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 The Decameron (1353)

  At first, being unable to make out what creature it was that was approaching the shore, she started back with a cry of alarm. He said nothing to her, for he was quite unable to speak and scarcely able to see. But as the current bore him closer to the shore, she could make out the shape of the chest, and, peering more intently, she first of all recognized a pair of arms stretched across its lid, after which she picked out the face and realized it was a human being. Prompted by compassion, she waded some distance out into the sea, which was now quite calm, took him by the hair and dragged him to the shore, chest and all. There, with an effort, she unhooked his hands from the chest, which she placed on the head of her young daughter who was with her, whilst she herself carried Landolfo away like a baby and put him into a hot bath. She rubbed away so vigorously at him and poured so much hot water over him, that eventually he began to thaw out and recover some of his lost strength. And when she judged it to be the right moment, she took him from the bath and refreshed him with a quantity of good wine and nourishing food. After she had nursed him to the best of her ability for several days, his recovery was complete and he took stock of his surroundings. The good woman therefore decided it was time to hand over his chest, which she had been keeping for him, and to tell him that from now on he must fend for himself. And this she did. He could remember nothing about any chest, but he nevertheless accepted it when the good woman offered it to him, for he thought it could hardly be so valueless that it would not keep him going for a few days. His hopes were severely jolted when he discovered how light it was, but all the same, when the woman was out of the house, he forced it open to see what was inside, and discovered that it contained a number of precious stones, some of them loose and others mounted. Being quite knowledgeable on the subject of jewels, he realized from the moment he saw them that they were extremely valuable, and his spirits rose higher than ever. He praised God for once again coming to his rescue, but since Fortune had dealt him two cruel blows in rapid succession, and might conceivably deal him a third, he decided he would have to proceed with great caution if he wanted to convey these things safely home. So he wrapped them up as carefully as he could in some old rags, told the woman that if she liked, she could keep the chest, since he no longer had any use for it, and asked her to let him have a sack in exchange.

• From Trash (1988)

  It looks like there are tears in her eyes. “I’m tired of not doing anything when these things happen, just talking about how horrible it all is and then going on with our lives. I want to call Jackie, or maybe even Fawn and Pris.” “No, not them.” I get a cold chill down my back, imagining Fawn and Pris walking in on Margaret’s mama some day. “That rent party idea is a good notion. I’ll give Jackie a call, and you and I can set it up. It’ll be like old times.” Margaret’s face relaxes. She stands up, but then stops and leans across the table to kiss me on the cheek. “Old times,” she laughs. “I’ve had some of my best times with you, you know.” “I know.” I watch Margaret walk away and shake my head. Margaret has gotten so skinny, she almost has no ass at all anymore. When I first met her she looked just like a Botticelli virgin, all lush and pink and full. I’d flirted with her for two years until she would go to bed with me, but then we’d spent the night in giggles. “Get serious,” I’d kept insisting, but neither of us could. After a while we’d given up the idea of sex and just relaxed into cuddling and telling stories. Once every few years we try it again, but with the same result. “Maybe it’s how we smell to each other,” Margaret once suggested. “I read about that somewhere. Or maybe we just know each other too well, huh?” I’d been laughing so hard at the time, I hadn’t been able to reply. I don’t really care anymore what it is that makes us so unsuited as lovers. We’ve become the best of friends. Not like Paula and me: we’ve been snipping at each other ever since we stopped being lovers. I wonder if Paula still drinks half a glass of vodka to put herself to sleep every night and if she’s still seeing Fawn now and then. For a moment I think about all the things we never say to each other, the things we know that we don’t admit we know. Dirt. Gossip. Simple cruelty and self-righteousness. I remember the first time Jackie showed me her drawings, the fear and uncertainty in her face, the fierceness on the features of the women she had drawn. I had liked the drawings. I had loved the passion in Jackie when she held them, the way she ground her teeth together as I lifted one after the other. I had wanted to tell her it would be all right, that people would love her warrior women, that I loved the way they threw their heads back and stared out of the drawings. Jackie seemed so fragile with her drawings spread out before her, like those white mountain flowers that come up in the spring on sturdy stalks but lose their blossoms if the wind hits them too suddenly.

• From Trash (1988)

  She turned her face to me with a wide happy smile. “God! I do love shopping.” “Wasn’t she from Louisville, that woman had the sports car? The one with those boots I liked so much?” Jo and I were folding sheets. We had cleared about a month of laundry off the bed, shifting sheets and towels up onto shelves, and stacking the T-shirts, socks, and underwear in baskets. Jo’s rules for housekeeping were simple; she did the least she could. All underpants, T-shirts, and socks in her house were white. Nothing was sorted by anything but size—when it was sorted at all. If I wanted to sleep, I had to get it all off the bed. “No,” I said. “Met her after I moved to Brooklyn.” “Sure had a lot of attitude. And Lord God! Those boots. What happened to her, anyway?” “Got a job in Chicago working for a news show.” “Oh, so not the one, huh?” Jo made a rude gesture with her right hand. “You talked like she had your heart in her hands.” “For a while.” I shook out a sheet and began to refold it more neatly. “But when I moved in with her, things changed. Turned out she had Jack’s temper and Arlene’s talent for seeing what she wanted to see.” “That’s a shock.” There was a sardonic drawl in Jo’s tone. “Didn’t think there was another like Arlene in the world.” “There’s a world of Arlenes,” I said. “World of Jacks, too, and a lifetime of scary women just waiting for me to drag them here so you can talk them out of their boots.” “Well, those were damn fine boots.” Jaybird came in then, dragging his feet across the doorsill to knock loose the sand. Jo waved him over. “You remember the red boots I bought in Atlanta that time?” “They hurt your feet.” Jay took a quick nibble on Jo’s earlobe and gave me a welcome grin. “Just about crippled me. But you sure liked the way they looked when I crossed my legs at the bar that weekend.” “You look good any way, woman,” Jay said. “You come in covered in dog shit and grass seed, I’ll still want to suck on your neck. You sit back in shiny red high-heeled boots and I’ll do just about anything you want.” “You will, huh?” She snagged one of his belt loops and tugged it possessively. “You know I will.” “Uh huh.” They kissed like I was not in the room, so I pretended I was not, folding sheets while the kiss turned to giggles and then pinches and another kiss. Jo and Jaybird have been together almost nine years. I liked Jay more than any other guy Jo ever brought around. He was older than the type she used to chase. Jo wouldn’t say, but Mama swore Pammy’s daddy was a kid barely out of junior high. “Your sister likes them young,” she complained. “Too young.” Jay was a vet.

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  On a sofa in the small adjoining room, covered with the hospital robe, the master lay in a deep sleep. His even breathing was soundless. Having wept her fill, Margarita went to the intact notebooks and found the place she had been rereading before she met Azazello under the Kremlin wall. Margarita did not want to sleep. She caressed the manuscript tenderly, as one caresses a favourite cat, and kept turning it in her hands, examining it from all sides, now pausing at the title page, now opening to the end. A terrible thought suddenly swept over her, that this was all sorcery, that the notebooks would presently disappear from sight, and she would be in her bedroom in the old house, and that on waking up she would have to go and drown herself. But this was her last terrible thought, an echo of the long suffering she had lived through. Nothing disappeared, the all-powerful Woland really was all powerful, and as long as she liked, even till dawn itself, Margarita could rustle the pages of the notebooks, gaze at them, kiss them, and read over the words: ‘The darkness that came from the Mediterranean Sea covered the city hated by the procurator . . .’ Yes, the darkness . . . CHAPTER 25: How the Procurator Tried to Save Judas of Kiriath, THE MASTER AND MARGARITA CHAPTER 25 How the Procurator Tried to Save Judas of Kiriath The darkness that came from the Mediterranean Sea covered the city hated by the procurator. The hanging bridges connecting the temple with the dread Antonia Tower disappeared, the abyss descended from the sky and flooded the winged gods over the hippodrome, the Hasmonaean Palace with its loopholes, the bazaars, caravanserais, lanes, pools . . . Yershalaim—the great city—vanished as if it had never existed in the world. Everything was devoured by the darkness, which frightened every living thing in Yershalaim and round about. The strange cloud was swept from seaward towards the end of the day, the fourteenth day of the spring month of Nisan. It was already heaving its belly over Bald Skull, where the executioners hastily stabbed the condemned men, it heaved itself over the temple of Yershalaim, crept in smoky streams down the temple hill, and flooded the Lower City. It poured through windows and drove people from the crooked streets into the houses. It was in no hurry to yield up its moisture and gave off only light. Each time the black smoky brew was ripped by fire, the great bulk of the temple with its glittering scaly roof flew up out of the pitch darkness. But the fire would instantly go out, and the temple would sink into the dark abyss. Time and again it grew out of it and fell back, and each time its collapse was accompanied by the thunder of catastrophe.

• From The History of Christianity: From the Disciples to the Dawn of the Reformation (2012)

  263 o The targets of the reformers were consistent: Scholastic theology, the power of the papacy, the complications of the liturgy and canon law, the institution of monasticism and religious life generally, and the emphasis on externals rather than internal realities, on “works” rather than the simple response of the heart. • The justice of the reformer’s charges is difficult to deny, for the changes they point to are obvious to anyone with a historical sense. Yet the fundamental charge that Christianity had lost its “essence” in the time leading up to the Reformation may be much too strong. o The problem with a counter-assertion, however, is the difficulty of substantiating it; can it be shown that ordinary Christians lived lives fully consonant with the Jesus of the Gospels, the teaching of Paul, and the guidance of the Holy Spirit? o Did the elaboration or even the corruption of public forms also corrupt in a fundamental way those practices of piety, charity, generous devotion, and quiet witness of a good life that had always, from the 1 st to the 16 th centuries, been the proclaimed goal of the Christian message? o Here, the evidence of the saints must count for something. By “saints,” we mean others than those officially recognized by the church, just as we must include others than the visible historical players. o We must include those who lived lives of patient endurance, quiet service, and deep charity in accordance with the gospel and, by so living, communicated something of the gospel’s power from one generation to the next. It does not matter whether they were monk or mendicant, pilgrim or poet. What matters is the character of their lives. o In the final analysis, although it would make for dull reading because it would be so lacking in high adventure or political 264 Lecture 36: The Ever-adapting Religion intrigue, perhaps the most authentic history of Christianity is, after all, the history of the saints. o Perhaps there were not so many of such folk as one would like in all these long years, but there were surely enough, for it must be said that without some such spark of life being transmitted from generation to generation, there would not have been any history at all to speak of. Bass, A People’ s History of Christianity. Pelikan, Jesus through the Ages. 1. How does the question concerning the “essence” of Christianity force us to recognize the limits of historical knowledge? 2. How does the post-Constantinian era alter the rules of the game within which Christianity was played for most of its history? Suggested Reading Questions to Consider

• From The Girls (2016)

  I combed his hair with my fingers, untangled his shark-tooth necklace. All those self-consciously maternal tasks, tasks that pleased me more than him and allowed me to imagine I alone had the power to make him calm. Nico was uncooperative with these moments of softness, breaking the spell bluntly, like he’d sensed my good feelings and resented them. Tugging his little penis at me. Demanding juice in a shrieking falsetto. Once hitting me so hard that I bruised. I watched him squat and take a shit out on the concrete by the pool, shits we’d sometimes hose away and sometimes not. Helen wandered downstairs in a Snoopy T-shirt and too-big socks, the red heels bunched around her ankles. “Anyone wanna play Liar’s Dice?” “Nah,” Suzanne announced. For all of us, it was assumed. Helen slumped onto a balding armchair stripped of cushions. She glanced at the ceiling. “Still leaking,” she said. Everyone ignored her. “Can someone roll a joint?” she said. “Please?” When no one answered, she joined Roos and Suzanne on the floor. “Please, please, please?” she said, nuzzling her head into Roos’s shoulder, draping herself in her lap like a dog. “Oh, just do it,” Suzanne said. Helen jumped up to get the fake ivory box they kept the supplies in, while Suzanne rolled her eyes at me. I smiled back. It wasn’t so bad, I thought, being inside. All of us huddled in the same room like Red Cross survivors, water boiling on the stove for tea. Roos working by the window, where the light was alabaster through the scrappy lace curtain. The calm was cut by Nico’s sudden whine, stampeding into the room as he chased a little girl with a bowl cut—she had Nico’s shark-tooth necklace, and a yelping scrabble broke out between them. Tears, clawing. “Hey,” Suzanne said without looking up, and the kids got quiet, though they kept staring hotly at each other. Breathing hard, like drunks. Everything seemed fine, quickly handled, until Nico scratched the girl’s face, raking her with his overgrown nails, and the screaming doubled. The girl clapped both hands over her cheek, wailing so her baby teeth showed. Sustaining a high note of misery. Roos got to her feet with effort. “Baby,” she said, holding her arms out, “baby, you gotta be nice.” She took a few steps toward Nico, who started screaming, too, sitting down heavy on his diaper. “Get up,” Roos said, “come on, baby,” trying to hold on to his shoulders, but he’d gone limp and wouldn’t be moved. The other girl sobered in the face of Nico’s antics, how he wrenched away from his mother and started banging his head against the floor. “Baby,” Roos said, droning louder, “no, no, no,” but he kept going, his eyes getting dark and buttony with pleasure. “God.” Helen laughed, a strange laugh that persisted. I didn’t know what to do.

• From The History of Christianity: From the Disciples to the Dawn of the Reformation (2012)

  235 order of women known as the Poor Clares. o Innocent III approved Francis’s short rule for the friars in 1209, and Francis may have attended the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215. The itinerant lifestyle of the Franciscans made them flexible instruments for many ministries. o The history of the early order is extraordinarily complex, but out of Francis’s ideals arose thousands of men committed to evangelical poverty, the care of the poor, and the saving of souls. o Almost inevitably, the order also gave rise to great theologians and mystical teachers, including Duns Scotus (1265–1308) and Bonaventura (1217–1274). • Dominic de Guzmán (1170–1221) studied arts and theology, then sold his possessions during a famine to help the poor; he joined the canons regular in Osma and, after undertaking legations to northern Europe, conceived of the ideal of preaching the gospel to pagans. When he became engaged with the Albigensians, he and his companions founded the Order of Preachers (1208), which was approved by Innocent III in 1216 and fully recognized by Honorius III in 1218. o From the Latin dominicani came the tag “dogs of the Lord” for the fiery preaching and disciplined zeal of the new order. o Despite his zeal to oppose heresy, it is doubtful that Dominic himself led the inquisition (the papal-led interrogation of those The first of the mendicant orders was founded by Francis of assisi around the year 1209. © iStockphoto/Thinkstock. 236 Lecture 32: Papal Revolution suspected of heresy), but because of their great learning and dedication, both Dominicans and Franciscans were used by the papacy as agents of inquisition. o Like the Franciscans, the Dominican order produced great theologians, including Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), and great mystics, including Meister Eckhart (1260–1327), John Tauler (d. 1361), and Henry Suso (1295–1366). • Together, the two mendicant orders not only served as flexible instruments of papal policy, but they energized evangelization and the care of the poor. Their commitment to the intellectual life made them the leading figures in the development of the medieval universities. Miller, Power and the Holy in the Age of the Investiture Conflict. Moore, Pope Innocent III (1160/61–1216). 1. Discuss the political (and moral!) implications of the forgery known as the Donation of Constantine. 2. What does the investiture conflict tell us about the increased confidence of secular rulers in the West? Questions to Consider Suggested Reading

• From From the Streets to the Sheets: Noire's Urban Erotic Quickies (2007)

  One Saturday, Life asked me if he could bring some music over to my place for me to hear. I agreed although Smooth warned me never to bring a nigga out the street and into my crib. He said it was for my safety. Maybe so, maybe not. Before I knew it, I’d rattled off my home address, and it didn’t take Life long to show up with a small bunch of roses. When he handed them to me, I felt weak from his sweetness. After I put the flowers in a vase, I listened to at least four cuts on Life’s CD. I was amazed that his beats were banging—he had mad skills that convinced me he could rise to the top. A slow beat came on and Life broke the ice and asked me to dance. “Yo, we never got a slow dance in the club that night. How about it right now?” Life said, walking up to me. As we swayed from side to side, I couldn’t believe that Life was so tender and romantic. “Yani, your curly afro smells so good. It’s nice to see a natural sista’s beauty.” He rubbed his full lips against my right cheek, but didn’t kiss it. He made my body sway from side to side. I felt his hot breath on my neck, then his lips press against my smooth skin. That was what I was talking about. Life was like that! I breathed deeply and said, “You smell good too, Life—really delicious. I like it.” His cologne clung to my nostrils and made me wet. I exhaled, then suddenly felt a gigantic bulge in his pants. Thankfully, a fast tempo hook began to play again. “I’ve got an idea. Let’s play a game,” Life suggested. “What kind of game?” “Let’s just say I have a heck of an imagination. Go put on something sexy for me, Ma.” “Like what? Tricks are for kids,” I joked. “Keep your day job, ’cause you ain’t no comedian!” Life joked in return. “Now just go put on something sexy. Hurry yo fine ass up,” he demanded. “Oh, now I’m supposed to tip over with happiness just to clap my ass for you?” “Girl, you are crazy. Pretend we’re in a strip club so I can worship that fine ass. Don’t make it seem like you ain’t down! I peeped you dancing wild at the club.”

• From Saint Augustine (Penguin Lives) (1999)

  Paradoxically, he began this systematic undermining of classical culture’s claims by doing his own little raid on that culture’s prizes. The use of philosophy to assuage grief had become formulaic with the Greeks and Romans. It was called the consolatio. Augustine composes a poignant consolatio for those who were killed, displaced, robbed, or raped in the fall of the ancient city. He uses the form’s stoic commonplaces—death is common, natural, inevitable, a thing we all must share, must undergo at some time, so no time is better or worse for it (CG 1.11). He takes the pagan dictum that what happens to the body is not important, only the mind is precious, and gives it a Christian turn: women raped in Rome’s fall do not lose their chastity, which is a virtue in the soul and does not depend on how others use the body. Even if the body responded, mechanically (he refers to the self-lubrication of a woman’s stimulated genitals), that does not matter if the soul withheld consent (1.16–18). No one should seek suicide for any shame imposed on them. God can forgive as well as console, but the suicide places a person beyond repentance (the same argument he uses against capital punishment). The Romans who glorified Lucretia for not living with the shame of rape were more interested in human pride than divine mercy (1.22–25). Her crime was worse than Tarquin’s: “He took her body, she took her life. He raped, she murdered.” (1.19) In the second book of The City of God, Augustine begins what amounts to a long palinode, or “reverse song,” undoing his own favorite poem, Virgil’s Aeneid. Virgil described the gods’ plan to make Rome an image of the divine order of justice. Augustine says Rome never became that, and never could have. No merely human institution can. Only the City of God has perfect order. Then what was Rome? The polar opposite of the City of God? Augustine cannot say that, since good Christians were involved in Rome’s workings—just officials like Marcellinus, powerful patrons like Melania and Pinian. Against the Donatists, Augustine had argued that the Church on earth is a mixed body, with some weeds growing amid the wheat. In the same way, worldly governments have some wheat growing among the weeds. If both are mingled, with the same two types living together, how are they to be distinguished, if at all? Here again Tyconius comes to Augustine’s aid. He, too, believed in the mixed Church. But he contrasted Christ’s body (the Christian community with some sinners in it) with Satan’s body (containing only sinners, though some are also mingled in with Christ’s members). This is an eschatological vision of what is going on in human history—the growing toward a final harvest that separates saints from sinners.

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  The procurator sat down in the armchair. Banga, his tongue hanging out, panting heavily, lay down at his master’s feet, and the joy in the dog’s eyes meant that the storm was over, the only thing in the world that the fearless dog was afraid of, and also that he was again there, next to the man whom he loved, respected, and considered the most powerful man in the world, the ruler of all men, thanks to whom the dog considered himself a privileged, superior and special being. Lying down at his master’s feet without even looking at him, but looking into the dusky garden, the dog nevertheless realized at once that trouble had befallen his master. He therefore changed his position, got up, came from the side and placed his front paws and head on the procurator’s knees, smearing the bottom of his cloak with wet sand. Banga’s actions were probably meant to signify that he comforted his master and was ready to meet misfortune with him. He also attempted to express this with his eyes, casting sidelong glances at his master, and with his alert, pricked-up ears. Thus the two of them, the dog and man who loved each other, met the night of the feast on the balcony. Meanwhile the procurator’s guest was in the midst of a great bustle. After leaving the upper terrace of the garden before the balcony, he went down the stairs to the next terrace of the garden, turned right and came to the barracks which stood on the palace grounds. In these barracks the two centuries that had come with the procurator for the feast in Yershalaim were quartered, as was the procurator’s secret guard, which was under the command of this very guest. The guest did not spend much time in the barracks, no more than ten minutes, but at the end of these ten minutes, three carts drove out of the barracks yard loaded with entrenching tools and a barrel of water. The carts were escorted by fifteen mounted men in grey cloaks. Under their escort the carts left the palace grounds by the rear gate, turned west, drove through gates in the city wall, and followed a path first to the Bethlehem road, then down this road to the north, came to the intersection by the Hebron gate, and then moved down the Jaffa road, along which the procession had gone during the day with the men condemned to death. By that time it was already dark, and the moon appeared on the horizon. Soon after the departure of the carts with their escorting detachment, the procurator’s guest also left the palace grounds on horseback, having changed into a dark, worn chiton. The guest went not out of the city but into it.

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  He offered Bulgakov a job in a Moscow theater so there would be no more letters. • • • Bulgakov wrote about his time with not only the viciousness of a satirist but also the tenderness of a native son. In these pages, I smell the Soviet Union of not only the 1930s but also the 1980s, when I was growing up there—a testament to that nation’s stagnancy and also to Bulgakov’s perception. He is an incomparably rich and detailed observer—intending to do full justice to the moon, a symbolic linchpin of this novel, he sat by the window night after night recording its changing appearance and ‘moods’. The Soviet Union in American accounts tends to be a deprived, and depraved, hell, but there was also much that was sweet, and sheltered, about it, and this book’s portrayal of that country touches the bone for an exile. So does the novel’s evocation of that subtle Soviet sense of living with eyes and ears everywhere; of how sinners find crumbs even at a table set for the new saints of socialism; and of the integrity that survives, miraculously, even in such circumstances. So that the Muscovites mocked in the early part of the book receive, as well, a kind of hidden sympathy. No human being deserves the trauma of a life in a place like the USSR, and that person’s ultimate judgment must take that into account. Margarita has too many achievements to list—for one thing, a plot scudding with action and suspense, not exactly a hallmark of Russian literature—but I am devoted especially to the way its openhearted, un-ironic celebration of art and love lives alongside such a dark-souled, too-knowing chronicle of the evil that nests inside the same human heart. And to the revenge—on the hacks, the yes-men, the snitches, the hypocrites—that the novel declines to rise above. Margarita is not interested in sainthood; even as its heroine soars, naked, above Moscow on a broom, shattering the windows of the critics who have savaged the Master to advance their own careers, the novel’s feet are as soil-bound as its Christ. Because it loves that soil, because that soil has been hijacked, and because it is running with blood. (‘ “Don’t be afraid, Queen, the blood has long since gone into the earth.

• From The Girls (2016)

  I’d gone only once with Suzanne, to pick up a pound of grass from a house she called, jokingly, the Russian Embassy. Some friends of Guy’s, I think, the old Satanist hangout. The front door was painted a tarry black—she saw my hesitation and hooked her arm through mine. “Doomy, huh?” she said. “I thought so too, at first.” When she hitched me closer, I felt the knock of her hipbones. These moments of kindness were never anything but dazzling to me. Afterward, she and I walked over to Hippie Hill. It was grayed-out, and drizzling, empty, except for the undead stumbling of junkies. I tried hard to squeeze out a vibe from the air, but there was nothing—I was relieved when Suzanne laughed, too, halting any labor for meaning. “Jesus,” she said, “this place is a dump.” We ended up back in the park, the fog dripping audibly from the eucalyptus leaves. I spent almost every day at the ranch, except for brief stopovers at my house to change clothes or leave notes on the kitchen table for my mother. Notes that I’d sign, “Your Loving Daughter.” Indulging the overblown affection my absence made room for. I knew I was starting to look different, the weeks at the ranch working me over with a grubby wash. My hair getting light from the sun and sharp at the edges, a tint of smoke lingering even after I shampooed. Much of my clothes had passed into the ranch possession, morphing into garments I often failed to recognize as my own: Helen clowning around in my once precious bib shirt, now torn and spotted with peach juice. I dressed like Suzanne, a raunchy patchwork culled from the communal piles, clothes whose scrappiness announced a hostility to the larger world. I had gone with Suzanne to the Home Market once, Suzanne wearing a bikini top and cutoffs, and we’d watched the other shoppers glare and grow hot with indignation, their sideways glances becoming outright stares. We’d laughed with insane, helpless snorts, like we’d had some wild secret, and we had. The woman who’d seemed about to cry with baffled disgust, clutching for her daughter’s arm: she hadn’t known her hatred only made us more powerful. I prepared for possible sightings of my mother with pious ablutions: I showered, standing in the hot water until my skin splotched red, my hair slippery with conditioner. I put on a plain T-shirt and white cotton shorts, what I might have worn when I was younger, trying to appear scrubbed and sexless enough to comfort my mother. Though maybe I didn’t need to try so hard—she wasn’t looking closely enough to warrant the effort. The times we did have dinner together, a mostly silent affair, she would fuss at her food like a picky child. Inventing reasons to talk about Frank, inane weather reports from her own life. I could have been anyone.

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  silvery radiance around her. She was carrying a large bunch of rust-colored chrysanthemums in the crook of her right arm, and when we had walked side by side across the yard without a word and were standing in the doorway, she raised her free hand and put the hair back from my forehead, as if she knew, in this one gesture, that she had the gift of being remembered. Yes, I can still see Adela, said Austerlitz; in my mind she has remained unchanged, as beautiful as she was then. At the end of those long summer days we quite often played badminton together in the ballroom of Andromeda Lodge, which had been empty since the war, while Gerald fed and watered his pigeons before night fell. The feathered shuttlecock flew between us as we struck it back and forth. The trajectory it followed, always turning on its way although you could not have said how, was a streak of white drawn through the evening hour, and I could have sworn that Adela often hovered in the air just above the parquet floor for much longer than the force of gravity allowed. After our game we usually stayed in the ballroom for a little while, looking at the images cast on the wall opposite the tall, arched window by the last rays of the sun shining low through the moving branches of a hawthorn, until at last they were extinguished. There was something fleeting, evanescent about those sparse patterns appearing in constant succession on the pale surface, something which never went beyond the moment of its generation, so to speak, yet here, in this intertwining of sunlight and shadow always forming and re-forming, you could see mountainous landscapes with glaciers and ice fields, high plateaux, steppes, deserts, fields full of flowers, islands in the sea, coral reefs, archipelagoes and atolls, forests bending to the storm, quaking grass and drifting smoke. And once, I remember, said Austerlitz, as we gazed together at this slowly fading world, Adela leaned towards me and asked: Do you see the fronds of the palm trees, do you see the caravan coming through the dunes over there? By the time Austerlitz repeated this question of Adela’s, a question still imprinted on his memory, we were on our way back into the city from Greenwich. Our taxi made slow progress in the dense evening traffic. It had begun to rain; the beams of headlights gleamed on the asphalt, cutting through the windscreen covered with silvery beads. It took us nearly an hour to travel a distance of not much more than three miles to Tower Bridge by way of Greek Street, Evelyn Street, Lower Road, and Jamaica Road. Austerlitz leaned back with his arms round his rucksack, staring ahead in silence. Perhaps he had closed his eyes, I thought, but I did not venture to glance sideways at him. Only at Liverpool Street Station, where he waited with me in McDonald’s until my train left, and after a casual remark about the glaring light which, so he said, allowed not even the hint of a shadow and perpetuated the momentary terror of a lightning flash—only at Liverpool Street did he resume his story. I never saw

• From Saint Augustine (Penguin Lives) (1999)

  If it becomes boring to repeat the same things to beginners, we should put ourselves in their affectionate brother’s place, or their mother’s or father’s. Then such will be our empathy with what they are feeling that what is said will become new to us again. The effect of this sympathy is so great that when listeners are moved as we speak, we enter into each other’s reactions, as the hearers speak in us and we learn in them what we were teaching. Isn’t that what happens when we show others beautiful scenes which we have often gone past with a careless glance, but which give us fresh joy as we share others’ joy on first seeing them? And the intensity of this experience is the greater, the closer we are to each other. The more, by the bond of love, we enter into each other’s mind, the more even old things become new for us again. (Instruction 17) The importance of sympathy in teaching and ministry was always in Augustine’s mind: “One becomes sick oneself, to minister to the sick, not with any false claim to having the same fever but by considering, with an attitude of sympathy, how one would want to be treated if he were the sick one” (L 40.4). Any account of Augustine’s ministry should begin with his preaching, since that is how he first made himself useful, indeed indispensable, to Bishop Valerius. To have given Augustine, a mere priest, the privilege of preaching in Hippo was unusual enough. Valerius went even further when the pan-African council of bishops met at Hippo in 393, just after Augustine’s ordination. Valerius secured the bishops’ agreement to have a priest address them on the subject “Faith and Creed.” The basic nature of that speech, which has survived, shows how badly the African clergy were in need of instruction. Luckily the primate of Carthage, Bishop Aurelius, was a reformer with visionary plans for the African Church. He and Augustine struck up a partnership that would remake the face of African Christianity over the next several decades. Augustine knew the size of the task before them, since he had recently confided to his own bishop: “How can I castigate wrongdoing or deception [in lay Christians] when these faults are far worse in our own ranks than among the people generally?” (L 22.2). Augustine would train in his monastery many of the bishops Aurelius helped place in key dioceses over the coming years.

• From Comrade Loves of the Samurai (1972)

  That night Sennojyo received his patrons in the tea-house with the greatest cordiality; but at dawn he went to the bank of the river Kamo to look for his former patron. He went alone, without a servant, along the gritty and pebbly river bank, with the river flowing at his side. At last he reached the bridge, and called: 'Samboku, my dear Owari patron! 'But no one answered him. It was the twenty-fourth of November, and not yet very light; therefore he could not distinguish the faces of the wretched men lying under the bridge. There were many beggars and vagabonds there. Then he remembered that his patron had a little scar on his neck; so he Started to examine all the sleepers closely, and after a long search found his man. 'You are cruel, 'he said. 'I have kept calling you, and you never answered.'And he wept for pity and joy at finding his old lover again, and chatted with him a little of past days and of their former love. The morning air was fresh, and to warm the two of them Sennojyo poured out the wine which he had brought, and they both drank. When the sky grew light in the East he could distinguish his old lover's features. He had lost all refinement, and Sennojyo was very sorry for this. He tenderly caressed the scurfed feet, and lay down with the old man under the bridge. Day came and people began to pass over the bridge; and the time came for the announcement of the theatre programme. Sennojyo was obliged to retire secretly, for he could not Stay there in the sight of all. He said to the old man: 'I beg you to wait for me here this evening. I shall come and take you back to my house with me.'But the old man had no wish to accept such a proposal. This meeting with his former lover had, in fad, troubled him. He wished to continue in his simple and serene obscurity. Therefore he disappeared. Sennojyo sought him through all Kyoto, but in vain. He collected all the gun flints that his lover had left behind, and made a tomb of them among the bamboos, in a corner of the field of Nii-Kamano at Higashiyama. His lover's favourite tree had been the violet paulownia, so he planted one beside the tomb. He engaged a priest, who lived in a little hut near the field, to pray for his lover's and his own soul. People named this tomb, 'The new tomb of love.' [image file=image_rsrc1KR.jpg] 10 Letter from a Buddhist Priest telling his Friend that his Lover comes to himDEAR FRIEND IN THE TEACHING OF BUDDHA: The cherry trees in flower at Kyoto so troubled me that I left the capital last spring. I send you this letter by a man who is going to visit the city. I hope that you are zealous in our religion at your temple, and without disturbance.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  It all happened quite simply as such things will happen. It was Roger who introduced Martin Hallam; it was Stephen who explained that she danced very badly; it was Martin who suggested that they sit out their dances. Then—how quickly it occurs if the thing is pre-destined—they suddenly knew that they liked each other, that some chord had been struck to a pleasant vibration; and this being so they sat out many dances, and they talked for quite a long while that evening. Martin lived in British Columbia, it seemed, where he owned several farms and a number of orchards. He had gone out there after the death of his mother, for six months, but had stayed on for love of the country. And now he was having a holiday in England—that was how he had got to know young Roger Antrim, they had met up in London and Roger had asked him to come down for a week, and so here he was—but it felt almost strange to be back again in England. Then he talked of the vastness of that new country that was yet so old; of its snow-capped mountains, of its canyons and gorges, of its deep, princely rivers, of its lakes, above all of its mighty forests. And when Martin spoke of those mighty forests, his voice changed, it became almost reverential; for this young man loved trees with a primitive instinct, with a strange and inexplicable devotion. Because he liked Stephen he could talk of his trees, and because she liked him she could listen while he talked, feeling that she too would love his great forests. His face was very young, clean-shaver and bony; he had bony, brown hands with spatulate fingers; for the rest, he was tall with a loosely knit figure, and he slouched a little when he walked, from much riding. But his face had a charming quality about it, especially when he talked of his trees; it glowed, it seemed to be inwardly kindled, and it asked for a real and heart-felt understanding of the patience and the beauty and the goodness of trees—it was eager for your understanding. Yet in spite of this touch of romance in his make-up, which he could not keep out of his voice at moments, he spoke simply, as one man will speak to another, very simply, not trying to create an impression. He talked about trees as some men talk of ships, because they love them and the element they stand for. And Stephen, the awkward, the bashful, the tongue-tied, heard herself talking in her turn, quite freely, heard herself asking him endless questions about forestry, farming and the care of vast orchards; thoughtful questions, unromantic but apt—such as one man will ask of another.

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  carmine red, the writing desk, the long ottoman, the camel-hair rug lying folded at one end of it, the blue-tinged aquatint of the Bohemian mountains— throughout my entire life, which was now unraveling headlong before me, all this had stayed in the same place because as Vera told me, said Austerlitz, once she had lost me and my mother, who was almost a sister to her, she could not bear to alter anything. I don’t remember in what order Vera and I told each other our stories that late March afternoon and evening, said Austerlitz, but I think that after I had given her a brief account of myself, leaving out all that had weighed on me so heavily over the years, we spoke first about my lost parents, Agata and Maximilian. Maximilian Aychenwald, who had come to Prague from St. Petersburg where his father traded in spices until the year of the revolution, soon established himself as one of the most prominent officials of the Czech Social Democratic Party, said Vera. He had met my mother, fifteen years younger than he was and then appearing in various provincial towns as she embarked on her stage career, in Nikolsburg on one of the many journeys he made to speak at public gatherings and shop-floor meetings. In May 1933, when I had only just settled in here, said Vera, they came back from a visit to Paris which, as they never tired of repeating, had been full of the most wonderful events and encounters, and perhaps that was why they decided, directly upon their return, to move into a flat in this house together, though they always remained unmarried. Agata and Maximilian, said Vera, both had a special fondness for all things French. Maximilian was a lifelong republican, and had dreamt of making Czechoslovakia an island of freedom in the midst of the tide of Fascism then inexorably spreading throughout Europe, a kind of second Switzerland, while Agata’s rather more colorful notion of the ideal world was inspired by the works of Jacques Offenbach, whom she admired enormously, which incidentally, said Vera, was the reason for my first name, not a usual one among Czechs. It was through an interest in every aspect of French civilization, she added, something which as an enthusiastic student of Romance culture I shared with both Agata and Maximilian, that a friendship began to develop between us immediately after our first conversation on the day when they moved in, a friendship which led as if quite naturally, so Vera told me, said Austerlitz, to her offering, since unlike Agata and Maximilian she had her time largely at her own disposal, to assume the duties of nanny for the few years until I started nursery school. It was an offer she had never once regretted later, said Vera, for even before I could talk it had always seemed to her as if no one understood her better than this small boy who, by the age of not quite three, entertained her in the most delightful way with his conversational gifts. By agreement with Agata, when we walked over the meadow slopes of the Seminar Garden among the pear and cherry trees, or

• From Saint Augustine (Penguin Lives) (1999)

  It is the clinical precision of his language about arousal that has made some people call him “obsessed with sex.” But he did not make this argument outside the context of his dispute with Julian over original sin. As Brown notes (B and S 416), he did not harp on sexual sin in preaching to his congregation. Greed, violence, and deception were greater concerns in the sermons. In his pastoral life, he was hardly a scourge of sexual sin. In fact, one can see why Pelagius called him lax. He was “surprisingly unruffled” by an accusation of sexual misconduct by a priest until overwhelming evidence was found. As Brown says: “One can imagine what Jerome would have made of the incident” (R and S 397). When a priest and a monk were accused of homosexuality, Augustine sent them to a shrine to pray for God’s judgment while telling his parishioners to suspend judgment where they do not know the secrets of others’ souls (L 78). On the other hand, when a monk of his monastery was found to be deceiving others about the property he held, Augustine rejected the attempt to transfer the property to the monastery, expelled the man, did an audit of others’ holdings, and explained the investigation in two sermons to his people (S 355–56). Sins of calculation, cold acts like lying, were what he most castigated—Satanic sins. For sins of the flesh (which Satan, having no flesh, could not commit), his own experience did not make him intolerant but compassionate. He told his people (S 78.6), during the scandal of homosexuality in the monastery, that his motto was taken from Saint Paul: “Who is weak, and I am not weak?” (2 Corinthians 11.29). When Chesterton’s detective priest, Father Brown, is asked how he got into a criminal’s mind, he says it was by knowing that he is a criminal himself. When the prophet of an exotic religion tells the priest that they share an interest in spiritual powers, he answers that he deals more with spiritual weakness. Father Brown voices good Augustinian doctrine: No man’s really any good till he knows how bad he is, or might be; till he’s realized exactly how much right he has to all this talk about “criminals,” as if they were apes in a forest ten thousand miles away; till he’s got rid of all the dirty self-deception of talking about low types and deficient skills; till he’s squeezed out the last drop of the oil of the Pharisees; till his only hope is somehow or other to have captured one criminal, and kept him safe and sane under his own hat. (The Secret of Father Brown)

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

  Christianity aims, first of all, to redeem man, without regard to rank or condition, from that worst bondage, the curse of sin, and to give him true spiritual freedom; it confirms the original unity of all men in the image of God, and teaches the common redemption and spiritual equality of all before God in Christ;636 it insists on love as the highest duty and virtue, which itself inwardly levels social distinctions; and it addresses the comfort and consolation of the gospel particularly to all the poor, the persecuted, and the oppressed. Paul sent back to his earthly master the fugitive slave, Onesimus, whom he had converted to Christ and to his duty, that he might restore his character where he had lost it; but he expressly charged Philemon to receive and treat the bondman hereafter as a beloved brother in Christ, yea, as the apostle’s own heart. It is impossible to conceive of a more radical cure of the evil in those times and within the limits of established laws and customs. And it is impossible to find in ancient literature a parallel to the little Epistle to Philemon for gentlemanly courtesy and delicacy, as well as for tender sympathy with a poor slave. This Christian spirit of love, humanity, justice, and freedom, as it pervades the whole New Testament, has also, in fact, gradually abolished the institution of slavery in almost all civilized nations, and will not rest till all the chains of sin and misery are broken, till the personal and eternal dignity of man redeemed by Christ is universally acknowledged, and the evangelical freedom and brotherhood of men are perfectly attained. Note on the Number and Condition of Slaves in Greece and Rome. Attica numbered, according to Ctesicles, under the governorship of Demetrius the Phalerian (309 b.c.), 400,000 slaves, 10,000 foreigners, and only 21,000 free citizens. In Sparta the disproportion was still greater. As to the Roman empire, Gibbon estimates the number of slaves under the reign of Claudius at no less than one half of the entire population, i.e., about sixty millions (I. 52, ed. Milman, N. Y., 1850). According to Robertson there were twice as many slaves as free citizens, and Blair (in his work on Roman slavery, Edinb. 1833, p. 15) estimates over three slaves to one freeman between the conquest of Greece (146 b.c.) and the reign of Alexander Severna (A.D. 222–235). The proportion was of course very different in the cities and in the rural districts. The majority of the plebs urbana were poor and unable to keep slaves; and the support of slaves in the city was much more expensive than in the country. Marquardt assumes the proportion of slaves to freemen in Rome to have been three to two. Friedländer (Sittengeschichte Roms. l. 55, fourth ed.) thinks it impossible to make a correct general estimate, as we do not know the number of wealthy families. But we know that Rome A.D.

• From Saint Augustine (Penguin Lives) (1999)

  After the third plenary session broke up on June 8, Marcellinus did not go to bed before making his decision, which was formalized in an edict on June 26—the heretic laws were said to apply to the Donatists, who thus lost their churches, were forbidden to hold meetings, and were fined for not attending Catholic church. Enforcement, as Brown notes (R and S 309–16, 335–36), was bound to be uneven, depending on the willingness of local landowners to make trouble for themselves by cooperating with the decree. Fines were even harder to collect than taxes (that perennial problem of the empire). Ordinary people would not be pursued. Leaders were more vulnerable—they lost their church holdings and their power to protect the hut people (who responded with another wave of suicides). But a leading Donatist bishop, Gaudentius, held his church for nine years at least, and perhaps for his whole life, despite a blistering attack on him by Augustine. Violent resistance to Marcellinus’ edict led to the prolongation of terrorism. One of Augustine’s priests had his eye put out and a finger cut off. Another was murdered. Enforcement of the law outside major cities was virtually impossible. According to Frend (299), “In the countryside, archaeologists have yet to find clear evidence for the transformation of a Donatist church into a Catholic one.” Augustine was preaching concord to the Donatists: Nothing in you do we hate, nothing detest, nothing denounce, nothing condemn, except human error. We repeat, we detest human error from regard for divine truth, but we acknowledge all of God’s graces [sacraments] in you, while whatever in you has gone astray we would correct. . . . The stray is the one I would seek out, find, admonish, approach, take by hand, and lead, correcting the deserter not defacing his divine image. (S 359.5) He told Catholics not to crow over Donatists like victors (L 78.8). Any Donatist bishop who joined the Church could keep his office, even though that violated the rule against two bishops in a single town. He personally would alternate service in his basilica with the Donatist bishop of Hippo. When the murderers of his priest confessed, Augustine showed what he meant by discipline as a teaching instrument. He begged Marcellinus not to execute, maim, or flog the men (the customary Roman penalties). We agree that criminals should lose the freedom to commit more crimes. But we hope it does not go beyond this—that, while retaining life and sound limbs, they should be compelled by law away from their mad instability toward a sober steadiness, and be assigned some useful labor to repair the wrongs they have done. Even this much is called a punishment, but who can doubt that it should be deemed more a service than a severity when the rage to harm is precluded but not the prospect of a healing repentance? (L 133.1)