Bewilderment

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From The Decameron (1353)

  ‘I do believe,’ said Pyrrhus, ‘that you take me for an idiot or a lunatic. Since you force me to speak, I saw you lying on top of your lady, and as soon as I started to descend, you got up and sat in the spot where you are sitting now.’ To which Nicostratos replied: ‘You are certainly behaving like an idiot, for we haven’t moved in the slightest since you climbed up the tree.’ ‘What’s the use of arguing about it?’ said Pyrrhus. ‘I can only repeat that I saw you, and you were going to it merrily.’ Nicostratos grew visibly more astonished, until finally he said: ‘I’m going to find out for myself whether this pear-tree is enchanted, and what kind of marvels you can see from its branches.’ So up he climbed, and no sooner had he done so than Pyrrhus and his lady began to make love together, whereupon Nicostratos, seeing what they were about, shouted: ‘Ah, vile strumpet, what are you doing? And you, Pyrrhus, after all the trust I placed in you!’ And so saying, he began to climb down again. ‘We are just sitting here quietly,’ said Pyrrhus and the lady. But on seeing him descending, they returned to their former places. No sooner had Nicostratos descended and found them sitting where he had left them than he began to shower them with abuse. ‘Why Nicostratos,’ said Pyrrhus, ‘I must confess that you were right after all, and that my eyes were deceiving me when I was up in the tree. My only reason for saying this is that I know for a fact that you too have had a similar illusion. If you think I am wrong, you have only to stop and reflect whether a woman of such honesty and intelligence as your good lady, even if she wished to stain your honour in this manner, would ever bring herself to do it before your very eyes. Of myself I say nothing, except that I would sooner allow myself to be drawn and quartered than even contemplate such an act, let alone do it in your presence. Hence it is quite obvious that whatever it is that is distorting our vision, it must emanate from the pear-tree. For nothing in the world would have dissuaded me from believing that you had lain here carnally with your lady, until I heard you claiming that I had apparently been doing something which I most certainly never did, nor even thought of doing for a moment.’ At this point, he was interrupted by the lady, who rose to her feet and said to her husband, in tones of considerable annoyance:

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

  Central Asia and what is now the Chinese Empire were almost as unknown to Western Europe in the twelfth century as the lake region of Central Africa was before the journeys of Speke, Livingstone, and Stanley. To the Nestorians, with their schools at Edessa and Nisibis, naturally belonged the task of spreading the Gospel in Central and Eastern Asia. They went as far as China, but after the ninth century their schools declined and a period of stagnation set in. Individual Nestorians reached positions of influence in Asiatic courts as councillors or physicians and Nestorian women became mothers of Mongol chiefs. But no Asiatic tribe adopted their creed. In the twelfth century the brilliant delusion gained currency throughout Europe of the existence in Central Asia of a powerful Christian theocracy, ruled over by the Presbyter John, usually called Prester-John.898 The wildest rumors were spread concerning this mysterious personage who was said to combine the offices of king and priest. According to Otto of Freisingen, a certain bishop of Gabala in 1145 had brought Eugenius III. the information that he was a Nestorian Christian, was descended from one of the three Wise Men, and had defeated the Mohammedans in a great battle.899 A letter, purporting to come from this ruler and addressed to the Emperor Manuel of Constantinople, related that John received tribute from seventy kings, and had among his subjects the ten tribes of Israel, entertained at his table daily twelve archbishops and twenty bishops, and that his kingdom was overflowing with milk and honey.900 Gradually his dominions were reported to extend to Abyssinia and India. To put themselves into communication with this wonderful personage and bring him into subjection to Rome engaged the serious attention of several popes. Alexander III., 1177, sent his physician Philip with commission to inform the king of the faith of Western Christendom. He also addressed him in a letter as his "most dear son in Christ, John, king of the Indies and most holy of priests." The illusion abated as serious efforts to find the kingdom were made. Rubruquis wrote back to Europe from the region where John was reported to have ruled that few could be found who knew anything about Prester-John and that the stories which had been told were greatly exaggerated. He added that a certain ruler, Coirchan, had been followed by a Nestorian shepherd, called John. It has been conjectured by Oppert that the word "Coirchan," through the Syrian Juchanan, became known as John in Europe. A prince of that name whom the Chinese call Tuliu Tasha fled from China westwards, and established a kingdom in Central Asia. Nestorians were among his subjects. Chinese tradition has it that the prince was a Buddhist. Thus dwindles away a legend which, to use Gibbon’s language, "long amused the credulity of Europe."

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

  Tertullian, who was intent on combating contemporary Christians who were denying any true humanity in Jesus, as well as in his own fashion defending the value of family and marriage, viewed these as younger siblings to the Saviour, born of Mary by Joseph; and, rather startlingly to later ears, when he considered Matthew’s use of Isaiah 7.14, he commented that, in bearing Jesus, Mary was ‘a virgin as regards her husband, not a virgin as regards child-bearing’. He was not alone among his theologian contemporaries. [20] One can see why later theologians were desperate to avoid such conclusions, many finding it impossible to stomach even the saving possibility (still the official view in Orthodox Christianity) that Joseph had had a wife before Mary to produce such a substantial family. It all involved just too much sexual intercourse, even for Joseph. In the fourth century, Jerome, the Latin theologian whom we will repeatedly encounter busily decoupling sex from holiness, suggested that ‘brothers’ really meant ‘cousins’, and that these had been interchangeable terms in Hebrew and Greek. This argument is still promulgated in conservative Christian circles. In the case of Greek, as Jerome surely knew, it was nonsense: Greek was a language with a very precise and extensive set of words to describe particular degrees of cousinage, and Greek-speakers would be unlikely to confuse any of it with ‘brothers’. The Apostle Paul, who was writing plain down-to-earth Greek and not translating from some earlier Aramaic, unselfconsciously (and, in context, crossly) referred to his fellow Apostle James in Jerusalem as the brother of the Lord. [21] Altogether, the Holy Family, so apparently familiar from Christmas cards, makes an uneasy fit with the many different views of family that Christian Churches have constructed over the centuries. Irreverently to adapt a famous remark of the late Princess Diana, there were three of them in that marriage, so it was a bit theologically crowded. From the matrix of this family in Nazareth, nevertheless, Jesus embarked on his public ministry throughout Galilee and Judaea. Amid these events, we move from dealing with purposeful and resonant myth to retrieving a number of the Lord’s concrete propositions about sex, family and relationships. THE

• From Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010)

  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.4 As for the sages of India, this insight was the result of a dedicated way of life. It was, Plato went on to explain, “not something that can be put into words like other branches of learning; only after long partnership in a common life devoted to this very thing does truth flash upon the soul, like a flame kindled by a leaping spark, and once it is born there it nourishes itself hereafter.”5 Socrates used to describe himself as a gadfly, stinging people to question every one of their ideas, especially those about which they felt certainty, so that they could wake up to a more accurate perception of themselves.6 Even though he was conversing with Socrates and others, each participant was also engaged in a dialogue with himself, subjecting his own deeply held opinions to rigorous scrutiny before, finally, as a result of the ruthless logic of Socrates’ questioning, relinquishing them. You entered into a Socratic dialogue in order to change; the object of the exercise was to create a new, more authentic self. After they had realized that some of their deepest convictions were based on faulty foundations, Socrates’ disciples could begin to live in a philosophical manner. But if they did not interrogate their most fundamental beliefs, they would live superficial, expedient lives, because “the unexamined life is not worth living.”7

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

  In practice, the LDS leadership went on clandestinely sanctioning plural marriage until further political pressure on the newly established State of Utah produced a more thoroughgoing prohibition in 1904. Beyond the now monogamous LDS Church with its base in Salt Lake City, polygyny still has its Mormon strongholds in Idaho, Arizona and Montana, with the largest number in Utah itself where there are well in excess of ten thousand people in polygynous families. Meanwhile, the worldwide missionary movement looking to Salt Lake City presents the most conventional imaginable version of a mid-twentieth-century monogamous family as the norm for Mormon life. Indeed, the fascination of LDS with family genealogy, in the interests of retrieving ancestors for enrolling in heaven, is perhaps one of the most American features of the Church. [65] The United States spread westward as a land empire after its independence from Britain; meanwhile Russia had also extended its imperial territory landward to the coasts of eastern Asia, and, for a century down to 1867, over the Bering Sea into Alaska. Popular Russian Orthodox Christianity continued to build on its tradition of self-assertion beyond the bureaucratic religion of the Tsars, and it was often inspired by new recruits to the identity of the Holy Fool in rebrandings of faith that could be as radical as anything embraced by the LDS. One peculiar eruption of enthusiasm in particular took a branch of Russian Christianity in the opposite direction to the Mormon theme of procreation, embracing practices that the mainstream Church of the Mediterranean had hesitantly repudiated in the third century CE (above, Chapter 7). In the late eighteenth century, a self-taught peasant prophet, Kondratii Selivanov, emerged in western Russia from an earlier dissident Orthodox group characterized by penitential flagellation. Outdoing their rigorism and extending the Orthodox tradition of negativity about sex, he founded a sect devoted to eliminating sexual lust from the human race through very specific and literal forms of self-mutilation. Selivanov based his teachings on particular proof-texts crafted out of his own misreadings of the Bible in Russian. He read a command of God to the Israelites as plotites’ (‘castrate yourselves’) rather than plodites’ (be fruitful), and he rendered Iskupitel’ (‘Redeemer’) as Oskopitel’ (‘Castrator’) where the New Testament speaks of Jesus. As a result, to achieve purity his male followers, the Skoptsy (‘castrated ones’), cut off their genitals, and women their breasts. The tsarist authorities were no less horrified or baffled than their Soviet successors after the 1917 Revolution, but persecution and punishment were not going to have much effect on people who had punished themselves so drastically; reports of them persist even after the Second World War. [66] By then, the Christian matrices of Skoptsy and Mormons alike were drastically different from the societies that had unwillingly fostered them, but, in the globalism of the modern age, their respective adherents might actually encounter one another in a fashion that would once have been inconceivable.

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

  Clergy, whether for or against the Constitutional Church, were hunted down for imprisonment or exile, and the only reliable safe course for them was to marry. The Revolution showed itself vigorously enthusiastic for marriage generally, and to return the clergy to the married state represented a gleeful extra blow against the old Church. As in the sixteenth- century European Reformations, many French priests discovered a vocation for matrimony; exactly how many will never be certain. When something of the old Catholic framework returned a decade later, more than three thousand, including around a thousand monks and supplemented by nearly three hundred nuns, sought papal absolution; probably many more chose not to reveal what they had done in bewildering times. [5] That turn away from de-Christianization in the first decade of the nineteenth century was the work of Napoleon Bonaparte, the most successful general to emerge from the Revolution. He extended its conquests but turned them to new ends to suit himself and consolidate power won both on the battlefield and in the fractious Republic. In 1799 he headed a coup d’état against the increasingly dysfunctional regime of the Directory and then thrust aside his fellow conspirators. Successive plebiscites, only partially rigged, gave overwhelming majorities to his assumption first of a Republican title of First Consul in 1802 and then, in 1804, Emperor of the French. Almost his first act on seizing power had been a symbolic step to reconciliation with the shattered Catholic Church: providing a decent funeral for Pope Pius VI, who had died exiled in France as a prisoner of the Revolution in 1799. Napoleon’s own religion was a collage of random pieties and Enlightenment clichés, but, in any case, it took second place to his sense of political realities. It happened that most of the Revolution’s most lasting conquests were in the Catholic parts of the continent, especially the Catholic Low Countries, southern Germany and Italy. Napoleon realized what could be gained from ending internal warfare in France against Catholic traditionalism, and how much lost if the Republic persisted in anti-Catholic brutality elsewhere in Europe. There was an all-embracing deal to be done, not with the troubled Constitutional Church of France but with a new Pope – Pius VII – a serious-minded Benedictine monk-bishop reputed to have Enlightenment sympathies, though also cousin to the late Pius VI. Very soon after Pius’s election in Venice in 1800, Napoleon, fresh from an unexpectedly shattering victory over the Austrian Habsburgs at Marengo in northern Italy, declared that he intended ‘that the Roman Catholic and Christian religion be preserved in its entirety, that it be exercised publicly…’. [6] It was a bold move that risked alienating the strong anti-clericalism in his army while failing to impress conservatives with bitter recent memories of the Revolution, but Napoleon persisted, his goal a new version of the Concordat agreed back in 1516 between Pope Leo X and

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

  in the northern Netherlands after it won independence from the Habsburgs over the half-century from the 1560s. The outcome of the Dutch Revolt had produced an unusual degree of religious untidiness and pluralism in the United Provinces; in the background was the fragrant memory of Erasmus of Rotterdam, who, in a Low Countries as yet undivided by Reformation and Counter-Reformation, had spoken much of spiritual religion and of tolerance, and had also discreetly questioned the way that Augustine of Hippo had shaped Western Christianity. Radical Christianity learned a great deal from Erasmus. [8] In cosmopolitan and commercial Amsterdam, émigré Jewish communities from mass expulsions in Iberia prospered alongside a spectrum of Christians who were also refugees from less-hospitable territories, ranging from the Catholic southern Netherlands to regions of eastern Europe where Catholicism had reasserted its control. After 1685 the Reformed Protestant element was much reinforced when Louis XIV of France betrayed his grandfather’s promises to tolerate his Protestant subjects (‘Huguenots’) and expelled them all after half a century of increasing harassment. The Netherlands also enjoyed ancient trading links with England, where the Stuart dynasty’s attempt at creating an episcopal Protestant religious monopoly in its three Atlantic kingdoms collapsed into war in the 1640s and never recovered. That encouraged a conversation of doubt and religious radicalism spanning the North Sea. [9] In this pluralist setting emerged some creatively disruptive views of biblical authority that interconnected and have never died away in the Judaeo- Christian tradition: the Jewish radicalism of Baruch Spinoza, the grimly physical rationalism of the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, and a variety of biblical scepticism among early English Quakers who have only recently been given the recognition that they deserve. The distinctive witness of the Friends was to encounter divine authority in experiencing the light of the Spirit within them, rather than from the Word of God in Scripture. Quakers were inclined to demonstrate this by denigrating biblical authority. Protestants had already given a paradoxical prompt to this by their very attempt to stress the authority of sola scriptura , because they stressed the Bible’s literal meaning as an historical text. In the process they had largely discarded more than a millennium of allegorical or poetic interpretation that had long unravelled or even celebrated the Bible’s more baffling aspects. Reading the Bible as history carried with it the problem that historical scrutiny of a sacred text is liable to reveal how similar to other texts it is in nature and construction. Martin Luther had tried to demarcate a Bible that was the revealed Word of God but was still set in the sort of historical time that humanist scholarship was defining. In doing so, he had narrowed the boundaries of the biblical texts by creating a category of Apocrypha, cordoned off from the Old Testament, though neither Jews nor the pre-Reformation Christian Church had made such a categorical distinction. Now Quakers noted the growing rediscovery of manuscripts containing new Jewish and Christian apocrypha, much of which reads remarkably like the Bible. The gifted Hebrew scholar and Quaker Samuel Fisher became familiar with the Amsterdam synagogues while trying to convert Dutch Jews; he may have used the young Spinoza to translate Quaker tracts into Hebrew. He correctly pointed out in 1660 that Paul’s Epistle to the Laodiceans (which Paul or his ventriloquist in the Epistle to the Colossians had demanded be read in community worship, and so should be considered canonical) had gone missing altogether from the Bible – though it did exist in a text extant but not acknowledged by official Christianity. Fisher also drew attention to Jesus Christ’s supposed correspondence with the historically elusive King Abgar of Edessa – why were such texts outside the Bible, when a trivial letter of Paul’s to Philemon was inside? [10] Fisher was not alone in his questioning, which spread far beyond the Friends through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and has become a major academic discipline, first in Protestantism, but then also in the last hundred years within Roman Catholicism. Now it also begins to affect the Churches of Orthodoxy as they enter dialogue with Western society. This enterprise of treating the Bible with all the skills of critical textual scholarship, which this book tries to honour, is one of the chief intellectual and devotional gifts of Western Christianity to the wider Church. It is in itself part of the Enlightenment’s wider gift to humanity: a commitment to treating one’s own culture with the same critical curiosity and detachment that most societies have found easier to exercise in scrutinizing other cultures. The heirs of the Enlightenment have often observed such relativism more in the breach than the observance, but it is still an ideal to which to aspire. THE

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

  The Devil is coming!’ It is possible to see Guillemette Belot’s cry as reflecting a dualist affirmation that Mary was no more human than her son Jesus, and that is how many thirteenth-century Catholic commentators did explain the devout interest in Mary which many puzzled inquisitors encountered among Albigensians. Maybe, however, it was just that Guillemette viewed Mary as the Mother of God, just as her Catholic contemporaries did. [13] The undoubted complications in the Cathar story have led some historians fundamentally to query the traditionally understood account of them: the British historian R. I. Moore leads other leading scholarly sceptics. [14] Such questioning returns to the eleventh-century Gregorian reforms. The very success in arousing Europe to a programme of renewal provoked energies that official restructuring could not contain: witness the Papacy’s flirtation with the ‘Patarine’ disturbances in Milan in the mid-eleventh century (above, Chapter 12). The problem was that Patarines did not stop seeking reform when popes felt that there had been enough of it: they wanted a contemporary Church really worthy of the Apostles. In the mid-twelfth century, Lambert le Bègue (‘the Stammerer’), a Patarine-style reformer in Liège far to the north of Milan, narrowly escaped a heretic’s death for revivalist activities that included composing a metrical vernacular version of the Book of Acts for his followers, and the dynamic of official disapproval only intensified after that. [15] Le Bègue was accused of starting a ‘sect’: a standard term in twelfth-century official accounts of religious movements of which the Church did not approve. Another grouping really did become a sect, the ‘Waldensians’, a movement started around 1170 in Lyons by a wealthy man called Valdes, who gave away all his wealth to the poor and ministered to a group who also valued poverty as the basis for Christian life. Church authorities were not prepared to make a distinction between this affirmation of poverty and that of any dualist Cathars in the same region, and, from 1184, a solemn papal pronouncement (a ‘bull’) condemned them both. The Waldensians persevered in clandestine expansion but were increasingly estranged from the episcopate of the Church on one vital issue: they were convinced that every Christian had a vocation to preach. That fatally clashed with the clerical priorities of the Gregorian reform. [16] Particularly interesting are reforming movements that, unlike Waldensianism, split between groupings accepted and condemned by the authorities. We have already noted one case (above, Chapter 12): the movement begun by Norbert of Xanten, much of which was moulded into the Premonstratensian monastic Order, with its early commitment to communities of chaste men and women. Such joint communities did not survive, and, in general, female monasticism suffered constrictions during the twelfth century. The problem was the conviction of twelfth-century men, particularly those learned men trained in medicine, canon law and theology in the new universities, that females had greater sexual energy and urges than males, needing the protection of strict segregation within convent walls, even when they were consecrated celibates.

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  Even from a distance, Margarita discerned that the faces of the people standing on the hearse, accompanying the deceased on his last journey, were somehow strangely bewildered. This was particularly noticeable with regard to the woman who stood at the left rear corner of the hearse. This woman’s fat cheeks were as if pushed out still more from inside by some piquant secret, her puffy little eyes glinted with an ambiguous fire. It seemed that just a little longer and the woman, unable to help herself, would wink at the deceased and say: ‘Have you ever seen the like? Outright mysticism! . . .’ The same bewildered faces showed on those in the cortège, who, numbering three hundred or near it, slowly walked behind the hearse. Margarita followed the procession with her eyes, listening to the dismal Turkish drum fading in the distance, producing one and the same ‘boom, boom, boom’, and thought: ‘What a strange funeral . . . and what anguish from that “boom”! Ah, truly, I’d pawn my soul to the devil just to find out whether he’s alive or not . . . It would be interesting to know who they’re burying with such astonishing faces.’ ‘Berlioz, Mikhail Alexandrovich,’ a slightly nasal male voice came from beside her, ‘chairman of Massolit.’ The surprised Margarita Nikolaevna turned and saw a citizen on her bench, who had apparently sat down there noiselessly while Margarita was watching the procession and, it must be assumed, absent-mindedly asked her last question aloud. The procession meanwhile was slowing down, probably delayed by traffic lights ahead. ‘Yes,’ the unknown citizen went on, ‘they’re in a surprising mood. They’re accompanying the deceased and thinking only about what happened to his head.’ ‘What head?’ asked Margarita, studying her unexpected neighbour. This neighbour turned out to be short of stature, a fiery redhead with a fang, in a starched shirt, a good-quality striped suit, patent leather shoes, and with a bowler hat on his head. His tie was brightly coloured. The surprising thing was that from the pocket where men usually carry a handkerchief or a fountain pen, this gentleman had a gnawed chicken bone sticking out. ‘You see,’ the redhead explained, ‘this morning in the hall of Griboedov’s the deceased’s head was filched from the coffin.’ ‘How can that be?’ Margarita asked involuntarily, remembering at the same time the whispering on the trolley-bus. ‘Devil knows how!’ the redhead replied casually. ‘I suppose, however, that it wouldn’t be a bad idea to ask Behemoth about it. It was an awfully deft snatch! Such a scandal! . . . And, above all, it’s incomprehensible—who needs this head and for what!’ Occupied though Margarita Nikolaevna was with her own thoughts, she was struck all the same by the unknown citizen’s strange twaddle. ‘Excuse me!’ she suddenly exclaimed. ‘What Berlioz?

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  The moment the drivers of the three cabs saw a passenger hurrying towards the stand with a tightly stuffed briefcase, all three left empty right under his nose, looking back at him angrily for some reason. Struck by this circumstance, the bookkeeper stood like a post for a long time, trying to grasp what it might mean. About three minutes later, an empty cab drove up, but the driver’s face twisted the moment he saw the passenger. ‘Are you free?’ Vassily Stepanovich asked with a cough of surprise. ‘Show your money,’ the driver replied angrily, without looking at the passenger. With increasing amazement, the bookkeeper, pressing the precious briefcase under his arm, pulled a ten-rouble bill from his wallet and showed it to the driver. ‘I won’t go!’ the man said curtly. ‘I beg your pardon . . .’ the bookkeeper tried to begin, but the driver interrupted him. ‘Got any threes?’ The completely bewildered bookkeeper took two three-rouble bills from his wallet and showed them to the driver. ‘Get in,’ he shouted, and slapped down the flag of the meter so that he almost broke it. ‘Let’s go!’ ‘No change, is that it?’ the bookkeeper asked timidly. ‘A pocket full of change!’ the driver bawled, and the eyes in the mirror went bloodshot. ‘It’s my third case today. And the same thing happened with the others, too. Some son of a bitch gives me a tenner, I give him change—four-fifty. He gets out, the scum! About five minutes later, I look: instead of a tenner, it’s a label from a seltzer bottle!’ Here the driver uttered several unprintable words. ‘Another one, beyond Zubovskaya. A tenner. I give him three roubles change. He leaves. I go to my wallet, there’s a bee there—zap in the finger! Ah, you! . . .’ and again the driver pasted on some unprintable words. ‘And no tenner. Yesterday, in the Variety here’ (unprintable words), ‘some vermin of a conjurer did a séance with ten-rouble bills’ (unprintable words) . . . The bookkeeper went numb, shrank into himself, and pretended it was the first time he had heard even the word ‘Variety’, while thinking to himself: ‘Oh-oh! . . .’ Having got where he had to go, having paid satisfactorily, the bookkeeper entered the building and went down the corridor towards the manager’s office, and realized on his way that he had come at the wrong time. Some sort of tumult reigned in the offices of the Spectacles Commission.

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  A messenger girl ran past the bookkeeper, her kerchief all pushed back on her head and her eyes popping. ‘Nothing, nothing, nothing, my dears!’ she shouted, addressing no one knew whom. ‘The jacket and trousers are there, but inside the jacket there’s nothing!’ She disappeared through some door, and straight away from behind it came the noise of smashing dishes. The manager of the commission’s first sector, whom the bookkeeper knew, ran out of the secretary’s room, but he was in such a state that he did not recognize the bookkeeper and disappeared without a trace. Shaken by all this, the bookkeeper reached the secretary’s room, which was the anteroom to the office of the chairman of the commission, and here he was definitively dumbfounded. From behind the closed door of the office came a terrible voice, undoubtedly belonging to Prokhor Petrovich, the chairman of the commission. ‘Must be scolding somebody!’ the consternated bookkeeper thought and, looking around, saw something else: in a leather armchair, her head thrown back, sobbing unrestrainedly, a wet handkerchief in her hand, legs stretched out into the middle of the room, lay Prokhor Petrovich’s personal secretary—the beautiful Anna Richardovna. Anna Richardovna’s chin was all smeared with lipstick, and down her peachy cheeks black streams of sodden mascara flowed from her eyelashes. Seeing someone come in, Anna Richardovna jumped up, rushed to the bookkeeper, clutched the lapels of his jacket, began shaking him and shouting: ‘Thank God! At least one brave man has been found! Everybody ran away, everybody betrayed us! Let’s go, let’s go to him, I don’t know what to do!’ And, still sobbing, she dragged the bookkeeper into the office. Once in the office, the bookkeeper first of all dropped his briefcase, and all the thoughts in his head turned upside-down. And, it must be said, not without reason. At a huge writing desk with a massive inkstand an empty suit sat and with a dry pen, not dipped in ink, traced on a piece of paper. The suit was wearing a necktie, a fountain pen stuck from its pocket, but above the collar there was neither neck nor head, just as there were no hands sticking out of the sleeves. The suit was immersed in work and completely ignored the turmoil that reigned around it. Hearing someone come in, the suit leaned back and from above the collar came the voice, quite familiar to the bookkeeper, of Prokhor Petrovich: ‘What is this? Isn’t it written on the door that I’m not receiving?’ The beautiful secretary shrieked and, wringing her hands, cried out: ‘You see? You see?! He’s not there! He’s not! Bring him back, bring him back!’ Here someone peeked in the door of the office, gasped, and flew out.

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  And so, as was said, the thing dragged on in this fashion until dawn on Saturday. Here new and very interesting data were added. A six-place passenger plane, coming from the Crimea, landed at the Moscow airport. Among the other passengers, one strange passenger got out of it. This was a young citizen, wildly overgrown with stubble, unwashed for three days, with inflamed and frightened eyes, carrying no luggage and dressed somewhat whimsically. The citizen was wearing a tall sheep-skin hat, a Georgian felt cape over a nightshirt, and new, just-purchased, blue leather bedroom slippers. As soon as he separated from the ladder by which they descended from the plane, he was approached. This citizen had been expected, and in a little while the unforgettable director of the Variety, Stepan Bogdanovich Likhodeev, was standing before the investigators. He threw in some new data. It now became clear that Woland had penetrated the Variety in the guise of an artiste, having hypnotized Styopa Likhodeev, and had then contrived to fling this same Styopa out of Moscow and God knows how many miles away. The material was thus augmented, yet that did not make things easier, but perhaps even a bit harder, because it was becoming obvious that to lay hold of a person who could perform such stunts as the one of which Stepan Bogdanovich had been the victim would not be so easy. Incidentally, Likhodeev, at his own request, was confined in a secure cell, and next before the investigators stood Varenukha, just arrested in his own apartment, to which he had returned after a blank absence of almost two days. Despite the promise he had given Azazello not to lie any more, the administrator began precisely with a lie. Though, by the way, he cannot be judged very harshly for it. Azazello had forbidden him to lie and be rude on the telephone, but in the present case the administrator spoke without the assistance of this apparatus. His eyes wandering, Ivan Savelyevich declared that on Thursday afternoon he had got drunk in his office at the Variety, all by himself, after which he went somewhere, but where he did not remember, drank starka 2 somewhere, but where he did not remember, lay about somewhere under a fence, but where he again did not remember.

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  Here he politely took off his beret, and the friends had nothing left but to stand up and make their bows. ‘No, rather a Frenchman . . .’ thought Berlioz. ‘A Pole? . . .’ thought Homeless. It must be added that from his first words the foreigner made a repellent impression on the poet, but Berlioz rather liked him—that is, not liked but . . . how to put it . . . was interested, or whatever. ‘May I sit down?’ the foreigner asked politely, and the friends somehow involuntarily moved apart; the foreigner adroitly sat down between them and at once entered into the conversation: ‘Unless I heard wrong, you were pleased to say that Jesus never existed?’ the foreigner asked, turning his green left eye to Berlioz. ‘No, you did not hear wrong,’ Berlioz replied courteously, ‘that is precisely what I was saying.’ ‘Ah, how interesting!’ exclaimed the foreigner. ‘What the devil does he want?’ thought Homeless, frowning. ‘And you were agreeing with your interlocutor?’ inquired the stranger, turning to Homeless on his right. ‘A hundred per cent!’ confirmed the man, who was fond of whimsical and figurative expressions. ‘Amazing!’ exclaimed the uninvited interlocutor and, casting a thievish glance around and muffling his low voice for some reason, he said: ‘Forgive my importunity, but, as I understand, along with everything else, you also do not believe in God?’ He made frightened eyes and added: ‘I swear I won’t tell anyone!’ ‘No, we don’t believe in God,’ Berlioz replied, smiling slightly at the foreign tourist’s fright, ‘but we can speak of it quite freely.’ The foreigner sat back on the bench and asked, even with a slight shriek of curiosity: ‘You are—atheists?!’ ‘Yes, we’re atheists,’ Berlioz smilingly replied, and Homeless thought, getting angry: ‘Latched on to us, the foreign goose!’ ‘Oh, how lovely!’ the astonishing foreigner cried out and began swivelling his head, looking from one writer to the other. ‘In our country atheism does not surprise anyone,’ Berlioz said with diplomatic politeness. ‘The majority of our population consciously and long ago ceased believing in the fairy tales about God.’

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  And here the unknown man burst into a strange little laugh. Berlioz listened with great attention to the unpleasant story about the cancer and the tram-car, and certain alarming thoughts began to torment him. ‘He’s not a foreigner . . . he’s not a foreigner . . .’ he thought, ‘he’s a most peculiar specimen . . . but, excuse me, who is he then? . . .’ ‘You’d like to smoke, I see?’ the stranger addressed Homeless unexpectedly. ‘Which kind do you prefer?’ ‘What, have you got several?’ the poet, who had run out of cigarettes, asked glumly. ‘Which do you prefer?’ the stranger repeated. ‘Okay—Our Brand,’ Homeless replied spitefully. The unknown man immediately took a cigarette case from his pocket and offered it to Homeless: ‘Our Brand . . .’ Editor and poet were both struck, not so much by Our Brand precisely turning up in the cigarette case, as by the cigarette case itself. It was of huge size, made of pure gold, and, as it was opened, a diamond triangle flashed white and blue fire on its lid. Here the writers thought differently. Berlioz: ‘No, a foreigner!’, and Homeless: ‘Well, devil take him, eh! . . .’ The poet and the owner of the cigarette case lit up, but the nonsmoker Berlioz declined. ‘I must counter him like this,’ Berlioz decided, ‘yes, man is mortal, no one disputes that. But the thing is . . .’ However, before he managed to utter these words, the foreigner spoke: ‘Yes, man is mortal, but that would be only half the trouble. The worst of it is that he’s sometimes unexpectedly mortal—there’s the trick! And generally he’s unable to say what he’s going to do this same evening.’ ‘What an absurd way of putting the question . . .’ Berlioz thought and objected: ‘Well, there’s some exaggeration here. About this same evening I do know more or less certainly. It goes without saying, if a brick should fall on my head on Bronnaya . . .’ ‘No brick,’ the stranger interrupted imposingly, ‘will ever fall on anyone’s head just out of the blue. In this particular case, I assure you, you are not in danger of that at all. You will die a different death.’ ‘Maybe you know what kind precisely?’ Berlioz inquired with perfectly natural irony, getting drawn into an utterly absurd conversation. ‘And will tell me?’ ‘Willingly,’ the unknown man responded. He looked Berlioz up and down as if he were going to make him a suit, muttered through his teeth something like: ‘One, two . . . Mercury in the second house . . . moon gone . . . six—disaster . . . evening—seven . . .’ then announced loudly and joyfully: ‘Your head will be cut off!’

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  Azazello and Koroviev you have already met. I present to you my maid-servant, Hella: efficient, quick, and there is no service she cannot render.’ The beautiful Hella was smiling as she turned her green-tinged eyes to Margarita, without ceasing to dip into the ointment and apply it to Woland’s knee. ‘Well, that’s the lot,’ Woland concluded, wincing as Hella pressed especially hard on his knee. ‘A small, mixed and guileless company, as you see.’ He fell silent and began to spin the globe in front of him, which was so artfully made that the blue oceans moved on it and the cap at the pole lay like a real cap of ice and snow. On the chessboard, meanwhile, confusion was setting in. A thoroughly upset king in a white mantle was shuffling on his square, desperately raising his arms. Three white pawn-mercenaries with halberds gazed in perplexity at the bishop brandishing his crozier and pointing forward to where, on two adjacent squares, white and black, Woland’s black horsemen could be seen on two fiery chargers pawing the squares with their hoofs. Margarita was extremely interested and struck by the fact that the chessmen were alive. The cat, taking the opera glasses from his eyes, prodded his king lightly in the back. The king covered his face with his hands in despair. ‘Things aren’t so great, my dear Behemoth,’ Koroviev said quietly in a venomous voice. ‘The situation is serious but by no means hopeless,’ Behemoth responded. ‘What’s more, I’m quite certain of final victory. Once I’ve analysed the situation properly.’ He set about this analysing in a rather strange manner—namely, by winking and making all sorts of faces at his king. ‘Nothing helps,’ observed Koroviev. ‘Aie!’ cried Behemoth, ‘the parrots have flown away, just as I predicted!’ Indeed, from somewhere far away came the noise of many wings. Koroviev and Azazello rushed out of the room. ‘Devil take you with your ball amusements!’ Woland grunted without tearing his eyes from his globe. As soon as Koroviev and Azazello disappeared, Behemoth’s winking took on greater dimensions. The white king finally understood what was wanted of him. He suddenly pulled off his mantle, dropped it on the square, and ran off the board. The bishop covered himself with the abandoned royal garb and took the king’s place. Koroviev and Azazello came back. ‘Lies, as usual,’ grumbled Azazello, with a sidelong glance at Behemoth. ‘I thought I heard it,’ replied the cat. ‘Well, is this going to continue for long?’ asked Woland. ‘Your king is in check.’ ‘I must have heard wrong, my master,’ replied the cat. ‘My king is not and cannot be in check.’ ‘I repeat, your king is in check!’ ‘Messire,’ the cat responded in a falsely alarmed voice, ‘you are overtired.

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  The bookkeeper felt his legs trembling and sat on the edge of a chair, but did not forget to pick up his briefcase. Anna Richardovna hopped around the bookkeeper, worrying his jacket, and exclaiming: ‘I always, always stopped him when he swore by the devil! So now the devil’s got him!’ Here the beauty ran to the writing desk and in a tender, musical voice, slightly nasal from weeping, called out: ‘Prosha! Where are you!’ ‘Who here is “Prosha” to you?’ the suit inquired haughtily, sinking still deeper into the armchair. ‘He doesn’t recognize me! Me he doesn’t! Do you understand? . . .’ the secretary burst into sobs. ‘I ask you not to sob in the office!’ the hot-tempered striped suit now said angrily, and with its sleeve it drew to itself a fresh stack of papers, with the obvious aim of appending its decision to them. ‘No, I can’t look at it, I can’t!’ cried Anna Richardovna, and she ran out to the secretary’s room, and behind her, like a shot, flew the bookkeeper. ‘Imagine, I’m sitting here,’ Anna Richardovna recounted, shaking with agitation, again clutching at the bookkeeper’s sleeve, ‘and a cat walks in. Black, big as a behemoth. Of course, I shout “scat” to it. Out it goes, and in comes a fat fellow instead, also with a sort of cat-like mug, and says: “What are you doing, citizeness, shouting ‘scat’ at visitors?” And—whoosh—straight to Prokhor Petrovich. Of course, I run after him, shouting: “Are you out of your mind?” And this brazen-face goes straight to Prokhor Petrovich and sits down opposite him in the armchair. Well, that one . . . he’s the kindest-hearted man, but edgy. He blew up, I don’t deny it. An edgy man, works like an ox—he blew up. “Why do you barge in here unannounced?” he says. And that brazen-face, imagine, sprawls in the armchair and says, smiling: “I’ve come,” he says, “to discuss a little business with you.” Prokhor Petrovich blew up again: “I’m busy.” And the other one, just think, answers: “You’re not busy with anything . . .” Eh? Well, here, of course, Prokhor Petrovich’s patience ran out, and he shouted: “What is all this? Get him out of here, devil take me!” And that one, imagine, smiles and says: “Devil take you? That, in fact, can be done!” And—bang! Before I had time to scream, I look: the one with the cat’s mug is gone, and th . . . there . . . sits . . . the suit . . . Waaa! . . .’ Stretching her mouth, which had lost all shape entirely, Anna Richardovna howled. After choking with sobs, she caught her breath, but then began pouring out something completely incoherent: ‘And it writes, writes, writes! You could lose your mind! Talks on the telephone! A suit!

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  Huxley is a little obscure in explaining how we might move from value-free observation to value-determining prescription. 29 Yet Huxley was responding to a lecture on the same topic, delivered at Oxford in 1893, by his grandfather, Thomas H. Huxley. In that earlier lecture, Huxley argued that Darwin’s evolutionary theory was ethically barren, incapable of informing human ethical reflection. ‘Cosmic evolution may teach us how the good and the evil tendencies of man may have come about; but, in itself, it is incompetent to furnish any better reason why what we call good is preferable to what we call evil than we had before.’ 30 So which Huxley is right? We can’t say. Both Huxleys offer interpretations of Darwin’s theory. Even if we could ascertain that one of them represented a closer approximation to Darwin’s own views, this would not make this right; it would simply count as a better interpretation of Darwin, rather than the right answer to the great ethical question under discussion. Finally, does Darwin’s theory entail atheism? Many populist atheist writers have taken it as self-evident that this is the case, despite Darwin’s own statements that he did not consider his own theory to mandate atheism, in that it was compatible with conventional religious belief. It is certainly true to say that ‘natural selection’ contradicts, or at least presents difficulties for, certain religious understandings of creation; yet there is a significant intellectual distance between calling for a review of such doctrines of creation and proving atheism. After all, Augustine of Hippo set out an interpretation of the book of Genesis in 401 which held that God created the world in an instant, and then set in place an extended process of development through which the created order changed over time. Perhaps the time has come to retrieve this older theory. Although I welcome and value the capacity of scientific theories to provide explanations for the workings of our universe, I am sceptical regarding their religious, metaphysical, or ethical interpretations. While Darwin’s theory of natural selection effectively explained the observational evidence available to him at that time, the moral and spiritual implications of his theory are still ambiguous and subject to debate. While scientific theories and explanations are grounded in evidence and are subject to empirical testing, our interpretations of their implications for human existence and self-understanding lack the same level of credibility and authority. In the end, they are opinions, not facts. They are beliefs about the implications of Darwin’s theory for human morality and meaning. This is not a problem; it’s just the way things are. But it can easily become a problem if these interpretations of scientific theories are mistakenly given the same authority as empirically-tested explanations of reality.

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  Here the foreigner pulled the following stunt: he got up and shook the amazed editor’s hand, accompanying it with these words: ‘Allow me to thank you with all my heart!’ ‘What are you thanking him for?’ Homeless inquired, blinking. ‘For some very important information, which is of great interest to me as a traveller,’ the outlandish fellow explained, raising his finger significantly. The important information apparently had indeed produced a strong impression on the traveller, because he passed his frightened glance over the buildings, as if afraid of seeing an atheist in every window. ‘No, he’s not an Englishman . . .’ thought Berlioz, and Homeless thought: ‘Where’d he pick up his Russian, that’s the interesting thing!’ and frowned again. ‘But, allow me to ask you,’ the foreign visitor spoke after some anxious reflection, ‘what, then, about the proofs of God’s existence, of which, as is known, there are exactly five?’ ‘Alas!’ Berlioz said with regret. ‘Not one of these proofs is worth anything, and mankind shelved them long ago. You must agree that in the realm of reason there can be no proof of God’s existence.’ ‘Bravo!’ cried the foreigner. ‘Bravo! You have perfectly repeated restless old Immanuel’s 19 thought in this regard. But here’s the hitch: he roundly demolished all five proofs, and then, as if mocking himself, constructed a sixth of his own.’ ‘Kant’s proof,’ the learned editor objected with a subtle smile, ‘is equally unconvincing. Not for nothing did Schiller 20 say that the Kantian reasoning on this question can satisfy only slaves, and Strauss 21 simply laughed at this proof.’ Berlioz spoke, thinking all the while: ‘But, anyhow, who is he? And why does he speak Russian so well?’ ‘They ought to take this Kant and give him a three-year stretch in Solovki 22 for such proofs!’ Ivan Nikolaevich plumped quite unexpectedly. ‘Ivan!’ Berlioz whispered, embarrassed. But the suggestion of sending Kant to Solovki not only did not shock the foreigner, but even sent him into raptures. ‘Precisely, precisely,’ he cried, and his green left eye, turned to Berlioz, flashed. ‘Just the place for him! Didn’t I tell him that time at breakfast: “As you will, Professor, but what you’ve thought up doesn’t hang together. It’s clever, maybe, but mighty unclear. You’ll be laughed at.” ’ Berlioz goggled his eyes. ‘At breakfast . . . to Kant? . . .

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  It was rather a terrible summer for them all, the more so as they were surrounded by beauty, and great peace when the eve- ning came down on the snows, turning the white, unfurrowed peaks to sapphire and then to a purple darkness; hanging out large, incredible stars above the wide slope of the Roseg Glacier. For their hearts were full of unspoken dread, of clamorous pas- sions, of bewilderment that went very ill with the quiet fulfil- ments, with the placid and smiling contentment of nature — and not the least bewildered was Mary. Her respite, it seemed, had been pitifully fleeting; now she was torn by conflicting emotions; terrified and amazed at her realization that Martin meant more to her than a friend, yet less, oh, surely much less than Stephen. Like a barrier of fire her passion for the woman flared up to forbid her love of the man; for as great as the mystery of virginity itself, is sometimes the power of the one who has destroyed it, and that power still remained in these days, with Stephen. Alone in his bare little hotel bedroom, Martin would wrestle with his soul-sickening problem, convinced in his heart that but for Stephen, Mary Llewellyn would grow to love him, nay more, that she had grown to love him already. Yet Stephen was his friend — he had sought her out, had all but forced his friendship upon her; had forced his way into her life, her home, her con- fidence; she had trusted his honour. And now he must either utterly betray her or through loyalty to their friendship, betray Mary. And he felt that he knew, and knew only too well, what life would do to Mary Llewellyn, what it had done to her already; for had he not seen the bitterness in her, the resentment that could only lead to despair, the defiance that could only lead to 490 THE WELL OF LONELINESS

• 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.