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.

Page 5 of 48 · 20 per page

• From The Diary of a Young Girl (The Definitive Edition) (2020)

  soon be able to get these repaired. I’m occasionally sentimental, as you know, but from time to time I have reason to be: when Peter and I are sitting close together on a hard wooden crate among the junk and dust, our arms around each other’s shoulders, Peter toying with a lock of my hair; when the birds outside are trilling their songs, when the trees are in bud, when the sun beckons and the sky is so blue--oh, that’s when I wish for so much! All I see around me are dissatisfied and grumpy faces, all I hear are sighs and stifled complaints. You’d think our lives had taken a sudden turn for the worse. Honestly, things are only as bad as you make them. Here in the Annex no one even bothers to set a good example. We each have to figure out how to get the better of our own moods! Every day you hear, “If only it were all over!” Work, love, courage and hope, Make me good and help me cope! I really believe, Kit, that I’m a little nutty today, and I don’t know why. My writing’s all mixed up, I’m jump- ing from one thing to another, and sometimes I seriously doubt whether anyone will ever be interested in this drivel. They’ll probably call it “The Musings of an Ugly Duckling.” My diaries certainly won’t be of much use to Mr. Bolkestein or Mr. Gerbrandy.* [* Gerrit Bolkestein was the Minister of Education and Pieter Gerbrandy was the Prime Minister of the Dutch government in exile in London. See Anne’s letter of March 29, 1944.] Yours, Anne M. Frank SATURDAY, APRIL 15, 1944 Dearest Kitty, “There’s just one bad thing after another. When will it all end?” You can sure say that again. Guess what’s happened now? Peter forgot to unbolt the front door. As a result, Mr. Kugler and the warehouse employees couldn’t get in. He went to Keg’s, smashed in our office kitchen window and got in that way. The

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  But purusha and prakrti were not enemies. “Nature,” depicted as female, was in love with purusha. Her job was to extricate each person’s purusha from her embrace, even if this required humans to turn against what, in their ignorance, they regarded as their true selves. 82 Nature yearned to liberate us, to free the purusha from the toils of illusion and suffering that characterize human life. Indeed, the whole of nature—did we but know it—existed in order to serve the eternal self ( purusha ) of each one of us. “From brahman down to the blade of grass, the whole of creation is for the benefit of the purusha, until supreme knowledge is attained.” 83 How did purusha fall into the toils of nature? Was there some kind of original sin? Samkhya does not answer these questions. Its metaphysical scheme was not intended to offer a literal, scientific, or historical account of reality. In India, truth was measured not by its objective but by its therapeutic value. The followers of Samkhya were supposed to meditate upon this description of nature’s relationship with the purusha in order to discover what a human being had to do to find his way back to his true self. The ideas of Samkhya were almost certainly born in the circles of renouncers who were not satisfied by the spirituality of the Upanishads. Instead of losing themselves in the impersonal brahman, they wanted to retain their individuality. It was quite clear to them that life was unsatisfactory. Something had gone wrong, but it was pointless to speculate on how this unhappy state of affairs had come to pass. In their meditations they had glimpsed some kind of inner light, which indicated to them that they had another, more absolute self, if only they could separate it from the mess of illusion and desire that impeded their spiritual growth. The word samkhya may have once referred to the “dissociation” of the self from the “natural” realm of mind and matter. The renouncer had already withdrawn from society; now he had to take the next step, and find the true center of his being: the true spirit, his real self, his immortal purusha. Samkhya attempted an analysis of reality that was simply designed to help the renouncer to achieve this liberation. In his forest retreat he could meditate upon it in order to understand the different components of his human nature. Only by becoming acquainted with the complexities of the human predicament could he hope to transcend it.

• From The Diary of a Young Girl (The Definitive Edition) (2020)

  Grandpa died, most of the money was lost, and after the Great War and inflation there was nothing left at all. Up until the war there were still quite a few rich relatives. So Father was extremely well-bred, and he had to laugh yesterday because for the first time in his fifty-five years, he scraped out the frying pan at the table. Mother’s family wasn’t as wealthy, but still fairly well-off, and we’ve listened openmouthed to stories of private balls, dinners and engagement parties with 250 guests. We’re far from rich now, but I’ve pinned all my hopes on after the war. I can assure you, I’m not so set on a bourgeois life as Mother and Margot. I’d like to spend a year in Paris and London learning the languages and studying art history. Compare that with Margot, who wants to nurse newborns in Palestine. I still have visions of gorgeous dresses and fascinating people. As I’ve told you many times before, I want to see the world and do all kinds of exciting things, and a little money won’t hurt! This morning Miep told us about her cousin’s engagement party, which she went to on Saturday. The cousin’s parents are rich, and the groom’s are even richer. Miep made our mouths water telling us about the food that was served: vegetable soup with meatballs, cheese, rolls with sliced meat, hors d’oeuvres made with eggs and roast beef, rolls with cheese, genoise, wine and cigarettes, and you could eat as much as you wanted. Miep drank ten schnapps and smoked three cigarettes -- could this be our temperance advocate? If Miep drank all those, I wonder how many her spouse managed to toss down? Everyone at the party was a little tipsy, of course. There were also two officers from the Homicide Squad, who took photographs of the wedding couple. You can see we’re never far from Miep’s thoughts, since she promptly noted their names and addresses in case anything should happen and we needed contacts with good Dutch people. Our mouths were watering so much. We, who’d had nothing but two spoonfuls of hot cereal for breakfast and were absolutely famished; we, who get nothing but half-cooked spinach (for the vitamins!) and rotten pota- toes day after day; we, who fill our empty stomachs with nothing but boiled lettuce, raw lettuce,

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  How did purusha fall into the toils of nature? Was there some kind of original sin? Samkhya does not answer these questions. Its metaphysical scheme was not intended to offer a literal, scientific, or historical account of reality. In India, truth was measured not by its objective but by its therapeutic value. The followers of Samkhya were supposed to meditate upon this description of nature’s relationship with the purusha in order to discover what a human being had to do to find his way back to his true self. The ideas of Samkhya were almost certainly born in the circles of renouncers who were not satisfied by the spirituality of the Upanishads. Instead of losing themselves in the impersonal brahman, they wanted to retain their individuality. It was quite clear to them that life was unsatisfactory. Something had gone wrong, but it was pointless to speculate on how this unhappy state of affairs had come to pass. In their meditations they had glimpsed some kind of inner light, which indicated to them that they had another, more absolute self, if only they could separate it from the mess of illusion and desire that impeded their spiritual growth. The word samkhya may have once referred to the “dissociation” of the self from the “natural” realm of mind and matter. The renouncer had already withdrawn from society; now he had to take the next step, and find the true center of his being: the true spirit, his real self, his immortal purusha. Samkhya attempted an analysis of reality that was simply designed to help the renouncer to achieve this liberation. In his forest retreat he could meditate upon it in order to understand the different components of his human nature. Only by becoming acquainted with the complexities of the human predicament could he hope to transcend it. Samkhya taught that nature had three different “strands” (gunas), which could be discerned in the cosmos as a whole and in each individual person. • Satta, “intelligence,” which is closest to the purusha • Rajas, “passion,” physical or mental energy • Tamas, “inertia,” the lowest of the gunas At the beginning of time, before individual creatures had come into existence, the three gunas coexisted harmoniously in primal matter, but the presence of purusha disturbed this equilibrium and set off a process of emanation. The first of the new categories to emerge from the original undifferentiated unity was the intellect (buddhi), known as the “Great One.” This was the highest part of our natural selves, and if we could isolate and develop it, it could bring us to the brink of enlightenment. The intellect was very close to the purusha, and could reflect the self in the same way as a mirror reflects a flower, but in the unenlightened human being it was clouded by the grosser elements of the world.

• From Cultish (2021)

  Title : Cultish Author: Montell, Amanda ASIN : B08HZ4YYGG [image file=Image00001.jpg] [image "image" file=Image00000.jpg] DedicationFor my dad—the optimist ContentsCover Title Page Dedication Note from the Author Part 1: Repeat After Me . . . i. ii. iii. iv. v. Part 2: Congratulations—You Have Been Chosen to Join the Next Evolutionary Level Above Human i. ii. iii. iv. v. Part 3: Even YOU Can Learn to Speak in Tongues i. ii. iii. iv. v. vi. Part 4: Do You Wanna Be a #BossBabe? i. ii. iii. iv. v. vi. Part 5: This Hour Is Going to Change Your Life . . . and Make You LOOK AWESOME i. ii. iii. iv. v. vi. Part 6: Follow for Follow i. ii. iii. Acknowledgments Notes About the Author Also by Amanda Montell Copyright About the Publisher Note from the AuthorSome names and identifying details have been changed to protect sources’ privacy. Part 1Repeat After Me . . . i.It started with a prayer. Tasha Samar was thirteen years old the first time she heard the bewitching buzz of their voices. It was their turban-to-toe white ensembles and meditation malas that first caught her eye, but it was how they spoke that beckoned her through the front door. She heard them through the open window of a Kundalini yoga studio in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “The prayers were so strange, all in another language,” Tasha, now twenty-nine, tells me over macadamia milk lattes at an outdoor café in West Hollywood. We’re less than a few miles away from the epicenter of the sinister life she led until only three years ago. Judging by her crisp cream button-down and satiny blowout, you’d never guess she could once tie a turban as naturally as any other young woman in this courtyard could toss her hair into a topknot. “Yeah, I could still do it now, if I had to,” Tasha assures me, her meticulous acrylics clack -clack -clack ing on her porcelain mug. Tasha, a first-generation Russian American Jew who experienced an agonizing lack of belonging her entire childhood, was struck by this yoga group’s sense of closeness, so she peeked her head into the lobby and asked the receptionist who they were. “The front-desk girl started telling me the basics; the phrase ‘the science of the mind’ was used a lot,” Tasha reflects. “I didn’t know what it meant, I just remember thinking, ‘Wow, I really want to try that.’” Tasha found out when the next yoga class would be, and her parents let her attend. You didn’t need to be a permanent member of the group to take a class—the only requirement was an “open heart.” Learning and reciting their foreign prayers, all directed toward a man with a long peppery beard whose photograph was plastered throughout the dimly lit studio, cast a spell over tween Tasha. “It felt ancient,” she says, “like I was a part of something holy.” Who was this group in all white?

• From A Way of Being (1980)

  interviews, and prescriptive advice as to treatment. This cold approach was, however, suffused with warmth by the personality of Dr. Leta Hollingworth, who taught us more by her person than by her lectures. Later, when I interned at the then new and affluent Institute for Child Guidance, I was exposed to a very different atmosphere. Dominated as it was by psychoanalysts, I learned more about the individual. I learned that he cannot be understood without an exhaustive case history seventy-five pages or more in length, going into all the personality dynamics of the grandparents, the parents, the aunts and uncles, and finally the “patient” himself—possible birth trauma, manner of weaning, degree of dependency, sibling relationships, and on and on. Then there was the elaborate testing, including the newly imported Rorschach, and finally many interviews with the child before deciding what sort of treatment he should have. It nearly always came out the same: the child was treated psychoanalytically by the psychiatrist, the mother was dealt with in the same fashion by the social worker, and occasionally, the psychologist was asked to tutor the child. Yet I carried on my first therapy case there. It started with tutoring but developed into more and more personal interviews, and I discovered the thrill that comes from observing changes in a person’s behavior. Whether those were due to my enthusiasm or my methods I cannot say. As I look back, I realize that my interest in interviewing and in therapy certainly grew in part out of my early loneliness. Here was a socially approved way of getting really close to individuals and thus filling some of the hungers I had undoubtedly felt. The therapeutic interview also offered a chance of becoming close without having to go through what was to me a long and painful process of gradual and deepening acquaintance. By the time I had completed my work in New York, I knew—with all the assurance of the newly trained—how to deal with people professionally. In spite of the wide differences between Teachers College and the Institute, they both helped me arrive at somewhat the same formula, which could be stated as follows: “I will gather an enormous amount of data about this individual: his history, his intelligence, his special abilities, his personality. Out of all this I can form an elaborate diagnostic formulation as to the causes of his present behavior, his personal and social resources for dealing with his situation, and the prognosis for his future. I will endeavor to interpret all this in simple language to the responsible agencies, to the parents, and to the child if he is capable of understanding it. I will make sound suggestions which, if carried out, will change the behavior, and I will reinforce those suggestions by repeated contact. In all of this I remain thoroughly objective, professional, and personally aloof

• From Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010)

  The dynamic nature of a life of ren was beautifully expressed by Yan Hui, Confucius’s most talented disciple, when he said “with a deep sigh”: The more I strain my gaze towards it the higher it soars. The deeper I bore down into it, the harder it becomes. I see it in front, but suddenly it is behind. Step by step, the master skilfully lures one on. He has broadened me with culture, restrained me with ritual. Even if I wanted to stop, I could not. Just when I feel that I have exhausted every resource, something seems to rise up, standing over me sharp and clear. Yet though I long to pursue it, I can find no way of getting to it at all. 35 Ren took him beyond the confines of selfishness and gave him fleeting intimations of a sacred dimension that was both immanent and transcendent— welling up from within and yet also an accompanying presence, “standing over me sharp and clear.” Confucius died in 479 BCE, regarding himself as a failure because he had never been able to persuade a ruler to adopt a more compassionate policy. Yet he had made an indelible impression on Chinese spirituality; even those who disagreed with him would not be able to escape his influence. One of these was Mozi (c. 470–c. 391 BCE), who seems to have come from a humbler background and had little patience with the aristocratic li. By this time China had entered the terrible epoch known as the Warring States, in which the larger kingdoms systematically destroyed the small principalities and then fought one another until, when the conflict ended in 221, only one—the state of Qin—was left. Warfare itself had been transformed. 36 The old battle rituals cast aside, war was now conducted with deadly efficiency and enhanced technology, and was masterminded by military experts wholly intent on subjugating the population, even if this meant the death of women, children, and old men. It was a frightening warning of what could happen when the passions of the old brain were married to the new. Mozi’s message was utilitarian and pragmatic. The thread that ran through his philosophy, like Confucius’s, was ren, but he believed—wrongly—that Confucius had distorted the ethic by confining it to the family. He wanted to replace the potential egotism of kinship with a wider altruism: “Others must be regarded like the self,” he insisted; this love must be “all embracing and exclude nobody.” 37 The only way to prevent the Chinese from slaughtering one another was to persuade the rulers to practice jian ai. Jian ai is often translated as “universal love,” but this phrase is too emotive for the tough-minded Mozi. 38 A better translation is “concern for everybody”; ai was an impartial benevolence that had little to do with feeling but was based on a deep-rooted sense of equity and a disciplined respect for every single human being.

• From Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010)

  The mythos is an expression of the Prophet’s yearning to bring the Arabs, who had long felt that they were off the map of the divine plan, into the heart of the monotheistic family. Instead of shunning the newcomer as a pretender, the other prophets welcome him as a brother. At each stage of his journey through the seven heavens, Muhammad meets and talks with Adam, Jesus, John the Baptist, Joseph, Enoch, Moses, Aaron, and Abraham. In one version of the story, Moses gives him advice about the number of times that Muslims should pray each day. It is a story of pluralism: the prophets pray together, embrace one another, and share their insights. It has become a paradigm of authentic Muslim spirituality, representing the perfect “surrender” of both the personal and the tribal ego. The Sufis, the mystics of Islam, who have a particular devotion to this story, developed an outstanding appreciation of other faiths. It is quite common for a Sufi poet to cry in ecstasy that he is no longer a Jew, a Christian, or a Muslim and is equally at home in a synagogue, mosque, temple, or church, because once you have glimpsed the divine, you have left these man-made distinctions behind. As we leave this step, we should meditate on the words of the influential Sufi philosopher Muid ad-Din ibn al-Arabi (1165–1240). His warning against religious exclusivity can also be applied to any “tribal” chauvinism. Do not attach yourself to any particular creed so exclusively that you disbelieve all the rest; otherwise you will lose much good, nay, you will fail to recognize the real truth of the matter. God, the omnipresent and omnipotent, is not limited by any one creed, for, he says, “Wheresoever ye turn, there is the face of Allah.”12 Everyone praises what he believes; his god is his own creature, and in praising it he praises himself. Consequently he blames the beliefs of others, which he would not do if he were just, but his dislike is based on ignorance.13 In the next step, we shall try to correct this ignorance. THE TENTH STEPKnowledgeWe have considered the importance of abandoning a tribal outlook in order to “get to know one another.” But this is not easy. We all have busy lives, and not everybody has either the time or the inclination to undertake the difficult and sensitive task of deciphering the cultural, religious, and political customs of other peoples. We need the help of experts, and most of us rely on the media or our governments for this kind of information. Yet those who live in a democracy may find themselves voting for politicians who have a partial or even tribal worldview. We owe it to our own nation and to others to develop a wider, more panoptic knowledge and understanding of our neighbors.

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  Shallow Certainties Don’t Allow Humans to FlourishMany philosophers argue that the best way of assessing beliefs is to consider their rationality. Do they make sense? Are there good reasons for thinking they are right, or at least defensible? This is entirely reasonable. But as I suggested earlier in this chapter, being right does not necessarily mean being relevant. Let me return to one of the certainties of our imagined world, noted earlier: ‘The whole is greater than the part.’ I can be absolutely sure of this truth. This is something that is right and therefore can be relied upon. There can be a universal consensus about this unassailable truth, where mere beliefs might lead to social division and tension, or the incitement of hatred. Yet truth cannot be directly correlated with relevance. I must confess I struggle to see how this truth might give me a reason to get up in the morning, or yearn to make the world a better place. It is rationally incontestable yet existentially irrelevant. As Wittgenstein noted, you can be certain about it, but it seems rather pointless. ‘Nothing would follow from it, and nothing could be explained by it. It would not tie in with anything in my life.’23 With this point in mind, I want to suggest that we reclaim an older concern – namely, considering the existential vitality of a way of thinking, asking how a belief or worldview enables human flourishing and fosters wellbeing. Is this way of thinking liveable? Does this worldview create a satisfying ‘way of life’? Does it account for our deepest longings and desires, and help us achieve joy and peace? Does it help us to find meaning in life? Or happiness? Or does it repress and limit us, trapping us within a constrained and impoverished account of human existence? In our own time, many people choose to abandon their commitments to worldviews, whether religious or secular, because they find them oppressive in their outcomes, rather than deficient in their intellectual foundations.24 For instance, when many sought to challenge the moral philosopher Peter Singer’s argument that it is permissible to euthanise severely disabled infants, they honed in on its consequences: the murder of disabled people. Singer’s conceptualisation of the value of a human life – founded upon rationality and autonomy – went largely unquestioned, as did his figuring of severely disabled people as a moral category apart from ‘normal human beings’. Disability advocates, however, protested his lectures – arguing that disabled people, like all people, are capable of being loved and finding meaning in life. Our revulsion at particular outcomes, in other words, can’t be separated from what we think human life is about. And for most of us, intuitively, it doesn’t come down to reason alone.

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  These experiences of ‘partial and fleeting realisations’ are seen as life-changing, possessing both weight and significance.44 They are like ‘bolts of lightning on a dark night that brilliantly illuminate everything in a single, instantaneous flash.’45 These ‘epiphanic’ moments of disclosure illuminate what was once dark, obscure or out of focus, bringing a ‘sense of clarification, which seems to allow us to understand things in their true nature’. Something of vast yet unassimilated significance seems to be shown to us in a dazzling moment of illumination – something that we proved unable to discover for ourselves by extended reflection and reason. What, then, do such experiences mean? Is this deep sense of longing a genuine response to something that lies, dimly glimpsed and partially apprehended, beyond the world of appearances, or is it simply a trick of the mind that points to nothing – a cypher without a key? Might there be a conceptual scheme that can unlock its meaning? Scientific study of such human experiences is often predetermined by the decision to adopt the principle of the ‘Methodological Exclusion of the Transcendent’,46 which presupposes a naturalist set of working assumptions, which inevitably focus on the mental mechanisms by which such experiences might arise, assuming that there is no transcendent referent for such experiences. The outcome of this is a premature foreclosure of a potentially important conversation, in which one possible explanation – some transcendent reality – is excluded in advance on methodological grounds. The parallels with J. B. S. Haldane’s naturalist dilemma can hardly be overlooked: ‘If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain, I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true. They may be sound chemically, but that does not make them sound logically.’47 One influential interpretative framework originates within the Christian tradition, which proposes a dialectic between humanity being intended to relate to God, but presently being alienated from God. In consequence, human beings experience a general sense of longing which nothing seems able to satisfy, in that this both originates from God and is designed to lead to God.48 The eleventh-century theologian Anselm of Canterbury expresses this interpretation in one of his meditations: ‘Lord, give me what you have made me want. I praise and thank you for the desire that you have inspired. Perfect what you have begun, and grant me what you have made me long for.’49 Other interpretations of this sense of longing are, of course, available. Richard Dawkins suggests a ‘general theory of religion as accidental by-product – a misfiring of something useful’ within our evolutionary history, in which religious experience can be explained reductively by anyone with ‘the slightest familiarity with the brain and its powerful workings.’50 It is a fascinating hypothesis, although lacking evidential substantiation.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  She must now pay many calls with her mother, must attend all the formal social functions — this for the sake of appearances, lest the neighbours should guess the breach between them. She must keep up the fiction that she found in a city the stimulus necessary to her work, she who was filled with a hungry longing for the green of the hills, for the air of wide spaces, for the morn- ings and the noontides and the evenings of Morton. All these things she must do for the sake of her father, aye, and for the sake of Morton. On her first visit home Anna had said very quietly one day: ‘ There’s something, Stephen, that I think I ought to tell you perhaps, though it’s painful to me to reopen the subject. There has been no scandal — that man held his tongue — you’ll be glad to know this because of your father. And Stephen — the Crossbys have sold The Grange and gone to America, I believe —’ she had stopped abruptly, not looking at Stephen, who had nodded, un- able to answer. So now there were quite different folk at The Grange, folk very much more to the taste of the county — Admiral Carson and his apple-cheeked wife who, childless herself, adored Mothers’ Meetings. Stephen must sometimes go to The Grange with Anna, who liked the Carsons. Very grave and aloof had Stephen become; too reserved, too self-assured, thought her neighbours. They sup- posed that success had gone to her head, for no one was now al- THE WELL OF LONELINESS 241 lowed to divine the terrible shyness that made social intercourse such a miserable torment. Life had already taught Stephen one thing, and that was that never must human beings be allowed to suspect that a creature fears them. The fear of the one is a spur to the many, for the primitive hunting instinct dies hard — it is better to face a hostile world than to turn one’s back for a moment. But at least she was spared meeting Roger Antrim, and for this she was most profoundly thankful. Roger had gone with his regiment to Malta, so that they two did not see each other. Violet was married and living in London in the: ‘ perfect duck of a house in Belgravia.’ From time to time she would blow in on Stephen, but not often, because she was very much married with one baby already and another on the way. She was somewhat subdued and much less maternal that she had been when first she met Alec. If Anna was proud of her daughter’s achievement she said nothing beyond the very few words that must of necessity be spoken: “I’m so glad yorr book has succeeded, Stephen.’ ‘Thank you, mother ~’

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  Others, however, are disturbed by the absence of any transcendent grounding for our beliefs which might challenge what are often self-serving ideologies, privileging the views of certain individuals or social groups. Surely our beliefs need to be grounded in and accountable to something greater? The idea of ‘natural law’ is important here. It suggests that our beliefs, commitments and purposes are to be judged against a transcendent norm, which lies beyond human manipulation and control. Morality and meaning rest on some transcendent ground that is not our creation, but which we progressively discern and gradually enact. The difficulties of these debates lead some to suggest that we ought to disengage from trying to interpret the world, in that questions of meaning and value lie beyond rational or scientific verification. Yet as Albert Camus pointed out, that amounts to a denial of an essential feature of the human condition – an inbuilt longing to seek meaning. Camus’ Sisyphus had to live in the ‘absurd’ situation of having to believe in a world that is silent when questioned, declining to tell us what it means. There is an existential tension between our desire for meaning and the inherent meaninglessness of our existence, leading Sisyphus to push this boulder up a hill time and time again, determined to find the meaning that had eluded him up to this point. We can, Camus suggests, only eliminate our distinctively human urge to find meaning through suppressing our exploration of the world on the one hand, or by ending our lives on the other. We have to work with human nature as we find it, rather than eliminate its distinctively human elements – such as the capacity and inclination to believe, often (though not invariably) expressed in religious faith. As Philip Pullman points out, ‘the religious impulse is part of what we are and it always has been’.34 Human beings thus seem to be ‘metaphysical animals’, to borrow a phrase from the Cambridge philosopher Donald MacKinnon.35 We are hardwired to supplement our biological instinct for survival with an existential instinct to find and enact meaning and value. Some seek to suppress this instinct, fearing its consequences; others dismiss it as a hangover from our evolutionary past which deludes us into believing in some greater account of reality that transcends mere functionality. Yet, clearly, meaning and values matter to human beings. We need beliefs to help us to navigate the complexities and cope with the ambiguities of life.

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  Forms of mathematical Platonism – such as that of Penrose – certainly have their critics, particularly social constructivists, but there is no doubting either the quality of the reasoning that leads them to their conclusions, or the intellectual resilience of this position. Yet I have not met a mathematical Platonist who equates their belief in a Platonic world with being ‘religious’. There are no grounds for considering this to be a religious position, other than the lingering presence of discredited notions of ‘religion’ within less informed sections of western culture. Mathematical Platonism is a philosophical doctrine about a real world that is held to exist beyond the human mind. There are, however, some who have found their way from a transcendent world of Platonic ideals to a specifically religious belief. The American philosopher Paul Elmer More, for example, was initially fascinated by the ideal world of beautiful Platonic forms, the silent and impersonal world of the purely ideal. 22 However, More began to experience a sense of unutterable bleakness and loneliness in this still and faceless realm. ‘To be satisfied I must see face to face.’ 23 More’s yearning to find a personal reality was finally met through the Christian doctrine of the incarnation, which allowed the ‘face of God’ to be seen. More’s comments chime in with Salman Rushdie’s declaration that it is difficult to describe or define human beings ‘in terms that exclude their spiritual needs’. 24 More’s personal narrative also helps us see how individuals are often drawn to religious faith for quite different reasons, reflecting the diversity of human needs and aspirations. While some flatten the spiritual needs of humanity, the evidence suggests a more complex set of factors that have the potential to draw individuals to faith. More’s desire to see ‘face to face’ in a world of abstractions may not be representative; it is, however, illustrative of the many factors that incline people to explore religious faith. Religious Belief: A Preliminary Exploration Our familiarity with the word ‘religion’ has created a false sense of security in its capacity and legitimacy to represent the many complex human attempts to make sense of our world. The term cannot bear the weight that has been placed upon it in contemporary discussions about the place of religion in our world, and we have yet to find a way of dealing with this problem. Suggesting that there is no defensible intellectual category of religion does not in any way disparage or devalue individual religions – whether we use that specific term or not – such as Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism or Hinduism. If anything, it allows us to focus on them as individual movements with their own distinct identities and histories, instead of feeling we have to force them into the predetermined (and problematic) category of ‘religion’, with the inevitable simplifications, associations, accommodations and distortions that this process of forced assimilation entails.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  His references to the Song of Songs were repeatedly echoed, for instance by Bishop Athanasios in various letters addressed to particular professed virgins, and inevitably by Jerome too, who was capable of referencing the Song of Songs around thirty times in just one letter out of his intense correspondence with the ascetic Eustochium, a hugely wealthy senatorial widow turned monastic leader in Palestine. Jerome, so unenthusiastic for actual marriage, was very free with sensuous borrowings from the Song in his frequent spiritual addresses to Eustochium: ‘Let the seclusion of your chamber ever guard you; ever let the bridegroom sport with you within. If you pray, you are speaking with your spouse.’ [64] Equally profligate with scriptural bridal imagery was the celebrated Ambrose, Bishop of Milan at the end of the fourth century. He was the chief exemplar of the new style of political bishop, having enjoyed a previous secular career governing the province of which Milan was the capital (at a time when the city was also the effective capital of the whole Western Empire). Ambrose’s background in the most exalted Roman nobility might have propelled him on to the imperial throne, and during his quarter-century as bishop of the capital from 374, he was the only person who could publicly overawe Theodosius I. Yet Ambrose’s power was also based on his outstanding ability as a theological author and preacher, as well as being the first major writer of hymns in the Latin West. He directed his talents to strong support for the ascetic movement, not least among the imperial elite, writing a whole series of treatises on virginity between 377 and 395. They are honest enough to concede that a significant number of parents were not at all enthusiastic about their daughters wilfully withdrawing themselves from the upper-class Roman marriage market. That is not the only evidence of unease among many elite men, Christian and non-Christian, about the radical rejection of their traditional values that the monastic life represented. [65] Ambrose, an astute judge of how to thrive in complicated political situations, made attack the best form of defence. [66] He enlisted the Mother of God as an ally, insisting repeatedly that she had been ever-Virgin, her womb and hymen physically inviolate even in the birth of Jesus ( virginitas in partu ). There was theological innovation here, based on a new Roman understanding of gynaecology: very few ancient doctors before the third century had believed that women possessed a hymenal barricade that must be broken to end their virginity. Now this idea was becoming common, and it has persisted into modern medicine. Equally uncommon before Ambrose’s time was the doctrine of Mary’s perpetual virginity, first asserted two centuries before in the lone and eccentric voice of the Protevangelium of James , but in the 390s the Bishop contrived to give it its first official status through an ecclesiastical Synod held at Milan, which condemned those who opposed the idea.

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  windows in desperation or found some other way of committing suicide. I sometimes thought I saw the windowless police cars racing through a city frozen with terror, the crowd of detainees camping out in the open in the Vélodrome d’Hiver, and the trains on which they were soon deported from Drancy and Bobigny; I pictured their journey through the Greater German Reich, I saw my father still in his good suit and his black velour hat, calm and upright among all those frightened people. Then again, I thought that Maximilian would surely have left Paris in time, had gone south on foot across the Pyrenees, and perished somewhere along his way. Or I felt, as I was saying, said Austerlitz, as if my father were still in Paris and just waiting, so to speak, for a good opportunity to reveal himself. Such ideas infallibly come to me in places which have more of the past about them than the present. For instance, if I am walking through the city and look into one of those quiet courtyards where nothing has changed for decades, I feel, almost physically, the current of time slowing down in the gravitational field of oblivion. It seems to me then as if all the moments of our life occupy the same space, as if future events already existed and were only waiting for us to find our way to them at last, just as when we have accepted an invitation we duly arrive in a certain house at a given time. And might it not be, continued Austerlitz, that we also have appointments to keep in the past, in what has gone before and is for the most part extinguished, and must go there in search of places and people who have some connection with us on the far side of time, so to speak? For instance, one curiously gloomy morning recently I was in the Cimetiére de Montparnasse, laid out by the Hospitalers in the seventeenth century on land belonging to the Hétel de Dieu and now surrounded by towering office blocks, walking among the gravestones erected in a vaguely segregated part in memory of members of the Woelfflin, Wormser, Mayerbeer, Ginsberg, Franck, and many other Jewish families, and I felt as if, despite knowing nothing of my origins for so long, I had lingered among them before, or as if they were still accompanying me. I read all their euphonious German names and retained them in my mind—thinking of my landlady in the rue Emile Zola and of a certain Hippolyte Cerf who was born in Neuf-Brisach in 1807, probably as Hippolyt Hirsch, and according to the inscription had died in Paris on the eighth of March 1890, the sixteenth of Adar 5650, many years after his marriage to one Antoinette Fulda of Frankfurt. Among the children of these forebears who had moved from Germany to the French capital were Adolphe and Alfonse, together with Jeanne and Pauline, who had brought Messrs. Lanzberg and Ochs into the family as sons-in-law, and a generation later came Hugo and Lucie Sussfeld, née Ochs, who had a memorial plaque half-hidden by a dried-up asparagus fern inside the cramped mausoleum, informing visitors to the grave that the couple

• From Naked Lunch (1959)

  All these jewelers standing around the Diamond in their frock coats, waiting on The Man. An error of one thousandth of an inch ruins the rock complete and they have to import this character special from Amsterdam to do the job. ...So he reels in dead drunk with a huge air hammer and pounds the diamond to dust.... I don't check these citizens.... Dope peddlers from Aleppo?... Slunk traffickers from Buenos Aires? Illegal diamond buyers from Johannesburg?... Slave traders from Somaliland? Collaborators at the very least... Continual dreams of junk: I am looking for a poppy field.... Moonshiners in black Stetsons direct me to a Near East cafe.... One of the waiters is a connection for Yugoslav opium.... Buy a packet of heroin from a Malay Lesbian in white belted trenchcoat.... I cop the paper in Tibetan section of a museum. She keeps trying to steal it back. ...I am looking for a place to fix.... The critical point of withdrawal is not the early phase of acute sickness, but the final step free from the medium of junk....There is a nightmare interlude of cellular panic, life suspended between two ways of being.... At this point the longing for junk concentrates in a last, all-out yen, and seems to gain a dream power: circumstances put junk in your way.... You meet an old-time Schmecker, a larcenous hospital attendant, a writing croaker.... A guard in a uniform of human skin, black buck jacket with carious yellow teeth buttons, an elastic pullover shirt in burnished Indian copper, adolescent- nordic-sun-tan slacks, sandals from calloused foot soles of young Malayan farmer, an ash-brown scarf knotted and tucked in the shirt. (Ash-brown is a color like grey under brown skin. You sometimes find it in mixed Negro and white stock, the mixture did not come of and the colors separated out like oil on water....) The Guard is a sharp dresser, since he has nothing to do and saves all his pay to buy fine clothes and changes three times a day in front of an enormous magnifying mirror. He has a Latin handsomesmooth face with a pencil line mustache, small black eyes, blank and greedy, undreaming insect eyes. When I get to the frontier the Guard rushes out of his casita, a mirror in a wooden frame slung round his neck. He is trying to get the mirror off his neck.... This has never happened before, that anyone reached the frontier. The Guard has injured his larynx taking off the mirror frame.... He has lost his voice.... He opens his mouth, you can see the tongue jumping around inside. The smooth blank young face and the open mouth with the tongue moving inside are incredibly hideous. The Guard holds up his hand. His whole body jerks in convulsive negation. I go over and unhook the chain across the road. It falls with a clank of metal on stone.

• From The Girls (2016)

  “Cold water makes your pores close up,” and maybe it was true: I felt my skin tighten, water dripping down my face and neck. How desperately Connie and I thought that if we performed these rituals—washed our faces with cold water, brushed our hair into a static frenzy with a boar-bristle brush before bed—some proof would solve itself and a new life would spread out before us. 2Cha ching, the slot machine in Connie’s garage went, like a cartoon, Peter’s features soaked in its rosy glow. He was eighteen, Connie’s older brother, and his forearms were the color of toast. His friend Henry hovered at his side. Connie decided she had a crush on Henry, so our Friday night would be devoted to perching on the weight-lifting bench, Henry’s orange motorcycle parked beside us like a prize pony. We’d watch the boys play the slot machine, drinking the off-brand beer Connie’s father kept in the garage fridge. Later they’d shoot the empty bottles with a BB gun, crowing at each glassy burst. I knew I’d see Peter that night, so I’d worn an embroidered shirt, my hair foul with hairspray. I’d dotted a pimple on my jaw with a beige putty of Merle Norman, but it collected along the rim and made it glow. As long as my hair stayed in place, I looked nice, or at least I thought so, and I tucked in my shirt to show the tops of my small breasts, the artificial press of cleavage from my bra. The feeling of exposure gave me an anxious pleasure that made me stand straighter, holding my head on my neck like an egg in a cup. Trying to be more like the black-haired girl in the park, that easy cast of her face. Connie narrowed her eyes when she saw me, a muscle by her mouth twitching, but she didn’t say anything. —Peter had really only spoken to me for the first time two weeks before. I’d been waiting for Connie downstairs. Her bedroom was much smaller than mine, her house meaner, but we spent most of our time there. The house done up in a maritime theme, her father’s misguided attempt to approximate female decoration. I felt bad for Connie’s father: his night job at a dairy plant, the arthritic hands he clenched and unclenched nervously. Connie’s mother lived somewhere in New Mexico, near a hot spring, had twin boys and another life no one ever spoke of. For Christmas, she had once sent Connie a compact of cracked blush and a Fair Isle sweater that was so small neither of us could squeeze our head through the hole. “The colors are nice,” I said hopefully. Connie just shrugged. “She’s a bitch.” Peter crashed through the front door, dumping a book on the kitchen table. He nodded at me in his mild way and started making a sandwich—pulling out slices of white bread, an acid-bright jar of mustard. “Where’s the princess?” he said.

• From An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness (1995)

  At the age of twenty, after two years of undergraduate studies, I took off a year from the turmoil that had become my life to study at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. My brother and cousin were studying at English universities at the time, and they suggested that I come over and join them. But I had been deeply affected by the Scottish music and poetry that my father loved, and there was something very appealing to me in the Celtic melancholy and fire that I associated with the Scottish side of my ancestry, even though I at the same time wanted to get away from my father’s black, unpredictable moods. Not entirely away, however; I think I had a vague notion that I might better understand my own chaotic feelings and thinking if I returned in some sense to the source. I applied for a federal grant, which enabled me for the first time to become a full-time student, and I left Los Angeles for a year of science by day, and music and poetry by night. St. Andrews, my tutor was saying, was the only place he knew where it snowed horizontally. An eminent neurophysiologist, he was a tall, lanky, and droll Yorkshireman who, like many of his fellow English, believed that rather superior weather, to say nothing of civilization, ended where the Scottish countryside began. He had a point about the weather. The ancient, gray-stoned town of St. Andrews sits right on the North Sea and takes blasts of late-autumn and winter winds that have to be experienced to be believed. I had been living in Scotland for several months by that time, and I had become a definite believer. The winds were especially harsh just off the town’s East Sands, where the university’s marine biology laboratory had been built. There were ten or so of us third-year zoology students, and we were sitting, shivering, wool layered, wool gloved, and teeth chattering, in the damp cold of the tank-filled laboratory. My tutor seemed even more puzzled by my being in these advanced zoology courses than I was. He was an authority on what one might have thought was a somewhat specialized portion of the animal kingdom, namely the auditory nerve of the locust, and just prior to his remarks about horizontal snowfalls in Scotland he had put my striking ignorance of zoological matters out into the public domain.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  The adagio says very distinctly: no more words of love! I am at the fountain again, watching the turtles pissing green milk. Sylvester has just come back from Broadway with a heart full of love. All night I was lying on a bench outside the mall while the globe was sprayed with warm turtle piss and the horses stiffened with priapic fury galloped like mad without ever touching the ground. All night long I smell the lilacs in the little dark room where she is taking down her hair, the lilacs that I bought for her as she went to meet Sylvester. He came back with a heart full of love, she said, and the lilacs are in her hair, her mouth, they are choking her armpits. The room is swimming with love and turtle piss and warm lilacs and the horses are galloping like mad. In the morning dirty teeth and scum on the windowpanes; the little gate that leads to the mall is locked. People are going to work and the shutters are rattling like coats of mail. In the bookstore opposite the fountain is the story of Lake Chad, the silent lizards, the gorgeous gamboge tints. All the letters I wrote her, drunken ones with a blunt stub, crazy ones with bits of charcoal, little pieces from bench to bench, firecrackers, doilies, tutti-frutti; they will be going over them now, together, and he will compliment me one day. He will say, as he flicks his cigar ash: “Really, you write quite well. Let’s see, you’re a surrealist, aren’t you?” Dry, brittle voice, teeth full of dandruff, solo for solar plexus, g for gaga. Upon the balcony with the rubber plant and the adagio going on down below. The keys are black and white, then black, then white, then white and black. And you want to know if you can play something for me. Yes, play something with those big thumbs of yours. Play the adagio since that’s the only goddamned thing you know. Play it, and then cut off your big thumbs. That adagio! I don’t know why she insists on playing it all the time. The old piano wasn’t good enough for her; she had to rent a concert grand—for the adagio! When I see her big thumbs pressing the keyboard and that silly rubber plant beside me I feel like that madman of the North who threw his clothes away and, sitting naked in the wintry boughs, threw nuts down into the herring-frozen sea. There is something exasperating about this movement, something abortively melancholy about it, as if it had been written in lava, as if it had the color of lead and milk mixed. And Sylvester, with his head cocked to one side like an auctioneer, Sylvester says: “Play that other one you were practicing today.” It’s beautiful to have a smoking jacket, a good cigar and a wife who plays the piano. So relaxing. So lenitive.

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  wide open, and a large audience is sitting not in rows as usual at a concert, but as if they were in some sort of tavern or hotel dining room, in groups of four around tables. The chairs, probably made specially for the occasion in the carpentry workshop of the ghetto, are of pseudo-Tyrolean design with heart shapes sawn out of their backs. In the course of the performance the camera lingers in close-up over several members of the audience, including an old gentleman whose cropped gray head fills the right-hand side of the picture, while at the left-hand side, set a little way back and close to the upper edge of the frame, the face of a young woman appears, barely emerging from the black shadows around it, which is why I did not notice it at all at first. Around her neck, said Austerlitz, she is wearing a three-stringed and delicately draped necklace which scarcely stands out from her dark, high-necked dress, and there is, I think, a white flower in her hair. She looks, so I tell myself as I watch, just as I imagined the singer Agata from my faint memories and the few other clues to her appearance that I now have, and I gaze and gaze again at that face, which seems to me both strange and familiar, said Austerlitz, I run the tape back repeatedly, looking at the time indicator in the top left-hand corner of the screen, where the figures covering part of her forehead show the minutes and seconds, from 10:53 to 10:57, while the hundredths of a second flash by so fast that you cannot read and capture them. —At the beginning of this year, Austerlitz finally continued his narrative, after lapsing, as so often, into deep abstraction in the middle of it, at the beginning of this year, he said, not long after our last meeting, I went to Prague for a second time, resumed my conversations with Vera, set up a kind of pension fund at a