Confusion

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 Reading Biblical Literature: Genesis to Revelation (2016)

  214 LECTURE 32 Paul’s Letters to a Community in Conflict I n this lecture, we’ll focus on two letters of the apostle Paul that appear in the New Testament as 1 and 2 Corinthians. Both were written to the Christians at Corinth in the mid-50s of the 1 st century, each dealing with the challenge of creating and maintaining a community. Paul lived in Corinth for about a year and a half and worked as a tentmaker there. Together with his associates Aquila, Priscilla, and Apollos, he later worked in Ephesus, although he continued to stay in touch with the community at Corinth. We’ll look at four issues dealt with in the letters: the cross, Spirit, resurrection, and reconciliation. The Cross ‹In the middle of 1 Corinthians 1, Paul says that he has received oral reports about conflict in the congregation. He has heard that various groups there each identify with a particular church leader. To portray the situation, Paul mimics the different groups: “I belong to Paul,” “I belong to Apollos,” “I belong to Cephas [Peter],” and “I belong to Christ.” As Paul portrays it, the Corinthians had turned Christ into someone associated with a particular faction, rather than the unifying center of the congregation. ‹In Paul’s eyes, the community’s fragmentation reflects misplaced loyalties. He wants the readers to see that Paul, Apollos, and Cephas are the bearers of a message, but none of them can be the focus of the community’s identity. He insists that Christ must be the focus, because it is through the message of Christ that God calls them to faith. ‹Paul’s argument is that neither he nor the others could bring anyone to faith through their preaching. He reminds the Corinthians that his message was about God bringing salvation through the crucified Jesus. Such an idea might

• From Reading Biblical Literature: Genesis to Revelation (2016)

  Reading Biblical Literature: Genesis to Revelation 182 time, Jesus’s mother comments that the wine has run out. But Jesus replies, “Woman, what have you to do with me? My hour has not yet come.” ‹The reference to Jesus’s hour is cryptic. We will eventually learn that it refers to the hour or time of his death and resurrection. But here, Jesus’s mother focuses on the immediate situation and directs the servants to do whatever Jesus tells them. He, in turn, transforms six stone jars filled with water into wine. ‹What does the gift of wine mean? John says that it reveals Jesus’s glory (Greek: doxa), possibly connoting the power and presence of God. In this context, a sign is an action that reveals divine power in a manner accessible to the senses. To do so by a lavish gift of wine displays divine favor. For the disciples, the gift confirms their conviction that Jesus is the agent of God. Feeding the Multitudes ‹John is keenly aware that actions are ambiguous, and people often interpret actions differently. He helps readers engage the interpretive process by bringing the struggle over meaning into the narrative itself. ‹A good example is the story of Jesus feeding 5,000 people, which appears in all four gospels. What makes John’s version unique is the attention to what this action means. ●For example, the crowd initially interprets the sign in the framework of the Passover tradition. They call Jesus a prophet, a new Moses, who miraculously feeds them, and they want to make this prophet their king. But instead of allowing it, Jesus slips away. ●The problem here concerns the nature of Jesus’s kingship. In the Roman world, an aspiring ruler could attract supporters by giving away free food and providing entertainment; John portrays the crowd this way. After enjoying the free food Jesus provides, they are eager to make him king, with the assumption that free food will keep coming in the future. ●Thus, later in the chapter, Jesus offers a different interpretation. The crowd follows him to a synagogue in the town of Capernaum, where he says that they have failed to see what the sign actually meant. He tells them they

• From Reading Biblical Literature: Genesis to Revelation (2016)

  Lecture 27—John on the Word Made Flesh 181 ● Indeed, John says that what the logos brings is life, and he describes such life as a kind of light for human beings. In a basic sense, life has a physical dimension. It involves heartbeats and breathing. And it was common for ancient writers to identify life with the radiance of light and to equate darkness with death. ● Yet John also recognizes that true life—authentic life—is more than that. Philosophers of his day insisted that true life emerged as one moved out of the darkness of ignorance into the light of understanding. In this process, a person would turn from the darkness of evil to the light of good. ● Up to a point, the author of John would agree. But he argues that life must be seen in more theological or relational terms. For him, darkness is not only ignorance but alienation—human alienation from the God who made us. Thus, light not only means coming to know God but being restored in relationship with God. For John, that is where true life is found. ‹ That relational aspect informs the pivotal statement in verse 14: “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” The idea is that the Word of God, which creates all things and gives life, now encounters people in embodied form. According to John, Jesus is the embodied Word of God, who conveys the creative will of God by what he says, by what he does, and by who he is. And the goal of God’s Word becoming flesh is restoring human beings to life in relationship with the God who made them. Turning Water into Wine ‹ In the next section of John, Jesus conveys divine reality to people through actions, called signs. They include miraculous gifts of food and drink, healings, and even the raising of the dead. The author of John was keenly aware that actions are ambiguous and can be construed in different ways. Thus, his challenge was to create a narrative context in which meaning could be discerned. ‹ The first sign occurs when Jesus turns water into wine. The disciples go with Jesus to a wedding in the town of Cana in Galilee, where Jesus’s mother is also present. In John’s gospel, we often find that people talk past each other, and that is the case here. When the wedding celebration has been going on for some

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  I looked out into the dark night, past Raylene’s hip and the porch railing. What had she done? I shook my head and swallowed. I knew nothing, understood nothing. Maybe I never would. Who had Mama been, what had she wanted to be or do before I was born? Once I was born, her hopes had turned, and I had climbed up her life like a flower reaching for the sun. Fourteen and terrified, fifteen and a mother, just past twenty-one when she married Glen. Her life had folded into mine. What would I be like when I was fifteen, twenty, thirty? Would I be as strong as she had been, as hungry for love, as desperate, determined, and ashamed? My eyes were dry, the night a blanket that covered me. I wasn’t old. I would be thirteen in a few weeks. I was already who I was going to be. I tucked the envelope inside my pocket. When Raylene came to me, I let her touch my shoulder, let my head tilt to lean against her, trusting her arm and her love. I was who I was going to be, someone like her, like Mama, a Boatwright woman. I wrapped my fingers in Raylene’s and watched the night close in around us. Afterword [image file=image_rsrc2PR.jpg] “You told my story,” the man in the Peterbilt cap said to me. His face was stern, the skin worn and lined, his eyes implacable and black under the brim of that cap. “Oh. I am sorry.” He nodded. “I wanted you to know,” he said, “you made sense of what did not make sense.” I breathed in as slowly as I could, trying to think what to say. His hands came over and took hold of mine. He nodded intently twice, as if that were a whole conversation. His hands pumped my own. When he let go of me, I rocked on my feet. Then he was walking away. I wanted to call after him, but that would have drawn attention to both of us, and he had waited a long time to come up to speak to me. People were still milling around the gymnasium that night at the town meeting—his neighbors, most likely—and I doubted any of them would have known what he said. There were probably very few people in the world who knew his story, and that seemed to be the way he wanted it. I understood that. It was the second heartbreaking moment of that long day.

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  I could easily credit the whole enterprise to my odd but acceptable lust for gospel music. Shannon knew the words to every song in the Baptist hymnal and spoke familiarly of every gospel group that toured the Opry circuit. Gospel was her family’s life, and she knew all there was to know about it, though she didn’t seem to feel the music’s impact the way I did. Shannon made fun of preachers and choir singers, telling her most devastating jokes about the hallelujah jumpers, who completely lost consciousness of themselves when they sang and began to spring up on the balls of their feet, swinging their arms in the air. I could never have told her my secret ambition, never have told her that I cried when I listened to tent shows on the radio late at night. “Those eyes of yours could break the heart of God,” Mrs. Pearl told me as she patted my black hair fiercely. I blinked and tried to tear up for her. “Lashes, oh! Bob, look at the lashes on this child. You grow up you can do Maybelline commercials on the television, honey. ‘Course, not that you’re going to want to. You don’t ever let anybody talk you into putting any of that junk on you. Your eyes are a gift from God !” She leaned close to my shoulder and put one hand on the top of my head, turning me so that I looked directly into her eyes. Her caramel-brown pupils were enormous flat surfaces that reflected nothing; her voice was honey-coated and sincere. I could not tell if she was making fun of me or speaking from her heart. “Mama has more ways of saying ‘God’ and ‘Jesus’ than any preacher I’ve ever heard.” Shannon blinked her pink eyelids at me. “She’s got a talent for it, talking real soft and low one minute, saying ‘Gawd’ so that you see him in your mind like some kind of old family relation, all quiet and well-mannered like an old man. Or she can drag it out long and loud, ‘ Gaaaaad ,’ and just shock you senseless. When she really gets going she’s got this hollow-sounding moan that just about rocks you off your feet. “Her ‘Jesus’ is even better. Everybody says ‘Jesus’ so much round here, you forget sometimes who he was supposed to be, but Mama rations her Jesuses. You hear her say ‘Jesus’ the way she does and you know for sure that Jesus was a real person, that little boy used to bring doves back to life, that quiet young man never known to curse or fornicate. You can just see him—a man, like your daddy maybe, aged by the sins of the world, a life sacrificed for you personally.”

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  My hands were small, the tendons blue and fine under pale skin, like Alma’s and Mama’s. We all had small hands. I looked back down the hall to the bedroom. I could just see the smashed and tumbled bed frame. No, I thought, you just can’t tell with women. Might be you can’t even tell with girls. “I never realized before how much you look like Alma.” It was so late it was almost morning. Mama’s voice came out of the darkness from the direction of the doorway. “But when we were sitting on those steps together and you were standing in the yard, I saw it so clear. I saw what you’re gonna look like when you’re full-grown. You’re gonna be as pretty as Alma was when she was a girl, prettier than you can imagine.” I said nothing. I was wrapped in a blanket, sitting on Little Earle’s mattress up against the wall where we had dragged it earlier in the evening. Aunt Alma had finally gone to sleep, and Mama had decided it was safe for us to try to get some rest. But for an hour she had been sitting propped up on her pillow, smoking, and I had been staring into the dark, listening to the cows move around in the pasture near the house. Mama shifted restlessly, turning toward me. “Bone,” she said softly. “What is it you think about all the time?” “Nothing much.” I looked at the cigarette’s burning tip. My eyes had adjusted to the dark so that I could make out the shape of her body, her shoulders pushed up on the pile of old pillows, her arms lying on top of the blanket. “Nothing I could explain.” “You’re always so quiet, always watching.” Mama’s voice was soft, and sounded more relaxed than I had heard in a long time. “I can tell when you’re mad, you know. You get that storm-cloud look on your face, and you’ve had that enough lately.” She shifted in her blanket, put the cigarette out in a saucer on the floor. “The thing is, if you’re not mad, I can’t tell what’s happening inside you. You never look happy. You look like you’re waiting. What are you waiting for, Bone?” For you to go back to Daddy Glen, I thought, and hugged my blanket tighter around my shoulders. “Bone?” I touched the backs of my fingers to my throat, felt the warmth there, the pulse in the hollow beneath my chin. “Bone? You’re not asleep?” “No.” “You don’t want to talk to me?” My fingers were wet, my chin, the edge of the blanket. I remembered Aunt Alma’s direct look this afternoon when she’d talked about loving Wade, about wanting to kill him. I didn’t understand that kind of love. I didn’t understand anything. I swallowed and tried not to make a sound. “You’re still mad at me, aren’t you?” Mama sounded like she wanted to cry.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  Anna would feel the small hand at her elbow, and would think that the fingers were curiously strong; strong and efficient they would feel, like Sir Philip’s, and this always vaguely displeased her. Nevertheless she would smile at Stephen while she let the child guide her in and out between the puddles. She would say: ‘Thank you, dear; you’re as strong as a lion!’ trying to keep that displeasure from her voice. Very protective and careful was Stephen when she and her mother were out alone together. Not all her queer shyness could prevent her protecting, nor could Anna’s own shyness save her from protection. She was forced to submit to a quiet supervision that was painstaking, gentle but extremely persistent. And yet was this love? Anna often wondered. It was not, she felt sure, the trusting devotion that Stephen had always felt for her father; it was more like a sort of instinctive admiration, coupled with a large, patient kindness. ‘If she’d only talk to me as she talks to Philip, I might get to understand her,’ Anna would muse, ‘It’s so odd not to know what she’s feeling and thinking, to suspect that something’s always being kept in the background.’ Their drives home from Malvern were usually silent, for Stephen would feel that her task was accomplished, her mother no longer needing her protection now that the coachman had the care of them both—he, and the arrogant-looking grey cobs that were yet so mannerly and gentle. As for Anna, she would sigh and lean back in her corner, weary of trying to make conversation. She would wonder if Stephen were tired or just sulky, or if, after all, the child might be stupid. Ought she, perhaps, to feel sorry for the child? She could never quite make up her mind.

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

  Zeituni wiped the sweat on her forehead with the back of her hand. “Anyway, after Sarah’s first husband died, she decided that your father should support her and her child, since he had received all the education. That’s why she disliked Kezia and her children. She thought Kezia was just a pretty girl who wanted to take everything. You must understand, Barry—in Luo custom, the male child inherits everything. Sarah feared that once your grandfather died, everything would belong to Barack and his wives, and she would be left with nothing.” I shook my head. “That’s no excuse for lying about who the Old Man’s children are.” “You’re right. But …” “But what?” Zeituni stopped walking and turned to me. She said, “After your father went off to live with his American wife, Ruth … well, he would go to Kezia sometimes. You must understand that traditionally she was still his wife. It was during such a visit that Kezia became pregnant with Abo, the brother you haven’t met. The thing was, Kezia also lived with another man briefly during this time. So when she became pregnant again, with Bernard, no one was sure who—” Zeituni stopped, letting the thought finish itself. “Does Bernard know about this?” “Yes, he knows by now. You understand, such things made no difference to your father. He would say that they were all his children. He drove this other man away, and would give Kezia money for the children whenever he could. But once he died, there was nothing to prove that he’d accepted them in this way.” We turned a corner onto a busier road. In front of us, a pregnant goat bleated as it scuttered out of the path of an oncoming matatu. Across the way, two little girls in dusty red school uniforms, their round heads shaven almost clean, held hands and sang as they skipped across a gutter. An old woman with her head under a faded shawl motioned to us to look at her wares: two margarine tins of dried beans, a neat stack of tomatoes, dried fish hanging from a wire like a chain of silver coins. I looked into the old woman’s face, drawn beneath the shadows. Who was this woman? I wondered. My grandmother? A stranger? And what about Bernard—should my feelings for him somehow be different now? I looked over at a bus stop, where a crowd of young men were streaming out into the road, all of them tall and black and slender, their bones pressing against their shirts. I suddenly imagined Bernard’s face on all of them, multiplied across the landscape, across continents. Hungry, striving, desperate men, all of them my brothers …. “Now you see what your father suffered.” “What?” I rubbed my eyes and looked up to find my aunt staring at me.

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

  No, I told her, it wasn’t exactly surprise that I was feeling. Since my first frightening discovery of bleaching creams in Life magazine, I’d become familiar with the lexicon of color consciousness within the black community—good hair, bad hair; thick lips or thin; if you’re light, you’re all right, if you’re black, get back. In college, the politics of black fashion, and the questions of self-esteem that fashion signified, had been a frequent, if delicate, topic of conversation for black students, especially among the women, who would smile bitterly at the sight of the militant brother who always seemed to be dating light-skinned girls—and tongue-lash any black man who was foolish enough to make a remark about black women’s hairstyles. Mostly I had kept quiet when these subjects were broached, privately measuring my own degree of infection. But I noticed that such conversations rarely took place in large groups, and never in front of whites. Later, I would realize that the position of most black students in predominantly white colleges was already too tenuous, our identities too scrambled, to admit to ourselves that our black pride remained incomplete. And to admit our doubt and confusion to whites, to open up our psyches to general examination by those who had caused so much of the damage in the first place, seemed ludicrous, itself an expression of self-hatred—for there seemed no reason to expect that whites would look at our private struggles as a mirror into their own souls, rather than yet more evidence of black pathology. It was in observing that division, I think, between what we talked about privately and what we addressed publicly, that I’d learned not to put too much stock in those who trumpeted black self-esteem as a cure for all our ills, whether substance abuse or teen pregnancy or black-on-black crime. By the time I reached Chicago, the phrase self-esteem seemed to be on everyone’s lips: activists, talk show hosts, educators, and sociologists. It was a handy catchall to describe our hurt, a sanitized way of talking about the things we’d been keeping to ourselves. But whenever I tried to pin down this idea of self-esteem, the specific qualities we hoped to inculcate, the specific means by which we might feel good about ourselves, the conversation always seemed to follow a path of infinite regress. Did you dislike yourself because of your color or because you couldn’t read and couldn’t get a job? Or perhaps it was because you were unloved as a child—only, were you unloved because you were too dark? Or too light? Or because your mother shot heroin into her veins … and why did she do that anyway? Was the sense of emptiness you felt a consequence of kinky hair or the fact that your apartment had no heat and no decent furniture? Or was it because deep down you imagined a godless universe?

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

  And, too: If Malcolm’s discovery toward the end of his life, that some whites might live beside him as brothers in Islam, seemed to offer some hope of eventual reconciliation, that hope appeared in a distant future, in a far-off land. In the meantime, I looked to see where the people would come from who were willing to work toward this future and populate this new world. After a basketball game at the university gym one day, Ray and I happened to strike up a conversation with a tall, gaunt man named Malik who played with us now and again. Malik mentioned that he was a follower of the Nation of Islam but that since Malcolm had died and he had moved to Hawaii he no longer went to mosque or political meetings, although he still sought comfort in solitary prayer. One of the guys sitting nearby must have overheard us, for he leaned over with a sagacious expression on his face. “You all talking about Malcolm, huh? Malcolm tells it like it is, no doubt about it.” “Yeah,” another guy said. “But I tell you what—you won’t see me moving to no African jungle anytime soon. Or some goddamned desert somewhere, sitting on a carpet with a bunch of Arabs. No sir. And you won’t see me stop eating no ribs.” “Gotta have them ribs.” “And pussy, too. Don’t Malcolm talk about no pussy? Now you know that ain’t gonna work.” I noticed Ray laughing and looked at him sternly. “What are you laughing at?” I said to him. “You’ve never read Malcolm. You don’t even know what he says.” Ray grabbed the basketball out of my hand and headed for the opposite rim. “I don’t need no books to tell me how to be black,” he shouted over his head. I started to answer, then turned to Malik, expecting some words of support. But the Muslim said nothing, his bony face set in a faraway smile. I decided to keep my own counsel after that, learning to disguise my feverish mood. A few weeks later, though, I awoke to the sound of an argument in the kitchen—my grandmother’s voice barely audible, followed by my grandfather’s deep growl. I opened my door to see Toot entering their bedroom to get dressed for work. I asked her what was wrong. “Nothing. Your grandfather just doesn’t want to drive me to work this morning, that’s all.” When I entered the kitchen, Gramps was muttering under his breath. He poured himself a cup of coffee as I told him that I would be willing to give Toot a ride to work if he was tired. It was a bold offer, for I didn’t like to wake up early. He scowled at my suggestion. “That’s not the point. She just wants me to feel bad.” “I’m sure that’s not it, Gramps.”

• From My Secret Garden (1973)

  Our first toy is a baby, a doll baby; our first “play” role is that of Mother, and while we dimly know this all has something to do with our sex, we are given no clues about that. Some step seems to have been left out, and the anger and anxiety our mothers show beneath their fixed smiles when we ask questions about it show it was left out deliberately, and we’d better Keep Off that particular grass. We play house with our play babies, but it’s a daddyless house. Little boys don’t play house; it’s not an accepted role. Nor is there any accepted play role in which the little mothers can explore their first sexual drives, which often come so unexpectedly. Little girls with lots of suddenly newfound energy, who want to run and holler, swing in trees and climb walls, are called tomboys. Clearly, spontaneity and action are not the quickest route to womanhood. But if it is not an acceptable outlet for these mysterious, perhaps troubling new energies, what is? We are not told. We only know there is a mystery here. We can go wrong somewhere. All about us is silence. We learn to be still. Passive. Eventually a girl grows out of doll babies and begins to get her first signs of having miraculously arrived at womanhood. (Without understanding how she got there, because to her knowledge she has done nothing, learned nothing, experienced nothing at all. Can this be it? Doing nothing, avoiding the mystery, being passive and ignorant—is that being a woman?) Whatever the answer is, boys are apparently aware which girls have solved the problem. They begin to ask those girls out on dates. Dates lead directly and naturally to those desires and urges she’s been stifling. And wonder of wonders, the way to get asked out most (to be the most womanly?) is to do what you really want to do, and stifle nothing at all! Freedom, excitement and “real” womanhood suddenly and magically seem united and integrated, beckoning at last. Wrong. Once again it is pointed out—by Mother and the other girls, if you’re slow in catching on—that action, the seemingly easiest way to womanhood, is not the nicest way. Is maybe not the way at all. In fact, once again, it seems womanhood has something to do with not doing what you want to do, with frustration and passivity. Suddenly childhood’s vague distinction between “nice” little girls and girls who were not “nice” becomes a decided hard-line distinction between women: there are two kinds. The ones boys like to go out with, and the kind they marry. But which of the two is the “real” woman? The choice is more bewildering now that she’s had a taste of the forbidden fruit: Whether to reach out and respond, or to hold back, to hold out for marriage.

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

  this time that heresy in the Midi was first linked to theological dualism. [20] The Cistercians also led the developing cult of Mary as they explored new ways of bringing the adults who joined their Order to a discipline of celibacy, of which Mary was the perfect earthly example: dualism was an offence to devout Marians. Thereafter, dualism became a trope of Cistercian accounts of heretics throughout Europe, not merely in the Midi, and the thirteenth-century inquisitions had little to add; they just needed to ask the right questions to terrified people, dualists or not. By now they were regularly melding present heresy with the past movement of reform that had once been the ally of Pope Gregory VII and calling ‘Cathars’ ‘Patarines’. [21] The movements that developed into the Orders of friars and the Beguines (this page) might have ended up in the same way. In the end, indeed, those mendicants who could not be contained in official structures created by thirteenth-century popes did end up, like the Cathars, being labelled as heretics and facing death by fire – often at the hands of inquisitors who were themselves Dominican friars. [22] Why would so many dissenters in the twelfth-century West be given a dualist label if they were not? One answer is that descriptions of dualism were handily on display in textbooks used by students in the universities. It was routine for budding theologians to prove their prowess by refuting Manicheism as portrayed by such giants of early theology as Augustine of Hippo. There was also a contemporary geopolitical motive. The nadir in centuries of growing bitterness between Western and Eastern Christianity was the Fourth Crusade in 1204, which, far from defending Christendom, sacked Constantinople and set up a Latin carpetbagger Emperor and Patriarch in the wrecked city. Westerners had every reason to seek to justify such unjustifiable conduct by portraying the East as the nursery of heresy, and one thing that Westerners knew about heresy in the East was that it was dualist. Once dissenters of various descriptions were formally defined as heretics, and persecution became systematized, it would encourage a defensive development of a formal hierarchical leadership in Catharism, united from a melange of dissidence by Catholic reaction, but there is no good reason to push back such leadership far into the twelfth century. A learned forgery by two seventeenth-century French historians put into print an account of a supposed pan-Cathar council in 1167, creating an impression of Cathar organization far earlier than any demonstrable reality, and the forgery has only recently been debunked. Add to that the repetition of chronicle narratives by later historians, and it has been difficult to see past the official narrative of Catharism; even many Cathars, under merciless attack by institutional Catholicism, may have come to embrace it. [23] * It has been worth examining the Cathar problem at length because it casts so much light on the ‘persecuting society’. Regardless of how much one accepts from R. I.

• From The Liars' Club: A Memoir (1995)

  (The only metaphor I can find for such a change is musical: where one note had been playing, it suddenly grew into a chord involving lots of black keys.) The look in her eyes was one I’d seen in the narrowing pupils of certain caged animals. “They’re yours, aren’t they?” I finally said, which option hadn’t even breezed through my head before. Again, the quiet between us held. “Don’t start hounding me about those rings now, Mary,” she said. Her voice was flat. She set down the mountain of laundry. “I just can’t take it.” She took to her bed. From the kitchen, I could hear her rummaging through the fruitcake tin where she kept pharmaceuticals. What was she looking for? I wondered. Some powerful pagan god, name of Valium or Thorazine or Halcion, was the only answer I came up with. Mother’s particular devils had remained mysterious to me for decades. So had her past. Few born liars ever intentionally embark in truth’s direction, even those who believe that such a journey might axiomatically set them free. Several times, I’d flown to Texas ready to push against the figurative door of the past. But the resistance I met was both invisible and fierce. Even when Daddy could still speak, he wouldn’t. He’d put on I’m-just-a-dumb-ol’-cracker face. “Shit, darling, I can’t remember none of that.” Lecia could confirm what I dredged up. But like me, she lacked basic facts, the whys and wherefores of Mother’s past. In her world, though, people who whined about their childhoods were woosies, ne’er-do-well liberals seeking to defraud the insurance industry out of dollars for worthless therapies. “Unconscious mind, my ass,” she said. “Get over it.” She went back to scrubbing Comet off some sink porcelain. (She worked her butt off all day and had a full-time, live-in cleaning lady, but spent hours every night in rubber gloves. Her house was as gleamingly sterile as most operating theaters.) Nonetheless, truth was conspiring to assemble itself before me. Call it fate or grace or pure shithouse chance. I was being guided somehow into the chute that led down the dark corridor at the end of which truth’s door would fly open. After I found the wedding rings, Mother became stonily resolute about not discussing them. Or her past. “I can’t take care of your daddy with you beating on me about all this,” she said. She pressed on her temples with both hands, as if her skull might explode from internal pressure unless she kept it squeezed tight. “I have two headaches, one behind each eye, each one the size of a Kennedy half-dollar.” I talked long-distance to a former therapist who had me write out all my questions for Mother on a spiral pad. I read them back to him: Whose wedding rings were those? Who were the two kids Grandma Moore showed me school pictures of? After she died, why did you go nuts? What were you doing with the knife that night?

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

  The external history of the controversy is a history of outrages and intrigues, depositions and banishments, commotions, divisions, and attempted reunions. Immediately after the council of Chalcedon bloody fights of the monks and the rabble broke out, and Monophysite factions went off in schismatic churches. In Palestine Theodosius (451–453) thus set up in opposition to the patriarch Juvenal of Jerusalem; in Alexandria, Timotheus Aelurus1668 and Peter Mongus1669 (454–460), in opposition to the newly-elected patriarch Protarius, who was murdered in a riot in Antioch; Peter the Fuller1670 (463–470). After thirty years’ confusion the Monophysites gained a temporary victory under the protection of the rude pretender to the empire, Basiliscus (475–477), who in an encyclical letter,1671 enjoined on all bishops to condemn the council of Chalcedon (476). After his fall, Zeno (474–475 and 477–491), by advice of the patriarch Acacius of Constantinople, issued the famous formula of concord, the Henoticon, which proposed, by avoiding disputed expressions, and condemning both Eutychianism and Nestorianism alike, to reconcile the Monophysite and dyophysite views, and tacitly set aside the Chalcedonian formula (482). But this was soon followed by two more schisms, one among the Monophysites themselves, and one between the East and the West. Felix II., bishop of Rome, immediately rejected the Henoticon, and renounced communion with the East (484–519). The strict Monophysites were as ill content with the Henoticon, as the adherents of the council of Chalcedon; and while the former revolted from their patriarchs, and became Acephali,1672 the latter attached themselves to Rome. It was not till the reign of the emperor Justin I. (518–527), that the authority of the council of Chalcedon was established under stress of a popular tumult, and peace with Rome was restored. The Monophysite bishops were now deposed, and fled for the most part to Alexandria, where their party was too powerful to be attacked.

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

  There he was apprehended by the magistrates of Bern at the instance of the Duke of Würtemberg, in September, 1557. His papers were seized and found to contain antitrinitarian and other heresies. He was ordered to renounce his errors by a confession drawn up with his own hand, and banished from the territory of Bern; but on his promise to keep quiet, he was allowed to return the following year for the sake of his seven children. He died of the plague which visited Switzerland in 1564, and swept away thirty-eight thousand persons in the territory of Bern, besides seven thousand in Basel, and fourteen hundred at Coire. It was a fatal time for the Reformed Church, for between 1564 and 1566 several of the leaders died; as Calvin, Farel, Bibliander, Borrhaus, Blaurer, Fabricius, and Saluz.954 2. Giorgio Biandrata (or Blandrata), an educated physician of a noble family of Saluzzo in Piedmont (born about 1515), escaped the inquisition by flight to Geneva in 1557. He agreed substantially with Gribaldo, but was more subtle and cautious. He called Calvin his reverend father, and consulted him on theological questions. He seemed to be satisfied, but returned again and again with new doubts. Calvin, overburdened with labor and care, patiently listened and spent whole hours with the sceptic. He also answered his objections in writing.955 At last he refused further discussion as useless. "He tried," wrote Calvin to Lismann, "to circumvent me like a serpent, but God gave me strength to withstand his cunning." The spirit of doubt spread more and more in the Italian congregation. One of the principal sympathizers of Biandrata was Gianpaolo Alciati, a Piedmontese who had served in the army, and was not used to reverent language. Martinengo, the worthy Italian pastor, shortly before his death, begged Calvin to take care of the little flock and to extirpate the dangerous heresy. Accordingly, a public meeting of the Italian congregation was held May 18, 1558, in the presence of Calvin and two members of the Council. Calvin, in the name of the Council, invited the malcontents to utter themselves freely, and assured them that they should not be punished. Biandrata appealed to certain expressions of Calvin, but was easily convicted of mistake. Alciati went so far as to declare that the orthodox party "worshipped three devils worse than all the idols of popery." After a three hours’ discussion, it was resolved that all the members of the congregation should subscribe a confession of faith, which asserted the divinity of Christ and the Holy Spirit, as being consistent with the essential unity of the Godhead. Six members at first refused to subscribe, but yielded afterwards with the exception, it seems, of Biandrata and Alciati. They felt unsafe in Geneva, and went to Bern. There they found a sympathizer in Zurkinden, the secretary of the city, who engaged in an angry controversy with Calvin.

• From The Art of Memoir

  mysterious constraints of the ancient world, the ghostly comes off as the truest way to render her internal dramas. She doesn’t know what to believe and what’s myth. The family actually refers to their American neighbors as “ghosts”; it’s family wisdom that, as an emigrant child, she’s being devoured by this ghost culture, so her parents hide things from her. Sometimes I hated the ghosts for not letting us talk; sometimes I hated the secrecy of the Chinese. “Don’t tell,” said my parents, though we couldn’t tell if we wanted to because we didn’t know. They would not tell us children because we had been born among ghosts, were taught by ghosts, and were ourselves ghost-like. Mysterious rituals are enacted and never talked about. At dinner, “Mother would pour Seagram’s 7 into the cups and, after a while, pour it back into the bottle. Never explaining.” Ironically, the adoption of her mother’s fantasy technique also serves this memoirist as an unlikely form of discretion. Because of it, the family secrets are kept, in a way; the book is a demimonde where reality and myth blur. That uncertain whimsy in another writer’s book would rankle or bore, coming off as digressive or decorative. Attempting to use Hong Kingston’s method myself, I could too easily hear a reader saying, Get back to the real story, as I tried to bamboozle her with pages of witchy spirits and conjecture. But Hong Kingston dissects its cultural source and context. As she explains how the fantastic became real in her household, we accept the mystical instant as wholly natural, as in this stranger-than-fiction trip to the drive-in: There was the woman next door who was chatty one moment—inviting us children to our first “sky movie”—and shut up the rest. Then we would see silver heat rise from her body; it solidified before our eyes. . . . Her husband threw the loudspeaker out the window and drove home fast. The girl matter-of-factly watches this angry spirit rise from a woman’s body. Few other writers could get away with this—it’d feel like technique. In Hong Kingston’s hands, it comes off as “true,” because the world she’s constructed operates that way.

• From The Art of Memoir

  cleave to their original intake). It’s the power of groupthink, the basis of both family dynamics and most propaganda. But worse than the groupthink that warps recall are the students’ original, radical misjudgments. Poets and trained musicians seem mysteriously keen at nailing dialogue verbatim. But they can still flub tone or even misattribute who said what. I was the one saying, “We can work this out.” But some credit Chris with the phrase as I jerked my elbow away. Some heard me exasperatedly sighing: “We can’t work this out.” Who knows why half the class recalled my advancing toward Chris, when I either stood still or backed up? Even my inertia, if they observed it at all, got recorded in almost military terms: sentences such as “She held her ground” or “She was sturdy as a bulldog in her stance” appeared and I was likened to granite or steel. One year the memory star was a saxophonist and hip-hop DJ so convinced by our acting that he almost left his seat to stop the brute assaulting me. Yet even in possession of the facts, this kid wound up speculating as to “what Mary had done to make him attack her like this.” The observing students’ innate prejudices shape how they view things. One year when I claimed the phone calls were from a doctor’s office, a girl with a serious illness worried about me, while everybody else just resented my answering during class as a bratty move. One guy figured Chris and I had been sleeping together, and this kid half manufactured an insidious narrative of betrayal based on our body language. A girl who’d had a stalker figured Chris was one. Somebody else thought we were both high. My unscientific, decades-long study proves even the best minds warp and blur what they see. For all of memory’s power to yank us back into an overwhelming past, it can also fail big time—both short-term (the lost vehicle in a parking lot, the name at the tip of your tongue) and long-term (we made out in high school?). That’s why I always send my manuscripts out to folks I write about, because I don’t trust my wiggly mind.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  But, be that as it would, he led her to a coach, went into it with her, and brought her to a very handsome apartment, with a bed in it; but whether it was a bagnio or not, she could not tell, having spoken to nobody but himself. But when they were alone together, and her inamorato began to proceed to those extremities which instantly discover the sex, she remarked, that no description could paint up to the life, the mixture of pique, confusion and disappointment, that appeared in his countenance, joined to the mournful exclamation: “By heavens, a woman!” This at once opened her eyes, which had been shut in downright stupidity. However, as if he had meant to retrieve that escape, he still continued to toy with and fondle her, but with so staring an alteration from extreme warmth into a chill and forced civility, that even Emily herself could not but take notice of it, and now began to wish she had paid more regard to Mrs. Cole’s premonitions against ever engaging with a stranger. And now an excess of timidity succeeded to an excess of confidence, and she thought herself so much at his mercy and discretion, that she stood passive throughout the whole progress of his prelude: for now, whether the impressions of so great a beauty had even made him forgive her sex, or whether her appearance or figure in that dress still humoured his first illusion, he recovered by degrees a good part of his first warmth, and keeping Emily with her breeches still unbuttoned, stript them down to her knees, and gently impelling her to lean down, with her face against the bed-side, placed her so, that the double way, between the double rising behind, presented the choice fair to him, and he was so fairly set on a mis-direction, as to give the girl no small alarms for fear of losing a maidenhead she had not dreamt of. However, her complaints, and a resistance, gentle, but firm, checked and brought him to himself again; so that turning his steed’s head, he drove him at length in the right road, in which his imagination having probably made the most of those resemblances that flattered his taste, he got, with much ado, to his journey’s end: after which, he led her out himself, and walking with her two or three streets length, got her a chair, when making her a present not any thing inferior to what she could have expected, he left her, well recommended to the chairmen, who, on her directions, brought her home.

• From My People (2022)

  And despite the contention of many people, both black and white, that it should never have been born, RC was, as its city fathers had been quick to point out, a moment in history that may yet have a telling effect on the future of this country. For although Resurrection City was never really a city, per se, it functioned as a city, with all the elements of conflict that arise when public issues and private troubles come together. The public issues were clear and could be articulated—at least in a general way—by most of the people who lived there. Handbills had helped residents formulate their statement of purpose. “What will the Poor People’s Campaign do in Washington?” read one handbill. “We will build powerful nonviolent demonstrations on the issues of jobs, income, welfare, health, housing, human rights. These massive demonstrations will be aimed at government centers of power and they will be expanded if necessary. We must make the government face up to poverty and racism.” If such a statement was not specific enough, residents—who in all probability found it difficult to always know just what the leaders had in mind (as did the leaders themselves)—would simply fend off the question with a statement like, “We know what the demands are.” If pressed further, they would glare accusingly at the questioner, as if to further confirm his ignorance. (This technique of bluffing one’s way into the offensive was initiated by the leader of the Poor People’s Campaign, the Reverend Ralph Abernathy. The press was relentless in its efforts to get Mr. Abernathy to give out more specifics about his demands, but this was impossible for a long while simply because none had been formulated.) The private troubles of those who came to live in RC were less clear, at least in the beginning. And as these troubles emerged—sometimes in the form of fights, rapes, thefts, and harassment—they became far more prominent than the cause or the individuals who came to fight for it. The outside world concerned itself with the disorganization and lack of leadership in the camp. And while this was certainly a valid concern, critics seemed to be missing one essential point—that the lifestyles of the poor vary, from individual to individual and from region to region. Long before coming to Resurrection City, leaders and followers had been conditioned by their backgrounds and the lifestyles they had established. That is why, for example, the first city manager of RC, Jesse Jackson—a twenty-six-year-old Chicagoan and an official of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC)—had more success with the Northern urban hustler than did Hosea Williams, the second city manager, who came out of the South and had much more success with diffident rural blacks. Most of the conflicts at the camp were caused by the ghetto youths whose lives in the asphalt jungles of the North led them to view Resurrection City as a camp outing and an alfresco frolic.

• From The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007)

  Juggle chainsaws? Draw cartoons? I drew a cartoon just for you. Does it make you happy? Or sad? Or just plain confused? Well, let me make something clear. I am happy and sad and confused all at the same time. I always feel clumsy. No, I always feel awkward. “Awkward” is a better word. “Awkward” is the perfect word for what I feel like. And I always feel like I’m going to bump into something and break my collarbone or my heart. But there I go again, talking about my life like it’s a soap opera. And I hate soap operas. So I must confess that my life on the rez is not so horrible. It’s actually pretty decent. If I had to guess, I’d say my life is about 52 percent good and 48 percent bad, and that’s a dang good score in a world where approximately 90 percent of the people are 90 percent sad. So I should probably stop whining. After all, I am loved and I do love. And I’ll prove it, too. These are the eight things that I love with all my heart and soul: my grandmother my mother and father (the parental units count as one) my big sister math (especially geometry) my best friend drawing cartoons any sport involving a ball the beautiful girl named X Discussion Guide 1. Consider the adjectives “absolutely true” and “part-time.” What concepts appear to be emphasized by the images and the title? Does the cover make a reference to Junior’s internal struggle, or a struggle between Junior and the white power structure, or both, or neither? 2. By drawing cartoons, Junior feels safe. He draws “because I want to talk to the world. And I want the world to pay attention to me.” How do Junior’s cartoons (for example, “Who my parents would have been if somebody had paid attention to their dreams” and “white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white” and “white/Indian”) show his understanding of the ways that racism has deeply impacted his and his family’s lives? 3. When Junior is in Reardan (the little white town), he is “half Indian,” and when he is in Wellpinit (his home reservation), he is “half white.” “It was like being Indian was my job,” he says, “but it was only a part-time job. And it didn’t pay well at all.” At Reardan High, why does Junior pretend to have more money than he does, even though he knows that “lies have short shelf lives”? 4. Junior describes his home reservation as “located approximately one million miles north of Important and two billion miles west of Happy.” Yet when he and Rowdy look down from almost the top of an immense pine, he says, “We could see our entire world. And our entire world, at that moment, was green and golden and perfect.”