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 Surprising Lives of Christian Saints (2023)

  2. Philip Neri: Playful Pragmatist At some point, he also began to evangelize, using his wit and interest in human foibles to approach those he met through the city’s vibrant street life. But he was no street-corner preacher. Philip’s evangelizing was deeply personal, more conversational than instructional. Slowly, a group of laymen began to gather around him informally, working in the hospital wards as they could and praying with him in their free time. In 1548, the city was preparing for the upcoming jubilee year of 1550. People of all classes flocked there from faraway lands, crowding the city and straining its capacity. Many arrived sick or injured, and the existing hospices, hospitals, and monasteries couldn’t provide enough shelter, food, and care for them all. Philip and his confessor founded the Confraternity of the Most Holy Trinity to provide for them. By the time the jubilee year came around, they were hosting some 500 pilgrims every day. Philip’s Ministry and the Early Oratory It may also have been around this time that Philip experienced something of a spiritual crisis. He felt a calling but was not sure in which direction. He knew the life of a monk wasn’t for him, nor the new religious orders, such as the Jesuits. In fact, throughout his career, Philip ardently resisted any attempts at curbing his individual freedoms. At the encouragement of his spiritual director, Philip entered the priesthood. He was ordained in 1551, when he was about 36, unusually old to embark on the career at that time. He moved into the community attached to San Girolamo della Carità and became a chaplain there, where he lived until pried out by papal order in his old age. Confessions and the spiritual direction he could impart with them became the backbone of Philip’s ministry. But his ministry was intensely personal, flexible, and pragmatic. He continued to meet individuals where they were: on the street, in a tavern or square, and, increasingly, in his own humble rooms. 11

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

  We had a good laugh about his dad dick-whuppin’ his mom into acceptin’ me as her daughter-in-law. We talked until we fell asleep in each other’s arms. We woke up to the sound of the ocean crashin’ on the shore. That last day we spent together, we got up before sunrise and walked out to the end of the pier. It was empty. We stood behind the little bait house and food stand and watched the seagulls fight over scraps. Dushawn was behind me with his big arms wrapped around me. I wondered if we could beat the odds. Most people ain’t up to forever. Suddenly he pulled up my jacket and my mini skirt, and moved the crotch of my panties to the side. He slid up inside me and started workin’ me slow while we watched the tide crash against the pier. I thought, Maybe it won’t last forever, but as long as he fucks me like this, it will. Shit. I pushed back on that big dick and stopped worryin’ ’bout whether or not it would last. As my man squeezed my ass and made my juices run down my leg, I squeezed my pussy muscles and started worryin’ ’bout how to finish my business in Compton and get back to Dushawn as soon as possible. 2 CAN PLAY K’wan “Whassup,” I said, standing in the doorway of her midtown apartment. She was a little on the plump side, but had a cute face. From the moment I saw her I knew her type. One of society’s misfits. They’re all one type or another. I know, it’s a chauvinistic statement, but what do you expect from a nigga in my line of work? “Hi,” she said, sheepishly. “You must be Chocolate?” “True,” I said, stepping into her apartment, not waiting for an invite. Her place was plush to say the least. Fifty-eight-inch television, plush carpet, and original paintings lining the walls. Shorty was obviously sitting on a few dollars, which suited me just fine. I mighta been a tramp, but I was no ho. To get a taste of this chocolate, you had to pay like you weighed. In Ms. Thang’s case, she’d be breaking the bank. “I’m Chandra,” she said, extending her hand. I didn’t take it, I just stared at her. Chandra was a big-boned sister, but she wasn’t fat. Give it a few years or a baby or two, and she would be. She had smooth caramel skin and a round face. Her hair was rich and black, just tickling her shoulders. I could tell that she had the potential to be a very attractive chick, but lacked the self-confidence to step it up. “Can I use your bathroom?” I asked, giving her my most innocent smile. “No problem. It’s down the hall to the right.”

• 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 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 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 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 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 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)

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  Then, seeing that I was an old friend of her Jo-Jo—that was how she called him—she ran downstairs and brought back a couple of bottles of white wine. I was to stay and have dinner with her—she insisted on it. As she drank she became by turns gay and maudlin. I didn’t have to ask her any questions—she went on like a self-winding machine. The thing that worried her principally was—would he get his job back when he was released from the hospital? She said her parents were well off, but they were displeased with her. They didn’t approve of her wild ways. They didn’t approve of him particularly—he had no manners, and he was an American. She begged me to assure her that he would get his job back, which I did without hesitancy. And then she begged me to know if she could believe what he said—that he was going to marry her. Because now, with a child under her belt, and a dose of clap besides, she was in no position to strike a match—with a Frenchman anyway. That was clear, wasn’t it? Of course, I assured her. It was all clear as hell to me—except how in Christ’s name Fillmore had ever fallen for her. However, one thing at a time. It was my duty now to comfort her, and so I just filled her up with a lot of baloney, told her everything would turn out all right and that I would stand godfather to the child, etc. Then suddenly it struck me as strange that she should have the child at all—especially as it was likely to be born blind. I told her that as tactfully as I could. “It doesn’t make any difference,” she said, “I want a child by him.” “Even if it’s blind?” I asked. “Mon Dieu, ne dites pas ça!” she groaned. “Ne dites pas ça!” Just the same, I felt it was my duty to say it. She got hysterical and began to weep like a walrus, poured out more wine. In a few moments she was laughing boisterously. She was laughing to think how they used to fight when they got in bed. “He liked me to fight with him,” she said. “He was a brute.” As we sat down to eat, a friend of hers walked in—a little tart who lived at the end of the hall. Ginette immediately sent me down to get some more wine. When I came back they had evidently had a good talk. Her friend, Yvette, worked in the police department. A sort of stool pigeon, as far as I could gather. At least that was what she was trying to make me believe. It was fairly obvious that she was just a little whore. But she had an obsession about the police and their doings. Throughout the meal they were urging me to accompany them to a bal musette .

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  There’s nothing doing any more at this hour… she’ll take the both of us for fifteen francs. We’ll go to my room… it’ll be cheaper.” On the way to the hotel the girl is shivering so that we have to stop and buy her a coffee. She’s a rather gentle sort of creature and not at all bad to look at. She evidently knows Van Norden, knows there’s nothing to expect from him but the fifteen francs. “You haven’t got any dough,” he says, mumbling to me under his breath. As I haven’t a centime in my pocket I don’t quite see the point of this, until he bursts out: “For Christ’s sake, remember that we’re broke. Don’t get tenderhearted when we get upstairs. She’s going to ask you for a little extra—I know this cunt! I could get her for ten francs, if I wanted to. There’s no use spoiling them. …” “Il est méchant, celui-là,” she says to me, gathering the drift of his remarks in her dull way. “Non, il n’est pas méchant, il est très gentil.” She shakes her head laughingly. “Je le connais bien, ce type.” And then she commences a hard luck story, about the hospital and the back rent and the baby in the country. But she doesn’t overdo it. She knows that our ears are stopped; but the misery is there inside her, like a stone, and there’s no room for any other thoughts. She isn’t trying to make an appeal to our sympathies—she’s just shifting this big weight inside her from one place to another. I rather like her. I hope to Christ she hasn’t got a disease. … In the room she goes about her preparations mechanically. “There isn’t a crust of bread about by any chance?” she inquires, as she squats over the bidet . Van Norden laughs at this. “Here, take a drink,” he says, shoving a bottle at her. She doesn’t want anything to drink; her stomach’s already on the bum, she complains. “That’s just a line with her,” says Van Norden. “Don’t let her work on your sympathies. Just the same, I wish she’d talk about something else. How the hell can you get up any passion when you’ve got a starving cunt on your hands?” Precisely! We haven’t any passion either of us. And as for her, one might as well expect her to produce a diamond necklace as to show a spark of passion. But there’s the fifteen francs and something has to be done about it. It’s like a state of war: the moment the condition is precipitated nobody thinks about anything but peace, about getting it over with.

• From An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness (1995)

  To my amazement, the ward psychiatrist came in accompanied by a very tall, good-looking man who looked at me and smiled wonderfully. He turned out to be a visiting professor, a psychiatrist on leave from the Royal Army Medical Corps, and we liked one another immediately. That afternoon we had a cup of coffee together in the hospital cafeteria, and I found myself opening up to him in a way that I hadn’t done in a very long time. He was soft-spoken, quiet and thoughtful, and didn’t push too hard against the edges of my still very raw soul. We both loved music and poetry; had military backgrounds in common; and, because I had studied in Scotland and England, had common experiences of cities, hospitals, and countrysides as well. He was interested in learning about the differences between British and American psychiatric practices, so I asked him to consult on one of my most difficult patients, a schizophrenic girl who believed she was a witch. He quickly saw through to the medical and psychotherapeutic issues that had been so slow to come out of her guarded and frightened mind. He was unbelievably kind to her, while remaining very much a doctor, and she sensed—as I did later—that she could trust him implicitly. His manner was matter-of-fact, but warm, and I enjoyed watching him gently phrase and then rephrase questions so as to win her trust and reach beyond her paranoia. David and I frequently had lunch together during his months at UCLA, often in the university’s botanical gardens. He repeatedly asked me to dinner, and I, as repeatedly, said I could not because I was still married and again living with my husband, after our initial separation. He returned to London, and, although we wrote to one another occasionally, I was preoccupied with teaching, running a clinic, getting tenure, problems in my marriage, and another bad attack of mania, which, as day the night, was followed by a long, absolutely paralyzing depression.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  Coming down the stairs this morning, with the fresh coffee in my nostrils, I was humming softly. … “Es wär’ so schön gewesen.” For breakfast, that. And in a little while the English boy upstairs with his Bach. As Elsa says—“he needs a woman.” And Elsa needs something too. I can feel it. I didn’t say anything to Boris about it, but while he was cleaning his teeth this morning Elsa was giving me an earful about Berlin, about the women who look so attractive from behind, and when they turn round—wow, syphilis! It seems to me that Elsa looks at me rather wistfully. Something left over from the breakfast table. This afternoon we were writing, back to back, in the studio. She had begun a letter to her lover who is in Italy. The machine got jammed. Boris had gone to look at a cheap room he will take as soon as the apartment is rented. There was nothing for it but to make love to Elsa. She wanted it. And yet I felt a little sorry for her. She had only written the first line to her lover—I read it out of the corner of my eye as I bent over her. But it couldn’t be helped. That damned German music, so melancholy, so sentimental. It undermined me. And then her beady little eyes, so hot and sorrowful at the same time. After it was over I asked her to play something for me. She’s a musician, Elsa, even though it sounded like broken pots and skulls clanking. She was weeping, too, as she played. I don’t blame her. Everywhere the same thing, she says. Everywhere a man, and then she has to leave, and then there’s an abortion and then a new job and then another man and nobody gives a fuck about her except to use her. All this after she’s played Schumann for me—Schumann, that slobbery, sentimental German bastard! Somehow I feel sorry as hell for her and yet I don’t give a damn. A cunt who can play as she does ought to have better sense than be tripped up by every guy with a big putz who happens to come along. But that Schumann gets into my blood. She’s still sniffling, Elsa; but my mind is far away. I’m thinking of Tania and how she claws away at her adagio. I’m thinking of lots of things that are gone and buried. Thinking of a summer afternoon in Greenpoint when the Germans were romping over Belgium and we had not yet lost enough money to be concerned over the rape of a neutral country. A time when we were still innocent enough to listen to poets and to sit around a table in the twilight rapping for departed spirits. All that afternoon and evening the atmosphere is saturated with German music; the whole neighborhood is German, more German even than Germany.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  Every serious reader of erotica has remarked about Miller that he is probably the only author in history who writes about such things with complete ease and naturalness. Lawrence never quite rid himself of his puritanical salaciousness, nor Joyce; both had too much religion in their veins. It is funny to recollect that Lawrence thought Ulysses a smutty book and Joyce thought Lady Chatterley a smutty book. Both were right. But at least they tried to free themselves from literary morality. Miller’s achievement is miraculous: he is screamingly funny without making fun of sex, the way Rabelais does. (Rabelais is, of course, magnificent; so is Boccaccio; but both write against the background of religion, like Joyce and Lawrence.) Miller is accurate and poetic in the highest degree; there is not a smirk anywhere in his writings. Miller undoubtedly profited from the mistakes of his predecessors; his aim was not to write about the erotic but to write the whole truth about the life he knew. This goal demanded the full vocabulary and iconography of sex, and it is possible that he is the first writer outside the Orient who has succeeded in writing as naturally about sex on a large scale as novelists ordinarily write about the dinner table or the battlefield. I think only an American could have performed this feat. We are dealing with the serious question of banned books, burned books, and fear of books in general. America has the most liberal censorship laws in the West today, but we have done no more than make a start. I have always been amused by the famous decision of Judge Woolsey who lifted the ban on Ulysses , although it was certainly a fine thing to do and it is a landmark we can be proud of. Woolsey said various comical things, such as that he could not detect the “leer of the sensualist” in Joyce’s book, and that therefore (the logic of it escapes me) it is not pornographic. In excusing the use of old Saxon words he noted that Joyce’s “locale was Celtic and his season Spring.” And, in order to push his decision through, Judge Woolsey stated that Ulysses “did not tend to excite sexual impulses or lustful thoughts,” and he closed his argument with the elegant statement that although the book is “somewhat emetic, nowhere does it tend to be an aphrodisiac.” Emetic means tending to produce vomiting and I doubt that Joyce savored that description of his masterpiece. The implication, of course, is that vomiting is good for you, and lustful thoughts not. Now everyone who has read Ulysses knows that the book is based largely on the lustful thoughts and acts of its characters and that Joyce spared no pains to represent these thoughts and deeds richly and smackingly. Ulysses is, since the Judge used the word, a pretty good aphrodisiac, partly because of Joyce’s own religious tensions.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  Sauntering along the boulevard I had noticed her verging toward me with that curious trot-about air of a whore and the run-down heels and cheap jewelry and the pasty look of their kind which the rouge only accentuates. It was not difficult to come to terms with her. We sat in the back of the little tabac called L’Eléphant and talked it over quickly. In a few minutes we were in a five franc room on the Rue Amelot, the curtains drawn and the covers thrown back. She didn’t rush things, Germaine. She sat on the bidet soaping herself and talked to me pleasantly about this and that; she liked the knickerbockers I was wearing. Très chic! she thought. They were once, but I had worn the seat out of them; fortunately the jacket covered my ass. As she stood up to dry herself, still talking to me pleasantly, suddenly she dropped the towel and, advancing toward me leisurely, she commenced rubbing her pussy affectionately, stroking it with her two hands, caressing it, patting it, patting it. There was something about her eloquence at that moment and the way she thrust that rosebush under my nose which remains unforgettable; she spoke of it as if it were some extraneous object which she had acquired at great cost, an object whose value had increased with time and which now she prized above everything in the world. Her words imbued it with a peculiar fragrance; it was no longer just her private organ, but a treasure, a magic, potent treasure, a God-given thing—and none the less so because she traded it day in and day out for a few pieces of silver. As she flung herself on the bed, with legs spread wide apart, she cupped it with her hands and stroked it some more, murmuring all the while in that hoarse, cracked voice of hers that it was good, beautiful, a treasure, a little treasure. And it was good, that little pussy of hers! That Sunday afternoon, with its poisonous breath of spring in the air, everything clicked again. As we stepped out of the hotel I looked her over again in the harsh light of day and I saw clearly what a whore she was—the gold teeth, the geranium in her hat, the rundown heels, etc., etc. Even the fact that she had wormed a dinner out of me and cigarettes and taxi hadn’t the least disturbing effect upon me. I encouraged it, in fact. I liked her so well that after dinner we went back to the hotel again and took another shot at it. “For love,” this time. And again that big, bushy thing of hers worked its bloom and magic. It began to have an independent existence—for me too. There was Germaine and there was that rosebush of hers. I liked them separately and I liked them together. As I say, she was different, Germaine.

• From The Letter to the Hebrews (The New Daily Study Bible) (2002)

  He awaits the final overcoming of his enemies; in the end, there must come a universe in which he is supreme. How that will come is not ours to know; but it may be that this final overcoming will consist not in the extinction of his enemies but in their submission to his love. It is not so much the power but the love of God which must conquer in the end. Finally, as is his habit, the writer to the Hebrews clinches his argument with a quotation from Scripture. Jeremiah, speaking of the new covenant which will not be imposed from outside but which will be written on the heart, ends: ‘I will ... remember their sin no more’ (Jeremiah 31:34). Because of Jesus, the barrier of sin is taken away forever. THE MEANING OF CHRIST FOR US Hebrews 10:19–25 Since then, brothers, in virtue of what the blood of Jesus has done for us, we can confidently enter into the Holy Place by the new and living way which Jesus inaugurated for us through the veil – that is, through his flesh – and, since we have a great high priest who is over the house of God, let us approach the presence of God with a heart wherein the truth dwells and with the full conviction of faith, with our hearts so sprinkled that they are cleansed from all consciousness of evil and with our bodies washed with pure water. Let us hold fast to the undeviating hope of our creed, for we can rely absolutely on him who made the promises; and let us put our minds to the task of spurring each other on in love and fine deeds. Let us not abandon our meeting together – as some habitually do – but let us encourage one another, and all the more so as we see the day approaching. THE writer to the Hebrews now comes to the practical implication of all that he has been saying. From theology, he turns to practical exhortation. He is one of the most profound theologians in the New Testament, but all his theology is governed by the pastoral instinct. He does not think merely for the thrill of intellectual satisfaction, but only that he may more forcibly appeal to men and women to enter into the presence of God. He begins by saying three things about Jesus. (1) Jesus is the living way to the presence of God. We enter into the presence of God by means of the veil, that is, by the flesh of Jesus. That is a difficult thought, but what he means is this. In front of the Holy of Holies in the tabernacle, there hung the veil to screen off the presence of God. For anyone to enter into that presence, the veil would have to be torn apart. Jesus’ flesh is what veiled his godhead.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  I know him, the innocent little devil, with his round, frightened eyes of a rabbit. And I know what a devil’s street is the Faubourg Montmartre with its brass plates and rubber goods, the lights twinkling all night and sex running through the street like a sewer. To walk from the Rue Lafayette to the boulevard is like running the gauntlet; they attach themselves to you like barnacles, they eat into you like ants, they coax, wheedle, cajole, implore, beseech, they try it out in German, English, Spanish, they show you their torn hearts and their busted shoes, and long after you’ve chopped the tentacles away, long after the fizz and sizzle has died out, the fragrance of the lavabo clings to your nostrils—it is the odor of the Parfum de Danse whose effectiveness is guaranteed only for a distance of twenty centimeters. One could piss away a whole lifetime in that little stretch between the boulevard and the Rue Lafayette. Every bar is alive, throbbing, the dice loaded; the cashiers are perched like vultures on their high stools and the money they handle has a human stink to it. There is no equivalent in the Banque de France for the blood money that passes currency here, the money that glistens with human sweat, that passes like a forest fire from hand to hand and leaves behind it a smoke and stench. A man who can walk through the Faubourg Montmartre at night without panting or sweating, without a prayer or a curse on his lips, a man like that has no balls, and if he has, then he ought to be castrated. Supposing the timid little rabbit does spend fifty francs of an evening while waiting for his Lucienne? Supposing he does get hungry and buy a sandwich and a glass of beer, or stop and chat with somebody else’s trollop? You think he ought to be weary of that round night after night? You think it ought to weigh on him, oppress him, bore him to death? You don’t think that a pimp is inhuman, I hope? A pimp has his private grief and misery too, don’t you forget. Perhaps he would like nothing better than to stand on the corner every night with a pair of white dogs and watch them piddle. Perhaps he would like it if, when he opened the door, he would see her there reading the Paris-Soir, her eyes already a little heavy with sleep. Perhaps it isn’t so wonderful, when he bends over his Lucienne, to taste another man’s breath.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  For that Christmas none save Mary might know of the bitterness that was in Stephen’s heart, least of all the impulsive, erratic Wanda. Wanda needed no second invitation to talk, and very soon her eyes were aglow with the fire of the born religious fanatic as she told of the little town in Poland, with its churches, its bells that were always chiming—the Mass bells beginning at early dawn, the Angelus bells, the Vesper bells—always calling, calling they were, said Wanda. Through the years of persecution and strife, of wars and the endless rumours of wars that had ravaged her most unhappy country, her people had clung to their ancient faith like true children of Mother Church, said Wanda. She herself had three brothers, and all of them priests; her parents had been very pious people, they were both dead now, had been dead for some years; and Wanda signed her breast with the Cross, having regard for the souls of her parents. Then she tried to explain the meaning of her faith, but this she did exceedingly badly, finding that words are not always easy when they must encompass the things of the spirit, the things that she herself knew by instinct; and then, too, these days her brain was not clear, thanks to brandy, even when she was quite sober. The details of her coming to Paris she omitted, but Stephen thought she could easily guess them, for Wanda declared with a curious pride that her brothers were men of stone and of iron. Saints they all were, according to Wanda, uncompromising, fierce and relentless, seeing only the straight and narrow path on each side of which yawned the fiery chasm. ‘I was not as they were, ah, no!’ she declared, ‘Nor was I as my father and mother; I was—I was . . .’She stopped speaking abruptly, gazing at Stephen with her burning eyes which said quite plainly: ‘You know what I was, you understand.’ And Stephen nodded, divining the reason of Wanda’s exile. But suddenly Mary began to grow restless, putting an end to this dissertation by starting the large, new gramophone which Stephen had given her for Christmas. The gramophone blared out the latest foxtrot, and jumping up Barbara and Jamie started dancing, while Stephen and Wanda moved chairs and tables, rolled back rugs and explained to the barking David that he could not join in, but might, if he chose, sit and watch them dance from the divan. Then Wanda slipped an arm around Mary and they glided off, an incongruous couple, the one clad as sombrely as any priest, the other in her soft evening dress of blue chiffon. Mary lay gently against Wanda’s arm, and she seemed to Stephen a very perfect dancer—lighting a cigarette, she watched them.

• From The Letter to the Hebrews (The New Daily Study Bible) (2002)

  It is a wonderful word. It means the ability to put up with people without getting irritated; it means the ability not to lose one’s temper with people when they are foolish and will not learn and do the same thing over and over again. It describes the attitude which does not get angry at the faults of others and which does not condone them, but which to the end of the day devotes itself to offering gentle yet powerful sympathy which by its very patience directs people back to the right way. We can never deal with others unless we have this strong and patient, God-given metriopatheia . (3) The third essential characteristic of a priest is this: people do not appoint themselves to the priesthood; their appointment is from God. The priesthood is not an office which is taken; it is a privilege and a glory to which people are called. The ministry of God is neither a job nor a career but a calling. Those who are called to the priesthood ought to be able to look back and say not: ‘I chose this work’ but rather: ‘God chose me and gave me this work to do.’ The writer to the Hebrews goes on to show how Jesus Christ fulfils the great conditions of the priesthood. (1) He takes the last one first. Jesus did not choose his task; God chose him for it. At his baptism, there came to Jesus the voice which said: ‘You are my son; today I have begotten you’ (Psalm 2:7). (2) Jesus has gone through the most bitter human experiences and understands what it is to be human with all its strength and weakness. The writer to the Hebrews has four great thoughts about him. (a) He remembers Jesus in Gethsemane. That is what he is thinking of when he speaks of Jesus’ prayers and entreaties, his tears and his cry. The word he uses for cry (kraugē) is very significant. It is an involuntary sound, a cry that is uttered in the stress of some tremendous tension or searing pain. So, the writer to the Hebrews says that there is no agony of the human spirit through which Jesus has not come. The Rabbis had a saying: ‘There are three kinds of prayers, each loftier than the preceding – prayer, crying and tears. Prayer is made in silence; crying with raised voice; but tears overcome all things.’ Jesus knew even the desperate prayer of tears. (b) Jesus learned from all his experiences because he met them all with reverence. The Greek phrase for ‘He learned from what he suffered’ is a linguistic jingle – emathen aph’ hōn epathen.