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 The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  I went toward Saul, this particular morning, and greeted him. He smiled amiably, but seemed preoccupied. The news was indeed serious: one of the older boys, the elder of the Garsia brothers, claimed that the Nestlé firm had set the end of the month as the deadline for the set of pictures to be completed, and that a new album was being launched for the following month. Saul was furious for he would never be able to complete his set in time. I watched the whole excited crowd like a spectator who is not involved in what is happening on the race track. The younger Garsia bought two chocolate bars at once and tore one wrapping open: all heads were bent over the card, a bird. That one belonged to a set already completed by all true collectors! He tore the second wrapping: a machine tool, which was better, but still failed to satisfy him. “I already have it. Who wants to swap it?” I would willingly have accepted it, but I had no card to give in exchange. Garsia put the pictures carefully away in his wallet, then offered the chocolate bars to Birdie: “Will you buy them back from me?” Birdie counted out two pennies twice and took the bars back without their red wrappings. The sons of rich parents, with Birdie’s help, had surely worked out that deal among themselves. Too well fed to eat all the chocolate bars that they bought, they sold them back to Birdie for two pennies, and he then sold them to us for three. That way, everyone was satisfied. I could now afford a chocolate bar every other day, if I wanted, as I needed to spend only one of my pennies on the intervening day and could save the second for the morrow. It was difficult to breakfast off bread and a single penny, but I had found a compromise: I bought a chocolate-flavored candy that I placed between my cheek and my lower jaw. I bit into my bread without touching the candy, which then melted slowly, giving me the impression that I was eating my bread with chocolate. I repeated this experiment several times and, for the days of celebration when I could afford a Nestlé bar, I also had a technique of my own for consuming my treat just as I had a plan for purchasing it. First, I economized carefully, eating my bread in large mouthfuls with as little chocolate as possible. Once I had swallowed my bread and assuaged my hunger, I then hesitated a while before suddenly gulping down all the chocolate that was left, I mean more than half the bar. All my mouth would then participate in this orgasm, with chocolate all over my gums, the lining of my cheeks, and my palate. This lasted thirty seconds, but thirty seconds of total bliss, almost making me feel nausea.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  If you read quickly through Israel’s scriptures—what Christians came to call the “Old Covenant” or the “Old Testament”—you will discover that, contrary to some popular suppositions, they tell a single great story. But this story is strangely inconclusive. It seems to be pointing toward, but not finding, an appropriate ending. The Hebrew Bible is arranged so that the books of Chronicles come last. In the traditions that shaped most modern translations, including English Bibles, Chronicles comes after Kings, and the collection ends with the prophets, the last of which is Malachi. But whether it’s Chronicles or Malachi, a quick read through leaves us straining forward, wondering what’s going to happen next. Actually, you get the same effect if you read quickly through the Pentateuch, the “Five Books,” which stand at the head of Israel’s scriptures. Deuteronomy, the fifth of the Five Books, does not conclude with a “happily ever after” vision of the future, but rather with a challenging prospect, a mixture of warning and hope. Yet the great opening sequence of the Bible—the creation of heaven and earth and man and woman; the call of Abraham; the slavery in Egypt and the subsequent Exodus; the journey to the land of promise—all this seems to indicate that ancient Israel, at least in the view of those who compiled and edited the scriptures, was playing a critical role in a great drama, the drama of the Creator himself and his creation. But the drama wasn’t over yet. At the end of Deuteronomy, Israel is warned about rebellion, exile, and death. At the end of Chronicles, the exile was still continuing. At the end of Malachi, God was promising to come back and sort everything out, but it hadn’t happened yet. One cannot imagine Shakespeare playing this trick, working his way through the stages of a plot and then stopping in the middle without tying the narrative strands together and reaching a resolution. Israel and Adam In particular, the scriptures tell the story of how Israel went into exile. In a sense, the whole story is about little else. The larger story, in which there is a single great “exile” in Babylon, is shot through at point after point with other “exiles,” which lead the eye up to the eventual one. Abraham goes down into Egypt and nearly gets into deep trouble. So does his son Isaac. Isaac’s younger son, Jacob, escaping his brother’s anger, runs away and stays in the land of his ancestors fourteen years before returning to the territory God had promised to Abraham.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  They even seemed not to recognize me. But I had still not penetrated into the room where the dance was being held, beyond a broad doorway that was cloudy with smoke. To get there, I had to make my way through a tangled throng of women who were watching, some of them standing on chairs, stools, even tables, leaning against the walls, clinging together in clusters, all peering deep into the cloud of smoke. How could they see anything at all? Close to me, I recognized my Aunt Noucha, dressed for the occasion in Bedouin costume. I shouted into her ear: “Where is Mother?” When I got no answer, I grasped hold of her arm and shook it roughly. It was oily and sticky with sweat, and seemed to slither out of my grasp. “Where is Mother,” I shouted again. “I want our keys!” She smiled absently at me and pointed toward the living-room. The closer I seemed to get to the heart of all this mysterious din, the more crowded it was. The women who were watching were treading on each other’s feet, almost melting into a mass of compact flesh. I had to be really rough to reach the blue-gray cloud that was so thick that I could scarcely distinguish, through the smoke, the red embers of an earthenware brazier, like a shepherd’s fire in a fog. My eyes smarted from the smoke and became clouded with soothing tears. The noise was so loud, so full, that I seemed no longer to hear anything at all. One moment, I felt I was in sheer void, with no shapes or sounds around me any longer. Then my eyes grew accustomed to it and began to distinguish with difficulty what was going on. Above the red point of the brazier, the heavy smoke of the incense rose; beyond it, I saw the strange creature that haunted this place. A woman, dressed in gaudy veils, was dancing wildly, throwing out her arms, jerking her head back and forth with so violent a motion that it hurt my neck to watch her. She turned her back to us and I could see her long loose hair cast wildly around her like tangled black serpents. Right at the back of the room and seated on the floor, the terrifying Negro musicians were playing. There they are, I thought, the demons! But this was only a half-hearted joke. The man who played the bagpipes, with his eyes bulging out of his head, two white spots against a coal-black background, his cheeks ready to burst, blew hard into his goatskin instrument. The tambourine-player was drunk, had reached a peak of frenzy, and kept on throwing his instrument in the air, catching it again and screaming all the time, without ceasing meanwhile to thump on the taut skin with all his strength.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  The babbling of the relaxed women now spread like water boiling over. The compact crowd gave birth to sudden movements as the individual women decided to change their positions, to climb down from a chair, to rise from the floor, and they all laughed, rushed off to find red scarves, to add incense to the burners. The musicians also seemed to shake their limbs like snorting horses, laughing among themselves with all their teeth showing white and yellow in their black faces. One could hear their guttural voices against a background of shrill gossip. The drummer heated and gently beat above the fire the skin of his instrument, the cymbal-player checked the leather thongs that bound the metal to his hands. Then, like flames, the red scarves were handed above the heads of the crowd, from woman to woman, to the heart of this gay, happy, and relaxed gathering, where my mother, still in her seizure, still lay on the floor, all by herself, in the indifferent gathering of her sisters and of all these other women. When at last the cock was brought in and the musicians got ready to start again, I had to admit that I was entirely helpless and took to flight. I ran down the stairs, rudely pushed aside anyone who was in my way, and was out of the house before the music had started again. In the cool evening air I shivered and then noticed for the first time that I was in a sweat. Unconsciously, I thought of going back, to avoid catching cold: this too had been taught me since childhood, not to leave a warm room without first drinking a glass of water, then to go out by degrees, breathing the colder air in small doses. But I no longer wanted to do anything that I had been taught to do. From now on, I’ll stare straight at the moon, though I’ve been taught that it may strike one blind; when I cut my nails, I’ll throw the parings away anywhere, without fearing that I’ll have to return every night, after my death, in order to find them, by the light of my own ten fingers flaming like torches, throughout all the dust and mud of the whole world; and I’ll no longer whisper to the Djnoun spirits, before throwing out water: “Excuse me, please excuse me!” So I rushed out of our Passage with my teeth already chattering from the drafts of the windy street. I walked fast to keep warm, and the exercise reduced my anxiety, which at the same time depressed me. Once more I felt that my revolt against all this was useless and made no sense. With whom was I really annoyed?

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  We already heard the cryptic hint in 1 Corinthians 2:8, where the “rulers” wouldn’t have executed Jesus if they had understood who he was and what the result would be. Here the point is spelled out far more graphically. If we ask Paul what had happened when Jesus died—if we bring to him our question of what had changed by six o’clock on that evening, what was different about the world, what was now true that hadn’t been true twenty-four hours earlier—I think this is one of the primary things he would have said, that the rulers, the powers, had been defeated. When Paul speaks of the “rulers and authorities,” he means both the visible rulers, the Herods, the Caesars, the governors, and the priests, and the “invisible” rulers, the dark powers that stand behind them and operate through them. By the time Jesus’s body was taken down from the cross, Paul believed, these “rulers and authorities” had been stripped, shamed, and defeated. Even at the time—especially at the time!—this must have sounded completely crazy. (Well, Paul did say that the “word of the cross” looked like madness.) One of the Caesars was still on the throne. His local officials around the world were still running the show with brutal efficiency. The chief priests were still in charge of the Temple in Jerusalem. Paul himself was in prison! So is this statement about God’s overthrowing the rulers and authorities in the cross of Jesus simply a bit of over-the-top bravado, whistling in the wind, shaking an apostolic fist at the cosmos? No doubt the rhetoric is deliberately designed to sound a bit like that, but underneath there is a logic that is crystal in its clarity and compelling in its conviction. The power of the rulers has been broken—the new Passover, to use our earlier language, has now taken place for certain—because in the messianic events “God made us alive together with Jesus, forgiving us all our offenses.” Victory over the powers, once more, is accomplished through the forgiveness of sins. Paul adds a note about God “blotting out the handwriting that was against us,” referring obliquely to the Jewish law, which had kept non-Jews out of the reckoning and had pronounced condemnation for disobedience on the Jews themselves. That has been done away with. It has been nailed to the cross. (Remember Gal. 2:19: “Through the law I died to the law, so that I might live to God”? This is a very similar point.) Once again, it is because of this victory that the Gentile mission was even thinkable. The “powers” that had held the nations captive had been defeated. The slaves could now walk free. So how does “forgiveness” result in “victory over the powers”? Here we go back to our earlier analysis of sin and idolatry.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  The very front of the brain, the prefrontal cortex, responsible for the most complex functions of human behavior and consciousness, curves all the way around the cranium, making a near U-turn and abutting, with intimate proximity, the most archaic parts of the brain stem, hypothalamus and limbic system. Neuroscience teaches that generally when two parts of the brain are in close anatomical closeness, it is because they are meant to function together. This makes it even more likely that the electrochemical signals will be reliably transmitted. Descartes might have been utterly flabbergasted at such an intimate relationship between the most primitive and the most refined portions of the brain. Here we have the highest pinnacle of what it is to be human “in bed” (cheek to cheek) with the most primal and archaic vestiges of our animal ancestry. Descartes would have found no rhyme or reason to this physical arrangement. Had he ever speculated in real estate, where value is all about “location, location, location,” he might have been even more perplexed. In addition, as next-door neighbors, brain stem, emotional brain and neocortex must find a common language with which to communicate. Maintaining such an intimate relationship is analogous to the task of interfacing a Craig or IBM supercomputer at MIT with an ancient abacus at the Chinese grocery so that they operate together as one unit. Likewise, the lizard’s rudimentary brain and Einstein’s genius brain (the neocortex) must cohabitate and communicate in a coherent harmony. But what happens when this coexistence between instinct, feeling and reason becomes disrupted? Phineas Gage, a railroad supervisor in 1848, was the first well-documented case of such a violent divorce. While he was blasting a tunnel near Burlington, Vermont, a three-foot-long spike called a tamping iron was propelled, bullet-like, through his skull. It entered near his eye socket, penetrating his brain, and exited through the crown on the opposite side of his head. To everyone’s amazement, Mr. Gage, minus one eye, “recovered fully.” Well, not quite … While his intellect functioned normally, the injury altered his basic personality. Before the accident, he was well liked by his employers and employees (the ideal middleman). However, the “new” Mr. Gage “was arbitrary, capricious, unstable and considered by those who knew him to be a foul-mouthed boor.” Lacking in motivation, he was unable to hold down a job and ended up drifting, including time spent in a carnival sideshow. ‡ One longtime associate observed that “Gage was no longer Gage.” In addition, a Dr. John Harlow, his physician, poignantly, described him in this manner: “Gage has lost the equilibrium or balance between his intellectual faculty and [his] animal propensities.” Fast-forward one hundred and forty years to Elliot, a patient of the eminent neurologist Antonio Damasio.

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

  BEDE. It is the same as Nicopolis, a remarkable town in Palestine, which after the taking of Judæa under the Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antonius, changed together with its condition its name also. But the stadium which, as the Greeks say, was invented by Hercules to measure the distances of roads, is the eighth part of a mile; therefore sixty stades are equal to seven miles and fifty paces. And this was the length of journey which they were walking, who were certain about our Lord’s death and burial, but doubtful concerning His resurrection. For the resurrection which took place after the seventh day of the week, no one doubts is implied in the number eight. The disciples therefore as they walk and converse about the Lord had completed the sixth mile of their journey, for they were grieving that He who had lived without blame, had come at length even to death, which He underwent on the sixth day. They had completed also the seventh mile, for they doubted not that He rested in the grave. But of the eighth mile they had only accomplished half; for the glory of His already triumphant resurrection, they did not believe perfectly. THEOPHYLACT. But the disciples above mentioned talked to one another of the things which had happened, not as believing them, but as bewildered at events so extraordinary. BEDE. And as they spoke of Him, the Lord comes near and joins them, that He may both influence their minds with faith in His resurrection, and fulfil that which He had promised, Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them (Mat. 18:20); as it follows, And it came to pans while they communed together and reasoned, Jesus himself drew near and went with them. THEOPHYLACT. For having now obtained a spiritual body, distance of place is no obstacle to His being present to whom He wished, nor did He any further govern His body by natural laws, but spiritually and supernaturally. Hence as Mark says, He appeared to them in a different form, in which they were not permitted to know Him; for it follows, And their eyes were holden that they should not know him; in order truly that they may reveal their entirely doubtful conceptions, and uncovering their wound may receive a cure; and that they might know that although the same body which suffered, rose again, yet it was no longer such as to be visible to all, but only to those by whom He willed it to be seen; and that they should not wonder why henceforth He walks not among the people, seeing that His conversation was not fit for mankind, but rather divine; which is also the character of the resurrection to come, in which we shall walk as the Angels and the sons of God.

• From The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (2014)

  At the end of our forty-five-minute session, the first thing my colleague said was that he’d found dealing with me so unpleasant that he would never refer a patient to me. Otherwise, he remarked, the EMDR session had resolved the matter of his father’s abuse. While I was skeptical and suspected that his rudeness toward me was a carryover from unresolved feelings toward his father, there was no question that he appeared much more relaxed. I turned to my EMDR trainer, Gerald Puk, and told him how flummoxed I was. This man clearly did not like me, and had looked profoundly distressed during the EMDR session, but now he was telling me that his long-standing misery was gone. How could I possibly know what he had or had not resolved if he was unwilling to tell me what had happened during the session? Gerry smiled and asked if by chance I had become a mental health professional in order to solve some of my own personal issues. I confirmed that most people who knew me thought that might be the case. Then he asked if I found it meaningful when people told me their trauma stories. Again, I had to agree with him. Then he said: “You know, Bessel, maybe you need to learn to put your voyeuristic tendencies on hold. If it’s important for you to hear trauma stories, why don’t you go to a bar, put a couple of dollars on the table, and say to your neighbor, ‘I’ll buy you a drink if you tell me your trauma story.’ But you really need to know the difference between your desire to hear stories and your patient’s internal process of healing.” I took Gerry’s admonition to heart and ever since have enjoyed repeating it to my students. I left my EMDR training preoccupied with three issues that fascinate me to this day: EMDR loosens up something in the mind/brain that gives people rapid access to loosely associated memories and images from their past. This seems to help them put the traumatic experience into a larger context or perspective. People may be able to heal from trauma without talking about it. EMDR enables them to observe their experiences in a new way, without verbal give-and-take with another person. EMDR can help even if the patient and the therapist do not have a trusting relationship. This was particularly intriguing because trauma, understandably, rarely leaves people with an open, trusting heart. In the years since, I have done EMDR with patients who spoke Swahili, Mandarin, and Breton, all languages in which I can say only, “Notice that,” the key EMDR instruction. (I always had a translator available, but primarily to explain the steps of the process.) Because EMDR doesn’t require patients to speak about the intolerable or explain to a therapist why they feel so upset, it allows them to stay fully focused on their internal experience, with sometimes extraordinary results.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  If you were to face the side of the head and slice the brain in half (providing what is known as the midsagittal view), you would observe a “mind be-lowing” fact. The very front of the brain, the prefrontal cortex, responsible for the most complex functions of human behavior and consciousness, curves all the way around the cranium, making a near U-turn and abutting, with intimate proximity, the most archaic parts of the brain stem, hypothalamus and limbic system. Neuroscience teaches that generally when two parts of the brain are in close anatomical closeness, it is because they are meant to function together. This makes it even more likely that the electrochemical signals will be reliably transmitted. Descartes might have been utterly flabbergasted at such an intimate relationship between the most primitive and the most refined portions of the brain. Here we have the highest pinnacle of what it is to be human “in bed” (cheek to cheek) with the most primal and archaic vestiges of our animal ancestry. Descartes would have found no rhyme or reason to this physical arrangement. Had he ever speculated in real estate, where value is all about “location, location, location,” he might have been even more perplexed. In addition, as next-door neighbors, brain stem, emotional brain and neocortex must find a common language with which to communicate. Maintaining such an intimate relationship is analogous to the task of interfacing a Craig or IBM supercomputer at MIT with an ancient abacus at the Chinese grocery so that they operate together as one unit. Likewise, the lizard’s rudimentary brain and Einstein’s genius brain (the neocortex) must cohabitate and communicate in a coherent harmony. But what happens when this coexistence between instinct, feeling and reason becomes disrupted? Phineas Gage, a railroad supervisor in 1848, was the first well-documented case of such a violent divorce. While he was blasting a tunnel near Burlington, Vermont, a three-foot-long spike called a tamping iron was propelled, bullet-like, through his skull. It entered near his eye socket, penetrating his brain, and exited through the crown on the opposite side of his head. To everyone’s amazement, Mr. Gage, minus one eye, “recovered fully.” Well, not quite ... While his intellect functioned normally, the injury altered his basic personality. Before the accident, he was well liked by his employers and employees (the ideal middleman). However, the “new” Mr. Gage “was arbitrary, capricious, unstable and considered by those who knew him to be a foul-mouthed boor.” Lacking in motivation, he was unable to hold down a job and ended up drifting, including time spent in a carnival sideshow. ‡ One longtime associate observed that “Gage was no longer Gage.” In addition, a Dr.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  Such readings then suggest that Paul has taken this original shorthand formula about God’s faithfulness to his covenant with Israel, still visible in vv. 24–26, and has modified it so that now it speaks, instead , about something different , namely, Jesus’s death as the remedy for human sins. This can then be fitted into one version or another of the usual “works contract,” as though sin, punishment, and forgiveness were the only things Paul was really interested in at this point. (Any attempt to suggest that the “covenant” is somehow Paul’s leading theme at this point is then regarded with suspicion, as though it means taking sin, punishment, and salvation less seriously—a suggestion whose absurdity has not prevented its frequent repetition.) But this is not a wise way to read any piece of writing. Particularly when a writer produces a dense little passage like this, it is greatly preferable to assume that the words are there because they say what the author intended. The traditions of reading against which I am arguing have done their best to exclude the idea of the covenant with Israel from Paul’s thought at this key point. It can’t be done. In particular, it can’t be done because Romans 3:21–26 (and the whole passage to the end of chapter 4) is designed—as we might expect—to be the answer to the questions raised in the previous section. This is where we need to pull the camera back a little and survey in more detail the passages we glanced at earlier, on either side of the central one. The usual “Romans road” reading of the letter assumes that the only point Paul is making between 1:18 and 3:20 is that “all humans are sinful.” This then leads us into the “works contract”: we are moral failures; we need to get “right with God” if we’re going to get to heaven; Jesus dies in our place; the job is done. And at one level this is better than nothing. The glass may be one-third full. But something vital has been left out, like a cocktail without the all-important shot of bourbon. You can still drink it. Some important flavors are really there. But the intended meaning, the real “kick” to Paul’s argument, is missing. Actually, there are two missing meanings. First, the usual reading ignores the implicit Temple theme, evident in the second half of Romans 3:23: “All sinned, and fell short of God’s glory.” This is not a coded way of saying “they failed to qualify for the ‘glory’ of “heaven.”

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  The living-room where we happened to be meeting struck me as unusually big, with space enough for a public gathering. I made a round of the other rooms in the apartment for all the doors were open. I counted nine rooms, or perhaps ten, all of them very spacious and some of them larger by themselves than our whole flat. I was unable to understand how one could need so much space. Besides, these rooms were sparsely furnished and I felt, on the whole, that they did not give one an impression of intimacy at all. Suddenly, all the gossiping stopped and the crowd gathered together according to a preconceived plan and began to sing in chorus. The National Commissioner had just arrived, accompanied by our local Commissioner. Standing to attention in the doorway, they joined in our song. I think the song was about our chief being like the Iroquois who is noble and virtuous, with a piercing gaze, a fleet foot, a lion’s heart, the faithfulness of the dove, and the wisdom of the Almighty. I have always, I admit, admired them for this: they could sing perfectly, these scouts, without a false note, but each one of them according to his own voice and in his own tone. The National Commissioner was singing with a convinced expression, his face lowered and thrust forward by his effort, his mouth open, as if he were drinking, whenever he reached the deep and graver notes. He was very thin and tall, his shoulders hunched beneath the weight of his bony build, his heavy and angular head somehow, so it seemed to me, like that of a prehistoric animal. Furtively, I glanced at Ginou, who was singing too and gazing earnestly at our chief. The song stopped dead, on a single collective cry, so perfectly timed and attuned that it sounded like a single voice. Then, for a second, complete silence, but followed at once, as suddenly as earlier, by an explosion of strange and childish sounds that I have never been able to utter with the rest of them, being always struck dumb by a sense of the absurdity of it all. These tall young men were already adults as far as their social sophistication and cynicism were concerned, but here they all were uttering catcalls and other animal cries like children. This cacophony of theirs even had a special name of its own and was known as “the firemen’s cheer,” unless I’m mistaken. But the ice was now broken and they abandoned their stance at attention; the tone of the gathering became more familiar and the National Commissioner left the doorway and entered the room while someone closed the door behind him. His muscular face relaxed into a kind of fixed half-smile that beamed kindness (“A pathfinder must always be good-tempered,” as the Pathfinder’s Code asserts). Then our local Commissioner began to introduce us all: “Owl, Deer, Rhinoceros, Gazelle, Hippopotamus, Caribou, Willow tree, Forget-me-not, Apple...”

• From Aquinas's Summa Theologiae (Critical Essays on the Classics Series) (2006)

  Kantian criticism of the ‘traditional proofs’ has maintained that they all, at least surreptitiously, introduce the ontological argument, and that they cannot do otherwise. It is maintained that since, in any valid argument, a conclusion may contain no term which is not contained in the premisses, and since the conclusion of the ‘traditional arguments’ is that God is, it must follow that some conception of the meaning of the word ‘God’ must be tacitly assumed in the argumentation itself, and this meaning (since it is presupposed to the proofs) must be derived from some source other than the proofs themselves. It is indeed difficult to see how this criticism can be countered if it be admitted that any meaning of the name ‘God’—Anselm’s or another‘s—is presupposed to the arguments; let alone if that meaning (the ‘nominal definition’ in scholastic parlance) be employed as the middle term (medium demonstrationis ) of the arguments. Yet it is expressly stated by many authors that it is to be so employed, and the Five Ways themselves are frequently formulated (for instance, by Gredt) in such a way that some meaning of the word ‘God’ is assumed, and employed as the means whereby the conclusion is reached. It is hard to see how such a conclusion is not indeed a foregone conclusion, and one precisely which will not be accepted either by those who “crediderint Deum esse corpus” (“believe God to be a body”), or by “ponentibus Deum non esse”—(“those who suppose there is no God”)—whose needs St. Thomas vindicates in this reply to the Anselmian argument. But it is not lightly to be supposed that St. Thomas’s own formulation of the Ways will be open to the very objection he levels at St. Anselm, or that it will fail to anticipate and avoid the criticism of Kant and his numerous successors; a criticism which, after all, should occur to the veriest novice in the rules of logic. Against this, it will be urged, is St. Thomas’s plain “necesse est accipere pro medio quid significet nomen” (“it is necessary to take what the name means for our medium of demonstration”) and “accipere possumus pro medio quid significet hoc nomen Deus” (“we can take for our medium what this name God means”) in the ad secundum of the following Article. We will examine this more closely after we have examined this second Article, ‘Whether it can be proved that God is’, as a whole. To it we will now turn.

• From Aquinas's Summa Theologiae (Critical Essays on the Classics Series) (2006)

  The difficulty of Aquinas’s position becomes even more evident when we reflect on the sort of unity that he wants to ascribe to soul and body. The conclusion he wants is that “the intellective principle is united to the body as its form” (76.1c). Yet when one thinks about the nature of this hylomorphic relationship, it is hard to see how Aquinas will be able to reach such a conclusion, especially in light of Q75. Aristotle had remarked that “it is not necessary to ask whether the soul and its body are one, just as we do not ask about wax and its shape . . .” (De Anima II.1, 412b6-7). But clearly the wax and its shape will not be a workable model for Aquinas. The shape of the wax is far too dependent on that wax: it could not, for example, exist without the thing it gives shape to. So if Aquinas is to explain the unity of soul and body in hylomorphic terms, he will have to say quite a lot about how this relationship is to be understood. Prima facie, such an account seems poorly suited to his needs. Among Aquinas’s contemporaries, despite the pervasively Aristotelian atmosphere, there were those who doubted that the rational soul could be explained as the form of the body. Even Albert the Great, who was not just Aquinas’s teacher but also a leader in the Aristotelian movement, wrote that the soul “is better spoken of as an actuality or perfection, rather than a form . . . A form, strictly speaking, according to natural philosophy, is that which has existence in matter and does not exist without it” (Summa de Homine 1.4.1 ad 6). Aquinas clearly has such worries in mind. He begins the long reply to 76.1 by recounting Aristotle’s extended argument from De Anima II.2. But immediately after reciting this argument, Aquinas begins anew, in his own way, as if acknowledging that Aristotle’s reasoning has not proved completely convincing to everyone: If someone wants to say that the intellective soul is not the form of the body, then it is incumbent on that person to find a way in which the action of intellectively cognizing is the action of a particular human being. For each one of us experiences that it is oneself who intellectively cognizes. (76.1c) Aquinas issues a challenge: If the intellective soul is not the form of the body, then some other account needs to be given of what makes an episode of intellective cognition mine or yours. An account needs to be given, in short, of what unites each of us with our intellects. The leading premise here is that each one of us does engage in intellective cognition. Each of us “experiences” that such cognition is something we do. In the De Anima commentary he writes:

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  It is only now that I can draw up this disastrously clear balance-sheet. At that time I fortunately did not realize how isolated we were. On the eighth day, after they had taken all their precautions, the Germans ordered all Jewish men between the ages of eighteen and forty to assemble to be sent off to forced-labor camps. Our immediate reaction was to ask the French Residency for its protection. To our amazement, our delegates were thrown out. “Gentlemen,” was the reply of the Resident General, “I too must carry out the orders of the Germans.” For the first time our community had been failed when it turned to our French trustee for protection. Bewildered, unprepared to undertake responsibility, it had to decide its own fate. Nevertheless, like a tracked animal, I thought first of saving my own skin. I relied on what connections I had among the French and on my admiration for France. It is not easy to believe in the betrayal of a myth. First, I put my papers in order and hid some vaguely political writings in the laundry-room; then I piously buried in Henry’s garden a number of poems that were almost finished and many more drafts. I’m not quite sure what it was I most feared, whether the bombings, the inquisitive hands of the children, or German police-raids. Not once did it occur to me that I might never come back. Then I started to move. I went to all the people I could count on. Luckily, at the head of my list was one of the highest French dignitaries in the country. Until the eve of the German invasion, I had been his son’s tutor. An incident to which I had not given its full meaning now came back to me. One day, quite recently, he had sent for me in his office. I had gone full of respect and proud to be able to tell the guard on duty that I had an appointment with His Excellency. He was an aristocrat in the diplomatic service of the Republic, tall, dry, theatrical, with white hair, fine features, and a discreet voice and gestures which greatly impressed me. I myself was incapable of speaking without becoming excited and of expressing myself without movements of my whole body, so that I admired men who could be brief and speak with no agitation. He wanted to know about his son’s work. At the end of our talk, he thanked me and said I could come and see him if ever I needed him. At the time, I did not realize the importance of these words. I was grateful that so important a personality should allow me to have recourse to his influence on my behalf, and the simplicity of his manner had impressed me. On another occasion, I had been received by his wife. I had never approached a woman of such high rank.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  And then, inchoately, he feels a sudden need for confession: “That day I left you in Louveciennes, rather drunk—would you believe it, while I was having dinner, a girl came and sat next to me. She was just an ordinary prostitute. Right in the restaurant I put my hand under her skirt. I went to a hotel with her, thinking of you all the time, hating myself, remembering our afternoon. I had been so satisfied. So many thoughts I had, that when the moment came, I couldn’t fuck the girl. She was so contemptuous. Thought me impotent. I gave her twenty francs, and I remember being glad it was not more because it was your money. Can you understand that, Anaïs?” I try to keep my eyes steady, mechanically I say I understand, but I am bewildered, hurt beyond words. And now he feels the need to continue: “Only one more thing. I must tell you one more thing, and then it is all. One night Osborn had just got his pay, he took me to a cabaret. We began to dance and then took two girls home to Clichy. When we were sitting in the kitchen they asked us to talk business. They asked a big price. I wanted them to go, but Osborn paid them what they wanted and they stayed. One was an acrobatic dancer and showed us some of her tricks naked, with only slippers on. Then Fred came home at three o’clock, furious to find I had used his bed, took the sheets off and showed them to me, saying: ‘Yes, yes, and then you say you love your Anaïs.’ And I do, Anaïs. I even think you might have found a perverse pleasure in seeing me.” Now I bow my head and the tears come. But I go on saying I understand. Henry is drunk. He sees that I am hurt. And then I shake it off. I look at him. The earth is rocking. Shouts and laughter from the students in the street. At the Hotel Anjou we lie like lesbians, sucking. Again, hours and hours of voluptuousness. The hotel sign, in red lights, shines into the room. The warmth heaves in. “Anaïs,” Henry says, “you have the most beautiful ass.” Hands, fingering, ejaculations. I learn from Henry how to play with a man’s body, how to arouse him, how to express my own desire. We rest. A big bus of students is passing. I jump and run to the window. Henry is asleep. I would like to be at the ball, to taste everything.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  Now the girls who had chosen to come late were arriving too, always two at a time and laden with cakes that they themselves had baked. The boys pretended to be enraptured by the contents of these sumptuous packages and uttered cries of affected admiration. The scout movement didn’t encourage flirting and courtship, so that it was not permitted to make gallant remarks about the appearance of the girls, though most of them were exquisite, and exquisitely dressed. The living-room where we happened to be meeting struck me as unusually big, with space enough for a public gathering. I made a round of the other rooms in the apartment for all the doors were open. I counted nine rooms, or perhaps ten, all of them very spacious and some of them larger by themselves than our whole flat. I was unable to understand how one could need so much space. Besides, these rooms were sparsely furnished and I felt, on the whole, that they did not give one an impression of intimacy at all. Suddenly, all the gossiping stopped and the crowd gathered together according to a preconceived plan and began to sing in chorus. The National Commissioner had just arrived, accompanied by our local Commissioner. Standing to attention in the doorway, they joined in our song. I think the song was about our chief being like the Iroquois who is noble and virtuous, with a piercing gaze, a fleet foot, a lion’s heart, the faithfulness of the dove, and the wisdom of the Almighty. I have always, I admit, admired them for this: they could sing perfectly, these scouts, without a false note, but each one of them according to his own voice and in his own tone. The National Commissioner was singing with a convinced expression, his face lowered and thrust forward by his effort, his mouth open, as if he were drinking, whenever he reached the deep and graver notes. He was very thin and tall, his shoulders hunched beneath the weight of his bony build, his heavy and angular head somehow, so it seemed to me, like that of a prehistoric animal. Furtively, I glanced at Ginou, who was singing too and gazing earnestly at our chief.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  How could I communicate with these people? Perhaps I too should dance until I became giddy, until I lost consciousness after accepting these rhythms and beating my own head again and again with disjointed gestures, repeated until it continued to shake all by itself, as empty as a doll’s head that moves as it follows its leaded pendulum, until my whole body became dislocated in all its joints, so that no longer a single bone, not a muscle, remained in its proper place, with all my consciousness vanished and my body disintegrated while I allowed the bagpipes to seize my nerves, the tom-tom to rule the beating of my heart and blood, and the cymbals to tear my limbs apart and scatter them north, south, east, and west, throughout the sky and the earth? Would I then manage in turn to get through to the other side of this pane of glass? I felt almost delirious. Suddenly, the music stopped on a single beat, leaving behind it a silence that was heavy and painful. Like a puppet when the thread that guides it breaks, my mother now collapsed, abandoned by the music, limp as a rag, motionless. Why, at this point, such a nauseous pity within me? My heart followed her to the floor and suffered from the sound of her heavy fall on the woven straw mat. Meanwhile, the other women continued their movements. Fat old Khmeissa, our neighbor from across the hallway, seemed to be suffering as she bent forward, with her head and her heavy breasts over my inanimate mother and, forcing her spine so that her buttocks protruded like something monumental, managed at last to place her mouth close to my mother’s ear. The women whispered among themselves in a moment of relative peace. Khmeissa then placed her ear close to my mother and seemed to be listening attentively for a long while. Suddenly, she shouted: “They have spoken! They have said: a red scarf and a white cock!” So the Djnoun spirits had answered! They had expressed their desires to the dancer in her seizure! But what could you really hear, you crazy old witch, from the lips of this poor woman in her coma? Still, Khmeissa may not have been lying that day, perhaps she really heard the voice of her own imagination, educated to this end and convinced of its truth ever since childhood. The babbling of the relaxed women now spread like water boiling over. The compact crowd gave birth to sudden movements as the individual women decided to change their positions, to climb down from a chair, to rise from the floor, and they all laughed, rushed off to find red scarves, to add incense to the burners.

• From Blue Nights (2011)

  How could I have missed what was so clearly there to be seen? Did I not read the poem she brought home that year from the school on the steep hill? The school to which she wore the plaid uniform jumper and carried the blue lunchbox? The school to which John watched her walk every morning and thought it was as beautiful as anything he had ever seen? “The World,” this poem is called, and I recognize her careful printing, quixotically executed on a narrow strip of construction paper fourteen inches long but only two inches wide. I see that careful printing every day: the strip of construction paper is now framed on a wall behind my kitchen in New York, along with a few other mementos of the period: a copy of Karl Shapiro’s “California Winter,” torn from The New Yorker; a copy of Pablo Neruda’s “A Certain Weariness,” typed by me on one of the several dozen Royal manuals my father had bought (along with a few mess halls, a fire tower, and the regulation khaki Ford jeep on which I learned to drive) at a government auction; a postcard from Bogotá, sent by John and me to Quintana in Malibu; a photograph showing the coffee table in the beach house living room after dinner, the candles burning down and the silver baby cups filled with santolina; a mimeographed notice from the Topanga–Las Virgenes Fire District instructing residents of the district what to do “when the fire comes.” Do note: not “if the fire comes.” When the fire comes. No one at the Topanga–Las Virgenes Fire District was talking about what most people see when they hear the words “brush fire,” a few traces of smoke and an occasional lick of flame: at the Topanga–Las Virgenes Fire District they were talking about fires that burned on twenty-mile fronts and spotted ahead twelve-foot flames as they moved. This was not forgiving territory: consider finding the driveway. Also consider “The World” itself, its eccentric strip of construction paper and careful printing obscuring one side of the mimeographed notice from the Topanga–Las Virgenes Fire District. Since the choices made by the careful printer may or may not have meaning, I give you the text of “The World” with her spacing, her single misspelling: THE WORLD The world Has nothing But morning And night It has no Day or lunch So this world Is poor and desertid. This is some Kind of an Island with Only three Houses on it In these Families are 2,1,2, people In each house So 2,1,2 make Only 5 people On this Island.

• From Bluets (2009)

  160. Equally complicated: the idea of agnosia , or unknowing , which is what one ideally finds, or undergoes, or achieves, within this Divine Darkness. Again: this agnosia is not a form of ignorance, but rather a kind of undoing . (As if one knew once, then forgot? But what did one know?) 161. Philosopher Bertrand Russell was a fan of Wittgenstein’s early work in logic, but he complained that the later Wittgenstein “seems to have grown tired of serious thinking and to have invented a doctrine which would make such an activity unnecessary.” I am not sure if I agree, but I note the temptation. So, I think, did Wittgenstein. “Explanations come to an end somewhere,” he wrote. 162. According to Dionysius, the Divine Darkness appears dark only because it is so dazzlingly bright—a paradox I have attempted to understand by looking directly at the sun and noticing the dark spot that flowers at its center. But as compelling as this paradox, or this experiment, may be, I am not as interested in it as I am in the fact that in Christian iconography, this “dazzling darkness” appears with startling regularity as blue. 163. Why blue? There is no basis for it in the Scriptures. In the Gospel accounts of the Transfiguration—ground zero, as it were, for the onset of this “bright cloud” of agnosia —the cloud is shadow, Jesus’s raiment a “glistering” white. Yet for the past two thousand years, in mosaic after mosaic, painting after painting, Jesus stands transfigured before his witnesses in the mouth of a glowing blue mandorla— a blue almond, or vesica piscus , the shape that, in pagan times, unabashedly symbolized Venus and the vulva. 164. I do not know the reason for this blue pussy, meant to convey both divine bewilderment and revelation. But I do feel that its color is right. For blue has no mind. It is not wise, nor does it promise any wisdom. It is beautiful, and despite what the poets and philosophers and theologians have said, I think beauty neither obscures truth nor reveals it. Likewise, it leads neither toward justice nor away from it. It is pharmakon . It radiates . 165. Two of the blue correspondents—two filmmakers—have just reported from the field to say that they have undertaken a rescue project, a rescue of soon-to-be-lost blues. As the digital age steamrolls ahead, most films are being rapidly digitized. And as the digitization process privileges green over both red and blue, the correspondents have decided to collect the blues that “fall out” of film during the transfer. They say they have to act fast. I do not know what they will do with their collection, or what form, exactly, “fallen-out”blues will take. I imagine it will be a sort of muddle.

• From Bluets (2009)

  I am not sure if I agree, but I note the temptation. So, I think, did Wittgenstein. “Explanations come to an end somewhere,” he wrote. 162. According to Dionysius, the Divine Darkness appears dark only because it is so dazzlingly bright—a paradox I have attempted to understand by looking directly at the sun and noticing the dark spot that flowers at its center. But as compelling as this paradox, or this experiment, may be, I am not as interested in it as I am in the fact that in Christian iconography, this “dazzling darkness” appears with startling regularity as blue. 163. Why blue? There is no basis for it in the Scriptures. In the Gospel accounts of the Transfiguration—ground zero, as it were, for the onset of this “bright cloud” of agnosia —the cloud is shadow, Jesus’s raiment a “glistering” white. Yet for the past two thousand years, in mosaic after mosaic, painting after painting, Jesus stands transfigured before his witnesses in the mouth of a glowing blue mandorla— a blue almond, or vesica piscus , the shape that, in pagan times, unabashedly symbolized Venus and the vulva. 164. I do not know the reason for this blue pussy, meant to convey both divine bewilderment and revelation. But I do feel that its color is right. For blue has no mind. It is not wise, nor does it promise any wisdom. It is beautiful, and despite what the poets and philosophers and theologians have said, I think beauty neither obscures truth nor reveals it. Likewise, it leads neither toward justice nor away from it. It is pharmakon . It radiates . 165. Two of the blue correspondents—two filmmakers—have just reported from the field to say that they have undertaken a rescue project, a rescue of soon-to-be-lost blues. As the digital age steamrolls ahead, most films are being rapidly digitized. And as the digitization process privileges green over both red and blue, the correspondents have decided to collect the blues that “fall out” of film during the transfer. They say they have to act fast. I do not know what they will do with their collection, or what form, exactly, “fallen-out”blues will take. I imagine it will be a sort of muddle. 166. The 1939 film The Women was shot entirely in black and white, with the exception of one Technicolor sequence—a fashion show—which was literally detachable from the rest of the film. This colored reel had no bearing on the plot whatsoever, so the projectionist could choose to insert it as part of the movie or ignore it altogether. Could one imagine a book that functioned similarly, albeit in reverse—a kind of optional, black-and-white appendage to a larger body of blue (e.g., “the blue planet”)? 167. I don’t go to the movies anymore.