Anxiety

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  They could particularly empathize with Paul’s acute sense of sin. A period of wrenching social change is often characterized by anxiety. People feel lost and impotent; living in medias res, they cannot see the direction their society is taking but experience its subterranean transformation in incoherent, sporadic ways. Alongside the enthralling achievements of the early sixteenth century, there was widespread distress. The Protestant reformers Huldrych Zwingli (1484–1531) and John Calvin (1509–64) both felt a sense of acute failure and powerlessness before they found a new religious solution. The Catholic reformer Ignatius Loyola (1491–1556), founder of the Society of Jesus, wept so copiously during Mass that doctors warned him that he could easily lose his sight. And the Italian poet Francesco Petrarch (1304–74) was equally lacrymose: ‘With what floods of tears I have sought to wash away my stains so that I can scarce speak of it without weeping, yet hitherto all is vain. God indeed is the best: and I am the worst.’ 2 Few experienced the angst of the age more painfully than a young monk in the Augustinian monastery of Erfurt in Germany: Although I lived a blameless life as a monk, I felt I was a sinner with an uneasy conscience before God. I also could not believe that I had pleased him with my works. Far from loving that righteous God who punished sinners, I actually loathed him . . . My conscience would not give me certainty, but I always doubted and said, ‘You did not do that right. You weren’t contrite enough. You left that out of your confession.’ 3 Martin Luther (1483–1546) had been educated in the scholastic philosophy of William of Ockham (c.1287–1347), who had urged Christians to try to merit God’s grace by their good works. 4 But Luther fell prey to agonizing depression and none of the traditional pieties could assuage his extreme terror of death. 5 To escape his fears, he plunged into a frenzy of reforming activity and was especially incensed by the papal policy of selling indulgences to swell the coffers of the Church. Luther was rescued from his existential distress by exegesis. The first time he saw a copy of the whole Bible he had been astonished that it contained so many more writings than he had realized. 6 He felt that he was seeing it for the first time. 7 Luther became Professor of Scripture and Philosophy at the University of Wittenberg and during the lectures that he gave on the Psalms and Paul’s epistles to the Romans and Galatians (1513–18) he experienced a spiritual breakthrough that enabled him to break free from his Ockhamite prison. 8 The lectures on the Psalms began conventionally enough – Luther expounded the text verse by verse according to each of the four senses in turn. But there were two significant changes. First, Luther asked the university printer Johannes Gutenberg to produce a custom-made Psalter for him with an ample margin and wide spaces for his own annotations.

• From The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  60 The authors were Jewish Christians, 61 who wrote in Greek and lived in the Hellenistic cities of the Roman empire. They were not only creative writers – each with his own particular bias – but also skilled redactors who edited earlier material. Mark wrote in about 70; Matthew and Luke in the late 80s, and John in the late 90s. All four gospels reflect the terror and anxiety of this traumatic period. The Jewish people were in turmoil. The war with Rome had divided families and communities and all the different sects had to rethink their relationship with the temple tradition. But the apokalypsis of the ruined shrine seemed so compelling to the Christians that they felt inspired to proclaim the messiahship of Jesus, whose mission, they believed, had been bound up with the temple. Mark, who was writing immediately after the war, was especially preoccupied by this theme. His community was in deep trouble. Christians had been accused of rejoicing at the temple’s destruction, and Mark shows that members of his ekklesia were being beaten in the synagogues, dragged before the Jewish elders and universally vilified. Many had lost faith. 62 Jesus’s teachings seemed to fall on stony ground and Christian leaders seemed as obtuse as the Twelve, who, in Mark’s gospel, rarely understood Jesus. 63 There was a grim sense of painful rupture with mainstream Judaism. You could not patch an old garment with new cloth, Jesus warned: ‘the patch pulls away from it, the new from the old, and the tear gets worse. And nobody puts new wine into old wineskins; if he does, the wine will burst the skins, and the wine is lost and the skins too!’ 64 Discipleship meant suffering and an endless struggle with demonic forces. Christians must stay awake; they must be perpetually vigilant! 65 Paul, who wrote while the temple was still standing, had scarcely mentioned it; but the temple was central to Mark’s vision of Jesus. 66 Its destruction was only the first stage in the imminent apocalypse. 67 Daniel had already foreseen this ‘desolating sacrilege’ long ago so the temple had been doomed. 68 Jesus was not a renegade, as his enemies claimed, but deeply in tune with the great figures of the past. He quoted Jeremiah and Isaiah to show that the temple had been intended for all the nations as well as for the Jews. 69 Mark’s ekklesia, which admitted gentiles, had fulfilled these ancient prophecies but the temple had not conformed to God’s plan. No wonder it had been destroyed.

• From The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  It would now be de rigueur to read the Bible in the original languages, and this scholarly requirement encouraged a more detached, historical attitude towards biblical antiquity. Hitherto, exegetes had viewed the Bible as a single work rather than a collection of diverse books. They may never have physically seen the scriptures in a single volume, but the practice of linking disparate texts together had encouraged them to downplay differences of vision and period. Now the humanists began to study the biblical authors as individuals, noting their special talents and idiosyncracies. They were especially drawn to Paul, whose style took on new immediacy in the original koine Greek. His passionate quest for salvation seemed a salutary antidote to scholastic rationalism. Unlike humanists today, they were not sceptical about religion, but had become ardent Pauline Christians. They could particularly empathize with Paul’s acute sense of sin. A period of wrenching social change is often characterized by anxiety. People feel lost and impotent; living in medias res, they cannot see the direction their society is taking but experience its subterranean transformation in incoherent, sporadic ways. Alongside the enthralling achievements of the early sixteenth century, there was widespread distress. The Protestant reformers Huldrych Zwingli (1484–1531) and John Calvin (1509–64) both felt a sense of acute failure and powerlessness before they found a new religious solution. The Catholic reformer Ignatius Loyola (1491–1556), founder of the Society of Jesus, wept so copiously during Mass that doctors warned him that he could easily lose his sight. And the Italian poet Francesco Petrarch (1304–74) was equally lacrymose: ‘With what floods of tears I have sought to wash away my stains so that I can scarce speak of it without weeping, yet hitherto all is vain. God indeed is the best: and I am the worst.’2 Few experienced the angst of the age more painfully than a young monk in the Augustinian monastery of Erfurt in Germany: Although I lived a blameless life as a monk, I felt I was a sinner with an uneasy conscience before God. I also could not believe that I had pleased him with my works. Far from loving that righteous God who punished sinners, I actually loathed him . . . My conscience would not give me certainty, but I always doubted and said, ‘You did not do that right. You weren’t contrite enough. You left that out of your confession.’3 Martin Luther (1483–1546) had been educated in the scholastic philosophy of William of Ockham (c.1287–1347), who had urged Christians to try to merit God’s grace by their good works.4 But Luther fell prey to agonizing depression and none of the traditional pieties could assuage his extreme terror of death.5 To escape his fears, he plunged into a frenzy of reforming activity and was especially incensed by the papal policy of selling indulgences to swell the coffers of the Church.

• From The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  4 But Luther fell prey to agonizing depression and none of the traditional pieties could assuage his extreme terror of death. 5 To escape his fears, he plunged into a frenzy of reforming activity and was especially incensed by the papal policy of selling indulgences to swell the coffers of the Church. Luther was rescued from his existential distress by exegesis. The first time he saw a copy of the whole Bible he had been astonished that it contained so many more writings than he had realized. 6 He felt that he was seeing it for the first time. 7 Luther became Professor of Scripture and Philosophy at the University of Wittenberg and during the lectures that he gave on the Psalms and Paul’s epistles to the Romans and Galatians (1513–18) he experienced a spiritual breakthrough that enabled him to break free from his Ockhamite prison. 8 The lectures on the Psalms began conventionally enough – Luther expounded the text verse by verse according to each of the four senses in turn. But there were two significant changes. First, Luther asked the university printer Johannes Gutenberg to produce a custom-made Psalter for him with an ample margin and wide spaces for his own annotations. He had, as it were, wiped the sacred page clean, erasing the traditional gloss in order to start again. Second, he introduced an entirely novel definition of the literal sense. By ‘literal’ he did not mean the original intention of the author; he meant ‘christological’. ‘In the whole of scripture,’ he claimed, ‘there is nothing else but Christ, either in plain words or involved words.’ 9 ‘Take Christ from the scriptures,’ he asked on another occasion, ‘and what else will you find there?’ 10 The quick answer to that question is that you will find a great deal. As he grew more familiar with the whole of the Bible, Luther became aware that much of the Bible had very little to do with Christ. Even in the New Testament, there were books that were more Christ-centred than others. This compelled him over the years to invent a new hermeneutics. Luther’s solution was to create a ‘canon within the canon’. A man of his time, he was especially drawn to Paul, finding his letters describing the Christian experience of the risen Christ far more valuable than the synoptic gospels which were merely about Christ. For the same reason, he privileged John’s gospel and the First Epistle of Peter but relegated Hebrews, the epistles of James and Jude, and Revelation to the periphery.

• From The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  This short-lived experiment lasted only a year, but it alarmed the reformers. If there was no authoritative body to control biblical reading, how could anybody know who was right? ‘Who will give our conscience sure information about which party is teaching us the pure Word of God, we or our opponents?’ asked Luther.‘Is every fanatic to have the right to teach whatever he pleases?’ 41 Calvin agreed: ‘If everyone has a right to be judge and arbiter in this matter, nothing can be set down as certain and our whole religion will be full of uncertainty.’ 42 Religious liberty was becoming problematic in a political world that increasingly demanded conformity, and was prepared to achieve it by coercive means. In the seventeenth century, Europe was convulsed by wars, which may have been articulated in a religious imagery, but which were really caused by the need for a different kind of political organization in the new Europe. The old feudal kingdoms had to be transformed into efficient, centralized states, initially under absolute monarchs, who could impose unity by force. Ferdinand and Isabella were welding together the old Iberian kingdoms to form a united Spain, but they did not yet have the resources to allow their subjects untrammelled freedom. There was no room for autonomous, self-governing bodies, such as the Jewish communities. The Spanish Inquisition, which hounded these dissidents, was a modernizing institution, designed to create ideological conformity and national unity. 43 As modernization progressed, Protestant rulers in such countries as England were just as ruthless to their Catholic subjects, who were regarded as enemies of state. The so-called Wars of Religion (1618–48) were in fact a thirty-year struggle on the part of the kings of France and the German princes to become politically independent of the Holy Roman Empire and the papacy, even though it was complicated by the confrontation of militant Calvinism and a reinvigorated, reformed Catholicism. Modernization was progressive and empowering, but it had an inbuilt intolerance: there would always be people who experienced this new Western society as cruel and invasive. Freedom for some meant enslavement for others. In 1620, a party of English settlers made the perilous journey across the Atlantic in the Mayflower and arrived in the harbour of Plymouth, Massachusetts. They were English Puritans, radical Calvinists who felt persecuted by the Anglican establishment and decided to migrate to the New World. They had inherited Calvin’s interest in the Old Testament and were particularly drawn to the story of the Exodus, which seemed a literal forecast of their own project.

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  16 [image file=image_rsrc2PR.jpg] I was sleepy the next day, and nervous. The exhilaration was gone. I kept expecting something to happen, someone to come in and confront me with what Grey and I had done. It had been so easy to get back to Aunt Alma’s and into bed with Reese without anyone noticing—too easy. I kept waking up suddenly, all night long, until finally I jerked awake and the room was full of daylight. Reese was still heavily asleep near the edge of the bed, but I heard Temple talking in the next room. I got up and dressed, trying to look like I’d had all the sleep I needed. Aunt Alma had stayed over at Aunt Ruth’s with Mama. Patsy Ruth was complaining that she had been on her own and hadn’t even known it. Garvey and Little Earle didn’t care. They were too busy arguing over whether Little Earle had spit in Garvey’s new harmonica. I kept looking at Grey’s shining features, wondering why everybody else didn’t see how smugly he was grinning, but there was too much confusion. No one even looked at him. Temple had come by to make sure we all got some breakfast, her swollen belly showing how close she was to having her first child. She kept pushing herself up straight and putting her hand on her lower back as if it ached. She served us all bowls of grits with cheese and set a platter of fried fatback in the center of the table. “Patsy Ruth and Little Earle.” She called their names like they were stray puppies. “I promised Mama I’d make sure you got off to school, so move it along.” She wiped grease off the edge of the platter and put a bowl of butter down beside it. “Bone, your mama said you were to stay over here till she comes to get you. But she might not get here till afternoon, so let Reese sleep as long as she wants.” “Why do we have to go to school if Bone and Reese don’t?” Little Earle was offended. “I don’t know and I don’t care.” Temple sounded like she’d been married for twenty years. “All I know is you’re going. If you want to argue with Mama about why, you can do it when she gets home tonight. Right now I’ve got to get Tadpole ready to come home with me.” I took a piece of fatback to chew and went into the living room with the book I’d gotten from Aunt Raylene, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis. I loved the story, but I was so tired I fell asleep, not waking up until Mama put her hand on my shoulder. “Where’s Reese, Bone?” Her voice sounded strange.

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  But something. Something hard and angry that only shows now and again.” They went quiet and looked over at me. I tried to pretend I hadn’t been listening, concentrating on waving the steam away so that I could see down into the pot. But if I slanted my eyes sideways, I could still see them clear. Through the steam they both looked older—two worn, tired women repeating old stories to each other and trying not to worry too much about things they couldn’t change anyway. It struck me then how young they both were to be looking so old, neither of them as old as Madeline, Mama not yet twenty-six and Aunt Raylene less than ten years older. Still, they seemed so different from me, almost as if they had come out of another century. I wished then that I could be more like them, easier in my body and not so angry all the time. Too much pride or too little? What was wrong with me? I wondered. After all the peaches had been canned, the tomatoes and the snap peas, Aunt Raylene did the rest of the fruit, the plums and the apples and the blackberries. The days were full of sweat and steam and boiling pots. I spent every minute I was not in school planted on a stool in her kitchen, peeling or scrubbing or watching pots while Aunt Raylene told me stories and my neck cramped with worry. I was afraid somebody would find my hook under her porch, but I couldn’t get it out of there until the canning was done. If one of the uncles found that hook, I knew Aunt Raylene would figure out that it was me who had brought it up out of the cellar. One early evening when we were almost finished putting up the canned fruit racks, Grey came into the kitchen, his face so bright it jumped out at me. His grin was spread so wide I gave him a shove before Aunt Raylene could see. “You found it!” I hissed at him. He stared at me for a long minute and then grinned wider. “You, huh, Bone? You the one been going in and out the cellar all this time, huh? Slick, girl, slick.” “Just keep your mouth shut or Aunt Raylene will hide it where we’ll never find it.” “I an’t gonna tell nobody.” “You looking like that, she’ll know something is going on.” Grey laughed and twirled a finger in a smear of blackberry juice I hadn’t had time to clean up. “You talk any louder and she’ll hear it from you.” I looked down the center hall into the room at the end. Aunt Raylene was folding towels and humming to herself. I pushed Grey back out onto the porch and looped my arm around his neck. I knew that if I got bossy, he’d just run off with the hook and I’d never see it again.

• From The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  In Germany the Pietists, who wanted to get beyond the arid doctrinal polemics of the competing Protestant sects, also seized on these analytic methods to reinstate the Bible, convinced that the biblical critic should be above denominational loyalty. 19 The Pietists’ aim was to liberate religion from theology and recover a more personal experience of the divine. In 1694, they founded a university at Halle to bring the new scholarship to the laity in a non-sectarian guise and Halle became the centre of a biblical revolution. 20 Between 1711 and 1719, its press printed 100,000 copies of the New Testament and 80,000 complete Bibles. Halle scholars also produced the Biblia Pentapla to encourage a trans-denominational reading of scripture: five different translations were printed side by side, so that Lutherans, Calvinists and Catholics could read the version of their choice but could consult the wording in another column if they encountered a difficulty. Others translated the Bible in a wholly literal way to show that even in the vernacular the Word of God was far from clear. Theologians should be more reticent in their use of ‘proof texts’ that could not bear the weight of theological interpretation imposed upon them. If the original could not be rendered into elegant German, the Bible sounded strange and unfamiliar and this was a salutary reminder that it was always difficult to understand God’s Word. 21 By the end of the eighteenth century, German scholars led the way in biblical studies and were taking Spinoza’s historical-critical method to new lengths. They agreed that Moses had certainly not written the entire Pentateuch, which seemed to have a number of different authors who all wrote in a distinctive style. One favoured the divine title ‘Elohim’; another preferred to call God ‘Yahweh’. There were duplicate narratives, obviously by different hands, such as the two creation accounts in Genesis. 22 So Jean Astruc (1684–1766), a Paris physician, and Johann Gottfried Eichhorn (1752–1827), Professor of Oriental Languages at Jena University, argued that there were two main documents in Genesis: the ‘Yahwist’ and the ‘Elohist’. But in 1798, Karl David Igen, Eichhorn’s successor, claimed that the Elohist material derived from two separate sources. Other scholars, including Johann Severin Vater (1771–1826) and Wilhelm DeWette (1780–1849) believed that this was too simplistic: the Pentateuch consisted of numerous, separate fragments that had been put together by a redactor. By the nineteenth century, it was generally agreed by the scholars of the Higher Criticism that the Pentateuch was a combination of four originally independent sources.

• From The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  Religious liberty was becoming problematic in a political world that increasingly demanded conformity, and was prepared to achieve it by coercive means. In the seventeenth century, Europe was convulsed by wars, which may have been articulated in a religious imagery, but which were really caused by the need for a different kind of political organization in the new Europe. The old feudal kingdoms had to be transformed into efficient, centralized states, initially under absolute monarchs, who could impose unity by force. Ferdinand and Isabella were welding together the old Iberian kingdoms to form a united Spain, but they did not yet have the resources to allow their subjects untrammelled freedom. There was no room for autonomous, self-governing bodies, such as the Jewish communities. The Spanish Inquisition, which hounded these dissidents, was a modernizing institution, designed to create ideological conformity and national unity.43 As modernization progressed, Protestant rulers in such countries as England were just as ruthless to their Catholic subjects, who were regarded as enemies of state. The so-called Wars of Religion (1618–48) were in fact a thirty-year struggle on the part of the kings of France and the German princes to become politically independent of the Holy Roman Empire and the papacy, even though it was complicated by the confrontation of militant Calvinism and a reinvigorated, reformed Catholicism. Modernization was progressive and empowering, but it had an inbuilt intolerance: there would always be people who experienced this new Western society as cruel and invasive. Freedom for some meant enslavement for others. In 1620, a party of English settlers made the perilous journey across the Atlantic in the Mayflower and arrived in the harbour of Plymouth, Massachusetts. They were English Puritans, radical Calvinists who felt persecuted by the Anglican establishment and decided to migrate to the New World. They had inherited Calvin’s interest in the Old Testament and were particularly drawn to the story of the Exodus, which seemed a literal forecast of their own project. England was their Egypt; the transatlantic voyage their sojourn in the wilderness, and they had now arrived in the Promised Land, which they christened New Canaan.44

• From The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  But Valla’s Collatio had appeared only in manuscript; Erasmus had it printed and immediately it reached a far wider audience. It would now be de rigueur to read the Bible in the original languages, and this scholarly requirement encouraged a more detached, historical attitude towards biblical antiquity. Hitherto, exegetes had viewed the Bible as a single work rather than a collection of diverse books. They may never have physically seen the scriptures in a single volume, but the practice of linking disparate texts together had encouraged them to downplay differences of vision and period. Now the humanists began to study the biblical authors as individuals, noting their special talents and idiosyncracies. They were especially drawn to Paul, whose style took on new immediacy in the original koine Greek. His passionate quest for salvation seemed a salutary antidote to scholastic rationalism. Unlike humanists today, they were not sceptical about religion, but had become ardent Pauline Christians. They could particularly empathize with Paul’s acute sense of sin. A period of wrenching social change is often characterized by anxiety. People feel lost and impotent; living in medias res , they cannot see the direction their society is taking but experience its subterranean transformation in incoherent, sporadic ways. Alongside the enthralling achievements of the early sixteenth century, there was widespread distress. The Protestant reformers Huldrych Zwingli (1484–1531) and John Calvin (1509–64) both felt a sense of acute failure and powerlessness before they found a new religious solution. The Catholic reformer Ignatius Loyola (1491–1556), founder of the Society of Jesus, wept so copiously during Mass that doctors warned him that he could easily lose his sight. And the Italian poet Francesco Petrarch (1304–74) was equally lacrymose: ‘With what floods of tears I have sought to wash away my stains so that I can scarce speak of it without weeping, yet hitherto all is vain. God indeed is the best: and I am the worst.’ 2 Few experienced the angst of the age more painfully than a young monk in the Augustinian monastery of Erfurt in Germany: Although I lived a blameless life as a monk, I felt I was a sinner with an uneasy conscience before God. I also could not believe that I had pleased him with my works. Far from loving that righteous God who punished sinners, I actually loathed him . . . My conscience would not give me certainty, but I always doubted and said, ‘You did not do that right. You weren’t contrite enough. You left that out of your confession.’ 3 Martin Luther (1483–1546) had been educated in the scholastic philosophy of William of Ockham ( c. 1287–1347), who had urged Christians to try to merit God’s grace by their good works.

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  “No problem, Mama,” Grey told her. I looked down to the window below us again. It was a girl, I was almost sure, a fierce girl watching us distrustfully. Grey pulled himself up from the steps with one big hand. The girl’s eyes followed his fist and then looked back to me. I tried to smile but my face felt stiff, nervous. The girl’s face remained expressionless and pulled back into the darkness of the apartment. “Don’t you be mean to those kids downstairs,” Aunt Alma told Grey. “I don’t want no trouble with these people.” “Yes, Mama,” Grey and Little Earle echoed. The window below stayed dark. [image file=image_rsrc2PS.jpg] The next time we went over to visit, Grey told me there were five of them downstairs, same as upstairs, with the daddy off working up north and none of the kids as old as he was. The woman kept to herself, wouldn’t do more than nod to Aunt Alma, but the kids started hanging out on the steps again after the first week, running inside whenever one of the uncles’ trucks pulled up but otherwise ignoring the white children. Sometime in the second week they held a spitting contest, upstairs against down, and Grey won. After that things got a little easier. Grey showed his pocketknife to the boys downstairs and in turn admired a set of tools the oldest boy had from his father. It was only the girl who kept herself aloof, staying with her mama while the boys played out in the yard. “She’s pretty, if niggers can be pretty,” Grey told me, “but not friendly. Looks like she expects me to bite her neck or something.” “You call her that and she might bite you. I would.” I was remembering the girl’s intent, determined face. I had heard all the hateful jokes and nasty things people said about “niggers,” but on my own, I had never before spoken to a colored person in anything more than the brief, careful “sir” and “ma’am” that Mama had taught us. I was as shy with those kids as they seemed to be with us. As nervous as the idea made me, I wished that girl would come out so I could try to talk to her, but she never did more than look out the windows at us. Her mama had probably told her all about what to expect from trash like us. “Boy howdy, you should have heard what Daddy and Uncle Beau said when they came over, the things they called them.” Grey frowned and kicked one foot against the other. “Daddy’s awful mad we moved in here.” I knew what he meant. Uncle Wade and Aunt Alma had been over at our place the week before, Wade looking worn-down and shabby and cursing Alma to her face.

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  [image file=image_rsrc2PS.jpg] Grey and Garvey seemed to fight all the time these days, boxing and wrestling as easily as some people spit, and it was clear to me that part of Grey’s excitement about our plan was because his brother was not part of it. They were not identical twins—none of the twins in the family were identical—but Alma’s boys looked more alike than either set of Aunt Carr’s girls. They were both tall and rangy, with skin that tanned dark, and hair that went red-brown in the sun. Garvey was better-looking, with crystalline blue eyes and a sharp little cleft in his chin that was strangely endearing. Grey had a half-mean look about him. His eyes narrowed too easily, and he frowned all the time, even after Aunt Alma got him a pair of metal-frame glasses. Grey hated those lenses and wore them only when one of the uncles was around to slap him for wasting his mama’s money. “That Grey’s getting bad habits,” Uncle Beau said to Reese and me once. We said nothing, since of the two brothers, both of us liked Grey best. He might have looked meaner, but he had a sweetness about him that Garvey didn’t. He’d always given us stolen candy and never pushed us around like Garvey did. But unlike his brother, Grey just didn’t have any luck. When he turned thirteen, he suddenly began to grow thick red-brown hair on his chest and arms. He tried to shave it off with his daddy’s straight razor, but that only made it grow back thicker. Garvey made fun of him for it, and in defense, Grey pretended stubbornly that he was proud of his “manly growth,” of how he was “turning into a bear.” It did make him look more different from Garvey—a lifelong ambition anyway. The only problem was that the hair didn’t grow back thicker, just patchy, and it itched him. It ruined his toughguy image, the way he was always standing around scratching at the reddish-brown hair on his forearms and the backs of his hands. Sometimes he’d seem to fall into a kind of trance, looking off into the distance, frowning and scratching. I found him standing like that back of Woolworth’s Friday. night. It was late—well past midnight—and I’d had trouble sneaking out of Alma’s house quietly enough not to wake Reese, so I was nervous and itchy myself. Grey scared me, standing out in the parking lot with the light pouring down from the Texaco sign across the street lighting up everything. A shadow hid the potato sack between his legs, and for a minute I thought he’d forgotten my hook. “Don’t sweat it,” he laughed when I demanded the hook. “I got it right here.” He squatted down and opened the sack, pulling out a four-pronged blackened object trailing a chain. “You ruined it!” I hissed.

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  Uncle Earle liked Glen Waddell well enough, but like Granny he didn’t think much of the Waddell family. He’d even said so to Glen’s face, but the boy had just grinned at him, and that didn’t seem right. Even if he didn’t get on with his people, Earle believed that Glen shouldn’t let anybody bad-mouth them. If they had traded a few punches over it, bled on each other a little and made up after, the whole thing would have felt better to Earle all around. But Glen was a quiet sort who never fought in friendly style. He either gave you that slow grin or went all out and tried to kill you. The latter earned him a little respect, Earle admitted. The cops had had to be called on Glen once at the foundry before he left to take the job at the RC Cola plant. Glen was a grown man, a working man, and he loved Anney Boatwright. Everybody knew that, even Granny. “Now, Earle, don’t you be making no trouble.” Granny pushed her hair back behind her ears and smoothed down the wrinkles on her green print blouse. “I want Alma to get pictures of everybody. I want a book of family pictures for my cedar chest.” Earle laughed and sneaked around to poke Alma while she was focusing on Granny and Mama, then chased Reese and me out into the yard, catching Reese and throwing her up in the air so high she flapped her arms like she was going to fly. I dodged them and cut through the bushes, ignoring the brambles that caught in the skirt of the new dress Mama had made me wear. From the other side of Earle’s truck, I stood and looked back at them, Granny up on the porch with her hesitant uncertain smile, and Mama down on the steps in her new blouse with Glen in that short brush haircut, while Alma posed on the walkway focusing up at them. Everybody looked nervous but determined, Mama stiff in Glen’s awkward embrace and Glen almost stumbling off the steps as he tried to turn his face away from the camera. It made my neck go tight just to look at them. Only Earle and Reese were relaxed, Reese shrieking and giggling, still up in Earle’s arms, her legs outstretched as he spun the two of them around and around on the wet grass in the bright sunlight. “Bone, Bone,” Reese screamed. “Oh, Bone, help me! Help me!” “I’m gonna fly you to the stars, little girl,” Uncle Earle teased through clenched teeth, making Reese scream all the louder. The words were barely out of his mouth when he slipped in the grass, coming down hard on his butt. His legs flew straight out in front of him, and Reese landed safely on his lap, her scream turning to a giggle as Earle started to curse. “Goddam, I’ve ruined these britches now.”

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  “She might, but she might not. Among our people hair stays blond sometimes.” Mrs. Parsons tried to smile at Mama, but her face didn’t soften until she looked down at Reese. I was sitting on the arm of the sofa next to Mama, where I could look out the window to see the waiting truck and the empty road all the way up to the next intersection. I kept listening for the sound of the Pontiac, hoping not to hear it. Daddy Glen might come home while Mrs. Parsons was still here, and I knew Mama was worried about that, her hands pulling again at her belt loops nervously. Mrs. Parsons looked over at Mama’s hands and then spoke carefully. “That money’s all there’s gonna be, I’m afraid. My property an’t worth much, and truth is I signed it over to Matthew just after my boys died. Matthew’s promised to take care of me, and I trust that he will. Thing is, Lyle didn’t have no title to the land and no other insurance as far as we know.” Mama shook her head once and looked up directly into Mrs. Parsons’s face. “I know he didn’t have nothing,” she said. “I knew that when he died, and it’s never mattered to me. Didn’t expect his death benefit, to tell you the truth. Thought he wasn’t entitled to nothing from the army.” Her face looked sad but not so stiff as it had. Mrs. Parsons’s face was a match for hers. “I wish you would get lots and lots of money from the insurance.” Reese wiggled happily in Grandma Parsons’s arms and beamed at all of us. “Oh, I don’t need no money, child.” Grandma Parsons laughed and pushed herself up off the couch. “I’m afraid I’ve got to get going, Anney. It’s a long trip for me to get home.” I looked closely at Mama to see if she had heard the old woman say her name, but Mama was already up and reaching for Mrs. Parsons’s glass. “Don’t you want more?” Mama was saying as she headed for the kitchen. Mrs. Parsons shook her head and said no while hanging on to Reese. I saw Mama’s shoulders relax a little as she turned to come back to us. The road outside was still quiet. Grandma Parsons bent over to hug Reese tightly one more time. “You just remember, honey, I got the best of Lyle when I got you,” she told her. That sounded strange to me, as if she’d hatched my baby sister herself off her boy’s dead frame. But Reese grinned like a princess and wiggled her toes into the nap of the rug. She followed Grandma Parsons out to the truck begging her to stay over. “Reese, be good,” Mama told her. “You can see your grandma next month when we go up to her place.” “You will come?” Mrs. Parsons looked sad and nervous all over again.

• From The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  In the second century there was, however, no canon of prescribed texts because there was, as yet, no standard form of Christianity. Marcion (c. 100–165), who held many gnostic ideas, wanted to sever the link between Christianity and the Hebrew scriptures, since he believed that Christianity was an entirely new religion. Marcion wrote his own gospel, based on the epistles of Paul and an expurgated reading of Luke. This made many Christians deeply uneasy about their relationship with Judaism. Irenaeus, bishop of Lyons (c. 140–200) was appalled by both Marcion and the Gnostics and insisted on the link between the old scriptures and the new. He compiled a list of approved texts in which we see the future New Testament in embryo. It began with the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John – in that order – continued with the Acts of the Apostles (a history of the early church), included epistles by Paul, James, Peter and John, and concluded with two prophetic descriptions of the end: Revelation and the Shepherd of Hermas. But the canon was not fixed until well into the fourth century. Some of Irenaeus’s chosen books, such as the Shepherd of Hermas, would be rejected and others, such as Hebrews and the epistle of Jude, would be added to Irenaeus’s list. The Christian scriptures were written at different times, in different regions and for very different audiences, but they shared a common language and set of symbols, derived from the Law and the Prophets as well as the Late Second Temple texts. They brought together ideas that originally had no connection with one another – son of God, son of man, messiah and kingdom – into a new synthesis.51 The authors did not argue this logically but simply juxtaposed these images so repeatedly that they merged together in the reader’s mind.52 There was no uniform view of Jesus. Paul had called him the ‘son of God’, but had used the title in its traditional Jewish sense: Jesus was a human being who had a special relationship to God, like the ancient kings of Israel, and had been raised by him to uniquely high status.53 Paul never claimed that Jesus was God. Matthew, Mark and Luke, who are known as the ‘synoptics’ because they ‘see things together’, also used the title ‘son of God’ in this way, but they also implied that Jesus was Daniel’s ‘son of man’, which gave him an eschatological dimension.54 John, who represented a different Christian tradition, saw Jesus as the incarnation of the Word and Wisdom of God which had existed before the creation of the world.55 When the final editors of the New Testament put these texts together, they were not disturbed by these discrepancies. Jesus had become too immense a phenomenon in the minds of Christians to be tied to a single definition.

• From The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  The title of ‘messiah’ was crucial. Once Jesus had been identified as God’s ‘anointed’ (christos), the Christian writers gave the term a radically new meaning. They read the Hebrew scriptures in Greek and whenever they found a reference to a christos – be it a king, prophet or priest – they immediately interpreted it as a coded reference to Jesus. They were also attracted to the mysterious figure of the servant in Second Isaiah, whose suffering had redeemed the world. The servant had not been a messianic figure, but by constantly comparing the servant with Jesus christos, using the same ‘blurring’ technique, they established for the first time the idea of a suffering messiah. Thus three separate figures – servant, messiah and Jesus – became inseparable in the Christian imagination.56 So thorough was the Christians’ pesher exegesis that there is scarcely a verse in the New Testament that did not refer to the older scriptures. The four evangelists seemed to use the Septuagint as another source for the biography of Jesus. As a result it is difficult to disentangle fact from exegesis. Did his executioners really give Jesus vinegar to drink and cast lots for his garments or was this incident suggested by certain verses from the Psalms?57 Did Matthew tell the story of the virgin birth of Jesus simply because Isaiah had prophesied that a ‘virgin’ would conceive and bear a son called ImmanuEl (the Septuagint translated the Hebrew almah, ‘young woman’ as parthenos, ‘virgin’)?58 Some scholars have gone so far as to suggest that it would be possible to construct an entire gospel from the Jewish scriptures, without quoting a single word by Jesus himself.59 We do not know who wrote the gospels. When they first appeared, they circulated anonymously and were only later attributed to important figures in the early church.60 The authors were Jewish Christians,61 who wrote in Greek and lived in the Hellenistic cities of the Roman empire. They were not only creative writers – each with his own particular bias – but also skilled redactors who edited earlier material. Mark wrote in about 70; Matthew and Luke in the late 80s, and John in the late 90s. All four gospels reflect the terror and anxiety of this traumatic period. The Jewish people were in turmoil. The war with Rome had divided families and communities and all the different sects had to rethink their relationship with the temple tradition. But the apokalypsis of the ruined shrine seemed so compelling to the Christians that they felt inspired to proclaim the messiahship of Jesus, whose mission, they believed, had been bound up with the temple.

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  [image file=image_rsrc2PS.jpg] I spent the night before the funeral with Aunt Raylene over at Aunt Ruth’s place, helping her clean things up a bit and cook a ham and two different casseroles, one with noodles and cheese and one big vegetable mix with a cornmeal crust. Deedee had spent the evening locked in her bedroom playing the radio, and Travis was still down at the funeral home when Aunt Raylene made me go to bed. I woke up late and had to hurry to get a bath while Aunt Raylene cooked some biscuits and a pan of bacon. I’d been careful the night before not to let Raylene see the bruises on my legs when she had put me to bed in Butch’s old room. She had been so distracted she’d noticed nothing. This morning I had no appetite but ate a bacon biscuit dutifully and drank the rest of Aunt Raylene’s coffee while she finished getting dressed. Then I went out on the porch to wait for her. The radio was playing “Get a Job” by the Silhouettes, the chorus staccato and driven, echoing loud in the early morning. Deedee was sitting in the porch rocker in her nightgown with her hair still done up in pin curls. “I hate that damn hillbilly music, always have,” she told me conversationally while I stared at her. “You got to get dressed. Aunt Raylene is just about ready to go.” I looked around for somebody else, but Uncle Travis’s truck was still gone and there was no one else there. Deedee looked like she hadn’t slept. She was smoking an unfiltered Chesterfield, her hand trembling slightly as she sucked intently on it, and her eyes bloodshot and squinted against the sunlight. “But that’s all the music Mama would ever play,” she went on as if I hadn’t said a thing. “Howling, yodeling, whining music, trashy music. Get mad every time I played my stations, called it nigger music. Told me it would ruin me. Like she hadn’t told me time and time again I was ruined already.” Deedee had one leg drawn up so that her arm was propped on her knee, the cigarette poised just in front of her mouth. An almost empty pack was in her other hand, and there was a box of kitchen matches on the floor beside a saucer full of ashes. The radio paused, pulsed, and the music changed. “Elvis Presley and the Jordanaires,” the DJ announced, “at the fairgrounds in Spartanburg this Sunday afternoon. I’m gonna be there, you can bet on it. Now here’s the man himself.” The music that had been playing softly in the background came up loud now. “I got a woman mean as she can be…” “I’ve seen Elvis now three times. What you think about that, Bonehead? You like Elvis?” Deedee looked at me almost hatefully. I shrugged. “Well enough. I an’t never seen him.” “You an’t never seen anything.” “No.”

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  Everything in that picture was clear, sharp, in focus, the contrast so strong you could trace the lines where sunlight sheared off and shade began. There was a blush on Mama’s cheek like the shadow of a bird, polka dots on her seersucker blouse, a raised nap on her dark calf-length skirt, and a fine part in her brushed-back blond hair. Mama was beautiful in it, no question, though there was a puffiness under her eyes and a tightness in the muscles of her neck that made her chin stick out. But her smile was full, her eyes clear, and you could see right into her, see how gentle she was in the way her neck angled as she looked past Glen to Reese and me, the way her hands lay open on her lap, the fingers slightly bent as if they were ready to catch the sunlight. Beside Mama, Glen was half in shadow with his head turned to the side, but the light shone on his smile, his cheek, his strong hands and slender frame. The smile was determined, tight, forceful, the eyes brilliant in the camera lens, gleaming in the sun’s glare, the shoulders tense and hunched forward a little, one arm extended to hold Mama close, reaching around her from where he sat to her left. You could not tell a thing about Glen from that picture, except that he was a good-looking man, strong and happy to be holding his woman. Mama’s eyes were soft with old hurt and new hope; Glen’s eyes told nothing. The man’s image was as flat and empty as a sheet of tin in the sun, throwing back heat and light, but no details—not one clear line of who he really was behind those eyes. I tried to imagine what it would be like to live with him once the honeymoon was past. I looked at the picture again and remembered the day of the picnic, the way he kept pulling Mama back against him, his hands cupped over her belly possessively. I had heard Alma tease Mama the day before the wedding that she better hurry up and get married before she started showing. Mama had gotten all upset, demanding to know how Alma had found out she was pregnant. I wondered if she had told Glen yet. “Come on, girls.” Glen’s voice when he called Reese and me for the picture had had a loud impatient note I had never heard before. I’d come back around Earle’s truck at a walk and looked into his face carefully. Yes, he knew. He was so pleased with himself, he looked swollen with satisfaction under that terrible haircut. Mama had said he wanted her to have his son, and it looked to me like he was sure he had it on the way.

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  Mama started taking me with her to the diner. There I could earn my own money washing dishes, money Mama didn’t make me save for clothes but let me spend as I pleased, mostly on secondhand books from racks at the thrift store that I could then trade in at the paperback exchange. Reese complained that I never played with her anymore, that I was always working or reading or sleeping. When school let out for the summer, I found a hiding place in the woods near Aunt Alma’s where I could camp for hours with a bag of Hershey Kisses and a book. The librarian gave me Black Beauty, Robinson Crusoe, and Tom Sawyer. On my own I found copies of Not as a Stranger, The Naked and the Dead, This Gun for Hire, and Marjorie Morningstar. I climbed up a tree to read the sexy parts over, drank water out of the creek, and only went home at dark. Mama was still worried about me, I could tell. “Honey, are you all right?” she asked me one morning. I just shrugged and went back to the paperback copy of The Secret Garden I’d never returned to the school library. She pushed the book down and took it away, making me look at her. Her face was thinner, her skin rougher, and there were shadows under her eyes that never went away. People no longer talked about how beautiful she was, but about how beautiful she had been. “I want you to do something for me.” She looked down at the book in her hands, at her fingers tracing the cracked spine and tape-wrapped cover. I gritted my teeth, afraid of what she might ask. “Your aunt Ruth isn’t doing well, you know. She’s gotten a lot weaker this summer, Travis says.” That surprised me. I had thought Mama would want to talk about how withdrawn I had become, how I never watched television with them now, or played with Reese or talked to anybody. Besides, Aunt Ruth had been sick so long everybody took it for granted. Could she really be that much worse? “Now that Deedee and Butch are gone, Travis worries about Ruth when she’s home alone. He asked me if you might not be willing to stay out there for a while, at least until she’s better.” Mama opened The Secret Garden to the place where I had slipped my bookmark, a piece of ribbon embossed with the Piggly Wiggly logo. “What do you think?” she asked. “I don’t know,” I said automatically. I hadn’t seen Aunt Ruth in a while, not since the day after Christmas, when Mama had taken us over to Aunt Alma’s for dinner with all her sisters. Even then Aunt Ruth had been thin and weak, her fingers blue and swollen where they lay in her lap. What would I do if she got worse while I was with her? What if she were to die?

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  Every time we went to see Mrs. Parsons, Daddy Glen would whine that Mama shouldn’t be running up there to that hateful old woman. “I don’t like that old biddy telling stories on you,” he kept saying, imagining that Grandma Parsons damned him and Mama as soon as Mama was out of the sound of her voice. I didn’t bother to tell him that she never spoke about them at all, that she talked about everyday stuff, how the garden was going or the weather or the cow’s disposition. The only grown-up she ever mentioned was Reese’s daddy, Lyle, and then only to say Reese had his smile—the soft, slow baby grin she told us had made Lyle the best-loved boy in the county. It was Mama who told us Lyle had been the youngest of three boys, and that the two others had died within a year of Grandma Parsons’s favorite. She told us to be kind to Mrs. Parsons, who was left with only one daughter she never saw and a couple of brothers who were waiting to sell off her land when she died. “Reese should get a share of that land,” Daddy Glen told Mama one autumn afternoon when we came back from visiting up in the hills. “Not that she’ll ever need anything from those stuck-up mountain people.” He rubbed at the back of his neck and looked out through the kitchen window as if he were looking into the future. “Still, it’s only right she gets what her daddy would have wanted her to have. You let me deal with them. I’ll take care of our girl.” When Grandma Parsons’s brother, Matthew, came by with some papers for Mama to sign, Daddy Glen met him at the door and took the papers in hand. “We’ll just look at these,” he said loudly, and then walked him out to the edge of the property, lowering his voice so we couldn’t hear what he said. Mama bit her lips and watched as the stiff-backed Matthew glared at Daddy Glen and then climbed into his truck. She went out as the truck drove off. “Honey, you didn’t say nothing rude to him, did you?” Daddy Glen turned to her with a sweet little smile. He put his arm around her and kissed her on the temple. “Don’t you worry,” he said, and gave her a quick pat on the behind. “I know what I’m doing. You got to be clear with these people, real clear.” He looked so pleased with himself that he couldn’t stop grinning. “I know their type. I sure do.” Mama frowned, and he gave her a little shake. “Now, don’t you go signing none of those papers when I’m not here. I’m telling you, you don’t know what they might be stealing from you. Let me handle it.” She nodded nervously, shooing us back in the house for dinner.