories more frequently than any others: Firsts and surprises Idyllic situations or partners Extensions and restrictions of time Learning about factors that stand but for The Group may call your attention to similar circumstances that contribute to your own arousal. But it’s quite possible that other memorability factors are more significant to you. After all, few things in life are more personal than sexual excitation. FIRSTS AND SURPRISESThe first time you have a significant experience you’re more likely to remember it because the characteristic of “firstness” stands out against the background of the familiar. Similarly, when your expectations and routines are shaken by a surprise, you also tend to take notice. These principles of memorability help explain why nearly a third of The Group’s peak encounters include at least one first or surprise. Over the years I’ve consistently observed that men recall their first sexual encounters fondly as welcome rites of passage, even if the details of what happened weren’t that terrific. Women, however, don’t always welcome sexual initiation so wholeheartedly. Often a woman’s first encounter “just happens” after a few drinks or in response to pressure from her partner or peers. Even when the encounter is desired and basically positive, her enthusiasm may be tempered by a sense of loss. Despite these differences in how men and women feel about sexual initiation, among The Group neither gender is inclined to report its first sexual encounters as peaks, with the exception of a few people whose sexual initiation coincided with falling in love. Other firsts, however—such as initial encounters with new partners, experiments with new sexual activities, or encounters in new settings—are mentioned regularly.

• From Going Clear (2013)

  Anywhere else you’d think it was about to rain, but there was no water in the approaching storm, a blue norther, bringing nothing but cold and trouble. The pastor, gray-bearded with the eyes of a benevolent fanatic, was leading a hymn, and because nearly everybody went to the same Church of Christ in Fort Davis, they joined expertly in the a cappella singing: Yonder, yonder! Yonder in the great beyond Peace and love await Beyond the pearly gate Over yonder in the great beyond! L.D. hadn’t been to church since the Nixon administration, but the song found its way back into his mouth as easily as if he had been singing it that very morning. The familiar harmonies awakened memories, not altogether unpleasant, of his long-forsaken youthful piety, enforced by family and community and really everyone he knew. But look at him now, the silver-haired cynic in a gray westerncut suit and handmade boots, tall, slender, suave, part of the scene and apart from it, a man who knew exactly where he ought to be, on top of the world and in control. Governor Abbott was there and said a few kind words of the sort that might be said of anyone not convicted of a felony. The deceased and the governor represented different parties, but L.D. thought it a smart move on Abbott’s part to plant a flag in the district, which had been solidly Democratic since the Civil War, but after Trump the chickens were out of the coop. At least, L.D. hoped so. The governor slyly called Walter a “friend and occasional ally,” overlooking votes that might be inconvenient to recall in the face of the fierce widow in the front row with the folded flag of Texas in her lap. Walter might be dead, but his influence lingered. After the eulogies—there must have been seven or eight of them, all on the same themes, good family man, selfless public servant, little truth in any of it—L.D. got in line to toss a few desiccated clods into Walter’s grave.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  where Ruth was rewarded for her filial devotion, and children may still be seen gleaning after the reapers in the grainfields, as she did in the field of Boaz; where his ancestor, the poet-king, was born and called from his father’s flocks to the throne of Israel; where shepherds are still watching the sheep as in that solemn night when the angelic host thrilled their hearts with the heavenly anthem of glory to God, and peace on earth to men of his good pleasure; where the sages from the far East offered their sacrifices in the name of future generations of heathen converts; where Christian gratitude has erected the oldest church in Christendom, the "Church of the Nativity," and inscribed on the solid rock in the "Holy Crypt," in letters of silver, the simple but pregnant inscription: "Hic de Virgine Maria Jesus Christus natus est." When all the surroundings correspond with the Scripture narrative, it is of small account whether the traditional grotto of the Nativity is the identical spot—though pointed out as such it would seem already in the middle of the second century.164 We accompany him in a three days’ journey from Bethlehem to Nazareth, his proper home, where he spent thirty silent years of his life in quiet preparation for his public work, unknown in his divine character to his neighbors and even the members of his own household (John 7:5), except his saintly parents. Nazareth is still there, a secluded, but charmingly located mountain village, with narrow, crooked and dirty streets, with primitive stone houses where men, donkeys and camels are huddled together, surrounded by cactus hedges and fruitful gardens of vines, olive, fig, and pomegranates, and favorably distinguished from the wretched villages of modern Palestine by comparative industry, thrift, and female beauty; the never failing "Virgin’s Fountain," whither Jesus must often have accompanied his mother for the daily supply of water, is still there near the Greek Church of the Annunciation, and is the evening rendezvous of the women and maidens, with their water-jars gracefully poised on the head or shoulder, and a row of silver coins adorning their forehead; and behind the village still rises the hill, fragrant with heather and thyme, from which he may often have cast his eye eastward to Gilboa, where Jonathan fell, and to the graceful, cone-like Tabor—the Righi of Palestine—northward to the lofty Mount Hermon—the Mont Blanc of Palestine— southward to the fertile plain of Esdraëlon—the classic battle-ground of Israel—and westward to the ridge of Carmel, the coast of Tyre and Sidon and the blue waters of the Mediterranean sea—the future highway of his gospel of peace to mankind. There he could feast upon the rich memories of David and Jonathan, Elijah and Elisha, and gather images of beauty for his lessons of wisdom.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  Gold rings and statuettes show men and women, alert and erect, with eyes straining toward a goddess figure floating in the sky. Burial grounds were holy places. The king was the partner of the gods: seals show him in conversation with a goddess, who hands him a spear or staff. Some of these rituals would survive in later Greek religion, and the Mycenaean texts mentioned gods who would continue to be important in the later Greek pantheon: Zeus, Athena, Poseidon, and Dionysus. But the disastrous collapse of the eastern Mediterranean severed the Greeks irrevocably from both these civilizations. Greece lapsed into illiteracy and relative barbarism; there was no central authority, and local chieftains ruled the various regions. Communities were isolated, and there were no more contacts with the Near Eastern countries, which were also in crisis. There was no more monumental building, no more figural art, and craftsmanship declined. Poets kept some of the old legends alive. They looked back on the Mycenaean period as a heroic age of magnificent warriors. They told stories about Achilles, the greatest of the Achaeans, who had been killed during the Trojan War. They recalled the tragic fate of Agamemnon, king of Mycenae, who had died in a divinely decreed vendetta. They kept alive the memory of Oedipus, king of Thebes, who, not realizing who they were, had killed his father and married his mother. The bards wandered around Greece and helped to give the scattered communities a shared identity and a common language. One of the few cities to survive the crisis was Athens, in eastern Attica, which had been an important Mycenaean stronghold. The city declined and its population diminished, but the site was never entirely abandoned. By the middle of the eleventh century, however, Athenian craftsmen had begun to produce sophisticated pottery, decorated in what is now called the Proto-Geometric style, and at the same time, some Athenians migrated to Asia Minor, where they founded settlements along the Aegean coast that preserved the city’s Ionian dialect. In the late tenth century, new villages began to appear in the countryside around Athens, and the population of Attica was divided into four tribes (phylai), which were administrative rather than ethnic units—like “houses” in a British public school. The tide was beginning to turn for Athens. Later this resurgence was attributed to Theseus, the mythical king of Athens. 3 Every year the Athenians would celebrate Theseus’s unification of their region in a religious festival on the Acropolis, the sacred hill beside the city. In the ninth century, Greek society was still predominantly rural. Our chief sources are the epics of Homer, which were not committed to writing until the eighth century, but which preserved some ancient oral traditions. The wealth of the local basileis (“lords”) was measured in sheep, cattle, and pigs.

• From The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures (2018)

  The condition was hardly different by the sixteenth century, when Shakespeare returned to this same tragic spirit, with great depth, in his treatment of malignant and ex machina emotions in Macbeth, Othello, Coriolanus, Hamlet, and Lear . Those tragedies were only gently offset by the elegiac bittersweetness of his Falstaff character in the Henry IV plays and in The Merry Wives of Windsor . With both regret and nostalgia, John Falstaff thinks of all the troubles and merriments he has felt in the flesh. By turns tragic and comic, he illustrates not just his condition but our own. It is intriguing that grand opera, which recuperated the settings of Greek tragedy by combining drama and music, returned, in the nineteenth century, to these same tragic themes and to the comedy that counters them. Verdi wrote remarkable versions of Macbeth and Othello and ended his career on an inspiring sunny note: an entire opera devoted to Shakespeare’s Falstaff that tellingly omits Falstaff’s sad undoing and ends instead in a joyous coda. There was not then, and there is not now, one single perspective and treatment of the human condition even when human beings live in the same part of the world and share a schematically comparable biography. Human differences reign. 19 In theatrical terms, our overall situation has moved a notch, from tragedy to plain drama, with welcome comedic interludes. The balance between our own decisions and the forces they combat has clearly moved and in our favor. Still, we constantly pay for ills that we did not create or for committing wrongs that we never wished to commit. One glimmer of hope, a big difference between past pursuits and future attempts, resides with the vast knowledge of human nature that we now have available and the possibility of planning a more humanly intelligent strategy than in the past. This approach would regard the notion that reason should take charge as pure folly, a mere leftover from the worst excesses of rationalism, but it would also reject the idea that we should simply endorse the recommendations of emotions—be kind, compassionate, angry, or disgusted—without filtering them through knowledge and reason. 20 It would foster a productive partnership of feelings and reason, emphasizing nourishing emotions and suppressing negative ones. Last, it would reject the notion of human minds as equivalent to artificial intelligence creations. While there may be no cure for life, and while we wait for the civilizational efforts to work their results, there may be shorter-term remedies.

• From Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (1989)

  This philosophy combined with a sense of crisis and new possibility engendered by the French Revolution, which indeed had partly inspired it. It defined the perspective of a new politics and a new culture, of which Germany would be the initiator. We can see so me expectation of this kind glowing through the lines of Hegel's Phanom enologie d es Geistes of I 8 07, though the transformation is seen in q uite apolitical terms. In later Hegel, the sense of imminent radical tran s formation i s gone. But what re mains is the notion of a new and higher age, which has already d awned, and which is now seeing the unfolding of a new and higher political form, and the religious and ph i losophical culture whic h goes with it. Hegel incorporates the whole traditional scenario of Western millenarism, but in a transposed, philosophical form. There are the three ages of wor l d history, the crisis of heightened conflict at the entry of the new a g e (fortunately now behind us, in the form of the Revolution and its res ult in g wars), and the new higher resolution. Lost in th e philosophical transposition , of course, is the final battle between good and evil, resulting in the tota l v ictory of the f ormer. The Hegelian battle is never between good an d ba d, b u t between two require m ents of the good; and it issues in synthesis, not t o ta l victory. But Marx reinstates this element of polarizatio n and total victory in h is version of the spiral; and this is the fo rm in which political millen arism h a s become a major force in modern civilization and history. I have tried to sh ow elsewhere 4 7 how Marx's theory of alienation and his pe r spective on liber a ti on The Expressivist Turn • 389 are based no t only on Enlight enment h uma nism but also on Romantic expressivism, and hence ultimately on the i dea of nature as a source. 21.4 The express1v1st theories o f nature as source thus develop their own c o nceptions of history and of t he narrative forms of human life, both in how a n individual life unfolds towards s elf-discover y and in how this life fits into t he whole human story. One such form is t he spiral I've just been describing. But the critique o f modern Enlightenment ci v ilization as fragmented and de ssicated could also generate a pessimistic sense that the world had declined, p e rhaps irreversibly, from an earlier, richer time. It could inspire a nostalgi a fo r a past age of integrity-often identified with the Middle Ages. Both forms broke with Enlightenment narrations.

• From Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (1989)

  Outside of th i s epiphan y, and prior to it, his life ca n ' t be brou g ht together into the usu a l sto ry of achie vement, where one creates a succession of works a nd th u s bec omes a "writer''. I t is s o much 'temps perdu' in the double sense of was t ed t i me on its way to joining the unrecoverable past. Only by cohering i n a w ay whic h cuts across ti me, which joins widely separated epiphanic mom en t s through me mory, c an it be given a sense, which can then be the basi s f o r a n oe uvre of the recognized kin d . The recovery of the past stops the wasti ng o f time. Or consider the uses of history in the poetry of Eliot and Pound . Th e ir s c ould sometimes be mistaken for the familiar Romantic stance, yearning after a riche r past, one fuller of meaning, from the standpoint of an empty o r s hallo w present. The implici t narration here is of history as decline, and th e E p i p hanies of Modernism · 46 J longing to recapture the earlier reality is doomed from the start, what is gone c an only be in v oked in nostalgia. But on examination, this doesn't seem at all to b e what is afoot in Po und's 'poems in c luding history' or i n Eliot's comparable work. The p resent ag e is in deed spiritually indigent. We in our time need to reco ver the past in order to attain fulness. But this is not so much because history has meant decline, as because the fulness of meaning isn't available with the resources of a single ag e. And what is more, Pound and Eliot seem to hold that we can recapture the past or, ra ther, make the gr eat moments and achievements of oth e r times come alive again in ours, to bring the long-dead back to speech.

• From The Diary of a Young Girl (The Definitive Edition) (2020)

  I’m occasionally sentimental, as you know, but from time to time I have reason to be: when Peter and I are sitting close together on a hard wooden crate among the junk and dust, our arms around each other’s shoulders, Peter toying with a lock of my hair; when the birds outside are trilling their songs, when the trees are in bud, when the sun beckons and the sky is so blue--oh, that’s when I wish for so much! All I see around me are dissatisfied and grumpy faces, all I hear are sighs and stifled complaints. You’d think our lives had taken a sudden turn for the worse. Honestly, things are only as bad as you make them. Here in the Annex no one even bothers to set a good example. We each have to figure out how to get the better of our own moods! Every day you hear, “If only it were all over!” Work, love, courage and hope, Make me good and help me cope! I really believe, Kit, that I’m a little nutty today, and I don’t know why. My writing’s all mixed up, I’m jump- ing from one thing to another, and sometimes I seriously doubt whether anyone will ever be interested in this drivel. They’ll probably call it “The Musings of an Ugly Duckling.” My diaries certainly won’t be of much use to Mr. Bolkestein or Mr. Gerbrandy.* [* Gerrit Bolkestein was the Minister of Education and Pieter Gerbrandy was the Prime Minister of the Dutch government in exile in London. See Anne’s letter of March 29, 1944.] Yours, Anne M. Frank SATURDAY, APRIL 15, 1944 Dearest Kitty, “There’s just one bad thing after another. When will it all end?” You can sure say that again. Guess what’s happened now? Peter forgot to unbolt the front door. As a result, Mr. Kugler and the warehouse employees couldn’t get in. He went to Keg’s, smashed in our office kitchen window and got in that way. The windows in the Annex were open, and the Keg people saw that too. What must they be thinking? And van Maaren? Mr. Kugler’s furious. We accuse him of not doing anything to reinforce the doors, and then we do a stupid thing like this! Peter’s extremely upset. At the table, Mother said she felt more sorry for Peter than for anyone else, and he nearly began to cry. We’re equally to blame, since we usually ask him every day if he’s unbolted the door, and so does Mr. van Daan. Maybe I can go comfort him later on. I want to help him so much! Here are the latest news bulletins about life in the Secret Annex over the last few weeks: A week ago Saturday, Boche suddenly got sick. He sat quite still and started drooling. Miep immediately picked him up, rolled him in a towel, tucked him in her shopping bag and brought him to the dog-and-cat clinic.

• From The Diary of a Young Girl (The Definitive Edition) (2020)

  I couldn’t help it; the more quiet and serious I am on the inside, the noisier I get on the outside! Who will be the first to discover the chink in my armor? It’s just as well that the van Daans don’t have a daughter. My conquest could never be so challenging, so beautiful and so nice with someone of the same sex! Yours, Anne M. Frank PS. You know I’m always honest with you, so I think I should tell you that I live from one encounter to the next. I keep hoping to discover that he’s dying to see me, and I’m in raptures when I notice his bashful attempts. I think he’d like to be able to express himself as easily as I do; little does he know it’s his awkwardness that I find so touching. TUESDAY, MARCH 7,1944 Dearest Kitty, When I think back to my life in 1942, it all seems so unreal. The Anne Frank who enjoyed that heavenly existence was completely different from the one who has grown wise within these walls. Yes, it was heavenly. Five admirers on every street corner, twenty or so friends, the favorite of most of my teachers, spoiled rotten by Father and Mother, bags full of candy and a big allowance. What more could anyone ask for? You’re probably wondering how I could have charmed all those people. Peter says It s ecause I m “attractive,” but that isn’t it entirely. The teachers were amused and entertained by my clever answers, my witty remarks, my smthng face and my critical mind. That’s all I was: a terrible flirt, coquettish and amusing. I had a few plus points, which kept me in everybody’s good graces: I was hardworking, honest and generous. I would never have refused anyone who wanted to peek at my answers, I was magnanimous with my candy, and I wasn’t stuck-up. Would all that admiration eventually have made me overconfident? It’s a good thing that, at the height of my glory, I was suddenly plunged into reality. It took me more than a year to get used to doing without admiration. How did they see me at school? As the class comedian, the eternal ringleader, never in a bad mood, never a crybaby. Was it any wonder that everyone wanted to bicycle to school with me or do me little favors? I look back at that Anne Frank as a pleasant, amusing, but superficial girl, who has nothing to do with me. What did Peter say about me? “Whenever I saw you, you were surrounded by a flock of girls and at least two boys, you were always laughing, and you were always the center of attention!” He was right. What’s remained of that Anne Frank? Oh, I haven’t forgotten how to laugh or toss off a remark, I’m just as good, if not better, at raking people over the coals, and I can still flirt and be amusing, if I want to be .

• From The Diary of a Young Girl (The Definitive Edition) (2020)

  she goes to Lake Como, where she runs into Hans. He tells her that two years earlier he’d married Cady’s successor, but that his wife took her life in a fit of depression. Now that he’s seen his little Cady again, he realizes how much he loves her, and once more asks for her hand in marriage. Cady refuses, even though, in spite of herself, she loves him as much as ever. But her pride holds her back. Hans goes away, and years later Cady learns that he’s wound up in England, where he’s struggling with ill health. When she’s twenty-seven, Cady marries a well-to-do man from the country, named Simon. She grows to love him, but not as much as Hans. She has two daughters and a son, Lthan, Judith and Nico. She and Simon are happy together, but Hans is always in the back of her mind until one night she dreams of him and says farewell. . . . It’s not sentimental nonsense: it’s based on the story of Father’s life. Yours, Anne M. Frank SATURDAY, MAY 13, 1944 My dearest Kitty, Yesterday was Father’s birthday, Father and Mother’s nineteenth wedding anniversary, a day without the cleaning lady. . . and the sun was shining as it’s never shone before in 1944. Our chestnut tree is in full bloom. It’s covered with leaves and is even more beautiful than last year. Father received a biography of Linnaeus from Mr. Kleiman, a book on nature from Mr. Kugler, The Canals of Amsterdam from Dussel, a huge box from the van Daans (wrapped so beautifully it might have been done by a professional), containing three eggs, a bottle of beer, a jar of yogurt and a green tie. It made our jar of molasses seem rather paltry. My roses smelled wonderful compared to Miep and Bep’s red carnations. He was thoroughly spoiled. Fifty petits fours arrived from Siemons’ Bakery, delicious! Father also treated us to spice cake, the men to beer and the ladies to

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  A man of sorrows, Orpheus mourned the loss of his wife, Eurydice, for his entire life and died a violent, horrible death: he had so enraged the women of Thrace by refusing to marry again that they tore him to pieces with their bare hands. Yet Orpheus was a man of peace, whose inspired poetry tamed wild beasts, calmed the waves, and made men forget their quarrels. 80 The second of these movements was initiated by Pythagoras, a mathematician from Samos, who migrated to Italy in 530, traveled in the east, and taught a version of the Indian doctrine of karma. We know very little about him personally, except that he established an esoteric sect whose members purified the body by abstaining from meat, refused to take part in the sacrificial rituals, and sought enlightenment through the study of science and mathematics. By concentrating on pure abstractions, Pythagoreans hoped to wean themselves away from the contaminations of the physical world and glimpse a vision of divine order. Most Greeks, however, continued to worship the gods in the traditional, time-honored way, though in the sixth century there were stirrings of an entirely new rationalism. A few philosophers had begun to study science, not, like the Pythagoreans, as a means of gaining spiritual enlightenment, but for its own sake. 81 These first scientists lived in Miletus, an Ionian polis on the coast of Asia Minor, a prosperous port with extensive links to the Black Sea and the Near East. The first to gain notoriety was Thales, who became an overnight sensation by predicting a solar eclipse in 593. This had simply been a lucky guess, but his real achievement was to see the eclipse as a natural rather than a divine event. Thales was not against religion. The only sentence of his to have survived was “Everything is water and the world is full of gods.” The primal sea had long been regarded as the divine raw material of the cosmos, but Thales’ approach to this mythical intuition was strictly logical. In the fragments of his work that have been preserved in the writings of other philosophers, it appears that he argued that all other creatures had derived from the element of water, and that life was impossible without it. Because water could change its form and become ice or steam, it was capable of evolving into something different. Following the same line of thought, Anaximenos (560–496), another Milesian philosopher, believed that air was the primal stuff: air was also essential to life and could mutate—becoming wind, cloud, and water.

• From The Sexual Life of Catherine M. (2001)

  I carry in me a sweet nostalgia for large apartments in Italian cities. When my collaboration with Enzo began he was living in Rome, in what I think was an outlying part of the city, in one of those ochre buildings separated from others by dodgy spaces. When I compared this area to the suburb of my childhood, I was amazed that there was so much fallow space. There must have been a sort of feudal urbanism dictating that each building should be able to project its entire shadow onto the ground in the evening. Inside, the rooms were much larger than those in French apartments of a comparable standard. One’s voice echoed in the bathroom, and the tiling which covered the floor of the entire apartment was so clean that it made it all the easier to appreciate the full extent of the space, as if someone had just finished buffing it in honour of our visit. After a couple of years Enzo moved to Milan. The buildings were older, the apartments even more spacious, the ceilings higher. There was no more furniture. It was such a pleasure wandering around it with nothing on, as pristine as the fresh paint on the walls, as true to myself as the bedroom, furnished with only a bed and an open suitcase! Pulling off my sweater and letting my skirt slip to the floor caused a movement of air which aroused my entire body. On the thresholdThe reader will understand more readily why I have made such an intimate connection between physical love and a mastering of space when I explain that I was born into a family of five living in a three-room apartment. And it was the first time I escaped the place that I fucked for the first time. That was not why I left, but that was what happened. Those who have been brought up in more well-off families, where each member has their own room, where individual intimacy is at least respected, or also those who have walked to school in the country may not have had the same experience. Discovering their body was not so dependent on the need to expand the space within which the body moved. Whereas I had to cover geographical distances to reach parts of myself. I had to go from Paris to Dieppe in a Renault 4 and to sleep facing the sea to learn that somewhere in a part of me that I could not see and that I had not imagined I had an opening, a cavity that was so supple and so deep that the extension of flesh that meant a boy was a boy, and I was not, could be accommodated there.

• From Cultish (2021)

  The words “culture” and “cultivation,” derived from the same Latin verb, cultus , are “cult”’s close morphological cousins. The word evolved in the early nineteenth century, a time of experimental religious brouhaha in the United States. The American colonies, which were founded upon the freedom to practice new religions, gained a reputation as a safe haven where eccentric believers could get as freaky as they liked. This spiritual freedom opened the door for a stampede of alternative social and political groups, too. During the mid-1800s, well over one hundred small ideological cliques formed and collapsed. When the French political scientist Alexis de Tocqueville came to visit the US in the 1830s, he was astonished by how “Americans of all ages, all stations in life, and all types of disposition [were] forever forming associations .” “Cults” of the tim e included groups like the Oneida Community, a camp of polyamorous communists in upstate New York (sounds fun); the Harmony Society, an egalitarian fellowship of science lovers in Indiana (how lovely); and (my favorite) a short-lived vegan farming cult in Massachusetts called Fruitlands, which was founded by philosopher Amos Bronson Alcott, an abolitionist, women’s rights activist, and father of Little Women author Louisa May Alcott. Back then, “cult” merely served as a sort of churchly classification, alongside “religion” and “sect.” The word denoted something new or unorthodox, but not necessarily nefarious. The term started gaining its darker reputation toward the start of the Fourth Great Awakening. That’s when the emergence of so many nonconformist spiritual groups spooked old-school conservatives and Christians. “Cults” soon became associated with charlatans, quacks, and heretical kooks. But they still weren’t considered much of a societal threat or criminal priority . . . not until the Manson Family murders of 1969, followed by the Jonestown massacre of 1978 (which we’ll investigate in part 2 ). After that, the word “cult” became a symbol of fear. The grisly death of over nine hundred people at Jonestown, the largest number of American civilian casualties prior to 9/11, sent the whole country into cult delirium. Some readers may recall the subsequent “Satanic Panic,” a period in the ’80s defined by widespread paranoia that Satan-worshipping child abusers were terrorizing wholesome American neighborhoods. As sociologist Ron Enroth wrote in his 1979 book The Lure of the Cults , “The unprecedented media exposure given Jonestown . . . alerted Americans to the fact that seemingly beneficent religious groups can mask a hellish rot.” Then, as these things tend to go, as soon as cults became frightening, they also became cool. Seventies pop culture didn’t wait long to birth terms like “cult film” and “cult classic ,” which described the up-and-coming genre of underground indie movies like The Rocky Horror Picture Show . Bands like Phish and the Grateful Dead came to be known for their peripatetic “cult followings.” A generation or two after the Fourth Great Awakening, the era began to take on a nostalgic cool factor among cult-curious youth.

• From A Way of Being (1980)

  Do We Need “A” Reality? The paper that follows is one I enjoy because it brings back pleasant memories of the beach cottage (mentioned in the third paragraph) loaned me by a friend for a short while during the autumn of 1974. For ten precious days, I was completely alone—no phone or other contacts with persons, except for a few visits to the local grocery store. I promised myself that I would not attempt to achieve or produce anything during that period. I took with me some books I had wanted to read. I took long walks on the beach, made the acquaintance of a great blue heron, kept a journal, recorded my dreams, read, and let my mind wander where it would. It was while I was sitting on the deck of the cottage one night that the germ of this paper arose in my mind. The paper turned out quite differently from anything I had written up to that time. It has a sort of dreamy quality that I like. None of the facts in it are new, but the implications of those facts are startling if taken seriously. This is not a personal paper in the sense that the previous ones have been, but I include it in this section because it expresses a new and different facet of myself. ... I believe most educators would agree that a high priority in education is to help individuals to acquire the learning, the information, and the personal growth that will enable them to deal more constructively with the “real world.” This is often the theme of commencement addresses, in which one expresses hopes or fears concerning how the new graduates will face and cope with the “real world.” It is often a topic in the final hours of intensive encounter groups, when individuals who have learned a great deal about themselves and about their interpersonal relationships are concerned about how they will behave when they return to their “real” lives outside. What is this “real world”? It is this question that I want to explore, and I believe that the direction in which my thinking has inexorably led me will be best portrayed by giving a number of personal and commonplace examples. A few weeks ago, I was sitting alone, late at night, on the deck of a beach cottage in northern California. As I sat there for several hours, a bright star on

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  2. Iron Age glimpses of Asherah: (left) pottery fragment from Kuntillet Ajrud (north Sinai) with a trio of figures, two bovine; in the inscription above, ‘I bless you by Yahveh our Guardian and his Asherah’; (right) figurine of Asherah in a common Judaean ‘pillar figurine’ type, with hands emphasizing her nursing breasts. The subsequent narrative in the Hebrew Bible (which, it has to be said, is not much reflected in archaeological discoveries) portrays David as conquering most of the tract of territory in which the Children of Israel lived, though never subduing their main rivals in coastal cities. His son Solomon (reigned c.970–c.930) brought extra swagger to the resulting kingdom – though probably not nearly so much as the biblical sources claim. Solomon’s most lasting achievement is undeniable: he built a new Temple for God on a hill beside Jerusalem, a spectacularly sited small city conquered by David a few decades before. There God reigned along with his consort Asherah, though she found herself unceremoniously ejected in later centuries. This monumental Temple became increasingly an unchallenged symbol of Judaic faith and identity, and though its successor was finally destroyed by a Roman army in the early years of Christian emergence a thousand years later, it remains a potent presence in the imaginations of Jews, Christians and Muslims alike. It may have been in Solomon’s time, the tenth century BCE, that the combination of monarchy and Temple priesthood spawned a bureaucracy of record-keepers. In turn they began producing what are probably the first large-scale fragments of text to remain in the Hebrew Bible: works of history chronicling and celebrating the monarchy, including a suitably edifying presentation of the rather awkward transition from Saul’s to David’s dynasty. Overladen with much long-term adaptations and preoccupations, these form the backbone of the books of Samuel, Kings and the later reworkings of them which Christian Bibles label the two books of Chronicles. [23] Solomon’s realm quickly split after his death into two kingdoms, southern Judah and northern Israel; their political union had probably never been robust despite their common worship of the God of Abraham. That political disaster led to constant nostalgia for the remembered and now much- exaggerated glories of David and Solomon, through two or three centuries of dual monarchical rule which the Hebrew Bible portrays as repeatedly falling short of earlier standards, not least in faithfulness to God and his laws. Because of this, alongside complex narrative history the Hebrew Bible enshrines a remarkable genre of literature rarely surviving from other ancient cultures: passionate denunciations of the society around the divinely inspired speaker, who is known as a prophet. Centuries later, Christians ransacked the texts inherited from these prophetic performances for clues about the coming of Jesus and the radical change of direction for the Judaic tradition that it represented.

• From Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (2020)

  A petite woman who never failed to exhibit remarkable poise, Schlafly established herself as “the sweetheart of the Silent Majority.” Her very appearance evoked a nostalgic past; her upswept hair, feminine suits, and string of pearls remained virtually unchanged over her half century in the public eye.10 Although Schlafly gained notoriety for championing “traditional” womanhood, her own life could hardly be described as traditional. After earning a master’s degree in political science from Radcliffe, she worked for a time at the American Enterprise Association, forerunner of the American Enterprise Institute. She then returned to St. Louis to run the campaign of a Republican candidate for Congress, embarking on what she would refer to as her “lifetime hobby” of politics. Her primary vocation, she liked to insist, was as wife to wealthy St. Louis lawyer Fred Schlafly and mother to their six children. In 1952, Schlafly ran for Congress herself. Campaigning with the slogan “A Woman’s Place Is in the House,” she won the Republican primary but lost in the general election. Undaunted, she worked her way up the party’s ranks, and in 1962 she began hosting a fifteen-minute radio show on national security. An ardent anticommunist, she had ties to the far Right; Robert Welch, founder of the John Birch Society, once called her “one of our most loyal members,” although Schlafly always denied membership in the organization. In 1964, Schlafly burst onto the national stage with the publication of A Choice Not an Echo , a small book promoting Goldwater’s campaign. Goldwater, she insisted, was the leader America yearned for. He would solve problems at home and beat the communists abroad. The book was a sensation, selling an estimated 3.5 million copies and helping Goldwater secure the nomination.11 Over the next decade Schlafly continued to write on foreign policy, and she began a monthly newsletter, The Phyllis Schlafly Report . Initially, Schlafly focused on opposing communism, maintaining the strength of America’s nuclear arsenal, and defending states’ rights and laissez-faire economics. In 1970, she launched another failed bid for Congress. For Schlafly, the highlight of that campaign was the radio ad that John Wayne recorded on her behalf. Two years later, a friend asked her to speak on the Equal Rights Amendment, but she wasn’t interested. The amendment didn’t concern Schlafly; she considered it somewhere “between innocuous and mildly helpful.” Originally proposed in the 1920s, the text of the amendment was simple: “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.” With the resurgence of feminism in the 1960s, interest in the amendment revived, and in 1972 it was approved by both houses of Congress and sent to states for ratification. When Schlafly came across conservative critiques of the amendment’s potential implications, however, she quickly changed her mind.12 In her February 1972 newsletter, Schlafly outlined her issues with the ERA. To begin with, she insisted that the very notion of women’s oppression was ludicrous.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  Even when a branch of the Christian Church was as powerful as the Western Church became in Europe between 1100 and 1500, we would be naïve in looking for one single outlook on sexual matters which was that of ‘the medieval West’ (below, Chapter 13). As the printing-press became available as a means of rapidly reproducing and spreading ideas, one can begin to notice, amid the growing torrent of printed matter, expressions of ideas that are very difficult to register in the written witness of earlier centuries. The previous apparent silence is no guarantee that the thoughts had not been thought, or expressed in private. Often the hints come in ephemeral forms of print like that of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century single-sheet ballads. The production and sale price of ballads were inexpensive, but their survival as physical evidence may be unrepresentatively small, since they were read to death by a great many people and ended up as recycling (often no doubt as toilet paper). For those without access to the technology of writing but with the capacity to read text – a likely distinction for women in much of Christian history – such ballads were witnesses to the oral and aural culture in which they could express themselves more fully. In the England of the Reformation era, a reader could brood on the personal implications of cheap ballads as much as she or he did when reading or hearing more officially acceptable works of prayer or piety. Folk will have been as eager as we are ourselves for novelty or emotional stimulation. [24] WORD COMPLEXITIES: SEX AND GENDER Such are some of the problems in sifting evidence from the past in a general survey of history. The continuing sexual revolution of our present world offers another series of puzzles: how historians should talk about both past and present, what words to use. Bliss was it in that dawn of the 1970s to be alive, when one leading historian of sexuality could blithely assert that, ‘for the first time in Western culture, we have the potential of coming to terms with human sexuality’, including a language to describe it ready to hand, as in his own massively judicious survey. [25] The term ‘heterosexuality’, for instance, is now so commonly used as to seem a basic part of our vocabulary on sex, gender and the family. It is nevertheless logically secondary to another word- coinage in 1869 by the same German-Hungarian journalist (Karl Maria Benkert/Károly Mária Kertbeny): his innovative term ‘homosexuality’ sought to describe same-sex behaviour, newly regarded in Kertbeny’s time as arising from medically defined behavioural disorders. English language borrowed both words from medical/psychological German usage, and they have persisted to our own time when other nineteenth-century attempted word-inventions have fallen by the wayside. [26] Like ‘homosexuality’, the early use of ‘heterosexuality’ described a medical pathology, an abnormal appetite for the opposite sex – an origin likely to surprise most of those who casually use the word today.