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 Apprenticed to Venus: My Secret Life with Anaïs Nin (2017)

  After Renate offered Anaïs something to eat and Anaïs refused, Renate picked up her imitation crocodile purse and headed for the door. “Ronnie and Peter won’t be back until dinner time, so you two should be undisturbed. I have an appointment with my lawyer.” Renate explained that because her contractor had built her house with its only view through the carport, she’d stopped paying him, and he was suing her. After she left, we heard the gears of her Volkswagen as she pulled out. Anaïs and I sat in awkward silence. Finally, Anaïs said, “Renate likes you very much.” “I like her, too.” Why couldn’t I think of anything more interesting to say? Anaïs gave me her reassuring smile. “We have so much catching up to do. I remember you wrote to me that you had an Italian boyfriend. What happened with him?” I hadn’t known she’d received my letters about Gerardo Palmieri, because she hadn’t replied. “After I got back to LA and had almost forgotten him, he unexpectedly wrote me saying we should marry, and I should ask my father to sponsor him so he could become a lawyer here.” “Do you see your father now?” “Occasionally. We aren’t close.” “Did you ask him to sponsor Gerardo?” “Yeah. He just guffawed.” “That was rude of him!” I shrugged. “When I wrote back to Gerardo, he stopped writing me.” “He wasn’t the right one.” She squeezed my hand gently. I recalled how safe and cared about she could make me feel. “Is your father still married to the big buxom blonde?” “You remembered! They got divorced,” I said with satisfaction. She asked about my mother and siblings and my lovers after Gerardo, in this way drawing me out, talking with me like a girlfriend, with no sense that she was more than forty years older than me or that it had been two years since we’d last talked. It was as if we were just picking up where we’d left off, even though we were in a different city, she had a new husband, and I was no longer a virgin. As I brought her up to date on my life, it seemed transformed by her interest. Through her vision I became a young heroine in an exciting drama with sad and funny parts and the promise of great adventure and romance ahead. “And what about that man I saw you with at Holiday House?” she asked merrily. “Ugh, I’m getting worried about myself. You told me I’d develop a Sabina, and you were right. In A Spy in the House of Love you wrote that Sabina achieved man’s detachment from sex. She could take pleasure without needing love, and afterwards she just wanted to leave, to get away. That’s how I am now.” “Don’t worry. Your Sabina may be dominant presently, but she is only one part of you. You have a wise, clairvoyant self to advise you. You have a Djuna.”

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  But parting with the Mulligans was really painful: Mrs. Mulligan was a dear, kind woman who would have mothered the whole race if she could; one of those sweet Irish women whose unselfish deeds and thoughts are the flowers of our sordid human life. Her husband too was not unworthy of her; very simple and straight and hard-working, without a mean thought in him, a natural prey to good fellowship and songs and poteen. [Illustration] On Friday afternoon I left New York for Chicago with Mr. Kendrick. The country seemed to me very bare, harsh and unfinished, but the great distances enthralled me; it was indeed a land to be proud of, every broad acre of it spoke of the future and suggested hope. My first round, so to speak, with American life was over. What I had learned in it remains with me still. No people is so kind to children and no life so easy for the handworkers; the hewers of wood and drawers of water are better off in the United States than anywhere else on earth. To this one class and it is by far the most numerous class, the American democracy more than fulfills its promises. It levels up the lowest in a most surprising way. I believed then with all my heart what so many believe today, that all deductions made, it was on the whole, the best civilization yet known among men. In time, deeper knowledge made me modify this opinion more and more radically. Five years later I was to see Walt Whitman, the noblest of all Americans, living in utter poverty at Camden, dependent upon English admirers for a change of clothes or a sufficiency of food, and Poe had suffered in the same way. Bit by bit the conviction was forced in upon me that if the American democracy does much to level up the lowest class, it is still more successful in leveling down the highest and best. No land on earth is so friendly to the poor illiterate toilers, no land so contemptuous-cold to the thinkers and artists, the guides of humanity. What help is there here for men of letters and artists, for the seers and prophets? Such guides are not wanted by the idle rich and are ignored by the masses, and after all the welfare of the head is more important even than that of the body and feet. What will become of those who stone the prophet? and persecute the teachers? The doom is written in flaming letters on every page of history. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ LIFE IN CHICAGO! Chapter VI.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  “You darling!” I cried, “I don’t believe there will be any consequences; but I want you to go to the basin and use this syringe: I’ll tell you why afterwards.” At once she went over to the basin: “I feel funny, weak”, she said, “as if I were—I can’t describe it—shaky on my legs. I’m glad now I don’t wear drawers in summer: they’d get wet.” Her ablutions completed and the sheet withdrawn and done up in paper, I shot back the bolt and we began our talk. I found her intelligent and kindly but ignorant and ill-read; still she was not prejudiced and was eager to know all about babies and how they were made. I told her what I had told Mrs. Mayhew and something more: how my seed was composed of tens of thousands of infinitesimal tadpole-shaped animalculae—Already in her vagina and womb these infinitely little things had a race: they could move nearly an inch in an hour and the strongest and quickest got up first to where her egg was waiting in the middle of her womb. My little tadpole, the first to arrive, thrust his head into her egg and thus having accomplished his work of impregnation, perished, love and death being twins. The curious thing was that this indescribably small tadpole should be able to transmit all the qualities of all his progenitors in certain proportions; no such miracle was ever imagined by any religious teacher. More curious still the living foetus in the womb passes in nine months through all the chief changes that the human race has gone through in countless aeons of time in its progress from the tadpole to the man. Till the fifth month the foetus is practically a four-legged animal. I told her that it was accepted today that the weeks occupied in the womb in any metamorphosis corresponded exactly to the ages it occupied in reality. Thus it was upright, a two-legged animal, ape and then man in the womb for the last three months and this corresponded nearly to one third of man’s whole existence on this earth. Kate listened enthralled, I thought, till she asked me suddenly: “But what makes one child a boy and another a girl?” “The nearest we’ve come to a law on the matter”, I said, “is contained in the so-called law of contraries: that is, if the man is stronger than the woman, the children will be mostly girls; if the woman is greatly younger or stronger, the progeny will be chiefly boys. This bears out the old English proverb: “Any weakling can make a boy, it takes a man to make a girl.’”

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  “You’re Irish”, I said, smiling at her. “I am”, she replied, “how did ye guess?” “Because I was born in Ireland too”, I retorted. “You were not!” she cried emphatically, more for pleasure than to contradict. “I was born in Galway”, I went on and at once she became very friendly and poured me out some milk warm from the cow, and when she heard I had had no breakfast and saw I was hungry, she pressed me to eat and sat down with me and soon heard my whole story or enough of it to break out in wonder again and again. In turn she told me how she had married Mike Mulligan, a longshoreman who earned good wages and was a good husband but took a drop too much now and again, as a man will when tempted by one of “thim saloons.” It was the saloons, I learned, that were the ruination of all the best Irishmen and “they were the best men anyway, an’—an’—” and the kindly, homely talk flowed on, charming me. When the breakfast was over and the things cleared away I rose to go with many thanks but Mrs. Mulligan wouldn’t hear of it. “Ye’re a child”, she said, “an’ don’t know New York: it’s a terrible place and you must wait till Mike comes home an’—” “But I must find some place to sleep”, I said, “I have money.” “You’ll sleep here”, she broke in decisively, “and Mike will put ye on yer feet; sure he knows New York like his pocket, an’ yer as welcome as the flowers in May, an’—” What could I do but stay and talk and listen to all sorts of stories about New York, and “toughs” that were “hard cases” and “gunmen” an’ “wimmin that were worse—bad scran to them.” In due time Mrs. Mulligan and I had dinner together, and after dinner I got her permission to go into the Park for a walk, but “mind now and be home by six or I’ll send Mike after ye”, she added laughing. I walked a little way in the Park and then started down-town again to the address Jessie had given me near the Brooklyn Bridge. It was a mean street, I thought, but I soon found Jessie’s sister’s house and went to a nearby restaurant and wrote a little note to my love, that she could show if need be, saying that I proposed to call on the 18th, or two days after the ship we had come in was due to return to Liverpool. After that duty which made it possible for me to hope all sorts of things on the 18th, 19th or 20th, I sauntered over to Fifth Avenue and made my way up town again. At any rate I was spending nothing in my present lodging.

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

  105 They devised new rules forbidding Jews to bear arms on the Sabbath or to bring weapons into the House of Studies, because violence was incompatible with Torah scholarship. The rabbis made it clear that instead of being an inflammatory force, religious activity could be used to quell violence. They either ignored the bellicose passages of the Hebrew Bible or gave them a radically new interpretation. They called their exegetical method midrash —a word derived from darash: “to investigate; go in search of something.” The meaning of scripture was not, therefore, self-evident; it had to be ferreted out by diligent study, and because it was God’s word, it was infinite and could not be confined to a single interpretation. Indeed, every time a Jew confronted the sacred text, it should mean something different. 106 The rabbis felt free to argue with God, defy him, and even change the words of scripture to introduce a more compassionate reading. 107 Yes, God was often described as a divine warrior in the Bible, but Jews must imitate only his compassionate behavior. 108 The true hero was no longer a warrior but a man of peace. “Who is the hero of heroes?” asked the rabbis. “He who turns an enemy into a friend.” 109 A “mighty” man did not prove his mettle on the battlefield but was one “who subdues his passions.” 110 When the prophet Isaiah had seemed to praise a soldier “who thrusts back his attacker to the gate,” he was really speaking of “those who thrust a parry in the way of Torah.” 111 The rabbis described Joshua and David as pious Torah scholars and even argued that David had had no interest in warfare at all. 112 When the Egyptian army drowned in the Sea of Reeds, some of the angels had wanted to sing Yahweh’s praises, but he had rebuked them: “My children lie drowned in the sea, and you would sing?” 113 The rabbis acknowledged that there were divinely ordained wars in their scriptures. They concluded that the campaigns against the Canaanites had been “obligatory” wars, but the Babylonian rabbis ruled that because these peoples no longer existed, warfare could no longer be compulsory. 114 The Palestinian rabbis, however, whose position in Roman Palestine was more precarious, argued that Jews were still obliged to fight sometimes—but only in self-defense.

• From A Way of Being (1980)

  A DEFINITION FOR CONTEMPORARY PERSONS Eugene Gendlin and others (Gendlin & Hendricks, undated) have recently been involved in a helping-community enterprise called “Changes,” which has many implications for dealing with the alienated and counterculture members of the chaos which we call urban living. Of particular interest is the “Rap Manual,” which has been developed to aid the ordinary person in learning “how to help with the other person’s process.” The Manual starts out with a section on “Absolute Listening.” Some excerpts give the flavor: This is not laying trips on people. You only listen and say back the other person’s thing, step by step, just as that person seems to have it at that moment. You never mix into it any of your own things or ideas, never lay on the other person anything that person didn’t express. . . . To show that you understand exactly; make a sentence or two which gets exactly at the personal meaning this person wanted to put across. This might be in your own words, usually, but use that persons own words for the touchy main things. It continues in this same vein, with many detailed suggestions, including ideas on “how to know when you’re doing it right.” So it seems clear that an empathic way of being, although highly subtle conceptually, can also be described in terms which are perfectly understandable by contemporary youth or citizens of a beleaguered inner city. It is a broad- ranging conception.

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

  Moreover, from the thirteenth century, more or less for the first time in the history of the Church, the clergy frequently told the laity what they should be thinking about marriage: that was part of the new work of preaching undertaken especially by the Franciscans and Dominicans. [78] The construction of the message was based on some theological innovations. One was a gradual shift of opinion among Western theologians, and then among clergy extracting advice from their writings to conduct confessions: Adam and Eve had found sex a pleasure. What was good enough for the first married couple surely provided guidelines for their successors. [79] Just as important, even though not such an exact fit for the circumstances of present-day lay households as Adam and Eve, was a new presentation of the Holy Family as a model for all Christian families. It was created in text and in art. Writers, preachers and many of the artists were celibate clergy, who had (in theory at least) left their last intimate contact with a real woman in childhood, before they left home for their institutional home in the Church. Such talented men, set aside for sacred ministry, felt safer with women who did not flaunt their sexuality but who rejoiced in their motherhood, or in a commitment to a celibacy which paralleled that of the male priesthood. That was the model of life in Nazareth around the Holy Mother Mary that was now pieced together for Catholic Europe. It was dependent on a devotional exploration of the human life of Christ, as part of the general humanist and personal turn of Western devotion (see Plate 21). Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury in the eleventh century, was one of the first to create this form of meditation, but a century later it became a theme of Cistercian piety with their Order’s particular dedication to Our Lady, universal patron of their monastic houses. That was paired with a new genre of writing about the person of Jesus. Aelred of Rievaulx was a pioneer in this, for instance writing a meditation on the passage in Luke’s Gospel (2.42) describing Jesus straying in the Temple ‘when he was twelve years old’. This was a literary present for Yvo, a Cistercian of Warden Abbey, remembered after his death in Aelred’s treatise on friendship as the ‘beloved’ monk whose ‘charming eyes’ had smiled on the writer. Burrowing into the various layers of meaning of Luke’s text in traditional fashion from ‘literal’ to ‘moral’, Aelred began by using his imagination to ponder on the boy lost in Jerusalem without a mother to feed him, make up his bed and tend his ‘boyish limbs with oil and baths’. One has to say that Jesus sounds a rather molly-coddled twelve-year-old. [80] The theme blossomed into the Christ-centred devotion preached by the Orders of friars. From the time of Francis onwards, that was a Franciscan speciality.

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

  19. A line installed in 1189 in the stone floor of Durham Cathedral’s nave and aisles marks the area beyond which women were not allowed – virtually the whole cathedral interior. A more edifying architectural experience became universal through Western Christendom during this time: the visual impact of the crucifixion scene described in John’s Gospel (19.25–27). Those primarily familiar with Western church buildings may not realize that it is a leading theme only in Latin Christian art; after some Anglo-Saxon beginnings in the ninth century, from the twelfth century depictions of Mary and John the Beloved Disciple standing flanking the cross swelled into a mighty visual flood. Up to the sixteenth-century Reformation, no Western church interior felt complete without this trio, raised specifically as carved images at the entrance to the chancel area of a church usually over a screen, and known as the ‘Rood group’ (‘Rood’ is the Anglo-Saxon word for ‘Cross’). [64] Amid the painted flat surfaces of Orthodox art, the theme is far less frequent in Eastern Christianity: the leading presence among Orthodox icons is the pairing of Mary and Jesus, biological mother and infant divine son (see Plates 3 and 4). Why the contrast? It is surely no coincidence that the Europe-wide proliferation of Roods began in the chief era of Crusading enthusiasm for ‘taking the Cross’ in the West, which would be an equally good reason why Eastern Christians did not warm to the idea, given their experiences at the hands of Crusaders. Moreover, the Orthodox had probably not forgotten that a plain, unadorned cross had been a dominant visual theme in the church art of the disgraced Iconoclasts. Yet there is another dimension to the Rood group, as became apparent when we surveyed the Gospel material on the family (above, Chapter 4). John the Evangelist’s portrait of the crucifixion scene unites and reconciles the biological mother Mary with the chosen and beloved disciple John, after all the tensions between these poles of relationship displayed in the Synoptic Gospel material. This sacred binary of the Rood group was a powerful symbol of the new binary of family and priestly vocation set up in the Gregorian revolution. Yet it also preserves and embodies that complication that runs through all Christian views of sex and the family: on a medieval reckoning, both the watchers at the cross are virgins. Like all the most effective symbolism, the message of the Rood spools out in a complex mixture of tragedy, horror, love and reconciliation, taking it in a multitude of directions. Over centuries, in the end Mary and John and their crucified Saviour subverted the tidiness of Gregory VII’s vision, both enriching and splitting apart the Latin Christianity that he and his circle had created.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  She thanked me and a day or two later came to me in the class-room with another puzzle and so our acquaintance ripened. Almost at once she let me kiss her; but as soon as I tried to put my hand up her clothes, she stopped me. We were friends for nearly a year, close friends, and I remember trying all I knew one Saturday when I spent the whole day with her in our class-room, till dusk came and I could not get her to yield. The curious thing was I could not even soothe the smart to my vanity with the belief that she was physically cold: on the contrary she was very passionate; but she had simply made up her mind and would not change. That Saturday in the class-room she told me if she yielded she would hate me: I could see no sense in this, even though I was to find out later what a terrible weapon the Confessional is as used by Irish Catholic Priests. To commit a sin is easy; to confess it to your priest is for many women an absolute deterrent. A few days later, I think, I got a letter from Smith that determined me to go to Philadelphia as soon as my hoardings provided me with sufficient money. I wrote and told him I’d come and cheered him up: I had not long to wait. Early that fall Bradlaugh came to lecture in Liberty Hall on the French Revolution—a giant of a man with a great head, rough-hewn, irregular features and stentorian voice: no better figure of a rebel could be imagined. I knew he had been an English private soldier for a dozen years; but I soon found that in spite of his passionate revolt against the Christian religion and all its cheap moralistic conventions, he was a convinced individualist and saw nothing wrong in the despotism of Money which had already established itself in Britain, though condemned by Carlyle at the end of his “French Revolution” as the vilest of all tyrannies. Bradlaugh’s speech taught me that a notorious and popular man, earnest and gifted, too, and intellectually honest might be fifty years before his time in one respect and fifty years behind the best opinion of the age in another province of thought. In the great conflict of our day between the “Haves” and the “Have-nots”, Bradlaugh played no part whatever: he wasted his great powers in a vain attack on the rotten branches of the Christian tree, while he should have assimilated the spirit of Jesus and used it to gild his loyalty to truth. About this time Kate wrote that she would not be back for some weeks: she declared she was feeling another woman; I felt tempted to write, “So am I, stay as long as you please”; but instead I wrote an affectionate, tempting letter; for I had a real affection for her, I discovered.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  Apart from the Comedía delie ninfe florentine and the Fiammetta (1343–4), already briefly referred to above, the years immediately following the author’s return to Florence also saw the completion of the Amorosa visione (1342), a complicated allegorical poem consisting of fifty cantos of terza rima in which the influence of the Commedia looms even larger than in any of his earlier compositions. There is also a lengthy pastoral poem, the Ninfale fiesolano, of which the dating (and indeed the authorship) have been subject to some dispute. Assuming that he was indeed the author, the maturity of its style and the directness of its narrative-line would lend support to Branca’s tentative placing of its composition in the years 1344–6. Although the poem is relatively free of the overt ‘autobiographical’ material of most of his earlier writings, the delicate presentation in one of its episodes of the affection of grandparents for their illegitimate grandson may well owe a part of its immediacy to his direct personal experience, during those years, of the sentiments it so charmingly depicts. Mario and Giulio, the first two of five children he fathered, all illegitimate, were already approaching adolescence, whilst the third, Violante, for whom he displays deep fatherly affection in one of his later Latin eclogues, was born either in Florence or Ravenna in the mid 1340s. More significantly, perhaps, the house where he lived with his elderly father and second stepmother was gladdened by the birth of their child, lacopo, in or around 1344. Positivist critics used to make a connection between the love-child of Mensola, the heroine of the Ninfale, with the circumstances of Boccaccio’s own illegitimate birth in 1313. It has even been suggested that the story is a literary re-working of a scandalous love-affair, imperfectly documented, between the author and a Benedictine nun from the convent of San Martino a Mensola, where a farm belonging to his father was located.

• From Apprenticed to Venus: My Secret Life with Anaïs Nin (2017)

  After Renate offered Anaïs something to eat and Anaïs refused, Renate picked up her imitation crocodile purse and headed for the door. “Ronnie and Peter won’t be back until dinner time, so you two should be undisturbed. I have an appointment with my lawyer.” Renate explained that because her contractor had built her house with its only view through the carport, she’d stopped paying him, and he was suing her. After she left, we heard the gears of her Volkswagen as she pulled out. Anaïs and I sat in awkward silence. Finally, Anaïs said, “Renate likes you very much.” “I like her, too.” Why couldn’t I think of anything more interesting to say? Anaïs gave me her reassuring smile. “We have so much catching up to do. I remember you wrote to me that you had an Italian boyfriend. What happened with him?” I hadn’t known she’d received my letters about Gerardo Palmieri, because she hadn’t replied. “After I got back to LA and had almost forgotten him, he unexpectedly wrote me saying we should marry, and I should ask my father to sponsor him so he could become a lawyer here.” “Do you see your father now?” “Occasionally. We aren’t close.” “Did you ask him to sponsor Gerardo?” “Yeah. He just guffawed.” “That was rude of him!” I shrugged. “When I wrote back to Gerardo, he stopped writing me.” “He wasn’t the right one.” She squeezed my hand gently. I recalled how safe and cared about she could make me feel. “Is your father still married to the big buxom blonde?” “You remembered! They got divorced,” I said with satisfaction. She asked about my mother and siblings and my lovers after Gerardo, in this way drawing me out, talking with me like a girlfriend, with no sense that she was more than forty years older than me or that it had been two years since we’d last talked. It was as if we were just picking up where we’d left off, even though we were in a different city, she had a new husband, and I was no longer a virgin. As I brought her up to date on my life, it seemed transformed by her interest. Through her vision I became a young heroine in an exciting drama with sad and funny parts and the promise of great adventure and romance ahead. “And what about that man I saw you with at Holiday House?” she asked merrily. “Ugh, I’m getting worried about myself. You told me I’d develop a Sabina, and you were right. In A Spy in the House of Love you wrote that Sabina achieved man’s detachment from sex. She could take pleasure without needing love, and afterwards she just wanted to leave, to get away. That’s how I am now.” “Don’t worry. Your Sabina may be dominant presently, but she is only one part of you. You have a wise, clairvoyant self to advise you. You have a Djuna.”

• From A Way of Being (1980)

  CONCLUSIONS When I began this discussion, I stated that the various issues I was raising had little logical connection, but were simply diverse challenges. As I have worked over the material, I do see—from my own bias, I am sure—a certain unity to the questions I have raised. I am far from sure that I have raised the most important issues. I may be greatly deceived in the way I perceive these challenges. But let me try to restate them in fresh ways and then indicate the thread that, for me, binds them together. I have raised the question of whether psychology will remain a narrow technological fragment of a science, tied to an outdated philosophical conception of itself, clinging to a security blanket of observable behaviors only; or whether it can possibly become a truly broad and creative science, rooted in subjective vision, open to all aspects of the human condition, worthy of the name of a mature science. I have raised the question of whether we dare to turn from being a past- oriented remedial technology to focusing on future-oriented planning, taking our part in a chaotic world to build environments where human beings can choose to learn, where minorities can choose to remake the establishment through relating to it, where people can learn to live cooperatively together. Will psychologists continue to be peripheral to our society, or will we risk the dangers of being a significant social factor? I have pointed out that perhaps the safety, the prestige, the vestments of traditionalism that can be earned through certification and licensure may not be worth the cost. I have wondered aloud if we would dare to rest our confidence in the quality and competence we have as persons, rather than the certificates we can frame on our walls. I have questioned—a bit despairingly, I fear—whether we could possibly see the day when faculty and students and psychologists in general could function as whole persons—not as minds walking around on stilts, or headless feelings muttering wild cries to one another. Could we accept ourselves as total organisms, with wisdom in every pore—if we would but hear and be aware of that wisdom? I have hesitantly pointed out that the reality we are so sure of, the reality so plainly shown to us by our senses, may not be the only reality open to

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

  98 The only true conquest was personal submission to what Ashoka called dhamma: a moral code of compassion, mercy, honesty, and consideration for all living creatures. Ashoka inscribed similar edicts outlining his new policy of military restraint and moral reform on cliff faces and colossal cylindrical pillars throughout the length and breadth of his empire. 99 These edicts were intensely personal messages but could also have been an attempt to give the far-flung empire ideological unity; they may have even been read aloud to the populace on state occasions. Ashoka urged his people to curb their greed and extravagance; promised that, as far as possible, he would refrain from using martial force; preached kindness to animals; and vowed to replace the violent sport of hunting, the traditional pastime of kings, with royal pilgrimages to Buddhist shrines. He also announced that he had dug wells, founded hospitals and rest houses, and planted banyan trees “which will give shade to beasts and men.” 100 He insisted on the importance of respect for teachers, obedience to parents, consideration for slaves and servants, and reverence for all sects—for the orthodox Brahmins as well as for Buddhists, Jains, and other “ heretical” schools. “Concord is to be commended,” he declared, “so that men may hear one another’s principles.” 101 It is unlikely that Ashoka’s dhamma was Buddhist. This was a broader ethic, an attempt to find a benevolent model of governance based on the recognition of human dignity, a sentiment shared by many contemporary Indian schools. In Ashoka’s inscriptions, we hear the perennial voice of those repelled by killing and cruelty who have, throughout history, tried to resist the call to violence. But even though he preached “abstention from killing living beings,” 102 he had tacitly to acknowledge that, as emperor and for the sake of the region’s stability, he could not renounce force; nor in these times could he abolish capital punishment or legislate against the killing and eating of animals (although he listed species that should be protected). Moreover, despite his distress about the plight of the Kalingans who had been deported after the battle, there was no question of repatriating them since they were essential to the imperial economy. And as head of state, he could certainly not abjure warfare or disband his army. He realized that even if he abdicated and became a Buddhist monk, others would fight to succeed him and unleash more havoc, and as always, the peasants and the poor would suffer most. Ashoka’s dilemma is the dilemma of civilization itself. As society developed and weaponry became more deadly, the empire, founded on and maintained by violence, would paradoxically become the most effective means of keeping the peace. Despite its violence and exploitation, people looked for an absolute imperial monarchy as eagerly as we search for signs of a flourishing democracy today.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  Stephen had felt rather bored just at first at the prospect of teaching the new member her duties, but after a while it came to pass that she missed the girl when she was not with her. And after a while she would find herself observing the way Mary’s hair grew, low on the forehead, the wide setting of her slightly oblique grey eyes, the abrupt sweep back of their heavy lashes; and these things would move Stephen, so that she must touch the girl’s hair for a moment with her fingers. Fate was throwing them continually together, in moments of rest as in moments of danger; they could not have escaped this even had they wished to, and indeed they did not wish to escape it. They were pawns in the ruthless and complicated game of existence, moved hither and thither on the board by an unseen hand, yet moved side by side, so that they grew to expect each other. ‘Mary, are you there?’ A superfluous question—the reply would be always the same. ‘I’m here, Stephen.’ Sometimes Mary would talk of her plans for the future while Stephen listened, smiling as she did so. ‘I’ll go into an office, I want to be free.’ ‘You’re so little, you’d get mislaid in an office.’ ‘I’m five foot five! ’ ‘Are you really, Mary? You feel little, somehow.’ ‘That’s because you’re so tall. I do wish I could grow a bit!’ ‘No, don’t wish that, you’re all right as you are—it’s you, Mary.’ Mary would want to be told about Morton, she was never tired of hearing about Morton. She would make Stephen get out the photographs of her father, of her mother whom Mary thought lovely, of Puddle, and above all of Raftery. Then Stephen must tell her of the life in London, and afterwards of the new house in Paris; must talk of her own career and ambitions, though Mary had not read either of her novels—there had never been a library subscription. But at moments Stephen’s face would grow clouded because of the things that she could not tell her; because of the little untruths and evasions that must fill up the gaps in her strange life-history. Looking down into Mary’s clear, grey eyes, she would suddenly flush through her tan, and feel guilty; and that feeling would reach the girl and disturb her, so that she must hold Stephen’s hand for a moment. One day she said suddenly: ‘Are you unhappy?’ ‘Why on earth should I be unhappy?’ smiled Stephen. All the same there were nights now when Stephen lay awake even after her arduous hours of service, hearing the guns that were coming nearer, yet not thinking of them, but always of Mary. A great gentleness would gradually engulf her like a soft sea mist, veiling reef and headland.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  And yet there was something quite new in her face, a soft, wise expression that Stephen had put there, so that she suddenly felt pitiful to see her so young yet so full of this wisdom; for sometimes the coming of passion to youth, in spite of its glory, will be strangely pathetic. Mary rolled up the stockings with a sigh of regret; alas, they would not require darning. She was at the stage of being in love when she longed to do womanly tasks for Stephen. But all Stephen’s clothes were discouragingly neat; Mary thought that she must be very well served, which was true—she was served, as are certain men, with a great deal of nicety and care by the servants. And now Stephen was filling her cigarette case from the big box that lived on her dressing table; and now she was strapping on her gold wrist watch; and now she was brushing some dust from her coat; and now she was frowning at herself in the glass for a second as she twitched her immaculate necktie. Mary had seen her do all this before, many times, but to-day somehow it was different; for to-day they were in their own home together, so that these little intimate things seemed more dear than they had done at Orotava. The bedroom could only have belonged to Stephen; a large, airy room, very simply furnished—white walls, old oak, and a wide, bricked hearth on which some large, friendly logs were burning. The bed could only have been Stephen’s bed; it was heavy and rather austere in pattern. It looked solemn as Mary had seen Stephen look, and was covered by a bedspread of old blue brocade, otherwise it remained quite guiltless of trimmings. The chairs could only have been Stephen’s chairs; a little reserved, not conducive to lounging. The dressing table could only have been hers, with its tall silver mirror and ivory brushes. And all these things had drawn into themselves a species of life derived from their owner, until they seemed to be thinking of Stephen with a dumbness that made their thoughts more insistent, and their thoughts gathered strength and mingled with Mary’s so that she heard herself cry out: ‘Stephen!’ in a voice that was not very far from tears, because of the joy she felt in that name.

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

  In such circumstances, for both practical and emotional reasons, it was eminently sensible to frame such a relationship with agreements before God accompanied by set prayers, recognized by the wider monastic world as a fictive or sacred making of brothers. That is what adelphopoiēsis originally was and long continued to be in the Orthodox tradition, but never in the West: only one surviving medieval Latin manuscript of the rite has been located, significantly deriving from the boundary of Greek East and Latin West in what is now Croatia. [37] The likely reason that adelphopoiēsis remained exclusively an Orthodox custom is that Western Latin monasticism quite early on set its face against such pairs or small groups of monks. This was much encouraged by the authority of John Cassian in his presentation of Eastern monastic custom to a fascinated West at the beginning of the fifth century: he sneered at this type of monastic life, which he darkly and indeed obscurely termed as ‘of the Sarabaites’. As a third variety of monasticism, standing midway between the hermit tradition of Antony and the community tradition of Pachomios, it was ‘a poor sort of thing and by all means to be avoided’. The sixth-century Italian monk Benedict, creator of a distinctive Western approach to monastic discipline, emphatically agreed with Cassian, and he made that clear in what is now known as the Benedictine Rule, basic to shaping Latin monastic life in later centuries. [38] It was perhaps in defensive reaction to this Western hostility that adelphopoiēsis remained important and widely practised in Eastern Orthodoxy. Yet in the course of time, such paired monastic life became rarer in Orthodoxy as well, and even Easterners might forget the origins of the ceremony. No doubt some couples of men, monastic and secular, did decide to use it for their own emotional purposes. There have been some quiet modern efforts in Orthodox contexts as widely separated as Jerusalem and Serbia to redeploy ‘brother-making’ to structure a variety of relationships, and also predictably, in the face of modern developments in sexuality, the Serbian Orthodox Church nervously suspended use of the ritual in 1975. Whatever its future, it is important to return it to its appropriate place in the past. [39] ANGELS, EUNUCHS, SAINTS The ascetic conquest of sex by whatever means, if successful, was a means of liberating constructions of gender from the traditional constraints of Graeco- Roman society. In fact, did the ascetic life create a third gender? There was a possible answer, or analogy, in the esteem accorded to angels. They were powerful sacred personalities close to God, who might be considered models for human behaviour, but this involved some radical rethinking about them. In both pre-Christian Jewish and Christian tradition, angels were frequently characterized by aggressively masculine sexual activity, as a perusal of Genesis 6 in the Septuagint’s Greek would inform any curious reader.

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

  A significant feature of this family history is that its considerable joint wealth ended up in the hands of the Church, because so many of the siblings embraced ecclesiastical careers or celibacy; that became a recurrent theme in later Christianity. [27] Gregory paid his own emotional debt to his sister by writing an affectionate though highly crafted biography of her. The story of Macrina lacked the lively incident of Antony’s, but the useful lesson of her life for many others was how to pursue lifelong Christian celibacy in a respectable if unexciting

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

  In such circumstances, for both practical and emotional reasons, it was eminently sensible to frame such a relationship with agreements before God accompanied by set prayers, recognized by the wider monastic world as a fictive or sacred making of brothers. That is what adelphopoiēsis originally was and long continued to be in the Orthodox tradition, but never in the West: only one surviving medieval Latin manuscript of the rite has been located, significantly deriving from the boundary of Greek East and Latin West in what is now Croatia. [37] The likely reason that adelphopoiēsis remained exclusively an Orthodox custom is that Western Latin monasticism quite early on set its face against such pairs or small groups of monks. This was much encouraged by the authority of John Cassian in his presentation of Eastern monastic custom to a fascinated West at the beginning of the fifth century: he sneered at this type of monastic life, which he darkly and indeed obscurely termed as ‘of the Sarabaites ’. As a third variety of monasticism, standing midway between the hermit tradition of Antony and the community tradition of Pachomios, it was ‘a poor sort of thing and by all means to be avoided’. The sixth-century Italian monk Benedict, creator of a distinctive Western approach to monastic discipline, emphatically agreed with Cassian, and he made that clear in what is now known as the Benedictine Rule, basic to shaping Latin monastic life in later centuries. [38] It was perhaps in defensive reaction to this Western hostility that adelphopoiēsis remained important and widely practised in Eastern Orthodoxy. Yet in the course of time, such paired monastic life became rarer in Orthodoxy as well, and even Easterners might forget the origins of the ceremony. No doubt some couples of men, monastic and secular, did decide to use it for their own emotional purposes. There have been some quiet modern efforts in Orthodox contexts as widely separated as Jerusalem and Serbia to redeploy ‘brother-making’ to structure a variety of relationships, and also predictably, in the face of modern developments in sexuality, the Serbian Orthodox Church nervously suspended use of the ritual in 1975. Whatever its future, it is important to return it to its appropriate place in the past. [39] ANGELS , EUNUCHS , SAINTS The ascetic conquest of sex by whatever means, if successful, was a means of liberating constructions of gender from the traditional constraints of Graeco- Roman society. In fact, did the ascetic life create a third gender? There was a possible answer, or analogy, in the esteem accorded to angels. They were powerful sacred personalities close to God, who might be considered models for human behaviour, but this involved some radical rethinking about them. In both pre-Christian Jewish and Christian tradition, angels were frequently characterized by aggressively masculine sexual activity, as a perusal of Genesis 6 in the Septuagint’s Greek would inform any curious reader.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  Soon she grew warm and I pulled off my nightshirt and my middle finger was caressing her sex that opened quickly: “E—E!” she said drawing in her breath quickly: “it still hurts.” I put my sex gently against hers, moving it up and down slowly till she drew up her knees to let me in; but as soon as the head entered, her face puckered a little with pain and as I had had a long afternoon, I was the more inclined to forbear and accordingly I drew away and took place beside her: “I cannot bear to hurt you,” I said, “love’s pleasure must be mutual.” “You’re sweet!” she whispered, “I’m glad you stopped; for it shows you really care for me and not just for the pleasure!” and she kissed me lovingly. “Kate, reward me,” I said, “by telling me just what you felt when I first had you” and I put her hand on my hot stiff sex to encourage her. “It’s impossible,” she said, flushing a little, “there was such a throng of new feelings; why, this evening waiting in bed for the time to pass and thinking of you, I felt a strange prickling sensation in the inside of my thighs that I never felt before and now”—and she hid her glowing face against my neck, “I feel it again!” “Love is funny, isn’t it?” she whispered the next moment: “now the pricking sensation is gone and the front part of my sex burns and itches, Oh! I must touch it!” “Let me,” I cried, and in a moment I was on her, working my organ up and down on her clitoris, the porch, so to speak, of Love’s temple. A little later she herself sucked the head into her hot, dry pussy and then closed her legs as if in pain to stop me going further; but I began to rub my sex up and down on her tickler, letting it slide right in, every now and then, till she panted and her love-juice came and my weapon sheathed itself in her naturally. I soon began the very slow and gentle in-and-out movements which increased her excitement steadily while giving her more and more pleasure, till I came and immediately she lifted my chest up from her breasts with both hands and showed me her glowing face. “Stop, boy,” she gasped, “please: my heart’s fluttering so! I came too, you know, just with you” and indeed I felt her trembling all over convulsively. I drew out and for safety’s sake got her to use the syringe, having already explained its efficacy to her; she was adorably awkward and when she had finished I took her to bed again and held her to me, kissing her. “So you really love me, Kate!” “Really,” she said, “you don’t know how much!”

• From Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010)

  In the West, for example, we value the independence of the young, expect them to speak their minds, and do not exact absolute obedience. But are we treating the elderly members of the family with an empathetic love and respect? Do they die surrounded with care, or are they shunted into impersonal nursing homes and hospices? If they are at home, are they treated only with perfunctory consideration and regarded as a burden? Are some people carrying more than their share of the responsibility of care? Confucius was incensed to see that instead of making their parents’ meals an elegant, gracious ceremony, many sons were simply throwing the food in front of them. “Even dogs and horses are cared for to that extent!” Confucius exclaimed. 4 “Filial piety does not consist merely in young people undertaking the hard work when anything has to be done,” he insisted; “it is something more than that.” This elusive “something” was the “demeanor”: you revealed the spirit in which you were carrying out these rites of service in every one of your gestures and facial expressions. 5 The care of the elderly is going to be a big problem in those Western countries with an increasingly aged population. Can we learn something about the compassionate care of the elderly from Confucius? Can you think of a twenty-first-century equivalent to the li that would make each member of the family feel supremely valued? How can you make your family a school for compassion, where children learn the value of treating all others with respect? What would life be like if all family members made a serious attempt to treat one another “all day and every day” as they would wish to be treated themselves? How would life be improved, for example, if everybody made a consistent effort to avoid speaking too hastily? We know that people brought up in dysfunctional families find it difficult to make good relationships in later life; they can have psychological problems that cause them to increase the sum of pain in the world. Creating a compassionate family life is one of the ways in which we can all make a constructive contribution to a more empathetic society in the future. Next, we should consider the workplace. How can a lawyer, businessperson, construction worker, doctor, educator, clergyperson, dog walker, police officer, traffic warden, nurse, shop assistant, caregiver, librarian, chef, cab driver, receptionist, author, secretary, cleaner, or banker observe the Golden Rule in the course of his or her work? What would be the realistic criteria of a compassionate company?