Bewilderment

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 23 of 69 · 20 per page

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

  AUGUSTINE. (de Ver. Dom. serm. lii) Mary and Martha, the sisters of Lazarus, though they had often seen Christ raise the dead, did not fully believe that He could raise their brother; Martha, the sister of him that was dead, saith unto Him, Lord, by this time he stinketh, for he hath been dead four days. THEOPHYLACT. Martha said this from weakness of faith, thinking it impossible that Christ could raise her brother, so long after death. BEDE. (non occ. [Nic.]) Or, these are not words of despair, but of wonder. CHRYSOSTOM. (Hom. lxiii. 2) Thus every thing tends to stop the months of the unbelieving. Their hands take away the stone, their ears hear Christ’s voice, their eyes see Lazarus come forth, they perceive the smell of the dead body. THEOPHYLACT. Christ reminds Martha of what He had told her before, which she had forgotten: Jesus saith unto her, Said I not unto thee, that, if thou wouldest believe, thou shouldest see the glory of God? CHRYSOSTOM. (Hom. lxiii) She did not remember what He said above, He that believeth in Me, though he were dead, yet shall he live. To the disciples He had said, That the Son of God might be glorified thereby; here it is the glory of the Father He speaks of. The difference is made to suit the different hearers. Our Lord could not rebuke her before such a number, but only says, Thou shalt see the glory of God. AUGUSTINE. (Tr. xlix) Herein is the glory of God, that he that stinketh and hath been dead four days, is brought to life again. Then they took away the stone. ORIGEN. (tom. in Joan. xxviii.) The delay in taking away the stone was caused by the sister of the dead, who said, By this time he stinketh, for he hath been dead four days. If she had not said this, it would not be said, Jesus said, Take away the stone. Some delay had arisen; it is best to let nothing come between the commands of Jesus and doing them. 11:41–4641. And Jesus lifted up his eyes, and said, Father, I thank thee that thou hast heard me. 42. And I knew that thou hearest me always: but because of the people which stand by I said it, that they may believe that thou hast sent me. 43. And when he thus had spoken, he cried with a loud voice, Lazarus, come forth. 44. And he that was dead came forth, bound hand and foot with graveclothes: and his face was bound about with a napkin. Jesus saith unto them, Loose him, and let him go. 45. Then many of the Jews which came to Mary, and had seen the things which Jesus did, believed on him. 46. But some of them went their ways to the Pharisees, and told them what things Jesus had done.

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

  ORIGEN. And observe that it is not said,’ He began to say,’ or ‘to teach,’ but to shew; for as things are said to be shewn to the sense, so the things which Christ spake are said to be shewn by Him. Nor indeed do I think, that to those who saw Him suffering many things in the flesh, were those things which they saw so shewn as this representation in words shewed to the disciples the mystery of the passion and resurrection of Christ. At that time, indeed, He only began to shew them, and afterwards when they were more able to receive it, He shewed them more fully; for all that Jesus began to do, that He accomplished. He must needs go to Jerusalem, to be put to death indeed in the Jerusalem which is below, but to rise again and reign in the heavenly Jerusalem. But when Christ rose again, and others were risen with Him, they no longer sought the Jerusalem which is beneath, or the house of prayer in it, but that which is above. He suffers many things from the elders of the earthly Jerusalem, that He may be glorified by those heavenly elders who receive His mercies. He rose again from the dead on the third day, that He may deliver from the evil one, and purchase for such as are so delivered this gift, that they be baptized in spirit, soul, and body, in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, who are three days perpetually present to those that through them have been made children of light. 16:22–2322. Then Peter took him, and began to rebuke him, saying, Be it far from thee, Lord: this shall not be unto thee. 23. But he turned, and said unto Peter, Get thee behind me, Satan: thou art an offence unto me: for thou savourest not the things that be of God, but those that be of men. ORIGEN. While Christ was yet speaking the beginnings of the things which He was shewing unto them, Peter considered them unworthy of the Son of the living God. And forgetting that the Son of the living God does nothing, and acts in no way worthy of blame, he began to rebuke Him; and this is what is said, And Peter took him, and began to rebuke him.

• From Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016)

  One afternoon I was doing precisely that, goofing around with my cousin and filling an empty plant pot with a huge pile of gunpowder, when I got distracted by some Black Cat firecrackers. The cool thing you could do with a Black Cat was, instead of lighting it to make it explode, you could break it in half and light it and it would turn into a mini-flamethrower. I stopped midway through building my gunpowder pile to play with the Black Cats and somehow dropped a match into the pile. The whole thing exploded, throwing a massive ball of flame up in my face. Mlungisi screamed, and my mom came running into the yard in a panic. “What happened?!” I played it cool, even though I could still feel the heat of the fireball on my face. “Oh, nothing. Nothing happened.” “Were you playing with fire?!” “No.” She shook her head. “You know what? I would beat you, but Jesus has already exposed your lies.” “Huh?” “Go to the bathroom and look at yourself.” I went to the toilet and looked in the mirror. My eyebrows were gone and the front inch or so of my hair was completely burned off. From an adult’s point of view, I was destructive and out of control, but as a child I didn’t think of it that way. I never wanted to destroy. I wanted to create. I wasn’t burning my eyebrows. I was creating fire. I wasn’t breaking overhead projectors. I was creating chaos, to see how people reacted. And I couldn’t help it. There’s a condition kids suffer from, a compulsive disorder that makes them do things they themselves don’t understand. You can tell a child, “Whatever you do, don’t draw on the wall. You can draw on this paper. You can draw in this book. You can draw on any surface you want. But do not draw or write or color on the wall.” The child will look you dead in the eye and say, “Got it.” Ten minutes later the child is drawing on the wall. You start screaming. “Why the hell are you drawing on the wall?!” The child looks at you, and he genuinely has no idea why he drew on the wall. As a kid, I remember having that feeling all the time. Every time I got punished, as my mom was whooping my ass, I’d be thinking, Why did I just do that? I knew not to do that.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  certainly set in, since people would lose faith in the scheme, and this could only set off a chain reaction of selling. How could Blunt not have foreseen this? The answer is simple: Blunt’s mental time frame had shrunk to the point where he lost the ability to look months down the road and consider consequences. Mesmerized by events in France and imagining all of the wealth and power he was on the verge of attaining, he could focus only on the present, making sure the scheme launched successfully. Its initial success only made him imagine it would trend this way for a long time. As it progressed, he certainly understood that he had to make the price rise even more quickly, and the only means of doing so was to lure in more investors through generous terms of credit. This would make the scheme even more precarious, one solution incurring several new dangers. The Bubble Act and the generous dividends carried even greater immediate risks, but by now his time frame had shrunk to a matter of days. If only he could keep the ship afloat another week, he would find some new solution. Finally, he ran out of time. When people lose the connection between their actions and their consequences, they lose their hold on reality, and the further this goes the more it looks like madness. The madness that overcame Blunt soon infected the king, the Parliament, and eventually an entire nation of citizens renowned for their common sense. Once the English saw their compatriots making large sums of money, it became a fact—the scheme had to be a success. They too lost the ability to think a few months ahead. Look at what happened to Sir Isaac Newton, paragon of rationality. In the beginning he too caught the fever, but after a week his logical mind could see the holes in the scheme, and so he sold his shares. Then he watched others making much larger sums of money than his paltry £14,000 and it bothered him. By August he had to get back in, even though it was the absolute worst time to reinvest. Sir Isaac Newton himself had lost the ability to think past the day. As one Dutch banker observed of the scene in Exchange Alley, “[It resembled] nothing so much as if all the Lunatics had escaped out of the Madhouse at once.” Understand: We humans tend to live in the moment. It is the animal part of our nature. We respond first and foremost to what we see and hear, to what is most dramatic in an event. But we are not merely animals tied to the present. Human reality encompasses the past—every event is connected to something that happened before in an endless chain of historical causation. Any present problem has deep roots in the past. It also encompasses the future. Whatever we do has consequences that stretch far into the years to come.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  The result would be a fresh generation that could begin to forge a classless society not weighed down by the past. The events depicted in Born Red reveal in a microcosm the result of Mao’s experiment—how human nature cannot be uprooted; try to alter it and it merely reemerges in different shapes and forms. The results of hundreds of thousands of years of evolution and development cannot be radically reengineered by some scheme, particularly when it involves the behavior of humans in groups, which inevitably conforms to certain ancient patterns. (Although it might be tempting to see what happened at YMS as mostly relevant to group adolescent behavior, young people often represent human nature in a more naked and purer form than adults, who are cleverer at disguising their motivations. In any case, what happened at the school occurred throughout China—in government offices, factories, within the army, and among Chinese of all ages—in an eerily similar way.) Here’s exactly how Mao’s experiment failed and what it shows about human nature. Mao had the following specific strategy to enact his bold idea: Focus people’s attention on a legitimate enemy—in this case, revisionists, those who consciously or unconsciously were clinging to the past. Encourage people, particularly the young, to actively fight against this reactionary force, but also against any entrenched forms of authority. In struggling against these conservative enemies, the Chinese would be able to free themselves from old patterns of thinking and acting; they would finally get rid of elites and ranking systems; and they would unify as a revolutionary class with utmost clarity as to what they were fighting for. His strategy, however, had a fatal flaw at its core: when people operate in groups, they do not engage in nuanced thinking and deep analysis. Only individuals with a degree of calmness and detachment can do so. People in groups feel emotional and excited. Their primary desire is to fit in to the group spirit. Their thinking tends to be simplistic—good versus evil, with us or against us. They naturally look for some type of authority to simplify matters for them. Deliberately creating chaos, as Mao did, only makes the group more certain to fall into these primitive patterns of thinking, since it is too frightening for humans to live with too much confusion and uncertainty. Look at how the students at YMS responded to Mao’s call for action: When first confronted with the Cultural Revolution, they merely transformed Mao himself into the new authority to guide them. They swallowed his ideas with very little personal reflection. They imitated the actions of others in Beijing in the most conventional way. Looking for revisionists, they tended to base their judgments on appearances—the clothes the teachers wore, the special food or wine they drank, their manners, their family background. Such appearances could be quite deceptive.

• From The History of Christianity II: From the Reformation to the Modern Megachurch (2017)

  õ Darwin’s father paid his way. He was a wealthy doctor who first wanted his son to be a doctor too, and then a priest, and now was close to giving up up hope that Charles would amount to anything. õ Before the Beagle voyage, Darwin dabbled in divinity at Cambridge. As a divinity student, he studied and admired the Anglican bishop William Paley’s Natural Theology, published in 1802. The book was required reading for any would-be minister in those days, and even if Darwin didn’t much go in for church or have a deep passion for theology, he loved this book. õ This is a bit of a surprise for people used to thinking of Darwin as the godfather of atheistic evolution. But Darwin himself did not think about his work in that way. Even at the end of his life, he was sincerely torn about the ramifications of his discoveries for religious belief. õ Paley’s book is a methodical examination of the natural world for proof that an intelligent designer must lie behind the miraculous complexities of, for example, the air bladder of a fish. Animals’ adaptations are suited to their environments. Darwin appreciated Paley’s careful examination of nature, and he was fascinated by this idea of species adaptation. SCIENCE AND NATURAL THEOLOGY õ Darwin returned from the Beagle’s voyage in the fall of 1836, and thanks to a nice allowance from his dad, he could afford to live in London and work on his book. Even though he did not have a formal university appointment, he was embedded in the growing intellectual network of professional scientists working throughout Britain and abroad. õ To be clear about Darwin’s key idea: On the Origin of Species put forward the theory of natural selection. This is the idea that in each generation of a plant or animal species, chance variants make one 206 The History of Christianity II

• From Another Bullshit Night in Suck City: A Memoir (2004)

  hiss & fall Spring-timed, the showers run maybe thirty seconds before the valve twists shut and you are forced to hit the stainless steel button again. When the water shuts off sometimes the man beneath the spray beside you doesn’t notice. Hands in his hair, lather running in streams down his face, eyes straight ahead—the sound of water surrounds him, you keep hitting your button, but this one man is lost—lost in the white tiles, lost in the fluorescence, lost in the hiss and the fall. After the Cage, Housing is the next level of work open to newcomers. Or at least this is where newcomers are encouraged to work. Only a few hours a night, like the Cage, but it’s more intense. No longer are you protected behind steel mesh. This is where the men bring the bed tickets that were handed out earlier at the Cage, this is where they strip down naked and hand in their clothes, to be stored overnight in the Hot Room. The Hot Room has a door like an old freezer, with that kind of pull handle, but inside it’s a sauna, wood-lined, set for maybe 180 degrees fahrenheit. To kill any bugs, to vaguely sanitize the clothes. Inside the Hot Room the smell is of superheated sweat, quick-fermented, an almost shiny smell, as shiny as an overworn coat. The joke is that it’s a good place to go to make out. Meet me in the Hot Room in ten minutes, we joke with our co-workers. If I’m not there start without me, they joke back. An as-yet-unnamed inner ring of Hell. A counter separates the guests from the two workers who take their clothes, live-in staff, formerly homeless guys who now live at the shelter, have their own rooms. A transitional step, theoretically, back into the world. Normally there are two counselors working Housing, one for the Brown side, one for the Yellow, but often one fails to show, which can make things difficult. The live-in staff worker takes the bed ticket, hands back a plastic bin with a wooden hanger and a wrist tag inside. The guest hangs his jacket, pants and shirt on the hanger, then puts his shoes, socks, underwear and whatever else into the bin. Both the hanger and bin are then given back to the live-in staff worker, who walks the hanger into the Hot Room, puts the bin on a shelf. Similar to a coat check at a museum, the number on the hanger corresponds to the number on the wrist tag, except this is also the number of a bed. Each man is allowed to store one bag overnight—by nine there is a mountain of bags to negotiate around. My job is to oversee this operation, to see it moves along smoothly, defuse any incidents.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  Although we are encountering the same reality as everyone else alive at the time, we are doing so from a peculiar angle—that of being a child, physically smaller, more helpless, and dependent on adults. From this point of view, the world of the adults can seem rather alien, as we do not understand so well what motivates them, or their adult cares or concerns. What our parents might take as serious we can often see as comical or odd. We may watch the same forms of entertainment as they do, but we see them from the angle of a child, with little life experience. We don’t have the power yet to affect this world, but we start to interpret it in our own way, and we share this with our peers. Then, when we reach our teen years or perhaps earlier, we become aware that we are part of a generation of young people (focusing more on those around our age) with whom we can identify. We bond over our particular way of seeing things and the similar sense of humor we have developed; we also tend to form common ideals about success and coolness, among other values. In these years, we inevitably go through a period of rebellion, struggling to find our own identity, separate from our parents. This makes us deeply attuned to appearances—to styles and fashions. We want to show that we belong to our generational tribe, with its own look and manner. Often a decisive event or trend will occur during these youthful years—this could be a major war, a political scandal, a financial crisis or economic boom. It could also be the invention of some new form of technology that has a profound impact on social relations. Because we are so young and impressionable, such events have a decisive influence on the generational personality that is forming, making us cautious (if it is a war or crash in the economy) or hungry for adventure (if it is something that sparks prosperity or stability). Naturally, we view such decisive events very differently from our parents and are affected more deeply. As we become more aware of what is going on in the world, we often come to see the ideas and values of our parents as not fitting very well our own experience of reality. What they have told or taught us does not seem so relevant, and we hunger for ideas that are more related to our youthful experience.

• From Blue Like Jazz (2003)

  My belief in Jesus did not seem rational or scientific, and yet there was nothing I could do to separate myself from this belief. I think Laura was looking for something rational, because she believed that all things that were true were rational. But that isn’t the case. Love, for example, is a true emotion, but it is not rational. What I mean is, people actually feel it. I have been in love, plenty of people have been in love, yet love cannot be proved scientifically. Neither can beauty. Light cannot be proved scientifically, and yet we all believe in light and by light see all things. There are plenty of things that are true that don’t make any sense. I think one of the problems Laura was having was that she wanted God to make sense. He doesn’t. He will make no more sense to me than I will make sense to an ant. [image "9780785263708_0067_007" file=Image00014.jpg] Tony and I were talking about Laura at the Horse Brass the other day; we were talking about belief, what it takes to believe, and he asked me how I believed in God. I felt silly trying to explain it, even though Tony is a Christian. I felt as if I were saying I believed in Peter Pan or the Tooth Fairy, and yet I don’t believe in Peter Pan or the Tooth Fairy. I believe in God, and as I said before it feels so much more like something is causing me to believe than that I am stirring up belief. In fact, I would even say that when I started in faith I didn’t want to believe; my intellect wanted to disbelieve, but my soul, that deeper instinct, could no more stop believing in God than Tony could, on a dime, stop being in love with his wife. There are things you choose to believe, and beliefs that choose you. This was one of the ones that chose me. “You know what really helped me understand why I believe in Jesus, Tony?” “What’s that?” “Penguins,” I told him. “Penguins?” “Penguins,” I clarified. “Do you know very much about penguins?” “Nope.” Tony smiled. “Tell me about penguins.” “I watched a nature show on OPB the other night about penguins. They travel in enormous groups, perhaps five hundred of them, and they swim north in the coldest of winter, so far north they hit ice. They look like cartoons, like something out of that movie Fantasia . All five hundred of them swim till they hit ice then they jump out of the water, one by one, and start sliding on their bellies. They sort of create ruts as they slide, and they follow each other in a line. They do this for days, I think.” “They slide on their bellies for days?” Tony asked. “Days,” I told him. “Why?” “I don’t know,” I confessed.

• From The History of Christianity II: From the Reformation to the Modern Megachurch (2017)

  LECTURE 4 THE ANABAPTIST RADICALS In the year 1536, St. Lambert’s Church, a Catholic establishment in the German town of Münster, contained a gruesome sight: three mutilated corpses in cages, their bloody limbs on display for everyone in the town to see. Münster hosted one of the most bizarre and brutal episodes of the Reformation. The story starts with a man named Jan Matthijszoon (simply known as Jan for the purposes of this lecture). 32 CHAOS õ Jan made his living as a baker in a little town outside of Amsterdam. During the 1530s, northern Europe was a pretty chaotic place. All kinds of priests and prophets were criticizing the Catholic Church and predicting that the Kingdom of God was on its way. õ Jan started to find this stuff much more interesting than breads and cakes. He became a disciple of a radical German preacher named Melchior Hoffman, who said the end of the world was coming soon, and there was little time left to turn away from the blasphemous practices of the Catholic Church. õ Meanwhile, in Münster, people were divided over whose side to take in the Reformation: some supported the Catholic bishop, while others had become Protestants. The leader of the Protestants was a radical named Bernhard Rothmann, who rejected the practice of baptizing babies. õ Jan eventually showed up in Münster, saying he was a prophet of God. He liked the radical Protestantism that was gaining steam. In February of 1534, crowds that believed that the Last Days were really approaching stormed the snowy streets of Münster and seized control of the town. But a local Catholic bishop marshaled troops and attacked; Jan died in the resulting battle. One of his followers, Jan Beukels (also known as John of Leiden), took his place. õ During the summer of 1534, the bishop and his allies blocked all roads into town and decided to starve the radicals into surrender. John responded by declaring that he was the divinely anointed king of the world, a successor to King David of Israel. He even minted new gold and silver coins proclaiming his reign. Lecture 4—The Anabaptist Radicals 33

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

  CYRIL OF ALEXANDRIA. As if not knowing how to continue in the right beginnings. Now Christ disdains to dwell with those who are thus disposed. Hence He says, How long shall I be with you, and suffer you? Feeling troubled with their company, because of their evil deeds. CHRYSOSTOM. (ubi sup.) Hereby also He shews that His departure was desired by Him, not because the suffering of the cross was grievous, but rather their conversation. BEDE. Not that weariness has overcome His patience, but after the manner of a physician, when he sees a sick man acting contrary to his commands, he says, ‘How long shall I come to thy house, when I order one thing, you do another. But to prove that He was not angry with the man, but with the sin, He immediately added, Bring thy son hither. TITUS BOSTRENSIS. He might indeed have healed him by His simple command, but He makes his sufferings public, bringing the weak in faith to the sight of things present. Then the devil, when he perceived our Lord, rends and dashes the child clown; as it follows, And as he was yet a coming, the devil threw him down, and tare him; that so first the sufferings should be made manifest, then the remedy be applied. CHRYSOSTOM. (ubi sup.) The Lord however does this not for display, but for the father’s sake, that upon seeing the devil disturbed at the mere summons, he might thus at least be led to the belief of the future miracles; of which it follows, And Jesus rebuked the unclean spirit, and healed the child, and delivered him again unto his father. CYRIL OF ALEXANDRIA. Now before not his father but the devil possessed him, but now the Evangelist adds that the people were astonished at the greatness of God, saying, And all were amazed at the mighty power of God, which he says, because of the gift of Christ, who conferred on the holy Apostles also the power of working divine miracles, and having the mastery over evil spirits.

• From Another Bullshit Night in Suck City: A Memoir (2004)

  Jonathan tells Scotty stories of his brushes with the law, his escapades, he lists all the businesses he has run—the car dealerships, the encyclopedia franchise, the theater space—and gleefully recounts how each collapsed. Clearly a bad influence, this pseudo-dad, and that’s what’s attractive. Jonathan’s been at the art game for a long time now, he likes to drop names, hint at the influence he can muster ( Does the name Kurt Vonnegut mean anything to you ?). A newspaper clipping he flashes around shows him sitting at the feet of Shirley MacLaine during a Democratic fund-raiser for McGovern. My father makes sure Scotty sees this dog-eared photo. As the winter ends, Jonathan finesses a place to sleep and steady pay in exchange for painting a house the upcoming summer in Cambridge. Jonathan proposes that he and Scotty become partners, fifty-fifty . The owners, a couple he met at an art opening, will be in Sweden for the summer. Free rent, easy work, steady cash, my father plans to rewrite his novel in the evenings and on weekends. Scotty, wary, knows Jonathan always tries to get something for nothing, always tries to get over. But he imagines they’ll put in a few good hours each day, make their way through. A house is a finite project, after all. The worst that could happen is what always happens—that Scotty will work harder. The job has a charge account at the hardware store—paint, brushes, scrapers, drop cloths. Jonathan charges his coveralls—white, denim, professional. If he has someplace to be later in the day he wears them over one of the Brooks Brothers suits he’d charged to my grandfather ten years earlier ( As president of a company I had to look the part ). He likes to keep a brush and scraper in his back pocket, even if he doesn’t use them all that much. The first morning Scotty wakes up at seven and Jonathan’s already up and drinking coffee, wearing his spotless coveralls. They sit at the kitchen table in the pleasant sun, suffused with good fortune. Mid-May, the owners won’t be back until September, no urgency, summer spread out before them. They can work half days if they choose. They can take three-day weekends. They can stretch it out. Scotty follows my father’s lead, says he isn’t worried. The owners left five hundred to start off, when they need more it’ll be wired. Sounds fine. Scotty says he wouldn’t mind quitting early some days, getting into the studio, keeping up with his sculptures. Yes , my father agrees, that’s what’s important. Anyone could paint this house—they chose us because we’re artists. In a few years they’ll be able to point to this house and say, Jonathan Flynn painted that. That’s worth something to people like this . They talk briefly about how to begin. The bushes need to be wrapped in tarps, pulled away from the house. The ladders laid out, ratcheted up into the eaves, the scraping begun.

• From On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019)

  That time when I was five or six and, playing a prank, leapt out at you from behind the hallway door, shouting, “Boom!” You screamed, face raked and twisted, then burst into sobs, clutched your chest as you leaned against the door, gasping. I stood bewildered, my toy army helmet tilted on my head. I was an American boy parroting what I saw on TV. I didn’t know that the war was still inside you, that there was a war to begin with, that once it enters you it never leaves—but merely echoes, a sound forming the face of your own son. Boom. That time, in third grade, with the help of Mrs. Callahan, my ESL teacher, I read the first book that I loved, a children’s book called Thunder Cake, by Patricia Polacco. In the story, when a girl and her grandmother spot a storm brewing on the green horizon, instead of shuttering the windows or nailing boards on the doors, they set out to bake a cake. I was unmoored by this act, its precarious yet bold refusal of common sense. As Mrs. Callahan stood behind me, her mouth at my ear, I was pulled deeper into the current of language. The story unfurled, its storm rolled in as she spoke, then rolled in once more as I repeated the words. To bake a cake in the eye of a storm; to feed yourself sugar on the cusp of danger. — The first time you hit me, I must have been four. A hand, a flash, a reckoning. My mouth a blaze of touch. The time I tried to teach you to read the way Mrs. Callahan taught me, my lips to your ear, my hand on yours, the words moving underneath the shadows we made. But that act (a son teaching his mother) reversed our hierarchies, and with it our identities, which, in this country, were already tenuous and tethered. After the stutters and false starts, the sentences warped or locked in your throat, after the embarrassment of failure, you slammed the book shut. “I don’t need to read,” you said, your expression crunched, and pushed away from the table. “I can see—it’s gotten me this far, hasn’t it?” Then the time with the remote control. A bruised welt on my forearm I would lie about to my teachers. “I fell playing tag.”

• From Another Bullshit Night in Suck City: A Memoir (2004)

  God’s gift—flour, eggs, milk, butter—good, clean, all-natural ingredients. Santa One : ( bullhorn ) The ha-ha, the ho-ho. Daughter Two : ( ignores him ) Those that do not sell on Day One move into Day Two, where we glaze them. Honey-dipped, we call it, though we use no honey. The same donut as Day One, now transformed. Many people wait for Day Two, the shiny donut. Santa Three : ( grabs bullhorn, to DAUGHTERS ) Is there a point to this? SANTA FOUR rises. Appreciative applause heard over the sound system, perhaps an electric applause sign overhead . SANTA FOUR steps out of character for just an instant, acknowledges the applause, tiptoes behind the counter and swipes a donut, then continues stumbling over to the jail cell, which he lets himself into using the oversized skeleton key hanging beside the bars. At the door he turns to audience. Santa Four : ( holds up donut ) Do you realize that the latest theory of the universe is that it’s shaped like a donut? Fucking amazing. ( He enters cell, curls up and snores loudly over the rest of the donut-process recitation .) Daughter Three : Day Three we dust the remaining honey-dipped with confectioner’s sugar—it is now a sugar donut. The faux honey has begun to skin over, like a caramel apple—it has some bite now, the sugar floating upon the surface like pollen dusts a pond in spring. SANTA FOUR takes his pillow and covers his head, attempting to block out the sound. Muffled curses . SANTA FIVE stands before DAUGHTERS , motions for a cup of coffee . DAUGHTERS ignore him. When they look away SANTA FIVE gives them the double finger . Daughter One : Day Four— Santa Three : ( bullhorn ) For the love of Christ can’t you move this along? The SANTAS adjust the pillows that make up their bellies . The projection on the scrim flickers, becoming the wall of a morgue, small stainless freezer doors stacked five high, maybe eight across, lit in the same way as the donuts . The DAUGHTERS exchange their flour-coated aprons for black industrial rubber aprons. Each rolls a gurney beside SANTAS ONE, TWO and THREE , who climb aboard and are covered with a white sheet. All barefoot, we now notice, with a tag hanging from their big toes, now revealed in their prone positions . SANTA FOUR stays in cell , SANTA FIVE huddles along left wall. The DAUGHTERS wheel the bodies into position, lined in a row, feet forward . One DAUGHTER stands behind each head. A blinding overhead light lowers over each body . One by one DAUGHTERS read the vital stats off each toe tag, and as they read each SANTA sits up briefly, winks, tells story, lays back dead . Daughter One : Fell on a broken bottle and bled to death—his last words were about robbing a bank.

• From Another Bullshit Night in Suck City: A Memoir (2004)

  the take (1974) Early February. Brandishing weapons, the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) kidnap Patricia Campbell Hearst as she’s watching television with her boyfriend, Steven Weed. The SLA force Hearst into the parking garage and into the trunk of a waiting car. The SLA does not take Weed. I am barely fourteen at this point, “weed” is what I call marijuana. I keep my weed hidden in a book I found in my grandmother’s attic and hollowed out, The Stories of Saki , which was good but not good enough to save the book from my razor. I have a paper route, and I read the story as I trudge through snow at dawn, mesmerized by the kidnapped heiress, by the idea of an invisible army, by the man named “Weed” useless to stop them. The ransom note for Hearst comes in the form of a tape recording sent to San Francisco radio station KPFA. In it the SLA demands that Hearst’s father, the newspaper baron, give every “Californian in need” seventy dollars’ worth of “quality” food. One feast, one last supper, and then she will be freed. After brief deliberations Hearst’s father complies. Packages containing two turkey hind-quarters, two cans of tomato juice, two cans of meat, and a box of saltine crackers are handed out to hundreds of people at several food distribution points. Two million dollars’ worth of quality food. My father, along with the rest of the country, reads about the kidnapped heiress. In some ways he’s also an heir, but to a fortune he will never see. His father died four years earlier and left him one dollar, in this way guaranteeing that the will cannot be disputed. Last May the “Plumbers” broke into the Watergate Hotel for the first time, word that Nixon may have ordered the break-in is seeping out. I stand under streetlights in the middle of my route, reading about Patty, unable to stop reading about her. Everyone now calls her simply “Patty.” After the food is distributed Patty is not returned. All that remains is Weed, who tells the tale over and over, pulling aside the curtain of his hair to show where he took the blow. Without Patty he is briefly a star. Weeks pass, our attention flags, then the image of Patty transformed appears—rifle in her lap, the Symbionese Liberation Army insignia behind her, snakes coming out of her beret—heiress as Medusa, gone over to the other side. Now she is “Tania.” A tape recording of her voice says, “This is my choice,” and the shrink talking head and the police specialist talking head and the crisis expert talking head all say it is likely she’s been brainwashed, likely she’s doing this in order to survive, that she’s reached a state of transference, which is complex and unpredictable and likely to influence her future actions. But to me it seems obvious—to risk so much for one meal, who wouldn’t be charmed?

• From Paul and Matthew Among Jews and Gentiles: Essays in Honor of Terence L. Donaldson (2021)

  3 As a summary statement of the monograph, the present essay does not include all the supporting references that will be provided there for many of the claims to follow. 42 42 Paul and Matthew among Jews and Gentiles Both this essay and the monograph that it summarizes are being written within the framework of another even larger project that will be, for want of a better term, a biography of the same erstwhile Paul. The larger project gathers together the results of an extended inquiry into the implied “historical” author of the “less inauthentic” canonical letters of Paul, which I have conducted as a pair of doctoral seminars over the last 20 years or so as part of the Advanced Degree program of the Toronto School of Theology where Prof. Donaldson has been giving courses on the same set of issues, albeit in a somewhat different direction. He and others will decide whether here, at last, our paths final y coincide or definitively diverge.4 Introduction: Stating the Obvious In the context of the ancient Mediterranean world, Paul was obviously Ioudaios. This social identity, moreover, never became a problem for him. At no point did Paul ever experience the fact that he was this kind of a human being as anything other than a self-evident truth about him as well as, arguably, the sign of a certain privilege. One could therefore begin to wonder how and why the question of Paul “within Judaism” now is deemed to be a necessary and/or important topic to discuss. At the same time, however, as someone who obviously was Ioudaios Paul also came to think—under the aegis of an experience that he called “Christ”—that this “fleshly” identity—which is how he described being Ioudaios—was not the last word to be spoken about him (just as the “Gentile” identity of many of Paul’s eventual coreligionists was likewise not the last word to be said about them, at least not by Paul). In fact, the whole debate about social “identity” in these terms would have been for Paul essential y beside the point were it not that it kept coming up in the developing and ongoing squabbling about what it meant sociopolitical y to be a manifestation of “Israel” or “heir of Abraham,” and the like. Again, all of these affirmations would be, in my opinion, so many statements of the obvious. But they obviously are not that, at least not as I have stated them, since they continue to elicit too much discussion to be declared simply a truth that goes without saying. What, then, would be final y at stake in a putative non-debate that nonetheless remains somehow debatable? How can the early Christian apostle Paul have been both indubitably Ioudaios and yet apparently not infrequently only questionably so?

• From Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away (2022)

  Knee-Deep in the Big MuddyThe very first sentence of one of the earliest and most influential academic papers identifying our tendency to persist in losing endeavors, even in the face of strong signals that we ought to quit, states very simply why such behavior is so confounding: “Intuitively, one would expect individuals to reverse decisions or to change behaviors which result in negative consequences.” The author of that seminal 1976 paper, “Knee-Deep in the Big Muddy: A Study of Escalating Commitment to a Chosen Course of Action,” is Harold and Shirley’s son, Barry Staw. At the same time his father was stubbornly fighting his losing battle with Kmart and some of his own shareholders, Barry Staw was studying to become one of a generation of social scientists developing fresh approaches to figuring out why we get stuck in losing endeavors, persisting too long in the face of bad news, and the strategies that work best for getting better at walking away. Staw came of age during the Vietnam War and viewed the U.S. involvement in that conflict as a paradigmatic example of how easy it is to get stuck in things once we’ve started them. He saw the U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War as a living, breathing, high-stakes, slow-motion train wreck of an example of our inability to quit. The desire to unlock the mystery of why became the driving force behind his work. The title of his landmark 1976 paper, “Knee-Deep in the Big Muddy,” was even a reference to Pete Seeger’s 1967 anti-war song, “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy.” By the end of the war, it was widely believed that the war was unwinnable, yet even decision-makers aware of this could not extricate the United States, instead responding with what Staw later called an escalation of commitment to the losing course of action, responding to the growing awareness that there was no real path to victory for the United States by increasing the nation’s commitment to the war. Staw pointed to the revelation from the Pentagon Papers, a secret Department of Defense history of that war published over government objection by The New York Times and The Washington Post , that Undersecretary of State George Ball warned LBJ in 1965 of the inevitable entrapment in the conflict, “Once we suffer large casualties, we will have started a well-nigh irreversible process. Our involvement will be so great that we cannot—without national humiliation—stop short of achieving our complete objectives. Of the two possibilities I think humiliation would be more likely than the achievement of our objectives—even after we have paid terrible costs.” Johnson, of course, did not follow the warning, and that’s exactly what happened. The Vietnam War cost the United States nearly $200 billion (which, adjusted for inflation, is about $1 trillion). It killed 58,000 American soldiers and injured another 300,000. It ended Lyndon Johnson’s political career, costing him a chance at a second term. The war created a generational distrust in government and authority in general.

• From Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away (2022)

  They went home and did not return, which is the behavior you would expect from a rational person whose beliefs (no matter how wacky) had just been so manifestly disproved. This left eight true believers and Festinger’s observers. The well-known finding reported in When Prophecy Fails was that the other eight members were not willing to quit their belief in the prophecy, even though it was demonstrably false. To the contrary, the members actually escalated their commitment. Although the Seekers had previously shied away from media attention, they now actively sought it out. As Keech relayed a flurry of new messages from Clarion explaining the situation, making new predictions, and promising additional imminent appearances, the members gave frequent and lengthy interviews and issued news releases about the latest contacts with the aliens. They engaged anyone curious to learn about their group, regardless of the sincerity of their interest or potential motives. Surprisingly, the two members of the group who had been the most skeptical in the run-up to the prophesied end of the world, Cleo Armstrong and Bob Eastman, became the most zealous after, especially Cleo. Her father, Dr. Thomas Armstrong, a physician in a small college town, had become a leader, along with Keech, of the Seekers. Her mother, Daisy, was also a believer. Bob Eastman considered Dr. Armstrong as his mentor and practically lived with the family by December. A parade of events in the final days before doomsday left Cleo and Bob doubtful of what they had committed to. They attended and listened to recordings of two seances hosted by a psychic named Ella Lowell. The proceedings devolved into a bumbling series of confusing, inconsistent, and contradictory predictions and messages. Cleo and Bob were also disillusioned by the gullibility of the other Seekers in blindly believing the authenticity of messages supposedly delivered from Clarion that were obvious pranks from local teenagers. Yet, “in the days following the 21st, their behavior took an astonishing turn. Though it might be most plausible to expect that they would give up their beliefs following disconfirmation, quite the reverse happened.” During the cult’s PR offensive on December 22 and throughout the week, Cleo frequently took over for her father and Marian Keech to answer reporters’ questions. In contrast to her prior conduct with reporters (avoiding them completely or lying to rid herself of them), she willingly became a voice for the beliefs of the cult. Five months later, she found herself on the garage ramp of a local hotel waiting all night yet again for the aliens to arrive. Ella Lowell had contacted Dr. Armstrong and told him that his family would be picked up on that date at that location. Cleo, now a college student, failed to get permission from her dormitory for the overnight absence, perhaps because she believed it wouldn’t matter once she was on her way to Clarion.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  For Bob and Jane (in the initial scenario), their emotions served to separate them. In 1978, after completing my doctoral work, I took a paid vacation as a teacher in residence at the Esalen Institute, nestled above the roiling sea of the breathtakingly serrated Big Sur coast. As part of my duties, I conducted what was called the open-seat forum. In this group setting, members of the Esalen community could come in and receive free therapy. My duties were executed on Monday and Thursday afternoons. After several weeks I became perplexed by an intriguing phenomenon. Thursdays were quite calm, and the impromptu clients were generally working productively. However, Mondays were quite a different story. It was as if there were firecrackers going off on the Fourth of July. One person after another would come to see me and, without prompting, would either break down in jagged sobs or pummel pillows with undirected (and impotent) rage. A possible explanation for this weekly divergence came to me unexpectedly. One day as I walked past the bulletin board outside the office, I noticed a note announcing that a particular group, which encouraged hyperventilation and strong emotional catharsis, had been canceled for that Wednesday evening. It was set to resume the following week. Hmm, I wondered, would this ordinarily calm Thursday be like the chaotic Mondays? And it was. Earlier that same year, my brother Jon had published a landmark study in the medical journal Lancet. 164 In this research, he had given a group of patients recovering from jaw surgery either an IV drip of morphine or a placebo that consisted of physiological saline. Both groups were told that they were being given a powerful painkiller. Fully two-thirds of the patients who received the saline placebo had as profound an effect of pain relief as did the group of patients who received a solid dose of morphine, pain abatement’s gold standard. a Jon’s findings, amazing in their own right, were surpassed by the next phase of the research. When patients were given the placebo plus Naloxone, the placebo response was completely negated. Naloxone is a drug that has absolutely no effect whatsoever when administered to a sober individual (not unlike the effect of Viagra on an individual whose dosage is followed by a leisurely walk with the dog). However, when administered in the emergency room to addicts who have overdosed on heroin, it makes them stone sober in seconds. The mode of action of Naloxone is as an opiate antagonist. This means that Naloxone attaches to opioid receptors throughout the brain, thereby blocking the attachment and action of both the exogenous opiate drugs, including morphine and heroin, as well as the body’s own endogenous (internally self-generated) opiates, called endorphins.

• From Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away (2022)

  Instead, Thaler hypothesized that it had something to do with the wines being in his possession, the fact of ownership. That ownership caused him to value his bottles more highly than bottles not in his possession. If an economist can fall for this illusion, even after his friends have been poking fun at him in academic journals for years, imagine how bad this is for the rest of us. Over the past forty years, researchers in well over a hundred subsequent studies have replicated and expanded on Thaler’s initial work. The early demonstrations of the endowment effect in the lab were quite simple. In one of Jack Knetsch’s early experiments, students signed up for the task of completing a questionnaire. Before filling it out, one group of participants received their payment in the form of a coffee mug. A second group received payment in the form of a big chocolate bar. (A third group was offered a choice between the two as a fresh decision with no prior ownership of either. This group split pretty evenly, favoring the mug 56%–44%.) Knetsch wanted to know whether ownership of the mug or the chocolate bar among the first two groups would change how the participants valued those items. To do that, after completing the questionnaire, he gave the participants in those groups a chance to switch their payment for the other item. In other words, the students with the mug could trade for the chocolate bar, and the students with the chocolate bar could trade for the mug. If there was no effect of ownership, you would expect that the first two groups, after trading when they preferred the other item, would end up with the same proportion of mugs and chocolate bars as those who came to the decision fresh. About half the participants in each group would trade, perhaps slightly more in the group that started with the chocolate bar and slightly fewer in the group starting with the mug. But that’s not what Knetsch found. It turned out that endowment to an item, even for such a brief period of time, had quite a strong effect on how much value they attached to the items. Of those given the mug, 89% declined to trade it for the chocolate bar. Among those given the chocolate, 90% favored the chocolate and only 10% traded it for the mug. Knetsch, along with several other collaborators (including Thaler and Kahneman) ran additional experiments to uncover the disparity that the endowment effect creates in buying and selling prices. These studies were an attempt to replicate the behavior of their economist friend, who simultaneously thought $200 was too much to pay for a bottle of wine but the same amount was too little to sell it for. One of the experiments involved paying some participants with cash and some with a coffee mug.