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 A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians (1921)

  Usage evidently favours the meta- phorical local sense of the preposition, and, since xéertt is evidently not the sphere in which the Galatians were when they were called, the pregnant use of the phrase is the more probable. (c) The sense yielded for this passage by taking yéertt as referring to the state in which the Galatians were called to be is much more suitable to the connection than that given by either of the other constructions. In speaking of a change of position on their part, it is more natural to refer to the state in which by God’s call they are or should be than to emphasise the basis or instrument of God’s call. The remarkable and surprising fact about their apostasy was that they were abandoning the position of grace, 7. e., the relation towards God which made them the objects of the grace of Christ and participators in its benefits, to put themselves under law, which could only award them their sad deserts. On Paul’s view of the nature of the change cf. 54 319-4. It is a further objection to the view that év is basal that while redemption is conceived of by Paul as based on the work of Christ (Rom. 3%), it is difficult to suppose that he would speak of God’s call as being on the ground of the grace of Christ. It is rather his thought that the work of Christ has its basis in the love of God. See Rom. 5’-. Nor is the thought that the call of God is by means of Christ’s grace materially easier, for the expansion of this into ‘‘the announcement of the grace of Christ” is unwarranted by the language. The absence of the article before yéertt has the effect, and is doubt- less due to the intention, of giving the word qualitative rather than individualising force. This in turn emphasises the folly of the con- duct of the Galatians. This shade of meaning can not well be expressed in English (which requires a definite article before “grace” because of the phrase that follows it) except by some such periphrasis as, “I mar- vel that ye are so quickly turning away from grace, that of Christ.” 22 GALATIANS eis €Tepov evaryyédov, “unto a different gospel.’”’ On the meaning of the word €7epov, see detached note, p. 420. On evayyédov, see detached note, p. 422. It is evident that in the present passage, as indeed generally in this epistle, it is the doctrinal aspect of the gospel that the apostle has specially in mind.

• From Delta of Venus (1977)

  One day he wanted a copy of Black Spring with a dedication. Henry said: “But I thought you told me he had all my books already, signed editions?” “He lost his copy of Black Spring.” “Who should I dedicate it to?” said Henry innocently. “Just say ‘to a good friend,’ and sign your name.” A few weeks later Henry needed a copy of Black Spring and none could be found. He decided to borrow the collector’s copy. He went to the office. The secretary told him to wait. He began to look over the books in the bookcase. He saw a copy of Black Spring. He pulled it out. It was the one he had dedicated to the “Good Friend.” When the collector came in, Henry told him about this, laughing. In equally good humor, the collector explained: “Oh, yes, the old man got so impatient that I sent him my own copy while I was waiting to get this one signed by you, intending to exchange them later when he comes to New York again.” Henry said to me when we met, “I’m more baffled than ever.” When Henry asked what the patron’s reaction to his writing was, the collector said: “Oh, he likes everything. It is all wonderful. But he likes it better when it is a narrative, just storytelling, no analysis, no philosophy.” When Henry needed money for his travel expenses he suggested that I do some writing in the interim. I felt I did not want to give anything genuine, and decided to create a mixture of stories I had heard and inventions, pretending they were from the diary of a woman. I never met the collector. He was to read my pages and to let me know what he thought. Today I received a telephone call. A voice said, “It is fine. But leave out the poetry and descriptions of anything but sex. Concentrate on sex.” So I began to write tongue-in-cheek, to become outlandish, inventive, and so exaggerated that I thought he would realize I was caricaturing sexuality. But there was no protest. I spent days in the library studying the Kama Sutra, listened to friends’ most extreme adventures. “Less poetry,” said the voice over the telephone. “Be specific.” But did anyone ever experience pleasure from reading a clinical description? Didn’t the old man know how words carry colors and sounds into the flesh? Every morning after breakfast I sat down to write my allotment of erotica. One morning I typed: “There was a Hungarian adventurer . . .” I gave him many advantages: beauty, elegance, grace, charm, the talents of an actor, knowledge of many tongues, a genius for intrigue, a genius for extricating himself from difficulties, and a genius for avoiding permanence and responsibility. Another telephone call: “The old man is pleased. Concentrate on sex. Leave out the poetry.”

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

  The New Testament contains no intimation of any worship or festival celebration of Mary. On the one hand, Mary, is rightly called by Elizabeth, under the influence of the Holy Ghost, "the mother of the Lord"761—but nowhere "the mother of God," which is at least not entirely synonymous—and is saluted by her, as well as by the angel Gabriel, as "blessed among women;"762 nay, she herself prophesies in her inspired song, which has since resounded through all ages of the church, that "henceforth all generations shall call me blessed."763 Through all the youth of Jesus she appears as a devout virgin, full of childlike innocence, purity, and humility; and the few traces we have of her later life, especially the touching scene at the cross,764 confirm this impression. But, on the other hand, it is equally unquestionable, that she is nowhere in the New Testament excepted from the universal sinfulness and the universal need of redemption, and represented as immaculately holy, or as in any way an object of divine veneration. On the contrary, true to the genuine female character, she modestly stands back throughout the gospel history, and in the Acts and the Epistles she is mentioned barely once, and then simply as the "mother of Jesus;"765 even her birth and her death are unknown. Her glory fades in holy humility before the higher glory of her Son. In truth, there are plain indications that the Lord, with prophetic reference to the future apotheosis of His mother according to the flesh, from the first gave warning against it. At the wedding in Cana He administered to her, though leniently and respectfully, a rebuke for premature zeal mingled perhaps with maternal vanity.766 On a subsequent occasion he put her on a level with other female disciples, and made the carnal consanguinity subordinate to the spiritual kinship of the doing of the will of God.767 The well-meant and in itself quite innocent benediction of an unknown woman upon His mother He did not indeed censure, but He corrected it with a benediction upon all who hear the word of God and keep it, and thus forestalled the deification of Mary by confining the ascription within the bounds of moderation.768 In striking contrast with this healthful and sober representation of Mary in the canonical Gospels are the numerous apocryphal Gospels of the third and fourth centuries, which decorated the life of Mary with fantastic fables and wonders of every kind, and thus furnished a pseudo-historical foundation for an unscriptural Mariology and Mariolatry.769 The Catholic church, it is true, condemned this apocryphal literature so early as the Decrees of Gelasius;770 yet many of the fabulous elements of it—such as the names of the parents of Mary, Joachim (instead of Eli, as in Luke iii. 23) and Anna,771 the birth of Mary in a cave, her education in the temple, and her mock marriage with the aged Joseph772—passed into the Catholic tradition.

• From Summer Sisters (1998)

  Bru HE SHOULD HAVE seen it coming. Maybe he just didn’t want to. Maybe that was it. That would be like him. Ignore all the signs. But something was wrong from the start. As soon as the wedding was over she changed. He figured it was the pregnancy. Too soon, maybe. And sick every day. But he knew she’d love being a mother. Babies. That’s what they all wanted. His cousins complained that once there was a baby around forget it ... no more sex. Problem was, she was never like other women. Didn’t take to motherhood. Something unnatural about that. And the sex thing ... she still wanted it. Even more than before. Every day, sometimes twice a day. But taking care of a baby at night wiped him out. Not that she noticed. Honey, fuck me ... fuck me, hard. Hurt me, honey ... What did that mean? It wasn’t right. They were married. She was a mother. He didn’t like it when she talked that way. Especially the hurt me part. He’d never wanted to hurt her. Never wanted to hurt any woman. What do you want? he’d asked her. It’s not what I want, it’s what I need. What ... what do you need? A lot of loving. I don’t give you a lot of loving? She smiled at him, a come-on. You do, honey ... you give me a lot of loving. Then what? What are you asking for? Everything. You’ve got everything. She gave him a sad smile. You need vitamins, he told her. Vitamins with minerals. She laughed. He didn’t care. And you need to get out of the house more. A job maybe ... I have a job. I’m your wife. I’m Maizie’s mother.

• From Summer Sisters (1998)

  You going to survive?” She’s wobbly but she makes it down to the water, where she pulls off the stupid T-shirt, wets it, then holds it to her face and neck. “Now that’s more like it,” Gus says, eyeing her dress, still a big kid with hormones. “And just for the record,” she tells him, “I was the one with the yellow bathing suit.” She’s sandwiched between Daniel and Gus at dinner. When Gus catches Phoebe’s boyfriend giving Vix a sleepy-eyed once-over, he turns to Daniel. “Cough Drop attracts guys like a magnet.” Caitlin was the magnet. She was just a particle in her magnetic field . After dinner they’re asked to gather on the beach for a display of fireworks honoring the bride and groom. Daniel covers her shoulders with his linen jacket. She leans back against Gus, who, she thinks, sniffs her hair as the sky lights up, taking her back to other fireworks on other beaches. You’re not scared of me, are you? No, I’m scared of these feelings . When the party breaks up, Caitlin offers to drive her back to the B&B. “Aren’t you going home with Bru?” Vix asks. “Not tonight. It’s bad luck for the bride and groom to spend the night before the wedding together.” Vix never heard that one but she gets into Caitlin’s white Jeep. The top is down and as they head out of town the wind whips their hair. “This isn’t too hard for you, is it?” Caitlin asks. “I mean, seeing us together?” Vix is grateful for the darkness and the champagne. “It was over between the two of you so long ago …” Vix would like to be generous, to reassure Caitlin, but she can’t find the right words, so she says nothing. “I hate it when you clam up that way!” Caitlin shouts. The Jeep swerves. Vix shuts her eyes and hangs on, sure Caitlin is going to kill them. But no, she just makes a sudden decision to pull into the Tashmoo Overlook where she cuts the engine and rests her head on the wheel. “Oh, God …” she cries. “I don’t even know if I want to marry him.” Vix stiffens. “That shocks you, I suppose?” Caitlin says. “You’ve never done a single thing you’ve regretted, have you?” At that moment Vix feels such a rush of … what? She’s not sure. She’s not sure if she hates Caitlin or herself, or maybe Bru, for creating this situation in the first place. “Oh, hell …” Caitlin wipes her nose with the back of her hand. “It’ll be a good party, anyway.” She turns the key in the ignition and revs up the engine, then drives to the B&B where she drops off Vix. “Sleep tight …” she calls, blowing Vix a kiss. “You, too.” 43SHE KNOWS she won’t be able to sleep. She tries to read but she can’t concentrate so she grabs her sweater and the flashlight and heads back outside.

• From Summer Sisters (1998)

  She could tell sometimes that Lewis was thinking, Why did they have to have him? Why didn’t they stop after the three of us? She knew they’d all asked themselves the same questions, even her parents. Tawny used to tell them Nathan was a gift from God, to teach them to be strong, to teach them to count their blessings. But what about Nathan? What kind of gift had God given him? 7THE SECOND WEEK in July, when the hydrangeas turned a deep blue and ran rampant around the porch, Lamb threw a party to celebrate Abby’s MBA. “She just loves showing off her new husband and her renovated summer house,” Caitlin snickered. “What about her lovely stepchildren?” Vix asked. “Oh, definitely.” They both looked across Abby’s newly planted flower garden to Sharkey, who had turned into a stranger, growing seven inches without gaining a pound, which left him looking like Lurch, his arms hanging like fishing poles from his shoulders, his hands dangling at his sides as if he couldn’t figure out what to do with them. “Almost as perfect as her own son,” Caitlin said. Daniel and Gus had arrived the day before, for a three-week visit, which meant she and Caitlin had to share the bathroom not just with Sharkey but with three teenage boys. Three disgusting fifteen-year-old boys who left the toilet seat up, peed on the rim, farted wherever and whenever. And one of them regularly forgot to flush or else was so proud of what he’d made, he wanted to share it with the rest of them. There was always toothpaste stuck to the sides of the sink from where they’d spit, wet towels tossed on the floor, and the tub was strewn with hair from God knows what parts of their bodies. They overheard a guest at the party telling Abby how attractive the children were, then asking if she’d found a job yet. Abby answered, “No, I really haven’t starting looking. I’m giving myself some time off to just enjoy.” “Now that she has her meal ticket she’ll probably never get a job,” Caitlin whispered to Vix. Meal ticket? The day after the party the weather turned rainy and windy, and for a week it stayed that way. Vix and Caitlin bought a stack of paperbacks at Bunch of Grapes and, except for meals, spent the entire week in bed, reading. Abby tried luring them out with boxes of old jigsaw puzzles. Sharkey hovered over Vix after dinner, his breath on her neck, as she put them together. “What’s your secret?” he asked after she’d completed a particularly complicated sailing scene. “Secret?” she said. “I don’t have a secret.” All she knew was she was good at putting the pieces together, at making the picture whole. Gus referred to her as the Cough Drop . Maybe Tawny knew what she was talking about when she’d said, If I’d wanted to name my daughter after a cold remedy I would have .

• From Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection (2013)

  To absorb what the new science of love has to offer, you’ll need to step back from “love” as you may now know it. Forget about the love that you typically hear on the radio, the one that’s centered on desire and yearns for touch from a new squeeze. Set aside the take on love your family might have offered you, one that requires that you love your relatives unconditionally, regardless of whether their actions disturb you, or their aloofness leaves you cold. I’m even asking you to set aside your view of love as a special bond or relationship, be it with your spouse, partner, or soul mate. And if you’ve come to view love as a commitment, promise, or pledge, through marriage or any other loyalty ritual, prepare for an about-face. I need you to step back from all of your preconceptions and consider an upgrade. Love 2.0 offers a different perspective—your body’s perspective. If you were asked today, by a roving reporter or an inquisitive dinner party guest, to provide your own definition of love, your answer would likely reflect a mishmash of shared cultural messages and your own deeply personal experiences with intimacy. However compelling your answer, I’d wager that your body has its own—quite different—definition of love. That’s what this book is about. Love is not sexual desire or the blood-ties of kinship. Nor is it a special bond or commitment. Sure enough, love is closely related to each of these important concepts. Yet none, I will argue, capture the true meaning of love as your body experiences it. The vision of love that I offer here will require a radical shift, a departure from what you’ve come to believe. It’s time to upgrade your view of love. Love is not a category of relationships. Nor is it something “out there” that you can fall into, or—years later—out of. Seeing love as a special bond is extraordinarily common, albeit misleading. A bond like this can endure for years—even a lifetime with proper commitment and effort. And having at least one close relationship like this is vital to your health and happiness, to be sure. Even so, that special bond and the commitments people often build around it are better taken as the products of love—the results of the many smaller moments in which love infuses you—rather than as love per se. When you equate love with intimate relationships, love can seem confusing. At times it feels great, while at other times it hurts like hell. At times it lifts you up with grand dreams for your future and at other times oppresses you with shame about your inadequacies, or guilt about your past actions. When you limit your view of love to relationships or commitment, love becomes a complex and bewildering thicket of emotions, expectations, and insecurities. Yet when you redirect your eyes toward your body’s definition of love, a clear path emerges that cuts through that thicket and leads you to a better life.

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  Finally, we entered hill country, climbing higher and deeper into the Appalachian Mountains, stopping from time to time to let the Oldsmobile catch its breath on the steep, twisting roads. It was November. The leaves had turned brown and were falling from the trees, and a cold mist shrouded the hillsides. There were streams and creeks everywhere, instead of the irrigation ditches you saw out west, and the air felt different. It was very still, heavier and thicker, and somehow darker. For some reason, it made us all grow quiet. At dusk, we approached a bend where hand-painted signs advertising auto repairs and coal deliveries had been nailed to trees along the roadside. We rounded the bend and found ourselves in a deep valley. Wooden houses and small brick buildings lined the river and rose in uneven stacks on both hillsides. “Welcome to Welch!” Mom declared. We drove along dark, narrow streets, then stopped in front of a big, worn house. It was on the downhill side of the street, and we had to descend a set of stairs to get to it. As we clattered onto the porch, a woman opened the door. She was enormous, with pasty skin and about three chins. Bobby pins held back her lank gray hair, and a cigarette dangled from her mouth. “Welcome home, son,” she said and gave Dad a long hug. She turned to Mom. “Nice of you to let me see my grandchildren before I die,” she said without a smile. Without taking the cigarette out of her mouth, she gave us each a quick, stiff hug. Her cheek was tacky with sweat. “Pleased to meet you, Grandma,” I said. “Don’t call me Grandma,” she snapped. “Name’s Erma.” “She don’t like it none ’cause it makes her sound old,” said a man who appeared beside her. He looked fragile, with short white hair that stood straight up. His voice was so mumbly I could hardly understand him. I didn’t know if it was his accent or if maybe he wasn’t wearing his dentures. “Name’s Ted, but you can call me Grandpa,” he went on. “Don’t bother me none being a grandpa.” Behind Grandpa was a ruddy-faced man with a wild swirl of red hair pushing out from under his baseball cap, which had a Maytag logo. He wore a red-and-black-plaid coat but had no shirt on underneath it. He kept announcing over and over again that he was our uncle Stanley, and he wouldn’t stop hugging and kissing me, as though I was someone he truly loved and hadn’t seen in ages. You could smell the whiskey on his breath, and when he talked, you could see the pink ridges of his toothless gums. I stared at Erma and Stanley and Grandpa, searching for some feature that reminded me of Dad, but I saw none. Maybe this was one of Dad’s pranks, I thought. Dad must have arranged for the weirdest people in town to pretend they were his family.

• From Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990)

  The debate over the meaning or subversive possibilities of identifications so far has left unclear exactly where those identifications are to be found. The interior psychic space in which identifications are said to be preserved makes sense only if we can understand that interior space as a phantasized locale that serves yet another psychic function. In agreement with Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok it seems, psychoanalyst Roy Schafer argues that “incorporation” is a fantasy and not a process; the interior space into which an object is taken is imagined, and imagined within a language that can conjure and reify such spaces.38 If the identifications sustained through melancholy are “incorporated,” then the question remains: Where is this incorporated space? If it is not literally within the body, perhaps it is on the body as its surface signification such that the body must itself be understood as an incorporated space. Abraham and Torok have argued that introjection is a process that serves the work of mourning (where the object is not only lost, but acknowledged as lost).39 Incorporation, on the other hand, belongs more properly to melancholy, the state of disavowed or suspended grief in which the object is magically sustained “in the body” in some way. Abraham and Torok suggest that introjection of the loss characteristic of mourning establishes an empty space, literalized by the empty mouth which becomes the condition of speech and signification. The successful displacement of the libido from the lost object is achieved through the formation of words which both signify and displace that object; this displacement from the original object is an essentially metaphorical activity in which words “figure” the absence and surpass it. Introjection is understood to be the work of mourning, but incorporation, which denotes a magical resolution of loss, characterizes melancholy. Whereas introjection founds the possibility of metaphorical signification, incorporation is antimetaphorical precisely because it maintains the loss as radically unnameable; in other words, incorporation is not only a failure to name or avow the loss, but erodes the conditions of metaphorical signification itself. As in the Lacanian perspective, for Abraham and Torok the repudiation of the maternal body is the condition of signification within the Symbolic. They argue further that this primary repression founds the possibility of individuation and of significant speech, where speech is necessarily metaphorical, in the sense that the referent, the object of desire, is a perpetual displacement. In effect, the loss of the maternal body as an object of love is understood to establish the empty space out of which words originate. But the refusal of this loss—melancholy—results in the failure to displace into words; indeed, the place of the maternal body is established in the body, “encrypted,” to use their term, and given permanent residence there as a dead and deadening part of the body or one inhabited or possessed by phantasms of various kinds.

• From Summer Sisters (1998)

  “Hey, Vix, this is Sweetie ... she’s older than Lamb in dog years. Give Vix a sniff,” she told the dog, who did exactly that, starting with her crotch. Vix felt her face redden. She shooed the dog away and crossed her legs. When Caitlin introduced Vix to Sharkey she said, “You better treat her right!” “I treat all your friends right unless they don’t get it,” Sharkey said. Vix vowed then and there not to be a person who didn’t get it. Whatever it was. The drive seemed to take forever. Lamb tapped the steering wheel, keeping time to the music on the tape deck. “Hey, Jude.” They came to a bridge with a sign that read, Feeling desperate? Call the Samaritans. It gave a phone number. Did that mean desperate enough to jump? Suddenly, a wave of homesickness washed over her. What was she doing here? Who was Caitlin, really? It was almost sunset as they pulled onto the ferry, another first for Vix. She’d never seen so much water in one place but Caitlin assured her this was not the ocean. Seabirds circled the boat as the ferry glided along and Caitlin warned Vix to stay alert because when they let out their stuff it went flying. Forty-five minutes later, when they docked, Vix sensed that this would not be the tropical island she’d conjured up in her fantasies. The night air was far from sultry, there was no reggae music, and the trees were pines and oaks, not palms. The phone was ringing as Lamb unlocked the door to the house. He ran for it, then handed it to Vix. “For you, kiddo.” “You were supposed to call,” her mother said. “I know, but—” She didn’t give Vix a chance to explain that they’d just arrived. “I expect you to do what you’re told, Victoria.” “I will, it’s just that ...” Lamb turned on a light and Vix saw they were in the kitchen. There was an old stove, shelves but no cabinets, red linoleum on the floor, a table whose yellow paint had cracked and peeled. “How was the plane trip?” her mother asked. Caitlin was motioning for her to hurry. She pointed across the room to eerie-looking shadows dancing across the windows. “The plane?” Vix asked. “Yes, the plane,” her mother repeated. Caitlin threw a towel over her head and walked toward Vix, arms outstretched like a zombie. Sweetie started barking, excited by Caitlin’s antics. “The plane was okay,” she told her mother. Already, it felt like ages ago. Her first trip on a plane. She wondered if all the firsts in her life would go by so quickly, and be forgotten just as quickly.

• From Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990)

  One place to interrogate the univocity of sex is the recent controversy over the master gene that researchers at MIT in late 1987 claim to have discovered as the secret and certain determinant of sex. With the use of highly sophisticated technological means, the master gene, which constitutes a specific DNA sequence on the Y chromosome, was discovered by Dr. David Page and his colleagues and named “TDF” or testis-determining factor. In the publication of his findings in Cell (No. 51), Dr. Page claimed to have discovered “the binary switch upon which hinges all sexually dimorphic characteristics.”24 Let us then consider the claims of this discovery and see why the unsettling questions regarding the decidability of sex continue to be asked. According to Page’s article, “The Sex-Determining Region of the Human Y Chromosome Encodes a Finger Protein,” samples of DNA were taken from a highly unusual group of people, some of whom had XX chromosomes, but had been medically designated as males, and some of whom had XY chromosomal constitution, but had been medically designated as female. He does not tell us exactly on what basis they had been designated contrary to the chromosomal findings, but we are left to presume that obvious primary and secondary characteristics suggested that those were, indeed, the appropriate designations. Page and his coworkers made the following hypothesis: There must be some stretch of DNA, which cannot be seen under the usual microscopic conditions, that determines the male sex, and this stretch of DNA must have been moved somehow from the Y chromosome, its usual location, to some other chromosome, where one would not expect to find it. Only if we could presume (a) this undetectable DNA sequence and (b) prove its translocatability, could we understand why it is that an XX male had no detectable Y chromosome, but was, in fact, still male. Similarly, we could explain the curious presence of the Y chromosome on females precisely because that stretch of DNA had somehow been misplaced. Although the pool that Page and his researchers used to come up with this finding was limited, the speculation on which they base their research, in part, is that a good ten percent of the population has chromosomal variations that do not fit neatly into the XX-female and XY-male set of categories. Hence, the discovery of the “master-gene” is considered to be a more certain basis for understanding sex-determination and, hence, sex-difference, than previous chromosomal criteria could provide.

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  When the oldest boy found their dad’s old pump-action shotgun under their mom’s bed, he decided to get in some target practice on Brian and me, firing buckshot at us as we ran for our lives through the woods. And then there were the Halls. All six of the Hall children had been born mentally retarded, and although they were now middle-aged, they all still lived at home with their mom and dad. When I was friendly to the oldest, Kenny Hall, who was forty-two, he developed a powerful crush on me. The other kids in the neighborhood teased Kenny by telling him that if he gave them a dollar or stripped down to his skivvies and showed them his wanker, they’d arrange for me to go on a date with him. On a Saturday night, if he’d been set up like that, he’d come stand on the street in front of our house, sobbing and hollering about me not keeping our date, and I’d have to go down and explain to him that the other kids had played a trick on him and that, although he did have many admirable qualities, I had a policy against dating older men. The family who had it the toughest on Little Hobart Street, I would have to say, was the Pastors. The mother, Ginnie Sue Pastor, was the town whore. Ginnie Sue Pastor was thirty-three years old and had eight daughters and one son. Their names all ended with Y. Her husband, Clarence Pastor, had black lung and sat on the front porch of their huge sagging house all day long, but he never smiled or waved at passersby. Just sat there like he was frozen. Everyone in town said he’d been impotent for years and none of the Pastor kids was his. Ginnie Sue Pastor pretty much kept to herself. At first I wondered if she lay around in a lacy negligee all day, smoking cigarettes and waiting for gentlemen callers. Back in Battle Mountain, the women lounging on the front porch of the Green Lantern—I’d long since figured out what they really did—wore white lipstick and black mascara and partially unbuttoned blouses that showed the tops of their brassieres. But Ginnie Sue Pastor didn’t look like a whore. She was a blowsy woman with dyed yellow hair, and from time to time we saw her out in the front yard, chopping wood or filling a scuttle from the coal pile. She usually wore the same kinds of aprons and canvas farm coats worn by the rest of the women on Little Hobart Street. She looked like any other mom. I also wondered how she did her whoring with all those kids to look after. One night I saw a car pull up in front of the Pastor house and blink its headlights twice. After a minute, Ginnie Sue came running out the door and climbed into the front seat. Then the car drove off.

• From The Canterbury Tales (2009)

  Great was the crowd that swarmed about this horse. It was so tall, so broad, so strong and so well proportioned that it seemed like a steed out of Lombardy. It had all the qualities of a horse. It was the horsiest horse anyone had ever seen. It could have come from Apulia, in fact, rather than from northern Italy. From its tail to its ears, it was a model of its kind. Everyone agreed that neither art nor nature could have improved upon it. And of course everyone was astonished that it was made of brass. How could the knight ride it? Some said that it was a wonder of the fairy world. Some said that it was the work of magicians. Diverse people offered diverse opinions. There were as many theories propounded as there were heads. The people murmured like a swarm of bees. They came up with elaborate fancies, based upon the stories they had read. Some said that it resembled Pegasus, the horse that had wings. Others said that it was the twin of the wooden horse that brought destruction into Troy. They knew all about these animals from the old books. ‘I am very afraid,’ said one of them. ‘I am sure that there is an army inside the belly of this beast, waiting to destroy this city. Why can’t we find out? Why can’t we know?’ ‘He’s quite wrong,’ another whispered softly to his companion. ‘This is an apparition shaped by magic, just like the illusions created by conjurors at great feasts.’ So the company was besieged by various doubts and fears. This is the way of common people when confronted by something beyond their experience or understanding. They come to the wrong conclusion. They panic. Others among them were wondering out loud about the mirror that had already been carried into the principal tower of the palace. They wanted to know how it worked. How could all these things be seen within it? One of them said that it might be a natural phenomenon. It was a question of perspectives and angles and reflections. There was one just like it in Rome. Then they all started talking about Alhazen and Vitello and Aristotle, who had written on the subject of mirrors and optics; they had heard of these authors, even if they had not actually read them. And then again they wondered at the magic sword that could cut through anything. They talked about King Telephus, who was wounded and then healed by the wonderful spear of Achilles. It had exactly the same miraculous properties as this sword, as you have just heard. So the company talked about the ways in which metal could be hardened. They spoke of the especial solutions that could be used to temper steel. They debated all the whys and wherefores. I myself know nothing about them.

• From Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (1994)

  I picked up a book on gardens, so I could study flowers and trees and vines in that way, and honest to God, people who read my novel believed that I loved to garden. Sometimes in fact they would start talking shop with me, thinking we could jam away, as gardeners are wont to do, until I’d let them know that I had only been winging it, with a lot of help from people around me, people who knew a lot more about gardens than I, friends who would cover for me, just like in real life. “You don’t love to garden?” they’d ask incredulously, and I’d shake my head and not mention that what I love are cut flowers, because this sounds so violent and decadent, like when Salvador Dalí said his favorite animal was fillet of sole. And in the years since, I have asked all sorts of people to help me design sets. I’ve asked them to describe what the world looked like in certain American cities or African villages, inside a particular car in the rain, or down by the water when hoboes still came to town on the train. Then I try to imagine the movie set of this scene in as much detail as possible. Sometimes I can see it most clearly if I close my eyes. Other times I stare off into the middle distance, like a cat. False StartsI talked earlier about the artist who is trying to capture something in one corner of his canvas but keeps discovering that what he has painted is not what he had in mind. He keeps covering his work over with white paint each time that he discovers what it isn’t, and each time this brings him closer to discovering what it is. This has happened again and again for me in writing. I may think I know who a certain character is or how an essay should proceed, so I make a stab at following this ghostly blueprint in my head. Then it turns out that I’ve been wrong, wrong about the character. I had the sandwich board she was wearing confused with who she really is. So I white it out and try again. I found out something important about false starts when I began accompanying some members of my church to a convalescent home once a month, where we were conducting a worship service. After that first dismal visit, I thought I knew who the residents were and what they were capable of, what they were all about. If I had started to write, I would have written about them with confidence, and I would have been all wrong.

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  he went on. “Don’t bother me none being a grandpa.” Behind Grandpa was a ruddy-faced man with a wild swirl of red hair pushing out from under his baseball cap, which had a Maytag logo. He wore a red-and-black-plaid coat but had no shirt on underneath it. He kept announcing over and over again that he was our uncle Stanley, and he wouldn’t stop hugging and kissing me, as though I was someone he truly loved and hadn’t seen in ages. You could smell the whiskey on his breath, and when he talked, you could see the pink ridges of his toothless gums. I stared at Erma and Stanley and Grandpa, searching for some feature that reminded me of Dad, but I saw none. Maybe this was one of Dad’s pranks, I thought. Dad must have arranged for the weirdest people in town to pretend they were his family. In a few minutes he’d start laughing and tell us where his real parents lived, and we’d go there and a smiling woman with perfumed hair would welcome us and feed us steaming bowls of Cream of Wheat. I looked at Dad. He wasn’t smiling, and he kept pulling at the skin of his neck as if he were itchy. • • • We followed Erma and Stanley and Grandpa inside. It was cold in the house, and the air smelled of mold and cigarettes and unwashed laundry. We huddled around a potbellied cast-iron coal stove in the middle of the living room and held out our hands to warm them. Erma pulled a bottle of whiskey from the pocket of her housedress, and Dad looked happy for the first time since we’d left Phoenix. Erma ushered us into the kitchen, where she was fixing dinner. A bulb dangled from the ceiling, casting harsh light on the yellowed walls, which were coated with a thin film of grease. Erma stuck a curved steel handle into an iron disk on top of an old coal cooking stove, lifted it, and with her other hand grabbed a poker from the wall and jabbed at the hot orange coals inside. She stirred a potful of green beans stewing in fatback and poured in a big handful of salt. Then she set a tray of Pillsbury biscuits on the kitchen table and ladled out a plate of the beans for each of us kids. The beans were so overcooked that they fell apart when I stuck my fork in them and so salty that I could barely force myself to swallow. I pinched my nose closed, which was the way Mom had taught us to get down things that had gone a little bit rotten. Erma saw me and slapped my hand away. “Beggars can’t be choosers,” she said. There were three bedrooms upstairs, Erma said, but no one had been to the

• From The Canterbury Tales (2009)

  The Canon’s Yeoman’s Prologue The Prologe of the Chanouns Yemannes Tale We had ridden scarcely five miles after we had heard the tale of Saint Cecilia when we came to the hamlet of Blean, a few miles from Canterbury. Just as we entered the forest there we were overtaken by a man dressed in black, with a white surplice showing beneath his gown. His mount, a dapple grey, was so soaked in sweat that we could scarcely credit it. It was clear that he had been riding hard for some miles. The poor horse could hardly go any further; its collar was dripping wet, and its flanks were flecked with foam. His rider travelled light, however, with only a bag of two pouches fastened to his saddle. It was a warm spring, after all. I wondered who this man in black might be, until I noticed that his hood and cloak were sewn together. I knew at once that he was a canon of the Church. His hat hung down his back, from a cord, and he had put a burdock leaf under his hood to keep his head cool and to prevent the sweat from running down his face. He had galloped fast and furiously. It was extraordinary to see the sweat on him; he held as much liquid as a distillery. When he came up to us he cried out in a loud voice, ‘God save you all! I have come all this way for your sake. I rode as fast as I could to catch up with you. Do you mind if I join you?’ His servant now rode up behind him. ‘Gentlemen,’ he said, ‘I saw you leave the inn early this morning, and I told my master here all about you. You seemed such a jolly crowd. So he was determined to ride with you. He likes a bit of fun.’ ‘I’m glad you told him,’ the Host replied to the boy. ‘It looks as if your master is a clever man. Witty, too. And I bet he has a few stories to keep us all amused. Am I right?’ ‘Stories? He has got a million of them. He is very entertaining, if you know what I mean. I will tell you something else. He is skilled in many ways. He has many talents. He has undertaken work of great importance, too, which no one else could manage. Unless they learned from him how to do it. He may look ordinary enough, but it will profit you to get to know him. I bet you anything that you will gain from acquaintance with him. He is a very wise man. He is one of the best.’ ‘Tell me this. Is he a priest or a scholar? What kind of man is he?’ ‘He is more than just a priest, sir. I will tell you, in a few words, what kind of art he practises.

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  Instead he just shook his head. Suddenly, Mom grinned broadly. “I’ll bet there aren’t any other artists living in Welch,” she said. “I won’t have any competition. My career could really take off here.” THE NEXT DAY MOM took Brian and me to Welch Elementary, near the outskirts of town. She marched confidently into the principal’s office with us in tow and informed him that he would have the pleasure of enrolling two of the brightest, most creative children in America in his school. The principal looked at Mom over his black-rimmed glasses but remained seated behind his desk. Mom explained that we’d left Phoenix in a teensy bit of a hurry, you know how that goes, and unfortunately, in all the commotion, she forgot to pack stuff like school records and birth certificates. “But you can take my word for it that Jeannette and Brian are exceptionally bright, even gifted.” She smiled at him. The principal looked at Brian and me, with our unwashed hair and our thin desert clothes. His face took on a sour, skeptical expression. He focused on me, pushed his glasses up his nose, and said something that sounded like “Wuts et tahm sebm?” “Excuse me?” I said. “Et tahm sebm!” he said louder. I was completely bewildered. I looked at Mom. “She doesn’t understand your accent,” Mom told the principal. He frowned. Mom turned to me. “He’s asking you what’s eight times seven.” “Oh!” I shouted. “Fifty-six! Eight times seven is fifty-six!” I started spouting out all sorts of mathematical equations. The principal looked at me blankly. “He can’t make out what you’re saying,” Mom told me. “Try to talk slowly.” The principal asked me a few more questions I couldn’t understand. With Mom translating, I gave answers that he couldn’t understand. Then he asked Brian some questions, and they couldn’t understand each other, either. The principal decided that Brian and I were both a bit slow and had speech impediments that made it difficult for others to understand us. He placed us both in special classes for students with learning disabilities. • • • “You’ll have to impress them with your intelligence,” Mom said as Brian and I headed off to school the next day. “Don’t be afraid to be smarter than they are.” It had rained the night before our first day of school. When Brian and I stepped off the bus at Welch Elementary, our shoes got soaked in the water that filled the muddy tire ruts left by the school buses. I looked around for the playground equipment, figuring I could win some new friends with the fierce tetherball skills I’d picked up at Emerson, but I didn’t see a single seesaw or jungle gym, not to mention any tetherball poles. It had been cold ever since we arrived in Welch. The day before, Mom had unpacked the thrift-shop coats she’d bought us in Phoenix.

• From Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (1994)

  I picked up a book on gardens, so I could study flowers and trees and vines in that way, and honest to God, people who read my novel believed that I loved to garden. Sometimes in fact they would start talking shop with me, thinking we could jam away, as gardeners are wont to do, until I’d let them know that I had only been winging it, with a lot of help from people around me, people who knew a lot more about gardens than I, friends who would cover for me, just like in real life. “You don’t love to garden?” they’d ask incredulously, and I’d shake my head and not mention that what I love are cut flowers, because this sounds so violent and decadent, like when Salvador Dalí said his favorite animal was fillet of sole. And in the years since, I have asked all sorts of people to help me design sets. I’ve asked them to describe what the world looked like in certain American cities or African villages, inside a particular car in the rain, or down by the water when hoboes still came to town on the train. Then I try to imagine the movie set of this scene in as much detail as possible. Sometimes I can see it most clearly if I close my eyes. Other times I stare off into the middle distance, like a cat. False StartsI talked earlier about the artist who is trying to capture something in one corner of his canvas but keeps discovering that what he has painted is not what he had in mind. He keeps covering his work over with white paint each time that he discovers what it isn’t, and each time this brings him closer to discovering what it is. This has happened again and again for me in writing. I may think I know who a certain character is or how an essay should proceed, so I make a stab at following this ghostly blueprint in my head. Then it turns out that I’ve been wrong, wrong about the character. I had the sandwich board she was wearing confused with who she really is. So I white it out and try again. I found out something important about false starts when I began accompanying some members of my church to a convalescent home once a month, where we were conducting a worship service. After that first dismal visit, I thought I knew who the residents were and what they were capable of, what they were all about. If I had started to write, I would have written about them with confidence, and I would have been all wrong.

• From Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990)

  Foucault’s introduction to the journals of the hermaphrodite, Herculine Barbin, suggests that the genealogical critique of these reified categories of sex is the inadvertent consequence of sexual practices that cannot be accounted for within the medicolegal discourse of a naturalized heterosexuality. Herculine is not an “identity,” but the sexual impossibility of an identity. Although male and female anatomical elements are jointly distributed in and on this body, that is not the true source of scandal. The linguistic conventions that produce intelligible gendered selves find their limit in Herculine precisely because she/he occasions a convergence and disorganization of the rules that govern sex/gender/desire. Herculine deploys and redistributes the terms of a binary system, but that very redistribution disrupts and proliferates those terms outside the binary itself. According to Foucault, Herculine is not categorizable within the gender binary as it stands; the disconcerting convergence of heterosexuality and homosexuality in her/his person are only occasioned, but never caused, by his/her anatomical discontinuity. Foucault’s appropriation of Herculine is suspect,36 but his analysis implies the interesting belief that sexual heterogeneity (paradoxically foreclosed by a naturalized “hetero”-sexuality) implies a critique of the metaphysics of substance as it informs the identitarian categories of sex. Foucault imagines Herculine’s experience as “a world of pleasures in which grins hang about without the cat.”37 Smiles, happinesses, pleasures, and desires are figured here as qualities without an abiding substance to which they are said to adhere. As free-floating attributes, they suggest the possibility of a gendered experience that cannot be grasped through the substantializing and hierarchizing grammar of nouns (res extensa) and adjectives (attributes, essential and accidental). Through his cursory reading of Herculine, Foucault proposes an ontology of accidental attributes that exposes the postulation of identity as a culturally restricted principle of order and hierarchy, a regulatory fiction. If it is possible to speak of a “man” with a masculine attribute and to understand that attribute as a happy but accidental feature of that man, then it is also possible to speak of a “man” with a feminine attribute, whatever that is, but still to maintain the integrity of the gender. But once we dispense with the priority of “man” and “woman” as abiding substances, then it is no longer possible to subordinate dissonant gendered features as so many secondary and accidental characteristics of a gender ontology that is fundamentally intact. If the notion of an abiding substance is a fictive construction produced through the compulsory ordering of attributes into coherent gender sequences, then it seems that gender as substance, the viability of man and woman as nouns, is called into question by the dissonant play of attributes that fail to conform to sequential or causal models of intelligibility.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  People suffering from epilepsy or mental illnesses for which there was no other cure naturally consulted exorcists, some of whom may have been able to effect an improvement in diseases that had a strong psychosomatic component. But like Honi, Jesus made it clear that he owed his miracles to the “powers” (dunamis) of God that worked through him and insisted that anybody who trusted God sufficiently would be able to do still greater things. 49 Far from these miracles being central to the gospel, the evangelists seem rather ambivalent about them. Mark tells us that even though the fame of these marvels spread far and wide, Jesus regularly asked people to keep quiet about their cure; 50 Matthew tends to play down the miracles, using them simply to show how Jesus fulfilled ancient prophecy, 51 while for Luke, the miracles merely showed that Jesus was “a great prophet” like Elijah. 52 The evangelists knew that, despite these signs and wonders, Jesus had not won many followers during his lifetime. The miracles had not inspired “faith;” people who witnessed them agreed that Jesus was a “son of God” but were not prepared to disrupt their lives and commit themselves wholeheartedly to his mission—any more than they had been willing to sell all they had and follow Honi the Circle Drawer. Even the inner circle of apostles lacked pistis. They made no comment at all when Jesus fed a crowd of five thousand people with a few loaves and fishes; and when they saw him walking on water, Mark tells us, they were “utterly and completely dumbfounded ... their minds were closed.” 53 Matthew relates that the disciples did indeed bow down before him after this miracle, crying: “Truly, you are the Son of God,” 54 but in no time at all Jesus had to rebuke them for their lack of faith. 55 The miracle stories probably reflect the disciples’ understanding of these events after the resurrection apparitions. With hindsight, they could see that God had already been working through Jesus to usher in the Kingdom, when God would vanquish the demons that caused suffering, sickness, and death and trample the destructive powers of chaos underfoot. 56 They did not think that Jesus was God, so did not argue that these miracles proved his divinity. But after the resurrection they were convinced that like any person of pistis, Jesus had been able to call upon God’s dunamis when he stilled the storm at sea and walked on the windswept waters. The rabbis knew that miracles proved nothing. One day, during the early years at Yavneh, Rabbi Eliezer was engaged in a fierce argument about a legal ruling (halakah) arising from the Torah. When his colleagues refused to accept his opinion, he asked God to prove his point with a series of miracles.