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 City of God

  416 Books That Matter: The City of God ›In this book Augustine critiques the repeated practice of looking for concrete predictions of the coming of the End of Days, urging what he sees as a better approach: to think about the end of time in a way that encourages us to abandon the quest for concrete forebodings of the apocalypse and seek to become people who will be ready for the end of time whenever it arrives. „In thinking about the Last Judgment, Augustine is especially emphatic that scripture is the sole canonical source of inquiry, because these matters lie outside the realm of natural reason at the edges of created order where the contingency of creation is revealed. Reason cannot determine the actual contours of created contingency; it can only respond to those edges when they appear, and their correct response is to stop. „Augustine uses the issues around the Last Judgment as a teaching device to show his audience how to read scripture as a guide to life in this world. He shows that the struggle to “read” the Last Judgment properly is just as hard as the struggle to understand scripture’s proposals about the rest of life. „According to Augustine, we must master the difficult task of admitting the limits of our knowing: affirming the truth of theological claims without presuming that we understand what they mean. We are tempted to affirmations of complete clarity as an anxious response to our authentic experience of the world as a profound ambivalence and ambiguity. ›As an example, Augustine offers the distribution of good and evil in our world and the deep moral obscurity that a clear-eyed assessment of that distribution would suggest. Punishments and rewards seem not to track with any moral pattern. Not only is good not always rewarded, nor good reliably rewarded and evil punished, nor good reliably harmed while evil predictably benefits. Rather, good generally does seem to get rewarded and evil does seem to harm itself, but the exceptions are so

• From Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982)

  I had never been too good at keeping between straight lines no matter what their width, so it slanted down across the page something like this: The notebooks were short and there was no more room for anything else on that page. So I turned the page over, and wrote again, earnestly and laboriously, biting my lip, half-showing off, half-eager to please. By this time, Miss Teacher had returned to the front of the room. “Now when you’re finished drawing your letter, children,” she said, “Just raise your hand high.” And her voice smiled a big smile. It is surprising to me that I can still hear her voice but I can’t see her face, and I don’t know whether she was Black or white. I can remember the way she smelled, but not the color of her hand upon my desk. Well, when I heard that, my hand flew up in the air, wagging frantically. There was one thing my sisters had warned me about school in great detail: you must never talk in school unless you raised your hand. So I raised my hand, anxious to be recognized. I could imagine what teacher would say to my mother when she came to fetch me home at noon. My mother would know that her warning to me to “be good” had in truth been heeded. Miss Teacher came down the aisle and stood beside my desk, looking down at my book. All of a sudden the air around her hand beside my notebook grew very still and frightening. “Well I never!” Her voice was sharp. “I thought I told you to draw this letter? You don’t even want to try and do as you are told. Now I want you to turn that page over and draw your letter like everyone…” and turning to the next page, she saw my second name sprawled down across the page. There was a moment of icy silence, and I knew I had done something terribly wrong. But this time, I had no idea what it could be that would get her so angry, certainly not being proud of writing my name. She broke the silence with a wicked edge to her voice. “I see.” she said. “I see we have a young lady who does not want to do as she is told. We will have to tell her mother about that.”

• From Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982)

  Suppose she really intended only to give me the drink which she had offered me as we left the Page? Suppose I had totally misunderstood the impact of her invitation, and would soon find myself stranded uptown at 3:00 A.M. on a Sunday morning, and did I even have enough change left in my jeans for carfare home? Had I put out enough food for the kittens? Was Flee coming over with her camera tomorrow morning, and would she feed the cats if I wasn’t there? If I wasn’t there. If I wasn’t there. The implication of that thought was so shaking it almost threw me out of the car. I had had only enough money for one beer that night, so I knew I wasn’t high, and reefer was only for special occasions. Part of me felt like a raging lioness, inflamed in desire. Even the words in my head seemed borrowed from a dime-store novel. But that part of me was drunk on the thighed nearness of this exciting unknown dark woman, who calmly moved us through upper Manhattan, with her patent-leather loafers and her camel’s-hair swing coat and her easy talk, from time to time her gloved hand touching my denimed leg for emphasis. Another piece of me felt bumbling, inept, and about four years old. I was the idiot playing at being a lover, who was going to be found out shortly and laughed at for my pretensions, as well as rejected out of hand. Would it be possible—was it ever possible—for two women to share the fire we felt that night without entrapping or smothering each other? I longed for that as I longed for her body, doubting both, eager for both. And how was it possible, that I should be dreaming the roll of this woman’s sea into and around mine, when only a few short hours ago, and for so many months before, I had been mourning the loss of Muriel, so sure that I would continue being broken-hearted forever? And what then if I had been mistaken? If the knot in my groin would have gone away, I’d have jumped out of the car door at the very next traffic light. Or so I thought to myself. We came out of the Park Drive at Seventh Avenue and 110th Street, and as quickly as the light changed on the now deserted avenue, Afrekete turned her broad-lipped beautiful face to me, with no smile at all.

• From House of Holes: A Book of Raunch (2011)

  “An alarm would go off in Lila’s office,” Daggett said. “Two headless men would come and take me away to be reversibly castrated. My testicles would live in a little mesh bag in a special lobster tank filled with a charged nutrient broth.” Rhumpa was appalled. “You mean with the lobsters in there?” “No, no, no,” he reassured. “Just a special tank.” “Oh.” “And meanwhile I’d wander around visiting museums and, you know, reading travel magazines and listening to choral music and feeling sorry for myself.” “Sounds not so bad,” Rhumpa said. “Oh, it’s bad.” He cleared his throat and stood. Rhumpa thought she saw a distinct hump in his corduroys. “So—why don’t you have your shower and I’ll get to work out here choosing and sorting. It’s not easy to lay out a selection, and I’ll need at least four minutes of complete concentration, I’m afraid.” Rhumpa went into the shower and was stepping out of her panties when he knocked. “Yes?” she fluted through the door. “Sorry, I’ll need your bra, as well, for comparison,” he called. “You can just hand it out.” So Rhumpa opened the door and swung the bra out through the crack. “Got it,” he said cheerily. While she was waiting for the shower water to adjust its temperature, she took a moment to look at herself in the mirror. Not too terrible, she thought. Admittedly her thighs were on the verge of jiggly, but her skin was smooth and almondy-brown, and her dense black bush was shiny and not unattractive. She pulled out her hair clip and looked at her face. Men liked her lips, she knew. No, she thought, it wasn’t inconceivable that she could be in a solo sex video. Rhumpa’s hearing had always been keen. As she was about to step into the shower, she heard a tiny clink from the hotel room. Noticing that she’d left the bathroom door slightly ajar, she peered through the crack, at an angle, and was surprised to see Daggett with his back to her and his pants around his ankles. He looked around at the bathroom door to be sure it was closed—it wasn’t—and as he turned she saw that he was clutching his erection in one hand and her bra in the other. He turned back and paused, evidently undergoing an inward struggle. Suddenly, with a moaning expression, he began wrapping her bra straps around his erection, which was startlingly large and curved upward slightly like some exotic purple tusk. Holding his hands motionless around her bunched and jumbled brassiere, he rocked his hips, poking and shoving the head of his cock into its waddedness. Then, doubling over, he folded one cup around the length of his cock and made several long gimbaling strokes.

• From The City of God

  370 Books That Matter: The City of God being tortured. Feeling this distentio is meant to make us feel our need for help more pointedly, and more vividly seek God’s assistance. This seeking of God’s help is why this experience of reading is so integral to the formation of the Christian community in general. For, Augustine says, the church’s fundamental activity, along with praising God, is always to call upon God for more help. As he puts it in these books—and this is a quote from Augustine—“The supreme task, in this world, of the pilgrim city of God, its whole task during this mortal life, is to call upon God;” to call upon God for help. So Augustine’s proposal for reading history is not simply one that gives us a nice lens to understand the events of history, it’s actually largely centered around reading history through the scriptural stories, reading history typologically; not, again, just to give us a vision of history, but also to enable us to experience ourselves as a certain kind of creature, to make us aware of a certain kind of stretched-outedness across time from which we suffer and from which we need a certain kind of healing. Far from being simply a way of talking about the past, then, Augustine’s method for reading history is a profound strategy for forming the Christian self as a creature with a certain relationship to time, and one who knows they stand in need of divine aid to help them reintegrate themselves. Augustine’s proposal for reading history, then, and for seeing one’s whole life as a practice of reading, is a very powerful one—both psychologically and historically. It’s been tremendously influential in Christian practice, and it stands behind the continued insistence among the churches of the West that the Bible is a text that should be read and reread by Christians throughout their lives. But it’s not without its suspicions. In the modern world, we’re typically skeptical of such typological strategies for reading, or for history. And our suspicions are threefold. First, this approach seems to not take the literality of history with sufficient seriousness. Why is the most important thing about an event that it reinforces some other moral

• From Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982)

  And the rest of the class snickered, as the teacher tore the page out of my notebook. “Now I am going to give you one more chance,” she said, as she printed another fierce A at the head of the new page. “Now you copy that letter exactly the way it is, and the rest of the class will have to wait for you.” She placed the crayon squarely back into my fingers. By this time I had no idea at all what this lady wanted from me, and so I cried and cried for the rest of the morning until my mother came to fetch me home at noon. I cried on the street while we stopped to pick up my sisters, and for most of the way home, until my mother threatened to box my ears for me if I didn’t stop embarrassing her on the street. That afternoon, after Phyllis and Helen were back in school, and I was helping her dust, I told my mother how they had given me crayons to write with and how the teacher didn’t want me to write my name. When my father came home that evening, the two of them went into counsel. It was decided that my mother would speak to the teacher the next morning when she brought me to school, in order to find out what I had done wrong. This decision was passed on to me, ominously, because of course I must have done something wrong to have made Miss Teacher so angry with me. The next morning at school, the teacher told my mother that she did not think that I was ready yet for kindergarten, because I couldn’t follow directions, and I wouldn’t do as I was told. My mother knew very well I could follow directions, because she herself had spent a good deal of effort and arm-power making it very painful for me whenever I did not follow directions. And she also believed that a large part of the function of school was to make me learn how to do what I was told to do. In her private opinion, if this school could not do that, then it was not much of a school and she was going to find a school that could. In other words, my mother had made up her mind that school was where I belonged. That same morning, she took me off across the street to the catholic school, where she persuaded the nuns to put me into the first grade, since I could read already, and write my name on regular paper with a real pencil. If I sat in the first row I could see the blackboard. My mother also told the nuns that unlike my two sisters, who were models of deportment, I was very unruly, and that they should spank me whenever I needed it.

• From House of Holes: A Book of Raunch (2011)

  She held the purse out to him and Dennis gingerly reached in. He felt around for a moment, found her keys, and then under it came across the tiny book. “Ooh, I’m squeezing it,” he said. “I wish my name were in here.” “It can be,” she said. “How?” he asked. “Become an investor in my film.” “I’ll think seriously about that.” Mindy held open her purse wider. “Come inside where it’s dark and warm,” she said. He bent and gazed deep and then, shrinking, he fell forward and was enveloped in purseness. “Come with me, Mindy,” he called as he shrank. He smelled the fumes of leather and bottles of nail polish, and he saw Mindy’s driver’s license picture staring at him behind plastic. Her eyes were generous and pretty. He lay for a minute in the jumble of her things, and then it occurred to him that if he didn’t climb out, he would probably suffocate. He grabbed the edge of the purse and hauled himself out onto the floor of a fancy hotel room. He sat, collecting his wits, until he had grown back to his normal size. The purse was on the floor next to him. “Mindy, are you in there?” he called. She wasn’t. He felt an odd tickling or burning sensation in the tip of his penis, and he heard a tiny voice shouting something muffled. He got up and took off his chinos and peered into his striped boxer shorts. Something was definitely going on inside his penis. He stripped off his boxers and sat on the edge of the bed, lifting his penis so that he could get a better look. Mindy’s head was protruding from its tip. Just her head and neck were visible. “Good lord, are you all right?” he said. “I think so!” Mindy shouted in her tiny voice. “Welcome to the House of Holes. I’m here stuck in your penis for some reason.” “Can you get out? You’re so teeny-tiny!” Mindy said something. “What did you say?” said Dennis. “You have to really shout, I’m afraid.” “I said that I feel like a kidney stone!” “Oh. We really need to get you safely out of there.” Dennis thought for a moment. “I don’t think I should try to pull on your head.” “No, you might injure me.” Mindy struggled, trying without success to free her arms, which were pinned next to her body. “I just need a good push. Do you think you could try urinating? That would work, I think. I’ll hold my breath.” “Well, I could try, but I’m warning you I’ve got a shy bladder.” Dennis went into the bathroom and got a glass and held it under his penis and pushed.

• From The City of God

  398 Books That Matter: The City of God „Politics is the coordination of desires among different people with different desires, and whose individual desires are not even themselves collectively coherent or durably stable. It is an attempt to create conditions in which humans can flourish, but which at best only partially satisfy our ends. This view understands politics as always shadowed by the threat—and not infrequently by the reality—of violence. „The conditions of the fallen world and the unruliness of our fallen wills make compulsion necessary. Thus compromise is not only imperfect, but typically held together by the tacit threat of violence. So force is necessary. Augustine reframes the issue: The question is not about whether Christians should participate in social life, but how. ›Augustine offers the example of the hard case: the judge who, as part of the legitimate civil authority, is compelled to use violence in order to determine the truth and who may, in fact, kill the one person from whom he might have learned that truth. ›Augustine takes the judge’s tragic and paradoxical situation as a kind of summit from which we may view the whole expanse of the miserable necessities of human society. And it raises a profound question: Given such inescapable tragedy, should the judge serve, should any of us serve? ›Augustine’s answer: Sociality is part of our existence, required for our flourishing, but accepting this burden may involve Our proper expectations for political life should be minimal; this minimum of expectation allows Christians to participate in worldly political life, with one crucial provision: that the temporal authorities not impede the religion.

• From The City of God

  391 More specifically, he wants to promote two kinds of ambiguity here—one temporal, the other spatial. We should be fully certain of neither where we are in this world, or when. To inhabit this stance, Augustine counsels patience, waiting, not trying to presume that we can achieve ultimate ends now. To live in history is to accept obscurity and ambiguity into our lives. The events in which we participate have meanings, for sure, but the full determinate shape of those meanings are deferred until the eschaton. So, we need to be humbly uncertain about where we are and where our interlocutors are when it comes to enumerating who is inside the city of God and who is not. Even outside the definitive borders of revelation, even in the heartland of the pagan religious traditions themselves, Augustine finds moments of true witness to Christ. And besides, consider the good man Job who was, after all, not a descendant of Abraham but an Uzzite, living long before Abraham. Or, consider the mysterious oracles of the Sibylline prophesies, some of which we now know, he says, point to Christ, even though they were central to pagan religious tradition. Especially interesting here is Augustine’s discussion of the life of the city of God on pilgrimage in this world as a life of a mixed church, composed of both the eventually elect and the eventually reprobate. Can you tell them neatly apart? Furthermore, in the worldly context of today, some present-day non-Christians will eventually become Christian. All of this should make us think back to what Christ did in Christ’s life, Augustine says. And Christ, in his life, used all for good. He used people like Judas as well and established what Augustin calls a pattern of forbearance with wicked men, moving from his own humiliation to his later exaltation through this use. So should we treat our own challenges, Augustine says to his fellow Christians, as opportunities for spiritual growth on the part of the faithful, and possibly spiritual growth on the part of those who are non-faithful now. We know neither—who among our opponents is our true Lecture 18 Transcript—Translating the Imperium (Book 18)

• From The City of God

  404 Books That Matter: The City of God Thus Christians are constantly made more aware of, and must constantly publicly confess, their need of faith and grace. The good life is not found here on earth; this life is too fragile, and true harmony of body and spirit is never realized here. Even virtue’s life on earth must wage perpetual war against the vices. Each of the virtues is known in its struggles, not in its accomplished, quiet [plaid ?-0:06:42] placidity. The virtue of temperance, Augustine says, is manifest in unending resistance to desires of flesh; the virtue of prudence in a constant monitoring of our situation for evil; the virtue of justice is discovered in an endless struggle to order all that is always tending entropically toward disorder; and the virtue of courage is found in the need to bear, with patience, the evils of this world. So not even the life of virtue in our world is a realm of settled delight; to seek to live rightly in this life is to pick a fight with the very structures of the cosmos as we find them, the inextricable conditions of life in this fallen world. And yet, we cannot conclude that our happiness lies in escaping our embodied condition, in becoming some sort of strong Stoic sage, who confuses true tranquility with insensate stupor, or those other philosophers like Cato again who conflate the end of life with ending this life/ with seeking secure and settled happiness through an escapist suicidal flight from here. For Augustine, true virtues can exist only in those in whom there is true piety and godliness, and even so, in those people, true virtue does not promise full happiness here; we can only ever at best be happy in hope. According to Augustine, then, Christians differ from pagan philosophers both in their conception of the good and in their understanding of how that good will be realized in their own lives. All the routes to happiness that the philosophers and others have scouted out are shown here to be inadequate. This world is filled with opportunities for destabilizing misery, and even any attempt to avoid that misery would simply leave us more miserable still. The world for

• From Notes of a Native Son (1955)

  But in the situation in which Americans found themselves, these beliefs threatened an idea which, whether or not one likes to think so, is the very warp and woof of the heritage of the West, the idea of white supremacy. Americans have made themselves notorious by the shrillness and the brutality with which they have insisted on this idea, but they did not invent it; and it has escaped the world’s notice that those very excesses of which Americans have been guilty imply a certain, unprecedented uneasiness over the idea’s life and power, if not, indeed, the idea’s validity. The idea of white supremacy rests simply on the fact that white men are the creators of civilization (the present civilization, which is the only one that matters; all previous civilizations are simply “contributions” to our own) and are therefore civilization’s guardians and defenders. Thus it was impossible for Americans to accept the black man as one of themselves, for to do so was to jeopardize their status as white men. But not so to accept him was to deny his human reality, his human weight and complexity, and the strain of denying the overwhelmingly undeniable forced Americans into rationalizations so fantastic that they approached the pathological. At the root of the American Negro problem is the necessity of the American white man to find a way of living with the Negro in order to be able to live with himself. And the history of this problem can be reduced to the means used by Americans—lynch law and law, segregation and legal acceptance, terrorization and concession—either to come to terms with this necessity, or to find a way around it, or (most usually) to find a way of doing both these things at once. The resulting spectacle, at once foolish and dreadful, led someone to make the quite accurate observation that “the Negro-in-America is a form of insanity which overtakes white men.” In this long battle, a battle by no means finished, the unforeseeable effects of which will be felt by many future generations, the white man’s motive was the protection of his identity; the black man was motivated by the need to establish an identity. And despite the terrorization which the Negro in America endured and endures sporadically until today, despite the cruel and totally inescapable ambivalence of his status in his country, the battle for his identity has long ago been won. He is not a visitor to the West, but a citizen there, an American; as American as the Americans who despise him, the Americans who fear him, the Americans who love him—the Americans who became less than themselves, or rose to be greater than themselves by virtue of the fact that the challenge he represented was inescapable. He is perhaps the only black man in the world whose relationship to white men is more terrible, more subtle, and more meaningful than the relationship of bitter possessed to uncertain possessor.

• From The City of God

  426 Books That Matter: The City of God should read scripture as a guide to life in this world. He shows how the struggle to read the Last Judgment properly is just as hard as the struggle to read scripture’s proposals about the rest of life properly. According to Augustine, then, we must master the difficult task of admitting the limits of our knowing, while yet affirming the truth of theological claims without thereby presuming that we ourselves understand what those claims fully and exhaustively mean. We are tempted toward such grandiose affirmations of complete clarity, Augustine suggests, as an anxious response to our authentic experience of the world, an experience whose primary note, he says, is one of a profound ambivalence and ambiguity. In fact, it is this felt ambiguity to the world, and our own experienced ambivalence at it, that might make us lunge for doubt-silencing certainty in the first place. Here Augustine offers us an example. Consider, he says, the distribution of good and evil in our world, and the deep moral obscurity that a clear-eyed assessment of that distribution would suggest. For the world is deeply obscure. Punishments and reward seem not to track with any moral pattern whatsoever. It’s not only that good is not always rewarded, nor is it that by and large good is reliably rewarded and evil punished, nor is it even a matter of the inversion of good and evil, so that good gets reliably harmed in this life while evil predictably benefits; it is rather that, in general, good does seem to get rewarded, and evil does seem to harm itself, but the exceptions are so vast, and broad, and frequent, as to make that general pattern not sufficiently visible unless one strains one’s eyes really hard. All we have, it seems, is randomness, noise. In fact, it would be easier to bear, Augustine says, if goodness were reliably punished with suffering—for then, at least, we would know what to expect. We would most prefer perfect justice, that is to say, but if we cannot have that or even a reliable approximation of that, we would at least appreciate some predictability, even if that predictability were that good was punished, and evil was rewarded.

• From Notes of a Native Son (1955)

  I am told that there are Haitians able to trace their ancestry back to African kings, but any American Negro wishing to go back so far will find his journey through time abruptly arrested by the signature on the bill of sale which served as the entrance paper for his ancestor. At the time—to say nothing of the circumstances—of the enslavement of the captive black man who was to become the American Negro, there was not the remotest possibility that he would ever take power from his master’s hands. There was no reason to suppose that his situation would ever change, nor was there, shortly, anything to indicate that his situation had ever been different. It was his necessity, in the words of E. Franklin Frazier, to find a “motive for living under American culture or die.” The identity of the American Negro comes out of this extreme situation, and the evolution of this identity was a source of the most intolerable anxiety in the minds and the lives of his masters. For the history of the American Negro is unique also in this: that the question of his humanity, and of his rights therefore as a human being, became a burning one for several generations of Americans, so burning a question that it ultimately became one of those used to divide the nation. It is out of this argument that the venom of the epithet Nigger! is derived. It is an argument which Europe has never had, and hence Europe quite sincerely fails to understand how or why the argument arose in the first place, why its effects are so frequently disastrous and always so unpredictable, why it refuses until today to be entirely settled. Europe’s black possessions remained—and do remain—in Europe’s colonies, at which remove they represented no threat whatever to European identity. If they posed any problem at all for the European conscience, it was a problem which remained comfortingly abstract: in effect, the black man, as a man, did not exist for Europe. But in America, even as a slave, he was an inescapable part of the general social fabric and no American could escape having an attitude toward him.

• From Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953)

  He rose and mounted the pulpit steps, and took from the small opening at the bottom of the pulpit three tambourines. He gave one to Sister McCandless, who nodded and smiled, not breaking her rhythm, and he put the rest on a chair near Sister Price. ‘ This may be the last time I sing with you This may be my last time, I don’t know .’ He watched them, singing with them—because otherwise they would force him to sing—and trying not to hear the words that he forced outwards from his throat. And he thought to clap his hands, but he could not; they remained tightly folded in his lap. If he did not sing they would be upon him, but his heart told him that he had no right to sing or to rejoice. ‘Oh, this May be my last time This May be my last time Oh, this May be my last time …’ And he watched Elisha, who was a young man in the Lord; who, a priest after the order of Melchizedek, had been given power over death and Hell. The Lord had lifted him up, and turned him around, and set his feet on the shining way. What were the thoughts of Elisha when night came, and he was alone where no eye could see, and no tongue bear witness, save only the trumpet-like tongue of God? Were his thoughts, his bed, his body foul? What were his dreams? ‘ This may be my last time, I don’t know .’ Behind him the door opened and the wintry air rushed in. He turned to see, entering the door, his father, his mother, and his aunt. It was only the presence of his aunt that shocked him, for she had never entered this church before: she seemed to have been summoned to witness a bloody act. It was in all her aspect, quiet with a dreadful quietness, as she moved down the aisle behind his mother and knelt for a moment beside his mother and father to pray. John knew that it was the hand of the Lord that had led her to this place, and his heart grew cold. The Lord was riding on the wind to-night. What might that wind have spoken before the morning came?

• From Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953)

  Aunt Florence moved to the mantelpiece and put her handbag down near the metal serpent. From the room behind him, John heard the baby begin to whimper. ‘John,’ said his mother, ‘go and pick her up like a good boy.’ Her hands, which were not trembling, were still busy: she had opened the bottle of iodine and was cutting up strips of bandage. John walked into his parents’ bedroom and picked up the squalling baby, who was wet. The moment Ruth felt him lift her up she stopped crying and stared at him with a wide-eyed, pathetic stare, as though she knew that there was trouble in the house. John laughed at her so ancient-seeming distress—he was very fond of his baby sister—and whispered in her ear as he started back to the living-room: ‘Now, you let your big brother tell you something, baby. Just as soon as you’s able to stand on your feet, you run away from this house, run far away.’ He did not quite know why he said this, or where he wanted her to run, but it made him feel instantly better. His father was saying, as John came back into the room: ‘I’m sure going to be having some questions to ask you in a minute, old lady. I’m going to be wanting to know just how come you let this boy go out and get half killed.’ ‘Oh, no, you ain’t,’ said Aunt Florence. ‘You ain’t going to be starting none of that mess this evening. You know right doggone well that Roy don’t never ask nobody if he can do nothing —he just go right ahead and do like he pleases. Elizabeth sure can’t put no ball and chain on him. She got her hands full right here in this house, and it ain’t her fault if Roy got a head just as hard as his father’s.’ ‘You got a awful lot to say, look like for once you could keep from putting your mouth in my business.’ He said this without looking at her. ‘It ain’t my fault,’ she said, ‘that you was born a fool, and always done been a fool, and ain’t never going to change. I swear to my Father you’d try the patience of Job.’ ‘I done told you before,’ he said—he had not ceased working over the moaning Roy, and was preparing now to dab the wound with iodine—‘that I didn’t want you coming in here and using that gutter language in front of my children.’ ‘Don’t you worry about my language, brother,’ she said with spirit, ‘you better start worrying about your life. What these children hear ain’t going to do them near as much harm as what they see .’ ‘What they see ,’ his father muttered, ‘is a poor man trying to serve the Lord.

• From House of Holes: A Book of Raunch (2011)

  Yes. It’s Cardell.” She handed him the phone. “Cardell, I thought I told you to leave my condo,” said the husband in an even voice. “I will,” said Cardell, “but you should know that your wife was telling me all about how you take her like a madman at least once a week, if not oftener, and leave her fully satisfied.” “That’s private information!” “True, but she says you’re quite the cocksman. She says you slap your dick on her ass to make her feel its meat. She says she knows just how to come with you inside because your knob is special and fits her perfectly. She seems quite content with you as a husband and a lover.” He sounded relieved. “That’s welcome news, at least.” “But look, man, she’s clearly a highly sexed woman, and she wants to show me how she takes care of important business when you’re out on the road selling the cheese, or whatever.” “I draw the line there.” “You shouldn’t draw that line, sir. I’m looking at her, and I can tell you she is nasty for the handle. This is a big, big urge she’s got. I think if you don’t say yes she may get frustrated and take me as a lover. ” “No!” There was real anguish in his voice. Cardell let the reality sink in for a moment. “How about if she just tells me, briefly, and doesn’t show me. Would that work?” The husband made an explosive sigh. “Did she just go for a walk on that beach?” “Yes.” “I know she’s a beautiful woman and a highly sexed woman. She gets superhorny after she’s gone for a beach walk and found a couple of pieces of nice beach glass. Put her back on.” Cardell handed the phone back to Betsy. “I’ll just tell him about it, hon,” said Betsy, “I won’t show him. Yes, I promise. Okay. Love you, honey. Bye!” She hung up. “I’ll pop into the shower, Cardell. Meanwhile, we keep the screwdrivers in a tool belt hanging in the foyer. I like the one with the kelly green handle. Not the huge one with the blue handle—I tried that one once. Troppo big. Feel free to read a magazine. As you can see, my husband’s into mountain hiking.” Cardell went and got the screwdriver, and then he sat and read part of an article about crampons. He heard the shower going for a while in the pipes, and then he heard it turn off. Betsy emerged wearing a loose gray cotton dress with her hair turbaned and a different color of lipstick on. She was carrying a tube of something.

• From Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953)

  When they were finished Elisha sat down at the piano and played to himself. John sat on a chair in the front row and watched him. ‘Don’t look like nobody’s coming to-night,’ he said after a long while. Elisha did not arrest his playing of a mournful song: ‘Oh, Lord, have mercy on me.’ ‘They’ll be here,’ said Elisha. And as he spoke there was a knocking on the door. Elisha stopped playing. John went to the door, where two sisters stood, Sister McCandless and Sister Price. ‘Praise the Lord, son,’ they said. ‘Praise the Lord,’ said John. They entered, heads bowed and hands folded before them around their Bibles. They wore the black cloth coats that they wore all week and they had old felt hats on their heads. John felt a chill as they passed him, and he closed the door. Elisha stood up, and they cried again: ‘Praise the Lord!’ Then the two women knelt for a moment before their seats to pray. This was also passionate ritual. Each entering saint, before he could take part in the service, must commune for a moment alone with the Lord. John watched the praying women. Elisha sat again at the piano and picked up his mournful song. The women rose, Sister Price first, and then Sister McCandless, and looked around the church. ‘Is we the first?’ asked Sister Price. Her voice was mild, her skin was copper. She was younger than Sister McCandless by several years, a single woman who had never, as she testified, known a man. ‘No, Sister Price,’ smiled Brother Elisha, ‘Brother Johnny here was the first. Him and me cleaned up this evening.’ ‘Brother Johnny is mighty faithful,’ said Sister McCandless. ‘The Lord’s going to work with him in a mighty way, you mark my words.’ There were times—whenever, in fact, the Lord had shown His favour by working through her—when whatever Sister McCandless said sounded like a threat. To-night she was still very much under the influence of the sermon she had preached the night before. She was an enormous woman, one of the biggest and blackest God had ever made, and He had blessed her with a mighty voice with which to sing and preach, and she was going out soon into the field. For many years the Lord had pressed Sister McCandless to get up, as she said, and move; but she had been of timid disposition and feared to set herself above others. Not until He laid her low, before this very altar, had she dared to rise and preach the gospel.

• From Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953)

  And what God had done for others, He could also do for him. But—out of all their troubles? Why did his mother weep? Why did his father frown? If God’s power was so great, why were their lives so troubled? He had never tried to think of their trouble before; rather, he had never before confronted it in such a narrow place. It had always been there, at his back perhaps, all these years, but he had never turned to face it. Now it stood before him, staring, nevermore to be escaped, and its mouth was enlarged without any limit. It was ready to swallow him up. Only the hand of God could deliver him. Yet, in a moment, he somehow knew from the sound of that storm which rose so painfully in him now, which laid waste—for ever?—the strange, yet comforting landscape of his mind, that the hand of God would surely lead him into this staring, waiting mouth, these distended jaws, this hot breath as of fire. He would be led into darkness, and in darkness would remain; until in some incalculable time to come the hand of God would reach down and raise him up; he, John, who having lain in darkness would no longer be himself but some other man. He would have been changed, as they said, for ever; sown in dishonour, he would be raised in honour: he would have been born again. Then he would no longer be the son of his father, but the son of his Heavenly Father, the King. Then he need no longer fear his father, for he could take, as it were, their quarrel over his father’s head to Heaven—to the Father who loved him, who had come down in the flesh to die for him. Then he and his father would be equals, in the sight, and the sound, and the love of God. Then his father could not beat him any more, or despise him any more, or mock him any more—he, John, the Lord’s anointed. He could speak to his father then as men spoke to one another—as sons spoke to their fathers, not in trembling but in sweet confidence, not in hatred but in love. His father could not cast him out, whom God had gathered in. Yet, trembling, he knew that this was not what he wanted. He did not want to love his father; he wanted to hate him, to cherish that hatred, and give his hatred words one day. He did not want his father’s kiss—not any more, he who had received so many blows. He could not imagine, on any day to come and no matter how greatly he might be changed, wanting to take his father’s hand. The storm that raged in him to-night could not uproot this hatred, the mightiest tree in all John’s country, all that remained to-night, in this, John’s floodtime.

• From Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953)

  He paused and stared at John, who watched him helplessly, not knowing what to say. ‘And boy, some of them is real nice girls, I mean beautiful girls, and when you got so much power that they don’t tempt you then you know you saved sure enough. I just look at them and I tell them Jesus saved me one day, and I’m going to go all the way with Him. Ain’t no woman, no, nor no man neither going to make me change my mind.’ He paused again, and smiled and dropped his eyes. ‘That Sunday,’ he said, ‘that Sunday, you remember?—when Father got up in the pulpit and called me an Ella Mae down because he thought we was about to commit sin—well, boy, I don’t want to tell no lie, I was mighty hot against the old man that Sunday. But I thought about it, and the Lord made me to see that he was right. Me and Ella Mae, we didn’t have nothing on our minds at all, but look like the Devil is just everywhere—sometime the Devil he put his hand on you and look like you just can’t breathe. Look like you just a-burning up, and you got to do something, and you can’t do nothing; I been on my knees many a time, weeping and wrestling before the Lord— crying , Johnny—and calling on Jesus’ name. That’s the only name that’s got power over Satan. That’s the way it’s been with me sometime, and I’m saved. What you think it’s going to be like for you, boy?’ He looked at John, who, head down, was putting the chairs in order. ‘Do you want to be saved, Johnny?’ ‘I don’t know,’ John said. ‘Will you try him? Just fall on your knees one day and ask him to help you to pray?’ John turned away, and looked out over the church, which now seemed like a vast, high field, ready for the harvest. He thought of a First Sunday, a Communion Sunday not long ago when the saints, dressed all in white, ate flat, unsalted Jewish bread, which was the body of the Lord, and drank red grape juice, which was His blood. And when they rose from the table, prepared especially for this day, they separated, the men on the one side, and the women on the other, and two basins were filled with water so that they could wash each other’s feet, as Christ had commanded His disciples to do. They knelt before each other, woman before woman, and man before man, and washed and dried each other’s feet. Brother Elisha had knelt before John’s father. When the service was over they had kissed each other with a holy kiss. John turned again and looked at Elisha. Elisha looked at him and smiled. ‘You think about what I said, boy.’

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  CYRIL OF ALEXANDRIA. The narrow gate also represents the toils and sufferings of the saints. For as a victory in battle bears witness to the strength of the soldiers, so a courageous endurance of labours and temptations will make a man strong. CHRYSOSTOM. (24, 40. in Matt.) What then is that which our Lord says elsewhere, My yoke is easy, and my burden is light? (Matt. 11:30.) There is indeed no contradiction, but the one was said because of the nature of temptations, the other with respect to the feeling of those who overcame them. For whatever is troublesome to our nature may be considered easy when we undertake it heartily. Besides also, though the way of salvation is narrow at its entrance, yet through it we come into a large space, but on the contrary the broad way leadeth to destruction. GREGORY. (Mor. 11. c. 50.) Now when He was about to speak of the entrance of the narrow gate, He said first, strive, for unless the mind struggles manfully, the wave of the world is not overcome, by which the soul is ever thrown back again into the deep. CYRIL OF ALEXANDRIA. Now our Lord does not seem to satisfy him who asked whether there are few that be saved, when He declares the way by which man may become righteous. But it must be observed, that it was our Saviour’s custom to answer those who asked Him, not according as they might judge right, as often as they put to Him useless questions, but with regard to what might be profitable to His hearers. And what advantage would it have been to His hearers to know whether there should be many or few who would be saved. But it was more necessary to know the way by which man may come to salvation. Purposely then He says nothing in answer to the idle question, but turns His discourse to a more important subject. AUGUSTINE. (Serm. 111.) Or else, our Lord confirmed the words He heard, that is, by saying that there are few who are saved, for few enter by the strait gate, but in another place He says this very thing, Narrow is the way which leadeth unto life, and few there are who enter into it. (Matt. 7:14.) Therefore He adds, For many I say unto you shall seek to enter; BEDE. Urged thereto by their love of safety, yet shall not be able, frightened by the roughness of the road. BASIL. (Hom. in Psalm 1, 15.) For the soul wavers to and fro, at one time choosing virtue when it considers eternity, at another preferring pleasures when it looks to the present. Here it beholds ease, or the delights of the flesh, there its subjection or captive bondage; here drunkenness, there sobriety; here wanton mirth, there overflowing of tears; here dancing, there praying; here the sound of the pipe, there weeping; here lust, there chastity.