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 Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  I would as soon have approached a charging bull as expose my political naïveté to them. Almost every Saturday afternoon, I watched in bewilderment as crowds of students gathered on the college lawn, carrying placards emblazoned with slogans directed against the government, the university authorities, the syllabus, and something mysteriously called “the system.” They seemed furious about everything. I heard astonishing reports of violent meetings in the English Faculty Library, where undergraduates screamed abuse at the dons. They demanded that the formidable linguistic requirements of the course be scrapped, that the syllabus include contemporary literature (it currently stopped at 1900), and that the study of Anglo-Saxon be abolished. To me, who had fallen passionately in love with Old English literature, this rage was incomprehensible. When I heard some of my fellow students at St. Anne’s inveighing against the tyranny of the dons, I gazed at them nonplussed. After the draconian atmosphere of the convent, the mildly liberal, laissez-faire atmosphere of St. Anne’s seemed like paradise to me. These kids didn’t know what tyranny was! But then I remembered my last painful year in the convent, when I had been the rebel, and had argued relentlessly with my superior about the rule. I had also been full of rage, constantly frustrated by the convent “establishment” and passionately eager for change. Perhaps I was not quite so different from my contemporaries, after all. We had just been fighting in different wars. Willy-nilly, I found myself drawn into the climate of protest. Somewhat to my astonishment, I had been approached the previous term, while still a nun, and asked if I would let my name go forward as a candidate in the forthcoming elections for the Junior Common Room committee. I had been reluctant—a humiliating defeat seemed inevitable—but my supporters were insistent and it seemed churlish to refuse. For a couple of weeks I slunk past the notice board, wincing at the sight of my photograph, complete with veil and crucifix, beside those of my wild-haired rivals. What student in her right mind would vote for me? I looked like a creature from another planet. I scarcely dared to approach the notice board on the morning after the election, but, amazed, I saw the same photograph prominently displayed, informing the college that I was now the secretary of the Common Room. So now I found that whether I liked it or not, I was being drawn into student politics. I had to attend protest meetings in the JCR and take part in intense committee discussions about how to bring St. Anne’s into line with the sixties. The most pressing issue was cohabitation in the colleges. Until the early twentieth century, women had not been permitted to attend the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. It was assumed that the effort of studying to the same level as men would blow their inferior little brains to smithereens.

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

  Perhaps I could become a don one day, and have a pretty room like this, piled high with books. Perhaps I could dedicate myself to scholarship, as I had once devoted myself to the disciplines of the religious life. My tutors’ comfortable, peaceful rooms increasingly seemed a haven. As I walked around Oxford, I realized that the world had undergone radical change while I had been inside. I had begun my postulantship in 1962, just before the sexual, social, and political upheavals of the 1960s. In the fifties, when I had grown up, young people had looked like miniature versions of their parents. Boys wore flannel trousers and ties, and girls were clad in demure twin sets and prim pearl necklaces. We were kept under fairly strict surveillance. I had been only seventeen years old when I had left this world, a product of convent schooling with an ingrained fear of sexuality. The dangers of premarital sex had been burned into my soul. And indeed, before the contraceptive pill, it was a risky enterprise for girls. But all that had clearly changed. Girls and boys walked with their arms casually slung around one another, in ways that might or might not be sexual. Some embraced languorously in public places. They certainly did not subscribe to the old shibboleths, though I knew that my Catholic friends still agonized about how far they could go without falling into mortal sin. But the demeanor of these young people was even more startling. They had long, flowing hair instead of the tidy, repressed bobs of my youth. The neat sweaters and ties had been thrown out. Their attire was careless, ragged, and often eccentric—flowered or ruffled shirts for the men, evening dress worn with jaunty insouciance in the middle of the day; the girls wore skirts that barely covered their thighs or long, flowing, vaguely Eastern robes. But above all, they were confident. I had just come from an institution in which young people were required to be absolutely obedient and submissive. We were never supposed to call attention to ourselves, never to question or criticize established custom, and if you were invited to address your elders, you did so with deference and courtesy that bordered on the obsequious. We had knelt down when we spoke to our superiors to remind ourselves that they stood in the place of God. These young people, however, seemed openly and unashamedly rebellious. They protested noisily and vociferously. They even took part in events called demonstrations, where they publicly aired their grievances, a concept that could not have been more alien to me. What on earth were they trying to demonstrate? What had they got to be so angry about?

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

  I usually traveled down with Jenifer in the Morris Minor, with Nanny and Jacob squeezed together into the backseat. It was a long, difficult journey, and my task was to talk to Jenifer, who had to do all the driving, while Nanny tried to keep Jacob amused. As soon as we arrived, we had to rush through the house, removing all the signs of the occupancy of Jenifer’s sister, who had the house during the winter months. Her elegant ornaments were thrust disdainfully into a cupboard (“Can you imagine choosing this?” Jenifer would ask, brandishing a quite unexceptionable lamp shade. “Ludicrous!”) and were replaced by Jenifer’s more unconventional objects. There had almost been outright war between the sisters when Jenifer had defiantly painted the kitchen wall a brilliant orange, Mariella apparently preferring magnolia. Herbert generally followed us in comfort on the train, and by the time he had arrived, the house was ready for habitation. Staying at Lamledra had always been an education. It had given me, as it were, a crash course in the permissive society. Adam and Charlie often turned up, each with a large entourage of wives, girl-friends, and other members of their respective communes. I often wondered whether Adam was more successful at meditation than I had been, but never dared to ask. I always found Adam and Charlie somewhat daunting, even though they were always perfectly, if rather distantly, friendly, and I was quite intimidated by Adam’s wife, Mary, who treated me with the scorn she reserved for somebody who had clearly sold out to the system. I much enjoyed Herbert’s account of an afternoon he had spent at Throstle’s Hole, the house he had bought for Adam’s commune. To preserve the spirit of equality, Adam and Mary used her surname as well as his, and so were listed in the telephone directory as Hamilton Hart. On the afternoon in question, two members of the local Conservative Party who were out canvassing and, not unnaturally, thought that the Hamilton Harts of Throstle’s Hole would be a pretty safe bet, had visited them. Herbert gleefully described the horror of these stalwart Tories when they confronted the communal scene, with various stoned communards crashed out on the floor, another couple meditating in yogic positions, refusing to acknowledge their presence, while Mojo, Adam’s daughter, ran naked amidst the general squalor. For once, Jenifer’s favorite adjective, “ludicrous,” seemed entirely appropriate.

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

  Perhaps I could become a don one day, and have a pretty room like this, piled high with books. Perhaps I could dedicate myself to scholarship, as I had once devoted myself to the disciplines of the religious life. My tutors’ comfortable, peaceful rooms increasingly seemed a haven. As I walked around Oxford, I realized that the world had undergone radical change while I had been inside. I had begun my postulantship in 1962, just before the sexual, social, and political upheavals of the 1960s. In the fifties, when I had grown up, young people had looked like miniature versions of their parents. Boys wore flannel trousers and ties, and girls were clad in demure twin sets and prim pearl necklaces. We were kept under fairly strict surveillance. I had been only seventeen years old when I had left this world, a product of convent schooling with an ingrained fear of sexuality. The dangers of premarital sex had been burned into my soul. And indeed, before the contraceptive pill, it was a risky enterprise for girls. But all that had clearly changed. Girls and boys walked with their arms casually slung around one another, in ways that might or might not be sexual. Some embraced languorously in public places. They certainly did not subscribe to the old shibboleths, though I knew that my Catholic friends still agonized about how far they could go without falling into mortal sin. But the demeanor of these young people was even more startling. They had long, flowing hair instead of the tidy, repressed bobs of my youth. The neat sweaters and ties had been thrown out. Their attire was careless, ragged, and often eccentric—flowered or ruffled shirts for the men, evening dress worn with jaunty insouciance in the middle of the day; the girls wore skirts that barely covered their thighs or long, flowing, vaguely Eastern robes. But above all, they were confident. I had just come from an institution in which young people were required to be absolutely obedient and submissive. We were never supposed to call attention to ourselves, never to question or criticize established custom, and if you were invited to address your elders, you did so with deference and courtesy that bordered on the obsequious. We had knelt down when we spoke to our superiors to remind ourselves that they stood in the place of God. These young people, however, seemed openly and unashamedly rebellious. They protested noisily and vociferously. They even took part in events called demonstrations, where they publicly aired their grievances, a concept that could not have been more alien to me. What on earth were they trying to demonstrate? What had they got to be so angry about?

• From Wild (2012)

  I stood up when a small beat-up pickup truck packed full of people rounded the bend. It had Oregon plates. It drove straight up to us and screeched to a sudden stop a few feet away. Before the driver had even turned the engine off, the seven people and two dogs in the truck started leaping out. Ragtag and grubby, dressed in high hippy regalia, these people were unquestionably members of the Rainbow Tribe. Even the dogs were discreetly funked out in bandannas and beads. I reached to touch their furry backs as they darted past me and into the weeds. “Hi,” Stacy and I said in unison to the four men and three women who stood before us, though in return they only gazed at us, squinty-eyed and aggrieved, as if they’d emerged from a cave rather than the bed or the cab of a truck. It seemed as if they’d been up all night or were coming down from hallucinogenics or both. “Is this the Rainbow Gathering?” the man who’d been behind the wheel demanded. He was tan and small-boned. A strange grungy white headband that covered most of his head held his long wavy hair back from his face. “That’s what we were looking for too, but we’re the only ones here,” I replied. “Oh my fucking GOD!” moaned a pale waif of a woman with a bare, skeletal midriff and a collage of Celtic tattoos. “We drove all the way from fucking Ashland for nothing?” She went to lie across the boulder I’d recently vacated. “I’m so hungry I’m seriously going to die.” “I’m hungry too,” whined another of the women—a black-haired dwarf who wore a string belt with little silver bells attached to it. She went and stood by the waif and petted her head. “Fucking folkalizers!” bellowed the headband man. “Fucking right,” mumbled a man with a green Mohawk and a big silver nose ring like the kind you see every now and then on a bull. “You know what I’m gonna do?” asked the headband man. “I’m gonna make my own fucking Gathering up at Crater Lake. I don’t need those fucking folkalizers to tell me where to go. I got major influence around here.” “How far is Crater Lake?” asked the last of the women in an Australian accent. She was tall, beautiful, and blonde, everything about her a spectacle—her hair in a heap of dreadlocks bundled on top of her head, her ears pierced with what looked like actual bird bones, her every last finger clad in extravagant rings. “Not too far, toots,” said the headband man. “Don’t call me ‘toots,’ ” she replied. “Is ‘toots’ offensive in Australia?” he asked. She sighed, then made a growling sound. “All right, baby, I won’t call you ‘toots,’ then.” He cackled to the sky. “But I will call you ‘baby’ if I damn well please. Like Jimi Hendrix said: ‘I call everybody baby.’ ” My eyes met Stacy’s.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  But when you take seriously the existence and malevolence of nonhuman forces that are capable of using “us” as well as “them” in the service of evil, the focus shifts. As the hazy and shadowy realities come into view, what we thought was clear and straightforward becomes blurred. Life becomes more complex, but arguably more realistic. The traditional lines of friend and foe are not so easy to draw. You can no longer assume that “that lot” are simply agents of the devil and “this lot”—us and our friends—are automatically on God’s side. If there is an enemy at work, it is a subtle, cunning enemy, much too clever to allow itself to be identified simply with one person, one group, or one nation. Only twice in the gospel story does Jesus address “the satan” directly by that title: once when rebuking him in the temptation narrative (Matt. 4:10), and again when he is rebuking his closest associate (Mark 8:33) for resisting God’s strange plan. The line between good and evil is clear at the level of God, on the one hand, and the satan, on the other. It is much, much less clear as it passes through human beings, individually and collectively. This is precisely the kind of redefinition that was going on in Jesus’s Nazareth Manifesto. Traditional enemies were suddenly brought, at least in principle, within the reach of the blessing of God’s great jubilee. And traditional friends—those who might have thought that they were automatically on the right side—had to be looked at again. Perhaps one can no longer simply identify “our people” as on the side of the angels and “those people” as agents of the satan. That’s why Jesus was run out of town and nearly killed. He had suggested that foes could become friends and by implication was warning that the “good people”—Israel as the people of God—might become enemies. Ironically, his own townsfolk proceeded to prove the point by their reaction. Later, as we just noticed, he even warned his closest supporter, Simon Peter, of precisely this, calling him “Satan” when he tried to dissuade him from his vocation to suffer and die (Mark 8:33) and warning him, later again, that the satan had wanted to work him over violently (Luke 22:31). Jesus sees the satan at work among his hearers, snatching away the word of the kingdom, so that it won’t take root (Mark 4:15), and sowing weeds among the wheat (Matt. 13:39); and again at work in the dehumanizing and deforming ailments that have crippled an old woman (Luke 13:16). He recognizes that one of his own followers is an “accuser” (John 6:70), and the gospel writers pick up this point, seeing the satan at work in the “accusing” role of Judas Iscariot (Luke 22:3; John 13:2, 27). Tragically, even the people of God themselves, focused on the Temple in Jerusalem, are to be seen now as children of the devil (John 8:44).

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

  And yet how deeply unattractive such a stance could be. Nothing we could say would cause Miss Franklin a moment’s doubt. Her mind was closed off to any other possibility. She reminded me of those virginal saints in the Catholic legends who were utterly impermeable: wild beasts fell back from them in terror; swords could not pierce their invulnerable flesh; even when they were thrust into brothels, they proved impenetrable. They seemed to be surrounded by an invisible shield, a barricade that preserved them in a world of their own. In the convent we had sung hymns to the Virgin Mary which compared her to a garden enclosed or a well sealed up. I had been proud to take my vow of chastity, but I knew that right now I was no longer on the same side as the virgin vote. I turned to Maureen inquiringly. She nodded and rose to her feet. “I don’t think we have anything more to say to one another,” she said. That night, under cover of darkness, I accompanied Maureen and a group of other students to the college wall. Each of us carried a pair of wire clippers. Grimly and methodically we demolished the barbed-wire fence and deposited it in a heap of ten-inch fragments on the lawn outside Miss Franklin’s window. I seemed to have thrown in my lot with the sexual revolution. But a few days later, when I went to my first party, I was not so sure. Yet again, when I walked into the murky, smoke-filled room, the noise almost knocked me sideways. The parties I had attended before the convent had been sedate, elderly affairs. Under the benign but hawklike gaze of our elders, we had lurched around the room in pairs, trying to match our faltering steps to the polite strains of waltzes and quicksteps—bored, I had to admit, almost to stupefaction. But nobody seemed bored here, I noted as I groped my way uncertainly to a corner where I had spotted Jane with her boyfriend, Mark, and accepted a glass of wine. I sipped it gratefully, hoping it might have some anesthetic effect, as I stared, dazed, at the scene before me. The room was as dark as an underground cavern, the gloom relieved periodically by flickering lights that transformed us all into granite-hued hags. Jane’s skin looked blanched, her lips black. On the other side of the room, I could see Pat and Fiona, their pretty, fresh faces also drained of color, their animated expressions curiously at variance with their corpselike pallor. “You look stunned.” Mark, a tall, solemn young man with the regular good looks of a male model, bent toward me solicitously. He had to shout above the din of a jangled crashing that I was trying to identify as music.

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

  When I met Sally’s parents, I could understand her detachment from any form of faith. They had rejected the religion of their childhood so thoroughly that it now had little reality for them. Lady Phyl, the title she preferred to the more correct Lady Cockburn, was one of those people who didn’t seem to need Christianity. Her painting was a form of contemplation that had nothing to do with any kind of deity, and she seemed naturally kind, gentle, and creative, able to make the best of any situation, including being married to Sir Robert, which could not have been easy. He was a brilliant, pugnacious physicist, one of the small team of scientists who had discovered radar during the Second World War. But his achievements meant very little to him. He certainly had no self-righteous certainty. A depressive, he was profoundly disturbed by life in the late twentieth century, but it would never have occurred to him to seek comfort in religion, which he found obscurely troubling. He worried at theological concepts rather as a terrier belabors a bone. The existence of God might have been a recalcitrant equation that refused to come out right. “Now, Karen,” he would boom in his strong Hampshire accent as soon as I had put my foot over the threshold of their house, “let’s get to the bottom of this question of God.” “For goodness’ sake, Bob!” Lady Phyl would exclaim. “Let the poor girl get her coat off first!” Yet ironically Sir Bob seemed to inspire the confidences of religious people. To the derision of his wife, in order to save a few pence, he would repair to the local unisex hairdressing salon, somewhat ambiguously called Blow Heads, on Thursday afternoons, when there was a cheap rate for senior citizens. He looked an incongruous figure, having his short back and sides amidst the youthful stylists with their Mohicans. One afternoon, when he had as usual been lugubriously lamenting the lack of honor in public life, the greed and triviality of the times, and looming ecological disaster, one of the stylists, with purple hair, tattoos down his bare arms, and clothes duly festooned with safety pins and razor blades, wordlessly thrust a card into his hand. Sir Bob stared at it with blank astonishment: it was an invitation to a special mission at the Church of the Lamb the following week. Then there was the time when he had paid a friendly visit to an elderly couple who were moving into the house next door. “Moving is hell, isn’t it?” he had commiserated affably to his new neighbor. “Terrible.” The old man nodded in agreement. “But fortunately I have a friend who makes the whole thing bearable.” “Oh really?” Sir Bob rumbled amiably, assuming that he was speaking of a helpful chum, but to his amazement, the friend turned out to be Jesus. Sir Bob returned home shaking his head in utter perplexity.

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

  Sir Bob returned home shaking his head in utter perplexity. “I can understand the idea of God—at a pinch,” he told me afterward, still shocked by this revelation of the aberrations of the human mind, “but I simply cannot— cannot —understand how anybody can imagine that he has a personal relationship with Jesus .” I could only agree, especially since the historical Jesus would have been more likely to tell the couple to give all their possessions to the poor rather than helping them to convey their worldly goods around the country in heavily insured vans. Yet it was in part due to this godless family that, even while I was recoiling from the very idea of faith, I had already taken the first step in a process that would, without my fully realizing what was happening, bring me back to religion. The Cockburns were great writers. Each one of them kept a diary, in which every evening they recorded the events of their day; it was, I could see, another form of meditation, or even an examination of conscience; it was a way of making sense of their lives. Sally had kept her diary since she was eight years old, and I used to marvel at the thick volumes, one for each year, lined up on her shelves. “I don’t know how anybody manages without a diary,” she used to say. “You should have kept one in the convent. I bet you would have got out sooner; you see things so much more clearly when you write them down. ” Both Sally and her parents constantly urged me to write about my years in the convent. “After all, it’s over ten years since you left,” Sally argued. “You’ll forget it all, and that would be such a pity.” In fact, I had been thinking along these lines myself. I was growing uneasy about the way these years were being trivialized, reduced to a series of funny stories to tell at dinner parties. It had been a crucial period and I needed to find out what it had really meant to me. I used to look thoughtfully at Sally’s diaries, which had clearly been a means of creative self-appraisal and discovery. Maybe I should try something similar. My mother agreed. She had recently given me a typewriter, which had been thrown out of her office. “But you can only have it on one condition,” she said. “Use it to write your story!” As it happened, I even had a literary agent lined up. Charlotte had invited me to a dinner party in her flat to meet June, who had edited an anthology of short stories to which Charlotte had contributed.

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

  As I watched the dancers, I felt completely out of my element. I could see that this kind of dancing was unabashedly sexual. It reminded me of the ceremonial mating dances performed by Africans that I had seen occasionally in documentaries or news-reels. It was interesting, but had nothing to do with me. I tried to look nonchalant and at ease, but felt miserably that I must look as out of place as the queen, in her suburban, matronly clothes, carrying her ubiquitous handbag like a shield, as she stares with a glazed smile at the ritual dances performed in her honor during a tour of the Commonwealth. I had found, to my considerable sorrow, that even though I no longer belonged in the convent, I didn’t belong out here either. Looking back, I can see that during those first few months, I was experiencing something akin to the culture shock of those who, for one reason or another, have been forced to leave homes in Pakistan, Palestine, or Zimbabwe and migrate to a Western country. The violent upheavals of the twentieth century have made millions of people homeless in one traumatic uprooting after another. Exile is, of course, not simply a change of address. It is also a spiritual dislocation. Anthropologists and psychologists tell us that displaced people feel lost in a universe that has suddenly become alien. Once the fixed point of home is gone, there is a fundamental lack of orientation that makes everything seem relative and aimless. Cut off from the roots of their culture and identity, migrants and refugees can feel that they are somehow withering away and becoming insubstantial. Their world—inextricably linked with their unique place in the cosmos—has literally come to an end. Now I was sharing something of this twentieth-century experience. True, I had left my home in the convent of my own free will and was not languishing in a camp. But I did feel in exile from everything that made sense. Because I could take nothing for granted, and did not know how to interpret the sixties world that had come into being during my absence, I too felt that the world had no meaning. Because I had lost my fundamental orientation, I felt spiritually dizzy, lacking all sense of direction and not knowing where to turn. I could see the same kind of stunned bewilderment in the eyes of the old Bangladeshi lady who served in the corner shop near St. Anne’s where we bought newspapers and sweets.

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

  So this was Jerusalem, the place that had been the central region of my interior geography ever since I was a small child. I waited to feel something, but the apartment blocks, the supermarkets, and the small news agencies could have belonged to almost any modern city in southern Europe. Joel rapped out another order to Danny, who advanced what seemed to be an objection but was silenced by an explosive imprecation from Joel. “We’re going to take a brief tour before we go to your hotel,” he announced. “It’s not too late,” he added, clearly for Danny’s benefit. “You can’t spend your first night in Jerusalem without seeing more than this shit!” He gestured out of the window. “I want to get your imagination working. Give you some ‘inspiration.’ ” He spoke the last word in ironical inverted commas, but I could tell that he was serious. It was a good idea, and I sat back and waited for the commentary, the patter of the guided tour. Nothing was forthcoming. We drove on in silence, broken only when Danny had a furious altercation with another driver at some traffic lights, leaning across me to yell at him out of the window, which he had yanked down to let in the cold city air. There was much clashing of brakes and shouting. Everybody in the adjacent car joined in, and Joel added his own clearly insulting contributions from the backseat. Finally the other car screeched off in high dudgeon. “Bastards!” muttered Joel contemptuously. “Wind up your window! It’s freezing in here!” He sniffed. “You know,” he said in a lighter tone, “I think it’s snowing. Karen,” he suddenly shouted expansively, “you’ve brought the snow with you from London!” I peered through my window. “It doesn’t look as if it’s snowing to me.” Joel guffawed—that is the only word for the sound he made. “It’s the holy snow of Jerusalem,” he snapped. “You don’t see, you just believe!” I laughed too, because it was funny, but my laughter was lost in Joel’s roars of mirth; I would learn that he was always convulsed by his own jokes. The atmosphere in the car lightened, and I could tell that—if only because I had occasioned a witty remark of his own—Joel felt more friendly toward me. We continued our journey through the busy streets and then, suddenly, turned a corner. There, floodlit but somehow timeless, were the extraordinary walls of the Old City, built, as I knew from my preliminary reading, by the Ottoman sultan Suleiman the Magnificent in the sixteenth century.

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

  For other people it may be a career in law or politics, a marriage, a love affair, or the raising of children. But that bliss provides us with a clue: if we follow it to the end, it will take us to the heart of life. My life has kept changing, but at the same time I have constantly found myself revolving round and round the same themes, the same issues, and even repeating the same mistakes. I tried to break away from the convent but I still live alone, spend my days in silence, and am almost wholly occupied in writing, thinking, and speaking about God and spirituality. I have come full circle. This reminds me of the staircase in Eliot’s Ash-Wednesday, which I picture as a narrow spiral staircase. I tried to get off it and join others on what seemed to me to be a broad, noble flight of steps, thronged with people. But I kept falling off, and when I went back to my own twisting stairwell I found a fulfillment that I had not expected. Now I have to mount my staircase alone. And as I go up, step by step, I am turning, again, round and round, apparently covering little ground, but climbing upward, I hope, toward the light. 7. Infirm Glory This could not be happening. I stared incredulously at the gentleman sitting opposite me and asked him to repeat his question. The room was noisy, after all, and I might have misheard. We were in the BBC studios in Glasgow, having dinner before going on to make a live television program. But this was a dinner party with a difference. There must have been about a hundred guests, most of whom would make up the studio audience, and apparently they were all prostitutes, pimps, strippers, drag artists, porn dealers, and other members of Glasgow’s vice ring. There were also a number of bathing beauties and beauty queens. As one of the principal discussants, I was seated at the top table. A few seats to my right was Linda Lovelace, the notorious star of Deep Throat, now in her feminist phase, slightly overweight and clad in a tent dress and sneakers, earnestly explaining to one of the transvestites that her little boy was going into first grade that fall. To my left was Oliver Reed, who was downing malt whiskey as though it were lemonade, and already looked the worse for wear. A few weeks earlier, I had been invited by the BBC to take part in a new talk show, which would deal in depth with the seven deadly sins. It was billed to me as a serious enterprise, and my publishers were excited by the idea. It would go out live in a prime slot on Saturday evening, and would give me a chance to show that I could talk about other things than being a nun.

• From Wild (2012)

  I stood up when a small beat-up pickup truck packed full of people rounded the bend. It had Oregon plates. It drove straight up to us and screeched to a sudden stop a few feet away. Before the driver had even turned the engine off, the seven people and two dogs in the truck started leaping out. Ragtag and grubby, dressed in high hippy regalia, these people were unquestionably members of the Rainbow Tribe. Even the dogs were discreetly funked out in bandannas and beads. I reached to touch their furry backs as they darted past me and into the weeds. “Hi,” Stacy and I said in unison to the four men and three women who stood before us, though in return they only gazed at us, squinty-eyed and aggrieved, as if they’d emerged from a cave rather than the bed or the cab of a truck. It seemed as if they’d been up all night or were coming down from hallucinogenics or both. “Is this the Rainbow Gathering?” the man who’d been behind the wheel demanded. He was tan and small-boned. A strange grungy white headband that covered most of his head held his long wavy hair back from his face. “That’s what we were looking for too, but we’re the only ones here,” I replied. “Oh my fucking GOD!” moaned a pale waif of a woman with a bare, skeletal midriff and a collage of Celtic tattoos. “We drove all the way from fucking Ashland for nothing?” She went to lie across the boulder I’d recently vacated. “I’m so hungry I’m seriously going to die.” “I’m hungry too,” whined another of the women—a black-haired dwarf who wore a string belt with little silver bells attached to it. She went and stood by the waif and petted her head. “Fucking folkalizers!” bellowed the headband man. “Fucking right,” mumbled a man with a green Mohawk and a big silver nose ring like the kind you see every now and then on a bull. “You know what I’m gonna do?” asked the headband man. “I’m gonna make my own fucking Gathering up at Crater Lake. I don’t need those fucking folkalizers to tell me where to go. I got major influence around here.” “How far is Crater Lake?” asked the last of the women in an Australian accent. She was tall, beautiful, and blonde, everything about her a spectacle—her hair in a heap of dreadlocks bundled on top of her head, her ears pierced with what looked like actual bird bones, her every last finger clad in extravagant rings. “Not too far, toots,” said the headband man. “Don’t call me ‘toots,’ ” she replied. “Is ‘toots’ offensive in Australia?” he asked. She sighed, then made a growling sound. “All right, baby, I won’t call you ‘toots,’ then.” He cackled to the sky. “But I will call you ‘baby’ if I damn well please. Like Jimi Hendrix said: ‘I call everybody baby.’ ” My eyes met Stacy’s.

• From Wild (2012)

  But he was wrong. There were no buses that went all the way to Sierra City, we learned. We’d have to catch a bus that evening and ride seven hours to Reno, Nevada, then take another one for an hour to Truckee, California. From there we’d have no option but to hitchhike the final forty-five miles to Sierra City. We bought two one-way tickets and an armful of snacks and sat on the warm pavement at the edge of the convenience store parking lot waiting for the bus to come. We polished off whole bags of chips and cans of soda while talking. We ran through the Pacific Crest Trail as a conversational topic, through backpacking gear and the record snowpack one more time, through the “ultralight” theories and practices of Ray Jardine and of his followers—who may or may not have misinterpreted the spirit behind those theories and practices—and finally arrived at ourselves. I asked him about his job and life in Tacoma. He had no pets and no kids and a girlfriend he’d been dating a year. She was an avid backpacker too. His life, it was clear, was an ordered and considered thing. It seemed both boring and astounding to me. I didn’t know what mine seemed like to him. The bus to Reno was nearly empty when we got on at last. I followed Greg to the middle, where we took pairs of seats directly opposite each other across the aisle. “I’m going to get some sleep,” he said once the bus lurched onto the highway.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  The number of the Gnostics it is impossible to ascertain. We find them in almost all portions of the ancient church; chiefly where Christianity came into close contact with Judaism and heathenism, as in Egypt, Syria, and Asia Minor; then in Rome, the rendezvous of all forms of truth and falsehood; in Gaul, where they were opposed by Irenaeus; and in Africa, where they were attacked by Tertullian, and afterwards by Augustin, who was himself a Manichaean for several years. They found most favor with the educated, and threatened to lead astray the teachers of the church. But they could gain no foothold among the people; indeed, as esoterics, they stood aloof from the masses; and their philosophical societies were, no doubt, rarely as large as the catholic congregations. The flourishing period of the Gnostic schools was the second century. In the sixth century, only faint traces of them remained; yet some Gnostic and especially Manichaean ideas continue to appear in several heretical sects of the middle ages, such as the Priscillianists, the Paulicians, the Bogomiles, and the Catharists; and even the history of modern theological and philosophical speculation shows kindred tendencies. § 117. The System of Gnosticism. Its Theology. Gnosticism is a heretical philosophy of religion, or, more exactly a mythological theosophy, which reflects intellectually the peculiar, fermenting state of that remarkable age of transition from the heathen to the Christian order of things. If it were merely an unintelligible congeries of puerile absurdities and impious blasphemies, as it is grotesquely portrayed by older historians,804 it would not have fascinated so many vigorous intellects and produced such a long-continued agitation in the ancient church. It is an attempt to solve some of the deepest metaphysical and theological problems. It deals with the great antitheses of God and world, spirit and matter, idea and phenomenon; and endeavors to unlock the mystery of the creation; the question of the rise, development, and end of the world; and of the origin of evil.805 It endeavors to harmonize the creation of the material world and the existence of evil with the idea of an absolute God, who is immaterial and perfectly good. This problem can only be solved by the Christian doctrine of redemption; but Gnosticism started from a false basis of dualism, which prevents a solution. In form and method it is, as already observed, more Oriental than Grecian. The Gnostics, in their daring attempt to unfold the mysteries of an upper world, disdained the trammels of reason, and resorted to direct spiritual intuition. Hence they speculate not so much in logical and dialectic mode, as in an imaginative, semi-poetic way, and they clothe their ideas not in the simple, clear, and sober language of reflection, but in the many-colored, fantastic, mythological dress of type, symbol, and allegory. Thus monstrous nonsense and the most absurd conceits are chaotically mingIed up with profound thoughts and poetic intuitions.

• From Notes of a Native Son (1955)

  The syllable hurled behind me today expresses, above all, wonder: I am a stranger here. But I am not a stranger in America and the same syllable riding on the American air expresses the war my presence has occasioned in the American soul. For this village brings home to me this fact: that there was a day, and not really a very distant day, when Americans were scarcely Americans at all but discontented Europeans, facing a great unconquered continent and strolling, say, into a marketplace and seeing black men for the first time. The shock this spectacle afforded is suggested, surely, by the promptness with which they decided that these black men were not really men but cattle. It is true that the necessity on the part of the settlers of the New World of reconciling their moral assumptions with the fact—and the necessity—of slavery enhanced immensely the charm of this idea, and it is also true that this idea expresses, with a truly American bluntness, the attitude which to varying extents all masters have had toward all slaves. But between all former slaves and slave-owners and the drama which begins for Americans over three hundred years ago at Jamestown, there are at least two differences to be observed. The American Negro slave could not suppose, for one thing, as slaves in past epochs had supposed and often done, that he would ever be able to wrest the power from his master’s hands. This was a supposition which the modern era, which was to bring about such vast changes in the aims and dimensions of power, put to death; it only begins, in unprecedented fashion, and with dreadful implications, to be resurrected today. But even had this supposition persisted with undiminished force, the American Negro slave could not have used it to lend his condition dignity, for the reason that this supposition rests on another: that the slave in exile yet remains related to his past, has some means—if only in memory—of revering and sustaining the forms of his former life, is able, in short, to maintain his identity. This was not the case with the American Negro slave. He is unique among the black men of the world in that his past was taken from him, almost literally, at one blow. One wonders what on earth the first slave found to say to the first dark child he bore.

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

  When I met Sally’s parents, I could understand her detachment from any form of faith. They had rejected the religion of their childhood so thoroughly that it now had little reality for them. Lady Phyl, the title she preferred to the more correct Lady Cockburn, was one of those people who didn’t seem to need Christianity. Her painting was a form of contemplation that had nothing to do with any kind of deity, and she seemed naturally kind, gentle, and creative, able to make the best of any situation, including being married to Sir Robert, which could not have been easy. He was a brilliant, pugnacious physicist, one of the small team of scientists who had discovered radar during the Second World War. But his achievements meant very little to him. He certainly had no self-righteous certainty. A depressive, he was profoundly disturbed by life in the late twentieth century, but it would never have occurred to him to seek comfort in religion, which he found obscurely troubling. He worried at theological concepts rather as a terrier belabors a bone. The existence of God might have been a recalcitrant equation that refused to come out right. “Now, Karen,” he would boom in his strong Hampshire accent as soon as I had put my foot over the threshold of their house, “let’s get to the bottom of this question of God.” “For goodness’ sake, Bob!” Lady Phyl would exclaim. “Let the poor girl get her coat off first!” Yet ironically Sir Bob seemed to inspire the confidences of religious people. To the derision of his wife, in order to save a few pence, he would repair to the local unisex hairdressing salon, somewhat ambiguously called Blow Heads, on Thursday afternoons, when there was a cheap rate for senior citizens. He looked an incongruous figure, having his short back and sides amidst the youthful stylists with their Mohicans. One afternoon, when he had as usual been lugubriously lamenting the lack of honor in public life, the greed and triviality of the times, and looming ecological disaster, one of the stylists, with purple hair, tattoos down his bare arms, and clothes duly festooned with safety pins and razor blades, wordlessly thrust a card into his hand. Sir Bob stared at it with blank astonishment: it was an invitation to a special mission at the Church of the Lamb the following week. Then there was the time when he had paid a friendly visit to an elderly couple who were moving into the house next door. “Moving is hell, isn’t it?” he had commiserated affably to his new neighbor. “Terrible.” The old man nodded in agreement. “But fortunately I have a friend who makes the whole thing bearable.” “Oh really?” Sir Bob rumbled amiably, assuming that he was speaking of a helpful chum, but to his amazement, the friend turned out to be Jesus. Sir Bob returned home shaking his head in utter perplexity.

• From The Confessions of Saint Augustine (354)

  Which way soever then this secret fore-perceiving of things to come be; that only can be seen, which is. But what now is, is not future, but present. When then things to come are said to be seen, it is not themselves which as yet are not (that is, which are to be), but their causes perchance or signs are seen, which already are. Therefore they are not future but present to those who now see that, from which the future, being foreconceived in the mind, is foretold. Which fore-conceptions again now are; and those who foretell those things, do behold the conceptions present before them. Let now the numerous variety of things furnish me some example. I behold the day-break, I foreshow, that the sun, is about to rise. What I behold, is present; what I foresignify, to come; not the sun, which already is; but the sun-rising, which is not yet. And yet did I not in my mind imagine the sun-rising itself (as now while I speak of it), I could not foretell it. But neither is that day-break which I discern in the sky, the sun-rising, although it goes before it; nor that imagination of my mind; which two are seen now present, that the other which is to be may be foretold. Future things then are not yet: and if they be not yet, they are not: and if they are not, they cannot be seen; yet foretold they may be from things present, which are already, and are seen. Thou then, Ruler of Thy creation, by what way dost Thou teach souls things to come? For Thou didst teach Thy Prophets. By what way dost Thou, to whom nothing is to come, teach things to come; or rather of the future, dost teach things present? For, what is not, neither can it be taught. Too far is this way of my ken: it is too mighty for me, I cannot attain unto it; but from Thee I can, when Thou shalt vouchsafe it, O sweet light of my hidden eyes.

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

  It was over egg-and-tomato sandwiches at a small greasy-spoon café near the tube station that Hyam delivered his bombshell. He was arguing that Jesus could well have belonged to the school of Rabbi Hillel, one of the leading Pharisees. Jesus had, after all, taught a version of Hillel’s Golden Rule. “You know the story?” I shook my head. “Some pagans came to Hillel and told him that they would convert to his faith if he could recite the whole of Jewish teaching while he stood on one leg. So Hillel obligingly stood on one leg like a stork and said: ‘Do not do unto others as you would not have done unto you. That is the Torah. The rest is commentary. Go and learn it.’ ” “Jesus said, ‘ Do unto others as you would have done unto you,’ didn’t he?” I asked, stirring my large mug of milky coffee. Hyam shrugged. “Same difference.” He tended to talk very quickly and you had to listen hard to keep up. And these ideas were very strange and new. “I think Hillel’s version is better than Jesus’, though. It takes more discipline to refrain from doing harm to others. It’s easier to be a do-gooder and project your needs and desires onto other people.” “When they might need something quite different.” Hyam nodded. But something was still troubling me. “But how could Hillel say that his Golden Rule represented the whole of Jewish teaching? That everything else was just commentary?” I asked. “What about faith? What about believing in God? What were those pagans supposed to believe ?” “Easy to see that you were brought up Christian.” Hyam didn’t have a high opinion of Christianity, I noticed. “Theology is just not important in Judaism, or in any other religion, really. There’s no orthodoxy as you have it in the Catholic Church. No complicated creeds to which everybody must subscribe. No infallible pronouncements by a pope. Nobody can tell Jews what to believe. Within reason, you can believe what you like.” I stared at him. I could not imagine a religion without belief. Ever since I had grown up and started to think, my Christian life had been a continuous struggle to accept the official doctrines. Without true belief you could not be a member of the church, you could not be saved. Faith was the starting point, the sine qua non, the indispensable requirement, and for me it had been a major stumbling block. “No official theology?” I repeated stupidly. “None at all? How can you be religious without a set of ideas—about God, salvation, and so on—as a basis?” “We have orthopraxy instead of orthodoxy,” Hyam replied calmly, wiping his mouth and brushing a few crumbs off the table. “ ‘Right practice’ rather than ‘right belief.’ That’s all. You Christians make such a fuss about theology, but it’s not important in the way you think. It’s just poetry, really, ways of talking about the inexpressible.

• From The Confessions of Saint Augustine (354)

  Which of us comprehendeth the Almighty Trinity? and yet which speaks not of It, if indeed it be It? Rare is the soul, which while it speaks of It, knows what it speaks of. And they contend and strive, yet, without peace, no man sees that vision. I would that men would consider these three, that are in themselves. These three be indeed far other than the Trinity: I do but tell, where they may practise themselves, and there prove and feel how far they be. Now the three I spake of are, To Be, to Know, and to Will. For I Am, and Know, and Will: I Am Knowing and Willing: and I Know myself to Be, and to Will: and I Will to Be, and to Know. In these three then, let him discern that can, how inseparable a life there is, yea one life, mind, and one essence, yea lastly how inseparable a distinction there is, and yet a distinction. Surely a man hath it before him; let him look into himself, and see, and tell me. But when he discovers and can say any thing of these, let him not therefore think that he has found that which is above these Unchangeable, which Is unchangeably, and Knows unchangeably, and Wills unchangeably; and whether because of these three, there is in God also a Trinity, or whether all three be in Each, so that the three belong to Each; or whether both ways at once, wondrously, simply and yet manifoldly, Itself a bound unto Itself within Itself, yet unbounded; whereby It is, and is Known unto Itself and sufficeth to itself, unchangeably the Self-same, by the abundant greatness of its Unity,—who can readily conceive this? who could any ways express it? who would, any way, pronounce thereon rashly? Proceed in thy confession, say to the Lord thy God, O my faith, Holy, Holy, Holy, O Lord my God, in Thy Name have we been baptised, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost; in Thy Name do we baptise, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, because among us also, in His Christ did God make heaven and earth, namely, the spiritual and carnal people of His Church. Yea and our earth, before it received the form of doctrine, was invisible and without form; and we were covered with the darkness of ignorance. For Thou chastenedst man for iniquity, and Thy judgments were like the great deep unto him. But because Thy Spirit was borne above the waters, Thy mercy forsook not our misery, and Thou saidst, Let there be light, Repent ye, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand. Repent ye, let there be light. And because our soul was troubled within us, we remembered Thee, O Lord, from the land of Jordan, and that mountain equal unto Thyself, but little for our sakes: and our darkness displeased us, we turned unto Thee and there was light. And, behold, we were sometimes darkness, but now light in the Lord.