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 Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  “Isn’t that what I’ve been saying for months, Paula? Cut down all your visits and phone calls to the dozens of patients on your roll. Simply come to the group. The group needs you. And I need you. Surely ninety minutes a week isn’t too much.” “No, I can’t do things piecemeal. I need a clean break. Besides, the group isn’t where I am anymore. It’s too superficial. I need to go deeper—to work with symbols, dreams, and archetypes.” “I agree, Paula.” By this time I was very sobered. “It’s what I want too, and we’re just now breaking that ground in the group.” “No, I’m too tired, too drained. Each new patient forces me to relive my own time of crisis, my own Calvary. No, I’ve decided: next week will be my last meeting.” And so it was. Paula never returned to the group. I asked her to call me at any time if she wanted to talk. She replied that it was also possible for me to call her. Although she wasn’t being malicious, her comment shifted the frame and stung me sharply. She never called me again. I phoned her a few times and twice took her to lunch. The first lunch (which was so painful that it was many months before I called her for another) began ominously. Finding the restaurant of our choice crowded, we went across the street to Trotter’s, a huge, cavernous structure, utterly without grace, that had had many previous lives: an Oldsmobile dealership, a natural-foods grocery store, a dance parlor. Now it was a restaurant featuring a menu of “dance” sandwiches—the Waltz, the Twist, the Charleston. No, it was not right; I felt it wasn’t right when I heard myself order a Hula sandwich and knew it wasn’t when Paula opened her purse, extracted a rock about the size of a small grapefruit, and placed it on the table between us. “My anger rock,” she said. From this point on, my memory is uncharacteristically spotty. Fortunately, I took some notes after our lunch—my conversations with Paula being too important to me to be entrusted to memory. “Anger rock?” I repeated blankly, transfixed by the lichen-covered boulder sitting on the table between us. “I’ve been buffeted about so much, Irv, that I’ve been swallowed by anger. Now I’ve learned to put anger away. Into this rock. I had to bring it today. I wanted it here when I met you.” “Why are you angry with me, Paula?” “I’m no longer angry. There’s too little time left to be angry. But I’ve been hurt; I’ve been deserted when I needed help most of all.” “I’ve never deserted you, Paula,” I said, but she didn’t acknowledge my comment and went on.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  was obsessive: ‘Why do you sit from morning until evening,’ he wrote to Eugenius III in 1150, ‘listening to litigants? What fruit is there in these things? They can only create cobwebs.’ His warnings were ignored. The litigious habit gradually permeated the whole Church. Ecclesiastical institutions tended to see their relationship with the lay world, and with each other, primarily in legal terms. The most bitterly fought and enduring cases were inter-clerical battles. One such medieval Jarndyce v. Jarndyce between the monks of St Augustine, Canterbury, and their archbishop, was hotly contested for fifteen years, successive popes being obliged to write seventy letters. Innocent III, exasperated, wrote: ‘I blush to hear of this mouldy business.’ But when had the law not generated mould? St Bernard’s cobwebs continued to spread. For, when he asked what fruit there was in legalism, the answer, of course, was money and power. A successful court – and the papal court was the outstanding legal success of the Middle Ages – generated income, and the need of great and small to solicit its verdicts. The Pope’s legal relations with a king, a duke or an archbishop, might involve a dozen or more cases going on at one time, some momentous, many trivial, all of which had to be weighed by both sides in considering total policy. Much of the Pope’s practical ability to get his way sprang from the power of his court to deliver. So it was impossible for the Pope to avoid the details. And to think chiefly in legal, was to think chiefly in secular, terms. The popes became progressively more entangled in legal-diplomatic considerations, and in the effort to hold together their estates in central Italy as a secure base for their ramifying international activities. In short, they became like any other rulers. The Gregorian reform, which sought to improve moral standards in the Church by disengaging the clergy from their role as supporters of the State, ended, by a kind of helpless logic, in thrusting the Church far more deeply and completely into the secular world. Indeed, the Church became a secular world of its own. As such – as a separate, rival institution – it was bound to come into conflict with the State at every level. Of course clerics and seculars were both Christians and shared not only major assumptions but most minor ones. But they were locked in a conflict of laws, and this could be brutally aggravated by a conflict of personalities. The outstanding case was Henry II’s tragic dispute with Thomas à Becket. Henry was only twenty-nine when he appointed Becket, his chancellor, to be chief ecclesiastical officer of his kingdom in 1162. He hoped that this combination of duties would help to smooth out difficulties which inevitably arose from the conflict of the two legal

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

  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. 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.

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  Ernst Engel, long the eminent chief of the Prussian Bureau of Statistics, compiled from a large number of family budgets the proportion expended for various purposes. The following table contains the main results:— Item of Expenditures Percentage of the Expenditure of a Family with an Income of: Incomes: A. $225–$300 a year B. $450–$600 a year C. $750–$1100 a year Categories: 1 Subsistence 2 Clothing 3 Lodging 4 Firing and lighting 5 Education, worship, etc 6 Legal protection 7 Care of health 8 Comfort, mental and bodily recreation The minor items of this table will vary somewhat in different countries, according to local prices and customs; but the main deduction, which is known in Political Economy as “Engel’s Law of Consumption,” is as universal as human nature. It will be noticed that the first four items include those expenditures which satisfy the animal necessities of the body: food, shelter, and warmth. The other four satisfy the higher needs. As the income rises, the proportion spent on the first group sinks, and the proportion spent on the second group rises. Within the first group the proportion spent for lodging, heat, and light is the same in all classes, and the proportion for clothing nearly so. But the proportion spent for food is far larger with the poorest families. The human body has certain imperious demands for its maintenance, and these demands cannot be compressed below a certain minimum. If the income is small, the largest part must go simply for stoking the human machine, and the higher needs of the social, intellectual, and religious nature must be starved. If food prices rise, that proportion will be still greater. The nearer the people descend toward the poverty line, the less will be available for the higher wants. If, then, any average wage-earner in the churches has actually given a tenth of his income, he deserves profound respect. It is heroic giving for him. And if we have allowed the impression to prevail that the giving of one-tenth by all was equal giving for all, we have unwittingly inflicted a grievous injustice on the poorer church members. In every church working among the poorer classes there are a number who contribute nothing or are dependents of the church instead of supporters. Every season of economic distress depresses additional families below this line. But some self-respecting people may choose a different line of action. If their church membership involves too heavy a tax, they drop away. Other causes and motives may work in the same direction, but the pressure exerted by the systematized giving of the modern church, and the insistence on this virtue in pulpit teaching, must alienate some. They simply cannot afford church life.

• From Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition (2004)

  343 uncle’s house in Mexico City, where she taught herself literature, science, mathematics, philosophy, theology, and languages. At 13, she was presented at the Viceregal Court, the cultural center of the New World, where she became the lady-in-waiting of the vicereine. She refused to marry and entered the convent of San Jeronimo. Her cell soon became an academy and her library numbered 4,000 volumes. Sister Juana was ordered to refute an unorthodox sermon preached by a Portuguese Jesuit, a refutation applauded by many. The bishop of Puebla, however, qualifi ed his praise with the suggestion that she wasted her talents on secular matters. Rather than become only a theologian, she sold her library and musical and scienti fi c instruments and renounced the use of pen and ink. She contracted the plague and died in 1695. In 1690, at the request of an unnamed theologian, Sister Juana wrote a commentary on a sermon delivered 40 years before by a Jesuit priest that had disputed the claims of St. Augustine and St. Thomas about the nature of Christ’s love. Sister Juana’s commentary was published without her permission by the bishop of Puebla, who titled it “Athenagoric letter,” that is, “letter worthy of the wisdom of Athena.” The bishop, using the pseudonym Sor Filotea de la Cruz, appended a letter to Sister Juana, advising her to focus less on secular and more on theological matters. It is in Sister Juana’s reply to this letter, published in 1691, that she articulates her right to a life of the mind. Aphra Behn, 17th–century playwright and a notable exception, along with Sister Juana, to the limitation of literary achievement and recognition to men in the 17 th and 18th centuries. Frank and Frances Carpenter Collection, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-127791.

• From Paul and Palestinian Judaism (40th Anniversary Edition) (2017)

  it would have been necessary to show how the man who previously was inherently incapable of producing good works received through the act of justification the capacity to do so. That capacity can only be bestowed upon him through Christ; but according to the doctrine of faith-righteousness, all that Christ does to believers is to cause them to be justified.43 Paul, however, never made an argument which would bridge the gap between being justified and ethics. Ethics, rather, are derived from 'the mystical doctrine of the dying and rising again with Christ', a doctrine which, Schweitzer then observed, used to be called precisely Paul's ethical doctrine rather than his mystical doctrine.44 The force of Schweitzer's argument will immediately be seen by anyone who will work through the letters of Paul trying to find instances in which righteousness by faith serves as the source for ethics45 (or is used to explain the sacraments, and the like). Without pausing here to note in detail how Bultmann and others have attempted to derive ethics from the conception of righteousness by faith, we may cite one sentence: 'Therefore, the imperative, "walk according to the Spirit", not only does not contradict the indicative of justification (the believer is rightwised) but results from it .. .'46 This is absolutely correct, except for one thing. In Paul's own terminology the indicative which cor- 42 Schweitzer, Mysticism, pp. 22of. 43 Ibid., p. 295. 44 Ibid. On the connection of Paul's ethical exhortation with the theme of dying and rising, see also Tannehill, Dying and Rising, pp. 77-83. 45 See the list of passages in which the imperative follows the indicative given by Bornkamm, Paul, p. 202. 46 Bultmann, Theology I, p. 332. 440 Paul [V responds to the imperative 'walk by the Spirit' is not righteousness, but living in the Spirit (Gal. 5.16-25; Rom. 8.1-17; cf. I Thess. 4.1-8).47 This is not to say that Schweitzer's position is completely correct. It is oversimplified in one minor way and in one major way. It is possible, for one thing, to find some passages in which 'faith', if not 'righteousness by faith', is related to ethics,48 although one must note that Paul generally works out his ethical statements on the basis of the believers' life in the Spirit. But more important - and this is basically what is wrong with Schweitzer's theory as a whole - Schweitzer did not see the internal connection between the righteousness by faith terminology and the terminology about life in the Spirit, being in Christ and the like (terminology which here will be called 'participationist' ,49 which seems better than the controversial term 'mystical'), a connection which exists in Paul's own letters. Thus Schweitzer did not note that besides saying that one becomes one body with the Lord in the sacraments (I Cor. 10.17; 12.13), Paul also wrote that the Spirit is received through faith (Gal. 3.1-5).50

• From Saint Augustine (Penguin Lives) (1999)

  Augustine was reluctant to get into this squabble—Brown thinks because he had heard Pelagius’ virtue praised by such friends as Albina and Paulinus of Nola, who admired the Briton. Augustine may also have entertained some misgivings about having Jerome as an ally—one rarely needed enemies when Jerome was your friend. Pelagius had expressed his own sincere admiration for Augustine’s earlier works, especially the dialogue Freedom of Choice, in a letter he sent Augustine from Jerusalem around 413. Augustine sent back a polite thank-you note, which Pelagius used two years later to show that Augustine supported him. Augustine, for whom the letter was short and perfunctory, felt Pelagius should have known he was being treated with caution. Pelagius’ less measured associate Caelestius had been condemned by the African Council in 411, for denying that Adam’s sin brought death to mankind. When Marcellinus expressed concern about Caelestius’ views, Augustine wrote two treatises for him in 413 to refute Caelestius’ views without ascribing them to Pelagius (What Sin Deserves and The Spirit and the Letter). But in 415 Augustine read Pelagius’ own work Nature, which argued that Adam’s fall did not cripple human nature. Pelagius’ exhaustive citation of Catholic authorities seemed especially dangerous to Augustine, and he at last opened fire on Pelagius himself, answering the Briton’s book Nature with his own Nature and Grace. Jerome egged Augustine on, saying they should lay aside their differences to make common cause against Pelagius (L 172.1). In 416, Jerome peppered Augustine with four letters in quick succession (only one survives; see L 19.1). In 415, Pelagius had been declared orthodox by a Palestinian council. Jerome wanted to get a condemnation from the West, since his own influence was not working in the East. Augustine wrote to Eastern prelates—John of Jerusalem and Cyril of Alexandria—trying to learn the council’s grounds for exoneration. Convinced that the Eastern council had erred, he put into action the efficient conciliar system of Carthage, solicited Honorius’ condemnation of Pelagius, and extracted the condemnation from Pope Zosimus: “The proceding is ended—I wish the heresy were.” Vain wish. Augustine had entered a quagmire in which he would thrash about for the remaining fifteen years of his life. 5. Hippo: Sin, Sex, and Death (418–430)

• From On Becoming a Person: A Therapist's View of Psychotherapy (1961)

  I think of it as trusting the totality of my experience, which I have learned to suspect is wiser than my intellect. It is fallible I am sure, but I believe it to be less fallible than my conscious mind alone. My attitude is very well expressed by Max Weber, the artist, when he says. “In carrying on my own humble creative effort, I depend greatly upon that which I do not yet know, and upon that which I have not yet done.” Very closely related to this learning is a corollary that, evaluation by others is not a guide for me. The judgments of others, while they are to be listened to, and taken into account for what they are, can never be a guide for me. This has been a hard thing to learn. I remember how shaken I was, in the early days, when a scholarly thoughtful man who seemed to me a much more competent and knowledgeable psychologist than I, told me what a mistake I was making by getting interested in psychotherapy. It could never lead anywhere, and as a psychologist I would not even have the opportunity to practice it. In later years it has sometimes jolted me a bit to learn that I am, in the eyes of some others, a fraud, a person practicing medicine without a license, the author of a very superficial and damaging sort of therapy, a power seeker, a mystic, etc. And I have been equally disturbed by equally extreme praise. But I have not been too much concerned because I have come to feel that only one person (at least in my lifetime, and perhaps ever) can know whether what I am doing is honest, thorough, open, and sound, or false and defensive and unsound, and I am that person. I am happy to get all sorts of evidence regarding what I am doing and criticism (both friendly and hostile) and praise (both sincere and fawning) are a part of such evidence. But to weigh this evidence and to determine its meaning and usefulness is a task I cannot relinquish to anyone else. In view of what I have been saying the next learning will probably not surprise you. Experience is, for me, the highest authority. The touchstone of validity is my own experience. No other person’s ideas, and none of my own ideas, are as authoritative as my experience. It is to experience that I must return again and again, to discover a closer approximation to truth as it is in the process of becoming in me. Neither the Bible nor the prophets—neither Freud nor research—neither the revelations of God nor man—can take precedence over my own direct experience. My experience is the more authoritative as it becomes more primary, to use the semanticist’s term.

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, Part 4 (300 – 1300, Rome) (2009)

  the Yemeni city of Najrān (now in south-west Saudi Arabia), attracted by an existing Christian community, and the city became a major centre for Miaphysite Christianity. In 523 or 524 its population suffered a horrific massacre at the hands of their overlord, Yusuf as’ar Yath’ar of the Yemeni kingdom of Himyar; in the previous century, his family had converted to Judaism and his campaigns were expressions of his own militant zeal for recreating Israel in Arabia. King Kaleb of Ethiopia, already provoked by Yusuf’s killing of Ethiopian soldiers, forcefully intervened across the Red Sea after this outrage and defeated and killed Yusuf.34 With Ethiopian backing, a local Miaphysite ruler, Abraha, now came to establish a kingdom in southern Arabia which had Miaphysite Christianity as its state religion. This might have become the future of the Arabian peninsula, had it not been for a major disaster of engineering: in the 570s, the ancient and famous Marib dam, on which the agricultural prosperity of the region depended, and which had undergone thorough repair under King Abraha, nevertheless suffered a catastrophic failure. After more than a thousand years of existence, it was never rebuilt until modern times. A complex and wealthy society which had flourished on the irrigation provided by the dam was ruined for ever, and with the collapsing dam must have perished much of the credibility of Christianity throughout Arabia. Five hundred miles to the north, in the same decade that the dam failed, there was born an Arab destined to be a new prophet: Muhammad (see pp. 255–9). The memory of the end of the Marib dam, when Sheba’s gardens were replaced ‘with others that yielded bitter fruit’, was still traumatic enough to win a mention in Muhammad’s revelations in the Qur’an, where the disaster was described as a punishment from God for Sheba’s faithlessness.35 But before we meet the new prophet and the impact of his faith on the world, we must turn to the other dissidence against Chalcedon: the Church of the East, the Dyophysite heirs of Theodore of Mopsuestia. THE CHURCH OF THE EAST (451–622) At the time of the Council of Chalcedon, with Nestorius declared a non-person despite the council’s quiet acceptance of much of his theology, matters looked dire for defiant Dyophysites. They had no power base in the Byzantine Empire comparable to Miaphysite Alexandria, and even eastwards beyond the imperial frontier there was no secure refuge for them among Syrian Christians in the Sassanian Empire. The mid-fifth century saw renewed pogroms of Christians by the Zoroastrian authorities. In the worst sequence under Shah Yazdgerd II, what

• From Going Clear (2013)

  And yet many of Hubbard’s associates testify to his keen eyesight. Without glasses, Hubbard would have been legally blind; perhaps that’s what he was referring to when he said he had cured himself of blindness after the war. But, clearly his eye examination showed different results. Hubbard had written in Dianetics that the eyesight of a Clear gradually improves to optimum perception. And yet, he admitted elsewhere that his vision was so bad in the postwar years that he could scarcely see his typewriter to write. He wore glasses and early versions of contact lenses. Through the use of Dianetic processing, he says, his eyes began to change. Many noticed that Hubbard had a habit of squinting, which has the effect of pressing astigmatic eyeballs into a rounder shape, which might momentarily improve his vision. He theorized that “ astigmatism, a distortion of image, is only an anxiety to alter the image.” One day, for instance, he was reading an American Medical Association report and couldn’t make it out at all. He thought he might have to resort to using a magnifying glass. Then he realized that the reason he couldn’t read it was that he wasn’t willing to confront what it said. “I threw it aside, picked up a novel and the print was perfect.” Hubbard would sometimes chastise members of his crew about their dependence on eyeglasses, which he said were an admission of “ overts”—transgressions against the group. One night as the fleet was sailing in the Caribbean, he looked at the young woman serving him dinner, Tracy Ekstrand, whose glasses were sliding down her nose in the tropical heat. “ You’re doing yourself an aesthetic disservice,” he pronounced. She was mortified and stopped wearing glasses that night. Although she was still able to move from room to room and serve meals, her vision remained quite blurred. Some weeks later, as Hubbard was retiring for the night, he looked at her again. He held up his pack of cigarettes a foot in front of her face and asked if she could read the bold capital letters: “KOOL.” Flustered by the personal attention from the Commodore, Ekstrand mumbled the name of the cigarettes. “There’s been a shift!” he declared triumphantly, then went to bed. Ekstrand was shaken. “I remained outside his door for some minutes, dumbfounded and unsure how to react,” she recalled. “This time there was no question. He was wrong. He was imagining improvement and success with Scientology where there had been none.” All of Hubbard’s senses were painfully acute. Each day, every room he inhabited had to be dusted to the point that it would pass a white-glove test. He was fanatically clean but also hypersensitive to soap, so that his clothes had to be rinsed up to fifteen times, and even then he would complain that he could smell the detergent. His chef had to switch from cooking on stainless steel to Corningware because Hubbard complained of the taste of metal in his food.

• From Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family (1901)

  It was known, especially the draper Benthien, that he not only got all his fine and new-fashioned clothes – and he owned an unusually large number of them: Pardessus, skirts, hats, waistcoats, trousers and ties – but also his underwear from Hamburg. It was even known that he changed his shirt every day, sometimes even twice a day, and his handkerchief and à la Napoleon IIIpulled-out mustache perfumed. And he didn't do all this for the sake of company and representation - the house "Johann Buddenbrook" didn't need that - but out of a personal inclination towards the superfine and aristocratic ... how should one put it, hell! And then these quotes from Heine and other poets, which he sometimes included in his speech on the most practical occasions, on business or city issues... And now this woman... No, there was something certain about himself too, about Consul Buddenbrook « - - which of course should be noted with every kind of respect, for the family was highly respectable and the company was of the highest credit standing and the boss was a shrewd, amiable man,found silly remembering that "silly" meant a very harsh expression of condemnation. But whoever, ever since he saw her on the street for the first time, had admired Thomas Buddenbrook's bride with fierce enthusiasm was the broker Gosch. he said in the club or in the "Schiffergesellschaft", holding up his punch glass and contorting his schemer's face in horrible facial expressions... "What a woman, gentlemen! Here and Aphrodite, Brünhilde and Melusine in one person ... Ha, life is beautiful!' he added abruptly; and none of the townsfolk who sat around him on the heavy, carved wooden benches of the old skipper's house under the models of sailing ships and large fish hanging from the ceiling and drank their pints, none of them understood what event the appearance of Gerda Arnoldsen in the modest and after Extraordinary longing life of the broker Gosch meant ... Not obliged, as I said, to larger festivities, the little company on Mengstrasse had all the more leisure to become acquainted with one another. Sievert Tiburtius told Klara's hand in his about his parents, his youth and his plans for the future; the Arnoldsens told of their family tree, which was at home in Dresden and from which only this one branch had been transplanted to the Netherlands; and then Madame Grünlich asked for the key to the desk in the landscape room and seriously dragged the folder with the family papers, in which Thomas had already noted the latest data.

• From The Four Vision Quests of Jesus (2015)

  Even if people do not know her complete story, they have a name recognition trigger for who she is: the Indian princess who saved Captain John Smith from execution at the hands of her own father, the great chief Powhatan. Her heroic deed, motivated by her love for a man about to die, has been immortalized in histories that began to circulate as early as the seventeenth century, in books, poems, songs, and most recently in a Disney animation. The only other Native American woman who comes close as a runner-up to her fame, a kind of historic Miss Congeniality, is Sacajawea, the young woman who helped Lewis and Clark find the Pacific Ocean. These two women are virtually alone in the public mind when it comes to naming famous Native American women. Both are remembered for befriending white men. Both are honored for having supported the efforts of European colonization and expansion. Both are considered heroic. In the case of Pocahontas, and probably Sacajawea as the spouse of a French Catholic fur trapper, a part of the story also includes their conversion to Christianity. Pocahontas was certainly a Christian. In fact, a painting by John Gadsby Chapman entitled “The Baptism of Pocahontas” hangs in the Rotunda of the United States Capitol in Washington, D.C.2 It is a study in the myth making that surrounds the historic figure of Pocahontas. Commissioned by the United States government in 1837, the painting shows her dressed in white, kneeling demurely before the baptismal font in the church at Jamestown, Virginia, the earliest permanent English colony in the Americas. She is surrounded by members of her own family, by white colonists, and with her future husband, John Rolfe, standing behind her. The Anglican priest, Alexander Whiteaker, is looking up to heaven with his hand raised in benediction. One of her Native relatives seems to be leaning forward while others seem to look away. What is so striking about this painting is not only its imagery of a docile Native being “saved,” nor its location in the very center of white American power, but its timing. It was commissioned at the height of the removal of Native nations from the United States on the Trail of Tears. It was painted and hung while thousands of Native Americans were being marched either to their deaths or to exile. It is only one of the vast number of images that have portrayed Pocahontas and Sacajawea in everything from paintings to postage stamps, but it is a unique piece of the legendary narrative of Pocahontas because it freeze frames on the religious subtext of her myth. Chapman’s painting, done at a time when Native nations were being illegally forced out of the United States, celebrates a famous Native American, a woman, and does so at the moment of her conversion to Christianity. Is this pure coincidence? Why would a painting of a Native woman’s baptism make its way into the halls of Congress?

• From The Decameron (1353)

  Nero’s dying words, ‘Qualis artifex pereo’ (‘What an artist dies with me!’), correspond exactly, in the view of Croce and others, 64 with the dying sentiments of Ciappelletto. But as Getto points out, Ciappelletto’s offer to assist his hosts in resolving their dilemma is motivated by stronger and more deeply inbred sentiments than these. When, having eavesdropped on the anxious conversation of the two money-lenders, he attempts to reassure them (‘I don’t want you to worry in the slightest on my account, nor to fear that I will cause you to suffer any harm. I heard what you were saying about me and I agree entirely that what you predict will actually come to pass, if matters take the course you anticipate; but they will do nothing of the kind’), he is in effect displaying the same kind of hard-headed business sense that had originally prompted his employer to commission his services as a debt-collector, and that the money-lenders themselves presumably possess. His instinctive adherence to the ragion di mercatura is seen in the fellow-feeling (or as Getto engagingly suggests, the omertà ) he displays towards the usurers, and in his total agreement with their assessment of the problem confronting them. Like the tale of Ciappelletto, all of the stories of the First Day without exception are concerned in one way or another with the operation of human intelligence. The second story is about Abraham the Parisian Jew, who is converted to Christianity after visiting Rome. Whilst he is there, he observes the depravity of the leaders of the Church, and concludes that any religion that can survive and prosper with so much corruption at its head must of necessity be the one true faith. The conclusion of the story paradoxically illustrates the theme of intelligence at the same time as it drives home its anticlerical polemic. Abraham, a hard-headed man of business, reaches his decision to convert to Christianity through the application of his experience and his assessment of observable facts. In the next story (I, 3), another Jew, Melchizedek, ingeniously avoids falling into a trap laid for him by Saladin (who has demanded to know which of the three main religions is the one true faith) by telling a story about three precious rings, all indistinguishable from one another, of which only one is authentic. The tale’s purpose is to illustrate the impossibility of choosing between established faiths. All are equally valid to the unprejudiced observer. The fiercely anti-clerical tone of the second story is tempered in the fourth, where a monk and his abbot, each caught in turn by the other in amorous dalliance with a comely wench smuggled into his cell by the former of the two, reach a gentleman’s agreement on their future handling of a delicate situation.

• From The Journals of Sylvia Plath (1982)

  Rum and lemon juice, and the cool elegant plopping of the water.… Jain monks in India; seeable only in 3-month rainy season as they have a vow to move on every night otherwise. Elaborate metaphorical pleas for money and scholarships at Harvard from Poona, Agra, etc. Indian fairy tales, bad translations of the great poets.… I feel in a rug-braiding mood today. Very sleepy, as after a good lovemaking, after all that writing this week. My poems are so far in the background now. It is a very healthy antidote, this prose, to the poems’ intense limitations.… A happier sense of life, not hectic, but very slow and sure, than I have ever had. That sea, calm, with sun bland on it. Containing and receiving all the reefy, narrow straits in its great reservoir of peace. Saturday, June 13 .… Stayed up till about 3 this morning, feeling again the top of my head would come off, it was so full, so full of knowledge. Found out yesterday, George Starbuck won the Yale. He is sure this proves him the Best. Calling up, “Oh, didn’t I tell you?” I had inured myself to a better book than mine, but this seemed a rank travesty.… For Dr. B.: It is not when I have a baby, but that I have one, and more, which is of supreme importance to me. I have always been extremely fond of the definition of Death which says it is: Inaccessability to Experience, a Jamesian view, but so good. And for a woman to be deprived of the Great Experience her body is formed to partake of, to nourish, is a great and wasting Death. After all, a man need physically do no more than have the usual intercourse to become a father. A woman has 9 months of becoming something other than herself, of separating from this otherness, of feeding it and being a source of milk and honey to it. To be deprived of this is a death indeed. And to consummate love by bearing the child of the loved one is far profounder than any orgasm or intellectual rapport.… … Read Jean Stafford, so much more human than Elizabeth Hardwick. Hardwick’s characters utterly unlikable in any way. A sense of the superior position of writer and reader—even the baby, as Agathas shrewdly observed, although it only appears for a paragraph, is a nasty louse, unredeemed. Stafford full of color, warmth, humor, even her witches and child-thiefs are human, humorous, part of the world, not small flat cutouts with sticky eyelashes.… MENTAL HOSPITAL STORIES : Lazarus theme. Come back from the dead. Kicking off thermometers. Violent ward. LAZARUS MY LOVE . I feel insufferable impatience. This week my Bed Book should be either accepted or rejected by the Atlantic Press. I have sent my revision to Emilie McLeod.

• From Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration (2014)

  Upon their return, the directors, Ron and John, each told me that research inspired the production in ways they never expected. It was the beginning of a sea change: Today, directors and writers at Disney can’t imagine developing an idea for a film without doing research. Leading up to the release of The Princess and the Frog , we’d had many conversations about what to call it. For a while we considered the title “The Frog Princess,” but Disney’s marketing folks warned us: Having the word princess in the title would lead moviegoers to think that the film was for girls only. We pushed back, believing that the quality of the film would trump that association and lure viewers of all ages, male and female. We felt a return to hand-drawn animation, done in the service of a beloved fairy tale, would pack ’em in. Turns out, it was our own version of a stupid pill. When The Princess and the Frog was released, we believed we had made a good film, the reviews confirmed that belief, and people who saw it loved it. However, we would soon learn that we had made a serious mistake—one that was only compounded by the fact that our movie opened nationwide just five days before James Cameron’s science fiction fantasy Avatar . This scheduling only encouraged moviegoers to take one look at a film with the word princess in the title and think: That’s for little girls only . To say that we are making a great film but not listen to the input of experienced colleagues within the company imperiled the quality we were so proud of. Quality meant that every aspect—not just the rendering and the storytelling but also the positioning and the marketing— needed to be done well, which meant being open to reasoned opinions, even when they contradicted our own. The movie had come in under budget, which is the rarest of achievements in the entertainment business. The quality of its animation rivaled the best ever done by the studio. The film was profitable, as we’d kept costs down, but it just didn’t make enough to convince anyone at the studio that we should pour more resources into hand-drawn films. While we’d had high hopes that the film would prove that 2D could rise again, our narrow vision and poor decision-making made it seem like the opposite was true. While we thought then—and still think today—that hand-drawn animation is a wonderfully expressive medium, I realize now that I got carried away by my childhood memories of the Disney Animation I’d once so enjoyed. I’d liked the idea of celebrating, right out of the box, the art form that Walt Disney himself pioneered. After The Princess and the Frog ’s somewhat lackluster opening, I knew we had to rethink what we were doing.

• From Boys & Sex (2020)

  Absent other sources, it’s clear that teenagers turn to porn, at least in part, for sex education, even as they claim to know that its content is about as authentic as pro wrestling. Girls in particular consult sexually explicit media for a template of male partners’ expectations, despite being more than twice as likely as boys to be disturbed by its treatment of women. One national survey of teenagers and their parents found that the teens watched significantly more porn, and harder-core porn, than the adults. While more than 56 percent of the boys and 38 percent of the girls had seen pornography (a figure that skews low because it includes very young teens), only a third of their fathers and fewer than a fifth of their mothers had. The boys were at least three times more likely than their dads to have watched videos depicting facial ejaculation, double penetration, BDSM, coercive sex, gang bangs, and rape; the differential between girls and their mothers was generally even higher. I never asked a boy in my interviews whether he watched porn (nor, unlike with girls I interviewed, did I ask whether he had ever masturbated). That would have shot my credibility to hell. Because of course all of them—every single one—had. Instead, my question was when they first saw it. Often, the first exposure was unbidden: older brothers (or older brothers’ friends) spun around a smartphone screen or motioned them over to a computer, either as a manly rite of passage—doing the little guy a favor—or to freak them out. Or maybe a friend sent a link to a video of a naked woman masturbating or a clip of a man shoving his outsize penis down a woman’s throat. Boys typically considered such pranks to be, yes, “hilarious.”

• From Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016)

  Eden Park was a colored neighborhood adjacent to several black townships on the East Rand. Half-colored and half-black, she figured, like us. We’d be camouflaged there. It didn’t work out that way; we never fit in at all. But that was her thinking when we made the move. Plus it was a chance to buy a home—our own home. Eden Park was one of those “suburbs” that are actually out on the edge of civilization, the kind of place where property developers have said, “Hey, poor people. You can live the good life, too. Here’s a house. In the middle of nowhere. But look, you have a yard!” For some reason the streets in Eden Park were named after cars: Jaguar Street. Ferrari Street. Honda Street. I don’t know if that was a coincidence or not, but it’s funny because colored people in South Africa are known for loving fancy cars. It was like living in a white neighborhood with all the streets named after varietals of fine wine. I remember moving out there in flashbacks, snippets, driving to a place I’d never seen, seeing people I’d never seen. It was flat, not many trees, the same dusty red-clay dirt and grass as Soweto but with proper houses and paved roads and a sense of suburbia to it. Ours was a tiny house at the bend in the road right off Toyota Street. It was modest and cramped inside, but walking in I thought, Wow. We are really living. It was crazy to have my own room. I didn’t like it. My whole life I’d slept in a room with my mom or on the floor with my cousins. I was used to having other human beings right next to me, so I slept in my mom’s bed most nights. There was no stepfather in the picture yet, no baby brother crying in the night. It was me and her, alone. There was this sense of the two of us embarking on a grand adventure. She’d say things to me like, “It’s you and me against the world.” I understood even from an early age that we weren’t just mother and son. We were a team.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  There is a fascinating crossover between Hellenism and Judaism in a popular Greek commonplace, so common in fact that no one could quite decide who said it first: leading candidates were Plato or the earlier philosopher Thales of Miletus. In any case, Hellenistic men could quote it with cheerful satisfaction as comprising three reasons for gratitude: ‘that I was born a human being and not a beast, next, a man not a woman, thirdly a Greek and not a barbarian’. Jewish men liked the thought as well and, suitably emended, it ended up as part of the synagogue liturgy, reattributed to the venerated Rabbi Judah: ‘Three blessings one must say daily: Blessed [art thou] who did not make me a gentile; Blessed who did not make me a woman;

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  “That it may be, but still it ought to be treated a little more respectfully. Snetkov, now.... We may be of use, or we may not, but we’re the growth of a thousand years. If we’re laying out a garden, planning one before the house, you know, and there you’ve a tree that’s stood for centuries in the very spot.... Old and gnarled it may be, and yet you don’t cut down the old fellow to make room for the flowerbeds, but lay out your beds so as to take advantage of the tree. You won’t grow him again in a year,” he said cautiously, and he immediately changed the conversation. “Well, and how is your land doing?” “Oh, not very well. I make five per cent.” “Yes, but you don’t reckon your own work. Aren’t you worth something too? I’ll tell you my own case. Before I took to seeing after the land, I had a salary of three hundred pounds from the service. Now I do more work than I did in the service, and like you I get five per cent. on the land, and thank God for that. But one’s work is thrown in for nothing.” “Then why do you do it, if it’s a clear loss?” “Oh, well, one does it! What would you have? It’s habit, and one knows it’s how it should be. And what’s more,” the landowner went on, leaning his elbows on the window and chatting on, “my son, I must tell you, has no taste for it. There’s no doubt he’ll be a scientific man. So there’ll be no one to keep it up. And yet one does it. Here this year I’ve planted an orchard.” “Yes, yes,” said Levin, “that’s perfectly true. I always feel there’s no real balance of gain in my work on the land, and yet one does it.... It’s a sort of duty one feels to the land.” “But I tell you what,” the landowner pursued; “a neighbor of mine, a merchant, was at my place. We walked about the fields and the garden. ‘No,’ said he, ‘Stepan Vassilievitch, everything’s well looked after, but your garden’s neglected.’ But, as a fact, it’s well kept up. ‘To my thinking, I’d cut down that lime-tree. Here you’ve thousands of limes, and each would make two good bundles of bark. And nowadays that bark’s worth something. I’d cut down the lot.’” “And with what he made he’d increase his stock, or buy some land for a trifle, and let it out in lots to the peasants,” Levin added, smiling. He had evidently more than once come across those commercial calculations. “And he’d make his fortune. But you and I must thank God if we keep what we’ve got and leave it to our children.” “You’re married, I’ve heard?” said the landowner.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  And on the second morning he was to order Messer Ruggieri to return to the King. The servant kept watch, and as soon as Messer Ruggieri left the city, attached himself to his entourage in as natural a manner as possible, giving him the impression that he too was going to Italy. So they rode along together, with Messer Ruggieri seated astride the mule presented to him by the King, conversing on various topics with his new companion, until at a certain point, just before tierce, he said: ‘I suppose we ought to stop and relieve the animals.’ So they stopped at a suitable place, where all the animals relieved themselves with the exception of the mule. They then rode on, with the King’s servant still listening carefully to the words of the knight, till they came to a watercourse, where, as they were watering their mounts, the mule staled into the river. On seeing this, Messer Ruggieri said: ‘Ah! God curse you, beast! you’re just like the gentleman who presented you to me.’ The King’s servant noted these words, and though he noted many more in the course of their long day’s journey together, he heard nothing else from Ruggieri’s lips that was other than highly complimentary to the King. Next morning, as soon as they were mounted and about to set off again for Tuscany, the servant delivered the King’s order to Messer Ruggieri, who immediately turned back. Having already been informed of what Messer Ruggieri had said about the mule, the King summoned him to his presence, welcomed him with a broad smile, and asked him why he had compared him to the mule, or rather vice versa. Messer Ruggieri replied, with the greatest of candour: ‘My lord, I compared it to you for this reason, that just as you bestow your gifts where they are inappropriate, and withhold them where they would be justified, so the mule relieved itself, not in the right place, but in the wrong one.’ So the King said: ‘Messer Ruggieri, it was not because I failed to recognize in you a most gallant knight, deserving of the highest honours, that I withheld my bounty from you and bestowed it on many others, who were insignificant by comparison with yourself. The blame rests not with me but with your fortune, which has prevented me from giving you your deserts. And I intend to prove to you that I am speaking the truth.’ ‘My lord,’ replied Messer Ruggieri, ‘the fact that you have not rewarded me is immaterial, for I never had any desire to multiply my wealth. What distresses me is the absence of any token of your esteem.