Yearning
Grief-coupled stretch toward distance—want that knows its object may stay out of reach.
18 passages tagged with this primary in the Penwright corpus · 6 published pairings shown below.
Study and magazine
Long-form guide in the magazine
An essay on how this word lives in language, in the tagged corpus, and in figurative art when curators pair passage with image — not a list of stages, not permission to feel.
Read the guideEntry resolves to the emotion-tagged sequence when published (ASN-933); until then you may land on a placeholder or the main player.
Passage and image
Curator-published pairings — the human claim between text and artwork.
HG-RC-131
84Some years ago, I looked up this boy from my past, wanted to know what had become of him. He does not have an uncommon name, but his name isn’t John Smith, either, so I had a chance. I looked and looked and looked. It became a minor obsession. Every day I scrolled through the hundreds of hits that came up when I searched his name on Google. I tried combinations of his name and the state where I knew him, but he no longer lives there. I tried to guess what he had become when he grew up—my first two guesses were p…
Winter Morning, Unguarded · View unit
ASN-931 anchor seed — replace with curator rationale or retract if unsuitable.
DB-RC-308
Since his low station in life had not blinded him to the fact that this passion of his was thoroughly improper, he had the good sense not to breathe a word about it to anyone, nor did he even dare to cast tell-tale glances in the lady’s direction. But although he was quite resigned to the fact that he would never win her favour, he could at least claim that his thoughts were directed towards a lofty goal. And being scorched all over by the flames of love, he outshone every one of his companions by the zealous mann…
Curtain of Gold · View unit
ASN-931 anchor seed — replace with curator rationale or retract if unsuitable.
JSP-RC-080
in my head I know it is too simple to wish for war, for open battle, but one cannot help but wish for those situations that make us heroic. living to the hilt of our total resources. our cosmic fights, when I think the end of the world is come, are so many broken shells around our growth. sunday noon: very stingily blue whipped to white by wind from russian steppes. the mornings are god’s time, and after breakfast for those five hours somehow everything is all right and most things are even possible. the afternoon…
One Small Clasp · View unit
ASN-931 anchor seed — replace with curator rationale or retract if unsuitable.
DC-RC-188
By her right easily may be known, how long the fire of love doth last in woman, if eye and touch do not oft rekindle it. The viper that the Milanese blazons on his shield will not make her so fair a tomb as Gallura’s cock would have done.” Thus spake he, his countenance stamped with the mark of that righteous zeal which in due measure glows in the breast. My yearning eyes were again turned towards heaven, even there where the stars are slowest, like a wheel nearest the axle. And my leader: “Son, what gazest thou a…
SLC-RC-097
Space rarely opens up to us in one go. Even in the theatre when one more curtain needs to be raised, the process can be laborious, the heavy fabric rises slowly or, when the scene is still half hidden, the mechanism gets stuck and some occult resistance defers by a few seconds the spectator’s involvement and mental participation in the action. It is well known that we attach special importance to the times of transition and the places in which they took place. The sensuous pleasure I feel in airport lounges is per…
Mäda Primavesi (1903–2000), Gustav Klimt | The Met · View unit
ASN-931 anchor seed — replace with curator rationale or retract if unsuitable.
CBN-RC-161
She put the notebook’s title on the next page: “List of Things for the Museum.” Ideas were coalescing in her mind. She needed a sequence or syntax for a vision as improbable as it was alluring—her very own museum. Both Gardners realized something needed to be done about how to keep and show their ever-growing collection. The previous September 1896, Isabella had met with the well-known Boston architect Willard T. Sears about the possibilities of expanding their Beacon Street residence. She knew Sears well after hi…
One Small Clasp · View unit
ASN-931 anchor seed — replace with curator rationale or retract if unsuitable.
Crowd-tagged images
Images attested as carrying this emotion — through curator pairings, the illustration corpus, or the cumulative picks of readers using Connect. Not a verdict on the image; a record of what others have said it holds.
Part of a cluster
Yearning sits inside the cluster below. Each card explains why these emotions cluster — and what specifically distinguishes Yearningfrom its siblings here.
Often arrives with
Secondary emotions tagged alongside this primary in the same passages (co-occurrence in loom_passage_tags).
Articles
Vela essays that take this emotion as subject. Articles are ordered by tagging weight (the editor's read of how central this emotion is to the piece).
guide
Centrally about
On Grief
5 min read
fiction
Centrally about
Life Drawing
A story in five images.
He signs up for the advanced class because the intermediate class doesn't have a live model and he is twenty-two years old and he has been drawing figures from photographs for three years and he wants to draw from life.
6 min read
Essays
Strongly present
Warhol, Without the Silkscreen
What repetition was for, what the Factory made possible, and what a contemplative platform takes from Warhol — and declines.
The cynical reading of Andy Warhol is so familiar by now that it has become the first thing the eye reaches for, the way a viewer reaches for a placard before the painting. Warhol was the artist who made fame itself the medium. Warhol was t…
15 min read
Conversations
Centrally about
The Figure Turned Away
Degas, 1885. A photographer you don't know, 2024. The same morning. What travels across time when everything else changes.
There is a Seurat conté study from the 1880s for Les Poseuses in which a standing nude faces you on the page — frontal and direct, nowhere to hide. This is not a turned back; it is here on purpose, because the essay is about absorption, and…
7 min read
essays
Centrally about
The Absent Anchor
Why naming what the library cannot cite is still scholarship
This is the first essay in the Coverage Gap Essays series — a standing invitation to turn retrieval misses into publishable argument.
6 min read
Elements of Looking
Strongly present
What Rembrandt Knew About Shadow
The most influential lighting technique in art history, and why photographers are still learning from a painter who died in 1669.
Rembrandt van Rijn never photographed anyone. He died three hundred and fifty-seven years before the first camera. And yet every portrait photographer working today is, in some sense, his student.
6 min read
essays
Strongly present
Shame Across Fifteen Centuries
Augustine's inward tribunal and Bataille's continuity of taboo
A Constellation pairs two corpus passages distant in era and stance while sharing subject pressure — here, shame — without pretending they agree.
8 min read
Essays
Centrally about
Vienna, Three Ways (draft mirror)
A retrospective: Warhol, Schiele, Klimt — what the studies kept, what they refused, and what still argues with us
This is the capstone to a deliberate triptych. Andy Warhol was our study in reproduction as a kind of devotion — a face the culture already held in common, passed through the Factory until the operation on the image, not the face it showed,…
9 min read
fiction
Centrally about
Undone, Part II
She does not think of him.
4 min read
fiction
Centrally about
Life Drawing, Part III
The second Tuesday she looks at him.
4 min read
essays
Strongly present
Luther, or How Marriage Became Good News Again
Martin Luther on sex in marriage, clerical celibacy, Genesis against Augustine, and the suppressed letters
The record on Martin Luther and marriage: vows he rejected, Genesis he re-read for Edenic joy, Katharina von Bora and the letter later editors censored — pillar 3 of 4 on Christianity’s quarrel with itself.
26 min read
Questions of Looking
Strongly present
The Contemplation Test
Why some images reward attention and others consume it — and how to tell the difference.
There is a distinction that matters enormously and is almost never named. Some images of the human body invite you to look. Others demand it.
6 min read
fiction
Adjacent
Life Drawing, Part II
He thinks about her on the way home.
4 min read
essays
Adjacent
Augustine, or How the West Learned to Be Ashamed
The bishop who fused shame, desire, and original sin — and what Latin Christianity overwrote to do it
What Augustine of Hippo actually taught about sex, how his biography and opponents shaped Latin doctrine, and what was lost when the West received him as normative.
32 min read
fiction
Centrally about
The Lesson, Part II
He sets down the charcoal.
4 min read
fiction
Adjacent
The Lesson
A story in five images.
He teaches drawing on Tuesday afternoons in a room that smells of charcoal and turpentine and something older than both.
5 min read
Research
How Vela holds this emotion as a research object — historiographic, ethnographic, and empirical. The full thread sits sibling to the desire program and the Christianity-sex-shame thread.
- Public introduction — What We Mean When We Name a Feeling. The program essay: what naming does, what disappears when a name disappears, and why the work matters for editorial honesty.
- Literature map — claims keyed to coordinates across historiography of emotion, the basic-vs-constructionist debate, cross-cultural ethnography, and the empirical psychology of named emotions.
- Bibliography — ~110 entries grouped by section, with verified DOIs and stable URLs where available.
- External research runs — index of the 36-run deep-research bring-back that underlies the map and bibliography.
- Vela research surface — index of all research threads (desire, Christianity-sex-shame, text-aesthetic, emotion, Boudoir Studios, museum diversity, artist studies).
Passages
Page 1 of 1 · 20 per page
18 tagged passages
- G2-RC-020From The Girls (2016)
The looping horns of Paul Revere and the Raiders sounding from his bedroom, how he’d sometimes stumble around with a proud, overt secrecy, so I would know he had taken acid. Filling and refilling a glass of water in the…
- BLM-RC-059From Blue Like Jazz (2003)
I told Penny that I wanted to marry her, but she wasn’t interested. I propose to Penny once a month now on the phone, but she just changes the subject. The thing I have to work on in myself is this issue of belief. Gand…
- HSMB-RC-124From Healing Sex: A Mind-Body Approach to Healing Sexual Trauma (2007)
If you arrange your sex life to avoid triggers, you’ll end up with no room left for your sex life.—Stephanie Many survivors feel understandably frustrated when it comes to triggers. You may be in a stage of sexual recov…
- BBL-RC-001From Beyond Belief
Title : Beyond Belief Author: Pulitzer, Lisa,Hill, Jenna Miscavige [image file=image_rsrc2TU.jpg] Dedication I would like to dedicate this book to my many good friends who are still in the Church. I love and miss you al…
- GE-RC-121From Goddesses in Everywoman
Moreover, a “Noah’s Ark” mentality prevails: people are expected to come in pairs, like shoes or socks. With this as a social norm, single women are made to feel that they are missing the boat. Thus the Hera archetype g…
- BB00-RC-079From Beyond Belief
From Pennsylvania, we headed across New York and northeast through Vermont to New Hampshire, where we stayed with Aunt Lori and her family, and my dad’s mother, Grandma Loretta, at the old house my parents had left behi…
- 2CRO-RC-281From 250 Contemporary Romance Outlines: Complete with prompts, settings, blurbs, conflict, character development and story arc (2024)
- Shard of Glass: Emily's past relationship with Jack, which ended abruptly when he enlisted, left her with unresolved feelings and questions about their future. His sudden departure and the subsequent years of silence …
- ANB-RC-281From Augustine: A New Biography (2005)
But what if he had avoided that Hippo ordination? What if he had never come back to Africa? Freed of the gravitational pull of African Christianity, he would have had the time and inclination to develop the persona he h…
- AK-RC-023From Anna Karenina (1877)
The mysterious, enchanting Kitty herself could not love such an ugly person as he conceived himself to be, and, above all, such an ordinary, in no way striking person. Moreover, his attitude to Kitty in the past—the att…
- SC-RC-092From Shunned (2018)
I could walk the city streets and revel in fresh anonymity, free of concern about bumping into anyone who might inquire into my spiritual well-being. I had the emotional and spiritual space I’d yearned for. I was the au…
- CBN-RC-161From Chasing Beauty
She put the notebook’s title on the next page: “List of Things for the Museum.” Ideas were coalescing in her mind. She needed a sequence or syntax for a vision as improbable as it was alluring—her very own museum. Both …
- JSP-RC-080From The Journals of Sylvia Plath (1982)
in my head I know it is too simple to wish for war, for open battle, but one cannot help but wish for those situations that make us heroic. living to the hilt of our total resources. our cosmic fights, when I think the …
- LF-RC-081From Like Family
[image "image" file=Image00003.jpg] ALL YOU HAD TO do was look at Hilde, her mouth in a hard line as if a ruler had slapped it there, arms crossed severely over her heart, to know there was no map, no access, no turnabl…
- SLC-RC-097From The Sexual Life of Catherine M. (2001)
Space rarely opens up to us in one go. Even in the theatre when one more curtain needs to be raised, the process can be laborious, the heavy fabric rises slowly or, when the scene is still half hidden, the mechanism get…
- UE-RC-065From In the Unlikely Event (2015)
As a little girl, Miri had loved to jitterbug with her mother, but not anymore. Miri preferred to watch Steve Osner dancing with Phil Stein’s cousin Kathy, who wore a dark-green strapless velvet dress. She laughed a lot…
- DB-RC-308From The Decameron (1353)
Since his low station in life had not blinded him to the fact that this passion of his was thoroughly improper, he had the good sense not to breathe a word about it to anyone, nor did he even dare to cast tell-tale glan…
- DC-RC-188From The Divine Comedy (1950)
By her right easily may be known, how long the fire of love doth last in woman, if eye and touch do not oft rekindle it. The viper that the Milanese blazons on his shield will not make her so fair a tomb as Gallura’s co…
- HG-RC-131From Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body (2017)
84Some years ago, I looked up this boy from my past, wanted to know what had become of him. He does not have an uncommon name, but his name isn’t John Smith, either, so I had a chance. I looked and looked and looked. It…