Sublime

she was enamoured of intensity and greatness, and rash in embracing whatever seemed to her to have those aspects; likely to seek martyrdom, to make retractions, and then to incur martyrdom after all in a quarter where she had not sought it.

Many widows turned to brewing as a way of making a living. You really didn’t need very much to set yourself up as an alehouse. A bench outside provided the only customer accommodation necessary. When the night watch in Shakespeare’s play Much Ado about Nothing say that they will ‘sit upon the bench til two’, they are referring to just such an estab

She had that rare sense which discerns what is unalterable, and submits to it without murmuring. Adoring her husband’s virtues, she had very early made up her mind to his incapacity of minding his own interests, and had met the consequences cheerfully. She had been magnanimous enough to renounce all pride in teapots or children’s frilling, and had

When rifts occurred, the same physical closeness helped to re-establish a cooperative and supportive environment. The anonymous Tales and Quick Answers, Very Mery, and Pleasant to Rede (1567), for example, tells of the widow who wanted a husband, ‘not for the nice play’ but more as a business partner to protect her in a world of men, but when her f

Over the decades your roles reversed and reversed again. You were the seeker; you were the sought. Eventually, in moments of deep stillness or unbearable anguish, lover and Beloved melded. Only Love remained. This state of suchness looked like emptiness but felt like plenitude. You came to understand that not only have you been connected to your Be

But now I was in Paradise, for body and soul were molten in one fire and went up in one flame. The mortal and the immortal vines were made one. Through the joy of the body I possessed the joy of the spirit. And it was so strange to think that all this was through a woman—through a woman I had seen dozens of times and had thought nothing of, except

He always thought of the sea as la mar which is what people call her in Spanish when they love her. Sometimes those who love her say bad things of her but they are always said as though she were a woman.