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 City of Night (1963)

  His blubbery lips envelop the stub of the cigar, almost swallowing it. “You dont mean the one in the black T-shirt!” “Yes, I do mean the blond one,” said the skinny one, having gone this far. Then he said to the fatman: “And dont call me ‘Mary’.” Skipper, aware of the skinny man’s interest, brings his hands together, fingers intertwined, and flexes his body slowly. The light from the jukebox weaves colors sinuously on him—and from the distance he looks like a very youngman, a boy.... “Honey,” the fatman was going on, addressing the skinny one, who still holds the cigarette aimed at Skipper as if it were a magic wand thai would bring him over, “I could have had him when he was Young and Pretty!” On the stools next to us, sit two middle-aged men. They have been talking in whispers, but now, as they glance surreptitiously but obviously at the fatman, one word emerges clearly from their sibilant sounds: “Fat” The fatman drops the cigar butt suddenly on the floor, letting it fall from his mouth; brings his ovaled fatfoot heavily on it, squashing it angrily into the debris of cigarettes on the floor. The two middle-aged men, aware he has heard them, turn away nervously, making rushed incoherent conversation as they clutch at their beers as if for protection—as they move against the wall. The fatman’s eyes follow the two doggedly. With renewed venom now, he goes on about Skipper: “I’ll bet hes over 30—hes been around longer than just about any of them.” “Maybe hes not as young as some of the delinquents around here,” said the skinny one, “but I still feel rawthuh Intrigued.”... And then, in an uncontrolled burst, in which the Mask slid off shockingly, he said: “I think hes positively Savage!” He flung his eyes ecstatically toward the smoky Heaven. Quickly, realizing what hes just said, he composes himself, adjusting his pose consistent again with his earlier charade of Maiden. He sips his drink, shifts his skinny hips; says: “This whole place is Positively Indecent; it should be razed!” The fatman roars with laughter. “Why dont you go talk to him?” “But what will I say to him?” the skinny man asks in renewed interest. He brought his hand to his chest in a gesture of uninitiated Helplessness. “Nothing.” The fatman contracted the mountains of flesh into a shrug. “You mean he’ll talk to me?” The fatman says viciously: “No. I mean, Mary, that all you have to do is wave a few bills before him and he’ll drop his pants for you—right here!” Even in the orangy dark, I can see the skinny man blanch; he tightens his lips, sucks them in between his teeth, breathing deeply. His eyes hurl their hatred at the fatman.

• From Educated (2018)

  “I saw you talking to Charles,” he said. “You don’t want people thinking you’re that kind of girl.” “The kind that talks?” “You know what I mean,” he said. The next night, Shawn came into my room unexpectedly and found me smudging my eyelashes with Audrey’s old mascara. “You wear makeup now?” he said. “I guess.” He spun around to leave but paused in the doorframe. “I thought you were better,” he said. “But you’re just like the rest.” He stopped calling me Siddle Lister. “Let’s go, Fish Eyes!” he shouted from across the theater one night. Charles looked around curiously. Shawn began to explain the name, so I started laughing—loud enough, I hoped, to drown him out. I laughed as if I loved the name. The first time I wore lip gloss, Shawn said I was a whore. I was in my bedroom, standing in front of my mirror, trying it out, when Shawn appeared in the doorway. He said it like a joke but I wiped the color from my lips anyway. Later that night, at the theater, when I noticed Charles staring at Sadie, I reapplied it and saw Shawn’s expression twist. The drive home that night was tense. The temperature outside had fallen well below zero. I said I was cold and Shawn moved to turn up the heat. Then he paused, laughed to himself, and rolled all the windows down. The January wind hit me like a bucket of ice. I tried to roll up my window, but he’d put on the child lock. I asked him to roll it up. “I’m cold,” I kept saying, “I’m really, really cold.” He just laughed. He drove all twelve miles like that, cackling as if it were a game, as if we were both in on it, as if my teeth weren’t clattering. I thought things would get better when Shawn dumped Sadie—I suppose I’d convinced myself that it was her fault, the things he did, and that without her he would be different. After Sadie, he took up with an old girlfriend, Erin. She was older, less willing to play his games, and at first it seemed I was right, that he was doing better. Then Charles asked Sadie to dinner, Sadie said yes, and Shawn heard about it. I was working late at Randy’s that night when Shawn turned up, frothing at the mouth. I left with him, thinking I could calm him, but I couldn’t. He drove around town for two hours, searching for Charles’s Jeep, cursing and swearing that when he found that bastard he was “gonna give him a new face.” I sat in the passenger seat of his truck, listening to the engine rev as it guzzled diesel, watching the yellow lines disappear beneath the hood. I thought of my brother as he had been, as I remembered him, as I wanted to remember him. I thought of Albuquerque and Los Angeles, and of the miles of lost interstate in between.

• From City of Night (1963)

  With his look, clearly, he refuses to acknowledge her with the coin dropped symbolically into the hat, poised before him like a parody sacrificial altar to what she represents. He is the only one who will not acknowledge her on her own terms, the only one who is refusing—with that look—to accept her judgment and is therefore judging her. Suddenly! their eyes are tied to each other, begin to grapple ferociously in mutual carnivorous looks: deadlocked far beyond the immediate insistence of the queen now, in view of the glaring, uncompromising, but un-acknowledging look from the man, to get the token offering from him. And the feared staring back by the queen is visibly nailing the man in a strange way: more, I realized startlingly, than the scene with me last night. The world he has joined at last has stripped itself luridly Naked. The queen’s look, the symbolic—now—seduction by the demanded acceptance of her, beyond the mere insistence of a dropped coin, emphasizes it savagely. Their eyes refuse to release each other. And now others on this bench are aware of that mysterious struggle between them. A vein on the man’s neck begins to squirm like a tiny pinioned worm. The queen doesnt move, except for the heavy, now-racked breathing: Shes leaning—still leaning—across that table; and still both pairs of eyes are knotted frozen: the enormous burning dark eyes of the queen (and they are staring at the man with hatred, although her mouth is still spread in that wide-set forced smile); the pale eyes of the man icily refusing to acknowledge her, refusing to acknowledge that stripped, suddenly unmasked, rock-bottom revelation in that knowing, glazed look aimed so surely into him. I see the man trying to control his breathing. The squirming vein on his neck paused in its pulsing, as if the blood refuses to pound any longer. And even the frozen smile on the queen’s face is threatening to disappear. The eyes—those eyes—those two pairs of eyes wrestling relentlessly for stakes which perhaps no one but them can really understand. Those eyes steady and fixed, almost unblinking, brimming with something too enormous to be contained much longer. Neither will break the deadlock. I imagine that a match ignited now will burst in a streak of cold white fire gluing their eyes to each other forever. The queen’s tongue darts as she moistens her lips—darts hideously from the dark pit of her mouth like a lashing snake’s. I see the man blink, his eyes moist with the intensity of the staring in this murky smoke-oppressed box-bar; and the queen’s eyes open wider, slowly wider as if they will somehow be able to swallow the man: wider perhaps in order not to sever the emotional whirling currents forming an invisible vortex sucking the man further and further within himself. For moments that seems like hours, the staring continues—and even the people at the other tables are aware now; their eyes, too, focus on this scene.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  For the first time in weeks, the hawk disappears from my mind as some part of me bunches up into one firm and unspoken sentence: What an asshole. He’s saying because I’m training a female hawk, there’s some bond of sisterhood between us? What the hell? We’re different species, for God’s sake. ‘I don’t think that’s a factor in my hawk’s behaviour,’ I say, and smile. It’s a thin smile. The smile of the placator. It is a smile that is a veneer on murder. I rage my way home, heart bating wildly. Back in the house, hawk on her perch, I collect myself. My anger has gone: now I am fascinated. I pull all the falconry books off the shelves and pile them up on the floor. Then I sit cross-legged next to the hawk. ‘Right, Mabel,’ I say, ‘Goshawks are boys’ birds, are they? Let’s see what the boys have said about you.’ I pick up Humphrey ap Evans’ Falconry for You, and read. ‘She purrs and chirps to her master, rubbing her head against him. But she is proud and wild and beautiful: her anger is terrible to behold. She can be moody and sulky.’ Hmm. Now I open Gilbert Blaine, and there I read of her ‘peculiar and somewhat sulky disposition’. ‘She will set her mind on making herself as disagreeable as she can,’ he explained; ‘will exasperate you to such a degree that you will long to wring her neck.’ Then to Frank Illingworth’s Falcons and Falconry: ‘Never was there a more contrary bird than the gos! Her sole purpose in life seems to be to aggravate her owner.’ ‘Mabel, this is very dubious,’ I say. Then I start on the Victorian falconers. Charles Hawkins Fisher did ‘not like her or her kin’, and Freeman and Salvin considered it ‘a thousand pities that the temper of this bird is so very far from amiable; it is, in fact, sulky’. ‘Sulky. Oh my God, Mabel. You know what you are? You’re a woman. You’re a hormonal woman!’ It made such ghastly sense. It was why these falconers never wondered if their own behaviour had anything to do with why their goshawks took stand in trees, or flew into fits of nerves, or rage, or attacked their dogs, or decided to fly away. It wasn’t their fault. Like women, Goshawks were inexplicable. Sulky. Flighty and hysterical. Their moods were pathological. They were beyond all reason. But reading further back I find that in the seventeenth century goshawks weren’t vile at all. They were ‘sociable and familiar’, though by nature ‘altogether shye and fearfull’ wrote Simon Latham in 1615. They ‘take exception’ at ‘rough and harsh behaviour from the man’, but if treated with kindness and consideration, are ‘as loving and fond of her Keeper as any other Hawke whatsoever’. These hawks, too, were talked about as if they were women. They were things to win, to court, to love. But they were not hysterical monsters.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  Indeed, one or two people will die in London this very night, of pure starvation ... ‘And all this, after two hundred years in which - as all the economists will tell you - Great Britain’s wealth has increased twenty times over! All this in the richest city on earth!’ There were some shouts at that, but I waited for them to die before taking up the speech where he had left it; and when I did speak at last, I did it quietly, so that people had to lean, and frown, to hear me. ‘Why is this so?’ I said. ‘Is it because working people are spendthrifts? Because we would rather use our money to buy gin and porter, and trips to the music hall, and tobacco, and on betting, than on meat for our children and bread for ourselves? You will see all these things written, and hear them said, by rich men. Does that make them true? Truth is a queer thing, when it comes to rich men talking about the poor. Only think: if we broke into a rich man’s house, he would call us thieves, and send us to prison. If we set a foot on his estate, we would be trespassers - he would set his dogs upon us! If we took some of his gold, we would be pickpockets; if we made him pay us money to get the gold back, we would be swindlers and con-men! ‘But what is the rich man’s wealth but robbery, called by another title? The rich man steals from his competitors; he steals the land, and puts a wall about it; he steals our health, our liberty; he steals the fruits of our labour, and obliges us to buy them back from him! Does he call these things robbery, and slave-holding, and swindling? No: they are termed enterprise; and business skill; and capitalism. They are termed nature. ‘But is it natural, that babies should die for want of milk? Is it natural, that women should sew skirts and coats long into the night, in cramped and suffocating workshops? That men and boys should be killed or crippled to provide the coal upon your fires? That bakers should be choked, baking your bread?’ My voice had risen as I spoke; and now I bellowed. ‘Do you think that’s natural? Do you think that’s just?’ ‘No!’ came a hundred voices at once. ‘No! No!’ ‘Neither do socialists!’ cried Ralph: he had crushed his speech between his fingers, and now shook it at the crowd. ‘We are sick of seeing wealth and property going straight into the pockets of the idle and the rich! We don’t want a portion of that wealth - the bit that the rich man cares, from time to time, to chuck at us. We want to see society quite transformed! We want to see money put to use, not kept for profit!

• From Educated (2018)

  clothes with no holes or stains so that, scrubbed and polished, I could sit in Grandma’s kitchen and watch her make pumpkin cookies. The autumn sun poured in through gossamer curtains and onto marigold tiles, giving the whole room an amber glow. After Grandma slid the first batch into the oven, I went to the bathroom. I passed through the hallway, with its soft white carpet, and felt a stab of anger when I remembered that the last time I’d seen it, I’d been with Tyler. The bathroom felt foreign. I took in the pearly sink, the rosy tint of the carpet, the peach-colored rug. Even the toilet peeked out from under a primrose covering. I took in my own reflection, framed by creamy tiles. I looked nothing like myself, and I wondered for a moment if this was what Tyler wanted, a pretty house with a pretty bathroom and a pretty sister to visit him. Maybe this was what he’d left for. I hated him for that. Near the tap there were a dozen pink and white soaps, shaped like swans and roses, resting in an ivory-tinted shell. I picked up a swan, feeling its soft shape give under pressure from my fingers. It was beautiful and I wanted to take it. I pictured it in our basement bathroom, its delicate wings set against the coarse cement. I imagined it lying in a muddy puddle on the sink, surrounded by strips of curling yellowed wallpaper. I returned it to its shell. Coming out, I walked into Grandma, who’d been waiting for me in the hall. “Did you wash your hands?” she asked, her tone sweet and buttery. “No,” I said. My reply soured the cream in her voice. “Why not?” “They weren’t dirty.” “You should always wash your hands after you use the toilet.” “It can’t be that important,” I said. “We don’t even have soap in the bathroom at home.” “That’s not true,” she said. “I raised your mother better than that.” I squared my stance, ready to argue, to tell Grandma again that we didn’t use soap, but when I looked up, the woman I saw was not the woman I expected to see. She didn’t seem frivolous, didn’t seem like the type who’d waste an entire day fretting over her white carpet. In that

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  Rage crouched inside me, and anything could provoke it. One weekday morning I laboured into town under a sky the colour of wet cement to meet an Uzbek student I’d worked with on a research trip to Central Asia the previous winter. A quiet, neat man, a nice man. I’d camped with him in frozen deserts, eaten lamb-stuffed quinces at roadside shacks on the Silk Road, stood with him on the banks of the Syr Darya river. He had lately arrived in Cambridge and he wanted to see me. I sat down with him at a café table. I liked him. I knew I should talk to him, but couldn’t remember how. I tried a few words. They sounded wrong. I stuck a watery smile on my face and turned my head towards the window, desperately trying to remember how to have a conversation. And there, behind the plate glass of the bank across the street, a woman in a grey uniform was standing on a chair in her stockinged feet, reaching up to peel a huge vinyl sticker of a singing skylark from the glass. It had been advertising some kind of financial offer. Now the offer was finished, and so was the lark. She picked at its open beak with her fingernails, then started pulling its head from the window. Inch by inch the bird disappeared; first it hung there, decapitated, printed wings spread wide, then each wing was stripped from the glass, hacked at with fingers and a plastic scraper, until the last feather of its tail was gone. She screwed the skylark into a ball, and threw it to the floor. Blind, cold, shaking fury. I felt it rise. I hated that woman. I wanted to burst into the bank, scream at her, pick up the tangled ball that was a skylark and take it home. Smooth it out, save it from harm. Across the table my student friend was looking at me with the same expression of baffled concern that the waiter had worn on the night my father died. That also made me angry. I was angry with the woman for tearing down the skylark and angry with this nice, innocent man who gave me no cause to be angry at all. I mumbled an unsatisfactory apology, told him that ‘things have been hard since my father died’, and ‘it isn’t your fault’ and ‘I’m sorry, and this is awful, but I really have to go’. I walked past the window as I crossed the street. The woman was back on her chair, smoothing a new sticker out against the glass: a giant arrow that pointed at nothing. I could not meet her eye.

• From Educated (2018)

  tinctures. Dad had always believed passionately in Mother’s herbs, but that night felt different, like something inside him was shifting, a new creed taking hold. Herbalism, he said, was a spiritual doctrine that separated the wheat from the tares, the faithful from the faithless. Then he used a word I’d never heard before: Illuminati. It sounded exotic, powerful, whatever it was. Grandma, he said, was an unknowing agent of the Illuminati. God couldn’t abide faithlessness, Dad said. That’s why the most hateful sinners were those who wouldn’t make up their minds, who used herbs and medication both, who came to Mother on Wednesday and saw their doctor on Friday—or, as Dad put it, “Who worship at the altar of God one day and offer a sacrifice to Satan the next.” These people were like the ancient Israelites because they’d been given a true religion but hankered after false idols. “Doctors and pills,” Dad said, nearly shouting. “That’s their god, and they whore after it.” Mother was staring at her food. At the word “whore” she stood, threw Dad an angry look, then walked into her room and slammed the door. Mother didn’t always agree with Dad. When Dad wasn’t around, I’d heard her say things that he—or at least this new incarnation of him—would have called sacrilege, things like, “Herbs are supplements. For something serious, you should go to a doctor.” Dad took no notice of Mother’s empty chair. “Those doctors aren’t trying to save you,” he told Grandma. “They’re trying to kill you.” When I think of that dinner, the scene comes back to me clearly. I’m sitting at the table. Dad is talking, his voice urgent. Grandma sits across from me, chewing her asparagus again and again in her crooked jaw, the way a goat might, sipping from her ice water, giving no indication that she’s heard a word Dad has said, except for the occasional vexed glare she throws the clock when it tells her it’s still too early for bed. “You’re a knowing participant in the plans of Satan,” Dad says. This scene played every day, sometimes several times a day, for the rest of the trip. All followed a similar script. Dad, his fervor kindled, would drone for an hour or more, reciting the same lines over and over, fueled by some internal passion that burned long after the rest of us had been lectured into a cold stupor.

• From Educated (2018)

  Dad’s mouth flew open and a gust of air rushed out. “You don’t think the Illuminati have infiltrated the church?” His voice was booming; every word reverberated with a powerful energy. “You don’t think the first place they’d go is that school, where they can raise up a whole generation of socialist Mormons? I raised you better than that!” I will always remember my father in this moment, the potency of him, and the desperation. He leans forward, jaw set, eyes narrow, searching his son’s face for some sign of agreement, some crease of shared conviction. He doesn’t find it. — THE STORY OF HOW TYLER decided to leave the mountain is a strange one, full of gaps and twists. It begins with Tyler himself, with the bizarre fact of him. It happens sometimes in families: one child who doesn’t fit, whose rhythm is off, whose meter is set to the wrong tune. In our family, that was Tyler. He was waltzing while the rest of us hopped a jig; he was deaf to the raucous music of our lives, and we were deaf to the serene polyphony of his. Tyler liked books, he liked quiet. He liked organizing and arranging and labeling. Once, Mother found a whole shelf of matchboxes in his closet, stacked by year. Tyler said they contained his pencil shavings from the past five years, which he had collected to make fire starters for our “head for the hills” bags. The rest of the house was pure confusion: piles of unwashed laundry, oily and black from the junkyard, littered the bedroom floors; in the kitchen, murky jars of tincture lined every table and cabinet, and these were only cleared away to make space for even messier projects, perhaps to skin a deer carcass or strip Cosmoline off a rifle. But in the heart of this chaos, Tyler had half a decade’s pencil shavings, cataloged by year. My brothers were like a pack of wolves. They tested each other constantly, with scuffles breaking out every time some young pup hit a growth spurt and dreamed of moving up. When I was young these tussles usually ended with Mother screaming over a broken lamp or vase, but as I got older there were fewer things left to break. Mother said we’d owned a TV once, when I was a baby, until Shawn had put Tyler’s head through it.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  He loved them because they were misunderstood, maligned, and ‘inevitably themselves’: they were versions of the self he aspired to be, just like the characters he called to life in his books: Merlyn the perfect teacher; the Wart, the orphan who was born to be king, and Sir Lancelot the ill-made knight, whose character White made his own. Lancelot was a sadist who refrained from hurting people through his sense of honour – his Word. His Word was his promise to be gentle, and it was one of the things that made him the Best Knight in the World. ‘ All through his life,’ White wrote of Lancelot, ‘even when he was a great man with the world at his feet – he was to feel this gap: something at the bottom of his heart of which he was aware, and ashamed, but which he did not understand.’ White always took great pains to be gentle precisely because he wanted to be cruel. It was why he never beat his pupils at Stowe. And though abjuring cruelty was White’s Word, animals played a curious role in keeping it. Riding out with the Old Surrey and Burstow Hunt, White recorded the first time he saw a kill with distanced fascination. The fox was dug out of a drain where it had taken refuge and thrown to the hounds. They tore it to pieces while a circle of human onlookers ‘screeched them on’. The humans, White thought, were disgusting, their cries ‘ tense , self-conscious, and hysterically animal’. But the hounds were not. ‘The savagery of the hounds,’ he wrote, ‘was deep-rooted and terrible, but rang true, so that it was not horrible like that of the human.’ In this bloody scene, only one man escaped White’s revulsion: the huntsman, a red-faced, grave and gentlemanly figure who stood by the hounds and blew the mort on his hunting horn, the formal act of parting to commemorate the death of the fox. By some strange alchemy – his closeness to the pack, his expert command of them – the huntsman was not horrible. For White it was a moral magic trick, a way out of his conundrum. By skilfully training a hunting animal, by closely associating with it, by identifying with it, you might be allowed to experience all your vital, sincere desires, even your most bloodthirsty ones, in total innocence. You could be true to yourself. When White dreamed of the hawk his false self was cracking under strain. He felt himself ‘ boiling with a strange unrest’; was increasingly out to shock and appal. Colleagues remember him turning up to parties, drunkenly announcing, ‘ This party has no racial future. Parties should be like bird sanctuaries, people should come to them to mate.’ He’d decided he hated people. He preferred animals. He was still drinking too much. He’d already turned on his former loves of foxhunting and flying.

• From City of Night (1963)

  People dart into doors, cross the street “Bring him with you,” an older man says peremptorily to me and another youngman who has witnessed the fight, and who, minutes earlier, had been with me and the blond boy at Les Petits bar. We hold the blond boy, the blood from his temple creating a growing dark-crimson flower on his white shirt. As quickly as we can move him—past the startled eyes of tourists as they dodge to one side to avoid Contamination—we turn into Royal, where the man who has asked us to follow him has already called a cab. Along the trellised balconied houses, the taxi flees from the afternoon, into the protective custody of the approaching night The youngman holding the blond one, who threatens to pass out at any moment (the older man sits in front, staring straight ahead; the driver is predictably unconcerned), is saying Toughly to me: “That dirty motherin bastard, we gonna come back and git him!”—asking me would we or wouldnt we kill the son of a bitch who had hit our buddy with a stick—although our buddy—the blond boy, whom both of us had met minutes earlier at Les Petits bar (all three of us with the same score), had done nothing but come on to the black-haired-youngman’s girlfriend; and she, sensing the possible conflict (easily brought into play in any hustling bar by the necessity of the hustler to assert his masculinity with a girl—any girl, any woman) and instigating the scene connivingly (by winking at us as the darkhaired youngman embraced her), had told her boyfriend that the blondhaired boy had leaned toward her as if to kiss her. On the street the fight had occurred. Somewhere beyond the Quarter, the taxi stopped before what looks like a boarded-up store, with black-painted windows. The man pays, we enter the building through an unlocked side door. Inside, the large room is dark, like a cell. Pushed against the walls are tables, chairs upturned on them. A couple of booths. Dark, smeared, ugly patches on the wall behind a bar without stools indicate that several panels of mirrors have been removed. Only one grayish-amber panel, smashed in the middle creating a glassy spider web, remained. A light is on in a room beyond the door. From the shadows, other faces begin to appear, slowly, dimly, peering impressionistically out of the darkness. They seemed to be crawling like giant insects from somewhere out of the woodwork. Now I can distinguish the faces clearly: three malehustlers I had seen at The Rocking Times, a bewildered girl, and a young painted queen.

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

  He insisted chiefly on the first point; so that Jerome devotes the whole first book of his refutation to this point, while he disposes of all the other heads in the second. In favor of the moral equality of married and single life, he appealed to Gen. ii. 24, where God himself institutes marriage before the fall; to Matt. xix. 5, where Christ sanctions it; to the patriarchs before and after the flood; to Moses and the prophets, Zacharias and Elizabeth, and the apostles, particularly Peter, who lived in wedlock; also to Paul, who himself exhorted to marriage,394 required the bishop or the deacon to be the husband of one wife,395 and advised young widows to marry and bear children.396 He declared the prohibition of marriage and of divinely provided food a Manichaean error. To answer these arguments, Jerome indulges in utterly unwarranted inferences, and speaks of marriage in a tone of contempt, which gave offence even to his friends.397 Augustine was moved by it to present the advantages of the married life in a special work, De bono conjugali, though without yielding the ascetic estimate of celibacy.398 Jovinian’s second point has an apparent affinity with the Augustinian and Calvinistic doctrine of the perseverantia sanctorum. It is not referred by him, however, to the eternal and unchangeable counsel of God, but simply based on 1 Jno. iii. 9, and v. 18, and is connected with his abstract conception of the opposite moral states. He limits the impossibility of relapse to the truly regenerate, who "plena fide in baptismate renati sunt," and makes a distinction between the mere baptism of water and the baptism of the Spirit, which involves also a distinction between the actual and the ideal church. His third point is aimed against the ascetic exaltation of fasting, with reference to Rom. xiv. 20, and 1 Tim. iv. 3. God, he holds, has created all animals for the service of man; Christ attended the marriage feast at Cana as a guest, sat at table with Zaccheus, with publicans and sinners, and was called by the Pharisees a glutton and a wine-bibber; and the apostle says: To the pure all things are pure, and nothing to be refused, if it be received with thanksgiving.

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

  (2) Under the sons of Constantine, between the years 343 and 350, Julius Firmicus Maternus, an author otherwise unknown to us,121 wrote against heathenism with large knowledge of antiquity, but with fanatical zeal, regarding it, now on the principle of Euhemerus, as a deification of mortal men and natural elements, now as a distortion of the biblical history.122 At the close, quite mistaking the gentle spirit of the New Testament, he urges the sons of Constantine to exterminate heathenism by force, as God commanded the children of Israel to proceed against the Canaanites; and openly counsels them boldly to pillage the temples and to enrich themselves and the church with the stolen goods. This sort of apology fully corresponds with the despotic conduct of Constantius, which induced the reaction of heathenism under Julian. (3) The attack of Julian upon Christianity brought out no reply on the spot,123 but subsequently several refutations, the chief one by Cyril of Alexandria († 444), in ten books "against the impious Julian," still extant and belonging among his most valuable works. About the same time Theodoret wrote an apologetic and polemic work: "The Healing of the Heathen Affections," in twelve treatises, in which he endeavors to refute the errors of the false religion by comparison of the prophecies and miracles of the Bible with the heathen oracles, of the apostles with the heroes and lawgivers of antiquity, of the Christian morality with the immorality of the heathen world. § 12. Augustine’s City of God. Salvianus. (4) Among the Latin apologists we must mention Augustine, Orosius, and Salvianus, of the fifth century. They struck a different path from the Greeks, and devoted themselves chiefly to the objection of the heathens, that the overthrow of idolatry and the ascendency of Christianity were chargeable with the misfortunes and the decline of the Roman empire. This objection had already been touched by Tertullian, but now, since the repeated incursions of the barbarians, and especially the capture and sacking of the city of Rome under the Gothic king Alaric in 410, it recurred with peculiar force. By way of historical refutation the Spanish presbyter Orosius, at the suggestion of Augustine, wrote an outline of universal history in the year 417.

• From Educated (2018)

  In October Dad won a contract to build industrial granaries in Malad City, the dusty farm town on the other side of Buck’s Peak. It was a big job for a small outfit—the crew was just Dad, Shawn, Luke, and Audrey’s husband, Benjamin—but Shawn was a good foreman, and with him in charge Dad had acquired a reputation for fast, reliable work. Shawn wouldn’t let Dad take shortcuts. Half the time I passed the shop, I’d hear the two of them shouting at each other, Dad saying Shawn was wasting time, Shawn screaming that Dad had damned near taken someone’s head off. Shawn worked long days cleaning, cutting and welding the raw materials for the granaries, and once construction began he was usually on-site in Malad. When he and Dad came home, hours after sunset, they were nearly always cussing. Shawn wanted to professionalize the operation, to invest the profits from the Malad job in new equipment; Dad wanted things to stay the same. Shawn said Dad didn’t understand that construction was more competitive than scrapping, and that if they wanted to land real contracts, they needed to spend real money on real equipment—specifically, a new welder and a man lift with a basket. “We can’t keep using a forklift and an old cheese pallet,” Shawn said.

• From Educated (2018)

  as if my father had come to accept that if he were really going to do battle with the Government, he would have to take certain risks. Mother’s being a midwife would subvert the Medical Establishment, but in order to be a midwife she needed a phone. Perhaps the same logic was extended to Luke: Luke would need income to support a family, to buy supplies and prepare for the End of Days, so he needed a birth certificate. The other possibility is that Mother didn’t ask Dad. Perhaps she just decided, on her own, and he accepted her decision. Perhaps even he—charismatic gale of a man that he was—was temporarily swept aside by the force of her. Once she had begun the paperwork for Luke, Mother decided she might as well get birth certificates for all of us. It was harder than she expected. She tore the house apart looking for documents to prove we were her children. She found nothing. In my case, no one was sure when I’d been born. Mother remembered one date, Dad another, and Grandma-down-the-hill, who went to town and swore an affidavit that I was her granddaughter, gave a third date. Mother called the church headquarters in Salt Lake City. A clerk there found a certificate from my christening, when I was a baby, and another from my baptism, which, as with all Mormon children, had occurred when I was eight. Mother requested copies. They arrived in the mail a few days later. “For Pete’s sake!” Mother said when she opened the envelope. Each document gave a different birth date, and neither matched the one Grandma had put on the affidavit. That week Mother was on the phone for hours every day. With the receiver wedged against her shoulder, the cord stretched across the kitchen, she cooked, cleaned, and strained tinctures of goldenseal and blessed thistle, while having the same conversation over and over. “Obviously I should have registered her when she was born, but I didn’t. So here we are.” Voices murmured on the other end of the line. “I’ve already told you—and your subordinate, and your subordinate’s subordinate, and fifty other people this week—she doesn’t have school or medical records. She doesn’t have them! They weren’t lost. I can’t ask for copies. They don’t exist!” “Her birthday? Let’s say the twenty-seventh.” “No, I’m not sure.”

• From Educated (2018)

  I was failing my PhD. If I had explained to my supervisor, Dr. Runciman, why I was unable to work, he would have helped me, would have secured additional funding, petitioned the department for more time. But I didn’t explain, I couldn’t. He had no idea why it had been nearly a year since I’d sent him work, so when we met in his office one overcast July afternoon, he suggested that I quit. “The PhD is exceptionally demanding,” he said. “It’s okay if you can’t do it.” I left his office full of fury at myself. I went to the library and gathered half a dozen books, which I lugged to my room and arranged on my desk. But my mind was made nauseous by rational thought, and by the next morning the books had moved to my bed, where they propped up my laptop while I worked steadily through Buffy the Vampire Slayer. — THAT AUTUMN, TYLER CONFRONTED my father. He talked to Mother first, on the phone. He called me after and related their conversation. He said

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

  "But I return to you, Sire. Let not your Majesty be at all moved by those groundless accusations with which our adversaries endeavor to terrify you; as that the sole tendency and design of this new gospel, for so they call it, is to furnish a pretext for seditions, and to gain impunity for all crimes. ’For God is not the author of confusion, but of peace;’ nor is ’the Son of God,’ who came to destroy ’the works of the devil, the minister of sin.’ And it is unjust to charge us with such motives and designs of which we have never given cause for the least suspicion. Is it probable that we are meditating the subversion of kingdoms? We, who were never heard to utter a factious word, whose lives were ever known to be peaceable and honest while we lived under your government, and who, even now in our exile, cease not to pray for all prosperity to attend yourself and your kingdom! Is it probable that we are seeking an unlimited license to commit crimes with impunity, in whose conduct, though many things may be blamed, yet there is nothing worthy of such severe reproach? Nor have we, by divine grace, profited so little in the gospel, but that our life may be to our detractors an example of chastity, liberality, mercy, temperance, patience, modesty, and every other virtue. It is an undeniable fact, that we sincerely fear and worship God, whose name we desire to be sanctified both by our life and by our death; and envy itself is constrained to bear testimony to the innocence and civil integrity of some of us, who have suffered the punishment of death, for that very thing which ought to be accounted their highest praise. But if the gospel be made a pretext for tumults, which has not yet happened in your kingdom; if any persons make the liberty of divine grace an excuse for the licentiousness of their vices, of whom I have known many; there are laws and legal penalties, by which they may be punished according to their deserts: only let not the gospel of God be reproached for the crimes of wicked men. You have now, Sire, the virulent iniquity of our calumniators laid before you in a sufficient number of instances, that you may not receive their accusations with too credulous an ear.

• From A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (BDB) (1907)

  the pl. corresp. to SS ,as DN to אני‎ ; v. Wee; Ph. אנחן‎ oI 2 Aram. NON, XY also NI 2 Syr. eins”, gin Nae ink) Gn 13° 29% 37° 42 Nar ל‎ DE sa Jo 277% etc. Like "38, following a ptcp. as its subj. Gn 10% Nu 10” Ju 105 2 K 18”; appended to a vb. for emph. Juo™ 2 K 10% Is 20% pron. 1 pl. we (abbrev. from‏ נחֶנוּ m3,‏ בד TIS ; cf. the frie 3 71/01: NII, just cited ; also ae nini) Gn42" Ex 167* Nu 32 La 3”. (In 28 17” 39M) is ז‎ pl. perf. Qal from 7.) 7 yeN n.{m.] plummet (cf. words in cogn. lang. for lead, tin, etym. dub., perh. foreign; Ar. ו"‎ (v. Fra™) Syr. 13/7, Mand. ,אנכא‎ As. andkeu Lyon קר אל‎ Lag Am Stnd-$1 of, Td. BN) - אכ‎ exc.once on "7 נש‎ Am 77%. א/‎ NDI, i.e..a vertical wall v’. pron.1 sg. v. supr. sub "28.‏ אנכי [JAS] vb. only Hithpo. complain, mur-‏ + mi ir (Mish. ps, Aram. j28, Ar. =I As. [andnu], whence énénu, unninu, sigh Zim” *)—Impf. WIND? La 3% (sq. עַל-‎ in || member); Pe. D232802 "3 Nu 111 (sq. ace.; vid. Di). DIN f[(DIN] vb. compel, constrain (late, oft. Aish. id., Aram. DIS, 1/"(--081 Pr. DIS PS viz., to drink Est 1° (| BAN) (ְכָּרְצון אִיש‎ . TEAS, ואנף‎ vb. (breathe, snort) be angry (Al id., cf. Ar. ail, As. ete. in a) Pf. BIS y 60%, etc.; Lmpf. Ny 2%, etc.;—be angry, of 7"; usually sq. 2‏ יא ץ t ‘ 8%= 2 Ch 6* Is 12% ¥ 85° Ezr 9; abs.‏ cf. also ~ 2. Hithp. id. alw. sq. 3,‏ ;79° 60° עד 4% 1% Dt‏ הַתְאנַּף alw. of %, Pf.‏ & 2K 17.‏ "זז א aS Dt or‏ 1. FN,.n.m."2 nostril, nose, face, an- ger (As. appu, face 1711000 7-77 cf. Hpt KAT? Glos, Ar. = .גנוד‎ 116: nose; Aram.J3/”, PES ₪ ץש‎ 78" +5) estr. Gn 27* -; אפיה‎ Ex 2 9 666. ; du. ז ץק אפים‎ 7 +; YES Gn

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  Our reading of the Hebrew Bible has been influenced by two and a half thousand years of monotheistic teaching. But Josiah, of course, had never heard of the First Commandment—“Thou shalt not have strange gods before my presence”—which the reformers would place at the top of the Decalogue. It pointedly condemned Manasseh’s introduction of the effigies of “strange gods” into the temple where Yahweh’s “presence” ( shechinah ) was enthroned in the Holy of Holies. But pagan icons had been perfectly acceptable there since Solomon’s time. Despite the campaigns of such prophets as Elijah, who had urged the people to worship Yahweh alone, most of the population of the two kingdoms had never doubted the efficacy of such gods as Baal, Anat, or Asherah. The prophet Hosea’s oracles showed how popular the cult of Baal had been in the northern kingdom during the eighth century, and the reformers themselves knew that Israelites “offered sacrifice to Baal, to the sun, the moon, the constellations and the whole array of heaven.” 105 There would be great resistance to monotheism. Thirty years after Josiah’s death, Israelites were still devotees of the Mesopotamian goddess Ishtar, and Yahweh’s temple was once again full of “the idols of the house of Israel.” 106 For many it seemed unnatural and perverse to ignore such a divine resource. The reformers knew that they were asking Judeans to relinquish beloved and familiar sanctities and embark on a lonely, painful severance from the mythical and cultural consciousness of the Middle East. Josiah was completely convinced by the sefer torah and at once inaugurated a violent orgy of destruction, eradicating the cultic paraphernalia introduced by Manasseh, burning the effigies of Baal and Asherah, abolishing the rural shrines, pulling down the house of sacred male prostitutes and the Assyrian horses. In the old territories of the Kingdom of Israel, he was even more ruthless, not only demolishing the ancient temples of Yahweh in Bethel and Samaria but slaughtering the priests of the rural shrines and contaminating their altars. 107 This fanatical aggression was a new and tragic development, which excoriated sacred symbols that had been central to both the temple cult and the piety of individual Israelites. 108 A tradition often develops a violent strain in a symbiotic relationship with an aggressive imperialism; fearing annihilation by an external foe, people attack an “enemy within.” The reformers now regarded the Canaanite cults that Israelites had long enjoyed as “detestable” and “loathsome”; they insisted that any Israelite who participated in them must be hunted down mercilessly. 109 “You must not give way to him, nor listen to him, you must show him no pity,” Moses had commanded; “You must not spare him, and you must not conceal his guilt.

• From A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (BDB) (1907)

  mW) +1 5' (Ex 21* v. 1. (רע‎ ; Impf. 3 ms. ירע‎ (Ges'*?) Gn2r?+; 3 fs. YIN Dt 28°; 3 mpl. ירעו‎ Ne 2%;---1. be displeasing: **¥2 בע‎ Nur1” 22" (J), Jos 24° (E), 16 *ס4‎ Pr 24'8 )6. } consec.) impf. °2Y3 ירע‎ Gn 211? (EK), 48% (J), ד‎ ₪ 8° 18° 28 117; later, bs וירע‎ Jon 4! or . וירע‎ Ne 2% (intensified by נָּדולָה‎ AY), Th .ב וירע לי‎ 2. be sad: ירע לבב‎ Dt 15° 181°; "J WT Ne 2*. 3. be injurious, evil: וירע ל‎ 106” it went ill with Moses, pers. subj. 2 8 20°; עין‎ MY be grudging, c. ב‎ pers., Dtr5? 28%. | &. be evil, wicked, ethically : ם1) וירע בְּעִינִי י'‎ 38")1(2 0 117 Is 89% DYN PVR 1Chai?. + Niph. suffer hurt: Impf. 3 ms, (רע) ירוע‎ Prir® 13”. Hiph.,, Pf. 3 ms. YJ Ex5*+; 2 ms. הרעות‎ 1K 17”, etc.; Impf. 3 ms. YY Zp 1, א רע‎ 16%; 2ms. YIN 443+, etc.; Inf. abs. YI 1S 12% 1 Char”; estr. YIN Gn 3174 8 t., YI 18 1*+ 46; Pt. YD 189" Prx7*; pl. מְרְעִים‎ ₪ 1*+;--1- do אש‎ injury, hurt: abs. Gn 44° (J), 1811*=65%, Je31* Pr 4* 24°; היטיב.קקס‎ 141% Je 10° Zp 1” (all in proy. phr.= do anything at all, cf. 922); הרע ל‎ Gn 19° 43° Ex 5°35 Nu rr" (J) 20” Jos 24" )15( + 5 t.; 0.800. pers. Nu 16" (J)4+4 6; ¢. 3, 1 Ch 16"=y 105" 6. >) Je 25° 74°; c. WY Gn 31’ (E); 6. על‎ 7 Kir” bring evil wpon ; swear Y1'}),= to one’s hurt, ץש‎ 15* Lv 5% (P); Pt.=subst. yap? baad Durr (shall be) for mischief. 2. do evil, wickedly : abs. Gn19/(J) 1S 12°” +4 6 t.; opp. היטיב‎ Je4™ 137 2 6. ,קוטס כ‎ 1 15 14 16% 2 Kar Jems גז2 הרעה מַַללִיהֶם ו‎ 35 cf. כ ד‎ 2535 Pr. YI evil doer, Is 9% Pr 17‘; pl. Je 20% 23" 25+ ל‎ 5; VY עדת מ' ;317 בית מ" ;14% *ז‎ מ' ]227 ץ‎ DOP 267s ור‎ 7 Lt [Ly ₪0 vb. break (Aram. loan-word =Heb. 7/3) q. v.) ;—Qal Pf. 3 pl. 1 Je 11 Impf. 3 ms. ירע‎ Je 15” Jb 34%, 2 ms. sf. OYA y 2° (but v. infr.); Inf. abs. nya) Is 24% (del. ה‎ as dittogr. and read yo, v. Hithpo‘.); Pt. f. MY (for AY) Pr 25'°:—1. trans. bra yu ברל וגו"‎ Je15” can one break iron, tron out of the north ? cf. OAD YN Jb 34%; Dawa תְּרעֶם‎ bya y 29 (but rd. OVA, v. 1. myn, GSY Hup- Now al.). 2. intrans. break = be broken, of branches Je 11" (in fig.; Gf Or al.; > Hi Gie are in a sad state, VI. (רעע‎ ; nya שן‎ Pr 20 broken tooth רַעַעֶה= ר')‎ 1; Frankenb Niph. 7. mY, cf. Toy, but Niph. not elsewhere; 8 AVI bad).—1v4 Is 8° read YI (G Lo Che al.,