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 Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble (2014)

  They seem to, but maybe they’re just playing along. As for me, I am completely transfixed. I’ve never seen or heard anything like this. Have you ever received a call from one of those annoying telemarketers and wondered what it must be like on his end of the phone? How many people are in the room where he is sitting? How does he talk people into buying whatever he’s selling? How did he learn how to do this? How does he rationalize what he does? The online version of that telemarketer’s world is the one that I’ve now entered. I’m in the Land of Spam, learning how to send email to lists of names in the hope that some teeny tiny percentage of the recipients will open my message and buy something. It’s appalling, but also fascinating. I have to learn more. “You all must be pretty special to be here,” Dave, our trainer, tells us. “HubSpot gets thousands and thousands of applications. Just to be sitting here in this room means you’ve climbed past a lot of other really exceptional people. Did you know that it’s harder to get hired at HubSpot than it is to get accepted at Harvard?” That line about Harvard is one that gets tossed around a lot. I hear it over and over again. Halligan likes to tout it. I have no idea how they came up with the claim, but Harvard has a 6 percent acceptance rate, so I suppose they just figured out that in a certain year HubSpot had hired fewer than 6 percent of people whose resumes they had seen, so that makes HubSpot more exclusive than Harvard. This is ridiculous, and oddly enough not that big of a deal: McDonald’s and Walmart have at times also hired fewer than 6 percent of job applicants. Nevertheless, people at HubSpot take it seriously. I suppose it makes the new hires feel special. HubSpot seems to recruit a certain kind of person: young and easily influenced, kids who belonged to sororities and fraternities or played sports in college. Many are working in their first jobs. As far as I can tell there are no black people, not just among my recruiting class, but across the entire company. The HubSpotters are not just white but a certain kind of white: middle-class, suburban, mostly from the Boston area. They look the same, dress the same. The uniformity is amazing. HubSpot prides itself on having numbers for everything—it’s a data-driven organization—and for being radically transparent. Yet oddly enough, HR, or “people operations,” as it is called, claims to have no statistics on diversity. One day, after sitting through a company meeting and noticing the bleachy-clean, driven-snow, Mormon-level whiteness of the crowd, I send an email to a woman in HR asking if we have any statistics about diversity. She sends back a terse response: No. Why?

• From A Grief Observed (1961)

  The grave and the image are equally links with the irrecoverable and symbols for the unimaginable. But the image has the added disadvantage that it will do whatever you want. It will smile or frown, be tender, gay, ribald, or argumentative just as your mood demands. It is a puppet of which you hold the strings. Not yet of course. The reality is still too fresh; genuine and wholly involuntary memories can still, thank God, at any moment rush in and tear the strings out of my hands. But the fatal obedience of the image, its insipid dependence on me, is bound to increase. The flower-bed on the other hand is an obstinate, resistant, often intractable bit of reality, just as Mum in her lifetime doubtless was. As H. was. Or as H. is. Can I honestly say that I believe she now is anything? The vast majority of the people I meet, say, at work, would certainly think she is not. Though naturally they wouldn’t press the point on me. Not just now anyway. What do I really think? I have always been able to pray for the other dead, and I still do, with some confidence. But when I try to pray for H., I halt. Bewilderment and amazement come over me. I have a ghastly sense of unreality, of speaking into a vacuum about a nonentity. The reason for the difference is only too plain. You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you. It is easy to say you believe a rope to be strong and sound as long as you are merely using it to cord a box. But suppose you had to hang by that rope over a precipice. Wouldn’t you then first discover how much you really trusted it? The same with people. For years I would have said that I had perfect confidence in B.R. Then came the moment when I had to decide whether I would or would not trust him with a really important secret. That threw quite a new light on what I called my ‘confidence’ in him. I discovered that there was no such thing. Only a real risk tests the reality of a belief. Apparently the faith—I thought it faith—which enables me to pray for the other dead has seemed strong only because I have never really cared, not desperately, whether they existed or not. Yet I thought I did. But there are other difficulties. ‘Where is she now?’ That is, in what place is she at the present time? But if H. is not a body—and the body I loved is certainly no longer she—she is in no place at all. And ‘the present time’ is a date or point in our time series.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  When Ma married him, he was twenty years older. Take the number of years you’ve lived outside of my body and plant them like seeds, growing twice as many: that’s the thicket of years between your grandmother and grandfather. Except Ma doesn’t measure her life in years but in languages: Tayal and Yilan Creole in the indigo fields where she was born blue-assed and fish-eyed, Japanese during the war, Mandarin in the Nationalist-eaten city. Each language was worn outside her body, clasped around her throat like a collar. Once, Ba asked her to teach him to write the Tayal alphabet she learned from the missionaries. But she said his hands were not meant to write: They were welded for war, good only for gripping guns and his own dick. Jie thought this was funny, but I didn’t laugh. I have those hands. When you were born, I saw too much of your grandfather in you: rhyming hairlines and fish-hook fingers, the kind that snag on my hair, my shadow, the sky. You made a moon-sized fist at every man, even your own brother, who tried to bury you in a pot of soil and grow you back as a tree. You think burial is about finalizing what’s died. But burial is beginning: To grow anything, you must first dig a grave for its seed. Be ready to name what’s born. Decades ago in Yilan, Ba shat out his last bar of gold, along with a sash of seawater and silt. He buried it here, in this yard we never owned and that you were born far from. Ma liked Arkansas because it sounded like Ark, as in Noah’s. All of Ma’s words are from the Bible. Most are single-syllable: Job, Ark, Lot, Wife, Smite. The only way we’ll find the gold is if we shoot Ba’s skull open, extract the memory of where he buried it. Ma tried it once. She pointed the shotgun at Ba’s head and stomped the floorboards while saying Bang, believing the memory would evacuate from his head. Instead, Ba wet himself and Jie had to mop the floor with a dress. Apparently Ba needs a war to motivate him. Ba won’t unbury anything unless there’s a boat to be bought and married. We have a week to hire a war to come to our house. Or else, Ma says, the gold will stay buried and we’ll have fed all we own to the trees that grow moss like pubic hair. Jie suggests we hang Ba by his feet, upside down, so that all his memories flee upstream and pool in his skull. We’d have to unscrew his head somehow.

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

  The last part of the Synodicon adv. tragödiam Irenaei (in Mansi, v. 731 sqq.). Evagrius: H. E. i. 9 sqq. Theodoret: jEranisthv" (the Beggar) or Poluvmorfo" (the Multiformed),—a refutation of the Egyptian Eutychian system of doctrines (which begged together so much from various old heresies, as to form a now one), in three dialogues, written in 447 (Opera, ed. Schulze, vol. iv.). Literature. Petavius: De incarnatione Verbi, lib. i. c. 14–18, and the succeeding books, particularly iii., iv., and v. (Theolog. dogmatum, tom. iv. p. 65 sqq. ed. Par. 1650). Tillemont: Mémoires, tom. xv. pp. 479–719. C. A. Salig: De Eutychianismo ante Eutychen. Wolfenb. 1723. Walch: Ketzerhist. vol. vi. 3–640. Schröckh: vol. xviii. 433–492. Neander: Kirchengesch. iv. pp. 942–992. Baur: Gesch. der Lehre von d. Dreieinigkeit, etc. i. 800–825. Dorner: Gesch. d. Lehre v. d. Pers. Chr. ii. 99–149. Hefele (R.C.): Conciliengesch. ii. pp. 295–545. W. Cunningham: Historical Theology, i. pp. 311–’15. Comp. also the Monographs of Arendt (1835) and Perthel (1848) on Leo I. The result of the third universal council was rather negative than positive. The council condemned the Nestorian error, without fixing the true doctrine. The subsequent union of the Alexandrians and the Antiochians was only a superficial peace, to which each party had sacrificed somewhat of its convictions. Compromises are generally of short duration; principles and systems must develope themselves to their utmost consequences; heresies must ripen, and must be opened to the core. As the Antiochian theology begot Nestorianism, which stretched the distinction of the human and divine natures in Christ to double personality; so the Alexandrian theology begot the opposite error of Eutychianism or Monophysitism, which urged the personal unity of Christ at the expense of the distinction of natures, and made the divine Logos absorb the human nature. The latter error is as dangerous as the former. For if Christ is not true man, he cannot be our example, and his passion and death dissolve at last into mere figurative representations or docetistic show. A large portion of the party of Cyril was dissatisfied with the union creed, and he was obliged to purge himself of inconsistency. He referred the duality of natures spoken of in the symbol to the abstract distinction of deity and humanity, while the two are so made one in the one Christ, that after the union all separation ceases, and only one nature is to be recognized in the incarnate Son. The Logos, as the proper subject of the one nature, has indeed all human, or rather divine-human, attributes, but without a human nature. Cyril’s theory of the incarnation approaches Patripassianism, but differs from It in making the Son a distinct hypostasis from the Father. It mixes the divine and human; but It mixes them only in Christ, and so is Christo-theistic, but not pantheistic.1602 On the other side, the Orientals or Antiochians, under the lead of John, Ibas, and especially Theodoret, interpreted the union symbol in their sense of a

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

  There was one exception, a poet named Frank who lived in a dilapidated house in a run-down section of Waikiki. He had enjoyed some modest notoriety once, was a contemporary of Richard Wright and Langston Hughes during his years in Chicago—Gramps once showed me some of his work anthologized in a book of black poetry. But by the time I met Frank he must have been pushing eighty, with a big, dewlapped face and an ill-kempt gray Afro that made him look like an old, shaggy-maned lion. He would read us his poetry whenever we stopped by his house, sharing whiskey with Gramps out of an emptied jelly jar. As the night wore on, the two of them would solicit my help in composing dirty limericks. Eventually, the conversation would turn to laments about women. “They’ll drive you to drink, boy,” Frank would tell me soberly. “And if you let ’em, they’ll drive you into your grave.” I was intrigued by old Frank, with his books and whiskey breath and the hint of hard-earned knowledge behind the hooded eyes. The visits to his house always left me feeling vaguely uncomfortable, though, as if I were witnessing some complicated, unspoken transaction between the two men, a transaction I couldn’t fully understand. The same thing I felt whenever Gramps took me downtown to one of his favorite bars, in Honolulu’s red-light district. “Don’t tell your grandmother,” he would say with a wink, and we’d walk past hard-faced, soft-bodied streetwalkers into a small, dark bar with a jukebox and a couple of pool tables. Nobody seemed to mind that Gramps was the only white man in the place, or that I was the only eleven- or twelve-year-old. Some of the men leaning across the bar would wave at us, and the bartender, a big, light-skinned woman with bare, fleshy arms, would bring a Scotch for Gramps and a Coke for me. If nobody else was playing at the tables, Gramps would spot me a few balls and teach me the game, but usually I would sit at the bar, my legs dangling from the high stool, blowing bubbles into my drink and looking at the pornographic art on the walls—the phosphorescent women on animal skins, the Disney characters in compromising positions. If he was around, a man named Rodney with a wide-brimmed hat would stop by to say hello. “How’s school coming, captain?” “All right.” “You getting them A’s, ain’t you?” “Some.” “That’s good. Sally, buy my man here another Coke,” Rodney would say, peeling a twenty off a thick stack he had pulled from his pocket before he fell back into the shadows.

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

  I discovered this article, folded away among my birth certificate and old vaccination forms, when I was in high school. It’s a short piece, with a photograph of him. No mention is made of my mother or me, and I’m left to wonder whether the omission was intentional on my father’s part, in anticipation of his long departure. Perhaps the reporter failed to ask personal questions, intimidated by my father’s imperious manner; or perhaps it was an editorial decision, not part of the simple story that they were looking for. I wonder, too, whether the omission caused a fight between my parents. I would not have known at the time, for I was too young to realize that I was supposed to have a live-in father, just as I was too young to know that I needed a race. For an improbably short span it seems that my father fell under the same spell as my mother and her parents; and for the first six years of my life, even as that spell was broken and the worlds that they thought they’d left behind reclaimed each of them, I occupied the place where their dreams had been. CHAPTER TWO [image file=image_rsrc2W2.jpg] THE ROAD TO THE embassy was choked with traffic: cars, motorcycles, tricycle rickshaws, buses and jitneys filled to twice their capacity, a procession of wheels and limbs all fighting for space in the midafternoon heat. We nudged forward a few feet, stopped, found an opening, stopped again. Our taxi driver shooed away a group of boys who were hawking gum and loose cigarettes, then barely avoided a motor scooter carrying an entire family on its back—father, mother, son, and daughter all leaning as one into a turn, their mouths wrapped with handkerchiefs to blunt the exhaust, a family of bandits. Along the side of the road, wizened brown women in faded brown sarongs stacked straw baskets high with ripening fruit, and a pair of mechanics squatted before their open-air garage, lazily brushing away flies as they took an engine apart. Behind them, the brown earth dipped into a smoldering dump where a pair of roundheaded tots frantically chased a scrawny black hen. The children slipped in the mud and corn husks and banana leaves, squealing with pleasure, until they disappeared down the dirt road beyond.

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

  12 Samuel Purchas, the company’s propagandist, gave fullest expression to their ideology. 13 If Adam had not fallen, the whole world would have retained its original perfection and exploration would have been easy. With the arrival of sin, though, men became so depraved that they would have slaughtered one another had not God scattered them over the earth after the destruction of the Tower of Babel and kept them in ignorance of one another. Yet he had also decreed that commerce would bring them together again. In Eden, Adam had enjoyed all essential commodities, but these too had been dispersed after the Fall. Now, thanks to modern maritime technology, a country in one region could supply what was lacking in other places, and God could use the global market to redeem the non-Christian world. In America the Virginians would supply staples for famine- prone England and at the same time bring the gospel to the Indians. A company broadsheet explained that God no longer worked through prophets and miracles; the only way to evangelize the world these days was “mixtly, by discoverie, and trade of marchants.” Living on the Indians’ land and trading with them, the colonists would “sell to them the pearles of heaven” by “dailie conversation.” 14 So the quest for commodities, Purchas insisted, was not an end in itself, and the company would fail if it sought only profit. Purchas initially believed that the land must not be forcibly taken from the Indians because it had been assigned to them by God. 15 His Protestant ideology may have been paternalistic, but it also had a measure of respect for the indigenous peoples. Yet during the first two terrible winters, when the colonists were starving to death, some of their conscripted laborers had fled to the local Powhattans, and when the English governor asked their chief to return the fugitives, he disdainfully refused. 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.

• From The Art of Memoir

  carnal evidence, conjuring the tropical feel of Saigon, a place whose soppy atmosphere insidiously seeps in to warp the map, as the war he’ll show us will warp him and those he meets. The physical veil or mist acts as a physical metaphor, embodying the notion of “spookiness” or mystery. Whatever truth exists about the war is “veiled,” as the map is. 6. Vietnam was divided into its older territories of Tonkin, Annam and Cochin China, and to the west past Laos and Cambodia sat Siam, a kingdom. These old places have an exotic echo, and Herr’s listing them again shows his interest in historical information. Siam’s being a kingdom brings up for my generation the musical The King and I. But even if you don’t have those associations, its being a kingdom suggests an enchanted realm. 7. If dead ground could come back to haunt you the way dead people do, they’d have been able to mark my map CURRENT and burn the ones they’d been using since ’64. Being haunted by the dead is a psychological driver for the book, and here’s the first time Herr suggests burning up some dishonest depiction of the country— in this case the maps the military had been using. The disinformation of high command is part of what will obscure the truth for Herr—and, through him, for us—throughout the book. He calls them “they” here, making them separate from him, other. The capitalized CURRENT mimics an official stamp of the type military personnel used. The capitals suggest certainty, which—in Herr’s view of this war—is always bogus. He occupies a visionary’s demimonde. 8. but count on it, nothing like that was going to happen. The “count on it” is a little piece of hippie-esque locution that brings you inside the more intimate, colloquial speech Herr will use. The interjection forms a kind of bond with the reader. On a literal level, he’s also saying the military will never rethink their maps’ accuracy, because they lack the curiosity or fluidity of thought that makes changing their minds possible—and also makes truth impossible for them.

• From The Art of Memoir

  been able to bullshit myself that I do. By this I mean, I do my best, which is limited by the failures of my so-called mind. I come from a family of storytellers, and it’s true that having a close group of folks retell events over and over better logs the narrative into long-term storage. But memorized language can also calcify what’s in your head. Events grow stale when told by rote. Like old dough squeezed out of a pastry bag, the stories can feel too artificially shaped. Painful events told for humor can be drained of the real pathos or terror they first registered with. And negotiated memories can be like a piece of writing clawed over by an editorial board—anything at all dubious gets deleted, and any particular point of view abolished. Anybody in a family knows how tyrannical groupthink can be. Not long after my first memoir came out, my mother and sister started ringing up to recount scenes I’d written about using my language. As a younger sibling whose views tend to get heavily discounted, I might have registered this as a triumph—finally they get it! Instead I felt bereft. I had inadvertently become the official chronicler of our collective memories, and who knows what I was screwing up? Part of me longs for the old days when I couldn’t open my mouth without hearing how something only happened a few times or wasn’t that bad. In a warped way, being wrong was way better: it kept me folded more safely in the family delusion system.

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

  The learned Jerome wrote the life of Paul, some thirty years afterward, as it appears, on the authority of Anathas and Macarius, two disciples of Anthony. But he remarks, in the prologue, that many incredible things are said of him, which are not worthy of repetition. If he believed his story of the grave-digging lions, it is hard to imagine what was more credible and less worthy of repetition. In this Paul we have an example, of a canonized saint, who lived ninety years unseen and unknown in the wilderness, beyond all fellowship with the visible church, without Bible, public worship, or sacraments, and so died, yet is supposed to have attained the highest grade of piety. How does this consist with the common doctrine of the Catholic church respecting the necessity and the operation of the means of grace? Augustine, blinded by the ascetic spirit of his age, says even, that anchorets, on their level of perfection, may dispense with the Bible. Certain it is, that this kind of perfection stands not in the Bible, but outside of it. The proper founder of the hermit life, the one chiefly instrumental in giving it its prevalence, was St. Anthony of Egypt. He is the most celebrated, the most original, and the most venerable representative of this abnormal and eccentric sanctity, the "patriarch of the monks," and the "childless father of an innumerable seed."308

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

  The West was so far ahead that it was virtually impossible for the subject peoples to catch up. Increasingly the world would be divided between the West and the Rest, and this systemic political and economic inequality was sustained by military force. By the mid-nineteenth century, Britain controlled most of the Indian subcontinent, and after the Indian Mutiny (1857), in which atrocities were committed on both sides and some seventy thousand Indians were killed in a final desperate protest against foreign rule, the British formally deposed the last Moghul emperor. 94 Because the colony had to fit into the global market, a degree of modernization was essential: policing, the army, and the local economy had to be completely reorganized, and some of the “natives” introduced to modern ideas. Only very rarely had agrarian empires attempted to change the religious traditions of the common people, but in India British innovations had a drastic effect on the religious and political life of the subcontinent. The ease with which they had been so thoroughly subjugated was profoundly disturbing to the people of India since it implied that something was radically amiss with their social systems. 95 Traditional Indian aristocracies now had to cope not only with a foreign ruling class but with a wholly different socioeconomic order and with the new native cadres of clerks and bureaucrats, created by the British, who often earned more than the old elites. These Westernized Indians had become in effect a new caste, separated by a gulf of incomprehension from the unmodernized majority. The increasing democratization of their British rulers was alien to the social arrangements of India, which had always been strongly hierarchical and had encouraged synergy among disparate groups rather than organized unity. Moreover, confronted with the bewildering social variety of the subcontinent, the British latched on to the groups they mistakenly thought they understood and divided the population into “Hindu,” “Muslim,” “Sikh,” and “Christian” communities. The “Hindu” majority, however, consisted of multifarious castes, cults, and groups that did not see themselves as forming an organized religion, as Western people now understood this term. They had no unifying hierarchy and no standard set of rituals, practices, and beliefs. They worshipped numerous unrelated gods and engaged in devotions that had no logical connection with one another. Yet now they all found themselves lumped together into something the British called “Hinduism.” 96 The term hindu had been used first by the Muslim conquerors to describe the indigenous people; it had no specifically religious connotation but simply meant “native” or “local,” and the indigenous peoples, including Buddhists, Jains, and Sikhs, came to use it of themselves. Under the British, however, “Hindus” had to become a close-knit group and cultivate a broad, casteless communal identity that was alien to their age-old traditions.

• From My People (2022)

  Surrounded by trees, grass, and open air, the Northern youths were among alien things, which (before the rain and mud) were hostile to them. The innocence of their Southern counterparts—for whom the trees, grass, open air, and mud are a way of life—was a challenge to the Northerners. With such easy, church-oriented prey, the hip cat from the North immediately went into his thing—taking advantage of the uninitiated. Southerners had the history of the movement behind them. They had produced the sit-ins, the Freedom Rides, the bus boycotts—the 1960s Direct Action Task Force. And yet much of the Southern mystique got beaten by the hard, hostile lifestyle of the urban ghetto-dweller. No one is quite sure how many people moved into Resurrection City, although there was an attempt to register people as they came in. The registration count was 6,312, but the community was nothing if not mobile and there was no way to count the outflow. The people came to the District from all sections of the country. They came in bus caravans and on trains. Some came from the South in the Mule Train (which was put into a regular train in Atlanta because the horses were giving out); some came from the nearby North in cars or on foot. They came representing the church. They came representing the community. They came representing street gangs—those that would fight and those that wouldn’t. And many came representing themselves. Most came as followers. But, of necessity, a few emerged as leaders. Many came to participate in the campaign for as long as SCLC wanted them there, and then they planned to go home. Others came thinking of the North as a land of opportunity. And they came to stay forever. Today, the site where Resurrection City stood is cleared. After the sun baked the mud dry, patches of growing grass were placed there, and although the land is not quite so green as it was before, it is just as it was when the architects began designing Resurrection City on paper back in April. Perhaps if they had it to do over, they would change a few things, because, by now, they would have learned about the differences in poverty—that poor people do not automatically respond positively to one another. The design, on paper, had been impressive. Three architects (none of them Negroes), with the help of students of the Howard University School of Architecture (all of them Negroes), produced plans that called for modest A-frame structures, which could be built small enough for two and large enough for six or eight and which would house three thousand people for two to four months. The prefabricated units—25 percent of them A-frames and 75 percent of them dormitories—were to be assembled in Virginia by local white volunteers, then brought to Washington in trucks that would be unloaded next to the building sites, starting west and building eastward. By the time the first stake for an A-frame was driven in by Mr.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  "He did not stare, but cast a side-long glance at me as he went by. He was met by a workman—a strong and sturdy fellow, either a butcher or a smith by trade. The old man would evidently have slunk by unperceived, but the workman stopped him. I could not hear what they said, for though they were but a few steps away, they spoke in that hushed tone peculiar to lovers; but I seemed to be the object of their talk, for the workman turned and stared at me as I passed. They parted. "The workman walked on for twenty steps, then he turned on his heel and walked back exactly on a line with me, seemingly bent on meeting me face to face. "I looked at him. He was a brawny man, with massive features; clearly, a fine specimen of a male. As he passed by me he clenched his powerful fist, doubled his muscular arm at the elbow, and then moved it vertically hither and thither for a few times, like a piston-rod in action, as it slipped in and out of the cylinder. "Some signs are so evidently clear and full of meaning that no initiation is needed to understand them. This workman's sign was one of them. "Now I knew who all these night-walkers were. Why they so persistently stared at me, and the meaning of all their little tricks to catch my attention. Was I dreaming? I looked around. The workman had stopped, and he repeated his request in a different way. He shut his left fist, then thrust the forefinger of his right hand in the hole made by the palm and fingers, and moved it in and out. He was bluntly explicit. I was not mistaken. I hastened on, musing whether the cities of the plain had been destroyed by fire and brimstone. "As I learnt later in life, every large city has its particular haunts—its square, its garden for such recreation. And the police? Well, it winks at it, until some crying offence is committed; for it is not safe to stop the mouths of craters. Brothels of men-whores not being allowed, such trysting-places must be tolerated, or the whole is a modern Sodom or Gomorrah." "What! there are such cities now-a-days?" "Aye! for Jehovah has acquired experience with age; so He has got to understand His children a little better than He did of yore, for He has either come to a righter sense of toleration, or, like Pilate, He has washed His hands, and has quite discarded them.

• From The Art of Memoir

  Memoirist Carolyn See recalled her husband bailing on her while she metaphorically held on to his leg. But her children and ex corrected her, saying she’d sent him packing. My friend David Carr of the New York Times tried to track down the facts about his most deranged coke-fiend years in The Night of the Gun, where he used investigative skills and a video camera to interview old running partners in Minneapolis. The highlight concerns a faceoff with a gun- toting maniac in an alley. The big reversal? It turned out Carr was the maniac wagging the gun. When he recounted that discovery to me years later, the discrepancy still set him back. In fairness to David’s memory, he was strung out at the time, but still. How can the mind get it so right, yet so wrong? Neurologist Jonathan Mink, MD, explained to me that with such intense memories as David’s, we often record the emotion alone, all detail blurred into unreadable smear. But lost memories are more our concern, and major lapses happen when episodic memory—events or experiences, feelings, times, places—and autobiographical memory (like episodic, but you- specific) move into semantic memory—thoughts or concepts, facts, meanings, knowledge. For me, fitting an episode into words squashes it down a little. Instead of lively sensations, I often wind up with a story containing an idea or opinion I may not even have anymore. These language memories I have to distrust a little. In Mary McCarthy’s Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, she writes of her son insisting that Mussolini was physically thrown off their bus in Hyannis, Massachusetts, in 1943, because the driver pulled over to the curb and “shouted the latest piece of news: ‘They’ve thrown Mussolini out.’” This yanks a laugh from you. Unless you’re a memoirist. It makes me bite my already-chewed-down nails. The thought of misrepresenting someone or burning down his house with shitty recall wakes me up at night. I always tell my students that doubt runs through me every day I work, like the subway’s third rail. So when people ask in challenging tones how I can possibly recall everything I’ve published, I often fess up, Obviously I can’t. But I’ve

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  Both Infancy Narratives contain linear genealogies for Jesus, but only some names occur in both (to the discreet puzzlement of Christian commentators from early times, resulting in much busyness in trying to reconcile them). Both genealogies end in a feature that makes no sense for a family tree, or for conventional accounts of the Incarnation: their genealogical goal is Joseph, who on any reading of the stories in the Infancy Narratives cannot be Jesus’s biological father. Both genealogies rather lamely make that clear, Luke launching his version by speaking of Jesus as ‘the son (as was supposed) of Joseph’ (Luke 3.23). [6] Matthew has previously stated that Joseph ‘knew [Mary] not’ (that is, did not consummate their marriage) ‘until she had borne a son’: that is, Jesus (Matt. 1.25). The peculiarity of Matthew’s and Luke’s genealogies, their biological pointlessness, is a clue to how and why they evolved. These genealogies share a purpose in linking Jesus as Messiah to the ancient hero King David, who features in both of them, via Joseph. That purpose links to the other shared feature in Matthew’s and Luke’s infancy stories: they locate the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem, ‘the city of David’, where the prophet Samuel had discovered the founder of the Davidic royal line (1 Sam. 16). Yet everywhere else in the Gospels, as well as in the New Testament book called the Acts of the Apostles, Jesus is described as coming from the villages of Nazareth or Capernaum in Galilee. In fact, not even Matthew and Luke mention Jesus’s birth in Bethlehem outside their Infancy Narratives, and the single other reference to Bethlehem in the rest of the New Testament is a note of scepticism. John’s Gospel describes an argument about whether or not Jesus was the Messiah; sceptics pointed out that Jesus was from Nazareth, while the Hebrew prophet Micah had foretold the birth of the Messiah in Bethlehem, about a hundred miles to the south. [7] Luke solves this geographical difficulty (Luke 2.1–5) by claiming that Joseph and Mary had been forced to travel from Nazareth to Bethlehem by a Roman imperial tax decree. This necessitated that everyone should return to their birth city to be enrolled: so to the City of David the couple must return, on genealogical grounds. What at first sounds like an historical detail in fact reveals how unhistorical the Infancy Narratives are, before ever considering

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  "'How? Is it to be a masquerade?' "'We all have our little hobbies. Some men like soldiers, others sailors; some are fond of tightrope dancers, others of dandies. There are men who, though in love with their own sex, only care for them in women's clothes. L'habit ne fait pas le moine is not always a truthful proverb, for you see that even in birds the males display their gayest plumage to captivate their mates.' "'And what clothes should you like me to wear, for you are the only being I care to please?' said I. "'None.' "'Oh! but——' "'You'll feel shy, to be seen naked?' "'Of course.' "'Well, then, a tight-fitting cycling suit; it shews off the figure best.' "'Very well; and you?' "'I'll always dress exactly as you do.' "On the evening in question we drove to the painter's studio, the outside of which was, if not quite dark, at least very dimly lighted. Teleny tapped three times, and after a little while Briancourt himself came to open. "Whatever faults the general's son had, his manners were those of the French nobility, therefore perfect; his stately gait might even have graced the court of the grand Monarque; his politeness was unrivalled—in fact, he possessed all those 'small, sweet courtesies of life,' which, as Sterne says, 'beget inclinations to love at first sight.' He was about to usher us in, when Teleny stopped him. "'Wait a moment,' said he, 'could not Camille have a peep at your harem first? You know he is but a neophyte in the Priapean creed. I am his first lover.' "'Yes, I know,' interrupted Briancourt, sighing, 'and I cannot say sincerely, may you long be the last.' "'And not being inured to the sight of such revelry he will be induced to run away like Joseph from Mrs. Potiphar.' "'Very well, do you mind giving yourself the trouble to come this way?' "And with these words he led us through a dimly-lighted passage, and up a winding staircase into a kind of balcony made out of old Arab mouchambiè, brought to him by his father from Tunis or Algiers. "'From here you can see everything without being seen, so ta-ta for a while, but not for long, as supper will soon be served.' "As I stepped in this kind of loggia and looked down into the room, I was, for a moment, if not dazzled, at least perfectly bewildered. It seemed as if from this every-day world of ours I had been transported into the magic realms of fairy-land. A thousand lamps of varied form filled the room with a strong yet hazy light. There were wax tapers upheld by Japanese cranes, or glowing in massive bronze or silver candlesticks, the plunder of Spanish altars; star-shaped or octagonal lamps from Moorish mosques or Eastern synagogues; curiously-wrought iron cressets of tortured and fantastic designs; chandeliers of murous, iridiscent glass work reflected in Dutch gilt, or Castel-Durante majolica sconces.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  "Then, with a deeper bow than he had vouchsafed to the public, he was about to leave the room, when he stopped again: 'But you, M. Des Grieux, you said you were not going to stay, may I request the pleasure of your company?' "'Most willingly,' said I, eagerly. "Briancourt again smiled ironically—why, I could not understand. Then he hummed a snatch of "Madame Angot," which operetta was then in fashion, the only words which caught my ears being— "'Il est, dit-on, le favori,' and these were marked purposely. "Teleny, who had heard them as well as I had, shrugged his shoulders, and muttered something between his teeth. "'A carriage is waiting for me at the back door,' said he, slipping his arm under mine. 'Still, if you prefer walking——' "'Very much so, for it has been so stiflingly hot in the theatre.' "'Yes, very hot,' added he, repeating my words, and evidently thinking of something else. Then all at once, as if struck by a sudden thought, 'Are you superstitious?' said he. "'Superstitious?' I was rather struck by the quaintness of his question. 'Well—yes, rather, I believe.' "'I am very much so. I suppose it is my nature, for you see the Gipsy element is strong in me. They say that educated people are not superstitious. Well, first I have had a wretched education; and then I think that if we really knew the mysteries of nature, we could probably explain all those strange coincidences that are ever happening.' Then, stopping abruptly, 'Do you believe in the transmission of thought, of feelings, of sensations?' "'Well, I really do not know—I——' "'You must believe,' added he, authoritatively. 'You see we have had the same vision at once. The first thing you saw was the Alhambra, blazing in the fiery light of the sun, was it not?' "'It was,' said I, astonished. "'And you thought you would like to feel that powerful withering love that shatters both the body and the soul? You do not answer. Then afterwards came Egypt, Antinöus and Adrian. You were the Emperor, I was the slave.' "Then, musingly, he added, almost to himself: 'Who knows, perhaps I shall die for you one day!' And his features assumed that sweet resigned look which is seen on the demi-god's statues. "I looked at him bewildered. "'Oh! you think I am mad, but I am not, I am only stating facts. You did not feel that you were Adrian, simply because you are not accustomed to such visions; doubtless all this will be clearer to you some day; as for me, there is, you must know, Asiatic blood in my veins, and——' "But he did not finish his phrase, and we walked on for a while in silence, then: "'Did you not see me turn round during the gavotte, and look for you? I began to feel you just then, but I could not find you out; you remember, don't you?'

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  The keen mind I recognize in you, Therese, will enable you to appreciate them. I believe you have been arrested by two irregularities you have remarked in us: you are astonished at the piquant sensation experienced by some of our friends where it is a question of matters commonly beheld as fetid or impure, and you are similarly surprised that our voluptuous faculties are susceptible of powerful excitation by actions which, in your view, bear none but the emblem of ferocity; let us analyze both these tastes and attempt, if 'tis possible, to convince you that there is nothing simpler or more normal in this world than the pleasures which are their result. "Extraordinary, you declare, that things decayed, noisome, and filthy are able to produce upon our senses the irritation essential to precipitate their complete delirium; but before allowing oneself to be startled by this, it would be better to realize, Therese, that objects have no value for us save that which our imagination imparts to them; it is therefore very possible, bearing this constant truth well in mind, that not only the most curious but even the vilest and most appalling things may affect us very appreciably. The human imagination is a faculty of man's mind whereupon, through the senses' agency, objects are painted, whereby they are modified, and wherein, next, ideas become formed, all in reason of the initial glimpsing of those external objects. But this imagination, itself the result of the peculiar organization a particular individual is endowed with, only adopts the received objects in such-and-such a manner and afterward only creates ideas according to the effects produced by perceived objects' impact: let me give you a comparison to help you grasp what I am exposing. Therese, have you not seen those differently formed mirrors, some of which diminish objects, others of which enlarge them; some give back frightful images of things, some beautify things; do you now imagine that were each of these types of mirrors to possess both a creative and an objective faculty, they would not each give a completely different portrait of the same man who stands before them, and would not that portrait be different thanks to the manner in which each mirror had perceived the object? If to the two faculties we have just ascribed to the mirror, there were added a third of sensation, would not this man, seen by it in such-andsuch a manner, be the source of that one kind of feeling the mirror would be able, indeed would be obliged, to conceive for the sort of being the mirror had perceived?

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  The male and female spaces, then, were dominated, respectively, by height and downfall and by strong motion and its channeling or arrest; and by static interiors which were open or simply enclosed, and peaceful or intruded upon. It may come as a surprise to some and seem a matter of course to others that here sexual differences in the organization of a play scene paralleled the morphology of genital differentiation itself; in the male, an external organ, erectable and intrusive in character, serving the channelization of mobile sperm cells; in the female, internal organs, with vestibular access, leading to statically expectant ova. The question is: what is really surprising about this, what only too obvious, and in either case, what does it tell us about the two sexest191 What indeed? Since Erikson admits, without further reference to age and education, that these were young people in their “teens,” it is likely to prove they have absorbed the socialization imposed upon them by their culture-policemen, Indians, story-book animals and all. He admits that youth of this age found his experiment banal and tiresome, and performed to be obliging. Erikson invites us to co-operate in his vision of piano playing as “static” and “peaceful” rather than boring,192 and a moving automobile as equivalent to “mobile sperm cells.” We are further asked to accept these distinctions as based on “somatic design,” an elaborate term for body parts, and to find in the paraphernalia of Erikson’s playroom, nature’s explanation for the sexual polarity our culture has created between the roles, temperament, and status of the sexes. What the experiment does seem to illustrate, and with remarkable clarity, is that each group responded with extreme sensitivity to its conditioning; one to passive domesticity, the other to egoistic achievement, partly constructive (towers, machines, ornament) and partly destructive (cannons, accidents, ruins). Yet for all the efficiency of the socialization (perhaps somewhat facilitated by Erikson’s standardized Hollywood movie equipment) not every youth responded as planned. Some unaccounted for number failed to conform: a girl who did outside scenes is dismissed as a “tomboy,” a boy who was insufficiently aggressive would also register as a deviate (effeminate), popularly regarded as a graver danger. One must also recall the normative attitude in which sexual identity is viewed. In 1964, when this study was first publicized, sexual reaction had created a climate where failure to conform to sexual category was seen as unhealthy or disturbing.

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  The fantastic is the most ambivalent of the three schools of attitude. Each of the first two had a definite stand to take for or against the sexual revolution, but the third is confused in its response. Despite fantasy’s elusive and escapist manner (for it usually refused to face social realities even more resolutely than chivalry, which had at least troubled to prepare a formula), it had a considerable contribution to make to the sexual revolution. Through its tactics of refuge in the unconscious and in fantasy, it released more sexual energy and expressed more tenuous and deeply buried sexual attitudes than did its rivals. As a result it was in the vanguard of the sexual revolution in the area of sexuality itself; suggesting, however unsystematically, greater measures for relief in the areas of sexual mores and sexual “deviance,” than any other. It was the center also of homosexual sentiment, and of certain other practices, which, unlike homosexuality, deserve to be labeled as sexually perverse. Although its means were irrational and often circuitous, occasionally even perverse, it was able to explore sexual politics at an inchoate primary level. The chivalrous school, deeply anti-revolutionary and conservative, was, by comparison, utterly unproductive save for its empty proclamations. It was the realists and the fantasists who brought about the revolution. However, the first group were far more practical and to the point, the fantasists often so incoherent as to be liable to subversion, and sometimes so ambivalent that they could hardly be relied upon for more than that cultural information which all representative fantasy affords. It should be remembered that only at the extreme of each class were unmixed attitudes to be found; needless to say, all three were coterminous. Reformers were often afraid of the effects of any relaxation of sexual mores; members of the fantasy school were afraid, delighted, and guilty all at once. Reforming novels were also full of chivalrous sentiment, even given to optimistic assurances that the unpleasantness they described was unique or exceptional and could be solved by love alone. It is impossible, even in a chapter so embarrassingly lengthy, to do any real justice to the literature of the first phase, a subject which merits a treatment of its own in one or several volumes. It is imperative therefore that we limit ourselves to these few generalizations and to an examination of a small number of lesser-known but representative works. The most famous products of revolutionary agitation, the plays of Shaw and Ibsen, the work of Virginia Woolf, are, whatever their present fortunes, perhaps too familiar. It seemed more interesting to hit upon a few texts which are not much read, or not read in this context, to furnish us with key examples-three novels by Hardy, Meredith, and Charlotte Brontë, and a prose poem by Oscar Wilde.