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 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 Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  Babies are often named after relatives or others who passed away. A child might be given the name of a person the parents loved, admired, or attributed certain characteristics to. The child’s name might reflect certain expectations, responsibilities, or roles. For example, one of my patients was named after his mother’s father, who died just before my patient was born. In therapy we connected his name to the role he was assigned at birth, as his mother’s caretaker. His mother described him as a mature and responsible baby, wise from a young age, whom she turned to for advice. Another patient was given a name by his mother that meant “mine.” It turned out that his father was ambivalent about having a child; she felt this baby was hers alone. As I describe in Part II, there is a profound meaning in naming a baby after a person who died in tragic circumstances, for example, a child or a person who died by suicide or was murdered. Doing so is often an expression of a wish not only to revive what was lost but also to repair the past and heal trauma. In mid-April Rachel, Marc, and baby Ruth go to Israel—to look for their future, to search for the past, to find out who Ruth was. What they discover is unbelievable but in fact also quite believable. Suddenly everything makes sense. In Jerusalem, Rachel, Marc, and Ruth meet the family of her grandfather’s friend from Auschwitz. His friend had died years earlier, but the man’s daughter and granddaughter are happy to see them. They invite them to the daughter’s house in Jerusalem. “We met them on a Sunday morning,” Rachel tells me. “I had never felt such a breeze as on that day in Jerusalem. We walked into our hosts’ home, with Ruth sleeping in the sling, and were invited to sit on the porch. As we sat down, Ruth woke up, and I introduced her to the family. ‘This is Ruth,’ I said, and the daughter looked at me, startled. She didn’t say a word and went to the kitchen to bring tea and cookies. When she came back, she said, ‘How meaningful that you named her Ruth. My father used to talk about Ruth. He said that your grandfather never recovered from her death. That a part of him died with her.’ “I didn’t know what to say. I was too embarrassed to tell her that I had no idea who Ruth was. That I only knew from my mother that she was a relative who had died at Auschwitz and that her name was on the memorial candle my grandparents used to light every holiday. I couldn’t breathe and instead kept silent. Marc looked at me and knew what I needed. He turned to our host and asked if she could tell us everything she knew about Ruth.

• From The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007)

  Rowdy is indeed based on my childhood best friend on the Spokane Indian Reservation. But I completely disguised the connection between the fictional character and the real person. How thorough was that disguise? Rowdy’s real name is Randy. Randy J. Peone. So, okay, “Rowdy” and “Randy” are almost synonyms. But Rowdy and Randy differ in significant ways. Unlike Rowdy, Randy is not a single child. He has, like, eighteen thousand brothers and sisters, all of them ridiculously attractive. Unlike Rowdy’s angry father, Randy has a mother and father who are loving and supportive. For many years, Randy has lived in a house only five minutes away from his parents. Unlike Rowdy, Randy liked school. He studied science in college and has worked for our tribal fish hatchery for as long as I can remember. However, our dear Randy has always had a mean temper, like Rowdy. He has always liked to fight, physically and verbally. He has struggled with depression and anger issues. Sometimes he drinks too much. Sometimes he is cruel to his family and friends. So, yeah, Rowdy and Randy also have a lot in common. Don’t worry. Randy read this book before it was published, and he signed a release letter that stated he was cool with his fictional avatar. “Junior,” he said to me during a phone call, “the book is good. But I didn’t punch you in the face when you left Wellpinit.” “Yes, you did,” I said. “Nope,” he said. We argued about that point for a while. We, as they say, agreed to disagree. And then, a few months later, on a publicity visit in Miami, I dreamed of the day when Randy had punched me and sent me to my new school, to Reardan, with a fresh black eye. Except in my dream, a different kid slugged me. I woke from that dream and realized Randy wasn’t the one who’d punched me. It was a different Indian boy, one of my damned bullies. I thought about calling up Randy to apologize. But then I remembered that he had definitely punched me in the nose after a Little League baseball game. Well, I had punched him first, but that was only because he’d been picking on me, just like one of my eternal bullies. Randy was supposed to be my best friend. He was supposed to be my protector. So I punched him in the face for betraying me. And then he punched me back. But he punched me harder. I think he broke my nose. I never went to the doctor. I let it heal on its own. And my nose has been a little flatter ever since. So, okay, Randy did not punch me when I left him for Reardan. But he had slugged me one year earlier. I think the fictional and real punches had very similar emotional content.

• From A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians (1921)

  BCDFGKL al. pier. Eus. Thdrt. Dam. omit it. Sheer accident would be as likely to operate on one side as on the other. At first sight intrinsic probability seems to make for the genuineness of the article, since the N. T. writers, and Paul in particular, rarely use 0e6<; as subject without the article. Yet the use of 0e6<; without the article, because employed with qualitative force with emphasis upon the divine attributes, especially in contrast with man, is an established usage of which there are numerous examples in Paul (see i Thes. i 9 24 i Cor. 2s 3»- 18) and a few in the nominative (i Thes. 25 Gal. 67 2 Cor. 510). In- asmuch, therefore, as there is in this passage just such a contrast, it would be in accordance with Pauline usage to omit the article, and the balance of intrinsic probability is apparently on this side. Tran- scriptional probability is also in its favour, since the scribe would be more likely to convert the unusual 0e6<; into 6 8e6q than the reverse. e/jiol ycip ol Sofcovvres ovSev irpocravdffGvro, "for to me the men of eminence taught nothing new/' In these words the apostle evidently says what he began to say in ATTO 8£ r&v SO/COVVTMV, giving it now the specific form that the Jerusalem apostles imposed on him no burden (of doctrine or practice), or imparted nothing to him in addition to what he already knew. See discussion of irpoa-avedevro below, yap may be justificatory, introducing a statement which justifies the seem- ingly harsh language of the two preceding statements, or ex- plicative, the thought overleaping the parenthetical statements just preceding, and the new clause introduced by yap putting in a different form the thought already partly expressed in awo &% r&v SoKoforaat. The latter is simpler and for that reason more probable* The uses of the verb nrp0aava<cC8i[jiat (Mid.) clearly attested outside of the present passage are three; (i) "To offer or* dedicate beside*': Boeckh. C. /, G. 2782. (2) "To confer with": Gal. i" ($.*.); Diod. Sic. 17, u64; Luc. Jup« Trog. i. (3) "To lay upon one's self in addition, to undertake besides": Xen. Mem, a.t8. Beside these there have been proposed for the present passage; (4) uTo lay upon in addition," L e, (3) taken actively instead of with a middle sense. Cf. Pollux, I gm, (5) (equiv. to vpoOTfthftAt) 4'To add," "to bestow something not possessed before ": Chrys., el al.; (6) (adding to the sense of dvaT£0«|xai in 2s and Acts 35", that of icp&<; In composition, "besides," "in addition ")» "To set forth in addition/1 L e., in this connection, " to teach in addition to what I had already leamed,*1 The word "impart1* in EV» might per- 90 GALATIANS

• 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.

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

  " ’Not a few profane opinions plucked up by the roots the first principles of that doctrine which Thou hast delivered to us in Thy Word. The true meaning of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper, also, was corrupted by numerous falsehoods. And then, when all, with no small insult to Thy mercy, put confidence in good works, when by good works they strove to merit Thy favor, to procure justification, to expiate their sins, and make satisfaction to Thee (each of these things obliterating and making void the virtue of Christ’s cross), they were yet altogether ignorant wherein good works consisted. For, just as if they were not at all instructed in righteousness by Thy law, they had fabricated for themselves many useless frivolities, as a means of procuring Thy favor, and on these they so plumed themselves, that, in comparison of them, they almost contemned the standard of true righteousness which Thy law recommended,—to such a degree had human desires, after usurping the ascendancy, derogated, if not from the belief, at least from the authority, of Thy precepts therein contained. " ’That I might perceive these things, Thou, O Lord, didst shine upon me with the brightness of Thy Spirit; that I might comprehend how impious and noxious they were, Thou didst bear before me the torch of Thy Word; that I might abominate them as they deserved, Thou didst stimulate my soul. " ’But in rendering an account of my doctrine, Thou seest (what my own conscience declares) that it was not my intention to stray beyond those limits which I saw had been fixed by all Thy servants. Whatever I felt assured that I had learned from Thy mouth, I desired to dispense faithfully to the Church. Assuredly, the thing at which I chiefly aimed, and for which I most diligently labored, was, that the glory of Thy goodness and justice, after dispersing the mists by which it was formerly obscured, might shine forth conspicuous, that the virtue and blessings of Thy Christ (all glosses being wiped away) might be fully displayed. For I thought it impious to leave in obscurity things which we were born to ponder and meditate. Nor did I think that truths, whose magnitude no language can express, were to be maliciously or falsely declared. " ’I hesitated not to dwell at greater length on topics on which the salvation of my hearers depended. For the oracle could never deceive which declares (John 17:3): "This is eternal life to know Thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom Thou hast sent."

• From A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians (1921)

  Ltft. Sief. Sd. e¢ al. Contra Zahn. ard arArOor eis ’ApaBiav, “but I went away into Arabia.” The purpose of this visit to Arabia, though not specifically stated, is clearly implied in od mpocaveéunv capki Kal atwarte above. By that phrase the apostle denies not only that he sought instruction from the Twelve in particular, but that he put himself in communication with men at all, excluding not only the receiving of instruction, but the imparting of it. The only natural, almost the only possible, implication is that he sought communion with God, a thought sufficiently indicated on the one side by the antithesis of “flesh and blood” and on the other by the mention of the relatively desert land to which he went. The view of some of the early fathers (adopted substantially by Bous.) that he sought no instruction from men, but having received his message hastened to Arabia to preach the gospel to the “barbarous and savage people” of this foreign land (for fuller statement of the early views see Ltft., p. 90) is not sustained by the language. He must in that case have written not mpocavebeuny, but some such expression as ove e6ntnoe SidacKkanriav, Nor is it in accordance with psy- chological probability. The revelation of Jesus as the Son of God must at once have undermined that structure of Pharisaic 56 GALATIANS thought which he had hitherto accepted, and, no doubt, fur- nished also the premises of an entirely new system of thought. But the replacement of the ruined structure with a new one built on the new premises and as complete as the materials and his power of thought enabled him to make it, however urgent the necessity for it, could not have been the work of an hour or a day. The process would have been simpler had the acceptance of Jesus as the Christ been, as it was to some of his fellow Jews, the mere addition to Judaism of the belief that Jesus was the long-expected Messiah; it would have been simpler if the acceptance of Jesus had been to him what it doubtless was to many of his Gentile converts, the acceptance of a new religion with an almost total displacement of former religious views and practices. To Paul the revelation of Jesus as the Son of God meant neither of these, but a revolutionary revision of his former beliefs, which issued in a conception of re- ligion which differed from the primitive Christian faith as com- monly held by Jewish Christians perhaps even more than the latter differed from current Judaism. Only prolonged thought could enable him to see just how much of the old was to be abandoned, how much revised, how much retained unchanged. Many days would be needed to construct out of the material new and old even so much of a new system as would enable him to begin his work as a preacher of the new faith.

• From A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians (1921)

  prove that it was to this peninsula that Paul went. If it is necessary to suppose that he went to a city, Petra in the south and Bostra in the north are among the possibilities. There is nothing to necessitate the supposition that he went far from Damascus, nor anything to exclude a far-distant journey except that if he had gone far to the south a return to Damascus would perhaps have been improbable. ical ird\LV vTnl&rpetya ek &a/jt,a<r/cdv, "and again I returned to Damascus." An indirect assertion that the experience de- scribed above (aTrofcdkv^ai TOP vlov avrov iv IfMol) occurred at Damascus (cf. Acts g1'22 and parallels); from which, however, it neither follows that the aTrofcdXmfrw here spoken of must, he- cause of Acts 93' 4 be interpreted as an external appearance of Jesus, nor that the narrative in Acts is to be interpreted as referring to an experience wholly subjective. The identity of place, Damascus, and the evident fact that both passages refer to the experience by which Paul was led to abandon his opposi- tion to Jesus and accept him as the Christ, require us to refer both statements to the same general occasion; hut not (nor are we permitted), to govern the interpretation of one expression by the other. As shown above our present passage deals only with the subjective element of the experience. For the apos- tle's own interpretation of the character of the event viewed objectively, cf. i Cor. 91 is1*1, (c) Evidence of his independent apostkmhtp drawn from a visit to Jerusalem three years after his convention (tw'*°), The apostle now takes up the circumstances erf his first visit to Jerusalem after his Damascus experience, finding in it evi- dence that he was conscious of a source of truth independent of men* l$Tkm I up ie ID Cephm, and I Mm m of I/if did 1 sm the of I/M m re* the I to you, ftnl, / iii» not 18 * *Bwmi rpik ITIJ ik K,i$8»9 "Then 1 up to to visit Cephas/* The "after Is I, 18 59

• From Less (2017)

  Less sits there for a moment and then chuckles in astonishment. “Well,” he says, “summer-weight wool. At least Freddy was listening.” Carlos laughs, loses the pose, and becomes his old self again, leaning against a palm, and it flashes across his face again, briefly, the expression Less noticed in the car. Fear. Desperation. About something other than these “letters.” “So what do you say, Arthur? Sell them to me.” “No, Carlos. No.” Carlos turns from the fire, cursing his son. Less says, “Freddy has nothing to do with this.” Carlos looks out at the moonlight on the water. “You know, Arthur, my son’s not like me. Once I asked him why he was so lazy. I asked him what the hell he wanted. He couldn’t tell me. So I decided for him.” “Let’s back up a minute.” Carlos turns to look down at Less. “You really haven’t heard?” It must be the moonlight—that couldn’t be tenderness in his face. “What was that about the tragic half?” Less asks. Carlos smiles as if he has decided something. “Arthur, I changed my mind. You have the luck of a comedian. Bad luck in things that don’t matter. Good luck in things that do. I think—you probably won’t agree with this—but I think your whole life is a comedy. Not just the first part. The whole thing. You are the most absurd person I’ve ever met. You’ve bumbled through every moment and been a fool; you’ve misunderstood and misspoken and tripped over absolutely everything and everyone in your path, and you’ve won. And you don’t even realize it.” “Carlos.” He doesn’t feel victorious; he feels defeated. “My life, my life over the past year—” “Arthur Less,” Carlos interrupts, shaking his head. “You have the best life of anyone I know.” This is nonsense to Less. Carlos looks into the fire, then tosses back the rest of his champagne. “I’m heading back to shore; I’ve got to leave early tomorrow. Make sure you give Vincent your flight details. To Japan, right? Kyoto? We want to make sure you get home safe. I’ll see you in the morning.” And with that, he strides off across the island to where his boat waits in moonlight. But Less does not see Carlos in the morning. His own boat takes him back to the resort, where he stays up late looking at the stars, recalling the lawn outside his cottage and how it shimmered with glowworms, and he sees one particular constellation that looks like the stuffed squirrel named Michael he had as a boy, who was left behind in a Florida hotel room. Hello, Michael! He goes to bed very late, and when he does get up, he finds that Carlos has already left. He wonders what it is he is meant to have won.

• From The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir (2004)

  We achieve a kind of gravity-free coordination, complete transcendence of the “fight”—the fight that is life—total trust allowing his deep, hard, long, and fast plunges entirely without self-protective gripping. Undulating . . . and great inner peace as I am rocked like a mermaid in the ocean. THE DOUBLE-SPHINCTER THEORY More mechanics: the inner anal sphincter is not within conscious control. It is regulated by the brain in the gut, the enteric nervous system, and is reflexive, opening on demand. The external sphincter, the internal’s sister sphincter, is, however, connected to the conscious brain, regulated by conscious control—witness the ability to grip and hold when necessary, when angry, when scared, when stressed. Unconscious internal sphincter, conscious external sphincter, only centimeters apart. Where else is one’s unconscious and conscious mind so intimately connected, so readily regulated, so easily probed? It is a psychological playground of the most intriguing potential. Put an ass on the couch and much is revealed. But the external sphincter did not begin with consciousness. For the first year or so of life it was unconscious, reacting in conjunction with the internal and letting go on demand—hence diapers. The brain and spinal cord at birth are not yet developed enough for conscious control. And then comes toilet training. When the brain is sophisticated enough and the parents encourage (or scream) enough, the little eighteen-month-old becomes conscious of that external anal sphincter and learns to grip it, control it, and not to let the shit fly at every urge. Shame is born. All this is to say that when I get fucked in the ass, I have learned to play with, and even reverse, that long-ago, probably traumatic coming to consciousness about gripping my ass, holding on to it, showing it to no one. After all, Freud hypothesized that one’s shit is the first gift one offers one’s parents—one’s first creative production. Only now—ninety-seven ass fucks later—is the enormity of the power that lies in this area dawning on me. It is emotional and physical therapy on the deepest level: revisiting and literally learning to trust enough to open the forbidden exit and enter the forbidden zone. As a baby, the first big resounding NO from the world as we know it is the NO perpetrated upon a loose and unconscious external anal sphincter. Getting ass-fucked is the most extreme form of rebellion against one’s parents in which one could possibly indulge—returning not to adolescent transgressions, but rather to the original injury.

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

  " ’For inveighing more freely against the Roman Pontiff, who was reverenced as the Vicegerent of Christ, the Successor of Peter, and the Head of the Church, they excused themselves thus: Such titles as those are empty bugbears, by which the eyes of the pious ought not to be so blinded as not to venture to look at them and sift the reality. It was when the world was plunged in ignorance and sloth, as in a deep sleep, that the pope had risen to such an eminence; certainly neither appointed head of the Church by the Word of God, nor ordained by a legitimate act of the Church, but of his own accord, self-elected. Moreover, the tyranny which he let loose against the people of God was not to be endured, if we wished to have the kingdom of Christ amongst us in safety. " ’And they wanted not most powerful arguments to confirm all their positions. First, they clearly disposed of everything that was then commonly adduced to establish the primacy of the pope. When they had taken away all these props, they also, by the Word of God, tumbled him from his lofty height. On the whole, they make it clear and palpable, to learned and unlearned, that the true order of the Church had then perished,—that the keys under which the discipline of the Church is comprehended had been altered very much for the worse; that Christian liberty had fallen,—in short, that the kingdom of Christ was prostrated when this primacy was reared up. They told me, moreover, as a means of pricking my conscience, that I could not safely connive at these things as if they concerned me not; that so far art Thou from patronizing any voluntary error, that even he who is led astray by mere ignorance does not err with impunity. This they proved by the testimony of Thy Son (Matt. 15:14): "If the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch." " ’My mind being now prepared for serious attention, I at length perceived, as if light had broken in upon me, in what a stye of error I had wallowed, and how much pollution and impurity I had thereby contracted. Being exceedingly alarmed at the misery into which I had fallen, and much more at that which threatened me in the view of eternal death, I, as in duty bound, made it my first business to betake myself to Thy way, condemning my past life, not without groans and tears. " ’And now, O Lord, what remains to a wretch like me, but, instead of defence, earnestly to supplicate Thee not to judge according to its deserts that fearful abandonment of Thy Word, from which, in Thy wondrous goodness, Thou hast at last delivered me.’

• From Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection (2013)

  There’s still more ground to clear. I need to ask you to disengage from some of your most cherished beliefs about love as well: the notions that love is exclusive, lasting, and unconditional. These deeply held beliefs are often more wish than reality in people’s lives. They capture people’s daydreams about the love-of-their-life whom they’ve yet to meet. Love, as your body defines it, is not exclusive, not something to be reserved for your soul mate, your inner circle, your kin, or your so-called loved ones. Love’s reach turns out to be far wider than we’re typically coaxed to imagine. Even so, love’s timescale is far shorter than we typically think. Love, as you’ll see, is not lasting. It’s actually far more fleeting than most of us would care to acknowledge. On the upside, though, love is forever renewable. And perhaps most challenging of all, love is not unconditional. It doesn’t emerge no matter what, regardless of conditions. To the contrary, you’ll see that the love your body craves is exquisitely sensitive to contextual cues. It obeys preconditions. Yet once you understand those preconditions, you can find love countless times each day. It’s difficult to speak of love in scientific terms, I’ve found, because listeners have so many preexisting and strong beliefs about it. Many of these beliefs reflect our shared cultural heritage, like all those proliferating songs and movies that equate love with infatuation or sexual desire, or with stories that end happily ever after, or even the realistic marriage ceremonies that celebrate love as an exclusive bond and commitment. Other beliefs about love are deeply personal. They reflect your own unique life history, with its interpersonal triumphs and scars, lessons about intimacy learned and not yet learned. Left unaddressed, these preconceptions can derail any serious intellectual discussion of love. They may even keep you from soaking up the full implications of the new findings on it. This Approach Is Different The approach I offer weaves together several new strands of science while keeping an eye toward the spiritual and the practical. With roots extending back millennia to your hunter-gatherer ancestors, this approach also casts forward to your future. It envisions your untapped potential for loving and growth, and your ability to create contexts that nurture love and growth in others, and in the generations to come who will inherit whatever world you help to shape. The bedrock for my approach to love is the science of emotions. For more than two decades, I’ve investigated that subset of emotions that feel good to you, those pleasing states—of joy, amusement, gratitude, hope, and the like—that simultaneously infuse your mind and body. Odds are you shift into and out of states like these dozens of times each day, sometimes when you’re alone, sometimes when you’re with others.

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

  " ’I, O Lord, as I had been educated from a boy, always professed the Christian faith. But at first I had no other reason for my faith than that which then everywhere prevailed. Thy Word, which ought to have shone on all Thy people like a lamp, was taken away, or at least suppressed as to us. And lest any one should long for greater light, an idea had been instilled into the minds of all, that the investigation of that hidden celestial philosophy was better delegated to a few, whom the others might consult as oracles—that the highest knowledge befitting plebeian minds was to subdue themselves into obedience to the Church. Then, the rudiments in which I had been instructed were of a kind which could neither properly train me to the legitimate worship of Thy Deity, nor pave the way for me to a sure hope of salvation, nor train me aright for the duties of the Christian life. I had learned, indeed, to worship Thee only as my God, but as the true method of worshipping was altogether unknown to me, I stumbled at the very threshold. I believed, as I had been taught, that I was redeemed by the death of Thy Son from the liability to eternal death, but the redemption I thought of was one whose virtue could never reach me. I anticipated a future resurrection, but hated to think of it, as being an event most dreadful. And this feeling not only had dominion over me in private, but was derived from the doctrine which was then uniformly delivered to the people by their Christian teachers. " ’They, indeed, preached of Thy clemency towards men, but confined it to those who should show themselves deserving of it. They, moreover, placed this desert in the righteousness of works, so that he only was received into Thy favor who reconciled himself to Thee by works. Nor, meanwhile, did they disguise the fact that we are miserable sinners, that we often fall through infirmity of the flesh, and that to all, therefore, Thy mercy behoved to be the common haven of salvation; but the method of obtaining it, which they pointed out, was by making satisfaction to Thee for offences. Then the satisfaction enjoined was, first, after confessing all our sins to a priest, suppliantly to ask pardon and absolution; and, secondly, by good to efface from Thy remembrance our bad actions. Lastly, in order to supply what was still wanting, we were to add sacrifices and solemn expiations. Then, because Thou wert a stern judge and strict avenger of iniquity, they showed how dreadful Thy presence must be. Hence they bade us flee first to the saints, that by their intercession Thou mightest be rendered exorable and propitious to us.

• From Between Us

  Even within the Chinese American sample, exposure mattered: later generations showed more ingroup advantage for the European American face set than earlier generations; conversely, earlier generations showed more ingroup advantage for the Chinese face set than later generations. While the classic paradigm of linking emotion words to static displays is not tremendously helpful in describing the daily emotional interactions of immigrants or later generations of immigrant minorities, it does help to make the case that all aspects of doing emotions are subject to cultural learning—even the ones that were originally claimed to be universal. Remember how our Japanese respondents thought Jon or Taro were happier if a happy-looking Jon was surrounded by people who also looked happy, rather than looking angry, sad, or neutral? Remember also how North Americans, when asked to judge Jon’s happiness, only focused on Jon without considering the affective context? I used this finding as one example of North Americans perceiving MINE, and Japanese perceiving OURS emotions. Taka Masuda, himself Japanese-born and now a professor at the University of Alberta, set out to study whether the perceptive lens of Japanese immigrant populations would change from OURS to MINE. Tweaking our original research a bit, he found it did. White Canadians judged Jon’s emotions without regard for the affective context; they just looked at Jon’s face. As immigrants became part of North American social life, their emotion model gradually seemed to shift from OURS to MINE. Though both Asian Canadian and Asian international students in Canada relied too on the emotional displays of the surrounding people when they were asked to judge how happy, angry, or sad Jon was, their emotion judgments became less reliant on the emotions of the surrounding people with increased exposure to North American culture. The eye-tracking data show even Asian international students, who had spent relatively little time in Canada, focused on the central person’s emotions more than the Japanese students in Japan; yet not even the Asian Canadians had bridged the gap with the European Canadians. Describing changes in emotional lives as a result of immigrating to another culture is no easy task, and the available research only scratches the surface.

• From Birthday Girl (2018)

  —Sí, sí... —lo escucho mientras enjuaga los platos, y los pone en el lavaplatos—, bien, te veré por la mañana. Cuelga y deja el teléfono, y le lanzo otra rápida mirada. —¿Trabajo? —pregunto. Asiente, echando algo en un vaso y tirándolo. —Siempre. Estamos construyendo un edificio de oficinas en la veintidós antes de llegar al parque. —Me mira—. No importa cuánto lo planees y presupuestes, siempre hay sorpresas que intentan desestabilizarte, ¿sabes? La autopista veintidós. El mismo camino que tomo para ir a clases al Doral. Debo haber pasado por su lugar de trabajo muchas veces. —Nada nunca sale según lo planeado —reflexiono—. Incluso a mi edad, ya lo sé. Se ríe, las esquinas de su boca curvándose en una sonrisa mientras me mira. —Exactamente. De repente titubeo, un déjà vù me golpea. Por un momento, veo al tipo en el teatro otra vez. Parpadeo, tratando de mirar hacia otro lado. Sus ojos color avellana se ven más verdes bajo la lámpara que cuelga sobre su cabeza, su cabello se secó de la ducha y, de repente, parece más un hermano mayor de Cole que su padre. Aparto los ojos de su sonrisa, captando un vistazo de los tendones de su brazo que se están flexionando mientras trabaja en el fregadero. Tomo mi teléfono del mostrador y me doy vuelta para irme, pero luego recuerdo algo. —¿Puedo tener tu número de teléfono? —Me giro y pregunto—: ¿En caso que haya un problema aquí, pierda mi llave o algo así? Me mira por encima del hombro, con las manos todavía en el agua. —Ah, claro. —Cierra el grifo y agarra una toalla, secándose—. Buena idea. Toma. Agarra su teléfono y abre la pantalla, entregándomela. —Pon también el tuyo en el mío, entonces. Le doy mi teléfono y tomo el suyo, ingresando mi nombre y mi número de teléfono. Me alegro de haberlo recordado. Cualquier cosa podría salir mal con la casa. El sótano podría inundarse, podrían entregarse paquetes que no son míos, podría no poder encargarme de la cena alguna noche, que Cole y yo estemos juntos

• From City of Night (1963)

  By now Pete had learned how to play checkers. And one afternoon, strangely—as Pete and I sat on the bed playing checkers for much longer than we ever had before, as if there had been no third party, no “performance,” actually enjoying it—with startling suddenness “Mom” abandoned his role as watcher, as doting mother, and nervously, claiming A Huge Headache, he asked us to leave. He folded the board hurriedly and abruptly dumped the checkers into their box. As we left, he almost slammed the door. “What bugged him?” Pete asked; then, shrugging, dismissing it, “I guess he did have a bad headache—shes kinda weird, anyway.... Fuck-im.” We didnt go back. 5 Now the nights began to warm up. It’s that magnificent interlude in New York between winter and spring, when you feel the warmth stirring, and you remember that the dreadful naked trees will inevitably sprout tiny green buds, soon. Everyone rushes into the parks, the streets—and you even forget that, very soon, summer will come scorchingly, dropping from the sky like a blanket of steam.... “I dont feel like fuckin around today,” Pete told me one afternoon. He seemed pensive. “Lets just make the flix, spote—and forget all about trying to score.” We saw a double feature—one, a French movie about Lesbians in a girls’ school. When we got outside, it was dark, the sky beaded wondrously with spring stars. “You really believe two chicks could dig each other that tough?” Pete asked me. I answer, “Sure.” I was wondering what had prompted such amazing, for him, naïveté. “It sure seems strange,” he went on. “Dig: I can see guys making it with each other—sure—for money—but—... Well, it sure seems strange, just digging each other like that—and those two chicks, man, they were both beautiful.” We were standing outside. Even the lights on the signs seemed livelier in the warm air. I didnt have any place to go, but I said, “Later,” to Pete. This is how it had always been before. “No, wait,” he says, “dont split—unless you got something to do.” “Nothing,” I said. “Lets stick together,” he said. “I just dont feel like fuckin around tonight,” he said moodily. We went to a cafeteria on the same block and ate. The drifting youngmen were in there, sitting at the tables sipping coffee, staring at the older men who walked in. “Sometimes this whole scene bugs me,” Pete said. “I guess maybe I should split—leave New York—go somewhere else: L.A., maybe. You wanna know something? I been in the East all my life—New Jersey—New York....” He stared dreamily out the window. “Lets go to Washington Square!” he said abruptly. In a few minutes, by subway, we were there.

• From Summer Sisters (1998)

  But Caitlin hasn’t finished. “Why do you think I stayed away?” she asks. “Haven’t you ever wondered about that?” You think you know someone really well and then you find out … “It never happened again,” Caitlin adds. “We never even saw each other again until a couple of months ago when I came back.” Vix catches a glimpse of herself in the mirror and is shocked that her face shows nothing, nothing . The photographer knocks. “One for the road,” she says, pushing open the bedroom door with her foot. She asks Vix to lean over Caitlin’s shoulder while they both look into the mirror. “That’s it …” she says, guiding them, “a little closer, so that your faces are almost touching. Yes!” Vix places the headband with the attached veil on Caitlin’s head, centers it just so, fluffs it out so that bits of lace and seed pearls frame Caitlin’s lovely face. The photographer snaps that one, too. Before they leave the house Caitlin leads Vix over to a table in the living room where Abby has displayed the wedding gifts. “Look at this,” she says, holding up a porcelain figurine of a girl in a tutu, standing atop a horse. The card reads: Darling girl, if all else fails, join the circus! Vix begins to laugh. Caitlin joins her. They hold on to one another, convulsed, until Phoebe separates them. “Time to get going,” she tells Caitlin, “if you’re sure you want to go through with this.” At the church, Grandmother Somers asks loudly, “Which one is she marrying?” Dorset points to Bru. “Oh, he’s quite handsome, isn’t he? Who are his parents? What do they do?” Sharkey escorts Phoebe down the aisle. She’s relaxed, smiling. Daniel escorts Abby, who looks tense, although she’s trying to hide it. The two women sit next to one another. Vix can’t look at Bru. She prays he won’t say anything … ever. How can he be sure Vix will keep their secret? Caitlin sails down the aisle on Lamb’s arm. He looks so proud, so loving, tears come to Vix’s eyes. Caitlin smiles directly at her. She has a feeling that Caitlin is about to pull something but she doesn’t know what. She half expects her to shove her island-grown bouquet of cosmos, bellflowers, and daisies in Vix’s face and say, You marry him. You two deserve each other! BruHE WAS CRAZY last night. Out of his fucking mind. What was he doing? Trying to get out of it? But here comes Caitlin on Lamb’s arm, drifting down the aisle like some kind of angel. Smiling right at him. Shit! What’s he supposed to do? He remembers the night she came to him with a message from Victoria, just after Nathan died. Beautiful Caitlin at seventeen, looking so sad, so sad … He’d taken her in his arms to stop her tears. Hadn’t meant to kiss her. But the way she’d looked at him, her lips parted and moist.

• From Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (1994)

  Anyway , let’s make him someone who works in an office, someone who’s been pampered—what could he say that lets us see this? Let’s dress him carefully because we may have to humiliate him in a minute. For instance, we can see by the precision of the knot in his tie that his wife tied it this morning. His clothes and ring and shoes are all going to talk, and they are going to help us find out who he is, but more importantly he is going to say things to his secretary and to his callers and to the people with whom he works, and these people are going to say things back to him, and we want to hear both sides of these conversations. What if his boss says something to him that seems innocuous but that cuts him to the quick? And what if this time he responds in a completely different way than heading out for barbecue? What if he starts saying things that have nothing to do with what you had in mind, and it all mysteriously rings true? What if he says something so insulting to his boss that it puts his job in jeopardy, and then, instead of a little assault eating, he responds by spending his entire lunch hour at an adult bookstore? Well, maybe you had him wrong to begin with. Maybe he goes from being an Ivy League lawyer to a semisuccessful rug salesman in two lines of dialogue. This may not be convenient for you, but at least now you can see with whom you are really working. Now I want to hear how he describes his day to his wife, what he leaves in and how he says it, and what he neglects to mention. So you make an attempt at capturing this by trying to find him in your psyche, this person who has been talked down to, whose skin is a little thin, whose feelings are easily hurt. You write a shitty first draft of it and you sound it out, and you leave in those lines that ring true and take out the rest. I wish there were an easier, softer way, a shortcut, but this is the nature of most good writing: that you find out things as you go along. Then you go back and rewrite. Remember: no one is reading your first drafts. I need to digress again for a minute: you create these characters and figure out little by little what they say and do, but this all happens in a part of you to which you have no access—the unconscious. This is where the creating is done. We start out with stock characters, and our unconscious provides us with real, flesh-and-blood, believable people.