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.

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• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  But it was not so easy to replace to our community the loss of so sweet a member of it: for, not to mention her beauty, she was one of those mild, pliant characters, that if one does not entirely esteem, one can scarce help loving, which is not such a bad compensation neither. Owing all her weaknesses to good nature, and an indolent facility that kept her too much at the mercy of first impressions, she had just sense enough to know that she wanted leading strings, and thought herself so much obliged to any who would take the pains to think for her, and guide her, that with a very little management, she was capable of being made a most agreeable, nay a most virtuous wife: for vice, it is probable, had never been her choice, or her fate, if it had not been for occasion, or example, or had she not depended less upon herself than upon her circumstances. This presumption her conduct afterwards verified: for presently meeting with a match, that was ready cut and dry for her, with a neighbour’s son of her own rank, and a young man of sense and order, who took as the widow of one lost at sea (for so it seems one of her gallants, whose name she had made free with, really was), she naturally struck into all the duties of her domestic life, with as much simplicity of affection, with as much constancy and regularity, as if she had never swerved from a state of undebauched innocence from her youth. These desertions had, however, now so far thinned Mrs. Cole’s cluck that she was left with only me, like a hen with one chicken; but though she was earnestly entreated and encouraged to recruit her crops, her growing infirmities, and, above all, the tortures, of a stubborn hip gout, which she found would yield to no remedy, determined her to break up her business, and retire with a decent pittance into the country, where I promised myself, nothing so sure, as my going down to live with her, as soon as I had seen a little more of life, and improved my small matters into a competency that would create in me an independence on the world: for I was now, thanks to Mrs. Cole, wise enough to keep that essential in view.

• From The Liars' Club: A Memoir (1995)

  No matter how swell some drawing looked in your head, it always got cobbled up into a ratty kid-thing by the time you were through. Mother set both cards on the mantel to dry. Lecia’s at least was clean. Mine had glue scabs all over. Plus she was hell on coloring inside the lines, which I was a long way from at that time. Still, old Hector swayed in front of both like they were the Holy Fucking Grail. He had this bleary, dog-faced look that I now realize was as much myopia as drunkenness. He slurred out a sentence about how he hoped someday we’d make him something for Father’s Day, to which Lecia said, “Don’t hold your breath.” That made me feel sorry enough to hug him before bed. My arms squeezed quick around his middle, which was wishy inside the slippery nylon of his shirt. The next morning Mother dragged out of bed first thing to hit the post office for stamps enough to mail Daddy our cards. Motoring around before her blood alcohol level got adjusted was no small act of will. She’d brought a Bloody Mary in a tumbler with a lid on it like a baby would sip out of. She sat heavy behind the wheel in front of the P.O., rifling through her brown Coach bag for her wallet. Her hands shook. She finally plopped the whole thing in Lecia’s lap, saying just take it. Left alone in the car with Mother, I saw for the first time how drinking had worn away at her looks. She’d bleached her hair platinum for some ungodly reason. She also wore dark sunglasses in daylight. Something about the vast difference between those colors—the hair like scalded grass and the shiny black of the glasses—yellowed her complexion. She had also draped a white chiffon scarf around her head and neck like some bandage too loose and sheer to do any good. Her big square hands trembled even when she did something definite with them, like dumping the ashtray out the window. I was silently scrambling for something to say. But no sooner did a possible sentence scuttle through my head than I could picture the tired scorn Mother would meet it with. She liked to say her bullshit meter went off pretty easy in those days. I only knew I bored her. I watched her sprinkling salt in the sippy hole of that tumbler using a Morton’s picnic shaker she kept in the car. I finally told her maybe she needed a whole block of salt like what we put out in the horse pasture. She pinched her mouth into a stiff little asterisk at that. Mother’s bleach job put me in mind of an obituary picture I’d seen of Jayne Mansfield, who apparently got her head cut slap off in a car wreck.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  There was no one near us save our driver - and he had the collar of his cape about his ears, and was busy with his pipe and his tobacco-pouch. I looked at the river again - at that extraordinary, ordinary transformation, that easy submission to the urgings of a natural law, that was yet so rare and so unsettling.It seemed a little miracle, done just for Kitty and me.‘How cold it must be!’ I said softly. ‘Imagine if the whole river froze over, if it was frozen right down from here to Richmond. Would you walk across it?’Kitty shivered, and shook her head. ‘The ice would break,’ she said. ‘We would sink and drown; or else be stranded and die of the cold!’I had expected her to smile, not make me a serious answer. I saw us floating down the Thames, out to sea - past Whitstable, perhaps - on a piece of ice no bigger than a pancake.The horse took a step, and its bridle jangled; the driver gave a cough. Still we gazed at the river, silent and unmoving - and both of us, finally, rather grave.At last Kitty gave a whisper. ‘Ain’t it queer,’ she said.I made no answer, only stared at where the curdled water swirled, thick and unwilling, about the columns of the bridge beneath our feet. But when she shivered again I moved a step closer to her, and felt her lean against me in response. It was icy cold upon the bridge; we should have moved back from the parapet into the shelter of the carriage. But we were loath to leave the sight of the frozen river - loath too, perhaps, to leave the warmth of one another’s bodies, now that we had found it.I took her hand. Her fingers, I could feel, were stiff and cold inside her glove. I placed the hand against my cheek; it did not warm it. With my eyes all the time on the water below I pulled at the button at her wrist, then drew the mitten from her, and held her fingers against my lips to warm them with my breath.I sighed, gently, against her knuckles; then turned the hand, and breathed upon her palm. There was no sound at all save the unfamiliar lapping and creaking of the frozen river. Then, ‘Nan,’ she said, very low.I looked at her, her hand still held to my mouth and my breath still damp upon her fingers. Her face was raised to mine, and her gaze was dark and strange and thick, like the water below.I let my hand drop; she kept her fingers upon my lips, then moved them, very slowly, to my cheek, my ear, my throat, my neck. Then her features gave a shiver and she said in a whisper : ‘You won’t tell a soul, Nan - will you?’I think I sighed then: sighed to know - to know for sure, at last! - that there was something to be told.

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

  Eventually the religion of Muhammad’s followers would be called islam, because it demanded that individuals “surrender” their whole being to Allah; a muslim was simply a man or woman who had made that surrender. At first, though, the new faith was called tazakka, which can be roughly translated as “refinement.” 9 Instead of hoarding their wealth and ignoring the plight of the poor, Muslims were exhorted to take responsibility for one another and feed the destitute, even when they were hungry themselves. 10 They traded the irascibility of jahiliyyah for the traditional Arab virtue of hilm— forbearance, patience, and mercy. 11 By caring for the vulnerable, freeing slaves, and performing small acts of kindness on a daily, even hourly basis, they believed that they would gradually acquire a responsible, compassionate spirit and purge themselves of selfishness. Unlike the tribesmen, who retaliated violently at the slightest provocation, Muslims must not strike back but leave revenge to Allah, 12 consistently treating all others with gentleness and courtesy. 13 Socially, the surrender of islam would be realized by learning to live in a community: believers would discover their deep bond with other human beings, whom they would strive to treat as they would wish to be treated themselves. “Not one of you can be a believer,” Muhammad is reported to have said, “unless he desires for his neighbor what he desires for himself.” At first the Meccan establishment took little notice of the ummah, but when Muhammad began to emphasize the monotheism of his message, they became alarmed, for commercial rather than theological reasons. An outright rejection of the local deities would be bad for business and alienate the tribes who kept their totems around the Kabah and came specifically to visit them during the hajj. A serious rift now developed: Muslims were attacked; the ummah, still only a small segment of the Quraysh, was economically and socially ostracized; and Muhammad’s life was in jeopardy. When Arabs from Yathrib, an agrarian colony some 250 miles to the north, invited the ummah to settle with them, it seemed the only solution. In 622, therefore, some seventy Muslim families left their homes for the oasis that would become known as al-Madinat, or Medina, the City of the Prophet. This hijrah (“migration”) from Mecca was an extraordinary step. In Arabia, where the tribe was the most sacred value, to abandon one’s kinsfolk and accept the permanent protection of strangers was tantamount to blasphemy. The very word hijrah suggests painful severance: HJR has been translated as “he cut himself off from friendly or loving communication ... he ceased ... to associate with them.” 14 Henceforth Meccan Muslims would be called the Muhajirun (“Emigrants”), this traumatic dislocation becoming central to their identity.

• From The Liars' Club: A Memoir (1995)

  He’d stayed long-muscled and wiry from decades of climbing oil towers. His hospital gown’s thin blue cotton looked overdelicate on his raw-boned frame. Somebody had slicked back his hair with Brylcreem. The green oxygen-tank hissing made the only sound in the room. The heart monitor sat squat and disconnected in the corner, its screen a muddy brown. But for the tube running from an upended bottle into the back of Daddy’s hand, he might have been carved of gray marble. He looked like a soapstone statue of my daddy sleeping, or like the elegant casket tops of pharaohs I’d pored over in the Egypt section of our encyclopedia as a kid. I slid my hand under the tent plastic to take his large dry hand. His lips were flaky. His eyes were swollen to reptilian-looking slits. I lifted the tent plastic another notch and poked my head in. The air inside was thin and cool as mountain air. “Daddy?” I said. The night nurse popped her head in the door and told me to get out from under there, I was killing him. She came over to fiddle with his feeding tube and feel his pulse. The door had just hissed shut behind her when Daddy’s eyes opened a notch. He raised his arm up stiff the way a cartoon sleepwalker would. With one trembling finger, he poked the plastic oxygen tent as if to touch my face. Then his arm dropped heavy. “Looooo,” he said. The left side of his mouth was drawn down in a sharp parody of being sad. “Hello, Daddy,” I said. I sounded cheerful enough to teach Romper Room. “Goddamn,” he said. Then, “Yamma.” I told him Mama was talking to the nurses. He used his good hand to feel down his bad arm like a blind man, exploring each finger. He pulled it across his middle as if to park it there. But the arm slid back to his side, dead as a fish. I drew the supper tray over and lifted the plastic lid. “Presto,” I said. Did he want any of that? He wrinkled his nose. “Shit,” he said. He went back to studying his bad hand, like it held the answer to some question he couldn’t quite formulate. I finally stuck a bendy straw in a carton of milk, and he sucked that down. Afterwards, I wiped his wet chin with my sleeve. “Ah looo,” he said. He stared at me steady, like a swami sending brain waves. “Hello, Daddy,” I said. I held up a cup of orange juice covered with Saran Wrap, and he wrinkled his nose. From curiosity, I pulled open the metal drawer of his bed table. A single can of Lone Star rolled into view. I shut the drawer, and in that brief interval, Daddy’s eyes had closed. I sneaked under the oxygen tent to be sure. “Daddy?” I said. But he was like Brer Rabbit, just playing possum. Mother let me drive home. Dr.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  Later, when both of us stood in front of the bathroom mirror, we looked like we were wearing our graves, dazzling with dirt, musky with the soil we’d turned on its back. Overnight, the holes contracted into nostril-holes, breathing out a fog that was thick as whisked egg, a fog that would fly far northwest to squat on top of the Bay Bridge. The fog smelled like fucking, like us, like our sweat fermented into sweet pudding, and when it began to rise, we found the last letter sprouting out of the 口 ’s lips. It parted the fog, flapping like a sail in trouble, no destination visible, and through the curdled milk of the air I could only see Ben bending down to save it.

• From My People (2022)

  She took flowers for the pulpit, and articles on Negro history for the Sunday school bulletin board. She also checked the board to find out which of the members were ill, and made mental notes to send cards if they lived too far away for her to get by to see them. If the minister, who lived out of town, was there, she would leave a contribution with him. If not, she’d leave it with one of the deacons. And every few weeks she would, near the end of her rounds, deposit at the bus station her shopping bag full of fresh vegetables from Mr. Will’s garden, then walk from there to the edge of town, where a narrow, crooked path led into the cemetery. She would pass the two or three family vaults and the hundreds of plain white, square Georgia-marble headstones—graves of former Leverton soldiers who had died either defending the Confederacy against the Yankees or defending the country against foreign enemies. She would walk past those graves on a single path through neatly laid-out plots to the end of the cemetery, where a thick row of hedges and uncontained growth distinctly cut off the main all-white cemetery and concealed from sight all that was behind it. Through a small opening in this thicket, my grandmother would make her way until she found another path, strewn with dead, brown grass and dry, severed tree branches that had been cut in the well-kept part of the cemetery and flung carelessly over the hedge border. This accumulation, along with spreading kudzu and other creeping things, had, over the years, completely covered the unattended and sunken graves back there except for my grandmother’s plot and one or two others. For some years past, the green wilderness that grew on the far side of these graves had been too dense to see through, but in recent months that land had been cleared and houses had been built almost up to the graves. A thin, insubstantial wire fence with intermingling vines provided the only protection from intruders. My grandmother had, for some time, hired Mr. Will to keep the grass and hedges cut around her plot, and he had voluntarily erected a white picket fence around the square cubicle to set off its border of evergreens. He had also planted a sapling in the left-hand corner, just below the foot of my grandfather’s grave. Although Mr. Will was the only person who tended the plot, the city nevertheless billed my grandmother monthly for upkeep. She had never complained about this, and had paid the sum regularly. She had allowed my mother to buy money orders and to keep in a lockbox the money-order stubs, along with the deeds, insurance policies, and records of every monetary transaction she had ever carried out. I had no doubt whatever that no oversight in payment had occurred.

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

  83 Living in this way gave Christians intimations of new possibilities in humanity epitomized in the man Jesus, whose self-abnegation had raised him to God’s right hand. All former social divisions, Paul insisted, had become irrelevant: “In the one Spirit we were all baptized, Jews as well as Greeks, slaves as well as citizens.” This sacred community of people who previously had nothing in common made up the body of the risen Christ. 84 In one memorable story, Luke, the evangelist who was closest to Paul, showed that Christians would come to know the risen Jesus not by a solitary mystical experience but by opening their hearts to the stranger, reading their scriptures together, and eating at the same table. 85 Despite Paul’s best efforts, however, the early Christians would never fit easily into Greco-Roman society. They held aloof from the public celebrations and civic sacrifices that bound the city together and revered a man who had been executed by a Roman governor. They called Jesus “lord” (kyrios), but this had nothing in common with the conventional aristocracy, which clung to status and regarded the poor with disdain. 86 Paul quoted an early Christian hymn to the Philippian ekklesia, to remind them that God had bestowed the title of kyrios on Jesus because he had “emptied himself [heauton ekenosen] to assume the condition of a slave ... and was humbler yet, even to accepting death, death on a cross.” 87 The ideal of kenosis, “emptying,” would become crucial to Christian spirituality. “In your minds, you must be the same as Christ Jesus,” Paul told the Philippians. “There must be no competition among you, no conceit; but everybody is to be self-effacing. Always consider the other person to be better than yourself, so that nobody thinks of his own interests first, but everybody thinks of other people’s interests instead.” 88 Like the followers of Confucius and Buddha, Christians were cultivating ideals of reverence and selflessness that countered the aggressive self-assertion of the warrior aristocracy. A tightly knit and isolated community, however, can develop an exclusivity that ostracizes others. In Asia Minor a number of Jewish- Christian communities, who traced their origins to the ministry of Jesus’s apostle John, had developed a different view of Jesus. Paul and the Synoptics had never regarded Jesus as God; the very idea would have horrified Paul who, before his conversion, had been an exceptionally punctilious Pharisee. They all used the term “Son of God” in the conventional Jewish sense: Jesus had been an ordinary human being commissioned by God with a special task. Even in his exalted state, there was, for Paul, always a clear distinction between Jesus kyrios Christos and God, his Father.

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

  Yet the kingdom was not a utopia that would be established at some distant date. At the very beginning of his mission, Jesus had announced: “The time has come and the Kingdom of God has already arrived.”65 The active presence of God was evident in Jesus’s miracles of healing. Everywhere he looked, he saw people pushed to the limit, abused, crushed, and desperate: “He felt sorry for them because they were harassed [eskulmenoi] and dejected [errimmenoi], like a sheep without a shepherd.”66 The Greek verbs have political connotations of being “beaten down” by imperial predation.67 These people would have been suffering from the hard labor, poor sanitation, overcrowding, indebtedness, and anxiety commonly endured by the masses in agrarian society.68 Jesus’s kingdom challenged the cruelty of Roman Judea and Herodian Galilee by approximating more closely to God’s will—“on earth as it is in heaven.”69 Those who feared indebtedness must release others from debts; they had to “love” even their enemies, giving them practical and moral support. Instead of taking violent reprisals, like the Romans, people in God’s kingdom would live according to the Golden Rule: “To the man who slaps you on one cheek, present the other cheek too; to the man who takes your cloak from you, do not refuse your tunic. Give to everyone who asks you, and do not ask for your property back from the man who robs you. Treat others as you would like them to treat you.”70 Jesus’s followers must live as compassionately as God himself, giving generously to all and refraining from judgment and condemnation.71 [image file=image_rsrcDZA.jpg] After his crucifixion, Jesus’s disciples had visions that convinced them that he had been raised to the right hand of God and would shortly return to inaugurate the kingdom definitively.72 Jesus had worked in rural Roman Palestine and had generally avoided the towns and cities.73 But Paul, a diaspora Jew from Tarsus in Cilicia, who had not known Jesus, believed that he had been commissioned by God to bring the “good news” of the gospel to the gentile world, so he preached in the Greco-Roman cities along the major trade routes in Asia Minor, Greece, and Macedonia. This was a very different milieu: Paul’s converts could not beg for their bread but had to work for their living, as he did, and a significant number of his converts may have been men and women of means. Writing in the 50s CE, Paul is the earliest extant Christian author, and his teachings influenced the accounts of Jesus’s life in the gospels of Mark, Matthew, and Luke (known as the Synoptics), written in the 70s and 80s. And while the Synoptics drew upon the earliest Palestinian traditions about Jesus, they were writing in an urban environment permeated by Greco-Roman religion.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  Friendship in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age: Explorations of a fundamental ethical discourse (Berlin and New York, 2010), 349–94. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 47 48. Aelred, Speculum Caritatis 1.112, qu. in Karras, Sexuality in Medieval Europe, 144. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 48 49. ‘Solus ego patior quod solent pariter pati qui si diligent, cum se amittunt’: D. Sabersky, ‘Affectum, confessus sum, et non negavi: reflections on the expression of affect in the 26th sermon on the Song of Songs of Bernard of Clairvaux’, in E. R. Elder (ed.), The Joy of Learning and the Love of God: Studies in honor of Jean Leclercq (Kalamazoo, Mich., 1995), 187–216, at 201, 214 n. 85. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 49 50. S. Düll, A. Luttrell and M. Keen, ‘Faithful Unto Death: The tomb slab of Sir William Neville and Sir John Clanvowe, Constantinople 1391’, Antiquaries Journal 71 (1991), 174–90; discussion of other examples of joint tombs in Puff, ‘Same-sex possibilities’, 382, and A. Bray, The Friend (Chicago and London, 2006), ch. 1, with later examples in chs. 6 and 7. For background on sworn brotherhood, see C. Rapp, Brother-making in Late Antiquity and Byzantium: Monks, laymen and Christian ritual (Oxford, 2016), 21–5. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 50 51. Macy, ‘Heloise, Abelard and the ordination of abbesses’, 28–30; see also his extended argument in G. Macy, The Hidden History of Women’s Ordination: Female clergy in the medieval West (New York and Oxford, 2008). BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 51 52. John ap Rice to Thomas Cromwell, 23 Aug. 1535: National Archives, Kew, SP 1/95 f.148. I have modernized spellings but not altered the words. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 52 53. G. Chaucer, General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales, ll.124–6 (modernized spellings). BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 53 54. G. Warnock (ed.), Revelations of Divine Love recorded by Julian Anchoress at Norwich...1373...(London, 1901), 3 (1st Revelation, Ch. 2); 10 (1st Revelation, Ch. 5). BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 54 55. On Adelheid (also known as Uchthilt von Frowenberg/Frabenberg), see M. Rubin, ‘Epilogue’, in M. Dzon and T. M. Kenney (eds), The Christ Child in Medieval Culture: Alpha es et O! (Toronto, 2012), 293–7, at 296, and J. Carroll, ‘Subversive obedience: images of spiritual reform by and for fifteenth-century nuns’, in T. Martin (ed.), Reassessing the Roles of Women as ‘Makers’ of Medieval Art and Architecture (2 vols, Leiden, 2012), ii, 705–38, at 726–8. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 55 56. E.g. Wiethaus (ed. and tr.), Agnes Blannbekin, Viennese Beguine, 36–7 (chs. 37–8). BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 56 57. G. Parsons, The Cult of Saint Catherine of Siena: A study in civil religion (Aldershot and Burlington, Vt., 2008), 17–18, 37–8. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 57 58. R. I. Moore, The First European Revolution c.970–1215 (Oxford, 2000), 33. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 58 59. D. C. Coleman, The Economy of England 1450–1750 (Oxford, 1977), 20; the definitive study of the city’s parish church provision is J.

• 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 Bestiary (2020)

  It was the same one Duck Uncle had taken us to. Our mother told us we had to go, even after my brother faked sickness by stewing vomit on the stove: He boiled water and cornstarch and an apple peel for color, then poured the pink glue of it down his shirt, pretending to gag it out of his mouth. But my mother wiped him off with a dishrag and said our father was our father: He carried us the way birds carry the sky. The sea shoulders the boat, she said. He’s the water, we’re what floats. Water can sink a boat too, I said, tracing a hole in the air with my finger. My brother and I finally agreed to go not because we thought our father was the sea, but because our mother begged us, and she was the only body of water we believed in. After my mother took the bus to work, my father drove us there with the windows down, our cheeks ripened by the wind. Our eyelashes knitted to the dust that blew in, a powder of sun-dried cowshit and dirt from the fields along the highway. Some summers, the fields caught fire and grew trees of smoke and my mother dipped bandanas in the sink to tie around our mouths, telling us to breathe careful: Our lungs could be lit up like logs. I fell asleep with my head rolling in my brother’s lap, his hands petting my hair along its part. He roved his palm over my face like a stethoscope, but it was his heart I could hear, accelerating as the car did. When we neared the zoo, I could hear him counting his own breaths, numbering them backward from a hundred, something he only did when my father was near. On our way to the bird enclosure, where the white nets were stiff as calcified wind and the parrots swore like men, my father bought me a popsicle that was supposed to resemble a pineapple but was the shape and color of a frozen booger. When we arrived at the parrots, my father pointed at a macaw with an orange band around its foot, a girl’s flower hairclip in its beak. Can you believe how red they are? How beautiful? People can only be that color if they bleed. I ate the popsicle stick-first, teething it to slivers, arming my tongue with quills. My father paid two dollars for us to ride in the back of a safari car that drove us along paths as twisted as arteries, past tanks full of bright fish the size of punctuation marks, past an enclosure where one of the monkeys slotted his penis through the bars and pissed at a passerby.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  What a night!’She set down her candle. ‘I’ve got a cloth,’ she said, ‘with a little bit of ice in it. If you’ll just - permit me -’ I lifted my head, and she placed the cloth against my cheek, so that I winced. ‘What a corker of an eye you’ll have!’ she said. Then, in a different tone: ‘What a devil that woman is!’ She began to wipe away the blood that was crusted about my nostril - lowering herself upon the bed, at my side, and placing her free hand upon my shoulder to brace herself against me, as she did so.Gradually, however, I became aware that she was trembling. ‘It’s the cold, miss,’ she said. ‘Only the cold and, well, the bit of fright I had downstairs ...’ But as she said it, I felt her shudder harder than ever, and she began to weep. ‘The truth is,’ she said through her tears, ‘I could not bear the thought of lying up there in my own room, with them wicked ladies roaming about the place. I thought, that they might come and have another go at me ...”‘There now,’ I said. I took the cloth from her and placed it on the floor. Then I drew the counterpane from the bed, and set it about her shoulders. ‘You shall stay here with me, where the ladies cannot get you ...’ I put my arm around her, and her head came against my ear. She still wore her servant’s cap; now I took the pins from it and drew it from her, and her hair fell to her shoulders. It was scented with burning roses, and with the spice from the wine, Smelling it, with Zena warm against my shoulder, I began suddenly to feel drunker than I had all night. Perhaps it was only that my head was reeling, from the force. of Diana’s blow.I swallowed. Zena put a handkerchief to her nose, and grew a little stiller. There came, from the floors below, the sound of running feet, a furious thundering upon the piano, and a scream of laughter.‘Just listen to them!’ I said, growing bitter again. ‘Partying like anything! They have forgotten all about us, sitting miserable up here ...’‘Oh, I hope they have!’‘Of course they have. We might be doing anything, it wouldn’ t matter to them! Why, we might be having a party of our own!’ She blew her nose, then giggled. My head gave a sort of tilt. I said: ‘Zena! Why shouldn’t we have a party, just the two of us! How many bottles of champagne are there left, in the kitchen?’‘There are loads of ’em.’‘Well, then. Just you run down and fetch us one.’She bit her lip. ‘I don’t know ...’‘Go on, you shan’t be seen.

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

  His deeply spiritual nature manifests itself in all his writings, but especially in his strictly devotional works, his Meditations and Prayers.1347 They are in danger of suffering neglect in the attention given to Anselm’s theological discussions. The Schoolman’s spiritual reflections abound in glowing utterances from the inner tabernacle of his heart. Now he loses himself in the contemplation of the divine attributes, now he laments over the deadness and waywardness of man. Now he soars aloft in strains of praise and adoration, now he whispers low the pleadings for mercy and pardon. At one moment he surveys the tragedy of the cross or the joys of the redeemed; at another the terrors of the judgment and hopeless estate of the lost. Such a blending of mellow sentiment with high speculations is seldom found. No one of the greater personages of the Middle Ages, except Bernard, excels him in the mystical element; and he often reminds us of Bernard, as when he exclaims, "O good Jesus, how sweet thou art to the heart of him who thinks of thee and loves thee."1348 Or again, when he exclaims in his tenth meditation, "O benign Jesus, condescending Lord, holy Master, sweet in mouth, sweet in heart, sweet in ear, inscrutably, unutterably gentle, self-sacrificing, merciful, wise, mighty, most sweet and lovely"—valde dulcis et suavis. The soaring grandeur of Anselm’s thoughts may be likened to the mountains of the land of his birth, and the pure abundance of his spiritual feeling to the brooks and meadows of its valleys. He quotes again and again from Scripture, and its language constitutes the chief vehicle of his thoughts. In the first meditation, Anselm makes the famous comparison of human life to the passage over a slender bridge, spanning a deep, dark abyss whose bed is full of all kinds of foul and ghastly things.1349 The bridge is a single foot in width. What anguish would not take hold of one obliged to cross over it, with eyes bandaged and arms tied, so as not to be able even to use a staff to feel one’s way! And how greatly would not the anguish be increased, if great birds were flying in the air, intent on swooping down and defeating the purpose of the traveller! And how much more anguish would be added if at every step a tile should fall away from behind him! The ravine is hell, measureless in its depth, horribly dark with black, dismal vapors!1350 And the perilous bridge is the present life. Whosoever lives ill falls into the abyss. The tiles are the single days of a man’s existence here below. The birds are malign spirits. We, the travellers, are blinded with ignorance and bound with the iron difficulty of doing well. Shall we not turn our eyes unto the Lord "who is our light and our salvation, of whom shall we be afraid?" Ps. 27:1. The Prayers are addressed to the Son and Spirit as well as to the Father.

• From My Secret Garden (1973)

  If women are a mystery to men, they are even more mysterious to themselves and to one another. I’m convinced that any closer sexual understanding between men and women must begin somewhere in an acceptance of the precise desires women express in their sexual thoughts of one another. These thoughts of other women are not necessarily, to my mind, lesbian thoughts, nor are all the women who visit this room lesbians. Nor should they be cheaply dismissed as “latent lesbians,” which is how many of them resignedly sum themselves up: “I suppose all this means I have a secret desire to be fucked by another woman.” The defeated tone itself is an indictment of the simple-minded effects of universal drugstore psychiatry on our age. Maybe she does, maybe she doesn’t, maybe she is a lesbian, or a bisexual; and maybe not. But in the end, I don’t care; that’s not the point. What interests me is that if the emotional openness women show one another in their fantasies could be extended to reality, I am sure the result would be, not a soaring increase in lesbianism, but the contrary: a broader, more meaningful heterosexuality. And yes, when we have that, more real warmth and honest affection between women, too. Who knows? In time women may come up with a new definition of what it is for a woman to have “normal” physical contact with another woman. What is repeatedly made clear in what so many of the women themselves call their “lesbian-type” fantasies is that they are seeking from other women in their fantasies what they aren’t getting from their lovers in reality. It’s not the real lesbian relationship that’s wanted. (Not to the exclusion of the heterosexual one, anyway; as one woman put it, “I wouldn’t go out of my way to find a lesbian or female bed partner.”) What they specifically find with other women in fantasy is tenderness, and complete and experienced arousal of their essentially female parts, their breasts and their clitorises. When reality is lacking, who knows more about tenderness, breasts, and clitorises than women, being women themselves? And what safer area to satisfy this need than in fantasy? It’s the most natural thing in the world that, for the same reason men do, women should turn to women for tenderness. That they should, for the most part, have to resort to fantasy to do so is—life. Woman, the great giver of tenderness, has always been on the short end of the tit. Take the great Cocksman’s Guide for Real Men: Playboy. Where in those seductive pages are men taught the values of tenderness toward women, and reassured that giving a woman this instead of a constantly hard prick makes him no less a man? One might as well impugn Hugh Hefner’s heterosexuality!

• From Bestiary (2020)

  A tree and a girl were summoned the same way. In this language, Mrs. Kersaint said, trees are assigned to different countries, bodies to different ways of being buried. We got in trouble with the other teacher for never using plurals. When I said that Chinese words have no plural forms, she said, Then how do you know if it’s one thing or many? I said, One thing is always many . Ben got in trouble for not capitalizing the names of countries and people. When the teacher asked her why she’d chosen a boy name, she said, I liked Ben because it’s already short for something. This way, none of you can abbreviate me further . In class, she asked questions like, How long ago was the sea salted? I was the only one who answered: So long ago, Nuwa was the one who did it. Because otherwise the sea would go bad like milk. Salt is what preserves it. She misremembered idioms: I’ve got butterflies in my bladder. Or: A bird in the hand is worth more in the soup. We misspelled all the words in our essays on purpose, baiting our teachers so we’d get a time-out together. We wrote: Baba’s a good sky and mama’s a good kook We be leave in rein carnation We were born hear so you cant depart us. All our essays were returned red: IMPROVE YOUR GRAMMAR. IMPROVE YOUR SPELLING. IMPLORE YOUR GODS. WE’LL SHOW YOU A SENTENCE. I mimicked the way all of Ben’s sentences ended with - er, a purr that made me feel feline, foreign to myself. Her accent was an axe: mother abbreviated to moth, country to cunt . There was a game where the teacher pointed at pictures of objects on a projector screen and asked us for their names— apple, bus, cat, doctor —but Ben had her own vocabulary, made mostly of the sounds different bird flocks produced when they passed over the parking lot. The sound they make, Ben told me, depended on the density of the flock and whether or not they were native to the weather here. She could hear any sound once and continue the strand of it, threading the sound through her left ear and pulling it out of her mouth. At noon, she walked up to me and stole my reduced-lunch hot dog bun, ripping it into confetti-sized pieces and feeding it to the crows. They walked up to the bench and pecked at her ankles, opening their beaks as if to name her.

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

  Yet during the ninth century, some of the Brahmins in the Kuru kingdom began yet another major reinterpretation of ancient Aryan tradition and embarked on a reform that not only systematically extracted all violence from religious ritual but even persuaded the Kshatriyas to change their ways. Their ideas were recorded in the scriptures known as the Brahmanas, which date from the ninth to the seventh centuries BCE. There would be no more crowded potlatches or rowdy, drunken contests. In this entirely new ritual, the patron (who paid for the sacrifice) was now the only layman present and was guided through the elaborate ceremony by four priests. Ritualized raids and mock battles were replaced by anodyne chants and symbolic gestures, although traces of the old violence remained: a gentle hymn bore the incongruous title “The Chariot of the Devas,” and a stately antiphon was compared to Indra’s deadly mace, which the singers were hurling back and forth “with loud voices.”39 Finally, in the reformed Agnicayana ritual, instead of fighting for new territory, the patron simply picked up the fire pot, took three steps to the east, and put it down again.40 We know very little about the motivation that lay behind this reform movement. According to one scholar, it sprang from the insoluble conundrum that the sacrificial ritual, which was designed to give life, actually involved death and destruction. The rishis could not eliminate military violence from society, but they could strip it of religious legitimacy.41 There was also a new concern about cruelty to animals. In one of the later poems of the Rig Veda, a rishi tenderly soothes the horse about to be slaughtered in the ashvameda: Let not thy dear soul burn thee as thou comest, let not the hatchet linger in thy body Let not a greedy, clumsy immolator, missing the joints, mangle thy limbs unduly. No, here thou diest not, thou art not injured: by easy paths unto the Gods thou goest.42 The Brahmanas described animal sacrifice as cruel, recommending that the beast be spared and given as a gift to an officiating priest.43 If it had to be killed, the animal should be dispatched as painlessly as possible. In the old days the victim’s decapitation had been the dramatic climax of the sacrifice; now the animal was suffocated in a shed at a distance from the sacrificial area.44 Some scholars, however, contend that the reform was driven not by a revulsion from violence per se; rather, violence was now experienced as polluting, and anxious to avoid defilement, priests preferred to delegate the task to assistants who killed the victim outside the sacred ground.45 Whatever their motivation, the reformers were beginning to create a climate of opinion that looked askance at violence.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  Thus absorbed, and concentered in this unutterable delight, I had not attended to the sweet author of it being thoroughly wet, and in danger of catching cold; when, in good time, the landlady, whom the appearance of my equipage (which, bye the bye Charles knew nothing of) had gained me an interest in, for me and mine interrupted us by bringing in a decent shift of linen and clothes; which now, somewhat recovered into a calmer composure by the coming in of a third person, I pressed him to take the benefit of, with a tender concern and anxiety that made me tremble for his health. The landlady leaving us again, he proceeded to shift; in the act of which, though he proceeded with all that modesty which became these first solemner instants of our re-meeting, after so long an absence, I could not refrain certain snatches of my eyes, lured by the dazzling discoveries of his naked skin, that escaped him as he changed his linen, and which I could not observe the unfaded life and complexion of without emotions of tenderness and joy, that had himself too purely for their object, to partake of a loose or mis-timed desire. He was soon dressed in these temporary clothes, which neither fitted him, nor became the light my passion placed him in, to me at least; yet, as they were on him, they looked extremely well, in virtue of that magic charm which love put into every thing that he touched, or had relation to him: and where, indeed, was that dress that a figure like his would not give grace to? For now, as I eyed him more in detail, I could not but observe the even favourable alteration which the time of his absence had produced in his person. There were still the requisite lineaments, still the same vivid vermillion and bloom reigning in his face; but now the roses were more fully blown; the tan of his travels, and a beard somewhat more distinguishable, had, at the expense of no more delicacy than what he could well spare, given it an air of becoming manliness and maturity, that symmetrized nobly with that air of distinction and empire with which nature had stamped it, in a rare mixture with the sweetness of it; still nothing had he lost of that smooth plumpness of flesh, which, glowing with freshness, blooms florid to the eye, and delicious to the touch; then his shoulders were grown more square, his shape more formed, more portly, but still free and airy. In short, his figure showed riper, greater, and perfecter to the experienced eye, than in his tender youth; and now he was not much more than two and twenty.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  When we got to the end of the block, Ben squatted to the pavement. She coughed and sand trumpeted out of her mouth, spraying the sidewalk gold. When she stood up, I asked if she’d swallowed sand from the baseball diamond. Laughing, she shook her head and said there was a sandstorm inside her belly, and once in a while the sand passed through her bowels and scoured her insides clean as glass. Ben told me about the weather in which she was fermented: I was conceived during a sandstorm, she said. In Ningxia where she was born, sand formed a pelt over the sky and no one could see for months. They wore wet scarves around their mouths and the sand flayed away their front teeth, their eyelashes. I asked her how she’d known who was who, and Ben answered by closing her eyes and reaching out both arms. We walk like this. She kneaded my cheek, inventing dimples. Her touch could name me better than language. I wanted to say I understood about the sand in her belly: There was also a hunger in me that was more than a body’s. Do you think we’ll get sick, I said, from touching those feathers? In the beginning of the year, when the TV repeated warnings of the Asian bird flu, the teachers had shown up to school wearing face masks with whirring fans. There are so many of you here, we don’t want to get sick. Species could share diseases, they told us, and SARS came from bats and other winged things. When birds and people get too close, they said, one of them gets sick. Ben said she was immune to the bird flu. Her grandmother had died from it and she had been exposed, which meant I was exposed now too. She said I could run away if I wanted to, but instead I stayed and asked her what the symptoms were. It began slow, she told me: First you grew feathers out of your armpits. It would be itchy. Then your lips protruded into a beak and you would only be able to eat sand, seeds, and fingernails. The last symptom was flight. It was safer for your close family members to release you where there was only sky, no telephone wires to get electrocuted on, no windows to mistake for mothers. At a crosswalk, I looked at her before the lights changed. Ben wore her FOB dot on the upper right arm, a vaccine scar the size and shape of my thumbprint. The scar opaled her skin, changing shades depending on the time of day, the season, and where she stood in relation to light.

• From The Art of Memoir

  [My father] fought with the Old IRA and for some desperate act he wound up a fugitive with a price on his head. When I was a child I would look at my father, the thinning hair, the collapsing teeth, and wonder why anybody would give money for a head like that. When I was thirteen my father’s mother told me a secret: as a wee lad your poor father was dropped on his head. It was an accident. He was never the same after, and you must remember that people dropped on their heads can be a bit peculiar. McCourt’s talent for verbal wit packed into a child’s mindset means the paternal bean serves as an occasion for dispensing other, more dramatic data. He lets us hear in his grandmother’s voice how he learned about his father’s dropped-on head. This foreshadows the family’s coming disasters and promises drama, piquing a reader’s curiosity. In the course of all that, he gives us a carnal portrait of the old man, too. George Orwell’s moving memoir of the Spanish Civil War, Homage to Catalonia, also palms off key data in a subtle way. Rather than start with the political sects and conflicts within the revolutionary ranks, he focuses on his encounter with a single Italian freedom fighter. The description of the young guy locates the book as a song of praise to the peasant people Orwell futilely fought alongside against fascism. It’s one of dozens such portraits, and it shows us why he’s there. He was a tough-looking youth of twenty-five or -six, with reddish yellow hair and powerful shoulders. His peaked leather cap was pulled fiercely over one eye. He was standing in profile to me, his chin on his breast, gazing with a puzzled frown at a map, which one of the officers had open on the table. Something in the face deeply moved me. It was the face of a man who would commit murder and throw away his life for a friend—the kind of face you would expect in an Anarchist, though likely as not he was a Communist. . . . As we went out he stepped across the room and gripped my hand very hard. Queer the affection you can feel for a stranger! It was as though his spirit and mine had momentarily succeeded in bridging the gulf of language and tradition and meeting in utter intimacy. I hope he liked me as well as I liked him. By speculating whether he’s an Anarchist or a Communist, Orwell lets us in on the dissent within the leftist ranks while saving us the boredom of a lengthy political disquisition. He knows he has to make