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 Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  It is also remarkable that these people did not see the evident error in their reasoning. For, although they maintained that all intelligible objects-known were united by one or two of these objects, still it does not follow for this reason, according to them, that we shall know all the other intelligible objects-known. Now it is evident that separate intelligible substances surpass all those objects which they call intelligible objects-known to a far greater degree than all of the latter taken together exceed one or two or any number of themselves; for these objects are all of one genus and have the same mode of intelligibility, whereas separate substances are of a higher order, and have a higher mode of intelligibility. Hence if the Agent Intellect is brought into union with us as a form, and as the agent of those intelligibles, it does not for this reason follow that it is united to us as a knower of separate substances.

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

  986. These, therefore, are the arguments by which Aristotle intends to prove that motion always has been and will never cease, The first part of which, i.e., that motion always existed, conflicts with our faith, For our faith admits nothing as eternally existing but God alone, Who is utterly immobile—unless, of courset you wish to refer to the act of the divine intellect as a motion, but that would be an equivocal sense, and Aristotle is not here speaking of motion in that sense but of motion properly so called. The other part of the conclusion is not entirely contrary to the faith, because, as was said above, Aristotle is not treating of the motion of the heavens in particular but of motion universally. Now we believe according to our faith that the substance of the world indeed began, yet so as never to cease. For we posit that some motions will always exist, especially in men who will always remaing living an unceasing life either of happiness or misery. But some, vainly trying to show that Aristotle concluded nothing contrary to the faith, have said that Aristotle does not intend here to prove as a truth that motion is eternal but to allege reason for both sides of a question that is doubtful. Rut this is a foolish statement to anyone who investigates Aristotle ’ s procedure here. Moreover, he uses the eternity of time and of motion as a principle to prove the existence of a first principle both here in Physics VIII and in Metaphysics XII. That shows he considered it proved. 987. But if one rightly considers the arguments here given, the truth of the faith is not assailed by them, For they prove that motion did not begin through the way of nature, as some taught it did, but that it did not begin by things being created by a first principle of things, as our faith holds, cannot be proved by these arguments. And that will be evident to anyone who considers each of the inferences here drawn by Aristotle. For when he asks whether, if motion did not always exist, the movers and mobiles always existed or not, the reply must be that the first mover always existed; other things—movers or mobiles—did not always exist, but began to exist from the universal cause of all existence. But it has been pointed out above that the production of all being by the first cause of being is not a motion, whether this coming-forth be taken to be ab aeterno or not. Accordingly, it does not follow that before the first change there was a previous change. But this would follow if the movers and mobiles were newly brought into existence by some particular agent acting upon some presupposed subject that would be changed from non-being to being, or from privation to form—and Aristotle ’ s argument concerns this way of coming into existence.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  One or two of the premises were warehouses; some had battened-up windows or displayed bleached and cracked signs for businesses long defunct. Though the buildings were eighteenth- or seventeenth-century, the streets were medieval, and, sloping quite steeply towards the Thames, gave the unsettling feeling that they could not long avoid being swept away. Skinner’s Lane, ending in a wall topped with spikes like spurs, half hidden amid tufts of brilliant yellow alyssum, had a mortal mood to it, and gave Charles’s residence the eccentric rectitude of a colonial staying on, unflaggingly keeping up appearances. I rang the bell twice before the door was opened by a man in shirt-sleeves and an apron, who let me in and then seemed to think better of it. ‘His Lordship expecting you, is he?’ he asked suspiciously. ‘Yes, William Beckwith. He asked me to come for tea.’ ‘First I’ve heard of it,’ the man said unsmilingly. ‘You’d better wait here.’ He went off with an ambiguous tread, his sergeant-majorish bearing infected with an ambling carelessness. It was a narrow, dark hall, the stairs going up ahead to the left, an old-fashioned coat-and-stick stand, of the kind on which one could conceivably sit, behind the door, and a high, marbletopped table against the opposite wall. On it was a salver with letters stamped for the post—one to the bank, another to a person called Shillibeer with the outlandish address of E7. Above it was a gloomy mirror in a gilt frame. The rest of the panelled walls were covered with pictures, hung one above the other to the cornice, and ascending the stairs too, where their glass collected some light from an upstairs window. There were oils, water-colours, drawings, photographs, all mixed up. There was an unusually large David Roberts of a Nubian temple, choked almost to the eaves with sand, with blue-robed figures giving a sense of its stunted, colossal scale. I was looking at a lovely pastel head of a boy which hung beside it, when the door at the back of the hall opened and Charles and the paramilitary butler appeared in it, issuing from a brighter room beyond, which cast new light over the bizarre, threadbare rugs on the floor. ‘Rosalba,’ said Charles, shuffling forward before greeting me. ‘My dear William. I do hope Lewis wasn’t rude to you. He can be most cantankerous at times. Can’t you, Lewis?’ Lewis had a look of being above such things. Following patiently behind, his square moustached head, with its cropped greying hair, indicated no emotion. ‘You never said he was coming.’ ‘Oh, nonsense, nonsense—I told you days ago I would be having an interesting young guest for tea for two. My word, you’re jolly brown, young fellow.’ We stood now in front of the mirror and I looked in, needlessly, to confirm what he was saying.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  Police had quick success in investigating the Pittman murder, rapidly concluding that Ralph Myers had been involved. When the police interrogated Ralph, they encountered a man as psychologically complicated as he was physically scarred. He was emotional and frail, and he craved attention—his only effective defense was his skill in manipulation and misdirection. Ralph believed that everything he said had to be epic, shocking, and elaborate. As a child living in foster care, he had been horribly burned in a fire. The burns so scarred and disfigured his face and neck that he needed multiple surgeries to regain basic functioning. He became quite used to strangers staring at his scars with pained expressions on their faces. He was a tragic outcast who lived on the margins, but he tried to compensate by pretending to have inside knowledge about all sorts of mysteries. After initially denying any direct involvement in the Pittman murder, Myers conceded that he may have played some accidental role but quickly put the blame for the murder itself on more interesting local figures. He first accused a black man with a bad reputation named Isaac Dailey, but the police quickly discovered that Dailey had been in a jail cell on the night of the murder. Myers then confessed that he had made up the story because the true killer was none other than the elected sheriff of a nearby county. As outrageous as the claim was, ABI agents appeared to take it seriously. They asked him more questions, but the more Myers talked, the less credible his story sounded. Officials began to suspect that Myers was the sole killer and was desperately trying to implicate others to minimize his culpability. While the death of Vickie Pittman was news, it failed to compare with the continuing mystery surrounding the death of Ronda Morrison. Vickie came from a poor white family, several of whose members were incarcerated; she enjoyed none of the status of Ronda Morrison. The Morrison murder remained the focus of everyone’s attention for months. Ralph Myers was illiterate, but he knew that it was the Morrison crime that was preoccupying law enforcement investigators. When his allegations against the sheriff didn’t seem to be going anywhere, he changed his story again and told investigators that he had been involved in the murder of Vickie Pittman along with Karen Kelly and her black boyfriend, Walter McMillian. But that wasn’t all. He also told police that McMillian was responsible for the murder of Ronda Morrison. That assertion attracted the full attention of law enforcement officials. It soon became apparent that Walter McMillian had never met Ralph Myers, let alone committed two murders with him. To prove that the two of them were in cahoots, an ABI agent asked Myers to meet Walter McMillian at a store while agents monitored the interaction. It had been several months since Ronda Morrison’s murder.

• From Heptaméron (1559)

  The Count Charles d'Angouleme,* father of Francis I., and a prince of great piety, being one day at Coignac, some one told him that in a village named Cherves there was a maiden who lived with such austerity that it was a marvel, yet she was with child, and did not even make any secret of it, but assured everybody that she had never known man, and that she knew not how it had happened to her, unless it was the work of the Holy Ghost. The people readily gave credit to this delusion, and looked upon the girl as a second Virgin Mary, the more so as she had been known to be so well-behaved from her childhood, and never to have shown the least sign of a disposition to mundane vanities. She not only fasted at the seasons appointed by the church, but also made several voluntary fasts every week, and never stirred from the church as long as there was any service going on in it. The common people made so much account of this manner of life that everyone flocked to see her, as though she were a living miracle, and fortunate was he who could touch her gown. The priest of the parish was her brother, a man in years, of an austere life, and a reputed saint. So rigorously did he treat his sister, that he had her shut up in a house, whereat the people were greatly displeased, and the affair made so much noise that it came, as I have already said, to the ears of * This story is told of the father of Queen Margaret, and is doubtless founded on fact. 20 3o6 THE HEPTAMEKON OF THE \N(wel ly Count Charles, who, seeing the delusion into which everybody had fallen, resolved to put an end to it.

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

  8. The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth; so is every one that is born of the Spirit. CHRYSOSTOM. (Hom. xxiv. 3) Nicodemus coming to Jesus, as to a man, is startled on learning greater things than man could utter, things too lofty for him. His mind is darkened, and he does not stand firm, but reels like one on the point of falling away from the faith. Therefore he objects to the doctrine as being impossible, in order to call forth a fuller explanation. Two things there are which astonish him, such a birth, and such a kingdom; neither yet heard of among the Jews. First he urges the former difficulty, as being the greatest marvel. Nicodemus saith unto him, How can a man be born when he is old? can he enter a second time into his mother’s womb, and be born? BEDE. (in loc.) The question put thus sounds as if a boy might enter a second time into his mother’s womb and be born. But Nicodemus, we must remember, was an old man, and took his instance from himself; as if he said, I am an old man, and seek my salvation; how can I enter again into my mother’s womb, and be born? CHRYSOSTOM. (Hom. xxiv. 2) Thou callest Him Rabbi, and sayest that He comes from God, and yet receivest not His sayings, but usest to thy master a word which brings in endless confusion; for that how, is the enquiry of a man who has no strong belief; and many who have so enquired, have fallen from the faith; some asking, how God became incarnate? others, how He was bornb? Nicodemus here asks from anxiety. But observe when a man trusts spiritual things to reasonings of his own, how ridiculously he talks. AUGUSTINE. (Tr. xi. c. 6) It is the Spirit that speaketh, whereas he understandeth carnally; he knew of no birth save one, that from Adam and Eve; from God and the Church he knows of none. But do thou so understand the birth of the Spirit, as Nicodemus did the birth of the flesh; for as the entrance into the womb cannot be repeated, so neither can baptism. CHRYSOSTOM. (Hom. xxiv. 3) While Nicodemus stumbles, dwelling upon our birth here, Christ reveals more clearly the manner of our spiritual birth; Jesus answered, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  I don't seem ever to have had any innate need (or, indeed, any innate ability) to distrust people: and so I took Bill Miller as she was, or as she appeared to be to me. Yet, the difference benveen Miss Miller and other white people, white people as they lived in my imagination, and also as they were in lif e, had to have had a profound and bewildering effect on my mind. Bill Miller was not at all like the cops who had already beaten me up, she was not like the landlords who called me nigger, she was not like the storekeepers who laughed at me. I had found white people to be unutterably menacing, terri fYing, mysterious-w icked: and they were mysterious, in fact, to the extent that they were wicked: the unfathomable ques tion being, precisely, this one: what, under heaven, or beneath the sea, or in the catacombs of hell, could cause any people to act as white people acted? From Miss Miller, therefore, I began to suspect that white people did not act as they did because they were white, but for some other reason, and I began to try to locate and understand the reason. She, too, anyway, was treated like a nigger, especially by the cops, and she had no love for landlords. My father said, during all the years I lived with him, that I was the ugliest boy he had ever seen, and I had absolutely no reason to doubt him. But it was not my father's hatred of my frog-eyes which hurt me, this hatred proving, in time, to be rather more resounding than real: I have my mother's eyes. When my father called me ugly, he was not attacking me so much as he was attacking my mother. (No doubt, he was also attacking my real, and unknown, father.) And I loved my THE DE VIL FINDS WORK mother. I knew that she loved me, and I sensed that she was paying an enormous price for me. I was a boy, and so I didn't really too much care that my father thought me hideous. (So I said to myself-t his judgment, nevertheless, was to have a decidedly tcrril)•ing effect on my lif e.) But I thought that he must have been stricken blind (or was as mysteriously wicked as white people, a paralyzing thought) if he was unable to sec that my mother was absolutely beyond any question the most beautiful woman in the world. So, here, now, was Bette Davis, on that Saturday afternoon, in close -up, over a champagne glass, pop-e yes popping. I was astounded. I had caught my father, not in a lie, but in an infirmity.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  Nobody likes to be told that things were not as they imagined. But I was quite certain that my own order had not been particularly austere, and agreed with Pat that it had been far more enlightened than many. Most nuns had observed these arcane rituals, had kissed the ground, confessed their external faults to one another, and were forbidden to have what were known as “particular friendships,” since all love must be given to God. That was why the reforms of the Second Vatican Council were so necessary. I also knew that, taken out of context, such practices as kissing the floor or reciting the Lord’s Prayer five times with your arms in the form of a cross would seem sensationalist, exaggerated, and histrionic. But in reality they became as normal to us as breathing, a routine part of our lives, sometimes even a little tedious. To speak of these things outside the convent would give a false impression. I had not left the convent because we had to do public penance but because I had failed to find God and had never come within shouting distance of that complete self-surrender which, the great spiritual writers declared, was essential for those who wished to enter into the divine presence. So I did not speak of my old life to anybody, and most people assumed that I had, therefore, simply put the past behind me. Much better out than in,” Miss Griffiths, my Anglo-Saxon tutor, said decisively as we sat in her elegant college rooms drinking sherry one evening. “You look much better out of that habit, my lamb. And you know, however things turn out in the future, I’m certain you made the correct decision. If you come back to me in fifteen years’ time and say, ‘Look, five children and a divorce!’ I shall still say that you were right to leave.” This, of course, was quite true. There had been no other option. But as I looked around at the richly colored William Morris curtains, the massive bookcases, and the Oriental rug in front of the fire, I felt entirely out of my element. Every item of furniture, down to the tasteful ornaments glinting on the marble mantel-piece and the cunningly arranged lamps, had been designed for comfort and pleasure. In the convent, everything had been pared down to bare essentials: scrubbed floorboards, uncurtained windows, starkly positioned tables and chairs. All were a perpetual reminder of how we too were to be stripped inwardly of any lingering attachment to the world, to people, and to material objects if we were to be worthy of God. Nevertheless, it was nice here, I reflected, the sherry blurring the room in a golden glow.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  It is a long drawn-out and somewhat bewildering and awkward process. When I was young, for example, it was an insult to be called black. The blacks have now taken over this once pejorative term and made of it a rallying cry and a badge of honor and are teaching their children to be proud that they arc black. It is true that the children are as vari colored-tea, coffee, chocolate, mocha, honey, eggplant coated with red pepper, red pepper dipped in eggplant-as it is possible for a people to be; black people, here, are no more uniformly black than white people are physically white; but TO BE BAPTI ZED 471 the shades of color, which have been used for so long to dis tress and corrupt our minds and set us against each other, now count, at least in principle, for nothing. Black is a tre mendous spiritual condition, one of the greatest challenges anyone alive can face-this is what the blacks are saying. :Nothing is easier, nor, for the guilt-ridden American, more inevitable, than to dismiss this as chauvinism in reverse. But, in this, white Americans are being-it is a part of their fate-i naccurate. To be liberated from the stigma of blackness by embracing it is to cease, fore\'er, one's interior agreement and collaboration with the authors of one's degradation. It abruptly reduces the white enemy to a contest merely physical, which he can win only physically. White men have killed black men for refusing to say, "Sir": but it was the corroboration of their worth and their power that they wanted, and not the corpse, still less the staining blood. When the black man's mind is no longer controlled by the white man's fantasies, a new balance or what may be described as an unprecedented inequalit y begins to make itself felt: for the white man no longer knows who he is, whereas the black man knows them both. For if it is dif ficult to be released from the stigma of blackness, it is clea rly at least equally difficult to surmount the delusion of whiteness. And as the black glories in his new found colo r, which is his at last, and asserts, not always with the very greatest politeness, the unanswerable \'alidity and power of his being-e,·en in the shadow of death-the white is \'ery often aff ronted and very often made afraid.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  Mildly dismayed, I treated it as a joke. ‘Bah!’ he went on. ‘You get these fellows—women mostly—doing all the old pictures up. No knowing what they’ll find. And then they look like fakes afterwards.’ I saw he was dribbling gin from his glass onto the carpet. He touched my outstretched hand. ‘Whoopsy!’ he said, as if I were being a nuisance. His gaze drifted into the middle distance and I too looked about, a little at a loss for talk. ‘Actually, I love art,’ he announced. ‘One day, if we get on quite well, I’ll show you my house. You’re keen on art, I should say?’ ‘I do have quite a lot of time for it,’ I conceded; then, fearing he might think my tone was rude, I enlarged a figure of speech into an observation. ‘I mean, I don’t have a job, and I have plenty of time to go to galleries and look at pictures.’ ‘You’re not married or anything are you?’ ‘No, nothing,’ I assured him. ‘Too young, I know. You’ve been up to university, of course?’ ‘I was at Oxford, yes—at Corpus—reading History.’ He drank this in with some more gin. ‘Do you like girls at all?’ he asked. ‘Yes, I like them quite a lot really,’ I insisted. ‘There are chaps who don’t care for them, you know. Simply can’t abide them. Can’t stand the sight of them, their titties and their big sit-upons, even the smell of them.’ He looked down the room authoritatively to where Percy was dispensing Sanatogen to a striking likeness of the older Gladstone. ‘Andrews, for instance, cannot tolerate them.’ It took me a moment to work this out. ‘In the gym?’ I said. ‘Yes, I’m not surprised—he seems very much a man’s man. You must know Andrews then,’ I lamely concluded. But I had lost my host already; I saw that he attacked questions with excitement but abandoned them within seconds. Or perhaps they abandoned him. ‘If you’ll give me a hand I do think we might go through now, so that we can get a good seat. They’re like hyenas here. They eat everything up if you’re not in there quick.’ I lifted one of his elbows as he pushed himself up with the other, his whole frame shaking with the effort. ‘Let’s have a look at the Library,’ he said, as if speaking to someone who was very deaf, winking at me in a musical-comedy way. ‘That’ll fool them,’ he explained, in a voice only slightly quieter.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  Presently, the morning drawing near, Ruggieri, who had slept a great while, having by this time digested the sleeping draught and exhausted its effects, awoke and albeit his sleep was broken and his senses in some measure restored, there abode yet a dizziness in his brain, which held him stupefied, not that night only, but some days after. Opening his eyes and seeing nothing, he put out his hands hither and thither and finding himself in the chest, bethought himself and said, 'What is this? Where am I? Am I asleep or awake? Algates I mind me that I came this evening into my mistress's chamber and now meseemeth I am in a chest. What meaneth this? Can the physician have returned or other accident befallen, by reason whereof the lady hath hidden me here, I being asleep? Methinketh it must have been thus; assuredly it was so.' Accordingly, he addressed himself to abide quiet and hearken if he could hear aught and after he had abidden thus a great while, being somewhat ill at ease in the chest, which was small, and the side whereon he lay irking him, he would have turned over to the other and wrought so dexterously that, thrusting his loins against one of the sides of the chest, which had not been set on a level place, he caused it first to incline to one side and after topple over. In falling, it made a great noise, whereat the women who slept therenigh awoke and being affrighted, were silent for fear. Ruggieri was sore alarmed at the fall of the chest, but, finding that it had opened in the fall, chose rather, if aught else should betide, to be out of it than to abide therewithin. Accordingly, he came forth and what with knowing not where he was and what with one thing and another, he fell to groping about the house, so haply he should find a stair or a door, whereby he might get him gone.

• From Enchanted: Erotic Bedtime Stories for Women (Erotic Fiction) (2006)

  “We must ask him the next time we see him,” said his friend with a chuckle, but their demeanor and attitude were quickly changing, and they were at once more jovial and good-humored. They moved in closer to Goldilocks and, very leisurely, began unbuttoning her dress. As they did so, they spoke to one another cheerfully, paying little attention to Goldilocks as they made blunt observations about her clothing. “Upon my word,” remarked the first, as he pulled the dress over her head and held it up to his friends. “Of what sort of material is this ungainly rag made?” “I can’t say that I have ever encountered anything like it before,” replied the second, wrinkling his nose with a look of distaste. “It reminds one of the stuff used to hold potatoes!” “Indeed,” chuckled the third, taking perverse delight in its shabbiness. “I half expected to find some of that product upon your removing the thing.” “Oh, but you must see these!” screeched the first baron. He tugged at Goldilocks’s undergarments, barely acknowledging her at all as he nearly ripped them off her body and held them up to his friends. “Why, they are absolutely revolting!” His friends gasped in horror at the sight of the cotton pantaloons, so unlike the silken undergarments they were used to seeing in the stores where they shopped. Goldilocks stared at them in astonishment. Before she had the presence of mind to comprehend their intentions she was standing naked before them, watching mutely as they nonchalantly discussed her clothing. Next, they began to undress themselves, doing so in a very casual and unhurried manner, carefully folding each article of clothing as they removed it and placing it neatly over a chair. At last the first baron laid himself across the bed that Goldilocks had been sleeping in only a few moments before. He raised his eyebrows and looked at her expectantly. “Well?” he said, and when she only stared at him he tapped the bed, exclaiming, “Look alive, old girl!” The other two, meanwhile, led her to where he lay. To her utter bewilderment, she could not bring herself to resist. It was most certainly her excessive curiosity that had brought her to this point, and now it once again pushed her onward to see the outcome of this unusual but exciting episode. To the barons, she was a total stranger who had been procured to entertain them. They would most likely never discover her real identity, so she could walk away from the experience as if it had never happened, and yet with a new knowledge of herself and the world around her. She had never before been presented with such an opportunity, and likely would not again. Aside from all of this, she felt herself to be under some queer influence, so that she could not oppose the oddly authoritative will of the barons, or this most peculiar orgy.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  Next morning, the kinsfolk of the two young men, hearing the truth of the case and knowing the ill that might ensue thereof for the imprisoned youths, should Giacomino choose to do that which he reasonably might, repaired to him and prayed him with soft words to have regard, not so much to the affront which he had suffered from the little sense of the young men as to the love and goodwill which they believed he bore to themselves who thus besought him, submitting themselves and the young men who had done the mischief to any amends it should please him take. Giacomino, who had in his time seen many things and was a man of sense, answered briefly, 'Gentlemen, were I in mine own country, as I am in yours, I hold myself so much your friend that neither in this nor in otherwhat would I do aught save insomuch as it should please you; besides, I am the more bounden to comply with your wishes in this matter, inasmuch as you have therein offended against yourselves, for that the girl in question is not, as belike many suppose, of Cremona nor of Pavia; nay, she is a Faentine,[277] albeit neither I nor she nor he of whom I had her might ever learn whose daughter she was; wherefore, concerning that whereof you pray me, so much shall be done by me as you yourselves shall enjoin me.' [Footnote 277: _i.e._ a native of Faenza (_Faentina_).] The gentlemen, hearing this, marvelled and returning thanks to Giacomino for his gracious answer, prayed him that it would please him tell them how she came to his hands and how he knew her to be a Faentine; whereto quoth he, 'Guidotto da Cremona, who was my friend and comrade, told me, on his deathbed, that, when this city was taken by the Emperor Frederick and everything given up to pillage, he entered with his companions into a house and found it full of booty, but deserted by its inhabitants, save only this girl, who was then some two years old or thereabouts and who, seeing him mount the stairs, called him "father"; whereupon, taking compassion upon her, he carried her off with him to Fano, together with all that was in the house, and dying there, left her to me with what he had, charging me marry her in due time and give her to her dowry that which had been hers. Since she hath come to marriageable age, I have not yet found an occasion of marrying her to my liking, though I would gladly do it, rather than that another mischance like that of yesternight should betide me on her account.'

• From Under the Banner of Heaven (2003)

  with the Shivwits, and an extended exploration of the Colorado Plateau conducted from 1871 through 1873; striving for a more dramatic narrative, he shamelessly presents events from 1872 as having occurred in 1870. * Perhaps the greatest reason to doubt the accepted version of what happened to Powell’s men is that it simply doesn’t stand the test of common sense. Both Mormonee and Mericats were typically quick to avenge Indian depredations, yet nobody ever attempted to punish the Shivwits who’d allegedly killed Dunn and the Howlands—no real effort was even made to recover their valuable guns, scientific instruments, or papers from the Indians. This despite the fact that the telegram sent by an anonymous Saint on September 7, 1869, which first reported the murders, also stated that “two of the She-bits who killed the men are in the Washington Indian camp with two of the guns.” The Washington Indian Camp was less than ten miles from St. George, but no Saints ever made the short trip up the hill to arrest the alleged perpetrators, or even to ask them where they had left the bodies of Powell’s men. Curiously, the telegram included no mention of who had composed it or from where it was sent; Larsen points out that it very well could have originated in Toquerville, where a telegraph office was situated in the same ward house in which the murders were alleged to have occurred. “It seems strange,” he adds, “that after Apostle Snow received the telegram, none of the locals tried to bring the Indians to justice. I’ve never heard of Indians being left alone after committing a deed like that during this period of Utah’s history.” * It also strains belief that three Shivwits would have been able to surprise and kill three seasoned, well-armed mountain men. The Shivwit tribe had no firearms of any kind; they were known to be a docile, dirt-poor band of “seed gatherers and bug eaters.” Dunn and the Howland brothers, on the other hand, had two rifles and a shotgun and were ever alert to the possibility of an ambush after years of tangling with Indians. Before joining Powell’s expedition, William Dunn had been wounded four times by Comanches, and as a consequence was especially wary of further attacks. While the evidence may not be conclusive that the three men who disappeared from Powell’s expedition were murdered by the inhabitants of Toquerville, credible evidence that Powell’s men were shot full of arrows by Shivwits, as Hamblin reported, is in even shorter supply. It is thus hard to countenance

• From Enchanted: Erotic Bedtime Stories for Women (Erotic Fiction) (2006)

  “We must ask him the next time we see him,” said his friend with a chuckle, but their demeanor and attitude were quickly changing, and they were at once more jovial and good-humored. They moved in closer to Goldilocks and, very leisurely, began unbuttoning her dress. As they did so, they spoke to one another cheerfully, paying little attention to Goldilocks as they made blunt observations about her clothing. “Upon my word,” remarked the first, as he pulled the dress over her head and held it up to his friends. “Of what sort of material is this ungainly rag made?” “I can’t say that I have ever encountered anything like it before,” replied the second, wrinkling his nose with a look of distaste. “It reminds one of the stuff used to hold potatoes!” “Indeed,” chuckled the third, taking perverse delight in its shabbiness. “I half expected to find some of that product upon your removing the thing.” “Oh, but you must see these!” screeched the first baron. He tugged at Goldilocks’s undergarments, barely acknowledging her at all as he nearly ripped them off her body and held them up to his friends. “Why, they are absolutely revolting!” His friends gasped in horror at the sight of the cotton pantaloons, so unlike the silken undergarments they were used to seeing in the stores where they shopped. Goldilocks stared at them in astonishment. Before she had the presence of mind to comprehend their intentions she was standing naked before them, watching mutely as they nonchalantly discussed her clothing. Next, they began to undress themselves, doing so in a very casual and unhurried manner, carefully folding each article of clothing as they removed it and placing it neatly over a chair. At last the first baron laid himself across the bed that Goldilocks had been sleeping in only a few moments before. He raised his eyebrows and looked at her expectantly. “Well?” he said, and when she only stared at him he tapped the bed, exclaiming, “Look alive, old girl!” The other two, meanwhile, led her to where he lay. To her utter bewilderment, she could not bring herself to resist. It was most certainly her excessive curiosity that had brought her to this point, and now it once again pushed her onward to see the outcome of this unusual but exciting episode. To the barons, she was a total stranger who had been procured to entertain them. They would most likely never discover her real identity, so she could walk away from the experience as if it had never happened, and yet with a new knowledge of herself and the world around her. She had never before been presented with such an opportunity, and likely would not again. Aside from all of this, she felt herself to be under some queer influence, so that she could not oppose the oddly authoritative will of the barons, or this most peculiar orgy.

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

  Some, however, through failing to observe that the universe was made by God, were unable to avoid erring in this question about the beginning of the world. Thus the earliest physicists recognised no effective cause and maintained that uncreated matter was the cause of all things, and thus they were compelled to hold that matter had always existed. For seeing that nothing brings itself from non-existence into being, that which begins to exist must be caused by something else. These asserted—either that the world was always in continual existence, because they recognised none but natural agents which being confined to one mode of action, of necessity always produced the same effects; —or that the world had an interrupted existence; thus Democritus held the world, or rather worlds, to be in a continual state of formation and destruction on account of the chance movements of atoms. Since, however, it seemed unreasonable that all the congruities and utilities to be found in nature should be due to chance, whereas they obtain either always or in the majority of cases: and seeing that nevertheless this would follow if there were no other cause but matter, and especially that there are some effects which cannot be sufficiently explained by the causality of matter, others like Anaxagoras posited an intellect as active cause, or like Empedocles, attraction and repulsion. Yet they did not hold these to be the active causes of the universe, but likened them to other particular agents whose activity consists in the transformation of matter from one thing into another. Consequently they were compelled to assert that matter is eternal, through not having a cause of its existence: but that the world had a beginning, because every effect of a cause which acts by, movement follows its cause in duration, since such effect does not exist before the end of the movement, which end is preceded by the initial movement, co-existent with which is the agent that initiates the movement.

• From Confessions of a Mask (1958)

  The shrine was paraded over every inch of it, and the shrubs, ripped apart crashingly, were trampled underfoot. It was difficult for me so much as to tell what was happening. The noises were neutralizing each other, and it seemed exactly as though my ears were being struck by recurrent waves of frozen silence and meaningless roaring. Likewise with the colors—gold and vermilion, purple and green, yellow and dark blue, all throbbed and boiled up and seemed like a single color in which now gold and now vermilion was the dominant hue. Through it all there was only one vividly clear thing, a thing that both horrified and lacerated me, filling my heart with unaccountable agony. This was the expression on the faces of the young men carrying the shrine—an expression of the most obscene and undisguised drunkenness in the world. . . . CHAPTER TWO For over a year now I had been suffering the anguish of a child provided with a curious toy. I was twelve years old. This toy increased in volume at every opportunity and hinted that, rightly used, it would be quite a delightful thing. But directions for its use were nowhere written, and so, when the toy took the initiative in wanting to play with me, my bewilderment was inevitable. Occasionally my humiliation and impatience became so aggravated that I even thought I wanted to destroy the toy. In the end, however, there was nothing for it but to surrender on my side to the insubordinate toy, with its expression of sweet secrecy, and wait passively to see what would happen. Then I took it into my head to try listening more dispassionately to the toy's wishes. When I did so, I found that soon it already possessed its own definite and unmistakable tastes, or what might be called its own mechanism. The nature of its tastes had become bound up, not only with my childhood memories, but, one after another, with such things as the naked bodies of young men seen on a summer's seashore, the swimming teams seen at Meiji Pool, the swarthy young man a cousin of mine married, and the valiant heroes of many an adventure story. Until then I had mistakenly thought I was only poetically attracted to such things, thus confusing the nature of my sensual desires with a system of esthetics.

• From Under the Banner of Heaven (2003)

  Author’s Remarks There were no formerly heroic times, and there was no formerly pure generation. There is no one here but us chickens, and so it has always been: A people busy and powerful, knowledgeable, ambivalent, important, fearful, and self-aware; a people who scheme, promote, deceive, and conquer; who pray for their loved ones, and long to flee misery and skip death. It is a weakening and discoloring idea, that rustic people knew God personally once upon a time—or even knew selflessness or courage or literature—but that it is too late for us. In fact, the absolute is available to everyone in every age. There never was a more holy age than ours, and never a less. ANNIE DILLARD, FOR THE TIME BEING The genesis for this book was a desire to grasp the nature of religious belief. Because I’ve spent most of my life in the West, in the happy company of Latter- day Saints, I decided to narrow my subject to a more manageable scope by examining belief more or less exclusively through the lens of Mormonism. I grew up with Mormons in Corvallis, Oregon, which had (and has) a robust LDS community. Saints were my childhood friends and playmates, my teachers, my athletic coaches. I envied what seemed to be the unfluctuating certainty of the faith professed so enthusiastically by my closest Mormon pals; but I was often baffled by it. I’ve sought to comprehend the formidable power of such belief ever since. I was irresistibly drawn to write about Latter-day Saints not only because I already knew something about their theology, and admired much about their culture, but also because of the utterly unique circumstances in which their

• From Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928)

  "With the child?" asked Connie. "With the child!" And his plain, rather worn face took on an indefinable look of derision. It was a face that changed all the time, baffling. "No," he said, seeing Connie stand at a loss, "my mother comes and cleans up for me on Saturdays; I do the rest myself." Again Connie looked at him. His eyes were smiling again, a little mockingly, but warm and blue, and somehow kind. She wondered at him. He was in trousers and flannel shirt and a grey tie, his hair soft and damp, his face rather pale and worn-looking. When the eyes ceased to laugh they looked as if they had suffered a great deal, still without losing their warmth. But a pallor of isolation came over him, she was not really there for him. She wanted to say so many things, and she said nothing. Only she looked up at him again, and remarked: "I hope I didn't disturb you?" The faint smile of mockery narrowed his eyes. "Only combing my hair, if you don't mind. I'm sorry I hadn't a coat on, but then I had no idea who was knocking. Nobody knocks here, and the unexpected sounds ominous." He went in front of her down the garden path to hold the gate. In his shirt, without the clumsy velveteen coat, she saw again how slender he was, thin, stooping a little. Yet, as she passed him, there was something young and bright in his fair hair, and his quick eyes. He would be a man about thirty-seven or eight. She plodded on into the wood, knowing he was looking after her; he upset her so much, in spite of herself. And he, as he went indoors, was thinking: "She's nice, she's real! she's nicer than she knows." She wondered very much about him; he seemed so unlike a gamekeeper, so unlike a working-man anyhow; although he had something in common with the local people. But also something very uncommon. "The gamekeeper, Mellors, is a curious kind of person," she said to Clifford; "he might almost be a gentleman." "Might he?" said Clifford. "I hadn't noticed." "But isn't there something special about him?" Connie insisted. "I think he's quite a nice fellow, but I know very little about him. He only came out of the army last year, less than a year ago. From India, I rather think. He may have picked up certain tricks out there, perhaps he was an officer's servant, and improved on his position. Some of the men were like that. But it does them no good, they have to fall back into their old place when they get home again." Connie gazed at Clifford contemplatively. She saw in him the peculiar tight rebuff against anyone of the lower classes who might be really climbing up, which she knew was characteristic of his breed. "But don't you think there is something special about him?" she asked. "Frankly, no! Nothing I had noticed."

• From The Story of My Experiments with Truth (An Autobiography) (1927)

  This was not a resolution that Hasrat Saheb would accept. His object was to wreak vengeance on the British Empire, in case justice was denied in a counter proposal for the boycott purely of British goods so far as practicable. I opposed it on the score of principle, as also of practicability, adducing for it those arguments that have now become pretty familiar. I also put before the conference my view-point of non-violence. I noticed that my arguments made a deep impression on the audience. Before me, Hasrat Mohani’s speech had been received with such loud acclamations that I was afraid that mine would only be a cry in the wilderness. I had made bold to speak only because I felt it would be a dereliction of duty not to lay my views before the conference. But, to my agreeable surprise, my speech was followed with the closest attention by those present, and evoked a full measure of support among those on the platform, and speaker after speaker rose to deliver speeches in support of my views. The leaders were able to see that not only would the boycott of British goods fail of its purpose, but would, if adopted, make of them a laughing stock. There was hardly a man present in that assembly but had some article of British manufacture on his person. Many of the audience therefore realized that nothing but harm could result from adopting a resolution that even those who voted for it were unable to carry out. ‘Mere boycott of foreign cloth cannot satisfy us, for who knows long it will be, before we shall be able to manufacture Swadeshi cloth in sufficient quantity for our needs, and before we can bring about effective boycott of foreign cloth? We want something that will produce an immediate effect on the British. Let your boycott of foreign cloth stand, we do not mind it, but give us something quicker, and speedier in addition’- so spoke in effect Maulana Hasrat Mohani. Even as I was listening to him, I felt that something new, over and above boycott of foreign cloth, would be necessary. An immediate boycott of foreign cloth seemed to me also to be a clear impossibility at that time. I did not then know that we could, if we liked, produce enough Khadi for all our clothing requirements; this was only a later discovery. On the other hand, I knew even then that, if we depended on the mills alone for effecting the boycott of foreign cloth, we should be betrayed. I was still in the middle of this dilemma when the Maulana concluded his speech. I was handicapped for want of suitable Hind or Urdu words. This was my first occasion for delivering an argumentative speech before an audience especially composed of Musalmans of the North.