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 Reading the Bible from the Margins (2002)

  In Spanish, it is those who hunger for justice to be done to all members of the community, especially to the disenfranchised, and who thirst for justice against all oppressors, that God will fully satisfy. The English text of Luke tells us of the centurion who, witnessing Christ's crucifixion, proclaimed, “Certainly this man was righteous” (23:47). Christ was the unsoiled innocent lamb who died for our sins. In Spanish, this same centurion says, “Certainly this was a just man.” Christ was a just man who died an unjust death. The advice given in 1 Timothy in English reads, “The law is laid down not for the righteous but for the lawless and disobedient, for the ungodly and sinful, for the unholy and profane” (1:19). While the English-speaking reader is assured that the law does not apply to her or him because by faith in Christ he or she has been justified and is neither ungodly, sinful, unholy, nor profane, the Spanish reader understands the passage as stating that the individual practicing justice does not need the law, for the law is already internal and her or his actions are only an outward expression of inward conversion.4 To read the Bible from the margins becomes an act of faith derived from two sources: a marginalized location (reality) and a paradigm (ideal) derived by the community of faith, a model based on justice. The communal expression of faith avoids the Euroamerican pitfall of a utilitarian individuality that relegates religion to the private sphere, transforming the public Christ into a personal Savior. It is at the cross where reality and idealism intersect. Rather than attempting to define and explain the mystery of Jesus on a cross, those residing in the margins of society attempt to define themselves in light of this mystery. Conversion is not a call to a new religion founded by Jesus; it is a call to a radically subversive lifestyle. Conversion constructs a life existence within a sacred space created both by reality and by the power of the ideal, a space transcending nature, the senses, and our ability to rationalize. All too often, the social location of the poor, specifically their spirituality, is romanticized. Yet their salvation arises when their quest for liberation from oppressive structures intersects with the action (praxis) of Christ, who willingly hung from a cross. Salvation is found in solidarity with those on the margins who discover a Christ who is also marginalized and crucified. Hence faith becomes a special form of consciousness containing specific consequences for the will. Satisfaction of intellectual needs ceases to be the ultimate goal. Rather, the longing of the heart to answer the unanswerable questions caused by an existence alienated from the earth's resources becomes a religious quest for meaning. ARE YOU SAVED? Sin opposes God's benevolent purposes for creation and is responsible for the corruption of God's created order.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  interest. We are marked by the continual desire to possess what we do not have—the object projected by our fantasies. Learn to create some mystery around you, to use strategic absence to make people desire your return, to want to possess you. Dangle in front of others what they are missing most in life, what they are forbidden to have, and they will go crazy with desire. The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence. Overcome this weakness in yourself by embracing your circumstances, your fate. The Object of Desire In 1895 eleven-year-old Gabrielle Chanel sat by her mother’s bedside for several days and watched her slowly die from tuberculosis at the age of thirty-three. Gabrielle’s life had been hard, but now it could only get worse. She and her siblings had grown up in poverty, shuttled from one relative’s house to another. Their father was an itinerant peddler of goods who hated any kind of ties or responsibility and was rarely at home. Their mother, who often accompanied her husband on the road, was the only comforting force in their lives. As Gabrielle had feared, a few days after the mother’s death her father showed up and deposited Gabrielle and her two sisters at a convent in central France. He promised to return for them quite soon, but they would never see him again. The nuns at the convent, housed in a former medieval monastery, took in all sorts of girls to care for, mostly orphans. They enforced strict discipline. Within the somber walls of the monastery, which was sparsely decorated, the girls were to live a life of austerity and spiritual practice. They each had only two dresses they could wear, both alike and formless. Luxuries were forbidden. The only music was church music. The food was exceptionally plain. In her first few months there, Gabrielle tried to accommodate herself to this new world, but she felt impossibly restless. One day, she discovered a series of romance novels that somehow had been smuggled into the convent, and soon they became her only salvation. They were written by Pierre Decourcelle, and almost all of them involved a Cinderella-like story—a young girl growing up in poverty, shunned and despised, suddenly finds herself whisked into a world of wealth through some clever plot twist. Gabrielle could completely identify with the protagonists, and she particularly loved the endless descriptions of the dresses that the heroines would wear. The world of palaces and châteaux seemed so very far away from her, but in those moments in which she drifted through novel after novel she could feel herself participating in the plot, and it gave her an overwhelming desire to make it come to life, even though it was forbidden for her to want such things and seemingly impossible to ever have them. At the age of eighteen she left the convent for a boarding school, also run by nuns. There she was trained for a career as a

• From The Boys of My Youth (1998)

  The truth is, I’m weary of all that men stuff. It’s either so boring that I’d rather hang around with my girlfriends or it’s like gunfire to the chest. I actually like it inside the bell jar — I don’t have to breathe anyone’s air but my own and I still get a view of the landscape. There’s a woman here at the colony, Stasia, a filmmaker who went to a workshop to learn how to walk over a bed of hot coals. She tells me about it postnap, as we’re waiting for the dinner bell, having drinks on the terrace. The thing is, why would anyone want to walk over a bed of hot coals? “I saw a flyer for it on a lamppost,” she explains. They spent an afternoon in the presence of a short charismatic man, talking about their feelings and consulting various higher powers. At about four-thirty they took their shoes off and performed the miracle. So, what did it feel like? “It felt like hot coals,” she says. I knew it would. The door to the terrace swings open and out walks our friend Frank. Right behind him is a new guy. Frank immediately starts filling us in on how much work he got done during the day. I feel vaguely guilty about the magnitude of my afternoon nap. Somehow the quality of the light has changed on the terrace, there’s a dangerous peach glow coming over the horizon. The new guy is introducing himself to a group of people. There are handshakes around. Today Frank finished a painting and started two new ones. Stasia says that you don’t burn your feet because the coals are too light. The new guy looks over in this direction. It’s like when you put your hand in a hot oven; the coals are almost light as air, they’re hot but have very made density so they don’t burn you. I can feel the frayed edge of his denim jacket and he’s standing all the way over there. I look at my hand. Frank asks me how the boys of my youth are doing. “They’re boring,” I say absently. Here he comes. [image "art" file=Image00001.jpg] Pertinent details. Blond poet. A slightly jaded and weary air about him. Something recognizable in the sideways glance, the set of the shoulders. He’s sober now, but from what I can tell the former bad boy is buried in a shallow grave. The color of his eyes escapes me but not the quality of the gaze. He appears to be fully and alarmingly present at all times. I have to get out of here. He leaves me a note on the mail table, full of charming misspellings. We meet and walk, describe our lives. He puts his hand on my arm as we cross a street and continues listening, offering kindness and advice. I have a sudden overwhelming desire to touch his face. I put my hands in the pockets of my jeans.

• From Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away (2022)

  When you are weighing whether to quit something or stick with it, you can’t know for sure whether you can succeed at what you’re doing because that’s probabilistic. But there is a crucial difference between the two choices. Only one choice—the choice to persevere—lets you eventually find out the answer. The desire for certainty is the siren song calling us to persevere, because perseverance is the only path to knowing for sure how things will turn out if you stay the course. If you choose to quit, you will always be left to wonder, “What if?” Just as the Sirens of mythology lured sailors toward their song, we are lured to persevering because we want to know. It’s the only way to avoid those “what ifs.” The problem, of course, is that sometimes, the siren song lures you toward a rocky shoal that breaks your ship apart. Or it leads you to your death at the top of Everest. In fact, the only time you can be sure you should quit is when it’s no longer a decision, when you’re at the edge of the abyss or you’ve already stumbled into it. Then you have no choice but to abandon course. I challenge you to put yourself in the position of climbers near the top of the mountain. Imagine having spent all that time and effort and money. Imagine the sacrifices that you and your family have made for you to get to the top of Everest. You are within a few hundred feet—just a few hours—from the summit. Could you turn around without knowing for sure whether you could have made it, after everything you put yourself through and all you’ve asked of others? How much of a burden would it be having to live with “What if I hadn’t quit?” for the rest of your life? Most people in that situation could not do it. Hutchison, Taske, and Kasischke did, but a much larger number—those who died that day and many others who barely escaped death—were unable to resist the call to persevere. The Super Bowl Is a Corporate Graveyard Just as you have to exercise skill in choosing which hills to climb, you also need skill in choosing when to climb down.

• From What Belongs to You (2016)

  And so the following weekend I met K.’s girlfriend, about whom I had heard so much I felt I already knew her, though we were still awkward and reserved with each other when we met in the kitchen of K.’s house. His mother handed us our drinks and made a general fuss of welcome, while of course all we wanted was to be left alone, to claim our privacy, which I anticipated with eager dread and for which K. I knew was simply eager. He fidgeted in his seat, glancing first at me and then at her, holding my gaze though he didn’t hold hers, as though he couldn’t bear to look at her for long. I was safer, he could share with me what he felt, and if this wasn’t the intimacy we had known or that I craved it was still a kind of intimacy, which I could be part of even if it wasn’t exactly mine. He drummed his fingers on the table, he shuffled his feet beneath it. We had already introduced ourselves, K.’s girlfriend and I; she was slight and blond and unremarkably pretty, smiling at me with her big teeth. I had resisted liking her but I did like her, she was kind and wanted my friendship, she had heard so much, she said, she had been waiting so long to meet me. Her name was K., which was something they joked about, their sharing of the initial: K. and K., they said, laughing, making a kind of music of their names, K. and K. They already had jokes of their own, which made them laugh even in front of K.’s mother, who laughed at them too. Even in her presence it was clear what they felt for each other, their feelings were bright and open, sure of their place; if there were certain obstacles to be overcome they were just for show, scenery for a drama everyone would applaud. Even their parents would applaud it, they only pretended to disapprove, when what they really felt was indulgence and pride and the sweetness of youth, their own youth that they could remember and relive and sanction.

• From Paul and Matthew Among Jews and Gentiles: Essays in Honor of Terence L. Donaldson (2021)

  In what follows I offer a close reading of Matt 1, and especial y the women in the genealogy, to argue (with Anderson, Clements, and others) that from the beginning the women of Matthew’s gospel are central to its good news. In turning again to the women of the genealogy I propose to argue the point a little differently and, I hope, strengthen it—and this in two ways. First, I want to ask in particular, in the face of Mary’s silence, about voice. Antoinette Wire states that Matthew’s gospel reflects a silencing of women’s voices as an original y marginal movement of Jesus followers becomes a scribal movement of the “self-sufficient and classical y educated.” 9 Even Anne Clements, who argues that in the birth narrative Matthew reclaims women’s stories and in the gospel general y “subverts and deconstructs the male-centred focus of the gospel,” 10 nevertheless says this of Mary: “she never speaks”; “Mary as a character remains in the background. ”11 The question of voice, Mary’s voice and Tamar’s, the voices of women in the Gospel of Matthew, is compelling for me both personal y and historical y. Historical y: how did we get from the silence of Mary to Perpetua, young mother and convert to Christ, who in the year 203 is hailed as prophet by her small band of catechumens and proclaims Christ in her own voice? Is Perpetua simply a Montanist exception? Does Matthew, alternatively, stand in a tradition of early Christian rhetorical deflection of attention away from ordinary women’s voices in the early church, such as Shel y Matthews has drawn attention to in Acts? 12 Or may we find in Matthew’s presentation of women in 6 Anderson, “Matthew: Gender and Reading,” Semeia 28 (1983): 3–27, here 10. 7 See, to varying degrees, Janice Capel Anderson, “Mary’s Difference: Gender and Patriarchy in the Birth Narratives,” J R 67.2 (1987): 183–202; Anderson, “Matthew: Gender and Reading,” 3–27; Wainwright, Feminist Critical Reading; Wim J. C. Weren, “The Five Women in Matthew’s Genealogy,” CBQ 59 (1997): 288–305; Dorothy Jean Weaver, “‘Wherever This Good News Is Proclaimed’: Women and God in the Gospel of Matthew,” Int 64.4 (2010): 390–401; E. Anne Clements, Mothers on the Margins: The Significance of the Women in Matthew’s Genealogy (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2014). Anderson and Wainwright note that there is a tension in Matthew between androcentric and patriarchal structures reflected in the text, and a treatment of women which at times challenges those structures. Cf. Stuart L. Love, Jesus and Marginal Women: The Gospel of Matthew in Social-Scientific Perspective (Matrix: The Bible in Mediterranean Context 5; Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2009), esp. 5, 218. 8 Clements, Mothers on the Margins, 234.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House as Memory Palace From the street, here is the house. There is a front door, but you never go in the front door. Here is what lines the driveway: all the boys who liked you as a girl. Colin, the dentist’s son, who told you in a soft voice that your dress was beautiful. You looked down to confirm for yourself, and then skipped merrily away. (A diva, even then! Your mother told you this story; you were so young you did not remember it on your own.) Seth, who, in sixth grade, bought you the brand-new Animorphs book— the one where Cassie transmogrifies into a butterfly on the cover—and had his mother drive him to your house so he could give it to you. Adam, your beloved friend who worked at the local movie theater and brought home garbage bags of day-old popcorn so you could watch movies your parents would never let you see: Memento and Dancer in the Dark and Pulp Fiction and Mulholland Drive and Y Tu Mamá También. Adam burned you so many CDs. Some of them were too weird for you. There was one band who just destroyed instruments into microphones, and you rolled your eyes and said, “This is stupid.” But then Adam’s mom took both of you to Philadelphia in January to see a Godspeed You! Black Emperor concert. The band started late, and you huddled together in a shared hoodie. The music was byzantine, kaleidoscopic, inexpressibly beautiful. You didn’t know how to even talk about the mix of audio and sound, the way the symphony of it washed over you, vibrated every part of your body. Once, Adam wrote a story about you and later, a song, when you went away to college. You did not know what to do with Adam’s love, the steady and undemanding affection of it. Then, Tracey, who had a twin brother, Timmy. They were Mormon and sweet, and you had a crush on Timmy, but Tracey had a crush on you. You once ordered a free Book of Mormon from the internet and ended up having a two-hour-long conversation with a young guy—he sounded so handsome—who was calling from Salt Lake City to gauge your interest in their religion. You couldn’t say, “I ordered it because I am in love with one half of a set of Mormon twins and the other half has a crush on me.” So instead, you bantered about theology for two hours before you regretfully got off the phone. Anyway, those boys. You were suspicious of their feelings because you had no reason to love yourself—not your body, not your mind. You rejected so much gentleness. What were you looking for? The back patio: college. So many unrequited crushes, and—ultimately—the worst sex. You once drove across four states to sleep with a man in upstate New York in the dead of winter. It was so cold your drugstore-brand astringent face wash froze in its tube. The sex was bad, obviously, but what you remember most clearly is what you wanted from that night. You wanted that drive-across-four-states desire. You wanted someone to be obsessed with you. How could you accomplish that? You were awake all night staring at the streetlight in the parking lot outside his bedroom window. Why did men never own curtains? How do you get someone you want to want you? Why did no one love you? The kitchen: OkCupid, Craigslist. Living in California and trying to date women, but failing because Bay Area lesbians proved to be pretty testy about the whole bisexual thing. So then, a parade of men: sweet men and terrible men and older men. Professionals and students. An astrophysicist, several programmers. One guy with a boat in the Berkeley marina. Then, moving to Iowa and going on a bunch of terrible dates, including with a man you kept seeing later in the waiting room of your therapist’s office. He played piano. A med student, maybe? You can barely remember. The living room, the office, the bathroom: boyfriends, or something approximating them. Casey and Paul and Al. Casey was the worst. Al was the kindest. Paul was knock-you-sideways perfect; he fucked you and fed you and tried to teach you to love California. It was all you ever wanted. He was so pretty. You loved his downy ass, his surprisingly soft scruff, the strength of his hands. You wanted to crawl up inside him and have him crawl up inside you. He made you feel special and sexy and smart. He broke up with you because he didn’t love you, which is a very good reason to break up with somebody, even though at the time you wanted to die. The bedroom: don’t go in there.

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  I saw myself riding shotgun beside Skipper in this fast, beautiful red car, the two of us having adventures along the way and helping people out of situations too tough for them to handle by themselves. They would want us to stay afterward but we would always move on, leaving them to stare at our dust as we receded down the highway. It seemed to me that Mexico, a barren place with unseen trumpet players wandering in the background, was a long way off, and that we would be a long time gone. I told Arthur I was going. I also told a few other kids, and some of the people on my paper route. As we were eating dinner one night Dwight said, “Say there, mister, what’s this I hear about you going to Mexico?” He was looking at me. Pearl said, “If he gets to go, I get to go too.” My mother laughed. “Mexico! Who said anything about Mexico?” “He did,” Dwight told her. “Jack, is that true?” my mother asked. “Did you tell someone you were going to Mexico?” “Skipper said I could,” I told her. “Huh?” Skipper said. “I said what?” I looked at him and remembered for the first time in days that he hadn’t actually said I could go along. “You said you’d think about it,” I told him. “No kidding? I said that?” I nodded. “Solly, Cholly,” he said. “No can do.” He must have seen the effect these words had on me, because he went on to explain that his friend Ray was planning to go along. They’d be sleeping in the car to save money and that meant there was only room for the two of them. “It’s a moot point,” Dwight said. It’s a moot point was one of his favorite weighty utterances, that and It’s academic . “Some other time,” Skipper said. Pearl asked him to get her a sombrero. “I want castanets,” Norma said. She wiggled her shoulders and sang “La Cucaracha” until Dwight told her to pipe down. SKIPPER AND I shared the smallest room in the house. We used the same desk, the same dresser, the same closet. A space of five or six feet separated our beds. But I never felt cramped in there until Skipper left for Mexico. Because he took up so much room when he was home, I could not forget that he was gone, and that led me to think about him and his friend Ray out on the road, free as birds. And those thoughts made me feel cheated and confined. I believed that Skipper should have taken me instead of Ray. I had asked first and, after all, I was his brother. This meant something to me but I saw that it meant nothing to him.

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  Armed with an ideology of love that advocates togetherness, we are awkward about pursuing autonomy. This is especially true of the individuality of our desire. Even couples who grant one another considerable space elsewhere—separate vacations, nights out on the town, close friends of the opposite sex—grapple with the idea that they might have an erotic life independent of each other. I’m not talking about extramarital sex. I’m talking about a sexual self that is discrete, that generates its own images, responds to others, and is delighted when it gets turned on unexpectedly. It is all these contingencies of desire that I bring to bear on my work with couples. Monogamous Marriage in a Promiscuous Society Generally, the role of therapists is to challenge the cultural status quo. We regularly encourage our patients to examine their assumptions about what’s normal, acceptable, and expected. Yet sexual boundaries are one of the few areas where therapists seem to mirror the dominant culture. Monogamy is the norm, and sexual fidelity is considered to be mature, committed, and realistic. Nonmonogamy, even consensual nonmonogamy, is suspect. It points to a lack of commitment or a fear of intimacy. It undermines the couple. As one of my colleagues firmly stated, “Open marriage doesn’t work. Thinking you can do it is totally naive. We tried it in the seventies and it was a disaster.” “That may be so, but the closed marriage is hardly a guarantee against disaster,” I cautioned. “And the monogamous ideal, which a decent chunk of married folks don’t live up to, may be no less naive. If anything, it seems to invite transgressions that are excruciatingly painful.” My colleague, an excellent family therapist, was nevertheless taking an all-or-nothing approach to fidelity. In this view, emotional commitment demands sexual exclusivity, and brooks no gradations. Yet we live in a world that offers us little help with staying put or making do. In our consumer culture, we always want the next best thing: the latest, the newest, the youngest. Failing that, we at least want more: more intensity, more variety, more stimulation. We seek instant gratification and are increasingly intolerant of any frustration. Nowhere are we encouraged to be satisfied with what we have, to think, “This is good. This is enough.” Sex is part and parcel of this economy—some people might even say that sex propels it. That dress, that car, those shoes, this lotion, a new tattoo, buns of steel, all carry the promise of a more sexually fulfilled life. We are convinced that sexual gratification and personal happiness go hand in hand. Earthly delights are everywhere, a veritable banquet, and we feel entitled to join the feast. No wonder people often feel restless in marriage. The fantasy of infinite variety is thwarted by commitment.

• From The History of World Literature (2007)

  110 Lecture 26: Goethe’s Faust virtually all earlier versions, the primary contract is between Faust and Mephistopheles. Faust gives his soul to Mephistopheles in exchange for some speci ¿ c gift (e.g., wealth or power) for a speci ¿ ed number of years. In Goethe’s play, the primary contract is a wager between God and Mephistopheles about the value of creation; this occurs in a frame prologue set in heaven. Mephistopheles says that creation is a bad job and that humans are the worst part of it. For Mephistopheles, humans are mostly animal but cursed with the gift of reason, which keeps them perpetually frustrated and unhappy. He says that he does not even enjoy tempting them very much, since they are such easy prey. God offers Faust as his justi¿ cation for creation and for human beings, and gives Mephistopheles permission to tempt Faust from what God terms “the primal source,” or what he should be as a human being. The scene is based on the book of Job in the Old Testament, but here its terms are very different: If Mephistopheles can corrupt Faust, he demonstrates that creation was a mistake. If God wins, he demonstrates that it has value. The play then shifts to Faust’s study, where we ¿ nd Faust depressed, frustrated, and on the verge of suicide. Faust has doctorates in everything and still knows nothing; he wants experience, not knowledge. Faust seems to illustrate everything that Mephistopheles says about humans in his wager with God. When Mephistopheles appears in Faust’s study, they eventually work out the terms of the contract: Mephistopheles will keep providing Faust with new human experiences until the point at which Faust is content with what he has and where he is, after which Mephistopheles can have his soul. Faust wants not some speci ¿ c good but in¿ nite human experience, with each experience becoming the springboard for the next. This contract marks the transition from the Enlightenment or Neoclassical Age to that of Romanticism. It marks the end of an age of empirical knowledge and rationality and the beginning of one of limitless aspiration, subjectivity, and the desire for transcendence. It also rejects morality as the basis for judging a protagonist, since Faust is asking for all experiences, [Faust is] asking for … experience, growth. …This is one of the ways we can mark a very clear transition from the Enlightenment to the Romantic Age.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  The back patio: college. So many unrequited crushes, and—ultimately—the worst sex. You once drove across four states to sleep with a man in upstate New York in the dead of winter. It was so cold your drugstore-brand astringent face wash froze in its tube. The sex was bad, obviously, but what you remember most clearly is what you wanted from that night. You wanted that drive-across-four-states desire. You wanted someone to be obsessed with you. How could you accomplish that? You were awake all night staring at the streetlight in the parking lot outside his bedroom window. Why did men never own curtains? How do you get someone you want to want you? Why did no one love you? The kitchen: OkCupid, Craigslist. Living in California and trying to date women, but failing because Bay Area lesbians proved to be pretty testy about the whole bisexual thing. So then, a parade of men: sweet men and terrible men and older men. Professionals and students. An astrophysicist, several programmers. One guy with a boat in the Berkeley marina. Then, moving to Iowa and going on a bunch of terrible dates, including with a man you kept seeing later in the waiting room of your therapist’s office. He played piano. A med student, maybe? You can barely remember. The living room, the office, the bathroom: boyfriends, or something approximating them. Casey and Paul and Al. Casey was the worst. Al was the kindest. Paul was knock-you-sideways perfect; he fucked you and fed you and tried to teach you to love California. It was all you ever wanted. He was so pretty. You loved his downy ass, his surprisingly soft scruff, the strength of his hands. You wanted to crawl up inside him and have him crawl up inside you. He made you feel special and sexy and smart. He broke up with you because he didn’t love you, which is a very good reason to break up with somebody, even though at the time you wanted to die. The bedroom: don’t go in there. Dream House as Time TravelOne of the questions that has haunted you: Would knowing have made you dumber or smarter? If, one day, a milky portal had opened up in your bedroom and an older version of yourself had stepped out and told you what you know now, would you have listened? You like to think so, but you’d probably be lying; you didn’t listen to any of your smarter, wiser friends when they confessed they were worried about you, so why on earth would you listen to a version of yourself who wrecked her way out of a time orifice like a newborn?

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  By the time we got there, quite a few people were standing along the cliff where the truck went over. It had smashed through the guardrails and fallen hundreds of feet through empty space to the river below, where it lay on its back among the boulders. It looked pitifully small. A stream of thick black smoke rose from the cab, feathering out in the wind. My mother asked whether anyone had gone to report the accident. Someone had. We stood with the others at the cliff’s edge. Nobody spoke. My mother put her arm around my shoulder. For the rest of the day she kept looking over at me, touching me, brushing back my hair. I saw that the time was right to make a play for souvenirs. I knew she had no money for them, and I had tried not to ask, but now that her guard was down I couldn’t help myself. When we pulled out of Grand Junction I owned a beaded Indian belt, beaded moccasins, and a bronze horse with a removable, tooled-leather saddle. IT WAS 1955 and we were driving from Florida to Utah, to get away from a man my mother was afraid of and to get rich on uranium. We were going to change our luck. We’d left Sarasota in the dead of summer, right after my tenth birthday, and headed West under low flickering skies that turned black and exploded and cleared just long enough to leave the air gauzy with steam. We drove through Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, Kentucky, stopping to cool the engine in towns where people moved with arthritic slowness and spoke in thick, strangled tongues. Idlers with rotten teeth surrounded the car to press peanuts on the pretty Yankee lady and her little boy, arguing among themselves about shortcuts. Women looked up from their flower beds as we drove past, or watched us from their porches, sometimes impassively, sometimes giving us a nod and a flutter of their fans. Every couple of hours the Nash Rambler boiled over. My mother kept digging into her little grubstake but no mechanic could fix it. All we could do was wait for it to cool, then drive on until it boiled over again. (My mother came to hate this machine so much that not long after we got to Utah she gave it away to a woman she met in a cafeteria.) At night we slept in boggy rooms where headlight beams crawled up and down the walls and mosquitoes sang in our ears, incessant as the tires whining on the highway outside. But none of this bothered me. I was caught up in my mother’s freedom, her delight in her freedom, her dream of transformation. Everything was going to change when we got out West. My mother had been a girl in Beverly Hills, and the life we saw ahead of us was conjured from her memories of California in the days before the Crash.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  Outside, I wanted to tell R. why I had needed to leave so suddenly, but as I began to speak what I had felt seemed ridiculous, out of scale, and I let it drop. It was already late afternoon, and we angled our way back to the busier part of town. We didn’t have any plans for the evening, and as we walked I kept an eye on the walls of the buildings beside the road, which were crowded with posters for concerts and exhibitions and plays, a surprising number for such a small town, I thought, posters mounted over other posters, bulging like plaster from the walls. Most of them were for small venues, clubs and cafés, but there was a series of performances held within the walls of the ruined fortress, too; the stage of ages, they called it, symphony and opera and ballet. We had been saving Tsarevets for the evening anyway; it would be brutal in the day, exposed to the sun and with almost no shade to be found. I saw that there was a concert that night, members of the Sofia Opera and Ballet performing Lakmé, the opera by Delibes. I had never seen it live, I told R., but it was the first opera I owned on CD, two discs I had played again and again. It was like a door opening onto my adolescence, I felt, a chance to share it with him, and suddenly it seemed important that we go, Please, I said, can we go, please, surprising us both with my insistence. He had never been to an opera before, but he was willing; it would be a new experience, he said, he was eager for new experiences.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House as Perpetual Motion MachineThere’s this game I played during gym class when I was eight, when they sent me to the outfield during baseball. I would stand so far from everyone else that the balls my classmates hit could never reach me, and our gym teacher didn’t seem to notice that I was sitting open-legged in the tall grass. The teacher, Ms. Lily, was short and stocky and had a cropped haircut, and one of the kids in my class called her a lesbian. I had no idea what that meant; I’m not sure he did, either. It was 1994. Ms. Lily wore baggy athletic pants with patches of neon greens and purples in abstract, eye-searing patterns. (When I learned the story of Joseph and his coat of many colors in Sunday school, all I could think of was Ms. Lily’s outfit.) The synthetic fabric hissed when she walked; you could always hear her coming. I have a clear memory of her trying to explain body isolation to us—she drew a line down the center of herself, starting at the top of her head. When she reached her crotch, kids giggled. From there, she showed us our left sides and our right sides, how to move each independently and then in tandem. She spun her arms like a carnival ride. Fitness!, she’d say, touching her right hand to her left foot, then her left hand to her right foot. You only have one body! You have to take care of it! Maybe she was a lesbian. Sitting in the grass during those baseball games, I’d rip up all of the weeds within my reach, leaving my hands smelling like dirt and wild onions. I broke dandelion stems and marveled at their sticky white milk. The game is this: You take the dandelion and rub it hard beneath your chin—in my case, right over the narrow white scar I earned falling in the tub when I was a toddler—so hard the florets begin to disintegrate. If your chin turns yellow, it means you’re in love. At eight I was reed-thin, anxious. I was too tightly wound to be dreamy, most of the time, but sitting in the grass gave me a kind of peace. Every class I took that dandelion’s severed head and worked it against my chin until it was a hot, wet ball, like a bud that hadn’t yet opened. The trick, or maybe it’s the punch line, is that the yellow always comes off on your skin. The dandelion yields every time. It has no wiles, no secrets, no sense of self-preservation. And so it goes that, even as children, we understand something we cannot articulate: The diagnosis never changes. We will always be hungry, will always want. Our bodies and minds will always crave something, even if we don’t recognize it.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  The back patio: college. So many unrequited crushes, and—ultimately—the worst sex. You once drove across four states to sleep with a man in upstate New York in the dead of winter. It was so cold your drugstore-brand astringent face wash froze in its tube. The sex was bad, obviously, but what you remember most clearly is what you wanted from that night. You wanted that drive-across-four-states desire. You wanted someone to be obsessed with you. How could you accomplish that? You were awake all night staring at the streetlight in the parking lot outside his bedroom window. Why did men never own curtains? How do you get someone you want to want you? Why did no one love you? The kitchen: OkCupid, Craigslist. Living in California and trying to date women, but failing because Bay Area lesbians proved to be pretty testy about the whole bisexual thing. So then, a parade of men: sweet men and terrible men and older men. Professionals and students. An astrophysicist, several programmers. One guy with a boat in the Berkeley marina. Then, moving to Iowa and going on a bunch of terrible dates, including with a man you kept seeing later in the waiting room of your therapist’s office. He played piano. A med student, maybe? You can barely remember. The living room, the office, the bathroom: boyfriends, or something approximating them. Casey and Paul and Al. Casey was the worst. Al was the kindest. Paul was knock-you-sideways perfect; he fucked you and fed you and tried to teach you to love California. It was all you ever wanted. He was so pretty. You loved his downy ass, his surprisingly soft scruff, the strength of his hands. You wanted to crawl up inside him and have him crawl up inside you. He made you feel special and sexy and smart. He broke up with you because he didn’t love you, which is a very good reason to break up with somebody, even though at the time you wanted to die. The bedroom: don’t go in there. Dream House as Time TravelOne of the questions that has haunted you: Would knowing have made you dumber or smarter? If, one day, a milky portal had opened up in your bedroom and an older version of yourself had stepped out and told you what you know now, would you have listened? You like to think so, but you’d probably be lying; you didn’t listen to any of your smarter, wiser friends when they confessed they were worried about you, so why on earth would you listen to a version of yourself who wrecked her way out of a time orifice like a newborn?

• From Confessions of a Mask (1958)

  But in my case, no sooner would I begin to share intellectual understanding with a person who had attracted me than my desire for that person would collapse. The discovery of even the slightest intellectualism in a companion would force me to a rational judgment of values. In a reciprocal relationship such as love, one must give the same thing he demands from the other; hence my desire for ignorance in a companion required, however temporarily, an unconditional "revolt against reason" on my part. But for me such a revolt was absolutely impossible. Thus, when confronting those possessors of sheer animal flesh unspoiled by intellect—young toughs, sailors, soldiers, fishermen—there was nothing for me to do but be forever watching them from afar with impassioned indifference, being careful never to exchange words with them. Probably the only place in which I could have lived at ease would have been some uncivilized tropical land where I could not speak the language. Now that I think of it, I realize that from earliest childhood I felt a yearning toward those intense summers of the kind that are seething forever in savage lands. . . . Well, then, there were the white gloves of which I was going to speak. At my school it was the custom to wear white gloves on ceremonial days. Just to pull on a pair of white gloves, with mother-of-pearl buttons shining gloomily at the wrists and three meditative rows of stitching on the backs, was enough to evoke the symbols of all ceremonial days—the somber assembly hall where the ceremonies were held, the box of Shioze sweets received upon leaving, the cloudless skies under which such days always seem to make brilliant sounds in midcourse and then collapse.It was on a national holiday in winter, undoubtedly Empire Day. That morning again Omi had come to school unusually early. The second-year students had already driven the freshmen away from the swinging-log on the playground at the side of the school buildings, taking cruel delight in doing so, and were now in full possession. Although outwardly scornful of such childish playground equipment as the swinging-log, the second-year students still had a lingering affection for it in their hearts, and by forcibly driving the freshmen away, they were able to adopt the face-saving pretense of indulging in the amusement half-derisively, without any seriousness. The freshmen had formed a circle at a distance around the log and were watching the rough play of the upperclassmen, who, in turn, were quite conscious of having an audience. The log, suspended on chains, swung back and forth rhythmically, with a battering-ram motion, and the contest was to make each other fall off the log. Omi was standing with both feet planted firmly at the mid-point of the log, eagerly looking around for opponents ; it was a posture that made him look exactly like a murderer brought to bay.

• From On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019)

  I was enamored of the verve, torque, and tone of the pastor’s voice, his sermon on Noah’s Ark inflected with hesitations, rhetorical questions amplified by long silences that intensified the story’s effect. I loved the way the pastor’s hands moved, flowed, as if his sentences had to be shaken off him in order to reach us. It was, to me, a new kind of embodiment, one akin to magic, one I’d glimpsed only partially in Lan’s own storytelling. But that day, it was the song that offered me a new angle of seeing the world, which is to say, seeing you. Once the piano and organ roared into the first thick chords of “His Eye Is on the Sparrow,” everyone in the congregation rose, shuffling, and let their arms fly out above them, some turning in circles. Hundreds of boots and heels hammered the wooden floors. In the blurred gyrations, the twirling coats and scarfs, I felt a pinch on my wrist. Your fingernails were white as they dug into my skin. Your face—eyes closed—lifted toward the ceiling, you were saying something to the fresco of angels above us. At first I couldn’t hear through the sound of clapping and shouting. It was all a kaleidoscope of color and movement as fat organ and trumpet notes boomed through the pews from the brass band. I wrested my arm from your grip. When I leaned in, I heard your words underneath the song—you were speaking to your father. Your real one. Cheeks wet with tears, you nearly shouted. “Where are you, Ba?” you demanded in Vietnamese, shifting from foot to foot. “Where the hell are you? Come get me! Get me out of here! Come back and get me.” It might have been the first time Vietnamese was ever spoken in that church. But no one glared at you with questions in their eyes. No one made a double take at the yellow-white woman speaking her own tongue. Throughout the pews other people were also shouting, in excitement, joy, anger, or exasperation. It was there, inside the song, that you had permission to lose yourself and not be wrong. I stared at the toddler-sized plaster of Jesus hanging to the side of the pulpit. His skin seemed to throb from the stamping feet. He was regarding his petrified toes with an expression of fatigued bewilderment, as if he had just woken from a deep sleep only to find himself nailed red and forever to this world. I studied him for so long that when I turned to your white sneakers I half expected a pool of blood under your feet.

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  For a moment there I forgot that he’s my husband and a real pain in the ass, obnoxious, stubborn, that he annoys me, that he leaves his mess all over the floor. At that moment I saw him as if I didn’t know all that, and I was drawn to him like in the beginning. He’s very smart; he talks well; he has this soothing, sexy way about him. I wasn’t thinking about all our stupid exchanges when we bicker in the morning because I’m running late, or why did you do this, or what’s going on for Christmas, or we have to talk about your mother. I was away from all that inane stuff and those absurd conversations. I just really saw him. That’s how I felt, and I wonder if he ever feels like that about me anymore.” When I ask Adele if she has ever told Alan of that experience, she is quick to let me know that she hasn’t. “No way. He’ll make fun of me.” I suggest that maybe the waning of romance is less about the bounds of familiarity and the weight of reality than it is about fear. Eroticism is risky. People are afraid to allow themselves these moments of idealization and yearning for the person they live with. It introduces a recognition of the other’s sovereignty that can feel destabilizing. When our partner stands alone, with his own will and freedom, the delicateness of our bond is magnified. Adele’s vulnerability is obvious in the way she wonders if Alan ever feels this way about her. The typical defense against this threat is to stay within the realm of the familiar and the affectionate—the trivial bickering, the comfortable sex, the quotidian aspects of life that keep us tethered to reality and bar any chance of transcendence. But when Adele looks at Alan out of the context of their marriage—switching from a zoom lens to a wide-angle—his otherness is accentuated, and that in turn heightens Adele’s attraction to him. She sees him as a man. She has transformed someone familiar into someone still unknown after all these years. Just When You Thought You Knew Her... If uncertainty is a built-in feature of all relationships, so too is mystery. Many of the couples who come to therapy imagine that they know everything there is to know about their mate. “My husband doesn’t like to talk.” “My girlfriend would never flirt with another man. She’s not the type.” “My lover doesn’t do therapy.” “Why don’t you just say it? I know what you’re thinking?” “I don’t need to give her lavish presents; she knows I love her.”

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  I encourage Mitch and Laura to listen to each other with greater empathy. Mitch begins to understand that Laura’s alienation from her body has nothing to do with him. This eases his sense of rejection and his anguish about being unable to please her. While it is clear to Mitch that his desire is rooted in love, he needs to help Laura trust the sincerity of his interest in her. Far from seeking a selfish discharge, he longs for union. For her part, Laura learns something equally crucial about Mitch—that when the language of words fails him, as it invariably does in the realm of emotion, he communicates with his body. She’d always felt that Mitch’s “itch for the horizontal” had little to do with her; it was just raw physical release. As she hears him, she sees that Mitch needs physicality to voice his tenderness, his yearning to connect. Only in sex does he feel emotionally safe. By limiting him to her own nonphysical language, to the exclusion of his sensual language, Laura has stifled his ability to “speak” to her. She blinds herself to her husband as he really is, and at the same time reinforces the very behaviors she rails against. When Mitch is reduced to using a truncated language of words, the romantic lover disappears and the bully emerges. Mitch and Laura exemplify two extremes on the mind-body continuum. Couples are often configured on opposite sides of this divide. There are those for whom the body is like a prison in which they feel confined, self-conscious, and self-critical. The body is an inhibited site, awkward and tense. Play and inventiveness have no place there. Words feel safer than gesture and movements, and these people take refuge in speech. When reaching out to others, they prefer the verbal route. Then there are those for whom the body is like a playground, a place where they feel free and unrestricted. They retain the child’s capacity to fully inhabit their bodies. In the physical realm, they can let go; they don’t have to be responsible. They are often the partner in the relationship who wants more physical intimacy. It is especially during lovemaking that they are able to escape their inner rumblings. For them, sex is a relief that puts a halt to their anxiety; for their more verbal partners, sex turns out to be a source of anxiety.

• From Story of O (1954)

  “Even if you don’t want to kiss me, O, keep me with you. Keep me with you always. If you had a dog, you’d keep him and take care of him. And even if you don’t want to kiss me but would enjoy beating me, you can beat me. But don’t send me away.” “Keep still, Natalie, you don’t know what you’re saying,” O murmured, almost in a whisper. The child, slipping down and hugging O’s knees, also replied in a near-whisper: “Oh, yes I do. I saw you the other morning on the terrace. I saw the initials, I saw the long black-and-blue marks. And Jacqueline has told me …” “Told you what?” “Where you’ve been, O, and what they did to you there.” “Did she talk to you about Roissy?” “She also told me that you had been, that you are …” “That I was what?” “That you wear iron rings.” “That’s right,” O said, “and what else?” “That Sir Stephen whips you every day.” “That’s correct,” O repeated, “and he’ll be here any second. So run along, Natalie.” Natalie, without shifting position, raised her head to O, and O’s eyes encountered her adoring gaze. “Teach me, O, please teach me,” she started in again, “I want to be like you. I’ll do anything you tell me. Promise me you’ll take me with you when you go back to that place Jacqueline told me about.” “You’re too young,” O said. “No, I’m not too young, I’m fifteen going on sixteen,” she cried out angrily. “I’m not too young. Ask Sir Stephen,” she said, for he had just entered the room.