intensity

When the fifteen bikers (all of whom just happen to have recently bathed and brushed their teeth -- in my heart of hearts I am hopelessly bourgeois when it comes to hygiene) play their games with the virginal Catholic schoolgirl in my head, I am neither ravisher nor ravished, but somewhere in the interstices between longing and the object of desire. And the greater the disparity there, the greater the tension. There is a tension like that between the spoken and the meant when you call me "whore" while your eyes are saying "goddess," and you know what that does to me. Blasphemy is a kind of tension, too; the story you told me, about wanting to break into a church and fuck my face before the altar, was very hot.

Force and tension are symbols for intensity.

In*ten"si*ty (?), n. [LL. intensitas: cf. F. intensit'e. See Intense.]

1.

The state or quality of being intense; intenseness; extreme degree; as, intensity of heat, cold, mental application, passion, etc.

If you would deepen the intensity of light, you must be content to bring into deeper blackness and more distinct and definite outline the shade that accompanies it.

F. W. Robertson.

2. Physics

The amount or degree of energy with which a force operates or a cause acts; effectiveness, as estimated by results produced.

3. Mech.

The magnitude of a distributed force, as pressure, stress, weight, etc., per unit of surface, or of volume, as the case may be; as, the measure of the intensity of a total stress of forty pounds which is distributed uniformly over a surface of four square inches area is ten pounds per square inch.

4. Photog.

The degree or depth of shade in a picture.

 

© Webster 1913.