Pride

Passages

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

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• From The Fermata (1994)

  [image file=image_rsrc1BH.jpg] 2I WAS BORN WITH A KNOT IN MY UMBILICAL CORD, A SIMPLE pretzel knot. I doubt that this fact of my birth has anything to do with my later chronanisms, but I will put it down here just in case it does. I am proud of having set immediately to work art-nouveauing the functional furnishings of my intrauterine deanery. Somehow I was able to form a loop and then swim right through it. I tied a knot in myself. Like many child prodigies, however, I fizzled early. The Fermata, first unfolding itself for me in fourth grade, has been a lifelong distraction. I have wanted to keep it a secret, and as a result it has swallowed up large chunks of my personality. But I hope that will change now.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  Some people in my life were still involved in religion. Jacob continued to attend Mass, because a member of the Blackfriars congregation had volunteered to take him. And then there was my sister, Lindsey. She had not stayed long in Canada. The man she had pursued had been a disappointment, and she hated the long winters. So she had married an Englishman whom she had met in Winnipeg and had driven all the way to California with him and their two Siamese cats. She had also become a Buddhist of the Nichiren school. I had no idea what that involved, but apparently it did not require her to wear a yellow robe or become a vegetarian. She chanted a mantra for about an hour each day, my mother told me. I found it hard to imagine this. Lindsey and I seemed to have changed places. “I don’t know what it is with this family and religion,” my long-suffering mother said in mock bewilderment. “Where did I go wrong?” Well, at least she didn’t have to worry about my religious obsessions anymore. My involvement with God was well and truly over. Pleased with myself, and with a mounting sense of excitement, I patted the bulky parcel containing three copies of my thesis, duly typed and bound in important-looking black covers with gilt lettering. It was a very satisfying sight. It had not been easy, but I had managed to complete this task. Against the odds, I had persevered, had shaped an idea and argued it through—like any other doctoral student. During these last few months, all the different themes had come together and fallen elegantly into place, almost of their own volition. My supervisor was pleased, and two professors whom I had consulted were impressed. Another, it was true, had been extremely rude about it, but my supervisor assured me that he did not approve of the close linguistic study of literature that I had attempted. Because he was known to have this bias, he would not be my examiner. So it all seemed hopeful. Here at least there had been no disaster. My mind still boiled with visions and paralyzing panic attacks, but this piece of sustained work was a guarantee of its ultimate integrity. The thesis was my passport to a job and a career, an earnest of my survival in a world that had once seemed so impossibly alien. I watched the girl behind the post office grille slap on the stamps and the registration forms. Then she put the parcel in a pile at the end of the room, whence they would be conveyed to Oxford.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  Because I had no experience, Joel had feared that this could not work, but in fact, I sailed through it all precisely because I thought that this was how it was always done; and after a slightly shaky start beside the statue of Artemis in the Israel Museum, we zipped through the schedule at top speed, everybody looking progressively more cheerful until, by the end of the day, they were positively elated. Despite the pressures, it was the most relaxed filming I have ever done. There was no fussing with powder puffs, no tweaking of my hair, and no anguished discussion of my wardrobe—which last could have been because the crew had such a gloomy view of my appearance. “Karen! You are not a pretty girl,” Joel said on the first morning. “You have big teeth, and you walk clumsy. Okay! What we can do? We will just have to build the film around this!” Charming. But it was said with so little malice that it was impossible to take offense. Joel might have been remarking on the filmic qualities of a rock or a tree. And in any case, no one had time on this shoot to be upset by a chance remark. “Karen!” Joel also announced on the first day. “You are not in England now. Do not be a polite English lady. If you think I am unreasonable, tell me to get lost, to shut up—whatever you like!” For me, this was a novel invitation, and the first time I took Joel up on his offer, I was astonished at myself. We had just arrived in Caesarea, in the late afternoon, after a hectic day in Galilee. We had a considerable number of my pieces to shoot to camera before sunset, and tension was high. Joel was tired and anxious. When he snapped at me, rudely questioning the number of presentations we were about to do, I simply threw my script at him, told him to refresh his memory, and marched off to change my clothes behind a nearby rock. “I was proud of you! Really!” Joel told me afterward. “ ‘Refresh your memory’—it’s a good phrase, I must remember it.”

• From The Fermata (1994)

  I haven’t been punished for it, either. Dr. Jekyll, Faustus, Stravinsky’s soldat, the ballet dancer in The Red Shoes, Gollum, Wells’s invisible man and time traveler, Dr. Frankenstein, and a thousand more recent horror heroes, all master some quasi-supernatural power and are punished for it, worn out by it, destroyed by it. How false and wearisome this outcome is. Why should a life with some unusual metaphysical feature built into it inevitably end in unhappiness and early death? Why should all the heroes have some fatal flaw that causes them to overreach and hence to self-destruct? It’s too convenient. Even the two quieter (and surprisingly similar, one to another) literary artifacts that treat conditions of temporal halt which resemble my own private Foldouts—I am speaking here of Ambrose Bierce’s “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” and Borges’s “The Secret Miracle”—both punish their heroes severely: they end with military executions. I read these two stories in high school with a sense of deep personal dissatisfaction. Is this all a writer thinks a Fold-drop could be about? Putting off death at the last minute? Where are the supervenient hebephrenias? Where is the life? Where are the tits? In reality, I’m here to report, people very often get away with things. I have not been caught and imprisoned for what I have done; and besides, I am not Dr. Jekyll or Dr. Frankenstein and don’t deserve torments and agonies. Even if I publish this memoir as a book, and someone recognizes herself in it and prosecutes me for a relevant sex-offense (I have gone through the manuscript, by the way, and altered a few names and fudged a few dates to decrease the possibility of this happening, but it still might), my life will still seem to me to have been a good life and I will seem to myself to have been a man who wanted to do no harm and who in fact did no harm.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  What are we supposed to do? What is obedience?” I was astonished at myself, because we were never supposed to challenge our superiors in this way, especially while we were being reprimanded. My fellow novices were gazing at me in dismay, clearly waiting for a thunderous riposte. But Mother Walter looked shocked, and for a moment was quite at a loss for words. She soon recovered herself, though the scolding she gave me was not up to her usual standard of scathing invective. But during those few seconds, while she fumbled for a suitable response, I could almost see an unwelcome insight breaking the surface of her mind, and forcing her to question the wisdom of her methods of training in a way that, perhaps, she had never done before. Despite my difficulties, I was allowed to make five-year vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience on August 25, 1965. It was a triumphant day. I felt that, like the heroes of myth, I had come through an ordeal and that life could only get better. I would soon get over the strains and tension that had made my life so miserable. Very quickly now, I would become mature and holy, and in five years’ time, if all went well, I would take the final vows that would commit me to the society for life. And at first, things did go well. After the noviceship, we left the mother house in Sussex and went to London for two further years of training, known as the scholasticate. During the noviceship, we had concentrated on our spiritual lives. We had spent most of the time learning about prayer and the meaning of our rule. Ironically, considering my aversion to domesticity, we also spent our days doing simple manual tasks, though in the second year we had been permitted to read a little theology. In the scholasticate, however, we began our professional training. Since our order was dedicated to the education of Catholic girls, most of us were destined to become teachers in one of the society’s many schools. I had already completed the matriculation requirements for college, and it was decided that I should now prepare for the competitive entrance examinations to Oxford University, where the order had been sending nuns ever since women had been allowed to take degrees. For the next twelve months I attended classes and tutorials at a crammer near Marble Arch. My subject was to be English literature. That meant that I had to take two three-hour papers in literature, one paper in English language and philology, two translation papers—one in Latin and the other in French—and a paper on topics of general interest. I loved it.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  Sensing a major discovery that would crown his new edition, Sparkling went back to Sewanee University, where Albedo’s manuscripts were kept, and looked again through some of the notebooks that the Master had kept during the time he was composing that particular movement of Map. Albedo’s later life had been decorated with odd incidents and minor scandals—there had been actual rumors of insanity. In the notebooks there were tantalizing annotations over certain motivic scraps—things like “Oh God, yes!” and “And here the Field develops greater potency.” Alan began to have the sense that Map had been more than a piece of piano music to Albedo; that it had constituted some sort of magic sonic recipe or spell for him. He also began strongly to suspect that the errors in the Yates and Boling edition had not been the fault of the publisher but had been intentional last-minute alterations on Albedo’s part, meant to disable whatever powers Map gave its performer, so that he, Albedo, could remain in sole possession of them. Finally, in one of the notebooks he came across a heavily erased part of a page under a large fermata and, with the help of a magnifying glass, was able to read the chord written there. It was an incomparably finer variant of the wrong-sounding fermata chord in Map. Deeply impressed with himself, Professor Sparkling took the last plane to Boston, sure now that he had a masterwork of twentieth-century music in his briefcase, polished, cleaned, restored, awakened from its dodecaphonic slumber by his profound scholarship and delicate musicological instinct. The next day was his day of giving piano lessons. Rhody was his very best student; and that morning she tore through the Tombeau de Couperin with such verve that, on a whim he didn’t himself quite understand, he turned toward her with an expression of great seriousness and seized her shoulders and told her that she alone must work up the new authorized version of Map. He made a copy of his own corrections for her so that she could incorporate them into her score. A week passed. Alan, gloating over his discoveries, played bits and pieces of Map for himself, and listened to it skimmingly in his head, but he devoted most of his time to finishing his article about it for The Quarterly of New Music. Since it was a formidably difficult work, he did not make any attempt to play the whole composition through, even sloppily, from beginning to end. That was what gifted students like Rhody were for, he felt.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  Yet Mother Walter herself was undergoing a painful transition, watching the religious practices that she had known and loved for so long thrown aside. It must have been a period of great suffering for her. It would never, of course, have occurred to me at the time, but I now suspect that she was not very intelligent, and therefore was unable to understand the effect of some of her policies. I remember once that, toward the end of my noviceship, when she was savaging us for what she regarded as a failure in obedience, I suddenly cracked and told her that I no longer knew what obedience really was. “We seem to swing, like a pendulum, from one extreme to another,” I protested, “from one disorder to another! One day we will be told off for not obeying absolutely to the letter, however absurd the command may be, and the next day we’ll be in trouble because we did obey blindly instead of using our intelligence and showing initiative! What are we supposed to do? What is obedience?” I was astonished at myself, because we were never supposed to challenge our superiors in this way, especially while we were being reprimanded. My fellow novices were gazing at me in dismay, clearly waiting for a thunderous riposte. But Mother Walter looked shocked, and for a moment was quite at a loss for words. She soon recovered herself, though the scolding she gave me was not up to her usual standard of scathing invective. But during those few seconds, while she fumbled for a suitable response, I could almost see an unwelcome insight breaking the surface of her mind, and forcing her to question the wisdom of her methods of training in a way that, perhaps, she had never done before. Despite my difficulties, I was allowed to make five-year vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience on August 25, 1965. It was a triumphant day. I felt that, like the heroes of myth, I had come through an ordeal and that life could only get better. I would soon get over the strains and tension that had made my life so miserable. Very quickly now, I would become mature and holy, and in five years’ time, if all went well, I would take the final vows that would commit me to the society for life.

• From Wild (2012)

  I was entering. I was leaving. California streamed behind me like a long silk veil. I didn’t feel like a big fat idiot anymore. And I didn’t feel like a hard-ass motherfucking Amazonian queen. I felt fierce and humble and gathered up inside, like I was safe in this world too. PART FIVE BOX OF RAINI’m a slow walker, but I never walk back. ABRAHAM LINCOLN Tell me, what is it you plan to do With your one wild and precious life? MARY OLIVER, “The Summer Day” 15 BOX OF RAINI woke in the darkness on my second-to-last night in California to the sound of wind whipping the branches of the trees and the tap-tapping of rain against my tent. It had been so dry all summer long that I’d stopped putting the rain cover on, sleeping with only a wide pane of mesh between the sky and me. I scrambled barefoot into the dark to pull my rain cover over my tent, shivering, though it was early August. It had been in the nineties for weeks, sometimes even reaching a hundred, but with the wind and the rain, the weather had suddenly shifted. Back in my tent, I put on my fleece leggings and anorak, crawled into my sleeping bag, and zipped it all the way up to my chin, cinching its hood tight around my head. When I woke at six, the little thermometer on my backpack said that it was 37 degrees. I hiked along a high ridgeline in the rain, dressed in most of what I had. Each time I stopped for more than a few minutes, I grew so chilled that my teeth chattered comically until I walked on and began to sweat again. On clear days, my guidebook claimed, Oregon was in view to the north, but I couldn’t see anything for the thick fog that obscured anything beyond ten feet. I didn’t need to see Oregon. I could feel it, huge before me. I would walk its entire length if I made it all the way to the Bridge of the Gods. Who would I be if I did? Who would I be if I didn’t? Midmorning, Stacy appeared out of the mist, walking southbound on the trail. We’d hiked away from Seiad Valley together the day before, after spending a night with Rex and the couples. In the morning, Rex had caught a bus back to his real life, while the rest of us walked on, splitting up a few hours out. I was fairly certain I wouldn’t see the couples on the trail again, but Stacy and I had made plans to meet up in Ashland, where she was going to lay over for a few days waiting for her friend Dee to arrive before they began their hike through Oregon. Seeing her now startled me, as if she were part woman, part ghost.

• From Another Country (1962)

  Hear my cry, hear my call, Take my hand, lest I fall, Precious Lord! The applause was odd—not quite unwilling, not quite free; wary, rather, in recognition of a force not quite to be trusted but certainly to be watched. The musicians were now both jubilant and watchful, as though Ida had abruptly become their property. The drummer adjusted her shawl around her shoulders, saying, “You been perspiring, don’t you let yourself catch cold”; and, as she started off the stand, the piano-player rose and, ceremoniously, kissed her on the brow. The bass-player said, “Hell, let’s tell the folks her name.” He grabbed the microphone and said, “Ladies and gentlemen, you’ve been listening to Miss Ida Scott. This is her first—exposure,” and he mopped his brow, ironically. The crowd laughed. He said, “But it won’t be her last.” The applause came again, more easily this time, since the role of judge and bestower had been returned to the audience. “We have been present,” said the bass-player, “at an historic event.” This time the audience, in a paroxysm of self-congratulation, applauded, stomped, and cheered. “Well,” said Vivaldo, taking both her hands in his, “it looks like you’re on your way.” “Were you proud of me?” She made her eyes very big: the curve of her lips was somewhat sardonic. “Yes,” he said, after an instant, gravely, “but, then, I’m always proud of you.” Then she laughed and kissed him quickly on the cheek. “My darling Vivaldo. You ain’t seen nothing yet.” “I’d like,” said Eric, “to add my voice to the general chorus of joy and gratitude. You were great, you really were.” She looked at him. Her eyes were still very big and something in her regard made him feel that she disliked him. He brushed the thought away as he would have brushed away a fly. “I’m not great yet,” she said, “but I will be,” and she raised both hands and touched her earrings. “They’re very beautiful,” he said, “your earrings.” “Do you like them? My brother had them made for me—just before he died.” He paused. “I knew your brother a little. I was very sorry to hear about his—his death.” “Many, many people were,” said Ida. “He was a very beautiful man, a very great artist. But he made”—she regarded him with a curious, cool insolence—“some very bad connections. He was the kind who believed what people said. If you told Rufus you loved him, well, he believed you and he’d stick with you till death. I used to try to tell him the world wasn’t like that.” She smiled. “He was much nicer than I am. It doesn’t pay to be too nice in this world.” “That may be true. But you seem nice—you seem very nice—to me.” “That’s because you don’t know me. But ask Vivaldo!” And she turned to Vivaldo, putting her arm on his.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  It was a clever piece, and I use that word advisedly. There was truth and insight there, but it was not profound. It was also very angry. As I spoke, I realized that I still had a lot of scores to settle with the church. When I had finished, the cameraman raised himself slowly into an upright position and gazed at me. “Phew!” he breathed, wiping his brow. When I went out into the control room, I found the rest of the crew staring at me dumbstruck, even the cool Nick. “Wow!” he said. And then he grinned. “You,” he told me, “are embarrassingly good!” Apparently nobody else had been able to do this. Without a TelePrompTer, most of the contributors had dried up after a few minutes. “And what you said was terrific,” Nick continued. “We’ll call it The Body of Christ. John is going to love it!” John apparently was the commissioning editor for religion at Channel 4. “But surely, if he’s religious, he won’t like this?” I asked. “No, no! You don’t understand.” Nick beamed at me. “John loathes religion! He’ll really go for this. Look, I know it’s a lot to ask, but would you mind doing it again? Just so we can show him the best of two pilots?” As I drove back to North London, I felt not merely lighthearted but elated. After the second filming, which had gone even better than the first, Nick had swept me off with the crew for a celebration lunch. All kinds of nice things had been said, but the flattery, though very welcome, was of secondary importance. It was only when I was on my way home that I realized what I had done. I had walked into a studio and talked for twenty minutes about an idea of my own. Nobody had suggested the theme to me; it was an eccentric, perhaps even original, idea that I had thought up for myself. I remembered all those years at Oxford when I had sat tongue-tied in class, my mind able to function only when somebody else had kick-started it. In one small but vital respect, I had recovered. And the wonderful thing was that it had seemed so effortless. It had never occurred to me that I would not be able to talk coherently and persuasively. The healing had happened without my realizing it. It was partly due to all those years in the classroom. Day after day, hour after hour, I had been compelled to talk to a captive and often reluctant audience of adolescent girls. To hold their attention and convey the ideas and information that they needed, I had learned to think on my feet and make my material lively and interesting. And as a result, what had once seemed an impossible feat had become second nature.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  Because I had no experience, Joel had feared that this could not work, but in fact, I sailed through it all precisely because I thought that this was how it was always done; and after a slightly shaky start beside the statue of Artemis in the Israel Museum, we zipped through the schedule at top speed, everybody looking progressively more cheerful until, by the end of the day, they were positively elated. Despite the pressures, it was the most relaxed filming I have ever done. There was no fussing with powder puffs, no tweaking of my hair, and no anguished discussion of my wardrobe—which last could have been because the crew had such a gloomy view of my appearance. “Karen! You are not a pretty girl,” Joel said on the first morning. “You have big teeth, and you walk clumsy. Okay! What we can do? We will just have to build the film around this!” Charming. But it was said with so little malice that it was impossible to take offense. Joel might have been remarking on the filmic qualities of a rock or a tree. And in any case, no one had time on this shoot to be upset by a chance remark. “Karen!” Joel also announced on the first day. “You are not in England now. Do not be a polite English lady. If you think I am unreasonable, tell me to get lost, to shut up—whatever you like!” For me, this was a novel invitation, and the first time I took Joel up on his offer, I was astonished at myself. We had just arrived in Caesarea, in the late afternoon, after a hectic day in Galilee. We had a considerable number of my pieces to shoot to camera before sunset, and tension was high. Joel was tired and anxious. When he snapped at me, rudely questioning the number of presentations we were about to do, I simply threw my script at him, told him to refresh his memory, and marched off to change my clothes behind a nearby rock. “I was proud of you! Really!” Joel told me afterward. “ ‘Refresh your memory’—it’s a good phrase, I must remember it.”

• From Bold Move

  In Marcus’s case, he was discriminated against, but because it activated his core belief, it put him at risk of dropping out of the program that he had worked hard to be accepted to. Today, I love my Latina identity, take pride in my curves, and often talk to my son about the fact that he is “Brazilian, Mexican, and American” and that all of those are part of him. I am trying to teach Diego to integrate his identities in a way that allows him more flexible beliefs about himself and to not get stuck in black-and-white thinking. But I won’t lie to you, whenever I am in a white-majority Harvard meeting with mostly high-power, older men, I still have trouble thinking “I am enough.” What changed for me is that I now proudly sit at the table! Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff, Just ShiftI have been sharing examples in which my clients and I have faced painful deep core beliefs that are causing us significant distress. But Shifting is a skill that applies to more than just the “deep” stuff in life. It is actually a way of seeing the world: even when it is just small stuff, Shifting will help. For example, my husband, David, was teaching his graduate class last night, when he noticed one student had checked out. His brain immediately said, I am not engaging well with the students; I need to do better , which made him slightly anxious while teaching. But David has had his share of coaching on Shifting during our marriage, so he asked himself, What else might be happening here? and immediately he came up with a few possibilities: 1) it is a night class; perhaps the student is tired, and 2) maybe something happened for them and that is why they seem checked out. David’s Shift allowed him to keep teaching without his anxiety escalating. In this case, he actually had a nice surprise: the student came to him at break to tell him they were not feeling well so they were going home, and they apologized for being checked out. Our close friend John tends to get stuck in predictions that would confirm he is “not such a great friend.” I bet many of us have had a few thoughts like this, but John has become a pro at Shifting . The other day he came over and told me that the fact that I had not returned his text for a week had made him very anxious, afraid that he had upset me.

• From The Erotic Engine (2011)

  “Because of our limited capacity, we don’t know what’s supposed to be next,” he said. “What I will say is that I don’t think it’s going to be from the bigger companies. I don’t see that happening. It’s going to be someone or a small group of people who are not going to be of the mindset of today. I think there’s a reason why the younger generation comes up with innovations. I don’t think it’s ageism. I think it’s just that as we get older, we tend to look at things from a different perspective, within a particular paradigm. The porn industry, at least the modern one, is getting into its forties now. I do have confidence that some interesting things will come out of the porn industry, I just don’t think it’s going to come from the big guys.” Dunia Montenegro is neither big nor a guy. She is a Brazilian-born porn performer, producer and entrepreneur, now based in Spain. Her career is in many ways a product of technology: she is one of a growing number of female performers who work for themselves rather than trying to make a go of it in the traditionally male-dominated porn-studio world. She runs her own website, which includes her own photos and movies along with those of a growing stable of other female performers. She also blogs and uses other interactive tools to maintain a more intimate connection with her customers. By using the technology to create a dedicated fan base, she is maintaining her customer base and dissuading them from drifting over to the tube sites. She has found a way to make the latest web tools profitable. “I love working on my website,” she told me. “I have done my blog every day for three years, and every day eight or nine thousand people in Spain and South America visit it. It’s very important to me.” Connecting directly with her fan base does more than foster an emotional bond that builds customer loyalty. It allows her to customize her product to meet her audience’s needs. “Every day I ask my fans, my customers, ‘What do you want? What can I shoot tomorrow? Give me a test.’ The fans tell, I do, and the people buy the videos.” The requests range from shooting a black-and-white movie to doing a scene with one of her fans. She fulfills almost all requests. She says her fans see her not as a celebrity but as a regular human being they can relate to and imagine themselves being friends with. “People want to see normal people,” she said. (That is vastly more true in Europe than in North America, where preferences lean more toward a surgically sculpted professional “porn-star look.” Montenegro’s perceived normalcy might explain why she has so little following in the United States, which is home to nearly forty-five million Hispanics.)

• From Wild (2012)

  The next morning I dressed in my hiking clothes—the same old stained sports bra and threadbare navy blue hiking shorts I’d been wearing since day 1, along with a new pair of wool socks and the last fresh T-shirt I’d have all the way to the end, a heather gray shirt that said UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA BERKELEY in yellow letters across the chest. I walked to the co-op with Monster on my back, my ski pole dangling from my wrist, and a box in my arms, taking over a table in the deli section of the store to organize my pack. When I was done, Monster sat tidily loaded down next to the small box that held my jeans, bra, and underwear, which I was mailing back to Lisa, and a plastic grocery bag of meals I couldn’t bear to eat any longer, which I planned to leave in the PCT hiker free box at the post office on my way out of town. Crater Lake National Park was my next stop, about 110 trail miles away. I needed to get back on the PCT and yet I was reluctant to leave Ashland. I dug through my pack, found my Strayed necklace, and put it on. I reached over and touched the raven feather Doug had given me. It was still wedged into my pack in the place I’d first put it, though it was worn and straggly now. I unzipped the side pocket where I kept my first aid kit, pulled it out, and opened it up. The condom I’d carried all the way from Mojave was still there, still like new. I took it out and put it in the plastic grocery bag with the food I didn’t want, and then I hoisted Monster onto my back and left the co-op carrying the box and the plastic grocery bag. I hadn’t gone far when I saw the headband man I’d met up at Toad Lake, sitting on the sidewalk where I’d seen him before, his coffee can and little cardboard sign in front of him. “I’m heading out,” I said, stopping before him. He looked up at me and nodded. He still didn’t seem to remember me—either from our encounter at Toad Lake or from a couple of days before. “I met you when you were looking for the Rainbow Gathering,” I said. “I was there with another woman named Stacy. We talked to you.” He nodded again, shaking the change in his can. “I’ve got some food here that I don’t need, if you want it,” I said, setting the plastic grocery bag down beside him. “Thanks, baby,” he said as I began to walk away. I stopped and turned. “Hey,” I called. “Hey!” I shouted until he looked at me. “Don’t call me baby,” I said. He pressed his hands together, as if in prayer, and bowed his head.

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

  The most important Latin apologists are Tertullian (d. about 220), Minucius Felix (d. between 220 and 230; according to some, between 161 and 200), the later Arnobius and Lactantius, all of North Africa. Here at once appears the characteristic difference between the Greek and the Latin minds. The Greek apologies are more learned and philosophical, the Latin more practical and juridical in their matter and style. The former labor to prove the truth of Christianity and its adaptedness to the intellectual wants of man; the latter plead for its legal right to exist, and exhibit mainly its moral excellency and salutary effect upon society. The Latin also are in general more rigidly opposed to heathenism, while the Greek recognize in the Grecian philosophy a certain affinity to the Christian religion. The apologies were addressed in some cases to the emperors (Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, Marcus Aurelius) or the provincial governors; in others, to the intelligent public. Their first object was to soften the temper of the authorities and people towards Christianity and its professors by refuting the false charges against them. It may be doubtful whether they ever reached the hands of the emperors; at all events the persecution continued.91 Conversion commonly proceeds from the heart and will, not from the understanding and from knowledge. No doubt, however, these writings contributed to dissipate prejudice among honest and susceptible heathens, to spread more favorable views of the new religion, and to infuse a spirit of humanity into the spirit of the age, the systems of moral philosophy and the legislation of the Antonines. Yet the chief service of this literature was to strengthen believers and to advance theological knowledge. It brought the church to a deeper and clearer sense of the peculiar nature of the Christian religion, and prepared her thenceforth to vindicate it before the tribunal of reason and philosophy; whilst Judaism and heathenism proved themselves powerless in the combat, and were driven to the weapons of falsehood and vituperation. The sophisms and mockeries of a Celsus and a Lucian have none but a historical interest; the Apologies of Justin and the Apologeticus of Tertullian, rich with indestructible truth and glowing piety, are read with pleasure and edification to this day. The apologists do not confine themselves to the defensive, but carry the war aggressively into the territory of Judaism and heathenism. They complete their work by positively demonstrating that Christianity is the divine religion, and the only true religion for all mankind. § 38. The Argument against Judaism.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  But I realized that if I wanted to truly be radical in the world, truly see white and skinny as one way people are born as opposed to the physical supreme, which pours over into every other aspect of life, I had to decolonize my desire. I had to learn to desire myself, my body, my skin, my rhythms, my pleasure. I took pictures at first. The pictures weren’t necessarily explicit in the beginning. They were just selfies, before Instagram. I started with my face—how did I look smiling? Happy? Turned on? Shut down? Laughing? I took photos of every part of myself until I felt I knew more about my body, could tolerate myself, even like what I saw. Then it was time for short videos. I would create the videos during moments of self-love, and then use them the next time I felt like touching myself. These videos were not shared, they were not for anyone else’s eyes, opinions, or desires. That was radically important. The energy of them was purely self-adoration. I dated a woman once who told me she had done sexual healing work to get to a place of screaming out her own name when she orgasmed. I let that concept be a guide. How much could I love myself, literally? The results were life-changing. This practice changed the way I dressed, the way I walked, the way I flirted, the way I made love to others, the way I spoke—because I had seen, heard, and felt my power. I mean both my physical, earthly power, and the divine power inside of this body, this light brown, big, queer, glasses-wearing body. It wasn’t ego, it was sitting with what is and finding beauty. And now no one could take that from me, however they might regard my body. I was a pleasure unto myself, I was a guaranteed delight in my own hands and my own eyes. It was, and continues to be, magnificent. 4. Developing erotic awareness. This section could also be called Staying Curious. It can get rote. You learn the way to release whatever is building up in your body, alone or with others, and you return and walk that path over and over, because you know it will satisfy your need. This parallels with other aspects of life—you can learn what works and keep doing it and get by. But bringing curiosity into your sexual relationship with yourself and your lovers is related to the spiritual practice of cultivating a beginner’s mind. As often as possible, I approach the experience of sex as if it is my first time feeling my flesh, feeling myself awaken. In my thirties, this led me to discover a whole new landscape of pleasure in my body and then to be able to clearly let my lover know when it feels good, how it feels good, and what adjustments to make.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  It was a clever piece, and I use that word advisedly. There was truth and insight there, but it was not profound. It was also very angry. As I spoke, I realized that I still had a lot of scores to settle with the church. When I had finished, the cameraman raised himself slowly into an upright position and gazed at me. “Phew!” he breathed, wiping his brow. When I went out into the control room, I found the rest of the crew staring at me dumbstruck, even the cool Nick. “Wow!” he said. And then he grinned. “You,” he told me, “are embarrassingly good!” Apparently nobody else had been able to do this. Without a TelePrompTer, most of the contributors had dried up after a few minutes. “And what you said was terrific,” Nick continued. “We’ll call it The Body of Christ. John is going to love it!” John apparently was the commissioning editor for religion at Channel 4. “But surely, if he’s religious, he won’t like this?” I asked. “No, no! You don’t understand.” Nick beamed at me. “John loathes religion! He’ll really go for this. Look, I know it’s a lot to ask, but would you mind doing it again? Just so we can show him the best of two pilots?” As I drove back to North London, I felt not merely lighthearted but elated. After the second filming, which had gone even better than the first, Nick had swept me off with the crew for a celebration lunch. All kinds of nice things had been said, but the flattery, though very welcome, was of secondary importance. It was only when I was on my way home that I realized what I had done. I had walked into a studio and talked for twenty minutes about an idea of my own. Nobody had suggested the theme to me; it was an eccentric, perhaps even original, idea that I had thought up for myself. I remembered all those years at Oxford when I had sat tongue-tied in class, my mind able to function only when somebody else had kick-started it. In one small but vital respect, I had recovered. And the wonderful thing was that it had seemed so effortless. It had never occurred to me that I would not be able to talk coherently and persuasively. The healing had happened without my realizing it.

• From Wild (2012)

  The next morning when I woke, I had the campsite to myself. I sat at the picnic table and drank tea from my cooking pot while burning the last pages of The Novel. The professor who’d scoffed about Michener had been right in some regards: he wasn’t William Faulkner or Flannery O’Connor, but I’d been utterly absorbed in his book nonetheless and not only for the writing. Its subject hit a chord in me. It was a story about many things, but it centered on the life of one novel, told from the perspectives of its author and editor, its critics and readers. Of all the things I’d done in my life, of all the versions of myself I’d lived out, there was one that had never changed: I was a writer. Someday, I intended to write a novel of my own. I felt ashamed that I hadn’t written one already. In the vision I’d had of myself ten years before, I felt sure I’d have published my first book by now. I’d written several short stories and made a serious stab at a novel, but I wasn’t anywhere close to having a book done. In the tumult of the past year it seemed as if writing had left me forever, but as I hiked, I could feel that novel coming back to me, inserting its voice among the song fragments and advertising jingles in my mind. That morning in Old Station, as I ripped Michener’s book into clumps of five and ten pages so they would burn, crouching next to the fire ring in my campsite to set them aflame, I decided to begin. I had nothing but a long hot day ahead of me anyway, so I sat at my picnic table and wrote until late afternoon. When I looked up, I saw that a chipmunk was chewing a hole in the mesh door of my tent in an attempt to get to my food bag inside. I chased it away, cursing it while it chattered at me from a tree. By then the campground had filled in around me: most of the picnic tables were now covered with coolers and Coleman stoves; pickup trucks and campers were parked in the little paved pull-ins. I took my food bag out of my tent and carried it the mile back to the café where I’d sat with Trina and Stacy the afternoon before. I ordered a burger, not caring that I’d be spending almost all of my money. My next resupply box was at the state park in Burney Falls, forty-two miles away, but I could get there in two days, now that I was finally able to hike farther and faster—I’d done two nineteen-milers back-to-back out of Belden. It was five on a summer day when the light stretched until nine or ten and I was the only customer, wolfing down my dinner.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  Deeply impressed with himself, Professor Sparkling took the last plane to Boston, sure now that he had a masterwork of twentieth-century music in his briefcase, polished, cleaned, restored, awakened from its dodecaphonic slumber by his profound scholarship and delicate musicological instinct. The next day was his day of giving piano lessons. Rhody was his very best student; and that morning she tore through the Tombeau de Couperin with such verve that, on a whim he didn’t himself quite understand, he turned toward her with an expression of great seriousness and seized her shoulders and told her that she alone must work up the new authorized version of Map . He made a copy of his own corrections for her so that she could incorporate them into her score. A week passed. Alan, gloating over his discoveries, played bits and pieces of Map for himself, and listened to it skimmingly in his head, but he devoted most of his time to finishing his article about it for The Quarterly of New Music . Since it was a formidably difficult work, he did not make any attempt to play the whole composition through, even sloppily, from beginning to end. That was what gifted students like Rhody were for, he felt. All that week Rhody devotedly practiced Map , conscious of what an honor it was to be the first person to reanimate the cleaned-up version. It soon became clear to her that Professor Sparkling’s enthusiasm was justified: Mascon Albedo stood revealed as no mere minor-league friend of Luciano Berio, but as a leaping titan of pianism. Though the surface of the piece had struck her ear at first as knotty and over-intellectual, as she perfected her performance of it she found that on the contrary it had an almost disturbing secondary sensual appeal: it made her exceedingly aware of the physical reality of her own playing. If the piece required her to play a simple A-flat-major triad with her left hand, she would feel in doing so as if the black A-flat and E-flat keys were soft, low, tree-covered hills, smoothed by forgotten glaciers, and the C between them a fog-filled valley, over which her poised fingers were parachuting very early in the morning; an ordinary pile of perfect fourths and fifths would slice through her like the stave of a hard-boiled-egg slicer; she could sense the felt-covered hammers thumping against the piano wires as gently as the noses of sheep in pens or fish against glass; she felt with extraordinary vividness her right foot making its little jumps on the sustain pedal, hosing off any recent blendings and allowing a new concord to rise up clean from its mud-wrestling past.

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

  His apostasy from Christianity, to which he was probably never at heart committed, Julian himself dates as early as his twentieth year, A.D. 351. But while Constantius lived, he concealed his pagan sympathies with consummate hypocrisy, publicly observed Christian ceremonies, while secretly sacrificing to Jupiter and Helios, kept the feast of Epiphany in the church at Vienne so late as January, 361, and praised the emperor in the most extravagant style, though he thoroughly hated him, and after his death all the more bitterly mocked him.63 For ten years he kept the mask. After December, 355, the student of books astonished the world with brilliant military and executive powers as Caesar in Gaul, which was at that time heavily threatened by the German barbarians; he won the enthusiastic love of the soldiers, and received from them the dignity of Augustus. Then he raised the standard of rebellion against his suspicious and envious imperial cousin and brother-in-law, and in 361 openly declared himself a friend of the gods. By the sudden death of Constantius in the same year he became sole head of the Roman empire, and in December, as the only remaining heir of the house of Constantine,64 made his entry into Constantinople amidst universal applause and rejoicing over escape from civil war. He immediately gave himself, with the utmost zeal, to the duties of his high station, unweariedly active as prince, general, judge, orator, high-priest, correspondent, and author. He sought to unite the fame of an Alexander, a Marcus Aurelius, a Plato, and a Diogenes in himself. His only recreation was a change of labor. He would use at once his hand in writing, his ear in hearing, and his voice in speaking. He considered his whole time due to his empire and the culture of his own mind. The eighteen short months of his reign Dec. 361-June 363) comprehend the plans of a life-long administration and most of his literary works. He practised the strictest economy in the public affairs, banished all useless luxury from his court, and dismissed with one decree whole hosts of barbers, cup-bearers, cooks, masters of ceremonies, and other superfluous officers, with whom the palace swarmed, but surrounded himself instead with equally useless pagan mystics, sophists, jugglers, theurgists, soothsayers, babblers, and scoffers, who now streamed from all quarters to the court. In striking contrast with his predecessors, he maintained the simplicity of a philosopher and an ascetic in his manner of life, and gratified his pride and vanity with contempt of the pomp and pleasures of the imperial purple. He lived chiefly on vegetable diet, abstaining now from this food, now from that, according to the taste of the god or goddess to whom the day was consecrated.