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.

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• From Cleanness (2020)

  We reached the top of the hill, where the medieval atmosphere was broken by two large trucks parked close to the ruins, each of them marked SOFIISKA NATSIONALNA OPERA I BALET in the block Cyrillic of government pronouncements. Tents had been set up to sell wine and refreshments, and genteel white folding chairs were arrayed on wooden platforms in front of the stage, where men in costumes, doubling as stagehands, were arranging scenery and props. A few potted plants and a painted backdrop sketched an idea of a forest, while complicated wooden scaffolding scaled the medieval wall, at the top of which a large statue of Ganesh reached out his many arms. I tried to take it in while R. flipped through the program: the ruins, the socialist-era trucks, the European refinement of the audience, the nineteenth-century sets, the ancient god serenely gazing; it was like a palimpsest with no original text, just endless layers peeling away, and I felt a quick shudder of vertigo, as though the ground might swing open beneath me.

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

  It culminates with Fonzie, out in Hollywood, on water skis, jumping over a shark, Evel Knievel style. If this doesn’t seem ridiculous enough, he does it while wearing his trademark leather jacket and a pair of swim trunks. Thanks to that origin, jumping the shark has become the ultimate pop culture burn, widely used to identify when something good turns bad. It’s now applied to washed-up TV shows, movie franchises, actors, and even athletes, politicians, and social media influencers. In hindsight, we can see the moment when somebody should have quit. When your favorite quarterback hangs on a few years too long, it’s easy to spot the exact point when they started the decline from their peak. It’s easy to look back at a relationship and realize when things began to go irreparably downhill. It’s easy to look back and see the moment when it was clear that Blockbuster was going to lose to Netflix. We have an expectation that people ought to have seen in foresight what we can so easily see in hindsight. And when they don’t, we can’t believe how obtuse they are. That’s the point of jumping the shark. It’s mocking someone who doesn’t quit on time, no matter that it’s much harder to see the shark in foresight, to pull a Stewart Butterfield and see it in advance. But the sad thing is that as much as we make fun of people who quit too late, when someone does manage to quit on time, we mock them for quitting too early. That’s the quitting bind. The Quitting Bind In the 1990s, Dave Chappelle became a popular stand-up comedian and actor. On the strength of his growing following and a successful HBO special, Comedy Central debuted Chappelle’s Show in 2003. It became an instant hit, called “a singular juggernaut in the annals of American television comedy.” After the first season, Comedy Central’s new parent, Viacom, gave him a $55-million deal for two more seasons. The deal also gave him the freedom to do outside projects and a share of DVD sales, which reached record levels. His passion was performing stand-up for a live audience, so he continued touring. It became clear that he was unhappy with how stardom and celebrity

• From Cleanness (2020)

  I went to bed before B., he said then, we were sharing a room but he wanted to stay up a bit and I was exhausted. I thought he would wake me up when he came in, that we would talk for a little like we always did, just a few minutes the two of us by ourselves; but I slept through the night and when I woke his side of the bed was untouched. I thought maybe he had fallen asleep out on the deck, but it had gotten cold in the night and there was nobody outside. It was early, foggy and quiet, like it only ever is in the mountains, and I stood for a while at the wooden rail, looking down at the village where everything was still. He waited for them in the main room, doing nothing, he said, just waiting until he heard a noise on the upper floor and then the final member of their group came down. G. called this boy by name and for the first time I had a clear sense of the four of them, all of them students I had seen every day, more or less, with so little idea of what passed between them. I have such a strange perspective on their lives; in one sense I see them as no one else sees them, my profession is a kind of long looking, and in another they are entirely opaque to me. He was so excited, G. said of this fourth friend, he couldn’t wait to tell me about the night before, how after I went to bed they stayed up drinking, how there was something going on between B. and our other friend, how they began talking to each other as though he weren’t there, until finally he said good night and left them alone. And then, before he fell asleep he heard them walk past his door together. Isn’t it great, this friend said to G., they’re perfect for each other, and it’s been coming for so long; he couldn’t understand how it hadn’t happened already, it was so obviously what they wanted. And he said all this to me like I knew it already, G. went on, like it was so clear it didn’t need to be said. But I didn’t know, I hadn’t seen anything, and as I sat there I felt something I had never felt before, it was like I was falling into something, like water though it wasn’t really like water, it was like a new element, G. said. But surely he didn’t say precisely that, surely this is something I’ve added; added in solidarity, I’d like to say, but it wasn’t solidarity I felt as I listened to him, it was more like the laying of a claim. The experience he had had was my own, I felt, I recognized it exactly, and as he spoke I felt myself falling also, into his story and his feeling both, I was trapped in what he told.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  We moved slowly along Tsar Osvoboditel. We had already passed the university, where in the laps of the statues of the founding brothers, scholarly and distinguished in their chairs, protesters had placed identical OSTAVKA signs. Skaters sloped up and down metal ramps in the Knyazheska Garden, and behind them rose the monument to the Soviet army, at the top of which huge cast-iron soldiers raised their rifles to the sky. It was pure Communist kitsch but for all that impressive, especially with the light waning, the mountains a jagged dark ring at the horizon, it was one of my favorite views in Sofia. The chants were starting up in earnest, they began at the front of the march and traveled backward, almost antiphonal, the three syllables of ostavka moving up and down the line. There was an angrier chant aimed at the socialists, cherveni boklutsi, red trash—there was a coalition government but the socialists had taken the brunt of the protesters’ anger, as they usually did; they weren’t really socialists at all, I’d heard people say, they were just the Communist Party rebranded. But each time this chant rose up it died down quickly, it couldn’t get any traction. S. told me that his sign was inspired by this chant, which sometimes became cherveni pedali, red faggots, among the angrier groups of protesters, he had heard it almost every night he had marched. But the mood now wasn’t angry at all, people passed bottles of wine and beer over the heads of children. I said goodbye to S. and the others, wishing them luck, and drifted among the crowd, which was easy to do, little groups of friends hung together but otherwise there was plenty of space between marchers. The protests were organized online, on Facebook and Twitter, and many of the signs were marked with hashtags, #ostavka and #mirenprotest, peaceful protest, giving me the eerie sense of being on- and offline at once. JOURNALISTS! one sign read in English, TELL THE WORLD WHAT’S HAPPENING HERE. A sense of bewilderment and grievance had grown as the days passed; how is this not news, my students asked me, why doesn’t anyone care, and I was at a loss to answer them, except that it was the season of uprisings, of the Arab Spring and Taksim Square, protests that were larger and more violent. There was only so much attention to go around, I supposed, it ran out before it could reach Bulgaria.

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

  156 156 Paul and Matthew among Jews and Gentiles late first century are not plausible, whereas hypotheses that foreground the rhetorical nature of our sources are much more persuasive. My own arguments, based on literary genre and rhetorical analysis, will not be appealing to those who see our ancient sources as reasonably accurate reflections of historical reality. These examples also il ustrate the conundrum we face in attempting to discern and describe the messy process of the “parting of the ways.” As I mentioned at the outset, I have begun to question the mutuality implied by this metaphor, given the relative paucity of reliable evidence for the non-Christ-confessing Jewish role in the process. Of course I recognize that my emphasis on the silence of our sources is also affected by my own views concerning plausible hypotheses. It could be that those who accept as plausible the various statements of the NT and other ancient sources about Jewish persecution of Christ-confessors, as well as the claims that Jews rejected belief in Jesus on theological grounds, will argue that the parting was indeed a mutual affair, and, perhaps, even instigated by the Jewish opponents to Christianity. I know I will not persuade everyone, or even anyone, to take a more skeptical approach, to this topic and others. But I hope that we can all reach the point of acknowledging that plausibility, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder, and not the same as objective truth. 157 10 Mark 14:51–52: A Socio-Rhetorical Reading of the Text and Conclusions Drawn from the History of Its Interpretation L. Gregory Bloomquist and Michael A. G. Haykin Introduction In Mark 14:51–52 we read a seemingly inconsequential story of a young man, found in the garden at the same time as Jesus, who is captured by Temple authorities. The lines are not only unparalleled in the Synoptic tradition, but as Albert Vanhoye noted, it is the only passage that is unique to Mark in the passion account1: καὶ νεανίσκος τις συνηκολούθει αὐτῷ περιβεβλημένος σινδόνα ἐπὶ γυμνοῦ, καὶ κρατοῦσιν αὐτό ὁ δὲ καταλιπὼν τὴν σινδόνα γυμνὸς ἔφυγεν. Why, one asks, would this simple passage not be found in any of the other gospel accounts of the passion, including the Gospel of Matthew? If, in particular, Matthew was not alien to the language and themes found in Mark 14, why did he not include the story, if we presume that he had Mark? In what follows we seek to provide an answer to this question and thus to helping better understand both the Gospel of Mark and the other gospels, including that of Matthew, by first providing an overview of some of the representative lines of interpretation on this passage from the earliest, extant comments on the Markan passage, through a more extended look at Protestant and Evangelical exegesis of the passage from Calvin to Spurgeon, and ending with a brief overview of historical-critical interpretations.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  Martin and Dorothy were dealing with far more significant problems than hers: “Sometimes,” she said, “I wish I had something visibly wrong with me, like paralysis. Then I’d feel more legitimate.” That stirred Dorothy into raising her head and making her first (and, as it happened, only) comment in the group: “You want paralyzed legs?” she whispered huskily. “Have mine.” To my great astonishment, Martin rushed in to defend Rosa: “No, no, Dorothy—I got the right name? It is Dorothy, isn’t it? Rosa didn’t mean it like that. I know she didn’t mean that she wanted your legs or mine. Look at my legs. Look at ’em. Just look at ’em. Who in their right mind would want ’em?” With his one good hand Martin ripped away the covering sheet and pointed to his legs. Hideously deformed, they ended in two or three gnarled nubbins. The rest of his toes had entirely rotted away. Neither Dorothy nor any of the other group members looked very long at Martin’s legs. They repelled me too, despite my medical training. “Rosa was just using a figure of speech,” Martin continued. “She only meant she wanted to have a more obvious disease, something you can see. She didn’t mean to minimize our condition. Did you, Rosa? It is Rosa, right?” Martin surprised me. I had allowed his deformity to conceal his acute intelligence. But he was not finished. “Do you mind if I ask you something, Rosa? I don’t mean to be nosy, so you don’t have to answer if you don’t want to.” “Shoot!” Rosa replied. “But I may not answer it.” “What is your condition? I mean, what’s wrong with you? You’re real skinny, but you don’t look sick. Why are you getting that IV?” he asked, gesturing toward it. “I don’t eat. They feed me with this stuff.” “Don’t eat? They don’t let you eat?” “No, they want me to eat. But I don’t want to.” Running her fingers through her hair, Rosa seemed to be trying to groom herself. “Aren’t you hungry?” Martin persisted. “No.” I was fascinated by this interchange. Since everyone always tiptoes around eating-disorder patients (so defensive, so fragile, so much denial), I had never before witnessed an anorexic patient being confronted so boldly. “I’m always hungry,” Martin said. “You should have seen what I had for breakfast today: around twelve pancakes, eggs, two orange juices.” He paused, hesitated. “Don’t eat? Haven’t you ever had an appetite?” “No. Not as far back as I can remember. I don’t like to eat.” “Don’t like to eat?” I could see Martin struggling to get his mind around this concept. He was genuinely baffled—as though he had just met someone who didn’t enjoy breathing. “I’ve always eaten a lot.

• From The History of World Literature (2007)

  205 Borges’s Labyrinths Lecture 47 In the last lecture, we looked [at] … the idea [in Postmodern literature] that the universe is absurd. In this lecture, we want to review that idea in the work of someone who’s usually considered to be one of the avatars of Postmodernism, Jorge Luis Borges, and some of the implications of that assumption for literature. I f the universe is absurd, as most Postmodernists believe, then what is there to write stories about—besides pointing out its absurdity? Jorge Luis Borges provides one answer to this question. In one of Borges’s most famous stories, “The Library of Babel,” he offers a vivid illustration of the absurdity of the universe. The story pictures the universe as a library made up of a presumably in ¿ nite number of identical hexagonal galleries; its exact center is any one of its hexagons and its circumference is inaccessible. Identical books (35 per shelf, each book being 410 pages long, each page containing 40 lines of 80 letters and spaces) line the identical shelves. A set of 25 characters consisting of a comma, 22 letters, a period, and a space encompasses all of the characters used in the books. Characters from the set are used in apparently random but unrepeated sequences on the pages of the books. Occasionally there is a comprehensible line—“O time thy pyramids” is one such—but for every line of sense there are “leagues of senseless cacophonies, verbal jumbles, and incoherences” that cannot correspond to any known language. The books would thus register every possible combination of the 25 symbols—a number that would be vast but not in ¿ nite, and they would express everything that could be expressed in all possible languages, meaning that all solutions to all problems and questions, including the origin of the library itself, would be in books somewhere—books which the librarians take to calling the “Vindications.” When this idea was ¿ rst introduced, librarians from every hexagon traveled through others, looking for the Vindications, forgetting that the chances of ¿ nding even one could be computed at zero. The narrator assumes that the library is in ¿ nite and cyclical, so that, traveling in any direction and after many centuries, one would ¿ nd the same volumes repeated in the same

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

  PSEUDO-CHRYSOSTOM. Not that they should answer it, and thereupon hear of Christ the answer to their question, but that being puzzled they should ask Him no farther; according to that precept He had given above, Give not that which is holy to the dogs. (Mat. 7:6.) For even if He had told them, it would have profited nothing, because the darkened will cannot perceive the things that are of the light. For him that enquires we ought to instruct, but him that tempts, to overthrow by a stroke of reasoning, but not to publish to him the power of the mystery. The Lord thus sets before them in His question a dilemma; and that they might not escape Him, says, Which if ye tell me, I in like wise will tell you by what authority I do these things. His question is this; The baptism of John whence was it? from heaven, or of men? AUGUSTINE. (in Joan. Tr. v. 4.) John received his authority to baptize from Him, whom he afterwards baptized; and that baptism which was committed to him is here called the baptism of John. He alone received such a gift; no righteous man before or after him was entrusted with a baptism to be called from himself. For John came to baptize in the water of repentance, to prepare the way for the Lord, not to give inward cleansing, which mere man cannot do. JEROME. What the Priests revolved in their malice is shewn when he adds, But they reasoned with themselves. For had they replied that it was from heaven, the question was inevitable, Why then were ye not baptized by John? But should they reply that it was an invention of human device, and had in it nothing divine, they feared a tumult among the people. For all the assembled multitudes had received John’s baptism, and held him accordingly for a Prophet. This godless party therefore make answer, and by a seeming humility of speech confessing that they know not, turned to hide their insidious designs. And they answered Jesus, and said, We know not. In saying that they knew not, they lied; and it might have followed upon their answering thus, that the Lord also should say, I know not; but truth cannot lie, and therefore it follows, And he said unto them, Neither tell I you by what authority I do these things. This shews that they knew, but would not answer, and that He also knew, but would not answer, because they would not speak what they knew.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  I started to undo his belt, wanting to meet him in his daring, to show him I was game; and he moaned into my mouth before he pulled back and pushed my hand away. Porta-te bem , he said, slapping my face lightly and laughing, behave. THE BUS LEFT US in the Piazza Maggiore, where there was a huge wooden statue in the center of the square, a cylinder painted an uneven green. The bottom half was featureless, the top carved into the torso of a frog, regal and upright, his lips drawn back in an expression at once benevolent and severe. Two arms crossed at his stomach, four long fingers hanging down from each; above the half-lidded eyes there was a crown with four prongs. Cables stretched down from its midsection, securing it to the pavement; wooden barriers marked off a space around it. It would be burned, the man working at reception told us back at the hotel when we asked, it was the tradition, the old year burned at the turn of the new. I remembered something I had seen in a movie, Fellini maybe, a stuffed witch on a pile of kindling and old furniture, the trash of the past, the promise of an uncluttered future. I wondered why we didn’t do it in the States, where we love to pretend to start afresh, where we love to burn things down. There was nothing like it in Bulgaria either, where New Year’s was celebrated at home; families gathered in apartments and at midnight they set off fireworks from their balconies. It had frightened me my first year, the sound ricocheting off the walls as the little bombs fell into the streets below, where everyone knew not to be, they were impassible for a good half hour. Which was the opposite of clearing away: all over the city the explosions came down and nobody swept them up, the wrappers and casings littered the streets until the heavy spring rains. It wasn’t a traditional statue, the man told us, there was a competition each year, artists submitted designs and the winner had his work displayed there, in the center of the city, for a week before it was burned. For us the frog is a symbol, the man said, it means poverty, here in Bologna, in Italy, so it means to burn poverty. You know the crisis is very hard here, he said, the austerity is very hard, it would be good to burn it away. He had apologized for his English, but it was very good, less stiff than he seemed in his jacket and tie; he was young, midtwenties, a college student in a university town.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  We moved slowly along Tsar Osvoboditel. We had already passed the university, where in the laps of the statues of the founding brothers, scholarly and distinguished in their chairs, protesters had placed identical OSTAVKA signs. Skaters sloped up and down metal ramps in the Knyazheska Garden, and behind them rose the monument to the Soviet army, at the top of which huge cast-iron soldiers raised their rifles to the sky. It was pure Communist kitsch but for all that impressive, especially with the light waning, the mountains a jagged dark ring at the horizon, it was one of my favorite views in Sofia. The chants were starting up in earnest, they began at the front of the march and traveled backward, almost antiphonal, the three syllables of ostavka moving up and down the line. There was an angrier chant aimed at the socialists, cherveni boklutsi, red trash—there was a coalition government but the socialists had taken the brunt of the protesters’ anger, as they usually did; they weren’t really socialists at all, I’d heard people say, they were just the Communist Party rebranded. But each time this chant rose up it died down quickly, it couldn’t get any traction. S. told me that his sign was inspired by this chant, which sometimes became cherveni pedali, red faggots, among the angrier groups of protesters, he had heard it almost every night he had marched. But the mood now wasn’t angry at all, people passed bottles of wine and beer over the heads of children. I said goodbye to S. and the others, wishing them luck, and drifted among the crowd, which was easy to do, little groups of friends hung together but otherwise there was plenty of space between marchers. The protests were organized online, on Facebook and Twitter, and many of the signs were marked with hashtags, #ostavka and #mirenprotest, peaceful protest, giving me the eerie sense of being on- and offline at once. JOURNALISTS! one sign read in English, TELL THE WORLD WHAT’S HAPPENING HERE. A sense of bewilderment and grievance had grown as the days passed; how is this not news, my students asked me, why doesn’t anyone care, and I was at a loss to answer them, except that it was the season of uprisings, of the Arab Spring and Taksim Square, protests that were larger and more violent. There was only so much attention to go around, I supposed, it ran out before it could reach Bulgaria.

• From Reading the Bible from the Margins (2002)

  Now, if Jesus is willing to learn something from the margins of society, shouldn't his church be willing to do likewise? CHAPTER 2Reading the Bible from the CenterAccording to the Bible, any child who disrespects his or her parents should be put to death. Leviticus reads, “Anyone who curses their father and mother shall surely be executed” (20:9). Now, as a parent of two preteen-agers, I confess that at times I am very tempted to take this command literally. Yet I wonder, if we were to read in the newspapers that a father killed his son or daughter for uttering a curse toward him and claimed the authority of Scripture as his defense, would good churchgoing Christians rally to his support? If not, why? Why can't a parent put a rebellious teenager to death in accordance with the Bible? The next verse (Lev. 20:10) calls for the death sentence for anyone who commits adultery. Just think of the impact this would have on our national government! How many high-ranking government officials, TV evangelists, business leaders, and everyday common folk have fallen into this sin? The bloodbath that would have to occur to uphold this commandment is staggering. Additionally, Leviticus 24:16 makes the cursing of God's name a capital offense. Although I personally shudder every time I hear people using the name of the Lord in vain, is their death a fit punishment for their transgression? Would anyone be willing to argue for the death sentence for those who constantly damn the name of God? Likewise, according to Exodus 31:14–15, anyone who works on the Sabbath must be killed. Should we execute police officers, hospital personnel, or firefighters who work on Sundays? What about the waiter who serves you lunch after church? Should his or her tip be a death sentence for working on the Sabbath? As much as we do not want to admit it, we all read biblical texts selectively. Few, if any, would insist that these “peccadillos” deserve death. Most of us simply choose to ignore or outright disobey the punishments associated with such passages. In effect, all who claim the authority of the Bible make a conscious or unconscious decision to follow some sections of the Scriptures literally while following others symbolically. In fact, if we were to follow literally everything within the biblical text, we would probably end up in jail. For example, Psalm 137:9 provides a paradigm for treating enemies: “Blessed is the one who seizes and dashes your little ones against the stone.” How can we reconcile the loving mercy of Christ with the vengeance of smashing the infants of our enemies against stones? We are forced to a choose. Either we take the Bible literally and commit crimes against humanity by obeying the psalmist, or we begin to question how we read and interpret certain sections of the Bible. How do such verses reflect the social location of those who first penned them? How do we interpret these verses for our time?

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  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. What Jon and his colleagues had demonstrated with these experiments was that the brain possesses its own pain mediating system.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  You probably felt as though you first consciously decided to move and then, following your intention, you moved it. It feels to you as though the conscious decision caused the action. Libet asked experimental subjects to do just this while he systematically measured the timing of three things: (1) The subjects “conscious” decision to move was marked on a special clock. (2) The beginning of (what is called) the readiness potential in the motor cortex was measured using EEG electrodes on the scalp. (3) The start of the actual action was measured using electrodes on the wrist. So which do you think (based on your experience in the preceding experiment) came first? Was it the decision to move, activity in the motor cortex, or the actual movement? The answer, defying credulity, dramatically contradicted common sense. The brain’s activity began about 500 milliseconds (half a second!) before the person was aware of deciding to act. The conscious decision came far too late to be the cause of the action. It was as though consciousness was a mere afterthought—a way of “explaining to ourselves,” an action not evoked by consciousness. As peculiar as this might seem, it fits in with previous experiments that Libet did on exposed brains as part of a neurosurgical procedure. Here, Libet had demonstrated that about half a second of continuous activity of stimulation in the sensory cortex is needed for a person to become aware of a sensory stimulus. 147 I had the opportunity to watch one of these procedures, and it was jaw-dropping to see it on the oscilloscope. In summary, Libet found that the “conscious” decision to perform a simple action (such as pushing a button) preceded the action. This conscious decision, however, occurred only after the “premotor” area in the brain first fired with a burst of electrical activity. In other words, people decide to act only after their brain unconsciously prepares them to do so. Daniel Wegner, at Harvard University, recently advanced and refined this proposition. 148 In one of his studies, an illusion was created by a series of mirrors. Subjects, thinking that they were looking at their own arms, were actually seeing (in the mirror) the movements of an experimenter’s arm. When the experimenter’s arms moved (according to the instructions of another researcher), the subjects reported that they had made and therefore willed the movements (when, in fact, they had not even moved their arms)! Wilhelm Wundt (considered one of the founders of experimental psychology) expands on our attachment to the notion of free will: “Nothing seems to us to belong so closely to our personality, to be so completely our property as our will.” Yet, the results of Libet and Wegner, taken together, seriously challenge (if not put to rest) our common-sense understanding of consciousness and our love affair with free will. The annihilation of free will, suggested in Wegner’s book, 149 goes against what we believe is the very core of our existence as autonomous human beings.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  Hers was the largest sign, with the letters LGBT and beneath them I NIE SME BULGARI , we’re Bulgarians too. We moved slowly along Tsar Osvoboditel. We had already passed the university, where in the laps of the statues of the founding brothers, scholarly and distinguished in their chairs, protesters had placed identical OSTAVKA signs. Skaters sloped up and down metal ramps in the Knyazheska Garden, and behind them rose the monument to the Soviet army, at the top of which huge cast-iron soldiers raised their rifles to the sky. It was pure Communist kitsch but for all that impressive, especially with the light waning, the mountains a jagged dark ring at the horizon, it was one of my favorite views in Sofia. The chants were starting up in earnest, they began at the front of the march and traveled backward, almost antiphonal, the three syllables of ostavka moving up and down the line. There was an angrier chant aimed at the socialists, cherveni boklutsi , red trash—there was a coalition government but the socialists had taken the brunt of the protesters’ anger, as they usually did; they weren’t really socialists at all, I’d heard people say, they were just the Communist Party rebranded. But each time this chant rose up it died down quickly, it couldn’t get any traction. S. told me that his sign was inspired by this chant, which sometimes became cherveni pedali , red faggots, among the angrier groups of protesters, he had heard it almost every night he had marched. But the mood now wasn’t angry at all, people passed bottles of wine and beer over the heads of children. I said goodbye to S. and the others, wishing them luck, and drifted among the crowd, which was easy to do, little groups of friends hung together but otherwise there was plenty of space between marchers. The protests were organized online, on Facebook and Twitter, and many of the signs were marked with hashtags, #ostavka and #mirenprotest, peaceful protest, giving me the eerie sense of being on- and offline at once. JOURNALISTS! one sign read in English, TELL THE WORLD WHAT’S HAPPENING HERE. A sense of bewilderment and grievance had grown as the days passed; how is this not news, my students asked me, why doesn’t anyone care, and I was at a loss to answer them, except that it was the season of uprisings, of the Arab Spring and Taksim Square, protests that were larger and more violent. There was only so much attention to go around, I supposed, it ran out before it could reach Bulgaria. At Orlov Most, the protesters turned onto the boulevard that runs alongside the canal.

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  But here’s the catch: eroticism is inefficient. It loves to squander time and resources. As Adam Phillips wryly notes, “In our erotic life work does not work...trying is always trying too hard. Eroticism is an imaginative act, and you can’t measure it. We glorify efficiency and fail to recognize that the erotic space is a radiant interlude in which we luxuriate, indifferent to demands of productivity; pleasure is the only goal. Octavio Paz writes, “The moment of merging is a crack in time, a balm against the wounds inflicted by the minutes and hours of time. A moment totally eternal as it is ephemeral.” It is a leap into a world beyond. This leap entails a loss of control that we’re taught from a very young age to guard against. We are socialized to tame our primal side: our unruly impulses, our sexual urges, and our rapacious appetites. Social order is built on this restraint, and lack thereof threatens to create chaos. Because loss of control is almost exclusively seen in a negative light, we don’t even entertain the idea that surrender can be emotionally or spiritually enlightening. But experiencing a temporary suspension of our discernible self is often liberating and expansive. I have seen many people stumble when they can’t simply take the problem of eros and fix it. They are left feeling bewildered and frightened by their slackened command. I help them learn how to relinquish control intentionally, as a means of personal growth and self-discovery. Ryan and Christine have been in therapy for a year. I meet with them together and individually as they struggle through the transition from being a sexually entwined couple to being the parents of three small children. Following the birth of their twin daughters, the lovers’ erotic inspiration began gasping for air. While some couples accept fading intensity with gracious resignation, settling into affectionate companionship, Ryan and Christine don’t want to give up. The memory of what they once had is still dear to them. They make a clear distinction between having sex and making love, and they haven’t made love in a while. They’ve rented videos, they’ve taken baths together, and they are committed to their weekly date. They’ve tried a lot of things, some yielding satisfying results, others a total waste. Merely having sex is not really their issue. Of course they’d like to have it more often, but their concern is more about intensity than frequency. It’s not the diminishing amount of sex that bothers them, but its increasing dullness. They like to be proactive, and they’re shopping for new tools. I can think of a number of things that I could suggest to this couple, joining them in their practical approach to the problem of diminishing desire. But I question the rationalist approach in matters of the heart. I think that the challenge of sustaining eros in a committed relationship over time is of a different nature. We don’t always know our aims in advance.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  My ignorance wasn’t for lack of trying: for months after I arrived, I came to the center every morning I could, walking the streets as the city woke up and returning to mark off my route on a map pinned to the wall. And yet those same streets, even a short time later, seemed almost entirely unfamiliar; I could never understand how they fit together, and only the stray detail (an old cornice carving, an oddly painted façade) reminded me I had passed that way before. Walking behind G., as always when I was with someone born in Sofia, I had a sense of the city opening itself up, the monolithic blank concrete of the Soviet-style apartment blocks giving way to unsuspected courtyards and cafés and paths through overgrown little parks. As we entered these spaces, which were quieter and less traveled than the boulevards, G. slowed his pace, allowing me to come up beside him, and we walked in a more companionable way, though still without speaking. It was in one of these courtyards or little parks that G.’s restaurant was hidden. It was below ground, and as we approached the door that would take us down to it, I noticed a neighboring storefront, an antiquarian shop, its windows crowded with icons—Cyril and Methodius, a beatific Mary, St. George on horseback hooking the dragon through the mouth—as well as Nazi paraphernalia, watches and billfolds and flasks all stamped with a broken cross. These are common at antiques shops and outdoor markets here, souvenirs for tourists or for young men longing for a time when they might have allied themselves, however disastrously, with some real power in the world. The space we descended into was larger than I had expected, an open room with booths along each side and, at the back, a bar I imagined crowded at night with university students. The room was lit by a row of small windows near the top of one wall, their panes clouded and stained with smoke, so that the light was strangely muted, as if steeped in tea. G. gestured toward one of the booths, most of which were empty, and we sat down in it together. G. laid his cigarettes on the table and rested the tips of his fingers on the pack, tapping it lightly.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  Hers was the largest sign, with the letters LGBT and beneath them I NIE SME BULGARI , we’re Bulgarians too. We moved slowly along Tsar Osvoboditel. We had already passed the university, where in the laps of the statues of the founding brothers, scholarly and distinguished in their chairs, protesters had placed identical OSTAVKA signs. Skaters sloped up and down metal ramps in the Knyazheska Garden, and behind them rose the monument to the Soviet army, at the top of which huge cast-iron soldiers raised their rifles to the sky. It was pure Communist kitsch but for all that impressive, especially with the light waning, the mountains a jagged dark ring at the horizon, it was one of my favorite views in Sofia. The chants were starting up in earnest, they began at the front of the march and traveled backward, almost antiphonal, the three syllables of ostavka moving up and down the line. There was an angrier chant aimed at the socialists, cherveni boklutsi , red trash—there was a coalition government but the socialists had taken the brunt of the protesters’ anger, as they usually did; they weren’t really socialists at all, I’d heard people say, they were just the Communist Party rebranded. But each time this chant rose up it died down quickly, it couldn’t get any traction. S. told me that his sign was inspired by this chant, which sometimes became cherveni pedali , red faggots, among the angrier groups of protesters, he had heard it almost every night he had marched. But the mood now wasn’t angry at all, people passed bottles of wine and beer over the heads of children. I said goodbye to S. and the others, wishing them luck, and drifted among the crowd, which was easy to do, little groups of friends hung together but otherwise there was plenty of space between marchers. The protests were organized online, on Facebook and Twitter, and many of the signs were marked with hashtags, #ostavka and #mirenprotest, peaceful protest, giving me the eerie sense of being on- and offline at once. JOURNALISTS! one sign read in English, TELL THE WORLD WHAT’S HAPPENING HERE. A sense of bewilderment and grievance had grown as the days passed; how is this not news, my students asked me, why doesn’t anyone care, and I was at a loss to answer them, except that it was the season of uprisings, of the Arab Spring and Taksim Square, protests that were larger and more violent. There was only so much attention to go around, I supposed, it ran out before it could reach Bulgaria. At Orlov Most, the protesters turned onto the boulevard that runs alongside the canal.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  I went to bed before B., he said then, we were sharing a room but he wanted to stay up a bit and I was exhausted. I thought he would wake me up when he came in, that we would talk for a little like we always did, just a few minutes the two of us by ourselves; but I slept through the night and when I woke his side of the bed was untouched. I thought maybe he had fallen asleep out on the deck, but it had gotten cold in the night and there was nobody outside. It was early, foggy and quiet, like it only ever is in the mountains, and I stood for a while at the wooden rail, looking down at the village where everything was still. He waited for them in the main room, doing nothing, he said, just waiting until he heard a noise on the upper floor and then the final member of their group came down. G. called this boy by name and for the first time I had a clear sense of the four of them, all of them students I had seen every day, more or less, with so little idea of what passed between them. I have such a strange perspective on their lives; in one sense I see them as no one else sees them, my profession is a kind of long looking, and in another they are entirely opaque to me. He was so excited, G. said of this fourth friend, he couldn’t wait to tell me about the night before, how after I went to bed they stayed up drinking, how there was something going on between B. and our other friend, how they began talking to each other as though he weren’t there, until finally he said good night and left them alone. And then, before he fell asleep he heard them walk past his door together. Isn’t it great, this friend said to G., they’re perfect for each other, and it’s been coming for so long; he couldn’t understand how it hadn’t happened already, it was so obviously what they wanted. And he said all this to me like I knew it already, G. went on, like it was so clear it didn’t need to be said. But I didn’t know, I hadn’t seen anything, and as I sat there I felt something I had never felt before, it was like I was falling into something, like water though it wasn’t really like water, it was like a new element, G. said. But surely he didn’t say precisely that, surely this is something I’ve added; added in solidarity, I’d like to say, but it wasn’t solidarity I felt as I listened to him, it was more like the laying of a claim. The experience he had had was my own, I felt, I recognized it exactly, and as he spoke I felt myself falling also, into his story and his feeling both, I was trapped in what he told.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  First, as we saw earlier, there is the remarkable and paradoxical idea that on the cross Jesus won a victory—or at least God won a victory through Jesus—over the shadowy “powers” that had usurped his rule over the world. That idea was popular in some quarters during the first few Christian centuries. Many thinkers in the second half of the twentieth century and up to the present day have advocated some version of this, partly as a way of warding off what they see as those dangerous ideas about punishment. But this simply pushes the question around the circle rather than answering it directly. What or who are these “powers”? Why would someone’s death—anyone’s death, the Messiah’s death, the death of the Son of God himself—why would such an event defeat these “powers”? Why would that be a revelation of divine love? And—perhaps the most pressing question of all—if these “powers” have been defeated, why does evil still appear to carry on as before, to reign unchecked? Did anything actually happen on the cross that made a real difference in the world, and if so what account can we give of it? Has the revolution really begun, or is it all wishful thinking? Second, there’s another idea that comes through prominently in the Bible that many have advocated as the “real meaning” of Jesus’s death. In this view, on the cross Jesus offered the supreme example of love, the ultimate display of what love will do. He thus transformed the world by offering a uniquely powerful example, a pattern for others to imitate. Now, of course, the New Testament does indeed insist on this line of thought. Jesus’s death is regularly appealed to as the gold standard of “love.” In John’s gospel, Jesus commands his followers to love one another and declares, “No one has a love greater than this, to lay down your life for your friends” (15:13). The First Letter of John insists on the same point, as do Paul and many other early writers. But this too runs into problems. Unless there was a reason for Jesus to die, and perhaps even a reason for him to die that particular and horrible kind of death, it is hard to see how this death could actually be an example of love. If Bill’s dearest friend falls into a fast-flowing river and Bill leaps in to try to save him, risking his own life in the process, that would indeed provide an example of love (as well as heroic courage) for anyone who witnesses the event or hears about it. But if Fred, wishing to show his dearest friend how much he loves him, leaps into a fast-flowing river when the friend is standing safely beside him on the bank, that would demonstrate neither love nor courage, but meaningless folly.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  Libet asked experimental subjects to do just this while he systematically measured the timing of three things: (1) The subjects “conscious” decision to move was marked on a special clock. (2) The beginning of (what is called) the readiness potential in the motor cortex was measured using EEG electrodes on the scalp. (3) The start of the actual action was measured using electrodes on the wrist. So which do you think (based on your experience in the preceding experiment) came first? Was it the decision to move, activity in the motor cortex, or the actual movement? The answer, defying credulity, dramatically contradicted common sense. The brain’s activity began about 500 milliseconds (half a second!) before the person was aware of deciding to act. The conscious decision came far too late to be the cause of the action. It was as though consciousness was a mere afterthought—a way of “explaining to ourselves,” an action not evoked by consciousness. As peculiar as this might seem, it fits in with previous experiments that Libet did on exposed brains as part of a neurosurgical procedure. Here, Libet had demonstrated that about half a second of continuous activity of stimulation in the sensory cortex is needed for a person to become aware of a sensory stimulus.147 I had the opportunity to watch one of these procedures, and it was jaw-dropping to see it on the oscilloscope. In summary, Libet found that the “conscious” decision to perform a simple action (such as pushing a button) preceded the action. This conscious decision, however, occurred only after the “premotor” area in the brain first fired with a burst of electrical activity. In other words, people decide to act only after their brain unconsciously prepares them to do so. Daniel Wegner, at Harvard University, recently advanced and refined this proposition.148 In one of his studies, an illusion was created by a series of mirrors. Subjects, thinking that they were looking at their own arms, were actually seeing (in the mirror) the movements of an experimenter’s arm. When the experimenter’s arms moved (according to the instructions of another researcher), the subjects reported that they had made and therefore willed the movements (when, in fact, they had not even moved their arms)!