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 Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  "What! you were in trade then, were you?" "Yes, my father had left me a very profitable business, and a most trustworthy and excellent manager who for years had been the soul of the house. I was then twenty-two, and my part in the concern was to pocket the lion's share of the profits. Still, I must say I not only had never been lazy, but, moreover, was rather serious for a young man of my age, and, above all, in my circumstances. I had but one hobby—a most harmless one. I was fond of old majolica, old fans, and old lace, of which I have now a rather fine collection." "The finest one I ever saw." "Well, I went to the office as usual, but do what I could it was quite impossible for me to settle down to any kind of work. "Teleny's vision was mixing itself up with whatever I happened to be doing, muddling everything up. Moreover, my mother's words were ever present to my mind. Every woman was in love with him, and their love was necessary to him. I thereupon tried hard to banish him from my thoughts. 'Where there is a will there is a way,' said I to myself, 'so I shall soon get rid of this foolish, maudlin infatuation.'" "But you did not succeed, did you?" "No! the more I tried not to think of him, the more I did think. Have you in fact ever heard some snatches of a half-remembered tune ringing in your ears? Go where you will, listen to whatever you like, that tune is ever tantalizing you You can no more recollect the whole of it than you can get rid of it. If you go to bed it keeps you from falling asleep; you slumber and you hear it in your dreams; you wake, and it is the very first thing you hear. So it was with Teleny; he actually haunted me, his voice—so sweet and low—was ever repeating in those unknown accents: Oh! friend, my heart doth yearn for thee. "And now his lovely image never left my eyes, the touch of his soft hand was still on mine, I even felt his scented breath upon my lips; thus in that eager longing, every now and then I stretched my arms to seize and to strain him to my breast, and the hallucination was so strong in me that soon I fancied I could feel his body on my own. "A strong erection thereupon took place, which stiffened every nerve and almost made me mad; but though I suffered, still the pain I felt was sweet." "Excuse my interrupting you, but had you never been in love before you had met Teleny?" "Never." "Strange." "Why so?"

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  Had you only been some poor girl —— ' "'Come, leave aside your morbid fancies, and tell me candidly if you would have loved me more than you do.' "He looked at me sadly, but could not bring himself to utter an untruth. Still, after awhile he added, sighing:— '"There is a love that is to last, When the hot days of youth are past." Tell me, Camille, is such love ours?' "'Why not? Can you not always be as fond of me as I am of you, or do I only care for you on account of the sensual pleasures you afford me? You know that my heart yearns for you when the senses are satiated and the desire is blunted.' "'Still, had it not been for me, you might have loved some woman whom you could have married —— ' "'And have found out, but too late, that I was born with other cravings. No, sooner or later I should have followed my destiny.' "'Now it might be quite different; satiated with my love, you might, perhaps, marry and forget me.' "'Never. But come, have you been confessing yourself? Are you going to turn Calvinist? or, like the "Dame aux Camellias," or Antinöus, do you think it necessary to sacrifice yourself on the altar of love for my sake?' "'Please, don't joke.' "'No, I'll tell you what we'll do. Let us leave France. Let us go to Spain, to Southern Italy—nay, let us leave Europe, and go to the East, where I must surely have lived during some former life, and which I have a hankering to see, just as if the land "Where the flowers ever blossom, the beams ever shine," had been the home of my youth; there, unknown to everyone, forgotten by the world.' "'Yes, but can I leave this town?' said he, musingly, more to himself than to me. "I knew that of late Teleny had been dunned a good deal, and that his life had often been rendered unpleasant by usurers. "Caring, therefore, but little what people might think of me—besides, who has not a good opinion of the man that pays?—I had called all his creditors together, and, unknown to him, I had settled all his debts. I was about to tell him so, and relieve him from the weight that was oppressing him, when Fate—blind, inexorable, crushing Fate—sealed my mouth. "There was again a loud ring at the door. Had that bell been rung a few seconds later, how different his life and mine would have been! But it was Kismet , as the Turks say.

• From Mud Vein (2014)

  Maybe I had a chronological way of dealing with things; a writer’s route to solving problems. Her insouciance over the matter was what finally won me over. It was as if the entire time I saw her I was counting down the days until I would have to tell her about the rape, dreading the pity I’d see appear her eyes. But there was none. “Life happens,” she said. “Bad things happen because we live in a world with evil.” And then she’d asked me the strangest thing. “Do you blame God?” It had never occurred to me to blame God since I didn’t believe in him. “If I believed in God, I would blame him. I suppose it’s easier not to believe, then I have nothing to be angry at.” She smiled. A cat’s curl smile. And then it was over, and I’d left a free woman, my purgatory served. Isaac would operate on me now. I would be free of cancer, free to move forward without fear. Without some of the fear. That night I started having the dreams again, hands pushing and pulling at me. Sharp pain and humiliation. The feeling of helplessness and panic. I woke up screaming, but there was no Isaac. I got in the shower to wash away the dream, shivering under the scalding water. I couldn’t fall back to sleep with those images so fresh in my mind, so I sat in my office and pretended to write the book my agent was waiting for. The book I had no words for. At noon, five days before my surgery, I dressed to go to the hospital for my pre-op appointment. It was March and the sun had been fighting the clouds for a week. Today the sky was uninterrupted blue. I felt resentful of the sun. That thought made me think of the things Nick used to say about me. You’re all grey. Everything you love, the way you see the world. I walked out to my car, stepping around puddles of rainwater from the day before. They were colored like an oyster shell, iridescent from the oil collected from my car or Isaac’s. When I got to the driver’s side door, I saw a cardboard square underneath my wiper blade. I darted a look over my shoulder before plucking it out. He had been here. Last night? This morning? Why hadn’t he rung the bell? I climbed into the car a little bit excited and slipped the CD from the sleeve. This time he’d written the name of the song on the disk in red permanent marker. Kill Your Heroes , Awolnation. My hands were shaking as I hit play. I listened with my eyes closed, wondering if all people listened to music with words this way.

• From Mud Vein (2014)

  Now I am feeling too many things. I crave my white room. What was the opposite of cutting? Wrapping yourself in a cocoon and never coming out. I roll myself in the feather comforter on the attic bed—that’s what we we’re calling it—the attic. My room. The place where my kidnapper put me in pajamas and laid me. Laid me out to what? I don’t know, but I’m starting to like it in the attic. I can’t hear the music as well when I’m wrapped in feathers. Landscape has not stopped playing. The first of our songs. The one he gave to me to let me know he understood. “You look like a joint,” Isaac says. He hardly ever comes up here. I feel him touch my hair, which is sticking out of the top of my cocoon. I bury my face in the white and try to suffocate myself. I traded comforters with him. He took the red because I couldn’t stand to look at it. “There is something downstairs you should probably see,” he says. He’s touching my hair in a way that’s lulling me. If he wants me to get up he’s going to have to stop doing that. I came straight up here after we carried the wood into the house and discovered the electric fence. Isaac must have found something more outside. “Unless it’s a dead body, I don’t want to see it.” “You’d want to see a dead body?” “Yes.” “It’s not a dead body, but I need you to come with me.” He unrolls me from my self-made joint, and pulls me to my feet. He doesn’t let go right away. He squeezes where he holds. Then he pulls me along by my hand like I’m a child. I stumble after him. He leads me downstairs. To the wood closet. Pulling open the door, he holds me by the tops of my arms, forcing me to stand in front of him and look inside. I see only the wood at first. Then he reaches over me with a pink Zippo and holds it as close to the inner wall as he can. Strange, I think, at first—there is writing on the walls. Some of the wood is obscuring it. I reach inside and move a couple of the logs over. I start shaking. He wraps his arms around my torso and squeezes, then leads me backwards to the sofa where I sit. Part of me wants to break away to go look some more, but I feel. I feel too much. If I don’t stop feeling I’m going to explode. Pages of my book—over and over—wall-papered on the inside of the closet like a slap in the face. “What does it mean?” I ask Isaac. He shakes his head. “A fan? I don’t know.

• From Going Clear (2013)

  Specifically, what he thought about in the middle of the night was what those kids said to one another as they sped out of the Blockbuster parking lot onto Wilshire in his pearlescent Cabriolet. Could he find himself in them? Haggis got out of bed and began writing. By mid- morning he had a lengthy outline. It was about the manifold ways that people interact with one another—how the experience of having someone honk at you in traffic and shoot you the finger can affect your mood, so that you take it out on someone else at the first opportunity; or how, alternatively, someone lets you into a long line of traffic, and your day brightens. He saw life in America as a volatile collision of cultures— of immigrants who fail to read the codes that underlie our system, of races that resent and mistrust one another, of people coexisting in different social strata who look at one another with uncomprehending fear and hatred. He had shopped the proposal around to different television producers, but they unanimously passed on it. Now, as he was struggling financially and artistically, Deborah suggested he consider writing the script as a movie. “You’ll win an Academy Award,” she told him. Haggis contacted his friend Robert Moresco, who had been a writer on Haggis’s series EZ Streets. He told Moresco, “I don’t think anybody’s going to make this, but it’s a great story.” The two men began working in Haggis’s home office, next to the laundry room. They wrote a first draft in two weeks. Haggis decided to call it Crash. The title refers to a fender bender that sets off a chain of events, revealing the contradictory elements of the characters and the city they inhabit. In the dizzying seconds after the collision an LAPD detective suddenly realizes what’s missing in his life. “It’s the sense of touch,” he says in the movie’s opening lines. “In LA no one touches you.... We’re always behind metal and glass. Think we miss that touch so much, we crash into each other just to feel something.” Haggis insists on turning his heroes into villains and vice versa, such as the racist white cop who molests a tony, upper-class black woman in one scene, then saves her life in another. Haggis felt that by exploring such complexities he was teasing out the dark and light threads of his own personality. For the next year and a half, he struggled to get the movie green-lit. He was still a first-time movie director, and that posed an obstacle. Moreover, the script called for an ensemble cast with no single starring role—always an obstacle in Hollywood. Haggis finally interested a producer, Bob Yari, who agreed to make the movie for $10 million if Haggis could assemble a star-studded cast. Don Cheadle was the first to sign on, both as an actor and a producer, and his name added credibility to the project.

• From The Erotic Mind (1995)

  Compulsive voyeurism, like other paraphilias, is relatively rare. Yet it’s important to keep in mind that millions of men and women are regularly stimulated in nonobsessive ways by the very things that excited Carlos. Who hasn’t been titillated by catching a glimpse of someone undressing or overhearing a sexual discussion or encounter? Most of us are also familiar with the bittersweet thrill of feeling inferior to those who most strongly attract us. And men and women of all sexual orientations, especially males in their teens and twenties, can identify with Carlos’s sexual preoccupation and constant quest for visual stimulation. Carlos’s eroticism was problematic because his negative core beliefs required that he stay in an inferior position. Yet within the self-defeating framework of his CET, Carlos used virtually every known source of arousal, including all four cornerstones of eroticism. The chasm between Carlos and the men he worshipped unleashed a flood of yearning. At the same time, a furtive sense of naughtiness permeated every scene, highlighted by the ever-present risk of discovery and punishment. The entire drama was further energized by a push-pull dance of power. On one hand, Carlos was clearly submissive to the men whose very existence seemed to mock him. Yet following the lead of his masturbation fantasies, primordial images of aggression and conquest helped him turn the tables. If the attention and reciprocation he craved weren’t freely given he would steal them with stealth and cunning. He stalked the men he envied as prey, using them without their consent as pawns in his psychodrama. Finally, a forceful undercurrent of ambivalence toward everyone—himself as well as the men who simultaneously excited and demeaned him—added yet another dimension to an already explosive concoction. The entire scene was infused with plentiful and intense emotions. Some were positive, such as the genuine admiration and appreciation he felt toward the men who represented his ideals of masculinity. Negative emotions included resentment, hostility, fear, guilt, and shame. As Carlos explored his eroticism more deeply, he discovered that revenge was a particularly gratifying aphrodisiac. It was both frightening and exciting to be spotted by the men he stalked. Only if they knew what he was doing could they be made to squirm, as other men in the past had made him squirm. He savored the notion that they felt humiliated when Carlos used them as pawns in his sexual games. One thing Carlos’s eroticism did not allow was the reciprocation of love and affection. He was trapped in the same bind as everyone whose eroticism is built on a foundation of self-hate: anybody who might be attracted to him was, by definition, excluded from the ranks of the desirable. Only those who reinforced his self-contempt were worthy objects of desire.

• From Going Clear (2013)

  Only Scientology can rescue humanity from its inevitable doom. The recruits were infused with a sense of mystery, purpose, and intrigue. Life inside Scientology was just so much more compelling than life outside. Preclears sometimes experience mystical states characterized by feelings of bliss or a sense of blending into the universe. They come to expect such phenomena, and they yearn for them if they don’t occur. “Exteriorization”—the sense that one has actually left his physical being behind—is a commonly reported occurrence for Scientologists. If one’s consciousness can actually uproot itself from the physical body and move about at will—what does that say about mortality? We must be something more than, something other than, a mere physical incarnation; we actually are thetans, to use Hubbard’s term, immortal spiritual beings that are incarnated in innumerable lifetimes. Hubbard said that exteriorization could be accomplished in about half the preclears by having the auditor simply command, “Be three feet back of your head.” Free of the limitations of his body, the thetan can roam the universe, circling stars, strolling on Mars, or even creating entirely new universes. Reality expands far beyond what the individual had originally perceived it to be. The ultimate goal of auditing is not just to liberate a person from destructive mental phenomena; it is to emancipate him from the laws of matter, energy, space, and time—or MEST, as Hubbard termed them. These are just artifacts of the thetan’s imagination, in any case. Bored thetans had created MEST universes where they could frolic and play games; eventually, they became so absorbed in their distractions they forgot their true immortal natures. They identified with the bodies that they were temporarily inhabiting, in a universe they had invented for their own amusement. The goal of Scientology is to recall to the thetan his immortality and help him relinquish his self-imposed limitations. Once, Haggis had what he thought was an out-of-body experience. He was lying on a couch, and then he found himself across the room, observing himself lying there. The experience of being out of his body wasn’t that grand, and later he wondered if he had simply been visualizing the scene. He didn’t have the certainty his colleagues reported when they talked about seeing objects behind them or in distant places and times. In 1976, at the Manor Hotel, Haggis went “Clear.” It is the base camp for those who hope to ascend to the upper peaks of Scientology. The concept comes from Dianetics. A person who becomes Clear is “adaptable to and able to change his environment,” Hubbard writes. “His ethical and moral standards are high, his ability to seek and experience pleasure is great. His personality is heightened and he is creative and constructive.”

• From Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (1989)

  I want to hold b a ck , but I get so distressed, I can't help lashing out'. Over against the d ed i ca ted fighter for a cause, the y feel themselves on the outside : 'I c an' t re a ll y th row myself into this great c ause/movement/religious life . I feel on the o u ts i de, u ntouched. I know it 's gre at, in a way, but I can' t feel moved by it. I f e el unworthy of it somehow'. Or alte rnativel y, someone migh t see in the same everyday life which so e n ri ch es t he householder onl y a na rrow and smug satisfaction at a pitiable co mfo rt, oblivious to the great issue s of life, or the suffering of the masses, or th e s wee p of history. In recent decades , we have seen the drama repeated th at th e ones who often react this way t urn out precisely to be the children whose growth the householder so cherish ed . This is j ust one example, a peculiarly poign ant one in our day, of how this aspiration to connection can motivate so m e of the most bitter conflicts in human life. It is in fact a fundamental drive, with an immense potential impac t in our lives. This craving for being in co n ta ct with or being rightly placed in relation t o the good can be more or less sa t isfied in our lives as we acquire more fame, or introduce more order in our lives, or become more firmly settled in our families. But the issue also arises for us not just as a matter of more or less but as a question of yes or no. And this is the form in which it most deeply affects and challenges us. The yes/no ques tion concerns not how near or far we are f ro m what we see as the good, but rather the direction o f our lives, towards or away from it, or the source o f our motivations in regard to it. We find this kind of question cl early posed in the religious tradition. The Puritan wondered whether he w as saved. The question was whether he was called or not.

• From Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (1989)

  For a moral sense theorist like Hutcheson, our own moral feelings are an important source of understanding of the good, but they only serve in combination wi th ou r grasping our setting within a providential order. This allows us to see how o ur instinctive approval o f bene v ol ence serves to bring about our own and the universal good. Rousseau ' s notion of the voice of nature withi n seems to be saying something much stronger. True, the Savoyard cu r ate relies on the vision of providential order too. But the definition of conscience as an inner sentiment could be taken in a much stronger sense. Not just that I have, thanks be to God, sentiments which accord with what I see through other means to be the universal good, but that the inner voice of my true sentiments define what is the good: since the elan of nature in me is the good, it is this wh ich has to be consulted to discover it. Rousseau never took the radical step to this much more subjectivist position. He ran his inner voice in tandem with the traditional way of understanding and recognizing universal good. But he was the crucial hinge fi gure, because he provided the language, with an eloquence beyond compare, which could articulate this radical view. All that was needed was for the inner voice to cut loose from its yoke fellow and declare its full moral competence. A new ethic of nature arises with Romantic expressivism, which takes this step. Rousseau immensely enlarged the scope of the inner voice. We now can know from within us, from the impulses of our own being, what nature ma rks as s ignificant. And our ultimate happiness is to live in conformity with this voice, that is, to be entirely ourselves. "]'aspire au moment", says the S avoyard curate, "ou, delivre des entraves du corps, je serai moi sans contradiction, sans p artage, et n'aurait besoin que de moi pour etre heureux" ("I long for the time when, freed from the fetters of the body, I shall be myself, at one wi t h myse l f, no longer t or n in two, w h en I myself shall suffic e for my own happiness ''). 20 This is a rather startling statement in a declaratio n of religious faith; and highly significan t in a writer who stands i n o the r respects i n an A ugustinian tradition, and whose autobio graphy contain s s o many echoes of that of the Bishop of Hippo, beginning with the title.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  Now, Confucius insisted, anybody could practice the rites, and even somebody of humble origins, such as Yan Hui, could become a junzi. Other Chinese philosophers of the Axial Age would propose a more realistic solution to the problems of China, but they were not always as ambitious as Confucius, who aimed at more than law and order. He wanted human dignity, nobility, and holiness, and knew that this could be achieved only by a daily struggle to achieve the virtue of shu. It was an audacious plan. Confucius was asking people to trust in the power of an enhanced humanity instead of coercion. Very few people really wanted to give up their egotism. But those who did try to put Confucius’s Way into practice found that it transformed their lives. Ren was difficult because it required the eradication of vanity, resentment, and the desire to dominate others. 32 And yet, paradoxically, ren was easy. “Is ren indeed so far away?” Confucius asked. “If we really wanted ren, we should find that it was at our very side.” 33 It came “after what is difficult is done”—after, that is, a person had mastered the education provided by the li. 34 It required perseverance, rather than superhuman strength, and was, perhaps, like learning to ride a bicycle: once you had acquired the skill, it became effortless. You had to keep at it, however. Either you constantly behaved toward other people—whoever they were—as though they had the same fundamental importance as yourself, or you did not. But if you did so, you achieved a moral power that was almost tangible. The pursuit of ren was a lifelong struggle; it would end only at death. 35 Confucius did not encourage his students to speculate about what lay at the end of the Way. Walking along this path was itself a transcendent and dynamic experience. Yan Hui, Confucius’s favorite disciple, expressed it beautifully when he said of ren, “with a deep sigh”: The more I strain my gaze towards it the higher it soars. The deeper I bore down into it, the harder it becomes. I see it in front, but suddenly it is behind. Step by step, the Master skilfully lures one on. He has broadened me with culture, restrained me with ritual. Even if I wanted to stop, I could not. Just when I feel that I have exhausted every resource, something seems to rise up, standing over me sharp and clear. Yet though I long to pursue it, I can find no way of getting to it at all. 36 Ren was not something you “got” but something you gave. Ren was an exacting yet exhilarating way of life.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  The Mohists’ condemnation of extravagance and fatalism and their “concern for everybody” were valuable, but Liu Xin was not happy with their rejection of ritual and their tendency to ignore “the distinction between kin and stranger.” 14 The Chinese understood that nobody had the last word on truth; no orthodoxy, however august, could claim anybody’s entire allegiance. Respect for others’ opinions was more important than achieving a single, infallible vision. China’s inclusive spirit is unique. 15 Later the Chinese would be able to absorb Buddhism alongside their homegrown spiritualities. In India and the West, religions are often aggressively competitive, but in China it is often said that a person can be a Confucian by day and a Daoist at night. Not even Legalism was discarded. The Chinese needed its insights as their empire expanded, so much so that orthodox Confucians often accused their rulers of being “Confucians in appearance but Legalists in practice.” 16 It is generally acknowledged that each faith has its proper sphere—an Axial attitude that is sorely needed in our own time. I n India, the Mauryan empire rapidly disintegrated after the death of Ashoka in 232. Regional kingdoms developed in the south, Magadha lapsed into obscurity, while Greek invaders from the Greco-Persian colony of Bactria in northern Afghanistan gained control of the Indus Valley. By the middle of the first century, the Greeks were supplanted by invasions of Scythian and Parthian tribes from Iran and central Asia. These foreign rulers were not hostile to Indian religion, but because the Brahmins regarded them as unclean, they tended to gravitate toward the non-Vedic sects. Between 200 BCE and 200 CE, Buddhism and Jainism were probably the most popular religions in India. There was also a powerful explosion of bhakti faith, reflecting a yearning for a more intimate, personal, and emotional spirituality that almost amounted to a popular revolution. We have only a fragmentary idea of events after the collapse of the Mauryan state, because India entered a dark age that lasted until the rise of the Gupta dynasty in Mathura in the north (319–415 CE ) and the Pallava rulers in southern India (300–888 CE ), which swept away the so-called heretical movements. Buddhism, however, took root in Sri Lanka, Japan, southeast Asia, and China. In India, classical Hinduism achieved preeminence, but it was very different from the Vedic religion of the Axial Age. The severe aniconic faith was replaced by a dazzling array of colorful deities, effigies, and temples. Indians, who used to experience the divine in sound, now wanted to see the sacred in images, which, they believed, housed the gods’ physical presence.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  Then the sweetness that was Mary seemed to stir and mingle with the very urgent sweetness of that garden; with the dim, blue glory of the African night, and with all the stars in their endless courses, so that Stephen could have wept aloud as she stood there, because of the words that must not be spoken. For now that this girl was returning to health, her youth was becoming even more apparent, and something in the quality of Mary’s youth, something terrible and ruthless as an unsheathed sword, would leap out at such moments and stand between them. Mary slipped a small, cool hand into Stephen’s, and they walked on towards the edge of the headland. For a long time they gazed out over the sea, while their thoughts were always of one another. But Mary’s thoughts were not very coherent, and because she was filled with a vague discontent, she sighed and moved even nearer to Stephen, who suddenly put an arm round her shoulder. Stephen said: ‘Are you tired, you little child?’ And her husky voice was infinitely gentle, so that Mary’s eyes filled with sudden tears. She answered: ‘I’ve waited a long, long time, all my life—and now that I’ve found you at last, I can’t get near you. Why is it? Tell me.’ ‘Aren’t you near? It seems to me you’re quite near!’ And Stephen must smile in spite of herself. ‘Yes, but you feel such a long way away.’ ‘That’s because you’re not only tired out but foolish!’ Yet they lingered; for when they returned to the villa they would part, and they dreaded these moments of parting. Sometimes they would suddenly remember the night before it had fallen, and when this happened each would be conscious of a very great sadness which their hearts would divine, the one from the other. But presently Stephen took Mary’s arm: ‘I believe that big star’s moved over more than six inches! It’s late—we must have been out here for ages.’ And she led the girl slowly back to the villa. 4The days slipped by, days of splendid sunshine that gave bodily health and strength to Mary. Her pale skin was tanned to a healthful brown, and her eyes no longer looked heavy with fatigue—only now their expression was seldom happy.

• From Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (1989)

  Habermas and Hare, for instance , have t heories of this kind. A similar co nta inm ent can be brought about b y a certain theological outlook. Our commands come from God, and we can b yp ass and subordinate the area of personal sensibi lity. But a study of t h e modern identity ought to make one dissatisfied with all The Conflicts of M odernity • 5 I J these positions. It is not that the basic moral standards of modernity, conce rning rights, justice, benevolence, depend on this exploratio n ; they depend rather on go ods to w hich we don't have access throu gh perso n al sensibility. But there are other important issues of life which we can only resolve through this kind of insight; for instance, why it matt e rs a nd what it m eans to have a more deep l y resonant human environment an d, even more, to have affiliations with some depth in time and commitment. These are qu estions which we can only clarify by exploring the human predicament, the way we are set in nature and among others, as a locus of moral sources. As ou r publi c traditions of family, ecology, even polis are undermined or swept away, we need new languages of personal resonance to make crucial human goods alive for us again. And this exploration is not only important for its experiential relevance. It would greatly help in staving off ecological disaster if we could recover a sense of the demand that our natural surroundin g an d wild erness make on us. The subjectivist bias that both instrumentalism a n d the ide o lo gies of person al fulfilme nt make almost inescapable makes it almost impossible to state the c ase here. Albert Borgman points out2 6 how much of the argument for ecological restraint and responsibility is couched in anthropocentric language. R estraint is shown as necessary for human welfare. This is true and important en ough, but it is not the whole story. It doesn't capture the full extent of our intuitions h ere. Our ideological milieu constitutes a force field in which even doctrines of a quite differ ent intent are bent to conformity. To read, for instance, Rilke is to get an articulation of our farther, stronger intuitions, of the way the world is not simply an ensemble of objects for our use, but makes a furt her claim on us. Rilke expresses this claim in image� of 'praising' and 'making inward ' , which seem to lay a demand of attention, of careful scrutiny, of respect for what is there. A n d this demand, though connected with what we are as language beings, is not simply one of self-fulfilment. It emanates from the world.

• From The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures (2018)

  The continuous attempt at achieving a state of positively regulated life is a defining part of our existence—the first reality of our existence, as Spinoza would say when he described the relentless endeavor of each being to preserve itself. A blend of striving, endeavor, and tendency comes close to rendering the Latin conatus, as used by Spinoza in propositions 6, 7, and 8 of the Ethics, part 3. In Spinoza’s own words, “Each thing, as far as it can be its own power, strives to persevere in its being,” and “The striving by which each thing strives to persevere in its being is nothing but the actual essence of the thing.” Interpreted with the advantage of current hindsight, Spinoza says that the living organism is constructed so as to maintain the coherence of its structures and functions, for as long as possible, against the odds that threaten it. It is interesting to note that Spinoza reached these conclusions before Maupertuis advanced the principle of least action (Spinoza died almost half a century before). He would have welcomed the support.4 In spite of the transformations that the body undergoes as it develops, renews its constituent parts, and ages, the conatus insists on maintaining the same individual, respecting the original architectural plan, and thus allowing for the sort of animation that is associated with that plan. The animation can vary in scope, corresponding to life processes merely sufficient to survive or to achieve optimal life processes. The poet Paul Éluard wrote about the dur désir de durer, another way of describing the conatus but with the alliterative beauty of a memorable collection of French sounds. I can translate it, pallidly, as the “determined desire to endure.” And William Faulkner wrote of the human desire to “endure and prevail.” He, too, was referring, with remarkable intuition, to the projection of the conatus in the human mind.5 Life on the MoveThere are plenty of bacteria around us, on us, and inside us, today, but there are no examples left around of those very early bacteria of 3.8 billion years ago. What they were like, what early life was like exactly, needs to be pieced together from different strands of evidence. Between the beginnings and now, there are sparsely documented gaps. How life arose, precisely, is open to informed conjecture. At first blush, in the wake of the discovery of the structure of DNA, the elucidation of the role of RNA, and the breaking of the genetic code, it must have appeared that life had to come from the genetic material, but that idea was up against a major difficulty: the likelihood of such complex molecules assembling themselves spontaneously as the first step in the construction of life was low to nil.6

• From The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir (2004)

  Colette declared that you couldn’t write about love while in its heady hold, as if only love lost resonates. No hindsight for me in this great love but rather behind-sight—cited from the eye of my behind. This is a book where the front matter is brief and the end matter is all. After all, my end does matter. When you’ve been ass-fucked as much as I have, things get both very philosophical and very silly very quickly. My brain has been rocked along with my guts. Having a cock in her ass really gives a woman focus. Receptivity becomes activity, not passivity. There’s just a whole lot to do. His cock pierces my yang—my desire to know, control, understand, and analyze—and forces my yin—my openness, my vulnerability—to the surface. I cannot do this alone, voluntarily. I must be forced. He fucks me into my femininity. As a liberated woman, it is the only way I can go there and retain my dignity. Turned over, ass in the air, I have little choice but to succumb and lose my head. This is how I can have an experience my intellect would never allow, a betrayal to Olive Schreiner, Margaret Sanger, and Betty Friedan, and an affront, from the rear, to many modern “feminists.” Oh, but once there, there is no going back—not to control, not to being on top, not to men more feminine than me. This is simply how my liberation manifested itself. Emancipation through the back door would never be, for any rational woman, a choice. It can only happen as a gift. A surprise. A big surprise. This story is about my coming to experience—and sometimes understand—terms that allude to spiritual endeavor. I have learned more of their meaning and power through being sodomized than through any other teaching. Anal sex is, for me, a literary event. The words first started flowing while he was actually buried deep in my ass. His pen to my paper. His marker to my blotter. His rocket to my moon. Funny where one derives inspiration. Or how one gets the message. I knew after my initiation that I must write it all down. To keep track, bear witness to myself, to him, to the harmonic energy we generated. Enough to burn holes through the parameters of my existing world. Enough for the word God to take on meaning. Enough for gratitude to flow like water. I didn’t want, afterward, just a memory. Memory would inevitably mar the truth with the vanity of nostalgia and the self-pity of lost desire. I wanted documentation, like a police log, which noted at the time—or moments later, an hour at most—the details of the crime, the crime of breaking and entering my ass, my heart. This record would say: this did happen, this did indeed come to pass in my own life, under my own watch.

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

  But during the last year, I had seen quite a lot of her on television, because she had landed a part in a popular soap opera. Nanny and I had become quite addicted to it, and even Jane had watched the odd episode with us. “She’s been written out of Crossroads, ” I explained, “and now she’s going to Canada to join a man she met on holiday in Cyprus last summer.” “A holiday romance? Is that wise?” Jane asked. “How long has she known him?” “Only a weekend,” I said. “I know—it’s crazy in a way. But as she says, she’s not the world’s greatest actress, and a new man in a new country seems better than going back to that hand-to-mouth existence in London again. And I think men are much more important to her than any career.” “A nice old-fashioned girl?” Jane smiled sardonically. It was a description that in one way seemed wildly inappropriate, since Lindsey was a sixties girl par excellence and had cast off the restraints of Catholicism with never a backward look. But on the other hand . . . “I think she really is, underneath all the modern trappings. You know: ‘Follow your man.’ ” “Even to Keswick,” Jane capped gloomily. “Well, I’m doing it. But not willingly, I have to tell you. Would you do this? You’ve just left one confining situation; would you give up your new freedom?” I had shrugged. My situation was so different from Jane’s. There was no prospect of my being enslaved to any man; men generally looked through me as though I did not exist. The problem simply did not arise. And yet, I asked myself as I got up to go back to the little room at the Harts’ where I spent the greater part of my life, how free was I? Were not Jane and Lindsey really more adventurous than I was? Would I ever love anything or anybody enough to leave it all behind? I had done that once, when I had entered the convent, and I wasn’t sure I had the courage to do it again. That Easter, as usual, I accompanied the Harts to Cornwall. They had an extraordinary house on the south coast, which had been built by Jenifer’s father for her mother as a wedding present. Because of the strong winds, the Cornish usually built behind the cliffs, but Lamledra, as this house was called, stood bravely on the seaward side.

• From The Ice Storm (1994)

  On nearby communities with less affluent tax bases—Stamford and Norwalk—as well as on New Canaan’s wealthy. The sleet ruined Wendy’s toe socks and her father’s cordovan loafers and at the same time, across town, it ruined the orthopedic shoes of Dan Holmes’s sister, Sarah Joe, one of the special-education kids at Saxe Junior High. Sarah Joe’s heart was all battered and worn, and she seemed to know it. But she managed to trudge along. The kids said that she would sleep with anyone. Wendy wondered if Sarah Joe had any instincts about positions and sex, if she knew about the myth of the vaginal orgasm, or if she felt somehow intuitively that her sexual fumblings were more gratifying with someone she loved. Sarah Joe, laboring up Brushy Ridge Road herself, through the slush, walking up that hill that all the boys careened down in tenth gear. Somewhere the popular girls were trapped indoors with their ephemeral crushes, the infatuations they shared with no one. And elsewhere the half-dozen poor boys of New Canaan High, whose fathers would have to go out into the snow and run the plows, watched TV from couches covered in flame-retardant vinyl. The sleet and snow turned the last light a sullen yellow. The sky looked awful, nauseating. Wendy wanted to know why conversations failed and how to teach compassion and why people fell out of love and she wanted to know it all by the time she got back to the house. She wanted her father to crusade for less peer pressure in the high school and to oppose the bombing of faraway neutral countries and to support limits on presidential power and to devise a plan whereby each kid under eighteen in New Canaan had to spend one afternoon a week with Dan Holmes’s sister, Sarah Joe, or with that other kid, Will Fuller, whom everybody called faggot. Wendy wanted her father to make restitution for his own confusion and estrangement and drunkenness. So when he asked how cold her feet were and then hoisted her into his arms for the last quarter mile, past Silver Meadow, down the embankment, through the thicket of barren trees, across the circle in the driveway, the driveway covered with frosted maple leaves, maple leaves, maple leaves, where a single lonely soccer ball lay buried in a crater of slush, the soccer ball Paul had been kicking around despondently before going into the city—when her father carried her close to his chest in silence, she thought it was fine. She would put off her journey to the Himalayan kingdom of the Inhumans. She would stay with her family for now. More of same—or worse. That was the weather report. The mercury would retreat into its little bulb. The heavens would open. Elena foresaw glazed and treacherous roads. Ski jackets with fur fringe. Hats with pom-poms.

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

  Silver’s coverlet in our mouths and flail the mattress with our fists. Then, bumping each other with our hips to make room, the three of us would press together in front of Mrs. Silver’s full-length mirror to comb our hair and practice looking cool. We wore our hair long at the sides, swept back into a ducktail. The hair on top we combed toward the center and then forward, with spit curls breaking over our foreheads. My mother detested this hairdo and forbade me to wear it, which meant that I wore it everywhere but at home, sustaining the distinctness of two different styles with gobs of Butch Wax that left my hair glossy and hard and my forehead ringed with little pimples. Unlit cigarettes dangling from the corners of our mouths, eyelids at half mast, we studied ourselves in the mirror. Spit curls. Pants pulled down low on our hips, thin white belts buckled on the side. Shirts with three-quarterlength sleeves. Collars raised behind our necks. We should have looked cool, but we didn’t. Silver was emaciated. His eyes bulged, his Adam’s apple protruded, his arms poked out of his sleeves like pencils with gloves stuck on the ends. Taylor had the liquid eyes and long lashes and broad blank face of a cow. I didn’t look that great myself. But it wasn’t really our looks that made us uncool. Coolness did not demand anything as obvious as that. Like chess or music, coolness claimed its own out of some mysterious impulse of recognition. Uncoolness did likewise. We had been claimed by uncoolness. At five o’clock we turned on the television and watched The Mickey Mouse Club . It was understood that we were all holding a giant bone for Annette. This was our excuse for watching the show, and for me it was partly true. I had certain ideas of the greater world that Annette belonged to, and I wanted a place in this world. I wanted it with all the feverish, disabling hunger of first love. At the end of every show the local station gave an address for Mousketeer Mail. I had begun writing Annette. At first I described myself in pretty much the same terms as I had in my letters to Alice, who was now very much past tense, with the difference that instead of owning a ranch my father, Cap’n Wolff, now owned a fleet of fishing boats. I was first mate, myself, and a pretty fair hand at reeling in the big ones. I gave Annette some very detailed descriptions of my contests with the friskier fellows I ran up against. I also invited her to consider the fun to be had in visiting Seattle. I told her we had lots of room. I did not tell her that I was eleven years old. I got back some chipper official responses encouraging me to start an Annette fan club. In other words, to organize my competition. Fat chance.

• From Introduction to the Hebrew Bible and Deutero-Canonical Books (2018)

  Opinions vary widely on the actual date of the poems. The appearance of a Persian word, pardes, “garden,” in 4:13, requires a postexilic date. Some scholars place it as late as the Hellenistic period, but decisive evidence is lacking. Besides the traditional allegorical interpretation, the major modern interpretations of the Song see it as (1) a drama with either two or three main characters, (2) a cycle of wedding songs, (3) a remnant of a fertility cult, (4) a single love poem, or (5) a collection of love poems. Neither the dramatic interpretation nor the theory that relates the Song to a fertility cult can be maintained without distorting or rearranging the poems. Neither is there any clear indication of a wedding context. The crucial factor in appreciating the literary structure of the text is the recognition that there are several changes of speaker. Most often the speaker is a woman, sometimes addressing the beloved directly, sometimes speaking to “the daughters of Jerusalem.” In 1:7—2:7 there is a dialogue between male and female. In 4:1-15 the voice is that of the man, and this is again the case in 6:1-10 and 7:1-9. In view of the changing voices and perspectives, it is difficult to defend the structural unity of the poem. Even those who argue for an overarching unity still distinguish a number of songs within the composition. The number of songs is also a matter of disagreement, ranging from as few as six to more than thirty. The analysis followed here distinguishes eleven units: I. 1:2-6: the woman expresses her longing for the beloved and introduces herself to “the daughters of Jerusalem.” She compares herself to a vineyard, which she “has not kept.” II. 1:7—2:7: a dialogue between man and woman, which starts by making inquiries about a rendezvous and culminates in mutual admiration. III. 2:8-17: a poem describing an encounter with the beloved. IV. 3:1-5: a description of the search for and discovery of the beloved. V. 3:6-11: a poem describing a wedding procession of King Solomon, which may be an implicit analogy, comparing the splendor of the beloved to the glory of Solomon. VI. 4:1—5:1: a poem describing the physical beauty of the woman. This kind of poem is called a wasf and is typical of Near Eastern love poetry. VII. 5:2—6:4: a dialogue between the woman and the daughters of Jerusalem, which includes a description of the man in the style of a wasf. VIII. 6:5-12: a poem spoken by the man in praise of the woman. Again, there are elements of a wasf here. IX. 7:1-9: another wasf in praise of the woman. X. 7:10—8:4: a poem by the woman expressing her desire. XI. 8:5-14: a series of very short poems that serve as an epilogue or conclusion. The woman refers to “my vineyard, my very own,” in 8:12, thereby echoing the introductory verses. The Song of Songs contains some of the most beautiful poetry in the Bible.

• From Opening Up by Writing It Down (2016)

  Both Jamie and Josh found in their early writing studies that at least one participant typically asked to keep his or her essays. These participants report that what they have written is a part of themselves and that they want to be able to refer back to their thoughts and feelings in the future. They have downloaded their traumas but don’t want their memories destroyed—in this metaphor, they want the source files preserved on their own computer. THE DRIVE TOWARD SELF-EXPRESSION Individuals have been known to produce major literary works while under great conflict. Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night, Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, and many other masterpieces express the fundamental psychological fears and traumas of the authors. A parallel phenomenon occurs within the visual arts, music composition, and dance. The stark photography of Diane Arbus, the twisted visions of van Gogh, the conflicted musical themes of Gustav Mahler or Kurt Cobain, or the haunting choreography of Alvin Ailey or Bob Fosse attests to the expression of conflicts across a variety of media. Is there a basic human need to express ourselves? One highly respected scholar, Abraham Maslow, suggested that if our most basic needs—such as food, sex, and security—are satisfied, people exhibit a strong drive toward self-expression. When this drive is blocked, tension will result. One reason that writing about traumas may be physically healthy is that writing itself is a fundamental form of self-expression. Writing, of course, is only one of many forms of self-expression. Looking back to our previous experiments, would people have shown similar improvements in physical health if they had been asked to draw, sing, or dance about their most upsetting experiences? This has been an important question in the creative and expressive arts. EXPRESSION THROUGH DANCING AND DRAWING In a striking article published in the American Journal of Public Health in 2010, Heather Stuckey and Jeremy Nobel summarized dozens of studies that explored whether singing, dancing, drawing, painting, acting, or writing stories or poetry could improve health. Most of the studies were impressionistic or case studies, but a small number were scientifically sound. As the authors pointed out, the findings were promising but not conclusive (a conclusion echoed by similar reviews conducted since). More than anything, this review highlighted the need for rigorous research with carefully assessed biological or behavioral outcomes to be conducted. One study is particularly relevant—one that was conducted by Anne Krantz, a dance therapist in San Francisco. The study itself was quite simple.