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 Confessions of the Flesh (The History of Sexuality, Vol. 4) (2021)

  Among the Greeks and the Romans, the practice of life guidance included a fairly wide range of different procedures. One finds it in the form of discontinuous and circumstantial relations: Antiphon the Sophist maintained a consulting office where he would sell advice to those facing difficult situations,2 and the physicians would respond to requests concerning not only physical ailments but also moral illnesses: just as much as preventive methods or guidelines for health, the regimens they prescribed were rules for living, for controlling the passions, gaining self-control, managing the economy of pleasures, and ensuring fairness in relations with others.3 But the consultations could also be acts of friendship and kindness, without remuneration: conversations, exchanges of correspondence, drafting of a little treatise addressed to a friend in distress. In general, these episodic forms of direction responded to a specific situation: a stroke of bad luck, exile, a spell of mourning could trigger them, but also a crisis, a period of difficulty, a moment of uncertainty. This was the case with Serenus when he explained his condition to Seneca, requesting the aid of his diagnosis and his counsel.4 He felt he was no longer progressing on the path of Stoic wisdom: opposite impulses were agitating his soul, not to the point of provoking a “storm,” but with enough force to give him “something like seasickness.”5 But there also existed much more continuous and much more institutionalized forms of direction. They functioned in the schools of philosophy in particular. There the discipline of collective life that was imposed on everyone was completed by much more individualized relations. The teacher was a constant guide for the disciple: he taught him the truth little by little, helped him progress on the path of virtue, self-control, and tranquility of the soul, tested his progress, and, day by day, gave him advice on living. Thus, among the Epicureans, individual interviews were set up, a rule of frankness was imposed on members of the school, encouraging everyone to reveal their soul and not to hide anything, so that they might be guided effectively; only the wisest teachers could take charge of this individual direction of students, while the others had the collective responsibility for a group.6

• From Becoming Myself: A Psychiatrist's Memoir (2017)

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN COMING ASHORE I n 1964, three years into my career at Stanford, I decided to attend an eight-day National Training Laboratory Institute at Lake Arrowhead in Southern California. The weeklong institute program offered many social psychological activities, but the heart of it, and my reason for going, was the daily three-hour small-group meeting. I arrived a few minutes early the morning of the first meeting, took one of the thirteen chairs placed in a circle, and glanced about at the leader and the other early arrivals. Though I had much experience leading therapy groups, and was heavily involved in group therapy research and teaching, I had never been a member of a group. It was time to remedy that. No one spoke as the others filed in and took seats. At 8:30, the leader, Dorothy Garwood, a therapist in private practice with two PhDs (biochemistry and psychology), stood up and introduced herself: “Welcome to the 1964 Lake Arrowhead NTL Institute,” she said. “This group will be meeting every morning at this time for three hours for the next eight days, and I’d like us to keep everything we say, all of our comments, in the here-and-now.” A long silence followed. I thought, “That’s all?” and looked around to see eleven faces radiating perplexity and eleven heads shaking in bewilderment. After a minute, members responded: “That’s a pretty skimpy orientation.” “Is this some kind of joke?” “We don’t even know anyone’s name.” No response from the leader. Gradually, the collective uncertainty began to generate its own energy: “This is pathetic. Is this the kind of leadership we’re getting?” “That’s rude. She’s doing her job. Don’t you get that this is a process group? We have to examine our own process.” “Right, I have a hunch, more than a hunch, she knows exactly what she’s doing.” “That is blind faith: I’ve never liked blind faith. The truth is we’re floundering, and where is she? Sure as hell not helping us.” There were a few pauses between comments as members waited for the leader to respond. But she smiled and remained silent. Other members pitched in. “And, anyway, how are we supposed to stay in the here-and-now when we have no history together? We’ve just met today for the first time.” “I’m always uncomfortable with this kind of silence.” “Yeah, me too. We’re paying a good bit of money and we’re sitting here doing nothing and wasting time.” “Personally, I like the silence. Sitting here quietly with all of you mellows me out.” “Me, too. I just slip into meditation. I feel focused, ready for anything.” A s I engaged in this interchange and reflected upon it, I had an epiphany—I learned something that I later incorporated into the very core of my approach to group therapy.

• From Henry Miller on Writing (1964)

  Once the moment is passed, moreover, the witness is altered forever. In another sense, the situation might be described as the transition from belief to faith. Once faith has been established, there is no regression; whereas with belief everything is in suspense and capable of fluctuation. It should also be recognized that those who have real power have no need to demonstrate it for themselves; it is never in their own interests, or for their own glorification, that these performances are made. In fact, there is nothing miraculous, in the vulgar sense, about these acts, unless it be the ability to raise the consciousness of the onlooker to that mysterious level of illumination which is natural to the Master. Men who are ignorant of the source of their powers, on the other hand, men who are regarded as the powers that move the world, usually come to a disastrous end. Of their efforts it is truly said that all comes to nought. On the worldly level nothing endures, because on this level, which is the level of dream and delusion, all is fear and wish vainly cemented by will. To revert to the artist again…. Once he has made use of his extraordinary powers, and I am thinking of the use of obscenity in just such magical terms, he is inevitably caught up in the stream of forces beyond him. He may have begun by assuming that he could awaken his readers, but in the end he himself passes into another dimension of reality wherein he no longer feels the need of forcing an awakening. His rebellion over the prevalent inertia about him becomes transmuted, as his vision increases, into an acceptance and understanding of an order and harmony which is beyond man’s conception and approachable only through faith. His vision expands with the growth of his own powers, because creation has its roots in vision and admits of only one realm, the realm of imagination. Ultimately, then, he stands among his own obscene objurgations like the conqueror midst the ruins of a devastated city. He realizes that the real nature of the obscene resides in the lust to convert. He knocked to awaken, but it was himself he awakened. And once awake, he is no longer concerned with the world of sleep; he walks in the light and, like a mirror, reflects his illumination in every act. Once this vantage point is reached, how trifling and remote seem the accusations of moralists! How senseless the debate as to whether the work in question was of high literary merit or not! How absurd the wrangling over the moral or immoral nature of his creation! Concerning every bold act one may raise the reproach of vulgarity. Everything dramatic is in the nature of an appeal, a frantic appeal for communion. Violence, whether in deed or speech, is an inverted sort of prayer. Initiation itself is a violent process of purification and union.

• From Confessions of the Flesh (The History of Sexuality, Vol. 4) (2021)

  During the same era in which Tertullian wrote, a new institution was developing that had the role of organizing, regulating, and controlling this purification prior to baptism. Doubtless this did not involve a radical innovation so much as an institutionalization, according to a model that tends to give a general form to the practices of catechesis and preparation for baptism. Historians recognize several reasons for this establishment of a catechumenate, which, in the third century, came more and more to resemble an “order,” alongside that of the baptized believers. There was the influx of candidates, which threatened to weaken the intensity of religious life; the existence of persecutions, causing the insufficiently prepared to abandon their faith; and the struggle against heresies, implying a more rigorous instruction in the rules of living and in doctrinal content. To which the model of the mystery religions should perhaps be added, with the care that was taken in training their initiates.39 The catechumenate constitutes a very long period of preparation (it can last three years), in which the catechesis and the teaching of the truths and the rules are combined with a set of moral prescriptions, ritual and practical obligations, and duties. In addition—and this is what should be retained here—this preparation is punctuated with procedures designed to “test” the candidate: that is, to show what he is made of, attest to the “labor” he is engaged in, testify to his transformation and to the genuineness of his purification. These procedures correspond to the probatio, which for Tertullian was one of the meanings of the discipline of penitence that he considered indispensable to baptismal preparation. And they show that metanoia must not be understood only as the movement by which the soul turns toward the truth in detaching itself from the world, from errors and sins, but also as an exercise in which the soul must reveal itself, its qualities and its will. In short, it’s the institutional aspect of the principle that the soul’s access to truth cannot be gained without the soul manifesting its own truth. This is the “price,” in a sense—to take up Tertullian’s metaphor with its quite particular interpretation—that the soul must pay for entry into the light that will fill it.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  Accordingly, Christmas Day come, the lady arose at daybreak and attiring herself, repaired to the church appointed her of her husband, who, on his part, betook himself to the same place and reached it before her. Having already taken order with the chaplain of that which he had a mind to do, he hastily donned one of the latter's gowns, with a great flapped cowl, such as we see priests wear, and drawing the hood a little over his face, seated himself in the choir. The lady, entering the chapel, enquired for the chaplain, who came and hearing from her that she would fain confess, said that he could not hear her, but would send her one of his brethren. Accordingly, going away, he sent her the jealous man, in an ill hour for the latter, who came up with a very grave air, and albeit the day was not over bright and he had drawn the cowl far over his eyes, knew not so well to disguise himself but he was readily recognized by the lady, who, seeing this, said in herself, 'Praised be God! From a jealous man he is turned priest; but no matter; I will e'en give him what he goeth seeking.'

• From Another Country (1962)

  He drank his whiskey very slowly, watching and listening to the crowd around him. They had been college boys, mostly, in his day, but both he and they had grown older and he gathered, from the conversations around him, that the college boys had graduated into the professions. He had his eye, vaguely, on a frail, blonde girl, who also seemed, somewhat less vaguely, to have her eye on him: incredibly enough, she seemed to be a lawyer. And he was abruptly very excited, as he had been years ago, at the prospect of making it with a chick above his station, a chick he was not even supposed to be able to look at. He was from the slums of Brooklyn and that stink was on him, and it turned out to be the stink that they were looking for. They were tired of boys who washed too much, who had no odor in their armpits and no sweat on their balls. He looked at the blonde again, wondering what she was like with no clothes on. She was sitting at a table near the door, facing him, toying with a daiquiri glass, and talking to a heavy, gray-haired man, who had a high giggle, who was a little drunk, and whom Vivaldo recognized as a fairly well-known poet. The blonde reminded him of Cass. And this made him realize—for the first time, it is astonishing how well the obvious can be hidden—that when he had met Cass, so many years ago, he had been terribly flattered that so highborn a lady noticed such a stinking boy. He had been overwhelmed. And he had adored Richard without reserve, not, as it now turned out, because of Richard’s talent, which, in any case, he had then been quite unable to judge, but merely because Richard possessed Cass. He had envied Richard’s prowess, and had imagined that this envy was love. But, surely, there had been love in it, or they could never have been friends for so long. (Had they been friends? what had they ever, really, said to one another?) Perhaps the proof of Vivaldo’s love resided in the fact that he had never thought of Cass carnally, as a woman, but only as a lady, and Richard’s wife. But, more probably, it was only that they were older and he had needed older people who cared about him, who took him seriously, whom he could trust. For this, he would have paid any price whatever. They were not much older now, he was nearly twenty-nine, Richard was thirty-seven or thirty-eight, Cass was thirty-three or thirty-four: but they had seemed, especially in the blazing haven of their love, much older then.

• From Girls & Sex (2016)

  “It’s about communication,” Denison continued. “That doesn’t mean you sing ‘Kumbaya’ in the middle of intercourse, but it does mean you are sharing with your partner. You are being intimate. You get to decide what that intimacy looks like and feels like, and you get to define what ‘intimate’ is. But there are two people involved—that ‘you’ is plural. Another way you can think about it is: ‘What will be a positive sexual experience for everyone involved?’” A boy in a football jersey, both of whose earlobes were pierced, raised his hand. “I never thought of it before, but in that baseball metaphor? You’re trying to score against them.” “Exactly,” Denison agreed. “There’s a winner and a loser in baseball. It’s a competition.” “So who is supposed to be the loser?” a girl asked. “The other person?” Denison just smiled. Watching the kids’ interchange reminded me of a conversation I’d had with one of Denison’s former students, Olivia, now a freshman in college. Olivia had told me she’d hooked up a lot during ninth and tenth grades. She couldn’t say why—she certainly wasn’t enjoying herself, and it made her feel, as she put it, “gross.” “There wasn’t a moment that things changed for me,” she said one afternoon as we chatted in a café near her former high school. “I just started to understand that I wasn’t behaving how I wanted to behave and I wasn’t the person I wanted to be. Charis’s class was a huge part of it, though. I learned to consciously make decisions instead of just letting things happen. And I began to really think about my values and my morals.” She tugged thoughtfully at a lock of dark hair. “I think the biggest difference is that now I try to live consciously, with intent. Like, I used to think, ‘Oh, okay, I guess we’re hooking up now,’ instead of thinking about whether I really wanted to be doing it. It’s not that I stopped hooking up entirely, but by my junior year, I was less impulsive. And I felt very much like I was participating in it, not just going along with it.”

• From The Confessions of Saint Augustine (354)

  And it was manifested unto me, that those things be good which yet are corrupted; which neither were they sovereignly good, nor unless they were good could he corrupted: for if sovereignly good, they were incorruptible, if not good at all, there were nothing in them to be corrupted. For corruption injures, but unless it diminished goodness, it could not injure. Either then corruption injures not, which cannot be; or which is most certain, all which is corrupted is deprived of good. But if they he deprived of all good, they shall cease to be. For if they shall be, and can now no longer he corrupted, they shall be better than before, because they shall abide incorruptibly. And what more monstrous than to affirm things to become better by losing all their good? Therefore, if they shall be deprived of all good, they shall no longer be. So long therefore as they are, they are good: therefore whatsoever is, is good. That evil then which I sought, whence it is, is not any substance: for were it a substance, it should be good. For either it should be an incorruptible substance, and so a chief good: or a corruptible substance; which unless it were good, could not be corrupted. I perceived therefore, and it was manifested to me that Thou madest all things good, nor is there any substance at all, which Thou madest not; and for that Thou madest not all things equal, therefore are all things; because each is good, and altogether very good, because our God made all things very good.

• From Another Country (1962)

  “Do wonders for our bank account, too. Don’t you let this lousy ex-expatriate come here and turn your head.” He walked over to the bar and poured himself a drink. “Did you leave many broken hearts over there?” “They were very restrained about it. Those centuries of breeding mean something, you know.” “That’s what they kept telling me when I was over there. It didn’t seem to mean much, though, beyond poverty and corruption and disease. How did you find it?” “I had a ball. I loved it. Of course, I wasn’t in the Army—” “Did you like the French? I couldn’t stand them; I thought they were as ugly and as phony as they come.” “I didn’t feel that. They can be pretty damn exasperating—but, hell, I liked them.” “Well. Of course, you’re a far more patient sort than I’ve ever been.” He grinned. “How’s your French?” “Du trottoir—of the sidewalk. But fluent.” “You learn it in bed?” He blushed. Richard watched him and laughed. “Yes. As a matter of fact.” Richard carried his drink to the sofa and sat down. “I can see that traveling hasn’t improved your morals any. You going to be around awhile?” Eric sat down in the armchair across the room from Richard. “Well, I’ve got to be here at least until the play opens. But after that—who knows?” “Well,” said Richard, and raised his glass, “here’s hoping. May it run longer than Tobacco Road.” Eric shuddered. “Not with me in it, bud.” He drank, he lit a cigarette; a certain familiar fear and anger began to stir in him. “Tell me about yourself, bring me up to date.” But, as he said this, he realized that he did not care what Richard had been doing. He was merely being polite because Richard was married to Cass. He wondered if he had always felt this way. Perhaps he had never been able to admit it to himself. Perhaps Richard had changed—but did people change? He wondered what he would think of Richard if he were meeting him for the first time. Then he wondered what Yves would think of these people and what these people would think of Yves. “There isn’t much to tell. You know about the book—I’ll get a copy for you, a coming-home present—” “That should make you glad you’ve returned,” said Cass. Richard looked at her, smiling. “No sabotage, please.” He said to Eric, “Cass still likes to make fun of me.” Then, “There’s a new book coming, Hollywood may buy the first one, I’ve got a TV thing coming up.” “Anything for me in the TV bit?” “It’s cast. Sorry. We probably couldn’t have afforded you, anyway.” The doorbell rang. Cass went to answer it.

• From Paul and Palestinian Judaism (40th Anniversary Edition) (2017)

  Rather, 'what once had splendour has come to have no splendour at all, because of the splendour that surpasses it' (3.10). We can see the same way of thinking in Phil. 3. As to righteousness under the law, says Paul, he was blameless; and he was zealous for Judaism. Zeal and righteousness are not themselves bad (cf. also Rom. 10.2), and no human plight is depicted. Paul puts his view of his former life in Judaism thus: 'But whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ. Indeed I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord' (Phil. 3.6-8). This logic -that God's action in Christ alone provides salvation and makes everything else seem, in fact actually be worthless-seems to dominate Paul's view of the law. This way of stating Paul's position modifies Bornkamm's view that on the basis of justification by faith Paul broke with the Jewish law. 39 Precisely put, it was on the basis of salvation only through Christ. Only if one identifies Paul's soteriology as being exhaustively defined by 'righteousness by faith' can Bornkamm's view be maintained. How, then, shall we understand Rom. 1-5; 7, the chapters on which Bultmann explicitly based his view and in which many New Testament exegetes understand Paul to be working out his fundamental line of thought? For here it is clearly said that (1) all those under the law have sinned and been condemned for it; (2) God then provided for men's salvation apart from the law; (3) faith is the opposite of boasting; (4) what is wrong with the law is that it is deceitful; it promises life but gives death to the man who seeks life by it. We cannot solve all the problems which confront one in read- ing Romans, but it will be necessary to give a sketch of the argument and to understand the place of Paul's discussion of the law in it. We shall then be in a position to consider precisely what Paul's view of man's plight was. Schweitzer, in concluding his argument that the theme of righteousness by faith is not a whole doctrine in Paul, but can be understood only in light of Paul's eschatological Christ-mysticism, noted the difference between Galatians and Romans. In Galatians, there is no attempt to make the doctrine of righteousness by faith independent of the doctrine of being in the body of Christ, but in Romans there is.

• From Another Country (1962)

  But that is not so important—anyway, no matter how happy I may become, and I am sure that I shall have great moments yet, this house will always stay with me. I found out something here.” “And what was that?” Yves turned his head and looked up at Eric. “I was afraid that I would just remain a street boy forever, that I was no better than my mother.” He turned away, toward the window again. “But, somehow, down here in this house with you, I finally realized that that is not so. I have not to be a whore just because I come from whores. I am better than that.” He stopped. “I learned that from you. That is really strange, for, you know? in the beginning I thought you thought of me like that. I thought that you were just another sordid American, looking for a pretty, degenerate boy.” “But you are not pretty,” Eric said, and sipped his whiskey. “Au fait, tu es plutôt moche.” “Oh. Ça va .” “Your nose turns up.” He stroked the tip of Yves’ nose. “And your mouth’s too big”—Yves laughed—“and your forehead’s too high and soon you won’t have any hair.” He stroked Yves’ forehead, stroked his hair. “And those ears, baby! you look like an elephant or a flying machine.” “You are the first person who ever say that I am ugly. Perhaps that is why I am intrigued.” He laughed. “Well. Your eyes are not too bad.” “Tu parle. J’ai du chien, moi.” “Well, yes, baby, now that you mention it, I’m afraid you’ve got a point.” They were silent for a moment. “I have been with so many horrible people,” Yves said, gravely, “so soon, and for so long. Really, it is a wonder that I am not completely sauvage .” He sipped his whiskey. Eric could not see his face, but he could imagine the expression it held: hard and baffled and terribly young, with the cruelty that comes from pain and fear. “First, my mother and all those soldiers, ils étaient mes oncles, tous ,” and he laughed, “and then all those awful, slimy men, I no longer know how many.” He was silent again. “I lay in the bed, sometimes we never got to bed, and let them grunt and slobber. Some of them were really fantastic, no whore has ever told the truth about who comes to her, I am sure of that, they would chop off her head before they would dare to hear it. But it is happening, it is happening all the time.” He leaned up, hugging his knees, staring at the sea. “Then I would take their money; if they made difficulties I could scare them because I was mineur . Anyway, it was very easy to scare them.

• From Becoming Myself: A Psychiatrist's Memoir (2017)

  Bandler, an eminent analyst, concurred that my presentation spoke for itself and they had no additional comments. One by one each faculty member around the table made similar comments. I left the meeting stunned: all I had done was to tell a story that seemed so natural and easy for me. Throughout my college and medical education I had always felt invisible, but at that moment everything changed. I walked out thinking I might have something special to offer the field. M arried life was both wonderful and stressful during my last two years of medical school. Money was tight and, for the most part, my parents supported us. Marilyn earned some money by working part-time in a dentist’s office while studying for a master of arts in teaching degree at Harvard, while I continued to earn money by selling blood to the hospital. I had applied to be a sperm donor, but the urologist told me that my sperm count was too low and advised me not to delay any attempt to have children. How wrong he was! Marilyn conceived instantaneously on our honeymoon. Our daughter Eve’s middle name is “Frances” to indicate “made in France,” and a year and a half later, during my fourth year of medical school, Marilyn became pregnant again. My clinical clerkships in my last two years of med school demanded long hours, but somehow my anxiety had calmed, replaced perhaps by honest exhaustion and the gratification of feeling that I was being helpful to my patients. I grew more committed to psychiatry and began reading extensively in the field. Certain horrific scenes from my psychiatry clerkships stay in my mind: a room of human statues at the Boston State Hospital—an entire ward of catatonic patients spending their lives in absolute stillness. The patients were mute and spent hours standing in one position, some by their beds, some by a window, some sitting, sometimes muttering but usually silent. All the staff could do was to feed them, keep them alive, and speak to them kindly. Such scenes were to be found in every large hospital in the mid-1950s before the advent of the first tranquilizer, Thorazine, and, soon thereafter, Stelazine, followed by a continuous stream of new, more effective major tranquilizers. Another scene at the Boston State Hospital stays with me: At some point in my clerkship I was able to observe Dr. Max Day, a Harvard psychiatrist, leading a group of about twelve psychiatric residents who had been asked to study their own group process. As a medical student I was permitted to attend a single meeting but not to participate, not one word. Although more than half a century has passed, I can still see that room in my mind’s eye. The residents and Dr. Day sat in a circle in the center of a large room.

• From Survival of the Prettiest: The Science of Beauty (1999)

  Gardner Lindzey brings up another reason that beauty was shunned by social scientists—the “spectacular failure” of previous attempts to link physical attributes to behavior (phrenology, physiognomy, and so on). In the next chapter we will review these studies and see that they yielded very little in the way of scientific fact and spread many fictions. It is no wonder that many scientists were eager to dissociate themselves from this work. Charles Darwin was one of many of its near victims. The captain of the Beagle, like many people of his time, had been influenced by the physiognomist Johann Caspar Lavater’s Essays on Physiognomy, written in 1772, which suggested that certain facial features predict character. As Darwin wrote in his biography, the captain “was an ardent disciple of Lavater … and he doubted whether anyone with my nose could possess sufficient energy and determination for the voyage.” As psychologist Leslie Zebrowitz has said, “The theory of evolution was almost lost for want of a proper nose.” Social scientists shunned beauty as trivial, undemocratic, and all in all not a proper subject for science. But by the late 1960s, Lindzey was chiding his colleagues for their “neglect of morphology [outward appearance]” and suggesting, “Perhaps now is the time to restore beauty and other morphological variables to the study of social phenomena.” Within the next three decades an explosion of research was to provide compelling evidence for a new view of human beauty. It suggested that the assumption that beauty is an arbitrary cultural convention may simply not be true. The research comes at a time when scientists have begun to question anew many other assumptions about the relationship between human behavior and culture. As Leda Cosmides, John Tooby, and Jerome Barkow point out: “Culture is not causeless and disembodied. It is generated in rich and intricate ways by information-processing mechanisms situated in human minds. These mechanisms are in turn the elaborately sculpted product of the evolutionary process.” Clearly, culture cannot just spring forth from nowhere; it must be shaped by, and be responsive to, basic human instincts and innate preferences. Until the 1960s it was believed that languages could vary arbitrarily and without limit, but now there is a consensus among linguists that there is a universal grammar underlying this diversity. Similarly, it was thought that facial expressions of emotion could arbitrarily vary across cultures until the psychologist Paul Ekman showed that many emotions are expressed by the same facial movements across cultures. Ekman made the important distinction between the facial expression of emotion (smiles, frowns, scowls, and so on), which are universal, and the rules for when to display those emotions, which show cultural variation. Similarly, aspects of judgments of human beauty may be influenced by culture and individual history, but the general geometric features of a face that give rise to perception of beauty may be universal.

• From Survival of the Prettiest: The Science of Beauty (1999)

  Mothers can recognize their babies by smell alone within six hours after birth, and within days babies can recognize their mothers’ distinct smells. As adults, we can recognize our own smells well enough to reliably fish out our T-shirts from a pile of others. Wedekind’s research suggests that we become attracted to the people who smell the least like our family members. When we tamper with our reproductive capability, as when we use birth control pills, we also derail this mechanism. Wedekind concludes that “no one smells good to everybody, it depends on who is sniffing whom.” People sometimes wonder why some beauties leave them sexually unaroused: perhaps they are sniffing something too close to home. Not Waiting for Beauty Visual beauty does not reign supreme in our sensual world—we are lured by beautiful voices, gestures of invitation, and sexy smells. We are even drawn to people by secretions from their hormones and immune systems that we cannot consciously detect. Looks are not everything, even in the superficial world of attraction and glances. But we are still left with the question of how to think about beauty, or why we should be thinking about it. After all, beauty is howlingly unfair. It is a genetic given. And physical appearance tells us little about a person’s intelligence, kindness, pluck, sense of humor, or steadfastness, although we think it does. As Tom Wolfe has written, “At the very core of fashionable society exists a monstrous vulgarity: The habit of judging human beings by standards having no necessary relation to their character. To be found dwelling upon this vulgarity, absorbed in it, is like being found watching a suck ’n fuck movie.” The grubbiness spreads contagiously and no one wants to touch the topic. But our squeamishness is no reason to stay away. Knowledge is power: the more we know about human nature, the better hope we have of addressing inequalities and of changing ourselves. Scientific inquiry is different from the assignment of value, and the fact that a tendency or preference is innate does not mean that culture, nurture, and circumstance cannot radically alter its expression. Our impulses are not necessarily good, but they are resistible. The politics of beauty needs a fresh forum, free from the attacks of the beauty bashers, as well as the unthinking reverence of beauty worshipers. As Lester Bangs wrote in 1979 about another fact of life (rock music), since it is “bound to stay in your life you would hope to see it reach some point where it might not add to the cruelty and exploitation already in the world.” Beauty is not going anywhere. The idea that beauty is unimportant or a cultural construct is the real beauty myth. We have to understand beauty, or we will always be enslaved by it.

• From The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1915)

  It is true that this logic is disconcerting for us. Yet we must be careful not to depreciate it: howsoever crude it may appear to us, it has been an aid of the greatest importance in the intellectual evolution of humanity. In fact, it is through it that the first explanation of the world has been made possible. Of course the mental habits it implies prevented men from seeing reality as their senses show it to them; but as they show it, it has the grave inconvenience of allowing of no explanation. For to explain is to attach things to each other and to establish relations between them which make them appear to us as functions of each other and as vibrating sympathetically according to an internal law founded in their nature. But sensations, which see nothing except from the outside, could never make them disclose these relations and internal bonds; the intellect alone can create the notion of them. When I learn that A regularly precedes B, my knowledge is increased by a new fact; but my intelligence is not at all satisfied with a statement which does not show its reason. I commence to _understand_ only if it is possible for me to conceive B in a way that makes it appear to me as something that is not foreign to A, and as united to A by some relation of kinship. The great service that religions have rendered to thought is that they have constructed a first representation of what these relations of kinship between things may be. In the circumstances under which it was attempted, the enterprise could obviously attain only precarious results. But then, does it ever attain any that are definite, and is it not always necessary to reconsider them? And also, it is less important to succeed than to try. The essential thing was not to leave the mind enslaved to visible appearances, but to teach it to dominate them and to connect what the senses separated; for from the moment when men have an idea that there are internal connections between things, science and philosophy become possible. Religion opened up the way for them. But if it has been able to play this part, it is only because it is a social affair. In order to make a law for the impressions of the senses and to substitute a new way of representing reality for them, thought of a new sort had to be founded: this is collective thought. If this alone has had this efficacy, it is because of the fact that to create a world of ideals through which the world of experienced realities would appear transfigured, a super-excitation of the intellectual forces was necessary, which is possible only in and through society.

• From Wild (2012)

  I thought of the woman I always thought of in such moments: an astrologer who’d read my natal chart when I was twenty-three. A friend had arranged for the reading as a going-away gift just before I left Minnesota for New York City. The astrologer was a no-nonsense middle-aged woman named Pat who sat me down at her kitchen table with a piece of paper covered in mysterious markings and a quietly whirring tape recorder between us. I didn’t put much faith in it. I thought it would be a bit of fun, an ego-boosting session during which she’d say generic things like You have a kind heart. But she didn’t. Or rather, she said those things, but she also said bizarrely specific things that were so accurate and particular, so simultaneously consoling and upsetting, that it was all I could do not to bawl in recognition and grief. “How can you know this?” I kept demanding. And then I would listen as she explained about the planets, the sun and the moon, the “aspects” and the moment I was born; about what it meant to be a Virgo, with a moon in Leo and Gemini rising. I’d nod while thinking, This is a bunch of crazy New Age anti-intellectual bullshit, and then she’d say another thing that would blow my brain into about seven thousand pieces because it was so true. Until she began to speak of my father. “Was he a Vietnam vet?” she asked. No, I told her, he wasn’t. He was in the military briefly in the mid-1960s—in fact, he was stationed at the base in Colorado Springs where my mother’s father was stationed, which is how my parents met—but he never went to Vietnam. “It seems he was like a Vietnam vet,” she persisted. “Perhaps not literally. But he has something in common with some of those men. He was deeply wounded. He was damaged. His damage has infected his life and it infected you.” I was not going to nod. Everything that had ever happened to me in my whole life was mixed into the cement that kept my head perfectly still at the moment an astrologer told me that my father had infected me. “Wounded?” was all I could manage. “Yes,” said Pat. “And you’re wounded in the same place. That’s what fathers do if they don’t heal their wounds. They wound their children in the same place.” “Hmm,” I said, my face blank. “I could be wrong.” She gazed down at the paper between us. “This isn’t necessarily literal.” “Actually, I only saw my father three times after I was six,” I said. “The father’s job is to teach his children how to be warriors, to give them the confidence to get on the horse and ride into battle when it’s necessary to do so. If you don’t get that from your father, you have to teach yourself.” O “But—I think I have already,” I sputtered. “I’m strong—I face things. I—”

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

  The precise time and place and circumstances of this great change are not accurately known. He was very reticent about himself. It probably occurred at Orleans or Paris in the latter part of the year 1532.413 In a letter of October, 1533, to Francis Daniel, he first speaks of the Reformation in Paris, the rage of the Sorbonne, and the satirical comedy against the queen of Navarre.414 In November of the same year he publicly attacked the Sorbonne. In a familiar letter to Bucer in Strassburg, which is dated from Noyon, Sept. 4 (probably in 1534), he recommends a French refugee, falsely accused of holding the opinions of the Anabaptists, and says, "I entreat of you, master Bucer, if my prayers, if my tears are of any avail, that you would compassionate and help him in his wretchedness. The poor are left in a special manner to your care; you are the helper of the orphan.... Most learned Sir, farewell; thine from my heart."415 There never was a change of conviction purer in motive, more radical in character, more fruitful and permanent in result. It bears a striking resemblance to that still greater event near Damascus, which transformed a fanatical Pharisee into an apostle of Jesus Christ. And, indeed, Calvin was not unlike St. Paul in his intellectual and moral constitution; and the apostle of sovereign grace and evangelical freedom had not a more sympathetic expounder than Luther and Calvin.416 Without any intention or effort on his part, Calvin became the head of the evangelical party in less than a year after his conversion. Seekers of the truth came to him from all directions. He tried in vain to escape them. Every quiet retreat was turned into a school. He comforted and strengthened the timid brethren in their secret meetings of devotion. He avoided all show of learning, but, as the old Chronicle of the French Reformed Church reports, he showed such depth of knowledge and such earnestness of speech that no one could hear him without being forcibly impressed. He usually began and closed his exhortations with the word of Paul, "If God is for us, who can be against us?" This is the keynote of his theology and piety. He remained for the present in the Catholic Church. His aim was to reform it from within rather than from without, until circumstances compelled him to leave. § 73. Calvin’s Call. As in the case of Paul, Calvin’s call to his life-work coincided with his conversion, and he proved it by his labors. "By their fruits ye shall know them."

• From Another Country (1962)

  That day. That day. Had he known where that day would lead him would he have writhed as he did, in such an anguished joy, beneath the great weight of his first lover? But if he had known, or been capable of caring, where such a day might lead him, it could never have been his necessity to bring about such a day. He was frightened and in pain and the boy who held him so relentlessly was suddenly a stranger; and yet this stranger worked in Eric an eternal, a healing transformation. Many years were to pass before he could begin to accept what he, that day, in those arms, with the stream whispering in his ear, discovered; and yet that day was the beginning of his life as a man. What had always been hidden was to him, that day, revealed and it did not matter that, fifteen years later, he sat in an armchair, overlooking a foreign sea, still struggling to find the grace which would allow him to bear that revelation. For the meaning of revelation is that what is revealed is true, and must be borne. But how to bear it? He rose from his seat and paced restlessly into the garden. The kitten lay curled on the stone doorstep, in the last of the sun, asleep. Then he heard Yves’ bicycle bell and, shortly, Yves’ head appeared above the low stone wall. He passed, looking straight ahead, and then Eric heard him in the kitchen, bumping into things and opening and closing the icebox door. Then Yves stood beside him. “Madame Belet will be here in a few moments. She is cooking for us a chicken. And I have bought some whiskey and some cigarettes.” Then he looked at Eric and frowned. “You are mad to be standing here in your bathrobe. The sun is down and it is getting cold. Come in and get dressed, I will make us both a drink.” “What would I do without you?” “I wonder.” Eric followed him into the house. “I also bought some champagne,” Yves said, suddenly, and he turned to face Eric with a small, shy smile, “to celebrate our last night here.” Then he walked into the kitchen. “Get dressed,” he called, “Madame Belet will be here soon.” Eric stepped into the bedroom and began putting on his clothes. “Are we going out after dinner?” “Perhaps. That depends. If we are not too drunk on champagne.” “I’d just as soon stay in, I think.” “Oh, perhaps we must have just one last look at our little seaside town.” “We have to get packed, you know, and clean up this house a little, and try to get some sleep.” “Madame Belet will clean it for us. Anyway, we would never be able to get it done. We can sleep on the train. And we do not have so very much to pack.”

• From Little Women (1868)

  In a minute a hand came down over the page, so that she could not draw, and Laurie's voice said, with a droll imitation of a penitent child, "I will be good, oh, I will be good!" But Amy did not laugh, for she was in earnest, and tapping on the outspread hand with her pencil, said soberly, "Aren't you ashamed of a hand like that? It's as soft and white as a woman's, and looks as if it never did anything but wear Jouvin's best gloves and pick flowers for ladies. You are not a dandy, thank Heaven, so I'm glad to see there are no diamonds or big seal rings on it, only the little old one Jo gave you so long ago. Dear soul, I wish she was here to help me!" "So do I!" The hand vanished as suddenly as it came, and there was energy enough in the echo of her wish to suit even Amy. She glanced down at him with a new thought in her mind, but he was lying with his hat half over his face, as if for shade, and his mustache hid his mouth. She only saw his chest rise and fall, with a long breath that might have been a sigh, and the hand that wore the ring nestled down into the grass, as if to hide something too precious or too tender to be spoken of. All in a minute various hints and trifles assumed shape and significance in Amy's mind, and told her what her sister never had confided to her. She remembered that Laurie never spoke voluntarily of Jo, she recalled the shadow on his face just now, the change in his character, and the wearing of the little old ring which was no ornament to a handsome hand. Girls are quick to read such signs and feel their eloquence. Amy had fancied that perhaps a love trouble was at the bottom of the alteration, and now she was sure of it. Her keen eyes filled, and when she spoke again, it was in a voice that could be beautifully soft and kind when she chose to make it so. "I know I have no right to talk so to you, Laurie, and if you weren't the sweetest-tempered fellow in the world, you'd be very angry with me. But we are all so fond and proud of you, I couldn't bear to think they should be disappointed in you at home as I have been, though, perhaps they would understand the change better than I do." "I think they would," came from under the hat, in a grim tone, quite as touching as a broken one. "They ought to have told me, and not let me go blundering and scolding, when I should have been more kind and patient than ever. I never did like that Miss Randal and now I hate her!" said artful Amy, wishing to be sure of her facts this time.

• From Talk Dirty to Me: An Intimate Philosophy of Sex (1994)

  To call a sexual behavior “abnormal” means to ignore the fact that to its practitioner the act feels utterly, ineluctably normal—normative. Not only does it feel right for a gay man to kiss another man, it feels wrong for him to kiss a woman in the same way. “Normality is, of course, a very difficult concept to define, being usually considered the equivalent of statistically common and accepted acts in the society doing the defining,” wrote Gershon Legman in his peculiar treatise on oral sex, Oragenitalism. “So understood, obviously neurotic and mentally diseased actions are regularly applauded as normal in cultures that are themselves abnormal or insane.” And acts that might somewhere else seem ordinary are condemned as mentally diseased. The first time I thought about sex in terms of perversities was when I read Rubyfruit Jungle, Rita Mae Brown’s lesbian-coming-of-age novel. Brown’s heroine, Molly Bolt, is in the big city at last and completely broke when she’s offered $100 to throw grapefruits at a man who can’t have orgasms any other way. “I picked up another one and carefully took aim. Squish! I got him square in the middle. He squealed with delight and got a hard-on. This isn’t so bad. I like throwing things. By now I was into hitting Ronnie. I aimed for cock. Bull’s-eye. He loved it.” I was seventeen when I read Rubyfruit Jungle, and still bless Rita Mae Brown for that scene, which I’ve remembered many times over the years. I remember wondering at length about all its permutations. Why grapefruit, and not oranges, for instance? I took it to heart—Ronnie’s happy squeals, most of all—and my ideas about sex and what it could be grew a hundred-fold that day. Perversity is not only relative to the culture, but, like obscenity, a condition in constant flux. Religiously and criminally persecuted perversions have at one time or another included all forms of homosexuality, incest, prostitution, adultery, fornication, oral sex, anal sex, and exhibitionism. A 1942 marriage manual lists as part of “the perverse component of the normal libido” voyeurism, cunnilingus, kleptomania, pyromania, and the use of fantasy. “Fortunately, in normal persons,” the book informs us, “these perverse elements are so thoroughly repressed that they give no trouble.”