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 Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995)

  People who overheard the conversation began to laugh, and Onyango beat this man severely. But the drunk man’s words must have stayed with your grandfather, for that month he set out to find another wife. He returned to Kendu and inquired about all the women in the village. Finally he made up his mind on a young girl named Akumu, who was well regarded for her beauty. She was already promised to another man, who had paid her father six cattle in dowry, promising to deliver six more in the future. But Onyango knew the girl’s father and he convinced him to send back these six cattle. In return, Onyango gave him fifteen cattle on the spot. The next day, your grandfather’s friends captured Akumu while she was walking in the forest and dragged her back to Onyango’s hut. The young boy, Godfrey, appeared with the washbasin, and we all washed our hands for lunch. Auma stood up to stretch her back, her hair still half undone, a troubled look on her face. She said something to Dorsila and Granny, and drew a lengthy response from both women. “I was asking them if our grandfather took Akumu by force,” Auma told me, spooning some meat onto her plate. “What did they say?” “They say that this thing about grabbing the woman was part of Luo custom. Traditionally, once the man pays the dowry, the woman must not seem too eager to be with him. She pretends to refuse him, and so the man’s friends must capture her and take her back to his hut. Only after this ritual do they perform a proper marriage ceremony.” Auma took a small bite of her food. “I told them that in such a custom some women might not have been pretending.” Zeituni dipped her ugali into the stew. “Yah, Auma, it was not as bad as you say. If her husband behaved badly, the girl could always leave.” “But what good was that if her father would only end up choosing someone else for her? Tell me, what would happen if a woman refused her father’s choice of a suitor?” Zeituni shrugged. “She shamed herself and her family.” “You see?” Auma turned to ask Granny something, and whatever it was that Granny said in response made Auma hit Granny—only half playfully—on the arm. “I asked her if the man would force the girl to sleep with him the night of her capture,” Auma explained, “and she told me that no one knew what went on in a man’s hut. But she also asked me how a man would know if he wanted the whole bowl of soup unless he first had a taste.” I asked Granny how old she had been when she married our grandfather. The question amused her so much that she repeated it to Dorsila, who giggled and slapped Granny on the leg. “She told Dorsila that you wanted to know when Onyango seduced her,” Auma said.

• From The Four Vision Quests of Jesus (2015)

  He also illustrates how diversity, even to the point of eccentricity, is essential to a healthy spiritual community. John embodies many of the dynamics the Native Covenant would assign to the role of “the Trickster,”7 a figure not articulated in European-based Christian theologies, although the “old testament” of Europeans contains parallel mythic beings like the Leprechauns. In Native tradition, the Trickster is most often an animal spirit, especially a coyote or a raven. The role of the Trickster in the Native Covenant is to serve as a spiritual teacher. Stories of the Coyote or the Raven are both humorous and serious at the same time. These spirit-creatures break the rules. They defy social and moral conventions. They try to get away with something. The results are sometimes calamitous, but the theological teaching is always clear. The Trickster underlines spiritual wisdom. Like a contrary, the Trickster makes apparent what is underlying in spiritual life. In this sense, John carries on the tradition of the Trickster. He intentionally provokes. He challenges assumptions. He breaks the rules. Consequently, the Trickster was not always welcome in human society. The Coyote and the Raven were often seen as being on the margins. People were suspicious of their intentions even though the end results often proved to be beneficial. There is a flavor of chaos sprinkled on the Trickster characters, a sense that they are generative forces whose powers may not always be controlled. Therefore, the Trickster figure in Native theology is a recognition that prophetic change never originates within the safe spaces of the status quo. Instead, change begins on the fringes, in the more wild areas of the imagination. John may have returned from his vision quest as a Trickster; he may have been welcomed back into his community as a spiritual eccentric; however, he may also have been too much of a Trickster for his own people to contain. The missing text in the story of John, from the Native American perspective, is what happened to him after he returned from his vision quest as a sacred clown. Was he out in the wilderness by choice or because his people had exiled him? Did they honor his eccentricity or find it too odd to contain? These questions are echoed in the reaction to John’s brother, Jesus. The gospels do tell us about the four vision quests of Jesus, and they also give us hints about how he was accepted by his community. Like John, Jesus returned from his vision quest a changed man. He had a new name. In his case, the vision he received would have called him to be a medicine man, a healer of the people. But how did his people react to this news? The New Testament gives us many answers, including indications that Jesus was rejected by his home community and driven out of his village.

• From A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (BDB) (1907)

  4 Is 14" Jb 25%; תולעת‎ Ts 4x¥+, תולעת‎ Dt 28% Nu 19°; estr. תולעת‎ Ex 25'-+; sf. onydin Is 66*;—1. worm, grub, vine-weevil Jon 4’ Dt 28% (coll.); devouring the dead Is 14" (coll.: || 739), 66** (coll.); symbol of insignificance 41 * > Jb25° )|| .'22ץו, (רפה‎ 2. elsewh. (P) specif., + Ww (q.v.), of the coccus ilicis yielding scarlet colour: “F(7) שָנִי‎ Lv 14**9 Nu rg’; of crimson stuff, Ww ת'‎ 732 48; usu. תּבָלֶת וְאַרְנָמֶן‎ וָת' (הַ)שָנִי ונו'‎ Ex 25* 261+ 24 t. Ex. T [vba] vb. Pu. denom. clad in scarlet {v. ולע .ד‎ 2; Aydin 2_NH Hiph. denom. is breed worms,etc.);—Pt.pl. (מָאָדָּם|)*2גּא מִתְלָעִים‎ 1 תלעות‎ n.£.pl. teeth (AV RV jaw-teeth) (perhaps gnawers, V. J ) ;— teeth, incisors, late (always || (שנים‎ : estr. מ'‎ Jb 29" and (of lion) Jor’; sf. מִתַלְעְתָיו‎ Pr 30". 1 תלפיות‎ n.f.pl. Ges (in Thes) exitialia, fatal things ) abn=Ar. W415 perish) ;—poet. for weapons; many other conj. in Comm.: mb ‘2a צוְארף‎ TF 5733 Ct 4", doubtful; Che Expos. Times, ix. 423; JQ, July 1899, 362 שָלָטִים‎ shields, cf. v®. .תל .1 .+ תַלְתָּלִים v.tbsba.‏ תַּלְשַר OF, OF, WAM +. oon. ימא ,+ תמא‎ 7 [|תמה]‎ vb. be astounded, dumb- founded (NH id.; so Aram. "OM, ooh) ;— Qal Pf. 3 pl. LA y 48°; Impf. 2 ms. 720} Ec 5‘; 3 mpl. Oh) Jb 26", etc.; Jmv. mpl. WDA Is 29° Hb 1°;—be astounded, 15 29° Hb 1° (v. Hithp.), Je 4° (|| ,שמם‎ Niph.), ץ‎ 48°; +1 caus. Jb 26"; +- על‎ rei at which Ec 5’; look in astonishment at wmyT dy ws ת'‎ Gn 43% (J), .513ך‎ Hithp. Jmv. mpl. + Qal Jmv, HAN 3A Hb 1° (v. supr.), lit..astonish yourselves, be astounded, but We Hithpalp. 127207 ; Gr rds. inf. abs. 7A (Martial. 3705) for תמהן‎ . ת' n.[m.] bewilderment ;—abs.‏ תמַהוּן1 Dt 28% - bewilderment,‏ תּמְהון Ze 12; estr.‏ of those infatuated‏ יצ stupefaction ; aad ’N‏ (v. Dr.); ’n alone of bewildered horses 20 2%‏ 1069 תמול THO n.pr.div. Tammuz (Bab. Dizu (also Dumuzt) COT ™®™ Zim ®4™ "© Jastr®- Pab- 452 et pass. on the phonetic change Hpt74"-™, but also Jiger*****");_/ATNS מְבכּוּת‎ Ez 8"; cf. Baud ®+ +5 sot‏ ; (אדון) Adonis‏ .03% = ת' Dr Dn ll, 37 Che Ency. Bib. TAMMUZ Say Hast. DB Ip.‏ MIVA +. .מין‎ MVNA +. -מור‎ MW +. nv. Tran n.pr.m. head of a Jewish family, Ezr 2*=Ne 7°; G Ocua (Ne Huad), GL Cepaa. TRA Vv. מוד‎ p. 556. Ex 26* 36” v. [OSA].‏ תמים

• From The History of Christian Theology (2008)

  32 Lecture 10: The Doctrine of the Trinity Orthodox, that is, Nicene, trinitarian theology arose in the course of the Arian controversy in the 4 th century. The Arian controversy began with Arius, a presbyter in the church of Alexandria, who taught a radical form of subordinationism, in which the Word or Logos is one of God’s creations— that is, a creature, not the Creator. The implication which horri ¿ ed nearly everyone was that “there was once when he was not.” The ¿ rst ecumenical (worldwide) council of the church was convened in Nicaea in 325 to condemn the teaching of Arius. In a new strategy for formulating Christian doctrine, the council adapted a modi ¿ ed baptismal creed as a test of orthodoxy. To make sure Arius and his followers couldn’t subscribe to this creed, they added a phrase saying the Son is homoousios, having “the same essence” as the Father. Rather than being created from nothing, the Logos comes “from the essence of the Father.” Although the exact meaning of this key phrase is often disputed, it clearly has the implication that the Son is God in exactly the same sense that the Father is God. Although Arius was soon widely rejected, many mainstream theologians found it dif¿ cult to accept the creed of Nicaea and its homoousios clause. Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria, was the most prominent defender of Nicene theology in the ¿ rst half of the 4 th century. His key point was that the Son is not created but eternally begotten from the Father; his key argument is that the Father is eternally a Father, never without a Son. As the 4 th-century controversy unfolded, the concept of the divine essence or ousia was further developed. Because it is equally shared by Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, it comes to be called the divine essence rather than the Father’s essence. The Father is the Source or First Principle of the Son, to whom he gives being by giving them the whole of the divine essence. The divine essence is not divided among the three, for it is not a material or stuff out of which they are made. Rather, it is characterized by its attributes: divinity, eternity, omnipotence, goodness, etc., all of which belong equally and wholly to Father, Son, and Spirit. The controversy concluded with the second ecumenical council in 381 at Constantinople. The council approved an expanded and edited version of the Creed of Nicaea, which is now recited around the world and called the

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  The Florence I had met first, the Green Street Florence, had been gay; she had had hair that twisted from her head like bed-springs, she had worn skirts as bright as mustard, she had laughed and shown her teeth. Florence Banner of Bethnal Green, however, was only grave, and weary. Her hair was limp, and her dresses were dark, or the colour of rust or dust or ashes; and when she smiled, you found you were surprised by it, and flinched.For her temper, I discovered, was fickle. She was kind as an angel to the undeserving poor of Bethnal Green; but at home she was sometimes depressed, and very often cross - I would see her brother and her friends tiptoeing about her chair, so as not to rouse her: I thought their patience quite astonishing. She might be gay as you like, for days at a time; but then she would come home from a walk, or wake one morning, as if from troubled dreams, dispirited. Strangest of all, to my mind, was her behaviour towards Cyril: for though I knew she loved him as her own, she would sometimes seem to turn her eyes from him, or push his grasping hands away, as if she hated him; then at other times she would seize him and cover him with kisses until he squealed. I had been at Quilter Street for several months when the talk, one evening, turned to birthdays; and I realised with a little start of surprise that Cyril’s must have passed and gone uncelebrated. When I asked Ralph about it he answered that, just as I’d thought, it had passed in July, but they had not thought it worthwhile to mark it. I said, laughing, ‘Oh, do socialists not keep birthdays, then?’ and he had smiled; Florence, however, had risen without a word, and left the room. I wondered again about what story there might be behind the baby; but Florence offered no clue to it, and I did not pry. I thought, if I did, that it might prompt her to ask me again about the gent who had supposedly kept me in luxury, then blacked my eye: she had never referred to him after that first night. I was glad she hadn’t.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  I leaned against the bonnet, rubbed my eyes and looked out at the harbour, willing the ferry into view. A clear pool of turquoise was spreading out there over the Irish Sea; small crosses that were gulls traversed it. It seemed strange that it was day at all; both of us were wiped out from yesterday’s long drive, and faintly freaked out by the hotel we’d stayed at the night before. 21st Century Hotel! it said on a laminated paper sign by the door. When we opened it the first thing we saw was a plastic bulldog sitting on a desk, grimacing at us with the malevolent, merry belligerence of a thing from a nightmare. In the hotel room we found a broken computer, a sink that wasn’t plumbed in, and a fully functioning cooker we’d been instructed not to use under any circumstances. ‘Health and Safety,’ the hotelier had explained, rolling his eyes. There were, unexpectedly, two televisions, acres of brown suedette stapled to the walls, and a bathroom with a six-foot sunken bath into which Christina subsided, marvelling at the tea-tinted peat water. I collapsed into a chair, the journey running in my mind like a road-movie directed by a drug-addled auteur. Giant Irn-Bru trucks full of orange, bubblegum-flavoured fizzy Scottish soda. A raven standing in a puddle by the side of the road, wet-trousered and chisel-beaked. Motorway service station A. Motorway service station B. A sandwich. A large cup of undrinkable coffee. Endless miles. More skies. A near-accident caused by inattention on a hillside somewhere. Motorway service stations C and D. I massaged my aching right calf, blinked away the after-images, and got to making jesses. I should have made them before, but I couldn’t. Only now did the hawk seem real enough to make them necessary. Jesses are the soft leather straps that fit through the leather anklets on a trained hawk’s legs. Singular, jess. It’s a French word from the fourteenth century, back when falconry was the favourite game of the ruling elite. A little scrap of social history in the name for a strip of leather. As a child I’d cleaved to falconry’s disconcertingly complex vocabulary. In my old books every part of a hawk was named: wings were sails, claws pounces, tail a train. Male hawks are a third smaller than the female so they are called tiercels, from the Latin tertius, for third. Young birds are eyasses, older birds passagers, adult-trapped birds haggards. Half-trained hawks fly on a long line called a creance. Hawks don’t wipe their beaks, they feak. When they defecate they mute. When they shake themselves they rouse. On and on it goes in a dizzying panoply of terms of precision. The terms were precise for a reason. Knowing your falconry terminology attested to your place in society.

• From Get Out of Your Head: Stopping the Cycle of Anxious Thoughts (2020)

  How can the thing that houses all those thoughts—just a bunch of folded tissue—contain so much of what makes us who we are? Learning to capture our thoughts matters. Because how we think shapes how we live. 2 The Patterns That Keep Us Stuck The subject of neuroscience has captivated me for years now, ever since one of my brilliant daughters began educating me on the science of the brain. When Kate, now a junior in high school, was in the seventh grade, she came home from school one afternoon and announced to the rest of us—her two brothers, her sister, my husband, Zac, and me—that she was going to cure Alzheimer’s disease someday. We smiled, but years later she still is reading books and articles on the subject, listening to every TED Talk on the brain, sharing research with me. Things like… Did you know that more has been discovered about our minds in the last twenty years than in all the time before that? Did you know that an estimated 60 to 80 percent of visits to primary care physicians have a stress-related component?3 Did you know that research shows that “75 to 98 percent of mental, physical, and behavioral illness comes from one’s thought life”?4 Did you know that, with what we know about the brain today, when Scripture is talking about the heart, it really could be talking about the mind and the emotions we experience in our brains? Well, no, Kate, I did not. But that’s very interesting. The truth is, it is very interesting to me. Somewhere along the way, Kate’s fascination became mine too. Because she taught me that what she is learning in science is also scattered throughout my Bible and many of the truths in the Bible concerning our thought lives have been backed up by science. This all became increasingly important to me as I became gripped by the idea that taking control of our minds could be the key to finding peace in the other parts of our lives. For several years I’d been in deep running IF:Gathering, the organization I believe God prompted me to start to disciple women and equip them to go disciple others. I loved our community, our gatherings, and the impact we seemed to be having, but over time I noticed a troubling trend among the women I loved and served every day. Women would feel conviction at an event or as they worked through our discipleship resources, and they would surrender their lives more fully to Jesus. They would soar on the wings of that resolve for a week, a month, sometimes a year or even two. But inevitably at some point they’d slip back into old habits, old patterns of doing life. Maybe you know exactly what I mean.

• From The History of Christian Theology (2008)

  1. What is it about the Gospel that is supposed to be good news? 2. Who is Jesus, really? The Gospel of John Lecture 5 LL The Gospel of John is particularly puzzling because it claims to be an eyewitness document. And the tradition is that this is written by the Elder John (probably not the Apostle John), who lived in Ephesus into the 90s, and who was an eyewitness and a disciple of Jesus. And yet, boy, does he tell the story differently from the other Gospels. Perhaps that’s because he’s not drawing on the stories and documents that the other Gospels drew on. he Gospel of John, probably the last of the Gospels to be written, is structured very differently from the others. It omits important episodes in the Synoptic Gospels, includes many episodes they do not, and reports some episodes in a strikingly different order. It omits the institution of the Eucharist, but includes a long discourse in which Jesus describes himself as the bread of life (chapter 6); it omits the baptism of Jesus, but includes Jesus offering to give believers “living water” (4:14); and it reports Jesus’s driving the money changers out of the temple in chapter 2, but not immediately before the Passion narrative. After a prologue, it includes a “book of signs” organized around Jesus’s seven miracles and then the “book of the passion” or, more accurately, the “book of glorification.” Throughout the Gospel is a series of “I am” statements, in which Jesus declares his identity: “I am the bread of life” (6:35); “I am the light of the world” (8:12); “I am the Good Shepherd” (10:11 lL anhe — Way, the Truth and the Life” (14:6). All the “I Jesus’s controversies am” statements recall the name of the God of with his opponents are Israel, which means, “I am.” : ; ; especially intense in The Prologue contains a famous description the Gospel of John. of Jesus as the Word made flesh. Ash Vo (Logos or Reason), Jesus existed before the creation and hence before his own humanity. In a crucial passage for the doctrine of the Trinity, John says, “The Word was God.” In a crucial passage 15 Lecture 5: The Gospel of John for the doctrine of the Incarnation, John says, “And the Word became flesh.” In a crucial passage for Christian soteriology (the doctrine of salvation), John says, “To all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave the authority to become children of God.” The Prologue is an example of John’s high Christology, his insistence on the exalted nature of Jesus from the beginning. To receive Jesus, in the Gospel of John, is to believe that he came from heaven and was sent by the Father into the world as Light and Life.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  Her talons gripped the painted glove so tightly my fingers prickled in numb sympathy. She was beautiful; taut with antipathy; everything a child feels when angry and silenced. As soon as we were home I raced upstairs to my room, jumped onto the bed, lay on my tummy and opened the book. And I remember lying there, propped on my elbows with my feet in the air, reading the opening lines of The Goshawk for the very first time. When I first saw him he was a round thing like a clothes basket covered in sacking. But he was tumultuous and frightening, repulsive in the same way as snakes are frightening to people who do not know them. It was unusual. It didn’t sound like my other falconry books at all. The eight-year-old girl that was me read on with a frown. It wasn’t anything like them. This was a book about falconry by a man who seemed to know nothing about it. He talked about the bird as if it were a monster and he wasn’t training it properly. I was bewildered. Grown-ups were experts. They wrote books to tell you about things you didn’t know; books on how to do things. Why would a grown-up write about not being able to do something? What’s more, the book was full of things that were completely beside the point. It talked, disappointingly, of things like foxhunting and war and history. I didn’t understand its references to the Holy Roman Empire and Strindberg and Mussolini and I didn’t know what a pickelhaube was, and I didn’t know what any of this was doing in a book that was supposed to be about a hawk. Later I found a review of the book in an old British Falconers’ Club journal. It was superbly terse. ‘For those with an interest in the dull introspective business of manning and training a hawk, The Goshawk will be a well-written catalogue of most of the things one should not do,’ it said. The men in tweed had spoken. I was on the right side, was allowed to dislike this grown-up and consider him a fool. It’s painful to recall my relief on reading this, founded as it was on a desperate misunderstanding about the size of the world. I took comfort in the blithe superiority that is the refuge of the small. But for all that, my eight-year-old self revered the hawk in the book. Gos. Gos was real to me. Gos had steely pinions and a mad marigold eye, and hopped and flew and mantled his great wings over a fist of raw liver. He cheeped like a songbird and was terrified of cars. I liked Gos. Gos was comprehensible, even if the writer was utterly beyond understanding.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  The behavior of the Seleucid king Antiochus IV in the second century resulted in a surge of Jewish apocalyptic passion, which drew on the ancient theology of the Davidic monarchy. But this messianic piety had no roots in the Axial Age, and took Judaism in a different, post-Axial direction. Alexander had won his empire at the peak of Greek intellectual achievement and his career marked the beginning of a new era. After his death, some poleis on the Greek mainland, including Athens, revolted against Macedonian rule, and Antipater, one of the six original diadochoi, took savage reprisals. This finished Athenian democracy. As Greek migrants and colonists settled in the new territories, Greek civilization began to merge with the cultures of the east. Scholars of the nineteenth century called this fusion “Hellenism.” The challenge of this encounter was enriching, but in the process the intensity of the Greek experiment became diluted. Spread thinly over such a huge, foreign area, it fragmented and became Greek ish rather than truly Greek. Any period of major social change is troubled. The collapse of the old order and the inevitable political disruption were disturbing. 58 There was widespread bewilderment and malaise. Personal and political autonomy had always been crucial to the Greeks’ sense of identity, but now their world had expanded so dramatically that people felt that their destiny was controlled by vast impersonal forces. During the third century, three new philosophies, rooted in the pain of the period, tried to assuage this sense of alienation. 59 Epicurus (341–270), for example, experienced very little security for the first thirty-five years of his life. His family was expelled from Samos by the Macedonians, and he wandered from one polis to another before arriving in Athens in 306. There he bought a house with a garden near the Academy, and founded a community of close friends. Pleasure, he taught, was the chief goal of human existence, but this did not mean, as his detractors assumed, that he flung himself into a hectic round of hedonistic delights. In fact, the community adopted a quiet, simple regime in “the Garden.” Pleasure did not consist in sensuality and self-indulgence, but in ataraxia (“freedom from pain”). Epicureans shunned all mental disturbances. Life in the polis was so tense and unpredictable that those who had the means should withdraw from public affairs and enjoy a peaceful existence with congenial people. They must avoid anything that caused them distress, including the superstitious belief in fickle deities who inflicted such great suffering on hapless men and women. Above all, Epicureans should not allow their mortality to poison their minds.

• From Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995)

  We became quiet again; lamplight grew low and people began drifting off to bed. Granny brought out blankets and a twin-sized cot for Bernard and me, and we arranged ourselves on the narrow bed before blowing out the lamp. My body ached from exhaustion; inside Granny’s bedroom, I could hear the murmur of her and Auma talking. I wondered where Roy had gone to, and thought about the yellow tiles on the Old Man’s grave. “Barry,” Bernard whispered. “Are you awake?” “Yeah.” “Did you believe what Zeituni told you? About night runners?” “I don’t know.” “Myself, I think there is no such thing as a night runner. They are probably just thieves who use these stories to make people afraid.” “You may be right.” There was a long pause. “Barry?” “What?” “What made you finally come home?” “I’m not sure, Bernard. Something told me it was time.” Bernard rolled over onto his side without answering. A moment later, I heard his soft snores beside me, and I opened my eyes to the darkness, waiting for Roy to return. In the morning, Sayid and Yusuf suggested that Auma and I take a tour of the lands. As we followed them across the backyard and down a dirt path, through fields of corn and millet, Yusuf turned to me and said, “It must seem very primitive to you, compared to farms in America.” I told him that I didn’t know much about farming but that, as far as I could tell, the land seemed quite fertile. “Yes, yes,” Yusuf said, nodding. “The land is good. The problem is that people here are uneducated. They don’t understand much about development. Proper agricultural techniques and so forth. I try to explain to them about capital improvements and irrigation, but they refuse to listen. The Luo are very stubborn in this way.” I noticed Sayid frowning at his brother, but he said nothing. After a few minutes we came to a small, brown stream. Sayid shouted out a warning, and two young women emerged on the opposite bank, wrapped in their kangas, their hair still gleaming from their morning baths. They smiled shyly and stepped behind an island of rushes, and Sayid pointed to the hedges running alongside the water. “This is where the land ends,” he said. “Before, when my father lived, the fields were much bigger. But as my mother said, much of the land has now been given away.”

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  When we opened it the first thing we saw was a plastic bulldog sitting on a desk, grimacing at us with the malevolent, merry belligerence of a thing from a nightmare. In the hotel room we found a broken computer, a sink that wasn’t plumbed in, and a fully functioning cooker we’d been instructed not to use under any circumstances. ‘Health and Safety,’ the hotelier had explained, rolling his eyes. There were, unexpectedly, two televisions, acres of brown suedette stapled to the walls, and a bathroom with a six-foot sunken bath into which Christina subsided, marvelling at the tea-tinted peat water. I collapsed into a chair, the journey running in my mind like a road-movie directed by a drug-addled auteur. Giant Irn-Bru trucks full of orange, bubblegum-flavoured fizzy Scottish soda. A raven standing in a puddle by the side of the road, wet-trousered and chisel-beaked. Motorway service station A. Motorway service station B. A sandwich. A large cup of undrinkable coffee. Endless miles. More skies. A near-accident caused by inattention on a hillside somewhere. Motorway service stations C and D. I massaged my aching right calf, blinked away the after-images, and got to making jesses. I should have made them before, but I couldn’t. Only now did the hawk seem real enough to make them necessary. Jesses are the soft leather straps that fit through the leather anklets on a trained hawk’s legs. Singular , jess. It’s a French word from the fourteenth century, back when falconry was the favourite game of the ruling elite. A little scrap of social history in the name for a strip of leather . As a child I’d cleaved to falconry’s disconcertingly complex vocabulary. In my old books every part of a hawk was named: wings were sails , claws pounces , tail a train . Male hawks are a third smaller than the female so they are called tiercels , from the Latin tertius , for third . Young birds are eyasses , older birds passagers , adult-trapped birds haggards . Half-trained hawks fly on a long line called a creance. Hawks don’t wipe their beaks, they feak . When they defecate they mute . When they shake themselves they rouse . On and on it goes in a dizzying panoply of terms of precision. The terms were precise for a reason. Knowing your falconry terminology attested to your place in society. Just as in the 1930s T. H. White worried about whether a hunting crop should be properly called a hunting whip, or a riding crop, or a riding whip, or just a crop, or a whip, so in the sixteenth century the Jesuit spy Robert Southwell was terrified he’d be found out because he kept forgetting his falconry terms. But the words weren’t about social fear when I was small.

• From Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995)

  A few miles north, we turned off the main highway onto a road of pulverized tarmac. It was slow going: at certain points the potholes yawned across the road’s entire width, and every so often trucks would approach from the opposite direction, forcing Francis to drive onto embankments. Eventually, we arrived at the road we’d seen from above and began to make our way across the valley floor. The landscape was dry, mostly bush grass and scruffy thorn trees, gravel and patches of hard dark stone. We began to pass small herds of gazelle; a solitary wildebeest feeding at the base of a tree; zebra and a giraffe, barely visible in the distance. For almost an hour we saw no other person, until a solitary Masai herdsman appeared in the distance, his figure as lean and straight as the staff that he carried, leading a herd of long-horned cattle across an empty flat. I hadn’t met many Masai in Nairobi, although I’d read quite a bit about them. I knew that their pastoral ways and fierceness in war had earned them a grudging respect from the British, so that even as treaties had been broken and the Masai had been restricted to reservations, the tribe had become mythologized in its defeat, like the Cherokee or Apache, the noble savage of picture postcards and coffee table books. I also knew that this Western infatuation with the Masai infuriated other Kenyans, who thought their ways something of an embarrassment, and who hankered after Masai land. The government had tried to impose compulsory education on Masai children, and a system of land title among the adults. The black man’s burden, officials explained: to civilize our less fortunate brethren. I wondered, as we drove deeper into their country, how long the Masai could hold out. In Narok, a small trading town where we stopped for gas and lunch, a group of children dressed in khaki shorts and old T-shirts surrounded our van with the aggressive enthusiasm of their Nairobi counterparts, peddling cheap jewelry and snacks. Two hours later, when we arrived at the adobe gate leading into the preserve, a tall Masai man in a Yankees cap and smelling of beer leaned through the window of our van and suggested we take a tour of a traditional Masai boma. “Only forty shillings,” the man said with a smile. “Pictures extra.”

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  I could feel the failure in her, the sense that she hadn’t got what she wanted, and I could feel, too, that what had just happened had spooked her, and that now she was flying away from it, and me, as fast as possible. I grabbed hold of the creance and ran with her, putting resistance on the line until she was brought to earth, crest raised, wings spread wide, feet planted in the turf, beak open, panting in fury. I held out my fist and she flew straight up onto it as if nothing had happened at all. ‘She must have been scared by something,’ I said. ‘Let’s try it again.’ And again the hawk came, low and fast, and again she snatched at the glove and kept flying. Again I brought her to earth. ‘Why is she doing it?’ ‘I don’t know. I don’t know.’ This had never happened before. Over the years I’d had hawks that ignored me. Hawks that turned their back on me. Hawks that flew reluctantly, flew badly, or didn’t fly at all. It never worried me. These hawks weren’t at their flying weight, that was all, and this was easily fixed. But this was different. This was a hawk desperately eager to fly to me, but with a last-second terror of landing on my glove. It was incomprehensible. I telephoned Stuart. ‘I don’t know what’s wrong. Does she need more manning? Is she too high in weight?’ I was as bewildered as a child. ‘What should I do?’ There was a long pause, and then a longer sigh. ‘Are you feeding her chicks?’ he said. ‘Yes.’ ‘Stop feeding her chicks! They’re too rich for her at this stage. She’ll be fine, she’s nearly there. Just feed her rabbit. It won’t hurt her, but it’ll stop this problem.’ All the trust I had left in the world rested in the fact that the hawk wanted to fly to me. Now she was scared to land on my fist – she didn’t trust me – and I could not explain to Stuart how awful this felt. I thanked him. I had asked for advice, and he had given it, simply and precisely. This is the problem. This is how you fix it. But I didn’t believe him. It can’t just be the food. I have done something bad, I thought miserably. Something terrible. The next day a plague of moorhens had come out of the messy copse behind the pavilion and were running all over the pitch like a flock of feathered black mice. Moorhens!

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  73 But Paul, a diaspora Jew from Tarsus in Cilicia, who had not known Jesus, believed that he had been commissioned by God to bring the “good news” of the gospel to the gentile world, so he preached in the Greco-Roman cities along the major trade routes in Asia Minor, Greece, and Macedonia. This was a very different milieu: Paul’s converts could not beg for their bread but had to work for their living, as he did, and a significant number of his converts may have been men and women of means. Writing in the 50s CE, Paul is the earliest extant Christian author, and his teachings influenced the accounts of Jesus’s life in the gospels of Mark, Matthew, and Luke (known as the Synoptics), written in the 70s and 80s. And while the Synoptics drew upon the earliest Palestinian traditions about Jesus, they were writing in an urban environment permeated by Greco-Roman religion. Neither the Greeks nor the Romans had ever separated religion from secular life. They would not have understood our modern understanding of “religion.” They had no authoritative scriptures, no compulsory beliefs, no distinct clergy, and no obligatory ethical rules. There was no ontological gulf separating the gods from men and women; each human being had a numen or genius that was divine, and gods regularly took human form. Gods were part of the citizen body so the Greco-Roman city was essentially a religious community. Each city had its own divine patron, and civic pride, financial interest, and piety were intertwined in a way that would seem strange in our secularized world. Participation in the religious festivals in honor of the city’s gods was essential to city life: there were no public holidays or weekends, so the Lupercalia in Rome and the Panathenaea in Athens were rare opportunities for relaxation and celebration. These rituals defined what it meant to be a Roman or an Athenian, put the city on show, invested civic life with transcendent meaning, presented the community at its best, and gave citizens a sense of belonging to a civic family. Participating in these rituals was just as important as any personal devotion to the gods. To belong to a city, therefore, was to worship its gods—though it was perfectly acceptable to worship other deities too. 74 This was potentially problematic for Paul’s Jewish and gentile converts in Antioch, Corinth, Philippi, and Ephesus, who, as monotheists, regarded Roman religion as idolatrous. Judaism was respected as a tradition of great antiquity, and Jews’ avoidance of the public cult was accepted in the Roman Empire.

• From Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995)

  All this marked them as vaguely liberal, although their ideas would never congeal into anything like a firm ideology; in this, too, they were American. And so, when my mother came home one day and mentioned a friend she had met at the University of Hawaii, an African student named Barack, their first impulse was to invite him over for dinner. The poor kid’s probably lonely, Gramps would have thought, so far away from home. Better take a look at him, Toot would have said to herself. When my father arrived at the door, Gramps might have been immediately struck by the African’s resemblance to Nat King Cole, one of his favorite singers; I imagine him asking my father if he can sing, not understanding the mortified look on my mother’s face. Gramps is probably too busy telling one of his jokes or arguing with Toot over how to cook the steaks to notice my mother reach out and squeeze the smooth, sinewy hand beside hers. Toot notices, but she’s polite enough to bite her lip and offer dessert; her instincts warn her against making a scene. When the evening is over, they’ll both remark on how intelligent the young man seems, so dignified, with the measured gestures, the graceful draping of one leg over another—and how about that accent! But would they let their daughter marry one? We don’t know yet; the story to this point doesn’t explain enough. The truth is that, like most white Americans at the time, they had never really given black people much thought. Jim Crow had made its way north into Kansas well before my grandparents were born, but at least around Wichita it appeared in its more informal, genteel form, without much of the violence that pervaded the Deep South. The same unspoken codes that governed life among whites kept contact between the races to a minimum; when black people appear at all in the Kansas of my grandparents’ memories, the images are fleeting—black men who come around the oil fields once in a while, searching for work as hired hands; black women taking in the white folks’ laundry or helping clean white homes. Blacks are there but not there, like Sam the piano player or Beulah the maid or Amos and Andy on the radio—shadowy, silent presences that elicit neither passion nor fear.

• From The Great Believers (2018)

  Fiona shouldered her way through clots of cold air. She felt the wind on her neck, and she said, “They’re breathing on me. They’re all around.” She caught a glimmer of a teenage boy sitting on a bus stop bench, writing in a journal with a blue fountain pen. She turned and he was gone, and she said “Oh, he was only—” and Yale—because he was there now, was somehow behind her —tried to say that no, she was wrong, this boy had died all the way back in the ’60s, he died in Vietnam, and there were other, older ghosts here too. But Yale could make no noise because he wasn’t really there. Fiona was on School Street now, a street Yale didn’t really know, but he’d always liked its name. Streets that carried their histories with them: He was fond of those. Was there still a school on School Street? Well, sure. There it was, abandoned and mossy. It stretched for blocks and blocks and blocks, and Fiona looked down at the stroller, at baby Nico. Because yes, it was Nico, she’d given birth to her brother and he only had to start again. He was swaddled in his orange scarf. He wore a crown of paper clips. She said, “He’s not old enough for school yet.” She said, “You have to wait until the year 2000.” But wasn’t it close? They were back on Broadway now, and the year 2000 was very close. That was why everything was ending. New Year’s Eve was the deadline. The dead line. The last gay man would die that day. What about baby Nico? “We’ll smuggle him through,” Fiona said to no one, “like Baby Moses. But he’ll have to play baseball.” Broadway and Briar. Broadway and Gladys Avenue. Poor Gladys, lost in the wrong part of town. A statue of President Gladys. Fiona pulled fliers off the telephone poles, loaded them into the empty stroller. It was her job to clean the streets. She stripped posters from windows, signs from stores, menus from restaurant entrances. She walked into an empty bar and sniffed the half-filled pint glasses still on the counter. And although she was still alone, Yale could talk to her now. He said, “What are they going to do with it all?” When she looked at him, he saw that the real answer was that she would live here forever, alone, that she would clean the streets forever. But she said, “They’re turning it into the zoo,” and he knew this was true as well. She sat down in the middle of the empty road, because no cars would ever come this way. She said, “What animal gets your old apartment? You’re allowed to choose.”

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  Whereupon the English militia descended on the settlement, killed fifteen Native Americans, burned their houses, cut down their corn, and abducted the queen, killing her children. So much for peaceful “dailie conversation.” The Indians were bewildered: “Why will you destroy us who supply you with food?” asked Chief Powhattan: “Why are you jealous of us? We are unarmed and willing to give you what you ask, if you come in a friendly manner.” 16 By 1622 the Indians had become seriously alarmed by the rapid growth of the colony; the English had taken over a significant acreage of their hunting grounds, depriving them of essential resources. 17 In a sudden attack on Jamestown, the Powhattans killed about a third of the English population. The Virginians retaliated in a ruthless war of attrition: they would allow local tribes to settle and plant their corn and then, just before the harvest, attack them, killing as many natives as possible. Within three years they had avenged the Jamestown massacre many times over. Instead of founding their colony on the compassionate principles of the gospel, they had inaugurated a policy of elimination imposed by ruthless military force. Even Purchas was forced to abandon the Bible and rely on the humanists’ aggressive doctrine of human rights when he finally agreed that the Indians deserved their fate because, by resisting English settlement, they had broken the law of nature. 18 More pragmatic considerations were beginning to replace the old piety. The company had not been able to produce the staples England needed, and investors had not seen an adequate return. The only way their colony could function was to cultivate tobacco and sell it at five shillings a pound. Begun as a holy enterprise, Virginia would gradually be secularized not by Locke’s liberal ideology but by pressure of events. The Puritans of Massachusetts had no qualms about killing Indians. They had left England during the Thirty Years’ War, had absorbed the militancy of that fearsome time, and justified their violence by a highly selective reading of the Bible. Ignoring Jesus’s pacifist teachings, they drew on the bellicosity of some of the Hebrew scriptures. “God is an excellent Man of War,” preached Alexander Leighton, and the Bible “the best handbook on war.” Their revered minister John Cotton had instructed them that they could attack the natives “without provocation”—a procedure normally unlawful—because they had not only a natural right to their territory, but “a special Commission from God” to take their land. 19 Already there were signs of the exceptionalist thinking that would in the future often characterize American politics. In 1636 William Bradford described a raid on the Pequot village of Fort Mystic on the Connecticut shore to avenge the murder of an English trader, contemplating the fearsome carnage with lofty complacency: Those that escaped the fire were slain with the sword; some hewed to pieces, others run through with rapiers, so as they were quickly dispatched, and very few escaped.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  My mother said hens ate their own eggs if they were left alone with them too long. I used to wake when the sky was still a shut eyelid, she said . If she out-slept the sun, there were no eggs left to collect. My mother opened her mouth, guided my fingers so deep down her throat I felt the hilt of a feather and plucked it out. She coughed as I cleaned off its scabbard of spit. I asked her what it did. All voices have wings, she said, that’s how they travel. I told her this was a regular chicken feather, flightless, but she said it’s easy to assimilate into the air. You just have to believe your bones hollow, no marrow no mother no memory. _ My mother always wore white socks with throats of lace, and when I asked her why, she said, My feet are hibernating. When I asked my brother, he said she probably had fish fins instead of feet, and to find out we snipped a hole through her socks while she was sleeping. We slit her socks along the sole, parting them to show the stone pads of her feet. On her left foot, the three littlest toes were gone. No wound, no scars or sign of stitching, just stumps with rings like a tree. Sleeves of space where three toes might have grown up, been given names. My brother and I ran back to bed and hid the scissors under our mattress. In the morning, our mother was wearing a new pair of socks. Where did they go? we asked, and our mother refused to answer. I asked if she’d been preyed on by Hu Gu Po and she said not everything was a story. Weeks later, we found an assortment cookie tin behind the other cookie tin that held my birth certificate and her sewing kit, both of them in the pantry where our mother kept inedible things: blankets, batteries, retired knives, a titanium baseball bat. There was a cartoon bear indented into the lid of the tin, and the blue paint had been battered off. Inside it were hardened rings of ash and in the center, brown stones. At first we thought they were chrysalises of some kind, bark-covered tubes rattling as if something inside were trying to hatch. But there were nails still growing from them, caramelizing in the tin’s body heat. We had found her toes. They hummed as if they owned our hearts, and we thought there was still a chance they could be sewn back on. When we showed her, she said, I don’t want them back . My brother and I held a ceremony to bury the toes, even writing a eulogy: Here lie the toes of our mother. May the soil eat them and shit them out as beautiful trees that smell like our feet.

• From Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995)

  And Marcus? I wasn’t sure what had happened to Marcus. He should have had one more year left, but something had gotten to him midway through his junior year, something that I recognized, even if I couldn’t quite name it. I thought back to one evening, sitting with him in the library, before he’d decided to drop out of school. An Iranian student, an older balding man with a glass eye, was sitting across the table from us, and he had noticed Marcus reading a book on the economics of slavery. Although the drift of his eye gave the Iranian a menacing look, he was a friendly and curious man, and eventually he leaned over the table and asked Marcus a question about the book. “Tell me, please,” the man said. “How do you think such a thing as slavery was permitted to last for so many years?” “White people don’t see us as human beings,” Marcus said. “Simple as that. Most of ’em still don’t.” “Yes, I see. But what I mean to ask is, why didn’t black people fight?” “They did fight. Nat Turner, Denmark Vescey—” “Slave rebellions,” the Iranian interrupted. “Yes, I have read something about them. These were very brave men. But they were so few, you see. Had I been a slave, watching these people do what they did to my wife, my children … well, I would have preferred death. This is what I don’t understand—why so many men did not fight at all. Until death, you see?” I looked at Marcus, waiting for him to answer. But he remained silent, his face not angry as much as withdrawn, eyes fastened to a spot on the table. His lack of response confused me, but after a pause I took up the attack, asking the Iranian if he knew the names of the untold thousands who had leaped into shark-infested waters before their prison ships had ever reached American ports; asking if, once the ships had landed, he would have still preferred death had he known that revolt might only visit more suffering on women and children. Was the collaboration of some slaves any different than the silence of some Iranians who stood by and did nothing as Savak thugs murdered and tortured opponents of the Shah? How could we judge other men until we had stood in their shoes? This last remark seemed to catch the man off guard, and Marcus finally rejoined the conversation, repeating one of Malcolm X’s old saws about the difference between house Negroes and field Negroes. But he spoke as if he weren’t convinced of his own words, and after a few minutes he abruptly stood up and walked toward the door.