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.

Page 60 of 69 · 20 per page

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  said Austerlitz, something which to this day I still find incomprehensible. I knew from Vera that for many years now Terezin had been an ordinary town again. Despite this, it was almost a quarter of an hour before I saw the first human being on the other side of the square, a bent figure toiling very slowly forward and leaning on a stick, yet when I took my eye off it for a moment the figure had suddenly gone. Otherwise I met no one all morning in the straight, deserted streets of Terezin, except for a mentally disturbed man who crossed my path among the lime trees of the park with the fountain, telling I have no idea what tale in a kind of broken German while frantically waving his arms, before he too, still clutching the hundred-crown note I had given him, seemed to be swallowed up by the earth, as they say, even as he was running off. Although the sense of abandonment in this fortified town, laid out like Campanella’s ideal sun state to a strictly geometrical grid, was extraordinarily oppressive, yet more so was the forbidding aspect of the silent facades. Not a single curtain moved behind their blind windows, however often I glanced up at them. I could not imagine, said Austerlitz, who might inhabit these desolate buildings, or if anyone lived there at all, although on the other hand I had noticed that long rows of dustbins with large numbers on them in red paint were ranged against the walls of the back yards. me yp "s | TF a a San Gs “ What I found most uncanny of all, however, were the gates and doorways of Terezin, all of them, as I thought I sensed, obstructing access to a darkness never yet penetrated, a darkness in which I thought, said Austerlitz, there was no more movement at all apart from the whitewash peeling off the walls and the spiders spinning their threads, scuttling on crooked legs across the floorboards, or hanging expectantly in their webs.

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  He had emerged from this doorway half an hour ago and now disappeared through it again, with an odd jerk, as it seemed to me. To this day I cannot explain what made me follow him, said Austerlitz. We take almost all the decisive steps in our lives as a result of slight inner adjustments of which we are barely conscious. But in any case, that Sunday morning I suddenly found myself on the other side of the tall fence, facing the entrance to the Ladies’ Waiting Room, the existence of which, in this remote part of the station, had been quite unknown to me. The man in the turban was nowhere to be seen, and there was no one on the scaffolding either. I hesitated to approach the swing doors, but as soon as I had taken hold of the brass handle I stepped past a heavy curtain hung on the inside to keep out drafts, and entered the large room, which had obviously

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  the sight of it, however, was not the question whether the complex form of the capital, now covered with a puce-tinged encrustation, had really impressed itself on my mind when I passed through Pilsen with the children’s transport in the summer of 1939, but the idea, ridiculous in itself, that this cast-iron column, which with its scaly surface seemed almost to approach the nature of a living being, might remember me and was, if I may so put it, said Austerlitz, a witness to what I could no longer recollect for myself. Beyond Pilsen the line ran towards the mountains dividing Bohemia from Bavaria. Soon the gradient was delaying the tempo of the train, and dark forests were almost encroaching on the railway embankment. Swathes of mist or low, drifting cloud hung among the dripping pines, until after about an hour the line went downhill again, the valley gradually broadened, and we came out into pleasant countryside. I don’t know what I had expected of Germany, said Austerlitz, but wherever I looked I saw trim towns and villages, neat yards around factories and industrial buildings, lovingly tended gardens, piles of firewood tidily stacked under cover, level asphalted cart tracks running through the meadows, roads with brightly colored cars purring along them at great speed, well-managed woodland, regulated watercourses, and new railway buildings where the stationmasters obviously felt under no obligation to come out. Parts of the sky had cleared, cheerful patches of sunlight lit up the country here and there, and the train, which had often seemed to be having difficulty in making any progress on the Czech side of the border, was now suddenly racing along with almost improbable ease. Around midday we reached Nuremberg, and when I saw the name on a signal box in its German spelling of Niimberg, which was unfamiliar to me, I remembered what Vera had said about my father’s account of the National Socialist Party rally of 1936 and the roars of acclamation rising from the people who had gathered here at the time. Although I had really meant to do no more than ask about my next connections, said Austerlitz, that recollection may have been why I walked out of Nuremberg Station without pausing to think, and on into that unknown city. I had never before set foot on German soil, I had always avoided learning anything at all about German topography, German history, or modern German life, and so, said Austerlitz, Germany was probably more unfamiliar to me than any other country in the world, more foreign even than Afghanistan or Paraguay. As soon as I had emerged from the underpass in front of the station I was swept along by a huge crowd of people who were streaming down the entire breadth of the street, rather like water in a riverbed, going in not just one but both directions, as if flowing simultaneously up and down stream. I think it was a Saturday, the day when people go to shop in town, inundating these pedestrian zones which apparently, as I was told later, said Austerlitz, exist in more or less

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  The mist gradually cleared; Stephen grew cold as steel, her perceptions becoming as sharp as daggers—daggers that thrust themselves into her soul, draining the blood from her innermost being. And she watched. To herself she seemed all eyes and ears, a monstrous thing, a complete degradation, yet endowed with an almost unbearable skill, with a subtlety passing her own understanding. And Martin was no match for this thing that was Stephen. He, the lover, could not hide his betraying eyes from her eyes that were also those of a lover; could not stifle the tone that crept into his voice at times when he was talking to Mary. Since all that he felt was a part of herself, how could he hope to hide it from Stephen? And he knew that she had discovered the truth, while she in her turn perceived that he knew this, yet neither of them spoke—in a deathly silence she watched, and in silence he endured her watching. It was rather a terrible summer for them all, the more so as they were surrounded by beauty, and great peace when the evening 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 passions, of bewilderment that went very ill with the quiet fulfilments, 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.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  The meal is never complete without music. As soon as the cheese is passed around Eugene jumps up and reaches for the guitar which hangs over the bed. It is always the same song. He says he has fifteen or sixteen songs in his repertoire, but I have never heard more than three. His favorite is Charmant poème d’amour. It is full of angoisse and tristesse. In the afternoon we go to the cinema which is cool and dark. Eugene sits at the piano in the big pit and I sit on a bench up front. The house is empty, but Eugene sings as if he had for audience all the crowned heads of Europe. The garden door is open and the odor of wet leaves sops in and the rain blends with Eugene’s angoisse and tristesse. At midnight, after the spectators have saturated the hall with perspiration and foul breaths, I return to sleep on a bench. The exit light, swimming in a halo of tobacco smoke, sheds a faint light on the lower corner of the asbestos curtain; I close my eyes every night on an artificial eye. ... Standing in the courtyard with a glass eye; only half the world is intelligible. The stones are wet and mossy and in the crevices are black toads. A big door bars the entrance to the cellar; the steps are slippery and soiled with bat dung. The door bulges and sags, the hinges are falling off, but there is an enameled sign on it, in perfect condition, which says: “Be sure to close the door.” Why close the door? I can’t make it out. I look again at the sign but it is removed; in its place there is a pane of colored glass. I take out my artificial eye, spit on it and polish it with my handkerchief. A woman is sitting on a dais above an immense carven desk; she has a snake around her neck. The entire room is lined with books and strange fish swimming in colored globes; there are maps and charts on the wall, maps of Paris before the plague, maps of the antique world, of Knossos and Carthage, of Carthage before and after the salting. In the corner of the room I see an iron bedstead and on it a corpse is lying; the woman gets up wearily, removes the corpse from the bed and absent-mindedly throws it out the window. She returns to the huge carven desk, takes a goldfish from the bowl and swallows it. Slowly the room begins to revolve and one by one the continents slide into the sea; only the woman is left, but her body is a mass of geography. I lean out the window and the Eiffel Tower is fizzing champagne; it is built entirely of numbers and shrouded in black lace. The sewers are gurgling furiously. There are nothing but roofs everywhere, laid out with execrable geometric cunning.

• From Reading Biblical Literature: Genesis to Revelation (2016)

  54 LECTURE 8 Violence and Kindness in the Promised Land A s you recall, Joshua led the people of Israel into Canaan, capturing the cities of the Promised Land. For many readers, this is a disturbing account of violent conquest. Some interpreters have tried to move beyond the violence by relegating it to the past. Others reject the book because it seems to commend violence. As an alternative approach, we’ll compare Joshua to Judges and Ruth. Judges is a haunting account of the tragic side of violence. It begins with heroism but ends in a tragic civil war. The book of Ruth then shows a remarkable openness to outsiders. In this lecture, let’s ask what it means to have these three viewpoints side by side. Joshua ‹ The story of Joshua opens as the people of Israel approach the Jordan River. Moses is now dead, and the people are being led by Joshua, a warrior. In the opening chapter, Joshua is told to be faithful to God and God will be faithful to him. This call for obedience is a central theme of the book, and Joshua exemplifies it. ‹ Joshua’s first challenge will be the city of Jericho. Here, the priests lead a procession across the Jordan River. When their feet touch the water, the river stops flowing so the people can walk across on dry land. Next, the priests lead a procession around the city of Jericho once each day for six days. On the seventh day, they march around the city seven times. The trumpets sound, the people shout, and the walls of Jericho come tumbling down. ‹ The collapse of the walls is followed by Joshua’s men utterly destroying the city and the people in it. The practice is called cherem in Hebrew. It means that something is completely given over to God. No one is allowed to take any plunder after the battle. Instead, everything is destroyed.

• From Reading Biblical Literature: Genesis to Revelation (2016)

  Lecture 30—Paul’s Calling 201 The Reshaping of Paul’s Identity ‹ Paul is first mentioned in the context of the martyrdom of Stephen, a disciple of Jesus who was stoned earlier in Acts. There, we find that Paul was present at the killing of Stephen and approved of it. Then, the text describes Paul embarking on his own campaign against the church. The writer does not give the reason for Paul’s hostility, but the impression is that he saw the message of Jesus as a threat to Jewish beliefs and practices. ‹ In chapter 9, Paul is traveling from Jerusalem to Damascus, apparently in some official capacity, in order to arrest Christians there. In this incident, we find a pattern that is similar to what Peter and the Roman officer Cornelius experienced when each had a vision that gave a new direction to his actions. In this story, the two people are Paul and a Christian named Ananias. Again, each of them has a vision, and in the process, each of them is transformed. After his conversion on the road to Damascus, Paul is blinded both physically and spiritually—he can’t “see” what the experience means; later, he will regain his sight.

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  The entire building, from the outside more like a mansion house than anything else, therefore consists of four wings, each not much more than three meters deep, set around the courtyard in an almost Illusionist manner and without any corridors or passages in them. It is a style resembling the prison architecture of the bourgeois epoch, when it was decided that the most useful design for the penal system was to build wings of cells around a rectangular or circular courtyard, with catwalks running along the interior. And it was not just of a prison that the archives building in the Karmelitska reminded me, said Austerlitz; it also suggested a monastery, a riding school, an opera house, and a lunatic asylum, and all these ideas mingled in my mind as I looked at the twilight coming in from above, and thought that on the rows of galleries I saw a dense crowd of people, some of them waving hats or handkerchiefs, as passengers on board a steamer used to do when it put out to sea. At any rate, it was a little while before I managed to bring myself back to the present, and turned to the lodge near the entrance, from which the porter had been keeping an eye on me ever since I had crossed the threshold and, attracted by the light of the interior courtyard, had passed by him without noticing his presence. If you wanted to speak to this porter you had to lean a long way down to his window, which was so low that he appeared to be kneeling on the floor of his lodge. Although I had soon adopted the right position, said Austerlitz, I could not make myself understood, with the result that after launching into a long verbal torrent in which I could make out nothing but the words anglicky and Anglican, repeated several times with special emphasis, the porter eventually phoned to request assistance from one of the archive’s officials, who did indeed, at practically the next moment, while I was still filling in a visitor’s form at the desk opposite the lodge, materialize beside me as if she had, as they say, sprung out of the ground. Tereza Ambrosova—so she introduced herself to me, immediately asking in her slightly hesitant but otherwise very correct English what I wanted to know—Tereza Ambrosova was a pale woman of almost transparent appearance, and about forty years old.

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

  Duns’ mind was critical rather than constructive. The abstruseness of his style offers difficulties almost insuperable to the comprehension of the modern student.1567 He developed no complete system.1568 It was his characteristic to disturb faith and to open again questions to which Thomas Aquinas and other Schoolmen were supposed to have given final statements. The sharp distinction he made between faith and knowledge, dogma and reason, and his use of the arguments from silence and probability, undermined confidence in the infallibility of the Church and opened the way for the disrepute into which scholasticism fell. Duns denied that the being of God and other dogmas can be proved by the reason, and he based their acceptance solely upon the authority of the Church. The analytic precision, as well as lucid statement of Thomas and Peter the Lombard, are wanting in the Subtle doctor, and the mystical element, so perceptible in the writings of Anselm, Thomas, and Bonaventura, gives way to a purely speculative interest. What a contrast Duns presents to the founder of his order, Francis d’Assisi, the man of simple faith and creed, and popular speech and ministries! Of all the Schoolmen, Duns wandered most in the labyrinth of metaphysical subtleties, and none of them is so much responsible as he for the current opinion that mediaeval theology and fanciful speculation are interchangeable terms. His reputation for specious ratiocination has given to the language the term, "dunce."1569 Of his personal history scarcely anything is known, and his extensive writings furnish not a single clew. Even the time and place of his entering the Franciscan order cannot be made out with certainty. The only fixed date in his career is the date which brought it to a close. He died at Cologne, Nov. 8, 1308. The date of his birth is placed between 1265–1274.1570 England, Scotland, and Ireland have contended for the honor of being the Schoolman’s native land, with the probability in favor of England. Irishmen since the fifteenth century have argued for Dun, or Down, in Ulster. Scotchmen plead for Dunse in Berwickshire, while writers, unaffected by patriotic considerations, for the most part agree upon Dunstane in Northumberland.1571 The uncertain tradition runs that he studied at Merton College, Oxford, and became teacher there on the transfer of William of Ware to Paris. In 1304, he was in the French capital, where he won the doctor’s degree. In 1308, be was transferred by the general of his order to Cologne, where he died soon after. The story ran that he was buried alive.1572 In 1707, the Franciscans tried in vain to secure his canonization. A monument, reared to Duns in the Franciscan church at Cologne, 1513, bore this inscription:— Scotia gave me birth, England nursed me, Gaul educated me, Cologne holds my ashes.1573

• From How to Read the Bible and Still Be a Christian (2015)

  Today we think that our universe began with that Big Bang around 14 billion years ago, that Earth began about 4.5 billion years ago, and that our own particular species began about 200,000 years ago. In our contemporary context, therefore, it is rather easy to mock those seventeenth-century divines and/or those biblical chronologies and genealogies. At this point, however, two alternative attitudes and questions are possible. One question asks, gleefully, why the Bible got it so wrong that it imagined the age of the universe to be in the low thousands while we recognize it to be in the low billions. The other question asks, thoughtfully, why, while inventing their genealogies and chronologies, did the biblical authors invent them so as to establish creation around 4000 BCE ? Why such feeble antiquity? In the late 2000s BCE , by contrast, a Sumerian scribe listed eight kings who had ruled “before the flood” for a total of 241,000 years. If you are imagining the distant past, why settle for 4,000 years when you could make it, say, 400,000? Hold that question about time in mind as we turn to the question about place and notice how place is much more direct and explicit than time: “And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the east. . . . A river flows out of Eden to water the garden, and from there it divides and becomes four branches . . . Pishon . . . Gihon . . . Tigris . . . Euphrates” (Gen. 2:8, 10–14). Creation began with a garden “in the east” (2:8), that is, east from the viewpoint of ancient biblical scholars in Israel (2:8b). The garden is superbly or even transcendentally well-watered by an unnamed super-river that flows through it on the inside and then forms four huge rivers on the outside. The Euphrates and Tigris Rivers are well-known, and indeed, as we already noted, Mesopotamia is a Greek name that refers to the land “between the rivers,” which we know today as Iraq. Those twin rivers rise fewer than twenty miles from one another in eastern Turkey’s Taurus Mountains and then flow southward to the Persian Gulf. The modern identity of the Pishon and Gihon Rivers is still subject to educated guesswork. But, of course, no super-river divides into the Euphrates, Tigris, Pishon, and Gihon—no matter how those latter two are identified. The author of Genesis seems to be imagining some mythical location in northern Mesopotamia as the source of four great rivers—certainly the Euphrates and Tigris, and possibly also the Halys and Aras. In any case, that garden in Eden is imagined as a super-garden well-watered by a super-river and presumably located in northern Mesopotamia. (That location for the garden may also explain why “the mountains of Ararat” were chosen for the ark’s landfall in Gen. 8:4. Re-creation in Gen. 8–9 started again where it began in Gen.

• From I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969)

  The exactness of her house was inhuman. This glass went here and only here. That cup had its place and it was an act of impudent rebellion to place it anywhere else. At twelve o'clock the table was set. At 12:15 Mrs. Cullinan sat down to dinner (whether her husband had arrived or not). At 12:16 Miss Glory brought out the food. It took me a week to learn the difference between a salad plate, a bread plate and a dessert plate. Mrs. Cullinan kept up the tradition of her wealthy parents. She was from Virginia. Miss Glory, who was a descendant of slaves that had worked for the Cullinans, told me her history. She had married beneath her (according to Miss Glory). Her husband's family hadn't had their money very long and what they had “didn't 'mount to much.” As ugly as she was, I thought privately, she was lucky to get a husband above or beneath her station. But Miss Glory wouldn't let me say a thing against her mistress. She was very patient with me, however, over the housework. She explained the dishware, silverware and servants' bells. The large round bowl in which soup was served wasn't a soup bowl, it was a tureen. There were goblets, sherbet glasses, ice-cream glasses, wineglasses, green glass coffee cups with matching saucers, and water glasses. I had a glass to drink from, and it sat with Miss Glory's on a separate shelf from the others. Soup spoons, gravy boat, butter knives, salad forks and carving platter were additions to my vocabulary and in fact almost represented a new language. I was fascinated with the novelty, with the fluttering Mrs. Cullinan and her Alice-in-Wonderland house. Her husband remains, in my memory, undefined. I lumped him with all the other white men that I had ever seen and tried not to see. On our way home one evening, Miss Glory told me that Mrs. Cullinan couldn't have children. She said that she was too delicate-boned. It was hard to imagine bones at all under those layers of fat. Miss Glory went on to say that the doctor had taken out all her lady organs. I reasoned that a pig's organs included the lungs, heart and liver, so if Mrs. Cullinan was walking around without those essentials, it explained why she drank alcohol out of unmarked bottles. She was keeping herself embalmed. When I spoke to Bailey about it, he agreed that I was right, but he also informed me that Mr. Cullinan had two daughters by a colored lady and that I knew them very well. He added that the girls were the spitting image of their father. I was unable to remember what he looked like, although I had just left him a few hours before, but I thought of the Coleman girls. They were very light-skinned and certainly didn't look very much like their mother (no one ever mentioned Mr. Coleman).

• From I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969)

  The cloth tent had been set on the flatlands in the middle of a field near the railroad tracks. The earth was carpeted with a silky layer of dried grass and cotton stalks. Collapsible chairs were poked into the still-soft ground and a large wooden cross was hung from the center beam at the rear of the tent. Electric lights had been strung from behind the pulpit to the entrance flap and continued outside on poles made of rough two-by-fours. Approached in the dark the swaying bulbs looked lonely and purposeless. Not as if they were there to provide light or anything meaningful. And the tent, that blurry bright three-dimensional A, was so foreign to the cotton field, that it might just get up and fly away before my eyes. People, suddenly visible in the lamplight, streamed toward the temporary church. The adults' voices relayed the serious intent of their mission. Greetings were exchanged, hushed. “Evening, Sister, how you?” “Bless the Lord, just trying to make it in.” Their minds were concentrated on the coming meeting, soul to soul, with God. This was no time to indulge in human concerns or personal questions. “The good Lord give me another day, and I'm thankful.” Nothing personal in that. The credit was God's, and there was no illusion about the Central Position's shifting or becoming less than Itself. Teenagers enjoyed revivals as much as adults. They used the night outside meetings to play at courting. The impermanence of a collapsible church added to the frivolity, and their eyes flashed and winked and the girls giggled little silver drops in the dusk while the boys postured and swaggered and pretended not to notice. The nearly grown girls wore skirts as tight as the custom allowed and the young men slicked their hair down with Moroline Hairdressing and water. To small children, though, the idea of praising God in a tent was confusing, to say the least. It seemed somehow blasphemous. The lights hanging slack overhead, the soft ground underneath and the canvas wall that faintly blew in and out, like cheeks puffed with air, made for the feeling of a country fair. The nudgings and jerks and winks of the bigger children surely didn't belong in a church. But the tension of the elders-their expectation, which weighted like a thick blanket over the crowd-was the most perplexing of all. Would the gentle Jesus care to enter into that transitory setting? The altar wobbled and threatened to overturn and the collection table sat at a rakish angle. One leg had yielded itself to the loose dirt. Would God the Father allow His only Son to mix with this crowd of cotton pickers and maids, washer women and handymen? I knew He sent His spirit on Sundays to the church, but after all that was a church and the people had had all day Saturday to shuffle off the cloak of work and the skin of despair.

• From I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969)

  She tried hard to make me into something she could reasonably accept. Her first attempt, which failed utterly, concerned my attention to details. I was asked, cajoled, then ordered to care for my room. My willingness to do so was hampered by an abounding ignorance of how it should be done and a fumbling awkwardness with small objects. The dresser in my room was covered with little porcelain white women holding parasols, china dogs, fat-bellied cupids and blown-glass animals of every persuasion. After making the bed, sweeping my room and hanging up the clothes, if and when I remembered to dust the bric-a-brac, I unfailingly held one too tightly and crunched off a leg or two, or too loosely and dropped it, to shatter it into miserable pieces. Daddy wore his amused impenetrable face constantly. He seemed positively diabolic in his enjoyment of our discomfort. Certainly Dolores adored her outsize lover, and his elocution (Daddy Bailey never spoke, he orated), spiced with the rolling ers and errers, must have been some consolation to her in their less-than-middle-class home. He worked in the kitchen of a naval hospital and they both said he was a medical dietician for the United States Navy. Their Frigidaire was always stocked with newly acquired pieces of ham, half roasts and quartered chickens. Dad was an excellent cook. He had been in France during World War I and had also worked as doorman at the exclusive Breakers’ Hotel; as a result he often made Continental dinners. We sat down frequently to coq au vin, prime ribs au jus, and cotelette Milanese with all the trimmings. His specialty, however, was Mexican food. He traveled across the border weekly to pick up condiments and other supplies that graced our table as pollo en salsa verde and enchilada con carne. If Dolores had been a little less aloof, a little more earthy, she could have discovered that those ingredients were rife in her town proper, and Dad had no need to travel to Mexico to buy provisions. But she would not be caught so much as looking into one of the crusty Mexican mercados, let alone venturing inside its smelliness. And it also sounded ritzy to say “My husband, Mr. Johnson, the naval dietician, went over to Mexico to buy some things for our dinner.” That goes over large with other ritzy people who go to the white area to buy artichokes. Dad spoke fluent Spanish, and since I had studied for a year we were able to converse slightly. I believe that my talent with a foreign language was the only quality I had that impressed Dolores. Her mouth was too taut and her tongue too still to attempt the strange sounds. Admittedly, though, her English, like everything else about her, was absolutely perfect.

• From I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969)

  The idea came to me that my people may be a race of masochists and that not only was it our fate to live the poorest, roughest life but that we liked it like that. “I know what you mean, Sister Williams. Got to feed the soul just like you feed the body. I'm taking the children, too, the Lord willing. Good Book say, ‘Raise a child in the way he should go and he will not depart from it.’” “That's what it say. Sure is what it say.” The cloth tent had been set on the flatlands in the middle of a field near the railroad tracks. The earth was carpeted with a silky layer of dried grass and cotton stalks. Collapsible chairs were poked into the still-soft ground and a large wooden cross was hung from the center beam at the rear of the tent. Electric lights had been strung from behind the pulpit to the entrance flap and continued outside on poles made of rough two-by-fours. Approached in the dark the swaying bulbs looked lonely and purposeless. Not as if they were there to provide light or anything meaningful. And the tent, that blurry bright three-dimensional A, was so foreign to the cotton field, that it might just get up and fly away before my eyes. People, suddenly visible in the lamplight, streamed toward the temporary church. The adults' voices relayed the serious intent of their mission. Greetings were exchanged, hushed. “Evening, Sister, how you?” “Bless the Lord, just trying to make it in.” Their minds were concentrated on the coming meeting, soul to soul, with God. This was no time to indulge in human concerns or personal questions . “The good Lord give me another day, and I'm thankful.” Nothing personal in that. The credit was God's, and there was no illusion about the Central Position's shifting or becoming less than Itself. Teenagers enjoyed revivals as much as adults. They used the night outside meetings to play at courting. The impermanence of a collapsible church added to the frivolity, and their eyes flashed and winked and the girls giggled little silver drops in the dusk while the boys postured and swaggered and pretended not to notice. The nearly grown girls wore skirts as tight as the custom allowed and the young men slicked their hair down with Moroline Hairdressing and water. To small children, though, the idea of praising God in a tent was confusing, to say the least. It seemed somehow blasphemous. The lights hanging slack overhead, the soft ground underneath and the canvas wall that faintly blew in and out, like cheeks puffed with air, made for the feeling of a country fair. The nudgings and jerks and winks of the bigger children surely didn't belong in a church. But the tension of the elders-their expectation, which weighted like a thick blanket over the crowd-was the most perplexing of all. Would the gentle Jesus care to enter into that transitory setting?

• From I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969)

  The idea came to me that my people may be a race of masochists and that not only was it our fate to live the poorest, roughest life but that we liked it like that. “I know what you mean, Sister Williams. Got to feed the soul just like you feed the body. I'm taking the children, too, the Lord willing. Good Book say, ‘Raise a child in the way he should go and he will not depart from it.’” “That's what it say. Sure is what it say.” The cloth tent had been set on the flatlands in the middle of a field near the railroad tracks. The earth was carpeted with a silky layer of dried grass and cotton stalks. Collapsible chairs were poked into the still-soft ground and a large wooden cross was hung from the center beam at the rear of the tent. Electric lights had been strung from behind the pulpit to the entrance flap and continued outside on poles made of rough two-by-fours. Approached in the dark the swaying bulbs looked lonely and purposeless. Not as if they were there to provide light or anything meaningful. And the tent, that blurry bright three-dimensional A, was so foreign to the cotton field, that it might just get up and fly away before my eyes. People, suddenly visible in the lamplight, streamed toward the temporary church. The adults' voices relayed the serious intent of their mission. Greetings were exchanged, hushed. “Evening, Sister, how you?” “Bless the Lord, just trying to make it in.” Their minds were concentrated on the coming meeting, soul to soul, with God. This was no time to indulge in human concerns or personal questions. “The good Lord give me another day, and I'm thankful.” Nothing personal in that. The credit was God's, and there was no illusion about the Central Position's shifting or becoming less than Itself. Teenagers enjoyed revivals as much as adults. They used the night outside meetings to play at courting. The impermanence of a collapsible church added to the frivolity, and their eyes flashed and winked and the girls giggled little silver drops in the dusk while the boys postured and swaggered and pretended not to notice. The nearly grown girls wore skirts as tight as the custom allowed and the young men slicked their hair down with Moroline Hairdressing and water. To small children, though, the idea of praising God in a tent was confusing, to say the least. It seemed somehow blasphemous. The lights hanging slack overhead, the soft ground underneath and the canvas wall that faintly blew in and out, like cheeks puffed with air, made for the feeling of a country fair. The nudgings and jerks and winks of the bigger children surely didn't belong in a church. But the tension of the elders-their expectation, which weighted like a thick blanket over the crowd-was the most perplexing of all. Would the gentle Jesus care to enter into that transitory setting?

• From Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2007)

  Perhaps no element in these sex reassignment and plastic surgery shows helps confirm the audience’s assumptions about gender and attractiveness more than the before-and-after photos. These pictures are designed to overemphasize stereotypes. In the programs that feature plastic surgery and gastric bypass surgery, the subject is almost always wearing frumpy clothes and frowning in the “before” picture, and dressed smart and smiling in the “after” picture, adding to the perception that they have become more attractive. In the transsexual documentaries, “before” photos of trans women almost always depict them in the most masculine of ways: playing sports as a young boy, with facial hair and wearing a wedding tuxedo or military uniform as a young man. Similarly, “before” shots of trans men often include pictures of them wearing birthday dresses as a child, or high school yearbook photos of them with long hair. The purpose for choosing these more stereotypically female and male images over other potential “before” pictures (for instance, ones where the subject looks more gender-variant or gender-neutral) is to emphasize the “naturalness” of the trans person’s assigned sex, thereby exaggerating the “artificiality” of their identified sex. In real life, before-and-after photos don’t always depict such clear-cut gender differences. One time, a friend who has only known me as a woman visited our apartment and saw wedding photos of me and my wife, Dani, for the first time. Despite the fact that I am physically male and wearing a tuxedo in the pictures (as we were married before I physically transitioned), I do not look very masculine; instead, I look like the small, long-haired, androgynous boy that I used to be. My friend seemed a little let down by the photos. She muttered, “It’s weird, because it looks just like you in the pictures, except that you’re a guy.” Similarly, whenever old friends meet up with me for the first time since my transition, they almost invariably comment on how strange it is that I seem like the exact same person to them, except that now I am female. It’s as if our compulsion to place women and men into different categories of our brain, to see them as “opposite” sexes, is so intense that we have trouble imagining that it is possible for a person to change their sex without somehow becoming an entirely different person.

• From Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2007)

  Indeed, the media tends to not notice—or to outright ignore—trans men because they are unable to sensationalize them the way they do trans women without bringing masculinity itself into question. And in a world where modern psychology was founded upon the teaching that all young girls suffer from penis envy, most people think striving for masculinity seems like a perfectly reasonable goal. Author and sex activist Patrick Califia, who is a trans man, addresses this in his 1997 book Sex Changes: The Politics of Transgenderism: “It seems the world is still more titillated by ‘a man who wants to become a woman’ than it is by ‘a woman who wants to become a man.’ The first is scandalous, the latter is taken for granted. This reflects the very different levels of privilege men and women have in our society. Of course women want to be men, the general attitude seems to be, and of course they can’t. And that’s that.”7 Once we recognize how media coverage of transsexuals is informed by the different values our society assigns to femaleness and maleness, it becomes obvious that virtually all attempts to sensationalize and deride trans women are built on a foundation of unspoken misogyny. Since most people cannot fathom why someone would give up male privilege and power in order to become a relatively disempowered female, they assume that trans women transition primarily as a way of obtaining the one type of power that women are perceived to have in our society: the ability to express femininity and to attract men. This is why trans women like myself, who rarely dress in an overly feminine manner and/or who are not attracted to men, are such an enigma to many people. By assuming that my desire to be female is merely some sort of femininity fetish or sexual perversion, they are essentially making the case that women have no worth beyond the extent to which they can be sexualized. Feminist Depictions of Trans Women

• From How to Read the Bible and Still Be a Christian (2015)

  It is simply “different” in its “devouring . . . breaking in pieces, and stamping” (7:7, 19, 23). But Alexander’s early death in 323 BCE turned his victorious generals into competing warlords. Greek-Syria and Greek-Egypt, for example, fought one another seven times over a hundred years. Next comes the final, climactic fifth kingdom. Daniel’s night vision continues with God, the “Ancient One,” surrounded by the angelic hosts of the divine council: “The court sat in judgment, / and the books were opened” (7:9–10). God’s verdict condemns those four kingdoms—long gone at the time of Daniel’s writing (7:12)—but especially the Greek-Syria subkingdom, not even counted among the four and very much present at the time of Daniel’s writing (7:11, 26). Daniel sees “one like a human being [RSV : “son of man”] coming with the clouds of heaven. / And he came to the Ancient One / and was presented before him” (7:13). (The NRSV is sensitive to change the term “son of man” to “human being” to avoid the Hebrew male chauvinism of the former.) The point is to say that imperial rule is “like a feral beast” (7:4–6), while divine rule is “like a human being” (7:13). We know, from elsewhere in Daniel, that this humanlike one is the archangel Michael, leader of the heavenly hosts (10:13, 21; 12:1). History’s climactic last kingdom is the “Kingdom of God,” first described in the story (2:38b–44) and then mentioned thrice more (4:3, 34; 6:26) before the threefold sequence here in Daniel 7. First, God’s Kingdom is “given” into the heavenly control of that archangel Michael (7:14), the “one like a human being.” Next, it is to be “received” and protected by “the holy ones of the Most High,” the heavenly hosts of angels (7:18, 22). Finally, it must be brought down to our earth and “given to the people of the holy ones of the Most High” (7:27). We saw already that tiny Israel was poised precariously first between north and south, with Anatolia and Egypt or Mesopotamia and Egypt, and then between west and east, with Greece and Persia or Rome and Parthia. The people of Israel knew all too well about the great imperial kingdoms of their world. It was Israel’s ancient hope—no, better, their ancient faith—that a God of justice in heaven would eventually establish a Kingdom of justice on this earth. Daniel 7 decrees a fundamental conflict between two archetypal visions of life here on earth, between all past and present imperial kingdoms and a divine Kingdom, prepared already in heaven, protected there by angels, and promised for eventual arrival on earth. We are told that this earthly Kingdom of God, this last or eschatological Kingdom, will be both universal and everlasting, but we are not told when and how it will arrive on our earth, or what exactly it will look like in our world as a structure or a system, a project or a process.

• 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.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  The very front of the brain, the prefrontal cortex, responsible for the most complex functions of human behavior and consciousness, curves all the way around the cranium, making a near U-turn and abutting, with intimate proximity, the most archaic parts of the brain stem, hypothalamus and limbic system. Neuroscience teaches that generally when two parts of the brain are in close anatomical closeness, it is because they are meant to function together. This makes it even more likely that the electrochemical signals will be reliably transmitted. Descartes might have been utterly flabbergasted at such an intimate relationship between the most primitive and the most refined portions of the brain. Here we have the highest pinnacle of what it is to be human “in bed” (cheek to cheek) with the most primal and archaic vestiges of our animal ancestry. Descartes would have found no rhyme or reason to this physical arrangement. Had he ever speculated in real estate, where value is all about “location, location, location,” he might have been even more perplexed. In addition, as next-door neighbors, brain stem, emotional brain and neocortex must find a common language with which to communicate. Maintaining such an intimate relationship is analogous to the task of interfacing a Craig or IBM supercomputer at MIT with an ancient abacus at the Chinese grocery so that they operate together as one unit. Likewise, the lizard’s rudimentary brain and Einstein’s genius brain (the neocortex) must cohabitate and communicate in a coherent harmony. But what happens when this coexistence between instinct, feeling and reason becomes disrupted? Phineas Gage, a railroad supervisor in 1848, was the first well-documented case of such a violent divorce. While he was blasting a tunnel near Burlington, Vermont, a three-foot-long spike called a tamping iron was propelled, bullet-like, through his skull. It entered near his eye socket, penetrating his brain, and exited through the crown on the opposite side of his head. To everyone’s amazement, Mr. Gage, minus one eye, “recovered fully.” Well, not quite … While his intellect functioned normally, the injury altered his basic personality. Before the accident, he was well liked by his employers and employees (the ideal middleman). However, the “new” Mr. Gage “was arbitrary, capricious, unstable and considered by those who knew him to be a foul-mouthed boor.” Lacking in motivation, he was unable to hold down a job and ended up drifting, including time spent in a carnival sideshow. ‡ One longtime associate observed that “Gage was no longer Gage.” In addition, a Dr. John Harlow, his physician, poignantly, described him in this manner: “Gage has lost the equilibrium or balance between his intellectual faculty and [his] animal propensities.” Fast-forward one hundred and forty years to Elliot, a patient of the eminent neurologist Antonio Damasio.