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 Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  Some educated girls think they prefer the practice of a profession because the dream of unusual success lures them; but when they have had a taste of the wearing routine that prevails in most professions, they turn with longing to the thought of a home of their own. Our industrial machine has absorbed the functions which women formerly fulfilled in the home, and has drawn them into its hopper because female labor is unorganized and cheap labor. They are made to compete with the very men who ought to marry them, and thus they further diminish their own chance of marriage. If any one has a sound reason for taking the competitive system by the throat in righteous wrath, it is the unmarried woman and the mother with girls. Girls go to work at the very age when their developing body ought to be shielded from physical and mental strain. Many are kept standing for long hours at a time. During rush seasons they are pushed to exhaustion. In few cases can they permit themselves that periodical easement which is essential to the continued health of most women. Many of them enter marriage with organic troubles that develop their full import only in later years. Girls pass from school to shop or store and never learn housekeeping well. If they marry, they assume charge of a manufacturing establishment in which all the varied functions are performed by one woman. They have to learn the work at an age when the body no longer acquires new habits readily. If the burden of maternity is added at the same time, the strain is immense, and is likely to affect the temper and the happiness of the home. It is thus our civilization prepares its women for the all-important function of motherhood, for on the women of the working class rests the function of bearing and rearing the future citizens of the republic. Individually Americans are more tender of women than any other nation. Collectively we treat them with cruelty and folly. A large proportion of working women are not paid wages sufficient to support themselves in comfort and to dress as the requirements of their position and of modern taste demand. In that case they must either suffer want or supplement their earnings. They are fortunate if fathers and brothers support the home. In that case they are able to underbid those who are dependent on their own labor alone. If the home does not thus shield them, what are they to do? There are numbers of unmarried and married men about them looking for transient love. The girls themselves have the womanly desire for the company and love of men. Satisfaction by marriage may not be in sight.

• From The Trembling of the Veil (1922)

  Our neighbourhood was small, for it consisted only of your Mother. She may probably have already told you that being left by her Parents in indigent Circumstances she had retired into Wales on eoconomical motives. There it was our freindship first commenced. Isobel was then one and twenty. Tho’ pleasing both in her Person and Manners (between ourselves) she never possessed the hundredth part of my Beauty or Accomplishments. Isabel had seen the World. She had passed 2 Years at one of the first Boarding-schools in London; had spent a fortnight in Bath and had supped one night in Southampton. “Beware my Laura (she would often say) Beware of the insipid Vanities and idle Dissipations of the Metropolis of England; Beware of the unmeaning Luxuries of Bath and of the stinking fish of Southampton.” “Alas! (exclaimed I) how am I to avoid those evils I shall never be exposed to? What probability is there of my ever tasting the Dissipations of London, the Luxuries of Bath, or the stinking Fish of Southampton? I who am doomed to waste my Days of Youth and Beauty in an humble Cottage in the Vale of Uske.” Ah! little did I then think I was ordained so soon to quit that humble Cottage for the Deceitfull Pleasures of the World. Adeiu. Laura. LETTER 5th LAURA to MARIANNE One Evening in December as my Father, my Mother and myself, were arranged in social converse round our Fireside, we were on a sudden greatly astonished, by hearing a violent knocking on the outward door of our rustic Cot. My Father started—“What noise is that,” (said he.) “It sounds like a loud rapping at the door”—(replied my Mother.) “it does indeed.” (cried I.) “I am of your opinion; (said my Father) it certainly does appear to proceed from some uncommon violence exerted against our unoffending door.” “Yes (exclaimed I) I cannot help thinking it must be somebody who knocks for admittance.” “That is another point (replied he;) We must not pretend to determine on what motive the person may knock—tho’ that someone does rap at the door, I am partly convinced.” Here, a 2d tremendous rap interrupted my Father in his speech, and somewhat alarmed my Mother and me. “Had we better not go and see who it is? (said she) the servants are out.” “I think we had.” (replied I.) “Certainly, (added my Father) by all means.” “Shall we go now?” (said my Mother,) “The sooner the better.” (answered he.) “Oh! let no time be lost” (cried I.) A third more violent Rap than ever again assaulted our ears. “I am certain there is somebody knocking at the Door.” (said my Mother.) “I think there must,” (replied my Father) “I fancy the servants are returned; (said I) I think I hear Mary going to the Door.” “I’m glad of it (cried my Father) for I long to know who it is.”

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

  RUTH The book of Ruth is exceptional in the Hebrew Scriptures insofar as its heroine is a Moabite woman who marries an Israelite and returns to Israel with her mother-in-law. Moabites do not usually get good press in the Hebrew Bible. In Numbers 25, the Israelites incite the wrath of YHWH by having sexual relations with Moabite women and joining in the worship of their gods. Deuteronomy 23:3 decrees that no Ammonite or Moabite should be admitted to the assembly of the Lord, even to the tenth generation. Ruth, however, is an exemplary character. Although the story is related to Israelite history at the beginning and at the end, it is primarily the story of family relationships. On this level of interaction between individuals, ethnic origin recedes in importance. What matters is how people behave toward one another. Like the parables of Jesus in the New Testament, the story uses concrete, specific situations to illuminate human behavior in a way that transcends the particularity of time and place. It is a story of human action, with little appeal to divine intervention. The occasional references to the Lord, however, are enough to suggest that the entire action is being guided to a happy conclusion by divine providence. The story of Ruth is divided into four chapters. The first chapter sets up the situation of crisis. As in some of the stories in Genesis, the action is set in motion by a famine in the land of Israel. A man from Bethlehem named Elimelech, in the time of the judges, goes to live in Moab. (Mention of Bethlehem helps to link the story with two incidents at the end of the book of Judges, the story of the Levite from Bethlehem, beginning in Judg 17:7, and that of the concubine from Bethlehem in Judges 19. These stories, however, are very different from that of Ruth.) The man’s sons marry Moabite women named Orpah and Ruth. Elimelech dies, and some years afterward his sons die too. Throughout the ancient Near East the situation of widows and orphans was especially precarious, as indeed it has also been in other times and places, including the modern world. The situation of a widow who had no son was especially dire, as there would be no one to inherit the family property.

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

  It is in fact a fundamental drive, with an immense potential impact in our lives. This craving for being in contact with or being rightly placed in relation to the good can be more or less satisfied in our lives as we acquir e 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 jus t 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 from what we see as the good, but rather the direction of our lives, towards or away from it, or the source of our motivations in regard to it. We find this kind of qu estion clearly posed in the reli gious tradition. The Puritan wondered whether he was saved. The question was whether he was called or not. If called , he was 'ju stified'. But if ju stified, he might still be a long way from being 'sanc tified' : this latter was a continuous process, a road that he could be more or less advanced on. My claim is that this isn't peculi ar to Puritan Christianity, but that all frameworks permit of, indeed, place us before an absolu te qu estion of this kind, framing the context in which we ask the relative que stions about how near or far we are from the good. This is obviously the case of those secular derivatives of Christianity, which see history in terms of a struggle between good and evil, progress and reaction, socialism and exploita tion. The insistent absolu te question here is: Which side are you on ? This permits of only two answers, however near or distant we may be from the triumph of the right. But it is also true for other conceptions which are not at all polarized in this way. The believer in disengaged obje ctification, who sees the mastery of reason as a kind of rational control over the emotions attained throu gh the distance of scientific scrutiny, the kind of modern of whom Freud is a prototypical example and for whom he is often a model, obviou sly sees this mastery as attained slowly and step by step.

• From Scandalous Liaisons (2007)

  Turning, Charlotte gave Hugh’s sister an impulsive hug. “Thank you so much.” Having been occupied all afternoon with entertaining Gwen and helping wherever she was needed, she hadn’t had the opportunity to see Hugh at all, and she missed him dreadfully. She was pleased to think that when he finally saw her, she would look as she did now, dressed in a green very much like the robe she wore the first night they made love. She was also quite willing to admit that her infatuation with the handsome earl was rapidly progressing to deeper waters. A few hours without him, and she felt bereft. She wondered where he’d been all day, how he’d occupied himself, if he’d thought of her at all and missed her, if only just a little. “I cannot wait until the moment Hugh first lays eyes on you,” Julienne said, with a smile. “I’ve waited so long for him to find his footing and a steady companion.” “Find his footing?” Charlotte asked. “Yes.” Julienne waved her arm carelessly. “His entire life he’s fallen into one scrape after another. Don’t misunderstand, he’s very intelligent and inherently kind. He simply has a tendency to leap before looking. He says and does things before considering all the consequences, and then regrets his actions later. Hugh has made an effort to change over the last few years, but it may be a while yet before he becomes a man that one would call responsible. There were a few times when I wondered . . .” She shook her head. “But you are a sensible sort, confident and poised, and Hugh is obviously quite taken with you. You’ll be a good influence on him. I can tell.” Charlotte frowned, attempting to reconcile the picture painted by Julienne with the image she bore of Hugh—a man who was strong and resourceful. “Shall we go down to dinner now, ladies?” Julienne asked, effectively squelching the questions Charlotte had been about to ask. “Oh, yes, let’s!” Gwen cried. Shaking off her sudden unease, Charlotte turned to look at Guinevere. Dressed in the ice blue gown, Gwen’s creamy skin was displayed to perfection. But there was something missing from the ensemble, and despite how hard she considered it, Charlotte could not remember what it was. Collecting the elbow-length gloves the abigail held out to them, they left Julienne’s dressing room and headed toward the main staircase. Several other guests also left their rooms, and Charlotte studied the latest fashions carefully, eager to see what was new and popular. A bright bauble on a passing baroness caught the light, and suddenly she remembered what it was Gwen’s dress was missing. “Please go on ahead,” she said, stopping in the middle of the gallery. “I forgot something.” Gwen frowned. “What is it?” “The diamond brooch that goes so beautifully with that gown.” “You would allow me to wear that?” Gwen’s eyes widened.

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

  On a deeper level, some committed leftists see themselves as part of the socialis t Revolution , or the march of human History , and this is wh at gives meaning, or fuller Being, to their lives. But whatever favoured descrip tion, be it in corpo rating something in one's life or connecti ng to something greater outside , I use my images of 'con tact' with the good, or 'how we are placed' in relation to the good, as generic terms, overarch ing this dist inction and mainta ining the primacy of my spati al metaphor. Thus with in certain religio us tradi tion s, 'cont act' is understood as a relation to God and may be understood in sacramental terms or in those of prayer or devotion. For those who espouse the honour ethic, the issue concerns their place in the space of fame and inf amy. The aspiration is to glory , or at least to avoid shame and disho nour , whi ch would make life unbearabl e and non -existence seem preferable . For those who define the good as self-mastery thr ough reason, the aspiratio n is to be able to order their lives, and the unbearab le threat is of being engulfed and degraded by the irresistible craving for lower thin gs. For those moved by on e of the modern forms of the affirmation of ordi nary life, it is above all important to see on eself as moved by and furthering this life, in one's work for insta nce, and one's family. People for whom meaning is given to life by expression must see themselves as bri nging their poten tial to expression, if not in on e of the recognized artistic or intel lectu al media, then perhaps in the shape of their lives themselves. An d so on. I am suggesting that we see all these diverse aspirations as forms of a craving which is inerad icable from human life. We have to be righ tly placed in relation to the good. This may not be very obtrusive in our lives if thin gs go well and if by and large we are satisfied with where we are.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Human beings are aware that something is wrong with their condition; they feel at odds with themselves and others, out of touch with their inner nature and disoriented. Conflict and a lack of simplicity seem to characterize our existence. Yet we are constantly seeking to unite the multiplicity of phenomena and reduce them to some ordered whole. When we glance at a person, we do not see a leg, an arm, another arm and a head, but automatically organize these elements into an integrated human being. This drive for unity is fundamental to the way our minds work and must, Plotinus believed, also reflect the essence of things in general. To find the underlying truth of reality, the soul must refashion itself, undergo a period of purification (katharsis) and engage in contemplation (theoria), as Plato had advised. It will have to look beyond the cosmos, beyond the sensible world and even beyond the limitations of the intellect to see into the heart of reality. This will not be an ascent to a reality outside ourselves, however, but a descent into the deepest recesses of the mind. It is, so to speak, a climb inward. The ultimate reality was a primal unity, which Plotinus called the One. All things owe their existence to this potent reality. Because the One is simplicity itself, there was nothing to say about it: it had no qualities distinct from its essence that would make ordinary description possible. It just was. Consequently, the One is nameless: “If we are to think positively of the One,” Plotinus explained, “there would be more truth in Silence.”46 We cannot even say that it exists, since as Being itself, it is “not a thing but is distinct from all things.”47 Indeed, Plotinus explained, it “is Everything and Nothing; it can be none of the existing things, and yet it is all.”48 We shall see that this perception will be a constant theme in the history of God.

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

  interpreters of the Torah. Sometimes these people claimed inspiration. The Teacher of Righteousness, who was the most authoritative figure in the sect known from the Dead Sea Scrolls, was a case in point. The Final Battle The book of Zechariah as it is now constituted ends on a note that resembles such passages as Ezekiel’s oracle against Gog or some later apocalyptic visions. This is a purely eschatological fantasy. It has no reference to any historical event. Again, the myth of the assault of the Gentiles on Mount Zion provides the framework. In this case, the city will be taken, as it was by the Babylonians, but then the Lord shall rouse himself. His appearance shall be followed by an earthquake and cosmic convulsions. The Lord will strike all the peoples who fight against Jerusalem so that their flesh and even their eyes will rot. This rather violent image of revenge on the nations is followed by a more peaceful conclusion. All who survive of the nations will go up year after year to worship YHWH as king at the Festival of Booths, and Jerusalem will be a holy city. This concluding oracle is in some ways typical of the anonymous oracles that have survived from the Second Temple period. Increasingly, these oracles are concerned not with the events of the time when they were composed, but with the final resolution of history, the end of days. They reflect the dissonance between the glorious promises of the Scriptures and the diminished existence of Judah under the Persians and later the Greeks, and a yearning for a time when the kingship of YHWH God of Israel would be revealed in all its splendor. Such oracles are sometimes called “proto-apocalyptic,” and they bear some resemblance to apocalyptic visions. We shall see, however, when we consider the book of Daniel, that apocalyptic visions were firmly rooted in specific historical events and were quite different from these late prophetic oracles in some crucial respects.

• From Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir (1996)

  I use the word “grace” to describe what someone else might experience as the unbidden, unstoppable inrush of feeling that comes from being in the company of a place to which one hopes to be native. We all live on land we’ve wounded by our living on it. Yet we must be here or be nowhere and have nothing with which to make our lives together. How should one act knowing that making a home requires this? How should I regard my neighbors? It’s possible to answer with fury or neglect. It’s possible to be so assured of privilege that contempt for a place like mine is the only answer. It’s possible to be so rootless that the questions are merely ironic. You once said that you wrote Holy Land to counterbalance the willful ignorance some prefer to have about suburban life. Do you think that we’re ready to reconsider that bias ? I want the day to come when writers deal honestly with the divided heart that’s in every story of every American place. We hunger for a home but doubt its worth when we have it. We long to acquire a sense of place but dislike its claims on us. This essential American contradiction isn’t going to change. No place is immune from the peculiarly American certainty that something better is just beyond the next bend in the road or waiting to be realized in the next utopia. How can a home —four walls, a ceiling, and a floor —affect our values? And if it can, doesn’t this leave room for a certain amount of manipulation? And is that necessarily bad ? Holy Land is, in part, a meditation on the fate of the things we touch and the corresponding effects of their touch on us. Manipulation is precisely what happens, but it works both ways. I can’t call this either good or bad, but only inevitable. What we hope for, I think, is tenderness in this encounter. Holy Land is the story of growth as a reflection of optimism . In southern California today, growth is the prime source for pessimism. Can we conclude that the suburban experiment has failed ? The builders of my suburb turned lima bean fields into housing tracts with an astonishing degree of good luck and wisdom. Some of the good luck has run out of suburban development, and much of the wisdom in the building of Lakewood has been ignored. Have suburbs failed as a result? In Los Angeles, suburbs like mine are all we have. They’d better not fail, or 13 million of us will be homeless. Of course, new suburbs can be made better, and what we value in older suburbs can be preserved. The preference of a majority of people for neighborhoods that look remarkably like mine won’t go away, however, even though the suburban frontier has grown harsher.

• From The Fixed Stars (0)

  5When I was thirteen, an older friend gave me a cassette tape of the DC hardcore band Fugazi. When they came through town, my friend’s brother, who was older than both of us, took us to the show. One of the singers had a raspy voice that swung between a whine and a growl, and I liked watching him throw his wiry body around. The room was clogged with smoke and smelled like a gymnasium, but I looked around in the dim light at the other girls there. They all looked coolly weird, streetwise, and confident. I wondered how it would be to look like them. I was a straight-A student naturally inclined to a nine o’clock bedtime. But I could dress like those girls. Act your way into a feeling: a phrase from the back cover of one of my mom’s self-help books. I got lipstick the color of dried blood and thrifted oversize men’s suit pants for fifty cents a pair. I bought a black pleather wallet with a metal chain that I snapped onto one of the belt loops. Nirvana’s Nevermind came out, and I pulled on opaque black tights under my cutoffs and wore them all winter. I was weird, and I hoped someone would notice. I wanted to be spotted, recognized for being the kind of girl I aspired to be. I knew I was on the right track when one of the doctor’s wives grazed me with her eyes and sniffed. [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] I had to do a research paper in eighth-grade science, and for my topic I chose homosexuality. I wanted to know whether being gay was based in biology. Was there something different about the brains or the genes of gay people like my uncle Jerry, something you could point to that made them gay? I found newsmagazine headlines that screamed NATURE OR NURTURE? and a couple of studies12 of gay twins. A group of researchers believed they’d found evidence that the brains of gay men were “feminized” by certain processes in utero. I read about a part of the brain called the suprachiasmatic nucleus, whose size seemed to differ between gay men and straight men.13 To me this happily proved what I’d been taught by my family, and what I’d been telling the kids at school: gay people are born that way. Sexual orientation is in our biology, went the prevailing assumption: it’s an inherent trait, built-in, and consistent over a person’s life-span. There’s no sense in arguing with it or judging it or trying to change it. I thought then, and well into adulthood, that each of us has an essential self, and that self is solid, stable, dependable. There would be things I could always count on, like science, and teachers having answers, and the USA having fifty states, and me being me, some elemental me that would be constant over my lifetime. Sexual orientation was a part of my essential self.

• From What Do Women Want?: Adventures in the Science of Female Desire (2013)

  So they did. The second woman was pretty and young. She, too, was at odds with her picture, but not drastically, and Rebecca immersed herself in the escort’s breasts, in her thighs, in her lips, in all the parts that had been paid for, lost herself in the textures and sights and smells, and was nearly euphoric afterward, both because, after years and years of yearning, she’d broken through the range of barriers that stood between her and another woman’s body and lost her virginity in this sense and because, leaving the breakthrough aside, there’d been such pleasure in having, among other things, the prostitute’s nipples in her mouth. When Rebecca and I talked, she said that while she hoped for another threesome with a woman soon and might like to have a woman alone, she didn’t much think of herself as a lesbian nor really as bisexual. She had no doubt that she preferred the romantic company of men. She fantasized mostly about men, was still happily with the same boyfriend, and definitely wouldn’t want to replace him with a woman. I described Chivers’s plethysmographic readings and asked for her thoughts. The results didn’t mean that women secretly want to have sex with bonobos, she began, laughing. And it might not be right to label most women as bi, even if lots of women, like her, did wish to have sex with women or would if they permitted themselves to know it. “It’s hard to find the right words,” she said. “The phrase that keeps coming into my head is that it’s like a pregnancy of wanting. Pregnancy’s not a good word—because it means pregnancy. It’s that it’s always there. Or always ready. And so much can set it off. Things you actually want and things you don’t. Pregnant. Full. The pregnancy of women’s desire. That’s the best I can do.” Stranger. Close friend. Lover of long-standing. This was the focus of a new experiment Chivers was finishing during one of my visits. The results made her pulse quicken. It didn’t race all that often. The daily labors of her research were painstaking; her office in Kingston was about as spare as a monk’s cell. The cinder-block walls were nearly bare. Taped above her desk were a few splotches of purple and green painted by her toddler son. On the opposite wall was a small photographic triptych she’d taken of stone carvings at an Indian temple. A man, in the first image, had sex with a mare while another masturbated; a couple tongued each other’s genitals in the middle picture; in the last photo seven human figures were lost in orgiastic heat. Yet for all its drama, the triptych was miniature enough to overlook. The cinder block dominated; there was minimal distraction; she wanted it like this. She could imagine herself surrounded by what she was venturing into, the forest of female desire.

• From What Do Women Want?: Adventures in the Science of Female Desire (2013)

  Rebecca—who was among the women I spent my time talking with, questioning relentlessly—had a talent for self-disparagement. This encompassed everything from her body to her career. How had she wound up teaching flute and clarinet to fourth-graders and never performing herself except during the intermissions at her students’ recitals? And how, she wondered further, had she managed to corner herself into this marmish existence in, of all places, Portland, Oregon, America’s city of hipsters? Yet her skill at self-denigration was matched by a fiery resilience. Increasingly, on her screen the image of the twenty-nine-year-old girlfriend was replaced by the home site of an Internet dating service. Gradually she had some dates. And gradually there was a man she saw as attractive and felt was kind, and—even before they slept together—she confided, over dinner in a Thai restaurant, something that had taken her fourteen years to tell her husband. She wanted to have a threesome with a woman. The discord and dissembling that ran through Chivers’s and Fisher’s findings weren’t her issues. Why she’d waited so long to raise her desire with her husband she wasn’t certain. Yes, some shyness was involved, but she guessed it had more to do with a hunch that turned out to be prescient: he didn’t show any interest. Probably, she thought, this was because having another woman in their bed would have made a glaring reality out of his lack of interest in Rebecca herself. In any case, her date agreed that a threesome would be good. They abandoned the topic there, began sleeping together, and returned to the subject a few months later. She said that she would leave the arrangements to him. He asked whether she had any criteria. She’d never been with a woman in a threesome or in any other way. Her wishes were specific. Hair color different from her own. Not too tall. In decent shape. White or Latina. And—a factor she’d been fixated on for years—large breasts. C-cups, at a minimum, as long as they were real. She and her boyfriend joked that she was as male as any caricature of a man. Because he’d never done anything like this before, it took him a while, but eventually he presented her with possibilities. He showed her a photograph from a casual connections site, a woman Rebecca found herself fantasizing about right away. But the emailing with this candidate flickered, and the chance faded. They debated whether to hire an escort. Periodically during this process of false starts, Rebecca was seized by fear: what if the woman saw her as old, repellent? But her boyfriend reassured her, and her desire was louder in her mind than her worry, and as they shifted toward the idea of renting someone, she reminded herself that her own attractiveness simply wasn’t supposed to matter.

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  When those cute little baby eels from Portugal are available again, I'll be ordering them; who cares if there'll be none left for the Portuguese? I will continue to occasionally drink caipirinhas with my sashimi at Sushi Samba in New York—and I'll try to not feel silly about it. Perhaps the best thing chefs can do is to cook, whenever possible, with heart. Where poorer nations have a tradition of cooking well because they have to, we have choices. If we can take something lasting from the Blood cause, it is that it is always better to make the most of what's available, to cook well. If a chef's unique vision and identity is associated closely with a particular area or local culture, great. He's doing God's work. If there is good, local skate available, then there is no reason to fly in the endangered, mushy, and oft-frozen Chilean sea bass. A good chef imports an ingredient from the other side of the globe because it makes sense—not for its novelty value or its rarity. Why bother to make Mexican food in London if the end result is nothing but soulless sour-tasting caulking compound? Why spend hundreds of thousands of dollars creating a fashionable ersatz dim-sum emporium and then bleed out all the happy sloppy informality that makes the dim-sum experience so much fun? However horrifying it might be to see some young, fresh-out-of-culinary-school novice bombarding his guests with dende oil, Thai basil, yuzu, and chipotles, it's nice to know that others for whom those ingredients are more familiar can find them at will. But I'm not giving up my white Italian truffles until the last one is gone. Show me a bootleg ortolan and I'm there, crunching bones with only a minimum of guilt. I'll just be sure to not overcook it. VIVA MEXICO! VIVA ECUADOR! Let's be honest, let's be really, painfully honest: Who is cooking? Who is the backbone of the American restaurant business? Whose sudden departure could shut down nearly every good restaurant, nightclub, and banquet facility in every major city in the country? Whose sweat and toil allows annoyingly well-known white-boy chefs like me to go around the country flogging books, appearing on TV, writing obnoxious magazine articles, and baiting their peers? Who, pound for pound, are the best French and Italian cooks in New York? If you're a chef, manager, or owner, you know the answer: Mexicans. Ecuadorans. Salvadoran guys (and women) from south of the border, many of them with green cards they bought on Queens Boulevard for thirty dollars. Ex-dishwashers with no formal training, minimal education; people who have often never eaten in restaurants as good as the ones they cook in. Manuel, the brilliant saucier at your two-star restaurant, puts on his best suit, combs his hair, dresses up his family in their Sunday best, and tries to get a table at the one-star place across the street.

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  Wild salmon is better than farmed salmon, and yes, the farmed stuff is a threat to overall quality. Free-range chickens taste better, and are less likely to contain E. coli bacteria. Free-range is no doubt nicer as well; whenever possible we should, by all means, let Bambi run free (before slitting his throat and yanking out his entrails). Since I serve mostly neurotic rich people in my restaurant, I can often afford to buy free-range and organic. I can respond to the seasons to a great extent. But at the end of the day, if I can find a genetically manipulated, irradiated tomato from the other side of the country that tastes better than an Italian vine-ripened one from Granny's backyard (not likely, but just suppose), even if it causes the occasional tumor in lab rats, I'll probably serve it. It's how it tastes that counts. For instance: I like grain-fed beef. When talking about beef, I don't want some muscular, over-exercised animal with delusions of liberty providing the steaks. I want a docile, corn- and grain-fed jailhouse fatboy who has spent the latter part of his life standing in a lot doing nothing but eating, all that nice fat marbling rippling through the lean. If, as in the case of Kobe beef, some nice cattleman wants to give my steer regular rubdowns with sake (and the occasional hand job), all the better. The grass-fed Argentine stuff, shipped in a cryovac bag full of water and blood, tastes like monkey meat by comparison. "Does the product taste good?" should probably be the chef's primary concern. To insist, to demand, that all food be regional, seasonal, directly connected to time and place can—in the case of some of the more fervent advocates—invite the kind of return-to-the-soil thinking evocative of the Khmer Rouge. Not long ago, watching perhaps the greatest of the Blood chefs (a man with only the faintest and best-intentioned Crip tendencies), Thomas Keller, yanking fresh garlic and baby leeks out of the ground at a nearby farm in the Napa Valley, I felt a powerful, bittersweet frisson, a yearning for how things might, in the best of all possible worlds, be. On the other hand, standing in Tokyo's Tsukiji market, gaping at the daily spoils of Japan's relentless rape of the world's oceans, I thought: "Jesus! Look at all this incredible fish! Damn, that toro looks good! That monkfish liver is amazing! I want some." Fully conscious of the evil that men do in the name of food, I have a very hard time caring when confronted with an impeccably fresh piece of codfish. So I guess I won't be stocking my restaurant's larder with exclusively Hudson Valley products anytime soon. When my customers want strawberries, I'll have them flown in from warmer climes. Though I use the New York foie gras for pan-seared, I will continue to order the French for terrine. My Arborio rice will come from Italy, my beans for cassoulet from Tarbes. Because they're better.

• From The Second Sex (1949)

  Mme de Beauvoir, intent on keeping up a facade of gentility, however shabby, sent her daughters to an elite convent school where Simone, for a while, ardently desired to become a nun, one of the few respectable vocations open to an ambitious girl. When she lost her faith as a teenager, her dreams of a transcendent union (dreams that proved remarkably tenacious) shifted from Christ to an enchanting classmate named ZaZa and to a rich, indolent first cousin and childhood playmate, Jacques, who took her slumming and gave her a taste for alcohol and for louche nightlife that she never outgrew. (Not many bookish virgins with a particle in their surname got drunk with the hookers and drug addicts at Le Styx.) Her mother hoped vainly that the worthless Jacques would propose. Her father, a ladies’ man, knew better: he told his temperamental, ill-dressed, pimply genius of a daughter that she would never marry. But by then Simone de Beauvoir had seen what a woman of almost any quality—highborn or low, pure or impure, contented with her lot or alienated—could expect from a man’s world. Beauvoir’s singular brilliance was apparent from a young age to her teachers, and to herself. An insatiable curiosity and a prodigious capacity for synthetic reading and analysis (a more inspired grind may never have existed) nourished her drive. One of her boyfriends dubbed her Castor (the Beaver), a nickname that stuck. She had a sense of inferiority, it would appear, only in relation to Jean-Paul Sartre. They met in 1929, as university students (she a star at the Sorbonne, he at the Ecole Normale Supérieure), cramming, as a team, for France’s most brutal and competitive postgraduate examination, the agrégation in philosophy. (On their first study date, she explained Leibniz to him.) Success would qualify her for a lifetime sinecure teaching at a lycée, and liberate her from her family. When the results were posted, Sartre was first and Beauvoir second (she was the ninth woman who had ever passed), and that, forever, was the order of precedence—Adam before Eve—in their creation myth as a couple.

• From What My Bones Know (2022)

  The Swedish town of Överkalix has the most comprehensive and oldest birth, death, and crop records in the world. Their records go back generations—a remarkably rich data set. And in analyzing this data set, scientists found some fascinating correlations. There were good and bad years for the crops in Överkalix and some particularly bad years where families were forced to go hungry. But scientists discovered that when children suffered starvation between the ages of nine and twelve, their grandchildren would on average live thirty years longer. Their descendants had far lower rates of diabetes and heart disease. On the other hand, when children were well-fed during those ages, their descendants were at four times the risk for heart attacks and their life expectancy dropped. In some strange way, the trauma of starvation changed descendants’ genes to be more resilient. Healthier. More likely to survive.[5] — Clearly, it wasn’t just my ruthless nurture that had shaped me into who I was, though who knows what kind of rampant methylation savaged my epigenome during my beatings and assaults. Beyond that, every cell in my body is filled with the code of generations of trauma, of death, of birth, of migration, of history that I cannot understand. Just piecemeal moments I collected from Auntie over the years. My family tried to erase this history. But my body remembers. My work ethic. My fear of cockroaches. My hatred for the taste of dirt. These are not random attributes, a spin of the wheel. They were gifted to me with purpose, with necessity. I want to have words for what my bones know. I want to use those gifts when they serve me and understand and forgive them when they do not. But now I turn my head like the Sankofa bird and see nothing. I want to reclaim my stolen past. I need it to write my future. — Auntie died suddenly, just a couple of months after I last visited her and she told me I was not the favorite after all. As much as I’d like to, I cannot ask her further questions about my family history. But I do still have recordings of our interactions from that visit. I dig up my old hard drives and dive back into them, transcribing whatever I can understand, leaving out the Cantonese bits. I supplement these recordings with oral histories I find stored in Singapore’s National Archives to learn the details of what bitterness my family was forced to eat. I learned that Auntie and my grandmother had not just survived World War II, as I’d previously thought. There was another war they lived through, a secret war that history would prefer to forget.

• From The Ice Storm (1994)

  Wendy put a finger to her lips and the performance began in earnest. In the half-light. A long afternoon was over at the office, Wendy thought. The daily political struggle was over. He brushed back her hair. Who was he and why did he understand so well how to console a woman? The loss of her husband, the estrangement of her children—she had been judged unfit—her inability to work. She had only the properties and income that the divorce settlement deeded her. Not enough to live in the style she was accustomed to. —Baby, Mike said. Our waiting is over. From the beanbag chair, Wendy slid to the floor. She rolled across Sandy’s battered pocket calculator. Her turtleneck rode up and the pale spotless area under her breasts was visible. She arranged it that way, just like Willie Mays arranged for his cap to fly off in pursuit of the long fly ball. Mike pinioned her— one arm under the beanbag, the other under a green leather footstool. A TV Guide with Sanford and Son on the cover was only inches from her face. —Maybe we should turn on the television, Mike whispered, in case someone comes along. —Don’t be silly, Wendy said. She dragged his hand along her stomach, and he climbed up on top of her. It was a sort of desperate embrace. Stuff was going to get into her hair, bugs and crumbs, and old pieces of gum that had been stamped into the rug. —Tell me your long-range plans, Wendy said. Tell me that you aren’t going to leave. Tell me that you aren’t like all the others. Read the awful parts of the Old Testament to me. Would you harm people for me? Would you give me your most expensive possession? Would you be on call twenty-four hours a day? Would you leave the church of your birth for me? Would you give up weekend sports activities, including touch football? Would you do my laundry, including the very personal items? Would you take responsibility for filling my prescription of birth control pills? Would you grow your hair or go to a group encounter session or visit Nepal? Would you swing? Their hips locked together uneasily, like mismatched pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. They ground themselves against one another slowly. She grazed the part of his jeans where the monstrous thing had swollen again. It looked as though it was bent uncomfortably toward his right pocket. —Have you forgotten everything? Mike said. —What do you mean, my darling? Wendy said. —I gave you work for the weekend. —I’m afraid I don’t understand the assignment. I’m going to need an extra help session. The quiet was funereal. Wendy slowed to a stop.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Gregory fled soon after, it is true, to his friend in Pontus, but out of regard to his aged parents and the pressing call of the church, he returned to Nazianzum towards Easter in 362, and delivered his first pulpit discourse, in which he justified himself in his conduct, and said: "It has its advantage to hold back a little from the call of God, as Moses, and after him Jeremiah, did on account of their age; but it has also its advantage to come forward readily, when God calls, like Aaron and Isaiah; provided both be done with a devout spirit, the one on account of inherent weakness, the other in reliance upon the strength of him who calls." His enemies accused him of haughty contempt of the priestly office; but he gave as the most important reason of his flight, that he did not consider himself worthy to preside over a flock, and to undertake the care of immortal souls, especially in such stormy times. Basil, who, as metropolitan, to strengthen the catholic interest against Arianism, set about the establishment of new bishoprics in the small towns of Cappadocia, intrusted to his young friend one such charge in Sasima, a poor market town at the junction of three highways, destitute of water, verdure, and society, frequented only by rude wagoners, and at the time an apple of discord between him and his opponent, the bishop Anthimus of Tyana. A very strange way of showing friendship, unjustifiable even by the supposition that Basil wished to exercise the humility and self-denial of Gregory.1974 No wonder that, though a bishopric in itself was of no account to Gregory, this act deeply wounded his sense of honor, and produced a temporary alienation between him and Basil.1975 At the combined request of his friend and his aged father, he suffered himself indeed to be consecrated to the new office; but it is very doubtful whether he ever went to Sasima.1976 At all events we soon afterwards find him in his solitude, and then again, in 372, assistant of his father in Nazianzum. In a remarkable discourse delivered in the presence of his father in 372, he represented to the congregation his peculiar fluctuation between an innate love of the contemplative life of seclusion and the call of the Spirit to public labor. "Come to my help," said he to his hearers,1977 "for I am almost torn asunder by my inward longing and by the Spirit. The longing urges me to flight, to solitude in the mountains, to quietude of soul and body, to withdrawal of spirit from all sensuous things, and to retirement into myself, that I may commune undisturbed with God, and be wholly penetrated by the rays of His Spirit ....

• From The Fixed Stars (0)

  When I cannot watch her, I think about watching her. I think all the time about it. I leave the house each morning with my thermos of coffee, thinking. I walk down our street, turn the corner, walk a few more blocks, and board the bus, thinking. One morning mid-trial I catch the headline of a fellow bus rider's newspaper: the Supreme Court had ruled on Obergefell vs. Hodges, making same-sex marriage legal across the United States. I choke back a sob, elated, disbelieving. Then I want to cry for a different reason, and I cannot tell anyone why. I think about her wrists and her white teeth. I wonder what she thinks about me. Then I remember not to think about that, because she probably doesn't think about me, and if she does, it cannot be good. I am a woman wearing a wedding ring while staring at a person who is not her spouse.

• From The Vagina Monologues (1998)

  you were beginning to walk into things imagine suffocating while you were still breathing imagine muttering and screaming inside a cage and no one is hearing imagine me inside the inside of the darkness in you i am caught there i am lost there inside the cloth which is your head inside the dark we share imagine you can see me i was beautiful once big dark eyes you would know me THEY BEAT THE GIRL OUT OF MY BOY…OR SO THEY TRIEDFor Calpernia and AndreaAt five years old I was putting my baby sister’s diapers on I saw her vagina I wanted one I wanted one I thought it would grow I thought I would open I ached to belong I ached to smell like my mother Her aroma lived in my hair on my hands, in my skin I ached to be pretty Pretty I wondered why I was missing my bathing suit top at the beach Why I wasn’t dressed like the other girls I ached to be completed I ached to belong To spin the baton They assigned me a sex The day I was born It’s as random as being adopted or being assigned a hotel room on the thirtieth floor It has nothing to do with who you are or your fear of heights. But in spite of the apparatus I was forced to carry around I always knew I was a girl They beat me for it They beat me for crying They pummeled me for wanting To touch To pet To hug To help To hold Their hands For trying to fly in church like Sister Bertrille For doing cartwheels Crocheting socks For carrying purses to kindergarten They kicked the shit out of me every day on my way to school. In the park they smashed my Magic Marker painted nails They punched my lipsticked mouth They beat the girl out of my boy or they tried So I went underground I stopped playing the flute “Be a man, stand up for yourself Go punch him back.” I grew a full beard It was good I was big I joined the Marines “Suck it up and drive on.” I became duller Jaded Sometimes cruel Butch it Butch it Butch it up Always clenched, inaccurate, Incomplete I ran away from home from school from boot camp. Ran to Miami Greenwich Village The Aleutian Islands New Orleans I found gay people Wilderness lesbians Got my first hormone shot Got permission to be myself To transition To travel To immigrate 350 hours of hot needles I would count the male particles as they died Sixteen man hairs gone The feminine is in your face I lift my eyebrows more I’m curious I ask questions. And my voice Practice practice It’s all about resonance Sing song sing song Men are monotone and flat Southern accents are really excellent Jewish accents really help. “Hello my friend” And my vagina is so much friendlier I cherish it