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We Decided To Call It Baseball

The day after my mother told him the news, he called. His voice cracked, and I could hear him trying to pick up his words and hand them to me, one by one. “Are you all right?” he asked, over and over. It wasn’t so much what he said as what I heard in his voice: I heard somebody I’d never met before, a man he didn’t even know so well himself.

Due To Illness

Raymond’s in the same “promising” eighth-grade section as me — the promise being based on some test we took at the end of seventh grade — but I don’t think of Raymond as promising. Nobody does. He wears high-water pants, and his glasses are held together with masking tape. He has a scattering of white pimples on his forehead, beneath his greasy bangs. Sometimes he smells.

Sunbeams

Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.

John Berger

Going To Bed

A late night walk on the beach, Drambuie or bourbon, the dreaded Carrot Lady

Evening Voices

The Symptoms

The second time I come to see her, she lets me touch her right breast. I’m sure she would let me touch the left one, and maybe slide my hand down her smooth belly, but the idea is too much for me. She strokes my arm as I hand her the fives through the window, just barely brushes her fingertips along the inside of my elbow. I roll her nipple between my fingers, run my palm over the breathless curve. I want to stop.

The Role Of The Erotic Imagination

Sex is so stunning and powerful that the sexual gaze would seem to have something in common with the religious gaze. Of course, for many religious people, sexual fascination is the opposite of the religious spirit, but in some traditions where sex is considered sacred, it isn’t much of a leap from honoring the image of a saint to venerating an image of a sexual god or goddess.

Summoning Venus

An Interview With Thomas Moore On Sex And The Soul

The goal of our sexuality — especially in our thinking about lovemaking — should be to evoke the spirit of Venus. That’s really what it’s about. It’s not about the modern idea of people trying to communicate with each other. Nor is it just instinct, nor biology. In The Soul of Sex, I set out to write about sex in a way that was not biological, not psychological, and not sociological. I came to the conclusion that summoning the spirit of sex — which the Greeks called Aphrodite and the Romans called Venus — is still what sex is about, and is what we need to do in today’s world.

Solstice

His mother is blessed with a dull acceptance that cushions her suffering, but Arnell, her youngest son, is bright, and this winter will leave its mark on him.