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 Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982)

  But the winters were too damned cold. And gin was too damned expensive.” She laughed and pushed back her hair. As we got back into the car to drive home, Eudora was unusually quiet. Finally, as we came over the tip of Morelos, she said, as if we’d continued our earlier conversation, “But it would be good if you came back here to work. Just don’t plan on staying too long.” Eudora and I only went to the Plaza once together. Although she knew the people who hung out there, she disliked most of them. She said it was because they had sided with Karen. “Frieda’s all right,” she said, “but the rest of them don’t deserve a pit to hiss in.” We sat at a small table for two, and Jeroméo ambled over with his bird cages to show his wares to the newcomers. The ever-present chamaquitos came to beg centavos and errands. Even the strolling mariachi players passed by to see if we were a likely prospect for serenading. But only Tammy, irrepressible and pre-adolescent, bounded over to our table and leaned possessively against it, eager for conversation. “Are you coming shopping with me tomorrow?” she inquired. We were going to buy a turtle to keep her duck company. I told her yes, hugged her, and then patted her fanny. “See you tomorrow,” I said. “Now the tongues can wag again,” Eudora said, bitterly. I looked at her questioningly. “Nobody knows anything about us,” I said, lightly. “And besides, everybody minds their own business around here.” Eudora looked at me for a moment as if she was wondering who I was. The sun went down and Jeroméo covered his birds. The lights on the bandstand came on, and Maria went around, lighting candles on the tables. Eudora and I paid our bill and left, walking around the closed market and down Guerrero hill toward Humboldt No. 24. The air was heavy with the smell of flowers and woodfire, and the crackle of frying grasshoppers from the vendors’ carts lining Guerrero hill. The next afternoon when Tammy and I came from the market, we joined Frieda and her friends at their table. Ellen was there, with her cat, and Agnes with her young husband Sam, who was always having to go to the border for something or other. “Did we interrupt something?”

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  houses (‘chapels’) for themselves all over the country (see Plate 38). This posed questions of identity — much as Wesley tried to avoid the issue by labelling his movement not a Church but a ‘Connexion’, and in mid-career (1758) writing a pamphlet entitled Reasons against a separation from the Church of England. Was he simply founding yet another new society to bring fresh life to Anglicanism? What about his congregations in Presbyterian Scotland, if this was so? The only legal way in either England or Scotland to sustain his preaching houses was to declare them to be Dissenting chapels and get them registered as the law demanded; reluctantly in 1787 he had to advise his societies that this must be done. By then other circumstances had made this inevitable. Wesley’s preachers had begun successful work in the British American colonies, but when revolution broke out in 1776, they were seriously affected. Many Anglican clergy withdrew and there was virtually no one left to whom Wesley’s American followers could go to receive Holy Communion. Wesley, High Church sacramentalist that he was — both John and Charles were prepared to use the language of ‘real presence’ in talking about the Eucharist — saw this as a desperate situation. There was still no Anglican bishop in America to ordain new clergy and Wesley could not persuade any English bishop to do so. Accordingly he searched for precedents to help out, and more or less found what he wanted in the early history of the Church in Alexandria, where priests as well as bishops had been involved in ordinations. So, on the basis of being a ‘Presbyter of the Church of England’, he took it on himself to revive the practice. His brother Charles, also an Anglican clergyman, deplored the move, but John obstinately refused to recognize that he had done anything decisive, even when he went on to ordain men for areas within the British Isles and elsewhere where he thought an emergency justified the action. With further inconsistency, he was furious when the leaders of the American Methodists called themselves bishops — a tradition which has remained within the American tradition of Methodism. And even towards the end of his life he repeated (as did Charles, with rather less complication) that he lived and died a member of the Church of England.65 So Wesley in his latter days was an Anglican in the fashion that the elderly Zinzendorf was a Lutheran; he was, and was not. Born in a different time and place, Wesley might have founded a religious order or a flexibly structured society which could find a home in the Church as the Jesuits had done (and even they had experienced early difficulty), but the English Reformation had set its face against monasticism. Wesley’s deliberate avoidance of the full consequences of his actions meant that he left a host of problems for his preachers and societies. On his death in 1791, they grappled with issues of

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  Non-Jurors loomed the far simpler identity of the Roman Catholic Church, towards which Newman was swept by a tide of doubt, which had gathered strength in him for some years as he contemplated the history of the early Church. Lutheranism and Calvinism were heresies, and he denounced them bluntly in a letter of protest about the Jerusalem bishopric, solemnly sent to his bishop and the Archbishop of Canterbury; but two years before that, he had already privately come to see the Church of England as nothing better than the Monophysites of the fifth century: no Church at all.60 His piecemeal withdrawal from Anglicanism was completed in 1845, to general dismay (except among those on all sides who saw it with gloomy relish as the natural result of Tractarianism). A further crisis for many High Churchmen was provoked by a legal judgement from the Privy Council in a case between two exceptionally obstreperous clergy, whose theological clash paralleled their combative personalities: the Evangelical Rev. George Cornelius Gorham and Henry Phillpotts, Bishop of Exeter, one of very few High Churchmen then on the episcopal bench. Phillpotts had refused to accept Gorham’s promotion to a new parish because he thought Gorham ‘Calvinist’ in his theology of baptism. Gorham appealed to the Archbishop of Canterbury’s highest court, the Court of Arches, which found in favour of the bishop. Gorham then appealed to the Privy Council, which with some hesitation, unsure of its ground in a matter of some theological intricacy, found in his favour.61 There was widespread High Church outrage that a secular court should thus interfere in a strictly ecclesiastical dispute. As a result, Newman was followed to Rome by several like-minded clergy and prominent laity, including the man whom many had regarded as his replacement in leadership of the Oxford Movement, Archdeacon Henry Manning, whose talents were such that he was to end his career as a distinguished Cardinal-Archishop of Westminster.62 This journey, virtually unknown among Laudians and Non-Jurors, has been a recurrent pattern among Anglo-Catholics ever since; yet by no means all followed suit. Newman’s background in intense Evangelical religiosity meant that his years as a Tractarian were a staging post on an unstable lurch away from his roots, but the existing High Church party, much caricatured by callow Tractarians as ‘High and Dry’, was not so easily tipped towards Rome, and beyond the shores of Britain there were other sources of strength. In the Episcopal Church of the United States of America, High Churchmen had already with a good deal less fuss faced up to the reality of being a disestablished Church whose very existence was centred on a sacramental life and episcopal government. In John Henry Hobart, Bishop of New York from 1811, they had what one of the doyens of American Church history has called

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  database about her through the use of allegory. Erasmus came to deplore the redirection on to Mary of Old Testament texts. Protestant Bible commentaries rammed home this message later, and drew gratefully on Erasmus’s other redefinitions of biblical terms in order to cut down to size Mary, her cult and her ability along with the lesser saints to intercede with her Son to the Father.68 More generally, they followed Erasmus in his cautious attitude to the use of allegorical interpretation of the Bible, which they came to consider prone to Catholic misuse. Erasmus faced up more honestly than most theologians to one problem which later proved as troublesome to Protestants as to Catholics, and whose solution was unavoidably dependent on the exploitation of allegorical reading of the Bible, whether humanists and Protestants liked it or not. This was the universally held belief in Mary’s perpetual virginity – that she had remained a virgin all her life. Much of the traditional case for this belief, which has no direct justification in scripture, was based on allegorical use of Ezekiel 44.2, which talks about the shutting of a gate which only the Lord could enter. This was then bolstered by the forced Greek and Latin reading of Isaiah’s original Hebrew prophecy that a young woman would conceive a son, Immanuel (Isaiah 7.14; see p. 81). Erasmus could not read these texts as Jerome had done. In response to shocked complaints about his comments, he set out a precise position: ‘We believe in the perpetual virginity of Mary, although it is not expounded in the sacred books.’ In other words, Erasmus acknowledged the ancient claim that there were matters of some importance which had to be taken on faith, because the Church said that they were true, rather than because they were found in the Bible. Erasmus had begun to discover a problem which became one of the major issues of the Reformation and which faced all those who called for Christianity to go back ‘ad fontes’. Did the Bible contain all sacred truth? Or was there a tradition which the Church guarded, independent of it? The issue of scripture versus tradition became a vital area of debate in the Reformation, which had no straightforward outcome for either side, whatever they might claim. Protestants were to find to their dismay that rather basic matters, like the justification for universal infant baptism, could only be resolved by appeal to tradition, rather than to any clear authority in the Bible.69 In a monumental set of dialogues or Colloquies intended to charm students into learning to speak elegant Latin, Erasmus made light comedy laced with biting criticism out of his pilgrimage journeys to the English shrines of Our Lady at Walsingham and Canterbury’s Thomas Becket. So Menedemus and Ogygius snigger over Ogygius’s visit to Norfolk’s Marian cult centre, playing around with the fact that the shrine was guarded by a priory which was a community of

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  radically separated morality from the practice of organized religion. The problem for pious Christians who knew Hume in his everyday life in Edinburgh was that he was a thoroughly likeable man; abuse of him generally came from those who had not met him. Dr Johnson’s celebratory biographer James Boswell, a devout member of the Kirk who tried to frighten Hume with the fear of death, was baffled by his cheerful indifference to the prospect: ‘I could not but be assailed by momentary doubts,’ Boswell admitted, ‘while I had actually before me a man of such strong abilities and extensive inquiry dying in the persuasion of being annihilated.’55 In the end, some thoughtful Christian critics even felt that Hume might have done good ‘by purging our religion of all the absurdities it contains … thereby enabling it to triumph over all opposition’.56 Catholic Europe was not immune to the excitement of the Enlightenment.57 By the mid-eighteenth century the Jesuits were running the largest single directed system of education that the world had ever known, an intellectual network unique at the time in its cultivation of scientific and cultural investigations, and inevitably their research culture formed an important component of the Enlightenment. Even when they were suppressed in 1773 (see pp. 804–5), the impulse to reform continued. Pius VI, whose predecessor had been forced into that humiliating betrayal of the Jesuits, pushed forward an ambitious programme of building in Rome after his election in 1775, putting finishing touches to St Peter’s Basilica, the church which had helped to spark the Reformation, just in time for the equally severe challenge to the Church sparked by the French Revolution). He promoted the past glories of the Vatican in an age which had otherwise seen a brutal diminution in power for the papacy, by founding a papal museum, but he also followed his fellow monarchs elsewhere in Europe by permitting the suppression of small monasteries when a terrible earthquake hit southern Italy in 1783. The intention was to help the poor; in the fashion of many such suppressions, the proceeds ended up at the mercy of landed interests who had a good less concern for the poor than their clerical predecessors.58 It was the Catholic world rather than the Protestant which produced a form of Enlightenment consciously setting itself against Christianity, proclaiming itself the enemy of mystery and the emancipator of humankind from the chains of revealed religion. Much of this was focused on France and started as being anti- Catholic rather than anti-Christian; to see why requires understanding the peculiar situation of the Catholic Church in France. The French Church had won a long-drawn-out victory against Protestantism, culminating in Louis XIV’s great betrayal of trust in revoking the Edict of Nantes in 1685. It showed every sign of life and success; its monasteries great and small were being rebuilt to

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  senator, or grave judge, \ end. One morning, knowing her aunt was out, he visited their house. It Will surrender to was the first time he and Cordelia had been alone together. As dryly and eloquence. Nevertheless, politely as possible, he proceeded to propose to her. Needless to say she was dissemble \ Your powers, avoid long words, \ Don't shocked and flustered. A man who had shown not the slightest interest in look too highbrow. Who her suddenly wanted to marry her? She was so surprised that she referred but a mindless ninny \ the matter to her aunt, who, as Johannes had expected, gave her approval. Declaims to his mistress? Had Cordelia resisted, her aunt would have respected her wishes; but she An overlettered style \ Repels girls as often as not. did not. Use ordinary language, \ On the outside, everything had changed. The couple were engaged. Jo- Familiar yet coaxing hannes now came to the house alone, sat with Cordelia, held her hand, words—a s though \ You were there, in her presence. talked with her. But inwardly he made sure things were the same. He re- If she refuses your letter, \ mained distant and polite. He would sometimes warm up, particularly Sends it back unread, when talking about literature (Cordelia's favorite subject), but at a certain persist. point he always went back to more mundane matters. He knew this frus- — O V I D , THE ART OF LOVE., trated Cordelia, who had expected that now he would be different. Yet TRANSLATED BY PETER GREEN even when they went out together, he took her to formal socials arranged for engaged couples. How conventional! Was this what love and marriage were supposed to be about, these prematurely aged people talking about houses and their own drab futures? Cordelia, who was shy at the best of times, asked Johannes to stop dragging her to these affairs. The battlefield was prepared. Cordelia was confused and anxious. 256 • The Art of Seduction Therefore, the person who Then, a few weeks after their engagement, Johannes sent her a letter. Here is unable to write letters he described the state of his soul, and his certainty that he loved her. He and notes never becomes a spoke in metaphor, suggesting that he had been waiting for years, lantern in dangerous seducer. hand, for Cordelia's appearance; metaphor melted into reality, back and —SØREN KIERKEGAARD, EITHER/OR, TRANSLATED BY forth. The style was poetic, the words glowed with desire, but the whole HOWARD V. H O N G was delightfully ambiguous—Cordelia could reread the letter ten times AND E D N A H . H O N G without being sure what it said. The next day Johannes received a response. The writing was simple and straightforward, but full of sentiment: his letter had made her so happy, Cordelia wrote, and she had not imagined this side Standing on a crag of

• From Looking for Alaska (2005)

  The Colonel flipped through his notebook. “Okay. Jake says, ‘Did you have a nice anniversary?’ and then Alaska says, ‘I had a splendid anniversary,’” and I could hear in the Colonel’s reading the excitement of her voice, the way she leaped onto certain words like splendid and fantastic and absolutely. “Then it’s quiet, then Jake says, ‘What are you doing?’ and Alaska says, ‘Nothing, just doodling,’ and then she says, ‘Oh God.’ And then she says, ‘Shit shit shit’ and starts sobbing, and told him she had to go but she’d talk to him later, but she didn’t say she was driving to see him, and Jake doesn’t think she was. He doesn’t know where she was going, but he says she always asked if she could come up and see him, and she didn’t ask, so she must not have been coming. Hold on, lemme find the quote.” He flipped a page in the notebook. “Okay, here: ‘She said she’d talk to me later, not that she’d see me.’” “She tells me ‘To be continued’ and tells him she’ll talk to him later,” I observed. “Yes. Noted. Planning for a future. Admittedly inconsistent with suicide. So then she comes back into her room screaming about forgetting something. And then her headlong race comes to its end. So no answers, really.” “Well, we know where she wasn’t going.” “Unless she was feeling particularly impulsive,” Takumi said. He looked at me. “And from the sound of things, she was feeling rather impulsive that night.” The Colonel looked over at me curiously, and I nodded. “Yeah,” Takumi said. “I know.” “Okay, then. And you were pissed, but then you took a shower with Pudge and it’s all good. Excellent. So, so that night...” the Colonel continued. And we tried to resurrect the conversation that last night as best we could for Takumi, but neither of us remembered it terribly well, partly because the Colonel was drunk and I wasn’t paying attention until she brought up Truth or Dare. And, anyway, we didn’t know how much it might mean. Last words are always harder to remember when no one knows that someone’s about to die. “I mean,” the Colonel said, “I think she and I were talking about how much I adored skateboarding on the computer but how it would never even occur to me to try and step on a skateboard in real life, and then she said, ‘Let’s play Truth or Dare’ and then you fucked her.” “Wait, you fucked her? In front of the Colonel?” Takumi cried. “I didn’t fuck her.” “Calm down, guys,” the Colonel said, throwing up his hands. “It’s a euphemism.” “For what?” Takumi asked. “Kissing.” “Brilliant euphemism.” Takumi rolled his eyes. “Am I the only one who thinks that might be significant?” “Yeah, that never occurred to me before,” I deadpanned. “But now I don’t know.

• From Scandalous Liaisons (2007)

  The vision that was his wife stopped before him, and to his amazement, she dropped into a curtsy so low her forehead would have touched the dirt if not for the brim of her hat. Sebastian scowled. What in hell was she doing? “My lord,” she murmured in deference. The town immediately resumed its frenzied activity. Reaching down, he yanked Olivia to her feet. She shielded her eyes from him with her hat, a meek gesture that was not in keeping with her fiery nature. He wanted, with a soul-deep need, to see her lovely eyes and look upon her beautiful face. Annoyed with her behavior, Sebastian spoke harshly. “What is the matter with you?” It wasn’t possible, and yet her head dropped even lower, until all he could see was the top of her blasted hat. “I apologize if I have displeased you again, my lord. I meant no offense.” Again? What the devil was she talking about? Sebastian gripped her elbow and dragged her up the gangplank, not stopping until they reached her cabin, where he thrust her in first and slammed the door shut behind them. Frustrated by her hat, he removed the offending article and tossed it aside. Her lovely visage was revealed to him, as well as her tears. Immediately, he felt contrite. He was a cad. “What ails you?” he queried, drawing her into his embrace. Olivia stood stiffly for a heartbeat before melting into him. “You’re angry with me.” “No,” he denied, his hands stroking the curve of her spine. “I’m confused.” She buried her face in his chest and sobbed. “You think I’m a wanton.” His confusion remained, but his mouth curved against her hair. “Perhaps a little.” She sobbed louder. “But I like it,” he amended hastily. “You don’t!” she argued in a muffled voice. “You left me so I wouldn’t throw myself at you again. And I won’t. Never again, I vow.” Ah! Sebastian grinned like an idiot. He kept his voice low and soothing. “I’d have ravished you further, Olivia, if the ocean hadn’t been between us. You were distraught. Your ship was attacked, you were abused, and your husband was revealed to be a criminal. It would have been dishonorable of me to take your body under those conditions. Bad enough I took the liberties I did.” She struggled away from him, her eyes flashing dangerously. “You are not an honorable man! You said so yourself. You refused to marry a woman you compromised, and yet the woman to whom you are married is left a virgin.” She stomped a slippered foot. “I am not a fool! Admit the truth.”

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  cent, in fact beautiful, with a sparkle in her eye that suggested a taste for adventure. The perfect prey. He listened to her song (which seemed vaguely suggestive), tossed her a coin that was equal to a month's salary, tipped his You should mix in the odd hat, then left. It was never good to come on too strong too early. As he rebuff \ With your cheerful fun. Shut him out of the walked along the street, he plotted how he would lure her into an affair. house, let him wait there \ Suddenly he felt a hand on his arm and he turned to see her walking along- Cursing that locked front side him. It was too hot to work—would he be a gentleman and escort her door, let him plead \ And threaten all he's a mind to. home? Of course. Do you have a lover? he asked her. No, she said, "I am Sweetness cloys the palate, mozita" —pure, a virgin. \ Bitter juice is a freshener. Conchita lived with her mother in a rundown part of town. Don Ma- Often a small skiff \ Is sunk by favoring winds: it's teo exchanged pleasantries, slipped the mother some money (he knew from their husbands' access to experience how important it was to keep the mother happy), then left. He them, \ At will, that considered waiting a few days, but he was impatient, and returned the fol- deprives so many wives of love. \ Let her put in a lowing morning. The mother was out. He and Conchita resumed their door, with a hard-faced playful banter from the day before, and to his surprise she suddenly sat in porter to tell him \ "Keep his lap, put her arms around him, and kissed him. His strategy flying out out," and he'll soon be the window, he took hold of her and returned the kiss. She immediately touched with desire \ Through frustration. Put jumped up, her eyes flashing with anger: you are trifling with me, she said, down your blunt foils, fight using me for a quick thrill. Don Mateo denied having any such intentions, with sharpened weapons \ and apologized for going too far. When he left, he felt confused: she had (I don't doubt that my own shafts \ Will be turned started it all; why should he feel guilty? And yet he did. Young girls can be against me). When a so unpredictable; it is best to break them in slowly new-captured lover \ Is Over the next few days Don Mateo was the perfect gentleman. He stumbling into the toils, then let him believe \ He visited every day, showered mother and daughter with gifts, made no alone has rights to your advances—at least not at first. The damned girl had become so familiar bed— but later, make him 371 372 • The Art of Seduction conscious \ Of rivals, of

• From Bright Lights, Big City (1984)

  You open your eyes and look at the ads. TRAIN FOR AN EXCITING NEW CAREER. BE AN INSTANT WINNER WITH WINGO! SOFT AND LOVELY HAIR RELAXER. BE A MODEL—OR JUST LOOK LIKE ONE. At Fiftieth you get off and walk up the stairs to the street. Walking east, you cross abrupt thermoclines as you move between the cool shadows of tall buildings and brief regions of direct sunlight. At Fifth Avenue you stand on the corner and look over at the long row of windows fronting Saks. You cross the street to the third window down from the uptown corner. The mannequin is gone. You count windows again. Where the Amanda mannequin had been is a new one with brunette acrylic on its head and a delicately upturned nose. You walk up and down the block, examining each of the mannequins. For a moment you think you have found it on Fiftieth Street, but the face is too angular and the nose is wrong. You came here with a notion of demonstrating to yourself that the icon was powerless, yet you are unsettled now that it is gone. What does this mean? You decide that it has disappeared because you were through with it, and you consider this a good omen. • • • On Madison you pass a construction site, walled in by acres of plywood on which the faces of various rock stars and Mary O’Brien McCann are plastered. Thirty stories above you, a crane dangles an I-beam over the street beside the skeleton of a new building. From the sidewalk the crane looks like a toy, but a few months back you read about a pedestrian who was killed at this site when a cable broke. DEATH FALLS FROM SKY, the Post said. You pass the Helmsley Palace—the shell of old New York transparently veiling the hideous erection of a real estate baron. A camera crew has taken over the sidewalk beside the entrance. Pedestrians submit to a woman with a clipboard who orders them to detour out into the street. “Close-up with the mini-cam,” someone says: The crew wear their importance like uniforms. Out in the bus lane, a kid in a Blessed Mother High School sweatshirt turns down the volume on his ghetto-blaster. “Who is it,” he asks you. When you shake your head

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  very cautious, she would based on those of several well-known libertines of the time, masters of not venture to declare her the game of seduction. And the most dangerous of their weapons was love by dispatching a insinuation—the means by which Madame cast her spell on the young man, maidservant or writing him making him seem the aggressor, giving her the night of pleasure she desired, Master the Art of Insinuation • 215 and safeguarding her guiltless reputation, all in one stroke. After all, he was a letter, for fear of the the one who initiated physical contact, or so it seemed. In truth, she was the dangers that this might entail. But having one in control, planting precisely the ideas in his mind that she wanted. That perceived that he was on first physical encounter in the carriage, for instance, that she had set up by very friendly terms with a inviting him closer: she later rebuked him for being forward, but what lin- certain priest, a rotund, gered in his mind was the excitement of the moment. Her talk of the uncouth, individual who was nevertheless regarded countess made him confused and guilty; but then she hinted that his lover as an outstandingly able was unfaithful, planting a different seed in his mind: anger, and the desire for friar on account of his very revenge. Then she asked him to forget what she had said and forgive her saintly way of life, she calculated that this fellow for saying it, a key insinuating tactic: "I am asking you to forget what I have would serve as an ideal go-said, but I know you cannot; the thought will remain in your mind." Pro- between for her and the voked this way, it was inevitable he would grab her in the pavilion. She sev- man she loved. And so, after reflecting on the eral times mentioned the room in the château—of course he insisted on strategy she would adopt, going there. She enveloped the evening in an air of ambiguity. Even her she paid a visit, at an words "If you promise to be good" could be read several ways. The young appropriate hour of the man's head and heart were inflamed with all of the feelings—discontent, day, to the church where he was to be found, and confusion, desire—that she had indirectly instilled in him. having sought him out, she Particularly in the early phases of a seduction, learn to make everything asked him whether he you say and do a kind of insinuation. Insinuate doubt with a comment here would agree to confess her. • Since he could tell at a

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  which to spin its web. The longer the web takes, the more fabulous —IBN HAZM; THE RING OF THE DOVE: A TREATISE ON THE its construction, yet few really notice it— its gossamer threads are ART AND PRACTICE OF ARAB LOV E, TRANSLATED BY A. J. nearly invisible. The spider has no need to chase for food, or ARBERRY even to move. It quietly sits in the corner, waiting for its victims to come to it on their own, and ensnare themselves in the web. Reversal In warfare, you need space to align your troops, room to maneuver. The more space you have, the more intricate your strategy can be. But sometimes it is better to overwhelm the enemy, giving them no time to think or react. Although Casanova adapted his strategies to the woman in question, he would often try to make an immediate impression, stirring her desire at the first encounter. Perhaps he would perform some gallantry, rescuing a woman in danger; perhaps he would dress so that his target would notice him in a crowd. In either case, once he had the woman's attention he would move with lightning speed. A Siren like Cleopatra tries to have an immediate physical effect on men, giving her victims no time or space to retreat. She uses the element of surprise. The first period of your contact with someone can involve a level of desire that will never be repeated; boldness will carry the day. But these are short seductions. The Sirens and the Casanovas only get pleasure from the number of their victims, moving quickly from conquest to conquest, and this can be tiring. Casanova burned himself out; Sirens, insatiable, are never satisfied. The indirect, carefully constructed seduction may reduce the number of your conquests, but more than compensate by their quality. Send Mixed Signals Once people are aware of your presence, and perhaps vaguely intrigued, you need to stir their interest before it settles on someone else. What is obvious and striking may attract their attention at first, but that attention is often short-lived; in the long run, ambiguity is much more potent. Most of us are much too obvious— instead, be hard to figure out. Send mixed signals: both tough and tender, both spiritual and earthy, both innocent and cunning. A mix of qualities suggests depth, which fascinates even as it confuses. An elusive, enigmatic aura will make people want to know more, drawing them into your circle. Create such a power by hinting at something contradictory within you. Good and Bad

• From What Are Biblical Values? (2019)

  Remarkably there is no law on relations between women. It can hardly be that love between women was not known in Israel or Judah. Neither is it the case that the authors were indifferent to what women did. Leviticus 18:23, the verse immediately after the prohibition against lying with a male, forbids relations with an animal but specifies that it is equally forbidden for a woman to give herself to an animal. So the question arises, How did sex between males differ from sex between females? The obvious answer to this question is that it involved the ejaculation of semen. This suggests that the problem is waste of seed. Yet there is no mention of seed in this passage, and other actions that involve a waste of seed, such as sex with a pregnant woman, are not prohibited. (Neither is masturbation. The problem with Onan in Genesis 38 is that he fails to honor the law of levirate marriage, which required him to raise up a son for his dead brother.) Alternatively, since a mingling of bodily fluids is involved, the issue might concern purity, perhaps because of the mingling of semen and excrement. (Excrement is not regarded as defiling in biblical law, but Ezekiel expresses revulsion when he is asked to cook his food over human dung in 4:12–13.) So none of the explanations on offer is entirely satisfactory, although each of them may have some validity. It is important in any case to see these laws in the context of the Holiness Code and of Leviticus more generally. The tone for many of the purity laws is set by the list of forbidden foods in Leviticus 11. An animal that has divided hooves and is cleft-footed and chews the cud is permitted. Such an animal is “normal.” But those that chew the cud but do not have divided hooves (such as the camel) or have divided hooves but do not chew the cud (such as the pig) are declared unclean. Mary Douglas famously argued that the problem was that the impure animals were regarded as anomalous, or rather that anomalous animals, those that deviated from some norm, were regarded as impure.32 This kind of reasoning may play a part in the prohibition of sexual relations between males, but it does not explain why the prohibition is not extended to women. Relations between women would seem to be as anomalous as relations between men. John Boswell claimed that the Hebrew word toevah , “abomination,” “does not usually signify something intrinsically evil, like rape or theft . . . but something which is ritually unclean for Jews, like eating pork or engaging in intercourse during menstruation.33 But this comparison is misleading.34 Leviticus recognizes occasions of ritual uncleanness that are not sinful, such as childbirth, seminal emission, heterosexual intercourse, and menstruation. In these cases, purification is accomplished through ritual, sacrifice, and washing.35 The word toevah is not used to refer to them.

• From The Greatest Controversies of Early Christian History (2013)

  78 Lecture 12: Did the Jews Expect a Suffering Messiah? o From the Dead Sea Scrolls and other Jewish writings, perhaps the most common expectation we fi nd for a future messiah is that he would be a future king like David, a warrior who overthrew the enemies of God to establish Israel once again as a sovereign state. This view, for example, can be found in a book written near the time of Jesus called the Psalms of Solomon, allegedly by Solomon but, in fact, not written for about 950 years after Solomon’s death. o Other Jews at the time of Jesus, however, expected a different kind of future messiah, a cosmic judge, sometimes called the Son of man, as we’ve seen in the teachings of Jesus. Still others believed that the future messiah would be a powerful priest who would rule God’s people by interpreting the Torah for them.  All these expectations had one thing in common: The future messiah would be a great and powerful ruler. There was no expectation of a future suffering messiah among the Jews prior to Christianity. Why, then, did Christians claim that the messiah was supposed to die for sins and be raised? Their logic was impeccable: Christians thought that Jesus was the messiah, and they knew that he had suffered and died. They concluded, therefore, that the messiah must suffer and die.  To most Jews, this claim seemed nonsensical. Jesus did not overcome his enemies and establish a new kingdom in Jerusalem For Jews who envisioned the messiah as a powerful fi gure, Jesus, who had been tortured and killed by the Romans, was anything but the messiah. © iStockphoto/Thinkstock.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  What drove women wild was that behind his somewhat cold and disdainful exterior, they could sense that he was actually quite romantic, even spiri- tual. Byron played this up with his melancholic airs and occasional kind deed. Transfixed and confused, many women thought that they could be the one to lead him back to goodness, to make him a faithful lover. Once a woman entertained such a thought, she was completely under his spell. It is not difficult to create such a seductive effect. Should you be known as emi- nently rational, say, hint at something irrational. Johannes, the narrator in Kierkegaard's The Seducer's Diary, first treats the young Cordelia with businesslike politeness, as his reputation would lead her to expect. Yet she very soon overhears him making remarks that hint at a wild, poetic streak in his character; and she is excited and intrigued. These principles have applications far beyond sexual seduction. To hold the attention of a broad public, to seduce them into thinking about you, you need to mix your signals. Display too much of one quality—even if it is a noble one, like knowledge or efficiency—and people will feel that you lack humanity. We are all complex and ambiguous, full of contradictory impulses; if you show only one side, even if it is your good side, you will wear on people's nerves. They will suspect you are a hypocrite. Mahatma Gandhi, a saintly figure, openly confessed to feelings of anger and venge- fulness. John F. Kennedy, the most seductive American public figure of modern times, was a walking paradox: an East Coast aristocrat with a love of the common man, an obviously masculine man—a war hero—with a vulnerability you could sense underneath, an intellectual who loved popu- lar culture. People were drawn to Kennedy like the steel filings in Wilde's fable. A bright surface may have a decorative charm, but what draws your eye into a painting is a depth of field, an inexpressible ambiguity, a surreal complexity. 194 • The Art of Seduction Symbol: The Theater Curtain. Onstage, the curtain's heavy deep-red folds attract your eye with their hypnotic surface. But what really fascinates and draws you in is what you think might be happen- ing behind the curtain—the light peeking through, the suggestion of a secret, something about to happen. You feel the thrill of a voyeur about to watch a performance. Reversal T he complexity you signal to other people will only affect them prop- erly if they have the capacity to enjoy a mystery. Some people like things simple, and lack the patience to pursue a person who confuses them.

• From Books That Have Made History: Books That Can Change Your Life (2005)

  59 Aeschylus, Oresteia Lecture 11 In the words of Aeschylus, “We only learn wisdom through suffering.” That is a line that I will repeat to you again, and have said to you already. Every generation, every individual, must, through their own suffering, in the mind of Aeschylus, fi nd wisdom to live their life. T he previous lecture discussed the Book of Job, which was composed around 500 B.C. in its present form. The Book of Job explored several themes. It explored the questions of fate and of good and evil. It asked whether things that happen to people can be called absolutely good or absolutely evil or whether good and evil are a matter of circumstances. It also asked about the existence of a connection between public morality and private morality. For the Greeks, as well as for the Hebrews, public and private morality and the questions of good and evil and fate lay at the foundation of some of the most creative literary works ever produced. The question of fate stood at the core of the most characteristic and enduring cultural statement of history’s fi rst democracy, Athens of the 5 th century B.C. Greek tragedy was developed at Athens to encourage public re fl ection on the most profound moral questions. Tragedy spoke to the belief that all political actions have moral consequences. Tragedy tells us that there is no separation between private and public morality. Tragedy comes about through sin, the sin of hybris. Hybris is outrageous arrogance, the abuse of power over the innocent. Hybris is punished by the gods. The Oresteia of Aeschylus ranks with the Oedipus of Sophocles as the greatest of these tragedies. The Oresteia is a trilogy, consisting of three plays: Agamemnon, Libation-Bearers, and Eumenides. The story of murder, revenge, duty, and divine intervention raises in stark form the dilemma of free will. Far from being automatons in the grip of a remorseless destiny, the characters in the Oresteia are possessed of free will. They make choices and they take actions that lead to disaster, both for themselves and for others. The purpose of Aeschylus in the Oresteia is to give us the wisdom to make the right choices and take the right action.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  An isolated person is weak. By slowly isolating your victims, you make them more vulnerable to your influence. Take them away from their normal milieu, friends, family, home. Give them the sense of being marginalized, in limbo— they are leaving one world behind and entering another. Once isolated like this, they have no outside support, and in their confusion they are easily led astray. Lure the seduced into your lair, where nothing is familiar. xvi • Contents Phase Three: The Precipice— Deepening the Effect Through Extreme Measures 16 Prove Yourself page 321 Most people want to be seduced. If they resist your efforts, it is probably because you ham' not gone far enough to allay their doubts— about your motives, the depth of your feelings, and so on. One well-timed action that shows how far you are willing to go to win them over will dispel their doubts. Do not worry about looking foolish or making a mistake— any kind of deed that is self-sacrificing and for your targets' sake will so overwhelm their emotions, they won't notice anything else. 17 Effect a Regression page 333 People who have experienced a certain kind of pleasure in the past will try to repeat or relive it. The deepest-rooted and most pleasurable memories are usually those from earliest childhood, and are often unconsciously associated with a parental figure. Bring your targets back to that point by placing yourself in the oedipal triangle and positioning them as the needy child. Unaware of the cause of their emotional response, they will fall in love with you. 18 Stir Up the Transgressive and Taboo page 349 There are always social limits on what one can do. Some of these, the most elemental taboos, go back centuries; others are more superficial, simply defining polite and acceptable behavior. Making your targets feel that you are leading them past either kind of limit is immensely seductive. People yearn to explore their dark side. Once the desire to transgress draws your targets to you, it will be hard for them to stop. Take them farther than they imagined— the shared feeling of guilt and complicity will create a powerful bond. 19 Use Spiritual Lures page 359 Everyone has doubts and insecurities— about their body, their self-worth, their sexuality. If your seduction appeals exclusively to the physical, you will stir up these doubts and make your targets self-conscious. Instead, lure them out of their insecurities by making them focus on something sublime and spiritual: a religious experience, a lofty work of art, the occult. Lost in a spiritual mist, the target will feel light and uninhibited. Deepen the effect of your seduction by making its sexual culmination seem like the spiritual union of two souls. 20 Mix Pleasure with Pain page 369

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  Contact with foreigners was now even more discouraged than on his movement of her robe. She first visit, but he managed to track Pei Pu down. She told him she had held out her hand for me to borne a son, in 1966, but he had looked like Bouriscout, and given the kiss and told me to sit down on the couch beside growing hatred of foreigners in China, and the need to keep the secret of her. On this occasion I her sex, she had him sent him away to an isolated region near Russia. It was certainly was not the so cold there—perhaps he was dead. She showed Bouriscout photographs Confuse Desire and Reality— The Perfect Illusion • 299 of the boy, and he did see some resemblance. Over the next few weeks they seducer. . . . After an managed to meet here and there, and then Bouriscout had an idea: he sym- interval Pauline pulled a pathized with the Cultural Revolution, and he wanted to get around the hell rope and ordered the woman who answered to prohibitions that were preventing him from seeing Pei Pu, so he offered to prepare a hath which she do some spying. The offer was passed along to the right people, and soon asked me to share. Bouriscout was stealing documents for the Communists. The son, named Wearing bathgowns of the finest linen we remained Bertrand, was recalled to Beijing, and Bouriscout finally met him. Now a for nearly an hour in the threefold adventure filled Bouriscout's life: the alluring Pei Pu, the thrill of crystal-clear bluish water. being a spy, and the illicit child, whom he wanted to bring back to France. Then we had a grand dinner served in another In 1972, Bouriscout left Beijing. Over the next few years he tried room and lingered on repeatedly to get Pei Pu and his son to France, and a decade later he fi- together until dusk. When nally succeeded; the three became a family In 1983, though, the French I left I had to promise to return again soon and I authorities grew suspicious of this relationship between a Foreign Office spent many afternoons official and a Chinese man, and with a little investigating they uncovered with the princess in the Bouriscout's spying. He was arrested, and soon made a startling confession: same way." the man he was living with was really a woman. Confused, the French or- —HARRISON BRENT, dered an examination of Pei Pu; as they had thought, he was very much a PAULINE BONAPARTE: A WOMAN OF AFFAIRS man. Bouriscout went to prison. Even after Bouriscout had heard his former lover's own confession, he was still convinced that Pei Pu was a woman. Her soft body, their intimate relationship—how could he be wrong? Only when Pei Pu, impris- The courtesan is meant to be a half-defined, floating

• From Middlesex (2002)

  On certain days, when the greenhouse was lit just so and the Obscure Object's blouse unbuttoned two buttons, when the light illuminated the scapulars dangling between the cups of her brassiere, did Calliope feel any inkling of her true biological nature? Did she ever, while the Obscure Object passed in the hall, think that what she was feeling was wrong? Yes and no. Let me remind you where all this was hap- pening. It was perfectiy acceptable at Baker & Inglis to get a crush on a fellow classmate. At a girls' school a certain amount of emotional en- ergy, normally expended on boys, gets redirected into friendships. Girls walked arm in arm at B&I, the way French schoolgirls do. They competed for affection. Jealousies arose. Betrayals occurred. It was common to come into the bathroom and hear somebody sobbing in one of the stalls. Girls cried because so-and-so wouldn't sit by them at lunch, or because their best friend had a new boyfriend who mo- nopolized her time. On top of this, school rituals reinforced an inti- mate atmosphere. There was Ring Day, where Big Sisters initiated Little Sisters into maturity by giving them flowers and gold bands. There was the Distaff Dance, a maypole without men, held in the spring. There were the bimonthly "Heart-to-Hearts," confessional meetings run by the school chaplain, which invariably ended in paroxysms of hugging and weeping. Nevertheless, the ethos of the school remained militandy heterosexual. My classmates might act cozy during the day, but boys were the number one after-school ac- tivity. Any girl suspected of being attracted to girls was gossiped about, victimized, and shunned. I was aware of all this. It scared me. I didn't know if the way I felt about the Obscure Object was nor- mal or not. My friends tended to get envious crushes on other girls. Reetika swooned over the way Alwyn Brier played Finlandia on the piano. Linda Ramirez was smitten with Sofia Cracchiolo because she was taking three languages at once. Was that it? Was the crush I had on the Object a result of her elocutionary talent? I doubted it. It felt 327 physical, my crush. It wasn't a judgment but a tumult in my veins. For that reason I kept quiet about it. I hid out in the basement bath- room to think the matter through. Every day, whenever I could, I took the back stairs down to the deserted washroom and shut myself up for at least half an hour.

• From The Greatest Controversies of Early Christian History (2013)

  Matthew, living hundreds of years later, quoted the passage in Isaiah in order to show that the prophecy had been fulfilled in Jesus, even though that’s not what the prophecy originally meant. Luke’s Account of the Virginal Conception In Luke’s account, the angel Gabriel comes to Mary, who is betrothed to Joseph, and tells her that she is to conceive a child. Mary becomes confused because she has never had sex with a man, she’s not married, and she doesn't understand how it is that she can have a child. Luke 1:35 reads: “The Holy Spirit will come upon you and the power of the most high will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be holy. He will be called the Son of God.” o This Is the angel's explanation. Mary will become pregnant by the Holy Spirit, not by a man. For that reason, the child will be called the Son of God because, in fact, God, in a very real sense, will be the father of this child. o Here, we have no word of Jesus’s mother being a virgin because she had to fulfill scripture. Here, the reason that she’s a virgin is so that Jesus, in a more literal sense, will be a son of God. Scanned by CamScanner e This story in Luke calls to mind other accounts that we have from the ancient world in non-Jewish writings about other divine men. In fact, in the ancient world, a large number of men were thought to be sons of God. Typically, these men had been supernaturally born, could perform miracles, could predict the future, and at the end of their lives, ascended to heaven. Alexander the Great and the philosopher Apollonius of Tyana are examples of two such men of supernatural birth. e Note that in these ancient stories, the mother is physically penetrated by a divine being; she is not a virgin. That’s different from what happens in the Gospel of Luke, where the Holy Spirit makes Mary pregnant, although some people have suspected that there is a suggestion in Luke of physical contact. e Even in the Jewish tradition, there are cases in which divine beings produce offspring with mortals; the most famous instance is in Genesis 6, in which we're told that the sons of God look down upon the daughters of men and saw that they were desirable. The sons came down and cohabited with the daughters, and their offspring were the Nephilim, the giants who once lived tn Canaan. e The stories of Luke and Matthew are somewhat different than the story in Genesis and the Greek and Roman myths because in the Christian tradition, God ts understood to be unique and completely transcendent, far above mortals in majesty, power, and being. Christians would not have accepted the physical implications of God having sex with a mortal woman.