Admiration

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 The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  26 The religion entrusted to Abraham was tailored to the needs of a simpler society than the torah bestowed upon Moses or David. The revelation became progressively clearer and more focused on the christos, right up to the time of John the Baptizer, who had looked directly into the eyes of Jesus. But the Old Testament was not simply about Christ, as Luther had argued. The covenant with Israel had its own integrity; it came from the same God, and the study of the Torah would help Christians to understand the Gospel. Calvin would become the most influential of the Protestant reformers and make the Jewish scriptures more important to Christians – especially in the Anglo-Saxon world – than ever before. Calvin never tired of pointing out that in the Bible God condescended to our limitations. The Word was conditioned by the historical circumstances in which it was uttered, so the less edifying stories of the Bible must be seen in context, as a phase in an ongoing process. There was no need to explain them away allegorically. The creation story in Genesis was an example of this divine balbative (‘baby talk’), which adapted immensely complex processses to the mentality of uneducated people. 27 It was not surprising that the Genesis story differed from the new theories of learned philosophers. Calvin had great respect for modern science. It should not be condemned simply ‘because some frantic persons are wont boldly to reject whatever is unknown to them. For astronomy is not only pleasant but also very useful to be known: it cannot be denied that this art unfolds the admirable wisdom of God.’ 28 It was absurd to expect scripture to teach scientific fact; anybody who wanted to learn about astronomy should look elsewhere. The natural world was God’s first revelation, and Christians should regard the new geographical, biological and physical sciences as religious activities. 29 The great scientists shared this view. Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543) regarded science as ‘more divine than human’. 30 His heliocentric hypothesis was so radical that few people could take it in: instead of being located in the centre of the universe, the earth and the other planets were rotating around the sun; the world appeared to be stable, but was in fact in rapid motion. Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) tested the Copernican theory empirically by observing the planets through his telescope. He was silenced by the Inquisition and forced to recant, but his somewhat aggressive and provocative temperament had also played a part in his condemnation. At first, Catholics and Protestants did not automatically reject the new science. The Pope approved of Copernicus’s theory when he first presented it in the Vatican and the early Calvinists and Jesuits were both keen scientists. But some were disturbed by the new theories. How could you reconcile Copernicus’s theory with a literal reading of Genesis?

• From The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  Yet many of the men of reason were in love with the classics of Graeco-Roman antiquity, which seemed to fulfil many of the functions of scripture.1 When Diderot read the classics, he experienced ‘transports of admiration . . . thrills of joy . . . divine enthusiasm’.2 Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–72) declared that he would study the Greek and Roman authors again and again.‘I took fire!’ he cried on reading Plutarch.3 When the English historian Edward Gibbon (1737–94) visited Rome for the first time, he found that he could not proceed with his research because he was ‘agitated’ by such ‘strong emotions’ and experienced a quasi-religious ‘intoxication’ and ‘enthusiasm’.4 They all invested these ancient works with their deepest aspirations, allowed them to shape their minds, inform their interior world, and found that, in return, the texts gave them moments of transcendence. * Other scholars applied their sceptically critical skills to the Bible. Baruch Spinoza (1632–77), a Sephardic Jew of Spanish descent born in the liberal city of Amsterdam, had studied mathematics, astronomy and physics and found them incompatible with his religious beliefs.5 In 1655 he started to voice doubts that unsettled his community: the manifest contradictions in the Bible proved that it could not be of divine origin; the idea of revelation was a delusion; and there was no supernatural deity – what we called ‘God’ was simply nature itself. On 27 July 1656 Spinoza was excommunicated from the synagogue and became the first person in Europe to live successfully beyond the reach of established religion. Spinoza dismissed conventional faith as ‘a tissue of meaningless mysteries’; he preferred to get what he called ‘beatitude’ from the untrammelled exercise of his reason.6 Spinoza studied the historical background and literary genres of the Bible with unprecedented objectivity. He agreed with Ibn Ezra that Moses could not have written the entire Pentateuch but went on to claim that the extant text was the work of several different authors. He had become the pioneer of the historical-critical method that would later be called the Higher Criticism of the Bible.

• From The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  But because few of them could read classical Hebrew, they could not understand the Torah. Indeed, even in Palestine, most Jews conversed in Aramaic rather than Hebrew, and needed a translation ( targum ) when the Law and the Prophets were read aloud in the synagogue. Jews had started to translate their scriptures into Greek during the third century BCE on the island of Pharos, just off the coast of Alexandria. 54 This project was probably initiated by the Alexandrian Jews themselves but over the years it acquired a mythical aura. It was said that Ptolemy Philadelpus, the Greek king of Egypt, was so impressed by the Jewish scriptures that he wanted a translation for his library. So he asked the High Priest in Jerusalem to send six elders from each of the twelve tribes to Pharos. They all worked on the text together and produced a translation that was so perfect that everybody agreed that it must be preserved forever ‘imperishable and unchanged’. 55 In honour of its seventy-plus translators, it was known as the Septuagint. Another legend seemed to have absorbed elements of the new Torah spirituality. The seventy translators proved to be ‘prophets and priests of the mysteries’: ‘Sitting . . . in seclusion . . . they became as it were possessed, and under inspiration, wrote, not each several scribe something different, but the same word for word.’ 56 Like the exegete, the translators were inspired and uttered the word of God in the same way as the biblical authors themselves. This last story was told by the famous Alexandrian exegete Philo (70 BCE to 45 CE ), who came from a wealthy Jewish family in Alexandria. 57 Although Philo was a contemporary of John the Baptizer, Jesus and Hillel (one of the most distinguished of the early Pharisees), he inhabited a very different intellectual world. A Platonist, Philo produced a large number of commentaries on Genesis and Exodus, which transformed them into allegories of divine logos (reason). This was another species of translatio . Philo was trying to ‘transfer’ or ‘carry over’ the essence of the Semitic tales into another cultural idiom and place them in an alien conceptual framework. Philo did not invent the allegorical method. The grammatikoi of Alexandria were already ‘translating’ Homer’s epics into philosophical terms, so that Greeks who were trained in the rationalism of Plato and Aristotle could use the Iliad and Odyssey as part of their quest for wisdom. They based their allegoria on numerology and etymology. Besides its everyday connotation, every name had a deeper, symbolic meaning that expressed its eternal, Platonic form.

• From The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  Like the Yerushalmi, it was a commentary ( gemara ) on the Mishnah, but did not ignore the Tanakh, which was used to support the Oral Torah. In some ways, the Bavli was similar to the New Testament in that its author-editors regarded it as the completion of the Hebrew Bible – a new revelation for a changed world. 53 Like the New Testament, the Bavli was highly selective in its treatment of the older scripture, choosing only those portions of the Tanakh that it found useful and ignoring the rest. The commentary of the Bavli went systematically through the Mishnah, portion by portion. The gemara referred not only to the Bible but also to the opinions of the rabbis, legends, history, theological reflections and legal lore. This method compelled the student to integrate the written and oral traditions, so that they merged together in his mind. The Bavli included a good deal of material that was older than the Mishnah but much of its content was new, so the student gained a fresh perspective that changed his view of both the Mishnah and the Bible. The Bavli revered the older texts but saw neither as sacrosanct. In their commentary, the author-editors would sometimes reverse the legislation of the Mishnah, play off one rabbi against another, and point out serious gaps in the Mishnah’s arguments. They did exactly the same with the Bible, noting lacunae in the biblical texts , 54 suggesting what the inspired authors should have said, 55 and even changing a biblical law to more congenial rulings of their own. 56 When read in conjunction with the Bavli, the Bible was transformed, in the same way as the New Testament altered the Christians’ reading of the ‘Old Testament’. If biblical texts were included in the gemara, they were never discussed on their own terms and in a biblical context, but were always read from the point of view of the Mishnah. As R. Abdini of Haifa explained, the rabbis were the new prophets: ‘Since the day the temple was destroyed, prophecy has been taken from the prophets and given to the sages.’ 57 The Torah was thus a transcendent reality embodied in two earthly forms: a written scripture and an oral tradition. 58 Both came from God; both were necessary, but the rabbis privileged the Oral Torah because a written text could encourage inflexibility and a backward-looking orientation, whereas the spoken word and the ever-shifting currents of human thought made the Word more sensitive to changing conditions. 59 We hear many voices in the Bavli: Abraham, Moses, the prophets, the Pharisees and the rabbis. They were not confined to their historical period but brought together on the same page, so that they seemed to be debating with each other across the centuries – often disagreeing quite vehemently. The Bavli gave no definitive answers. If an argument ended in impasse, the students had to sort it out to their own satisfaction with their teachers.

• From The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  Preachers must be well read in rabbinical and patristic exegesis and acquainted with contemporary scholarship. They must always see a biblical passage in its original context but at the same time they must make the Bible relevant to the daily needs of their congregations. Zwingli’s study of the Greek and Roman classics had taught him to appreciate other religious cultures: 24 the Bible did not have the monopoly of revealed truth; Socrates and Plato had also been inspired by the Spirit and Christians would meet them in heaven. Like Luther, Zwingli believed that the written Word must be spoken aloud. Because a preacher was guided by the Spirit in the same way as the biblical authors, Zwingli regarded his own sermons as prophetic. His task was to animate the written Word and make it a living force in the community. The Bible was not about what God had done in the past, but what he did here and now. 25 Calvin, however, had no time for classical culture. He agreed with Luther that Christ was the focus of scripture and the ultimate manifestation of God. But Calvin had a far greater appreciation of the Hebrew Bible. God’s revelation had been a gradual, evolutionary process; at each stage of their history, he had adapted his truth to the limited capacity of human beings. The teaching and guidance that God had given to Israel had changed and developed over time. 26 The religion entrusted to Abraham was tailored to the needs of a simpler society than the torah bestowed upon Moses or David. The revelation became progressively clearer and more focused on the christos , right up to the time of John the Baptizer, who had looked directly into the eyes of Jesus. But the Old Testament was not simply about Christ, as Luther had argued. The covenant with Israel had its own integrity; it came from the same God, and the study of the Torah would help Christians to understand the Gospel. Calvin would become the most influential of the Protestant reformers and make the Jewish scriptures more important to Christians – especially in the Anglo-Saxon world – than ever before. Calvin never tired of pointing out that in the Bible God condescended to our limitations. The Word was conditioned by the historical circumstances in which it was uttered, so the less edifying stories of the Bible must be seen in context, as a phase in an ongoing process. There was no need to explain them away allegorically. The creation story in Genesis was an example of this divine balbative (‘baby talk’), which adapted immensely complex processses to the mentality of uneducated people. 27 It was not surprising that the Genesis story differed from the new theories of learned philosophers. Calvin had great respect for modern science. It should not be condemned simply ‘because some frantic persons are wont boldly to reject whatever is unknown to them.

• From The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  3 In the Jewish scriptures, God had sent a coded message to humanity that the Christians alone had managed to decipher. Justin’s notion of the Logos became central to the exegesis of the theologians who are known as the ‘fathers’ of the church, because they created the seminal ideas of Christianity and adapted this Jewish faith to the Graeco-Roman world. From an early date, the fathers regarded the Tanakh as an elaborate sign system. As Irenaeus explained, the writings of Moses were really the words of Christ, the eternal Logos, who had been speaking through him. 4 The fathers did not see the ‘Old Testament’ as an anthology of writings but as a single book with a unified message, which Irenaeus called its hypothesis, the argument ‘beneath’ (hypo) the surface. The Hebrew scriptures did not mention Jesus directly but his life and death formed the coded subtext of the Bible and also revealed the secret of the cosmos. 5 Material objects, invisible realities, historical events and natural laws – indeed, everything that existed – formed part of a divinely organized system, which Irenaeus called the ‘economy’. Everything had its proper place in the economy and connected with everything else to form a harmonious whole. Jesus was the incarnation of this divine economy. As Paul had explained, his coming had finally revealed God’s plan: ‘that the universe, everything in heaven and earth, might be brought into a unity [anakephalaiosis] in Christ’. 6 Jesus was the reason, purpose and culmination of God’s grand design. Because Christ lay at the heart of the Hebrew scriptures, they also expressed the divine economy, but this subtext only became apparent if the Bible was interpreted correctly. Like the cosmos itself, scripture was a text (textus), a tissue made up of an infinite number of interconnecting entities that were ‘woven together’ to form an inextricable whole. 7 Contemplating the encoded textus of scripture helped people to understand that it was Jesus who held everything together and explained the deeper significance of the entire economy. The task of the exegete was to demonstrate this, fitting all the clues together like the interlocking pieces of a vast puzzle. Irenaeus compared the scriptures to a mosaic, composed of innumerable tiny stones which, once they had been placed together correctly, formed the image of a handsome king.

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  3 [image file=image_rsrc2PR.jpg] Love, at least love for a man not already part of the family, was something I was a little unsure about. Aunt Alma said love had more to do with how pretty a body was than anyone would ever admit, and Glen was pretty enough, she swore, with his wide shoulders and long arms, his hair combed back and his collar buttoned up tight over his skinny neck. Sometimes after Glen had been over to visit and gone, Mama would sit on the porch and smoke a cigarette, looking off into the distance. Sometimes I’d go slide quietly under her armpit and sit with her, saying nothing. I would wonder what she was thinking, but I didn’t ask. If I had, she’d have said something about the road or the trees or the stars. She’d have talked about work or something one of my cousins had done, or one of the uncles, or she’d have swatted my butt and sent me off to bed, then gone back to sitting there with her face so serious, smoking her Pall Mall cigarette right down to the filter. “You and Reese like Glen, don’t you?” Mama would say now and then in a worried voice. I would nod every time. Of course we liked him, I’d tell her, and watch her face relax so her smile came back. “I do too. He’s a good man.” She’d run her hands over her thighs slow, hug her knees up close to her breasts, and nod to herself more than me. “He’s a good man.” The nights Mama worked at the diner, she’d leave us with Aunt Ruth or Aunt Alma. But sometimes, if she wasn’t working too late, she would make up a bed of blankets and pillows in the backseat of her Pontiac and take us with her. She’d feed us dinner in a booth near the kitchen and let us listen to the jukebox for a while before she put us to bed in the car, telling me sternly not to unlock the door for anyone but her. While we sat in that booth, I’d watch her at work. She was mesmerizing, young and sweet-faced and too pretty for anyone to be mean to her. The truckers teased her and played her favorite songs on the jukebox. The younger ones would try to get her to go out with them, but she’d joke them out of it. The older ones who knew her well would compliment her on us, her pretty girls. I watched it all, admiring the men with their muscular forearms and broad shoulders as they sipped the coffee my mama served them, absorbing the music as it played continuously, keeping Reese from spilling her milk or sliding down under the table, and smiling at Mama when she looked over to me.

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  [image file=image_rsrc2PS.jpg] Uncle Earle was my favorite of all my uncles. He was known as Black Earle for three counties around. Mama said he was called Black Earle for that black black hair that fell over his eyes in a great soft curl, but Aunt Raylene said it was for his black black heart. He was a good-looking man, soft-spoken and hardworking. He told Mama that all the girls loved him because he looked like Elvis Presley, only skinny and with muscles. In a way he did, but his face was etched with lines and sunburned a deep red-brown. The truth was he had none of Elvis Presley’s baby-faced innocence; he had a devilish look and a body Aunt Alma swore was made for sex. He was a big man, long and lanky, with wide hands marked with scars. “Earle looks like trouble coming in on greased skids,” my uncle Beau laughed. All the aunts agreed, their cheeks wrinkling around indulgent smiles while their fingers trailed across Uncle Earle’s big shoulders as sweetly and tenderly as the threadlike feet of hummingbirds. Uncle Earle always seemed to have money in his pockets, some job he was just leaving and another one he was about to take up. His wife had left him around the time Lyle Parsons died, because of what she called his lying ways. He wouldn’t stay away from women, and that made her mad. Teresa was Catholic and took her vows seriously, which Earle had expected, but he had never imagined she would leave him for messing around with girls he would never have married and didn’t love. His anger and grief over losing her and his three daughters gave him an underlying bitterness that seemed to make him just that much more attractive. “That Earle’s got the magic,” Aunt Ruth told me. “Man is just a magnet to women. Breaks their hearts and makes them like it.” She shook her head and smiled at me. “All these youngsters playing at being something, imagining they can drive women wild with their narrow little hips and sweet baby smiles, they never gonna have the gift Earle has, don’t even know enough to recognize it for what it is. A sad wounded man who genuinely likes women—that’s what Earle is, a hurt little boy with just enough meanness in him to keep a woman interested.” She pushed my hair back off my face and ran her thumb over my eyebrows, smoothing down the fine black hairs. “Your real daddy…” She paused, looked around, and started again. “He had some of that too, just enough, anyway, to win your mama. He liked women too, and that’s something I can say for him. A man who really likes women always has a touch of magic.”

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  Glen Waddell nodded, understanding completely the look on Earle’s face. The man was a Boatwright, after all, and he and his two brothers had all gone to jail for causing other men serious damage. Rumor told deadly stories about the Boatwright boys, the kind of tales men whispered over whiskey when women were not around. Earle was good with a hammer or a saw, and magical with a pickax. He drove a truck like he was making love to the gears and carried a seven-inch pigsticker in the side pocket of his reinforced painter’s pants. Earle Boatwright was everything Glen had ever wanted to be—specially since his older brothers laughed at him for his hot temper, bad memory, and general uselessness. Moreover, Earle had a gift for charming people—men or women—and he had charmed the black sheep of the Waddell family right out of his terror of the other men on the crew, charmed him as well out of his fear of his family’s disapproval. When Earle turned that grin on him, Glen found himself grinning back, enjoying the notion of angering his daddy and outraging his brothers. It was something to work for, that relaxed and disarming grin of Earle’s. It made a person want to see it again, to feel Earle’s handclasp along with it and know a piece of Earle’s admiration. More than anything in the world, Glen Waddell wanted Earle Boatwright to like him. Never mind that pretty little girl, he told himself, and put his manners on hard until Earle settled back down. Glen yes-ma’amed all the waitresses and grabbed Earle’s check right out of Anney’s hand, though it would take him down to quarters and cigarettes after he paid it. But when Earle went off to the bathroom, Glen let himself watch her again, that bow on her ass and the way her lips kept pulling back off her teeth when she smiled. Anney looked him once full in the face, and he saw right through her. She had grinned at her brother with an open face and bright sparkling eyes, an easy smile and a soft mouth, a face without fear or guile. The smile she gave Glen and everyone else at the counter was just as easy but not so open. Between her eyes was a fine line that deepened when her smile tightened. A shadow darkened her clear pupils in the moment before her glance moved away. It made her no less pretty but added an aura of sadness. “You coming over tonight, Earle?” she asked when he came back, in a voice as buttery and sweet as the biscuits. “The girls miss you ‘bout as much as I do.” “Might be over,” Earle drawled, “if this kid here does his job right and we get through before dark this time.” He slapped Glen’s shoulder lightly and winked at Anney. “Maybe I’ll even bring him with me.”

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  We lived on one porch or another all summer long, laughing at Little Earle, teasing the boys and picking over beans, listening to stories, or to the crickets beating out their own soft songs. When I think of that summer—sleeping over at one of my aunts’ houses as easily as at home, the smell of Mama’s neck as she bent over to hug us in the dark, the sound of Little Earle’s giggle or Granny’s spit thudding onto the dry ground, and that country music playing low everywhere, as much a part of the evening as crickets and moonlight—I always feel safe again. No place has ever seemed so sweet and quiet, no place ever felt so much like home. I worshiped my uncles—Earle, Beau, and Nevil. They were all big men with wide shoulders, broken teeth, and sunken features. They kept dogs trained for hunting and drove old trucks with metal toolboxes bolted to the reinforced wood sides. They worked in the mills or at the furnace repair business, or sometimes did roofing or construction work depending on how the industry was going. They tinkered with cars together on the weekends, standing around in the yard sipping whiskey and talking dirty, kicking at the greasy remains of engines they never finished rebuilding. Their eyes were narrow under sun-bleached eyebrows, and their hands were forever working a blade or a piece of wood, or oiling some little machine part or other. “You hold a knife like this,” they told me. “You work a screwdriver from your shoulder, swing a hammer from your hip, and spread your fingers when you want to hold something safe.” Though half the county went in terror of them, my uncles were invariably gentle and affectionate with me and my cousins. Only when they were drunk or fighting with each other did they seem as dangerous as they were supposed to be. The knives they carried were bright, sharp, and fascinating, their toolboxes were massive, full of every imaginable metal implement. Even their wallets bulged with the unknown and the mysterious—outdated ID cards from the air base construction crew, passes for the racetrack, receipts for car repairs and IOUs from card games, as well as little faded pictures of pretty women who were not their wives. My aunts treated my uncles like overgrown boys—rambunctious teenagers whose antics were more to be joked about than worried over—and they seemed to think of themselves that way too. They looked young, even Nevil, who’d had his teeth knocked out, while the aunts—Ruth, Raylene, Alma, and even Mama—seemed old, worn-down, and slow, born to mother, nurse, and clean up after the men. Men could do anything, and everything they did, no matter how violent or mistaken, was viewed with humor and understanding.

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  The sheriff would lock them up for shooting out each other’s windows, or racing their pickups down the railroad tracks, or punching out the bartender over at the Rhythm Ranch, and my aunts would shrug and make sure the children were all right at home. What men did was just what men did. Some days I would grind my teeth, wishing I had been born a boy. I begged my aunts for Earle’s and Beau’s old denim work-shirts so I could wear them just the way they did when they worked on their trucks, with the front tucked in and the tail hanging out. Beau laughed at me affectionately as I mimicked him. Earle and Nevil raked their calloused fingers through my black hair and played at catching my shirttail as I ran past them, but their hands never hurt me and their pride in me was as bright as the coals on the cigarettes they always held loosely between their fingers. I followed them around and stole things from them that they didn’t really care about—old tools, pieces of chain, and broken engine parts. I wanted most of all a knife like the ones they all carried—a Buck knife with a brass-and-stained-wood handle or a jackknife decorated with mother-of-pearl. I found a broken jackknife with a shattered handle that I taped back together around the bent steel tang. I carried that knife all the time until my cousin Grey took pity and gave me a better one. Uncle Earle was my favorite of all my uncles. He was known as Black Earle for three counties around. Mama said he was called Black Earle for that black black hair that fell over his eyes in a great soft curl, but Aunt Raylene said it was for his black black heart. He was a good-looking man, soft-spoken and hardworking. He told Mama that all the girls loved him because he looked like Elvis Presley, only skinny and with muscles. In a way he did, but his face was etched with lines and sunburned a deep red-brown. The truth was he had none of Elvis Presley’s baby-faced innocence; he had a devilish look and a body Aunt Alma swore was made for sex. He was a big man, long and lanky, with wide hands marked with scars. “Earle looks like trouble coming in on greased skids,” my uncle Beau laughed. All the aunts agreed, their cheeks wrinkling around indulgent smiles while their fingers trailed across Uncle Earle’s big shoulders as sweetly and tenderly as the threadlike feet of hummingbirds. Uncle Earle always seemed to have money in his pockets, some job he was just leaving and another one he was about to take up.

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  “Oh, Lord.” She arched her back and then sank down in a squat on the bank, her black serge skirt bunching up under her. “I am so tired of people whining about what might happen to them, never taking no chances or doing anything new. I’m glad you an’t gonna be like that, Bone. I’m counting on you to get out there and do things, girl. Make people nervous and make your old aunt glad.” She wrapped her arms around her knees and looked off down the river. I saw her do that a lot, sit out there and stare into the distance. She always seemed completely comfortable with herself, elbows locked around her knees and one hand drawn up to smoke. Sometimes she’d hum softly, no music I’d ever heard. Aunt Raylene hated most everything that played on the radio, saved her greatest contempt for the kind of country ballads that bemoaned the faithless lover and always included a little spoken part during the chorus. “Terrible maudlin shit,” she’d declare. “You don’t like that, do you, Bone?” I’d promised her that no, I didn’t, ‘course I didn’t, not mentioning that I had liked it before. I would have hated for her to think I didn’t have good sense. For my own protection, I never talked to her about gospel music. I couldn’t bear it if Raylene laughed at the music I dreamed of singing. [image file=image_rsrc2PS.jpg] Aunt Alma’s girl Patsy Ruth came out to Aunt Raylene’s to get out of caring for Tadpole. The baby had finally been diagnosed with a heart condition, though she didn’t look sick, just very small and slightly blue. At four she still fit in Alma’s laundry basket and had to be watched all the time. “Tadpole falls asleep and it looks like she an’t breathing. Mama gets all crazy, thinks she’s died or something, and goes shaking her till she cries. Gets on my nerves,” Patsy Ruth complained. “I’d rather pull weeds for Aunt Raylene any day.” Patsy Ruth wanted to help me pull stuff out of the river but hated getting mud on herself. She stayed up on the exposed roots of the trees and rarely retrieved anything worth the trouble. Still, she was the one who saw the hooks—two of them, linked together with a rusted chain, big four-pronged things still dragging little shreds of rope. “Lookit the shine!” she yelled, almost sliding down in the mud. “Lookit there. It’s something, I bet you. Something.” I climbed out on one of the roots until I could reach down to the curved metal edge that was showing through the brown water. It was hard to untangle the hooks from the muddy trash. By the time I worked them free, I’d slid down and had one leg thigh-deep in the mud. “You get your ass down here and help me,” I yelled at Patsy Ruth, but she had no intention of risking the river. Instead she ran back to find Grey and Garvey.

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  Though half the county went in terror of them, my uncles were invariably gentle and affectionate with me and my cousins. Only when they were drunk or fighting with each other did they seem as dangerous as they were supposed to be. The knives they carried were bright, sharp, and fascinating, their toolboxes were massive, full of every imaginable metal implement. Even their wallets bulged with the unknown and the mysterious—outdated ID cards from the air base construction crew, passes for the racetrack, receipts for car repairs and IOUs from card games, as well as little faded pictures of pretty women who were not their wives. My aunts treated my uncles like overgrown boys—rambunctious teenagers whose antics were more to be joked about than worried over—and they seemed to think of themselves that way too. They looked young, even Nevil, who’d had his teeth knocked out, while the aunts—Ruth, Raylene, Alma, and even Mama—seemed old, worn-down, and slow, born to mother, nurse, and clean up after the men. Men could do anything, and everything they did, no matter how violent or mistaken, was viewed with humor and understanding. The sheriff would lock them up for shooting out each other’s windows, or racing their pickups down the railroad tracks, or punching out the bartender over at the Rhythm Ranch, and my aunts would shrug and make sure the children were all right at home. What men did was just what men did. Some days I would grind my teeth, wishing I had been born a boy. I begged my aunts for Earle’s and Beau’s old denim work-shirts so I could wear them just the way they did when they worked on their trucks, with the front tucked in and the tail hanging out. Beau laughed at me affectionately as I mimicked him. Earle and Nevil raked their calloused fingers through my black hair and played at catching my shirttail as I ran past them, but their hands never hurt me and their pride in me was as bright as the coals on the cigarettes they always held loosely between their fingers. I followed them around and stole things from them that they didn’t really care about—old tools, pieces of chain, and broken engine parts. I wanted most of all a knife like the ones they all carried—a Buck knife with a brass-and-stained-wood handle or a jackknife decorated with mother-of-pearl. I found a broken jackknife with a shattered handle that I taped back together around the bent steel tang. I carried that knife all the time until my cousin Grey took pity and gave me a better one.

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  “God, yes,” Mama laughed. “And that sheriff like to peed in his pants when he saw her throwing clothes out the window and yelling, ‘Take it all, why don’t you? Take the kids too, take it all.’ Oh, my sweet Jesus, yes.” “Wade always said she threw her housedress at him, and then just stood there in her underwear, and he wasn’t gonna go near her after that.” “Oh no, girl. That’s just what people tell. She didn’t really do that. She just threatened to do that.” “It’s a better story if she had done it, which is probably why they say she stripped down to her panties, huh?” “Just like her, too. Alma an’t scared of hell or high water.” “Not like her girls.” “No.” Mama looked over at me. “Give that rack a jiggle,” she told me. “You don’t want them jars to settle too much.” She stretched her neck to look over without getting up. “I don’t think those jars are setting deep enough in that pot.” Aunt Raylene poured mama some more ice tea. “Oh Anney. Bone’s doing a good job. When she grows up, she’s gonna know all she’ll need about canning and cooking and gossiping in the kitchen.” Mama spooned a little more sugar into her tea. “Raylene, you’re spoiling her. You should have had some of your own, and then you’d watch them all a little more sharply.” “Well, for not birthing any, it sure feels like I’ve raised a crowd. Seems like I’ve had somebody’s kids under my feet for years now. An’t nobody in this family ever been selfish with their children. Why, I’ve got up many a morning to find a porch full of young’uns somebody’s dropped off in the night.” “Most often Alma’s.” “Oh, don’t go on about Alma. She’s got a good heart, for all that temper of hers, and maybe because of it. And damn, but she’s had a hard time, especially with her girls. It don’t surprise me that this sick baby of hers is a girl. She’s had no luck with her girls. Ever since Temple left home she’s gone as sour as bad whiskey.” “Everybody says Temple takes after Alma, but I can’t see it,” Mama said. “I’d swear the girl was never easy in her body. Never gave a hoot about nobody or nothing, except her pride.” Aunt Raylene started giggling over the lip of her tea glass. “You know, she was standing in the yard that time the sheriff came and all the yelling started. Stood out there and tried to pretend wasn’t nothing going on, wasn’t no sheriffs in the yard with a warrant, no beating on the door, nobody throwing clothes out the window. The girl’s purely amazing.” “What’d she do, offer him a glass of water?”

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  Earle Boatwright was everything Glen had ever wanted to be—specially since his older brothers laughed at him for his hot temper, bad memory, and general uselessness. Moreover, Earle had a gift for charming people—men or women—and he had charmed the black sheep of the Waddell family right out of his terror of the other men on the crew, charmed him as well out of his fear of his family’s disapproval. When Earle turned that grin on him, Glen found himself grinning back, enjoying the notion of angering his daddy and outraging his brothers. It was something to work for, that relaxed and disarming grin of Earle’s. It made a person want to see it again, to feel Earle’s handclasp along with it and know a piece of Earle’s admiration. More than anything in the world, Glen Waddell wanted Earle Boatwright to like him. Never mind that pretty little girl, he told himself, and put his manners on hard until Earle settled back down. Glen yes-ma’amed all the waitresses and grabbed Earle’s check right out of Anney’s hand, though it would take him down to quarters and cigarettes after he paid it. But when Earle went off to the bathroom, Glen let himself watch her again, that bow on her ass and the way her lips kept pulling back off her teeth when she smiled. Anney looked him once full in the face, and he saw right through her. She had grinned at her brother with an open face and bright sparkling eyes, an easy smile and a soft mouth, a face without fear or guile. The smile she gave Glen and everyone else at the counter was just as easy but not so open. Between her eyes was a fine line that deepened when her smile tightened. A shadow darkened her clear pupils in the moment before her glance moved away. It made her no less pretty but added an aura of sadness. “You coming over tonight, Earle?” she asked when he came back, in a voice as buttery and sweet as the biscuits. “The girls miss you ‘bout as much as I do.” “Might be over,” Earle drawled, “if this kid here does his job right and we get through before dark this time.” He slapped Glen’s shoulder lightly and winked at Anney. “Maybe I’ll even bring him with me.” Yes, Glen thought, oh yes, but he kept quiet and took another drink of tea. The gravy in his stomach steadied him, but it was Anney’s smile that cooled him down. He felt so strong he wanted to spit. He would have her, he told himself. He would marry Black Earle’s baby sister, marry the whole Boatwright legend, shame his daddy and shock his brothers. He would carry a knife in his pocket and kill any man who dared to touch her. Yes, he thought to himself, oh yes. Mama looked over at the boy standing by the cash register, with his dark blue eyes and bushy brown hair.

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  She talked as if nothing had happened, and in fact most of it was about me, about how slow I answered, how daydreamy I was, how much I looked like my great-aunt Malvena. I’d been surprised to hear all that, more surprised when she said I would stay here with Alma, give her a hand now that spring was warming up. “You need some help around this place, Alma,” Mama told her. “You’ll like having Bone around. Maybe you can even get her to sing for you now and then.” My mouth had fallen open, and I’d stood transfixed, as close to the bed as I dared. Did she mean that? Did Mama think I was reliable? Did I look like my great-aunt Malvena? Did she really think I could sing? Aunt Alma barely acknowledged what Mama said, just went on with her complaints about Uncle Wade. “I said, ‘Give me a baby, Wade. Just give me a baby.’” She tried to sit up, and Mama leaned over to soothe her, climbing in bed with her. “You know what he said to me? You know what he said to me?” Alma asked, hanging on to Mama with one desperate hand. She didn’t wait for an answer. She took hold of the blanket in her fist, shook it and hissed the answer between her teeth. “Said, ‘What you want an’t what I want.’ He said, ‘You old and ugly and fat as a cow, crazy as a cow eaten too much weed, and you smell like a cow been lying in spoiled milk.’ Said, ‘I wouldn’t touch you even if you took a bath in whiskey tonic and put a bag over your head.’ He laughed at me. Then he walked right out of here.” She lay back limply. There were tears on her face, and her lips had flattened back against her teeth. She shook her head slowly back and forth. “All this time, taking care of him, loving him, giving him children and meals and clean clothes and loving him. Loving him, and him to talk to me that way.” She cried deep, broken sobs. “And Annie!” she wailed. Mama gathered Aunt Alma up like a little girl, rocked her back and forth while she cried. It didn’t last long. In the silence that followed, the two of them murmured a little, something I couldn’t hear clearly. It sounded like Mama said something about Uncle Wade being a loving man, that Aunt Alma loved him. Then Aunt Alma’s voice came out loud and strong again. “Oh, but that’s why I got to cut his throat,” she said plainly. “If I didn’t love the son of a bitch, I’d let him live forever.” “Woman takes it in her head to go crazy, you just might as well stand back.”

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

  Ernest Renan, the celebrated Orientalist and member of the French Academy, prepared from the opposite standpoint of sceptical criticism, and mixing history with romance, but in brilliant, and fascinating style, the Life of Christ, and the history of the Beginnings of Christianity to the middle of the second century.36 (c) English works. English literature is rich in works on Christian antiquity, English church history, and other special departments, but poor in general histories of Christianity. The first place among English historians, perhaps, is due to Edward Gibbon (d. 1794). In his monumental History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (finished after twenty years’ labor, at Lausanne, June 27,1787), he notices throughout the chief events in ecclesiastical history from the introduction of the Christian religion to the times of the crusades and the capture of Constantinople (1453), with an accurate knowledge of the chief sources and the consummate skill of a master in the art of composition, with occasional admiration for heroic characters like Athanasius and Chrysostom, but with a keener eye to the failings of Christians and the imperfections of the visible church, and unfortunately without sympathy and understanding of the spirit of Christianity which runs like a golden thread even through the darkest centuries. He conceived the idea of his magnificent work in papal Rome, among the ruins of the Capitol, and in tracing the gradual decline and fall of imperial Rome, which he calls "the greatest, perhaps, and most awful scene in the history of mankind," he has involuntarily become a witness to the gradual growth and triumph of the religion of the cross, of which no historian of the future will ever record a history of decline and fall, though some "lonely traveller from New Zealand," taking his stand on "a broken arch" of the bridge of St. Angelo, may sketch the ruins of St. Peter’s.37 Joseph Milner (Vicar of Hull, d. 1797) wrote a History of the Church of Christ for popular edification, selecting those portions which best suited his standard of evangelical orthodoxy and piety. "Nothing," he says in the preface, "but what appears to me to belong to Christ’s kingdom shall be admitted; genuine piety is the only thing I intend to celebrate. He may be called the English Arnold, less learned, but free from polemics and far more readable and useful than the German pietist. His work was corrected and continued by his brother, Isaac Milner (d. 1820), by Thomas Grantham and Dr. Stebbing.38 Dr. Waddington (Dean of Durham) prepared three volumes on the history of the Church before the Reformation (1835) and three volumes on the Continental Reformation (1841). Evangelical.

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

  The idea of a common humanity, which underlies all the distinctions of race, society and education, began to dawn in the heathen mind, and found expression in the famous line of Terentius, which was received with applause in the theatre: "Homo sum: humani nihil a me alienum puto." This spirit of humanity breathes in Cicero and Virgil. Hence the veneration paid to the poet of the Aeneid by the fathers and throughout the middle ages. Augustine calls him the noblest of poets, and Dante, "the glory and light of other poets," and "his master," who guided him through the regions of hell and purgatory to the very gates of Paradise. It was believed that in his fourth Eclogue he had prophesied the advent of Christ. This interpretation is erroneous; but "there is in Virgil," says an accomplished scholar,84 "a vein of thought and sentiment more devout, more humane, more akin to the Christian than is to be found in any other ancient poet, whether Greek or Roman. He was a spirit prepared and waiting, though he knew it not, for some better thing to be revealed." The civil laws and institutions, also, and the great administrative wisdom of Rome did much for the outward organization of the Christian church. As the Greek church rose on the basis of the Grecian nationality, so the Latin church rose on that of ancient Rome, and reproduced in higher forms both its virtues and its defects. Roman Catholicism is pagan Rome baptized, a Christian reproduction of the universal empire seated of old in the city of the seven hills. § 13. Judaism and Heathenism in Contact. The Roman empire, though directly establishing no more than an outward political union, still promoted indirectly a mutual intellectual and moral approach of the hostile religious of the Jews and Gentiles, who were to be reconciled in one divine brotherhood by the supernatural power of the cross of Christ.

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

  "For a thousand years," says Zwingli, "no mightier investigator of the Holy Scriptures has appeared than Luther. No one has equaled him in manly and immovable courage with which he attacked popery. But whose work is it? God’s, or Luther’s? Ask Luther himself, and he will say God’s. He traces his doctrine to God and his eternal Word. As far as I have read his writings (although I have often purposely abstained from doing so), I find them well founded in the Scriptures: his only weak point is, that he yields too much to the Romanists in the matter of the sacraments, and the confession to the priest, and in tolerating the images in the churches. If he is sharp and racy in speech, it comes from a pious, honest heart, and a flaming love for the truth .... Others have come to know the true religion, but no one has ventured to attack the Goliath with his formidable armor; but Luther alone, as a true David, anointed by God, hurled the stones taken from the heavenly brook so skillfully that the giant fell prostrate on the ground. Therefore let us never cease to sing with joy: ’Saul has slain his thousands, and David his ten thousands’ (1 Sam. 18:7). He was the Hercules who slew the Roman boar .... I have always been grateful to my teachers, how much more to that excellent man whom I can never expect to equal in honor and merit! With no men on earth would I rather he agreed than with the Wittenbergers .... Many have found the true religion before Luther became famous; I have learnt the gospel from the same fountain of the Scriptures, and began to preach it in 1516 (at Einsiedeln), when I diligently studied and copied with mine own hand the Greek epistles of Paul,919 before I heard the name of Luther. He preaches Christ, so do I, thanks to God. And I will be called by no other name than that of my Captain Christ, whose soldiers we are."920 I may add here the impartial testimony of Dr. Köstlin, the best biographer of Luther, and himself a Lutheran: —

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  Her hair’s grown out from spiky to thick cumulus cloud, and the curves of her body have started to burn off. Though she’s shrinking down toward the underlying bone, her mind is unquenchable fire. She’s grown saner with age, but she still has the lackadaisical whims of a kid. Even after a quadruple bypass has reamed the four chambers of her heart, she smokes nonstop and exists on a diet—I once heard her announce to her careworn cardiologist—of provolone cheese and summer sausage, fruit, and the occasional Ho Ho. Two suitors come to see her at regular intervals, but their romantic beseechings have become as matter-of-fact as her refusals. Afternoons, she plays dominoes with them at the kitchen table, speculating at length on which of them will die first. And she says, I don’t know why I’m still here. She lights one long cigarette after another and despite all this, fails to seem—exactly—unhappy. She still has some arrows in her quiver. For instance, when she feels hungry for Mexican food or merely wants company, she’ll call my sister more than two hours away with killer traffic. Lecia’s family of six (her son and four stepkids plus executive husband) keep her busy. She runs an insurance business that’s paid for a house, inside which are a waterfall and a pond with plump orange koi trained by regular feedings to recognize my sister’s shadow and swim to her with their mouths blowing her kisses from the pond’s surface. On the edge of that, a golf course where tall Husband Tom—nickname: Big, both for his height and after the romantic lead in a TV show—putts with an accuracy almost surgical. There’s even a metal-lined room to hide in if the revolution comes and bandits or insurgents show up. The Scarface House, I dub it. But to run all this, my sister gets up at four or five most mornings, following a regimen fit for a five-star general executing a military coup. At night Big entertains executives by cooking vast carcasses on that grill the size of a station wagon. They take a lot of trips—some involving golf, which Lecia hates—and the rest of which she mostly doesn’t think up. In short, she’s as much slave as empress to her realm. Yet when Mother calls to report a heart attack coming on, my sister grabs her bag and dashes out of the house, floorboarding her Batmobile down to the sagging corner of earth sliding toward the Gulf, only to find Mother affably awaiting her, palpitations miraculously improved. No, they needn’t visit the doctor, but that place on the corner has the best enchiladas and virgin margaritas.