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 My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  I had got accustomed to spend all my spare time with Reece, Dell, Bob or the Boss, and from all of them I learned a good deal. In a short time I had exhausted the Boss and Reece; but Dell and Bob each in his own way was richly equipped, and while Dell introduced me to literature and economics, Bob taught me some of the mysteries of cowpunching and the peculiar morals of Texan cattle. Every little herd of those half-wild animals had its own leader, it appeared and followed him fanatically. When we brought together a few different bunches in our corral, there was confusion worse confounded till after much hooking and some fighting a new leader would be chosen whom all would obey. But sometimes we lost five or six animals in the mellay. I found that Bob could ride his pony in among the half-savage brutes and pick out the future leader for them. Indeed, at the great sports held near Taos, he went in on foot where many herds had been corralled and led out the leader amid the triumphant cheers of his compatriots who challenged los Americanos to emulate that feat. Bob’s knowledge of cattle was uncanny and all I know I learned from him. For the first week or so, Reece and the Boss were out all day buying cattle; Reece would generally take Charlie and Jack Freeman, young Americans, to drive his purchases home to the big corral; while the Boss called indifferently first on one and then on another to help him. Charlie was the first to lay off: he had caught a venereal disease, the very first night and had to lie up for more than a month. One after the other, all the younger men fell to the same plague. I went into the nearest town and consulted doctors and did what I could for them; but the cure was often slow for they would drink now and again to drown care and several in this way, made the disease chronic. I could never understand the temptation; to get drunk was bad enough; but in that state to go with some dirty Greaser woman, or half-breed prostitute was incomprehensible to me.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  An advanced thinker sees the relations of his topics in such masses and so instantaneously that when he comes to explain to younger minds it is often hard to say which grows the more perplexed, he or the pupil. In every university there are admirable investigators who are notoriously bad lecturers. The reason is that they never spontaneously see the subject in the minute articulate way in which the student needs to have it offered to his slow reception. They grope for the links, but the links do not come. Bowditch, who translated and annotated Laplace's Mécanique Céleste, said that whenever his author prefaced a proposition by the words 'it is evident,' he knew that many hours of hard study lay before him. When two minds of a high order, interested in kindred subjects, come together, their conversation is chiefly remarkable for the summariness of its allusions and the rapidity of its transitions. Before one of them is half through a sentence the other knows his meaning and replies. Such genial play with such massive materials, such an easy hashing of light over far perspectives, such careless indifference to the dust and apparatus that ordinarily surround the subject and seem to pertain to its essence, make these conversations seem true feasts forgoes to a listener who is educated enough to follow them at all. His mental lungs breathe more deeply, in an atmosphere more broad and vast than is their wont. On the other hand, the excessive explicitness and short- windedness of an ordinary man are as wonderful as they are tedious to the man of genius. But we need not go as far as the ways of genius. Ordinary social intercourse will do. There the charm of conversation is in direct proportion to the possibility of abridgment and elision, and in inverse ratio to the need of explicit statement. With old friends a word stands for a whole story or set of opinions. With new-comers everything must be gone over in detail. Some persons have a real mania for completeness, they must express every step. They are the most intolerable of companions, and although their mental energy may in its way be great, they always strike us as weak and second-rate. In short, the essence of plebeianism, that which separates vulgarity from aristocracy, is perhaps less a defect than an excess, the constant need to animadvert upon matters which for the aristocratic temperament do not exist. To ignore, to disdain to consider, to overlook, are the essence of the 'gentleman.' Often most provokingly so; for the things ignored may be of the deepest moral consequence.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  The uncritical render, giving his first careless glance at the subject, will say that there is no mystery in this, and that 'of course' local signs must appear alongside of each other, each in its own place;—there is no other way possible. But the more philosophic student, whose business it is to discover difficulties quite as much as to get rid of them, will reflect that it is conceivable that the partial factors might fuse into a larger space, and yet not each be located within it any more than a voice is located in a chorus. He will wonder how, after combining into the line, the points can become severally alive again: the separate puffs of a, 'sirene' no longer strike the ear after they have fused into a certain pitch of sound. He will recall the fact that when, after looking at things with one eye closed, we double, by opening the other eye, the number of retinal points affected, the new retinal sensations do not as a rule appear alongside of the old ones and additional to them, but merely make the old ones seem larger and nearer. Why should the affection of new points on the same retina have so different a result? In fact, we will see no sort of logical connection between (l) the original separate local signs, (2) the line as a unit, (3) the line with the points discriminated in it, and (4) the various nerve-processes which subserve all these different things. We will suspect our local sign of being a very slippery and ambiguous sort of creature. Positionless at first, it no sooner appears in the midst of a gang of companions than it is found maintaining the strictest position of its own, and assigning place to each of its associates. How is this possible? Must we accept what we rejected a, while ago as absurd, and admit the points each to have position in se? Or must we suspect that our whole construction has been fallacious, and that we have tried to conjure up, out of association, qualities which the associates never contained?

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  The mental condition which accompanies these systematized anæsthesias and amnesias is a very curious one. The anæsthesia is not a genuine sensorial one, for if you make a real red cross (say) on a sheet of white paper invisible to an hypnotic subject, and yet cause him to look fixedly at a dot on the paper on or near the cross, he will, on transferring his eye to a blank sheet, see a bluish-green after-image of the cross. This proves that it has impressed his sensibility. He has felt it, but not perceived it. He had actively ignored it, refused to recognize it, as it were. Another experiment proves that he must distinguish it first in order thus to ignore it. Make a stroke on paper or blackboard, and tell the subject it is not there, and he will see nothing but the clean paper or board. Next, he not looking, surround the original stroke with other strokes exactly like it, and ask him what he sees. He will point out one by one all the new strokes slid omit the original one every time, no matter how numerous the new strokes may be, or in what order they are arranged. Similarly, if the original single stroke to which he is blind be doubled by a prism of sixteen degrees placed before one of his eyes (both being kept open), he will say that he now sees one stroke, and point in the direction in which the image seen through the prism lies. Obviously, then, he is not blind to the kind of stroke in the least. He is blind only to one individual stroke of that kind in a particular position on the board or paper,—that is, to a particular complex object; and, paradoxical as it may seem to say so, he must distinguish it with great accuracy from others like it, in order to remain blind to it when the others are brought near. He 'apperceives' it, as a preliminary to not seeing it at all! How to conceive of this state of mind is not easy. It would be much simpler to understand the process, if adding new strokes made the first one visible. There would then be two different objects apperceived as totals,—paper with one stroke, paper with two strokes; and, blind to the former, he would see all that was in the latter, because he would have apperceived it as a different total in the first instance. A process of this sort occurs sometimes (not always) when the new strokes, instead of Being mere repetitions of the original one, are lines which combine with it into a total effect, say a human face. The subject of the trance then may regain his sight of the line to which he had previously been blind, by seeing it as part of the face.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  And though the directions of the scraping differ so completely inter se, not one of them can be identified with the particular direction in the outer world to which it corresponds. The space of the tooth- sensibility is thus really a little world by itself, which can only become congruent with the outer space world by farther experiences which shall alter its bulk, identify its directions, fuse its margins, and finally embed it as a definite part within a definite whole. And even though every joint's rotations should be felt to vary inter se as so many differences of direction in a common room; even though the same were true of diverse tracings on the skin, and of diverse tracings on the retina respectively, it would still not follow that feelings of direction, on these different surfaces, are intuitively comparable among each other, or with the other directions yielded by the feelings of the semi-circular canals. It would not follow that we should immediately judge the relations of them all to each other in one space-world. If with the arms in an unnatural attitude we 'feel' things, we are perplexed about their shape, size, and position. Let the reader lie on his back with his arms stretched above his head, and it will astonish him to find how in able he is to recognize the geometrical relations of objects placed within reach of his hands. But the geometrical relations here spoken of are nothing but identities recognized between the directions and sizes perceived in this way and those perceived in the more usual ways. The two ways do not fit each other intuitively. How lax the connection between the system of visual and the system of tactile directions is in man, appears from the facility with which microscopists learn to reverse the movements of their hand in manipulating things on the stage of the instrument. To move the slide to the seen left they must draw it to the felt right. But in a very few days the habit becomes a second nature. So in tying our cravat, shaving before a mirror, etc., the right and left sides are inverted, and the directions of our hand movements are the opposite of what they seen. Yet this never annoys us. Only when by accident we try to tie the cravat of another person do we learn that there are two ways of combining sight and touch perceptions. Let any one try for the first time to write or draw while looking at the image of his hand and paper in a mirror, and he will be utterly bewildered. But a very short training will teach him to undo in this respect the associations of his previous lifetime.

• From Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (2020)

  Standing on the stage where Trump now stood, I had led prayers, performed in Christian “praise teams,” and, during choir rehearsal, flirted with the man who would become my husband. We married in a church just down the road. Although I moved away after college, the space remained intimately familiar. But as I watched those in the overflow crowd waving signs, laughing at insults, and shouting back in affirmation, I wondered who these people were. I didn’t recognize them. Not everyone present that day shared in the enthusiasm for Trump. Some were there out of curiosity. Others came in protest. A small group of residents, including students from the college and the Christian grade school, stood bundled against the chill, holding handmade signs proclaiming “Love Your Neighbors” and “Perfect Love Casts Out Fear.” But their numbers were dwarfed by Trump’s supporters. Their numbers were again dwarfed on November 8, 2016, when 82 percent of Sioux County voters voted for Donald Trump—a proportion remarkably close to the 81 percent of white evangelical voters who backed Trump, according to national exit polls, and proved crucial to his victory over Hillary Clinton.3 Trump’s confidence in the loyalty of his followers seemed like bluster at the time, but it soon took on a prophetic ring. His evangelical supporters stuck by his side even as he mocked opponents, incited violence at his rallies, and boasted of his “manhood” on national television. Then there were Trump’s sexual indiscretions. Divorce was one thing, rumors of sexual escapades another, but the release of the Access Hollywood tape furnished irrefutable evidence of the candidate speaking in lewd terms about seducing and assaulting women. How could “family values” conservatives support a man who flouted every value they insisted they held dear? How could the self-professed “Moral Majority” embrace a candidate who reveled in vulgarity? How could evangelicals who’d turned “WWJD” (“What Would Jesus Do?”) into a national phenomenon justify their support for a man who seemed the very antithesis of the savior they claimed to emulate? Pundits scrambled to explain. Evangelicals were holding their noses, choosing the lesser of two evils—and Hillary Clinton was the greatest evil. Evangelicals were thinking in purely transactional terms, as Trump himself is often said to do, voting for Trump because he promised to deliver Supreme Court appointments that would protect the unborn and secure their own “religious liberty.” Or maybe the polls were misleading. By confusing “evangelicals-in-name-only” with good, church-attending, Bible-believing Christians, sloppy pollsters were giving evangelicalism a bad rap. But evangelical support for Trump was no aberration, nor was it merely a pragmatic choice. It was, rather, the culmination of evangelicals’ embrace of militant masculinity, an ideology that enshrines patriarchal authority and condones the callous display of power, at home and abroad. By the time Trump arrived proclaiming himself their savior, conservative white evangelicals had already traded a faith that privileges humility and elevates “the least of these” for one that derides gentleness as the province of wusses.

• From Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (2020)

  Trump promised to “bring it back bigger and better and stronger than ever before.” He promised to “Make America Great Again.”7 Trump’s opening barrage was shocking enough, but his rhetoric only devolved over the course of a heated primary season. He fulminated on Twitter, derided Cruz’s wife for her physical appearance, and ended up boasting about the size of his penis on national television during a primary debate. The more raucous the campaign grew, the more emboldened Trump became. And the more evangelicals seemed to fall in behind him. Even before the first primary debate, mounting evidence pointed to Trump’s popularity among white evangelicals. A poll conducted in July 2015 found 20 percent of Republican-leaning white evangelicals supporting Donald Trump, compared to 14 percent for Scott Walker, 12 percent for Huckabee, and 11 percent for Jeb Bush. Marco Rubio came in at 7 percent, and Ted Cruz at just 5 percent. Journalists struggled to explain the baffling phenomenon of evangelical support for “the brash Manhattan billionaire” who seemed to stand for everything they despised. What could compel “family-values” evangelicals to flock to this “immodest, arrogant, foul-mouthed, money-obsessed, thrice-married, and until recently, pro-choice” candidate? Many evangelical leaders shared this bewilderment. Not a few remained skeptical of reports of evangelical support. “I haven’t talked to a pastor yet who is supporting Donald Trump,” insisted Russell Moore. “I think what’s happening right now is that we’re in the reality TV phase of the presidential campaign where people are looking to send a message rather than hand over the nuclear codes to a person.” Trump knew how to get attention, and he knew how to tap into anger and resentment. Evangelicals were just sending a message.8 But as evangelical support for Trump proved to be more than a passing fancy, evangelical leaders confronted the limits of their own influence. This was true on a national level, with the old guard discovering that their endorsements of Rubio or Cruz didn’t seem to be quelling the surge of support for Trump, and on the local level, as pastors realized the limits of their power even within their own congregations. “It’s the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen,” wrote evangelical activist Randy Brinson. “It’s like this total reversal of the shepherd and the flock,” with congregants threatening to leave their churches if their pastors opposed Trump.9 By early 2016, a few leaders were starting to get on board with grassroots enthusiasm for the unconventional candidate. Jerry Falwell Jr. and Robert Jeffress were two of Trump’s earliest and most brazen supporters. In January, Falwell invited Trump to speak at Liberty University’s convocation. Several months earlier Cruz had launched his campaign at Liberty, but now the enthusiasm for Trump was far greater. Introducing Trump, Falwell spoke of his father’s support for Ronald Reagan over Southern Baptist Jimmy Carter: “When he walked into the voting booth, he wasn’t electing a Sunday school teacher or a pastor or even a president who shared his theological beliefs.” He was electing a leader.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  If with the arms in an unnatural attitude we 'feel' things, we are perplexed about their shape, size, and position. Let the reader lie on his back with his arms stretched above his head, and it will astonish him to find how in able he is to recognize the geometrical relations of objects placed within reach of his hands. But the geometrical relations here spoken of are nothing but identities recognized between the directions and sizes perceived in this way and those perceived in the more usual ways. The two ways do not fit each other intuitively. How lax the connection between the system of visual and the system of tactile directions is in man, appears from the facility with which microscopists learn to reverse the movements of their hand in manipulating things on the stage of the instrument. To move the slide to the seen left they must draw it to the felt right. But in a very few days the habit becomes a second nature. So in tying our cravat, shaving before a mirror, etc., the right and left sides are inverted, and the directions of our hand movements are the opposite of what they seen. Yet this never annoys us. Only when by accident we try to tie the cravat of another person do we learn that there are two ways of combining sight and touch perceptions. Let any one try for the first time to write or draw while looking at the image of his hand and paper in a mirror, and he will be utterly bewildered. But a very short training will teach him to undo in this respect the associations of his previous lifetime. Prisms show this in an even more striking way. If the eyes be armed with spectacles containing slightly prismatic glasses with their bases turned, for example, towards the right, every object looked at will be apparently translocated to the left; and the hand put forth to grasp ally which object will make the mistake of passing beyond it on the left side. But less than an hour of practice in wearing such spectacles rectifies the judgment so that no more mistakes are made. In fact the new-formed associations are already so strong, that when the prisms are first laid aside again the opposite error is committed, the habits of a lifetime violated, and the hand now passed to the right of every object which it seeks to touch.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  Subjects in this condition will receive and execute suggestions of crime, and act out a theft, forgery, arson, or murder. A girl will believe that she is married to her hypnotizer, etc. It is unfair, however, to say that in these cases the subject is a pure puppet with no spontaneity. His spontaneity is certainly not in abeyance so far as things go which are harmoniously associated with the suggestion given him. He takes the text from his operator; but he may amplify and develop it enormously as he acts it out. His spontaneity is lost only for those systems of ideas which conflict with the suggested delusion, The latter is thus 'systematized'; the rest of consciousness is shutoff, excluded, dissociated from it. In extreme cases the rest of the mind would seem to be actually abolished and the hypnotic subject to be literally a changed personality, a being in one of those 'second' states which we studied in Chapter X. But the reign of the delusion is often not as absolute as this. If the thing suggested be too intimately repugnant, the subject may strenuously resist and get nervously excited in consequence, even to the point of having an hysterical attack. The conflicting ideas slumber in the background and merely permit those in the foreground to have their way until a real emergency arises; then they assert their rights. As M. Delbœuf says, the subject surrenders himself good-naturedly to the performance, stabs with the pasteboard dagger you give him because he knows what it is, and fires off the pistol because he knows it has no ball; but for a real murder he would not be your man. It is undoubtedly true that subjects are often well aware that they are acting a part. They know that what they do is absurd. They know that the hallucination which they see, describe, and act upon, is not really there. They may laugh at themselves; and they always recognize the abnormality of their state when asked about it, and call it 'sleep.' One often notices a sort of mocking smile upon them, as if they mere playing a comedy, and they may even say on 'coming to' that they were shamming all the while. These facts have misled ultra-skeptical people so far as to make them doubt the genuineness of any hypnotic phenomena at all. But, save the consciousness of 'sleep,' they do not occur in the deeper conditions; and when they do occur they are only a natural consequence of the fact that the 'monoideism' is incomplete. The background-thoughts still exist, and have the power of comment on the suggestions, but no power to inhibit their motor and associative effects. A similar condition is frequent enough in the waking state, when an impulse carries us away and our 'will' looks on wonderingly like an impotent spectator. These 'shammers' continue to sham in just the same way, every new time you hypnotize them, until at last they are forced to admit that if shamming there be, it is something very different from the free voluntary shamming of waking hours.

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

  This is fine. I don’t make a fuss about stuff like this. The one thing I don’t want to be is the curmudgeon who goes around saying, “Back in my day, we did things this way.” I’ve been warned that at a place like HubSpot the worst thing you can say is that anything that was done at your last company is something we should think about doing here. Even if your last company was Google or Apple, nobody at HubSpot wants to be told, especially by some newcomer—some outsider—that there might be a better way. HubSpot is HubSpot. It’s unique. It’s different. HubSpot has its own way of doing things. We’re rethinking everything. We’re challenging all the assumptions. We’re not just making software, we’re reinventing the way companies do business. Maybe that sounds arrogant, but who knows? Maybe the people at HubSpot have figured something out. Maybe the best way to do something really innovative is to hire a bunch of young people who have no experience and therefore no preconceived notions about how to run a company. Larry Page and Sergey Brin were twenty-five years old when they founded Google. Mark Zuckerberg was twenty when he founded Facebook, and once famously said, “Young people are just smarter.” Maybe Zuckerberg was right. Sure, experience is valuable, but I’m willing to accept the idea that experience can also be an impediment. Forbes and Newsweek were filled with old-timers who scoffed at the Internet, didn’t understand it, and didn’t want to understand it. They pined for the good old days. I couldn’t stand them. I was on the side of change. Those people had lots of experience, but their experience kept them from being able to adapt. I’m not here at HubSpot to fight these guys; I’m here to learn from them. If they think it’s better to book lunch by using Gmail calendar invitations, then that’s what we’ll do. But then, about two months into the job, there comes an experience where the cultural gap between me and the people I’m working with opens up like a yawning chasm, and I begin to doubt whether I will be able to make my way across. This happens during our personality assessments. A lot of tech companies do these now. The idea is to figure out what kind of person you are, and what kind of people your co-workers are. Somehow by knowing these things about each other we will be able to work together more effectively. Companies use various tests and methodologies.

• From The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica Volume 10 (2011)

  “Let’s say God has stepped away from his masterpiece, the ‘paragon of animals’, and sees that as masterful as it is, it is not perfect, it has flaws.” “Yes?” Rachel had no idea where this was going, but she loved listening to his voice. sapiens, but to . “So, he creates this companion species, not to supersede homo . take out the garbage, as it were.” . “T’m not sure I understand.” “That’s all right, you’ll reach your own conclusions soon enough. The thing you need to understand now is that both these branches of man could, and have interbred from time to time. Rarely, due to circumstances that are rooted deep in history, but such unions have occurred.” Rachel began to tremble, sensing an impending epiphany she wasn’t certain she wanted to experience. “Clare,” Connor said. “Rachel looks like she could use a bit of fresh air.” 234 Robert Buckley Clare stood. Rachel thought she would keep going up and up. Clare took her hand and drew her on to her feet, but she still towered over Rachel. “Come on, petite soeur.” Locan and Connor watched the ladies leave. “You care for her very much,” Connor said. “A dangerous thing to care for one so much, in your line of work.” “T know.” Connor raised his glass. “You’re a good and noble man, my friend.” “T hope she goes easy on her,” Locan said. “She’ll open up a new world for her.” “Yeah ...I just hope she’s up for it.” Connor laughed. “She looks tough enough to me.” Outside a clear twilight sky cast the first stars over the heavens. “Follow me,” Clare said. “Where?” “Across the road, to the edge of the forest.” Rachel complied, her eyes captured by the sway of Clare’s hips, and her pale, sculpted thighs. Women’s thighs excited Rachel, in all their shapes and textures. Clare’s were smooth, muscular, strong. Rachel thought about touching them, even kissing them. A tickle began to swirl in her belly. They crossed the road and Clare stepped into the trees. “Do you smell them?” she asked Rachel. “Smell? Who?” “Give free rein to your senses. There now, smell them ... beer, sweat, sour breath, bowel stink?” Rachel filled her nostrils and nearly retched. The clean smell of pine vanished; she felt like she was standing in a very dirty men’s room. What thes 1 “T don’t like them,” Clare said. ““E heme “People ... P?ve seen the worst of them. But ... Connor ... he’s shown me many have worth, they can even be noble.” ~Oh? “These swine are only here to do harm. Shall we have our fun with them?” “Lace bden't knows: Paladins 235 “You've shifted?” Rachel shook her head. “Shifted?” “It’s frightening at first, when you don’t control it, and it comes over you all of a sudden,” Clare said. “Like the first time you pass blood.” Rachel said nothing; her mind was astir with questions she couldn’t form into words.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  This is probably the reason why, if we look at an isolated printed word and repeat it long enough, it ends by assuming an entirely unnatural aspect. Let the reader try this with any word on this page. He will soon begin to wonder if it can possibly be the word he has been using all his life with that meaning. It stares at him from the paper like a glass eye, with no speculation in it. Its body is indeed there, but its soul is fled. It is reduced, by this new way of attending to it, to its sensational nudity. We never before attended to it in this way, but habitually got it clad with its meaning the moment we caught sight of it, and rapidly passed from it to the other words of the phrase. We apprehended it, in short, with a cloud of associates, and thus perceiving it, we felt it quite otherwise than as we feel it now divested and alone. Another well-known change is when we look at a landscape with our head upside down. Perception is to a certain extent baffled by this manœuvre; gradations of distance and other space-determinations are made uncertain; the reproductive or associative processes, in short, decline; and, simultaneously with their diminution, the colors grow richer and more varied, and the contrasts of light and shade more marked. The same thing occurs when we turn a painting bottom upward. We lose much of its meaning, but, to compensate for the loss, we feel more freshly the value of the mere tints and shadings, and become aware of any lack of purely sensible harmony or balance which they may show. [92] Just so, if we lie on the floor and look up at the mouth of a person talking behind us. His lower lip here takes the habitual place of the upper one upon our retina, and seems animated by the most extraordinary an unnatural mobility, a mobility which now strikes us because (the associative processes being disturbed by the unaccustomed point of view) we get it as a naked sensation and not as part of a familiar object perceived. On a later page other instances will meet us. For the present these are enough to prove our point. Once more we find ourselves driven to admit that when qualities of an object impress our sense and we thereupon perceive object, the sensation as such of those qualities does not still exist inside of the perception and form a constituent thereof. The sensation is one thing and tile perception another, and neither can take place at the same time with the other, because their cerebral conditions are not the same. They may resemble each other, but in no respect are they identical states of mind. PERCEPTION IS OF DEFINITE AND PROBABLE THINGS. The chief cerebral conditions of perception are the paths of association irradiating from the sense-impression, which may have been already formed.

• From The New Testament (Great Courses) (1997)

  28 Lecture 5: Mark—Jesus the Suffering Son of God credentials as the uniquely authoritative Son of God. He is announced by a Jewish prophet, John the Baptist, as the ful¿ llment of the Jewish Scriptures (Mark 1:2–3). After he is baptized by John, he goes into the wilderness to do battle with the devil and the wild animals and returns unscathed. He immediately begins his public ministry by acting in ways that reveal his great power. You would think that with all these miracles, people would recognize Jesus for who he is. But one of the major points of this Gospel—unlike some of the other Gospels—is that no one recognizes Jesus. Consider how people react to him in the ¿ rst half of the Gospel: His family thinks that he’s gone out of his mind (3:21). The people from his hometown can’t understand what he’s doing, because to them he’s just the carpenter down the street (6:1–6). The leaders of his own people, the Jews, think that he’s possessed by the Devil (3:22). Most striking of all, his own disciples are explicitly said not to understand who he is (6:51–52; 8:21). Who, then, does know that Jesus is actually the Son of God in this Gospel? When you read the ¿ rst half of the Gospel carefully, you may be surprised. When Jesus is baptized, the voice comes from heaven saying, “you are my beloved son” (1:11). God knows who Jesus is and because the voice in this account comes to Jesus (and only to Jesus), it’s clear that Jesus knows. When Jesus casts out demons, they declare him to be the Son of God (3:14). So they know. Obviously Mark knows, because he’s writing these things, and presumably you know, because you’re reading them. But no one else seems to know. All that changes in the middle of the Gospel, in a sequence of stories that show that some people, at least the disciples, begin to get some kind of an inkling of Jesus’ identity. At almost the midway point of the Gospel comes the most interesting miracle in the entire narrative, an account of a man who Mark’s Gospel was ... written by a Greek-speaking Christian who had inherited a number of traditions about Jesus. This author, though, did not simply repeat these traditions ... Mark’s account is much richer and contains more nuance than that.

• From The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica Volume 10 (2011)

  As aggressive and as strange as I found her, I did not for even a moment consider trying to stop her. And even if I had, her wiry strength and the sheer joy she exhibited would probably have made it impossible. I suddenly realized that I was letting her do all the work, that I ought to do my part with my tongue. So I started to lick her... “Don’t do that!” she ordered. This made no sense, so I continued. She came to a complete halt. “T told you, don’t do that!” “Why not?” “Because I don’t want your tongue to lick my pussy lips. I want my pussy lips to lick your face.” - God, she was weird! But I was in no position to argue, so I obeyed her. It suddenly hit me that from her point of view, I wasn’t possessing her at all, she was possessing me. It was an odd feeling. 462 Alex Gross Her mood quickly passed. I looked up at her and found myself astounded at how remarkably lovely she looked from this perspective. And how powerful as well. I realized that I had never looked at a woman from this precise angle before. Ranging up from where she held my face, her hips zoomed out past her midriff into the broad thrust of her breasts, which looked even larger and more formidable when seen from below. Sometimes she would move forward, blocking my view with her belly, and now and then she would slide decisively upward, shading my eyes in an almost total blackout. But as she rode me and drove both her pressure and her softness over me, I was able to look up and intermittently see her face, even glimpse her expression, And I sometimes found her own eyes gazing back at me to gauge my own reactions. Not all the time, just occasionally — most of the time she was entirely caught up in her own pleasure. She looked so eager, so totally intent on her goal. But I also sensed a touch of anxiety. A chance for perfect ecstasy lay before her, but she also had to pay attention to her every move if she were to reach it. At least now and then she carefully looked down and scrutinized me, as though she wanted to know exactly how I was taking it. Yes, she was well aware that I was there, that I was technically her lover, I could even tell that she felt some kind of tenderness for me. But I could also tell that she saw me mainly as a tool, an implement she needed to reach the highest level of pleasure. Almost as a necessary evil. At one point she came close to admitting it.

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

  Another contemporary, Epicurus, saw life’s goal as the pursuit of happiness: an affirmation echoed in the American Declaration of Independence in 1776, but without the original Epicurean qualification that happiness consists in attaining inner tranquillity. Overall, a strain of pessimism ran through Hellenistic culture, drawing on Plato’s pessimism about everyday things, his sense of their unreality and worthlessness. That pessimism readily extended to one major source of human joy and misery, sex. [15] Greek cities and their imitations across Asia and North Africa continued to stand side by side with ancient cultures conquered by Macedonian and Greek generals turned gods on earth. The different worlds made untidy and unstable accommodations in repulsion, incomprehension and mutual exploration and exploitation. Nowhere was the clash more bitter or more productive than in the land of Judaea, where the Hellenistic mixture of autocratic brute force and distinctively Greek construction of society ran up against a culture with just as high a sense of its unique destiny as any Greek. To understand the eventual encounter, the Judaeans, Jews and Judaism need an introduction. ISRAEL: PLACING A PEOPLE IN THE LAND The ethnic grouping into which Jesus was born, the Judaeans, had long lived in a small but geographically complex band of territory in south-west Asia behind the Mediterranean coast. The fate of this land was bound up with its inescapable position between long-standing power blocs with far greater resources at their disposal. To the south, in north-east Africa along the Nile, lay the Egyptian empire; to the north a sequence of empires emerged in the Anatolian peninsula, or in lands to the east shaped by two other great rivers, the Tigris and Euphrates (hence from those rivers, this latter area is called in Greek Mesopotamia, ‘the between-rivers-lands’). People thus poised between Egypt and west Asian powers could never ignore these mightier neighbours, who were repeatedly inclined to occupy or devastate their territory. Equally, they could not agree among themselves as to who had the best claim on their tangled little tract of coastline, hills, valleys and plains – or even what to call the land: Canaan, Israel, Judah, Judaea, Phoenicia, Palestine, Promised Land and Holy Land were among the choices over two millennia. The lack of agreement continues. The Hebrew Scripture, reorganized by Christians as their ‘Old Testament’, is a bundle of documents setting out one answer to the answerless question. Yet it is far more than that: an astoundingly fertile and adaptable heritage of words and images of the divine with a capacity to shape human lives in countless different situations through three thousand years. It would be a mistake to date the Christian Old Testament’s sequence of books from Genesis to Malachi as if it were a linear historical accumulation from oldest to most recent.

• From Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010)

  470–399 BCE). Socrates believed that wisdom was not about accumulating information and reaching hard-and-fast conclusions. To his dying day, he insisted that the only reason he could be considered wise was because he knew that he knew nothing at all. When he was attacked by a leading Athenian politician, he told himself: I am wiser than this man; it is likely that neither of us knows anything worthwhile, but he thinks he knows something when he does not, whereas when I do not know, neither do I think that I know; so I am likely to be wiser than he to this small extent, that I do not think about what I do not know. 3 The people who came to see Socrates usually thought that they knew what they were talking about, but after half an hour of his relentless questioning they discovered that they knew nothing at all about such basic issues as justice or courage. They felt deeply perplexed, like bewildered children; the intellectual and moral foundations of their lives had been radically undermined, and they experienced a frightening, vertiginous doubt ( aporia ). For Socrates, that was the moment when a person became a philosopher, a “lover of wisdom,” because he had become aware that he longed for greater insight, knew he did not have it, but would henceforth seek it as ardently as a lover pursues his beloved. Thus dialogue led participants not to certainty but to a shocking realization of the profundity of human ignorance. However carefully, logically, and rationally Socrates and his friends analyzed a topic, something always eluded them. Yet many found that the initial shock of aporia led to ekstasis , because they had “stepped outside” their former selves. Plato (c. 428–347 BCE), Socrates’ most famous disciple, used the language associated with Mysteries of Eleusis to describe the moment when, pushed to the very limit of what was knowable, the mind tipped over into transcendence: It is only when all these things, names and definitions, visual and other sensations are rubbed together and subjected to tests in which questions and answers are exchanged in good faith and without malice that finally, when human capacity is stretched to its limit, a spark of understanding and intelligence flashes out and illuminates the subject at issue.

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

  life of the spirit. It has to be said that, whatever one thinks of Jerome’s opinions and character, the virtuoso of the Vulgate could craft knockabout Latin prose as enjoyable as that of his irascible theological predecessor Tertullian. [8] Jerome’s emphatic feelings about sex and marriage led him into an interesting logical trap around the always tangled theological status of Jesus’s family. He was drawn into the question of what constitutes a Christian marriage, already a matter of contention in his time. Is it defined by an act of consent, or by the beginning of sexual relations? The case of Mary the Mother of God, in which the decisive moment was her ‘Be it unto me according to thy word’, suggested a solution based solely on consent, but Jerome’s obsessions had led him to insist that sexual activity was an integral part of marriage. Logic then drove him to argue that if this was the case, since Mary was ever-virgin, Joseph and Mary had only been betrothed, not actually married. This created an entertaining complication for Jerome in his parallel insistence that Christ’s union with the Church was the model for Christian marriage; one presumes that such union is based on consent, not sexual intercourse. [9] Generally, in late antiquity, the anomalous model of marriage provided by Joseph and Mary became more obviously at odds with Paul’s proposition of a mutual sexual debt between husband and wife. Significantly Joseph was customarily portrayed as an old man, which would (alas) diminish his chances of sexual activity of any sort. Far from being regarded as a good Roman paterfamilias, Joseph’s devotional stock went down in the Church of late antiquity, even as Mary’s rose, and took around a millennium to recover (below, Chapter 13). [10] Contention about defining marriage, and the place of the Holy Family in that contention, raged on into medieval and Western Reformation Christianity, as we will see; moreover, the question marks remain. * Straight away, many even among Jerome’s friends (a moving target) felt that his bitter rhetoric went too far. Always lurking around any praise of celibacy and denigration of marriage were those two vague menaces, encratism and messalianism, and the rather more concrete present reality of a rival Mediterranean faith, Manicheism, which strenuously and consistently classified matters of the flesh as evil. Jerome had accused Jovinian of Manicheism, but the charge could more convincingly be levelled at his own writings. It was that uncomfortable thought that led to the writing of one of the most influential early Christian texts on marriage: De bono coniugali, ‘On the good of marriage’. Probably written in 401 and deliberately paired with a consideration of virginity (De sancta virginitate, ‘On holy virginity’), it dominated Western Latin Christianity’s thinking on marriage for a millennium and more, because it was the work of the key theologian in the Western tradition: Augustine, Bishop of Hippo Regius in North Africa and a celibate presiding over celibate communities in his diocese.

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

  We might extend our curiosity into downright irreverence, to ask similar questions of the Christian Trinity, two of whose Persons are customarily given a precise male reference as Father and Son. Even to raise that thought shows how important it is for Christians to distinguish between sex and gender. The absurdity of discussing sexual organs in relation to Father and Son also reveals the absurdity of arguing from the male gender of Jesus in his earthly life that Christian priesthood (and therefore presidency at the liturgical act of Eucharist) is irretrievably male in character. It also raises questions about using gender references in relation to the Third Person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit. What clues there are about the Spirit do not concern genitals but grammar. The many references to the Spirit of God in the Hebrew Scripture are to ruach, a noun of feminine gender; the post-biblical Hebrew word shekhinah, signifying the presence of God, is also feminine, as is the allied concept of Wisdom (hokmah: see Chapter 2). That remained the case in Syriac, closely allied to the Aramaic language that Jesus himself spoke and productive of a wide variety of Eastern Christianities: in Syriac, ‘Spirit’ is likewise the feminine rukha. Some early Syriac texts suggest that in such a context, it was not considered at all shocking to think of a Divine Trinity composed of Father, Mother and Son. [38] As the Hebrew religion embraced Greek speakers, and later went on to shape the Greek-speaking Christianity of the Mediterranean, Spirit became the grammatically neutral Greek pneuma, but Wisdom remained strikingly female as sophia. Small wonder that after five centuries of argument after the time of Jesus, mainstream Christianity became insistent that believers should not confuse the Persons of the Trinity or regard them as mere aspects of the one Godhead, even though Christians should be conscious of their ultimate unity. [39] We will repeatedly stumble over such worries through two millennia. Such awkwardnesses are natural outcomes of dealing with truths beyond the visible world, which humans find expressible only through simile and metaphor relating to the physical world. Theologians over the centuries, taking their cue from the statements in Gen. 1.26–27 that God made humanity in his own image and likeness, have sought to explore how human relationships might mirror divine realities. They have generally ignored or explained away the complication that this same passage goes on to tell us that ‘male and female created he them’: does that mean that God is likewise male and female? They ought to have considered more seriously the possibility that the process of manufacturing images may have worked the other way round: at particular periods of history and of human social constructions, Christians have made the Trinitarian God in their own image. Here is an example of a further puzzle about God’s gender: how does one square the circle that Jesus called himself ‘the Son of Man’ while his humanity came through a woman, Mary?

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

  I lean around the side of my monitor to get his attention. “Hey,” I say, in a quiet voice, looking around to make sure no one is listening. “Did you read this essay that Dharmesh just published on LinkedIn?” “I did,” he says. “What’d you think?” “He’s a good writer.” “But the teddy bear,” I say. “What’d you think of that?” “I think it’s cool that he’s so serious about solving for the customer. A lot of companies lose sight of that.” “Okay,” I say. “All right. But the teddy bear. You really think that’s a good idea? That’s a big breakthrough in management? When you were at Google, if you found out that Larry Page was carrying a teddy bear to meetings, would people think that was okay? Because I think people would be afraid that Larry had lost his mind.” Zack just shrugs. “Start-ups are eccentric,” he says. So that’s that. Zack isn’t going to dish on the boss. No one is. This in itself is amazing to me. In any place I’ve ever worked, if the boss started bringing a teddy bear to meetings, he would be a laughingstock, forever. There would be stuffed animals everywhere. Mean questions would be asked at all-hands meetings. The teddy bear would be kidnapped and hung from a noose, photographed in flagrante delicto with other stuffed animals, dressed in bondage gear and sodomized by a Smurf. You get the idea. Here at HubSpot there is none of that. Dharmesh is our Dear Leader. A HubSpotter mocking his teddy bear would be akin to a Scientologist making fun of L. Ron Hubbard’s cravat, or his kooky captain’s hat. But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe after spending all those years in the news business I have become overly cynical. Maybe bringing a teddy bear to meetings is the big new thing and everybody is going to do it. Maybe the world has changed, and I’ve been left behind, back in that outdated, old-fashioned era where people don’t bring stuffed animals to meetings. I check with my friend Chuck, a guy who once worked in marketing at a really big tech company. I send him a link to the teddy bear article, asking him if this is really what life is like in the corporate world. “Are all companies like this?” I ask. Chuck assures me they are not. “Any place with a founder who brings a teddy bear to meetings,” he writes, “is a step away from Jonestown.” He tells me to run out of this place as fast as I can. Another friend, Mike, is a former Microsoft executive who now does some angel investing and works with start-ups. He agrees that the teddy bear is nuts, but he says that quitting would be a huge mistake. “You’ve only been there for three months.

• From The Sexual Life of Catherine M. (2001)

  I have suggested that I came to meet Éric having got to know his friends, and heard what they had to say about him. Amongst these friends was Robert whom I met while putting together a piece on art foundries. In the event, he took me to Le Creusot where he was having a monumental sculpture cast. We travelled back at night and, during the trip, Robert joined me in the back of the car and lay full length on top of me. I didn’t turn a hair. It was a narrow car and I was sitting sideways in my seat with Robert’s head resting on my abdomen, and my pelvis over the edge to facilitate his groping. From time to time I would put my head down and he would give me little kisses. Glancing in the rear view mirror, the driver commented that I didn’t seem to be on top of things. In fact the situation left me as dumbfounded as the visits to the foundries with their gigantic ovens. I saw Robert almost daily for quite a long time and he introduced me to a lot of people. I could instinctively distinguish between those with whom the relationship could take a sexual turn and those with whom it could not. An instinct that Robert also had; as a way of putting some of them off, he had come up with the idea of warning them that, as an art critic, I was beginning to wield some power. It was Robert who told me about that myth of Parisian life, Madame Claude. I have fantasised a great deal about being a high-class prostitute although I knew I was neither tall or beautiful, which I had been told you needed to be, nor distinguished enough for the job. Robert used to joke about the combination of my sexual appetite and my professional curiosity; he would say that I would be able to write a piece about plumbing if I went out with a plumber. And he always maintained that, given my personality, the person I had to meet was Éric. But in the end, I met the latter through a mutual friend of theirs, a very edgy boy, one of those men who pounds into you with mechanical power and regularity, and someone with whom I had spent exhausting nights. In the morning, as if that wasn’t enough, he would take me to the huge studio he shared with his work partner, and there, languidly tired, I would let this other man come over and take me in a silent, almost serious way. One evening this friend invited me to go and have dinner with him and Éric. As we already know, Éric introduced me to more men than anyone else, friends, colleagues and strangers. For the sake of accuracy, I must add that, at the same time, he introduced me to a rigorous way of working to which I still adhere.