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 64 of 69 · 20 per page

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  In 1874 Bismarck had said that to do so would mean a papal triumph and ‘we non-Catholics must either become Catholics or emigrate or our property would be confiscated, as is usual with heretics.’ But by 1887 he was tired of the struggle and looking for allies; Leo XIII persuaded some of the Catholic Centre party to support Bismarck in the Reichstag, and got as his reward the withdrawal of the laws. Bismarck, who had put them through to preserve national unity from papal interference now said: ‘What do I care whether the appointment of a Catholic priest is notified to the state or not – Germany must be united’ – a reversal of position which marked his discomfiture. The truth is that, in practice, the papacy did not so much turn its back on the world as seek to nudge it in a conservative direction. It did not object to the modern state so long as it had a traditionalist posture. Leo, one of the few modern popes to write elegant Latin, spent a great deal of time publishing encyclicals which purported to lay down Catholic principles; but nearly all of them reflected the views of a conservative empiricist. In Italy, he refused to recognise the regime and forbade Catholics to take any part in it – they were to be ‘neither electors nor elected’; on the other hand he encouraged the systematic creation of a network of Catholic clubs, associations and congresses, which the Church could control much more easily than Catholic deputies, and which could exert almost as much pressure behind the scenes. In 1885 his encyclical Immortale Dei was a move towards recognizing popularly-elected governments where there was really no alternative: he laid down that ‘the greater or less participation of the people in government has nothing blamable in itself. This document set out his political philosophy, such as it was. Both Church and State have their authority from God. The Church has power of judgment over all that relates to the salvation of souls and the worship of God, and of course there can be only one true Church. He denounced the ‘rage for innovation’. Freedom of thought and publication was ‘the fountain-head of many evils’. It was ‘not lawful for the state . . . to hold in equal favour different kinds of religion’; on the other hand ‘no one should be forced to embrace the Catholic faith against his will’, a retreat from the papal position held at least until the 1820s, when toleration had been again condemned as ‘madness’. Leo had attacked socialism as long ago as 1878, in his Quod apostolici muneris, and he denied the right of any state, whatever its composition, to dissolve Christian marriage (Arcanum 1880). The right to rule came from God: civil power did not come from men as such (Diuturnum illud 1881).

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  Kings, bishops and abbots might employ professional criminals, or they might venture into crime themselves, using whatever power was available or necessary. Men did not make a distinction between political and military force, and the spiritual force generated by holy bones. An ambitious man like King Cnut, for instance, took risks in this field, just as he staked his kingdoms and his life in battle: the potential rewards were worth it. In 1020, Abbot Æthelstan of Romsey, instigated by the Bishop of Dorchester and with the consent of Cnut, sent a naval expedition to Sohan to steal the body of St Felix: there was nearly a naval battle with the monks of Ely. Three years later, Archbishop Æthelnoth, with Cnut’s help, opened the sarcophagus of St Ælfeah in St Paul’s, using crowbars, while the king’s housecarles stood guard against the angry citizens. Cnut hurried half-clad from his bath to take part in the raid, and himself took the tiller of the boat which carried the corpse, on a plank, across the Thames, to travel under armed escort to reinterment in Canterbury. Cnut also abetted the theft of St Mildred, pinched from Thanet and taken, again, to Canterbury. These incidents were not pranks or escapades, but high acts of State, concerned with power, privilege, authority, jurisdiction and the hopes and fears of primitive rulers. During the twelfth century we get the first doubts cast on certain aspects of the system. About 1120, Guibert, Abbot of Nogent, wrote his Relics of the Saints, which argued that many of the saint-cults were spurious – he instanced a young squire who became the object of a cult solely because he happened to die on Good Friday. A generation later, Pope Alexander III made the whole business of canonization a papal monopoly. Guibert also pointed to elements in the system which were clearly fraudulent. Churches in both Constantinople and Angeli claimed to have the head of St John the Baptist. Was he two-headed then? Ely and St Albans each claimed all the bones of St Dunstan; and so did Odense in Denmark. A rich bishop or abbot might easily be duped. Bishop Odo of Bayeux was swindled by the monks of Corbeil who pretended to sell him the body of St Exupéry but in fact handed over the corpse of a peasant. How could it be explained that duplicate relics, or wholly fraudulent ones, seemed able to exert spiritual power? By this time, of course, the system was in decline. In the thirteenth century the eucharist became the centre of popular devotion, and saints had to be new and spectacular – like St Thomas – to inspire important cults. In the meantime, however, the relic cult had changed the face of Europe. The most important relic of all was the body of St Peter, which Christian opinion had believed, at least since the mid second century, was buried on the site of the Vatican church called after him.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  (This ceremony, atheist in objective, was almost identical with anti-Catholic masquerades staged by Protestants in the mid sixteenth century.) Most of the ceremonies were deist. Occasionally, as an alternative to reason, such abstractions as law, truth, liberty or nature were worshipped. But God had a way of popping up behind these concepts; at Beauvais, reason, liberty and nature emerged as three goddesses, and at Auch, the celebrant asked: ‘What is the cult of reason, if not the homage we render to the order established by the eternal wisdom?’ Robespierre ended de-Christianization, and replaced reason with the Supreme Being; the creed he laid down included immortality of the soul, so it went beyond Locke’s minimal Anglicanism. But without the savage excitement of de-Christianization, the ceremonies were tedious to the mob, and attracted only those solid bourgeois citizens who had a vested interest in them (like late-Roman paganism). The props were repainted and renamed. For a time, enthusiasts called their children Marat, Brutus, and so forth. Poupinel, who wrote republican hymns, urged: ‘Let us use civic pomp to make people forget the old displays of superstition; in a word, provide more striking and attractive alternatives to the ceremonies that for so long have deceived the people, and the skeleton of sacerdotalism will disintegrate of its own accord.’ This was more easily said than done. Christianity, with its many insights and matrices, had found no difficulty at all in absorbing elements of pagan ceremonial, and transforming them. The Republicans, divided and self-conscious, floundered, and their ceremonies oscillated between parody and empty bombast, like the Red Square displays of Soviet Communism or the neo-gymnastics of Mao’s China. It seems to have been assumed that public morale depended on religious or gnostic displays of one kind of another; the Erasmian emphasis on private belief and piety was dismissed as not enough. The Institut in two successive years set an essay-competition under the title: ‘Quelles sont les institutions les plus propres à fonder la morale d’un peuple?’ A large number of cults were invented. There was the ‘Culte des Adorateurs’, compounded of ideas and images from Rousseau, Indian temples, Pompeii and the paintings of Greuze; its priests, elected annually, were to tend an eternal fire, burn incense at funerals and pour libations of milk, honey and wine. A variation had doctors and scientists serving instead of priests, with laboratory experiments replacing the mass. A third was an amalgam of the teachings of Moses, Christ, Confucius and Mohammad. There were social or communist secular cults. The most successful of all seems to have been Théophilanthropie, a form of deism close to Christianity (some of its members called themselves Christians), which had a manual, sixteen places of worship in Paris, and others in the provinces, and whose ‘observances’ were run by ‘directors’, most of them civil servants, schoolmasters and so forth. Former priests provided sermons.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  Church. Indeed, the third force, and institutional religion, parted company completely. For the first time we get a disassociation between religious reform and scientific development. The Reformation and the Renaissance had been at one in thinking that the true way to God, and the secrets of knowledge, were to be rediscovered by examination of the mysteries and secrets of the past; it had been assumed that knowledge of the supernatural and the natural world was inextricably linked, that metaphysics began where physics ended, and that theology was indeed the Queen of the Sciences. These were bedrock Christian assumptions; assumptions, in fact, which even antedated Christianity, or rather had been absorbed by Christianity during the process of Hellenization which marked the triumph of Pauline doctrine. During the twenty years 1640–60 we see the earliest challenge to the belief that knowledge was indivisible. We can observe it in the formative period in the history of the Royal Society. The Society, of course, was incorporated under Charles II at the Restoration; but its origins go back to the end of the Civil War. Indeed, it was none other than the materialization of the famous ‘invisible college’ so long demanded by the Christian Hermetics and third force propagandists. In origin it was undoubtedly part of a religious-scientific movement to purge Christianity and give it rebirth as part of a ‘general instauration’ of knowledge. We see this from what might be called the ‘Palatine connection’. John Wallis, in his account of the first meetings in London in 1645, says that those taking part included ‘Dr John Wilkins, afterwards Bishop of Chester, then chaplain to the Prince Elector Palatine in London’, and ‘Mr Theodore Haak, a German of the Palatinate, and then resident in London, who, I think, gave the first occasion and first suggested these meetings’. This group was undoubtedly the ‘invisible college’ referred to by Robert Boyle in letters dating from 1646–7. Later it met at Wadham College, Oxford, and moved to London in 1659, before finally attaining royal recognition, patronage and complete respectability. During its migrations and transmutations, however, the embryo Royal Society seems to have discarded its original religious context completely. Religious ‘enthusiasm’, attachment to a particular sect or credal confession – which might be politically acceptable one year, and illegal the next – were now seen as possible barriers to official approval, even fatal to the survival of the Society. The founder-members of the Royal Society were all sincere Christians, but they were coming to accept that institutional Christianity, with its feuds and intolerances, was an embarrassment and a barrier to

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  charged with breaking a mystical chalice, smashing an episcopal chair, false imprisonment, deposing a bishop unlawfully, placing him under military guard and torturing him, striking other bishops physically, obtaining his bishoprics by perjury, breaking and cutting off the arm of one of his opponents, burning his house, tying him to a column and whipping him, and putting him in a cell illegally – all this in addition to teaching false doctrine. The venom employed in these endemic controversies reflects the fundamental instability of Christian belief during the early centuries, before a canon of New Testament writings had been established, credal formulations evolved to epitomize them, and a regular ecclesiastical structure built up to protect and propagate such agreed beliefs. Before the last half of the third century it is inaccurate to speak of a dominant strain of Christianity. So far as we can judge, by the end of the first century, and virtually throughout the second, the majority of Christians believed in varieties of Christian-gnosticism, or belonged to revivalist sects grouped round charismatics. Eusebius, seeking to push back the origins of uniformity and orthodoxy as close as possible to the generation of the apostles, constantly uses phrases – ‘countless’, ‘very many’, ‘all’, – when he deals with the orthodox Church, its size, its influence, its success, its champions and its heroic sacrifices, which is not borne out by evidence, even when he cites it. In particular, he exaggerates the volume of orthodox literature from the earliest times. His motive was to show that a massive quantity of books setting out the true faith was produced in the first two centuries, that they had wide circulation, were faithfully preserved and enjoyed a long life; they grew up and spread so vigorously that they smashed the heretics or drove them into tiny enclaves. But the books to which Eusebius refers have not survived and he does not seem to have read them, to judge by his references. Why should they survive up to the fourth century, then disappear? On the other side, the overwhelming bulk of heretic writings, including diatribes between rival heresies, have disappeared. But often their titles survive and these, in many cases, do not suggest polemics – the works of sects struggling for survival against orthodoxy – but the regular teaching of the established majority faith. A very complex picture of orthodoxy and heterodoxy in the early period is revealed if we study the ‘succession lists’ of individual bishoprics. By the third century, lists of bishops, each of whom had consecrated his successor, and which went back to the original founding of the see by one or other of the apostles, had been

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  for all types and temperaments of men, as well as all races and generations: the activist, the militant, the doctrinaire, the ascetic, the obedient, the passive, the angular, the scholar, and the simple-hearted? How could it impart both a sense of urgency and immediacy, and at the same time be valid for all eternity? How could it bring about, in men’s minds, a confrontation with God which was both public and collective, and individual and intimate? How could it combine a code of ethics within a framework of strict justice and a promise of unprecedented generosity? These were only a few of the evangelical problems confronting Jesus. Moreover, he had to resolve them within a preordained series of historical events which could be adumbrated but not forecast and whose necessary enactment would terminate his mission. The teaching of Jesus is therefore more a series of glimpses, or matrices, a collection of insights, rather than a code of doctrine. It invites comment, interpretation, elaboration and constructive argument, and is the starting point for rival, though compatible, lines of inquiry. It is not a summa theologica, or indeed ethica, but the basis from which an endless series of summae can be assembled. It inaugurates a religion of dialogue, exploration and experiment. Its radical elements are balanced by conservative qualifications, there is a constant mixture of legalism and antinomianism, and the emphasis repeatedly switches from rigour and militancy to acquiescence and the acceptance of suffering. Some of this variety reflects the genuine bewilderment of the disciples, and the confusion of the evangelical editors to whom their memories descended. But a great deal is essentially part of Jesus’s universalist posture: the wonder is that the personality behind the mission is in no way fragmented but is always integrated and true to character. Jesus contrives to be all things to all men while remaining faithful to himself. This complex and delicate operation was conducted against a politico-religious background full of perils and traps. Jesus had a new doctrine to deliver – salvation through love, sacrifice and faith – but to some extent he had to present it in the guise of a reformation of the old. He was preaching to Jews, introducing new concepts through traditional Jewish forms. He was anxious to carry the orthodox with him, without compromising his universalism. He confronted the establishment on their own territory, while including all the outcast elements in his mission; thus he had to carry on the process of disassociation from the Temple and the law while trying to avoid accusations of blasphemy. Then, too, there was the revelation of his own

• From The Decameron (1353)

  7 He was the Archbishop of Naples, and he had been buried with some very valuable regalia and wearing a ruby on his finger, worth more than five hundred gold florins, which these two fellows were on their way to plunder. They disclosed their intentions to Andreuccio, and being more covetous than well-advised, he set off in their company. As they were on their way to the cathedral, with Andreuccio still putting forth a powerful odour, one of them said: ‘Couldn’t we find some place or other where this fellow could be washed, so that he didn’t stink so appallingly?’ ‘Certainly,’ said the other. ‘Not far from here, there’s a well, which always used to have a pulley and a big bucket at the top. Let’s go there and give him a quick wash.’ On reaching the well, they found that the rope was still there, but the bucket had been removed. So they hit on the idea of tying him to the rope and lowering him into the well so that he could wash himself down below. When he had finished washing, he was to give the rope a tug, and they would haul him up again. Shortly after they had lowered him into the well, some officers of the watch, feeling thirsty on account of the heat and also because they had been chasing somebody, happened to come to the well for a drink. When the other two saw them coming, they immediately took to their heels, making good their escape without being spotted by the officers. Meanwhile Andreuccio, having completed his ablutions at the bottom of the well, gave a tug on the rope. The officers had taken off their surcoats and laid them on the ground beside their bucklers and pikestaffs, and they now began to haul away at the rope, thinking it had a bucket full of water attached to it. When Andreuccio saw that he had nearly reached the top of the well, he let go the rope and threw himself on to the rim, clinging to it with both hands. On seeing this apparition, the officers were filled with sudden panic, and without a word they dropped the rope and began to run as fast as their legs would carry them. Andreuccio stared at them in blank amazement, and if he hadn’t held on tightly, he would have fallen to the bottom, perhaps being killed or doing himself serious injury. However, he clambered out, and when he saw these weapons, he grew even more perplexed, for he knew they had not been left there by his companions. Bewailing his misfortune, and fearing lest anything worse should befall him, he decided to leave all these things where they were and clear off. So away he went without having the slightest idea where he was going. As he was walking along, he came across his two companions, who were on their way back to the well to haul him out.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  42 In political life, people always preferred frenzied activity to doing nothing, knowledge to ignorance, and strength to weakness, but—to the astonishment of his contemporaries, who were intrigued with this novel idea 43 —Laozi insisted that they should do the exact opposite. In the world there is nothing more submissive and weak than water Yet for attacking that which is hard and strong nothing can surpass it. This is because there is nothing that can take its place. That the weak overcomes the strong, And the submissive overcomes the hard, Everyone in the world knows, yet no one can put this knowledge into practice. 44 All human effort was directed against passivity, so to do the opposite of what was expected by the aggressively scheming politicians was to return to the spontaneity of the Way. 45 It was a law of nature that everything that went up must come down, so in strengthening your enemy by submission, you actually hastened his decline. The reason why Heaven and Earth endured forever was precisely because they did not struggle to prolong their existence: Therefore the sage puts his person last and comes first. . . . Is it not because he is without thought of self that he is able to accomplish his private ends? 46 Such self-emptying required a long mystical training, but once the sage ruler had achieved this interior void, he would become as vital, fluid, and fecund as the so-called weaker things of life. Force and coercion were inherently self-destructive. Here Laozi returned to the spirit of the ancient rituals of warfare, which had urged the warriors to “yield” to the enemy. “Arms are ill-omened instruments, and are not the instruments of the sage,” Laozi maintained. “He uses them only when he cannot do otherwise.” 47 Sometimes war was a regrettable necessity, but if he was forced to fight, the sage must always take up his weapons with regret. There must be no egotistic triumphalism, no cruel chauvinism, and no facile patriotism. The sage must not intimidate the world with a show of arms, because this belligerence would almost certainly recoil on him. The sage must always try to bring a military expedition to an end. “Bring it to a conclusion, but do not boast; bring it to a conclusion, but do not brag; bring it to a conclusion, but do not be arrogant; bring it to a conclusion, but only where there is no choice; bring it to a conclusion, but do not intimidate.” 48 Wu wei, therefore, did not mean total abstinence from action, but an unaggressive, unassertive attitude that prevented the escalation of hatred.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  When they heard the things he confessed to having done, they were so amused that every so often they nearly exploded with mirth, and they said to each other: ‘What manner of man is this, whom neither old age nor illness, nor fear of the death which he sees so close at hand, nor even the fear of God, before whose judgement he knows he must shortly appear, have managed to turn from his evil ways, or persuade to die any differently from the way he has lived?’ Seeing, however, that he had said all the right things to be received for burial in a church, they cared nothing for the rest. Shortly thereafter Ser Ciappelletto made his communion, and, failing rapidly, he received Extreme Unction. Soon after vespers 5 on the very day that he had made his fine confession, he died. Whereupon the two brothers made all necessary arrangements, using his own money to see that he had an honourable funeral, and sending news of his death to the friars and asking them to come that evening to observe the customary vigil, and the following morning to take away the body. On hearing that he had passed away, the holy friar who had received his confession arranged with the prior for the chapterhouse bell to be rung, and to the assembled friars he showed that Ser Ciappelletto had been a saintly man, as his confession had amply proved. He expressed the hope that through him the Lord God would work many miracles, and persuaded them that his body should be received with the utmost reverence and loving care. Credulous to a man, the prior and the other friars agreed to do so, and that evening they went to the place where Ser Ciappelletto’s body lay, and celebrated a great and solemn vigil over it; and in the morning, dressed in albs and copes, carrying books in their hands and bearing crosses before them, singing as they went, they all came for the body, which they then carried back to their church with tremendous pomp and ceremony, followed by nearly all the people of the town, men and women alike. And when it had been set down in the church, the holy friar who had confessed him climbed into the pulpit and began to preach marvellous things about Ser Ciappelletto’s life, his fasts, his virginity, his simplicity and innocence and saintliness, relating among other things what he had tearfully confessed to him as his greatest sin, and describing how he had barely been able to convince him that God would forgive him, at which point he turned to reprimand his audience, saying: ‘And yet you miserable sinners have only to catch your feet in a wisp of straw for you to curse God and the Virgin and all the Saints in heaven.’ Apart from this, he said much else about his loyalty and his purity of heart.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  kingship, and ‘There is one king, and his Word and royal law is one; a law not subject to the ravages of time, but the living and self-subsisting word.’ Clearly, according to this analysis, Constantine, as emperor, was an important agent of the salvation process, at least as vital to it as the apostles. So, evidently, the emperor himself thought. Thus he had a tomb prepared for himself within the new Church of the Apostles he built and gloriously endowed in Constantinople, ‘anticipating’, says Eusebius, ‘that his body would share the title with the apostles themselves, and that he should after his death become the subject, with them, of the devotions performed in their honour in this church.’ His coffin and tomb, in fact, were placed in the centre, with monuments to six apostles on each side, making him the thirteenth and chief; and he contrived to die on Whitsunday. How could the Christian Church, apparently quite willingly, accommodate this weird megalomaniac in its theocratic system? Was there a conscious bargain? Which side benefited most from this unseemly marriage between Church and State? Or, to put it another way, did the empire surrender to Christianity, or did Christianity prostitute itself to the empire? It is characteristic of the complexities of early Christian history that we cannot give a definite answer to this question. It is not at all clear why the empire and Christianity came into conflict in the first place. The empire extended toleration to all sects provided they kept the peace. Jewish Christianity may have been penetrated by Zealotry and Jewish irredentism, but the gentile Christianity of the Pauline missions was non-political and non-racial. Its social implications were, in the long run, revolutionary, but it had no specific doctrines of social change. Jesus had told his hearers to pay taxes. Paul, in a memorable passage, advised the faithful, while waiting for the parousia, to obey duly-constituted authority. As early as the mid-second century, some Christian writers saw an identity of interests between the burgeoning Christian movement, with its universalist aims, and the empire itself. Christians might not yield divine honours to the emperor, but in other respects they were loyal Romans. Tertullian claimed: ‘We are for ever making intercession for the emperors. We pray for them a long life, a secure rule, a safe home, brave armies, a faithful senate, an honest people, a quiet world, and everything for which a man and a Caesar may pray. . . . We know that the great force which threatens the whole world, the end of the age itself with its menace of hideous sufferings, is delayed by the respite which the Roman

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  lacked was any kind of stability. It became increasingly less likely that an educated man would support the cult of his parents, let alone his grandparents; or even that he would fail to change his cult once, perhaps twice, in his life. And, perhaps less noticeably, the cults themselves were in constant osmosis. We do not know enough about the time to provide complete explanations for this constant and ubiquitous religious flux. But it is obvious enough that the old city and national creeds were now hopelessly obsolete except as aids to public decorum, and the oriental mystery cults, though syncretized and rendered sophisticated by the Hellenic philosophical machine, still could not provide a satisfactory account of man and his future. There were huge gaps and anomalies in all the systems. And the frantic efforts to plug them produced disintegration, and so yet more change. It is at this point in the argument that we see the crucial relevance of the Jewish impingement on the Roman world. For the Jews not merely had a god; they had God. They had been monotheists for at least two millennia. They had resisted with infinite fortitude and sometimes with grievous suffering, the temptations and ravages of eastern polytheistic systems. It is true that their god was originally tribal, and more recently national; in fact he was still national, and since he was closely and intimately associated with the Temple in Jerusalem, he was in some way municipal too. But Judaism was also, and very much so, an interior religion, pressing closely and heavily on the individual, who was burdened with a multitude of injunctions and prohibitions which posed acute problems of interpretation and scruple. The practising Jew was essentially homo religiosus as well as a functionary of a patriotic cult. The two aspects might even conflict, for Pompey was able to breach the walls of Jerusalem in 65 BC primarily because the stricter elements among the Jewish defenders refused to bear arms on the sabbath. It could be said, in fact, that the power and dynamism of the Jewish faith transcended the military capacity of the Jewish people. The Jewish state might, and did, succumb to empires, but its religious expression survived, flourished and violently resisted cultural assimilation or change. Judaism was greater than the sum of its parts. Its angular will to survive was the key to recent Jewish history. Like other Middle-eastern states, Jewish Palestine had fallen to Alexander of Macedon and then had become a prize in the dynastic struggles which followed his death in 323 BC. It had eventually fallen to the Graeco-oriental monarchy of the Seleucids, but had successfully resisted Hellenization. The attempt by the Seleucid king, Antiochus

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

  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. I liked that life – it was predictable, safe, secure and cozy. It was enough, more than enough. In fact, I had so much that it would have been unseemly to have wanted more. It never crossed my mind to want something else, and yet – and yet – now that it’s gone, I don’t want it back, not if it means giving up this incredible freedom, this not knowing what comes next. “So you probably need to go pick up your daughter,” #8 says, interrupting my internal dialogue. I glance at my watch and shake my head, saying that my mother is in fact picking Georgia up at this very moment. He is silent, and I realize he wasn’t saying that out of concern for my schedule, he is simply ready for me to leave. I pick through the pile of tangled blankets and sheets for my clothes.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  And all that Solomon said by way of reply was: ‘Love.’ This said, Melissus was promptly shown the door, and Joseph explained his own reason for coming. But the only answer he received from Solomon was: ‘Go to Goosebridge,’ and the words were scarcely out of the King’s mouth before Joseph, too, was removed from his presence. Outside, he found Melissus waiting for him, and told him about the answer he had been given. After pondering upon these words without succeeding in extracting a meaning from them, or anything that might help to resolve their problems, the two young men, feeling they had been made to look foolish, began to make their way homewards. After travelling for several days, they came to a fine-looking bridge across a river; and since a lengthy baggage-train of mules and horses happened to be using the bridge, they were forced to wait till all the animals had crossed it. When all but a few of them had done so, one of the mules took fright, in the way they frequently do, and refused to take another step. So one of the muleteers took hold of a stick and began to beat it, quite gently to begin with, in order to make it go across. But the mule, veering from one side of the road to the other and occasionally turning back, was utterly determined not to go on. This caused the muleteer to lose his temper completely, and he began to beat it with his stick quite unmercifully, raining a series of terrible blows on its head, its flanks, and its hindquarters, but all to no avail. Melissus and Joseph, who were standing there watching all this, directed a stream of abuse at the muleteer, saying: ‘Hey! villain, what are you doing? Do you want to kill the poor beast? Why don’t you try talking nicely to him and leading him across gently? He’ll come more quickly that way than by beating him as you are doing.’ ‘You know your horses and I know my mule,’ replied the muleteer. ‘Just you leave him to me.’ Having said this he began to beat the mule all over again, and administered so many blows to each of its flanks that the mule moved on, and the muleteer’s point was made. As the two young men were about to proceed on their way, Joseph saw a fellow sitting on the farther side of the bridge and asked him what the place was called. ‘Sir,’ the good man replied, ‘this place is called Goosebridge.’ No sooner did Joseph hear the name than he recalled the words of Solomon, and said to Melissus: ‘I do declare, my friend, that the advice I had from Solomon may yet turn out to be sound and sensible.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  They even seemed not to recognize me. But I had still not penetrated into the room where the dance was being held, beyond a broad doorway that was cloudy with smoke. To get there, I had to make my way through a tangled throng of women who were watching, some of them standing on chairs, stools, even tables, leaning against the walls, clinging together in clusters, all peering deep into the cloud of smoke. How could they see anything at all? Close to me, I recognized my Aunt Noucha, dressed for the occasion in Bedouin costume. I shouted into her ear: “Where is Mother?” When I got no answer, I grasped hold of her arm and shook it roughly. It was oily and sticky with sweat, and seemed to slither out of my grasp. “Where is Mother,” I shouted again. “I want our keys!” She smiled absently at me and pointed toward the living-room. The closer I seemed to get to the heart of all this mysterious din, the more crowded it was. The women who were watching were treading on each other’s feet, almost melting into a mass of compact flesh. I had to be really rough to reach the blue-gray cloud that was so thick that I could scarcely distinguish, through the smoke, the red embers of an earthenware brazier, like a shepherd’s fire in a fog. My eyes smarted from the smoke and became clouded with soothing tears. The noise was so loud, so full, that I seemed no longer to hear anything at all. One moment, I felt I was in sheer void, with no shapes or sounds around me any longer. Then my eyes grew accustomed to it and began to distinguish with difficulty what was going on. Above the red point of the brazier, the heavy smoke of the incense rose; beyond it, I saw the strange creature that haunted this place. A woman, dressed in gaudy veils, was dancing wildly, throwing out her arms, jerking her head back and forth with so violent a motion that it hurt my neck to watch her. She turned her back to us and I could see her long loose hair cast wildly around her like tangled black serpents. Right at the back of the room and seated on the floor, the terrifying Negro musicians were playing. There they are, I thought, the demons! But this was only a half-hearted joke. The man who played the bagpipes, with his eyes bulging out of his head, two white spots against a coal-black background, his cheeks ready to burst, blew hard into his goatskin instrument. The tambourine-player was drunk, had reached a peak of frenzy, and kept on throwing his instrument in the air, catching it again and screaming all the time, without ceasing meanwhile to thump on the taut skin with all his strength.

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

  Rounding up the right kind of eager-beaver young white people is just the first step. Next, HubSpot applies a two-part process of indoctrination. First the newcomers are reminded how lucky they are to be here. Then comes the threat, which is that HubSpot is so competitive, and so intense, that a lot of people simply can’t make the grade. “Look around the room,” Dave says. “A year from now, a lot of the people around you aren’t going to be here anymore.” At HubSpot only the best survive. Getting in is just the first step. Now we all have to earn our place on the team. For the people who are going to work in the sales department this process will be particularly brutal. The reps have high quotas, and if you fall short, you get cut. Most companies put sales reps on a quarterly or annual quota. At HubSpot the quotas are monthly, which means sales reps never come up for air. The sales department churns through these young hires. Bring them in, burn them out, toss them away, find new ones— that’s the model. In every aspect of life, we’re told, there is a HubSpotty way of doing things. Nobody can really explain what HubSpotty means, but it is a real word that people use, all the time. Some people are more HubSpotty than others. Some are 100 percent HubSpotty, possessed of a HubSpottiness that is so complete as to be beyond reproach. Those people “bleed orange.” Their ideas cannot be questioned. They can do pretty much anything they want. They are the HubSpot equivalent of a Level 8 Operating Thetan in Scientology. Newcomers are by definition not HubSpotty yet. We have to earn that designation, and it takes time. Nobody just comes in and gets accepted. A big part of establishing your HubSpottiness involves being relentlessly upbeat and positive. HubSpot is like a corporate version of Up with People, the inspirational singing group from the 1970s, but with a touch of Scientology. It’s a cult based around marketing. The Happy!! Awesome!! Start-up Cult, I began to call it. Instead of ID badges, the company gives out rubber ID bracelets with the HubSpot logo on them. The bracelets contain a transponder that unlocks doors into different parts of the office. It feels ridiculous and cultish to wear a special bracelet, but you can’t get anywhere without one. I’ve spent years writing incredibly over-the-top satire about the technology industry, inventing stories in which Steve Jobs possesses the power to hypnotize people just by staring at them, and depicting Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, California, as a crazy cult compound policed by rifle-toting public relations people and populated by brainwashed corporate zombies who speak their own private jargon and all truly believe they are doing incredibly important work, making the world a better place. Now I am encountering a real-life version of this, at a company in Kendall Square. It’s amazing.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  They were born defective and unfinished, and could only build themselves up to full strength in the ritual. When he took part in the soma sacrifice, the patron experienced a second birth, and went through an initiation process that symbolically reproduced the various stages of gestation. 78 Before the rite began, he made a retreat, crouched in a hut (representing the womb), dressed in a white garment and black antelope skin (representing the caul and placenta), with his hands clenched into fists, like an embryo. He was fed on milk, and had to stammer when he spoke, like an infant. 79 Finally he sat beside the fire and sweated, as Prajapati had done, in order to effect a new creation. Once he had drunk the intoxicating soma, he experienced an ascent to the gods without having to die a violent death, as in the old ritual. 80 He could not stay long in heaven, but after his death, if he had accumulated sufficient liturgical credit, he would be reborn in the world of the gods. In ritual, therefore, the sacrificer reconstructed his self ( atman ), just as Prajapati had done. In the workshop of sacrifice, he had put together the daiva atman (divine self), which would live on after his death. By performing the rituals correctly, with the knowledge of the bandhus firmly in his mind, the warrior could rebuild his own purusha (person). The Brahmin priests “make the person, consisting of the sacrifices, made of ritual actions,” explained the ritualist. 81 The rites of passage also built up the human being. An Aryan boy had to undergo the upanayana that initiated him into the study of the Veda and the sacrificial procedure, or he would never be able to build a fully realized atman. Only married men could commission a ritual, and begin the process of self-building, so marriage was another rite of passage for both men and women (who could attend the sacrifice only in the company of their husbands). After a person’s death, the corpse resembled the exhausted Prajapati and had to be reconstructed by means of the correct funeral rites. 82 But the system did not work automatically. Unless a person was proficient in ritual science, he would be lost in the next world. He would not be able to recognize the “divine self” that he had created during his lifetime, nor would he know which of the heavenly realms he should go to. “Bewildered by the cremation fire, choked with smoke, he does not recognize his own world. But he who knows, he, indeed, having left this world, knows the atman, saying: ‘This am I’ and he recognizes his own world. And now the fire carries him to the heavenly world.”

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  If you read quickly through Israel’s scriptures—what Christians came to call the “Old Covenant” or the “Old Testament”—you will discover that, contrary to some popular suppositions, they tell a single great story. But this story is strangely inconclusive. It seems to be pointing toward, but not finding, an appropriate ending. The Hebrew Bible is arranged so that the books of Chronicles come last. In the traditions that shaped most modern translations, including English Bibles, Chronicles comes after Kings, and the collection ends with the prophets, the last of which is Malachi. But whether it’s Chronicles or Malachi, a quick read through leaves us straining forward, wondering what’s going to happen next. Actually, you get the same effect if you read quickly through the Pentateuch, the “Five Books,” which stand at the head of Israel’s scriptures. Deuteronomy, the fifth of the Five Books, does not conclude with a “happily ever after” vision of the future, but rather with a challenging prospect, a mixture of warning and hope. Yet the great opening sequence of the Bible—the creation of heaven and earth and man and woman; the call of Abraham; the slavery in Egypt and the subsequent Exodus; the journey to the land of promise—all this seems to indicate that ancient Israel, at least in the view of those who compiled and edited the scriptures, was playing a critical role in a great drama, the drama of the Creator himself and his creation. But the drama wasn’t over yet. At the end of Deuteronomy, Israel is warned about rebellion, exile, and death. At the end of Chronicles, the exile was still continuing. At the end of Malachi, God was promising to come back and sort everything out, but it hadn’t happened yet. One cannot imagine Shakespeare playing this trick, working his way through the stages of a plot and then stopping in the middle without tying the narrative strands together and reaching a resolution. Israel and Adam In particular, the scriptures tell the story of how Israel went into exile. In a sense, the whole story is about little else. The larger story, in which there is a single great “exile” in Babylon, is shot through at point after point with other “exiles,” which lead the eye up to the eventual one. Abraham goes down into Egypt and nearly gets into deep trouble. So does his son Isaac. Isaac’s younger son, Jacob, escaping his brother’s anger, runs away and stays in the land of his ancestors fourteen years before returning to the territory God had promised to Abraham.

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  Faced with the mysteries of woman, Sigmund Freud, who seemed to have an answer for everything else, came up empty. “Despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul,” he wrote, “I have not yet been able to answer…the great question that has never been answered: what does a woman want?” It’s no accident that what the BBC called “the most famous image in the history of art” is a study of the inscrutable feminine created by a homosexual male artist. For centuries, men have been wondering what Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa was thinking. Is she smiling? Is she angry? Disappointed? Unwell? Nauseated? Sad? Shy? Turned on? None of the above? Probably closer to all of the above. Does she contradict herself? Very well, then. The Mona Lisa is large. Like all women, but more—like all that is feminine—she reflects every phase of the moon. She contains multitudes. Our journey into a deeper understanding of the “feminine soul” begins in a muddy field in the English countryside. In the early 1990s, neuroscientist Keith Kendrick and his colleagues exchanged that season’s newborn sheep and goats (the baby sheep were raised by adult goats, and vice versa). Upon reaching sexual maturity a few years later, the animals were reunited with their own species and their mating behavior was observed. The females adopted a love-the-one-you’re-with approach, showing themselves willing to mate with males of either species. But the males, even after being back with their own species for three years, would mate only with the species with which they were raised.1 Research like this suggests strong differences in degrees of “erotic plasticity” (changeability) in the males and females of many species—including ours.2 The human female’s sexual behavior is typically far more malleable than the male’s. Greater erotic plasticity leads most women to experience more variation in their sexuality than men typically do, and women’s sexual behavior is far more responsive to social pressure. This greater plasticity could manifest through changes in whom a woman wants, in how much she wants him/her/them, and in how she expresses her desire. Young males pass through a brief period in which their sexuality is like hot wax waiting to be imprinted, but the wax soon cools and solidifies, leaving the imprint for life. For females, the wax appears to stay soft and malleable throughout their lives. This greater erotic plasticity appears to manifest in women’s more holistic responses to sexual imagery and thoughts. In 2006, psychologist Meredith Chivers set up an experiment where she showed a variety of sexual videos to men and women, both straight and gay. The videos included a wide range of possible erotic configurations: man/woman, man/man, woman/woman, lone man masturbating, lone woman masturbating, a muscular guy walking naked on a beach, and a fit woman working out in the nude. To top it all off, she also included a short film clip of bonobos mating.3

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  Barbara, fragile and barely nineteen; the angular Jamie not yet quite twenty. They had talked because words will ease the full spirit; talked in abrupt, rather shy broken phrases. They had loved because love had come naturally to them up there on the soft, springy turf and the heather. But after a while their dreams had been shattered, for such dreams as theirs had seemed strange to the village. Daft, the folk had thought them, mouching round by themselves for hours, like a couple of lovers. Barbara’s grand-dame, an austere old woman with whom she had lived since her earliest childhood—Barbara’s grand-dame had mistrusted this friendship. ‘I dinna richtly unnerstan’ it,’ she had frowned; ‘her and that Jamie’s unco throng. It’s no richt for lass-bairns, an’ it’s no proaper!’ And since she spoke with authority, having for years been the village post-mistress, her neighbours had wagged their heads and agreed. ‘It’s no richt; ye hae said it, Mrs. MacDonald!’ The gossip had reached the minister, Jamie’s white-haired and gentle old father. He had looked at the girl with bewildered eyes—he had always been bewildered by his daughter. A poor housewife she was, and very untidy; if she cooked she mucked up the pots and the kitchen, and her hands were strangely unskilled with the needle; this he knew, since his heels suffered much from her darning. Remembering her mother he had shaken his head and sighed many times as he looked at Jamie. For her mother had been a soft, timorous woman, and he himself was very retiring, but their Jamie loved striding over the hills in the teeth of a gale, an uncouth, boyish creature. As a child she had gone rabbit stalking with ferrets; had ridden a neighbour’s farmhorse astride on a sack, without stirrup, saddle or bridle; had done all manner of outlandish things. And he, poor lonely, bewildered man, still mourning his wife, had been no match for her. Yet even as a child she had sat at the piano and picked out little tunes of her own inventing. He had done his best; she had been taught to play by Miss Morrison of the next-door village, since music alone seemed able to tame her. And as Jamie had grown so her tunes had grown with her, gathering purpose and strength with her body. She would improvise for hours on the winter evenings, if Barbara would sit in their parlour and listen. He had always made Barbara welcome at the manse; they had been so inseparable, those two, since childhood—and now? He had frowned, remembering the gossip. Rather timidly he had spoken to Jamie. ‘Listen, my dear, when you’re always together, the lads don’t get a chance to come courting, and Barbara’s grandmother wants the lass married. Let her walk with a lad on Sabbath afternoons—there’s that young MacGregor, he’s a fine, steady fellow, and they say he’s in love with the little lass. . . .’

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

  It turns out that Cranium rarely speaks to any of the people in the sixty- person marketing department. He spends four days a week in the office. On Friday he works from home. He talks to Wingman and apparently to a few other people who are his direct reports, but that seems to be it. He never takes the gang to lunch, never pulls people aside to ask how they’re doing, never sets up a one- on-one just to check in or give you feedback. Instead, he conducts anonymous online surveys. Constantly. Are you happy? How happy are you? On a scale of one to ten, with ten being the happiest day in your entire life, how happy are you? What if anything could make you happier? How could HubSpot be better? “More surveys,” I suggest once. Since Cranium is not in contact with me, I am left to get direction from Wingman. But Wingman is equally tuned out. One day he sets a meeting with me to ask how things are going. I tell him I’m not sure what they want me to do. He says I should just write articles for the blog. “Just write about anything you want,” he says. I thought I had been hired to help make the blog better. Apparently not. All Wingman wants me to do is write two articles a week. So that’s what I do. I write articles about anything I want, and I send them to Jan, the grumpy editor, and she publishes them. Day to day, I deal with Zack. Zack has lots of energy. He loves to send out long memos bursting with enthusiasm and peppered with phrases in ALL CAPS about some half-formed idea that he believes will enable us to “conquer the world” and “blow up the Internet.” People at HubSpot love that phrase about blowing up the Internet. They use it all the time. The problem is that Zack changes his mind a lot. We’re heading south! No, we’re going north! We’re taking a plane! No, a train! No, bicycles! One of my colleagues compares Zack to Dug, the peppy dog in the movie Up, who is constantly being distracted by squirrels. Zack realizes that the blog sucks, and he wants to make it better. One day, he asks me to write up a memo explaining what changes we should make. He says he will send the memo to Wingman. Finally, I think, here’s my chance to do something. I write a long, detailed memo explaining all the problems with the blog. The memo isn’t vicious, but it is pretty critical.