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 A History of God (1993)

  Today, we generally see science and philosophy as antagonistic to religion, but the Faylasufs were usually devout men and saw themselves as loyal sons of the Prophet. As good Muslims, they were politically aware, despised the luxury of the court and wanted to reform their society according to the dictates of reason. Their venture was important: since their scientific and philosophic studies were dominated by Greek thought, it was imperative to find a link between their faith and this more rationalistic, objective outlook. It can be most unhealthy to relegate God to a separate intellectual category and to see faith in isolation from other human concerns. The Faylasufs had no intention of abolishing religion, but wanted to purify it of what they regarded as primitive and parochial elements. They had no doubt that God existed—indeed they regarded his existence as self-evident—but felt that it was important to prove this logically in order to show that al-Lah was compatible with their rationalist ideal. There were problems, however. We have seen that the God of the Greek philosophers was very different from the God of revelation: the Supreme Deity of Aristotle or Plotinus was timeless and impassible; he took no notice of mundane events, did not reveal himself in history, had not created the world and would not judge it at the end of time. Indeed history, the major theophany of the monotheistic faiths, had been dismissed by Aristotle as inferior to philosophy. It had no beginning, middle or end, since the cosmos emanated eternally from God. The Faylasufs wanted to get beyond history, which was a mere illusion, to glimpse the changeless, ideal world of the divine. Despite the emphasis on rationality, Falsafah demanded a faith of its own. It took great courage to believe that the cosmos, where chaos and pain seemed more in evidence than a purposeful order, was really ruled by the principle of reason. They too had to cultivate a sense of an ultimate meaning amid the frequently disastrous and botched events of the world around them. There was a nobility in Falsafah, a search for objectivity and a timeless vision. They wanted a universal religion, which was not limited to a particular manifestation of God or rooted in a definite time and place; they believed that it was their duty to translate the revelation of the Koran into the more advanced idiom developed through the ages by the best and noblest minds in all cultures. Instead of seeing God as a mystery, the Faylasufs believed that he was reason itself.

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  We can go home laughing about all we endured, feeling good about ourselves, talking about the bus that didn't hit us instead of slinking out the door quietly, mulling over la puta vida, muttering half-formed recriminations. Now, I've heard and seen some very fine chefs sneer at The System. "I would never do that," they say, when told of some culinary outrage performed in another kitchen. "Never!" they insist, with all the assurance of an officer on the prewar Maginot Line. But when the Hun starts pouring over the wall, and there's no fire support, and the rear guard is in full retreat—these same chefs are often the first guys to commit food crimes that even the most pragmatic practitioner of System D would never (okay, almost never) do. Fast well-done steak? I've watched French grads of three-star kitchens squeeze the blood out of filet mignons with their full body weight, turning a medium to well in seconds. I've watched in horror as chefs have hurled beautiful chateaubriands into the deep-fat fryer, microwaved veal chops, thinned sauce with the brackish greasy water in the steam table. And when it gets busy? Everything that falls on the floor, amazingly, falls "right on the napkin." Let me tell you—that's one mighty big napkin. System D, arguably, reached its heyday in the Victorian-era railway hotels, where the menus were huge and it was not unusual for an extra two hundred guests to show up wanting, say, the Fricassee of Lobster Thermidor—for which only fifty portions were ever available. Suddenly, Thermidor for fifty was transformed into Thermidor for two hundred. Don't ask how. You don't want to know. It is possible that the system began with the ever-changing requirements of volume cookery, only to be perpetuated by subsequent generations as the golden age of mammoth hotels began to wane and the enormous dining halls and banquet facilities of days past were faced with the necessity of serving grande luxe-style meals and bloated menus with ever-shrinking staffs and more stringent economizing. I suspect that some of the classic dishes of that era reflect System D philosophy, particularly the efforts to get more bang from limited ingredients. Potage Mongole, for instance, allowed a chef to take a little pea soup and a little tomato soup, combine them, and come up with a third menu selection. New York's fabled Delmonico's offered, at one time, a staggering array of soups, numbering over a hundred. One can only assume that not all of those were made individually and from scratch every day. Parsimonious and forward-thinking Frenchmen—already inclined to make the most of humble (read cheap) ingredients, utilized every scrap of stock meat, hoof, snout, tongue, organs, creating dishes that are now popular stand-alone and frequently expensive favorites, ordered on their own merits, rather than served as cleverly disguised by-products. The traditional bistros that grew up around Les Halles, Paris's central marketplace, were fertile ground for hotel-trained cooks and chefs to take System D to even more extreme lengths.

• From Between Us

  What Jiro and I had in common was that we sparsely interacted with people from our own heritage culture while we lived in the U.S. This may have been the case for the average second-generation Turkish Belgian and Korean American respondent: On average, the emotion profiles of the second-generation immigrants in De Leersnyder’s study were not very “Turkish” or “Korean.” Yet, some individuals formed an exception in that their emotional profiles were “Turkish” or “Korean.” What these individuals had in common was that they had Turkish and Korean friends in their everyday lives. The reality of having a “Turkish” or a “Korean” friend trumped anything else when it came to emotions. You can be quite attached to your heritage traditions, you can feel identified with the heritage culture, and you may wish you were surrounded by friends of your heritage culture, but unless you also have heritage friends, these are not enough to preserve your heritage way of doing emotions. Not participating in the relationships makes you lose a culture’s ways of doing emotions pretty quickly, although perhaps not permanently. My friend psychologist Shinobu Kitayama is Japanese American bicultural. He grew up in Japan with an OURS model of emotions. Coming to the U.S. for him meant a shift from an OURS to a MINE model of emotions. In Japan, “emotions” were out in the world. Throughout the many years he lived in the U.S., he learned to think about his emotions as mental states. Yet, whenever he comes back to the U.S., after having spent some time in Japan, he at first has trouble answering the simple question of “How are you feeling?” It is as if he needs to zoom back into his insides again, shifting his focus outward-in. He goes through this small adjustment each time again. An equally telling example is the fact that the feelings of excitement and pride that I experience in American contexts are not sustained in the same way in European everyday life. Whenever I spend a lot of time on the European continent, my excitement and pride peter out, and are replaced by feelings more appropriate as well as better attuned to that European context.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  who wish to turn Christianity into a closed system. He believed in freedom. For him, Christianity was the only kind of freedom that matters, the liberation from the law, and the donation of life. He associated freedom with truth, for which he had an unlimited reverence. And in pursuing truth he established the right to think, and to think through to the ultimate conclusion. The process of inquiry, in fact, mirrored his salvationist theology: he accepted the bonds and obligations of love, but not the authority of scholarship and tradition. He established the right to think in the full Hellenistic sense and thus showed that the Christian faith has nothing to fear from the power of thought. Schweitzer called Paul ‘the patron saint of thought in Christianity’, and added: ‘All those who think to serve the gospel of Christ by destroying the liberty of thinking must hide their faces from him.’ This detailed analysis of Paul’s theology and personality has been necessary to illuminate the significance of the Jerusalem Council and its aftermath in the whole history of Christianity. Behind the controversy over circumcision and the attitude to gentile converts a whole range of the deepest issues was at stake. Nor did the suggested compromise of James and Peter work. It was based upon a ruling from Leviticus which provided for the entertainment of strangers and allowed a certain relaxation of the law. This was precisely the kind of misplaced casuistry which Paul thought ruinous to Jesus’s message. Paul made no attempt to put it into operation; later generations, puzzled by its significance, reinterpreted it as a general moral command – thus it appears in the writings of Irenaeus, Tertullian, Jerome. But equally, Paul’s opponents did not abide by the apostolic ruling. Both the Acts and Paul’s own epistles make it plain that the struggle continued, and became more bitter. For Paul, it was literally a matter of life or death, and his own writings make no attempt to hide its gravity and acrimony. The Jerusalem Council revealed the existence of a ‘centre party’, led in somewhat pusillanimous manner by Peter and James. Afterwards, the centre crumbled and surrendered to the Judaistic wing of the Christian-Pharisees: hence Peter’s shamefaced refusal of table-fellowship to Gentiles at Antioch and Paul’s stern rebuke. Peter eventually broke with, or at any rate left, the Jewish-Christian Church of Jerusalem. He accepted Paul’s theology – he may well have contributed to it with his own knowledge and insights – and joined him in the mission to the Gentiles. In all probability they died together as martyrs at Rome. But the rest of the Jerusalem Church maintained its connection with Judaism and became increasingly hostile to Paul’s efforts. The attempt to divide the missionary work was

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  They know when to step into another cook's station—and, more importantly, how to do it—without that station becoming a rugby match of crushed toes and sharp elbows. They know how to sling dirty pots twenty-five feet across the kitchen so that they drop neatly into the pot sink without disfiguring the dishwasher. It's when the orders are pouring in and the supplies are running low and the tempers are growing thin that one sees System D practiced at its highest level. Hot water heater explodes? No sweat. Just push the rillettes over and start boiling water, carnale. Run out of those nice square dinner plates for the lobster spring rolls? No problem. Dummy up a new presentation and serve on the round plates. We know what to do. Meat grinder broken? It's steak tartare cut by hand, papi. Few things are more beautiful to me than a bunch of thuggish, heavily-tattooed line cooks moving around each other like ballerinas on a busy Saturday night. Seeing two guys who'd just as soon cut each other's throats in their off hours moving in unison with grace and ease can be as uplifting as any chemical stimulant or organized religion. At times like these, under fire, in battlefield conditions, the kitchen reverts to what it has always been since Escoffier's time: a brigade, a paramilitary unit, in which everyone knows what they have to do, and how to do it. Officers make fast and necessarily irrevocable decisions, and damn the torpedoes if it isn't the best decision. There's no time to dither, to waffle, to ponder, to empathize when there's incoming fire threatening to bring the whole kitchen and dining room crashing down. Move forward! Take that hill! Forced out of expediency to lose that cute herbal garnish on the Saddle of Lamb en Crepinette? It's a shame—but we'll cry about it later, at the after-action reporting, when we're all comfortably sucking down late-night sushi together and drinking iced sake or vodka shots at some chef-friendly joint. Right now it's System D time, bro'—and there's no time for that bouquet of herbs. There's the fish to contend with, and one of the runners just fell down the stairs and broke his ankle, and they need forks on table number seven, and that twelve-top arrived late and is eating up half the dining room while they linger over cognacs, and the customers waiting by the bar and shivering in the street are starting to get that angry, haunted look you see in lynch mobs and Liberian militia who've spent too much time in the jungle. Running out of arugula? Substitute mache for Chrissakes! Fluff it out with spinach, watercress . . . anything green! At times like these, even one heroic practitioner of System D can save the day, step in and turn the tide. One guy can make the difference between another successful Saturday night and total chaos.

• From Stripped: Nashville (2021)

  Like these are people that would probably never even make it through the door of a club because they would be too nervous to do it and I'm bringing them the opportunity. So I've been able to take my dancing career and mix it with my cosplay. [upbeat ambient music] I also have an OnlyFans on the side, which is really nice, you know, because you have the club that has these certain laws and requirements from you, but then you also have this thing that is solely your baby. Like you can do whatever you wanna do with it. Maybe there are some days where you don't feel it going into the club or maybe you're sick. But one thing you can always do is just be like, well, I could always just shoot some content. It can be a really good way to have extra income. [upbeat ambient music] [boyfriend faintly talking] [Marie chuckles] - At least a half chunk of your bills? Like that's amazing. Then it's like the other nights you can dance when that's taken care of and then just save your money. Like holy shit. Like what a blessing. [upbeat ambient music] - It's so important for me to have multiple revenue streams. I am a personal trainer and a spin instructor, just not full-time. [upbeat music] And I still do professional dancing for music videos, for projects that come up, things that fill me creatively. - Music has always been part of my life. Being at the studio is definitely heart racing. Hi! In a good way. The name of my song is Step Back. There's Spanish and English in it. It's got these two beautiful cultures put together and I'm really excited about it ♪ I should have known you had another lover ♪ ♪ I just wanted this to be forever ♪ ♪ I gave everything I had ♪ ♪ And you just took it all for granted ♪ ♪ The signs were right in front of me ♪ ♪ I just kept on playing make-believe ♪ ♪ But now it's time for me to leave, step back ♪ ♪ You don't get another piece of me ♪ ♪ I would rather you just let me be ♪ ♪ You don't deserve me, step back ♪ ♪ I'm running out of tears to cry ♪ ♪ It's time for me to say goodbye ♪ ♪ We're all done here, step back ♪ - I love singing 'cause I've always loved to express all those emotions I have that are just like trapped inside. [Belle singing in foreign language] [Belle singing in foreign language continues] [Belle singing in foreign language continues] [upbeat music] - OnlyFans has been a really big part of my career as a dancer. [upbeat music] I've got this whole pole room now.

• From Saint Augustine (Penguin Lives) (1999)

  The tribes of Israel go up to Jerusalem, and because “there is no falsehood in them,” those tribes are in themselves the “testimony [testimonium] of Israel.” Whither do they go up, and why? “To testify [confiteri] to your name, Lord.” It could not be more eloquently put. Pride asserts, humility testifies [confitetur]. The proud want to seem what they are not. The one who gives testimony [confessor] does not want to appear what he is not, but to love what, in the full sense, is. (P 121.8) And Augustine’s favorite Gospel in the Christian Scriptures, John’s, says that the Son must testify to the Father, as the Spirit does to the Son. Christians are brought into the inmost mystery of the Trinity when the Spirit testifies in them to the triune glory: “As the Spirit gave them an inner testimony of Christ, they spread the testimony themselves” (S 94.2). It is this action of the Spirit in Christians that Augustine wants to manifest: “This it is to testify [confiteri], to speak out what the heart holds true. If the tongue and the heart are at odds, you are reciting, not testifying” (J 26.2). Little if any of this rich theological resonance carries over to the word “confessions” in English. That is why, unsettling as it is to many, I translate Confessiones as The Testimony of Augustine (with T as the key to citations of it). Better a shock of the new than indulging old associations that mislead. We must be on guard from the outset for such misreadings, since Augustine seems deceptively easy of access. People feel, for instance, that they understand intuitively Augustine’s testimony to his own sexual sins. In fact, they are convinced that Augustine was a libertine before his conversion, and was so obsessed with sex after his conversion that they place many unnamed sins to his account—though his actual sexual activity was not shocking by any standards but those of a saint. He lived with one woman for fifteen years “and with her alone, since I kept faith with her bed” (T 4.2). This kind of legal concubine was recognized in Roman law—a man who took another’s concubine could be prosecuted as an adulterer. Even the Church recognized the legitimacy of such a relationship (Council of Toledo 400, Canon 17).

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  It may feel wonderfully fulfilling, putting one's best foot forward, sweating and fiddling and wiping and sculpting impeccable little spires of a-la-minute food for an adoring dining public, but there is another kind of satisfaction: the grim pride of the journeyman professional, the cook who's got moves, who can kick ass on the line, who can do serious numbers, and "get through." "How many'd we do?" is the question frequently asked at the end of the shift, when the cooks collapse onto flour sacks and milk crates and piles of dirty linen, smoking their cigarettes, drinking their shift cocktails, and contemplating what kind of felonious activity they will soon take part in during their after-work leisure hours. If the number is high (say three hundred fifty dinners), and there have been few returns or customer complaints, if only happy diners waddled satiated out the crowded doorway to the restaurant, squeezing painfully past the incoming mob—well, that's a statistic we can all appreciate and understand. Drinks and congratulations are in order. We made it through! We didn't fall into the weeds! We ran out of nothing! What could be better? We not only served a monstrous number of meals without a glitch, but we served them on time and in good order. We avoided disaster. We brought honor and riches to our clan. And if it was a particularly brutal night, if the specter of meltdown loomed near, if we just narrowly avoided the kind of horror that occurs when the kitchen "loses it," if we managed to just squeak through without taking major casualties—then all the better. Picture the worst-case scenario: The saucier is getting hit all night long. Everything ordered is coming off his station instead of being spread around between broiler, middle, and appetizer stations. The poor bastard is being pounded, constantly in danger of falling behind, running out of mise en place, losing his mind. Nothing is worse in a situation like this than that terrible moment when a line cook looks up at the board, scans the long line of fluttering dinner orders, and sees only incomprehensible cuneiform, Sanskrit-like chicken scratches that to his shriveled, dehydrated, poached, and abused brain mean nothing at all. He's "lost it" . . . he's dans la merde now . . . and because kitchen work requires a great deal of coordination and teamwork, he could take the whole line down with him. But if you're lucky enough to have a well-oiled machine working for you—a bunch of hardcore, ass-kicking, name-taking debrouillards on the payroll—the chances of catastrophe are slim in the extreme. Old-school cholos, assassinos, vato locos, veterans of many kitchens like my cooks, they know what to do when there's no space left on the stove for another saute pan. They know how to bump closed a broiler or shut a refrigerator door when their hands are full.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  He had tried so hard not to be a coward. It was why he had hunted with the Grafton and learned to fly, and why he had swum around the St Leonards pier when he was small, and dived off the highest diving board at the Hastings Baths at school. He feels that old, sick horror. Powerless to remain erect. He must be brave. When he was small his mother had pleaded with him that he should ‘grow up a big brave and honourable man’ and it had conditioned him to fear the reverse. ‘I felt myself incapable of being any of these noble things’, he’d written. This was a test of manhood. Screwing his courage tight he calls Gos once more, from fifty yards this time, and this time he does not duck, even with terror flowing in all the courses of his veins. He is proud of the hawk for flying fifty yards, proud of himself for standing his ground. It is a victory worthy of celebration, and that night he drinks himself senseless. ‘I cry prosit loudly and repeatedly,’ he wrote, ‘quaff fiery liquids of triumph, drink damnation to my enemies, and smash the glasses on the floor.’ It is fifteen days since the hawk arrived. I’ve washed my hair, applied some make-up, found some presentable clothes – that is, ones not dusted with dried hawk-mutes – and walked with Mabel to my college for a summer lunch-party at the Master’s Lodge. At ten minutes past two I’m sitting at a long table on a secluded English lawn giving an impromptu lecture on falconry while Mabel tears at a rabbit leg in my hand. The Master of the college, a shrewd and genial man in an impeccably tailored suit, is listening intently to my speech. Next to him is his mother, looking distinctly amused. Her grandchildren sit by her. And next to them, the Master’s wife, an elegant dark-haired lawyer, holding a glass of wine. She catches my eye and grins. Two days ago on the way to the supermarket I’d heard her shout my name and turned to see her dismount from her bicycle with practised equestrian grace. We’d talked for a while under tattered leaf shadows, and soon I was in the kitchen of the Master’s Lodge drinking tea. ‘So, Helen,’ she said, ‘we’re having a lunch party on Saturday. Just family. In the garden, if the weather’s fine. What would be marvellous,’ she said, head tilted, ‘would be if you came along afterwards and brought your hawk. We’ve heard you’re flying her on the college grounds, and we’d love to meet her.’ She uncapped a black marker pen, wrote HELEN GOSHAWK on a whiteboard, then hesitated, turned to me. ‘Two p.m.?’ ‘Two p.m.’ She wrote the time in her elegant hand and smiled.

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

  GREGORY. (Mor. xxvii. 13.) He says not’ to the foolish,’ but to babes, shewing that He condemns pride, not understanding. CHRYSOSTOM. (Horn. xxxviii.) Or when He says, The wise, He does not speak of true wisdom, but of that which the Scribes and Pharisees seemed to have by their speech. Wherefore He said not, ‘And hast revealed them to the foolish,’ but, to babes, that is, uneducated, or simple; teaching us in all things to keep ourselves from pride, and to seek humility. HILARY. The hidden things of heavenly words and their power are hid from the wise, and revealed to the babes; babes, that is, in malice, not in understanding; hid from the wise because of their presumption of their own wisdom, not because of their wisdom. CHRYSOSTOM. That it is revealed to the one is matter of joy, that it is hid from the other not of joy, but of sorrow; He does not therefore joy on this account, but He joys that these have known what the wise have not known. HILARY. The justice of this the Lord confirms by the sentence of the Father’s will, that they who disdain to be made babes in God, should become fools in their own wisdom; and therefore He adds, Even so, Father; for so it seemed good before thee. GREGORY. (Mor. xxv. 14.) In which words we have a lesson of humility, that we should not rashly presume to discuss the counsels of heaven concerning the calling of some, and the rejection of others shewing that that cannot be unrighteous which is willed by Him that is righteous. JEROME. In these words moreover He speaks to the Father with the desire of one petitioning, that His mercy begun in the Apostles might be completed in them. CHRYSOSTOM. These things which the Lord spoke to His disciples, made them more zealous. As afterwards they thought great things of themselves, because they cast out dæmons, therefore He here reproves them; for what they had, was by revelation, not by their own efforts. The Scribes who esteemed themselves wise and understanding were excluded because of them-pride, and therefore He says, Since on this account the mysteries of God were hid from them, fear ye, and abide as babes, for this it is that has made you partakers in the revelation. But as when Paul says, God gave them, over to a reprobate mind, (Rom. 1:28), he does not mean that God did this, but they who gave Him cause, so here, Thou hast hid these things from the wise and understanding. And wherefore were they hid from them? Hear Paul speaking, Seeking to set up their own righteousness, they were not subject to the righteousness of God (Rom. 10:3.) 11:2727. All things are delivered unto me of my Father: and no man knoweth the Son, but the Father; neither knoweth any man the Father, save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son will reveal him.

• From My People (2022)

  Initially, like them, my job was typing rejection slips and story lineups, but before long I was promoted to reporter, the first black to be named to that position. I kept my eye on and my soul in what was going on in the civil rights movement, and wrote about black people in ways they were rarely portrayed anywhere in the media—in their full humanity. I continued this work at the New York Times , and in the decades since, never strayed, even as my reach widened to television, radio, and other media, and to the world beyond our borders—most notably South Africa during the days of apartheid. I always felt I had a responsibility to confront issues of race and racism, but in ways that narrow the divide and focus on the positives of difference, rather than the all-too-exploited negatives. It hasn’t been without its challenges. Once, when I was working at PBS NewsHour , I surprised a white guest when he saw me sit down on the set to interview him. “How long have you been doing this?” he asked after the show was over. And when I answered, “About thirty years,” he responded, “Well, I guess it beats being a hairdresser.” I view unintentionally hurtful comments like that as coming from people who, if not ignorant, are uninformed. Unfortunately, expressions of racial insensitivity or hatred are still littering the landscape of our ever-elusive “more perfect union.” And the reversal of some of the progress we made—sadly evident in the resegregation of our nation’s schools and neighborhoods—is spurring scant public outrage, not even another righteous crusade. And so, wearing my invisible tiara, I continue to renew the commitment and the mantra of the civil rights movement: to “keep on keeping on,” to use the values the village in stilled in me all those years ago, to recite and write about our history and its relevance to our struggles today, to work at ensuring people are judged not by the color of their skin or the god they worship or the person they love, but by the content of their character—Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream of “the Beloved Community.” Oak Bluffs, More than a Region in My MindThe Vineyard Gazette JULY 5, 2012 Throughout my high school years in Atlanta, Georgia, in the 1950s, Oak Bluffs on Martha’s Vineyard was a region in my mind. I can still remember the image I had of the island back then—an enchanted place with beautiful green grapevines gracefully covering a landscape with children roaming freely in and around them.

• From The History of Sexuality, Vol. 2: The Use of Pleasure (1984)

  4. Actually, while the text does not indicate the practical forms that are to be respected and the physical boundaries that are not to be crossed, it does at least designate the general principle that determines the way to conduct oneself in these matters. The entire eulogy of Epicrates refers to an agonistic context in which the worth and brilliance of the young man must affirm itself through his superiority over others. Let us quickly review these motifs that were so frequent in set speeches. The individual being eulogized is greater than the praise that one offers him, and the words risk being less beautiful than the one to whom they are addressed; or the boy surpasses all others in physical and moral qualities; not only his gifts but his conversation places him above all others; among all the exercises in which one can excel, he has chosen the most noble, the most rewarding; his soul is prepared for “the rivalries of ambition,” and not content to distinguish himself by one quality, he combines “all the qualities of which a man might justly feel proud.”18 However, the merit of Epicrates is not just in this abundance of qualities that enable him to outstrip all his rivals and bring glory to his parents;19 it also consists in the fact that with respect to all those who approach him he always maintains his eminent worth; he does not allow himself to be dominated by any of them; they all want to draw him into their intimacy—the word synētheia has both the general meaning of living together and the specific meaning of sexual relations—but he surpasses them in such a way, he gains such an ascendancy over them that they derive all their pleasure from the friendship they feel for him.20 By not yielding, not submitting, remaining the strongest, triumphing over suitors and lovers through one’s resistance, one’s firmness, one’s moderation (sōphrosynē)—the young man proves his excellence in the sphere of love relations. Given this general indication, must we imagine a precise code based on the analogy—so familiar to the Greeks—between positions in the social field (with the difference between “the first ones” and the others, the great who rule and those who obey, the masters and the servants) and the form of sexual relations (with dominant and subordinate positions, active and passive roles, penetration carried out by the man and undergone by his partner)? To say that one must not yield, not let others get the best of one, not accept a subordinate position where one would get the worst of it, is doubtless to exclude or advise against sexual practices that would be humiliating for the boy, putting him in a position of inferiority.21

• From A History of God (1993)

  From the friendly Jews of Medina, Muhammad also learned the story of Ishmael, Abraham’s elder son. In the Bible, Abraham had had a son by his concubine Hagar, but when Sarah had borne Isaac she had become jealous and demanded that he get rid of Hagar and Ishmael. To comfort Abraham, God promised that Ishmael would also be the father of a great nation. The Arabian Jews had added some local legends of their own, saying that Abraham had left Hagar and Ishmael in the valley of Mecca, where God had taken care of them, revealing the sacred spring of Zamzam when the child was dying of thirst. Later Abraham had visited Ishmael and together father and son had built the Kabah, the first temple of the one God. Ishmael had become the father of the Arabs, so, like the Jews, they too were sons of Abraham. This must have been music to Muhammad’s ears: he was bringing the Arabs their own scripture and now he could root their faith in the piety of their ancestors. In January 624, when it was clear that the hostility of the Medinan Jews was permanent, the new religion of al-Lah declared its independence. Muhammad commanded the Muslims to pray facing Mecca instead of Jerusalem. This changing of the direction of prayer (qibla) has been called Muhammad’s most creative religious gesture. By prostrating themselves in the direction of the Kabah, which was independent of the two older revelations, Muslims were tacitly declaring that they belonged to no established religion but were surrendering themselves to God alone. They were not joining a sect that impiously divided the religion of the one God into warring groups. Instead they were returning to the primordial religion of Abraham, who had been the first muslim to surrender to God and who had built his holy house: And they say, “Be Jews”—or “Christians”—“and you shall be on the right path.” Say: “nay, but [ours is] the creed of Abraham, who turned away from all that is false and was not of those who ascribe divinity to aught beside God.” Say: “We believe in God and in that which had been bestowed from on high upon us, and in that which has been bestowed upon Abraham and Ishmael and Isaac and Jacob and their descendants, and that which has been vouchsafed to Moses and Jesus, and that which has been vouchsafed to all the [other] prophets by their Sustainer: we make no distinction between any of them. And it is unto him that we surrender ourselves.”33 It was, surely, idolatry to prefer a merely human interpretation of the truth to God himself.

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, Part 4 (300 – 1300, Rome) (2009)

  the monastic life and also shown the qualities of a soldier. Geneviève the counsellor of a king would in the fifteenth century provide a role model for an equally strange model of female sanctity, Joan of Arc, peasant visionary, intimidating presence at the French Court and formidable military leader against the English. The alliance between these saints and a Christian Catholic monarchy of France remained one of the great political facts about Christianity in western Europe down to the nineteenth century, and later French monarchs came to glory in their title of ‘the Most Christian King’. That title stood alongside another potent title which sprang from the eventual downfall of the Merovingians: the ‘Holy Roman Emperor’ (see pp. 349–50). Over centuries, the rivalry of these two sacred Christian monarchies repeatedly disturbed the peace of Europe. Until within living memory, French politics were still affected and embittered by an intense consciousness of the ancient French alliance between Church and Crown. The reputation of the Merovingians still enthrals many who prefer to construct the past through cloudy esoteric conspiracy theories rather than pay attention to the exciting realities of Christian history. Another monarchy was also taking shape, in Rome. The end of the Acacian schism in 519 produced renewed assertions of the pope’s spiritual authority. It was a moment when the devout and Western-born Emperor Justin was especially eager to conciliate Rome, with the encouragement of his nephew and heir Justinian, who was himself already contemplating the restoration of a single united empire of East and West based on Constantinople. The then pope, Hormisdas (514–23), was determined to drive a hard bargain for restoring the two halves of the imperial Church to communion together. He demanded that the bishops of the Eastern Church should subscribe to a formula of agreement which would leave Rome in an unchallengeable position: Christ built his Church on St Peter, and so in the apostolic see the Catholic faith has always been kept without stain. There is one communion defined by the Roman see, and in that I hope to be, following the apostolic see in everything and affirming everything decided thereby.9 The Patriarch of Constantinople managed to sidestep a full commitment to this statement of total surrender, but it was destined to have a long future in the armoury of the Bishops of Rome, both in later efforts to force reunion on a weakened Byzantine Church and in their own general self-image: the pronouncement of Papal Infallibility at the first Vatican Council of 1870 (see pp. 824–5) is inconceivable without this foundation. It was clear to Catholic leaders in the West that Easterners were cold towards Hormisdas’s formula and that the Emperor Justinian was still seeking to modify Chalcedon. Given that there was now so much cooperation between Catholic

• From The Ultimate Guide to Orgasm for Women: How to Become Orgasmic for a Lifetime (2011)

  If you want to be sexually fulfilled, at some point in your lifetime you need to take charge and make sex into a form of play where you set your own rules and call your own shots, doing only what you want to do and what gives you pleasure. If at the end of the day you have only stroked your lover’s back, and you feel fulfilled by that, you can feel confident that you owe nothing more. Sex should never, even inadvertently, be a violation. No matter how many times you say “I don’t want to do anything that you don’t want to,” if you never say, “Okay, this is what I want,” then the relationship can never grow. Whether it is sleeping alone, having separate beds, doing nothing explicitly sexual, masturbating across the room while your partner watches, or vice versa, doing cunnilingus and nothing else, engaging in sex only in a spiritual context—whatever it is, no matter how seemingly radical, you must decide what it is you really want and negotiate with your partner from there. Once you have learned to take charge, you can make the conscious choice not to be in charge if that’s what you want. And remember, changing your mind about what you want is always an option. Do sex the way you want to do it, and know that you are doing it because you have chosen it. The best partners are the ones who are doing it for themselves, from a place of compassion and openheartedness. When I asked Jesse how she would describe to someone how to give her oral sex, she said: I wouldn’t tell somebody how to give me oral sex. That would be like telling someone how to talk to me, what to say to me. I want to hear what they have to say. This is a very astute observation and explains why sex manuals often come up short. What is needed is not so much information on the practical aspects of sex, but more information on how to talk to one another with our bodies, with and without words. It is a skill that can be learned if you are open to learning it. But you have to want to be there with every part of your being, not just the conscious part, and you have to be willing to be open and vulnerable. Not many of us are really willing to be that visible, that exposed. Anna Marti explains it like this: The most exciting erotic partner is one who is totally wired into it themselves and is having a really good time. They’re probably having a good time regardless of who is gong to be there. The erotic experience is really about having every cell in my body engaged.

• From Henry Miller on Writing (1964)

  But I am not a saint, and probably never will be one. Though it occurs to me, as I make this assertion, that I have been called that more than once, and by individuals whom the Court would never suspect capable of holding such an opinion. No, I am not a saint, thank heavens! nor even a propagandist of a new order. I am simply a man, a man born to write, who has taken as his theme the story of his life. A man who has made it clear, in the telling, that it was a good life, a rich life, a merry life, despite the ups and downs, despite the barriers and obstacles (many of his own making), despite the handicaps imposed by stupid codes and conventions. Indeed, I hope that I have made more than that clear, because whatever I may say about my own life, which is only a life, is merely a means of talking about life itself, and what I have tried, desperately sometimes, to make clear is this, that I look upon life itself as good, good no matter on what terms, that I believe it is we who make it unlivable, we , not the gods, not fate, not circumstance. Speaking thus, I am reminded of certain passages in the Court’s decision which reflect on my sincerity as well as on my ability to think straight. These passages contain the implication that I am often deliberately obscure as well as pretentious in my “metaphysical and surrealistic” flights. I am only too well aware of the diversity of opinion which these “excursi” elicit in the minds of my readers. But how am I to answer such accusations, touching as they do the very marrow of my literary being? Am I to say, “You don’t know what you are talking about?” Ought I to muster impressive names—“authorities”—to counterbalance these judgments? Or would it not be simpler to say as I have before, “Guilty! Guilty on all counts, your Honor!” Believe me, it is not impish, roguish perversity which leads me to pronounce, even quasi-humorously, this word ‘‘guilty.” As one who thoroughly and sincerely believes in what he says and does, even when wrong, is it not more becoming on my part to admit “guilt” than attempt to defend myself against those who use this word so glibly? Let us be honest. Do those who judge and condemn me—not in Oslo necessarily, but the world over—do these individuals truly believe me to be a culprit, to be “the enemy of society,” as they often blandly assert? What is it that disturbs them so? Is it the existence, the prevalence, of immoral, amoral or unsocial behavior, such as is described in my works, or is it the exposure of such behavior in print?

• From Educated (2018)

  In my account, history did not set Mormons apart from the rest of the human family; it bound them to it. I sent Dr. Runciman the draft, and a few days later we met in his office. He sat across from me and, with a look of astonishment, said it was good. “Some parts of it are very good,” he said. He was smiling now. “I’ll be surprised if it doesn’t earn a doctorate.” As I walked home carrying the heavy manuscript, I remembered attending one of Dr. Kerry’s lectures, which he had begun by writing, “Who writes history?” on the blackboard. I remembered how strange the question had seemed to me then. My idea of a historian was not human; it was of someone like my father, more prophet than man, whose visions of the past, like those of the future, could not be questioned, or even augmented. Now, as I passed through King’s College, in the shadow of the enormous chapel, my old diffidence seemed almost funny. Who writes history? I thought. I do . —ON MY TWENTY-SEVENTH BIRTHDAY, the birthday I had chosen, I submitted my PhD dissertation. The defense took place in December, in a small, simply furnished room. I passed and returned to London, where Drew had a job and we’d rented a flat. In January, nearly ten years to the day since I’d set foot in my first classroom at BYU, I received confirmation from the University of Cambridge: I was Dr. Westover. I had built a new life, and it was a happy one, but I felt a sense of loss that went beyond family. I had lost Buck’s Peak, not by leaving but by leaving silently. I had retreated, fled across an ocean and allowed my father to tell my story for me, to define me to everyone I had ever known. I had conceded too much ground—not just the mountain, but the entire province of our shared history. It was time to go home. [image "Chapter 39 Watching the Buffalo" file=Image00041.jpg] It was spring when I arrived in the valley. I drove along the highway to the edge of town, then pulled over at the drop-off overlooking the Bear River. From there I could look out over the basin, a patchwork of expectant fields stretching to Buck’s Peak. The mountain was crisp with evergreens, which were luminous set against the browns and grays of shale and limestone. The Princess was as bright as I’d ever seen her. She stood facing me, the valley between us, radiating permanence. The Princess had been haunting me. From across the ocean I’d heard her beckoning, as if I were a troublesome calf who’d wandered from her herd. Her voice had been gentle at first, coaxing, but when I didn’t answer, when I stayed away, it had turned to fury. I had betrayed her. I imagined her face contorted with rage, her stance heavy and threatening.

• From Four Days to Glory: Wrestling with the Soul of the American Heartland (2005)

  Among the Iowa faithful, the notion of Ohio State taking its program to championship heights on the back of Sanderson or Brands was too much to bear, and it prompted a seismic shift. On the same day in March, Iowa fired Zalesky with a year remaining on his contract, and Iowa State University announced the surprise “retirement” of longtime coach Bobby Douglas. It was a one-two punch unprecedented in the annals of the sport in the state—and it was a direct response to the perceived outside threat. For Iowa State, moving Douglas aside meant creating room to immediately anoint Sanderson as the coach and the recruiting face of the program, and to get him away from Ohio State’s clutches. Iowa’s interest in Zalesky’s successor lay a bit farther east. For Tom Brands, Iowa’s offer to have him return as head coach was to be one of the few automatic decisions of his life. This was the no-brainer about which he had always dreamed. Zalesky, in the end, had been the guy who couldn’t measure up to Gable’s stature; Brands would be the coach coming in to help fix all that, the one coming after the one who followed the legend. And whether or not anyone wanted to admit it, the bar had been lowered: Still just 37, Brands was taking over an Iowa team coming off a lousy dual season, a bad conference tournament and also-ran status at the NCAAs. He was viewed, almost immediately, as an answer. It was what he had always wanted to be. After a cursory search period, Iowa athletic director Bob Bowlsby offered Brands the job in the late spring of 2006, and Brands needed about three seconds to know he’d take it. Shortly thereafter, the lives of his freshman class of wrestlers changed forever. Prior to Brands’s arrival in Blacksburg, the Virginia Tech wrestling program occupied no space on the national landscape. Brands being there, winning the ACC title in his first year and landing such a prized recruiting class changed that. The university had made commitments to Brands to upgrade facilities and improve the wrestling program, and Brands in turn had brought his considerable national pedigree to a place that was ready to be recognized. It seemed like a decent enough marriage, but the divorce was a wicked one. After coming to grips with the fact that Brands had the contractual right to end his Virginia Tech tenure early and return to Iowa, university officials decided to play hardball. They couldn’t keep Brands, but his recruits wouldn’t be getting off so easy. Tech officials were determined not to see their program slip back into irrelevance after having come so far so quickly, even if, as athletic director Jim Weaver noted, they had not realistically expected Brands to be with them more than, say, three to five years.

• From Four Days to Glory: Wrestling with the Soul of the American Heartland (2005)

  Dan LeClere dealt with his depression and got past it, and he dealt with his family dynamic and never let it slow his drive. He suffered with fairly good humor his week of inordinate attention in Des Moines, but the fact of the matter is, he was relieved to get out, get through the great homecoming in one piece, get back to his family’s land and maybe just not really talk much for a while. He never wrestled for any reason other than the love of it and an epic winner’s urge, which makes him more like his father than he would be likely to admit. Jay loves to use the doubts of total strangers as motivation for him to be what he wants to be as a wrestler, which isn’t the same as saying he ever actually listens to the criticism. He uses it, is all. He is aware of most everything. He’s a wired, plugged-in high school senior. But Jay has made peace with two very basic facts that seem to have accompanied his life in sports: Most of the time people have no idea what he’s actually up to; and when he is the subject of public interest, it is often for the purpose of someone explaining that he isn’t really as good as people make him out to be. It only matters as much as he needs it to matter. If the ultimate honor is working hard at something for no reason other than to master it, Jay figures, then wrestlers really are better than other athletes, because their suffering is so removed from the everyday world. They sweat and cry alone, with their teammates and their coaches, and even in the heart of the wrestling universe they really only are brought out for full inspection a few times in a year. The rest is just work. And that is what makes it so great, and what makes them special. And maybe they need to know that, and to be reminded of it—that there is a nobility in the idea of laying it all out there, every day, in a little box of a room with crappy ventilation, losing fluids, denying themselves the simple pleasures of food and drink, subjecting their bodies to real pain and full exhaustion, and then dragging their wilted, diminished selves off the mat, showering, going home and falling into bed in order to get up and do it all again tomorrow. There is supposed to be a cosmic reward in that. Jay and Dan long ago came to believe that the reward was always there to be savored. The reward is yet to come; it renews itself in their blood and their ache. They are champions and gods, and they will start all over again in college, as nothings. They will have to prove everything again. The day after it all ends, it begins itself anew.

• From A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (BDB) (1907)

  of praise 2822'=y 18+ מָאד‎ “mia י'‎ bin לש‎ 96% = 1 Ch 16”, 145°; so " OY 0 113°. Hithpa. Impf. 2700 1K 20"45+.; dbo) ibe 2043 3 fs. b>ann + 5% dann Rear’; 2 ms. bbann ap 52% Pr 2}: Deon Tigao -2ris. ‘2M Je 49% 3 mpl. WENN ץ‎ 64" Is 45°; spb ץצ‎ 497 1647; Imv. mpl. oan 1Ch16” y105%; Inf, 93000} y 106%; Pt. מִתְהַלל‎ Pros Je 9%; pl. מִתְהַפַלִים‎ W 977 ;- glory, boast, make one's boast:—1. of self-confident boasting, abs. 1 K 20" cf. Pr 2079; sq. 3 of ground of boast Je 9?” 40* 49! 52° Pr 25%, אַלתִתְהַלל‎ מַחֶר‎ OVA Pr 'דָ2‎ ; of glorying in idols pddonen .דפ ץ ְּאָלִילִים‎ 2. of glorying, making one’s boast in (3, on the ground of)”: בי תִּתְהַלָל‎ Wed ץ‎ 34% cf. Is 45% Je 4? וְהַתַבֶּרְכוּ בו||)‎ ; sq. byte wWIP2 Is 417°; v. also ש‎ 1053=1 Ch 16" sq. WIP OA (||) wPID לב‎ Now), cf. further Jeg™; less oft. abs. 760% ץש‎ 63" 64" & 106° 6- עםהנחלְתךּ‎ together with thine heritage (733 (לשמח בְּשָמְחַת‎ 3. once, late=pass. be praised, commended, of God-fearing woman Pr sx, Poel Jmpf. ו ְהוּלֶל‎ make into a fool, make fool of, obj. שפטים‎ Jb יכז‎ (subj. 7; || שולל‎ Dy’ (מוליף‎ ; obj. DP Ts 44% (subj. || D2 אתות‎ ABP); obj. O30 Ec 77 (subj. PYVT; [2D אֶתדלָב‎ TAN). | 1 Pt. boinn אָמַרְתִּי‎ pind Ec 2° of laughter I said, It is mad (folly); ‘92ND y 102° those mad against me (||‘258). | 1139200. Imp. 9>An ז‎ 21"; 3 mpl. ‘Donn 19 5% sin? Na 2°, oH Jeso®; mv. mpl. SANT Je 49%, MANA Je 25"°;—act madly, or like a madman, 2onn*) OV2 1821" (of David) and he acted like a madman tn their hands; of idolatrous worship by Chaldeans 779) וּבְאִימִים‎ 16 60% ; of nations, as drunken men, fig. of terror at Yahweh’s judgments, Je 25" ) || (התגעשו‎ 517; also of madly driving & jolting chariots Na2° Je 46°. + דל ל‎ apram. (he hath praised; of. NH n.pr. bb Hillel) father of a judge of Israel Jur2™*, 681166 פְּרְעָתוּן .ץ הַפְּרְעָתוּנִי‎ + [Dabs] (1360א) [.צ].‎ only pl. oda rejoicing, praise: 1. הלוּלים‎ wy) Jug” i.e. a vintage-rejoicing, merry-making, connected with thanksgiving בִּית אֶלְהִיהֶם‎ WI, ete. (ice. god Baal-Berith, see v‘). 2. of praise to %, “WIP Ly 19% (H) holiness of praise, i.e. a 239 תהלה consecrated thing in token of thanksgiving for fruit, offered in 4th year (cf. NH). n.f. madness (on txt. v. infr.),‏ [הוּלְלֶה] ז and‏ "ד 0 and only Ec:‏ הוללות הללות only pl.‏ I set my heart ("22 MAS) to know wisdom, and‏ ef.‏ (הללוּת ושכלוּת) to know madness and folly‏ doa yey nythy‏ וְהַפָבְלוּת ה' ; (.2||) 2% הוללות i.e. to know folly to be madness ; possibly‏ ,7° cf. map & foll.; the moral evil of‏ חוללוּת rd.‏ .(רע||) it is specif. recognised in He g*‏