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 The History of Christianity II: From the Reformation to the Modern Megachurch (2017)

  358 The History of Christianity II õ Maybe the more fundamental reason for the Pentecostal revival is that humans seem to be instinctively religious creatures. We need something to worship, and we have trouble with the idea that death could be the end of everything. õ It’s hard to predict whether globalization will eventually bring Western- style secularization to the rest of the world, or whether “reverse missionaries” from the Global South will re-Christianize the West. But whether or not humans stop going to church, we won’t lose our desire to seek order in the universe, our curiosity about what lies beyond the material world, and our hope for the cosmic comfort that someone, or something, cares about us. SUGGESTED READING Dennett, Breaking the Spell. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. Taylor, A Secular Age. QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER ä What are the hazards and the benefits of using Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” model to understand conflict between Muslims and Christians? ä What challenges have the growth of global capitalism and secularization posed for Christians? ä If a time machine brought Savonarola and Pico della Mirandola to the 21st century, is there a Christian community around the world where they would they feel at home? 359Bibliography Bibliography Aikman, David. Jesus in Beijing: How Christianity Is Transforming China and Changing the Global Balance of Power. Washington DC: Regnery, 2003. A rather breathless but reliable and lively account of Christianity’s recent spread in China, told through the author’s personal encounters with missionaries and political prisoners. Allen, John. Desmond Tutu: Rabble-Rouser for Peace. New York: Free Press, 2006. An authorized biography, and so decidedly uncritical, but rich with detail thanks to great access to sources. Arthur, Anthony. The Tailor-King: The Rise and Fall of the Anabaptist Kingdom of Munster. New York: St. Martin’s, 1999. A grisly and well- researched account of an apocalyptic experiment gone wrong. Bainton, Roland. Erasmus of Christendom. New York: Charles Scribner, 1969. A charming and insightful biography by one of the 20 th century’s best religious historians. Bellah, Robert, et al. Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1985. A best- selling, highly influential analysis of how religion shapes Americans’ attitudes toward democracy, community, and the good life. Benedict, Philip. Christ’s Churches Purely Formed: A Social History of Calvinism. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002. A book that tells you how church and state worked—and what life was really like—in reformed communities throughout Europe. Boyer, Paul. When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Belief in Modern American Culture. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992. An accessible and detailed survey of apocalyptic movements and their political influence in America.

• From Augustine: Philosopher and Saint (2005)

  24 emoH daoR ehT—snoissefnoC :5 erutceL • The hinge on which the whole Confessions turns comes in the middle of book 10: “Late have I loved You, O Beauty so ancient and so new. For behold, you were within, but I was without” (10:27.38). • After this point, Augustine looks forward to the rest of his life on earth as a journey full of temptations and spends the second half of book 10 discussing the temptations of this mortal life (following the formula of 1 John 2:16): (cid:405) “The lust of the (cid:192) esh”: each of the (cid:191) ve senses offers its own particular temptations. (cid:405) “The lust of the eyes”: idle curiosity. (cid:405) “The pride of life”: pride as the deepest sin of all. • At the end of book 10, Augustine focuses again on Christ (10:48.68): (cid:405) His humility counters our pride. (cid:405) In his humility he shares our mortality. (cid:405) His righteousness counters our sin. (cid:405) In his humility he shares his righteousness with us sinners. (cid:405) Hence the end of book 10 echoes the “hinge”: “How you have loved us, O Father, who spared not your only Son but gave him up for us sinners—how you have loved us!” (10:47.68) Interpreting Genesis (“Confessions” 11–13) • Why interpret Genesis? (cid:405) To understand God’s Creation (versus the Manichaean view that earthly existence is evil). (cid:405) To understand the cosmos in which our soul’s journey takes place. (cid:405) To understand the beginning helps us understand the end: our goal is related to our origin; our end is related to our beginning. • Our heavenly home. (cid:405) Augustine discovers hints of our heavenly home (the “heaven of heavens”) in Genesis (12:1.1–16.23). (cid:405) Augustine’s famous saying, “My will is my weight” (13:9.10), is meant to explain how our loves drive us in whatever direction we go—up to heaven or down to earth. (cid:405) Our will comes to rest in what makes us ultimately happy. Our hearts are restless until that happens—i.e., until we rest in God! (1:1.1) (cid:374) Essential Reading Augustine, Confessions, books 8 and 10. Brown, Augustine of Hippo, chapter 16. Supplementary Reading Augustine, Confessions, books 11–13. O’Connell, Soundings in St. Augustine’s Imagination, chapters 1–3 (images of coming home in Augustine). O’Donnell, Augustine, chapter 5 (particularly good on Confessions, books 10 and 11–13). O’Meara, Young Augustine, chapters 11 and 12 (a study of Augustine’s conversion). Questions to Consider 1. Have you ever tried to choose something wholeheartedly—and failed? What happened? Does Augustine’s description of self-con(cid:192) ict explain it? 2. What would it be like, really, to love God? Does Augustine help us understand that? 25

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  There was the Bubble House and the Happy House and the Glue Factory and the Brady Bunch House. I learned the Bubble House was our first foster home, where we all slept in the same room and our foster parents and their daughter, Susan, would lull us to sleep by turning on a globelike machine that would spin around and show bubbles on the blue walls of our room. The Glue Factory was where we lived the longest as a family in Saint James. But I couldn’t remember living in the Happy House, a place were Cherie and Camille seem to remember that we three girls were loved, cared for, and fed beyond anything else we’ve ever experienced. As we moved from place to place, they would reminisce about the Happy House and the Bubble House—“At the Happy House, the curtains were always open to let the light in,” Cherie would say, or “When I hear this song on the radio, I always turn it up because it reminds me of the Bubble House.” Since we never could figure out where the Happy House was, we all finally agreed that it must have been born from our own folklore. We settled on the fact that we learned how to keep a home at the Bubble House. But we’d also agreed that, at one point, there’d been an aunt Julie and an uncle Frank in our lives. There was something that made us believe they weren’t our true aunt and uncle, but people we’d met along the way. As soon as Pete pulls the motor home back into our driveway in Centereach, I run out of the camper to the yellow kitchen phone and call Camille. “Julia and Frank Accerbi—could they be the same people we called aunt and uncle?” “Regina, maybe . . . maybe these people are related to Paul. But I don’t know how we would have known them, and I wouldn’t believe whatever crazy story Cookie would come up with if we asked her. It doesn’t quite fit together.” But she didn’t rule it out . . . and I so badly needed to know if Paul had moved away or, God forbid, died, so I convince myself that they would know. For weeks, I rehearse draft after draft of what to write. On Easter, I select a note at random from a stack of the very best I’ve written. I address it to Julia and Frank Accerbi and include only my name and house number on the return address line—not the Petermans’ names, or their phone number. I don’t want any of the Accerbis letting the Petermans know that I’ve reached out to the man I believe is my biological father. April 3, 1983 Dear Mr. & Mrs. Accerbi, My name is Regina Marie Calcaterra. I am 16 years old and believe that Paul Accerbi is my father. I also believe that there is a possibility that you are related to him.

• From While You Were Out (2023)

  I’m sitting in a diner with my mother like somebody special, slurping soda through a paper straw. When my drink was done, I folded the straw in two and stuffed it between my top lip and upper teeth to make walrus fangs. Oh, Meg, my mother said and shook her head, chuckling. What a wag you are. And then she looked at me for what seemed like a very long time and smiled so that I could see her dimples. She looked so pretty when she smiled like that. When we were done with our meal, in no hurry at all, we walked down Chicago Avenue, just the two of us, peeking into a dress shop. I reached for my mother’s hand. We moseyed past an antique store with shelves of thick leather books, a big velvet chair, and an umbrella stand. The bookstore on the corner sold purple sweatshirts and wall posters for the Northwestern University students who lived in the dorms nearby. We didn’t talk about anything special. We didn’t need to. I watched my mother lean down and look into the windows, and I noticed how glamorous she was with her tangerine lipstick and tweed coat. She smelled like roses. Okay, kid, she said after a bit. Back we go. I didn’t tell anyone about the roast beef sandwich or our window shopping. That was my private time. Mine and my mother’s. That night, it was back to business as usual. A stack of dishes for her to clean, baskets of laundry to fold, Billy and Danny and Molly burrowing into her belly as she read them Nappy the Dog . An hour later, long after we were supposed to be asleep, Patty and I were back to jumping over the Tiger Pit, hooting. Come in here so I can crack your skulls together, my mother called out from her room weakly. No more Green Rivers or elevator buttons or diners that smelled like cherry pie. Just shut up and go to bed . Something inside me ached. I wanted private time with my mother again. I wanted to make walrus teeth out of paper straws to make her laugh. I wanted to see those dimples. A few days later, I locked myself in the bathroom with a pile of fresh lined school paper. To make sure the edges were good and sharp, I ran my fingers along the side and felt a little sting. A tiny drop of blood began to pool. But that was just a dress rehearsal. You can do this, I told myself as I took a deep breath and raised the paper toward my eye. But no matter how many times I tried, I couldn’t slice my darn eyeball again. Not long after my eye patch came off, Nancy swallowed a whole bottle’s worth of aspirin, saying she wanted to die. Then she did it again a few months later.

• From Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016)

  When I was thirteen my dad moved to Cape Town, and we lost touch. We’d been losing touch for a while, for a couple of reasons. I was a teenager. I had a whole other world I was dealing with now. Videogames and computers meant more to me than spending time with my parents. Also, my mom had married Abel. He was incensed by the idea of my mom being in contact with her previous love, and she decided it was safer for everyone involved not to test his anger. I went from seeing my dad every Sunday to seeing him every other Sunday, maybe once a month, whenever my mom could sneak me over, same as she’d done back in Hillbrow. We’d gone from living under apartheid to living under another kind of tyranny, that of an abusive, alcoholic man. At the same time, Yeoville had started to suffer from white flight, neglect, general decline. Most of my dad’s German friends had left for Cape Town. If he wasn’t seeing me, he had no reason to stay, so he left. His leaving wasn’t anything traumatic, because it never registered that we might lose touch and never see each other again. In my mind it was just Dad’s moving to Cape Town for a bit. Whatever. Then he was gone. I stayed busy living my life, surviving high school, surviving my early twenties, becoming a comedian. My career took off quickly. I got a radio DJ gig and hosted a kids’ adventure reality show on television. I was headlining at clubs all over the country. But even as my life was moving forward, the questions about my dad were always there in the back of my mind, bubbling up to the surface now and then. “I wonder where he is. Does he think about me? Does he know what I’m doing? Is he proud of me?” When a parent is absent, you’re left in the lurch of not knowing, and it’s so easy to fill that space with negative thoughts. “They don’t care.” “They’re selfish.” My one saving grace was that my mom never spoke ill of him. She would always compliment him. “You’re good with your money. You get that from your dad.” “You have your dad’s smile.” “You’re clean and tidy like your father.” I never turned to bitterness, because she made sure I knew his absence was because of circumstance and not a lack of love. She always told me the story of her coming home from the hospital and my dad saying, “Where’s my kid? I want that kid in my life.” She’d say to me, “Don’t ever forget: He chose you.” And, ultimately, when I turned twenty-four, it was my mom who made me track him down.

• From While You Were Out (2023)

  His parents took care of baby Violet while he traveled for work and searched for a surrogate mother. Grandpa’s best friend, a man named Adolf Graner, assured him that Alice, his new wife’s sister, would make a suitable stepmother for the child. She’s a real looker, too, the friend said. Come with me to Michigan and see for yourself. Indeed, she was, albeit plump and more than a little zealous in the religion department. At Grandma’s insistence, Grandpa, a Lutheran, converted to Catholicism, and they married on June 22, 1921, after just a few weeks of courting. Grandma moved to Milwaukee to care for little Violet. But the child cried so much that they let her go back to live with her grandparents. If Grandpa had regrets about his new wife, it was too late now to do anything about it. She was pregnant. Jack was born the following April, followed by Patsy two years later, and then my father, who was born two years after that. The blessing of children did nothing to bring my grandparents together, particularly once the Depression hit and money got tighter. Grandpa was away most weeks on business and steered clear on weekends by going fishing in northern Wisconsin or grouse hunting in the western part of the state. By the time my siblings and I were born, Grandma and Grandpa not only slept in separate beds, they stayed on different floors of their house, as far away from one another as they could get. I imagine Grandpa always missed his little Violet and likely resented Grandma for scaring away the child. Just thinking about that made me miss my own mother. Will she be home soon? I asked again. She’s back in the hospital, Grandma said. For what? I asked. Grandma waved her hand at me like she was swatting a fly. I want to know what’s wrong with my mother, you old witch, I thought. But the nuns need to know, I protested. Tell ’em she’s got pneumonia, Grandma said. I wasn’t going to fool those nuns. They knew everything. I bet the whole parish already knew where my mother was. If you asked me, my mother didn’t look sick enough to be in any hospital. Her frosted blond hair was always poufed and sprayed and her dark brown eyebrows were neatly plucked. I wouldn’t call her pretty in a movie star way. With her long, straight nose and smooth, milky skin, she was more of a classic beauty like the statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary on the altar at church. With no solid information provided to me, I began to develop my own theories of where my mother was and why she was gone. Holmer had made a lot of money selling ads for Physicians Management, the business magazine that he and his partner had started a few years earlier. Magazine sales were soaring so fast, they felt like they had grabbed hold of a rocket.

• From Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016)

  And colored people didn’t just get promoted to white. Sometimes colored people became Indian. Sometimes Indian people became colored. Sometimes blacks were promoted to colored, and sometimes coloreds were demoted to black. And of course whites could be demoted to colored as well. That was key. Those mixed bloodlines were always lurking, waiting to peek out, and fear of losing their status kept white people in line. If two white parents had a child and the government decided that child was too dark, even if both parents produced documentation proving they were white, the child could be classified as colored, and the family had to make a decision. Do they give up their white status to go and live as colored people in a colored area? Or would they split up, the mother taking the colored child to live in the ghetto while the father stayed white to make a living to support them? Many colored people lived in this limbo, a true purgatory, always yearning for the white fathers who disowned them, and they could be horribly racist to one another as a result. The most common colored slur was boesman. “Bushman.” “Bushie.” Because it called out their blackness, their primitiveness. The worst way to insult a colored person was to infer that they were in some way black. One of the most sinister things about apartheid was that it taught colored people that it was black people who were holding them back. Apartheid said that the only reason colored people couldn’t have first-class status was because black people might use coloredness to sneak past the gates to enjoy the benefits of whiteness. That’s what apartheid did: It convinced every group that it was because of the other race that they didn’t get into the club. It’s basically the bouncer at the door telling you, “We can’t let you in because of your friend Darren and his ugly shoes.” So you look at Darren and say, “Screw you, Black Darren. You’re holding me back.” Then when Darren goes up, the bouncer says, “No, it’s actually your friend Sizwe and his weird hair.” So Darren says, “Screw you, Sizwe,” and now everyone hates everyone. But the truth is that none of you were ever getting into that club. Colored people had it rough. Imagine: You’ve been brainwashed into believing that your blood is tainted. You’ve spent all your time assimilating and aspiring to whiteness. Then, just as you think you’re closing in on the finish line, some fucking guy named Nelson Mandela comes along and flips the country on its head. Now the finish line is back where the starting line was, and the benchmark is black. Black is in charge. Black is beautiful. Black is powerful. For centuries colored people were told: Blacks are monkeys. Don’t swing from the trees like them. Learn to walk upright like the white man. Then all of a sudden it’s Planet of the Apes, and the monkeys have taken over. —

• From The Ice Storm (1994)

  Pete’s parlance, with Eileen Becker in fourth form, but late in the spring she began seeing, instead, his roommate, Stan Sinclair. A period followed in which Paul frequently disturbed them in his dorm room—the two of them pretending to be asleep, or Eileen clutching a rumpled frock around her. Hood struck back with a few crushes that didn’t last more than a week. He struck back by being alone. Then one night he persuaded Eileen into an empty reading room. In the sciences building. He had preyed upon her confused notions of fidelity. I can’t eat since you started up with Sinclair , he said. I’m all cut up inside . Which was misleading, since basically he felt that way all the time. Paul knelt at her waist, her jeans and panties in a tangle around her sneakers—Tretorns with pink stripes—and held her vagina close to his face. She parted her legs, standing over him, lowered herself down until they touched this way. He got the tip of his tongue inside her. So briefly it was almost certainly a dream. And though this was as far as she would go, further than she wanted to, she had whispered one thing, shivered and whispered it, before going back to Stan Sinclair. Paul Hood , she had said, I know what you’re gonna be good at one day . The train roared through Pelham. Alongside, on the highway, cars were backed up in either direction. The headlights, the streetlights, were a forlorn effort in the sleet and snow. Paul Hood had more ideas about the Wankel rotary engine than he did about love. But he was not dumb. Though Testors model glue in the bottom of a paper bag was his preferred companion, though he had once soaked his penis in milk in an effort to get his housemaster’s cat to have congress with him—her tongue was like sandpaper—he knew the name of what he was missing. He had gotten his hand down the waist of Jeannie McFarlane’s pants to feel the tuft of what she concealed there, and he had kissed a variety of girls for durations short and long, and he had read about blow jobs and sixty-nine, orgies, bisexuality, mutual masturbation, transvestism, ménage à trois, anal sex, fetishism, and even fist-fucking. He had perused Davenport’s dog-eared copy of the Kama Sutra ; he knew what love was. He was going to pursue this education. He didn’t want to be as sad as his parents. So he was on the train, on his way to meet Libbets Casey, a girl from school, who, unlike his friends from the Cult, unlike Carla Bear, say, was a fine conversationalist, who did charity work with the St. Pete’s Missionary Society, and whose parents left her entirely unsupervised. Paul was infatuated. It had come over him suddenly. The Bear was just someone he liked; Debby Vartagnan was just someone he liked. He wanted Libbets, a girl who wore a mink coat with blue jeans.

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  The “excessive womanliness” of Dolly Parton captured in a stand-up poster of her in a Nashville music store. This photograph appeared in Esquire in 1977. Esquire In this way only, she shared a persona with the Tennessean Dolly Parton. The country singer known for her “voluptuously overflowing body,” garish outfits, big blonde wig—what one scholar has called “excessive womanliness.” Dolly’s grandfather was a Pentecostal preacher. Like Tammy Faye, the singer liked to buy her clothes at the cheaper stores. Her image, as Parton confessed in her autobiography, expressed the desire of poor white trash girls to see themselves as magazine models. She explained, “They didn’t look at all like they had to work in the fields. They didn’t look like they had to take a spit bath in a dishpan. They didn’t look as if men and boys could just put their hands on them any time they felt like it, and with any degree of roughness they chose.” Poverty, for a female, went beyond the wretchedness of having no money. 42 Here lies a clue to the real appeal Tammy Faye had among her fans, who vicariously enjoyed the exhibitionism and excess. Parton’s style could be seen as a burlesque—a hooker on the outside and a sweet country girl on the inside; similarly, Tammy Faye’s drag queen look was embraced by the gay community. She was one of very few conservative evangelicals to show sympathy for gay men who were dying of AIDS. She also became for true believers a real-life Christian Cinderella story; one PTL partner made a handcrafted doll of her (marketed for adults, not children) that sold for $675. The Tammy Barbie was a fairy-tale princess with a large heart, adorned, as well, with exaggerated eyelashes. 43

• From The Second Sex (1949)

  There is nonetheless one advantage woman can gain from her very inferiority: since from the start she has fewer chances than man, she does not feel a priori guilty toward him; it is not up to her to compensate for social injustice, and she is not called upon to do so. A man of goodwill feels it his duty to “help” women because he is more favored than they are; he will let himself be caught up in scruples or pity, and he risks being the prey of “clinging” or “devouring” women because they are at a disadvantage. The woman who achieves a virile independence has the great privilege of dealing sexually with autonomous and active individuals who—generally—will not play a parasite’s role in her life, who will not bind her by their weaknesses and the demands of their needs. But women who know how to create a free relation with their partners are in truth rare; they themselves forge the chains with which men do not wish to burden them: they adopt toward their partner the attitude of the woman in love. For twenty years of waiting, dreaming, and hoping, the young girl has embraced the myth of the liberating hero and savior: independence won through work is not enough to abolish her desire for a glorious abdication. She would have had to be brought up exactly like a boy7 to be able to comfortably overcome adolescent narcissism: but in her adult life she perpetuates this cult of self toward which her whole youth has predisposed her; she uses the merits of her professional success to enrich her image; she needs a gaze from above to reveal and consecrate her worth. Even if she is severe on men whom she judges daily, she reveres Man nonetheless, and if she encounters him, she is ready to fall on her knees. To be justified by a god is easier than to be justified by her own effort; the world encourages her to believe in the possibility of a given salvation: she chooses to believe in it. At times she entirely renounces her autonomy, she is no more than a woman in love; more often she tries conciliation; but adoring love, the love of abdication, is devastating: it takes up all thoughts, all instants, it is obsessive, tyrannical. If she encounters a professional disappointment, the woman passionately seeks refuge in love: her failures find expression in scenes and demands at the lover’s expense. But her heartbreaks in no way have the effect of increasing her professional zeal: generally she becomes irritated, on the contrary, by the kind of life that keeps her from the royal road of the great love. A woman who worked ten years ago for a political magazine run by women told me that in the office people talked rarely about politics but incessantly about love: one would complain that she was loved only for her body, ignoring her fine intelligence; another would whine that she was only appreciated for her mind and no one ever appreciated her physical charms. Here again, for the woman to be in love like a man—that is to say, without putting her very being into question, freely—she would have to think herself his equal, and be his equal concretely: she would have to commit herself with the same decisiveness to her enterprises, which, as we will see, is still not common.

• From The Second Sex (1949)

  Men we call great are those who—in one way or another—take the weight of the world on their shoulders; they have done more or less well, they have succeeded in re-creating it or they have failed; but they took on this enormous burden in the first place. This is what no woman has ever done, what no woman has ever been able to do. It takes belonging to the privileged caste to view the universe as one’s own, to consider oneself as guilty of its faults and take pride in its progress; those alone who are at the controls have the opportunity to justify it by changing, thinking, and revealing it; only they can identify with it and try to leave their imprint on it. Until now it has only been possible for Man to be incarnated in the man, not the woman. Moreover, individuals who appear exceptional to us, the ones we honor with the name of genius, are those who tried to work out the fate of all humanity in their particular lives. No woman has thought herself authorized to do that. How could van Gogh have been born woman? A woman would not have been sent on mission to Borinage, she would not have felt men’s misery as her own crime, she would not have sought redemption; so she would never have painted van Gogh’s sunflowers. And this is without taking into account that the painter’s kind of life—the solitude in Arles, going to cafés, whorehouses, everything that fed into van Gogh’s art by feeding his sensibility—would have been prohibited to her. A woman could never have become Kafka: in her doubts and anxieties, she would never have recognized the anguish of Man driven from paradise. Saint Teresa is one of the only women to have lived the human condition for herself, in total abandonment: we have seen why. Placing herself beyond earthly hierarchies, she, like Saint John of the Cross, felt no reassuring sky over her head. For both of them it was the same night, the same flashes of light, in each the same nothingness, in God the same plenitude. When finally it is possible for every human being to place his pride above sexual differences in the difficult glory of his free existence, only then will woman be able to make her history, her problems, her doubts, and her hopes those of humanity; only then will she be able to attempt to discover in her life and her works all of reality and not only her own person. As long as she still has to fight to become a human being, she cannot be a creator.

• From My Secret Garden (1973)

  …I am a divorcee and live alone, but am not ever lonely, even though I do not go out and about much. My “fantasy” lover is always with me day and night, and I find her very exciting. She is a “masculine”-looking woman dressed in “drag” (men’s dress). She is very sweet and she takes me out every Saturday and Sunday evening. She works in the Ambulance Services as a driver [senior]. When we go to bed she is very gentle and understanding and a great lover—much better than a man. I would never exchange her for a man. Every time we have sex it is more exciting than the last time, and we manage to make love often (about twelve times per night—when I feel hot). Each action short, fast, but satisfying. Of course, this is just a fantasy or daydream, but the woman exists; however, not in my life (lucky devil who has her). I have only seen her in passing. I have been holding the “torch” for her for nearly six years now. …there’s this giant centipede or prawn, or a cross between the two, crawling into me headfirst, my legs being really wide apart to accommodate him. As he crawls into me, his thousands of fuzzy legs fall off onto the sheets around me. He tickles and excites me as he undulates and wiggles from side to side getting further and further in, and he becomes drenched with my nectar, which he licks up and is strengthened by. He goes on up and up. This all takes hours as he is ten thousand feet long, but I like every inch of it. The next morning, happily exhausted, I begin the ritual of carefully gathering up the thousands of orange fuzzy legs that surround me, and take them in a wicker basket to the kitchen. There I dump them into my blue enamel jammaking pot, and add sugar, orange peel, lemon, nutmeg, banana peel scrapings, and a bit of hash when available (very optional). At the hardball, or so-called crack stage of cooling, I pour the orange mass into penis-shaped molds (can be bought in your nearest sex shop), and allow them to cool and harden. To be sucked later when desired, but I usually give mine away to my friends, as the penis-shaped mold itself is far more satisfying and I share him with no one. You’d be surprised how many of my friends drop by for their sucks. As you can tell, these aren’t things I really think about while fucking. They’re not even masturbatory fantasies, just the kind of idle daydreams I have after a bath, while I’m lying down for an hour or so, half asleep, half awake, waiting until it’s time to get dressed and go out for the evening.

• From The Erotic Mind (1995)

  Now that you have seen how negative emotions can cause a great deal of trouble, I hope you won’t conclude—as many sex therapists and educators erroneously do—that anxiety and guilt are solely the enemies of good sex. If that were the case, eliminating the destructive side effects of these emotions would be easy because few people would be drawn to them in the first place. However, the paradoxical perspective prepares us to accept a more complicated reality. Only by recognizing the untidy fact that emotions function as either aphrodisiacs or antiaphrodisiacs can we empathize with the struggles of people like Brian or Nancy. Only when we see the true nature of their dilemma do new possibilities become visible on the horizon. TROUBLESOME ATTRACTIONSSexual attractions are among life’s elemental pleasures. The simple act of noticing another or being noticed stimulates aliveness and vitality. Most people you find attractive are just passing treats for the eyes, although some become objects of longing or characters in fantasies. Not all attractions are pleasant, though. The lonely, especially those convinced of their undesirability, find the lure of a beautiful other a painful reminder of deprivation. Whether we’re looking for a casual partner or a lifelong companion, most of us defer to our attractions despite considerable evidence that they can’t always be trusted. After all, attraction is often based on as little as one compelling feature, such as terrific breasts or a beguiling smile—hardly sufficient reason to pursue a potentially life-changing involvement. The attractions that stir you aren’t nearly as straightforward as they initially appear. When you feel an irresistible response to someone, your CET is probably being stimulated, although you may have no idea why this particular person is affecting you so strongly. Attractions that strike a deep inner chord do so because of a mysteriously complex and multidimensional psychic resonance. When you are strongly drawn to someone, do subtle clues and intuition allow you to perceive things about them that are normally hidden from view? Or is the object of your desire simply an appealing blank screen onto which you project a preexisting image from within yourself? In my view, strong attractions are a baffling mixture of heightened perception, fantasy projections, and pure chance—so thoroughly intermingled that no dependable method exists for sorting them out. No wonder some attractions work out well while others are disastrous. Sometimes what you think you see is precisely what you get. At other times you may feel shocked and betrayed to realize that you are involved with someone who is not at all the person you thought. Attraction is a meaningful toss of the dice, neither a rational choice nor mere happenstance. With luck, experience has taught you valuable lessons about how to manage your attractions so that they work for rather than against you. This is perhaps the most anyone can reasonably expect.

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  Sexologist Lisa Diamond spent over a decade studying the ebb and flow of female desire. In her book Sexual Fluidity, she reports that many women see themselves as attracted to specific people, rather than to their gender. Women, in Diamond’s view, respond so strongly to emotional intimacy that their innate gender orientation can easily be overwhelmed. Chivers agrees: “Women physically don’t seem to differentiate between genders in their sex responses, at least heterosexual women don’t.” Apparently, many women see the Mona Lisa looking back at them from the mirror. What are the practical effects of this crucial difference in erotic plasticity? To start with, we’d expect to find far more transitory, situational bisexual behavior among women than among men. Various studies of heterosexual couples engaging in group sex or “swinging” agree that it is common for women to have sex with other women in these situations but that men almost never engage with men. Additionally, while we’d be the last to suggest popular culture is a reliable indicator of innate human sexuality, it’s probably significant that women kissing women has quickly become accepted as mainstream behavior while depictions of men kissing each other on television or films remains unusual and controversial. Most women presumably wake up the morning after their first same-sex erotic experience more interested in finding some coffee than in conducting a panicked reassessment of their sexual identity. The essence of sexuality for most women seems to include the freedom to change as life changes around them. There is, after all, a liberating simplicity in Mona Lisa’s complexity, which Freud seems to have missed. The answer to his question couldn’t be simpler, yet it contains multitudes. What does woman want? It depends. CHAPTER TWENTY-ONEThe Pervert’s LamentParaphilias are not universally present in human societies, their incidence could be greatly reduced if tolerance and education in sexual matters were more widespread. This is a most important but socially sensitive area of sex research. ALAN DIXSON1 While many women are freed by their erotic flexibility, men can find themselves trapped by the rigidity of their sexual response, like the male sheep and goats mentioned earlier. Once determined, male eroticism tends to retain its contours throughout life, like concrete that has set. Consequently, the theory of erotic plasticity predicts that paraphilias (abnormal sexual desires and behaviors) should be far more prevalent in men than in women who would presumably be more responsive to social pressures and find it easier to abandon previous turn-ons or ignore unseemly urges. Nearly every source of evidence supports this prediction. Most researchers and therapists agree that these unusual sexual hungers are almost exclusively seen in males, appear to be related to early imprinting, and are difficult, if not impossible, to alter once boyhood impressions have hardened into adult yearnings.

• From In the Unlikely Event (2015)

  “What the heck,” Rusty said to Little Mary, who worked behind the counter, “it’s my birthday.” “Happy birthday, hon,” Little Mary said. “I’d give you a soda on the house but then I’d be fired.” The 12:30 show was a double feature. First, You Never Can Tell, with Dick Powell and Peggy Dow. A dog dies and is reincarnated into a private eye. Rusty loved screwball comedies. Miri preferred her movies torrid and dark. The feature attraction was Across the Wide Missouri, with Clark Gable. Halfway through Rusty leaned over and said, “Time to go. We have to change for dinner.” Now Miri would never find out what happened to Clark Gable or his Indian wife. RubyAt Newark Airport the Miami Airlines plane was delayed again with no explanation. No wonder Dana had tried to dissuade her from taking the non-scheduled flight to Tampa, then Miami. “Non-skeds are unreliable,” Dana said. Ruby argued how much cheaper this flight was than the others. Really, what was the difference? An airplane is an airplane. It gets you where you want to go. So non-skeds don’t have a regular schedule like a train or a bus. Who cares? Besides, she was impatient. The sooner she got to Florida, the better. She’d been dreaming of balmy beaches and soft moonlit nights. She couldn’t wait to get away from this awful weather. So what if she had to wait another hour or two? She took a seat in the departure lounge, adjusted her skirt and pulled the book she was reading from her oversize purse, glad she had a gripping mystery to distract her. She was aware of the glances coming her way, at the sight of a pretty girl reading I, the Jury, by Mickey Spillane, known for his racy language, but Ruby didn’t give a hoot. Let them look. Let them stare. It was nothing to her. Across from her an older couple were talking in voices loud enough for her to hear. The wife said, “You have a long drive. You should get going, and don’t forget to pick up my Voluptés from Irene Ammerman. You remember where she lives?” He said, “I’m not leaving until I see you on the plane.” “That’s sweet, Ben, but it doesn’t make sense.” “It makes sense to me.” She laughed. “You’re such a romantic.” “Me, you’re calling me a romantic?” “Maybe not every day but when it counts.” He laughed and kissed her. She said, “Ben, people can see…” “So? I’m not allowed to kiss my wife in public after thirty-five years?” Ruby smiled to herself. She couldn’t remember a time when her parents kidded around that way. “Excuse me,” a young man said, “but is anyone sitting here?” Ruby sighed and moved her bag, meant to discourage other passengers from sitting next to her. He sat down, hoping to start up a conversation, she could tell. “My mother thinks I’m driving to Florida,” he said, “either that or taking the train.

• From The Erotic Mind (1995)

  Some people, however, seem unable to achieve such a balance. For them the experience of longing, whether or not they fully realize it, is the centerpiece of their eroticism. No longing, no turn-on—end of story. Relying on subtle signs and well-honed intuition, they are invariably attracted to those who are unavailable, confused, ambivalent, of the “wrong” sexual orientation, or who live far away. They can sniff out long shots and lost causes with amazing precision. Yearning enthusiasts become adept at zeroing in on partners who are somewhat available, or very available part of the time, or who hint that they might become more available in the unspecified future. Longing-based involvements are passionate, stormy, and—at key moments—profoundly moving. Unfortunately, those who genuinely seek long-term relationships often discover that their commitment to longing as the source of excitement turns out to be incompatible with their ultimate goals. The thorniest challenge of longing-based eroticism is neither desire nor arousal—these are easy. The hard part is fulfillment. Maggie: Master of the chase With the wisdom that comes from tough experience, Maggie spoke a fundamental truth: “The most painful relationships to give up are the ones that never were.” She was referring to a year of wrenching grief that had followed the inevitable end of a four-year affair with a married man. But on a deeper level she was summarizing a realization that, with few exceptions, her strongest attractions had always been for men whom, in one way or another, she couldn’t have. Yet she dreamed of an enduring bond with someone who would desire her without reservation and enthusiastically choose to be hers exclusively. She thought she wanted a man she wouldn’t have to pursue. There was no logical explanation for her inability to find such a man. A bright, witty elementary school teacher in her mid-thirties, with a pleasing face, a shapely body, and a smile that exuded kindness, she obviously had much to offer. Over the years several men had pursued her. Yet she voiced a complaint I have heard often: “The ‘normal’ guys—the stable, dependable ones who would make great husbands—bore me. The exciting ones are all spoken for or on the run.” Although her latest affair had been the only one with a married man, four others had many similarities, beginning with an energetic youthfulness she found irresistible. Each also had a flair for adventure, both in and out of bed, and a knack for playful spontaneity. All her lovers had also been unreliable at times and could not be counted on to follow through with plans, return phone calls, or remember special dates—important symbols of love for Maggie.

• From In the Unlikely Event (2015)

  “You were loved from the moment you were born.” That was the last time Miri asked her mother about her father. Because what was the point? At least no one said he was a no-good son of a bitch, the way she’d heard Cousin Belle describe her daughter’s husband. They didn’t say anything, which in a way was worse. “This talk has to be a secret between us,” Henry had said that night last April as they’d walked to his car, each of them with an ice cream cone. “Okay?” She didn’t tell him how much she hated secrets. Hated them with a passion. Were adults ever honest with kids? Aside from Henry, none had been honest with her—not Rusty, not Irene. They lived in a world where children, even teenagers, were protected from the truth for their own good. That’s how they got out of saying anything. Ever since she could remember, the adults would stop talking when she walked into the room. They’d smile at her, then change the subject. Now here was Henry telling her she had to keep this a secret from Rusty and Irene. With pleasure, Uncle Henry. “I’d be in big trouble for breaking their rules. Who am I to say you have the right to know about your father? I don’t have kids. I don’t know how I’d feel if I did.” “Thank you, Uncle Henry.” She didn’t ask any of the hundreds of questions already forming inside her head. She’d save them for another time. She wondered where Mike Monsky was now. Maybe he’d been a passenger on the plane to Miami yesterday. Maybe Dr. Osner would have to identify him by his teeth and dental X-rays. Rabbi Halberstadter would pray over him, even though there would be no next of kin for the rabbi to comfort. Who’s to say Mike Monsky hadn’t bought a huge insurance policy on his life before he’d boarded the doomed flight and once they discovered she was next of kin, she would get the money? Would she take it? She didn’t have to think twice. Yes, she’d take it! For Rusty and Irene and Henry, who had raised her without a dime from him. Just don’t expect her to visit his grave, Rabbi. She’d give him the same thing he’d given her. Not a second thought. Even if he’d bought that policy she knew it was just because he’d felt guilty for all the years he’d neglected his daughter. If he even knew he had a daughter. HenryHadn’t Rusty told her anything? She had a right to know. It was her life, her history. He may have been young then, but he remembered how Irene had argued with Rusty over calling Mike’s family. Rusty wouldn’t hear of it. “He’s gone, Mama. He’s probably on a ship in the Pacific by now.

• From A History of God (1993)

  As a Platonist, Origen was convinced of the kinship between God and the soul: the knowledge of the divine was natural to humanity. It could be “recollected” and awakened by special disciplines. To adapt his Platonic philosophy to the Semitic scriptures, Origen developed a symbolic method of reading the Bible. Thus the virgin birth of Christ in the womb of Mary was not primarily to be understood as a literal event but as the birth of the divine Wisdom in the soul. He also adopted some of the ideas of the Gnostics. Originally, all the beings in the spiritual world had contemplated the ineffable God who had revealed himself to them in the Logos, the divine Word and Wisdom. But they had grown tired of this perfect contemplation and fallen from the divine world into bodies, which had arrested their fall. All was not lost, however. The soul could ascend to God in a long, steady journey that would continue after death. Gradually it would cast aside the fetter of the body and rise above gender to become pure spirit. By means of contemplation (theoria), the soul would advance in the knowledge (gnosis) of God, which would transform it until, as Plato himself had taught, it would itself become divine. God was deeply mysterious and none of our human words or concepts could adequately express him, but the soul had the capacity to know God, since it shared his divine nature. Contemplation of the Logos was natural to us, since all spiritual beings (logikoi) had originally been equal to one another. When they had fallen, only the future mind of the man Jesus Christ had been content to remain in the divine world contemplating God’s Word, and our own souls were equal to his. Belief in the divinity of Jesus the man was only a phase; it would help us on our way, but would eventually be transcended when we would see God face to face. In the ninth century, the Church would condemn some of Origen’s ideas as heretical. Neither Origen nor Clement believed that God had created the world out of nothing (ex nihilo), which would later become orthodox Christian doctrine. Origen’s view of the divinity of Jesus and the salvation of humanity certainly did not conform to later official Christian teaching: he did not believe that we had been “saved” by the death of Christ, but that we ascended to God under our own steam. The point is that when Origen and Clement were writing and teaching their Christian Platonism there was no official doctrine. Nobody knew for certain if God had created the world or how a human being had been divine. The turbulent events of the fourth and fifth centuries would lead to a definition of orthodox belief only after an agonizing struggle.

• From Adam, Eve, and the Serpent (1988)

  A famous Egyptian Christian named Anthony chose such freedom, and generations of ascetically inclined Christians loved to tell his story. Anthony was the son of affluent Christian parents who lived in a small town in Egypt around the year 260. When Anthony was about eighteen, his parents died and left him responsible for a large household. He had to care for his young sister, supervise the slaves, and manage three hundred acres of fertile and beautiful farmland. Some six months after his parents’ death, Anthony was pondering his future when in church one day he heard the words Jesus spoke to a rich young man: “Go, sell what you have, and give to the poor, and you shall have treasure in heaven; come and follow me.”9 Anthony’s biographer tells us that he immediately left the church and gave to the villagers the property he had received as his inheritance, “so that he and his sister would not be encumbered with it.”10 He sold all their possessions, gave most of the money to the poor, and kept only a little in reserve to provide for his sister; soon afterward, he placed her in a home with some ascetic Christian women and left the village, “watching over himself and patiently disciplining himself.”11 Instead of marrying and entering into the lifelong obligations of a wealthy landowner in his hometown, Anthony took Jesus’ words as permission—indeed, as encouragement—to shrug off these onerous responsibilities. Intense, solitary, and self-involved, Anthony was not seeking an easy escape from difficulty. Instead, he abruptly abandoned a traditional and respectable life to make his own way to self-discovery—and the discovery of God. Anthony devoted himself to ascesis—which literally means “exercise”—in order to “attend to his soul,”12 but first he had to battle a residual desire for human company and approval. His biographer tells us that at first the devil tormented Anthony with “memories of his property; anxiety for his sister; intimacy with his relatives; desire for money and for power; and the manifold enjoyment of food and the other pleasures of life,” and finally with vivid sexual fantasies.13 What Anthony wanted to learn was what human life was or could be apart from ordinary social expectations. He did not reject all human society but sought out the society of an aristocracy quite different from the local Egyptian landholders—experts, or so he believed, in the practice of divine wisdom. Though he rejected family, marriage, and kinship, he willingly subjected himself to those whose self-mastery he admired, and sought to become one of them: “he noticed the courtesy of one; another’s constancy in prayer; one’s humility; another’s kindness,” and, above all, “their devotion to Christ, and their love for one another.”14

• From Escape (2007)

  This philosophy of “perfect obedience produces perfect faith” began sweeping through the community. Warren was assuming more control of the FLDS, claiming he was acting for his father. He began promoting the doctrine of perfect obedience. He preached it and talked about it on tapes, and laminated handmade signs proclaiming it were hung in nearly every home. We were told that every problem a woman faced was because she was not being perfectly obedient to her husband. Women were being instructed to listen to the whispers of God and pray to know their husband’s hearts. A wife’s goal was to be able to meet his every need without ever being asked. If she asked questions when her husband gave her an order, it was only because she still had contamination in her heart. If she was in harmony with him, God’s whisper would have made it precisely clear what was expected of her. But even if a woman did exactly what her husband demanded, he could still find fault with her and accuse her of still not being in perfect harmony with him, because otherwise she’d have understood what he really meant. Linda and I had grown close again after she returned to the community. We’d had almost no contact for nearly five years. Linda was now twenty-seven and was raising five children—her own two and her new husband’s three. She’d managed to get a nursing degree but had to quit working to take care of five preschoolers. Linda’s husband traveled a lot and she began inviting women over for coffee some mornings to break up her loneliness. These became rare forums to talk about what we felt was happening within the FLDS. Had it been known that we were meeting, we would have been reprimanded and seen as being out of harmony with our priesthood training. We kept our coffee parties secret. This was a radical departure for me. For the first time I had women friends outside my family. Compared to Merril’s other wives, I was running in a rowdy crowd and was being exposed to new viewpoints and controversial ideas. All of us, myself included, believed that Uncle Rulon was the true prophet of God, so we would never dream of criticizing anything he said or did. But that still left us room to talk about how people interpreted his teachings and how the new religious doctrines that were coming to us via Warren Jeffs were playing out in people’s lives. These women weren’t afraid to make fun of what they were seeing. “Perfect obedience” was very much on our minds. I remember the morning when one of the women said, “Remember Fascinating Womanhood? We don’t have to be fascinating anymore! The prophet has given us a new answer and we will never have to be abused again. The new answer is obedience!”