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 Pillar of Salt (1953)

  Both the furniture and the room were extremely poor and evidently of no interest to their owner, for her only effort at decoration were a few pictures on the walls, women naked or in their underclothes. These pictures filled me with shame, for their obscenity spoiled what I insisted on considering pure. All around them, the damp reddish distemper was dropping off in scales, letting the sand and plaster run through. The bed was sway-backed in the middle, and the table, of ordinary unpainted white wood, was black with dirt. But I forgave and accepted all this; I was alone in a room with a woman, and she was undressing for me. I felt grateful to her and was moved by what was about to happen to me, by the extraordinary gift she was about to make. She shut the door and, in the intimate darkness, one single slanting ray of light descended from the shutters onto the bed. Then she unbuttoned her dress from top to bottom and was naked. So that was all she was wearing! I did not know what to look at in this body, so rich and so real. Here were the shoulders, the legs, the stomach, the loins, and the breasts, all in one and alive, all of which I had so often tried to imagine separately. I was not so much surprised as overcome and satisfied. I had already seen naked women in drawings and films and dreams. But I stood in a daze and watched her move. When I saw her at last naked, I feverishly undressed very quickly. I had developed a special technique for the nights when I was in a hurry to get to sleep. In one movement, I took off my pullover with my shirt and undershirt; with one more, my pants and drawers. When she saw that I had stripped she made a gesture of displeasure. “There was no need to take off your shirt,” she said. It pained me that I had displeased her, as though I had done something tactless, and I picked up my heap of clothes. “I can put them on again, if you want.” “No, never mind, now.” She was saying “tu” to me. I knew that it was the custom to use familiar forms of speech with prostitutes — my friends and books had taught me that. But I was unable to utter them, the instant was too solemn. So I waited, self-consciously. She adjusted the rubber sheet on the bed and lay down on her back. “Come on,” she said. I lay down alongside her body. She fixed the hard horsehair pillow beneath her head, threw back her arms, and was motionless. So much passivity, such an absent manner, disconcerted me indeed. Vaguely, I had rather expected some sort of gentle communion, a game we would play together.

• From The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (2014)

  Bowlby saw attachment as the secure base from which a child moves out into the world. Over the subsequent five decades research has firmly established that having a safe haven promotes self-reliance and instills a sense of sympathy and helpfulness to others in distress. From the intimate give-and-take of the attachment bond children learn that other people have feelings and thoughts that are both similar to and different from theirs. In other words, they get “in sync” with their environment and with the people around them and develop the self-awareness, empathy, impulse control, and self-motivation that make it possible to become contributing members of the larger social culture. These qualities were painfully missing in the kids at our Children’s Clinic. The Dance of AttunementChildren become attached to whoever functions as their primary caregiver. But the nature of that attachment—whether it is secure or insecure—makes a huge difference over the course of a child’s life. Secure attachment develops when caregiving includes emotional attunement. Attunement starts at the most subtle physical levels of interaction between babies and their caretakers, and it gives babies the feeling of being met and understood. As Edinburgh-based attachment researcher Colwyn Trevarthen says: “The brain coordinates rhythmic body movements and guides them to act in sympathy with other people’s brains. Infants hear and learn musicality from their mother’s talk, even before birth.”[4] In chapter 4 I described the discovery of mirror neurons, the brain-to-brain links that give us our capacity for empathy. Mirror neurons start functioning as soon as babies are born. When researcher Andrew Meltzoff at the University of Washington pursed his lips or stuck out his tongue at six-hour-old babies, they promptly mirrored his actions.[5] (Newborns can focus their eyes only on objects within eight to twelve inches—just enough to see the person who is holding them). Imitation is our most fundamental social skill. It assures that we automatically pick up and reflect the behavior of our parents, teachers, and peers. Most parents relate to their babies so spontaneously that they are barely aware of how attunement unfolds. But an invitation from a friend, the attachment researcher Ed Tronick, gave me the chance to observe that process more closely. Through a one-way mirror at Harvard’s Laboratory of Human Development, I watched a mother playing with her two-month-old son, who was propped in an infant seat facing her.

• From The Prophetic Imagination (1978)

  As he went ashore he saw a great throng, and he had compassion on them because they were like sheep without a shepherd; and he began to teach them many things. (Mark 6:34) “I have compassion on the crowd because they have been with me now three days, and have nothing to eat.” (Mark 8:2) And toward the one who grieved the dead: And as he drew near to the gate of the city, behold, a man who had died was being carried out, the only son of his mother, and she was a widow; and a large crowd from the city was with her. And when the Lord saw her, he had compassion on her. (Luke 7:12-13) More programmatically, his compassion is for the whole range of human persons who are harassed and helpless: And Jesus went about all the cities and villages, teaching in their synagogues and preaching the gospel of the kingdom, and healing every disease and every infirmity. When he saw the crowds, he had compassion for them because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. (Matt 9:35-36) Matthew has taken the saying that Mark has in the setting of the feeding and made it a more general statement, both by placing it at a narrative transition and by inserting the words “harassed and helpless.” Those words are polemical, for the people did not get helpless by themselves but were rendered helpless. And to speak of harassment is to suggest that some others are doing the harassing. Thus the Matthean version is much more direct and critical. Moreover, the Matthean saying has attending it a harsh judgment statement: “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; pray therefore the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest” (Matt 9:37-38). The image of harvest clearly is one of dismantling judgment. The juxtaposition of “harvest” with “helpless and harassed” puts the present ordering and its managers on notice. Again we may note the appeal to the radical prophetic tradition. The internalization of hurt for the marginal ones is especially faithful to the tradition of anguish in Hosea and Jeremiah. In Hosea the internalization of hurt is especially clear in 11:8-9: “My heart recoils within me, my compassion ( reh.em ) grows warm and tender.” The same internalization is evident in Jeremiah as I have presented it. Both prophets and now Jesus after them bring to expression

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  They recognized the Jesus followers as a strange new presence in their midst, neither a “religion” nor a “political power,” but a whole new kind of life, a new way of being human. That, of course, brought new challenges. Victories always do. That moment when the church was first permitted and then authorized as the official religion of the state was indeed difficult, and brought the church into a potentially compromised situation. Nobody ever suggested the church would face no challenges to its integrity, or that Jesus’s followers would never have difficulty working out what following him would mean in new situations. But it did mean that many brave and wise teachers and leaders navigated and negotiated their way through the new challenges, and that what at the time were clearly “Christian values”—an emphasis on education, medicine, and looking after the poor as well as on avoiding idolatry and immorality—ceased to be the strange, unnatural concerns of a minority and became instead the way of life that an increasing number recognized, not just as a new way to be human, but as a far better way. Sometimes things are not so clear-cut. In our own day the harrowing novel Silence by the Japanese writer Shusaku Endo tells of the sustained and vicious persecution of the small Japanese church a few hundred years ago and of the appalling dilemmas faced by those who wanted to stay loyal to their faith. As I write, the novel is being made into a film by the director Martin Scorsese. The Japanese Christian artist Mako Fujimura (with Philip Yancey) has written about it in a moving book entitled Silence and Beauty. As Fujimura brings out, even when God seems silent—as in the novel—there is still a message to be heard. Light is present in the darkness. Sometimes even silence can speak with hidden beauty and truth. These are uncomfortable messages for comfortable Western Christians to hear, and they are all the more important for that. But we don’t have to look to novels or to distant history. While I have been working on this book, Christians have been beheaded in public on a beach in North Africa. Others have been shot, raped, and tortured. On the day I am revising this chapter, a message comes from the struggling Christian community in Ethiopia, which is facing a massive refugee crisis and with it increased tensions between tribal as well as religious groups. Those of us for whom a visit to the dentist is about as much pain as we normally experience in a month and who confidently expect to worship and study scripture without any threats from either the authorities or hostile local groups find it almost impossible to imagine being in such a position. But these are our sisters and brothers.

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

  Reply to Objection 1: We ought not to help a sinner as such, that is by encouraging him to sin, but as man, that is by supporting his nature. Reply to Objection 2: Almsdeeds deserve on two counts to receive an eternal reward. First because they are rooted in charity, and in this respect an almsdeed is meritorious in so far as it observes the order of charity, which requires that, other things being equal, we should, in preference, help those who are more closely connected with us. Wherefore Ambrose says (De Officiis i, 30): “It is with commendable liberality that you forget not your kindred, if you know them to be in need, for it is better that you should yourself help your own family, who would be ashamed to beg help from others.” Secondly, almsdeeds deserve to be rewarded eternally, through the merit of the recipient, who prays for the giver, and it is in this sense that Augustine is speaking. Reply to Objection 3: Since almsdeeds are works of mercy, just as a man does not, properly speaking, pity himself, but only by a kind of comparison, as stated above ([2608]Q[30], AA[1],2), so too, properly speaking, no man gives himself an alms, unless he act in another’s person; thus when a man is appointed to distribute alms, he can take something for himself, if he be in want, on the same ground as when he gives to others. Whether alms should be given in abundance?Objection 1: It would seem that alms should not be given in abundance. For we ought to give alms to those chiefly who are most closely connected with us. But we ought not to give to them in such a way that they are likely to become richer thereby, as Ambrose says (De Officiis i, 30). Therefore neither should we give abundantly to others. Objection 2: Further, Ambrose says (De Officiis i, 30): “We should not lavish our wealth on others all at once, we should dole it out by degrees.” But to give abundantly is to give lavishly. Therefore alms should not be given in abundance. Objection 3: Further, the Apostle says (2 Cor. 8:13): “Not that others should be eased,” i.e. should live on you without working themselves, “and you burthened,” i.e. impoverished. But this would be the result if alms were given in abundance. Therefore we ought not to give alms abundantly. On the contrary, It is written (Tob. 4:93): “If thou have much, give abundantly.” I answer that, Alms may be considered abundant in relation either to the giver, or to the recipient: in relation to the giver, when that which a man gives is great as compared with his means. To give thus is praiseworthy, wherefore Our Lord (Lk. 21:3,4) commended the widow because “of her want, she cast in all the living that she had.” Nevertheless those conditions must be observed which were laid down when we spoke of giving alms out of one’s necessary goods [2609](A[9]).

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

  JEROME. It was a Jewish custom, and held no disgrace, according to the manners of the people of old, for women to minister of their substance, food, and clothing to their teachers. This Paul says, that he refused, because it might occasion scandal among the Gentiles. They ministered to the Lord of their substance, that He might reap their carnal things, of whom they reaped spiritual things. Not that the Lord needed food of the creature, but that He might set an example for the teacher, that He should be content to receive food and clothing from His disciples. But let us see what sort of attendants He had; Among whom was Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James and Joseph, and the mother of Zebedee’s children. ORIGEN. In Mark the third is called Salome. CHRYSOSTOM. These women thus watching the things that are done are the most compassionate, the most sorrowful. They had followed Him ministering, and remained by Him in danger, shewing the highest courage, for when the disciples fled they remained.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  “Henry, I swear to you, I find joy in telling you the truth. Someday, after another one of your victories, I’ll answer any question you put to me.” “Yes, I know that,” said Henry, “I am sure of it. I wait quite patiently. I can wait.” What I could have found ridiculous only touched me with its humanness: Henry crawling to find my black silk garters, which had fallen behind the bed. His awe on seeing my twelve-franc necklace: “It is such a fine, rare thing you wear.” When I saw him naked, he appeared defenseless to me, and my tenderness welled up. Afterwards he was languid, and I was gay. We even talked about our craft: “I like,” said Henry, “to have my desk in order before I begin, only notes around me, a great many notes.” “Do you do that?” I said excitedly, as if it were a most interesting statement. Our craft. Delight in talk of techniques. I guess, Henry, that you are suffering from the effort at complete revelations about yourself and June, inexorable frankness but painfully obtained. You have moments of reserve, of feeling you are violating sacred intimacies, the secret life of your own being as well as of others. At moments I am willing to help you because of our common objective passion for truth. But it hurts, Henry, it hurts. I am trying to be honest in my journal, day to day. You are right, in one sense, when you speak of my honesty. An effort, anyway, with the usual human or feminine retractions. To retreat is not feminine, male, or trickery. It is a terror before utter destruction. What we analyze inexorably, will it die? Will June die? Will our love die, suddenly, instantaneously if you should make a caricature of it? Henry, there is a danger in too much knowledge. You have a passion for absolute knowledge. That is why people will hate you. And sometimes I believe your relentless analysis of June leaves something out, which is your feeling for her beyond knowledge, or in spite of knowledge. I often see how you sob over what you destroy, how you want to stop and just worship; and you do stop, and then a moment later you are at it again with a knife, like a surgeon.

• From Aquinas's Summa Theologiae (Critical Essays on the Classics Series) (2006)

  To put it crudely, Thomas does not regard God as some jealous lover who insists that people care for no one but Him and for no happiness other than the happiness they could have in His presence. God Himself gave human beings bodies and emotions; God Himself made human beings social (political) animals, inclined by their very nature to seek happiness in the company of others of their kind. Heaven itself should not be regarded as some eternal tête-à-tête with God. Like Augustine, Thomas describes heaven as a community (or city), where Christians enjoy not only the company of God but also the company of the saints. Thomas’s efforts to legitimate both pagan virtues and Christian concern for worldly happiness are carefully balanced with efforts to avoid giving the erroneous impression that various Christian saints were morally inferior to ancient sages. Recall the words of St. Paul in Romans 7: “I delight in the law of God in my inmost self, but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind.” Also consider Augustine’s description of temperance: “What is the activity of virtue here but a perpetual war with vices?—not external vices but internal, not alien but clearly our very own—a war waged especially by what is called sôphrosynê in Greek and temperantia in Latin which bridles our fleshly lusts lest they drag our will to consent to crimes of every sort.”38 In fact, what Aristotle calls temperance (sôphrosynê) produces harmony between the possessor’s emotions and rational judgment. The temperate person no longer need struggle to resist temptation because he no longer feels tempted to do anything bad. While Aristotle recognizes that some people have emotions that they must perpetually work to control, he labels this state of character “continence” (enkrateia) and distinguishes it from virtue.39 Should we conclude, then, that saints praised as a virtue what ancient philosophers judged second-rate—or worse, that Augustine and Paul were themselves second-rate in moral character?

• From Bluets (2009)

  205. One of the most vulnerable items is a scrap of paper that reads: you said you think of blue , written to me by a lover from long ago. Onto this note he pasted a square of ripped blue paper, which he then meticulously stitched back together. The whole apparatus is now falling apart—the stitches peeling off, the words fading. This seems just, as this lover was always breaking things then coming up with ingenious means of rigging them back together. In each place he lived, he built a bed high in the air served by a precarious ladder, then placed precious orchids on wobbly stands near the bottom of the ladder so that often one would knock the flowers over upon one’s descent. This man had one tattoo, a navy blue snake, which I liked to watch dance against the white of his wrist when the rest of his hand had disappeared inside me. He got this tattoo to commemorate the night that all of his snakes died, a winter night in Connecticut when it was so cold and the heat shut off, so he put as many lights as possible against the snakes’ cage to try to keep them warm. Then we fell asleep and the heat came back on and the snakes overheated and died. This was much worse than knocking over an orchid. This man once taught me how to kill a mouse by thwapping it against the table while holding on to its tail, you do that if the snake strikes and wounds but doesn’t kill. It’s cruel to keep the mouse alive, he said, just because the snake has lost interest. Eventually he got a new snake, a rainbow boa named Buttercup, a rope of incandescence. Buttercup’s colors were a source of endless fascination to me, but she was five feet long and strong and I did not like to feel her coil around my biceps if he wasn’t in the room. Near the end, which neither of us quite saw coming, he said he had a surprise for me, and the surprise was another blue tattoo, this one a distorted circle at the base of his neck. It was very beautiful on him, very simple. I didn’t live with it long enough to know about what it did.

• From Bluets (2009)

  154. It is tempting to derive some kind of maturity narrative here: eventually we sober up and grow out of our rash love of intensity (i.e. red); eventually we learn to love more subtle things with more subtlety, etc. etc. But my love for blue has never felt to me like a maturing, or a refinement, or a settling . For the fact is that one can maintain a chromophilic recklessness well into adulthood. Joan Mitchell, for one, customarily chose her pigments for their intensity rather than their durability—a choice that, as many painters know, can in time bring one’s paintings into a sorry state of decay. (Is writing spared this phenomenon?) 155. It does not really bother me that half the adults in the Western world also love blue, or that every dozen years or so someone feels compelled to write a book about it. I feel confident enough of the specificity and strength of my relation to it to share. Besides, it must be admitted that if blue is anything on this earth, it is abundant . 156. “Why is the sky blue?”—A fair enough question, and one I have learned the answer to several times. Yet every time I try to explain it to someone or remember it to myself, it eludes me. Now I like to remember the question alone, as it reminds me that my mind is essentially a sieve, that I am mortal. 157. The part I do remember: that the blue of the sky depends on the darkness of empty space behind it. As one optics journal puts it, “The color of any planetary atmosphere viewed against the black of space and illuminated by a sunlike star will also be blue.” In which case blue is something of an ecstatic accident produced by void and fire. 158. God is truth; truth is light; God is light; etc.: the chain of syllogisms goes on and on. See John 1:5: “And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.” (As if darkness, too, had a mind.) 159. A good many have figured God as light, but a good many have also figured him as darkness. Dionysius the Areopagite, a Syrian monk whose work and identity are themselves shrouded in obscurity, would seem to be one of the first serious Christian advocates of the idea of a “Divine Darkness.” The idea is a complicated one, as the burden falls to us to differentiate this Divine Darkness from other kinds of darknesses—that of a “dark night of the soul,” the darkness of sin, and so on. “We pray that we may come unto this Darkness which is beyond light, and, without seeing and without knowing, to see and to know that which is above vision and knowledge through the realization that by not-seeing and unknowing we attain to true vision and knowledge,” Dionysius wrote, as if clarifying the matter.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  He came yesterday. A serious, tired Henry. He had to come, he said. He had not slept for several nights, keyed up by his book. I have forgotten my sorrows. Henry is tired He and his book must be nurtured. “What do you want, Henry? Lie on my couch. Have some wine. Yes, this is the room I have been working in. Don’t kiss me just now. We’ll have lunch in the garden. Yes, I have a lot to tell you, but it must all wait. I am deliberately postponing everything which might disturb the breathing of your book. It can all wait.” And then Henry, pale, intense, eyes very blue, said, “I came to tell you that while I worked on my book I realized everything between June and me had died three or four years ago. That what we lived out together the last time she was here was only an automatic continuation, like a habit, like the prolongation of an impetus which cannot come to a dead stop. Of course, it was a tremendous experience, the greatest upheaval. That is why I can write so frenziedly about it. But this is the swan song I am writing now. You must be able to differentiate between the writer’s evocation of the past and his present feelings. I tell you, I love you. I want you to come away with me to Spain, on any pretext, for a few months. I dream of our working together. I want you close to me. Until things work out in such a way that I can completely protect you. I have learned a bitter lesson with June. You and June are women of such personalities that you cannot thrive on drabness, hardships. It is not your element. You are both too important. I won’t ask that of you.” I sat dazed. “Certainly,” he added, “I had to live through all that, but precisely because I have lived it through, I am finished with it and I can experience a new kind of love. I feel stronger than June, yet if June comes back things might start again out of a kind of fatal necessity. What I feel is that I want you to save me from June. I do not want to be diminished, humiliated, destroyed by her again. I know enough to know I want to break with her. I dread her return, the destruction of my work. I was thinking how I have absorbed your time and attention, worried you, hurt you, even; how other people’s troubles are poured on you, too; how you are asked to solve problems, to help. And meanwhile there is your writing, deeper and better than anybody’s, which nobody gives a goddamn about and nobody helps you to do.” At this I laughed. “But, Henry, you do give a goddamn, and besides I can wait. It is you who are behind time and must be given a chance to catch up.”

• From Bluets (2009)

  104. I do not feel my friend’s pain, but when I unintentionally cause her pain I wince as if I hurt somewhere, and I do. Often in exhaustion I lay my head down on her lap in her wheelchair and tell her how much I love her, that I’m so sorry she is in so much pain, pain I can witness and imagine but that I do not know. She says, if anyone knows this pain besides me, it is you (and J, her lover). This is generous, for to be close to her pain has always felt like a privilege to me, even though pain could be defined as that which we typically aim to avoid. Perhaps this is because she remains so generous within hers, and because she has never held any hierarchy of grief, either before her accident or after, which seems to me nothing less than a form of enlightenment. 105. There are no instruments for measuring color; there are no “color thermometers.” How could there be, as “color knowledge” always remains contingent upon an individual perceiver? This didn’t stop a certain Horace Bénédict de Saussure, however, from inventing, in 1789, a device he called the “cyanometer,”with which he hoped to measure the blue of the sky. 106. When I first heard of the cyanometer, I imagined a complicated machine with dials, cranks, and knobs. But what de Saussure actually “invented” was a cardboard chart with 53 cut-out squares sitting alongside 53 numbered swatches, or “nuances,” as he called them, of blue: you simply hold the sheet up to the sky and match its color, to the best of your ability, to a swatch. As in Humboldt’s Travels (Ross, 1852): “We beheld with admiration the azure colour of the sky. Its intensity at the zenith appeared to correspond to 41° of the cyanometer.” This latter sentence brings me great pleasure, but really it takes us no further—either into knowledge, or into beauty. 107. Many people do not think the writing of Gertrude Stein “means” anything. Perhaps it does not. But when my students complain that they want to throw Tender Buttons across the room, I try to explain to them that in it Stein is dealing with a matter of pressing concern. Stein is worried about hurt colors , I tell them. “A spectacle and nothing strange a single hurt color and an arrangement in a system to pointing,” I read aloud, scanning the room for a face that also shows signs of being worried about hurt colors. “Enthusiastically hurting a clouded yellow bud and saucer.” “A cool red rose and a pink cut pink.” As if color could be further revealed by slitting .

• From Henry and June (1986)

  He said he wanted to be buried there, never to be sent away, to be metamorphosed into a bear who would come in through my bedroom window when anyone was making love to me. He became child, lulled by my tenderness. I had never seen him so small and frail. There is the weirdest contrast between his drunkenness, when he sits flushed, combative, destructive, sensual, all instinct, a man whose animal vitality lures and subjugates women; and his soberness, when he can sit before a woman and read to her from books, talk to her in an almost religious tone, become wistful, pale, holy. It is an amazing transformation. He can sit in the garden like a gentle Eduardo of fifteen years ago, and then a few hours later, bite with great ferocity and utter the most obscene words while we lie convulsed with pleasure. Yet great tenderness wells up in me when Hugo returns. I want to give him joy, I force myself, and I begin to sincerely respond to his passion. I remember that one evening when Henry and I were lying on the couch in my studio, a string of Hugo’s guitar snapped, the deepest string, resonant like his voice. It terrorized me, a foreboding of a finality I do not desire. I went to Allendy Monday, and I refused to be analyzed because, I said, I had begun to lie to him. So we sat and talked, and he was aware of my hostility. When I first came in I evaded his kiss. What I felt was that he was destroying my relationship with Henry; he was making fissures in it. I resented his strong influence, his domination of me. He answered wisely. Suddenly I again wanted to obey him. I said I was ready for analysis, that I would not lie any more, that I had exaggerated the dangers of my flight with Henry only to see how concerned he was about my life. His strange blue eyes fascinated me. I got up and walked around in my usual way, arms raised behind my head. He stretched out his arms. He has a big, overwhelming body, like John’s. He holds me so tightly I almost suffocate. His mouth is not as voluptuous as Henry’s, and we don’t understand each other. But I stay in his arms. He says, “I will teach you to play, not to take love so tragically, not to pay such a heavy price for it. You have made it too dramatic and intense a thing. This will be pleasant. I have such a strong desire for you.” Detestable wisdom. Oh, I hate him. While he talks I bow my head and smile. He shakes me, wanting to know what I am thinking. I really want to weep. I had aspired to this sort of relationship, and now I have it. Allendy is poised, powerful, but I have upset him.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  I was glad it was Henry who was staying at Louveciennes—warm, soft, human Henry. He was in such a chastened, helpless mood. We sat in the garden. He said he wanted to be buried there, never to be sent away, to be metamorphosed into a bear who would come in through my bedroom window when anyone was making love to me. He became child, lulled by my tenderness. I had never seen him so small and frail. There is the weirdest contrast between his drunkenness, when he sits flushed, combative, destructive, sensual, all instinct, a man whose animal vitality lures and subjugates women; and his soberness, when he can sit before a woman and read to her from books, talk to her in an almost religious tone, become wistful, pale, holy. It is an amazing transformation. He can sit in the garden like a gentle Eduardo of fifteen years ago, and then a few hours later, bite with great ferocity and utter the most obscene words while we lie convulsed with pleasure. Yet great tenderness wells up in me when Hugo returns. I want to give him joy, I force myself, and I begin to sincerely respond to his passion. I remember that one evening when Henry and I were lying on the couch in my studio, a string of Hugo’s guitar snapped, the deepest string, resonant like his voice. It terrorized me, a foreboding of a finality I do not desire. I went to Allendy Monday, and I refused to be analyzed because, I said, I had begun to lie to him. So we sat and talked, and he was aware of my hostility. When I first came in I evaded his kiss. What I felt was that he was destroying my relationship with Henry; he was making fissures in it. I resented his strong influence, his domination of me. He answered wisely. Suddenly I again wanted to obey him. I said I was ready for analysis, that I would not lie any more, that I had exaggerated the dangers of my flight with Henry only to see how concerned he was about my life. His strange blue eyes fascinated me. I got up and walked around in my usual way, arms raised behind my head. He stretched out his arms.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  He looked so serious. He had received a letter from June, in pencil, irregular, mad, like a child’s, moving, simple, cries of her love for him. “Such a letter blots out everything.” I felt the moment had come for me to release my June, to give him my June, “because,” I said, “it will make you love her more. It’s a beautiful June. Other days I felt you might laugh at my portrait, jeer at its naïveté. Today I know you won’t.” I read him all I had written in my journal about June. What is happening? He is deeply moved, torn apart. He believes. “It is in that way I should have written about June. The other is incomplete, superficial. You have got her, Anaïs.” But wait. He has left softness, tenderness out of his work, he has written down only the hate, the violence. I have only inserted what he has left out. But he has not left it out because he doesn’t feel it, or know it, or understand (as June thinks), only because it is more difficult to express. So far his writing has only issued from violence, it has been whipped out of him, the blows have made him wail and curse. And now he sits and I confide in him completely, in the sentient, profound Henry. He is won. He says, “Such a love is wonderful, Anaïs. I do not hate or despise that. I see what you give each other. I see it so well. Read, read—this is a revelation to me.” I read, and I tremble as I read, up to our kiss. He understands too well. Suddenly he says, “Anaïs, I have just realized that what I give you is something coarse and plain, compared to that. I realize that when June returns . . .” I stop him. “You don’t know what you have given me! It is not coarse and plain! Today, for example . . .” I am choking with feelings that are too entangled. I want to tell him how much he has given me. We are oppressed by the same fear. I say, “You see a beautiful June now.” “No, I hate her!” “You hate her?” “Yes, I hate her,” Henry says, “because I see by your notes that we are her dupes, that you are duped, that there is one pernicious, destructive direction to her lies. Insidiously, they are meant to deform me in your eyes, and you in my eyes. If June returns, she will poison us against each other. I fear that.” “There is something between us, Henry, a tie which is not quite possible for June to comprehend or to seize.” “The mind,” he murmured. “For that she will hate us, yes, and she will combat with her own tools.” “And her tools are lies,” he said. We were both so acutely aware of her power over us, of the new ties which bound us together.

• From Blue Nights (2011)

  There is also on my desk in New York a framed photograph she herself took one Christmas on Barbados: the rocks outside the rented house, the shallow sea, the wash of surf. I remember the Christmas she took that picture. We had arrived on Barbados at night. She had gone immediately to bed and I had sat outside listening to a radio and trying to locate a line I believed to be from Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques but was never able to find: “The tropics are not exotic, they are merely out of date.” At some point after she went to sleep news had come on the radio: since our arrival on Barbados the United States had invaded Panama. When the first light came I had woken her with this necessary, or so it seemed to me, information. She had covered her face with the sheet, clearly indicating no interest in pursuing the topic. I had nonetheless pressed it. I knew “exactly yesterday” we were going to invade Panama last night, she had said. I asked how she had known “exactly yesterday” we were going to invade Panama last night. Because all the SIPA photographers were stopping by the office yesterday, she said, picking up credentials for the Panama invasion. SIPA was the photo agency for which she then worked. She had again burrowed beneath the sheet. I did not ask why she had not thought the invasion of Panama worth a mention on the five-hour flight down. “For Mom and Dad,” the inscription on the photograph reads. “Try to imagine the seductive sea if you can, love XX, Q.” She had known exactly yesterday we were going to invade Panama last night. The tropics were not exotic, they were merely out of date. Try to imagine the seductive sea if you can. Even in those Malibu photographs which are unfamiliar, I recognize certain elements: the improvised end table by a chair in the living room, one of my mother’s “Craftsman” dinner knives on the table we identified as “Aunt Kate’s,” the straightbacked wooden Hitchcock chairs my mother-in-law had painted black-and-gold to send to us from Connecticut. The oleander branch on which she swings is familiar, the curve of the beach on which she kicks through the wash is familiar. The clothes of course are familiar. I had for a while seen them every day, washed them, hung them to blow in the wind on the clotheslines outside my office window. I wrote two books watching her clothes blow on those lines. Brush your teeth, brush your hair, shush I’m working. So read the list of “Mom’s Sayings” that she posted one day in the garage, an artifact of the “club” she had started with a child who lived down the beach. What remained until now unfamiliar, what I recognize in the photographs but failed to see at the time they were taken, are the startling depths and shallows of her expressions, the quicksilver changes of mood.

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  The religious history and the ceremonial worship of Israel were the only bond of national unity that survived. Jeremiah began the turn toward individual piety. The nation was breaking up about him. His prophetic activity had failed; the people refused to believe that his words were the word of Jehovah. But he heard the insistent inner voice of God, and the consciousness of this personal communion with Jehovah was his stay and comfort. Through his very failure and sufferings a tender personal relation developed between the soul of the prophet and his God. Other choice spirits were in the same situation. The influence of Jeremiah’s writings reproduced in others that personal piety which was the outcome of his peculiar experience. For religious experience has a remarkable capacity for perpetuating and reproducing its type; witness the Confessions of Saint Augustine and the mysticism of Saint Bernard. Jehovah had been the God of the nation, and the God of the individual in so far as he was part of the nation. Now the nation was gone, and the righteous and lowly in their suffering and isolation stretched the lonely hand of faith to him and found him near with a personal touch of love and comfort. Thus the death-pangs of the national life were the birth-pangs of the personal religious life. This was a wonderful triumph of religion, an evidence of the indestructibility of the religious impulse. It was fraught with far-reaching importance for the future of religion and of humanity in general. The subtlest springs of human personality were liberated when the individual realized that he personally was dear to God and could work out his salvation not as a member of his nation, but as a man by virtue of his humanity. The value of this religious achievement has so impressed the students of Hebrew religious history that they have frequently assumed that this change in religion was pure gain. The real edifice of religion in the individual soul was now ready to stand for itself, they say, and the scaffolding of political and social religion could be torn down and its planking abandoned. It is assumed that Jeremiah and those who followed him recognized that the external means of realizing the ideal theocracy had failed, and they now set themselves deliberately to build a new religious community of regenerate souls. They turned their back on the Jewish nation and created the Jewish church. That seems to me a misleading construction of the historical situation. It is true that the progress of religion toward spirituality was sure to make religion more personal. But every new religious synthesis should contain all that was good and true in the old. If the religious value of the individual was being discovered, why should the religious value of the community be forgotten? As a matter of fact, this concentration of religious life in the individual was not a deliberate step of progress, freely taken, but was forced upon these men by dire necessity.

• From Girls & Sex (2016)

  It didn’t go quite that way: Neither Brooke nor her boyfriend of seven months had a car, for one thing, so there was no way to get to the beach. Plus, it was winter. Anyway, what if someone walked by and caught them? In the end, they lost their mutual virginity in a fairly mundane fashion: in his bunk bed during a weekend when his family was out of town. She brought the condoms, which she had spent ages choosing at a nearby Walgreens, and the lube; she also, for reasons she can’t remember, brought over a batch of home-baked cookies. “The truth is, losing your virginity is about the least sexy sexual act there is,” she said. “It’s awkward, especially when losing it to another virgin. Putting on the condom is the opposite of smooth. Things don’t seem like they’re going to fit together. You don’t know how much of your weight to put on the other person. It’s a little sweaty. And it doesn’t feel good.” After a minute or so, they felt like they had “done it” enough to say they had (both to themselves and to their friends), so they just . . . stopped. “But, you know,” Brooke added, “it was a very positive experience for me. We bonded over the awkwardness, and that was fun. And even though the sex was lackluster, I felt totally comfortable with the situation and with him, and I’m grateful for that.” They slept together a few more times before breaking up; Brooke kept their first condom wrapper as a souvenir, inscribing it with the date she used it.

• From Chéri and The Last of Chéri (1920)

  He gave a short laugh, and did not immediately lie down again. Outside, the first milkcart clinked out its tinkling carillon, and he made a vague movement in the direction of the avenue. The strawberry-coloured curtains were slit through by the cold blade of dawning day. Cheri turned back to look at Lea, and stared at her with the formidable intensity of a suspicious dog or a puzzled child. An undecipherable thought appeared in the depths of his eyes; their shape, their dark wallflower hue, their harsh or languorous glint, were used only to win love, never to reveal his mind. From sheets crumpled as though by a storm, rose his naked body, broad-shouldered, slimwaisted; and his whole being breathed forth the melancholy of perfect works of art. ‘Ah, you ...’ sighed the infatuated Lea. He did not smile, accustomed as he was to accepting personal praise. 4 Tell me, Nounoune. ‘What, my pretty?’ He hesitated, fluttered his eyelids, and shivered. ‘I’m tired ... and then to-morrow, how will you manage about —’ Lea gave him a gentle push and pulled the naked body and drowsy head down to the pillows again. ‘Don’t worry. Lie down and go to sleep. Isn’t Nounoune here to look after you? Don’t think of anything. Sleep. You’re cold, I’m sure. ... Here, take this, it’s warm. ...’ She rolled him up in the silk and wool of a little feminine garment, retrieved from somewhere in the bed, and put out the light. In the dark, she lent him her shoulder, settled him happily against her side, and listened till his breathing was in rhythm with her own. No desires clouded her mind, but she did not wish for sleep- “Let him do the sleeping; it’s for me to do the thinking,” she repeated to herself. “I’ll contrive our flight with perfect tact and discretion; I believe in causing as little suffering and scandal as possible. ... For the spring we shall like the south best- If there were only myself to be considered, I’d rather stay here, in peace and quiet; but there’s Ma Peloux and the young Madame Peloux. ...” The vision of a young wife in her nightgown, anxiously standing beside a window, checked Lea only long enough for her to shrug her shoulders with cold impartiality. “I can’t help that. "What makes one person’s happiness ...” The black silky head stirred on her breast, and her sleeping lover moaned in his dream. With a zealous arm, L£a shielded him against nightmares, and rocked him gently so that — without sight, without memory, without plans for the future — he might still resemble that ‘naughty little boy’ never born to her.

• From Chéri and The Last of Chéri (1920)

  He walked out into the street, erect, with shoulders squared. He went in his open motor to the jeweller’s, where he became sentimental over a slender little bandeau of burning blue sapphires invisibly mounted on blue steel, “so exactly right for Edmee’s hair,” and took it away with him. He bought some stupid, rather pompous flowers. As it had only just struck eleven, he frittered away a further halfhour, drawing money from the Bank, turning over English illustrated papers at a kiosk, visiting his scent-shop and a tobacconist’s that specialized in Oriental cigarettes. Finally, he got back into his motor, and sat down between his sheaf of flowers and a heap of little beribboned parcels. ‘Home.’ The chauffeur swivelled round on his basket-seat. ‘Monsieur? ... What did Monsieur say? ...’ ‘I said Home - Boulevard d’Inkermann. D’you require a map of Paris? ’ The motor went full speed towards the Champs-Elysees. The chauffeur drove much faster than usual and his thoughts could almost be read in his back. He seemed to be brooding uneasily over the gulf which divided the flabby young man of the past months — with his ‘ As you like ’, and his ‘ Have a glass of something, Antonin? ’ — from young Monsieur Peloux, strict with the staff and mindful of the petrol. ‘Young Monsieur Peloux’ leaned back against the morocco leather, hat on knees, drinking in the breeze and exerting ail his energy in an effort not to think. Like a coward, he closed his eyes between the Avenue Malakoff and the Porte Dauphine to avoid a passing glimpse of the Avenue Bugeaud, and he congratulated himself on his resolution. The chauffeur sounded his horn in the Boulevard d’lnkermann for the gate to he opened, and it sang on its hinges with a heavy musical note. The capped concierge hurried about his business, the watch-dogs barked in recognition of their returning master. Very much at his ease, sniffing the green smell of the newly mown lawns, Cheri entered the house and with a master’s step climbed the stairs to the young woman whom he had left behind three months before, much as a sailor from Europe leaves behind, on the other side of the world, a little savage bride. IE a sat at her bureau, throwing away photographs from the last trunk to be unpacked. “Heavens, how hideous people are! U The women who had the nerve to give me these! And they think I’m going to put them up in a row on the mantelpiece - in plated frames or little folding-cases. Tear them all up quick, and straight into the waste-paper basket!”