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 Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  There was no one near us save our driver - and he had the collar of his cape about his ears, and was busy with his pipe and his tobacco-pouch. I looked at the river again - at that extraordinary, ordinary transformation, that easy submission to the urgings of a natural law, that was yet so rare and so unsettling.It seemed a little miracle, done just for Kitty and me.‘How cold it must be!’ I said softly. ‘Imagine if the whole river froze over, if it was frozen right down from here to Richmond. Would you walk across it?’Kitty shivered, and shook her head. ‘The ice would break,’ she said. ‘We would sink and drown; or else be stranded and die of the cold!’I had expected her to smile, not make me a serious answer. I saw us floating down the Thames, out to sea - past Whitstable, perhaps - on a piece of ice no bigger than a pancake.The horse took a step, and its bridle jangled; the driver gave a cough. Still we gazed at the river, silent and unmoving - and both of us, finally, rather grave.At last Kitty gave a whisper. ‘Ain’t it queer,’ she said.I made no answer, only stared at where the curdled water swirled, thick and unwilling, about the columns of the bridge beneath our feet. But when she shivered again I moved a step closer to her, and felt her lean against me in response. It was icy cold upon the bridge; we should have moved back from the parapet into the shelter of the carriage. But we were loath to leave the sight of the frozen river - loath too, perhaps, to leave the warmth of one another’s bodies, now that we had found it.I took her hand. Her fingers, I could feel, were stiff and cold inside her glove. I placed the hand against my cheek; it did not warm it. With my eyes all the time on the water below I pulled at the button at her wrist, then drew the mitten from her, and held her fingers against my lips to warm them with my breath.I sighed, gently, against her knuckles; then turned the hand, and breathed upon her palm. There was no sound at all save the unfamiliar lapping and creaking of the frozen river. Then, ‘Nan,’ she said, very low.I looked at her, her hand still held to my mouth and my breath still damp upon her fingers. Her face was raised to mine, and her gaze was dark and strange and thick, like the water below.I let my hand drop; she kept her fingers upon my lips, then moved them, very slowly, to my cheek, my ear, my throat, my neck. Then her features gave a shiver and she said in a whisper : ‘You won’t tell a soul, Nan - will you?’I think I sighed then: sighed to know - to know for sure, at last! - that there was something to be told.

• From Another Country (1962)

  “I don’t think it’s just a murder story,” he said, gesturing with the pipe. “I mean, I don’t see why you can’t do something fairly serious within the limits of the form. I’ve always been fascinated by it, really.” “You didn’t think much of them when you were teaching me English in high school,” said Vivaldo, with a smile. “Well, I was younger then than you are now. We change, boy, we grow——!” The waiter entered the room, looking as though he wondered where on earth he could be, and Richard called him. “Hey! We’re dying of thirst over here!” He turned to Cass. “You want another drink?” “Oh, yes,” she said, “now that our friends are here. I might as well make the most of my night out. Except I’m a kind of dreamy drunk. Do you mind my head on your shoulder?” “Mind?” He laughed. He looked at Vivaldo. “Mind! Why do you think I’ve been knocking myself out, trying to be a success?” He bent down and kissed her and something appeared in his boyish face, a single-mindedness of tenderness and passion, which made him very gallant. “You can put your head on my shoulder anytime. Anytime, baby. That’s what my shoulders are for.” And he stroked her hair again, proudly, as the waiter vanished with the empty glasses. Vivaldo turned to Richard. “When can I read your book? I’m jealous. I want to find out if I should be.” “Well, if you take that tone, you bastard, you can buy it at the bookstore when it comes out.” “Or borrow it from the library,” Cass suggested. “No, really, when can I read it? Tonight? Tomorrow? How long is it?” “It’s over three hundred pages,” Richard said. “Come by tomorrow, you can look at it then.” He said to Cass, “It’s one way of getting him to the house.” Then: “You really don’t come to see us like you used to—is anything the matter? Because we still love you.” “No, nothing’s the matter,” Vivaldo said. He hesitated. “I had this thing with Jane and then we broke up—and—oh, I don’t know. Work wasn’t going well, and”—he looked at Rufus—“all kinds of things. I was drinking too much and running around whoring when I should have been—being serious, like you, and getting my novel finished.” “How’s it coming—your novel?” “Oh”—he looked down and sipped his drink—“slow. I’m really not a very good writer.” “Bullshit,” said Richard, cheerfully. He almost looked again like the English instructor Vivaldo had idolized, who had been the first person to tell him things he needed to hear, the first person to take Vivaldo seriously. “I’m very glad,” Vivaldo said, “seriously, very glad that you got the damn thing done and that it worked so well. And I hope you make a fortune.”

• From The Argonauts (2015)

  You, reader, are alive today, reading this, because someone once adequately policed your mouth exploring. In the face of this fact, Winnicott holds the relatively unsentimental position that we don’t owe these people (often women, but by no means always) anything. But we do owe ourselves “an intellectual recognition of the fact that at first we were (psychologically) absolutely dependent, and that absolutely means absolutely. Luckily we were met by ordinary devotion.” By ordinary devotion, Winnicott means ordinary devotion. “It is a trite remark when I say that by devoted I simply mean devoted.” Winnicott is a writer for whom ordinary words are good enough. As soon as we moved in together, we were faced with the urgent task of setting up a home for your son that would feel abundant and containing—good enough—rather than broken or falling. (These poeticisms come from that classic of genderqueer kinship, Mom’s House, Dad’s House) But that’s not quite right—we knew about this task beforehand; it was, in fact, one of the reasons we moved so quickly. What became apparent was the urgent task specifically before me: that of learning how to be a stepparent. Talk about a potentially fraught identity! My stepfather had his faults, but every word I have ever uttered against him has come back to haunt me, now that I understand what it is to hold the position, to be held by it. When you are a stepparent, no matter how wonderful you are, no matter how much love you have to give, no matter how mature or wise or successful or smart or responsible you are, you are structurally vulnerable to being hated or resented, and there is precious little you can do about it, save endure, and commit to planting seeds of sanity and good spirit in the face of whatever shitstorms may come your way. And don’t expect to get any kudos from the culture, either: parents are Hallmark-sacrosanct, but stepparents are interlopers, self-servers, poachers, pollutants, and child molesters. Every time I see the word stepchild in an obituary, as in “X is survived by three children and two stepchildren,” or whenever an adult acquaintance says something like, “Oh, sorry, I can’t make it—I’m visiting my stepdad this weekend,” or when, during the Olympics, the camera pans the audience and the voiceover says, “there’s X’s stepmother, cheering him on,” my heart skips a beat, just to hear the sound of the bond made public, made positive.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  But there was a warmth in the room that was moving and intriguing: the men embraced one another and came over specially to talk to us women, admiring the baby and congratulating Susan’s and Barrie’s parents with tears in their eyes. I did not think about it much at the time, but that service planted a seed: there were other ways of being religious than I had been accustomed to. Not everybody felt that it was unworthy to feel emotional and to show your feelings. Yet again, in the spirit of Ash-Wednesday, I found that relinquishing hope had released something within me. My love for reading came back in full. Even though I had started to respond to literature again, there had still been something rather dutiful and anxious in my approach. I would read a new novel desperately casting around for a clever thing to say about it that would impress my colleagues. But now that I had been ejected from academia so publicly, I no longer needed to impress anybody. It didn’t matter whether I came up with any brilliant insights or not. When I read a novel or a poem now, I no longer had an ulterior motive; I was no longer trying to use literature to promote myself, but was simply immersing myself in the text for its own sake—as, of course, I should have been doing all along. As a result, I found myself inundated with ideas and with the words to express them. The mind that I had bludgeoned into stupor had been given back to me. Again, I did not reflect upon this much at the time. I simply noted it as an irony. And yet my renewed delight in the written word was a gift and a grace. This too planted a seed of perception. Insight does not always come to order, and there will certainly be no renaissance if you are merely trying to “get” something for yourself. As soon as I stopped trying to exploit my literary skills to advance my career or enhance my reputation, I found that I was opening myself to the text, could lose myself in the beauty of the words and in the wisdom of the writer. It was a kind of ekstasis, an ecstasy that was not an exotic, tranced state of consciousness but, in the literal sense of the word, a going beyond the self. Then, in February 1976, just over a year since the viva that, I thought, had wrecked my life, I received the greatest gift of all, though at first it seemed like another setback. It had been a perfectly ordinary day in college. Richard was producing some short plays by W. B. Yeats and I was his assistant, dogsbody, and stage manager.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  If you skip the middle stage, the Israel stage, as so many Christian theologians have done, forgetting the vital role of Abraham’s descendants in the whole saving plan, you will have to force your categories to make sense of Jesus in some other way. You may even try to make his “divinity” accomplish this, though this is not what the New Testament says. What we have, rather, is the extraordinary story of Israel’s Messiah taking upon himself the Accuser’s sharpest arrow and, dying under its force, robbing the Accuser of any further real power. We must stress, in closing this account of Jesus’s death, that the earliest testimony insists on its being an act, primarily, of love . “He loved me,” wrote Paul within twenty years of the event, “and gave himself for me” (Gal. 2:20). “No one has a love greater than this,” says Jesus himself in John 15:13, “to lay down your life for your friends.” Take the outpouring of care and concern for the sick, the weak, the vulnerable, and the sinners that were characteristic of Jesus’s public career. Wrap them all together in a single bundle. Then remind yourself that this whole bundle was what it looked like when the living God began to reign on earth as in heaven, began to roll back the sickly tide of the rule of sin and death. Then remind yourself once more that the announcement only made sense if it was to be backed up by the final victory, the final reestablishment of God’s presence and rule. As with the brief rule of Simon the Star, Jesus’s short public career, his inauguration of God’s kingdom, needed to be completed with the last battle and the rebuilding of the Temple. Thus the compassion that overflowed in all directions in the first part of Jesus’s work was the same compassion with which he went to his death. Having loved his own who were in the world, wrote John, he loved them to the end. To the uttermost. I am absolutely sure that there is far, far more that could and perhaps should be said about the meaning of Jesus’s death. The world would not suffice. But I am equally sure that one should not say significantly less than this.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  “That’s a thought,” she would say. She would part her thighs and pull the bucket between them. I would see a brevity of light-brown hair. The ice bucket would be round and black. She would remove its top. A little steam would plume up from the water inside. She would gather her hair and throw its mass behind her shoulders. “Shall I?” she would ask me, lifting the washcloth. “It’s the right thing to do,” I would say. “Dunk it” She would push the washcloth in the water. She would lift it, squeeze it, submerge it again. The second time she squeezed it out, she would let it fall open in her hand. It would be a fairly thin washcloth, as hotel washcloths often are—you would almost be able to see her shadowy fingers through it. She would look at me. Then she would bend forward and watch her hand as it surrounded her soft breast with the warmth of the white cloth. She would steady her breast from underneath with her other hand as she gently held it and circled it with the compress. “What a beautiful sight,” I would say. “Is it warm?” “Very warm,” Adele would say, squeezing and circling. “Very warm. I always wanted to do this with those hot towels they hand out in Japanese restaurants. Just lift my shirt at the table, you know? ‘Why thank you! How very kind of you!’ Mmm. Or at the end of airplane flights.” “The other one,” I would breathe. “The other one’s looking left out.” Then I would have an inspiration. “Hang on, what am I thinking? I’ll get the other washcloth! Don’t move!” I would leap up and retrieve my washcloth from the bathroom. “It’s still a little wet from my shower,” I would tell her. “You won’t mind?” She would shake her head. I would poke the washcloth through the door. She would drop it into the ice bucket, squeeze it, and, leaning forward again, cup her other breast with it. Two hands on two washcloths on two breasts. I would make sounds of wonder and praise. “I bet they’ll stay on by themselves,” she would say. She would straighten and let her hands fall to her sides. The washcloths would indeed remain in place. She would pull at their corners, neatening away the wrinkles. They would look like oversized pockets on a very sheer shirt. I would ask her what it would feel like to hold her nipples through them. “Probably it would feel pretty good,” Adele would say. She would gently pinch her nipples through the wet plush. Still holding them, she would bow forward and shake her breasts so that the washcloths peeled off her skin and fell over her pinching fingers. Then she would drop both washcloths into the bucket. “You know how I might like to wash my breasts if I were by myself?” she would ask me, shaking the water from her fingers. “How?” I would ask.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  This can be done by placing it solely within a framework that speaks of Jesus as the ultimate example of love—although why, without more of a framework, his death would be an act of love it is interestingly difficult to say. Or it can be done by making Jesus the representative model who goes through death to new life and thereby enables us to make the same journey “in him” or “through him.” Or, notoriously, it can be done by imagining a straightforward transaction in which a God who wanted to punish people was content to punish the innocent Jesus instead. This always, of course, leaves unanswered the question of how such a punishment could itself be just, let alone loving. Each of these models, though, has its point to make. First, as I have argued above, there is undoubtedly a vital sense in which Jesus’s death is exemplary. At every stage in the narrative we see, acted out in the small but vital human details, that sense of healing and forgiveness, that sense of a powerful love going out to rescue and restore, that we saw in the earlier details of Jesus’s public career. He hasn’t, in other words, stopped being the same kingdom-bringing Jesus; on the contrary, what he does on the cross is the culmination and retrospective explanation of all that earlier work. Likewise, second, there is indeed a sense in which Jesus was “representing” his people, and through them the whole world. He lived in a world of understanding in which it made sense to see the Messiah as standing in for Israel and Israel as standing in for the rest of humankind. But, important though this theme is not only in the gospels but in Paul and elsewhere, it will scarcely carry all the weight required. There is too, third, a massive sense in which Jesus’s death is penal. Jesus has announced God’s imminent judgment on his rebel people, a judgment that would consist of devastation at the hands of Rome. He then goes ahead of his people to take precisely that judgment, literally, physically and historically upon himself. “Not only in theological truth, but in historic fact, the one bore the sins of the many.” 9 This is both penal and substitutionary, but it is far bigger and less open to objection than some other expressions of that theory. Once you put it together with the previous model ( Jesus as Messiah representing Israel and hence the world), you draw the sting of the main objections that have been advanced against it.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  They shall come and sing aloud on the height of Zion, and they shall be radiant over the goodness of YHWH . (Jer. 31:10–12 ) And then, in particular, an extraordinary passage in which YHWH , the true shepherd of Israel, is contrasted with the human rulers who have failed in their task of looking after the “sheep,” Israel: Mortal, prophesy against the shepherds of Israel: prophesy, and say to them—to the shepherds: Thus says the Lord YHWH : Ah, you shepherds of Israel who have been feeding yourselves! Should not shepherds feed the sheep? You eat the fat, you clothe yourselves with the wool, you slaughter the fatlings; but you do not feed the sheep. You have not strengthened the weak, you have not healed the sick, you have not bound up the injured, you have not brought back the strayed, you have not sought the lost, but with force and harshness you have ruled them. So they were scattered, because there was no shepherd; and scattered, they became food for all the wild animals. My sheep were scattered, they wandered over all the mountains and on every high hill; my sheep were scattered over all the face of the earth, with no one to search or seek for them. . . . For thus says the Lord YHWH : I myself will search for my sheep, and will seek them out. As shepherds seek out their flocks when they are among their scattered sheep, so I will seek out my sheep. I will rescue them from all the places to which they have been scattered on a day of clouds and thick darkness. . . . I will feed them with good pasture, and the mountain heights of Israel shall be their pasture; there they shall lie down in good grazing land, and they shall feed on rich pasture on the mountains of Israel. I myself will be the shepherd of my sheep, and I will make them lie down, says the Lord YHWH . I will seek the lost, and I will bring back the strayed, and I will bind up the injured, and I will strengthen the weak, but the fat and the strong I will destroy. I will feed them with justice. (Ezek. 34:2–6, 11–12, 14–16) This could hardly be clearer. The human “shepherds” have been a dismal failure; only YHWH himself will now do. He and he alone will give the “sheep”—the people of Israel—what they need and what the other shepherds have so obviously not given them. There is a radical break between the way Israel’s rulers have been telling and living the national story and the way God wants to tell it.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  “So, you see,” he went on, “the kingdom of heaven is like a king who wanted to settle up accounts with his servants. As he was beginning to sort it all out, one man was brought before him who owed ten thousand talents. He had no means of paying it back, so the master ordered him to be sold, with his wife and children and everything he possessed, and payment to be made. “So the servant fell down and prostrated himself before the master. “‘Be patient with me,’ he said, ‘and I’ll pay you everything!’ “The master was very sorry for the servant, and let him off. He forgave him the loan. “But that servant went out and found one of his fellow servants who owed him a hundred dinars. He seized him and began to throttle him. ‘Pay me back what you owe me!’ he said. “The colleague fell down and begged him, ‘Be patient with me, and I’ll pay you!’ “But he refused, and went and threw him into prison until he could pay the debt. So when his fellow servants saw what had happened, they were very upset. They went and informed their master about the whole affair. Then his master summoned him. “‘You’re a scoundrel of a servant!’ he said to him. ‘I let you off the whole debt, because you begged me to. Shouldn’t you have taken pity on your colleague, like I took pity on you?’ “His master was angry, and handed him over to the torturers, until he had paid the whole debt. And that’s what my heavenly father will do to you, unless each of you forgives your brother or sister from your heart.” (Matt. 18:23–35) Even the story of the great wedding party to which all and sundry are invited carries within it a dark note of warning: don’t think you can come into God’s party without putting on the proper clothes. Even the great story of spectacular forgiveness is turned back against itself when the servant who had been forgiven a huge sum refused to forgive his fellow servant a tiny sum. If this is what it looks like when God’s kingdom comes on earth as in heaven—if this is what it looks like when God’s in charge—then there must have been more wrong with “earth” than anyone had supposed. That, indeed, is the conclusion we are forced to draw at every turn. It isn’t that God, coming to rule on earth, is picky or grouchy, determined to find fault. It is, rather, that the patient is deathly sick, and the doctor must prescribe an appropriately drastic course of treatment. It is that the sheep are in danger of being totally lost, since they appear to have no shepherd at all. Jesus speaks of himself, more than once, as a doctor; also, more than once, as a shepherd (Mark 2:17; Luke 4:23; Matt. 9:36; John 10:11; Mark 14:27).

• From Another Country (1962)

  Stupidly, he picked up the glass, afraid that she would cut herself. She was kneeling in the spilt whiskey, which had stained the edges of her skirt. He dropped the broken glass in the brown paper bag they used for garbage. He was afraid to go near her, he was afraid to touch her, it was almost as though she had told him that she had been infected with the plague. His arms trembled with his revulsion, and every act of the body seemed unimaginably vile. And yet, at the same time, as he stood helpless and stupid in the kitchen which had abruptly become immortal, or which, in any case, would surely live as long as he lived, and follow him everywhere, his heart began to beat with a newer, stonier anguish, which destroyed the distance called pity and placed him, very nearly, in her body, beside that table, on the dirty floor. The single yellow light beat terribly down on them both. He went to her, resigned and tender and helpless, her sobs seeming to make his belly sore. And, nevertheless, for a moment, he could not touch her, he did not know how. He thought, unwillingly, of all the whores, black whores, with whom he had coupled, and what he had hoped for from them, and he was gripped in a kind of retrospective nausea. What would they see when they looked into each other’s faces again? “Come on, Ida,” he whispered, “come on, Ida. Get up,” and at last he touched her shoulders, trying to force her to rise. She tried to check her sobs, she put both hands on the table. “I’m all right,” she murmured, “give me a handkerchief.” He knelt beside her and thrust his handkerchief, warm and wadded, but fairly clean, into her hand. She blew her nose. He kept his arm around her shoulder. “Stand up,” he said. “Go wash your face. Would you like some coffee?”

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  “Well . . .” Jenifer trailed off. Her heart was just not in this at all. “Don’t let your egg get cold. By the way,” she added, as if in an afterthought, “I’ve been thinking that it might be nice if you could join us for Sunday lunch. It’s the only meal that we all eat together, and you are part of the household now. I really mean it,” she went on, less embarrassed now that she felt on firmer ground. “You’ve fitted in so well. It seems wrong that you should be upstairs on your own on Sundays. You should be with the rest of us.” “Thank you, Jenifer.” I felt immensely moved. This was not a casually issued invitation. The Harts fulfilled most of their social obligations by inviting people to their Cornwall house or taking them to guest nights in their respective colleges. They rarely had friends to dine in Manor Place. It didn’t matter that Jenifer was transparently trying to ensure that I ate at least one decent meal a week. It was kindly meant, and kindness was something that I had learned to value. “Thank you,” I said again. “I should like that very much indeed.” Sunday lunch, I was not surprised to learn, was neither a decorous nor an elegant occasion. “Mummy! I’m going to tip the water jug right over!” Jacob tilted the jug at a perilous angle, his eyes fixed on Jenifer. “No, Jacob, don’t do that,” she replied somewhat ineffectually, while she briskly carved slices of roast lamb and tried to continue a civilized conversation. “Where do you go to Mass, Karen?” she inquired politely. The Harts were mildly intrigued by my Catholicism. My years in the convent were so remote from anything in their experience that I might just as well have spent seven years living with a peculiarly exotic tribe in New Guinea. In fact, they would probably have found that a good deal easier to understand. Both Herbert and Jenifer were committed atheists. Herbert found the whole structure of religion utterly incomprehensible and to Jenifer any form of religion was “ludicrous.” Like many intellectuals of her generation, she had been a member of the Communist Party; there were occasional wild and inaccurate speculations in the media that she had been the “fifth man” in the Burgess-MacLean spy circle, a charge she vehemently denied. She had long been disillusioned with the party, but her disdain for religion remained intact. Both she and Herbert regarded Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular as “monstrous.” Yet today, for some reason, Jenifer seemed unusually interested in my churchgoing. I told her briefly about Blackfriars, thinking that she could not possibly be interested, but she persisted: “So it doesn’t matter if the children at this family Mass are noisy or make a scene?” “No. But actually because they feel relaxed, they tend to behave fairly well,” I replied. “They seem to enjoy it.”

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  When I drew it from its wrappings and held it up against me before the glass, I shook my head, quite stricken. ‘It’s beautiful,’ I said to Kitty, ‘but how can I keep it? It’s far too smart. You must take it back, Kitty. It’s too expensive.’But Kitty, who had watched me handle it with dark and shining eyes, only laughed to see me so uneasy. ‘Rubbish!’ she said. ‘It’s about time you started wearing some decent frocks, instead of those awful old schoolgirlish things you brought with you from home. I have a decent wardrobe - and so should you. Goodness knows we can afford it. And anyway, it can’t go back: it was made just for you, like Cinderella’s slipper, and is too peculiar a size to fit anybody else.’Made just for me? That was even worse! ‘Kitty,’ I said, ‘I really cannot. I should never feel comfortable in it ...’‘You must,’ she said. ‘And, besides’ - she fingered the pearl that I had so recently placed about her neck, and looked away - ‘I am doing so well, now. I can’t have my dresser running round in her sister’s hand-me-downs for ever. It ain’t quite the thing, now is it?’ She said it lightly - but all at once I saw the truth of her words. I had my own income now - I had spent two weeks’ wages on her pearl and chain; but I had a Whitstable squeamishness, still, about spending money on myself. Now I blushed to think that she had ever thought me dowdy.And so I kept the dress for Kitty’s sake; and wore it, for the first time, a few nights later. The occasion was a party - an end-of-season party at the Marylebone theatre at which we had spent such a happy month. It was to be a very grand affair. Kitty had a new frock of her own made for it, a lovely, low-necked, short-sleeved gown of China satin, pink as the warm pink heart of a rose-bud. I held it for her to step into, and helped her fasten it; then watched her as she pulled her gloves on - aching all the time with the prettiness of her, for the blush of the silk made her red lips all the redder, her throat more creamy, her eyes and hair all the browner and more rich. She wore no jewellery but the pearl that I had given her, and the brooch that had been Walter’s gift. They didn’t really match - the brooch was of amber.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  She brought an alabaster jar of ointment. Then she stood behind Jesus’s feet, crying, and began to wet his feet with her tears. She wiped them with her hair, kissed his feet, and anointed them with the ointment. The Pharisee who had invited Jesus saw what was going on. “If this fellow really was a prophet,” he said to himself, “he’d know what sort of a woman this is who is touching him! She’s a sinner!” “Simon,” replied Jesus, “I have something to say to you.” “Go ahead, Teacher,” he replied. “Once upon a time there was a money-lender who had two debtors. The first owed him five hundred dinars; the second a tenth of that. Neither of them could pay him, and he let them both off. So which of them will love him more?” “The one he let off the more, I suppose,” replied Simon. “Quite right,” said Jesus. Then, turning toward the woman, he said to Simon, “You see this woman? When I came into your house, you didn’t give me water to wash my feet—but she has washed my feet with her tears, and wiped them with her hair. You didn’t give me a kiss, but she hasn’t stopped kissing my feet from the moment I came in. You didn’t anoint my head with oil, but she has anointed my feet with ointment. “So the conclusion I draw is this: she must have been forgiven many sins! Her great love proves it! But if someone has been forgiven only a little, they will love only a little.” Then he said to the woman, “Your sins are forgiven. ” “Who is this,” the other guests began to say among themselves, “who even forgives sins?” “Your faith has saved you,” said Jesus to the woman. “Go in peace.” (Luke 7:36–50) There are many interesting features to the passage—notice, for instance, the way in which Simon, the Pharisee, is mentally criticizing Jesus for not knowing what sort of a woman this is, whereupon Jesus shows that he knows what’s going on, not only in the woman’s heart, but in Simon’s too. But we focus here on forgiveness itself. Jesus, as usual, tells a story to explain what he is doing. This time it’s about a man who had two debtors, one owing him a huge sum and the other a small sum. Neither could pay, so he forgave them both. So, he asks his host, which of the two will love him the more? Clearly, comes the answer, the one for whom he forgave the greater debt. Precisely so, says Jesus, explaining that this is why this woman had poured out love so richly upon him—unlike the host, who hadn’t even begun to show Jesus any love at all. In other words, Jesus is saying, you can tell that this woman has been forgiven, has indeed been forgiven a great deal.

• From Another Country (1962)

  Henry was younger, or seemed younger, than his wife. He was a trial to Grace, and probably to them all, because he drank too much. He was the handyman and one of his duties was the care of the furnace. Eric still remembered the look and the smell of the glaring furnace room, the red shadows from the furnace playing along the walls, and the sticky-sweet smell of Henry’s breath. They had spent many hours together there, Eric on a box at Henry’s knee, Henry with his hand on Eric’s neck or shoulder. His voice fell over Eric like waves of safety. He was full of stories. He told the story of how he had met Grace, and how he had seduced her, and how (as he supposed) he had persuaded her to marry him; told stories of preachers and gamblers in his part of town—they seemed, in his part of town, to have much in common, and, often, to be the same people—how he had outwitted this one and that one, and how, once, he had managed to escape being put on the chain gang. (And he had explained to Eric what a chain gang was.) Once, Eric had walked into the furnace room where Henry sat alone; when he spoke, Henry did not answer; and when he approached him, putting his hand on Henry’s knee, the man’s tears scalded the back of his hand. Eric no longer remembered the cause of Henry’s tears, but he would never forget the wonder with which he then touched Henry’s face, or what the shaking of Henry’s body had caused him to feel. He had thrown himself into Henry’s arms, almost sobbing himself, and yet somehow wise enough to hold his own tears back. He was filled with an unutterably painful rage against whatever it was that had hurt Henry. It was the first time he had felt a man’s arms around him, the first time he had felt the chest and belly of a man; he had been ten or eleven years old. He had been terribly frightened, obscurely and profoundly frightened, but he had not, as the years were to prove, been frightened enough. He knew that what he felt was somehow wrong, and must be kept a secret; but he thought that it was wrong because Henry was a grown man, and colored, and he was a little boy, and white.

• From Wild (2012)

  “I don’t have a dad either,” Kyle said. “Well, everybody has a dad, but I don’t know mine anymore. I used to know him when I was a baby, but I don’t remember it.” He opened his palms and looked down at them. They were full of tiny blades of grass. We watched as they fluttered away in the wind. “What about your mommy?” he asked. “She’s dead.” His face shot up to mine, his expression moving from startled to serene. “My mommy likes to sing,” he said. “You wanna hear a song she taught me?” “Yes,” I said, and without a moment’s hesitation he sang every last lyric and verse of “Red River Valley” in a voice so pure that I felt gutted. “Thank you,” I said, half demolished by the time he finished. “That might be the best thing I’ve ever heard in my whole life.” “My mother has taught me many songs,” he said solemnly. “She’s a singer.” Vera snapped a photograph of me and I cinched Monster back on. “Goodbye, Kyle. Goodbye, Vera. Goodbye, Shooting Star,” I called as I walked up the trail. “Cheryl!” Kyle hollered when I was nearly out of sight. I stopped and turned. “The dog’s name is Miriam.” “Adios, Miriam,” I said. Late in the afternoon, I came to a shady spot where there was a picnic table—a rare luxury on the trail. As I approached, I saw that there was a peach on top of the table and beneath it a note. Cheryl! We yogied this from day hikers for you. Enjoy! Sam and Helen I was thrilled about the peach, of course—fresh fruit and vegetables competed with Snapple lemonade in my food fantasy mind—but more so, I was touched that Sam and Helen had left it for me. They no doubt had food fantasies every bit as all-consuming as my own. I sat on top of the picnic table and bit blissfully into the peach, its exquisite juice seeming to reach my every cell. The peach made it not so bad that my feet were a throbbing mass of pulp. The kindness with which it was given blunted the heat and tedium of the day. As I sat eating it, I realized I wasn’t going to be able to thank Sam and Helen for leaving it for me. I was ready to be alone again; I was going to camp by myself that night.

• From Another Country (1962)

  He told the story of how he had met Grace, and how he had seduced her, and how (as he supposed) he had persuaded her to marry him; told stories of preachers and gamblers in his part of town—they seemed, in his part of town, to have much in common, and, often, to be the same people—how he had outwitted this one and that one, and how, once, he had managed to escape being put on the chain gang. (And he had explained to Eric what a chain gang was.) Once, Eric had walked into the furnace room where Henry sat alone; when he spoke, Henry did not answer; and when he approached him, putting his hand on Henry’s knee, the man’s tears scalded the back of his hand. Eric no longer remembered the cause of Henry’s tears, but he would never forget the wonder with which he then touched Henry’s face, or what the shaking of Henry’s body had caused him to feel. He had thrown himself into Henry’s arms, almost sobbing himself, and yet somehow wise enough to hold his own tears back. He was filled with an unutterably painful rage against whatever it was that had hurt Henry. It was the first time he had felt a man’s arms around him, the first time he had felt the chest and belly of a man; he had been ten or eleven years old. He had been terribly frightened, obscurely and profoundly frightened, but he had not, as the years were to prove, been frightened enough. He knew that what he felt was somehow wrong, and must be kept a secret; but he thought that it was wrong because Henry was a grown man, and colored, and he was a little boy, and white. Henry and Grace were eventually banished, due to some lapse or offense on Henry’s part. Since Eric’s parents had never approved of those sessions in the furnace room, Eric always suspected this as the reason for Henry’s banishment, which made his opposition to his parents more bitter than ever. In any case, he lived his life far from them, at school by day and before his mirror by night, dressed up in his mother’s old clothes or in whatever colorful scraps he had been able to collect, posturing and, in a whisper, declaiming. He knew that this was wrong, too, though he could not have said why.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  All that ritual, for example— he’d simply love that. And religion is supposed to give some kind of comfort, isn’t it?” She looked up at me tentatively. “Well . . .” I trailed off, unwilling to go down that road, tonight of all nights. I couldn’t resist a little sarcasm. “You wouldn’t feel like coming along yourself, I suppose? You haven’t seen the light? And perhaps Herbert would like to join us?” “Oh, heavens no!” We both laughed, as noiselessly as possible, at the absurdity of the suggestion. “But seriously,” Jenifer continued, “the Blackfriars Mass sounds ideal, because presumably no one would mind if he made some kind of fuss. And he’d get to meet lots of new people at your coffee morning afterwards. I really think that it would do him good.” She sounded as though religion were like an iron tonic: a regular dose each week would automatically induce peace of soul. “He would probably enjoy it,” I conceded somewhat reluctantly. The very idea of Jacob or any Hart in a church was so astounding that it was difficult to imagine. “But”—again I could hear the irony in my voice—“I take it he’ll just be going along for the show. You won’t want me to give him instruction or anything like that?” “Oh Lord, no—he doesn’t have to understand it!” Jenifer exclaimed, slightly scandalized. I stared at her hard: this really was a bit of a cheek. And yet, I reflected, how many Catholics truly understood the labyrinthine complexity of their doctrinal system? “I don’t want him getting any of those ghastly ideas you all have— God, heaven and hell, or anything of that sort,” Jenifer went on, oblivious to any offense that her words might give. “Of course, all those beliefs are nonsense anyway. Ludicrous, in fact! He doesn’t need to know any of that !” “He’ll probably have to know something, though, to help him into the experience,” I said, trying to see how the Mass might look to a complete outsider. “It would all be a sort of fantasy to him, of course, on a par with Guy Fawkes or Goldilocks. But he might grasp the point of some of the stories. Nothing heavy, just—I don’t know—Jesus loves me and is my friend.” “Well, I suppose that wouldn’t do any harm,” Jenifer said doubtfully. She frowned, and I felt a sudden wave of affection for her. There was something heroic in what she was doing. She was sacrificing all her most cherished principles; her clever, skeptical friends would be merciless to her face and probably lethal behind her back. But what mattered most to Jenifer was what was best for Jacob. “You see,” she continued, “it’s all very well for people like Herbert and me to reject religion.

• From Another Country (1962)

  They shook hands. Her handshake was as brief as her mother’s had been, but stronger. And she looked at Vivaldo differently, as though he were a glamorous stranger, glamorous not only in himself and his color but in his scarcely to-be-imagined relation to her brother. “Well, now, where,” asked Rufus, teasingly, “do you think you’d like to go, young lady?” And he watched her, grinning. But there was a constraint in the room now, too, which had not been there before, which had entered with the girl who would soon be a woman. She stood there like a target and a prize, the natural prey of someone—somewhere—who would soon be on her trail. “Oh, I don’t care,” she said. “Anywhere you-all want to go.” “But you so dressed up—you sure you ain’t ashamed to be seen with us?” He was also dressed up, in his best dark suit and a shirt and tie he had borrowed from Vivaldo. Ida and her mother laughed. “Boy, you stop teasing your sister,” said Mrs. Scott . “Well, go on, get your coat,” Rufus said, “and we’ll make tracks.” “We going far? ” “We going far enough for you to have to wear a coat .” “She don’t mean is you going far,” said Mrs. Scott. “She trying to find out where you going and what time you coming back.” Ida had moved to the door by which she had entered and stood there, hesitating. “Go on,” her mother said, “get your coat and mine, too. I’m going to walk down the block with you.” Ida left and Mrs. Scott smiled and said, “If she thought I was coming with you today, she be highly displeased. She want you all to herself today.” She picked up the empty beer glasses and carried them into the kitchen. “When they were younger,” she said to Vivaldo, “Rufus just couldn’t do no wrong, far as Ida was concerned.” She ran water to rinse out the glasses. “She always been real afraid of the dark, you know? but, shucks, honey, many’s the time Ida used to crawl out of her bed, middle of the night, and go running through this dark house to get in bed with Rufus. Look like she just felt safe with him. I don’t know why, Rufus sure didn’t pay her much mind.” “That’s not true,” said Rufus, “I was always real sweet to my little sister.” She put the glasses down to drain and dried her hands.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  This insight was not confined to Buddhism, however. The late Jewish scholar Abraham Joshua Heschel once said that when we put ourselves at the opposite pole of ego, we are in the place where God is. The Golden Rule requires that every time we are tempted to say or do something unpleasant about a rival, an annoying colleague, or a country with which we are at war, we should ask ourselves how we should like this said of or done to ourselves, and refrain. In that moment we would transcend the frightened egotism that often needs to wound or destroy others in order to shore up the sense of ourselves. If we lived in such a way on a daily, hourly basis, we would not only have no time to worry overmuch about whether there was a personal God “out there”; we would achieve constant ecstasy, because we would be ceaselessly going beyond ourselves, our selfishness and greed. If our political leaders took the Golden Rule seriously into account, the world would be a safer place. I have noticed, however, that compassion is not always a popular virtue. In my lectures I have sometimes seen members of the audience glaring at me mutinously: where is the fun of religion, if you can’t disapprove of other people! There are some people, I suspect, who would be outraged if, when they finally arrived in heaven, they found everybody else there as well. Heaven would not be heaven unless you could peer over the celestial parapets and watch the unfortunates roasting below. But I have myself found that compassion is a habit of mind that is transforming. The science of compassion which guides my studies has changed the way I experience the world. This has been a pattern in my life. Once I had started to study seriously at Oxford, I found that I could no longer conform to convent life. The attitudes that you learn at your desk spill over into your everyday existence. The silence in which I live has also opened my ears and eyes to the suffering of the world. In silence, you begin to hear the note of pain that informs so much of the anger and posturing that pervade social and political life. Solitude is also a teacher. It is lonely; living without intimacy and affection tears holes in you. Saint Augustine of Hippo said somewhere that yearning makes the heart deep. It also makes you vulnerable. Silence and solitude strip away a skin; they break down that protective shell of heartlessness which we cultivate in order to prevent ourselves from being overwhelmed by the suffering of the world that presses in upon us on all sides.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  She had told me a little about Jacob when I had first applied for the room, as he was the reason for my presence in the house. He was her eight-year-old, mentally handicapped son. When she spoke of him, her rather gruff voice took on a range of different inflections, expressing anxiety and a disarming eagerness to present him in an attractive light. Jacob had been an afterthought, born when the other three children were almost grown up. The birth had been precipitous, and Jacob had emerged with the umbilical cord wound around his neck. Deprived of oxygen, his brain had been irretrievably damaged, and he was now diagnosed officially as autistic. Recently he had also started to have epileptic seizures. I had assumed that autistic children were silent and withdrawn, but apparently Jacob never stopped talking and loved language. He lived in a fantasy world, however—unable, because of his malfunctioning brain, to see his surroundings in the same way as other people. He had, Jenifer told me, terrible fears. He could be driven into frenzy by a loud noise or a thunderstorm, because however carefully these alarming events were explained to him, they always retained the force of the unknown and the inexplicable. These terrors could often result in temper tantrums, during which he would lie on the floor and kick and scream, quite beside himself. At such moments it was impossible to do anything with him. “I seem to have a particularly bad effect on him.” Jenifer had smiled ruefully. “But then I never seemed to have much control over my other children either.” The Harts had a nanny who had lived with the family for almost thirty years, ever since their oldest child, Joanna, had been born. “Nanny is a treasure,” Jenifer had told me sternly. “It’s vital that you get on with Nanny.” And Jacob was able to attend a special school for educationally disadvantaged children, which wasn’t really right for him, as in some ways he was apparently very bright. He had, I was told, an extraordinary vocabulary for his age, and could read fluently. “The doctors told me that he would never be able to read,” Jenifer said. “I think they thought that because we are academics, we were obsessed with literacy. They kept telling us not to push it. But you know, it happened quite naturally—by accident, really. When he was little, he used to sit next to me at breakfast while I read the paper, so to keep him quiet and give him something to do, I taught him to pick out all the Os and then the As and so on, and then, all of a sudden, he started reading all by himself.”