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.

Page 81 of 501 · 20 per page

• From Augustine: A New Biography (2005)

  When they arrived in Africa, Pinian and Melanie made their way to their estates at Tagaste, ostensibly to sit at the feet of Alypius, whom they had heard to be most skilled in scriptural matters, though they observed of the town in passing that it looked extremely poor to their eyes.460 Such an arrival created a huge stir among the notables of the town. Augustine probably never saw any such thing in his years growing up there, when his family’s friend and patron Romanianus was the richest man they had to do with. The estates that Melanie and her husband had inherited were, in the absence of such visitors, large economic facts of life but detached from the practicalities of local society and politics. Alypius, as bishop of Tagaste, naturally welcomed the visitors. A delicate process of “relationship management” followed, as the bishop let his guests know just how welcome their intention to divest themselves of their wealth could be, for reasons both spiritual and temporal. The local church could hope to benefit in both ways. Not long after coming to Tagaste, Pinian and Melanie made a visit to Hippo and found themselves in Augustine’s church. Things went badly that day, and Augustine found himself writing a long self-exculpatory letter to Melanie’s mother, Albina.461 The very first thing he needed to tell her was that Pinian had never had any reason to fear for his life, a reassurance that had to be sobering in its own way! It had been, he went on to admit, an unruly situation and some outbreak of violence might have been possible, but happily the moment had passed. What had happened was simple and, in its way, predictable. Just as this same crowd twenty years earlier had pounced on the visiting Tagastan Augustine and forced him to accept ordination as priest, so too this day they wanted to claim Pinian for their clergy and their community, and with him his wealth. As the storm of acclaim erupted in church, Augustine intervened and told the congregation that he had promised Pinian that no such thing would occur and that if they forced Pinian to become a priest, he would no longer be their bishop. With that, he turned his back on the congregation and went back to his episcopal seat at the end of the apse. The crowd paused, and then roared back with their demands. A small group of the more distinguished members of the community came up to talk privately with Augustine in the apse, but he held firm, while the larger crowd roiled in the nave a few feet away. The situation grew ugly. Augustine insists in his account that he had stood firm, while admitting that he thought of walking out of the church, either alone or together with Alypius, but he feared violent outcomes no matter which course of action he followed.

• From Augustine: A New Biography (2005)

  And throughout we will struggle to hear his voice. We know it filled theaters and churches for over half a century and dictated the five million words that survive today in his published works. Once it even stopped a riot. Yet we know almost nothing of how he looked—tall or short, dark or light, though he was probably thin, by ascetic choice. Even the very oldest image, from sixth-century Rome, only approximates his dress, but it cannot be an image of the man himself. Far more familiar are the medieval, Renaissance, and modern paintings that turn him into a great bishop of those later ages. In their time, they were at best edifying; today we should be amused by them and persist in imagining a man who held people’s attention precisely by the way he seemed to eschew attention. So while we do know this of him, nothing that aspires to be a picture of the man has a prayer of being anything like him. Of the books he dictated in his study, and that survived through arduous hand-copying for a thousand years and repeated printing for another five hundred, the one that is most often read today he called Confessions, a work of extraordinary artifice and power. If we use that book and his other books to imagine his life, we might then fall into the same trap his contemporaries did: of being overpowered by him, of being seduced by his art, of being driven to accept his words as he intended them, of taking his world his way. By writing these famous confessions, he wanted us to learn his story, wanted to make us think he was coming entirely clean. But no one ever comes entirely clean. No one tells the whole story. We cannot tell the whole of our own story, much less that of someone who lived and died sixteen hundred years ago. But we can tell more of the story than Augustine told us, more than he sometimes knew. If we read his words and those of his contemporaries with resistance and imagination, they will reveal him to us in many ways. So we must struggle to hear his voice, and struggle at the same time not to be hypnotized by it. The balancing act is exhilarating and terrifying. Let’s start with these famous words: Inquietum est cor nostrum, donec requiescat in te. Our heart is restless, until it rests in you.4 They come from the first page of his Confessions. Another eighty thousand Latin words follow. Where do they come from? How did he speak them?

• From Augustine: A New Biography (2005)

  You don’t know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain’t no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth. That is nothing. I never seen anybody but lied one time or another, without it was Aunt Polly, or the widow, or maybe Mary. Aunt Polly—Tom’s Aunt Polly, she is—and Mary, and the Widow Douglas is all told about in that book, which is mostly a true book, with some stretchers, as I said before. You probably don’t know about Augustine without you having read, or at least heard about, the book called his Confessions. Perhaps, like me, you purchased a copy in a high school bookshop long ago because you had heard it had some salacious things in it. (If they’re there, I haven’t found them yet.) Since our first page, we’ve been preventing Augustine from getting on with his Confessions, taking time to look around at who he was and where he was and how he lived there. Now it’s time to let him have his say and see what we make of it. MAKING THE CONFESSIONS69 Augustine never practiced the humility of the man who would escape attention. In prostrating himself before the divine in the Confessions, Augustine performs an astonishing act of self-presentation and self-justification and, paradoxically, self-aggrandizement. Though friends and family get carefully scripted parts to play in the Confessions, the book as a whole is a one-man show, and a virtuoso performance at that. And for all that it is a testimony of faith and confidence, it is permeated with anxiety. Two threads mix, one light and one dark. The light and obvious thread is the description of a life’s career meant to impress its readers. No one could read the account of education and advancement without realizing that the youth Augustine had left behind had been a golden one: riding provincial ambition to a place on the fringes of the imperial retinue. He could write of this the more easily because he could dismiss it, but we get a good view of the future glory before Augustine casts it aside. As bishop and Christian, he was always the man who used to have a very different future, and made sure that you remembered it. The darker thread is harder to see. Much of it lies buried in the repellent and frustrating text of book 10, where bright mystical vision, culminating in luminous and often-quoted words (“I was late in loving you, beauty so old and so new, I was late in loving you!”70), is suddenly derailed by an obsessive and meticulous examination of conscience that sifts through the ashes of regret and anxiety for the possibility of past and future sin.

• From Augustine: A New Biography (2005)

  But Augustine was a moderate in his time and place. A gentleman named Publicola (whom some scholars think to be a very wealthy gentleman indeed, the father of the Melanie the younger we will meet later) wrote to him, probably in the late 390s, a letter full of fears.274 Barbarians on the frontier well south of Carthage came and negotiated with Roman officers there and swore by their own gods—demons, in Publicola’s and Augustine’s eyes—to make and keep the peace. But Publicola fretted—could a Christian benefit from such a defiled oath? Publicola went round and round that issue, asking related questions in half a dozen ways, enough to make us think that it was just that frontier-life confrontation with demons that had distressed him. He went on, once worked up, to ask another set of increasingly improbable, scruple-driven questions. What if I’m traveling, he wonders, and will perish of thirst unless I drink from a fountain in a temple of demons? What if someone, barbarian or Roman, is going to kill me—may I kill in self-defense? On the last point, Augustine was cautious, offering his consent most readily if the defender is a soldier, killing not on his own behalf but for others, and in this we see the muddled moderation that led to his acceptance of the notion of “just war.” But on the superstitious points, Augustine was sturdy and unanxious. The Christian is not defiled by what others do, but by what he does himself. This position is strictly inconsistent with belief in the power of demons, for then their words and food and drink and shrines really would be polluted and dangerous. Without coming explicitly to the point, Augustine seemed to be saying that the power of the Christian god so far outran that of the demons that a blithe disdain could accompany the truly faithful and confident Christian in an ambiguous world. THE BISHOP UTTERS A HARD SAYING Here is a fragment in Augustine’s voice newly heard just in the 1990s, a short sermon he gave as visiting preacher in another bishop’s pulpit somewhere in Africa. A wealthy and well-regarded man had died, a Christian who had not been baptized, a candidate member of the community. This fourth-century practice of postponing baptism often gave rise to whispers, as we have seen, that it was for people who would wait until the last minute after a lifetime of sin and peccadillo in order to get washed in the blood of the lamb just in time for it to do some good.

• From Augustine: A New Biography (2005)

  That Christian lives in a world divided sharply in two, between citizens of the earthly city and citizens of the heavenly city. In principle, this divides the world between members of the catholic church and all those who stand outside, but the actual dividing line is invisible. The visible church includes some, very likely many, who will not be saved in the end. Insistence on this point made Augustine’s Christianity focus on the imperfection of the church as it exists in the world, over against Donatist insistence on seeing the church as “without spot or wrinkle.”496 It was a matter of emphasis, with the Donatist more than mildly baffled at Augustine making a difference where the Donatist (happy to concede that some of the moment’s Christians would fall away before they died) could see none. The Christian of City of God is on the inside of the anxious and uncertain church of Augustine, there because it is the right place to be, but radically unsure of both himself and his colleagues—that is, utterly dependent still on god for future salvation. The old classical wheeze attributed to the early Greek law-giver Solon, “Count no man happy until he has died,”497 was literally true again for Augustine and his followers. The story told in City of God is the same one told in the Confessions, only now generalized to the whole church. In the creation of “paganism”—creation in the sense of elaborating and theorizing a hodge-podge of received opinions about “pagans”498—Augustine did his cause lasting damage. We may find inside his version of Christianity indications of an expansive and embracing modern notion of Christian community, one in which the “visible church” of later theology has a leadership position in a world that is genuinely all on the move toward divine reconciliation. But in practice the drawing of hard and sharp lines between the two cities left Christianity with no alternative but to imagine itself as forced to convert or condemn all those it encountered. At a moment of Christian universalism such as the fifth century, the costs seemed bearable, but in the ages of European colonialism, for example, a great price would be paid, and in a world of twentieth-century pluralism, Christianity would never quite be able to portray itself as the welcoming and embracing community that its best instincts and judgment told it to be. The understanding of history and promised redemption that Augustine evolves here is one already seen by at least a few of his contemporaries in the Donatist Tyconius, the renegade Donatist. (Augustine must have realized the irony.) Only in the 420s could Augustine acknowledge his influence openly, in the completion of Christian Doctrine. Even then, the credit that Tyconius will get from Augustine is hardly generous. But if we can see Augustine’s stamp on the doctrine of the two cities, he had seen something very like it in Tyconius and had been impressed.

• From The City of God

  Chapter 27. --That the Peace of Those Who Serve God Cannot in This Mortal Life Be Apprehended in Its Perfection. But the peace which is peculiar to ourselves we enjoy now with God by faith, and shall hereafter enjoy eternally with Him by sight. But the peace which we enjoy in this life, whether common to all or peculiar to ourselves, is rather the solace of our misery than the positive enjoyment of felicity. Our very righteousness, too, though true in so far as it has respect to the true good, is yet in this life of such a kind that it consists rather in the remission of sins than in the perfecting of virtues. Witness the prayer of the whole city of God in its pilgrim state, for it cries to God by the mouth of all its members, "Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. " [1306]And this prayer is efficacious not for those whose faith is "without works and dead," [1307] but for those whose faith "worketh by love. " [1308]For as reason, though subjected to God, is yet "pressed down by the corruptible body," [1309] so long as it is in this mortal condition, it has not perfect authority over vice, and therefore this prayer is needed by the righteous. For though it exercises authority, the vices do not submit without a struggle. For however well one maintains the conflict, and however thoroughly he has subdued these enemies, there steals in some evil thing, which, if it does not find ready expression in act, slips out by the lips, or insinuates itself into the thought; and therefore his peace is not full so long as he is at war with his vices. For it is a doubtful conflict he wages with those that resist, and his victory over those that are defeated is not secure, but full of anxiety and effort. Amidst these temptations, therefore, of all which it has been summarily said in the divine oracles, "Is not human life upon earth a temptation? " [1310] who but a proud man can presume that he so lives that he has no need to say to God, "Forgive us our debts? " And such a man is not great, but swollen and puffed up with vanity, and is justly resisted by Him who abundantly gives grace to the humble. Whence it is said, "God resisteth the proud, but giveth grace to the humble. " [1311]In this, then, consists the righteousness of a man, that he submit himself to God, his body to his soul, and his vices, even when they rebel, to his reason, which either defeats or at least resists them; and also that he beg from God grace to do his duty, [1312] and the pardon of his sins, and that he render to God thanks for all the blessings he receives. But, in that final peace to which all our righteousness has reference, and for the sake of which it is maintained, as our nature shall enjoy a sound immortality and incorruption, and shall have no more vices, and as we shall experience no resistance either from ourselves or from others, it will not be necessary that reason should rule vices which no longer exist, but God shall rule the man, and the soul shall rule the body, with a sweetness and facility suitable to the felicity of a life which is done with bondage. And this condition shall there be eternal, and we shall be assured of its eternity; and thus the peace of this blessedness and the blessedness of this peace shall be the supreme good.

• From Shunned (2018)

  My Bible lay open on my lap, the gold leaf long since worn from its pages. I struggled to concentrate. My haunting, awkward conversation the day before with Nick Marshall kept forcing itself into my mind’s eye. Ross sat next to me, eyes focused on the speaker, occasionally nodding his head. We were at the Kingdom Hall, in our usual seats, four rows from the front. Vince Lloyd, one of our favorite elders and a talented orator, was delivering the Sunday sermon: “Beware of Subtle Worldly Influences.” “Remember, friends, that Jehovah is a God who exacts exclusive devotion. It’s important to regularly reflect upon our lives and see where our loyalties lie. It is not enough just to be separate from the world, but to hate the world, abhorring what is wicked.” He had just finished reading from Genesis the story of Dinah, whose life was ruined when she gave her heart to an unbeliever. Dinah didn’t just bring suffering on herself; her brothers got into the mix, murder and mayhem ensued, and an entire family was undone, all because Dinah spent too much time with her worldly neighbors. Nick’s creased brow, a mix of patience and pensiveness, dominated my thoughts. Each time I thought of our exchange on his doorstep, I was riddled with tension. My entire life was spent secure in the knowledge that I had The Truth. Witnesses refer to people as being either “in” or “out” of The Truth. The “T” is always capitalized. Jesus said the truth would set you free, and I had always felt lucky to be born into the one true way. And when we knocked on doors, we were bearing witness to the One True God, Jehovah. “‘You are my witnesses,’ says Jehovah.” I understood my role in the world to be one of telling The Truth about Jehovah and his purposes, like a character witness in a court of law. (“Do you swear to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help you God?” “I do.”) From my earliest days, I was certain of my religious beliefs. During my grammar school years, my convictions for political neutrality excused me from things like saying the Pledge of Allegiance and standing for the National Anthem. I didn’t attend birthday or Christmas parties because their pagan origins could poison my worship of the Almighty. When it came time for the annual school holiday program, I would venture off to the library, reading a book while “Silent Night” floated through the hollow halls. Crouched in a wooden chair of the fiction section, I sat, a lone soul among a sea of books—a bit lonely, yes, but innocent the hypocrisy of false Christianity, which had bastardized true worship by embracing heathen rituals. Lucky for me, I liked to read.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  The suffering and rejection Karlstadt experienced—Luther had made him feel “anxiety, envy, hatred, and disgrace”—enabled him to reach Gelassenheit.61 As he wrote in a dialogue that dealt line by line with Luther’s Against the Heavenly Prophets: “Through such suffering we must subdue, break, and subordinate to the spirit our untamed flesh in order to assist hope, strengthen faith, and firm up the word. For tribulation brings about patience and patience leads to a certain knowledge and experience.” This, he insisted, had nothing to do with the “works of love,” the self-mortification and asceticism practiced by the monks, with which Luther identified his ideas.62 What both men had in common, however, is that they invoked experience. For Luther, the story of his heroic stance at Worms was proof that he alone was the touchstone of truth, while Karlstadt regarded his own persecution and suffering as unique. It was something that Luther, living in his secure professorship in Wittenberg, could never understand. Thus the dispute between Luther and Karlstadt was personal as well as intellectual, reflecting both men’s understanding of their individual history and destiny.63 Luther’s sacramental theology did not determine his moral theology, but the two were of a piece. His differences with Karlstadt over the sacrament were paralleled by divergent theologies of marriage and morals, and would soon become a major fissure within the Reformation more broadly. Luther’s evangelical opponents, who drew a sharp distinction between flesh and spirit, subscribed largely to two broad views. Some, like Karlstadt, could never entirely reconcile wedded life with Gelassenheit and remained ambivalent about marriage, not only because it involved physical pleasure, but also because it brought emotional attachments to spouse and children.64 Müntzer too sometimes hinted that it would be better to remain chaste. (Indeed, according to the Lutheran Johann Agricola’s mischievous story, Müntzer was so “spiritual” that he showed no joy when told of the birth of his son on Easter Day 1524.)65 This unease about the “flesh” would be shared by a variety of spiritualist and Anabaptist thinkers—Anabaptists rejected infant baptism—many of whom were influenced directly by Karlstadt or Müntzer. Formed by their Catholic pasts, with its disgust for sex as polluting, many found it impossible to imagine that any sexual liaison could be pleasing to God. Some, however, building on the idea of marriage as a sacrament in which physical union was an integral part, tried to sacralize sex, believing that God had called them to leave their spouse and take a new “marital sister.” One group of Anabaptists who became known as the Thuringian “blood friends” even held that sexual union was the “Christ-izing,” the true sacrament that should replace the Eucharist. For them, the sacrament had to be experienced in the flesh, and sex itself, the epitome of “fleshly” expression, had to be spiritualized.66

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  WB 10, 4014, [early Aug. 1544], 616, Editor’s Introduction, Melanchthons Briefwechsel—Regesten online, 3646, Aug. 8, [1544]; in this letter to Veit Dietrich he also mentioned Amsdorf’s criticism of his draft of the Cologne Reformation, which Luther had thought mild, so he expected a new dispute to blow up; and see 3648, Aug. 8, 1544, where he praises mild sermons and describes being himself in danger because of his measured views. In letters to Camerarius and Dietrich (3652, 3653, Aug. 11, [1544]; 3658, Aug. 12 [1544]; and see 3667, Aug. 28, [1544]; 3669 [Aug. 28, 1544]), Melanchthon mentioned Amsdorf ’s bitter critique again, repeating that Luther thought it “mild.” Luther, he wrote, had declared war in his sermons on 1 Corinthians; and he feared a whole new dispute over the sacrament; he might have to leave Wittenberg. Luther, he worried, was writing a new work on the sacrament attacking both Melanchthon and Bucer. Bucer, to whom Melanchthon also wrote, reported all this to Landgrave Philip of Hesse, trying to get him to calm the storm by talking to the Elector. 70. WB 11, 4139, July 28, 1545, 149:15–16; 19; 8. This was not the first time he had had enough of the Wittenbergers. In late 1529 he had simply stopped preaching in the city church for several months, and did not resume until late March; WB 5, 1521, Jan. 18, 1530. 71. WB 11, 4143, Aug. 5, 1545, esp. 163ff. 72. Walch, XXI b, 3131–32, 3131. Despite suffering from very severe attacks of the stone, Luther visited his old friends Jonas and Camerarius too, traveling from Zeitz to Merseburg, Eisleben, Leipzig, and Torgau; WB 11, 4143, Aug. 5, 1545, 165. 18. Hatreds 1. WS 50, 284–308. Luther’s preface refers to the foxtails with which the bishops wanted to cleanse the Church, so he must have had a hand in the making of this image, too. See also Brecht, Luther, III, 191. 2. WS 54, 346. 3. WS 54, 206–99; LW 41, 257–376. 4. LW 41, 273, 278, 334; WS 54, 214:30; 218:19–21; 265:11–13; 16–17. 5. WT 3, 3543A and 3543B. In 1537, when Luther nearly died at Schmalkalden, he also said that his epitaph should remain true: Pestis eram vivens, moriens ero mors tua, papa (Living I was your plague; dying I will be your death, O Pope); 3543A, 390:17. Cochlaeus also referred to it; Vandiver, Keen, and Frazel, eds. and trans., Luther’s Lives, 349. On the legacy of these images in later print, see Paas, The German Political Broadsheet, vols. 1 and 2. 6. WS 54, 346; Cochlaeus described this and other woodcuts as “obscoenas figuras,” printed at Wittenberg: Grisar and Heege, Luthers Kampf bilder, III, 4. 7. Francisco, Luther and Islam; Ehmann, Luther, Türken und Islam . 8. See Thomas Kaufmann, “Türckenbüchlein.” Zur christlichen Wahrnehmung “türkischer Religion” in Spätmittelalter und Reformation . 9. WS 30, 2, 107–48, Vom Kriege wider die Türken, 127. 10.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Karlstadt evidently meant them. 31 But Wittenberg and the university also faced other problems. Luther’s renown had attracted hordes of students and the university had seen a strong growth in numbers up to 1521, so much so that Luther had fretted about how to house them all. Melanchthon’s lectures were also famed, and students had thronged the halls to hear them. But the Reformation’s attack on scholasticism was also a general assault on intellectual training itself, and it offered little to replace it. With theology the most important intellectual discipline of the day, a crisis in theology heralded a crisis of intellectual life. After hearing Karlstadt preach, the student Philipp Eberbach, who had come to Wittenberg to study the Roman rhetorician Quintilian, no longer saw the point: “I said farewell to the Muses.” 32 With begging, the major source of student funding, gone, and with intellectual endeavor put into question, student numbers dropped precipitously. Many were reported to be leaving town; even Melanchthon was rumored to be planning to leave Wittenberg by Easter. 33 The fall in enrollments greatly worried the Elector and Spalatin, but the problem did not concern just Wittenberg. Right across the empire student numbers collapsed throughout the rest of the 1520s. The University of Greifswald even had to close its doors for a generation. The clergy too was transformed by the evangelical message. The immediate effect of the attack on private Masses was to destroy at a stroke the whole ecclesiastical career structure. And who would now want their sons to enter the Church? Whatever else the Reformation meant, it would entail a massive reduction in the numbers of clergy, culling both the clerical proletariat of priests saying private Masses and the upper clerical ranks with their substantial benefices. Neither priests nor university men had a monopoly on religious truth any longer. Anyone, even the unlettered, could understand the Bible for themselves. In late December 1521, a group of three prophets arrived in Wittenberg from nearby Zwickau, claiming that God spoke to them directly. Nikolaus Storch and Thomas Drechsel were journeyman cloth-makers; the third, Markus Thomas or Stübner, had attended university in Wittenberg, but he was the son of a bathkeeper whose name “Stübner” betrayed his origins. Because of their close contact with the body, bathkeepers were regarded as dishonorable, their status so low that marriage to a bathkeeper’s child meant social death. Storch had already caused considerable excitement in his hometown, where he set up conventicles and stressed the importance of direct revelation. Stübner, who knew Melanchthon well, argued that infant baptism could not be found in Scripture. The Zwickau prophets represented a new kind of evangelical movement that owed little or nothing to universities.

• From Shunned (2018)

  But there was only so much I could take in one week, and I told her I wouldn’t come until Saturday. That would give me time to recuperate from the polemic of the previous week. Ross and I found new ways to move around each other in the house. We were both considerate yet clumsy, experimenting with our independence, trying not to get in each other’s way. He started sleeping on a futon in his office. We stopped our occasional carpooling to work, and I left off calling to tell him when I’d be home or to discuss dinner plans. Tuesday night, I made a point of arriving home after he’d left for the Kingdom Hall. He’d left a note in the kitchen, encouraging me to eat the leftover chicken. I started a fire with a Presto log, and then I sat for a while, sipping a glass of wine, staring at the flames, my mind uncoiling with each flicker of light. After eating, I put Gloria Estefan on the stereo and danced in the living room to “Get on Your Feet,” replaying it several times until my clothes were damp with perspiration. I relished the huge release of energy and felt just as spiritual as—and much happier than—I would have felt sitting through another Bible lesson. By the time Ross came home, I was fast asleep in bed. Chapter 7 I’m not intolerant. I just know what it says in the Scriptures. —Jesse Helms My sister’s home was tucked behind another house on Oak Street, just a few blocks from my parents’. I walked down the short paved sidewalk and entered through the back door. I found Lory in the bathroom. Two pieces of the white floor tiling were displaced, and tubes of grout and caulking were open and resting on a folded newspaper. She was wearing rubber gloves. “Just give me a minute,” she said. “These tiles came loose, and I want to let them set while we visit.” I was grateful for the distraction, which allowed me to settle in. I wasn’t sure what would happen here between us, but I knew she would have some choice words for me about getting a divorce and taking a sabbatical from The Truth. Lory’s role in this drama was to talk some sense into me. I looked up to Lory and was proud she was my sister, and I never doubted her love for me. But growing up, six years apart in age, we always seemed to be moving to a slightly different beat. We never sat for hours in our pajamas, brushing each other’s hair, talking about boys, giggling, sharing our darkest fears and shimmering hopes.

• From Shunned (2018)

  I always sensed she had drawn an unspoken emotional line that I didn’t dare breach, so I never felt a sustained closeness to her. Regardless, Lory was one of the most intelligent people I knew, the kind of person you could see becoming a revolutionary brain surgeon or physicist. Instead, when she got out of high school in the early ’70s, she immediately started pioneering and supported herself with part-time housekeeping jobs. After all, Armageddon was coming and all prophecies pointed to these being the Last Days of the worldly system. Her mental acuity became focused on the Scriptures, and she spent hours studying theocratic literature and researching topics in the encyclopedic Aid to Bible Understanding and other Watchtower Society tomes. Now, as my sister and I walked into her kitchen, I saw that she’d set out two sets of teacups and shot glasses, and a full bottle of Crown Royal Black. Steam was languishing over a teakettle on the stove. A small plate held tea biscuits and my favorite chocolate-covered toffee. “It looks like you’ve prepared for all contingencies,” I said. “Booze, caffeine, chocolate, and sugar.” “That’s right,” Lory said. She wasn’t the sort to fuss over me, and I was surprised and touched that she would have taken the time to make these preparations. It lessened the knot I felt in my belly. No. That is exactly what she wants—for you to relax. You’re dealing with a smart cookie here. Keep your wits about you. I took a deep breath. She surprised me by pouring whiskey into both shot glasses. My sister had never had a taste or physical tolerance for alcohol. “Would you like some tea?” she asked, and I said I would. She pulled a tray from the cupboard, lined it with a cloth napkin, and started placing the cups, glasses, and treats on it. “I thought we’d talk in the sunroom,” she said, pouring hot water over tea bags. “Fine,” I said, complying with her plans, a sense of both dread and guilt coming over me. She was going to a lot of trouble to receive me hospitably, and I knew in my heart she would be unsuccessful at dissuading me. It would take a long time for my family to accept that. Just the thought of it made me tired. I grabbed the bottle of Crown Royal and followed my sister past the dining room and into the beaming sunroom at the front of the house. She set the tray down on the coffee table, and we both sat down on the couch. “We’ve never done this before,” I said. “Sit in this room?” Lory said. “That too,” I said. “But I don’t think I’ve ever had tea and whiskey at the same time, and I can’t say I’d ever have imagined you’d be the one offering it to me.”

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Luther did not mention Melanchthon’s failure to refer to his father’s death, so it may be that he considered it to be a private matter (in which case, why send Coelius’s letter?), or they may have communicated in some other way (some letters are missing), or the omission may have rankled with Luther, and may explain some of his irritation. 46. On June 26, Melanchthon wrote begging Luther to write to them again: Veit Dietrich had told him Luther had determined not to write anymore. There were certainly problems in getting messengers to take the letters, and it was expensive: WB 5, 1601, June 25, 1530: Jonas had been forced to pay four guilders. Now rattled, Melanchthon even resorted to sending his own messengers; 1604, June 26, 1530, 397:19–20; and he wrote an extra letter for Wolf Hornung, a friend, to take with him, not missing the chance to be sure of getting another letter there; 1607, June 27, 1530. 47. WB 5, 1604, June 26, 1530, 397:8–13; 1607, June 27, 1530, 403:16–17; 9–12. 48. WB 5, 1602, June 25, 1530, 392:44. 49. LW Letters, II, 327–28; WB 5, 1609, June 29, 1530, 405:3–9. 50. WB 5, 1609, June 29, 1530. 51. WB 5, 1611, June 30, 1530, 412:30–31. 52. WB 5, 1611, June 30, 1530, 411:1–8. 53. WB 5, 1610, June 29?, 1530; 1614, June 30, 1530; and see also 1613, June 30, 1530 (to Agricola). 54. WB 5, 1614, June 30, 1530, 418:16–18. 55. WB 5, 1631, July 8, 1530 (Brenz to Luther). 56. WB 5, 1716, Sept. 11, 1530, 618:25–27. He also began to cite Staupitz, and some of his sayings, such as “When God wants to blind someone, he shuts their eyes first” (WB 5, 1659, July 27, 1530, 498:3–4); and he used the same expression, which he owed to “meus Staupitz” in a letter to Agricola, 1662, July 27, 1530; and WB 5, 1670, July (?), 1530. He recalled how Staupitz had said that Luther’s attacks of melancholy were necessary trials sent by God, destining him for service to the Church: Luther now understood this in prophetic terms. 57. WB 5, 1716, Sept. 11, 1530. 58. Unluckily for the Lutherans, one of the Catholic negotiators fell ill and was replaced by Duke Georg of Saxony, Luther’s old bête noire; 1695, p. 565. 59. Walch, XVI, cols. 1482–84, Hieronymus Baumgartner to Lazarus Spengler, Sept. 13, 1530. 60. WB 5, 1653, July 16 (15?), 1530, 486:16. 61. LW Letters, II, 390: “Also, you are wearing me out with your vain worries, so that I am almost tired of writing to you, since I see that I accomplish nothing with my words.” WB 5, 1656, July 21, 1530; 1699, Aug. 26, 1530, 577:3–4.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  God’s spirit, it seemed, was being poured out onto laypeople to preach and prophesy, bypassing traditional authority. 34 The sense that these were exceptional times was further heightened by the arrival of the plague in Wittenberg. Confronted with the reality of death, many worried about the state of their souls. Melanchthon, Luther’s representative in the town during his prolonged absence, was thrown into a flurry of indecision. He was unsure what to make of the prophets’ claims that God spoke to them directly, and defended them against the students. At the same time he tried to persuade Spalatin and Friedrich to permit Luther to return: Only Luther, he urged, could judge these spirits. He sent the request to the Elector via Spalatin, leaving the letter unsealed so that Spalatin could read it. 35 Luther for his part was breezily unworried about the prophets, writing to Spalatin: “I do not come to Wittenberg, nor do I change my quarters, because of the ‘Zwickau prophets,’ for they don’t disturb me.” 36 It was easy for Luther to discern spirits, far away in the Wartburg; however, those involved in the frenetic pace of politics and religious reform in Wittenberg found it much more difficult to work out what path to take. — L UTHER always regarded political authority as resting in the hands of the ruler, a perception strengthened by his stay in the Wartburg, where his main contact was the Elector’s right-hand man, Spalatin. Karlstadt, by contrast, seems to have believed that the town council should be empowered to introduce the Reformation, and placed his faith in “the Christian city of Wittenberg,” as he termed it in his pamphlets. This was a line he had been taking since the disputation on the Mass in October 1521, when he advocated that the whole community should decide what evangelical reforms to introduce. Karlstadt’s marriage, the departure of Zwilling—who had been a leading figure advocating change, and who now left the Augustinian order altogether to preach in Eilenburg—and the arrival of the charismatic Zwickau prophets may all have played their part in radicalizing Karlstadt. 37 Or perhaps it was just that, although it always took a long time to persuade Karlstadt of anything, once he was convinced he became a zealot. Another factor in Karlstadt’s enthusiasm for civic ideals may have been his experience of working closely with laypeople, and his conviction that a Christian community truly was being established in the town. He now signed his pamphlets as “A New Layman.” The council’s mandate of January 24, 1522, introducing the Reformation in Wittenberg and reorganizing poor relief in line with its earlier ordinance reflected some of Karlstadt’s views, and may even have been written in part by him, but it was also the result of close cooperation between evangelical preachers and the town’s elite: A group of around thirty people had been meeting daily to draw it up.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  13 Homesick …Mind like a floating white cloud, Sunset like the parting of old acquaintances Who bow over their clasped hands at a distance. Our horses neigh to each other as we are departing. —Li Po, “Taking Leave of a Friend” (trans. Ezra Pound) T wo years after the wedding—five years after we met—Warren meets my invalid daddy on a summer day when the humid Texas air is saturated from the local oil refineries with a fluorocarbon stench that could peel paint. It’s their sole encounter. I lead Warren into the urine-drenched air of Daddy’s nursing home with a bluster I don’t feel, hugging the nurses on duty as if we’re long lost sorority sisters. But inside, I’m ashiver with anxiety. For what? What could I expect to go right or wrong between two men with such gulfs between them and such silence inside them—Warren bred to it, Daddy broken to it. Amid the other patients in the dayroom, Daddy is sitting with a thin pink blanket over his legs when we walk up. When he sees me, his face tries to brighten, but the dead half of it hangs down. He’s shaking his head with a stiff, persistent fraction of a smile. Truly, he’s a man split in half, neither fully dead nor fully alive . His eyes are black as a crow’s, though, and they sparkle and go wet when he sees me. Mur, he says, Murr. That’s right, I say It’s Mary. I kiss his whiskery neck, asking does he want me to shave him before I leave. But he doesn’t register the offer—a relief, since I whinge at inflicting the slightest razor nick. His good hand grabs my left hand, grips it with the old iron he had in my youth. I stand next to him while Warren waits off to the side. A little old lady in cat’s eye glasses with hair woven atop her head wheels up to me. She says, Are you his wife? No, ma’am, I say, wondering if maybe Mother doesn’t visit as often as she’s told us, else this old bird was also too out of things to remember Mother. His sweetheart? No, ma’am, I say. I’m his daughter. Thank goodness, she says. I’m his girlfriend. Daddy lets go my hand a second and waves over toward the lady. She wheels to his other side, then puts her hand on one wheel of his chair protectively, saying, He buys me Cokes. He stays with me all day, so I never have to wonder where he’s at. He’s good that way, I say. He’s never lied to me, not once. From the half of Daddy’s face I can see, his old smile is perfect. His eye glances off mine in cahoots. I can, for an instant, see him as he’d been all tall, kneeling down to me, saying, Don’t tell your mama and sister.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  Before I can open it, I do have the sense to phone Joan the Bone, who’s on her way to the theater and can’t talk . This, she tells me, is a test of your new willingness. You’ve gotta keep calling till you reach somebody. I hang up and stare again at the medicine bottle. Raising it to eye level, I study the small blue pills, now glowing ethereally. Are you sick? Dev wants to know. He’s holding a matchbox car, studying me with the intensity I no doubt brought to my own mother, whose invisible engines of misery could—at the slightest spark—ignite and blast her off into the stratosphere. That level stare of his guides my hand to put the valium back above the sink, where the bottle pulses and throbs. That night I ask Warren to hide it from me. I phone Lux, who’s barbecuing for his family. They have us over. It’s a freakishly warm day, so they’ve gotten the wading pool out. He pokes at meat splayed on the grill while Dev splashes around the water. I ask Lux, Do you actually pray? I couldn’t imagine it—Lux, that dismal sucker. Ever taciturn, Lux tells me: I say thanks for all kinds of things. For what? I want to know, for I’m a habitually morbid bitch. Even my poetry is obsessed with our collective hurtle toward death—the prospect of my own death seeming specially tragic and unsung. For me, everything’s too much and nothing’s enough. I honestly can’t think of anything to be grateful for. I tell Lux something like I’m glad I still have all my limbs. (Why—I now wonder—couldn’t I register the privilege of tossing my wriggling blond boy off the pool float?) Lux stands in his baggy blue swim trunks at the barbecue, turning sausages and chicken with one of those diabolical-looking forks. In the considerable smoke, he looks like a bronzed Satan at the devil’s cauldron. Say thanks for the sky, Lux says, say it to the floorboards. This isn’t hard, Mare. What’re you so miserable about? In truth, I dread Warren coming home that night, how we skirt each other’s paths, how he still looks at me with suspicion after my short sobriety. I really mean it this time . I fear I’ve sculpted for Dev a childhood tortured and lonely as mine was. But to confess these realities to Lux would reveal too much of my chewing insides. Instead, I babble on about my long-held grudges against the god I don’t believe in, saying, What kind of god would permit the holocaust? To which Lux says, You’re not in the holocaust. In other words, what is the holocaust my business? When my own life is falling apart, he wants to know, why am I taking as evidence of my own prospects the worst carnage of history? The smoke coils around him as he says, Try getting on your effing knees tonight. Just find ten things you’re grateful for. Your effing knees!

• From Vision Quest (1979)

  I slow my breathing and fold my hands on my chest. * * * Coach comes up and says the JVs lost it. He tells us not to be nervous about the big crowd. What it sounds like down there is the goddamn Superbowl. In our moment of silence I think about the millions of factors that combined to bring about this moment. I controlled a few, but most I had no control of. I made the decision to lose the weight and wrestle Shute and I trained hard. But I can’t take credit for my birth as a healthy male in a relatively loving family with enough to eat. And it wasn’t me who set things up so the wrestling bus arrived after the VW hit the gas truck near Cheney our sophomore year. A few minutes earlier and it could have been us. I realize my eighteen years have been full of real good luck. Silently, I thank my parents for the gift of life. * * * We stand in the dark behind the gym doors. Through the little window all I see are the backs of people’s heads. I’m sort of paralyzed. It sounds like they’re going crazy in there. “Whatcha waitin’ for?” asks Otto from the darkness behind me. “I can’t think of anything to yell.” “You’ve gotta yell somethin’. You’re the fucking captain!” Coach pokes his head in to see what’s holding us up. “What you guys doing?” “Swain can’t think of anything to yell,” says Otto. “I can’t think of a thing, Coach,” I confess. “Banzai! Banzai!” yells Coach as he shoves me through the doors and runs beside me, weaving through the people and between the bleachers and the chairs. He drops off when we hit the mats. I lead the guys around the big circle a couple times, then into our exercises. The sound of Kuch’s braid slapping the mat is notably absent. * * * I’m watching Shute lead Evergreen through their exercises when I’m tapped on the shoulder. It’s Mom and her husband. I get up and give Mom a kiss and shake hands with Arney. She looks good. I think maybe she’s put on weight. But she’ll melt away to nothing if she doesn’t take off that dumb fur coat. I take them to the bleachers, where Mr. and Mrs. Konigi promised to save them seats. The Konigis squinch one way and the people next to them squinch the other way, creating a space. Dad spots Mom and Arney and Mom spots Dad and Cindy. For a second nothing happens. Then they both put on smiles and wave. I go back to the bench. Carla waves to Mom from her seat with Tanneran and the Wain family. Belle sits on the floor, leaning back into Gene’s lap. She’s wearing her Rolling Stones panties. They’re gold and they’ve got that big red Rolling Stones tongue sewn on the crotch. Shute and I go out for the coin toss.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  Doing it alone is not working . The speaker’s named Joan—an elegant pageboyed social theorist at Harvard whose unlikely outlaw stint in Alaska involved going to the bar one night in subzero weather wearing a tutu under her arctic parka, just to stir things up. Since the night I woke up after puking, I’ve become semi-teachable, and I tell her that I’m ready to hear suggestions. She says, Do some volunteer work. So I start scrubbing coffee urns with the black marine, who tells me that, yes, even if I consider dosing the coffee with cyanide, the act of making it still constitutes spiritual progress. Joan also urges me to start praying to some half-baked higher power whose existence I argue against. No way, I say. Never happen, no offense. But her voice—speaking daily to me on the phone—keeps me postponing the drink I often feel myself barreling toward like a boulder rolling downhill. With her ministrations, I do not—for two months—drink: a white-knuckled, tooth-grinding effort that impresses no one outside the church basement I go to a few nights per week. The sun rises and sets. The moon makes two arcs over the house I fail to sleep in. I remember no intersecting days with Warren, aside from how he takes evening shifts with Dev when I go to meetings. It’s as if he doesn’t even live there, which can’t be right. I don’t write. I can barely read enough to grade the bushels of essays I lug around. And when I long to drive off to the liquor store to buy and suck down fiery elixirs, spiritual directress Joan the Bone—a nickname picked solely for the rhyme—tells me I can do it first thing I wake up: even before you brush your teeth . And while I mock her one-day-at-a-time ploy as a trick for the dim-witted, since it actually means no day dawns in which drinking is a good idea, I have to admit that—sixty days in—when she buys me a celebratory bagel with my coffee, I feel fresher inside, albeit a bit scooped out, like a gourd. Stick a candle in my mouth, and you could use me for Halloween decor . It’s September fifteenth. We sit at a nameless coffee shop I call Now Baking, for the neon sign in its window. It’s before the age of bottled water, when ordering a cappuccino gets you crap coffee dollopped with whipped cream, a zigzag of grenadine syrup, and a cherry on top. So we drink that day unadorned diner coffee, mine laced with fatty cream and enough sugar to induce a diabetic coma, sugar craving being the curse of the newly sober. (One newly sober pal stole half-sweetened baking chocolate from the kitchen of a friend he was visiting—the host later found the wrappers stashed under the guest room mattress.) Leaves aren’t yet tumbling from the trees, but for me, all color is leaching from the landscape.

• From Vision Quest (1979)

  In my mind I see Coach waving at me from the top of David Thompson’s green-and-gold water tower in the park. He’s yelling toward school, where I’m being kept prisoner. I think he wants to spring me, but I can hardly hear. Gene answers for me. “Forty-six after a workout about fifteen minutes ago.” Gene’s voice is faraway. “Christ!” Coach rants. “He’s going down too fast. He’s probably dehydrated. I’ll go get some salt. Make him drink some water, Gene.” And Coach is gone. I hear his heels click. He’s walking right down the side of the water tower! What balance! Boy, I’d have hated to wrestle Coach Ratta in his prime. I lose control. I rave. I’m out the window, up the hill in the park. It’s summer and I’m swinging on the big kids’ swing. I throw my head back and pump for the sky. Upside down a green-and-gold kingdom oscillates feudally. There are 2,563 of us in David Thompson High School. That’s more than some small towns. The high school is green and gold, the junior high, the grade school, the water tower, the public toilet, the grass, the sun. I swing level with the bar. I stretch my head way back, the ground swooshing, swooshing in my ears. I can’t get sick now. I always get sick on the big swing. I look down. How many David Thompson sneakers rubbed to sand this former grass? My teeth fall out. They slide across the sandy patch below, near, then very far as I swing. They nip the iron pole, bite down on a clump of grass. I can’t get sick now. I’m lean. I carry the colors of the Columbia. I can make the river flow again. My short hair brushes the sand, the grass, the sand, the grass. My nose begins to bleed, arcing dots of blood elliptically. I rave. I jump. Gene catches me. He’s making me drink water. It’s easy, because I’m thirsty as hell. “You’re all right, man,” Gene says. “You’re just dehydrated.” “Victim of a fucked-up nitrogen balance,” I reply. “At least I hope that’s all, Gene. There’s no end to the terrible diseases people can get.” I’ve been reading Rare Diseases lately. It’s ghastly. Poe could have written it. I feel a bit better. Things have changed a little since Gene wrestled in high school back in the middle sixties. I explain to him how I’ve got to have a doctor’s permission to drop down to 147. I have my appointment next Tuesday, the day after Christmas. The appointment’s in the morning; then we wrestle Lewis and Clark in the afternoon. If I’m much over fifty, I doubt the old doctor will let me go down. We have to wrestle eight matches at the weight we’ll wrestle in the state tournament. Outside of those eight, we can wrestle in any class above the one we start the season in.

• From Vision Quest (1979)

  Her chromosomes are probably restructured, but she’s a nice girl.” “What’s her name?” Gene asks. “Belle,” I reply. Gene nods. I’m sure he’s seen her around. Everybody knows cheerleaders. XWe’re circled up on the mat and Coach is going over the scouting report for the Lewis and Clark match. L.C. is especially tough in the lower weights. Damon Thuringer, “Sausage Man,” our sophomore at 105, has a real tough one. He’s wrestling a Japanese kid named Kenuchi Mashamura. Mash is a senior who has taken the state championship at both 119 and 112. Early in the season a Spokesman Review article quoted him as saying he was beginning to think seriously about college wrestling, so he thought he’d train real hard this season and drop down to a weight where he could be more competitive. He was sincere. He’s a very humble guy. He’s also a monster, a real teratoid. He looks about thirty years old with his giant little body and his furry eyebrows and cauliflower ears even more grotesque than mine. Of course, Mash is undefeated. Sausage is a baby-faced, flute-playing, downy-haired hobbit. Carla thinks he’s the cutest thing in the world and is always after me to stop scaring his little brother. Sausage’s record is four and four. He is well-conditioned and fierce to a fault, but I hope he’s made peace with himself. Coach has made him captain for the meet. That’ll help a little. It always give the guy a psychological boost. The whole school knows who the captain is because Coach announces it over the intercom at the beginning of the week. Kids encourage him in the halls, call him “Captain” and stuff. And when he leads us out on the mat and circles us up for our warm-ups, people ooh and aah and yell heartening sentiments because they know what a tough match the guy must have if he’s captain. As we’re circled here on the mat listening to Coach go over the scouting report, Otto and I plot to harass the Sausage Man. Coach is saying he’s glad Kuch and I got our wrestle-off for Shute out of the way a few days early, so now we can get down to thinking about the immediate future. We could have waited until next week, but we were too nervous and wanted to get it done. I’m glad we did. Before, I was worried about Kuch and Shute. Now I’m just worried about Shute. Both Kuch and I still officially have to wrestle off with our number-two men to see who wrestles L.C. But we’ve been beating them all season. While Coach explains that Kuch’s man likes to work a fireman’s carry right to a fast pin, Otto and I sneak around the circle to Sausage, who peers out from beneath a pile of wool blankets. He has some trouble making weight. He’s down from 125 as a cross-country man.