Yearning

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 Looking for Alaska (2005)

  I wanted to say more, but the thoughts kept coming, unbidden and unwanted. If I’d been the author, I would’ve stopped thinking about my microbiome. I would’ve told Daisy how much I liked her idea for Mychal’s art project, and I would’ve told her that I did remember Davis Pickett, that I remembered being eleven and carrying a vague but constant fear. I would’ve told her that I remembered once at camp lying next to Davis on the edge of a dock, our legs dangling over, our backs against the rough-hewn planks of wood, staring together up at a cloudless summer sky. I would’ve told her that Davis and I never talked much, or even looked at each other, but it didn’t matter, because we were looking at the same sky together, which is maybe more intimate than eye contact anyway. Anybody can look at you. It’s quite rare to find someone who sees the same world you see. MARINA WATERS JOHN GREEN is the author of Looking for Alaska, An Abundance of Katherines, Paper Towns, The Fault in Our Stars, Turtles All the Way Down, and Will Grayson, Will Grayson (with David Levithan). His books have received many accolades, including a Printz Medal, a Printz Honor, and an Edgar Award. John has twice been a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize and was selected by TIME magazine as one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World. With his brother, Hank, John has co-created many online video projects, including Vlogbrothers and the educational channel Crash Course. He lives with his family in Indianapolis, Indiana. You can visit John online at johngreenbooks.com What’s next on your reading list? Discover your next great read! Get personalized book picks and up-to-date news about this author. Sign up now. _140192380_ * Julie was also like, “You should really use the word deadpan a bit less often in this novel.” Sadly, I ignored that advice.

• From Looking for Alaska (2005)

  And as I stood up to walk home and make my peace with the Colonel, I tried to imagine her in that chair, but I could not remember whether she crossed her legs. I could still see her smiling at me with half of Mona Lisa’s smirk, but I couldn’t picture her hands well enough to see her holding a cigarette. I needed, I decided, to really know her, because I needed more to remember. Before I could begin the shameful process of forgetting the how and the why of her living and dying, I needed to learn it: How. Why. When. Where. What. At Room 43, after quickly offered and accepted apologies, the Colonel said, “We’ve made a tactical decision to push back calling Jake. We’re going to pursue some other avenues first.” twenty-one days after AS DR. HYDE shuffled into class the next morning, Takumi sat down next to me and wrote a note on the edge of his notebook. Lunch at McInedible, it read. I scribbled Okay on my own notebook and then turned to a blank page as Dr. Hyde started talking about Sufism, the mystical sect of Islam. I’d only scanned through the reading—I’d been studying only enough not to fail—but in my scanning, I’d come across great last words. This poor Sufi dressed in rags walked into a jewelry store owned by a rich merchant and asked him, “Do you know how you’re going to die?” The merchant answered, “No. No one knows how they’re going to die.” And the Sufi said, “I do.” “How?” asked the merchant. And the Sufi lay down, crossed his arms, said, “Like this,” and died, whereupon the merchant promptly gave up his store to live a life of poverty in pursuit of the kind of spiritual wealth the dead Sufi had acquired. But Dr. Hyde was telling a different story, one that I’d skipped. “Karl Marx famously called religion ‘the opiate of the masses.’ Buddhism, particularly as it is popularly practiced, promises improvement through karma. Islam and Christianity promise eternal paradise to the faithful. And that is a powerful opiate, certainly, the hope of a better life to come. But there’s a Sufi story that challenges the notion that people believe only because they need an opiate. Rabe’a al-Adiwiyah, a great woman saint of Sufism, was seen running through the streets of her hometown, Basra, carrying a torch in one hand and a bucket of water in the other. When someone asked her what she was doing, she answered, ‘I am going to take this bucket of water and pour it on the flames of hell, and then I am going to use this torch to burn down the gates of paradise so that people will not love God for want of heaven or fear of hell, but because He is God.’” A woman so strong she burns heaven and drenches hell.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Nathan’s theology was very popular in Amsterdam: now the Messiah had become a Marrano, clinging in secret to the core of Judaism, while conforming outwardly to Islam. 56 Those Marranos who had long had trouble with the Torah looked forward to its imminent demise, once redemption was complete. Other Jews believed that they must continue to observe the Torah until the Messiah brought about full redemption, but that he would then institute a new Law which would contradict the old in every respect. A small minority of radical Shabbateans went further. They could not bring themselves to go back to the old Law, even on a temporary basis; they believed that Jews must follow their Messiah into the realm of evil and become apostates too. They converted to the mainstream faith—Christianity in Europe, and Islam in the Middle East—and remained Jewish in the privacy of their own homes. 57 These radicals also presaged a modern Jewish solution: many Jews would assimilate with gentile culture in most respects, but would privatize their faith, keeping it in a separate sphere. Shabbateans imagined Shabbetai living his double life in anguish, but in reality he seemed quite content with his Muslim persona. He spent his days studying the Shariah, the sacred law of Islam, and teaching the sultan’s spiritual adviser about Judaism. He was permitted visitors, and held court, receiving delegations of Jews from all over the world. They spoke of his great piety. Shabbetai was often to be seen in his home, sitting cradling the Torah scroll in his arms and singing hymns; people marveled at his devotion and his wonderful ability to enter sympathetically into other people’s feelings. 58 The ideas in Shabbetai’s circle were quite different from those of Nathan’s, and far more positive toward gentiles. Shabbetai seems to have seen all faiths as valid; he saw himself as a bridge between Judaism and Islam, and was also fascinated by Christianity and Jesus. Guests reported that sometimes he behaved like a Muslim, sometimes like a rabbi. The Ottomans permitted him to observe the Jewish festivals, and Shabbetai was frequently to be seen with a Koran in one hand and a Torah scroll in the other. 59 In the synagogues, Shabbetai tried to persuade Jews to convert to Islam; only then, he told them, would they return to the Holy Land. In one letter, written in 1669, Shabbetai vehemently denied that he had converted to Islam only under duress; the religion of Islam, he declared, was “the very truth,” and he had been sent as the Messiah to the gentiles as well as to the Jews. 60 Shabbetai’s death on September 17, 1676, was a severe blow to Shabbateans, since it seemed to preclude all hope of redemption. Nevertheless, the sect continued its underground existence, showing that the messianic outburst had not been a freak occurrence, but had touched something fundamental in the Jewish experience.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  In Luria’s myth, the creative process begins with an act of voluntary exile. It starts by asking how the world could exist if God is omnipresent. The answer is the doctrine of Zimzum (“withdrawal”): the infinite and inaccessible Godhead, which Kabbalists called Ein Sof (“Without End”), had to shrink into itself, evacuating, as it were, a region within itself in order to make room for the world. Creation had begun, therefore, with an act of divine ruthlessness: in its compassionate desire to make itself known in and by its creatures, Ein Sof had inflicted exile upon a part of itself. Unlike the orderly, peaceful creation described in the first chapter of Genesis, this was a violent process of primal explosions, disasters, and false starts which seemed to the Sephardic exiles a more accurate appraisal of the world they lived in. At an early stage in the Lurianic process, Ein Sof had tried to fill the emptiness it had created by Zimzum with divine light, but the “vessels” or “pipes” which were supposed to channel it shattered under the strain. Sparks of divine light fell into the abyss of all that was not God. After this “breaking of the vessels,” some of the sparks returned to the Godhead, but others remained trapped in this Godless realm, which was filled with the evil potential that Ein Sof had purged from itself in the act of Zimzum. After this disaster, creation was awry; things were in the wrong place. When Adam was created, he could have rectified the situation and, had he done so, the divine exile would have ended on the first Sabbath. But Adam sinned and henceforth the divine sparks were trapped in material objects, and the Shekhinah, the Presence that is the closest we come to an apprehension of the divine on earth, wandered through the world, a perpetual exile, yearning to be reunited with the Godhead.11

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  significant that previous major Christian missionary efforts had nearly all been undertaken by people whom the imperial Chalcedonian Church labelled as heretics – Bishop Eusebius of Nicomedia and the ‘Arian’ Ulfila to the northern ‘barbarians’, the Syriac Miaphysite Jacob Baradeus in the Middle East and the Syriac Dyophysites who spread Christianity into Arabia, Central Asia and (initially) to Ethiopia. The one substantial exception to this had been the initiatives of Celtic Britons, who were Catholic Christians, strongly influenced by the vigorous Catholic Church of Gaul. It was very important for the future shape of British Christian life that, like the Christians of Gaul, they decided to keep their literature and liturgy in the sacred language of the Catholic Western Church: Latin. From the late fourth century these Celtic Christians travelled beyond the frontiers of the decaying provinces of Britannia, into Hibernia (Ireland) and territories and islands to the north of Hadrian’s Wall, lands where Germanic peoples had as yet made little impact. We have met one of them already, Ninian of Whithorn (see pp. 313–14), but he is a shadowy figure compared with a driven, tormented British eccentric called Patrick, who was probably a younger contemporary of Ninian’s: Patrick and Ninian would both have been alive and active in Christian ministry when the great theologian Augustine was Bishop of Hippo. Patrick, unlike Ninian, is illuminated for us by his own account of his life, written in rough and confused Latin, but a wonderfully precious and rare survival.Dating this text and Patrick’s career is difficult, but it seems to fit into the first half of the fifth century, a generation after the death of Martin of Tours, a time when the Western Church was still much divided by the Pelagian controversy (see pp. 315–17): conflicts resound through what remains of Patrick’s writing. Grandson of a priest, he tells us the name of his home town, ‘Bannavemtaberniae’, the identity of which has provoked much debate, but it was probably one of the little settlements along Hadrian’s Wall.15 As a teenager, he was captured and enslaved by raiders from Ireland, and after wanderings to Gaul and a return to his own people, he felt compelled to go back to Ireland to act as bishop, gathering up what remained from the mission of a previous bishop, Palladius. Both this and a subsequent letter reveal that Patrick faced a good deal of distressing opposition alike in Britain, southern Scotland and Ireland, much of which was from fellow Christians, but this opposition is left behind in subsequent legend. Patrick was to become Apostle to Ireland and eventually, through the worldwide wanderings of the Irish, a saint inspiring veneration throughout the modern Catholic Church – but his posthumous sway was to extend even further, since his years as a slave across the seas (and his reputation for having expelled snakes from Ireland) inspired countless Africans

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  IN THE JEWISH WORLD, there were also signs that people were beginning to retreat from the overly rational forms of faith that had developed during the nineteenth century. In Germany, philosophers such as Herman Cohn (1842–1918) and Franz Rosenzweig (1886–1929) attempted to keep alive the values of the Enlightenment, though Rosenzweig also tried to revive the old ideas of mythology and ritual in a way that modernized people could appreciate. He described the various commandments of the Torah, which could not always be explained rationally, as symbols, pointing beyond themselves to the divine. These rites created an interior attitude that opened Jews to the possibility of the sacred, helping them to cultivate a listening, waiting attitude. The biblical stories of creation and revelation were not facts but expressions of spiritual realities in our inner lives. Other scholars, such as Martin Buber (1878–1965) and Gershom Scholem (1897–1982), directed attention to those forms of faith which had been dismissed by the rationalist historians. Buber revealed the richness of Hasidism and Scholem explored the world of the Kabbalah. But these older spiritualities, which belonged to a different world, were increasingly opaque to Jews who were imbued with the rational spirit. Zionists often experienced their defiantly secularist ideology in ways that would once have been called religious. People had to fill the spiritual vacuum somehow, in order to avoid nihilistic despair. If conventional religion no longer worked, they would create a secularist spirituality that filled their lives with transcendent meaning. Zionism was, like other modern movements, a return to a single, fundamental value that represented a new way of being Jewish. By going back to the Land, Jews would not only save themselves from the anti-Semitic catastrophe that some felt to be imminent, but they would also find psychic healing without God, the Torah, or the Kabbalah. The Zionist writer Asher Ginsberg (1856–1927), who wrote under the pseudonym Ahad Ha-Am (“One of the People”), was convinced that Jews had to develop a more rational and scientific way of looking at the world. But, like a true modern, he wanted to return to the irreducible essence of Judaism, which could only be found when Jews returned to their roots and took up residence in Palestine. Religion, he believed, was only the outer shell of Judaism. The new national spirit that Jews would create in the Holy Land would do what God had once done for them. It would become “a guide to all the affairs of life,” would reach “to the depths of the heart” and “connect with all one’s feelings.”53 The return to Zion would thus become the sort of interior journey once undertaken by Kabbalists: a descent to the depths of the psyche to achieve integration.

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  of Christian commonwealths in the east, or were snapped up by Western entrepreneurs profiting from the catastrophe. Especially significant was the presence of the great Greek philosopher Georgios Gemistos Plethon at the negotiations for reunion at the Council of Florence at the turn of the 1430s and 1440s (see pp. 492–3), because he was a charismatic exponent of Plato. While the Greek Church establishment posthumously repudiated Gemistos after the fall of Constantinople (see pp. 495–6), the Medici rulers of Florence celebrated his scholarship, and commissioned the equally gifted Marsilio Ficino to translate Plato into Latin. Plato’s reappearance was especially significant, because twelfth- and thirteenth-century Western scholasticism had been shaped by the rediscovery of his very different pupil Aristotle. Now Plato’s attitude to the ultimate problems of philosophy, his sense that the greatest reality lay beyond visible and quantifiable reality, disposed humanists to disrespect the whole style of scholastic learning, its careful distinctions and definitions. Indeed, Ficino saw Plato as having been providentially provided by God to illuminate the Christian message, first through Origen but now once more in his own city, and he viewed contemporary exponents of Aristotle as ‘wholly destructive of religion’.40 Ficino’s insight that Plato’s writings had profoundly affected early Christian thought was one of humanism’s legacies to our understanding of Christianity, long after his apocalyptic excitement had faded. One of the most important and distinctive features of Western Christian culture is its capacity to stand back from societies, both its own and others, and its yearning to understand past cultures in their own terms. In 1440 a group of humanist friends, headed by the architect and writer on art theory Leon Battista Alberti and encouraged by the local lord Cardinal Prospero Colonna, attempted the first major conscious venture in a scholarly exploration which had virtually no precedent in the ancient world, certainly none among its respected intellectual disciplines: archaeology. In the presence of an excited crowd and virtually all the leading men of the papal court, they tried to raise from the depths of Lake Nemi one of two giant Roman ships lying below: pleasure-craft commissioned by the Emperor Caligula, if they had but known. Their efforts succeeded in tearing the hulk apart but, undeterred by their own destructiveness, they analysed the fragments they retrieved and taught themselves about lost techniques of Roman shipbuilding. The Pope reapplied some of their findings to roof construction in the churches of Rome. These pioneer archaeologists had learned almost for the first time how artefacts from the past might be witnesses to its strangeness, its difference, as well as how the present might gain from the discovery. They could apply the same thought to written texts.41 Alongside their exhilarating rediscovery of Greek, humanists gained new

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  If Iranians lost Islam, they would lose themselves. That was the message of the charismatic young philosopher Dr. Ali Shariati (1933–77), to whose lecture halls the young Western-educated Iranians flocked in ever-increasing numbers during the late 1960s.53 Shariati had not had a conventional madrasah education, but had studied at the University of Mashhad and at the Sorbonne, where he had written a dissertation on Persian philosophy and studied the work of the French orientalist Louis Massignon, the existential philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, and the Third World ideologist Frantz Fanon. He had become convinced that it was possible to create a distinctively Shii ideology which would meet the spiritual needs of modern Iranians without cutting them off from their roots. After returning to Iran, Shariati eventually taught at the husainiyyah in north Tehran, which had been founded in 1965 by the philanthropist Muhammad Humayun. Humayun had been much moved by the lectures of the reforming ulema in the early sixties, and had established the husainiyyah to try to reach Iranian youth. In Iran, a husainiyyah was a center of devotion to Imam Husain, and was usually built beside the mosque. The hope was that the Kerbala story would inspire the young who attended classes at the husainiyyah to work for a better society. Iran was also experiencing the swing toward religion that had taken place in the Middle East after the 1967 war, and by 1968, Ayatollah Motahhari, one of the reformers who had helped to set it up, could write that, thanks to the husainiyyah, “our educated youth, after passing through a period of being astonished, even repulsed [by religion] are paying an attention and a concern for it that defies description.”54 None of the lecturers made as great an impact as Shariati. Students rushed to hear him during their lunch hour or after work, inspired by the passion and vehemence of his delivery. They could relate to him. Shariati dressed as they did, shared their dilemma of torn cultural allegiance, and some felt that he was like an older brother.55

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Gordon was an Orthodox Jew and Kabbalist, but he was also a student of Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Marx, and Tolstoy. He had come to believe that modern industrialized society exiled men and women from themselves. They had developed a one-sided and overrational approach to life. To counteract this, they must cultivate chavayah , an immediate, mystical experience of the sacred, by immersing themselves as fully as possible in the life of the natural landscape, because that was where the Infinite revealed itself to humanity. For Jews, that landscape must be in Palestine. “The soul of the Jew,” Gordon insisted, “is the offspring of the natural environment of the Land of Israel.” Only there could a Jew experience what Kabbalists had called “clarity, the depth of an infinitely clear sky, a clear perspective, mists of purity.” 55 By means of labor (avodah) a pioneer would experience “the divine unknown,” and would re-create himself, as the mystics had done in the course of their spiritual exercises. By working on the land, “the unnatural, defective, splintered person” that he had become in the Diaspora would be “changed into a natural, wholesome human being who is true to himself.” 56 For Gordon it was no accident that avodah , the word for “labor” or “service,” had once applied to the liturgy in the Temple. For the Zionist, holiness and wholeness were no longer to be found in conventional religious practices, but in their hard labor in the hills and farms of Galilee. One of the most innovative and daring Jewish attempts to spiritualize the secular was developed by Rabbi Abraham Yitzak Kook (1865–1935), who also migrated to Palestine in 1904 to become the rabbi of the new settler communities. It was an odd appointment. Unlike most of the Orthodox, Kook had been deeply stirred by the Zionist movement, but he had been horrified to hear that the delegates to the Second Zionist Congress in Basel in 1898 had issued the statement: “Zionism has nothing to do with religion.” 57 He condemned this remark in the strongest terms. It “spreads the terrible, black wings of death over our tender, lovely young national movement, by cutting it off from the source of its very life and the light of its splendor.” It was an “abomination and perverse;” a “poison” that was corrupting Zionism, causing it to “putrify and be covered in worms.” It could only turn Zionism “into an empty vessel … filled with a spirit of destructiveness and strife.” 58 Kook often spoke like one of the ancient prophets, but many elements in his thought were modern. He was one of the first religious people who perceived, long before the First World War, that nationalism could become lethal and that, without a sense of the sacred, politics could become demonic. He pointed to the example of the French Revolution, which had begun with such high ideals but had degenerated into an orgy of bloodshed and cruelty.

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  foundation of Harvard College meant that Massachusetts was unique among the North American colonies in never being short of ministers to serve its parishes, and that made establishing a single dominant Church all the easier. The clergy ministered to a federation of parishes made up of laity who were devotees of the Religion of the Book, possibly the most literate society then existing in the world. They felt as keenly as any godly congregations in the worldwide Reformed Protestant family that they must fulfil the hopes of a century of Reformation; they kept in close touch with like-minded congregations in England throughout the century and beyond, and were very conscious of their international heritage.10 Technically this was not a theocracy, a state run by the Church, but the Church’s government functioned side by side with secular government, as in Geneva. The elect were in charge of the Commonwealth; they were nevertheless still a minority of the population, particularly as children were born and grew up without having experienced the excitement of committing to emigration and a new life. Winthrop and his fellows were in any case conscious that not all who had crowded the Atlantic migration boats were pure in heart or sought godliness, and that some might have murkier reasons for fleeing England than objections to Laud’s sacramental theology. Such people should not be allowed to pollute the purified Church and should be excluded from government. In 1631, the franchise for the colony’s assembly was limited to Church members. Still it was compulsory for everyone to go to their parish church (known in New England simply as a ‘meeting house’), and the Massachusetts government tried to stop people settling beyond a certain distance from the meeting houses so that they could be properly supervised. In the Interregnum after 1649, government back home in England came to look pleasingly more like the Massachusetts model, and many New Englanders returned across the Atlantic to help out the new regime. However, the return of Charles II in 1660 threatened to bring everything to ruin on both sides of the ocean; the flow back to England abruptly dried up.11 As the leadership argued about how to preserve the delicate balance of their polity, they evolved a compromise which ingeniously built on their favourite notion of covenant. In 1662, after every congregation had voted on the issue, they agreed on establishing a ‘Half-Way Covenant’. Some could remain members of the Church by virtue of their baptism only, but the fully committed would have to offer proof of repentance and lively faith to gain the full Church membership which allowed them to receive communion at the Lord’s Table. Thus godliness, a wide franchise in the Massachusetts Assembly and an established Church could all be preserved. New England’s Congregationalism

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  The first [landing site] is just barely beneath the vertical now, and the second one is coming up—it’s just a grand view.” As the spacecraft moved over the second landing site, Lovell yearned to set down there; it seemed as close as the aircraft carriers he’d landed on so many times. He told himself he would come back here, not just to observe the Moon, but to walk on it. —Just before Apollo 8 slipped behind the Moon for its seventh pass over the far side, Lovell began singing to himself, as was his habit, then turned to his crewmates. “Did you guys ever think that one Christmas you’d be orbiting the Moon?” “Just hope we are not doing it on New Year’s,” Anders replied, his wit growing drier with each orbit. There was a dark truth behind Anders’s humor. If Apollo 8 was still here in a week, it meant the crew was never coming home. Susan Borman knew it, too. She cleared her kitchen table, sat, and started to compose Frank’s eulogy. She needed to be ready—not like her friend Pat White, who’d been taken by surprise by the death of her husband in the Apollo 1 fire, and by the swiftness with which government officials moved in to orchestrate funeral arrangements. This time, Susan would be in charge. She would do it the way she and Frank wanted it, and the way that was right for their sons. It seemed to her a better fate for a man like Frank to die in space than to burn up on the launchpad while training, and a better fate for her, knowing Frank was in a place he’d be forever, a beautiful Moon she could see in the night, a place where she could always find him. —Just eight and a half hours remained before Trans Earth Injection. On board Apollo 8, Anders secretly hoped something would go wrong—nothing catastrophic, of course, just enough that he could show Houston, and his crewmates, how beautifully he’d mastered the spacecraft and its systems. But the ship was proving to be a jewel. As the spacecraft readied to reconnect with Houston and begin its seventh pass across the lunar near side, Borman called out to his crewmates. “Oh, brother! Look at that!” “What was it?” Lovell asked. “Guess,” Borman said. Lovell did some quick computations. The ship was above the far side, at around 120º E longitude, and at the most southerly part of its orbit. For Borman to react like that, he must have seen Tsiolkovsky, one of the far side’s most impressive craters, 115 miles wide, with a peak rising 2 miles out of its sunken center, and 80-foot boulders strewn about. So that’s what Lovell guessed. “No,” Borman said. “It’s the Earth coming up.” Through his window, Borman had caught another Earthrise, this one as stunning as the first, not just for its beauty, but for how it came to him—unexpected, ascendant, a call from home.

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  much of the newly converted Jewish population was at best confused and at worst a cloak for their older faith. One of them described their unhappy situation as floating aimlessly ‘like a cork on the water’.58 Disoriented, leaderless and caught between two conflicting religions, conversos were easy prey for prophets proclaiming that the Last Days were coming. Such uncontrolled religious energy spilled over into the population at large, itself disturbed by the sudden change in the peninsula’s religious balance; around 1500 Spain was in a ferment of expectation of a universal monarchy, and avid for any dramatic manifestation of God’s plan for the future. By the second quarter of the sixteenth century, the Inquisition was making it clear that sudden conversions, sightings of messengers from Heaven or reports of statues that bled were no longer to be treated with respect, and it was bringing a new discipline to Spanish religion.59 17. Spain and Portugal in 1492 The Spanish version of Catholicism thus presents a complex set of features. It fostered deep personal yearnings for closeness to God, linked to mystical spirituality in Judaism and Islam and later bearing rich fruit in the mystical experience of Teresa of Ávila and John of the Cross (see pp. 673–5). Alongside official and unofficial moves to remove corruption from Church institutions, churchmen revealed a paranoid suspicion of any rival culture, which found increasing support from the secular authorities. After official Spain decisively

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  The pay wasn’t much, about ten cents an hour, but after work, he and the other young farmhands piled into trucks for a ride to the local lake, where they swam late into the night. Lying on his back beneath crystalline Wisconsin skies, Jim could pick out the Big Dipper, the North Star, and Cassiopeia, all of which he’d learned to use for navigation. All through the summer, celestial bodies moved across Jim’s nights, calling to him from their black canvas. —Working as a server of hot foods in the cafeteria during his junior year, Jim spotted Marilyn Gerlach, a pretty freshman he’d admired all year. He decided to ask her to the prom. “I don’t know how to dance,” she said. “I don’t either,” Jim replied. “We’ll learn together.” He went to Marilyn’s house, introduced himself to her parents, and played his record albums in her living room as they practiced their dance moves. Prom night came, the dance floor shook, and Jim and Marilyn became an item. Near the end of his junior year, Jim and some friends planned to build a rocket. Gathering cardboard mailing tubes for the body and #10 tin cans for fuel tanks was a cinch; finding rocket fuel was another matter. Jim got a formula from his chemistry teacher, then found a company in Chicago that sold the ingredients to make the fuel, but when he arrived something seemed amiss—the place, located in a tall building downtown, looked more like an attorney’s office than a hardware store. When Jim placed his order, the receptionist arched an eyebrow. “You want sulfur, potassium nitrate, and charcoal?” “Yes, ma’am, just a few pounds.” She asked for Jim’s name—his full name—then summoned a man from the back. “Do you know what those chemicals make when mixed together?” the man asked. “Yes, sir. Rocket fuel.” “No, son. That’s gunpowder.” No one looked more surprised than Jim. But he told the man he was still willing to buy it. The man, however, was not willing to sell. For one, he told Jim, the company sold its chemicals by the truckful. Second, Jim was seventeen. Third, fourth, fifth, and sixth, Jim was seventeen. Back in Milwaukee, Jim’s teacher got a kick out of the story, then helped him and his friends find the chemicals in appropriate quantities. A few days later, a three-foot rocket took shape, complete with wooden nose cone and fins, and a fuse made from a soda straw. Protected by a welder’s mask, Jim took the creation to an open field, lit the fuse, and ran with pals for cover behind rocks. Across the way, Marilyn watched from a safe distance. On ignition, the rocket screamed into the sky, leaving a trail of crooked smoke as it climbed eighty feet before exploding and raining down blackened shards of cardboard tubing. Somewhere, Robert Goddard was smiling. —Toward the end of Jim’s senior year of high school in 1946, he visited a Milwaukee fairground. There, he witnessed a wonder.

• From Holy Ghost Girl (2012)

  unchanged. I thought I recognized every dusty outcropping of rock, every stand of cedar and pad of prickly pear. The person who looked out the window, the woman who had changed the way she thought, spoke, dressed, prayed, or didn’t pray, the woman who had sold her birthright, she was the one I didn’t know. I pointed out a gravel road. “Slow down. Turn right.” My husband swerved, and all at once we were there. Dusty cars of every make and model were scattered across the scrubby field. Small groups of people streamed toward a large utilitarian building, the Terrellite church, positioned in what appeared to be the same spot the tent had occupied during the run-up to the end-time. My husband parked the car and we stepped out into the sunlight of a mild November day. A light breeze played at the edges of my suit jacket. No west Texas gusts pulled or pushed at me. No need to pull my coat tighter about me. No need for a coat at all. We picked our way across the dry, rocky terrain, moving ever closer to the church. I remembered the times I had backed away, literally and figuratively, from anything that had evoked this place, these people. The pop singer who crooned “Job’s God Is True” at the after-hours party, the sad little gospel tent in Boston Common, the voice of a street preacher wafting through a hotel window ten stories above San Francisco, the French Holy Rollers who tried to convert me in Nice. Trickster spirits that winked at me from unexpected corners of my life, reminders that all was not as it seemed, that I was not as I seemed. Family members clustered outside the church doors, arranging themselves in two long wobbly lines. My sisters stood near the front of the line, an ordinary and astonishing sight. A remnant of scripture came to mind: “. . . and the last shall be first.” Unsure of whether to join the family or take a seat inside, I positioned myself to the side of the line. Was I family? Friend? Foe? Pam walked over, took my arm, and settled the question. I filed into church that morning with all of the women and children who had lived separate and sometimes secret lives with Brother Terrell. Legitimate and illegitimate, adopted and semiadopted, steps, halves, and blood relatives, mistresses and wives paraded down the aisle, two by two. The existence of my sisters and other children born outside the sanctity of marriage had become known fifteen years earlier, but the funeral marked our first and only appearance as a family. We numbered around seventy as we filed into the center section of the church. My husband and I took seats behind my three sisters. The secrets Brother Terrell had gone to such lengths to conceal had names and faces and sat shoulder to shoulder in his church, and yet it was a day like any other. The Earth didn’t shift on its

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  Gemini 7, a two-week Earth-orbital flight, the longest mission ever planned by the space agency. In a matter of months, James Arthur Lovell, Jr., would be going into space. To some, the pairing of Borman and Lovell might have seemed curious—even doomed. Borman didn’t bother with space dreams, spent no energy imagining the heavens. He’d come to NASA for a single purpose—to help America defeat the Soviet Union. In meetings or in training, he could come off as brash or bullheaded if he believed you to be impeding the mission; sometimes he’d walk out on a discussion, even over drinks after work, if he sensed bullshit in the air. That kind of directness earned Borman almost universal respect, but not everyone liked him for it. Lovell seemed Borman’s opposite. He had ridden a dream—of exploring the cosmos and flying rockets to new worlds—from childhood all the way to NASA. And while it would please Lovell to beat the Russians, he mostly thrilled to the idea of going places forever thought unreachable and reporting back to the world about what he’d seen. Few could deny Lovell’s abilities as a thinker or a pilot, but it was his warmth and friendliness that people remembered most. And yet, from the day they began working together, Borman and Lovell seemed a natural match. Each respected the other’s abilities, work ethic, intellect, and piloting skills. And they made each other laugh. To many, it seemed the men had been friends since boyhood. In early June 1965, Lovell packed Marilyn and their three kids into the car and drove from Houston to the Cape to watch one of the Gemini launches in person. Asleep in bed one night at the Cocoa Beach Holiday Inn, Lovell was awakened by the sound of his wife munching saltines. “What’s going on?” he asked. “I hate to tell you this,” Marilyn said, “but I think, I mean I know...I’m pregnant.” It was great news but could not have been more awkwardly timed. Marilyn was due around the time Lovell was scheduled to fly on Gemini 7 in early December 1965. Many at NASA believed the agency would remove an astronaut from a flight if his wife was pregnant, so Lovell and Marilyn had to figure out what to do. To him, the answer was simple— silence. He would keep training and say nothing; she would angle to be

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  — By the time Apollo 8 launched, NASA was considering just two possible sites for a future landing mission. Both were located in the Sea of Tranquillity, to the right side of the full Moon as seen from America and other places in Earth’s northern hemisphere. NASA wanted to land during the lunar morning, when temperatures were moderate and low Sun angle would create long shadows that would help a commander discern a smooth spot on which to set down. But those conditions shifted every day on the Moon. By choosing two sites, twelve degrees apart, NASA ensured that if it had to delay launch by a day, the lunar module would still have an optimal landing site when it arrived. Both sites also satisfied other important NASA criteria for the first lunar landing. They were accessible to a spacecraft flying a free-return trajectory—a NASA safety requirement—and they existed in areas with ample level terrain, which meant a lunar module wouldn’t have to expend an undue amount of propellant hovering and maneuvering to avoid boulders and slopes before setting down. Among Apollo 8’s tasks were to confirm that its own trajectory could be used by future spacecraft to reach these landing sites, and to get a close-up view of the areas under the same lighting conditions as the future landing mission would encounter. As Apollo 8 coasted over the first of these sites during its sixth pass over the near side, Lovell described it for Houston. Even the shadows, a critical element to judging shape, depth, and distances, looked excellent to him. “I have a beautiful view of it. The first [landing site] is just barely beneath the vertical now, and the second one is coming up—it’s just a grand view.” As the spacecraft moved over the second landing site, Lovell yearned to set down there; it seemed as close as the aircraft carriers he’d landed on so many times. He told himself he would come back here, not just to observe the Moon, but to walk on it. — Just before Apollo 8 slipped behind the Moon for its seventh pass over the far side, Lovell began singing to himself, as was his habit, then turned

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  was actually quite masculine drew both men and women to him. that his Blancheflor was his enemy he faltered and A potent variation on this theme is the blending of physical heat and sought to escape: but at emotional coldness. Dandies like Beau Brummel and Andy Warhol com-once came hope, bringing bine striking physical appearances with a kind of coldness of manner, a dis-him her love, and a fond tance from everything and everyone. They are both enticing and elusive, aspiration, and so perforce he remained. In the face of and people spend lifetimes chasing after such men, trying to shatter their such discord he did not unattainability. (The power of apparently unattainable people is devilishly know where to turn: no-seductive; we want to be the one to break them down.) They also wrap where could he go forward. The more he strove to flee, themselves in ambiguity and mystery, either talking very little or talking the more firmly love forced only of surface matters, hinting at a depth of character you can never reach. him back. The harder he When Marlene Dietrich entered a room, or arrived at a party, all eyes in-struggled to escape, love drew him back more firmly. evitably turned to her. First there were her startling clothes, chosen to make heads turn. Then there was her air of nonchalant indifference. Men, and — G O T T F R I E D VON STRASSBURG, TRISTAN, TRANSLATED BY A . T . women too, became obsessed with her, thinking of her long after other HATTO memories of the evening had faded. Remember: that first impression, that Send Mixed Signals • 193 entrance, is critical. To show too much desire for attention is to signal insecurity, and will often drive people away; play it too cold and disinterested, on the other hand, and no one will bother coming near. The trick is to combine the two attitudes at the same moment. It is the essence of coquetry. Perhaps you have a reputation for a particular quality, which immediately comes to mind when people see you. You will better hold their attention by suggesting that behind this reputation some other quality lies lurking. No one had a darker, more sinful reputation than Lord Byron.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  Most of us carry these with their actual selves, love is impossible. • The transfer of the ego-ideal to a person is the most characteristic trait of love. —THEODOR REIK, OF LOVE AND LUST I gave [Sylphide] the eyes of one girl in the village, the fresh complexion of another. The portraits of great ladies of the time of Francis I, Henry IV, and Louis XIV, hanging in our drawing room, lent me other features, and I even borrowed beauties from the pictures of the Madonna in the churches. This magic creature followed me invisibly everywhere, I conversed with her as if with a real person; she changed her appearance according to the degree of my madness; Aphrodite without a veil, Diana shrouded in azure and rose, Thalia in a laughing mask, Hebe with the goblet of youth—or she became a fairy, giving me dominion over nature. . . . The delusion lasted two whole years, in the course of which my soul attained the highest peak of exaltation. —CHATEAUBRIAND, MEMOIRS FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE, QUOTED IN FRIEDRICH SIEBURG, CHATEAUBRIAND, TRANSLATED BY VIOLET M. MACDONALD 338 • The Art of Seduction ideals around with us, buried just below the surface. We are secretly disap- pointed in how much we have had to compromise, how far below the ideal we have fallen as we have gotten older. Make your targets feel they are liv- ing out this youthful ideal, and coming closer to being the person they wanted to be, and you will effect a different kind of regression, creating a feeling reminiscent of adolescence. The relationship between you and the seduced is in this instance more equal than in the previous kinds of regressions—more like the affection between siblings. In fact the ideal is often modeled on a brother or sister. To create this effect, strive to repro- duce the intense, innocent mood of a youthful infatuation. The Reverse Parental Regression. Here you are the one to regress: you deliberately play the role of the cute, adorable, yet also sexually charged child. Older people always find younger people incredibly seductive. In the presence of youth, they feel a little of their own youth return; but they are in fact older, and mixed into the invigoration they feel in young people's company is the pleasure of playing the mother or father to them. If a child has erotic feelings toward a parent, feelings that are quickly repressed, the parent must deal with the same problem in reverse. Assume the role of the child in relation to your targets, however, and they get to act out some of those repressed erotic sentiments. The strategy may seem to call for a differ- ence in age, but this is actually not critical. Marilyn Monroe's exaggerated little-girl qualities worked just fine on men her age. Emphasizing a weak- ness or vulnerability on your part will give the target a chance to play the protector. Some Examples 1.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  gleaming substance lative, that we are rarely charmed or deceived by them. We have grown having luster, glitter, and increasingly cynical. Try to persuade a person by appealing to their con-sparkle . . . those rays of sciousness, by saying outright what you want, by showing all your cards, and the eye are reflected back, what hope do you have? You are just one more irritation to be tuned out. and the observer then beholds himself and To avoid this fate you must learn the art of insinuation, of reaching the obtains an ocular vision of unconscious. The most eloquent expression of the unconscious is the his own person. This is dream, which is intricately connected to myth; waking from a dream, we what you see when you look into a mirror; in that are often haunted by its images and ambiguous messages. Dreams obsess us situation you are as it were because they mix the real and the unreal. They are filled with real charac-looking at yourself through ters, and often deal with real situations, yet they are delightfully irrational, the eyes of another. pushing realities to the extremes of delirium. If everything in a dream were —IBN HAZM, THE RING OF THE D O V E : A TREATISE ON THE realistic, it would have no power over us; if everything were unreal, we ART AND PRACTICE OF ARAB would feel less involved in its pleasures and fears. Its fusion of the two is LOVE, TRANSLATED BY A . J . what makes it haunting. This is what Freud called the "uncanny": some-ARBERRY thing that seems simultaneously strange and familiar. We sometimes experience the uncanny in waking life—in a déjà vu, a miraculous coincidence, a weird event that recalls a childhood experience. The only important constellation of collective People can have a similar effect. The gestures, the words, the very being of seduction produced by men like Kennedy or Andy Warhol, for example, evoke both the real and modern times [ is] that of the unreal: we may not realize it (and how could we, really), but they are film stars or cinema like dream figures to us. They have qualities that anchor them in reality— idols. . . . They were our only myth in an age sincerity, playfulness, sensuality—but at the same time their aloofness, their incapable of generating superiority, their almost surreal quality makes them seem like something great myths or figures of out of a movie. seduction comparable to those of mythology or art. • These types have a haunting, obsessive effect on people. Whether in The cinema's power lives in public or in private, they seduce us, making us want to possess them both its myth. Its stones, its physically and psychologically. But how can we possess a person from a psychological portraits,

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  Reese asks if Ames wants some water. She’s wearing a camisole and a pair of cotton sleep shorts. Without waiting for a response she walks past him, trailing a hand on his lightly, then pulls two glasses from a shabby doorless cabinet and fills them in the sink. “You’re in trouble with Ir-is,” she sing-whispers, drawing out Iris’s name. “Same as always.” “T think you interrupted her mid-fuck.” Some sort of slow, bass- heavy darkwave cranks up from behind Iris’s door, sex music for goths. “Well, next time answer your phone. Katrina’s flipping out. I wanted to hear from you what’s really going on.” Reese hands him a glass of water. “I didn’t answer my phone because I finally fell asleep.” Reese takes him back into her tiny room, where there isn’t any place for Ames to sit except on the bed beside her. He notes the floral bedspread. It’s very girly, and it depresses him. This little room, the hopeful nod to girlishness from a woman he’s known for so long. On a makeup table, he sees the same jewelry chest in the shape of a book, the same chest that she had when they shared an apartment, and the little makeup mirror from Costco. He’d had an identical mirror—they had bought them together. Reese hands him a pillow, puffs one up for herself and puts it against the wall to lean on. The pillow has little centipede footprints of mascara from her eyelashes. Like always. “So?” Reese says. “She’s really upset. Can you at least tell me your side of the story?” “Are you upset too?” “Yeah. I stormed out, I was furious. With both of you.” But he doesn’t feel furious. He feels nauseated, needy. He wants to put his face in Reese’s lap. For a woman to run her fingers through his hair and say that he has tried so, so hard, that she sees how hard he’s tried. Ames can’t find a place to set down the water she gave him, so he drinks it all, then leans over and puts the glass on the floor. Just then, from through the wall, comes a series of cracks, and then the burst of Iris’s laughter. “Oh wow,” Ames says. “Is she being flogged?” Reese shrugs. “I can’t see Iris bothering to buy a flogger when guys have perfectly serviceable hands to wear out first.” “Can we take a walk or something?” Ames asks. “This is the exact wrong soundtrack” “Where to?” Reese answers her own question, “But oh, we could go down to the river? There was a work-stoppage order where they’re building the skyscraper, and they have been leaving the fence around it wide open. You can wander right up to the water to get a view of the Midtown skyline.”