Surprise

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 Little Women (1868)

  There was ice cream, actually two dishes of it, pink and white, and cake and fruit and distracting French bonbons and, in the middle of the table, four great bouquets of hot house flowers. It quite took their breath away, and they stared first at the table and then at their mother, who looked as if she enjoyed it immensely. "Is it fairies?" asked Amy. "Santa Claus," said Beth. "Mother did it." And Meg smiled her sweetest, in spite of her gray beard and white eyebrows. "Aunt March had a good fit and sent the supper," cried Jo, with a sudden inspiration. "All wrong. Old Mr. Laurence sent it," replied Mrs. March. "The Laurence boy's grandfather! What in the world put such a thing into his head? We don't know him!" exclaimed Meg. "Hannah told one of his servants about your breakfast party. He is an odd old gentleman, but that pleased him. He knew my father years ago, and he sent me a polite note this afternoon, saying he hoped I would allow him to express his friendly feeling toward my children by sending them a few trifles in honor of the day. I could not refuse, and so you have a little feast at night to make up for the bread-and-milk breakfast." "That boy put it into his head, I know he did! He's a capital fellow, and I wish we could get acquainted. He looks as if he'd like to know us but he's bashful, and Meg is so prim she won't let me speak to him when we pass," said Jo, as the plates went round, and the ice began to melt out of sight, with ohs and ahs of satisfaction. "You mean the people who live in the big house next door, don't you?" asked one of the girls. "My mother knows old Mr. Laurence, but says he's very proud and doesn't like to mix with his neighbors. He keeps his grandson shut up, when he isn't riding or walking with his tutor, and makes him study very hard. We invited him to our party, but he didn't come. Mother says he's very nice, though he never speaks to us girls." "Our cat ran away once, and he brought her back, and we talked over the fence, and were getting on capitally, all about cricket, and so on, when he saw Meg coming, and walked off. I mean to know him some day, for he needs fun, I'm sure he does," said Jo decidedly. "I like his manners, and he looks like a little gentleman, so I've no objection to your knowing him, if a proper opportunity comes. He brought the flowers himself, and I should have asked him in, if I had been sure what was going on upstairs. He looked so wistful as he went away, hearing the frolic and evidently having none of his own." "It's a mercy you didn't, Mother!" laughed Jo, looking at her boots.

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

  Moreover, without symbols, social sentiments could have only a precarious existence. Though very strong as long as men are together and influence each other reciprocally, they exist only in the form of recollections after the assembly has ended, and when left to themselves, these become feebler and feebler; for since the group is now no longer present and active, individual temperaments easily regain the upper hand. The violent passions which may have been released in the heart of a crowd fall away and are extinguished when this is dissolved, and men ask themselves with astonishment how they could ever have been so carried away from their normal character. But if the movements by which these sentiments are expressed are connected with something that endures, the sentiments themselves become more durable. These other things are constantly bringing them to mind and arousing them; it is as though the cause which excited them in the first place continued to act. Thus these systems of emblems, which are necessary if society is to become conscious of itself, are no less indispensable for assuring the continuation of this consciousness. So we must refrain from regarding these symbols as simple artifices, as sorts of labels attached to representations already made, in order to make them more manageable: they are an integral part of them. Even the fact that collective sentiments are thus attached to things completely foreign to them is not purely conventional: it illustrates under a conventional form a real characteristic of social facts, that is, their transcendence over individual minds. In fact, it is known that social phenomena are born, not in individuals, but in the group. Whatever part we may take in their origin, each of us receives them from without.[720] So when we represent them to ourselves as emanating from a material object, we do not completely misunderstand their nature. Of course they do not come from the specific thing to which we connect them, but nevertheless, it is true that their origin is outside of us. If the moral force sustaining the believer does not come from the idol he adores or the emblem he venerates, still it is from outside of him, as he is well aware. The objectivity of its symbol only translates its externalness.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  Now it chanced that Isabetta, suspecting nothing of this nor being on her guard, caused her lover come thither one night, which was forthright known to those who were on the watch for this and who, whenas it seemed to them time, a good part of the night being spent, divided themselves into two parties, whereof one abode on guard at the door of her cell, whilst the other ran to the abbess's chamber and knocking at the door, till she answered, said to her, 'Up, madam; arise quickly, for we have discovered that Isabetta hath a young man in her cell.' Now the abbess was that night in company with a priest, whom she ofttimes let come to her in a chest; but, hearing the nuns' outcry and fearing lest, of their overhaste and eagerness, they should push open the door, she hurriedly arose and dressed herself as best she might in the dark. Thinking to take certain plaited veils, which nuns wear on their heads and call a psalter, she caught up by chance the priest's breeches, and such was her haste that, without remarking what she did, she threw them over her head, in lieu of the psalter, and going forth, hurriedly locked the door after her, saying, 'Where is this accursed one of God?' Then, in company with the others, who were so ardent and so intent upon having Isabetta taken in default that they noted not that which the abbess had on her head, she came to the cell-door and breaking it open, with the aid of the others, entered and found the two lovers abed in each other's arms, who, all confounded at such a surprise, abode fast, unknowing what to do.

• From Another Country (1962)

  She probably won’t call back.” Eric picked up the receiver. “Hello?” Vivaldo heard, dimly, from far away, Cass’ voice rushing through the wires. “Good morning, baby, how are you?” cried Eric. Then he fell into silence. Something in the quality of that silence caused Vivaldo to come full awake and sit straight up. He watched Eric’s face. Then he lit himself a cigarette, and waited. “Oh,” said Eric, after a moment. Then, “Jesus. Oh, my poor Cass.” The voice went on and on, Eric’s face becoming more troubled and more weary. “Yes. But now it has happened. It’s here. It’s upon us.” He looked briefly at Vivaldo, then looked over at his watch. “Yes, certainly, where?” He looked toward the window. “Cass, it doesn’t look as though it’s likely to let up.” Then, “Please, Cass. Please don’t.” His face changed again, registering shock; he glanced at Vivaldo, and said quickly, “Vivaldo’s here. We didn’t go anywhere, we just stayed here.” A dry, bitter smile touched his lips. “That’s what they say and it sure as hell is pouring to beat the band now.” He laughed: “No, nobody lives without clichés—what?” He listened. He said, gently, “But I’m going to be in rehearsal very soon, Cass, and I may be going to the Coast, and besides—” He looked over at Vivaldo with a heavy, helpless frown. “Yes, I understand that, Cass. Yes. At four. Okay. You hold on, baby, you just hold on.” He hung up. He sat for a moment, turned, staring toward the rain, then lowered his gaze to Vivaldo with a small smile, both sad and proud. He looked at his watch again, put out his cigarette, and lay back, staring at the ceiling, his head resting on his arms. “Well. Guess what. The shit has hit the fan. Cass got in late last night and she and Richard had a fight—about us. Richard knows about us.” Vivaldo whistled, his eyes very big. “I knew you shouldn’t have answered that phone. What a mess. Is Richard on his way down here with a shotgun? and how did he find out?” Eric looked strangely guilty, then he said, “Oh, Cass wasn’t at her most coherent, I don’t really know. Anyway, how he found out hardly matters now, since he has.” He sat up. “Apparently, he has been suspicious—but he was suspicious of you——” “Of me? He must be crazy!” “Well, Cass kept coming to see you all the time, that’s what she told him, anyway—” “And what did he think Ida was doing while Cass and I were screwing? Reading us bedtime stories?” Again, Eric looked uncomfortable, but he laughed. “I don’t know what he thought. Anyway, Cass says that he’s very bitter against you because”—he faltered for a moment and looked down—“because you knew about the affair and you’re supposed to be his friend and you didn’t tell him.”

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

  From another point of view, it must be added that if men were really forced to project their own image into things, then the first sacred beings ought to have been conceived in their likeness. Now anthropomorphism, far from being primitive, is rather the mark of a relatively advanced civilization. In the beginning, sacred beings are conceived in the form of an animal or vegetable, from which the human form is only slowly disengaged. It will be seen below that in Australia, it is animals and plants which are the first sacred beings. Even among the Indians of North America, the great cosmic divinities, which commence to be the object of a cult there, are very frequently represented in animal forms.[131] "The difference between the animal, man and the divine being," says Réville, not without surprise, "is not felt in this state of mind, and generally it might be said that _it is the animal form which is the fundamental one_."[132] To find a god made up entirely of human elements, it is necessary to advance nearly to Christianity. Here, God is a man, not only in the physical aspect in which he is temporarily made manifest, but also in the ideas and sentiments which he expresses. But even in Greece and Rome, though the gods were generally represented with human traits, many mythical personages still had traces of an animal origin: thus there is Dionysus, who is often met with in the form of a bull, or at least with the horns of a bull; there is Demeter, who is often represented with a horse's mane, there are Pan and Silenus, there are the Fauns, etc.[133] It is not at all true that man has had such an inclination to impose his own form upon things. More than that, he even commenced by conceiving of himself as participating closely in the animal nature. In fact, it is a belief almost universal in Australia, and very widespread among the Indians of North America, that the ancestors of men were beasts or plants, or at least that the first men had, either in whole or in part, the distinctive characters of certain animal or vegetable species. Thus, far from seeing beings like themselves everywhere, men commenced by believing themselves to be in the image of some beings from which they differed radically. V Finally, the animistic theory implies a consequence which is perhaps its best refutation.

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

  Here we touch the solid rock upon which all the cults are built and which has caused their persistence ever since human societies have existed. When we see what religious rites consist of and towards what they seem to tend, we demand with astonishment how men have been able to imagine them, and especially how they can remain so faithfully attached to them. Whence could the illusion have come that with a few grains of sand thrown to the wind, or a few drops of blood shed upon a rock or the stone of an altar, it is possible to maintain the life of an animal species or of a god? We have undoubtedly made a step in advance towards the solution of this problem when we have discovered, behind these outward and apparently unreasonable movements, a mental mechanism which gives them a meaning and a moral significance. But we are in no way assured that this mechanism itself does not consist in a simple play of hallucinatory images. We have pointed out the psychological process which leads the believers to imagine that the rite causes the spiritual forces of which they have need to be reborn about them; but it does not follow from the fact that this belief is psychologically explicable that it has any objective value. If we are to see in the efficacy attributed to the rites anything more than the product of a chronic delirium with which humanity has abused itself, we must show that the effect of the cult really is to recreate periodically a moral being upon which we depend as it depends upon us. Now this being does exist: it is society.

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

  The first discovery of the catacombs was a surprise to the Christian world, and gave birth to wild fancies about the incalculable number of martyrs, the terrors of persecution, the subterranean assemblies of the early Christians, as if they lived and died, by necessity or preference, in darkness beneath the earth. A closer investigation has dispelled the romance, and deepened the reality. There is no contradiction between the religion of the ante-Nicene monuments and the religion of the ante-Nicene literature. They supplement and illustrate each other. Both exhibit to us neither the mediaeval Catholic nor the modern Protestant, but the post-apostolic Christianity of confessors and martyrs, simple, humble, unpretending, unlearned, unworldly, strong in death and in the hope of a blissful resurrection; free from the distinctive dogmas and usages of later times; yet with that strong love for symbolism, mysticism, asceticism, and popular superstitions which we find in the writings of Justin Martyr, Tertullian, Clement of Alexandria, and Origen. CHAPTER VIII.CHRISTIAN LIFE IN CONTRAST WITH PAGAN CORRUPTION.§ 88. Literature. I. Sources: The works of the Apostolic Fathers. The Apologies of Justin. The practical treatises of Tertullian. The Epistles of Cyprian. The Canons of Councils. The Apostolical Constitutions and Canons. The Acts of Martyrs.—On the condition of the Roman Empire: the Histories of Tacitus, Suetonius, and Dion Cassius, the writings of Seneca, Horace, Juvenal, Persius, Martial. II. Literature: W. Cave: Primitive Christianity, or the Religion of the Ancient Christians in the first ages of the Gospel. London, fifth ed. 1689. G. Arnold: Erste Liebe, d. i. Wahre Abbildung der ersten Christen nach ihrem lebendigen Glauben und heil. Leben. Frankf. 1696, and often since. Neander: Denkwürdigkeiten aus der Geschichte des christlichen Lebens (first 1823), vol. i. third ed. Hamb. 1845. The same in English by Ryland: Neander’s Memorials of Christian Life, in Bohn’s Library, 1853. L. Coleman: Ancient Christianity exemplified in the private, domestic, social, and civil Life of the Primitive Christians, etc. Phil. 1853. C. Schmidt: Essai historique sur la société dans le monde Romain, et sur la transformation par le Christianisme. Par. 1853. The same transl. into German by A. V. Richard. Leipz. 1857. E. L. Chastel: Études historiques sur l’influence de la charité durant les Premiers siècles chrét. Par. 1853. Crowned by the French Académe. The same transl. into English (The Charity of the Primitive Churches), by G. A. Matile. Phila. 1857. A. Fr. Villemain: Nouveaux essais sur l’infl. du Christianisme dans le monde Grec et Latin. Par. 1853. Benj. Constant Martha (Member of the Académie des sciences morales et politiques, elected in 1872): Les Moralistes sous l’Empire romain. Paris 1854, second ed. 1866 (Crowned by the French Academy). Fr. J. M. Th. Champagny: Les premiers siècles de la charité. Paris, 1854. Also his work Les Antonins. Paris, 1863, third ed. 1874, 3 vols. J. Denis: Histoire des theories et des idées morales dans l’antiquité. Paris, 1856, 2 tom. P. Janet: Histoire de la philosophie morale et politique. Paris, 1858,·2 tom. G. Ratzinger: Gesch. der kirchlichen Armenpflege. Freib. 1859.

• From Little Women (1868)

  Father, we wait your services." All eyes turned toward the bridal party, and a murmur of amazement went through the throng, for neither bride nor groom removed their masks. Curiosity and wonder possessed all hearts, but respect restrained all tongues till the holy rite was over. Then the eager spectators gathered round the count, demanding an explanation. "Gladly would I give it if I could, but I only know that it was the whim of my timid Viola, and I yielded to it. Now, my children, let the play end. Unmask and receive my blessing." But neither bent the knee, for the young bridegroom replied in a tone that startled all listeners as the mask fell, disclosing the noble face of Ferdinand Devereux, the artist lover, and leaning on the breast where now flashed the star of an English earl was the lovely Viola, radiant with joy and beauty. "My lord, you scornfully bade me claim your daughter when I could boast as high a name and vast a fortune as the Count Antonio. I can do more, for even your ambitious soul cannot refuse the Earl of Devereux and De Vere, when he gives his ancient name and boundless wealth in return for the beloved hand of this fair lady, now my wife." The count stood like one changed to stone, and turning to the bewildered crowd, Ferdinand added, with a gay smile of triumph, "To you, my gallant friends, I can only wish that your wooing may prosper as mine has done, and that you may all win as fair a bride as I have by this masked marriage." S. PICKWICK Why is the P. C. like the Tower of Babel? It is full of unruly members. ________ THE HISTORY OF A SQUASH Once upon a time a farmer planted a little seed in his garden, and after a while it sprouted and became a vine and bore many squashes. One day in October, when they were ripe, he picked one and took it to market. A grocerman bought and put it in his shop. That same morning, a little girl in a brown hat and blue dress, with a round face and snub nose, went and bought it for her mother. She lugged it home, cut it up, and boiled it in the big pot, mashed some of it with salt and butter, for dinner. And to the rest she added a pint of milk, two eggs, four spoons of sugar, nutmeg, and some crackers, put it in a deep dish, and baked it till it was brown and nice, and next day it was eaten by a family named March. T. TUPMAN ________ Mr.

• From Little Women (1868)

  with a bang an ugly black imp appeared and, having croaked a reply, tossed a dark bottle at Hugo and disappeared with a mocking laugh. Having warbled his thanks and put the potions in his boots, Hugo departed, and Hagar informed the audience that as he had killed a few of her friends in times past, she had cursed him, and intends to thwart his plans, and be revenged on him. Then the curtain fell, and the audience reposed and ate candy while discussing the merits of the play. A good deal of hammering went on before the curtain rose again, but when it became evident what a masterpiece of stage carpentery had been got up, no one murmured at the delay. It was truly superb. A tower rose to the ceiling, halfway up appeared a window with a lamp burning in it, and behind the white curtain appeared Zara in a lovely blue and silver dress, waiting for Roderigo. He came in gorgeous array, with plumed cap, red cloak, chestnut lovelocks, a guitar, and the boots, of course. Kneeling at the foot of the tower, he sang a serenade in melting tones. Zara replied and, after a musical dialogue, consented to fly. Then came the grand effect of the play. Roderigo produced a rope ladder, with five steps to it, threw up one end, and invited Zara to descend. Timidly she crept from her lattice, put her hand on Roderigo's shoulder, and was about to leap gracefully down when "Alas! Alas for Zara!" she forgot her train. It caught in the window, the tower tottered, leaned forward, fell with a crash, and buried the unhappy lovers in the ruins. A universal shriek arose as the russet boots waved wildly from the wreck and a golden head emerged, exclaiming, "I told you so! I told you so!" With wonderful presence of mind, Don Pedro, the cruel sire, rushed in, dragged out his daughter, with a hasty aside... "Don't laugh! Act as if it was all right!" and, ordering Roderigo up, banished him from the kingdom with wrath and scorn. Though decidedly shaken by the fall from the tower upon him, Roderigo defied the old gentleman and refused to stir. This dauntless example fired Zara. She also defied her sire, and he ordered them both to the deepest dungeons of the castle. A stout little retainer came in with chains and led them away, looking very much frightened and evidently forgetting the speech he ought to have made. Act third was the castle hall, and here Hagar appeared, having come to free the lovers and finish Hugo. She hears him coming and hides, sees him put the potions into two cups of wine and bid the timid little servant, "Bear them to the

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

  Sometimes I’m shocked at what shocks, the cultural relativism at work. The sculptures of Pompeii shocked the Europe of the 1700s, Kinsey shocked Americans in the 1940s, and Shakespeare shocks us now. Our oldest stories validate desire. I sometimes wish that those who rail about morality and normality would read a little anthropology and a bit of Homer. Myths and folklore are full of blunt, amused, and salacious stories, full of castration and masturbation and incest, necrophilia and zoophilia, the mysterious power of the vagina and the clitoris. Many cultures have practiced freer and more open sex lives than our own. Reading history makes it clear that the gradually increasing tolerance toward most sexual behaviors has come from the repeated inability of every culture to control them. Masturbation, adultery, homosexuality, and prostitution are not common—they are universal. One senses entire eras shrugging resignedly in the face of these sexual “crimes,” committed not just by one’s leaders, royalty, and priests, but by one’s neighbors and oneself. Babies are sexual, celibate people are sexual, all of us are sexual—and most of us do it right out there in front of God and at least one other person. I’m amazed how often conversations about sex mince around that particular fact. Everyone does it, and everyone knows that everyone does it, I know you do it and you know I do it. American society is adolescent; there is no other word for our restlessness and preachy finger-shaking. We live in a world filled with a continual proliferation of sexual images outside context. Still we find it almost unbearable to talk openly about sex—with our friends, our lovers, our parents and children, least of all to each other as makers of our culture. The result is cultural puberty: lewd, leering, intensely curious and ashamed and prudish all at once. Americans have lost their minds over sex; sex is like a stick in the American eye—people can’t see past it.

• From Cult: A Love Story: Ten Years Inside a Canadian Cult and the Subsequent Long Road of Recovery (2013)

  Limori had him tune in to God to see what was to be done (this is where the victim becomes a partner in his own manipulation). Eventually she said that God was saying that, because of the lack of love in Michael’s marriage and Jessica’s inability to love and support him in a generous way, Michael’s connection to God and to the Masters (a specific group of spirit guides that Limori had lately been training Michael to tune into) was blocked. His passion for God was convincing Michael that Jessica was blocking his growth and his connection with God and the Masters. The struggles in their marriage and Jessica’s unwillingness or inability to provide loving support to her husband were creating a block between Michael and the one thing he loved most: his work for God. This was something that Michael could not bear. Everyone has a lever (as Dr. Phil says); Michael’s lever is his deep and abiding passion for and devotion to working for God. The need to rectify the situation would trump his innate desire to protect Jessica from any pain. Once the seed of that idea was planted, Limori had only to water it for the next few days or weeks, until the roots of it had taken hold, and then begin to plant the idea that Michael needed love and support into order to connect with God and the Masters, and that if he wasn’t getting it from his wife then he should get it from someone else. Thus, the idea that Michael should take a mistress was born, and before a name for this person was put forth the idea was broken to Jessica. She was told that “her lack of love-flow in the marriage was preventing Michael from reaching energies that he was meant to reach.” I can’t imagine that that conversation was an easy one for Michael to broach, but he would have been shored up by the belief that he was doing it for God. Jessica was given some time to adjust to the idea and I don’t suppose I have to describe how painful that must have been for her —to have her husband come to her and tell her God had said that she wasn’t loving enough and that as punishment for this her husband would be having an affair with someone else while remaining married to her. And not just any someone else, but someone she knew. Someone from her closest community of friends. It slowly began to dawn on me that we had come to the point of my visit and of Michael’s story. I sat on the couch in Jessica and Michael’s living room and listened to him explain that what was being asked of me was that I become his mistress. To say I was stunned when Michael reached this punch line is a gross understatement. I could barely process what he was saying.

• From The Erotic Engine (2011)

  I was surprised at this myself since this was liberal New York, but you’d very rarely get a nice response on the street. People were nasty, they were insulting, very insulting. Girls would sometimes flip me the finger or say four-letter words to me, they were not very nice when they were misses. When a girl I sensed would do it, she never ever said yes. I don’t think I ever once got a yes in my life. You know, “Yeah, sure. Let’s go into a hallway and take my clothes off, I’ve been dreaming about this.” I never got that. It was always, “I can’t do this,” “I won’t do this,” but I would sense something about her “no” that really meant, “Hmmm, I might be interested if you handle it in the right way.” I was on both local TV stations. They had teasers. “Do you know what’s coming up on channel J at 12 o’clock? Oh, it’s disgusting. Let us give you a little preview of the disgusting filth you are going to see, with the naked women, at 12 o’clock on cable TV.” Their ratings went through the roof and I found out the next day the cable station’s phones lit up like never before. What happened was—this is only in New York. In normal places this probably wouldn’t happen—hundreds and thousands of people suddenly called the cable station and said, “I just saw a news report about filth and smut and degrading women on cable TV. What channel is that so I can be sure not to watch it?” At that time the cable stations had letters, not numbers, so the letter was J and people called up and said, “I’m tuning my TV so I can be sure not to catch that guy Ugly George on channel J, but I can’t find channel J. All I have is 2, 4, 6, 8, 10. Where is channel J so I can be offended?” The next day Manhattan Cable’s phones lit up and everybody suddenly wanted cable who had never wanted it before. It wasn’t Time Warner yet, it was just Time, had about eighty thousand subscribers. My contract was thirteen weeks, by the time thirteen weeks came along and I had to sign my second contract, mysteriously they were up to a hundred thousand. In two years they hadn’t had a surge like this. Never. So, within thirteen weeks, I sold an additional twenty thousand subscribers for them. That had never happened before. It was a huge impact. ABC, NBC and CBS would constantly have all kinds of propaganda going out, usually not identified as propaganda, and they would say, “We are quality. We have the biggest stars in the country and fine filming and this and that. And there’s that pay-TV, that they want you to pay for.”

• From Wild (2012)

  I hadn’t expected it to rain in the desert, and I certainly hadn’t expected it to snow. As with the mountains, there’d been no deserts where I grew up, and though I’d gone on day hikes in a couple of them, I didn’t really understand what deserts were. I’d taken them to be dry, hot, and sandy places full of snakes, scorpions, and cactuses. They were not that. They were that and also a bunch of other things. They were layered and complex and inexplicable and analogous to nothing. My new existence was beyond analogy, I realized on that second day on the trail. I was in entirely new terrain. What a mountain was and what a desert was were not the only things I had not expected. I hadn’t expected the flesh on my tailbone and hips and the fronts of my shoulders to bleed.O I hadn’t expected to average a bit less than a mile an hour, which is what, by my calculations—made possible by the highly descriptive guidebook—I’d been covering so far, lumping my many breaks in with the time I actually spent walking. Back when my hike on the PCT had been nothing but an idea, I’d planned to average fourteen miles a day over the course of my trip, though most days I’d actually walk farther than that because my anticipated average included the rest days I’d take every week or two, when I wouldn’t hike at all. But I hadn’t factored in my lack of fitness, nor the genuine rigors of the trail, until I was on it.

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

  “What!” In my astonishment I forgot to whisper, and we both froze and turned anxiously back to the bed. But fortunately Jacob slept on. “Sorry”—I spoke as softly as I could—“but you must admit that this is a bit of a turnaround. I mean, I would have thought it was the last thing . . .” “Yes, I know.” She smiled ruefully and made a helpless gesture. “I know it must sound perfectly mad. Herbert and I, of all people! Can’t you imagine what our friends are going to say? I know it seems illogical, inconsistent. But I’ve often thought that Jacob ought to have some kind of religion. All that ritual, for example— he’d simply love that. And religion is supposed to give some kind of comfort, isn’t it?” She looked up at me tentatively. “Well . . .” I trailed off, unwilling to go down that road, tonight of all nights. I couldn’t resist a little sarcasm. “You wouldn’t feel like coming along yourself, I suppose? You haven’t seen the light? And perhaps Herbert would like to join us?” “Oh, heavens no!” We both laughed, as noiselessly as possible, at the absurdity of the suggestion. “But seriously,” Jenifer continued, “the Blackfriars Mass sounds ideal, because presumably no one would mind if he made some kind of fuss. And he’d get to meet lots of new people at your coffee morning afterwards. I really think that it would do him good.” She sounded as though religion were like an iron tonic: a regular dose each week would automatically induce peace of soul. “He would probably enjoy it,” I conceded somewhat reluctantly. The very idea of Jacob or any Hart in a church was so astounding that it was difficult to imagine. “But”—again I could hear the irony in my voice—“I take it he’ll just be going along for the show. You won’t want me to give him instruction or anything like that?” “Oh Lord, no—he doesn’t have to understand it!” Jenifer exclaimed, slightly scandalized. I stared at her hard: this really was a bit of a cheek. And yet, I reflected, how many Catholics truly understood the labyrinthine complexity of their doctrinal system? “I don’t want him getting any of those ghastly ideas you all have— God, heaven and hell, or anything of that sort,” Jenifer went on, oblivious to any offense that her words might give. “Of course, all those beliefs are nonsense anyway. Ludicrous, in fact! He doesn’t need to know any of that !” “He’ll probably have to know something, though, to help him into the experience,” I said, trying to see how the Mass might look to a complete outsider. “It would all be a sort of fantasy to him, of course, on a par with Guy Fawkes or Goldilocks. But he might grasp the point of some of the stories. Nothing heavy, just—I don’t know—Jesus loves me and is my friend.”

• From Mystical Tradition: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (2008)

  Lecture Twenty-Nine The Appearance of Sufism Scope: For a religion that, in its exoteric form, is so anti-ascetical, the emergence of Sufism (the distinctive form of mysticism in the Islamic tradition) in the early 8th century is something of a surprise, as is its remarkable success. This lecture assesses various possible causes for this development, then sketches the Sufi way of life as a path (tariqa) of knowledge, love, and prayer. The lecture concludes with a general guide to the stations and states of the Sufi’s progression toward Allah, as well as some of the tensions created by this powerful form of mysticism within the House of Islam. Outline I. The appearance and the continued flourishing of Sufism as the dominant form of Islamic Mysticism is a surprise to those who are unaware of the place it holds in the history of this religious tradition. A. A Hadith of the Prophet declares, “There are no monks in Islam,” and the Qur’an has a strong anti-ascetical tendency: Marriage, property ownership, and political involvement are all encouraged. 1. The Shari’ah was developed and organized by scholars (ulama) with little attention to the internal response of the individual. 2. The ulama, furthermore, was closely attached to the political power of the caliphate, with a concern for the Islamic state. 3. Islam, in this framework, is a religion of the will (obedience) and the mind but not necessarily of the heart. B. Sufism offers a powerful alternative way of being Muslim, both within and at the fringes of the Shari’ah. 1. It emphasizes the individual’s response to Allah through mind, heart, and mystical experience. 2. Politically, its system of Sufi brotherhoods (orders) offers a place not totally defined by the theocratic state. C. Sufism’s relation to exoteric Islam has always been both emphatic and debated. 1. The ulama has responded variously to Sufism, with attempts to resist it, co-opt it, and reform it. 116 ©2008 The Teaching Company.

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

  I’m thinking out loud about what I would want to do. “Maybe I’m the cousin from Cleveland who comes to visit, and you’re going to show me the city. Very trashy and very cheap. Don’t know class when I see it.” “Yes. Very slutty. We’ve got to rat your hair. Big hair. Get some spandex.” “I look awful in spandex!” “I know, I know!” Just then a woman wearing an orange knit minidress with beads stitched on it walks by and Don swivels around to watch her pass. “Now,” he says thoughtfully, “if that dress were a little bit tighter and a little shorter, Co’lean would love it.” Genitals may be the least important part of masculinity and femininity, both from the inside and the outside. There is great eroticism in that gray and ill-defined middle ground, in crossing and criss-crossing, mixing and matching, fitting new folds around unexpected extensions. A woman wearing a dildo, a man wearing lipstick and lingerie—depending on your taste, and your taste may surprise you, the combination is what works. The cross itself, the pregnant, promising image that is both and neither. The taboo is born where fabric ends and skin begins. The difference between transvestites and transsexuals could be called the difference between being and becoming. Woman-with-cock—does that mean woman first and cock second? Or the other way around? The excitement is the same, a sexual paradox, unbounded. Dangerous, because no one knows the rules here. A man tells me the sight of two men kissing makes him squeamish. But, he adds, “I’ve always said I’d be happy to suck a dick if it was on a beautiful woman.” When I was in my late twenties, my mother called to tell me, almost in passing, that the young woman who had been my best friend for several years in adolescence was now a man. Terry’s transformation was less a shock to me than my mother had expected it to be. Though it had never consciously occurred to me to think of Terry as a man, the moment I did I felt the eminent logic of the idea. It felt right—suddenly obvious. Terry had always had about her the quality of a man, the ineffable, indefinable masculinity I associate with men and which is different from the masculinity of women. I was more surprised that Terry stayed in our hometown after his surgery, willing to endure whatever was dished out. To this day my father calls him “It.”

• From The Erotic Engine (2011)

  Given the modern tradition of separation of church and humour (not to mention sex, bottoms, poop and monkeys), it seemed impossible that such a manuscript could even exist. Yet, while these kinds of pictures were not the norm for a Book of Hours, they were far from rare. Mind-boggling as it might seem today, in their own time they were neither subversive nor scandalous. In fact, the main reason I had tracked down Wieck was so that he could talk me through the ways these tiny sexual drawings had affected the rise and fall of illuminated manuscripts. It turned out that nearly seven hundred years ago, monkeys’ bums and tiny sex scenes were altering the arc of media evolution. Until about 1250, only ordained members of the church— monks, priests and nuns—owned and read books; lay people simply were not taught to read. In the mid-thirteenth century, there began to emerge in Europe a middle class, and with them came the spread of literacy, libraries and universities. The lay literate class was still very much upper crust—shopkeepers and fieldworkers remained illiterate—but a growing number of families could afford to learn their letters and to own a book. They developed what Wieck calls a “bibliophilic jealousy” of the church leaders. The demand created by this jealousy was met by the production of prayer books for lay people. Complex protocols required the owners to recite certain psalms on specific days, to cycle through all 150 such prayers each week, to use the other prayers in the book appropriately for special situations. People discovered that these books demanded a formidable commitment. The laity wanted something simpler—reading and prayer were all very fine, but if they wanted to read and pray for a living, they wouldn’t be laity. Eventually, the complicated parts, including the psalms, were taken out, leaving a much simpler set of prayers, highlighted by the Hours of the Virgin. In those pre–printing press days, each book was individually handcrafted, and customized for the commissioning patron. The buyer made the call about what kind of illustrations would grace the pages, meaning that the fourteenth-century French woman would have asked for all that naughty marginalia. And consistent with many other media, people were often willing to pay a premium for that (sex) appeal. “You have to pay for all this stuff,” Wieck said. “Before she paid her bill they would count all these line fillers and marginalia, and you would pay two pennies per item or whatever the price was. So she would have specified the number of decorations she wanted, and I suspect have had input into the nature. The artist couldn’t on his own freedom put in these kinds of naughty bits, especially like ass-kissing, and know that it would be acceptable to the patron, especially a female patron.”

• From The Erotic Engine (2011)

  The sexuality of these images is more humorous than erotic. But that doesn’t make their presence in a prayer book any less surprising. Another prayer manuscript portrays a man and woman having sex in the corner of a page. Another shows two men linked at the genitals in a tiny box bordering six lines of Latin holy text. To the modern eye, nothing could be more incongruous. One item in the Morgan’s collection, a Book of Hours from fifteenth-century Italy, commissioned by a woman named Cecilia Gonzaga, is a rare exception that takes this saucy humour out of the margins and into the main illustrations. In what looks like a traditional depiction of Baby Jesus being bathed, the infant saviour appears to be sporting a porn-star-grade erection. But wait—it’s only his mother’s hand protruding from between his legs. Just an honest mistake? A few pages later, the endowment is back in another picture, only this time it turns out to be the knife of the High Priest who is circumcising Christ. Other than the visual penis joke, these illustrations look exactly like any other depiction of these scenes from that century. There was no scandal when this book was made. “This was a private commission,” Wieck said. “Now whether she asked for those images, who knows? But clearly her personality must have been known enough by either the bookseller or the artist or both that they knew they could get away with this sort of little in-joke.” Such a “little in-joke” could well be a source of major apoplexy today. Six hundred years of cultural change make these images simply unbelievable to the modern eye. They existed in the first place only because of a unique combination of social values and technological circumstances. These sexual images exist only in books that were commissioned by, and customized for, individuals: the book-making process of the day created one-offs rather than multiple copies. That allowed the elite few who could acquire such documents to have them customized however they wanted, without fear of upsetting anyone. When the printing press came along, Books of Hours started to become more standardized. It wasn’t quite mass production, but the market broadened just enough to cause the idiosyncrasies and jokes to disappear. “They occur in a small percentage, but consistently, in these manuscripts,” Wieck said. “The humour and the erotic element played a small role in people’s desire to own these books and enjoy them. If we only had this in one book here and another a hundred years later, you could say it had nothing to do with it. From the middle of the thirteenth century on, there’s an explosion of manuscript production. Humour and erotic imagery were a factor in why these books were popular, why they were consumed and why they were commissioned. Clearly there was always a percentage of society—a small one—for whom these images had great appeal.”

• From Another Country (1962)

  His reality shocked her and so did his beauty—or his vigor, which, in a man, is so nearly the same thing. She might have been seeing him for the first time—his short, disordered red hair, a rather square forehead with lines burned into it, heavier eyebrows than she remembered and darker eyes, set farther back. His chin had a tiny cleft—she had never noticed it before. His mouth was wider than she remembered, his lips were fuller, his teeth were slightly crooked. He had not shaved and his red beard bristled and gleamed in the weak yellow light on the landing. His trousers had no belt and his bare feet were in leather sandals. He said, “Come in,” and she brushed quickly past his body. He closed the door behind her. She walked into the center of the room and stared about her, seeing nothing; then they stared at each other, terribly driven, terribly shy, not daring to imagine what came next. He was frightened, but very self-contained. She felt that he was studying her, preparing himself for whatever this new conundrum might prove to be. He had made no decisions at all as yet, was trying to attune himself to her; which placed her under the necessity of finding out what was in his heart by revealing what was in hers. And she did not yet know what was in her heart—or did not want to know. He took her bag from her and set it on the bookcase. The way he did this made her realize that he was unaccustomed to having women in his room. The Shostakovich Fifth Symphony was on his record player; the play, Happy Hunting Ground , lay open on his bed, under his night light. The only other light in the room came from a small lamp on his desk. His apartment was small and spare, absolutely monastic; it was less a place to live in than it was a place to work; and she felt, suddenly and sharply, how profoundly he might resent the intrusion into his undecorated isolation of the feminine order and softness. “Let’s have a drink,” he said, and took the bottle from her bag. “How much do I owe you? ” She told him, and he paid her, shyly, with some crumpled bills which were lying on the mantelpiece, next to his keys. He moved into the kitchen, tearing the wrapper off the bottle. She watched him as he found glasses and ice.

• From Wild (2012)

  Late in the afternoon, I stopped for a break in a spot on the trail with a view over the rolling green land. I was on a slope, the mountain rising above me and descending steeply below. With no other place to sit, I sat on the trail itself, as I often did. I pulled off my boots and socks and massaged my feet as I stared out across the tops of the trees, my perch on the trail essentially a ledge over the forest. I loved the sensation of feeling taller than the trees, of seeing their canopy from above, as a bird would. The sight of it eased my sense of worry over the state of my feet and the rough trail ahead. It was in this reverie that I reached for the side pocket of my pack. When I pulled on the pocket’s zipper, Monster toppled over onto my boots, clipping the left one in such a way that it leapt into the air as if I’d thrown it. I watched it bounce—it was lightning fast and in slow motion all at once—and then I watched it tumble over the edge of the mountain and down into the trees without a sound. I gasped in surprise and lurched for my other boot, clutching it to my chest, waiting for the moment to reverse itself, for someone to come laughing from the woods, shaking his head and saying it had all been a joke. But no one laughed. No one would. The universe, I’d learned, was never, ever kidding. It would take whatever it wanted and it would never give it back. I really did have only one boot. So I stood up and tossed the other one over the edge too. I looked down at my bare feet, staring at them for a long moment, then began repairing my sandals with duct tape as best I could, sealing the bottoms back together and reinforcing the straps where they threatened to detach. I wore my socks inside the sandals to protect my feet from the lines of tape and hiked away feeling sick about the new state of affairs, but reassuring myself that at least I had a new pair of boots waiting for me in Castle Crags.