Realization

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

  He himself, in a tract soon afterwards written to a friend,1555 gives us the following oratorical description of his conversion: While I languished in darkness and deep night, tossing upon the sea of a troubled world, ignorant of my destination, and far from truth and light, I thought it, according to my then habits, altogether a difficult and hard thing that a man could be born anew, and that, being quickened to new life by the bath of saving water, he might put off the past, and, while preserving the identity of the body, might transform the man in mind and heart. How, said I, is such a change possible? How can one at once divest himself of all that was either innate or acquired and grown upon him?... Whence does he learn frugality, who was accustomed to sumptuous feasts? And how shall he who shone in costly apparel, in gold and purple, come down to common and simple dress? He who has lived in honor and station, cannot bear to be private and obscure .... But when, by the aid of the regenerating water,1556 the stain of my former life was washed away, a serene and pure light poured from above into my purified breast. So soon as I drank the spirit from above and was transformed by a second birth into a new man, then the wavering mind became wonderfully firm; what had been closed opened; the dark became light; strength came for that which had seemed difficult; what I had thought impossible became practicable." Cyprian now devoted himself zealously, in ascetic retirement, to the study of the Scriptures and the church teachers, especially Tertullian, whom be called for daily with the words: "Hand me the master!"1557 The influence of Tertullian on his theological formation is unmistakable, and appears at once, for example, on comparing the tracts of the two on prayer and on patience, or the work of the one on the vanity of idols with the apology of the other. It is therefore rather strange that in his own writings we find no acknowledgment of his indebtedness, and, as far as I recollect, no express allusion whatever to Tertullian and the Montanists. But he could derive no aid and comfort from him in his conflict with schism. Such a man could not long remain concealed. Only two years after his baptism, in spite of his earnest remonstrance, Cyprian was raised to the bishopric of Carthage by the acclamations of the people, and was thus at the same time placed at the head of the whole North African clergy. This election of a neophyte was contrary to the letter of the ecclesiastical laws (comp. 1 Tim. 3:6), and led afterwards to the schism of the party of Novatus. But the result proved, that here, as in the similar elevation of Ambrose, Augustin, and other eminent bishops of the ancient church, the voice of the people was the voice of God.

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

  From Les Recherches de la France, p. 769 (Paris, 1633). … "He [Calvin) wrote equally well in Latin and French, the latter of which languages is greatly indebted to him for having enriched it with an infinite number of fine expressions (enrichie d’une infinité de beaux traits), though I could have wished that they had been written on a better subject. In short, a man wonderfully conversant with and attached to the books of the Holy Scriptures, and such, that if he had turned his mind in the proper direction, he might have been ranked with the most distinguished doctors of the Church." Jacques Auguste de Thou (Thuanus, 1553–1617). President of the Parliament of Paris. A liberal Roman Catholic and one of the framers of the Edict of Nantes. From the 36th book of his Historia sui Temporis (from 1543–1607). "John Calvin, of Noyon in Picardy, a person of lively spirit and great eloquence (d’un esprit vif et d’une grande eloquence),379 and a theologian of high reputation among the Protestants, died of asthma, May 20 [27], 1564, at Geneva, where he had taught for twenty-three years, being nearly fifty-six years of age. Though he had labored under various diseases for seven years, this did not render him less diligent in his office, and never hindered him from writing." De Thou has nothing unfavorable to say of Calvin. Testimonies of Later French Writers. Charles Drelincourt (1595–1669). "In that prodigious multitude of books which were composed by Calvin, you see no words thrown away; and since the prophets and apostles, there never perhaps was a man who conveyed so many distinct statements in so few words, and in such appropriate and well-chosen terms (en des mots si propres et si bien choisis).... Never did Calvin’s life appear to me more pure or more innocent than after carefully examining the diabolical calumnies with which some have endeavored to defame his character, and after considering all the praises which his greatest enemies are constrained to bestow on his memory." Moses Amyraut (1596–1645). "That incomparable Calvin, to whom mainly, next to God, the Church owes its Reformation, not only in France, but in many other parts of Europe." Bishop Jacques Bénigne Bossuet (1627–1704). From his Histoire des Variations des Eglises Protestantes (1688), the greatest polemical work in French against the Reformation. "I do not know if the genius of Calvin would be found as fitted to excite the imagination and stir up the populace as was that of Luther, but after the movement had commenced, he rose in many countries, more especially in France, above Luther himself, and made himself head of a party which hardly yields to that of the Lutherans. By his searching intellect and his bold decisions, he improved upon all those who had sought in this century to establish a new church, and gave a new turn to the pretended reformation.

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

  At the wedding in Cana He administered to her, though leniently and respectfully, a rebuke for premature zeal mingled perhaps with maternal vanity.766 On a subsequent occasion he put her on a level with other female disciples, and made the carnal consanguinity subordinate to the spiritual kinship of the doing of the will of God.767 The well-meant and in itself quite innocent benediction of an unknown woman upon His mother He did not indeed censure, but He corrected it with a benediction upon all who hear the word of God and keep it, and thus forestalled the deification of Mary by confining the ascription within the bounds of moderation.768 In striking contrast with this healthful and sober representation of Mary in the canonical Gospels are the numerous apocryphal Gospels of the third and fourth centuries, which decorated the life of Mary with fantastic fables and wonders of every kind, and thus furnished a pseudo-historical foundation for an unscriptural Mariology and Mariolatry.769 The Catholic church, it is true, condemned this apocryphal literature so early as the Decrees of Gelasius;770 yet many of the fabulous elements of it—such as the names of the parents of Mary, Joachim (instead of Eli, as in Luke iii. 23) and Anna,771 the birth of Mary in a cave, her education in the temple, and her mock marriage with the aged Joseph772—passed into the Catholic tradition. The development of the orthodox Catholic Mariology and Mariolatry originated as early as the second century in an allegorical interpretation of the history of the fall, and in the assumption of an antithetic relation of Eve and Mary, according to which the mother of Christ occupies the same position in the history of redemption as the wife of Adam in the history of sin and death.773 This idea, so fruitful of many errors, is ingenious, but unscriptural, and an apocryphal substitute for the true Pauline doctrine of an antitypical parallel between the first and second Adam.774 It tends to substitute Mary for Christ. Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, and Tertullian, are the first who present Mary as the counterpart of Eve, as a "mother of all living" in the higher, spiritual sense, and teach that she became through her obedience the mediate or instrumental cause of the blessings of redemption to the human race, as Eve by her disobedience was the fountain of sin and death.775 Irenaeus calls her also the "advocate of the virgin Eve," which, at a later day, is understood in the sense of intercessor.776 On this account this father stands as the oldest leading authority in the Catholic Mariology; though with only partial justice; for he was still widely removed from the notion of the sinlessness of Mary, and expressly declares the answer of Christ in John ii.

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

  This did not mean that Mother Greta did not believe in the resurrection of Jesus, or that she had lost her faith. But she had studied at the prestigious Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium and knew that the kind of essay I had written was no longer regarded as a respectable intellectual exercise. A careful study of the resurrection stories in the gospels, which consistently contradict one another, shows that these were not factual accounts that could ever satisfy a modern historian, but mythical attempts to describe the religious convictions of the early Christians, who had experienced the risen Jesus as a dynamic presence in their own lives and had made a similar spiritual passage from death to life. As I stared wordlessly back at Mother Greta, I knew that, if it had been up to her, she would have scrapped this course in apologetics and introduced us to a more fruitful study of the New Testament. But, like any nun, she was bound by the orders of her superiors. What I had written was not true, because the insights of faith are not amenable to rational or historical analysis. Even at this early stage, in a confused, incoherent way, I knew this, and Mother Greta knew that I knew it. It was a sobering moment, and when I look back now on that scene in the postulantship, with the autumn sun coming through the window, the older nun mentally tired and demoralized, while the postulant gazed at her blankly, both of us deliberately turning our minds away from the light, I wonder what on earth we all thought we were doing. I had been set a quite pointless task. For a week, while preparing my essay, writing it and learning how to dispose of the obvious problems with various mental sleights of hand, I had been doing something perverse. I had been telling an elaborate lie. I had deflected the natural healthy bias of my mind from a truth that was staring me in the face and forced it to deny what should have been as clear as day. Years later, while I was having my breakdown, I learned that Mother Greta had been very anxious indeed about the way we were being trained, had voiced her disapproval, and had been overruled. What had our superiors been about, and why did I not tear up that dishonest piece of work, or at least argue with Mother Greta? I had simply gone along with the whole unholy muddle. But I was only eighteen years old and this had not been an isolated incident.

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

  But the principal target of the Crusaders had been Islam, and now I had to come to terms with the third Abrahamic religion. Without knowing anything about it, I had always assumed that the Muslim faith was inherently violent and fanatical. It was a religion of the sword, and had established itself only by means of warfare. I had been instinctively moved by Islam when I had visited the Middle East, but I assumed that I would find the theology as repellent as the crusading ethos. But yet again—as with The First Christian— once I was confronted with the facts, I found the reality to be quite different. Islam might have become more intolerant during the last half century; this seemed to be due to the peculiar strains of our modernity. In general, however, it had been far more respectful of other faiths than Christianity. During the Crusades, Muslim generals, such as Nur ad-Din and Saladin, who led the Islamic riposte, had behaved with greater restraint and compassion than their Christian counterparts. Increasingly—just as I had done with Saint Paul—I had to dismantle my old position, which I could now see to be ignorant, prejudiced, and deeply conditioned by the culture into which I happened to have been born. Westerners had needed to hate Islam; in the fantasies they created, it became everything that they hoped that they were not, and was made to epitomize everything that they feared that they were. Islam had become the shadow self of the West, and even in the 1980s, I noticed, we seemed to find it difficult to regard Muslim faith and civilization with fairness and objectivity. The stereotypical view of Islam, first developed at the time of the Crusades, was in some profound sense essential to our Western identity.

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

  Saint Paul seemed a great place to start. I was convinced that many if not all of the failings of Christianity could be traced back to this pugnacious apostle. The churches’ obsession with complex doctrine, their denigration of women and the body, their intolerance and authoritarian corruption could all be laid at his door. He had perverted the simple, loving message of Jesus, and the religion that came after him had never fully recovered. But as I started to read a little more deeply, I found that the role of Paul in early Christianity had been even more significant. I had stumbled unawares into the minefield of New Testament scholarship, whose findings astounded me. In the convent, I had been introduced to the rudiments of modern biblical criticism while working for my theology diploma, but this had been a very ladylike syllabus, which had excluded most of the really challenging material. Now, reading in my flat in the weeks before my departure for Israel, while June was arguing with Channel 4 about my contract, I made some startling discoveries. A disturbing number of eminent scholars agreed that Jesus had no intention of founding a new religion. He had preached only to his fellow Jews, and there was nothing strikingly original about his teaching, which was in line with other strands of first-century Judaism. Jesus certainly never claimed to be God, but preferred the title “Son of Man,” which emphasized his humanity. After the scandal of his crucifixion, his traumatized disciples had had visions of him risen from the tomb and concluded that he was the long-awaited Jewish Messiah, who would shortly return to inaugurate the kingdom of God on earth. But the early Christians still regarded themselves as forming an exclusively Jewish sect. It was Saint Paul, who had never known the historical Jesus, who had first marketed the faith for the non-Jewish world of the Roman Empire. But even Paul had not seen Jesus as divine in any simplistic way. When he called him “Son of God,” he used the phrase in its strictly Jewish sense: Jesus was an ordinary human being who had been given a special mission by God; as a result of his obedience and devotion, he had been elevated to a position of unique intimacy with God and given the title “Lord,” or kyrios. But (I now read) there is always a clear distinction in the New Testament between the kyrios Christos and God the Father.

• From A Theology for the Social Gospel (1918)

  THE SOCIAL GOSPEL AND THE ATONEMENT 267 creation of such aneffectivenucleus isessential to any real reconciliation. This conception is freefrom the artificial and immoral elements inherent in all forensicand governmental inter- pretations of the atonement. It begins with the solidarity between God and Christ, and proceeds tothe solidarity between God and mankind. Itdealswith social and re- ligious realities.It connectsthe idea of reconciliation and the idea of the Kingdom ofGod.Itdoes notdis- pense with the moraleffort ofmen and the moral re- newal of social life but absolutely demands both. It fur- nishesa mystic basis for the social revolution. Itwould be a theological conception which the social gospel could utilize and enforce. Finally we must inquire how the atonementaffected men. What did the deathof Christ add tohis life in the way of reconciling, and redemptivepower? The answer- to thiscan not benarrowed downto a single influence. An event likethedeathof Jesus influences human thought and feeling in many ways. I shall mentionthree. First: It was theconclusive demonstration of the power of sin in humanity. I can not contemplate the force and malignancy of the six socialand racial sins which converged on Jesus without a deep sense ofthe enormous power ofevilin theworld and ofthebitter task before those who make up the cutting edge ofthe Kingdom of God. Invarious ways this realization comes to all who think of the cross of Christ. But the solidar- istic interpretation ofthe killing power of sin is by far

• From Worried about Everything Because I Pray about Nothing (2022)

  Letting God be God is a good thing. We would be terrible at that job. Imagine if five-year-olds ruled the world for a day, and every idea they had was promptly carried out by adults. On the one hand, it could be the most entertaining thing ever. On the other, it wouldn’t take long before the world descended into total chaos. School would be outlawed, sinks would flow with chocolate milk, and bedtime would simply not happen. Kids need adults because they aren’t the best judges of their own needs. And the difference in maturity and wisdom between a kindergartner and an adult is nothing compared to the difference between us and God. Praying that His will would be done reminds us that we aren’t as smart as our Twitter bio or our résumé makes us sound. Also, notice that the line doesn’t say, “your will be done in my life, God, because it’s my life that really matters here.” It says, “on earth.” Your problems and needs are real. And they are almost as important as mine are. Just kidding, of course. But that’s how we tend to think, right? Our problems take precedence over those of others. God, unsurprisingly, has a bigger perspective. And prayer has a way of helping us zoom out a bit and see the bigger picture. It’s amazing when you think about it. Jesus is asking us to partner with God in prayer, not just to get our own needs met but to see His kingdom—His power, love, glory, and purpose—accomplished on earth. That realization adds a whole new dimension to our prayers. Practicing the Lord’s Prayer Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Am I committed to obeying God? Do I trust Him enough to do what He says? Specifically, what is God’s will in my family today? What is His will in my work, school, or friendships?

• From Worried about Everything Because I Pray about Nothing (2022)

  You take it in for service. None of us are perfect, but we should always pay the most attention to the areas that are most important. WHOLE PEOPLE ARE HEALTHY PEOPLE Spiritual bypassing comes from a mindset that sees our spirit as separate from the rest of our selves. We think that belief in God means ignoring the physical, tangible parts of our beings in favor of spiritual practices. But it doesn’t work that way. You can’t separate the pieces of yourself. Faith doesn’t exist separately. Our spirituality, and therefore our prayers, are inextricably connected to every aspect of who we are: mind, soul, spirit, body, will, emotion. Dr. Clark writes: One key identifier of spiritual bypass is an obvious imbalance or compartmentalization of the self; rather than integrating all levels of human consciousness, those in spiritual bypass focus solely on the spiritual level as a means to avoid painful psychological work. . . . The spiritual practices, seeking, and focus are not in and of themselves detrimental. Rather, the concern is the avoidance of the psychological and emotional work that is necessary for healing. Therefore, the discourse around spiritual bypass does not carry the implication that the spiritual life is wrong or unhealthy. There are times, however, when the most appropriate spiritual practice is to engage in necessary, albeit uncomfortable, psychological work.2 In other words, we need spiritual practices—but we also need to deal with trauma. We need to understand grief. We need to recognize our weaknesses, addictions, fears, and dreams. We need to take care of our entire selves: body, soul, and spirit. So yes, have faith for physical health. But also eat more salads and fewer corn dogs. Pray for your finals. But also study and get a good night’s sleep. Ask God to bless your finances. But read a book or take a class or at least watch a few YouTube videos about balancing a budget. Faith and works are friends. And they are on the same side—yours. Don’t pit them against each other. Beware of teaching or philosophies that deny reality in the name of faith or that permit abuse to continue under the guise of spirituality. There is nothing spiritual about ignoring reality. Faith is not blind. Only foolishness is. I remember an old preacher saying that he had met people who were “so heavenly minded they were no earthly good.” He makes a valid point. If your faith doesn’t work in the real world, maybe it’s not faith at all. Maybe it’s escapism. Real faith is fully aware of what is happening in the physical world, but it sees beyond that world. It takes God into account. It uses faith to inform the present, not deny it. Your faith should make you more whole, not more fragmented. It should align you, orient you, stabilize you, unify you. If it doesn’t, get a new one, because yours is broken.

• From The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir (2004)

  Once gravity reasserted its hold on me, I immediately started examining my experience. It felt like my new job. I’d been given a gift and now I had to attempt some understanding. Why? Why me? Why him? Why there? I had given my vaginal virginity to the first man who paid me any consistent sexual attention. I would have married him as only a virgin would: with adoration and ignorance. Eight penises later, I married one. Ten years later, when I departed that union, I was horny as hell, like never before—a bunny on a hot tin roof—but intercourse was not what I wanted. I needed love, admiration, and pussy worship. This insatiable desire ruled my life. But then A-Man came along and shook my overanalyzed ego off its self-important pedestal. I was an anal virgin. He showed me, physically, where my rage resided. Anger thrives in your ass. A Dickensian alley, the ass. Despite its tiny, ignored entry, once opened, it contains literally yard upon yard of coiled past traumas, the internal gripping of the emotionally unbearable. A-Man penetrated the site of my anger and cauterized my wound. I was now being given a second chance—not on the well-trodden vaginal trail, but in a place entirely new to my consciousness—and it quickly became the site of my consciousness. Truly virgin, once again. With the discovery of this new world, I experienced all the wonder and beauty that a deflowering might be but rarely is. And so it began, in naive complicity, once a week, twice a week, three times a week. Mostly late afternoons. He was an expert and I was willing. I began to count. It just seemed like the right thing to do. #41 Ablaze afterward, he stood up, still hard, and slugged some water from a blue bottle. “What is it about?” I asked from the bed, flushed and dazed. He stopped drinking, looked over at me, paused, and said, “Vibrations.” He says we’re learning something about time. The passage of time, the experience of time, the truth of time, the eternity of time. The best time. ENTERING THE EXIT Once initiated, I couldn’t help thinking about anal everything. Including the mechanics. The digestive system is a one-way pipe where peristaltic contractions urge food from mouth to anus. Ass-fucking entails the bold—and contrary—attempt to travel the route in reverse. Fucking a pussy is entering a cave with only one pinprick exit—the hole in the cervix that enters the womb. (And, of course, it is an “exit” to parenthood.) Under normal circumstances, the pussy is a pretty closed, if expandable, place. The vagina is a receptacle. The anal canal, on the other hand, is directly, though complexly, connected to the mouth, the point of entry, the place that feeds the life. Thirty feet or so of digestive track from rectum to colon to small intestine to stomach to esophagus to throat to mouth is the route entered by the anal fucker.

• From Wild (2012)

  I walked down to the empty little beach along Elk Lake with the two pennies in my hand, wondering if I should toss them into the water and make a wish. I decided against it and put them in my shorts pocket, just in case I needed two cents between now and the Olallie Lake ranger station, which was still a sobering hundred miles away. Having nothing more than those two pennies was both horrible and just the slightest bit funny, the way being flat broke at times seemed to me. As I stood there gazing at Elk Lake, it occurred to me for the first time that growing up poor had come in handy. I probably wouldn’t have been fearless enough to go on such a trip with so little money if I hadn’t grown up without it. I’d always thought of my family’s economic standing in terms of what I didn’t get: camp and lessons and travel and college tuition and the inexplicable ease that comes when you’ve got access to a credit card that someone else is paying off. But now I could see the line between this and that—between a childhood in which I saw my mother and stepfather forging ahead over and over again with two pennies in their pocket and my own general sense that I could do it too. Before I left, I hadn’t calculated how much my journey would reasonably be expected to cost and saved up that amount plus enough to be my cushion against unexpected expenses. If I’d done that, I wouldn’t have been here, eighty-some days out on the PCT, broke, but okay—getting to do what I wanted to do even though a reasonable person would have said I couldn’t afford to do it. I hiked on, ascending to a 6,500-foot viewpoint from which I could see the peaks to the north and east: Bachelor Butte and glaciated Broken Top and—highest of them all—South Sister, which rose to 10,358 feet. My guidebook told me that it was the youngest, tallest, and most symmetrical of the Three Sisters. It was composed of over two dozen different kinds of volcanic rock, but it all looked like one reddish-brown mountain to me, its upper slopes laced with snow. As I hiked into the day, the air shifted and warmed again and I felt as if I were back in California, with the heat and the way the vistas opened up for miles across the rocky and green land.

• From Justine (Alexandria Quartet vol. 1) (1957)

  Sailing upwards to the fifth floor in the lift, making awkward attempts to appear presentable (feeling the dark stubble on his chin, retying his tie) Nessim questioned his reflection in the cheap mirror, puzzled by the whole new range of feelings and beliefs these brief scenes had given him. Under everything, however, aching like a poisoned tooth or finger, lay the quivering meaning of those eight words which Melissa had lodged in him. In a dazed sort of way he recognized that Justine was dead to him — from a mental picture she had become an engraving, a locket which one might wear over one’s heart for ever. It is always bitter to leave the old life for the new — and every woman is a new life, compact and self-contained and sui generis. As a person she had suddenly faded. He did not wish to possess her any longer but to free himself from her. From a woman she had become a situation. He rang for Selim and when the secretary appeared he dictated to him a few of the duller business letters with a calm so surprising that the boy’s hand trembled as he took them down in his meticulous crowsfoot shorthand. Perhaps Nessim had never been more terrifying to Selim than he appeared at this moment, sitting at his great polished desk with the gleaming battery of telephones ranged before him. Nessim did not meet Melissa for some time after this episode but he wrote her long letters, all of which he destroyed in the lavatory. It seemed necessary to him, for some fantastic reason, to explain and justify Justine to her and each of these letters began with a long painful exegesis of Justine’s past and his own. Without this preamble, he felt, it would be impossible ever to speak of the way in which Melissa had moved and captivated him. He was defending his wife, of course, not against Melissa, who had uttered no criticism of her (apart from the one phrase) but against all the new doubts about her which emerged precisely from his experience with Melissa. Just as my own experience of Justine had illuminated and re-evaluated Melissa for me so he looking into Melissa’s grey eyes saw a new and unsuspected Justine born therein. You see, he was now alarmed at the extent to which it might become possible to hate her. He recognized now that hate is only unachieved love. He felt envious when he remembered the single-mindedness of Pursewarden who on the flyleaf of the last book he gave Balthazar had scribbled the mocking words: Pursewarden on Life N.B. Food is for eating Art is for arting Women for — — — — — Finish RIP

• From Worried about Everything Because I Pray about Nothing (2022)

  You develop empathy and a smidge of humility. You have kids of your own and suddenly wish you would have given your parents more grace. You discover that who they are to you matters far more than what they give you . I’m a grown man with a family, house, and job of my own. I don’t “need” my parents to give me anything. But my relationship with them is genuine, deep, fulfilling, and vital. The way I value them has changed dramatically since I was a teenager. Mark Twain is often quoted as saying, “When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.” If I’m honest, sometimes I’ve viewed God the way I viewed my parents. At first, He was there to provide for my needs, but that was about it. But I’ve changed. I’ve grown up, so to speak. And now I’m astonished at how much God means to me, how much He does, and how important my relationship with Him has become. I’ve learned that, like my parents, who God is matters far more than what He gives me . So if I pray just to get something from God, I’m missing out on most of what prayer is for. In the following chapters, we’re going to explore the benefits of prayer. We’ll ask questions like, “Why do I need God?” and “What is prayer good for?” You’ll notice that the last chapter is the only one that talks about answered prayer. Answered prayer is awesome, of course. But it’s actually far down the list of importance. The rest of the chapters focus on what prayer does in, through , and for us. In the grand scheme of your life, those are the things that matter most. Prayer changes things. Mostly you. TWO Relaxing on a roller coasterPrayer and peace I can still remember playing hide-and-seek with my friends as a kid. I would hide under a bed or in a closet while someone counted to ten. Then the person would stalk the house in search of a victim. After a few moments, I would inevitably hear footsteps right beside the bed or outside the closet. It would strike me—too late—that, like a total newbie, I had chosen the most obvious hiding place in the room. I would be as terrified as if I were hiding from an actual ax murderer. My heart would dislodge itself from its normal spot inside my chest and make its way up my throat. There would be nothing to do but hold my breath and hope the “seeker” assumed no one would be stupid enough to hide where I was.

• From The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir (2004)

  One heroic diver would come over, eat me out, slowly, slowly, daring me not to come. Sometimes I’d last over an hour. How wonderful to be in the position of trying to hold back, of not praying to come. There was one thing he did want, to lick my ass. Okay, I said, go ahead. But he didn’t just lick my ass, he fucked my ass with his tongue, very impressive indeed, never had a tongue deeper to date. He never took his clothes off, and he had the good taste to never kiss me on the mouth. There is risk, however, with the Pussy Hounds. The final fading of my respect has sometimes happened when a man is so eager to suck my pussy that I know he indulges his need to please rather than an actual love of pussy. It’s distracting. Intention is all—I can feel it with my clit. It is more important to me that a man love pussy in general than mine in particular. After all, if he likes them as a whole, then mine is a slam dunk. But if a man likes only mine and not all the others, well, I just don’t trust him. With this type of man I have learned to guide my orgasm with fantasy, and, like him, play the using game. While he licks furiously, indulging his codependence, I file through my Rolodex of every man I’ve ever known, all in the audience, erections puncturing the air, watching this one lap at the altar they all still covet. Works every time. It is my altruism, not my narcissism, that fosters this fantasy. After all, a man can acquire such wisdom at the source of a woman’s orgasm: how to slow down, speed up, be consistent, be nonlinear, be persistent, be unpredictable, be patient, be outrageous, be generous, be witty. There is, in fact, nothing of value, philosophically and practically, that he can’t learn if he can turn the delta of Venus into the site of Vesuvius. Most men will lick and suck and drink a pussy—and I’m not complaining. But it is the rare man who does so with his whole consciousness poised on his tongue. It is this awareness that will move a woman; when her consciousness—on her clit—encounters his, orgasm marks their meeting. Ultimately, it is here—or rather, down there—that a man will learn how to be a winner or a loser, with women as in life. WHY THERE? Once gravity reasserted its hold on me, I immediately started examining my experience. It felt like my new job. I’d been given a gift and now I had to attempt some understanding. Why? Why me? Why him? Why there?

• From The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir (2004)

  “Can’t I see her, too? You know, separately?” He thought it a fine idea—same mom, common ground, and similar information. She was less enthusiastic, but she finally agreed. Great—I finally had the shrink of my dreams, and she could now help me deal with the very annoying man who came with the deal. Here was a different kind of triangle—not sexual, per se—but more insidious. All my conversations with the Boyfriend were about our different, and occasionally mutual, therapy. In bed with Mom we certainly were—trouble was, I came to love Mom more than I loved him, while he remained convinced that he was her most cherished client. Just like when a man has bought three lap dances from a stripper, has a raging hard-on, and declares in all seriousness, “I think she really likes me!” When I initiated mistressing, our dear therapist announced that one of us had to go—or both. If we were potentially not monogamous and she knew it, the therapy would be poisoned. The Boyfriend announced that he’d had enough therapy and was ready to hit the road alone, comforted by the notion that when a man chooses his lover over his therapist it is a sign of his newly found independence and maturity. This was fortunate because I announced that I would definitely not give up the shrink no matter what. I chose my therapist over my lover, which was a sign of my own growing maturity: I had finally decided to choose a woman over a man. After four or five months of mistressing, I ended it completely and during the last phone call with the Boyfriend the elegant irony became apparent: he had now lost not only his lover but his shrink as well. I see it like this: you just never really can know what a particular connection is about—until later. The Last Boyfriend was about me finding a woman who would not only witness and analyze my misery but whose very presence in my life echoed my never-before-possible ability to endorse myself above, and beyond, any man. And when A-Man entered my world, she endorsed me from behind as well—while I learned to embrace my masochism sexually and leave it out of my life. DURING A-MAN You just don’t know when he’s going to show up. The one who is going to change everything forever, the one who’s going to rock your world. He might even be someone you already know. The Young Man had been gone for two years. In the meantime, I had acquired the Boyfriend, while the redhead Pre-Raphaelite had acquired a tall, skinny, rocker musician who wore more makeup than she did: they painted each other’s nails and were mad in monogamous love. So when the Young Man called, I knew it would have to be a two-way; the safety of a three-way sandwich was no longer an option.

• From Justine (Alexandria Quartet vol. 1) (1957)

  I turned at last into an empty café where I drank coffee served by a Saidi whose grotesque squint seemed to double every object he gazed upon. In the far corner, curled up on a trunk and so still that she was invisible at first sat a very old lady smoking a narguileh which from time to time uttered a soft air-bubble of sound like the voice of a dove. Here I thought the whole story through from beginning to end, starting in the days before I ever knew Melissa and ending somewhere soon in an idle pragmatic death in a city to which I did not belong; I say that I thought it through, but strangely enough I thought of it not as a personal history with an individual accent so much as part of the historical fabric of the place. I described it to myself as part and parcel of the city’s behaviour, completely in keeping with everything that had gone before, and everything that would follow it. It was as if my imagination had become subtly drugged by the ambience of the place and could not respond to personal, individual assessments. I had lost the capacity to feel even the thrill of danger. My sharpest regret, characteristically enough, was for the jumble of manuscript notes which might be left behind. I had always hated the incomplete, the fragmentary. I decided that they at least must be destroyed before I went a step further. I rose to my feet — only to be struck by a sudden realization that the man I had seen in the little booth had been Mnemjian. How was it possible to mistake that misformed back? This thought occupied me as I recrossed the quarter, moving towards the larger thoroughfares in the direction of the sea. I walked across this mirage of narrow intersecting alleys as one might walk across a battlefield which had swallowed up all the friends of one’s youth; yet I could not help in delighting at every scent and sound — a survivor’s delight. Here at one corner stood a flame-swallower with his face turned up to the sky, spouting a column of flame from his mouth which turned black with flapping fumes at the edges and bit a hole in the sky. From time to time he took a swig at a bottle of petrol before throwing back his head once more and gushing flames six feet high. At every corner the violet shadows fell and foundered, striped with human experience — at once savage and tenderly lyrical. I took it as a measure of my maturity that I was filled no longer with despairing self-pity but with a desire to be claimed by the city, enrolled among its trivial or tragic memories — if it so wished.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  Don’t you worry I’ll raise a row; that I’ll tell the papers - the police - your secret?’ ‘And with it, your own? Oh no, Miss King. I have no fear of sensation: on the contrary, I court it! I seek out sensation! And so do you.’ She leaned closer, and fingered a lock of my hair. ‘You say I know nothing about you; but I have watched you upon the streets, remember. How coolly you pose and wander and flirt! Did you think you could play at Ganymede, for ever? Did you think, if you wore a silken cock, it meant you never had a cunt at the seam of your drawers?’ Her face was very close to my own; she would not let me turn my eyes from hers. She said: ‘You’re like me: you have shown it, you are showing it now! It is your own sex for which you really hunger! You thought, perhaps, to stifle your own appetites: but you have only made them swell the more! And that is why you won’t raise a row - why you still stay, and be my tart, as I desire.’ She gave my hair a cruel twist. ‘Admit that it is as I say!’ ‘It is!’ For it was, it was! What she said was the truth: she had found out all my secrets; she had shown me to myself. Not just with the fierce words of that moment, but with all - the kisses, the caresses, the fuck on the chair - that had made her say them; and I was glad! I had loved Kitty - I would always love Kitty. But I had lived with her a kind of queer half-life, hiding from my own true self. Since then I had refused to love at all, had become - or so I thought - a creature beyond passion, driving others to their secret, humiliating confessions of lust; but never offering my own. Now, this lady had torn it from me - had laid me bare, as surely as if she had ripped the shrieking flesh from my white bones. She pressed against me still; and even as her breath came warm against my cheek, I felt my lusts rise up to meet her own, and knew myself in thrall. After all, there are moments in our lives that change us, that discontent us with our pasts and offer us new futures.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  Alice’s voice becomes tender as she continues. “It was also the first time I thought that maybe my father was sad. That maybe he had lost something too. I know it sounds strange, but honestly, I never thought about how he felt when I didn’t want to see him anymore. I never imagined how he felt when he walked into his office that Monday morning. It didn’t occur to me that maybe my mother did this to hurt him and not only to heal herself. Even when I say it now, it feels wrong. I don’t think she had bad intentions.” I hear how through Art’s eyes, Alice’s view of her father became more nuanced. She could start seeing him and her mother as complex humans who struggled to survive. “After about a month of nightly conversations with Art, when we talked about absolutely everything, I agreed to meet him outside of the office. And that was it.” Alice pauses. “We spent that night together and knew that we would spend every night of the rest of our lives together. A month later we tried to get pregnant.” “And you felt like you were betraying your mother,” I say. “Oh yeah,” she replies. “I obviously told my mother right away and she was happy for me, but I knew that I had crossed some secret line. I was afraid to tell her that he wasn’t legally divorced yet. I was afraid she would see that as a move toward my father and would worry that I might forgive him and leave her. So I told her gradually. “At first she just listened, as she always did. She was always a good listener. And then she asked, ‘Is he a good man, Alice?’ And that made me so uncomfortable because I knew what she really wanted to ask. I knew she was thinking about my father. But she didn’t want to ruin it for me. She just kept asking if he was a good man. “‘Why do you keep asking that, Mom? Of course he is,’ I answered, and she noticed that I was irritated. “‘I love you more than anything,’ she said. ‘I want you to be with a good man. I want you to be happy. One day you will have a daughter and you will understand that.’” Alice looks at me. “To tell you the truth,” she says, “it did ruin it for me. It made me worried. I felt her doubt and I thought that maybe she could see something about Art that I couldn’t. When I was with him, I felt completely safe, but when I was with her, I felt her suspicion of him, and it made me doubt my own judgment.” I wonder out loud if it was her fear of losing Alice that made her mother so worried.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  She smiled - a curiously vague and inward-seeming kind of smile. ‘I never said, did I,’ she went on, ‘what I did that night?’ I shook my head. I remembered very well what I had done that night - I had supped with Diana, and then fucked her in her handsome bedroom, and then been sent from it, chilled and chastened, to my own. But I had never stopped to think what Florence might have done; and she, indeed, had never told me. ‘What did you do?’ I asked now. ‘Did you go to that - that lecture, on your own?’ ‘I did,’ she said. She took a breath. ‘I - met a girl there.’ ‘A girl?’ ‘Yes. Her name was Lilian. I saw her at once, and couldn’t take my eyes from her. She was so very - interesting looking. You know how it is, with a girl, sometimes? - well, no, perhaps you don’t...’ But I did, I did! And now I gazed at her, and felt myself grow warm; and then rather chill. She coughed, and put a hand to her mouth. Then she said, still gazing at the coals: ‘When the lecture was finished Lilian asked a question - it was a very clever question, and the speaker was quite thrown by it. I looked at her then, and knew I must know her. I went over to her, and we began to talk. We talked - we talked, Nance, for an hour, quite without stopping! She had the most unusual views. She’d read, it seemed to me, everything, and had opinions on it all.’ The story went on. They had become friends; Lilian had come calling... ‘You loved her!’ I said. Florence blushed, and then nodded. ‘You couldn’t have known her, and not loved her a little.’ ‘But Flo, you loved her! You loved her — like a tom!’ She blinked, and put a finger to her lip, and blushed harder than ever. ‘I thought,’ she said, ‘you might have guessed it ...’ ‘Guessed it! I - I am not sure. I never thought you might have - well, I cannot say what I thought...’ She turned her head away. ‘She loved me, too,’ she said, after a moment. ‘She loved me, like anything! But, not in the same way. I knew it never would be, I didn’t mind. The fact is, she had a man-friend, who wished to marry her. But she wouldn’t do it, she believed in the free union. Nance, she was the strongest-minded woman I ever knew!’ She sounded, I thought, insufferable; but I had not missed that was. I swallowed, and Florence gazed once at me, then looked again at the fire. ‘A few months after I first met her,’ she went on, ‘I began to see that she was not - quite well. One day she turned up here with a suitcase.

• From Less (2017)

  The restaurant sits on a rock above the river and is very old and water stained in ways that would delight a painter and trouble a contractor; some of the walls seem bent with humidity, and paper hangings have taken on the crinkle Less associates with books he has left in the rain. Intact are the old tile roof, wide roof beams, carved rosettes, and sliding paper walls of the old inn this used to be. A tall stately woman meets him at the entrance, bowing and greeting him by name. On their tour of the old inn, they pass a window onto an enormous walled garden. “The garden was planted four hundred years ago, when the surrounding area was poplar.” The woman makes a sweeping gesture, and he nods in appreciation. “And now,” Less says, “it’s unpoplar.” She blinks for a polite moment, then leads him into another wing, and he follows the sway of her green and gold kimono. At the portal, she slips off her clogs, and he unlaces and removes his shoes. There is sand in them: Saharan or Keralan? The woman gestures to a sniffling teenage girl in a blue kimono, who leads him down another corridor. This one is filled with hanging calligraphy and has the Alice in Wonderland effect of beginning with an enormous wooden frame and ending in a door so small that as the woman slides it sideways into a pocket in the wall, she is forced to get onto her knees to enter. It is clear that Less is meant to do the same. He supposes he is meant to experience humility; by now, he is well acquainted with humility. It is the one piece of luggage he has not lost. There, in the room, a small table, a paper wall, and one glass window so ancient that the garden behind it undulates dreamily as Less crosses the room. The room is wallpapered in large faint gold and silver snowflakes; he is told the design is from the Edo period, when microscopes made their way to Japan. Before that, no one had seen a snowflake. He takes a seat on a cushion beside a golden folding screen. The young woman exits through the little door. He hears her struggling to close it behind her; it has clearly suffered for centuries and is ready to die. He looks around at the golden screen, the stylized snowflakes, the single iris in a vase below a drawing of a deer, the paper wall. The only sound is the breathing of a humidifier behind him, and, despite the purity of the room, the view, no one has bothered to remove from its surface the sticker DAINICHI RELIABILITY . Before him: the warped view of the garden. He starts back in recognition. Here it is.