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 Introduction to the Hebrew Bible and Deutero-Canonical Books (2018)

  But a worse fate awaits him. In chapter 7, when the king and Haman come to her banquet, Esther tells the king about the plot against the Jews, whom she now identifies as “my people.” When the king asks who is responsible, she identifies Haman. When the king storms out in anger, Haman throws himself on Esther to beg for his life, but the king returns and thinks it is a sexual assault. Haman is hanged on the gallows he had prepared for Mordecai. The story now moves to its conclusion. In chapter 8 Esther asks the king to revoke the decree against the Jews. The king tells her and Mordecai that they may write as they please and seal it with his seal (so much for the unchangeable decrees of the Medes and Persians). The letters, written by Mordecai, give the Jews permission to kill any people who might attack them, throughout the provinces. So on the very day on which the Jews were to be destroyed, they slaughtered their enemies by the thousand, with the knowledge and permission of the king (chap. 9). Furthermore, they instituted the Festival of Purim to commemorate the occasion. The book ends with a brief epilogue (chap. 10) claiming that the honors given to Mordecai are recorded in the annals of the kings of Media and Persia. Esther and History Despite the reference to the annals at the end, it is quite clear that the events recorded in Esther are not historical. Several details in the book are historically problematic. Mordecai was supposedly among the exiles taken to Babylon by Nebuchadnezzar. Yet he is active in the reign of Xerxes a century later. The number of provinces, or satrapies, is inaccurate. There is no historical evidence for the deposition of a Persian queen, and so forth. But the fictional character of Esther should be quite clear from the style of the book, which is full of hyperbole and stock characters, such as the gullible king and the wicked courtier. The idea that a Persian king would give the Jews in his kingdom unlimited authority to slaughter their enemies is simply incredible. Perhaps the crowning irony of the book is that so many Jews and Christians over the centuries accepted it as historical. Scholars who try to salvage a historical core from this fantastic story are only slightly less gullible than their precritical ancestors. As presented in the Hebrew Bible, the book appears to be a festal legend: a story told to explain why a festival (Purim) is celebrated. The actual origin of this festival is unclear. It is not strictly a religious festival. No prayers or sacrifices are prescribed, but drinking to inebriation is permitted by the Babylonian Talmud ( Megillah 7b).

• From The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction (1976)

  One day in 1867, a farm hand from the village of Lapcourt, who was somewhat simple-minded, employed here then there, depending on the season, living hand-to-mouth from a little charity or in exchange for the worst sort of labor, sleeping in barns and stables, was turned in to the authorities. At the border of a field, he had obtained a few caresses from a little girl, just as he had done before and seen done by the village urchins round about him; for, at the edge of the wood, or in the ditch by the road leading to Saint-Nicolas, they would play the familiar game called “curdled milk.” So he was pointed out by the girl’s parents to the mayor of the village, reported by the mayor to the gendarmes, led by the gendarmes to the judge, who indicted him and turned him over first to a doctor, then to two other experts who not only wrote their report but also had it published.14 What is the significant thing about this story? The pettiness of it all; the fact that this everyday occurrence in the life of village sexuality, these inconsequential bucolic pleasures, could become, from a certain time, the object not only of a collective intolerance but of a judicial action, a medical intervention, a careful clinical examination, and an entire theoretical elaboration. The thing to note is that they went so far as to measure the brainpan, study the facial bone structure, and inspect for possible signs of degenerescence the anatomy of this personage who up to that moment had been an integral part of village life; that they made him talk; that they questioned him concerning his thoughts, inclinations, habits, sensations, and opinions. And then, acquitting him of any crime, they decided finally to make him into a pure object of medicine and knowledge—an object to be shut away till the end of his life in the hospital at Maréville, but also one to be made known to the world of learning through a detailed analysis. One can be fairly certain that during this same period the Lapcourt schoolmaster was instructing the little villagers to mind their language and not talk about all these things aloud. But this was undoubtedly one of the conditions enabling the institutions of knowledge and power to overlay this everyday bit of theater with their solemn discourse. So it was that our society—and it was doubtless the first in history to take such measures—assembled around these timeless gestures, these barely furtive pleasures between simple-minded adults and alert children, a whole machinery for speechifying, analyzing, and investigating.

• From Introduction to the Hebrew Bible and Deutero-Canonical Books (2018)

  It is apparent from Esther 3:4 that prostration was not in accordance with Jewish custom, although the religious basis for the refusal is not made explicit. Again, the honor of both characters is at stake. Haman attributes the slight to the fact that Mordecai is a Jew, and resolves to destroy all the Jews in the kingdom. The excessive character of this reaction is typical of the hyperbolic style of Esther. Haman appeals to the king, but does not mention the Jews by name. Instead, he characterizes them as “a certain people . . . whose laws are different from those of every other people, and who do not keep the king’s laws” (2:8). These people are evidently not assimilated, but retain their distinct identity within the empire. As typically happens in stories of this sort, the king is entirely gullible and gives his assent without question. Thus the crisis of the story develops: a decree is issued for the destruction of all the Jews of the kingdom. The fasting of the Jews at the beginning of chapter 4 is in pointed contrast to the constant feasting of the royal court. The crisis facing the Jewish people presents a special dilemma for Queen Esther. Mordecai asks her to go to the king to intercede. She responds that no one may enter the presence of the king without being summoned. This is another folkloric motif, analogous to the irrevocable laws of the Medes and Persians, that heightens the drama of the story. Mordecai’s reply goes to the heart of the predicament: “Do not think that in the king’s palace you will escape any more than all the other Jews. For if you keep silence at such a time as this, relief and deliverance will arise for the Jews from another quarter, but you and your father’s family will perish. Who knows? Perhaps you have come to royal dignity for just such a time as this” (4:14). Esther resolves to risk her life and calls on all the Jews of Susa to join her in a fast. The danger to Esther’s life is quickly dispelled in chapter 5. The king receives her warmly and offers to grant anything she might ask. At first she requests only that the king and Haman join her in a banquet. Haman is elated, but he is still galled by the insubordination of Mordecai, so he gives orders that a gallows be prepared for him. From this point forward, however, the story is marked by the repeated reversal of expectations. In chapter 6 the king has a sleepless night and remembers that Mordecai has not been rewarded. He asks Haman what should be done for the man the king wishes to honor. Haman, thinking that he himself is the man, recommends lavish honors. Consequently, he has to attire Mordecai with robes and lead him on horseback around the city, to his great chagrin.

• From The John Dominic Crossan Essential Set (Jesus; The Birth of Christianity; The Power of Parable; The Greatest Prayer) (2004)

  Recall Sayre’s description of the typical Cynic dress and equipment given just above: “wallet, staff and cloak, which must invariably be worn, dirty and ragged and worn so as to leave the right shoulder bare.” What is there translated as “wallet” is the Greek term p [image "image" file=Image00032.jpg] ra , which we might call a knapsack but which, in any case, was functionally a begging pouch. It was where itinerants kept whatever they were given. It declared and symbolized their self-sufficiency. They had all they needed on their hip. They did not need house or shelter, family or kinfolk. But that is precisely what Jesus’ companions do not carry. They are no-p [image "image" file=Image00032.jpg] ra people, however that term is translated in our English texts. It has been suggested that Jesus is distinguishing his group from the Cynics, as if onlookers would catch that subtle difference. Maybe Jesus had never heard of Cynicism. Or maybe he knew all about it and was adapting its dress code to his own quite different program. In any case, the no-knapsack dress code is symbolically correct for his program, in which itinerants are not self-sufficient but interdependent with the householders. In other words, the interdependency of itinerants and householders established by that eating and healing conjunction is symbolically dramatized by the commands about dress and equipment. The no-sandals mandate emphasizes their poverty. The no-knapsack mandate emphasizes their interdependency. The no-staff mandate emphasizes their vulnerability, their defenselessness, their nonviolence. Conclusion . I consider this unit central for an understanding of the Common Sayings Tradition. It is also the place where that text locks hardest in conjunction with my context . The peasant dislocation resulting from Antipas’s urbanization in Lower Galilee is reflected directly in those itinerants. They are not general or perennial beggars, although there may be some beggars included among them. They are not freeholders and probably not tenants either. They are dispossessed and now landless laborers, close to but not yet beggars. They are the expendables. They are the other side of commercialization in a land that belongs to God. I take, therefore, the following disjunctive pairs as a series of correlative terms all pointing to the same situation: landless laborers and landed peasants itinerants and householders eating and healing destitute and poor enough bread for today and no debt for tomorrow This is the great and terrible divide in peasant life. The kingdom movement focuses not just on the permanent existence of that great divide but on its increasing and widening presence in Antipas’s Galilee during the 20s C.E. Never forget that context of rural commercialization pushing peasants from landed to landless status—in other words, from poverty to destitution. Think of those itinerants not as beggars born and bred to destitution, surviving and dying in destitution. Think of them as increasingly dispossessed peasants forced off their lost farms into survival on the roads of the countryside or in the streets of the cities.

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

  But this proposition is not accepted before the raising of strong objections. It seems very strange that one must turn back, and be transported to the very beginnings of history, in order to arrive at an understanding of humanity as it is at present. This manner of procedure seems particularly paradoxical in the question which concerns us. In fact, the various religions generally pass as being quite unequal in value and dignity; it is said that they do not all contain the same quota of truth. Then it seems as though one could not compare the highest forms of religious thought with the lowest, without reducing the first to the level of the second. If we admit that the crude cults of the Australian tribes can help us to understand Christianity, for example, is that not supposing that this latter religion proceeds from the same mentality as the former, that it is made up of the same superstitions and rests upon the same errors? This is how the theoretical importance which has sometimes been attributed to primitive religions has come to pass as a sign of a systematic hostility to all religion, which, by prejudging the results of the study, vitiates them in advance. There is no occasion for asking here whether or not there are scholars who have merited this reproach, and who have made religious history and ethnology a weapon against religion. In any case, a sociologist cannot hold such a point of view. In fact, it is an essential postulate of sociology that a human institution cannot rest upon an error and a lie, without which it could not exist. If it were not founded in the nature of things, it would have encountered in the facts a resistance over which it could never have triumphed. So when we commence the study of primitive religions, it is with the assurance that they hold to reality and express it; this principle will be seen to re-enter again and again in the course of the analyses and discussions which follow, and the reproach which we make against the schools from which we have separated ourselves is that they have ignored it. When only the letter of the formulæ is considered, these religious beliefs and practices undoubtedly seem disconcerting at times, and one is tempted to attribute them to some sort of a deep-rooted error. But one must know how to go underneath the symbol to the reality which it represents and which gives it its meaning. The most barbarous and the most fantastic rites and the strangest myths translate some human need, some aspect of life, either individual or social. The reasons with which the faithful justify them may be, and generally are, erroneous; but the true reasons do not cease to exist, and it is the duty of science to discover them.

• From The Genius of Judy: How Judy Blume Rewrote Childhood for All of Us (2023)

  16.“The first page I opened to talked about masturbation,” she explained to a reporter : Michael Hirsley, “ACLU Senses an Upturn in School-Book Censorship in South,” Chicago Tribune , December 29, 1985.“No one is obligated to read this book” : Ibid.she demanded that the school system remove the Harry Potter books from libraries : “Hearing to Determine Fate of ‘Harry Potter’ Book in GCPS,” Gwinnett (GA) Daily Post , April 10, 2006.“That’s what happens when they start banning books” : “Deenie Sales Soar,” Galveston Daily News , September 10, 1985, p. 9A.In June 1984, she received a letter from a board member : Box 32 of the Judy Blume Papers at Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Accessed May 11, 2022.“My life changed when I learned about the National Coalition Against Censorship” : Judy Blume, “Places I Never Meant to Be: A Personal View,” American Libraries , June/July 1999, pp. 62–67.“The intense battles around the control of sexuality” : Leanne Katz, “Introduction: Women, Censorship and Pornography,” New York Law School Review 38 (January 1993): 9–23.“I used to feel so alone when I heard my books were being challenged” : Judy Blume, “Is Puberty a Dirty Word,” New York Law School Review 38, nos. 1–4 (1993): 37–43.Chapter Twenty-Three Daughters“I gave you a lot of shit this year, didn’t I, Mother?” : Judy Blume, Smart Women (New York: Berkley Books, 1983). I worked from the 2004 reprint by Berkley Books, p. 350.The next night they got tickets to see Apocalypse Now : Carlin Flora, “Judy Blume: Mating IQ,” Psychology Today , January 1, 2007. Accessed via the New York Public Library.“Falling in love at forty (or any age) is s’wonderful” : Judy Blume, Smart Women, Introduction, p. IX.“She did not understand how or why Michelle had turned into this impossible creature” : Ibid., p. 16. “believes that Michelle is based on her (when she was that age)” : Ibid., Introduction, p. x.“look[s] like the girl on the Sun-Maid raisin box” : Ibid., p. 6.“No more affairs going nowhere” : Ibid., p. 93.“She tried to think reasonably, but she couldn’t” : Ibid., p. 135.“Did you know when we first moved to town my mother joined Man-of-the-Month club?” : Ibid., p. 140.“I’m the one who has to suffer through it every time one of her love affairs fizzles” : Ibid., p. 144.“One day, Margo would be sorry” : Ibid., p. 146.“You’ve become so self-absorbed that you probably never even considered” : Randy Blume, Crazy in the Cockpit (New York: DK Publishing, 1999), pp. 5–6.“It turned out my mother wouldn’t have noticed if I’d flown an airplane through the living room” : Ibid., p. 19.“My mother and Norman got up early every morning to bike, snorkel, or sail” : Ibid., p. 24.“How could she have let me come to this intellectual and cultural wasteland” : Ibid., p. 213.“She felt a pouring out of motherly love” : Judy Blume, Smart Women , p.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  I add this last word, because his French freedom of speech came as pure spring water to my thirsty soul. A dozen of us were grouped about him one day, talking when one student with a remarkable gift for vague thought and highfalutin’ rhetoric, wanted to know what Taine thought of the idea that all the worlds and planets and solar systems were turning round one axis and moving to some divine fulfillment (accomplissement). Taine, who always disliked windy rhetoric, remarked quietly: “The only axis in my knowledge round which everything moves to some accomplishment is a woman’s cunt (le con d’une femme).” They laughed, but not as if the bold word had astonished them. He used it when it was needed, as I have often heard Anatole France use it since, and no one thought anything of it. In spite of the gorgeous installation of his brunette, Ned at the end of a week found out how blessed are those described in Holy Writ, who fished all night and caught nothing. He had caught a dreadful gonorrhea and was forbidden spirits or wine or coffee till he got well. Exercise, too, was only to be taken in small doses, so it happened that when I went out, he had to stay at home and the outlook on the rue St. Jacques was anything but exhilarating. This naturally increased his desire to get about and see things, and as soon as he began to understand spoken French and to speak it a little, he chafed against the confinement and a room without a bath; he longed for the centre, for the opera and the Boulevards, and nothing would do but we should take rooms in the heart of Paris: he would borrow money from his folks, he said. Like a fool I was willing and so we took rooms one day in a quiet street just behind the Madeleine, at ten times the price we were paying Marguerite. I soon found that my money was melting; but the life was very pleasant. We often drove in the Bois, went frequently to the Opera, the theatres and music-halls and appraised, too, the great restaurants, the Café Anglais and the Trois Frères as if we had been millionaires. As luck would have it, Ned’s venereal disease and the doctors became a heavy additional expense that I could ill afford. Suddenly one day I realised that I had only six hundred dollars in the bank: at once I made up my mind to stop and make a fresh start. I told my resolution to Bancroft: he asked me to wait: “he had written to his people for money”, he said, “he would soon pay his debt to me”; but that wasn’t what I wanted: I felt that I had got off the right road because of him and was angry with myself for having wasted my substance in profligate living and worst of all in silly luxury and brainless showing off.

• From The History of Sexuality, Vol. 2: The Use of Pleasure (1984)

  To the insufficiently prepared, Socrates recommended to flee from the sight of a handsome boy, even if it meant a year’s exile, 1 and the Phaedrus evokes the lover’s long struggle against his own desire; but nowhere is there a statement, as there will be in Christian spirituality, of the precautions that have to be taken in order to prevent desire from entering the soul surreptitiously, or to detect its secret traces. Even stranger perhaps: the doctors who set forth, in some detail, the elements of the aphrodisia regimen are practically silent concerning the forms that the acts themselves may take; they say very little—aside from a few references to the “natural position”—regarding what is in accord with or contrary to the will of nature. Was this due to modesty? Possibly. For, as much as we like to credit the Greeks with a great liberty of morals, the representation of sexual acts that they suggest in their written works—and even in their erotic literature—seems to have been characterized by a good deal of reserve, * despite the impression one gets from the entertainments they staged or from certain iconographic representations that have been rediscovered. 3 In any case, one does sense that Xenophon, Aristotle, and later Plutarch would not have thought it decent to dispense the sort of presumptive and pragmatic advice on sexual relations with one’s lawful wife that the Christian authors lavishly distributed on the subject of conjugal pleasures. They were not prepared, as the directors of conscience would be, to regulate the process of demands and refusals, of first caresses, of the modalities of union, of the pleasures one experienced and the conclusion they should properly be given. But there was a positive reason for this attitude that we may perceive retrospectively as “reticence” or “reserve.” It was due to their conception of the aphrodisia , to the kind of questioning they directed to them, which was not oriented in the least toward the search for their profound nature, their canonical forms, or their secret potential. 1 . The aphrodisia are the acts, gestures, and contacts that produce a certain form of pleasure. When Saint Augustine in his Confessions recalls the friendships of his youth, the intensity of his affections, the pleasures of the days spent together, the conversations, the enthusiasms and good times, he wonders if, underneath its seeming innocence, all that did not pertain to the flesh, to that “glue” which attaches us to the flesh.

• From The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine, Vol. 4: Reformation of Church and Dogma (1300-1700) (1984)

  Could the hypostatic union be salvaged without going to this extreme ? Both precedent and prudence seemed to call for some sort of compromise, and despite the polarization of dog matic positions there were adherents of each position who recognized this. The spokesmen for the theology of pre- existence, kenosis, and exaltation, having excommuni cated Nestorius at a Roman synod in 432, approved the action of the synod at Ephesus; but various papal docu ments—including even the rescript of Pope Celestine, who had commissioned Cyril to carry out the excommuni cation and deposition of Nestorius—made it clear that there was still hope of asserting an "apostolic" solution that would reconcile, if not the extremists, then at least the main body of believers and theologians. Theodoret, who in many ways assumed the mantle of Nestorius as the defender of the theology of the indwelling Logos, found it possible to formulate a compromise document in which it was affirmed that "a union of two natures has taken place, and therefore we confess one Christ, one Son, one Lord" and that consequently "in accordance with this concept of the union without confusion we confess that ap.Joh.Ant.Ej.Cyr.3 (ACO ■ r . . 1-1-4:9) the Holy Virgin is Theotokos. In some way, Cyril round it possible to sign this document, to the chagrin of many of his partisans. Yet neither in theological finesse nor in political timing did this confession succeed in providing the right formula for the right time. That was done by the principal interpreter of the theology of preexistence, kenosis, and exaltation, Pope Leo, in his Tome to Flavian, which, with judicious additions from other theological traditions, came to serve as the formula of reconciliation for most, though by no means all, of the parties at Chal- cedon in 451.

• From Working Girl: On Selling Art and Selling Sex (2023)

  Nowadays, when a bad take on sex work makes the rounds on Twitter, or a celebrity or influencer dabbles in OnlyFans or softcore porn production, or a popular singer borrows the aesthetics of stripping or hooking for a music video, sex workers inevitably post criticisms and write articles railing the person in question for invoking sex work and its deviant cultural capital without being a real sex worker. This focus on what makes a person a real or actual sex worker implies that a kind of authenticity—one that could only be satisfied by a person publicly disclosing all of their sex work experiences, a compulsion that for many could lead to violence, criminalization, or deportation—would make their art or article better, or legitimate, or just okay, even if it is actually bad. Participation in a certain type of labor is not enough to assume political affinity or solidarity. When I see someone questioning whether or not a person with an opinion on sex work has ever sold sex, my first thought now is—who cares? But these questions highlight the current conditions structuring discourse around sex, labor, and capitalism: the confession authenticates the speaker, rendering her legible, and thus, consumable. In an interview titled “The Ideal Neoliberal Subject Is the Subject of Trauma,” queer theorist Yasmin Nair discusses the demand for authentication-through-trauma that permeates current discourse on consent and rape culture, as well as larger critiques of patriarchy, capitalism, and immigration: “You cannot speak about capitalism as a person of color if you are not willing to talk about yourself as a trauma subject, or at least as someone who’s afflicted by capitalism, as opposed to someone who is an analyst of capitalism.” Nair is concerned that “the imperative to confess, and … to reveal oneself as the wounded subject” derails analysis of the socio-political conditions that facilitate state-based and interpersonal violence. She elaborates, “There’s a kind of demand for authenticity in all of this that I find particularly vexing. And I know for a fact that many people who have a critique of trauma and of violence and of the state may well have been sexually abused, but just don’t talk about it. And does that make them less authentic?” In an essay published on their Patreon, “A Question of Authenticity,” moses moon writes, Am I a real artist? Does my identity as a creative change how I engage sex work (politics)? Does poverty? … I’m wondering what it means to be pursuing sex work as a means to an end. There’s a long history of creatives moonlighting as whores or in related professions in order to achieve their goal of making their creative work their main source of income. Does my experience matter? Should I abandon my writing in favor of pursuing erotic labor vis-à-vis authenticity?

• From The Prophetic Imagination (1978)

  Eerdmans, 1998), and Robert P. Carroll, Jeremiah: A Commentary, OTL (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1986). ↵ 3 . See John Kautsky, The Politics of Aristocratic Empires (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1982), 7–8; K. C. Hanson and Douglas E. Oakman, Palestine in the Time of Jesus: Social Structures and Social Conflicts (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1998) 64–70. ↵ 4 . Norman K. Gottwald, Studies in the Book of Lamentations, SBT 1/14 (2d ed. Chicago: Allenson, 1962). ↵ 5 . Bernhard W. Anderson has explored two quite distinct dimensions of the tradition to which appeal is made; but in each case it is to a specific Israelite tradition. See “Exodus Typology in Second Isaiah,” in Israel’s Prophetic Heritage: Essays in Honor of James Muilenburg, ed. B. W. Anderson and W. Harrelson (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1962), 177–95; “Exodus and Covenant in Second Isaiah and Prophetic Tradition,” in Magnalia Dei: The Mighty Acts of God. Essays on the Bible and Archaeology in Memory of G. Ernest Wright , ed. F. M. Cross et al. (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1976), 339–60. ↵ 6 . Prophetic ministry must see more clearly than we have in recent time the integral connection between speech and hope! It is only speech that makes hope possible, and when the royal consciousness of technology stops serious speech, it precludes hope. This was seen clearly by Paul in his claim in Rom 10:14-21. ↵ 7 . On the subversive power of hope as a way of dismantling, see John M. Swomley Jr., Liberation Ethics (New York: Macmillan, 1972). ↵ 8 . The richness of the language of Second Isaiah suggests that the poet not only lived in but knew and utilized the literature of his own time; compare especially Klaus Baltzer, Deutero-Isaiah, trans. M. Kohl, Hermeneia (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001). The links between Job and Second Isaiah on creation theology have been noted by Robert Pfeiffer, “Dual Origin of Hebrew Monotheism,” JBL 46 (1927): 193–206. The possibility that Second Isaiah is a response to the chagrin of Lamentations is worth pursuing. See below, that the poetry of Second Isaiah begins with “Comfort, comfort” (Isa 40:1) is probably a response to the “none to comfort” of Lamentations (1:2, 17). ↵ 9 . The reference is only a partially facetious one to June Bingham’s biography of Reinhold Niebuhr, Courage to Change: An Introduction to the Life and Thought of Reinhold Niebuhr (New York: Scribner, 1961). That same phrase is not only applicable to the Lord of Israel but is an important prophetic assertion against the immutability of God fostered by the royal consciousness that yearns for eternal stability. ↵ 10 . Raitt, A Theology of Exile, 188–89. ↵ 11 . Such waiting is of course not passivity. See the recent hints by Dorothee Soelle, Revolutionary Patience, trans. Rita Kimber and Robert Kimber (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1977), and the older statement by Christoph Blumhardt under the phrase “Warten und Eilen!” Concerning the dialectic of action and waiting in the Blumhardts, see Karl Barth’s comments in the afterword to Christoph Blumhardt’s Action in Waiting (Farmington, Pa.: Plough, 1998). ↵

• From Working Girl: On Selling Art and Selling Sex (2023)

  In 1964, conceptual artist Robert Morris performed Site, alongside Carolee Schneemann, whom he had enlisted to reenact the scene depicted in Edouard Manet’s famous 1863 painting Olympia. In the painting, a naked, white prostitute wearing a flower in her hair, a ribbon around her neck, pearls in her ears, and a bangle on her wrist reclines, legs crossed, breasts bare, arm draped across her body with her hand resting on her thigh to obscure her genitals. She leans against white pillows, white sheets, and cream-colored floral linens. A Black maid, dressed in white, holds a bouquet of flowers open, over Olympia’s legs. A black cat, back arched, stands at the very edge of the cot, looking agitated. The painting was controversial at the time due to Olympia’s profession and direct gaze. In his reenactment, Morris, wearing work clothes and a mask of his own face fabricated by Jasper Johns, deconstructs a large wooden box, removing four-by-eight plywood sheets one at a time, revealing Schneemann inside. She reclines naked on a sheet, wearing only earrings and Olympia’s black ribbon tied around her neck, signifying her harlotry. The pose, gaze, and sheets are the same. A soundtrack of construction noise—jackhammering—plays in the background. Morris returns the plywood sheets, shrouding Schneemann once again. Writing of Morris upon his death in 2019, Schneemann recalls of their working together: During the presentations of Site, my own kinetic theater was obscured by the appreciation of and excitement around your work. I have said that being in Site both historicized and immobilized me. The fact is that it remains a visionary, transformative event that forever reshaped references to historic imagery. You cleaved the specific qualities of painting and sculpture, of movement and stillness.

• From The Argonauts (2015)

  For all the years I didn’t want to be pregnant—the years I spent harshly deriding “the breeders”—I secretly felt pregnant women were smug in their complaints. Here they were, sitting on top of the cake of the culture, getting all the kudos for doing exactly what women are supposed to do, yet still they felt unsupported and discriminated against. Give me a break! Then, when I wanted to be pregnant but wasn’t, I felt that pregnant women had the cake I wanted, and were busy bitching about the flavor of the icing. I was wrong on all counts—imprisoned, as I was and still am, by my own hopes and fears. I’m not trying to fix that wrong-ness here. I’m just trying to let it hang out. Place me now, like a pregnant cutout doll, at a “prestigious New York university,” giving a talk on my book on cruelty. During the Q&A, a well-known playwright raises his hand and says: I can’t help but notice that you’re with child, which leads me to the question—how did you handle working on all this dark material [sadism, masochism, cruelty, violence, and so on] in your condition? Ah yes, I think, digging a knee into the podium. Leave it to the old patrician white guy to call the lady speaker back to her body, so that no one misses the spectacle of that wild oxymoron, the pregnant woman who thinks. Which is really just a pumped-up version of that more general oxymoron, a woman who thinks. As if anyone was missing the spectacle anyway. As if a similar scene didn’t recur at nearly every location of my so-called book tour. As if when I myself see pregnant women in the public sphere, there isn’t a kind of drumming in my mind that threatens to drown out all else: pregnant, pregnant, pregnant, perhaps because the soul (or souls) in utero is pumping out static, static that disrupts our usual perception of an other as a single other. The static of facing not one, but also not two.

• From Augustine: A New Biography (2005)

  Augustine threw himself into the collective work of constructing that broad western view. Even if his theology did not prevail, his psychology persists. The Augustine of the Confessions lends himself easily to post-Freudian interpretation, and, having made that transition, remains the voice of a powerful tradition. His body of work about soul and its meaning changed the imaginations of men in his own time and remained influential long after. Late-antique controversies about “soul” were lively and often renewed, when writer after writer felt he had to define what no one had ever seen. Augustine was no exception, and he was far more persuasive than most, even though—and this is the truly curious feature of his teaching—he was unable to resolve a fundamental question (where does soul come from?) or the paradoxes into which he was thrust by that uncertainty. Bodiless, eternal, dispassionate, and even unchanging, soul in union with body, moreover, was shot through with aberrancy: change, passion, illness, death. The successful soul was the one that transcended ordinary human experience in ways difficult to imagine. That Augustine, the Augustine who imagined his own self so persuasively in ways that seem so traditional to us even if they were innovative in his own time, is the Augustine most at risk now of dying. If his view of the human person and his narrative account of the inner life is supplanted by better science, then all that he has been to centuries of devout and not so devout heirs could crumble very quickly into irrelevance. What can history do for such a man? Can he be rescued from his sainthood before he dies completely a second time? He achieved much, and now he risks much. That paradox makes him a promising object for historical study, for study, that is, that defamiliarizes the famous and sees for the first time what we might think is already well enough known. Augustine comes weighed down with the assumptions, expectations, and conventional narratives of many generations. But he is complex, well documented, and knowable in a way only a tiny handful of other ancient figures are knowable. To reduce him to a familiar story is to do him and ourselves an injustice. Can he be set free? WHAT’S LEFT? Augustine lived and died a long time ago. Most of our contemporaries will make it through their lives without hearing his name, and many of those who do will be cheerfully ignorant or decisively misinformed about his deeds and words. Those who will know that he made a difference to our world will accordingly remain few. For those connoisseurs—including all readers of this book, by definition—the question at the end is, what remains? What is left to us from him? Let me suggest just a few things that are part of our world that either would not be here or would not be so strongly marked here had he not played a part in our history.

• From Why Is Sex Fun? The Evolution of Human Sexuality (1997)

  This role of hunting is undoubtedly an important one. Nevertheless, one has to ask what specific dangers the hunters are trying to detect, and whose interests they are thereby trying to advance. While lions and other big carnivores do pose dangers to people in some parts of the world, by far the greatest danger to traditional hunter-gatherer human societies everywhere has been posed by hunters from rival tribes. Men of such societies were involved in intermittent wars, the purpose of which was to kill men of other tribes. Captured women and children of defeated rival tribes were either killed or else spared and acquired as wives and slaves, respectively. At worst, patrolling groups of male hunters could thus be viewed as advancing their own genetic self-interest at the expense of rival groups of men. At best, they could be viewed as protecting their wives and children, but mainly against the dangers posed by other men. Even in the latter case, the harm and the good that adult men bring to the rest of society by their patrolling activities would be nearly equally balanced. ····· Thus, all five of my efforts to rescue Aché big-game hunting as a sensible way for men to contribute nobly to the best interests of their wives and children collapsed. Kristen Hawkes then reminded me of some painful truths about how an Aché man himself (as opposed to his wife and kids) gets big benefits from his kills besides the food entering his stomach. To begin with, among the Aché, as among other peoples, extramarital sex is not uncommon. Dozens of Aché women, asked to name the potential fathers (their sex partners around the time of conception) of 66 of their children, named an average of 2.1 men per child. Among a sample of 28 Aché men, women named good hunters more often than poor hunters as their lovers, and they named good hunters as potential fathers of more children. To understand the biological significance of adultery, recall that the facts of reproductive biology discussed in chapter 2 introduce a fundamental asymmetry into the interests of men and women. Having multiple sex partners contributes nothing directly to a woman’s reproductive output. Once a woman has been fertilized by one man, having sex with another man cannot lead to another baby for at least nine months, and probably for at least several years under hunter-gatherer conditions of extended lactational amenorrhea. In just a few minutes of adultery, though, an otherwise faithful man can double the number of his own offspring.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  Though “The Hungarian Cat Curse” is my most fictional and fantastical tale, it is studded with real events and issues. The therapist’s delight when a taxing and unpleasant patient decides to terminate, his boredom with a particular patient and the subsequent use of that boredom as a guide in therapy, the therapist’s chagrin at the damage his patient has inflicted on another, his yearning to redress that wrong, lapses in which he loses sight of his patient’s best interests, his grandiose rescue fantasies, his lustful fascination with a character in a patient’s life, his dilemma about whether healers are ever off duty—all of these foibles, and more, are taken from my personal experience. The final surreal dialogue between man and ninth-lifer cat is meant to represent a type of truth—a therapeutic inquiry into the ultimate concern of death. A few attributions for that discussion are in order: the psychologist who said that many refuse the loan of life to avoid the debt of death was Otto Rank. The ancient philosopher who said “Where death is, I am not; where I am, death is not” was Lucretius, expounding upon Epicurus. And Nabokov was the Russian writer who, in his autobiography, Speak, Memory, pictured life as a brilliant spark between two vast and identical pools of darkness: the darkness existing before birth and the darkness following death. The same image is to be found in Schopenhauer, with whom, no doubt, Nabokov was familiar. I have deeply disguised the identity of all the patients and acquaintances who appear in these stories. Some of the events described took place long ago and many of the characters are dead. All those who provided incidents or dreams read the manuscript in both early and final draft and gave me permission to publish it. Irvin D. Yalom, M.D. *Yalom, I., Greaves, C., “Group Therapy with the Terminally Ill,” American Journal of Psychiatry, 134:4, April 1977, pp. 396-400; Spiegel, D., Yalom, I., “A Support Group for Dying Patients,” International Journal of Group Psychotherapy, 28:2, April 1978; Spiegel, D., Bloom, J., Yalom, I., “Group Support for Metastatic Cancer Patients: A Randomized Prospective Outcome Study,” Archives of General Psychiatry, 38:527-534, May 1981.*Yalom, I., Vinogradov, S., “Bereavement Groups: Techniques and Themes,” International Journal of Group Psychotherapy, 38:4, October 1988; Yalom, I., Lieberman, M., “Bereavement and Heightened Existential Awareness,” Psychiatry, 1992.Author’s Note In this book, I have tried to be both storyteller and teacher. On the occasions when these two roles conflicted and I had to choose between inserting a juicy pedagogical comment and maintaining the dramatic pace of the story, I almost always put the story first and attempted to fulfill my teaching mission through indirect discourse.

• From The City of God

  He who hears these words of Cato or of Sallust probably thinks that such praise bestowed on the ancient Romans was applicable to all of them, or, at least, to very many of them. It is not so; otherwise the things which Cato himself writes, and which I have quoted in the second book of this work, would not be true. In that passage he says, that even from the very beginning of the state wrongs were committed by the more powerful, which led to the separation of the people from the fathers, besides which there were other internal dissensions; and the only time at which there existed a just and moderate administration was after the banishment of the kings, and that no longer than whilst they had cause to be afraid of Tarquin, and were carrying on the grievous war which had been undertaken on his account against Etruria; but afterwards the fathers oppressed the people as slaves, flogged them as the kings had done, drove them from their land, and, to the exclusion of all others, held the government in their own hands alone. And to these discords, whilst the fathers were wishing to rule, and the people were unwilling to serve, the second Punic war put an end; for again great fear began to press upon their disquieted minds, holding them back from those distractions by another and greater anxiety, and bringing them back to civil concord. But the great things which were then achieved were accomplished through the administration of a few men, who were good in their own way. And by the wisdom and forethought of these few good men, which first enabled the republic to endure these evils and mitigated them, it waxed greater and greater. And this the same historian affirms, when he says that, reading and hearing of the many illustrious achievements of the Roman people in peace and in war, by land and by sea, he wished to understand what it was by which these great things were specially sustained. For he knew that very often the Romans had with a small company contended with great legions of the enemy; and he knew also that with small resources they had carried on wars with opulent kings. And he says that, after having given the matter much consideration, it seemed evident to him that the pre-eminent virtue of a few citizens had achieved the whole, and that that explained how poverty overcame wealth, and small numbers great multitudes. But, he adds, after that the state had been corrupted by luxury and indolence, again the republic, by its own greatness, was able to bear the vices of its magistrates and generals. Wherefore even the praises of Cato are only applicable to a few; for only a few were possessed of that virtue which leads men to pursue after glory, honour, and power by the true way,--that is, by virtue itself. This industry at home, of which Cato speaks, was the consequence of a desire to enrich the public treasury, even though the result should be poverty at home; and therefore, when he speaks of the evil arising out of the corruption of morals, he reverses the expression, and says, "Poverty in the state, riches at home."

• From Chasing Beauty

  Morris Carter discovered that being her employee differed from being her friend. He had had many lunches with her over the years at Fenway Court, but no longer. She put up a barrier, formalizing their new relationship and asserting her authority. He would recall, in a later interview, a poignant scene that made this change particularly clear. When Berenson came to see Isabella at Fenway Court the following year, Isabella received him in the Dutch Room, with Carter standing next her. He remembered how Berenson “came into the room and he came forward and he was going to greet me, he was so glad to see me or something like that, and, of course, I thought it was Berenson’s interests just as well to be on good terms with the future director, but Mrs. Gardner said: ‘Oh, don’t pay any attention to him, he’s just my secretary.’” If this stung Carter, he also understood that “she couldn’t bear to let people think she needed anybody to assist her.” He realized too what she’d always known—if she wasn’t careful, the men around her would get the larger credit for what she had accomplished. *** IN THE EARLY FALL OF 1919, JOHN SINGER SARGENT AND HENRY DAVIS Sleeper came for an evening with Isabella at Fenway Court. They brought along the Harvard professor of medicine, Dr. Richard Strong; his wife, Agnes Strong; and Grace Nichols. All had served in the Red Cross during the war. Sleeper delivered the Reims glass piece later in 1919. Isabella recorded this occasion by asking her guests for their signatures and adding at the top of the page “Spanish Cloister” and the date: September 22, 1919. Gathered in the cloister, in front of Sargent’s El Jaleo, the friends surely were impressed; Isabella must have basked in this approval of the painting’s magnificent setting. Perhaps this was also the evening when Sargent gave Isabella a sheaf of remarkable preparatory sketches for this painting from the 1880s, one showing a woman dancing in an exquisite show of control and abandon. Vitality—everything conveyed by Sargent and embodied by Isabella contrasts sharply with what came next for her. Later, in 1921, Sargent would give her yet more drawings, this time nine preparatory drawings for the museum murals, with Thomas McKeller as his model. These sets of his remarkable drawings were Sargent’s nod to his friend and her legacy. *** ON THE NIGHT AFTER CHRISTMAS, ISABELLA HAD DINNER WITH FRIENDS. After coming home, she felt weary, undone. By morning it was clear she had suffered a stroke, which left her right side paralyzed.

• From Jesus and the Disinherited (1949)

  It has long been a matter of serious moment that for decades we have studied the various peoples of the world and those who live as our neighbors as objects of missionary endeavor and enterprise without being at all willing to treat them either as brothers or as human beings. I say this without rancor, because it is not an issue in which vicious human beings are involved. But it is one of the subtle perils of a religion which calls attention—to the point of overemphasis, sometimes—to one’s obligation to administer to human need. I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times that I have heard a sermon on the meaning of religion, of Christianity, to the man who stands with his back against the wall. It is urgent that my meaning be crystal clear. The masses of men live with their backs constantly against the wall. They are the poor, the disinherited, the dispossessed. What does our religion say to them? The issue is not what it counsels them to do for others whose need may be greater, but what religion offers to meet their own needs. The search for an answer to this question is perhaps the most important religious quest of modern life. In the fall of 1935 I was serving as chairman of a delegation sent on a pilgrimage of friendship from the students of America to the students of India, Burma, and Ceylon. It was at a meeting in Ceylon that the whole crucial issue was pointed up to me in a way that I can never forget. At the close of a talk before the Law College, University of Colombo, on civil disabilities under states’ rights in the United States, I was invited by the principal to have coffee. We drank our coffee in silence. After the service had been removed, he said to me, “What are you doing over here? I know what the newspapers say about a pilgrimage of friendship and the rest, but that is not my question. What are you doing over here? This is what I mean. “More than three hundred years ago your forefathers were taken from the western coast of Africa as slaves. The people who dealt in the slave traffic were Christians. One of your famous Christian hymn writers, Sir John Newton, made his money from the sale of slaves to the New World.

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

  But this raises even more important questions: What is the purpose of someone writing letters in Paul’s name after Paul’s death? What is the intention of the post-Pauline and pseudo-Pauline letters? The most traditional answer is that Paul’s disciples or even a collective Pauline “school” wrote letters in his name to discuss new problems that rose after his death. Their sense would be, If Paul were here today, this is what he would have written. This is a persuasive explanation, as long as you do not make the mistake of actually reading all thirteen of the letters. If you were to do that, another answer becomes possible. Those six letters not written by him are not just post-Pauline and pseudo-Pauline letters but are actually anti -Pauline letters. They represent the subversion of which the seven authentic letters were the assertion. Jesus, as we saw, was subverted over two stages—by rhetorical violence in the Gospels and by physical violence in Revelation. This happened similarly with Paul: he was de-radicalized and re-Romanized in two stages. The seven authentic letters (1 Thessalonians, Galatians, Philippians, Philemon, 1 and 2 Corinthians, and Romans) represent the radical Paul. The three “probably not” letters (2 Thessalonians, Colossians, and Ephesians) represent an initial de-radicalization into a conservative “Paul.” And the three “certainly not” letters (1 and 2 Timothy and Titus) represent a final de-radicalization into a reactionary “Paul.” Only the first seven letters were written by the historical Paul, but the other six are equally important for confirming how to read those seven. You cannot de-radicalize someone who is not already a radical. Think, for example, of this section’s title. Here is the full text: “our beloved brother Paul wrote to you according to the wisdom given him, speaking of this [peace] as he does in all his letters. There are some things in them hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other scriptures” (2 Pet. 3:15b–16). But is Paul (like Jesus) hard to understand or only hard to follow? Is Paul (like Jesus) very easy to understand but terribly hard to imitate? Maybe twisting the scriptures could be another name for what I call assertion-and-subversion. In any case, in this chapter I focus on slavery and patriarchy to see how post-Pauline and pseudo-Pauline are actually anti-Pauline letters. “Tell Slaves to Be Submissive to Their Masters”WE SAW IN BOTH Chapter 2 and Chapter 13 that as far as the original, radical, and historical Paul was concerned, Christians could not own Christian slaves. But, to expand here on that glimpse in Chapter 2, the post-Pauline letters to the Colossians and Ephesians take for granted, without any discussion, that of course Christians could and did own Christian slaves.