Anger

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 From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  The ecclesiastical campaign against same-sex love was vicious but highly sporadic. By contrast, the struggle against fornication, porneia, was a full-fledged war, which saw the church muster its forces in deliberate array against an ancient style of sexual life. The preaching was endless, the penitential enforcement real. But the sex industry was too entrenched for the Christian state even to compass its repression. Instead, the Christian emperors focused on an aspect of the sex trade whose moral and material significance should not be underestimated: they banned forced prostitution. The brutal exposure of vulnerable women rested on a public indifference so vast that it lay invisibly at the very foundations of the ancient sexual order. As Christianity progressively absorbed society, and could ever less comfortably present itself as a dissent movement apart from the world, it was forced to reckon with the silences in its own sexual program. Because prostitution was at the center of an ancient sexual culture, an order of relationships between state and society built on the concept of shame, the progressive realization of its injustice is a privileged index of Christianization. The aggressive campaign of Justinian against compulsion in the flesh industry marks the end of a distinctly ancient sexual order, one whose distant origins lie at the very beginnings of the archaic Mediterranean city-state and finally crumble in the midst of his rule.16 Chapter 4 follows the Christian revolution in sexual morality through the medium of imaginative literature. The fictional word is an essential complement to the injunctions of the moralists and the dictates of law. Literature is capable of expressing, in a way more intimate than mere commands, the shape of sexual morality, when actually projected onto the furrowed plane of human life. Pagans, Christians, and Jews alike used stories as vehicles to express their deepest beliefs about the relationships between the sexual body, the mechanics of society, and the nature of the cosmos. The Christian transformation of sex can be retraced in the history of literature, which mirrors quite sensitively the passage from a public sexual ideology organized around the imperatives of social reproduction to a mentality founded in ecclesiastical norms. In short, the history of literature recapitulates the passage from shame to sin.

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  “And I’m just supposed to know who Jeff is? So she gets all snotty: ‘Who the fuck do you think he is, Cherie? He’s the guy I’ve been living with the past couple months.’ I thought I would throw the phone at the wall. ‘Norm is there, watching Rosie,’ Cookie says. ‘He’s twelve—practically a young man now!’ ” “Oh crap,” I say. “Did they see her get arrested?” “That’s what I asked her,” Cherie says. “Cookie tells me, ‘Nope,’ all dismissive. ‘They busted me in the pub parking lot. See, I went to meet Jeff so we could talk it out, but he set me up. Next thing I know, I’m in cuffs.’ ” Cherie explains that the cops had social services track down the kids, who were staying in a motel. I march to Addie’s kitchen phone. “I’m calling Ms. Harvey.” When she answers, she explains: “The cops decided Norman is old enough to watch Roseanne while Cookie is incarcerated for assault and battery.” “Wait, Ms. Harvey, let me get this straight: Cookie is arrested for trying to beat up her boyfriend—in jail for the weekend—and our little brother is watching Rosie by himself?” “Regina, I’m just telling you what the police told me.” “Who’s paying for the room? What if they get kicked out? Then what?” “Well, in that case they would be homeless and we would place them in another home. But until then, the authorities have decided that they’re both safe and secure. Besides, now that your mother’s bailed out, she’ll probably be back with them in a few hours.” Camille and I have devised a plan: The only way we can watch out for Rosie and Norm is to convince Cookie that all’s forgiven and we still want her in our lives. “She’s a lunatic,” Cherie says. “You sure you want to go through with this cockamamy plan?” With Daisy Duck and Goofy ball caps in a bag as souvenirs, we wait at the motel room’s outside entrance until Cookie answers with a cigarette between her fingers like some Hollywood vixen. “Well well well,” she says, holding the door as though she has to consider letting us in. “Just like always, you two come crawling back.” Camille occupies Rosie and Norm while I sit down on the bed, across from where Cookie’s seated at the motel room’s desk. Without looking at me, she says, “I see you’re starting to come into your own. Shocker with those little tits, nobody’s knocked you up yet.” “I didn’t come here to be the butt of any insults,” I answer. “I really want to work this out.” “Well, don’t try to buy me with any sweet talk. You ratted me out to every official in Suffolk County when all I’ve ever done was work hard to give you kids a good life.” “Ratted you out?” In the background Camille turns on the TV for Rosie and Norm.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  But it wasn’t quite over. ‘I didn’t say a word, but started the car, and of course just as I did so my bleep went. Then I saw the evening was inevitable in a different way, and the irony was all working overtime in that hideous way it can do. So it was my turn to grope in my breast pocket for my little professional accoutrement. I tried to make something of this with what now seems a fantastic gallantry and said how neither of us was what he seemed. I needn’t have fucking bothered. He changed completely and became all textbook—not actually taken down and used in evidence et cetera, but calling me sir and not giving an inch (as it were) …’ ‘James,’ I had become angry. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t say anything about this for obvious reasons. I have had that man—Colin he’s called, isn’t he?’ He nodded. ‘I picked him up on the Tube, ages ago, just after we’d seen him at the baths. He followed me off the train, almost invited himself back to my place. I fucked him. He fucked me. He’s as queer as—whatever is very, very queer: me, you. He can’t possibly get away with this pretty policeman thing.’ James looked at me very closely. Under no other circumstances could all this have been good news to him. I carried on being angry all day. My tiredness made it harder to resist and as I went into town later I was muttering audibly about people around me, and when they showed signs of offence, deviating abruptly into sarcastic good manners. I was full of outrage at an act in which the brittle shoppers in Liberty’s (where I went to buy socks) and the incurious drifters of Oxford Street (who got in my way) seemed all to be careless conspirators. At the Corry, I did a few ferocious exercises and then flaked out and dropped into the pool with more than usual relief. But even there the slowness and clumsiness of others enraged me, and I was becoming the victim of one of those premature oldsters who bump into one on purpose, just for the muffled charge of contact. I wondered what I would do or say if I saw Colin. Was the whole matter strictly speaking sub judice? Would it have been any service to James to deal angrily, even ironically, with the officer who had charged him?

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  It’s clear I haven’t done a very good job establishing this, but you can’t just come and go as you please.” “What would you prefer I do, Addie? Live as the bastard daughter with no life? No friends, and no future? Counting down the days until I get pushed out of here once the checks stop coming in? I’d rather take control now.” She clenches her fists, fuming, and her chin begins to quiver. “Either you live here, or you don’t; and if you leave, you don’t. Is that clear? And I’d prefer if you don’t challenge me again.” In a total of twenty seconds, Addie Peterman has just reinforced the way I’ve felt since I first set foot on her perfect carpet five years ago—or actually, since I first understood what foster care was. I’m just a Rent-a-Kid. I’m suddenly suspicious that the reason she and any foster parent has given me shelter was to keep the checks coming. Anger boils in me and my words sear my tongue as I tell her what I’ve feared since I met her. “You’ve always been in this for the money!” I yell. “It’s not for the kids, or because you’re some saint! Now that I’m going away, I will get the government’s subsidy—not you. And you can’t stand that, can you? If you were in this for me, if you were really concerned about supporting me, then you would want me back at holidays and breaks. This whole stupid act—you’re not my family! You’re just the people who get paid to act like it. And you know what? I’ve already gotten rid of one mother. Don’t you dare think I won’t do it again.” “Regina, you’re jumping to conclusions,” she says steadily. “We could always discuss some kind of rent arrangement so that you can come back.” In my seasoned insistence to get the last word, I scream in her face, “Don’t worry! This is the last place I’d ever come back to!” During this last half-decade in Addie’s home, I’ve been grateful that she’s provided every necessity a young woman needs and some sense of family so I could feel like a normal kid. At moments I was even distracted from my guilt for failing Rosie and Norm. Addie and Pete have filled that emptiness by being the family who greet me when I walk in the door; for being involved in my life for more than the length of a beating or a heated phone call like the negligent fools who are my biological parents. Addie and Pete have been there so much that sometimes my teachers and my friends and their parents have asked why they never adopted me. Deep down I’ve always been aware that I’m just like the forty thousand other foster kids in America who age out of care every year to end up homeless, incarcerated, addicted, or dead.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  Such an obsession may seem surprising in one who was already deep in meditation upon death, but I do not pretend to be more consistent than others. When confronted by the least stupidity or the commonest petty contriving I was seized with inward fury and wild impatience (nor did I exempt myself from my own disgust). For example, Juvenal, in one of his Satires, was bold enough to attack the actor Paris, whom I liked. I was tired of that pompous, tirading poet; I had little relish for his coarse disdain of the Orient and Greece, or for his affected delight in the so-called simplicity of our forefathers; his mixture of detailed descriptions of vice with virtuous declamation titillates the reader's senses without shaking him from his hypocrisy. As a man of letters, however, he was entitled to certain consideration; I had him summoned to Tibur to tell him myself of his sentence to exile. This scorner of the luxuries and pleasures of Rome would be able hereafter to study provincial life and manners at first hand; his insults to the handsome Paris had drawn the curtain on his own act. Favorinus, towards that same time, settled into his comfortable exile in Chios (where I should have rather liked to dwell myself), whence his biting voice came no longer to my ears. At about this period, too, I ordered a wisdom vendor chased ignominiously from a banquet hall, an ill-washed Cynic who complained of dying of hunger, as if that breed merited anything else. I took great pleasure in seeing the prater packed off, bent double by fear, midst the barking of dogs and the mocking laughter of the pages. Literary and philosophical riff-raff no longer impressed me. The least setback in political affairs exasperated me just as did the slightest inequality in a pavement at the Villa, or the smallest dripping of wax on the marble surface of a table, the merest defect of an object which one would wish to keep free of imperfections and stains. A report from Arrian, recently appointed governor of Cappadocia, cautioned me against Pharasmanes, who was continuing in his small kingdom along the Caspian Sea to play that double game which had cost us dear under Trajan. This petty prince was slyly pushing hordes of barbarian Alani toward our frontiers; his quarrels with Armenia endangered peace in the Orient. When summoned to Rome he refused to come, just as he had already refused to attend the conference at Samosata four years before. By way of excuse he sent me a present of three hundred robes of gold, royal garments which I ordered worn in the arena by criminals loosed to wild beasts. That rash gesture solaced me like the action of one who scratches himself nearly raw.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  Few relationships are as complex as that between mothers and daughters in divorced families. The strands from both sides include love, longstanding anger, compassion, and guilt. But the fact remains that mothers and daughters in divorced families are more conflict-ridden than their counterparts in good intact families. Their relationship is less stable, fluctuates over the years, and reflects more ambivalence on behalf of both generations. The postdivorce relationship is complicated by the undiluted intensity of these feelings and each woman’s reciprocal need for love and approval. Fathers can buffer the mother-daughter relationship, helping the girl separate from her mother and move on to create her own career and new family. The stepfather can also serve this function in a divorced family. But if there is no one to play this role, the two women often engage in a prolonged push-pull, going from too much closeness to too much distance. While profoundly distressing to both, this situation also fails to help the girl resolve her conflicts and get on with her adult life. Paula spent her whole childhood and adolescence locked in conflict with her mother, which did not cool until she divorced and returned home at midnight with her child and was taken in. The two women then had the opportunity to reformulate their relationship. The mother took on an important supportive role as grandmother and the child consolidated the new bridge between mother and daughter. In general, the arrival of a baby drew mothers and daughters of divorce in this study closer together. Daughters who had kept their mothers at bay now welcomed any and all help with the child. As new mothers, they finally began to understand how much sacrifice is required to care for a baby and young child. Perhaps their mothers were not as bad as they thought. Maybe they had had good mothering before the breakup. As their anger at their moms receded, the daughters’ compassion emerged more strongly. The result was a greater understanding from which both women benefited. The perspective of this long-term study has enabled me to observe an incredible amount of fluctuation in parent-child relationships in the postdivorce family. Of course, all families change as parents age and children grow up, but the changes in divorced families are more dramatic. It starts with the breakup, when children feel abandoned by their parents, continues with the changing cast of characters that come in and out of the family, and moves into phases of reassessment when children grow up, sustain their own disappointments, and decide that maybe they had judged their parents too harshly. Parents, seeing their children struggle as adults, are newly worried and want to help. As a result, families that are estranged for decades may come back together during a serious crisis.

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  “We’ll stay at Camille’s tonight.” I flag Rosie toward the car, waiting for Cherie and Camille to rip into me. But the only sounds are the hum of the motor; the click-click-clicking of Camille’s turn signal in the night. I lean up toward the front seat. “Can somebody turn on the radio?” Neither Cherie nor Camille budges. In the morning, Camille finds me dialing the kitchen phone. “Who you calling?” I hesitate. “The social worker.” She comes to me and braces my shoulders. Looking in my eyes, Camille says, “Gi, honey: We’ve done all we can. She has to go back to Idaho .” There’s a ringtone in my ear. “Hello?” “Ms. Harvey, it’s me. Regina.” Camille sighs, rubs her temples, and goes to the cupboard to pull out a can of coffee. I tell Ms. Harvey everything—how we tried to rescue Rosie after social services in Idaho triggered Cookie to lash out; how Nick was chasing after us and we need to keep Rosie with us. “Ms. Harvey, can you call the police in Idaho and tell them how social services put Rosie in danger?” “Regina, you kidnapped a minor across state lines . That’s against the law, and because Rosie’s guardian lives in Idaho, no. There’s nothing I can do from here.” I shoot a glance to Camille and react the only way I can think: I slam the phone back on the wall and storm outside in my bare feet for air. The storm door claps shut behind Camille. “None of us likes this, but sweetie, we all have so much at risk—especially Rosie. We have to take her to Nick’s.” “The hell we do.” “Gi, we’re out of options.” Rosie steps onto the front porch and folds her arms tight across her chest. Cherie steps out behind her. “We’ll tell him that you’ll only stay there as long as Cherie and I stay, too,” I tell Rosie. “Fine.” “Then Regina and I will drive you to the airport,” Cherie says. Nick’s Dobermans charge the door when we ring the bell, and I steady Rosie in her terrified reaction. Cherie and I grab Rosie’s hands and walk into Nick’s home, taking in the stained walls and carpet, the smell of mildew combined with wet dog and urine. With his hands that are perpetually filthy from his job in printing, Nick wrangles his dogs from pummeling us, while his docile wife attempts to coax them from his grip. Then he turns his lips down and points his finger in my face. “You,” he says. “This is all because of you. You have always thought that you were better than us, you think you’re so high and mighty. If I could, I would beat that smugness right off your face, Regina. You need to be brought down a few notches, you snotty bitch, and I could still do that to you.” I glare at Nick and his wife, who’s hovering behind him like a wilting weed.

• From The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us (2017)

  Null hypotheses are essential to science, even when they are horribly wrong, because it’s only in the attempt to find evidence to reject them that a better understanding emerges. For example, “cigarettes do not cause lung cancer” is a null hypothesis. According to this null, lung cancer has many diverse causes, and smoking has no generalized effects on lung cancer risks. Many people do smoke cigarettes, and many smokers do get lung cancer, but according to the null there is no causal association here. Interestingly, in the 1950s, Ronald A. Fisher was an enthusiastic and energetic public advocate of this particular, dismally incorrect null hypothesis, which has since been definitively disproven. Another, more contemporary null hypothesis is “global warming is not caused by the human production of atmospheric greenhouse gases.” The job for the scientist in such instances is to prove the null hypothesis wrong by gathering the requisite evidence to reject it. In other words, the scientific burden of proof always lies with those who want to show that something specific is happening, not on those who think that it is not. After years of struggling against Grafen’s abundant proof standard, I came to realize that the field of evolutionary biology had become like the financial market news reports. Evolutionary biologists have become convinced that a special kind of rhyme and reason—adaptive mate choice—must be happening everywhere and all the time. Why are they so convinced? When you examine it, it is mostly just a belief that the world must be that way. Remember, in rejecting Darwinian mate choice, Wallace asserted as a matter of principle that “natural selection acts perpetually and on an enormous scale.” The intellectual justification remains largely unchanged. Despite its enduring strangeness to many, the Lande-Kirkpatrick sexual selection mechanism is not merely an alternative hypothesis to adaptive mate choice; it is the appropriate null model for the evolution of sexual display traits and mating preferences. It describes how evolution by mate choice works when nothing special is happening—that is, when mates are choosing what they prefer, period. Because evolution requires genetic variation to occur, the Lande-Kirkpatrick model assumes genetic variation in trait and preference. But it does not assume that mates vary in quality, that any display traits are correlated with that quality, or that mating preferences are under natural selection to prefer those traits. That is why it is the null model. If the Lande-Kirkpatrick mechanism is the appropriate null model for evolution of traits and preferences, then it cannot be proven. Thus, Grafen’s demand for “abundant proof” of the Fisher-Lande process was so rhetorically effective precisely because it demanded the impossible. Checkmate! This was the trap I experienced when I realized that I could never satisfy my reviewers. And this is why, nearly 150 years after The Descent of Man and 25 years after Grafen’s 1990 paper, there are still no generally accepted, textbook examples of arbitrary mate choice. Period. Grafen’s gambit triumphed.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  I’ll describe the stepmother’s role at length in Chapter 20, but for now I just want to note that generally the man is eager to please the new woman. He has sustained one failure already and is likely to yield to his new wife in setting rules for the children’s visits. In many homes, she calls the shots that determine whether visiting is a happy or dreaded occasion. Another factor in visiting patterns is the father’s overall sense of well-being. When a man changes his life and increases his self- confidence, his desire to visit his children can skyrocket. This is what happened with Paula’s father, who reentered her life after a four-year absence. Like so many other men who are physically ill or psychologically depressed during and immediately after divorce, he was uncomfortable about visiting. “I felt I had nothing to offer them,” he said a year after the breakup. But when he felt better, he wanted to initiate contact. Such factors also explain the tremendous instability and fluctuations in how many fathers visit their children in the years after divorce. In short, as the man goes up and down, the visiting goes up and down. When Paula’s father reappeared, both the children and their mother were surprised. Their lives had been based on his absence, and now, like Lazarus, he was back. The children missed him but they had given up expecting him to be an important part of their daily lives ever again. In some families, the father returns after the mother has remarried—and this poses a threat to the emerging role of the stepfather. Whatever the circumstances, the father’s reentry opens a new chapter in family life, which is plagued by an unhappy question in the children’s minds: since he disappeared once, will he disappear again? Paula’s father was now managing a large variety store and living in one of his family’s apartment buildings in Santa Rosa, a city about an hour to the north. Almost immediately the two parents resumed fighting. They could not agree on a visiting schedule, and years of unpaid or poorly paid child support remained a bitter, unresolved issue. Anger arose with new vigor. When Paula’s mom threatened to block their visits Paula’s dad took her to court, whereupon a judge set child support and a visitation schedule. Paula’s dad was to have the children for two weekends each month, from Friday after school until Sunday night at six o’clock. Holidays would be rotated every other year. The children would reside with the father during the full month of July. For the next three years Paula and Joan, despite their many protests, were held to this schedule as if they were factory workers punching a time clock.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  James came to lunch with me, and I had taken special care to stuff some aubergines and make a bitter and original little salad. I felt something of that homely, maternal impulse which would occasionally surface in me at times of strain. One could potter pathetically with one’s chicory and watercress and enjoy an almost creative feeling. James, of course, had been hard at work for hours, and I thought what a great narcotic a job could be; and then one earned one’s own money. ‘How are you getting on?’ he asked. ‘I feel pretty helpless. I thought it was a good thing there had been no sordid row or anything, but one would like some kind of contact. It’s so stupid. I don’t know what’s going on. Why doesn’t the little fucker ring me? I feel furious for a while, and then—well, I love him so much. I want to be with him again. And then at other times I feel like a sort of Pantaloon figure, who’s been hoodwinked. Actually I don’t see how any of us can do anything without a certain loss of dignity.’ ‘You could just go round to the hotel.’ ‘What, and find them frigging away again? I’m not into that.’ ‘I thought you thought it couldn’t possibly still be going on.’ I opened the oven door and shoved my hands into the linked asbestos pockets of the oven-gloves, slapping them together a few times as if I were a lunatic in some restraining garment. A good garlicky smell blossomed. ‘I don’t honestly believe they can be having an affair,’ I said carefully. ‘On the other hand, I do believe that the heart, and more particularly the willy, have some very strange ways. It’s just possible,’ I allowed as I squatted down, ‘that a handsome eighteen-year-old could prefer a waddling fifty-year-old to someone as beautiful and well-endowed as me.’ James embarrassedly ruffled the top of my head, but I shouted ‘Out of the way!’ as I made for the table. The oven-gloves were never as efficient as they should have been. After lunch we popped into James’s Mini and made the two-minute journey over the avenue to Staines’s house. These were the very streets where little Rupert had seen Arthur and Harold at their miserable business: I looked out for them, in a fairly ridiculous and superstitious way. I wanted to save Arthur. At least, I think that’s what I wanted to do to him. It was a strange conviction I had, that I could somehow make these boys’ lives better, as by a kind of patronage—especially as it never worked out that way. Staines was on his very best behaviour, though it didn’t fool me.

• From Sin: The Early History of an Idea (2012)

  Other binary pairs also shaped Paul’s letters: contrasts between gospel and law, between grace and the “works of the law,” between Greek and Jew, between the uncircumcised and the circumcised. Gentile forms of Christianity as they developed in the course of the second century polarized these pairs: gospel, grace, uncircumcised, and Greek were “good”; law, works of the law, circumcision, and Jew were “bad.” A very surprising turn in military events and imperial politics, further exerted a tremendous influence on such polarized readings, validating and reinforcing them. In 70 CE, after a long and bloody Jewish uprising, Rome smashed Judea and utterly destroyed the temple in Jerusalem. Some six decades later, in 132, Judea again erupted in revolt. By 135, Jerusalem itself was erased; and over its ruins Hadrian built a new, pagan city, Aelia Capitolina. Altars to Roman deities now smoked on the blasted plain where once the temple had stood. The gods of Rome had defeated the god of the Jews.8 What effect did all of these factors—cosmological, anthropological, rhetorical, political—have on evolving Christian ideas of sin? [image file=image_rsrc4UW.jpg] Before we can explore the second century of Christianity, we must glance ahead to events in the fourth. In 312 CE, toward the end of a brief, brutal struggle between military strongmen in the Western Roman Empire, a victorious Constantine began Christianity’s conversion to a form of late Roman imperial culture. He threw his prestige, his authority, and a good deal of publicly funded largesse behind one sect of the church, in effect empowering its bishops to suppress their rivals. Thus began a new stage in the empire’s persecution of Christians, this time pursued by Christians themselves. By the end of the fourth century, the bishops’ battle against Christian diversity had resulted in a practical victory for the “orthodox” church (that is, for the church now supported by the state). Their victory affected not only the future but also the past. By banning the texts of “deviant” Christians, burning their books or simply impeding their being copied, the bishops got to remake the Christian past in their own image: the only documents to survive were the ones that they approved. This ancient triage consigned countless gospels, apocryphal acts, sermons, prayers, letters, liturgies, commentaries, and theological treatises to the ash heap of history. The record of the Christian past, in short, was effaced by the church itself. The victors’ muscular retrojection of fourth-century definitions of orthodoxy compromises our view of developments in the second century, a period of particularly rich Christian diversity. To map only a small area of this very varied terrain, I propose to triangulate using the work of three major second-century theologians. Two of these three were so important and influential in their own lifetimes, and established such vital, widespread and long-lived communities then and thereafter, that their writings, vigorously repudiated by other Christian contemporaries, were eventually suppressed by their fourth-century orthodox opponents—in the case of one of these theologians, with complete success.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  My whole wish was to throw things around, make a storm to dispel the stagnant heat, assert myself. Yet I found myself fastidiously tidying up, tight-lipped, not looking at him. He followed me helplessly around, at first retailing jokes from the television, dialogue from Star Trek , but then falling silent. He was confused, wanted to be ready to do what I wanted, but found he could only annoy me further. Then I hurled the stack of newspapers I was collecting across the floor and went for him—pulled the trousers down over his narrow hips without undoing them, somehow tackled him onto the carpet, and after a few seconds’ brutal fumbling fucked him cruelly. He let out little compacted shouts of pain, but I snarled at him to shut up and with fine submission he bit them back. Afterwards I left him groaning on the floor and went into the bathroom. I remember looking at myself, pink, excited, horrified, in the mirror. I took all my clothes off and after a few minutes went back into the sitting-room. I don’t know if it was just his confused readiness to take what I gave him, or if he really understood the absolute tenderness that I now felt for him as I picked him up and dumped him on the sofa; but he held me very tight as I lay down beside him. I was the only person he had; the very melodrama of the case had repelled me before, but for a while I allowed myself to accept it. I had been disgusted by his need for me, but now it moved me, and I burbled into his ear about how I loved him. ‘I love you too—darling,’ he said. It was a word that he could never have used before, and the tears poured down my face and smudged all over his, as we lay there and hugged, rocking from side to side. There were several occasions of this kind, when I was exposed by my own mindless randiness and helpless sentimentality. I made a point of going out to the baths each day, and while I was there, talking to friends, exercising, looking at other men, I could see with more detachment how these scenes weakened my authority. I was eight years older than Arthur, and our affair had started as a crazy fling with all the beauty for me of his youngness and blackness.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  They especially don’t want to play Santa Claus. Handled rigidly and without help for parents and children, this kind of visiting is a lost opportunity for all. In good intact families, children are not ordered to spend major blocks of time with one parent or another on a rigid schedule about which they have no say. Why treat children of divorce with less consideration? The outcome for Joan was more serious. I talked with her shortly after she graduated from college. “Tell me about your dad,” I said. “I haven’t seen much of him since I graduated from high school,” she replied with a shrug. “Did he help with your college tuition?” “Well, not much. He sent me money from time to time. But he never really helped with tuition.” Joan was bitter. “My mom had to mortgage our house.” I was not surprised at her anger but I wondered if other feelings lay buried under the surface, especially feelings of love, disappointment, or regret. “Did you ever make any attempt to get closer to him?” She answered angrily. “I remember forever those dreary weekends and those lonely Julys without my friends when I cried my eyes out. I have no reason in the world to be in contact with him and so why should I bother? ” There was no mistaking Joan’s anger and sense of having been treated unjustly by powerful forces over which she had no control. As we talked, I had a sad sense that both father and daughter had missed a unique opportunity to get to know and cherish each other. Their spontaneous interest in one another had been blocked by a system that could only antagonize an adolescent and discourage a father from having to make the effort to find points of mutual interest with his daughter. By relying on his “rights,” he lost her. What a pity. How foolish we are to think that we can legislate or direct the human heart. When Joan was twenty-eight years old I asked her about her social life. “Oh, I go out a lot,” she said. “And I get hurt a lot. Maybe it has to do with my being dominated all those years by my dad and the court. But it’s hard for me to stand up for what I want. I never learned to fight for myself.” Joan clearly made a connection between the powerlessness she felt as a child and her current relationships with men. If she is right—and I believe she is—then our interventions are not only misguided but may have harmed an entire generation of young people who grew up under similar circumstances. How many are still reacting to their feelings of having been bullied and made to feel powerless?

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  I had all sorts of plans, not necessarily the wiser for their violent neatness. James’s experience, like mine with the skinheads, made me abruptly selfconscious, gave me an urge to solidarity with my kind that I wasn’t used to in our liberal times. In the busy one o’clock changing-room, cross though I was, I looked at the others, the bankers, the teachers, the journos, the advertising johnnies, the managers of hamburger outlets, the actors, the consultants, the dancers from West End musicals, the scaffolders, the rack-renters, queuing for the hair dryer and clouding the air with Trouble for Men, with a kind of foreboding, as an exotic species menaced by brutal predators. It was outrageous that Colin should have joined the brutes. I could see him clearly in memory, his tan and his weird eyes—hungry and yet chilly—and his habit of hanging about, the feeling he gave that something might happen. Afterwards I went to have my hair cut. A while ago I had affected an old-fashioned barber in Neal Street, who would keep me trimmed and tidy for £1.05—a guinea, as he always insisted. In the window were black-and-white photographs of men tipping their heads forward, and inside, where one waited, a colour poster of the Prince and Princess of Wales simpered above the boxes of Durex. The shop was an outpost of neighbourly simplicity amid the chic revamping of Covent Garden, and Mr Bandini, who ran it with his middle-aged bachelor son Lenny, would talk with motiveless fluency about boxing and about life during the war, and the hard time he had had then. Unlike modern studios, where each haircut has the pretensions of a work of art, Mr Bandini’s shop, with its floral linoleum, its clippers and ivory-handled razors, gave me the reassuring feeling that exactly the same thing had been happening in it for half a century. There was something melancholy but entrancing in imagining the hundreds of thousands of identical, routine haircuts that Mr Bandini had given as the decades slipped by. Though, like other Soho Italians, he had been interned in the war, he had been at work on this spot for almost forty years. I could easily imagine Charles, in handsome middle age, popping in for his fortnightly short back and sides and a friction of eau de quinine. Wartime London, which I had always imagined half bombed to bits, the rest of it keeping going on five-shilling dinners and a lot of selflessness and doing without, emerged quite differently in Charles’s journal. It appeared (and I suppose this was the other side of my apprehension about war) as an era of extraordinary opportunity, when all kinds of fantasy became suddenly possible, and when the fellow-feeling of allies and soldiers could be creamed off in sex and romance. September 26, 1943: My birthday … It’s so dull being as old as the century, it makes one’s progress seem so leaden & inevitable, with no scope for romantic doubts about one’s age.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  I tried to make something of this with what now seems a fantastic gallantry and said how neither of us was what he seemed. I needn’t have fucking bothered. He changed completely and became all textbook—not actually taken down and used in evidence et cetera, but calling me sir and not giving an inch (as it were) …’ ‘James,’ I had become angry. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t say anything about this for obvious reasons. I have had that man—Colin he’s called, isn’t he?’ He nodded. ‘I picked him up on the Tube, ages ago, just after we’d seen him at the baths. He followed me off the train, almost invited himself back to my place. I fucked him. He fucked me. He’s as queer as—whatever is very, very queer: me, you. He can’t possibly get away with this pretty policeman thing.’ James looked at me very closely. Under no other circumstances could all this have been good news to him. I carried on being angry all day. My tiredness made it harder to resist and as I went into town later I was muttering audibly about people around me, and when they showed signs of offence, deviating abruptly into sarcastic good manners. I was full of outrage at an act in which the brittle shoppers in Liberty’s (where I went to buy socks) and the incurious drifters of Oxford Street (who got in my way) seemed all to be careless conspirators. At the Corry, I did a few ferocious exercises and then flaked out and dropped into the pool with more than usual relief. But even there the slowness and clumsiness of others enraged me, and I was becoming the victim of one of those premature oldsters who bump into one on purpose, just for the muffled charge of contact. I wondered what I would do or say if I saw Colin. Was the whole matter strictly speaking sub judice? Would it have been any service to James to deal angrily, even ironically, with the officer who had charged him? I had all sorts of plans, not necessarily the wiser for their violent neatness. James’s experience, like mine with the skinheads, made me abruptly selfconscious, gave me an urge to solidarity with my kind that I wasn’t used to in our liberal times. In the busy one o’clock changing-room, cross though I was, I looked at the others, the bankers, the teachers, the journos, the advertising johnnies, the managers of hamburger outlets, the actors, the consultants, the dancers from West End musicals, the scaffolders, the rack-renters, queuing for the hair dryer and clouding the air with Trouble for Men, with a kind of foreboding, as an exotic species menaced by brutal predators.

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  “You see, I didn’t do such a bad job after all with you kids.” I stare at her, dumbfounded. I try to hold myself back from letting loose on her the way I did on her brother in his driveway the morning we took Rosie to the airport. “Cookie,” I tell her—my composure astounds me even though I am burning inside. “You did not raise us . You left us to raise ourselves—do you understand that? We are responsible for the women we have become. Not you. You gave birth to us: that was your single wretched contribution to what we are now. We did the rest, and any help we got along the way was from strangers—some who were paid to take care of us. Not you.” I anticipate what’s coming next: She’ll slap my face, or take me by the hair and slam me to the ground. Instead, she approaches me slowly. Her eyes soften and so does her voice. “Regina,” she says, “the only reason I hurt you is because your father hurt me. The other kids’ dads didn’t hurt me like yours did . . . he was the worst to me. You see?” Face-to-face like this, I can smell the alcohol that’s seeping from her pores; the tobacco smoke in the fabric of her clothes. She steps back—she’s contemplating whether I will accept her explanation. But I know it will never be possible for her to acknowledge what she did, the same as it will never be possible for me to fully forget it: the years of shielding our bodies from her blows, hiding our bruises, scavenging for food, and convincing teachers and authorities that if they gave us a chance, my siblings and I could be successful. In a stunned, calm disgust I glare at her . . . and suddenly I’m recollecting my conversation five years ago with Paul Accerbi. I didn’t believe it was a one-night stand. I was the first to call Cookie out on her life of lies, but the one thing she never waivered from insisting was that she and Paul had a relationship. “How did he hurt you?” She looks at me as if she is trying to determine if I’m asking this in the spirit of empathy or a demand. “What did he do to you that caused you so much anger that you’d take it out on a defenseless child? Huh? Did he beat you like you beat me? Did he use your head to bust holes in walls or doors? Did he, Cookie? Did he tie you up in closets or to radiators or beds? Did he strip you naked in front of others, and beat you with a belt that caused welts around every section of your body? Did he humiliate you or scare you into submission? Did he rape you?

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  I called my dad to help me run the store for a few weeks so I could run back and forth and take Sara her lunch and check out how she was feeling. Let me tell you, I got Sara back so fast she didn’t know what hit her. She was very quiet when I brought her home. A few days later we had a long and very useful talk in which I made it clear that she is first a wife and only second a daughter. She belongs with me just like I belong with her. Whatever care was needed we would provide for each other. She was subdued but didn’t raise a single objection. Actually I think she was pleased that I fought for her. I think she knew that a separation from her family was overdue. Anyway, I won that battle hands down.” I think it would be fair to say that Gary’s battle established the marriage as the top priority for himself and Sara. He understood the importance of what he had done when we discussed the episode. “I was fighting for my marriage,” he said. “These are exactly the values I got from my folks. They taught me that marriage comes first. I realized that if I didn’t do something drastic, our home would end up as a satellite to her parents’ home.” It is, of course, impossible to compare particular incidents in one marriage with what occurs in other marriages. But in looking through the stories of children of divorce, I noted with dismay how passively these young men and women addressed their marital difficulties. During crises in their relationships, the men typically waited on the sidelines for the woman to make a decision. They’d accept her behavior as a given, essentially unmodifiable by anything they said or did. It was as if the trouble they dreaded had come to be and there was nothing they could do to change things. The second crisis in Gary’s marriage reflected conceptions he had unconsciously internalized from his parents’ marriage. The inner template of family relationships that we each carry within is only partly known to us. Much of it emerges only when it is kicked off within a particular interaction. Gary told me the story about the biggest fight he ever had with Sara. Their youngest child was having chronic earaches that kept them both up at night. Their son was having tummyaches in kindergarten. “I was worn out and disillusioned with everything,” he said. “Sara and I were stale on each other. We were stuck in a child-centered rut with no time for us. I wanted to go away for a few days on a ski trip with the guys. That went down like a lead balloon.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  A majority used these substances for more than five years and several were seriously addicted by the time they reached their twenties. As I pointed out in Larry’s story, teenagers in the comparison group were no angels and also used drugs and alcohol as part of their rites of passage. But only a few started this behavior before age fourteen and only a quarter ended up as heavy users by their senior year in high school. 1 Early sex was very common among girls in the divorced families and has been described in several national studies. 2 In our study, one in five had her first sexual experience before the age of fourteen. Over half were sexually active with multiple partners during their high school years. In the comparison group, the great majority of girls postponed sex until the last year of high school or their early years in college. Those who engaged in sexual activity did so as part of an ongoing relationship that lasted an average of a year. Intense sexual activity serves many purposes for girls from divorced families, as it does for those in chaotic intact families. Some combine promiscuity with drugs and drinking as a way to deaden feelings. They go to bars and spend the night with the first guy who catches their fancy. The sex rarely ends in orgasm for the women, but it does bring excitement and comfort in being held and wanted. Others are more aggressive, and I have come to think of them as female Don Juans. They take dominant roles with men, getting pleasure out of seducing, conquering, and then abandoning partner after partner. “Love them and leave them” was the script. These young women are anxious to turn the tables on what they understand to be the natural pecking order between men and women. One said, “From age eighteen on I was a man. I was being like my dad. Men use, they’re powerful and they’re smart. Women are stupid and want men. I get a kick out of being sexy, smart, and using people.” Several told me that they enjoyed seducing their girlfriends’ lovers. These young women were motivated by a frank vengeance against men that was startling in its passion. Such behavior seems hard to understand in attractive, intelligent young women, including some who were in graduate programs and professional schools. But they were driven to use sex as an arena for playing out unfinished business with their parents—especially anger and longing for their fathers and defiance of and competition with their mothers.

• From Sin: The Early History of an Idea (2012)

  Yet Paul also battles a full panoply pagan deities, whose powers stretch from earth and below the earth up to the planets and stars of the firmament (Phil 2.10). The “god of this age,” blinding the minds of unbelievers, tries to frustrate Paul’s mission (2 Cor 4.4); the archontes tou aionos toutou, astral or cosmic “rulers of this age,” have waxed so powerful that they crucified the son of Paul’s god (1 Cor 2.8). The stoicheia, cosmic astral “elements,” once worshiped by Paul’s gentiles in Galatia (Gal 4.8–9), and the daimones who constitute the “gods of the nations” (1 Cor 10.20–21; cf. Ps 95.5, LXX) are divinities whom Paul’s gentiles absolutely must repudiate. These entities may not be “gods by nature” but they still exert a hold on Paul’s gentiles and threaten to “enslave” them once again (Gal 4.8–9). To establish the kingdom, the returning Christ will have to defeat these cosmic forces, who will finally acknowledge his sovereignty and that of the Father by “bending knee” whether they are “in heaven,” “on earth,” or “below the earth” (Phil 2.10–11).16 In the meantime, these deities angrily attempt to derail Paul’s mission, and they threaten his baptized pagans. Why? Precisely because, as a consequence of receiving Paul’s message, these people have abandoned cult to these gods and the pieties traditionally lavished on their images: “Even though there are many so-called gods in heaven or on earth—as in fact there are many gods and many lords—yet for us [that is, for Paul and for his gentiles in Corinth] there is one god, the Father, . . . and one lord, Jesus Christ” (1 Cor 8.5–6; note that Paul does not dispute the existence of these gods, he just urges that they no longer be worshiped). Such a break with their native religions was a nonnegotiable demand of Paul’s mission to these gentiles. If a member of the new community lapsed back into his ancestral religious practices, he was to be shunned: I wrote to you in my letter not to associate with sexually immoral persons—not at all meaning the immoral of this world, or the greedy, the robbers, or the idolaters—you would need to go out of the world to do so! But I write to you now to say do not associate with anyone who bears the name “brother” [that is, anyone who was a baptized member of the ekklēsia] who is sexually immoral or greedy, or who worships idols; a reviler or a drunkard or a robber. Do not even eat with such a one! (1 Cor 5.9–11)

• From Sin: The Early History of an Idea (2012)

  Yet when scholars began to attend more to both Paul’s intense eschatology and his explicit focus on gentiles, perspective shifted, and so did interpretation of his letters. Paul’s fury in Galatians, for example, is directed not toward Jews in general, or toward Judaism in general, but toward competing Christian missionaries who advocate circumcising Paul’s gentiles-in-Christ. He repudiates their position as profoundly wrongheaded, misconstruing as it does (he urges) what God had wrought through Christ for gentiles, in conformity with his ancient promise to Abraham: in Abraham “all the gentiles will be blessed” (Gal 3.8; Gen 12.3). If the gentiles are all made to “become” Jews through conversion/receiving circumcision, they will not “be” gentiles any more, thereby nullifying the promise (Gal 3.17): “For if inheritance comes from the Law, it no longer comes from the promise. But God granted it to Abraham through the promise!” (Gal 3.18). Paul accordingly does not oppose circumcision tout court—that is, for Jews or for Jews-in-Christ; in fact, no such topic is addressed in this or in any other letter. Rather, Paul opposes circumcision for gentiles-in-Christ. In this newer scenario, surprisingly, it is Paul who emerges as a Jewishly traditional figure, his circumcising competitors the radical innovators. Neither in quotidian circumstances nor in eschatological traditions did Jews practice or anticipate “missionizing” gentiles to turn them “into” Jews.27 So also with Paul’s sarcasm and anger in 2 Corinthians 10–11. Other missionaries—Jews in the Jesus movement, like Paul himself—had moved into Corinth and challenged Paul’s authority: “Are they Hebrews? So am I. Are they Israelites? So am I. Are they descendants of Abraham? So am I. Are they servants of Christ? . . . I am a better one” (2 Cor 11.22–23). Paul’s harshest condemnation of “Jews,” in other words, is directed to those Jews who are fellow apostles. Perhaps also his experience with these competing apostles who intrude, in his view, into his own communities is what informs Paul’s own sensitivity about “not building on another’s foundation,” which he explicitly disavows doing (Rm 15.20).