Tenderness

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.

Page 109 of 145 · 20 per page

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I said, ‘Don’t think me rude, but - whenever do you spent it?’‘I am saving it, miss!’ she said. ‘I aim to emigrate. My friend says, in the colonies a girl with twenty pounds can set up as a landlady of a rooming-house, with girls of her own.’‘Is that so?’ She nodded. ‘And you’d like to run a rooming-house?’‘Oh yes! They will always need rooming-houses in the colonies, you see, for the people coming in.’‘Well, that’s true. And, how much have you saved?’She flushed again. ‘Seven pounds, miss.’I nodded. Then I thought and said: ‘But the colonies, Blake! Could you bear the journey? You should have to live in a boat - suppose there were storms?’She picked up the scuttle of coal. ‘Oh, I shouldn’t mind that, miss!’I laughed; and so did she. We had never chatted so freely before. I had grown used to calling her only ‘Blake’ as Diana did; I had grown used to her curtseys; I had grown used to having her see me as I was now: swollen-eyed and swollen-mouthed, naked in a bed with the sheet at my bosom, and the marks of Diana’s kisses at my throat. I had grown used to not looking at her, not seeing her at all. Now, as she laughed, I found myself gazing at her at last, at her pinking cheeks and at her lashes, which were dark, and thinking, Oh! — for she was really rather handsome.And, as I thought it, there came the old self-consciousness between us. She hoisted her scuttle of coal a little higher, then came to take my tray and ask me, ‘Would there be anything else?’ I answered that she might run me a bath; and she curtseyed.And when I lay soaking in the bathroom I heard the slam of the front door. It was Diana. She came to find me. She had been to the Cavendish, but only to take a letter that must be signed by another lady.‘I didn’t like to wake you,’ she said, dipping her hand into the water.I forgot about Blake, then, and how handsome she was. I forgot about Blake, indeed, for a month or more. Diana gave dinners, and I posed and wore costumes; we made visits to the club, and to Maria’s house in Hampstead. All went on as usual.

• From The Art of Memoir

  in a wet trench (he never let them). Herr admires, pities, adores, and shrinks from them over the course of the book: “I stood as close to them as I could without actually being one of them, and then I stood as far back as I could without leaving the planet.” Herr’s compassion for the soldiers—“How do you feel when a nineteen-year-old kid tells you from the bottom of his heart that he’s gotten too old for this shit?”—somehow mitigates his horror, and ours: Was it possible they were there and not haunted? No, not possible, not a chance, I know I wasn’t the only one. Where are they now? (Where am I now?). . . . But disgust was only one color in the whole mandala, gentleness and pity were other colors. . . . I think all those people who used to say they only wept for the Vietnamese never really wept for anyone at all if they couldn’t squeeze out at least one for those men and boys when they died or had their lives cracked open for them. But of course we were intimate, I’ll tell you how intimate: they were my guns, and I let them do it. We covered each other, an exchange of services. . . . Talk about impersonating an identity, about locking into a role, about irony: I went to cover the war and the war covered me. . . . I went there behind the crude but serious belief that you had to be able to look at anything, serious because I acted on it and went, crude because I didn’t always know what you were seeing until later, maybe years later, that a lot of it never made it in at all, it just stayed there in your eyes. Time and information, rock and roll, life itself, the information isn’t frozen, you are. The book’s darkness relents in the clown play of the Mission. I spit coffee reading his interview with General William Westmoreland. Sending Herr in to speak with him is like sending the visionary William Blake into the tent of Attila the Hun. The general expects, since Herr’s from Esquire, that he’s “writing ‘humoristical’ pieces.” I came away feeling as though I’d just had a conversation with a man who touches a chair and says “This is a chair,” points to a desk and says, “This is a desk.” I couldn’t think of anything to ask him. Herr’s ability to mock “official military speak” rivals comic genius Joseph Heller in Catch-22. Herr will set out by quoting somebody,

• From The Great Believers (2018)

  He couldn’t quite focus; the face was cloudy. The morphine was a rug, a warm, numbing rug that was on him and in him. “Hey, it’s Kurt,” the man said. “Cecily’s son.” Yale tried to breathe in to say something, but he coughed out far more air than he’d taken in, and each cough was a morphine-dulled boot against his ribs. Debbie was here. It must be night again. Now that he thought about it, he’d known Debbie was here. He’d felt her beside him for a while now. She knew about the spot between his eyes. “Hey, I’m sorry. I don’t need you to talk. My mom wanted me to check how you were, and I—” Yale could see, foggily, Kurt glancing to Debbie for permission. He unzipped the duffel bag he carried. “I brought Roscoe.” A blur of gray. Yale had held Roscoe on his lap every time he went to Cecily’s for dinner, and each time, Roscoe settled in as if he knew exactly who Yale was. “Mom’s back from California on Friday.” Yale had no idea how far away Friday was. Kurt hovered near the bed, but he didn’t put Roscoe on it. He surely hadn’t been prepared for the number of tubes, the number of machines. He might have imagined Yale propped up with pillows, reading a book. “I know he appreciates it, honey,” Debbie said. “Here, let me bring him close for a second.” She took Roscoe, who didn’t object, and she raised Yale’s hand and put it down in the thick fur. Yale was aware, as he moved his fingers as much as he could, that this was the last time he’d ever touch animal fur, the last time, in fact, he’d touch much of anything besides his own bed and people’s hands. Kurt said, “But I’d better get going.” The poor kid. Yale wanted to tell him it was okay, that he wouldn’t blame him if he ran for his life. When he was gone, Yale managed to make an F sound with his lips, and Debbie understood. “She’s in labor,” she said. “She’s going to have a beautiful, healthy baby. I’ll let you know as soon as we get the news.” — He was aware that he was dreaming, but it felt like a dream that would never end. Fiona, alone on the street. Only sometimes he was Fiona, looking down at the stroller she pushed, a stroller that was empty at first and then held twins and then again was empty. After a while there was no stroller. And sometimes he was looking at Fiona, following behind her, above, reaching out to touch her hair. Fiona alone on Broadway, walking south. A hot, thick summer night, windows lit around her, but the streets were empty. The windows were empty, the parking lots. Broadway and Roscoe. Broadway and Aldine. Broadway and Melrose. Broadway and Belmont. Airplanes crossed the sky, and far away there was traffic, but here there was no one.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  In a past life, Ben’s mother sold one of her ovaries when she was a teenager, after a river molested her city and she needed money to rebuild her house. If Ben and I offered our hands, kneading her mother’s neck for an hour first, she’d let us ask her about it. She’d worm out of her skirt to show us: The scar made her loss legible to us, an indented hyphen three inches to the left of her belly button. Ben stroked the blue scar like a bird, as if she could calm it and coax it into her hands. What Ben wanted was to hold our hurts for us. She once told me a bruise was scratch-and-sniff. She scratched the one on my knee and sniffed it and said, Sweet. Inside the shack, Ben and her brother pretended they lived in a bomb shelter: Outside was a war they could win solely by surviving. When we played together, the bunk bed was our only bunker and every cockroach was a landmine. If I stepped on one, the penalty was death. Ben wore the uniform of a soldier, white pajamas that turned fog-thin with her body heat. I dressed in the uniform of a casualty, a masking-tape X over my heart, a bullet hole penned into my neck. We argued what color it should be: Ben’s brother said red, because of blood. Ben said black, because that’s the color of the hole itself. I wanted to say neither, but I was already dead. Ben’s birdcage was neutral territory. She placed it on the floor in the center of the shed, and whenever one of us placed our palm on it, we were safe for a maximum of ten seconds. I was the coward that always ran to the cage, placing both palms on its domed top while Ben and her brother waited on either side of me. They counted, and when I dropped my hands from the cage they tackled me at the same time. They stacked on top of me, one sitting on my chest and the other holding down my feet, promising to give me a good death, promising to bury all my bones as neighbors. Beg us to let you go, Ben said. Her hands corseted my ankles, her thumb stroking the bone. Let me go, I said, meaning don’t. _

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I should like to get Kitty back to Ginevra Road as swiftly as possible.’I hesitated, then looked at Kitty again. She raised her eyes to mine at last, very briefly, and nodded.‘All right,’ I said. I watched them leave. Walter took up his cloak, and - though it was far too large for her, and trailed upon the dusty floor - he placed it over Kitty’s slender shoulders. She clasped it tight at the throat, then let him usher her away, past the angry manager and the knot of whispering boys.By the time I reached Ginevra Road - after having gathered our boxes and bags together at Deacon’s, and delivered Flora to her own house in Lambeth - Walter had gone, our rooms were dark, and Kitty was in bed, apparently asleep. I bent over her, and stroked her head. She did not stir, and I didn’t like to wake her to perhaps more upset. Instead, I simply undressed, and lay close beside her, and placed my hand upon her heart - which beat on, very fiercely, through her dreams. The disastrous night at Deacon’s brought changes with it, and made some things a little strange. We did not sing at the hall again, but broke our contract - losing money on the deal. Kitty became choosier about the theatres we worked at; she began to question Walter, too, about the other acts that we must share the bills with. Once he booked us to appear alongside an American artist - a man called ‘Paul or Pauline?’ whose turn was to dance in and out of an ebony cabinet, dressed now as a woman, now as a man, and singing soprano and baritone by turns. I thought the act was a good one; but when Kitty saw him work, she made us cancel. She said the man was a freak, and would make us seem freakish by association ...We lost money on that deal, too. In the end I marvelled at Walter’s patience.For that was another change. I have spoken of the curious dimming of Walter’s brightness, of the subtle new distance that had grown between us, since Kitty and I had become sweethearts. Now the dimming and the distance increased. He remained kind, but his kindness was tempered by a surprising kind of stiffness; in Kitty’s presence, in particular, he grew easily flustered and self-conscious - and then jolly, with a horrible, forced kind of jolliness, as if ashamed of himself for being so awkward. His visits to Ginevra Road grew rarer. At last we saw him only to rehearse new songs, or in the company of the other artistes we sometimes took supper or drinks with.I missed him, and wondered at his change of heart - but didn’t wonder very hard, I must confess, because I thought I knew what had caused it.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  111 “How Does MonaLisa Touch Help Atrophic Vaginitis?,” Greater Boston Urology, January 17, 2018, https://www.info.greaterbostonurology.com/blog/gbu-blog/2018/01/how-does-monalisa-touch-help-atrophic-vaginitis.112 Alice Walker, Possessing the Secret of Joy (San Diego: Harcourt, 1992), 20.The Work of ParentingAutumn Brown Automn Brown is a mother of three living children, a facilitator with AORTA, and cohost of How to Survive the End of the World, our podcast. She teaches me most of what I know. Pleasure in the work of parenting is abundant. It is hard to describe, best revealed through a series of scenes. The reverential interest of Siobhán, age seven, and Máiréad, age five, watching their father Genjo transplanting tender Hog Heart tomato starts, explaining that the most fragile part of the plant is its tiny root system, which peeks out from the peat pockets from which they sprouted. The smell of Máiréad’s hair and the warmth of her naked leggy body when she crawls under the covers with me at seven in the morning, pulls my arms over and under her, and settles in for another half hour of restless rest. Finn is ten now, but when we lost our fourth child, the infant phenomenon, in 2014, Finn had recently turned six. In processing our loss, he wrote a cartoon about a momma dragon and a baby dragon. The momma dragon sustained an injury to her wing. In one scene, the momma dragon stands with her wings spread to show her wound, and the baby dragon stands next to and below her, wings spread in concert. They both look at her wound with frowny faces. Later, she dies while battling a T. Rex, and the baby dragon is forced to escape the scene in terror. The only way he can take flight is by throwing up. Finn instinctively understands that to play a game successfully with his sister Máiréad he must let her both win and continuously change the rules as suits her fancy. In this area of his life, alone, he is patient. Siobhán lies in my lap weeping for the death of her teacher’s mother, who dies in hospice at a ripe old age. She is weeping for her teacher, and she is weeping for me because she knows this means, finally, that I will die. She is inconsolable. But she is also consoled and secured by my living body, holding her right here, right now. Siobhán, this past winter, is lying in my lap while I stroke her hair and her face. She lifts her face and whispers into my ear, “Mommy, I feel safe with you.” Less than a year prior, she had been terrorized by her school, who more than once called the police on her, at the tender age of six. She knows what it means to feel unsafe and again safe.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  I also spoke of anything to do with his physical self with love and acceptance. For example, he fell in kindergarten and broke a front tooth, and it turned gray. The dentist said to wait for it to fall off rather than extract it. I immediately named it “the Leader Tooth” and we created a whole story about it. When the tooth fell out, what I told him was that the Leader Tooth had fallen out. When it was revealed he had a slight curve in his spine we needed to monitor, I told him he was lucky to have a “permanent gangsta lean,” knowing he is the kid who would love that. He still relishes his lean. All this has not been about cultivating his vanity but really about giving him a map and a vocabulary and a practice of loving himself, not abstractly but concretely. For him to understand that his body is extraordinary in what it can do. We have had cyclical sex talks. At ages four, then eight, then twelve, then again around fifteen, and none since. They have always been precise, frank, and age-appropriate, dictated by him. His questions have been great and even instructive for me. He is a very private young man, so now I am told to stay at bay. But I still compliment him anytime I notice something that I find particularly healthy in his engagement with his own body or with the young women and men in his life. I celebrate his body-positive and sexually healthy attitudes, his physical intimacy with his male friends, his feminist ideas, which come so naturally to him, the fierce way he respects the young women he has close relationships with, and their comfort and trust and intimacy with him. I am explicit about how amazing that is, how rare and necessary for him and for them. Without making things awkward, I gently connect the dots—I try to tell him that sex should be a lot like how they hang out in his room watching movies or talking for hours, and that sexual pleasure belongs to him just like love and friendship and ideas and dreams belong. I think he gets that. Tips for Raising Sexually Liberated KidsZahra Ala

• From Bestiary (2020)

  Ama took a seven-hour bus, heading north to us with crates of Coca-Cola and a bag of ginger that required two seats. In our kitchen, Ama boiled Coca-Cola with slices of ginger wading inside, a Cantonese cure she learned from the other women at the factory. She held my mouth open and poured in the ginger-cola, wouldn’t let go until I swallowed. Her fingers corseting my throat. My mother watched in the doorway, waiting to intervene, but Ama left the next day. She’d sewn me a charm to put inside my pillowcase, a stuffed gourd of felt and cotton balls. My mother threw it away every morning, but I stole it out of the trash and slept with my mouth around it, a gourd I’d ripen into my daughter. Ben told me to keep going, that the holes were opening, listening through their throats. But the story was too long for me to speak: My throat would run out like a ribbon. Inside the house, I wrote what I remembered, folded it into squares, and fed it to the 口. _ TRANSLATOR’S NOTE: Ama told me this story during my fever. I didn’t remember anything she said until days after she left, when my mother said I should delete all recollections of Ama before they invaded my neighboring memories. But this is a story I don’t want to forget. Other things I don’t want to forget: The way Ama held my hand when I dreamt I was stranded in a boat, the mattress flooding with my own sweat. When I asked her what the sea was like as a child and she said here’s a story. Is it possible that she threw her daughters into a river? Maybe she thought they were on fire. Maybe she thought she was saving them. Is there a way to tell a story without sides? Parable of the Pirate: Ama’s Interlude[To be read in Ama’s voice. Suggestions: Read this aloud underwater, or speak perpendicular to a strong wind, or swallow a fork before speaking. Bleed your voice of its language, then learn a sea’s accent.] _

• From Bestiary (2020)

  My mother lifted the bedsheet over us both when she told me this story, crouching down over my feet, grasping them in her fists, and ferrying them to her mouth. My toes squirmed like minnows in her maw, swimming against the current of her spit. In the dark, I watched the geography of her face rearranging: the mountain range of moles on her forehead, the hook of her lip lowering when she fished up a story. She let go of my feet when I begged her not to eat them, but one night she concluded the story by biting down on my big toe. Her teeth encircled it like a tiara, resting on the skin rather than breaking it, but I could feel her trembling, her jaw reined back by something I couldn’t see. In the morning, my toe wore a ringlet of white where the blood didn’t return again for months. Some nights, I woke to my mother’s finger foraging around in my ear, nicking out the earwax with her hooked pinky nail. She liked to joke she was digging for gold. She lifted the canoe of her pinky nail, loaded with my grit, and brought it to her mouth. I yanked at her wrist and said, No, no, no no no. But she ate it anyway, laughing when I said it was gross. I used to eat my earwax when I was hungry, she said. My ears were always so clean. That’s why I can hear everything. My mother said if I let the earwax live inside me, it would eventually grow beetle legs and scuttle into my brain, nesting there like shrapnel. She said she was saving me by eating my ear canals clean, allowing the sun to tunnel into my skull and keep all my memories lit. _ In the bedroom I shared with my brother, our mother told us stories about Arkansas/the rain, her sister/my aunt, her ma/my ama, her ba/my agong. How my grandfather buried two gold bars that an earthquake gave back, and how they spent the gold to get to LA. I was born from breakage: My mother left Ama and Agong in LA and moved six hours north, planting my brother and me in soil unsalted by memories. She summarized her life in slashes, everything a choice: Leave/Stay. Mother/Daughter. Love/Live.

• From Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995)

  I didn’t heed Marty’s advice, though, perhaps because, as the bonds between myself and the leadership grew stronger, I found them offering more than simple friendship. After meetings, I might go with one of the men to a local tavern to watch the news or listen to oldies—the Temptations, the O’Jays—thump from a dinged-up corner jukebox. On Sunday, I’d visit the various church services and let the women tease me over my confusion with communion and prayer. At a Christmas party in the Gardens, I danced with Angela, Mona, and Shirley under a globe that sent sparkling beads across the room; I swapped sports stories over stale cheese puffs and meatballs with husbands who had been reluctantly dragged to the affair; I counseled sons or daughters on their college applications, and played with grandchildren who sat on my knee. It was during such times, when familiarity or weariness dissolved the lines between organizer and leader, that I began to understand what Marty had meant when he insisted that I move toward the centers of people’s lives. I remember, for instance, sitting in Mrs. Crenshaw’s kitchen one afternoon, gulping down the burned cookies she liked to force on me every time I stopped by. It was getting late, the purpose of my visit had begun to blur in my head, and almost as an afterthought I decided to ask her why she still participated in the PTA so long after her own children had grown. Scooting her chair up closer to mine, she started to tell me about growing up in Tennessee, how she’d been forced to stop her own education because her family could afford to send only one child to college, a brother who would later die in World War II. Both she and her husband had spent years working in a factory, she said, just to see to it that their own son never had to stop his education—a son who had gone on to get a law degree from Yale. A simple enough story to understand, I thought: the generational sacrifice, the vindication of a family’s faith. Only, when I asked Mrs. Crenshaw what her son was doing these days, she went on to tell me that he had been diagnosed with schizophrenia a few years earlier and that he now spent his days reading newspapers in his room, afraid to leave the house. As she spoke, her voice never wavered; it was the voice of someone who has forced a larger meaning out of tragedy.

• From Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995)

  “That’s one of your brothers,” Auma said to me. “Bernard.” I went over to the young man and we shook hands, studying each other’s faces. I found myself at a loss for words but managed to ask him how he had been. “Fine, I guess,” he answered softly, which brought a round of laughter from everyone. After the introductions were over, Jane pushed me toward a small table set with bowls of goat curry, fried fish, collards, and rice. As we ate, people asked me about everyone back in Hawaii, and I tried to describe my life in Chicago and my work as an organizer. They nodded politely but seemed a bit puzzled, so I mentioned that I’d be studying law at Harvard in the fall. “Ah, this is good, Barry,” Jane said as she sucked on a bone from the curry. “Your father studied at this school, Harvard. You will make us all proud, just like him. You see, Bernard, you must study hard like your brother.” “Bernard thinks he’s going to be a football star,” Zeituni said. I turned to Bernard. “Is that right, Bernard?” “No,” he said, uncomfortable that he’d attracted attention. “I used to play, that’s all.” “Well … maybe we can play sometime.” He shook his head. “I like to play basketball now,” he said earnestly. “Like Magic Johnson.” The meal smothered some of the initial excitement, and the children turned to a large black-and-white TV that was showing the munificence of the president: the president opens a school; the president denounces foreign journalists and various Communist elements; the president encourages the nation to follow the path of nyayo—“footsteps toward progress.” I went with Auma to see the rest of the apartment, which consisted of two bedrooms, both jammed from one end to the other with old mattresses. “How many people live here?” I asked. “I’m not sure right now,” Auma said. “It always changes. Jane doesn’t know how to say no to anybody, so any relative who moves to the city or loses a job ends up here. Sometimes they stay a long time. Or they leave their children here. The Old Man and my mum left Bernard here a lot. Jane practically raised him.” “Can she afford it?” “Not really. She has a job as a telephone operator, which doesn’t pay so much. She doesn’t complain, though. She can’t have her own children, so she looks after others’.”

• From Bestiary (2020)

  But my tail was as much meat and tendon as bone. If I severed it, if I fed it to Agong, maybe I could give it a purpose that wasn’t hurt. My tail behaved like a flipper, frantic between my legs, knowing what I wanted of it. I called Ben in the morning, told her: I have something that needs to be cleaved. In the morning the sky was milk, already mourning me. Ben met me in the yard, the 口 breathing at our feet, exhaling moths that flew toward the light inside the house, clattering against the windows, attracted to ache. Turning to me, Ben stroked the skin behind my ears where no light lived. Cleave it from me, I said, sliding the tail out of my waistband. It hummed in my hand, thinner, reshaped by Ama’s fist. I told her how Ama had used it as a leash, how I’d lost the ability to steer it. Ben said there were two definitions of cleave. I said she knew which one I meant. My brother had been right to say my tail was a liability. Having a body is a liability, Ben said. And I like your body. My tail went still. I used to think stillness would save me, the way some animals choose stillness so they won’t be seen as moving prey. I turned around to show her the way it dangled, almost to the floor now, its weight like an anchor. Soon it would drown me and I’d have to evacuate from my body. Standing behind me, Ben pressed her belly against my back. She combed my hair with her fingers, pulled it back from my shoulders. I pretended I was a tree and her hands in my hair were perching birds. I tried to be a place she could stay. What would you be without this tail, she said, reaching down to grasp it. Free, I said, but I knew it wasn’t true. It was my umbilical cord, and I’d never been freer than inside my mother’s belly, Ama’s blood braiding into me. My body multiplied by theirs. Ben nudged her nose into my neck. The 口 squinted at our feet, watching us through hyphen-shaped eyes. You should see what my tail did, I told her. But it wasn’t the tail I blamed for hurting him. It was me, and Ben knew, and when she stepped back from me, tugging me by the tail so that I walked backward into the house, it was tenderness that tethered me to her, a desire to be crowned by her teeth, queened by them. She pulled me into the doorway, nipped my chin. Held me by the hips so tight I’d find the forensic outline of her fingers there later. I’d place my fingers in the same place and replay the ache that was my name. She kissed me and my bladder almost unzipped itself, eager to empty, to be filled with what she could give me.

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

  Basil was poor, and almost always sickly; he had only a single worn-out garment, and ate almost nothing but bread, salt, and herbs. The care of the poor and sick he took largely upon himself. He founded in the vicinity of Caesarea that magnificent hospital, Basilias, which we have already mentioned, chiefly for lepers, who were often entirely abandoned in those regions, and left to the saddest fate; he himself took in the sufferers, treated them as brethren, and, in spite of their revolting condition, was not afraid to kiss them.1952 Basil is distinguished as a pulpit orator and as a theologian, and still more as a shepherd of souls and a church ruler; and in the history of monasticism he holds a conspicuous place.1953 In classical culture he yields to none of his contemporaries, and is justly placed with the two Gregories among the very first writers among the Greek fathers. His style is pure, elegant, and vigorous. Photius thought that one who wished to become a panegyrist, need take neither Demosthenes nor Cicero for his model, but Basil only. Of his works, his Five Books against Eunomius, written in 361, in defence of the deity of Christ, and his work on the Holy Ghost, written in 375, at the request of his friend Amphilochius, are important to the history of doctrine.1954 He at first, from fear of Sabellianism, recoiled from the strong doctrine of the homoousia; but the persecution of the Arians drove him to a decided confession. Of importance in the East is the Liturgy ascribed to him, which, with that of St. Chrysostom, is still in use, but has undoubtedly reached its present form by degrees. We have also from St. Basil nine Homilies on the history of the Creation, which are full of allegorical fancies, but enjoyed the highest esteem in the ancient church, and were extensively used by Ambrose and somewhat by Augustine, in similar works;1955 Homilies on the Psalms; Homilies on various subjects; several ascetic and moral treatises;1956 and three hundred and sixty-five Epistles,1957 which furnish much information concerning his life and times. § 165. Gregory of Nyssa.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  In 2008 she was awarded the TED Prize and began working with TED on the Charter for Compassion, created online by the general public and crafted by leading thinkers in Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Confucianism. It was launched globally in the fall of 2009. Also in 2008, she was awarded the Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Medal. And in 2013, she received the British Academy’s inaugural Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize for Transcultural Understanding. ALSO BY KAREN ARMSTRONG Through the Narrow Gate A History of God: The 4,000–Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam Jerusalem: One City, Three Faiths Islam: A Short History Buddha The Battle for God: Fundamentalism in Judaism, Christianity and Islam The Spiral Staircase A Short History of Myth Muhammad: A Prophet for Our Time The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions The Bible: The Biography The Case for God: What Religion Really Means Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life Afterword W e have seen that, like the weather, religion “does lots of different things.” To claim that it has a single, unchanging, and inherently violent essence is not accurate. Identical religious beliefs and practices have inspired diametrically opposed courses of action. In the Hebrew Bible, the Deuteronomists and the Priestly authors all meditated on the same stories, but the Deuteronomists turned virulently against foreign peoples, while the Priestly authors sought reconciliation. Chinese Daoists, Legalists, and military strategists shared the same set of ideas and meditative disciplines but put them to entirely different uses. Saint Luke and the Johannine authors all reflected on Jesus’s message of love, but Luke reached out to marginalized members of society, while the Johannines confined their love to their own group. Antony and the Syrian boskoi both set out to practice “freedom from care,” but Antony spent his life trying to empty his mind of anger and hatred, while the Syrian monks surrendered to the aggressive drives of the reptilian brain. Ibn Taymiyyah and Rumi were both victims of the Mongol invasions, but they used the teachings of Islam to come to entirely different conclusions. For centuries the story of Imam Husain’s tragic death inspired Shiis to withdraw from political life in principled protest against systemic injustice; more recently it has inspired them to take political action and say no to tyranny. Until the modern period, religion permeated all aspects of life, including politics and warfare, not because ambitious churchmen had “mixed up” two essentially distinct activities but because people wanted to endow everything they did with significance. Every state ideology was religious.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  Dani. Hopefully I bring good, thoughtful feedback to the questions and considerations you pose and share. I bring my attention. I bring my care. I think I also bring a helpful dose of the mundane. Real talk: there is a lot of fabulousness happening in woes-land. There is a ton of travel to fabulous places, a lot of high-level work with some of the baddest organizers and thinkers in the country and world, a lot of freedom around thinking about what’s possible in sex and in love. While I used to share in a lot of that fabulousness, my life is different now and probably will continue to be for a while. I wash a lot of dishes, prepare a lot of food, do a lot of nursing, sweep the floor a lot. I’m much more homebound than maybe at any other time in my adulthood. My life has shifted because I can’t travel or work as much. I do a lot of thinking about how to best piece together childcare and manage family relationships. I know that family relationships and children are hugely important in your lives too, but I think I bring a dose of what it means to be primarily focused on these things every day. I think we learn from each other in this regard—I remember not to give up on the fabulousness of life, and you both witness what’s tough for me and fill in in incredible ways to lend support. amb. That’s true, it has been powerful actually to feel the woeship adapt to the change in Dani’s life of becoming a parent. I feel like I bring an attitude of “what do you really want? You can have that.” A standard for pleasure, permission. I bring a Virgo energy of getting things functional. And I love problem-solving, working through things that feel impossible. I am also fiercely protective of both of you, of your right to be whole. Also, I am funny. AMB. We also share a commitment to pleasure, which shows up in our support of each other living our best lives and in our woecations, aka, wherever two or more of us are gathered. What have you learned about pleasure in this relationship?

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  Other sages and mystics developed spiritual practices to help people control their aggression and develop a reverence for all human beings. In India, renouncers practiced the disciplines of yoga and ahimsa to eradicate egotistic machismo. Others cultivated the ideals of anatta (“no self”) and kenosis (“self-emptying”) to control the “me first” impulses that so often lead to violence; they sought an “equanimity” that would make it impossible for one to see oneself as superior to anybody else, taught that every single person has sacred potential, and asserted that people should even love their enemies. Prophets and psalmists insisted that a city could not be “holy” if the ruling class did not care for the poor and dispossessed. Priests urged their compatriots to draw on the memory of their own past suffering to assuage the pain of others, instead of using it to justify harassment and persecution. They all insisted in one way or another that if people did not treat all others as they would wish to be treated themselves and develop a “concern for everybody,” society was doomed. If the colonial powers had observed the Golden Rule in their colonies, we would not be having so many political problems today. One of the most ubiquitous religious practices was the cult of community. In the premodern world, religion was a communal rather than a private pursuit. People achieved enlightenment and salvation by learning to live harmoniously together. Instead of distancing themselves from their fellow humans as the warriors did, sages, prophets, and mystics helped people cultivate a relationship with and responsibility for those they would not ordinarily find congenial. They devised meditations that deliberately extended their benevolence to the ends of the earth; wished all beings happiness; taught their compatriots to revere the holiness of every single person; and resolved to find practical ways of assuaging the world’s suffering. Neuroscientists have discovered that Buddhist monks who have practiced this compassionate meditation assiduously have physically enhanced those centers of the brain that spark our empathy. Jains cultivated an outstanding vision of the community of all creatures. Muslims achieved the surrender of islam by taking responsibility for one another and sharing what they had with those in need. In Paul’s churches, rich and poor were instructed to sit at the same table and eat the same food. Cluniac monks made lay Christians live together like monks during a pilgrimage, rich and poor sharing the same hardships. The Eucharist was not a solitary communion with Christ but a rite that bonded the political community.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  He would not even keep the booty he acquired in a raid he had fought simply to rescue his nephew Lot, who had been kidnapped by four marauding kings. 34 His kindness and hospitality to three passing strangers stand in stark contrast to the violence they experienced in civilized Sodom. 35 When Yahweh told Abraham that he planned to destroy Sodom, Abraham begged him to spare the city, because unlike rulers who had scant respect for human life, he had a horror of shedding innocent blood. 36 When the biblical authors tell us about Jacob on his deathbed blessing his twelve sons and prophesying their future, they are asking what kind of leader is needed to create a viable egalitarian society in such a ruthless world. Jacob rejected Simeon and Levi, whose reckless violence meant that they should never control territory, populations, and armies. 37 He predicted that Judah, who could admit and correct his mistakes, would make an ideal ruler. 38 But no state could survive without Joseph’s political savvy, so when the Israelites finally escaped from Egypt, they took Joseph’s bones with them to the Promised Land. Then there were occasions when a nation might need Levi’s radicalism, because without the aggressive determination of the Levite Moses, Israel would never have left Egypt . The book of Exodus depicts Egyptian imperialism as an extreme example of systemic oppression. The pharaohs made the Israelites’ lives “unbearable,” compelling them to “work with clay and with brick, all kinds of work in the fields; [forcing] on them every kind of labour.” 39 To stem their rising birthrate, Pharaoh even ordered the midwives to kill all Israelite male babies, but the infant Moses was rescued by Pharaoh’s daughter and brought up as an Egyptian aristocrat. One day in instinctive revulsion from state tyranny, Moses, a true son of Levi, killed an Egyptian who was beating a Hebrew slave. 40 He had to flee the country, and Yahweh, who had not revealed himself to Moses the Egyptian aristocrat, first spoke to him when he was working as a shepherd in Midian. 41 During the Exodus, Yahweh could liberate Israel only by using the same brutal tactics as any imperial power: terrorizing the population, slaughtering their children, and drowning the entire Egyptian army. Peaceful tactics were of no avail against the martial might of the state. Yahweh divided the Sea of Reeds in two so that the Israelites could cross dry shod as effortlessly as Marduk had slit Tiamat, the primal ocean, in half to create heaven and earth; but instead of an ordered universe, he had brought into being a new nation that would provide an alternative to the aggression of imperial rule.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  I want to offer that the same practices we use for getting naked in the realm of sex and intimacy—the unveiling of skin—can teach us to bring our unapologetic selves into any space where we need to get naked. Know Your Own Nakedness In my early years of hooking up, I never looked at myself naked. I would get my outfit on, and once things were sucked in and lifted up and shaped into a stiff mannequin version of my body I would look in the mirror and approve. Later, if the night went well, as the clothes were coming off I would turn off or move away from bright light and hope the other person didn’t notice the difference between presentation and reality. I am grateful for formative experiences where I got to practice being naked around others in relationship, at hot springs and bathhouses. I am grateful for children who love my soft enveloping hugs. And for lovers who said, “You’re beautiful.” But the most meaningful work was a year of personal practice: looking in mirrors at my naked body and finding something I liked. It’s tender to remember that at first I could only say “my left pinky,” but it was a beginning: “Left pinky, you are smooth and unbitten. You look delicate, and your nail is beautiful.” My standard was that I couldn’t repeat a body part. Eventually I got to the stretch marks, scars, and dimples of cellulite. Eventually I got to a place of seeing myself whole, in motion, decompartmentalized. Eventually I realized it was a sacred and beautiful body. I have been through a similar process for my emotions, for my spirit, and for my movement worker self. Knowing this nakedness allows me to have more than gumption when it is time to show myself to others; it allows me to have dignity. I keep up the practice, and these days I sometimes find it hard to keep any clothes on at all. Be Good to Your Body Moisturize. Eat your greens. Stretch. Say nice things in the mirror like “damn god/dess, you look delectable today.” Be Sure You Want to Be Naked If you’re in a situation where keeping clothes on feels right, listen to that feeling without judgment; be curious. What is the data inside that feeling that can help you understand yourself and the situation? There’s a lot of fun and sexy sex to be had in various states of partial dress, and I support all of that. Or there might be a question of safety or comfort that needs attending to that hasn’t been articulated or agreed on yet. And while there’s nothing that compares to the experience of skin on skin, it has to be in the right setting with the right person or people. Nakedness is vulnerability. Vulnerability is something we offer where it is earned; as it is held well, we can offer more. So ask yourself, has this moment earned my nakedness?

• From Bestiary (2020)

  I felt around the bottom again and withdrew a bracelet with bone beads, then a plastic spoon, then a penny. I raked the soil with my fingers until I was slit by something: a page. Tugging it loose from the soil, I slid it out and held it with the tips of my fingers. On both sides it was blank, white as the soil. For you to write back to me, Ama said. I dropped it back into the hole. I said I would never. She smiled, half her teeth missing, places for morning to pour into her mouth. She said the letters were meant for anyone listening, and I was the one who had been translating. I was the one who wanted to witness. I thought of everything I’d fed to the holes: Dayi’s goose, Ben’s birdcage, my tail. While Ama watched me, I thought of kidnapping the rest of her teeth, holding them hostage in my mouth. She’d have to beg me to return them to her, give her back the ability to speak. You’ll write back. I know you will. I said no, I didn’t have the history to forgive her, and Ama said, I never wanted you to forgive me. Weren’t you reading? Behind her, the garden hose spewed into the soil. She kneeled in the white, held out her palms. She said she must have dreamt of growing a tail just like this when she was a girl, but sometimes a wound skips a generation or two, appearing again in the body that is most ready to wield it. I said I never wanted to wield anything ever again, that I had seen Agong’s chest branded by me. You’ll write back, Ama said. Not because you’ve forgiven me, but because I will never hate you for what you’ve done. Because I’m the only one who knows what you’re capable of. She bowed her head like a knight in a fairy tale, all parody, and at the nape of her neck, there was a cowlick the same size and shape of my mother’s. It was like seeing again a species of bird you thought went extinct: I couldn’t stop myself from cooing down at it, petting it. With the tip of my soiled thumb, I touched the spot where her hair grew circular like my mother’s, the tip of the strand chasing its own root. I stirred the cowlick with my thumb and told her this was what my mother did before I fell asleep: She traversed my hairline with her finger, renaming my widow’s peak Papakwaka, every part of me a creation story.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  The story I told the holes was this one: The first time I got a fever, only months after my father left for the mainland, I wet the bed twice in one night. My mouth was hot and oven-doored, baking my tongue brittle when I tried to speak. After days of staying home with me, of swapping my bedsheets for towels and saran-wrapping my pillow to keep me from clawing out the foam, my mother called Ama. I knew she didn’t want to call, but she hadn’t been to work in a week and we were running out of grocery bags for me to vomit into. I couldn’t hear what she’d said to Ama, but after she hung up and knotted up the plastic bag of my vomit, she swiped the slime off my chin and said, I have to go to work. Feet don’t scour themselves of fungus. I knew she wanted me to contradict her, to tell her to stay home with me, but instead I said I wanted to see Ama. My mother stood in the doorway with the bag of vomit flopping in her arms. A leak opened in the corner of the bag and my belly drained out of it, a stew splattering her toes. She stepped through it, came to my bedside. Said I didn’t know what I wanted. But what I wanted was both of them beside me, their arms impersonating a bridge above me, but that would mean I was the river below them, siding with the water that had almost drowned my mother. Ama took a seven-hour bus, heading north to us with crates of Coca-Cola and a bag of ginger that required two seats. In our kitchen, Ama boiled Coca-Cola with slices of ginger wading inside, a Cantonese cure she learned from the other women at the factory. She held my mouth open and poured in the ginger-cola, wouldn’t let go until I swallowed. Her fingers corseting my throat. My mother watched in the doorway, waiting to intervene, but Ama left the next day. She’d sewn me a charm to put inside my pillowcase, a stuffed gourd of felt and cotton balls. My mother threw it away every morning, but I stole it out of the trash and slept with my mouth around it, a gourd I’d ripen into my daughter. Ben told me to keep going, that the holes were opening, listening through their throats. But the story was too long for me to speak: My throat would run out like a ribbon. Inside the house, I wrote what I remembered, folded it into squares, and fed it to the 口. _ TRANSLATOR’S NOTE: Ama told me this story during my fever. I didn’t remember anything she said until days after she left, when my mother said I should delete all recollections of Ama before they invaded my neighboring memories. But this is a story I don’t want to forget.