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 Sex-Starved Marriage: Boosting Your Marriage Libido: A Couple's Guide (2003)

  If things get heated in a good way, take a time-out from talking. If things get heated in a bad way, take a time-out too. When you’re discussing differences in how you feel about your sexual relationship, you may find yourselves getting angry or defensive or saying the same things over and over. If this happens, agree to stop talking about sex for a while, and go do something else for a while, either together or alone. Plus, you should always keep in mind that it’s important not to say anything in the heat of the moment that you’ll regret later. People feel vulnerable when it comes to their sexuality. If you say something hurtful, your spouse is likely to remember it and hold a grudge for a long time to come. Be careful and thoughtful. Don’t say anything you wouldn’t want to hear yourself. Prolonging an argument because you are trying to win your partner over won’t work very well. You need to approach each other with more openness and caring. If you’re arguing about sex, you’re probably not listening to each other, and this would be a very good time to pull out your active listening skills. Really hear how your spouse feels. Make sure s/he knows that you’ve heard him or her. Good things happen when people feel heard. One of the most touching moments I’ve ever had with couples happened just a few weeks ago. Lanie and Dennis came in with garden-variety marital problems: a hectic lifestyle, a lack of time together, not enough communication, too much sarcasm, and the usual complications that are created when an extrovert and introvert go to social functions together. It wasn’t until several sessions into our work together that Lanie began to talk about her lack of sexual desire. It concerned her because she used to look forward to sex with her husband. Now, they made love once every two weeks, and even that was an effort for her. When Lanie talked about her lack of interest in sex, Dennis, a rather talkative man, was unusually quiet. As she pondered all the possible reasons she might not be feeling sexually inspired, Dennis listened on. Eventually, I turned to him and said, “I know that Lanie is trying to find out why her libido isn’t what it used to be, but in the meantime, how are you doing? What’s going on with you?” Dennis went on to say, “Lanie is interested only if everything is perfect. And by perfect, I mean absolutely everything has to be in order. Otherwise she just says no. Sometimes I wish she would be more spontaneous or a little more flexible. If we’ve had a great evening together and we’re feeling close, I’m thinking to myself, ‘Maybe tonight . . . maybe she’d be willing to make love even though it’s not on her schedule.’ But it doesn’t happen. I just have to wait for her to be in the mood.”

• From Wild (2012)

  I opened up The Novel, but my headlamp was flickering and dying, so I turned it off and lay in the dark. I smoothed my hands over my arms, hugging myself. I could feel my tattoo beneath my right fingers; could still trace the horse’s outline. The woman who’d inked it had told me that it would stand up on my flesh for a few weeks, but it had remained that way even after a few months, as if the horse were embossed rather than inked into my skin. It wasn’t just a horse, that tattoo. It was Lady—the horse my mother had asked the doctor at the Mayo Clinic if she could ride when he’d told her she was going to die. Lady wasn’t her real name—it was only what we called her. She was a registered American Saddlebred, her official name spelled out in grandiose glory on the breeder’s association certificate that came with her: Stonewall’s Highland Nancy, sired by Stonewall Sensation and foaled by Mack’s Golden Queen. My mother had managed, against all reason, to buy Lady in the horrible winter when she and my father were finally and forever breaking up. My mother had met a couple at the restaurant where she worked as a waitress. They wanted to sell their purebred twelve-year-old mare for cheap, and even though my mother couldn’t afford even cheap, she went to see the horse and struck a deal with the couple to pay them three hundred dollars over the course of six months, and then she struck another deal with another couple who owned a stable nearby, doing work in exchange for Lady’s board. “She’s breathtaking,” my mother said each time she described Lady, and she was. Over sixteen hands tall, lean and long-limbed, high-stepping and elegant as a queen. She had a white star on her forehead, but the rest of her coat was the same red chestnut as the fox I’d seen in the snow.

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  Since, in my metaphysics, I am a confirmed non-unionist and have no use for organized tours through anthropomorphic paradises, I am left to my own, not negligible devices when I think of the best things in life; when, as now, I look back upon my almost couvade-like concern with our baby. You remember the discoveries we made (supposedly made by all parents): the perfect shape of the miniature fingernails of the hand you silently showed me as it lay, stranded starfish-wise, on your palm; the epidermic texture of limb and cheek, to which attention was drawn in dimmed, faraway tones, as if the softness of touch could be rendered only by the softness of distance; that swimming, sloping, elusive something about the dark-bluish tint of the iris which seemed still to retain the shadows it had absorbed of ancient, fabulous forests where there were more birds than tigers and more fruit than thorns, and where, in some dappled depth, man’s mind had been born; and, above all, an infant’s first journey into the next dimension, the newly established nexus between eye and reachable object, which the career boys in biometrics or in the rat-maze racket think they can explain. It occurs to me that the closest reproduction of the mind’s birth obtainable is the stab of wonder that accompanies the precise moment when, gazing at a tangle of twigs and leaves, one suddenly realizes that what had seemed a natural component of that tangle is a marvelously disguised insect or bird. There is also keen pleasure (and, after all, what else should the pursuit of science produce?) in meeting the riddle of the initial blossoming of man’s mind by postulating a voluptuous pause in the growth of the rest of nature, a lolling and loafing which allowed first of all the formation of Homo poeticus—without which sapiens could not have been evolved. “Struggle for life” indeed! The curse of battle and toil leads man back to the boar, to the grunting beast’s crazy obsession with the search for food. You and I have frequently remarked upon that maniacal glint in a housewife’s scheming eye as it roves over food in a grocery or about the morgue of a butcher’s shop. Toilers of the world, disband! Old books are wrong. The world was made on a Sunday.

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  Now and then a recognized patch of historical background aids local identification—and substitutes other bonds for those a personal vision suggests. Our child must have been almost three on that breezy day in Berlin (where, of course, no one could escape familiarity with the ubiquitous picture of the Führer) when we stood, he and I, before a bed of pallid pansies, each of their upturned faces showing a dark mustache-like smudge, and had great fun, at my rather silly prompting, commenting on their resemblance to a crowd of bobbing little Hitlers. Likewise, I can name a blooming garden in Paris as the place where I noticed, in 1938 or 1939, a quiet girl of ten or so, with a deadpan white face, looking, in her dark, shabby, unseasonable clothes, as if she had escaped from an orphanage (congruously, I was granted a later glimpse of her being swept away by two flowing nuns), who had deftly tied a live butterfly to a thread and was promenading the pretty, weakly fluttering, slightly crippled insect on that elfish leash (the by-product, perhaps, of a good deal of dainty needlework in that orphanage). You have often accused me of unnecessary callousness in my matter-of-fact entomological investigations on our trips to the Pyrenees or the Alps; so, if I diverted our child’s attention from that would-be Titania, it was not because I pitied her Red Admirable (Admiral, in vulgar parlance) but because there was some vaguely repulsive symbolism about her sullen sport. I may have been reminded, in fact, of the simple, old-fashioned trick a French policeman had—and no doubt still has—when leading a florid-nosed workman, a Sunday rowdy, away to jail, of turning him into a singularly docile and even alacritous satellite by catching a kind of small fishhook in the man’s uncared-for but sensitive and responsive flesh. You and I did our best to encompass with vigilant tenderness the trustful tenderness of our child but were inevitably confronted by the fact that the filth left by hoodlums in a sandbox on a playground was the least serious of possible offenses, and that the horrors which former generations had mentally dismissed as anachronisms or things occurring only in remote khanates and mandarinates, were all around us.

• From Chasing Beauty

  [image file=image_rsrc78C.jpg] David Stewart, maker unknown, 1860–65, watercolor and graphite over photo mechanical reproduction on paper. [image file=image_rsrc78D.jpg] Adelia Smith Stewart, maker unknown, 1855–60, hand-colored albumen print. The only portrait of Belle’s mother, Adelia Smith Stewart, is also a hand-colored albumen print from about the 1860s. It shows a trim, pretty woman, with a sweet smile and dark hair parted in the middle, following mid-century fashion. The ermine stole she holds around her shoulders signals her family’s comfortable financial standing. Morris Carter, who began making notes for his 1925 biography of Isabella Stewart Gardner while his subject was still alive, recounts a brief memory suggesting that Adelia Stewart felt called upon, at least on one occasion, to be a disciplinarian. Little Belle takes off her uncomfortable shoes, the story goes, on her way home from Grace Church, ruining her Sunday stockings. This earns her a spanking from her disapproving mother. A school friend of Belle’s, Julia Gardner, who knew mother and daughter well, recalled a woman of warmth and confidence. When Julia visited the Stewarts at their New York home, Mrs. Stewart greeted her with “her arms wide open,” urging she make herself “perfectly at home” and insisting she consider the Stewart home a “Liberty Hall.” What is also clear: Belle and her mother shared interests in fashion and travel, theater and music. On the inside cover of a leather-bound album filled with portraits of European royals, Belle made this note: “photographs of royalties that belonged to my mother.” This too was a shared interest. *** BELLE WOULD TALK INFREQUENTLY OF HER CHILDHOOD OR HER FAMILY, which is not the same thing as a lack of interest. Sometime in the 1880s, she filled out a large, elaborate family genealogy chart, measuring sixteen by twenty-one inches, recording birth and death dates, marriages and children of the previous generations. Her mother’s side of the family had been in America since the 1600s. Her Smith grandparents, Selah Smith and Anna Carpenter, were born in Jamaica, Long Island, in the revolutionary 1770s. Selah operated a tavern and stable at Old Ferry in Brooklyn. Belle left out, perhaps because she did not know, that he died in his forties in 1818 with sizable debts, so that his property, possibly including an enslaved person he owned, had to be sold to pay them off. Belle lists none of their nine children except their youngest, her mother. An ancestor on her father’s side, his great-grandfather Lieutenant Elijah Kent, the father of Isabella Tod’s mother, Rachel Kent, qualified Belle to join the Daughters of the American Revolution.

• From Chasing Beauty

  Father Field also served as Isabella’s spiritual director during these years. According to a story from the time told by the Cowley Fathers, Field urged Isabella to go periodically to the Boston Lying-In Hospital, which was dedicated to the city’s poor, at night and dressed incognito, to talk with patients there. Some of the women were the mothers of newborns; some had suffered the kinds of tragedies that Isabella knew intimately. Field may have suggested that comforting others as she would have liked to be comforted was a key to healing. It seems impossible that one of the most talked-about women in Boston did this without any report appearing in the papers. Father Field had stressed that her action would be worthless if it was public. Veils, which Isabella wore with regularity, can have many uses. In June 1891, the Myopia Hunt Club (so called because its founder brothers were all nearsighted) threw its annual ball in downtown Boston. For a pre-ball occasion, Isabella and Jack hosted several young friends in their music room for dinner and dancing. They hired a local photographer, James Notman, to make a visual record, which he did in a series of eight photographs that capture the joie de vivre of the evening. In one photograph, Isabella’s guests gather around a large table covered in fine white linen: Alice Perkins, Frank Seabury, Anna Anderson, Randolph Appleton, Helen Mixter Appleton (Randolph’s wife), Augustus “Gussie” Gardner, Isabella, and Frank Peabody, with Jack politely offering tea to Ellen Bullard at the far right. These names, except Gussie, the youngest of Joe Gardner’s boys, and Helen Mixter Appleton, appear little in Isabella’s records—maybe they were mostly Gussie’s friends. In an albumen print, with color added, she dances with Randolph Appleton, an image right out of a Renoir or Degas painting. Isabella wore a choker with jewels attached and two large diamonds in her hair. Her Worth-designed dress, nipped in close at the waist, was made of extraordinary pale-green compound satin with a weft of silver thread in the pattern of large tassels that seemed to move with her. [image file=image_rsrc79E.jpg] Reception Before Myopia Hunt Club Ball, Boston, James Notman, June 28, 1891, gelatin silver print.

• From Chasing Beauty

  Morris Carter prepared for the future. He described in his notes in September that he had read to Isabella from her 1913 document, “Suggestions for Running a Museum.” He made some emendations to the plan, citing an agreement she had made at the start of 1922 that Fenway Court would be open from 10 A.M. to 1 P.M. on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, during a season that would last from October 1 to May 1. Isabella’s letters that spring were full of tenderness. She wanted to see people, wanted them to be close, as if reaching out her long hands to them. “A thousand, thousand thanks, dearest, for your enchanting note,” she said in a note to Caroline Sinkler. “I wish I could have been with you there by the fire.” She also asked Caroline to tell Piatt and Henry Sleeper to “try to see me” if they came to Boston—“I want very much to have a glimpse of each of them.” And, as ever, she was attentive to the smallest beautiful detail: “It was a joy indeed to see you,” she told Caroline, and to “remember your black, curly feather with pleasure.” Isabella was giving away some of her treasures. She sent a cherished watch to Helen Appleton and an outsize jade to Elsie de Wolfe, with whom she had traveled in Paris in 1906. Olga Gardner Monks wrote a letter of thanks after receiving a photograph of Jack Gardner, which Isabella had kept on display above her bed since early in her marriage. “Uncle Jack’s picture is hung and it is lovely to have it in my room,” Olga said. Olga also inherited the two diamonds, “The Light of India” and “The Rajah” that Isabella had purchased in 1886. She evenly split the longest rope of pearls, her signature jewelry, to give to seven women, five of whom were in the Gardner family: Olga and her sister Ellen Gardner Loring; George Peabody Gardner’s wife, Esther; and two of Julia Gardner Coolidge’s daughters-in-law. Ralph Curtis’s daughter, Sylvia, and Helen Appleton’s daughter, also Sylvia, inherited the other two strings. Sylvia Curtis received one of her rubies.

• From Paul and Palestinian Judaism (40th Anniversary Edition) (2017)

  13 Horovitz, p. 4. Similarly Lev. 16.16 ('which abides with them in the midst of their uncleanness') is taken to show that God (the Shekinah) is with Israel even when they are unclean in Yoma 56b-57a and Sifra AJ:iare pereq 4.5; so also Sifra Metsora' pereq 9.7 (to 15.31). 14 On the Shekinah being with Israel despite sin, see further Abelson, The Immanence of God in Rabbinical Literature, pp. 138ff.; Kuhn, Gottes Selbsterniedrigung, p. 84. And on the presence of God with Israel, see section 10 below. 15 The nature of the Rabbinic conception of the covenant will be discussed throughout the balance of this chapter, and especially in section 4. It is not presupposed that the conception is identical with one of the biblical conceptions of the covenant. 3] The nature of Tannaitic literature The relationship between the covenant, the commandments and the requirement of obedience is one of the focal points of this study, and we shall see that the understanding of the relationship which is expressed in the reason for fulfilling the commandments is that God Sifre Num. 1 - specified obedience as Israel's response to the covenant, to God's presence with his people - is the common understanding of the Tannaim. The precise way in which the Rabbis deal with the covenant, the commandments and obedience or disobedience (and consequently with reward and punishment) will require detailed analysis (sections 4-6), but we may conclude this section by citing two further passages which express especially dearly the Tannaitic understanding of obedience, the commandments and the coven ant; and these passages will further demonstrate why the Tannaim were so concerned with meticulously defining and obeying the commandments. A profound insight into the motive for obedience appears in the following passage from Sifre Deuteronomy, commenting on Deut. 6.6: 'And these words which I command you this day shall be upon your heart.' Rabbi says: Why is it said? Because it says (Deut. 6.5) 'And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart.' I do not know how one should love God (ha Maqom), 16 and so Scripture says, 'And these words which I command you this day shall be upon your heart.' Place these words upon your heart so that through them you will come to know the one who spoke and the world came into being, and cleave to his ways. 17

• From New Testament Words (1964)

  J. P. Struthers, that great Scottish preacher, used to say that it would do the Church more good than anything else in the world if Christians would only sometimes do a bonnie thing. He lived up to his own teaching. He lived in a manse in Greenock which was at the end of the road which led up to the hillside above the firth. The lads and lasses used to take that road at evening time. Struthers had a garden; and he used to pluck the flowers in it and make them up into little posies which he used to lay along his garden wall. And the lads knew that he meant them to take the posies and give them to the girls with whom they were walking along the road. That was an action which was the perfect illustration of this word kalos; and that is the kind of action which does the Church more good than most of the great works of theology that ever were written. Scholarship can baffle; learning can bewilder; efficiency can chill; aggressiveness can antagonize. That which tugs at men’s hearts and pulls them to Christ is the winsome attractiveness in Jesus Christ himself, the attractiveness which ought to reside in those who claim to be his. If we would serve Christ in his Church, there must be on our lives that winsome beauty which will entitle us, too, to the title of kalos, loveliest of all the words which describe the Christian life. KATAGGELLEINTHE WORD OF AUTHORITYThe word kataggellein means to announce or to proclaim; but the characteristic flavour of the word is that the announcement or the proclamation is made with authority. In classical Greek it is used of proclaiming war or announcing a festival. In the papyri a widow makes an official pronouncement regarding the appointment of a representative to look after her interests in consequence of her husband’s death. It is used of the announcement of an emperor’s accession to the throne. Always the word carries with it weight and authority. In the NT the word is used 15 times. It is used of the prophets foretelling the coming of Christ and the events of the early days (Acts 3.24). It is used of the work of Jesus in that he showed light to the people and to the Gentiles (Acts 26.23). It is Paul’s word of praise that the faith of the Roman church is spoken of throughout the world (Rom. 1.8). The words and actions of the Sacrament are said to show forth the death of Christ (I Cor. 11.26). But the main interest of the word lies in the fact that it is one of the great NT words for preaching. In Acts 15.36 we are told that Paul and Barnabas plan to revisit the churches to which they have preached (kataggellein).

• From The Power of Myth (1988)

  Early hunters usually had a kind of animal divinity—the technical name would be the animal master, the animal who is the master animal. The animal master sends the flocks to be killed. You see, the basic hunting myth is of a kind of covenant between the animal world and the human world. The animal gives its life willingly, with the understanding that its life transcends its physical entity and will be returned to the soil or to the mother through some ritual of restoration. And this ritual of restoration is associated with the main hunting animal. To the Indians of the American plains, it was the buffalo. On the Northwest coast the great festivals have to do with the run of salmon coming in. When you go to South Africa, the eland, the magnificent antelope, is the principal animal. MOYERS: And the principal animal is— CAMPBELL: —is the one that furnishes the food. MOYERS: So in the early hunting societies there grew up between human beings and animals a bonding that required one to be consumed by the other. CAMPBELL: That is the way life is. Man is a hunter, and the hunter is a beast of prey. In the myths, the beast of prey and the animal who is preyed upon play two significant roles. They represent two aspects of life—the aggressive, killing, conquering, creating aspect of life, and the one that is the matter or, you might say, the subject matter. MOYERS: Life itself. What happens in the relationship between the hunter and the hunted? CAMPBELL: As we know from the life of the Bushmen and from the relation of the native Americans to the buffalo, it is one of reverence, of respect. For example, the Bushmen of Africa live in a desert world. It’s a very hard life, and the hunt in such an environment is a very difficult hunt. There is very little wood for massive, powerful bows. The Bushmen have tiny little bows, and the extent of the arrow’s flight is hardly more than thirty yards. The arrow has a very weak penetration. It can hardly do more than break the animal’s skin. But the Bushmen apply a prodigiously powerful poison to the point of the arrow so that these beautiful animals, the elands, die in pain over a day and a half. After the animal has been shot and is dying painfully of the poison, the hunters have to fulfill certain taboos of not doing this and not doing that in a kind of “participation mystique,” a mystical participation in the death of the animal, whose meat has become their life, and whose death they have brought about. There’s an identification, a mythological identification. Killing is not simply slaughter, it’s a ritual act, as eating is when you say grace before meals. A ritual act is a recognition of your dependency on the voluntary giving of this food to you by the animal who has given its life.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  There was once a coyote who felt overwhelmed by the pressures in his life. All he could see were too many hungry cubs, too many hunters, too many traps. So one day he ran off to be alone. Suddenly he heard the notes of a sweet melody, a melody of well-being and great peacefulness. Following the song to a clearing in the forest, he came upon a large locust sunning himself on a hollow log and singing. “Teach me your song,” the coyote asked the locust. No response. Again he demanded to be taught the song. But the locust remained silent. Finally, when the coyote threatened to gobble him up, the locust acquiesced and sang the sweet song over and over until the coyote had memorized it. Humming his new song, the coyote started back to his family. Suddenly a flock of wild geese flew up and distracted him. When he had recovered his wits he opened his mouth to sing again but found he had forgotten the song. So he turned back to the sunny clearing in the forest. But by this time the locust had molted, left his empty skin sunning on the same hollow log, and flown onto a tree branch. The coyote wasted no time making sure he had the song permanently inside him. In one gulp he swallowed the locust skin, thinking that the locust was still within. Starting home, again he discovered he did not know the song. He realized he could not learn it from ingesting the locust. He would have to let the locust out and force it to teach him. Taking a knife, he cut into his abdomen to release the locust. He cut so deep that he died. “And so, Irv,” Paula said, giving me her lovely, beatific smile, reaching out for my hand and then whispering into my ear, “you’ve got to find your own song to sing.” I was very moved: her smile, her mystery, her stretch for wisdom—that was the Paula I loved so much. I liked the parable. It was vintage Paula; it felt like old times. I took the meaning at face value—that I should sing my own song—and pushed away the story’s darker, more disturbing implications about my relationship with her. I have refused even to this day to examine it too deeply.

• From Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010)

  We know from our own experience that human beings do not confine their altruistic behavior to those who carry their genes. The Confucian philosopher Mencius (c. 371–c. 289 BCE) was convinced that nobody was wholly without sympathy for other people. If you saw a child poised perilously on the edge of a well, you would immediately lunge forward to save her. Your action is not inspired by self-interest: you would not pause to ascertain whether or not she was related to you; you were not motivated by the desire to ingratiate yourself with her parents or win the admiration of your friends, or by the fact that you were irritated by her cries for help. There was no time for such calculation; you would simply feel her plight in your gut. There would be something disturbingly wrong with a person who watched the child fall to her death without a flicker of unease. Firefighters regularly plunge into burning houses to rescue people who are entirely unknown to them; volunteers risk their lives to rescue climbers stranded on mountainsides; and we have all heard stories of passersby who save total strangers from drowning, often insisting that there was nothing heroic about it: “I could do nothing else,” they will say. “I could no more have let go of his hand than cut off my own.” Some researchers attribute this response to the “mirror neurons” in the frontal region of the brain, which light up on the neuroimagist’s screen when the subject watches somebody else burning her hand. These recently discovered neurons seem to mediate empathy and enable us to feel the pain of another as if it were our own—simply by watching her experience it.22 You could stamp on this natural shoot of compassion, Mencius argued, just as you can cripple or deform your body, but if you cultivate this altruistic tendency assiduously, it will acquire a dynamic power of its own.23

• From Between Us

  To a Western eye, it is striking how Japanese parents and educators fail to impose boundaries on children’s behavior. In one cross-cultural study, for instance, developmental psychologists Gisela Trommsdorff and Hans-Joachim Kornadt observed Japanese and German mothers responding to their disobedient five-year-olds. Japanese mothers interpreted disobedience empathetically from the child’s perspective, remarking that “the child is just a child, is too much absorbed in playing, is too tired.” If the child kept disobeying, Japanese mothers repeated their demands in a friendly manner, again showing empathy for the child. Only after some back and forth would the mothers start appealing to the child, and asking their child to consider how they, the mother, felt; even then, they never corrected the child. Interestingly, the Japanese approach to their disobedient kindergartners often ended the interaction in compromise and harmony, and thus led to relatedness. It also was associated with long-term socialization goals for Japanese children: nine years after Trommsdorff and Kornadt initially observed the interactions, they found that the Japanese children were more empathetic than German children. In Japan, a young child is assumed to initially feel amae, which is a complete dependence on the nurturant indulgence of their caregiver, usually their mom. Amae is recognized by the Japanese as an emotion. Mothers accept their child’s amae, and show them omoiyari, or empathy, in return. They indulge their child in ways that, to a Western eye, verge on spoiling, giving in to the child’s every wish. In doing so, they model the very emotion that they ultimately want their child to display: omoiyari. Omoiyari “refers to the ability and willingness to feel what others are feeling, to vicariously experience the pleasure and pain that they are undergoing, and to help them satisfy their wishes.” The emotion is at the very center of the harmonious relatedness that is culturally valued in Japan. Japanese mothers instill omoiyari in their child by embodying this emotion. While at first children are not expected to show any omoiyari themselves, over time the mother will encourage them to take her point of view, and help them to be sensitive to her feelings. Rather than telling the child what to do, Japanese mothers wait until the child is motivated to voluntarily follow the social rules in order to meet her expectations. Modeling and instilling omoiyari requires patience on the part of the mother, but is thought of as the only way to prepare a child for their adult role: taking the perspective of others, meeting one’s role expectations, and avoiding causing others any trouble. Perspective taking makes a person ponder about how they can improve to better meet others’ expectations, and to persevere and overcome externally encountered adversities.

• From The History of Sexuality, Vol. 3: The Care of the Self (1984)

  In a similar fashion, the Marriage Precepts affirm the principle of a reciprocal fidelity. They do not, however, formulate it as a rigorously and formally symmetrical requirement. While the text assumes, without even having to recall the fact, that the wife owes her husband fidelity, it implies that although the pursuit of other pleasures may be for the husband a rather frequent offense, it is also a rather minor one. At all events, it is within the marriage relationship, according to the affective relations obtaining between the two spouses, and not according to rights and prerogatives, that the question must be resolved. Plutarch expects the husband not to have sexual relations with other women, not just because to do so would pose a threat to the prestige of the lawful wife, but because it would inflict a wound—a natural wound that causes suffering. He calls to mind the behavior of cats, which are excited to frenzy by the odor of perfume. In the same way, women are infuriated when the husband has intercourse with other women. It is therefore unjust (adikon) to make them suffer such a violent vexation for a pleasure that is “trivial.” And he advises the husband to follow, with his wife, the example of the beekeeper, who does not go near his bees if he has had intercourse with a woman.18 Conversely, Plutarch counsels wives to show a certain tolerance; not only would it be better for them to shut their eyes—a little like the wives of Persian kings who take part in banquets with their husbands but return to their apartments when, with the onset of drunkenness, the musicians and courtesans are summoned. But they ought to tell themselves that if their husbands are going to seek pleasure with a hetaera or a maidservant, this is out of respect for them, and because he would not want them to share his debauchery, his licentiousness, and his excess.19 Thus marriage, as a bond of affection and a relation of respect, much more than as a statutory structure, draws all sexual activities to it and condemns all those that might take place outside it. And while it tends to demand a symmetrical fidelity of the two partners, it also constitutes a locus of conciliation, where the husband’s attachment to the wife and the wife’s prudence vis-à-vis the husband will manage to correspond. The external pleasures of the husband will no longer be the recognized consequence of his statutory superiority, but the consequence of a certain weakness, which he is all the more obliged to limit seeing that the wife tolerates it through a concession that, while possibly saving her honor, also proves her affection.

• From The History of Sexuality, Vol. 3: The Care of the Self (1984)

  This integral conjugalization of sexual practice that one finds in Musonius and the principle of a strict monopoly of the aphrodisia reserved for marriage are no doubt exceptional. A point has been reached where the art of married life seems to be organized around the formal principle of double prohibition. But in the authors who are careful not to formulate such rigid rules, one also notes the emergence of a requirement of fidelity calling for slightly different modes of conduct and ways of acting. These authors do not assert an explicit prohibition, but rather a concern with preserving the conjugal bond with all that it may entail in the way of individual relationship, attachment, affection, and personal respect between the marriage partners. This fidelity is defined less by a law than by a style of relating to the wife, by a way of being and of behaving with respect to her. The renunciation, as complete as possible, of extramarital relations must stem, on the part of the husband, from a pursuit of refinement in marital relations. It must be the result of conduct that is both skillful and affectionate, while a certain subtlety is expected of the wife in the de facto tolerance that she is fully obliged to concede and that she would be unwise not to show.

• From The History of Sexuality, Vol. 3: The Care of the Self (1984)

  An art of being together, and an art of dialogue as well. To be sure, the Oeconomicus of Xenophon described a certain model of exchange between the two spouses. The husband was supposed above all to guide, to give advice, to instruct, and, when required, to direct her in her activity as mistress of the house. For her part, the wife needed to ask questions about those things she did not know and to give an account of what she had been able to accomplish. The later texts suggest another kind of dialogue, with different ends. Each of the two spouses, according to Hierocles, should report to the other concerning what they have done. The wife will tell the husband what is going on at home, but she will also need to ask him about what is happening on the outside.21 Pliny likes Calpurnia to keep informed of his public activity, to encourage him, and to rejoice in his successes—a custom that had long been traditional in aristocratic Roman families. But he associates it directly with his work; and in return, the taste his wife has for belles-lettres is inspired by the tenderness she feels for her husband. She must be the witness and judge of his literary endeavors. She reads his works, listens to his speeches, and receives with pleasure the compliments she may hear. Pliny trusts that in this way mutual affection, concordia, will endure and grow stronger day by day.22 Whence the idea that married life must also be the art of collaborating to form a new unity. One recalls how Xenophon had distinguished the different qualities with which nature had endowed the man and the woman so that they might carry out their respective responsibilities in the household, or how Aristotle bestowed on men the possibility of developing, to the point of perfection, virtues which in women would always remain inferior, justifying their subordination. The Stoics, on the other hand, granted both sexes, if not identical aptitudes, at least an equal capability for virtue. The good marriage, according to Musonius, depends on homonoia. What is meant by this word is not just likemindedness between the partners; rather, it denotes an identity in their way of being reasonable, in their moral attitude, and in their virtue. The couple is expected to form a veritable ethical unity in marital life. This unity is compared by Musonius to the fitting of two pieces of wood in a frame: they must both be straight in order to constitute a solid whole.23 But in order to characterize the substantial unity the couple must form, writers occasionally resort to another metaphor, stronger than that of pieces fitted together: di’holōn krasis, complete fusion, according to a notion borrowed from Stoic physics.

• From The History of Sexuality, Vol. 3: The Care of the Self (1984)

  Must it be said that marriage became a more insistent and more often debated question than in the past? Should one suppose that the choice of the matrimonial life and the way one was expected to conduct oneself in it occasioned in this period more apprehension and that they were more carefully problematized? It is doubtless not possible to give an answer in quantitative terms. It does seem, however, that the art of leading the married life was considered and defined in several important texts in a relatively new way. The first change appears to consist in the fact that the art of matrimonial existence, while continuing to be concerned with the household, its management, the birth and procreation of children, places an increasing value on a particular element in the midst of this ensemble: the personal relationship between husband and wife, the tie that joins them, their behavior toward each other. And this relationship, rather than borrowing its importance from the other exigencies of the life of a master of a household, seems to be regarded as a primary and fundamental element around which all the others are organized, from which they derive, and to which they owe their strength. In sum, the art of conducting oneself in marriage would appear to be defined less by a technique of government and more by a stylistics of the individual bond. The second change resides in the fact that the principle of moderate conduct in a married man is placed more in the duties of reciprocity than in mastery over others; or rather, in the fact that the dominion of oneself over oneself is increasingly manifested in the practice of obligations with regard to others and above all in showing a certain respect for one’s wife. The intensification of the concern for the self goes hand in hand with a valorization of the other. The new way in which the question of sexual “fidelity” is sometimes formulated attests to this change. Finally, and this is the most important point in the present context, this art of marriage—in the form of a symmetrical relationship—accords a comparatively greater place to the problems of sexual relations between spouses. These problems are still treated in a rather discreet and allusive manner, but the fact remains that one finds, in authors like Plutarch, a concern with defining a certain way for marriage partners to act, to conduct themselves in pleasure relations. Here the interest in procreation is combined with other significations and values, which have to do with love, affection, understanding, and mutual sympathy.

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  Then she stopped turning and studied herself head-on in a sober way. Without taking her eyes from the mirror she asked me how she looked. Really pretty, I told her. “That’s what you always say.” “Well, it’s true.” “Good,” she said. She gave herself one last look and we went downstairs. Marian and Kathy came in while my mother was cooking dinner for me. They had her turn around for them, both of them smiling and exclaiming, and Marian pushed her away from the stove and finished making my dinner so she wouldn’t get stains on her blouse. My mother was cagey with their questions. They teased her about this mystery man, and when the horn honked outside they followed her down the hall, adjusting her clothes, patting her hair, issuing final instructions. “He should have come to the door,” Marian said when they were back in the kitchen. Kathy shrugged, and looked down at the table. She was hugely pregnant by this time and may have felt unsure of her right to decide the finer points of dating. “He should have come to the door,” Marian said again. I SLEPT BADLY that night. I always did when my mother went out, which wasn’t often these days. She came back late. I listened to her walk up the stairs and down the hall to our room. The door opened and closed. She stood just inside for a moment, then crossed the room and sat down on her bed. She was crying softly. “Mom?” I said. When she didn’t answer I got up and went over to her. “What’s wrong, Mom?” She looked at me, tried to say something, shook her head. I sat beside her and put my arms around her. She was gasping as if someone had held her underwater. I rocked her and murmured to her. I was practiced at this and happy doing it, not because she was unhappy but because she needed me, and to be needed made me feel capable. Soothing her soothed me. She exhausted herself, and I helped her into bed. She became giddy then, laughing and making fun of herself, but she didn’t let go of my hand until she fell asleep. In the morning we were shy with each other. I somehow managed not to ask her my question. That night I continued to master myself, but my self-mastery seemed like an act; I knew I was too weak to keep it up. My mother was reading. “Mom?” I said. She looked up. “What about the Raleigh?” She went back to her book without answering. I did not ask again. Marian and Kathy and my mother decided to rent a house together. My mother offered to find the house, and so she did. It was the most scabrous eyesore in West Seattle. Paint hung in strips off the sides, the bare wood weathered to a gray, antlerish sheen. The yard was kneehigh in weeds.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  AUGUSTINE. (Cont. Ep. Parm. iii. 2.) For when any one of the number of Christians included in the Church is found in such sin as to incur an anathema, this is done, where danger of schism is not apprehended, with tenderness, not for his rooting out, but for his correction. But if he be not conscious of his sin, nor correct it by penitence, he will of his own choice go forth of the Church and be separated from her communion; whence when the Lord commanded, Suffer both to grow together till the harvest, He added the reason, saying, Lest when ye would gather out the tares ye root up the wheat also. This sufficiently shews, that when that fear has ceased, and when the safety of the crop is certain, that is, when the crime is known to all, and is acknowledged as so execrable as to have no defenders, or not such as might cause any fear of a schism, then severity of discipline does not sleep, and its correction of error is so much the more efficacious as the observance of love had been more careful. But when the same infection has spread to a large number at once, nothing remains but sorrow and groans. Therefore let a man gently reprove whatever is in his power; what is not so let him bear with patience, and mourn over with affection, until He from above shall correct and heal, and let him defer till harvest-time to root out the tares and winnow the chaff. But the multitude of the unrighteous is to be struck at with a general reproof, whenever there is opportunity of saying aught among the people; and above all when any scourge of the Lord from above gives opportunity, when they feel that they are scourged for their deserts; for then the calamity of the hearers opens their ears submissively to the words of their reprover, seeing the heart in affliction is ever more prone to the groans of confession than to the murmurs of resistance. And even when no tribulation lays upon them, should occasion serve, a word of reproof is usefully spent upon the multitude; for when separated it is wont to be fierce, when in a body it is wont to mourn. CHRYSOSTOM. This the Lord spake to forbid any putting to death. For we ought not to kill an heretic, seeing that so a never-ending war would be introduced into the world; and therefore He says, Lest ye root out with them the wheat also; that is, if you draw the sword and put the heretic to death, it must needs be that many of the saints will fall with them. Hereby He does not indeed forbid all restraint upon heretics, that their freedom of speech should be cut off, that their synods and their confessions should be broken up—but only forbids that they should be put to death.

• 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.”