Chagrin

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 Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I made my way first to the lavatory, then headed downstairs to the change-room. This had been opened tonight only so that the ladies should have a place to hang their coats, and it was cold and empty and rather dim; but it had a looking-glass: and it was to this that I now stepped, squinting and tugging at my dress to pull it straight.I had been there for no longer than a minute when there came the sound of footsteps in the passageway beyond, and then a silence. I turned my head to see who was there, and found that it was Kitty. She had her shoulder against the doorframe and her arms folded. She wasn’t standing as one normally stands - as she usually stood - in an evening gown. She was standing as she did when she was on stage, with her trousers on - rather cockily. Her face was turned towards me and I couldn’t see her rope of hair, or the swell of her breasts. Her cheeks were very pale; there was a stain upon her skirt where some champagne had dripped upon it from an over-spilling glass.‘Wot cheer, Kitty,’ I said. But she did not return my smile, only watched me, levelly. I looked uncertainly back to the glass, and continued working at my sash. When she spoke at last, I knew at once that she was rather drunk.‘Seen something you fancy?’ she said. I turned to her again in surprise, and she took a step into the room.‘What?’‘I said, “Seen something you fancy, Nancy?” Everybody else here tonight seems to have. Seems to have seen something that has rather caught their eye.’I swallowed, unsure of what reply to make to her. She walked closer, then stopped a few paces from me, and continued to fix me with the same even, arrogant gaze.‘You were very fresh with that horn-player, weren’t you?’ she said then.I blinked. ‘We were just having a bit of a lark.’‘A bit of a lark? His hands were all over you.’‘Oh Kitty, they weren’t!’ My voice almost trembled. It was horrible to see her so savage; I don’t believe that, in all the weeks that we had spent together, she had ever so much as raised her voice to me in impatience.‘Yes they were,’ she said. ‘I was watching - me and half the party. You know what they’ll be calling you soon, don’t you?’ “Miss Flirt”.’Miss Flirt! Now I didn’t know whether to cry or to laugh.‘How can you say such a thing?’

• From Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995)

  “Listen, everybody! Now that we are all here, we must have a toast! To those who are not with us! And to a happy ending!” With solemn deliberation, he started to pour his beer onto the floor. At least half of the beer splashed on Auma’s shoes. “Aggh!” Auma shouted, jumping back. “What are you doing?” “The ancestors must drink,” Roy said cheerfully. “It is the African way.” Auma grabbed a napkin to wipe the beer off her legs. “That’s outdoors, Roy! Not in somebody’s house! I swear, sometimes you’re so careless! Who will clean this up now? You?” Roy was about to answer when Jane rushed up with a rag in her hand. “Don’t worry, don’t worry!” she said, wiping up the floor. “We are just happy to have this one home.” It had been decided that after dinner we would all go out dancing at a nearby club. As Auma and I headed down the stairs ahead of the others, I heard her muttering to herself in the darkness. “You Obama men!” she said to me. “You get away with anything! Have you noticed how they treat him? As far as they are concerned, he can do no wrong. Like this thing with Amy. This is just an idea that has popped into his head because he’s lonely. I have nothing against Amy, but she’s as irresponsible as he is. When they’re together, they make each other worse. My mum, Jane, Zeituni—they all know this. But will they say anything to him? No. Because they’re so afraid to offend him, even if it’s for his own good.” Auma opened the car door and looked back at the rest of the family. They had just emerged from the shadows of the apartment building, Roy’s figure towering over the others like a tree, his arms spread out like branches over the shoulders of his aunts. The sight of him softened Auma’s face just a bit. “Yah, it’s not really his fault, I suppose,” she said, starting up the car. “You see how he is with them. He’s always been more of a family person than me. They don’t feel judged with him.” The club, Garden Square, turned out to be a low-roofed, dimly lit place. It was already packed when we arrived, the air thick with cigarette smoke. The clientele was almost all African, an older, after work crowd of clerks, secretaries, government workers, all gathered around wobbly Formica tables. We pushed together two empty tables away from the small stage, and the waiter took our orders. Auma sat down next to Amy. “So, Amy. Roy tells me you two are thinking about getting married.” “Yes, isn’t it wonderful! He’s so much fun! When he settles down, he says I can come to stay with him in America.” “You don’t worry about being apart? I mean …”

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  All premodern civilizations adopted this oppressive system; there seemed to be no alternative. This inevitably had implications for religion, which permeated all human activities, including state building and government. Indeed, we shall see that premodern politics was inseparable from religion. And if a ruling elite adopted an ethical tradition, such as Buddhism, Christianity, or Islam, the aristocratic clergy usually adapted their ideology so that it could support the structural violence of the state. 44 In Parts One and Two we shall explore this dilemma. Established by force and maintained by military aggression, warfare was essential to the agrarian state. When land and the peasants who farmed it were the chief sources of wealth, territorial conquest was the only way such a kingdom could increase its revenues. Warfare was, therefore, indispensable to any premodern economy. The ruling class had to maintain its control of the peasant villages, defend its arable land against aggressors, conquer more land, and ruthlessly suppress any hint of insubordination. A key figure in this story will be the Indian emperor Ashoka (c. 268–232 BCE). Appalled by the suffering his army had inflicted on a rebellious city, he tirelessly promoted an ethic of compassion and tolerance but could not in the end disband his army. No state can survive without its soldiers. And once states grew and warfare had become a fact of human life, an even greater force—the military might of empire—often seemed the only way to keep the peace. So necessary to the rise of states and ultimately empires is military force that historians regard militarism as a mark of civilization. Without disciplined, obedient, and law-abiding armies, human society, it is claimed, would probably have remained at a primitive level or have degenerated into ceaselessly warring hordes. 45 But like our inner conflict between violent and compassionate impulses, the incoherence between peaceful ends and violent means would remain unresolved. Ashoka’s dilemma is the dilemma of civilization itself. And into this tug-of-war religion would enter too. Since all premodern state ideology was inseparable from religion, warfare inevitably acquired a sacral element. Indeed, every major faith tradition has tracked that political entity in which it arose; none has become a “world religion” without the patronage of a militarily powerful empire, and, therefore, each would have to develop an imperial ideology. 46 But to what degree did religion contribute to the violence of the states with which it was inextricably linked? How much blame for the history of human violence can we ascribe to religion itself? The answer is not as simple as much of our popular discourse would suggest.

• From The Art of Memoir

  He’s preening, in a way. Eventually he also casually drops how Uncle Ruka left him a couple million dollars in 1916. And he claims he has no long grouse against the Soviet dictatorship for having made off with this rightful inheritance. But he argues this disinterest in cash so hard, I have a hard time swallowing it. The following passage is not for the general reader, but for the particular idiot who, because he lost a fortune in some crash, thinks he understands me. . . . The nostalgia I have been cherishing all these years is a hypertrophied sense of lost childhood, not sorrow for lost banknotes. Point being: it would feel more honest to this reader if he confessed to begrudging the lost cash—who wouldn’t? At this chapter’s end he gets back to a beautiful reverie. It’s somewhat reassuring that even a masterpiece like Speak, Memory sags a little with the weight of one chapter, where we sense that Nabokov is showing off his exotic pedigree without admitting as much. Mary McCarthy perpetrates a similar gaffe in Catholic Girlhood, devoting a chapter to her role in a school play and her mastery of Latin in a way that points up her cleverness. Students always rankle against that chapter. Ditto Hemingway, who in A Moveable Feast (1964) seems to be slyly mocking Fitzgerald when he chooses to recount a talk they allegedly had about F. Scott’s penis size. Somebody once asked me if I minded the review that claimed I was too circumspect in describing my son’s father in Lit, so he comes off two-dimensional as any WASP in an L.L.Bean catalog. My answer? If I’d written it better, it would’ve worked for every reader. Writing about him had tormented me, and those passages did feel weaker than the rest. Another divorce failure, I think, occurs in Elizabeth Gilbert’s much-adored Eat, Pray, Love, which otherwise displays a nice mix of circumspection and candor. She overtly blames herself for the demise of her marriage, for instance, and for not wanting to have a baby. She claims the reasons for the divorce are too private— drawing a curtain I respect across those events without seeming coy.

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

  In his juvenile work on Seneca and in earlier editions of his Institutes, Calvin had expressed noble sentiments on toleration;1210 even as Augustin did in his writings against the Manichaeans, among whom he himself had lived for nine years; but both changed their views for the worse in their zeal for orthodoxy. Calvin’s "Defence" did not altogether satisfy even some of his best friends. Zurkinden, the State Secretary of Bern, wrote him Feb. 10, 1554: "I wish the former part of your book, respecting the right which the magistrates may have to use the sword in coercing heretics, had not appeared in your name, but in that of your council, which might have been left to defend its own act. I do not see how you can find any favor with men of sedate mind in being the first formally to treat this subject, which is a hateful one to almost all."1211 Bullinger intimated his objections more mildly in a letter of March 26, 1554, in which he says: "I only fear that your book will not be so acceptable to many of the more simple-minded persons, who, nevertheless, are attached both to yourself and to the truth, by reason of its brevity and consequent obscurity, and the weightiness of the subject. And, indeed, your style appears somewhat perplexed, especially in this work." Calvin wrote in reply, April 29, 1554: "I am aware that I have been more concise than usual in this treatise. However, if I should appear to have faithfully and honestly defended the true doctrine, it will more than recompense me for my trouble. But though the candor and justice which are natural to you, as well as your love towards me, lead you to judge of me favorably, there are others who assail me harshly as a master in cruelty and atrocity, for attacking with my pen not only a dead man, but one who perished by my hands. Some, even not self-disposed towards me, wish that I had never entered on the subject of the punishment of heretics, and say that others in the like situation have held their tongues as the best way of avoiding hatred. It is well, however, that I have you to share my fault, if fault it be; for you it was who advised and persuaded me to it. Prepare yourself, therefore, for the combat."1212 § 158. A Plea for Religious Liberty. Castellio and Beza. Cf. § 126, p. 627, and especially Ferd. Buisson, Sébastien Castellion. Paris (Hachette et Cie), 1892. 2 vols. 8vo (I. 358–413; II. 1–28).

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  But the Oedipus complex is rather less a matter of the son’s passion for the mother than his passion for attaining the level of power to which adult male status is supposed to entitle him. Sexual possession of adult woman may be the first, but is hardly the most impressive manifestation of that rank. Mrs. Morel (in only one short passage of the novel is she ever referred to by her own name-Gertrude Coppard) has had no independent existence and is utterly deprived of any avenue of achievement. Her method of continuing to seek some existence through a vicarious role in the success she urges on her sons, is, however regrettable, fairly understandable. The son, because of his class and its poverty, has perceived that the means to the power he seeks is not in following his father down to the pits, but in following his mother’s behest and going to school, then to an office, and finally into art. The way out of his dilemma lies then in becoming, at first, like his mother rather than his father. We are frequently told that Lawrence made restitution to his father and the men of his father’s condition in creating Mellors and others like him. Such, alas, is not the case. Mellors is as one critic observes, “really a sort of gentleman in disguise,”37 and if the portrait of the broken drunkard in Sons and Lovers is cruel, and it is undeniably, it is less cruel than converting this victim of industrial brutality into a blase sexual superman who is too much of a snob to belong to either the working or the middle classes. The late Lawrentian hero is clearly Lawrence’s own fantasy of the father he might have preferred. In the same way, Lady Chatterley is a smartened-up version of his mother herself. Like his own wife Frieda von Richthofen, she is a real lady, not that disappointed little woman of the mining village with chapped red hands who fears her clothes are too shabby to be seen in Lincoln cathedral. Yet Mrs. Morel is a brave, even a great woman, though waitresses in teahouses snub her when she can only order custard, too poor to pay for a full meal. Sons and Lovers gives us Lawrence’s parents without the glamour with which his snobbishness later invested them. All the romances of his later fiction are a reworking of his parents’ marriage, and of his own too, modeled on theirs, but a notable advance in social mobility. For Lawrence saw his course, saw it with a Calvinistic sense of election, as a vocation to rise and surpass his origins.

• From Going Clear (2013)

  The jury awarded Wollersheim $30 million.4 Worse than the financial loss was the derision that greeted the church all over the world and the loss of control of its secret doctrines. The church has never recovered from the blow. The other court challenge that year involved Julie Christofferson Titchbourne, a young defector who had spent her college savings on Scientology counseling. She argued that the church had falsely claimed that Scientology would improve her intelligence, creativity, communication skills, and even her eyesight. For the first time, much of Hubbard’s biography came under attack. The litigant said that Hubbard had been portrayed as a nuclear physicist and civil engineer. The evidence showed that he attended George Washington University but never graduated. In response to Hubbard’s claim that he had cured himself of his injuries in the Second World War, the evidence showed he had never been wounded. Other embarrassing revelations came to light. The church stated that Hubbard was paid less than the average Scientology staff member—at the time, about fifteen dollars a week—but witnesses for the plaintiff testified that in one six-month period in 1982, about $34 million had been transferred from the church into Hubbard’s personal bank from a Liberian corporation.5 One former Scientologist described training sessions in which members were hectored and teased over sensitive issues until they were desensitized and would no longer react. In two such instances of “ bull-baiting,” Christofferson Titchbourne saw the eight-year-old son of the registrar repeatedly put his hands down the front of a woman student’s dress and a female coach unzipping the pants of a male student and fondling his genitals. The jury seemed most disturbed by testimony that members of the Guardian’s Office had culled the auditing files of members, looking for salacious material that could be used to blackmail potential defectors. Christofferson Titchbourne had originally sought a $30,000 refund from the church. The jury awarded her $39 million. At the time, that sum could have bankrupted Scientology. That evening, Miscavige and other members of the church hierarchy had a gloomy meeting in a condo in Portland, Oregon. One of the executives vowed that Christofferson Titchbourne would never collect because he was going to kill her. “ I don’t care if I get the chair,” he said. “It’s only one lifetime.” There was a lengthy silence, and then Miscavige said, “No, here’s what we’re going to do.” And on the spot, he came up with the Portland crusade. As many as 12,000 Scientologists came from all over the world in May and June 1985 to protest the judgment in what they called the Battle of Portland. Day after day they marched around the Multnomah County courthouse, shouting “Religious freedom now!” and carrying banners reading WE SHALL OVERCOME ! Chick Corea flew in from Japan to play a concert, along with other musicians affiliated with the church, including Al Jarreau, Stanley Clarke, and Edgar Winter.

• From Going Clear (2013)

  Instead of constantly going on the attack, he might simply say, “ Yeah, I get that it sounds crazy, but it works for me.”3 Cruise didn’t want to hear what Haggis had to say at the time, but soon after this conversation, he took a wildly comic turn in the Ben Stiller film Tropic Thunder , playing a profane studio executive who reminded a number of Hollywood insiders of Sumner Redstone. He also went back on the Today show for another interview with Matt Lauer. This time, he was chastened and introspective. “ I came across as arrogant,” he admitted, when reflecting on their previous interview three years earlier. “That’s not who I am. That’s not the person I am.… I’m here to entertain people. That’s who I am and what I want to do.” Outside the windows of the studio, a crowd of people in the plaza of Rockefeller Center waved and blew kisses. HAGGIS WAS CASTING The Next Three Days in the summer of 2009, and he asked Jason Beghe to read for the part of a detective. Beghe’s best-known film role was as the love interest for Demi Moore in G.I. Jane . In the late nineties, when Haggis had worked with the gravel-voiced actor on a CBS series, Family Law , Beghe had been an occasional front man for Scientology. He had come to the church, like so many others, through the Beverly Hills Playhouse. In old promotional materials for the church, Beghe is quoted as saying that Scientology is “ a rocket ride to spiritual freedom.” He says that Miscavige once called him “the poster boy for Scientology.” [image file=Image00026.jpg] Paul Haggis on the set of The Next Three Days , in a Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, train yard “I just want you to know I’m no longer in Scientology,” Beghe told Haggis when he called. “Actually, I’m one of its most outspoken critics. The church would be very unhappy if you hire me.” “ Nobody tells me who I cast,” Haggis responded, but he decided to look at the lengthy video Beghe had posted on the Internet, in which he denounces the church as “destructive and a rip-off.” Haggis thought the actor had gone over the edge, but he asked if they could talk. The two men met at Patrick’s Roadhouse, a pleasantly shabby coffee shop on the Pacific Coast Highway. Beghe was calmer than he had been in the video, which he now called “a snapshot of me having been out only three months.” He could see that Haggis was troubled. Even though Beghe had renounced the church, he continued to use Scientology when dealing with former members. In his several meetings with Haggis, he employed techniques based on Hubbard’s Ethics Conditions. These range from Confusion at the bottom and ascend through Treason, Enemy, Doubt, Liability, Emergency, and so on, up to Power. Each of the conditions has a specific set of steps to follow in order to advance to a higher state.

• From Going Clear (2013)

  Haggis had no idea what was going on. He assumed that the church was going to pressure him to take some more auditing or another course, as had happened so often in the past. Davis met him at the Celebrity Centre and escorted him to a room where Greg Wilhere was waiting. Wilhere, a handsome former college football player, was a senior executive in the church assigned to be Cruise’s personal auditor. ( He accompanied the star even to the shooting of Days of Thunder , where a character in the movie was named after him.) Wilhere was livid because Haggis had upset Tom Cruise by subverting years of work on Cruise’s part to recruit Spielberg into the church. “ It was a joke,” Haggis protested. He said he had no idea how that could have undermined Cruise’s efforts to draw the most powerful man in Hollywood into Scientology. Wilhere said that Steven was having a problem with one of his seven children, and Tom was working to “steer him in the right direction.” All that was ruined, Wilhere said, because Spielberg now believed there were evil Scientologists who were locked in a closet. Haggis felt like he was trapped in a farce. It all seemed wildly ridiculous, but he was the only one who thought so. Still, he’d be crazy to antagonize Tom Cruise and Steven Spielberg. He offered to explain to Spielberg that he had been kidding, there were no evil Scientologists, and if there were, they wouldn’t be kept in a closet. He couldn’t believe that Spielberg would actually think he had been serious. Wilhere was unappeased. He said Cruise was apoplectic. He directed Haggis to write the star a letter of apology—this minute. Haggis dutifully wrote out a note on the paper handed to him, but Wilhere said it wasn’t sufficient. Haggis wrote a more contrite note. Wilhere said he would pass it along. But Haggis never got a response from Cruise.4 Haggis came away from that meeting with a new appreciation of the significance of Tom Cruise to Scientology. He had heard that Cruise had often been enlisted to try to recruit famous people. They included James Packer, the richest man in Australia; David Beckham, the British soccer star, and his wife, Victoria, the former Spice Girl; and Cruise’s good friends, the actors Will and Jada Pinkett Smith, who later funded a school that used Hubbard educational techniques. But there was no one else like Spielberg. Had Cruise been successful in his efforts, it would have been a transformative moment in the history of the church, especially in its relation to Hollywood. It would have given reality to the mythology of Scientology’s influence in the entertainment industry. Who could guess how many recruits would flood into the church because of Spielberg’s imprimatur? Or how much money would pour into Scientology’s coffers by moguls and agents and aspiring movie stars seeking to gain favor?

• From Going Clear (2013)

  He resigned as Executive Director of the Church of Scientology and sold his interests in the Hubbard Association of Scientologists International, although he maintained actual control of the organization through his innumerable telexes. He journeyed to Rhodesia, the South African republic that had recently declared its independence from the United Kingdom (it later became Zimbabwe). Isolated, diplomatically spurned, and subject to international sanctions, the Rhodesian government served a clique of white colonists who ruled over an insurgent black majority. To Hubbard, Rhodesia seemed ripe for a takeover. He felt a kinship with the republic’s dashing and flamboyant founder, Cecil John Rhodes, who also had red hair and a taste for swashbuckling adventure. Hubbard believed he might have been Rhodes in a previous life, although it’s unclear whether he knew that Rhodes was homosexual. Hubbard had a fantasy that he would be welcomed in Rhodesia, that the black population would embrace him like a brother, and that eventually he would become its leader, issuing passports and his own currency. However, the current prime minister, Ian Smith, was desperately trying to negotiate a settlement with the black nationalist movement that would preserve white-minority rule. Hubbard thoughtfully wrote up a constitution for the government that he claimed would accomplish just that, but he couldn’t get anyone to take it seriously. While Hubbard talked about his big plans for developing the country, the government became increasingly suspicious of his motives and his resources. Ultimately, Hubbard’s visa was not renewed. “He told me Ian Smith was going to be shot because he was a ‘Suppressive,’ ” John McMaster said. “The real reason that Hubbard was kicked out of Rhodesia was that his cheques bounced.” Hubbard returned to England with a new scheme. If the world’s governments were lining up against him, he would put himself beyond reach. Scientologists were whispering about a clandestine “sea project” that their leader was planning. He quietly began acquiring a small fleet of oceangoing vessels. Then he disappeared again. This time, he went to Tangier, the Moroccan city on the Strait of Gibraltar, which was a famous hangout for hipsters and artists. There he began his research on Operating Thetan Level Three (OT III), his “Wall of Fire.” Mary Sue and the children remained in England, but Hubbard wrote to her daily, complaining of a barking dog that was interrupting his work, and various ailments—a bad back, and a lung problem that emerged from a lingering cold. He admitted that he was “drinking lots of rum” and taking drugs—“pinks and grays”—while he was doing his research.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  In Parts One and Two we shall explore this dilemma. Established by force and maintained by military aggression, warfare was essential to the agrarian state. When land and the peasants who farmed it were the chief sources of wealth, territorial conquest was the only way such a kingdom could increase its revenues. Warfare was, therefore, indispensable to any premodern economy. The ruling class had to maintain its control of the peasant villages, defend its arable land against aggressors, conquer more land, and ruthlessly suppress any hint of insubordination. A key figure in this story will be the Indian emperor Ashoka (c. 268–232 BCE). Appalled by the suffering his army had inflicted on a rebellious city, he tirelessly promoted an ethic of compassion and tolerance but could not in the end disband his army. No state can survive without its soldiers. And once states grew and warfare had become a fact of human life, an even greater force—the military might of empire—often seemed the only way to keep the peace. So necessary to the rise of states and ultimately empires is military force that historians regard militarism as a mark of civilization. Without disciplined, obedient, and law-abiding armies, human society, it is claimed, would probably have remained at a primitive level or have degenerated into ceaselessly warring hordes.45 But like our inner conflict between violent and compassionate impulses, the incoherence between peaceful ends and violent means would remain unresolved. Ashoka’s dilemma is the dilemma of civilization itself. And into this tug-of-war religion would enter too. Since all premodern state ideology was inseparable from religion, warfare inevitably acquired a sacral element. Indeed, every major faith tradition has tracked that political entity in which it arose; none has become a “world religion” without the patronage of a militarily powerful empire, and, therefore, each would have to develop an imperial ideology.46 But to what degree did religion contribute to the violence of the states with which it was inextricably linked? How much blame for the history of human violence can we ascribe to religion itself? The answer is not as simple as much of our popular discourse would suggest. [image file=image_rsrcDZA.jpg] Our world is dangerously polarized at a time when humanity is more closely interconnected—politically, economically, and electronically—than ever before. If we are to meet the challenge of our time and create a global society where all peoples can live together in peace and mutual respect, we need to assess our situation accurately. We cannot afford oversimplified assumptions about the nature of religion or its role in the world. What the American scholar William T. Cavanaugh calls “the myth of religious violence”47 served Western people well at an early stage of their modernization, but in our global village we need a more nuanced view in order to understand our predicament fully.

• From Going Clear (2013)

  Miscavige’s audacious plan was to seize control of the GO and place it under control of the Messengers, who numbered only about fifty at the time. Several thousand Guardians were still working for Mary Sue. She had treated them kindly, paying them decent wages and allowing them to live in private homes. Most of them remained loyal to her and thought that she was being made a scapegoat. They would have to be purged. Mary Sue received the delegation of Messengers coolly. Her case was still on appeal, but the outcome was clear: she was taking the fall for a program that Hubbard, after all, had put in motion. She understood the influence she still wielded in the church and the threat she represented. She demanded to deal with Hubbard himself, but Miscavige refused. He controlled access to the church’s founder so thoroughly that even his wife couldn’t talk to him. Indeed, they hadn’t spoken in more than a year. Mary Sue cursed Miscavige and threatened to throw a heavy ashtray at him. But her negotiating position was not strong, unless she was willing to betray everything she had worked to build with the man she still believed was a savior. It must have been galling for her to negotiate with Miscavige, who was twenty-one at the time—the age Mary Sue was when she married Hubbard. Privately, she called him “Little Napoleon.” In exchange for her resignation from the GO, the Messengers offered a house and a financial settlement. Mary Sue had substantial legal bills and no other means of support. Under the guise of having to sort out the messes that would be left behind in the wake of her resignation, Miscavige went over a number of different subjects, even including a couple of murders that were alleged to have been committed by a member of the GO office in London. He wanted Mary Sue on tape, confessing to other crimes, which could then be fed to the government. This was done, Bill Franks asserts, with Hubbard’s knowledge: “Hubbard wanted her out of the way. He wanted all guns pointed at her so he could go about his old age without worrying about being thrown in jail.” Mary Sue lost her last appeal. She began serving a five-year sentence in Lexington, Kentucky, in January 1983. Hubbard never visited her in prison. Her letters went unanswered. “I don’t believe he’s getting them,” she later reasoned. Mary Sue was released after serving one year. She never saw her husband again. MANY PEOPLE WHO JOINED the church under Hubbard would later contend that Miscavige’s machinations were opposed to the will of the founder.

• From Notes of a Native Son (1955)

  When he was committed, it was discovered that he had tuberculosis and, as it turned out, the disease of his mind allowed the disease of his body to destroy him. For the doctors could not force him to eat, either, and, though he was fed intravenously, it was clear from the beginning that there was no hope for him. In my mind’s eye I could see him, sitting at the window, locked up in his terrors; hating and fearing every living soul including his children who had betrayed him, too, by reaching towards the world which had despised him. There were nine of us. I began to wonder what it could have felt like for such a man to have had nine children whom he could barely feed. He used to make little jokes about our poverty, which never, of course, seemed very funny to us; they could not have seemed very funny to him, either, or else our all too feeble response to them would never have caused such rages. He spent great energy and achieved, to our chagrin, no small amount of success in keeping us away from the people who surrounded us, people who had all-night rent parties to which we listened when we should have been sleeping, people who cursed and drank and flashed razor blades on Lenox Avenue. He could not understand why, if they had so much energy to spare, they could not use it to make their lives better. He treated almost everybody on our block with a most uncharitable asperity and neither they, nor, of course, their children were slow to reciprocate. The only white people who came to our house were welfare workers and bill collectors. It was almost always my mother who dealt with them, for my father’s temper, which was at the mercy of his pride, was never to be trusted. It was clear that he felt their very presence in his home to be a violation: this was conveyed by his carriage, almost ludicrously stiff, and by his voice, harsh and vindictively polite.

• From Notes of a Native Son (1955)

  Columns signed by Lena Horne and Paul Robeson appeared in PV until several weeks ago, when both severed their connections with the paper. Miss Horne’s column made her sound like an embittered Eleanor Roosevelt, and the only column of Robeson’s I have read was concerned with the current witch-hunt in Hollywood, discussing the kind of movies under attack and Hollywood’s traditional treatment of Negroes. It is personally painful to me to realize that so gifted and forceful a man as Robeson should have been tricked by his own bitterness and by a total inability to understand the nature of political power in general, or Communist aims in particular, into missing the point of his own critique, which is worth a great deal of thought: that there are a great many ways of being un-American, some of them nearly as old as the country itself, and that the House Un-American Activities Committee might find concepts and attitudes even more damaging to American life in a picture like Gone With the Wind than in the possibly equally romantic but far less successful Watch on the Rhine. The only other newspapers in the field with any significant sale in Harlem are the Pittsburgh Courier, which has the reputation of being the best of the lot, and the Afro-American, which resembles the New York Journal-American in layout and type and seems to make a consistent if unsuccessful effort to be at once readable, intelligent, and fiery. The Courier is a high-class paper, reaching its peak in the handling of its society news and in the columns of George S. Schuyler, whose Olympian serenity infuriates me, but who, as a matter of fact, reflects with great accuracy the state of mind and the ambitions of the professional, well-to-do Negro who has managed to find a place to stand. Mr. Schuyler, who is remembered still for a satirical novel I have not read, called Black No More, is aided enormously in this position by a genteel white wife and a child-prodigy daughter—who is seriously regarded in some circles as proof of the incomprehensible contention that the mating of white and black is more likely to produce genius than any other combination.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  73 It is hard to suppress a mixed reaction to the story. In the Life of Mary all the features of the subgenre, both attractive and disturbing, are refined to the highest degree. The blunt, unquestioning grace offered to the sinner finds its most poignant expression in Mary’s encounter with the mother of God. Because this is an allegory of sin and repentance, the scale of Mary’s depravity is a measure of the infinite grace she can receive. At the same time, in Mary’s story the toll of such forgiveness is plain to see. Mortification, self-abasement, death unto this world—such are the adjuncts of redemption. The penitent prostitute is walled into a cell, she surrenders her beauty, she sobs eternally. In Mary’s case, she suffers hauntingly until her evils have evaporated along with her body. She becomes a phantasm, a pure, pitiful creature whose body has been wasted to virtual nothingness. The body, its existence in the world, its participation in the mysterious cycles of regeneration, offer no truth, no pleasure, no redemption. In structure and in spirit, the Life of Mary is the quintessential antiromance. From Shame to Sin CONCLUSION: MYTHICAL IMPERIALISM IN LATE ANTIQUITY In the eighth century, a mischievous Byzantine author wrote a hagiographical romance that begins where the novel of Achilles Tatius ends. Clitophon and Leucippe—whose name has been apathetically disguised as “Gleucippe”—are married and living in Emesa. Gleucippe is infertile, and Clitophon is a wife-beater. She regularly beseeches Artemis (her savior in the romance) to allow her to have a child, without issue. Not until she converts to Christianity does she bear a son, Galaktion, who will become the chaste, Christian hero of the story. The saint’s life proves that hagiographers, even at this date, simply could not live without the imaginary world created by the authors of romance. The grotesque story of Gleucippe and Clitophon is probably the least subliminal instance of what Frye called “mythical imperialism.” The invention of the penitent prostitutes was only one campaign in a massive cultural conquest that sprawled across the entire continent of ancient literature. But this new archetype, born from the warm embers of imperial romance, reflects an especially meaningful encounter in the transition to a Christian culture. The stories of the penitent prostitutes, as a subgenre, mirror the coming of age of Christianity as a dominant public ideology. The woman’s body was a potent symbol, a shorthand for the order of society. At the deepest level, the redemption of a prostitute’s corrupted flesh stood for the ability of the church to absorb society and through baptism to cleanse it. The prostitute’s sins are only an exaggerated and especially condensed symbol of the sins of the world.

• From The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church's Conservative Icon (2009)

  Philemon cannot keep Onesimus as a Christian slave by claiming that—inside, spiritually, in our souls—we are all equal before God and Christ. The equality of liberation must be both physical and social as well as spiritual and theological. Paul continues and pushes home his point once again: So if you consider me your partner, welcome him as you would welcome me. If he has wronged you in any way, or owes you anything, charge that to my account. I, Paul, am writing this with my own hand: I will repay it. I say nothing about your owing me even your own self. (17–19) Once again the bite of sarcasm is very obvious—as if Paul could have an “account” payable to Philemon, who owes Paul his very “own self” as a Christian. And, to make it worse, Paul writes this verse himself in large letters as if he were signing off on a debt, as if to say, “Maybe, dear Philemon, you require a signature to make this all legal?” By this point, poor Philemon must have had no idea what hit him. And remember that all of this is in a personal but public letter. And Paul continues just as forcefully (to use a kind word): Yes, brother, let me have this benefit from you in the Lord! Refresh my heart in Christ. Confident of your obedience, I am writing to you, knowing that you will do even more than I say. One thing more—prepare a guest room for me, for I am hoping through your prayers to be restored to you. (20–22) Look closely at the rhythm of those three verses. The first one is gentle (20). It addresses Philemon once again as “brother” and mentions “refresh my heart,” as if Paul is finishing up by referring back to those same words at the start of the letter (7). As you will recall, that earlier verse was followed by Paul appealing to rather than commanding Philemon (8–9). But in the present three verses, the next verse, 21, rather annuls those earlier verses, 8–9. The phrase “confident of your obedience” (21) annuls “though I am bold enough in Christ to command you to do your duty, yet I would rather appeal to you on the basis of love” (8–9). So it is a command after all, but from whom? Paul or Christ or God or all of them? The third verse reverts once more to the language of friends and equals, but it also has a slight edge, as if to say: “Do not think, dear Philemon, that a proconsular jail means you will never see me again.” And in conclusion: Epaphras, my fellow prisoner in Christ Jesus, sends greetings to you, and so do Mark, Aristarchus, Demas, and Luke, my fellow workers.

• From The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church's Conservative Icon (2009)

  Barnabas, says Luke, goes to the synagogues in each city and attempts to convert Jews to the messianic Jesus, but has greater success with Gentiles. Paul watched, Paul learned, and Paul changed. It is not even certain that Paul returned to Syrian Antioch with Barnabas. He may have left him at Derbe and headed northward onto the arid Anatolian plateau. Possibly the moist Pamphylian climate had resulted in malarial relapses because, as we saw above, he later reminded the Galatians, “It was because of a physical infirmity that I first announced the gospel to you” (4:13). Be that as it may, we can now see why Luke’s Acts always has Paul going into synagogues to convert the Jews. Luke had special traditions about Barnabas in the first half of Acts. He introduces him as “a Levite, a native of Cyprus, Joseph, to whom the apostles gave the name Barnabas (which means ‘son of encouragement’). He sold a field that belonged to him, then brought the money, and laid it at the apostles’ feet” (4:36–37). He has Barnabas vouch for Paul at Jerusalem after his conversion: “Barnabas took him [Paul], brought him to the apostles, and described for them how on the road he had seen the Lord, who had spoken to him, and how in Damascus he had spoken boldly in the name of Jesus” (9:27). And, as just noted, he has Barnabas bring Paul back from his Tarsus refuge after that failed Nabatean mission (11:25). Finally, Luke has famine relief sent from Antioch to Jerusalem “by Barnabas and Saul” (11:30). In other words, Luke takes Barnabas’s mission—and what Paul did when he was under Barnabas—as a model for what Paul always did even when he was by himself. Luke filled out his lesser knowledge of Paul on his own with his greater knowledge of Paul under Barnabas. But is that what Paul did when he was on his own independent mission? And, first of all, how did he finally gain that independence? THE AEGEAN MISSION At the end of Paul’s second mission—that one under Barnabas in the 40s—there was a major apostolic agreement in Jerusalem and a major apostolic disagreement at Antioch. Paul details the former event in Galatians 2:1–10 and the latter in 2:11–14, but Luke speaks only of agreement at both Jerusalem and Antioch in Acts 15. The debate at Jerusalem was whether gentile males who converted to Christianity had to be circumcised. And, as Paul reminded the Galatians, “James and Cephas and John, who were acknowledged pillars,…gave to Barnabas and me the right hand of fellowship, agreeing that we should go to the Gentiles and they to the circumcised” (2:9). That was a crucial apostolic agreement for Paul. Simon, by the way, had a bilingual nickname, Cephas in Aramaic and Peter in Greek. Both terms meant “the Rock” or, if you prefer, Rocky. The debate at Antioch was whether a mixed community of Jewish and gentile Christians should observe kosher rules in their common eucharistic meals.

• From The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1915)

  These are especially in the case of necessity, when the totem is a dangerous animal, [380] for example, or when the man has nothing to eat. There are even tribes where men are forbidden to hunt the animals whose names they bear, on their own accounts, but where they may kill them for others. [381] But the way in which this act is generally accomplished clearly indicates that it is something illicit. One excuses himself as though for a fault, and bears witness to the chagrin which he suffers and the repugnance which he feels, [382] while precautions are taken that the animal may suffer as little as possible. [383] In addition to these fundamental interdictions, certain cases of a prohibition of contact between a man and his totem are cited. Thus among the Omaha, in the clan of the Elk, no one may touch any part of the body of a male elk; in the sub-clan of the Buffalo, no one is allowed to touch the head of this animal. [384] Among the Bechuana, no man dares to clothe himself in the skin of his totem. [385] But these cases are rare; and it is natural that they should be exceptional, for normally a man must wear the image of his totem or something which brings it to mind. The tattooings and the totemic costumes would not be possible if all contact were forbidden. It has also been remarked that this prohibition has not been found in Australia, but only in those societies where totemism has advanced far from its original form; it is therefore probably of late origin and due perhaps to the influence of ideas that are really not totemic at all. [386] If we now compare these various interdictions with those whose object is the totemic emblem, contrarily to all that could be foreseen, it appears that these latter are more numerous, stricter, and more severely enforced than the former. The figures of all sorts which represent the totem are surrounded with a respect sensibly superior to that inspired by the very being whose form these figures reproduce. The churinga, the nurtunja and the waninga can never be handled by the women or the uninitiated, who are even allowed to catch glimpses of it only very exceptionally, and from a respectful distance.

• From Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (1999)

  “. . . Three, Two, One, Contact: Times Square Red” began as an invited academic lecture and, as such, launches itself with a different order of conceptual difficulty and employs a different level of rhetorical density. Its appeal to theoretical discourse, its mosaic structure, and its range of attendant topics make it as different from “Times Square Blue” as a piece roughly the same length and that (sometimes) focuses on similar topics can be. Indeed, all the commercial forces that yearn to reinstate those authorial unities of history, style, theory, and value are here at their most distressed, so that the very reasonableness of bringing the two together under paired titles in a single book is in question. But a few readers have suggested not so much that the two pieces are “good to think with” but rather that their very differences make them particularly productive for thinking about and against and through each other. If this is the case, their abutment, one against the other here, is worth it. A commitment both to the vernacular and to the expert—and to combining them in reasonable and responsible ways—offers the reader a starting place from which she or he may, if inclined, begin to justify both the organizational eccentricities of “Times Square Red” (to name it by its subtitle) as well as the decision to publish two pieces of such different texture and structure in one book. On my way to deliver some late revisions on the text to the managing editor at New York University Press, I stopped in to see a friend for half an hour at his book-, computer-, and memorabilia-crowded home. There I met a man who, when I mentioned the title of my book, told me he had worked for the Brandt theater chain on Forty-second Street up until 1984. That chain included the majority of the legitimate theaters there; the Brandt Theater itself was, by then, a porn house. The man erupted with a cascade of anecdotes about the appalling working conditions in the Forty-second Street theaters in those years, about young people hired at the concession stands for minimum wage (then $3.50 an hour) and still forced to join a company union as well as to testify in the company’s favor at city hearings. All of this might easily and profitably be researched to expand the annals of human degradation. (Needless to say, most of these young people were black and Hispanic.) These tales are not told here—because, among other things, there were no concession stands in any of the porn theaters I write of. In this regard you will find here a passing concern for diachrony (the overall explanation for the situation the man described is certainly stated in the following pages), but neither “Times Square Blue” nor “Times Square Red” is a history of that area or the city.

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

  When Eulogius, in return for this exaltation of his own see, afterwards addressed Gregory as "universal pope," he strongly repudiated the title, saying: "I have said that neither to me nor to any one else (nec mihi, nec cuiquam alteri) ought you to write anything of the kind. And lo! in the preface of your letter you apply to me, who prohibited it, the proud title of universal pope; which thing I beg your most sweet Holiness to do no more, because what is given to others beyond what reason requires is subtracted from you. I do not esteem that an honor by which I know my brethren lose their honor. My honor is that of the universal Church. My honor is the solid strength of my brethren. I am then truly honored when all and each are allowed the honor that is due to them. For, if your Holiness calls me universal pope, you deny yourself to be that which you call me universally [that is, you own yourself to be no pope]. But no more of this: away with words which inflate pride and wound charity!" He even objects to the expression, "as thou hast commanded," which had occurred in hid correspondent’s letter. "Which word, ’commanded,’ I pray you let me hear no more; for I know what I am, and what you are: in position you are my brethren, in manners you are my, fathers. I did not, therefore, command, but desired only to indicate what seemed to me expedient."225 On the other hand, it cannot be denied that Gregory, while he protested in the strongest terms against the assumption by the Eastern patriarchs of the antichristian and blasphemous title of universal bishop, claimed and exercised, as far as he had the opportunity and power, the authority and oversight over the whole church of Christ, even in the East. "With respect to the church of Constantinople," he asks in one of his letters, "who doubts that it is subject to the apostolic see?" And in another letter: "I know not what bishop is not subject to it, if fault is found in him." "To all who know the Gospels," he writes to emperor Maurice, "it is plain that to Peter, as the prince of all the apostles, was committed by our Lord the care of the whole church (totius ecclesiae cura) .... But although the keys of the kingdom of heaven and the power to bind and to loose, were intrusted to him, and the care and principality of the whole church (totius ecclesiae cura et principatus), he is not called universal bishop; while my most holy fellow-priest (vir sanctissimus consacerdos meus) John dares to call himself universal bishop. I am compelled to exclaim: O tempora, O mores!"226