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 Available: The unfiltered and empowering new memoir for women about sex, dating and divorce after 40 (2021)

  And the guy above my head was very close to me and I was hyperaware of him, so that was awkward. And then the worst part, I can’t even say it,” he says. I wait silently. There’s no way I’m not getting the rest of this story out of him so I figure if the silence is uncomfortable enough, he will break it eventually. “Well, the guy on top was really short, remarkably short, but he had a huge dick. Huge . The ratio of the size of it to the size of his body was jarring,” he says. “I could feel him while I was inside of her. I mean, it’s just a thin wall between her ass and her pussy, and I’m inside her pussy and I can feel him moving inside of her. It was too much for me. I’m glad I tried it, but I never need to do it again.” “Was there any part of it that you enjoyed?” I ask. “Honestly, not really,” he says laughing. “It reduced sex to something that felt purely animalistic. I like this woman, but this isn’t for me. I haven’t spoken to her since the party. I think she knows it spooked me. By the way, if you saw her you would be shocked. She looks quite prim and proper. She’s petite, wears a headband and has a big job working for a bank.” “I don’t think I could do that. I’m trying hard not to judge. I get that everyone needs different things to make them feel whole or turned on or alive or whatever, but the extremeness makes me wonder a hundred different things about her, why she needs so much at once. It seems violent,” I say, and I can’t help but wonder if he realizes that his own approach to sex, if not exactly violent, is definitely aggressive and feral. I sigh and changing topics, he asks me about the rest of my day. “My parents are staying for dinner and we’re going to try out the new air fryer I got for Christmas,” I say. “My mom and I love testing out kitchen appliances.” He pulls up an instructional video on YouTube so that we can watch a demonstration. How odd , I think, to be naked in a man’s bed on a Wednesday afternoon discussing sex parties and watching a video about air fryers . For at least the hundredth time over the past few months I am perplexed, puzzling over the path that led me to this spot at this moment. I was so certain of my life’s trajectory and my vision definitely didn’t include this bit of off-roading, it just involved more of the same: marveling as the kids grew, spending holidays with my parents, upgrading our iPhones, brining increasingly larger turkeys for Thanksgiving, clearing books we didn’t love from the shelves to make room for new ones, arguing over who got more coffee every morning.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  The gospels offer us not so much a different kind of human, but a different kind of God: a God who, having made humans in his own image, will most naturally express himself in and as that image-bearing creature; a God who, having made Israel to share and bear the pain and horror of the world, will most naturally express himself in and as that pain-bearing, horror-facing creature. This is perhaps the most difficult thing for us to keep in mind, though the gospels are inviting us to do so on every page. And it is the failure to bear this in mind, perhaps, that makes it so difficult to hold together the idea of God’s kingdom breaking into the world and God’s son going to a shameful death. Insofar as the gospels do hold those things together, this isn’t simply a confidence trick. It is because they have a different view of God and God’s kingdom. To this we shall return in due course. 6 The Launching of God’s Renewed People T HIS BRINGS US NICELY to the third speaker in our sound system. Like the second one, this third one has often been turned up far too loud. This has meant both that the music it is quite properly trying to play has itself been distorted and that the music coming from the other speakers (apart from the equally distorted second one) has been overwhelmed. In much modern biblical scholarship, in fact, this one has often drowned out all the others. Here the gospels are read simply as reflections of the life of the early church, with no real connection to the narrative of Israel and (except in conservative circles) no real thought that the story of Jesus might be the story of God in person. Instead, we have the gospels as the projection of early Christian faith, reflecting the controversies and crises of the early church, which, according to the theory, placed in the mouth of a fictitious “Jesus” sayings that in fact came from early Christian prophets speaking in his name. Before we go any farther, it is important to stress that this is at best a half-truth, and the wrong half at that. Though of course the gospels reflect the life of the early church, in which the four evangelists lived, prayed, and wrote—how could they not reflect that life?—the whole point for each of them, and for any sources they had, was that something had happened in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus through which the world had changed, Israel had changed, humankind had changed, their vision and knowledge of God had changed, and they themselves had changed. They were reflecting the changed world, to be sure. But they were talking about the change itself, how it had come about, and what it all meant.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  The gospels are of course so dense, so full of splendid and vivid detail, that preachers, on the one hand, have quite enough to do with this week’s parable or miracle, and scholars, on the other, have quite enough to do with figuring out which source the passage comes from. Neither the preachers nor the scholars have bothered too much about what the story in question actually does within the longer and larger narrative the evangelist has constructed. (This is of course an overstatement. Many have done and continue to do this. I am talking about the large generality of preachers and teachers in the church and a fair proportion of scholars as well.) In part this may stem from personality. For a long time it has been much easier to get a Ph.D. in biblical studies if you’re a “details person” rather than a “big-picture person.” This has attracted into the field people with sharp eyes for small details; such an ability is a great asset for a scholar, but it needs to be balanced with the vision and imagination that will ask the big questions too, if scholarly study of the gospels is not to become seriously distorted. The meaning of a word is its use in a sentence; the meaning of a sentence is its use in a paragraph; and the meaning of a paragraph is its use in the larger document to which it contributes . Details are vitally important, but they are important as part of the overall picture. And the burden of my song in this book is that we’ve all forgotten what the big picture actually is. 3 The Inadequate Answers S O WHAT HAVE THE CHURCHES normally done with the “middle bits,” with the “body” inside the “cloak”? I have on occasion challenged groups of clergy and laity to tell me what they or their congregations might say if asked what “all that stuff in the middle” was about. What was the point, I have asked, of the healings and feastings, the Sermon on the Mount and the controversies with the Pharisees, the stilling of the storm, Peter’s confession at Caesarea Philippi, and so on, and so on—all the mass of rich material that the gospels offer us between Jesus’s birth, or at least his baptism, and his trial and death? Pastors and preachers reading this book might like to consider the question this way. If you asked your congregation about this, what do you think they would say? What, indeed, would your congregation expect you to say the gospels were all about? The responses I have received have been revealing. The church’s tradition has, it seems, offered at least six different types of answer. They are all, in my view, inadequate. None of them corresponds very closely to what the four gospels actually talk about .

• From How God Became King (2012)

  It has been a salutary exercise, I believe, to review in this way the different things that people have said as they face the question of why the gospels included all that material between Jesus’s birth and his death. All these proposals have been advanced quite seriously, and I have tried to take them in the same serious spirit. But it is clear to me that none of them have actually taken the gospels seriously as they stand. They have gone to them with the wrong questions and have found answers, of a sort, to those questions. The challenge now is to accept that we have all misunderstood the gospels and to set about finding ways in which we can put this right. It is time for a fresh look at our central texts. PART TWOAdjusting the Volume4The Story of IsraelIMAGINE, IF YOU WILL, that you have set up a new sound system in your living room. You have installed a quadraphonic set of speakers, one in each corner. But you haven’t yet figured out how to adjust them individually, and the sound is strange and distorted. Each of the four needs to be sorted out. Otherwise, when you’re listening to orchestral music, you’ll get too much violin or perhaps woodwind and no cello or brass. Now, one of the reasons the gospels are such a challenge to read is that there are four strands, four dimensions, that contribute to what they are saying, which in much modern reading have become distorted in something like the same way. Some of them have been turned way down or even silenced altogether. Others have been turned up too loud, so that they are shrill and crackly. One way or another, the music is out of balance. Some parts are almost inaudible, and other parts are all too audible, blasting out at top volume, distorted in themselves and drowning out everything else. Of course, this isn’t the same in all readings of the gospels. Different Christian traditions have twiddled the knobs on these four speakers, making this or that one louder or softer. But the point I want to make in this part of the book is that we only get the correct sound when all four are properly adjusted.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  Most people in the ancient world, in fact, not just Jews, would have supposed that legitimacy came, ultimately, from what you did in office, not from the method by which you got there. But that’s only the immediate and rather obvious political problem. There are deeper issues afoot as well. In today’s muddled thinking we find, on the one hand, some people who are almost ready to deny the Fall, imagining that the world is a nice, safe place and that nobody needs any “power” to look after it (hence the anarchist dream and its right-wing small-government equivalent). On the other hand, there are other people who are ready to produce a doctrine of total depravity when it comes to anyone who actually has power, so that power is automatically, ipso facto, bad. Both of these viewpoints result in suspicion of actual rulers: the first, because they’re not really needed, and the second, because they are bound to abuse their power. You could of course run the argument the other way, with the charitable assumption attaching itself to rulers and the doctrine of depravity going with the mob. (Another contemporary irony is that the libertarians, who are all for cutting back on police powers and making prisons more comfortable, are often the first in line to call for harsh penalties when violent mobs rampage through their own neighborhoods.) And, in the middle of this, the word “theocracy” is not one that many people like to hear. It makes them think of Fascist states in Europe in the first half of the twentieth century or fundamentalist states in the Middle East in the first half of the twenty-first. If God is in charge, then—so people suppose—there will be a hard-line “clerical” elite or near equivalent (the Party bosses in Communist or Fascist systems) who claim to be channeling God’s will. No room, then, for dissent or even debate. God says it; they enforce it; that settles it. But does this square with first-century Jewish views of what “theocracy” might look like, and perhaps should look like? First-century Jews knew all about bad rulers, both pagan and Jewish. But when they longed, as many did, for God alone to become king, this vision, rooted as it was in the great biblical kingdom texts, usually envisaged that the way God would become king would be through the appropriate human agency. This, in the Psalms, Isaiah, and many other texts both biblical and postbiblical, meant of course the messiah, the anointed king.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  And if that was true of him, it is true of a great deal of the Western Christian tradition (I can’t speak about Eastern Orthodoxy): Catholic and Protestant, liberal and evangelical, charismatic and contemplative. We use the gospels. We read them aloud in worship. We often preach from them. But have we even begun to hear what they are saying, the whole message, which is so much greater than the sum of the small parts with which we are, on one level, so familiar? I don’t think so. This is the lifetime puzzle. It isn’t just that we’ve all misread the gospels, though I think that’s broadly true. It is more that we haven’t really read them at all. We have fitted them into the framework of ideas and beliefs that we have acquired from other sources. I want in this book to allow them, as far as I can, to speak for themselves. Not everyone will like the result. Canon and Creed This problem about the puzzling relationship between “the gospel” and “the gospels” is reflected in the equally puzzling relationship between the gospels and the great Christian creeds. A good friend of mine, in a sparkling presentation, once let slip the remarkable line, “The canonical Jesus is, of course, the Christ of the church’s creeds.” In other words, the Jesus we find in the four canonical gospels is the Jesus Christ we confess when we say the Apostles’ Creed, the Nicene Creed (properly, the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed), or even the so-called Athanasian Creed (a much longer formula that the old Anglican prayer book instructs worshippers to include on special occasions). My friend was distinguishing this supposedly both creedal and canonical Jesus from the reconstructed “Jesus” figures of so much would-be historical scholarship. Over here to one side, he implied, we have that mountain of historical scholarship, with characters such as Schweitzer and Sanders and even N. T. Wright peeping out from under the great pile, offering their various historical reconstructions. Over here to the other side, a very different thing, we have the Jesus whom the canonical gospels actually present, who is the same as the Jesus of the great creeds.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  Would chapters 1–2 (Jesus’s birth) and 27–28 (his death and resurrection) have done just as well? Was Matthew, and were Mark, Luke, and John for that matter, wasting time telling us all that stuff in the middle? Were they just giving us the “backstory” to satisfy any lingering curiosity the church might have about the earlier life of the one Christians now worshipped as Lord? This problem, as we began to notice in the previous section, resurfaced in twentieth-century scholarship in the form of the question scholars associate with Rudolf Bultmann in particular (though with many antecedents and many followers): Why should the church, worshipping the living Lord, be bothered by the history of what he had done in the past? The answers given by conservative scholarship seem thin and flat. They amount to what we now refer to as arm-waving: they maintain that early converts, eager to worship the risen Lord in the present, wanted to know about the earthly life of this same Jesus. But although that was undoubtedly the case, responding to a request for information doesn’t seem to come anywhere close to describing what the gospels seem to be doing. They do not seem merely to be providing background biographical details. They are not merely “filling in gaps” to help the present faith and life of their readers. They are telling a story, a story that is almost entirely missing in the great creeds of the early church. The same point comes out even more strongly in the Nicene Creed, which developed to its present form by the middle of the fifth century. I quote the second article in its traditional English form: I believe...in one Lord Jesus Christ the only-begotten Son of God; begotten of his Father before all worlds; God of God; light of light; very God of very God; begotten, not made; Being of one substance with the Father; by whom all things were made; Who for us men, and our salvation came down from heaven; And was incarnate of the Holy Spirit from the Virgin Mary, and was made man. Then we can imagine a deep breath, a dramatic pause, as we wait to see if anything further will be said about Jesus. But no, the creed leaps right over the whole “middle story” and lands once more at the end: And was crucified also for us under Pontius Pilate; he suffered and was buried; And the third day he rose again according to the Scriptures; And ascended into heaven; and sitteth on the right hand of the Father; And he shall come again in glory to judge both the living and the dead, And his kingdom shall have no end. Again, lots of detail, filled in in new ways to answer new problems and challenges. But again no detail at all, no mention at all, of anything between the second person of the Trinity becoming human and this human/divine man being “crucified for us under Pontius Pilate.”

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

  This was extraordinarily disconcerting to me at first, as being a crossdresser was such a huge part of my identity at the time. I remember lying in bed one morning and thinking, I wonder where I should take my crossdressing next? as if I simply needed to find some new aspect of femaleness or femininity to experiment with, some new crossdressing stage to pioneer, in order to regain interest in it. However, by this point, I had explored femininity and female gender roles as much as possible within the context of being a crossdresser. Fortunately for me, this was when Dani (who was my girlfriend at the time) introduced me to Kate Bornstein’s and Leslie Feinberg’s writings. Their books allowed me to start viewing myself as bigendered rather than as a crossdresser. I began to see my expressions of femaleness and femininity not merely as something that existed outside of myself that I could emulate or imagine but never truly experience, but rather as an intrinsic and legitimate part of my person, as something that came from within me.Thinking of myself as bigendered also helped me make sense of another new development in my life: that people were beginning to pick up on my femininity even when I was in boy-mode. Strangers began to assume that I was gay, and on rare occasions even gendered me as female. These changes, which occurred despite the fact that I was dressing the same and had not consciously altered my behavior, took me by surprise. I eventually realized that over those many years of crossdressing I must have unlearned many of the rote masculine mannerisms that I’d acquired during my adolescence and early adulthood—behaviors that had served as a selfdefense mechanism that allowed me to escape effemimanic derision. In other words, during the years that I crossdressed, it wasn’t so much that I learned how to be female (as I was no longer employing any of the contrived and stereotyped feminine mannerisms I practiced back when I was crossdressing), but that I had in effect unlearned maleness.If it were not for my years as a crossdresser, I doubt that I would have been able to demystify femaleness and unlearn maleness to the point that I could live for several years as a feminine bigendered boy—an identity that preceded my decision to transition. While I certainly do not believe that crossdressing is merely a phase that eventually leads to becoming a transsexual woman, I do believe that many crossdressers experience similar phases of demystifying femaleness/femininity and unlearning maleness/masculinity over the course of their lives. While crossdressing may seem highly contrived to many outsiders, from an MTF perspective, it is an invaluable way to reconcile our female/feminine inclinations with our male/masculine bodies and socialization.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  This text, highlighted elsewhere in first-century Judaism as well, was very important for the early Christians as they struggled to understand the enormous thing that had just happened in their midst. There is a very tight nexus between God, David, the Temple—and the purposes of establishing the kingdom. The early Christians also saw that in the word “I will raise up” there was a hint of something else: resurrection. This rich, dense combination of themes reappears in a passage we looked at a moment ago, namely, Isaiah 53. In the previous section of the book, the prophet has invoked “the arm of YHWH” as a way of talking about YHWH himself, coming in person to do what he had promised, namely, to defeat the enemy and rescue his people: Awake, awake, put on strength, O arm of YHWH! Awake, as in days of old, the generations of long ago!… Was it not you who dried up the sea, the waters of the great deep, who made the depths of the sea a way for the redeemed to cross over?… YHWH has bared his holy arm before the eyes of all the nations, and all the ends of the earth shall see the salvation of our God. (51:9–10; 52:10; cf. 40:10) This means that when we arrive at 53:1, there is only one possible interpretation: Who has believed what we have heard? And to whom has the arm of YHWH been revealed? For he grew up before him like a young plant, and like a root out of dry ground. (53:1–2) The prophet looks on in horror at the “servant,” battered and bruised beyond recognition, and says in wondering tones, “Who would have thought that he was ‘the arm of YHWH’?” Looking at him, at this “servant,” you’d never have guessed it. But the point of the larger poem, of Isaiah 40–55 as a whole, is that the servant is the one through whose representative work Israel’s God will accomplish his purposes for Israel and the whole world. The “servant” is a role made for YHWH’s own use. The purpose is to establish the kingdom; the means is the obedient suffering of Israel’s representative. This role and the accomplishment of this purpose are tasks that only YHWH himself can undertake. Here is the mystery at the heart not only of the New Testament (which went back again and again to these texts in the quest for understanding what had just happened), but of the Old as well.

• From Available: The unfiltered and empowering new memoir for women about sex, dating and divorce after 40 (2021)

  It’s already clear to me that I had been silly to worry about his being too genteel to be an ardent lover. Soon I am lying on the couch and he lifts the blouse over my head, then runs his finger along my clavicle, down my breastbone to my navel, slowly but finally landing at the button to my jeans, which he easily opens with one hand. He slides my jeans down my legs, taking his time to kiss the soft spot of skin where my thong touches my bikini line, along the inside of my upper thighs and then down my legs, delicately lifting my feet to free me of my jeans. I watch wordlessly as he puts my toe into his mouth, gently sucking on it as I arch my back and let out a long, slow breath. He rises from the couch, then takes my hand and leads me to his bedroom. His bedroom is small but his bed is hotel-quality, with a crisp white duvet covering a fluffy down quilt and copious pillows with matching white pillowcases and navy blue piping. It is elegant and enticing, but also masculine without signs of the bachelor beds I’ve seen haphazardly thrown together and usually covered in dog hair up until now; decidedly metrosexual, which hits my sweet spot. I lie back against the pillows and he kneels between my legs, saying, “I’m dying to taste you.” He pulls my thong down, his thumbs hooked around the lace waistband, and slowly runs his fingers down my legs. When he puts his head between my legs, he inhales deeply and says, “Your smell is intoxicating.” With these words, I’m at a loss. Am I supposed to respond? And what exactly would an appropriate response be – a delighted, why thank you? A sidebar that the smell is deeply indebted to expensive Parisian rose oil that never goes on sale so he’s lucky I used some of it for his benefit? A sultry and absurd, “You know it baby”? Flummoxed, I remain silent and hope my silence will be a hint that I’m all action and no conversation once I’m in bed. I am not quite so lucky though, as it appears that #6 is going to take the time and effort to observe every detail of our sexual encounter and verbalize these observations. “You are so wet and so sweet,” he says, and my mouth twists so that I am biting the corner of my lip. He’s kind of far away so if I do speak I’m going to have to do it in a loud voice, which means I’m going to have to really assert myself, say whatever I can muster up with some degree of gumption. I am running through all the possible responses, trying to come up with one that registers I hear him but offers only the most banal words so that I’m not forced to follow up with even more words.

• From Available: The unfiltered and empowering new memoir for women about sex, dating and divorce after 40 (2021)

  “OK,” I say, relieved that this is the only objection she voices. When I call a lawyer friend and learn that I could sleep with a different man every day and it won’t legally be held against me, I consider that all the approval I need. CHAPTER 12This Must Be BadWhen I tell friends that Michael and I have separated, they want an explanation. It makes little sense to anyone, aside from the friend who stunned me when he bluntly announced his surprise that we had actually made it this long. We bickered within the range of what I thought was expected and normal for a long-married couple, we loved and often adored each other, we had just moved into our “forever” home, we traveled and loved spending time together with our kids. We often poked fun at each other’s peculiarities (the animalistic way he tore into his grapefruit standing over the sink every morning, the way I chewed apples like a horse). I was proud of his professional success – and of having been by his side as he built it – and I still delighted in his ability to be playful, optimistic, and sometimes flat-out zany. For decades, he had been my perfect counterbalance: an embracer of change and the unknown when I resisted both, and able to find the glass half-full when I seemed only to find it half-empty. In exchange, I had given him freedom to come and go as he worked long and unpredictable hours, showing unwavering faith and support in all his endeavors. Most importantly, after his having bounced around countless New York City apartments as the only child of divorced, bohemian parents, I had made him a home, one that looked and smelled and felt like a warmly shared space in which a loving family lived. My closest friends are astounded. Some friends who are slightly less close comment, “You never know what goes on behind closed doors.” This hits me like a slap in the face, as if we had been putting on a front the whole time, as if who we really were as a couple was different from who we appeared to be. I understand that these friends want to believe there was a sinister story unfolding at home so that this event could make some sort of sense, but I am as shocked as they are, so how can I offer reasonable explanations? How can I reassure them that their own marriages won’t fall prey to this trauma too? I had always been the advice columnist of our group, the one friends had referred to as “Dear Laura”, ready and able to dispense advice and resources. If this could happen to me, it seemed reasonable to assume that it could happen to any of them too. I have been selective with whom I have shared my tale of woe but still, word spreads. One day I run into an acquaintance who has been battling cancer.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  This and similar passages are enough for Mark’s alert readers to start asking the question: Suppose this is what it looks like when Israel’s God returns at last? Suppose this isn’t a story about a man going about “proving that he’s God,” but about God coming back in person to rescue his people? Part of the problem, I believe, is not only that skeptics have sneered at the idea of “God” coming into our world. It is also that believers have found it easier to imagine the kind of “intervening God” the skeptics have denied and a lot harder to imagine the kind of utterly human “God” Mark seems to be describing. Of course, this raises huge questions that Mark doesn’t really begin to answer. What happens at the death of Jesus? What is the relationship between Jesus himself and the one to whom he prays—particularly, the one to whom he prays with the terrible cry of desolation? Mark doesn’t seem concerned about giving us an answer in the form of a theory. Pay attention to the story, he seems to be saying. Live in it and allow it to shift the ground on which you’re standing. Then maybe you won’t need a theory. Maybe you’ll see everything differently: At midday there was darkness over all the land until three in the afternoon. At three o’clock Jesus shouted out in a powerful voice, “Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?” Which means, “My God, my God, why did you abandon me?” When the bystanders heard it, some of them said, “He’s calling for Elijah!” One of them ran and filled a sponge with sour wine, put it on a pole, and gave it him to drink. “Well then,” he declared, “let’s see if Elijah will come and take him down.” But Jesus, with another loud shout, breathed his last. The Temple veil was torn in two, from top to bottom. When the centurion who was standing facing him saw that he died in this way, he said, “This fellow really was God’s son.” (15:33–39) Calling Jesus “God’s son” echoes, of course, the voice at Jesus’s baptism (1:11). But when a Roman centurion says those words, we assume he didn’t know what had happened on that day. For him, the phrase “God’s son” would normally have meant one person and one person only: Tiberius Caesar, son of the “divine” Augustus. That’s what the coins all said—including the coin they showed Jesus a few days before (12:15–17). This points ahead to our fourth sound speaker (Chapter 7).

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

  In other words, when we critique any gender as being “good” or “bad,” we are by definition being sexist. After all, isn’t what drives many of us into feminism and queer activism in the first place our frustration that other people often place rather arbitrary meanings and values onto our sexed bodies, gender expressions, and sexualities? Is there really any difference between the schoolyard bullies who teased us for being too feminine or masculine when we were little, the arrogant employer who assumes that we aren’t cut out for the job because we’re female, the gay men who claim that we are holding back the gay rights movement because we are not straight-acting enough, and the people—whether lesbian-feminists of the 1970s and 1980s, or subversivists in the 2000s—who decry us for not being androgynous enough to be “true gender radicals”? Some might argue that it’s simply human nature for us to assign different values to different genders and sexualities. For example, if we tend to prefer the company of men over women, or if we find androgynous people more attractive than feminine or masculine ones, isn’t that assigning them a different worth? Not necessarily. There is a big difference between rightly recognizing these preferences in terms of our personal predilections (“I find androgynous people attractive”) and entitled claims that imply that there are no other legitimate opinions (“Masculine and feminine people are not sexy, period”). Similarly, there’s a big difference between calling yourself a woman or a genderqueer because you feel that word best captures your gendered experience and using that identity to make claims or presumptions about other people’s genders (e.g., assuming that “men” or “gender-conforming people” are your “opposites”). Some might also argue that there is such a thing as “bad” gender—for instance, a woman who feels coerced into living up to stereotypically feminine ideals. As someone who was closeted for many years, I can understand why someone might be tempted to describe genders that are enforced by others (e.g., stereotypical femininity or masculinity) as being “bad.” The problem is that there is no way for us to know whether any given person’s gender identity or expression is sincere or coerced. While we experience our own genders and sexualities firsthand, and thus are capable of separating our own intrinsic inclinations from the extrinsic expectations that others place on us, we are unable to do so on behalf of other people. We can only ever make assumptions and educated guesses about the authenticity of someone else’s sexuality or gender—and that’s always dangerous. The thing that always impresses me about human beings is our diversity. Even when we are brought up in similar environments, we still somehow gravitate toward very different careers, hobbies, politics, manners of speaking and acting, aesthetic preferences, and so forth. Maybe this diversity is due to genetic variation.

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

  Granted, my transition went a lot quicker than it does for many trans women, since I started out as a small, long-haired boy who was occasionally “ma’am”ed even before taking hormones. Nevertheless, the speed and extent of my transition, and the fact that it occurred without my having to change my behavior or mannerisms, challenged everything I used to believe to be true about gender. My initial reaction to this experience was to even further embrace my “genderqueerness”—my sense of otherness. The taken-for-granted assumption that female and male were fixed and reliable states suddenly appeared to me to be the product of a mass hallucination, held together only by the fact that so few people actually had the firsthand experience of transitioning—of seeing how such small differences in one’s physical gender can result in such a large difference in the way one is perceived and treated by others. Suddenly, I no longer felt like I was journeying from one gender to the other. I felt more like I was floating in a little dinghy that had been recently released from the dock I had been anchored to my whole life; and now I was being tossed about on an ocean of other people’s perceptions of me. And while I was definitely searching for a place where I could feel at home in my own body, I was no longer quite sure what that place might look like or what I might call it when I finally arrived. From conversations I’ve had with a number of transsexual friends who transitioned before me, I would say that my attitude at the time—my questioning of (and refusal to identify within) the male/female binary—was a fairly common response to being in the throes of physical and social transition. Transitioning is such an upending, mind-blowing experience that it seems to me to be almost a necessity for one to let go of one’s preconceived notions of maleness and femaleness in order to traverse those states of being. Being perceived as female while having an entirely male history and a mostly male body (as I did at the time) made me feel not like an imposter (as some might imagine), but more like an alien. I was just being myself, but other people were relating and reacting to me in ways that were foreign to me. I felt less like a woman or a man than I did a stranger in a strange land. As with many of my transsexual friends, I found that this sense of otherness steadily subsided with time. And over the course of a year or two, I eventually did come to identify as a woman. Part of this evolution in my self-perception was driven by how different I felt in my body after physically transitioning. This is one of the most difficult aspects of transitioning to describe, as there are so few words in our language to articulate “body feelings” of any sort.

• From In Search of Paul: How Jesus's Apostle Opposed Rome's Empire with God's Kingdom (2005)

  You are on a two-week Pauline tour around the Aegean, this is the first full day after a transatlantic flight through Munich, and you have no idea how tired you are or how much more tired you yet will be. The plan is that, as at home, you will get up each morning at dawn to jog for an hour before breakfast, and today you are right on schedule for this trip’s first—and last—run. Your hotel is just west of the old city and a block or so in from the bay. You cross the negligible Saturday morning traffic toward the main commercial port to run east along the seafront. It is the first week of May in 2000, the air is crisp to cool, the wind is slight to nonexistent, and only a few waiting freighters break the surface of the bay to your right. But jogging is for thinking, and this is the question. Where in this metropolis of a million can you glimpse anything from the first century, from the world that Paul knew, from the city that Paul visited in the early 50s C.E.? The Roman port is completely obliterated, the extant forum dates from around 200, and the triumphal arch of Galerius dates from around 300 C.E. So what about the year 50? You pass the fifteenth-century White Tower, where workers are setting up platforms under surrounding trees for tomorrow’s folk festival. But the Christian antiquities in the tower’s Byzantine Museum start a few centuries after Paul’s time. Nothing first-century there. The esplanade is wider now and ahead are the shrubs and trees surrounding the marble and bronze of the Alexander monument. On a raised platform, a large marble-sheathed pedestal holds a statue of the twenty-something general astride Bucephalos rearing toward the east. Alexander rides bareback (stirrups had not yet been invented), his left hand reins the warhorse’s head slightly to the left, and his right hand holds a short sword. Two lines of small uninflected Greek letters identify him as Alexandros/o Megas, or Alexander the Great (megas, by the way, is the first Greek root in “megalomania”). At the left front of the platform, as if in a linked column following Alexander, stands the technological core of his killing machine. Five tall pikes stand upright in marble sockets with five round shields attached about one-third of the way up from the bottom. Greek hoplites had long used massed shoulder-to-shoulder attacks, but with larger shields and much shorter spears. Alexander perfected his father’s invention of phalanxes using 18-foot pikes extending 12 feet in front of each soldier. Those sarissai were so heavy that they required two hands for steady horizontal thrusting but, with shields suspended from their necks, those in the first five rows of the phalanx could all extend their lethal iron points into the killing zone.

• From The Pisces (2018)

  We spend most of them looking like we are in our late teens and early twenties. I think it’s the saltwater. It preserves us in some way.” “So are you mythic? Are you a mythic creature? Is this a joke you are playing? Am I hallucinating you?” But from the look on his face I knew it wasn’t a joke. There was no way the place his skin met his tail could be fake. The gradations were too rough and eerie. There was no makeup or costume in the world that could do that. He really was part man and part fish. Or something. Had I lost it at some point along the way? Was I worse off than I thought? “You aren’t hallucinating, not really,” he said. “I mean, you are kind of hallucinating in the sense that your perspective has shifted. But in a way you were really hallucinating before you met me—in the sense that there was only one part of life you could see. You believed only that which was in front of you. Most people do. Most people believe that which you cannot see or know could not possibly exist. Humans are very arrogant. I don’t think you are arrogant, but I think it’s just your nature to only believe in what you can see.” “I don’t even know what to say,” I said. “I have so many questions for you.” “Let’s start slow,” he said. “Are you real?” I asked. He laughed. “I suffer like I’m real. I have wants like I’m real. I fear that I will be unliked or unloved. Men, women, I think that maybe everyone wants the same thing.” “Men want sex,” I said. “Don’t you?” he asked. “I do,” I said. “Maybe. But I think I mistake it for love, or something.” “How do you know when you’re mistaking it?” “I think when I get high off it.” “Well, why not? That could be love,” he said. “Can’t you get high off of love? I don’t think I want a love that doesn’t make me feel amazing.” “I don’t know if that’s love or something else,” I said. “But I don’t think it’s love if the person disappears.” “I wouldn’t say it’s not love,” he said. “But it’s hard. That is a very painful experience.” I was surprised to hear him say that. I felt that surely he must always be the one doing the disappearing. Merman, fish fillet, whatever the fuck he was, I still thought of him as a surfer who worried about nothing. Someone who was very free to just disappear off into the night at any time. I wondered what he looked like to the mermaids under there. Were there mermaids? Was he beautiful for the sea or just average? I didn’t dare ask. Surely the mermaids must be beautiful—breathing in and out under the ocean. I imagined them long-haired with little waists and shells on their tits. I imagined them all like Aphrodite.

• From Available: The unfiltered and empowering new memoir for women about sex, dating and divorce after 40 (2021)

  I say no, because now that our clothes are on and we are back to the business of practicalities, I’m anxious to be on my way. We walk quietly and quickly. “Wow, you walk fast! I’ve never walked with a woman who can match my pace and definitely not in heels in the rain,” he says. “I’m a city girl,” I tell him, remembering how little he knows about me aside from my body and the basic facts of my life. When we reach my car, I offer to drive him back up the hill to the hotel. Stepping into the driver’s seat, I do a quick swipe of the passenger seat, which is still filled with the remnants of my trip with Georgia: Ziplocs of goldfish crackers, granola bar wrappers, a bag of cherry pits. I feel totally and suddenly exposed for who I really am: a harried housewife and busy mom. How does this fit with the woman who a few hours ago stripped off her clothes and practically begged to be debauched? Back in the driveway under the stark, too-bright lights of the hotel, I turn to him and shyly say, “Well, thank you. It was really nice meeting you.” “Yeah, it was great to meet you too. Maybe I’ll run into you one of these weekends when I’m back up here,” he says, but he doesn’t ask for my phone number and I don’t ask for his. Within seconds I’m pulling out of the parking lot and driving back to my house. I’ve been gone only seven hours, but I am returning home a changed woman. * The next morning, I wake up bewildered. It seems impossible that last night happened the way I replay it in my imagination. I feel like I’ve been hit by lightning. I look down at my naked body, put my hand over my heart. Everything looks as it did just a day ago, my skin deeply tanned from the Nantucket beaches, my stomach slightly rounded, breasts spilling over toward the sides of my body. I’m not as taut or as buoyant as I was the last time I had sex with someone for the first time. My edges seem to be both harder, having lost the supple baby fat of my youth, and softer, having experienced gravity and childbirth and age. I survey myself, every freckle and vein and scar and hair, and think, it’s all mine, for better or for worse, and I can do whatever I want with it . This knowledge is liberating and riveting. For months I have felt numb when I’m having a good day and despondent when it’s a rough day, but I feel a flicker of myself coming back to life. It’s both a physical sensation and a sudden awareness of myself as a person. Not just a mother, not just a wife, not just a jilted lover. I am all these things but not just that.

• From In Search of Paul: How Jesus's Apostle Opposed Rome's Empire with God's Kingdom (2005)

  The only thing I want to learn from you is this: Did you receive the Spirit by doing the works of the law or by believing what you heard? Are you so foolish? Having started with the Spirit, are you now ending with the flesh? Did you experience so much for nothing?—if it really was for nothing. Well then, does God supply you with the Spirit and work miracles among you by your doing the works of the law, or by your believing what you heard? (Gal. 3:2–5) Paul picks up this experiential argument again later when he mentions that they are now God’s adopted children “and because you are children, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, ‘Abba! Father!’” (4:6; notice that transition from “you” to “our”). That “Abba” is not just a statement of faith, but a cry of ecstasy. That is a forceful, powerful, and experiential argument that opponents could only rebut by claiming those ecstatic experiences were demonic and not divine, were from hell and not from heaven. Exegesis: “A Sign of the Covenant” Paul’s third and central argument is exegetical. And if, in reading it and trying to follow its logic, your head begins to spin, you are getting the right effect. It does not seem that Paul’s male converts had already accepted circumcision—“if you let yourselves be circumcised,” he says in 5:2. They probably wrote to him asking about its necessity and letting him know the arguments of his opponents, about whom Paul says nastily, “I wish those who unsettle you would castrate themselves” (5:12). Apart from disputing Paul’s integrity and authority, what precise biblical argument did the opponents use to make his male converts even consider circumcision? They must have argued from Abraham because, if they had not, Paul’s counterargument is inexplicable. They chose to attack Paul’s Galatian teachings by appealing to God’s covenant with Abraham from Genesis 17 in the first book of Moses’s five-book Torah. Genesis gave them two powerful bases from which to argue that male gentile converts had to be circumcised to become full members of God’s people. The Argument Against Paul First, God made a covenant with Abraham. But a covenantal bond is a two-way relationship with duties, obligations, and commitments on both sides. From God’s side that covenant involves the promise of progeny and land. Read Genesis 17:1–8 and note its drumbeat emphasis on progeny (“exceedingly numerous,…multitude of nations,…exceedingly fruitful;…nations…and kings,…offspring,…offspring,…offspring”). But there are also obligations on Abraham’s side. He must, of course, “walk blameless before God” (17:1), but there is also this special obligation:

• 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.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Once pointed out, the color motif need not be identified further; but the reader is reminded again that Nabokov is no “symbolist.” After reading the first draft of these Notes, Nabokov thought that this point had not been made clear enough, and, moved too by the annotator’s loose play with some “red” images, wrote the following for my information, under the heading “A Note about Symbols and Colors re ‘Annotated Lolita. ’ ” It is included here because I think it is one of the most significant statements Nabokov made about his own art. He writes: There exist novelists and poets, and ecclesiastic writers, who deliberately use color terms, or numbers, in a strictly symbolic sense. The type of writer I am, half-painter, half-naturalist, finds the use of symbols hateful because it substitutes a dead general idea for a live specific impression. I am therefore puzzled and distressed by the significance you lend to the general idea of “red” in my book. When the intellect limits itself to the general notion, or primitive notion, of a certain color it deprives the senses of its shades. In different languages different colors were used in a general sense before shades were distinguished. (In French, for example, the “redness” of hair is now expressed by “ roux ” meaning rufous, or russet, or fulvous with a reddish cast.) For me the shades, or rather colors, of, say, a fox, a ruby, a carrot, a pink rose, a dark cherry, a flushed cheek, are as different as blue is from green or the royal purple of blood (Fr. “ pourpre ”) from the English sense of violet blue. I think your students, your readers, should be taught to see things, to discriminate between visual shades as the author does, and not to lump them under such arbitrary labels as “red” (using it, moreover, as a sexual symbol, though actually the dominant shades in males are mauve—to bright blue, in certain monkeys).… Roses may be white, and even black-red. Only cartoonists, having three colors at their disposal, use red for hair, cheek and blood. See Orange … and Emerald for further remarks on color. Miss Phalen : from the French phalène : moth. For the entomological allusions, see John Ray, Jr. . C HAPTER 13 friable : easily crumbled or pulverized. parkled : H.H.’s coinage. safely solipsized : see solipsism . An important phrase (see second half of not human, but nymphic ). The verbal form of solipsist is of course H.H.’s coinage—a most significant portmanteau suggesting that Lolita has been reduced in more than size, as H.H. comes to realize.