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 The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  For children who have not reached adolescence—which means most children of divorce since demographers tell us that 80 percent of divorces occur by the ninth year of marriage—splitting the family to solve family problems makes no sense at all. For them, it’s a bizarre and terrifying idea. Few children are aware that their parents are suffering. Even if they have seen one or both of their parents crying or yelling or hitting, they do not make the connection between the parents’ behavior and the breakup of the marriage. Among younger children, such a connection is an abstract idea far beyond their ability to understand. It’s well known that young children cannot cope with what they don’t understand. Moreover—and this is particularly difficult for adults to grasp—children do not understand about recurrent patterns of behavior. The fact that Daddy hit Mommy several times and then said that he was sorry in no way signifies for them that this behavior is likely to reoccur. So the divorce makes no sense to them as a necessary protection for their mother. Thus children do not think of divorce as a remedy. Similarly, when they are ill they do not distinguish the pain caused by the illness from the pain of the treatment. Divorce for the child is the root cause of the trouble that follows, not the solution to the troubled marriage. They do not want to adjust their lives to the divorce. They want to make the divorce go away and restore the marriage. And they continue to hope and even expect for many years that this will indeed happen. It is hard for children to distinguish their powerful wishes from reality. I have had many discussions with children about their reconciliation hopes in which I have patiently pointed out that both of their parents are remarried. Their equally patient response has been, “If they divorced once they could again.” Parents would be surprised to learn that many children cling to their reconciliation hopes well into their teens. The wide gulf between the adult mind and the child’s mind is the same in high-and low-conflict divorces. Children in the most abusive families are often very worried about their parents. But unlike adults, they do not conclude that they or their parents would be better off if the parents separated. To the utter despair of mothers who, like Larry’s mother, have to mobilize all their courage to leave the marriage, children in violent marriages want their parents to stay together. They want the fighting to stop but they want the marriage to continue. In his campaign to bring his father back and reunite the family, Larry engaged in behavior absolutely typical of children his age and even much older. Being children they fully believe that they can rescue the family. Often they think that it is their moral duty to do so.

• From Untrue (2018)

  After all, self-censure is no small thing. In Lust in Translation, Druckerman writes about an American woman so upset by a mutual attraction she and her doctor experience but never act on that she feels she doesn’t even know who she is anymore. Another woman who is engaged to be married posts online that she is nearly suicidal about having kissed a man not her fiancé at a bar. Once. We all have friends who say they simply could never have an affair, period. And friends who say they are tempted but “would never dare.” What separates these women, the Sarahs who long for sexual adventure and autonomy yet hesitate to pull the trigger, from the Annikas who do not? The Florida women—who married early and then sought out sexual adventures with men other than their husbands—challenge our presumption that, when it comes to women and affairs, we have become more and more open and accepting, that sexual progress is an arrow shooting forward, unconstrained, into empty space. These women also offer a compelling model of female sexual entitlement. They desired sex and pursued it, their marital status and vows of fidelity notwithstanding. Depending on your point of view, you might say that since their day, we’ve had setbacks. Annika’s story brings home the way many circumstances of women’s lives that seem unrelated to their sexuality—childcare options, labor-force participation, family and peer networks—can actually determine the most intimate choices they make. A few weeks after my talk with Sarah, I found myself sitting in Annika’s cheerful, cozy kitchen, making small talk about our children and our work. Annika was warm, open, and engaging, with chicly messy blonde hair and an infectious sense of humor. She was Scandinavian and had moved to a wealthy suburb of Chicago with her family as a teen. The transition was jarring. “I was used to a high level of independence and maturity. At home, my friends and I could go out to lunch on our school lunch hour and have a beer,” she said. “But in the US, I had to bring a note from my mother if I was late for school because I was stuck in traffic. It was so infantilizing and confusing!” Sexual standards were just as bewildering. Back at home, Sex Ed “was practically demonstrated.” She laughed. A lot of information was imparted, in great detail, beginning before adolescence. What Annika didn’t learn at school, she heard from her mother, who spoke to her honestly about sex. “I remember her once saying, ‘When grown-ups with kids go away to a hotel without them, it’s a free-for-all!’…She gave me the sense that it was fun.” Indeed, sex was “sort of in the air” wherever you looked while Annika was growing up. “Where I’m from, you see [women’s breasts] in ads, on billboards. There’s not the same shameful feeling there is here. Where I’m from, prostitution is legal, for God’s sake, and that was always my baseline.”

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  There is also the simple yet terrible fact that the legal system does not provide protection against most kinds of abuse—verbal, emotional, psychological—and even worse, it does not provide context. It does not allow certain kinds of victims in. “By elevating physical violence over the other facets of a battered woman’s experience,” law professor Leigh Goodmark wrote in 2004, “the legal system sets the standard by which the stories of battered women are judged. If there is no [legally designated] assault, she is not a victim, regardless of how debilitating her experience has been, how complete her isolation, or how horrific the emotional abuse she has suffered. And by creating this kind of myopia about the nature of domestic violence, the legal system does battered women a grave injustice.” After all, in Gaslight, Gregory’s only actual crimes are murdering Paula’s aunt and the attempted theft of her property. The core of the film’s horror is its relentless domestic abuse, but that abuse is emotional and psychological and thus completely outside of the law. Narratives about abuse in queer relationships—whether acutely violent or not—are tricky in this same way. Trying to find accounts, especially those that don’t culminate in extreme violence, is unbelievably difficult. Our culture does not have an investment in helping queer folks understand what their experiences mean. When I was a teenager, there was this girl in my sophomore-year English class. She had luminous gray-green eyes and a faint smattering of freckles across her nose. She was a little swaggery and butch but also loved the same movies I did, like Moulin Rouge and Fried Green Tomatoes. We sat diagonally from each other and, every day, talked until our teacher threatened to separate us. I liked her in a way that made me excited to go to class, but I didn’t understand why. She was such a good friend and so fun and so smart I wanted to rise out of my seat and grab her hand and yell, “To hell with Hemingway!” and haul her out of class; all to some end I couldn’t quite visualize. From the corner of my eye, I stared at her freckles and imagined kissing her mouth. When I thought about her, I squirmed, tormented. What did it mean? I had a crush on her. That’s it. It wasn’t complicated. But I didn’t realize I had a crush on her. Because it was the early 2000s and I was just a baby in the suburbs without a reliable internet connection. I didn’t know any queers. I did not understand myself. I didn’t know what it meant to want to kiss another woman. Years later, I’d figured that part out. But then, I didn’t know what it meant to be afraid of another woman. Do you see now? Do you understand?

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  We are never quite as passive as we seem in this. In the back of our minds, we are aware that we are taking an extra long time to get back to someone or putting a dig in a comment, but at the same time we can also pretend to ourselves and to others that we are innocent. (We humans are capable of holding such conflicting thoughts at the same time.) In general, we must consider this everyday version of passive aggression to be merely an irritating part of social life, something we are all guilty of. We should be as tolerant as possible of this low- grade passive aggression that thrives in polite society. Some people, however, are chronic passive aggressors. Like the more active aggressors, they generally have a high degree of energy and need for control but at the same time a fear of outright confrontation. They often had domineering or neglectful parents; passive aggression became their way of getting attention or asserting their will while avoiding punishment. Such behavior becomes a pattern for them as adults, as they often repeat the same types of strategies that worked in childhood. (If we observe the passive aggressor closely enough, we can often see the manipulative child peeking through the adult mask.) These chronic types operate in a personal or work relationship, in which their drip-drip passive-aggressive strategies can take effect on an individual over time. They are masters at being ambiguous and elusive—we can never quite be sure that they are attacking us; perhaps we are imagining things and are paranoid. If they were directly aggressive, we would get angry and resist them, but by being indirect they sow confusion, and exploit such confusion for power and control. If they are truly good at this and get their hooks into our emotions, they can make our lives miserable. Keep in mind that actively aggressive types can generally be quite passive-aggressive at times, as Rockefeller certainly was. Passive aggression is simply an additional weapon for them in their attempts at control. In any event, the key to defending ourselves against passive aggressors is to recognize what they are up to as early as possible. The following are the most common strategies employed by such aggressors, and ways to counter them. The Subtle-Superiority Strategy: A friend, colleague, or employee is chronically late, but he or she always has a ready excuse that is logical, along with an apology that seems sincere. Or similarly, such individuals forget about meetings, important dates, and deadlines, always with impeccable excuses at hand. If this behavior repeats often enough, your irritation will increase, but if you try to confront them, they very well might try to turn the tables by making you seem uptight and unsympathetic. It is not their fault, they say—they have too much on their mind, people are pressuring them, they are temperamental artists who can’t keep on top of so many irritating details, they are overwhelmed.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  We walked together through bleak, twilit streets to the Underground, and rode into town on the Central Line. Over, or rather under, the noise of the train and in the near-emptiness of the carriage he confided in me. His confidences, though, were not about himself: they were the secrets and crises of others that he had observed. He told me feelingly about how the boy Alastair’s mother had died of leukaemia, and the struggles of the father to look after him properly. He said how Roy, at the Corry, had come off his motorbike and severed a tendon in his knee. Something more came out about the Nantwich Cup too—how Charles had created it in memory of a friend of his who had been killed, though Bill was vague about the details, and when I asked him how he had met Charles, assumed a kind of dignified obtuseness, as though so intimate and critical a subject could not be so lightly approached. Could there have been something between the two men? It was the recurrent problem of imagining them twenty, thirty years earlier—before I was born, when Charles was the age that Bill was now, and Bill was Phil’s age. He was looking forward then, building up his body like a store, a guarantee of his place in the future. Now the future had come he still hoarded and packed it. It sat opposite me, massive, gathering bullishly at the shoulders, the open shirt showing a broad V of black hair, the thighs splayed ponderously on the slashed and stitched upholstery of the banquette. I knew I could never love it or want it, but it was an achievement, this armour of useless masculinity. As we travelled west, through lit City stations like Bank and St Paul’s which I thought purposeless at night till I recalled that Charles, for one, would need them, that here and there in the City that was emptied for the weekend, people, eccentric or indigenous, still lived, my thoughts deserted Bill (though I still looked at him), and fled on down the rails to Phil. We were nearly at Tottenham Court Road, where Bill would have to change for the Northern Line, when he said, with tense cheeriness: ‘How’s young Phil getting on these days?’ I didn’t know how much he knew. Phil and I had been discreet, though together, at the Corry; but it was hard to tell what, in the crowded complex of the Club, had been seen, guessed or overheard. I gave a smile which could be read as a happy admission or an amiable ignorance. ‘All right, I should say,’ I offered neutrally.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  Still, the mind of man is reluctant to consider itself as the product of chance, or the passing result of destinies over which no god presides, least of all himself. A part of every life, even a life meriting very little regard, is spent in searching out the reasons for its existence, its starting point, and its source. My own failure to discover these things has sometimes inclined me toward magical explanations, and has led me to seek in the frenzies of the occult for what common sense has not taught me. When all the involved calculations prove false, and the philosophers themselves have nothing more to tell us, it is excusable to turn to the random twitter of birds, or toward the distant mechanism of the stars. VARIUS MULTIPLEX MULTIFORMIS Marullinus, my grandfather, believed in the stars. This tall old man, emaciated and sallow with age, conceded to me much the same degree of affection, without tenderness or visible sign, and almost without words, that he felt for the animals on his farm and for his lands, or for his collection of stones fallen from the sky. He was descended from a line of ancestors long established in Spain, from the period of the Scipios, and was third of our name to bear senatorial rank; before that time our family had belonged to the equestrian order. Under Titus he had taken some modest part in public affairs. Provincial that he was, he had never learned Greek, and he spoke Latin with a harsh Spanish accent which he passed on to me, and for which I was later ridiculed in Rome. His mind, however, was not wholly uncultivated; after his death they found in his house a trunk full of mathematical instruments and books untouched by him for twenty years. He was learned in his way, with a knowledge half scientific, half peasant, that same mixture of narrow prejudice and ancient wisdom which characterized the elder Cato. But Cato was a man of the Roman Senate all his life, and of the war with Carthage, a true representative of the stern Rome of the Republic. The almost impenetrable hardness of Marullinus came from farther back, and from more ancient times. He was a man of the tribe, the incarnation of a sacred and awe-inspiring world of which I have sometimes found vestiges among our Etruscan soothsayers. He always went bareheaded, as I was criticized for doing later on; his horny feet spurned all use of sandals, and his everyday clothing was hardly distinguishable from that of the aged beggars, or of the grave tenant farmers whom I used to see squatting in the sun. They said that he was a wizard, and the village folk tried to avoid his glance.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  Abdul tugged my shirt out at the waist, and ill-temperedly opened my fly and pulled my trousers down about my knees. I saw his cock curving and buckling in his pants with anticipation before he turned me round and spread me out. It was one of those worn, foot-thick chopping tables, eaten away by incessant jointings and slicings into a deep, curved declivity. I waited greedily, and yelped as his hand came down, and again and again, tenderising my ass with wild, hard slaps. Then he crossed the room in front of me and yanked down from a shelf a catering-size drum of corn oil. It fell cold on my skin as he splashed it from a height then slicked my cheeks and slot, driving a strong unhesitating finger in. I heard the graphic rustle of his clothes, his trousers dropping to the floor with the weight of the keys in his pocket. He fucked me with a thrilling leisured vehemence, giving each long stroke, when it was in to the balls, a final questing shunt that had me gurgling with pleasure and grunting with pain, my cock chafing beneath me against the table’s furred and splintered edge. It was quickly finished, and he slurped out of me, and slapped me again. ‘Hmm,’ he said noncommittally; then, ‘Fuck off out of here, man.’ 12I was woken by Andrews crossing the wide expanse of the bedroom and tugging back the curtains with a cruel flourish, shouting, ‘Good morning, my Lord.’ Behind him came the naked Abdul, pushing a trolley on which his cock, perhaps three feet long, was supported, curved and garnished like an eel. He wheeled it to the bedside and I looked at it anxiously: it had a dull grey-black sheen to it, and a slight pile, like wet suede. ‘I’m going to be very late,’ I said, sitting up abruptly and kicking back the bedclothes. ‘I have to give my maiden speech in the House at ten o’clock.’ Then other sounds broke in, and I woke up, heart racing, in the pink penumbra of my own room. It had gone eleven, but I had not slept until four or five, turning over the uncomfortable revelations of the previous evening. If Charles had been orchestrating his campaign, as I sometimes believed he had, then he had brought it brilliantly and comprehensively to a head. The prison was the key. The one unspeakable thing that no one had been able to tell me threw light on everything else, and only left obscure the degrees of calculation and coincidence in Charles’s offering me his biography to write—a task he must have known I could never, in the end, accept.

• From Untrue (2018)

  But in the Chicago suburb where they landed for her father’s work, bodies and sex were a different animal. “In school here, Sex Ed was called ‘health,’ and they basically just explained how the sperm fertilized the egg and then told you not to do it.” Annika put out some cookies and made a pot of tea while we talked, and when I asked her for adjectives to describe her sex life, she hooted and said, “Colorful!” She started at the beginning. A newcomer who struggled, initially, to find her place, Annika nevertheless managed to make some friends at her new high school. She also found a boyfriend and began having sex toward the end of her senior year, though she felt confused by the way her American peers went about it. “At home, kids my age decided to have sex and sometimes girls even had sleepovers at home with their boyfriends. Our parents knew and let it happen. But here—it was very secretive. Lots of kids were doing it, but girls especially weren’t talking about it. It was a very gossipy environment. There were scary rumors about two girls at school having abortions. Well, what do you expect? Nobody talked about birth control! People went to parties and got really drunk and had sex there. It was a big change to wrap my mind around.” She moved to California for college and met Dan, a California native who found her exotic and fun. Dan was rather shy, tall and fit—“I loved his body right away,” Annika recalled—and, having already graduated, had a job in their midsized college town. Annika, meanwhile, was just beginning her college adventure, so initially she turned Dan down when he asked her out. But he persisted, and she found that his maturity and competence were as compelling and attractive to her as his body. “He was a real man with a job and a life in a sea of all these frat boys getting wasted all the time.” They began dating toward the end of her freshman year. From the beginning, Annika felt they were less than ideally aligned, sexually speaking. “I felt like I initiated sex almost all the time, and that made me self-conscious.” She didn’t bring it up, and while it progressively ate away at her feelings of worth—“I kept wondering whether there was something wrong with me”—Annika loved their time together hiking, cooking at his place, and talking. Soon things were serious and exclusive, “though it wasn’t something we ever talked about; we just kind of fell into it, because that’s how it was done,” Annika told me, staring out the window for a moment, seemingly lost in thought.

• From Combating Cult Mind Control: The Guide to Protection, Rescue and Recovery from Destructive Cults (1988)

  Once I had officially dropped out of college, I was sent back to the campus to recruit new members. The leaders told me I could go back to finish my degree the following year. A lie. When I later told them about my desire to teach, they informed me that the Family—as members refer to the movement—was planning to start its own university in a few years, and I could be a professor there. I was also ordered to set up an official student club at Queens College, even though I was no longer a student. The club was to be called Collegiate Association for the Research of Principles, or C.A.R.P. Within a couple of weeks I had done so, and I was made C.A.R.P.’s director. Although I told students that C.A.R.P. had no affiliation with any other group, I received all of my instructions and funding from the director of the Unification Church in Queens. We sponsored free lectures, poetry readings, anti-Communist political rallies, and free movies, all while seeking to meet potential converts. I recruited several people, and they were instructed to drop out of college, too. At that point, we were the most successful C.A.R.P. chapter in the country. I was in a high-speed daze of exhaustion, zeal, and emotional overload. I generally slept between three and four hours a night. Almost all my time that first year was spent recruiting and lecturing. Occasionally I went out with others “fundraising”—selling flowers or other items on the street—to support the house and the operations of the New York church. I was also ordered to fast for three days, drinking only water. Later, I would do three separate seven-day fasts, having been told that fasting was an “indemnity condition” (a supposed restitution to God for some past transgression). During my time in the group, I was directly involved in many political demonstrations, though they were usually organized under the names of front groups. (Over the years, the Moon organization has created and used hundreds of such groups.)34 For example, in July 1974, I was sent to the Capitol steps with several hundred Moonies, under the name National Prayer and Fast for the Watergate Crisis, to fast for three days and demonstrate in support of then-President Richard Nixon. Before joining the Moonies I had had several arguments with my father at the dinner table about Nixon. My father, a businessman, was at that time a die-hard Nixon supporter. I voted for McGovern and had always felt strongly that Nixon was not to be trusted. In fact I had often referred to him as a crook. Now, in the heat of my Moon-inspired prayer vigil for Nixon, I called my parents from Washington to tell them about the fast. Because my father had always been so staunchly behind Nixon, I thought he would be pleased. When I told him the news, my father said to me, “Steven, you were right. Nixon’s a crook!”

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  I’m a brave man and I want to be brave even with this wound. I want to understand how I can live with it and with everything else that happened over there, the dead corporal from Georgia and all the other crazy things. I find a place on the side of the hospital where the old men sit. The grass is very green and they feed the birds from their wheelchairs. They are the old men from the First World War, I am sure of that, and I sit next to them and feed the birds too. I just want to slow down, the whole thing has been moving much too fast, like some wild spinning top, and now I am trying to catch my breath, I am trying to figure out what this whole terrible thing is about. I read the paper every morning and it always says the war is going on and the president is sending more troops, and I still tell people, whoever asks me, that I believe in the war. Didn’t I prove it by going back a second time? I look them all right in the eye and tell them that we are winning and the boys’ morale is high. But more and more what I tell them and what I am feeling are becoming two different things. I feel them tearing, tearing at my whole being, and I don’t want to talk about the war anymore. I feed the birds and the squirrels. I want things to be simple again, things are just too confusing. The hospital is like the whole war all over again. The aides, the big tall black guys who spit and sit on the toilet bowls all night, they’re doing it again, they’re picking up the paralyzed drunks from the hallways, they’re wheeling them along the halls to the rooms. Now I see them strapping the men into big lifts, hoisting the drunken bodies back into their beds. And the aides are laughing, they’re always laughing the way people laugh at a sideshow, it’s all pretty funny to them. We are like a show of puppets dancing on strings for them, dancing to maddening music. They’re wheeling all the guys in from the halls because it’s late and it’s time for all of the bodies to be put back into the beds, for all the tubes to be hooked up, and the drip of the piss bags to start all over again. There’s a train in the Bronx, somewhere out over the Harlem River, and it sounds so good, it sounds warm and wonderful like the heater back home, like the Long Island train that I used to hear as a kid. Pat, the new guy, is crying for help. He’s puking into the cup again and he’s cursing out everybody, he’s cursing the place and the nurses, the doctors.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  I am not of those who say that their actions bear no resemblance to them. Indeed, actions must do so, since they alone give my measure, and are the sole means of engraving me upon the memory of men, or even upon my own memory (and since perhaps the very possibility of continuing to express and modify oneself by action may constitute the real difference between the state of the living and of the dead). But there is between me and these acts which compose me an indefinable hiatus, and the proof of this separation is that I feel constantly the necessity of weighing and explaining what I do, and of giving account of it to myself. In such an evaluation certain works of short duration are surely negligible; yet occupations which have extended over a whole lifetime signify just as little. For example, it seems to me as I write this hardly important to have been emperor. Besides, a good three-quarters of my life escapes this definition by acts: the mass of my wishes, my desires, and even my projects remains nebulous and fleeting as a phantom; the remainder, the palpable part, more or less authenticated by facts, is barely more distinct, and the sequence of events is as confused as that of dreams. I have a chronology of my own which is wholly unrelated to anything based on the founding of Rome, or on the era of the Olympiads. Fifteen years with the armies have lasted less long than a single morning at Athens; there are people whom I have seen much of throughout my life whom I shall not recognize in Hades. Planes in space overlap likewise: Egypt and the Vale of Tempe are near, indeed, nor am I always in Tibur when I am here. Sometimes my life seems to me so commonplace as to be unworthy even of careful contemplation, let alone writing about it, and is not at all more important, even in my own eyes, than the life of any other person. Sometimes it seems to me unique, and for that very reason of no value, and useless, because it cannot be reduced to the common experience of men. No one thing explains me: neither my vices nor my virtues serve for answer; my good fortune tells more, but only at intervals, without continuity, and above all, without logical reason.

• From The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us (2017)

  Although there are fifty-four species of manakins, and therefore fifty-four variations on their breeding and social relationships, we can make a few general observations about manakin leks. To recapitulate the basics: Leks are groups of sexually displaying males. Within the lek, each male defends a specific territory of his own, but the territory includes nothing of value except the opportunity to mate. From species to species, there can be a lot of variation in the size and spatial distribution of these territories and in the number of territories within a lek (from a few to dozens). In some species the territories can be as small as three to fifteen feet or so wide, in others as large as thirty feet or more. In some the territories are closely packed and adjacent, in others more widely dispersed. In a few species, males defend “solitary” lek territories that are so far apart that they are outside visual and acoustic contact with one another. The males may occupy their territories for anywhere between four and nine months of the year, with some populations being on lek nearly the entire year except when the males are molting their feathers. Outside the manakins, leks have evolved in a wide variety of other birds, in various insects, fishes, frogs, and salamanders, and in a few ungulates and fruit bats. Confusion about the nature and function of leks dates back to Darwin himself, who was divided in his assessment. He discussed avian lek behavior in several sections of The Descent of Man. In “The Law of Battle” section he interpreted it in the context of male-male competition, which is how most evolutionary biologists have discussed it ever since, down to this very day. But in the “Vocal Music” and “Love-Antics and Dances” sections he wrote about lekking birds in the context of female mate choice. For over a century, Darwin was unusual in considering even the possibility that leks could have anything to do with female choice. In the absence of a working theory of female mate choice or sexual autonomy, it’s not surprising that theorists of the evolutionary origin of leks have generally conceived of lek organization as a purely male-male competition phenomenon—a product of the struggle for male dominance or control. The traditional hypothesis is that the males within a lek fight it out ritualistically in order to establish a hierarchy, and the females acquiesce to mate with the dominant male. Females would thereby win the male who was by definition “the best,” because he had fought his way to the top of the hierarchy. This fit in well with the Wallacean notion that all sexual selection is a form of adaptive natural selection.

• From Untrue (2018)

  “I grew up in a predominantly black neighborhood,” Philyaw told me when we spoke by phone one afternoon and later when we spoke in person in New York City. “And being part of the church shaped me growing up, even though my mom and grandmother didn’t go. They’d say, ‘When I get myself together I’ll go to church.’” Philyaw laughed when I said I had never heard of this belief, that you had to work hard on and improve yourself before you could even show up at church. Wasn’t church for everyone? Philyaw patiently explained that it might have been not wanting to be judged for their behavior, including their sexuality, that kept some of the women she grew up with from going, and that in this way “the church was like a mirror.” She herself would attend with neighborhood friends or her half sister as a kid but was “off and on about it once I was in my preteen years. I fell into that dichotomy of good/bad and struggled mightily to be good. There was definitely a strong current of ‘Keep your legs closed.’” Sex, she told me, “was not something that sounded pleasurable. Boys and men took it from you, was the basic message.” She faded away from the church as a preteen, but by her junior and senior years of high school, she was going again. With a young woman’s sensibility this time around, Philyaw tried to make sense of it all. “Every once in a while there was a story—the choir director or youth minister of one church or another would run off with somebody’s daughter.” The contradictions she saw, like the Madonna/whore dichotomy messaging she heard, were “all very confusing and very confining,” she told me with a sigh.

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

  The more sophisticated specimens of ancient romance, especially the works of Achilles Tatius and Heliodorus, are in such total command of the tradition that it is illuminating to consider how they exploit the tensions inherent in the standard repertoire of the genre. Leucippe and Clitophon is an arch melodrama, a wry, winking, sensational elaboration of the erotic romance. Its most notable idiosyncrasies form carefully wrought statements on the conventions of romantic literature. For example, the first two books of the novel are conducted according to the rules of classical pederasty, as Clitophon is tutored in seduction by his expert cousin Clinias. Achilles Tatius exploits the rich possibilities offered by this conceit. It allows him to burlesque Plato, and it serves as a kind of valediction to same-sex eros before the heterosexual romance is able to proceed. But the first two books of Leucippe and Clitophon are also a deliberate manipulation of the rules of the romantic genre, especially the delicate protocols of feminine respectability. The scenes of Clitophon’s tutelage in the arts of seduction call into question the distinction between volition and coercion, a distinction that is a foundational prop of the romantic genre. The classical model of pederasty, which institutionalized a certain amount of bluff and ambiguity around the question of the boy’s consent, provided a ready contrast to the strident unwillingness of the romantic heroine to consent to anything but marriage. Clinias tells Clitophon that “when you have a tacit understanding that the next step is the big deed, even those who are ready to surrender prefer the appearance of compulsion, to let the façade of force deflect the shame of consent.” If the girl’s resistance is “hearty,” Clinias warns not to use “force, because she is not yet persuaded.” But “as soon as her will begins to weaken, act your role in this play, lest your drama fail to reach its conclusion.” The theatrical metaphor is clever, for the astute reader will realize that Clinias does not know exactly what sort of drama he has been cast in. His assumptions about the will—as a murky and pliable thing—contradict the social grammar of female respectability and of the romance in general.18

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  All this is equipment of unequal value; the tools are more or less dulled; but I have no others: it is with them that I must fashion for myself as well as may be some conception of my destiny as man. When I consider my life, I am appalled to find it a shapeless mass. A hero's existence, such as is described to us, is simple; it goes straight to the mark, like an arrow. Most men like to reduce their lives to a formula, whether in boast or lament, but almost always in recrimination; their memories oblingingly construct for them a clear and comprehensible past. My life has contours less firm. As is commonly the case, it is what I have not been which defines me, perhaps, most aptly: a good soldier, but not a great warrior; a lover of art, but not the artist which Nero thought himself to be at his death; capable of crime, but not laden with it. I have come to think that great men are characterized precisely by the extreme position which they take, and that their heroism consists in holding to that extremity throughout their lives. They are our poles, or our antipodes. I have occupied each of the extremes in turn, but have not kept to any one of them; life has always drawn me away. And nevertheless neither can I boast, like some plowman or worthy carter, of a middle-of-the-road existence. The landscape of my days appears to be composed, like mountainous regions, of varied materials heaped up pell-mell. There I see my nature, itself composite, made up of equal parts of instinct and training. Here and there protrude the granite peaks of the inevitable, but all about is rubble from the landslips of chance. I strive to retrace my life to find in it some plan, following a vein of lead, or of gold, or the course of some subterranean stream, but such devices are only tricks of perspective in the memory. From time to time, in an encounter or an omen, or in a particular series of happenings, I think that I recognize the working of fate, but too many paths lead nowhere at all, and too many sums add up to nothing. To be sure, I perceive in this diversity and disorder the presence of a person; but his form seems nearly always to be shaped by the pressure of circumstances; his features are blurred, like a face reflected in water.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  Direct observation of man is a method still less satisfactory, limited as it frequently is to the cheap reflections which human malice enjoys. Rank, position, all such hazards tend to restrict the field of vision for the student of mankind: my slave has totally different facilities for observing me from what I possess for observing him, but his means to do so are as limited as my own. Every morning for twenty years, old Euphorion has handed me my flask of oil and my sponge, but my knowledge of him ends with his acts of service, and his knowledge of me ends with my bath; any effort on the part of either emperor or slave to learn more straightway produces the effect of an indiscretion. Almost everything that we know about anyone else is at second hand. If by chance a man does confess, he pleads his own cause and his apology is made in advance. If we are observing him, then he is not alone. They have reproached me for liking to read the police reports of Rome, but I learn from them, all the time, matter for amazement; whether friends or suspects, familiars or persons unknown, these people astound me; and their follies serve as excuse for mine. Nor do I tire of comparing the clothed and the unclothed man. But these reports, so artlessly detailed, add to my store of documents without aiding me in the least to render a final verdict. That this magistrate of austere appearance may have committed a crime in no way permits me to know him better. I am henceforth in the presence of two phenomena instead of one, the outer aspect of the magistrate and his crime. As to self-observation, I make it a rule, if only to come to terms with that individual with whom I must live up to my last day, but an intimacy of nearly sixty years' standing leaves still many chances for error. When I seek deep within me for knowledge of myself what I find is obscure, internal, unformulated, and as secret as any complicity. A more impersonal approach yields informations as cool and detached as the theories which I could develop on the science of numbers: I employ what intelligence I have to look from above and afar upon my life, which accordingly becomes the life of another. But these two procedures for gaining knowledge are difficult, and require, the one, a descent into oneself, the other, a departure from self. Out of inertia I tend, like everyone else, to substitute for such methods those of mere habit, thus conceiving of my life partly as the public sees it, with judgments ready-made, that is to say poorly made, like a set pattern to which an unskillful tailor laboriously fits the cloth which we bring him.

• From Sin: The Early History of an Idea (2012)

  God is still just in holding the sinner culpably responsible, however, even if the sinner cannot help but sin, for two reasons. First, the sinner (since he was “in Adam”) suffers the universal penalty of Adam’s sin—the will’s diminished capacity—justly. And, second, though he cannot help but sin, he nonetheless sins freely in the sense that nothing outside of himself compels him to sin. A person sins because he chooses to sin. Since his sin is his own choice, he is punished justly.18 In his Confessions, Augustine brilliantly explored these ideas on sin and its consequences in part through the device of autobiographical narrative. In books 1 through 8 he provides a story about his own past, of his search for happiness (and, thus, for God, the only true source of happiness) in all the wrong places: in academic success, in social acceptance, in sex, in Manichaeism, in professional advancement. The story of his search peaks in book 8, where he provides an unforgettable portrait of his own indecision and divided will. In the end he converts, but only, he says, with the help of heaven.19 Augustine’s life story ends with his baptism in book 9; but the Confessions goes on. Fully 40 percent of the work’s eighty thousand words still remain, philosophically rich discussions of memory (book 10), time (book 11), language, scriptural interpretation, divine revelation (books 12 and 13). What emerges clearly from the soaring speculations of these difficult final books is the question that had driven Augustine’s tale from its beginning: How can fallen humankind know God? Why is finding God so difficult? After all, Augustine notes, God has provided many ways to know him: physical creation, which is his handiwork; his scriptures and his church; his divine Son, “who is the mediator between You the One and us the many” (11.29.39, with deliberate reference to the Platonic contrast). And the soul itself naturally longs for God (Confessions 1.1,1, quoted on p. 116). Especially via the higher part of the soul, the mind made according to the divine image and likeness, God has provided the royal road back to himself (Gen 1.26–27; Confessions 13.34,49). By turning inward, Augustine urges, a person can find God, who is “deeper in me than I am in me” (3.6,11). But it is precisely here, in the deep self of the seeker, that sin has wrought its worst damage. Sin has ruptured the human self by tearing apart will and affect, thought and feeling. (For Augustine as for Origen, as for the Platonic tradition generally, knowing, willing, and loving are all functions of a unified mind.) As now constituted, a person cannot choose what she loves; and if she loves, she cannot will herself not to love. Love, the motor of the will, escapes the mind’s control. After the Fall, every person’s loves—good intentions notwithstanding—are misdirected carnaliter, and people act accordingly. What moves a person is not what she knows, but what she wants.

• From Untrue (2018)

  I was older now, and my work as a writer afforded me some autonomy in my intellectual and professional pursuits. I queried therapists and open-minded mommy friends and experts, and turned again to anthropology and primatology, particularly the writing of feminist anthropologists, and the new, game-changing sex research being done by women. What was sexually normal for women? Why was it so hard to be true? My list of questions was long. I wanted to know: Who is the woman who steps out? And why does she do it? Are her motivations different from a man’s? What separates the woman who actually cheats from those who merely think about it? How do women who stray experience their infidelity, and live with it? And why do we as a society feel the way we do about these women—riveted, triggered, convinced that they must be contained, corrected, and punished, that something must be done about them? Finally, I wondered, what larger lessons can the adulteress teach us—about female longing and lust, about our fixation on women we deem “deceptive,” and about the past, present, and future of partnership and commitment?

• From Sin: The Early History of an Idea (2012)

  What, then, is the mechanism of this redemption? How does Christ’s death by these hostile cosmic powers work to effect a universal salvation? On this issue Paul mobilizes the language of sanctuary, sacrifice, purity, and holiness—the language, in other words, of the Jerusalem temple. Christ serves as the sacrifice par excellence. But what sort of sacrifice? Here Paul is less than clear. His reference to Christ as a Paschal lamb in 1 Corinthians 5.7 is, upon examination, less descriptive than hortatory: in that passage, Paul urges his gentile followers to cleanse themselves of the “leaven” of pride in view of the fact that the (metaphorical) holiday of Passover is already underway. The Paschal image, in other words, refers to Jewish timekeeping (leaven should be long gone by the beginning of Passover!), not to a sacrificial death on the part of Christ. (And Paschal offerings, in any case, are not “for sin.”) On the other hand, 2 Corinthians 5.21 and Romans 8.3 do present Christ forthrightly as a “sin sacrifice,” but this also seems confusing: sin sacrifices did not cleanse the sinner, but the sancta of the temple. The hilasterion of Romans 3.25, finally, is a sacrifice of expiation; but again, the image is extremely confusing (and, I think, confused): In Leviticus, penitent humans bring the offering (16.6–22); in Romans, it is God who brings Jesus. The closest analogy to a sacrifice in Paul’s time that would bear away the sinner’s sin would be the scapegoat of Yom Kippur (Lv 16.21). But Paul nowhere uses this image and, besides—a nod to the eucharistic traditions—no one eats scapegoats. In brief, to present Christ’s death as a sacrifice, Paul falls back on the wellsprings of his tradition—Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy—but no single biblical paradigm controls the metaphor.25

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  At first she was big and velvety, like the jaguar, with that silky, deceptive strength of the feline species, the crouch, the spring, the pounce; then she grew emaciated, fragile, delicate, almost like a cornflower, and with each change thereafter she went through the subtlest modulations—of skin, muscle, color, posture, odor, gait, gesture, et cetera. She changed like a chameleon. Nobody could say what she really was like because with each one she was an entirely different person. After a time she didn’t even know herself what she was like. She had begun this process of metamorphosis before I met her, as I later discovered. Like so many women who think themselves ugly she had willed to make herself beautiful, dazzlingly beautiful. To do this she first of all renounced her name, then her family, her friends, everything which might attach her to the past. With all her wits and faculties she devoted herself to the cultivation of her beauty, of her charm, which she already possessed to a high degree but which she had been made to believe were nonexistent. She lived constantly before the mirror, studying every movement, every gesture, every slightest grimace. She changed her whole manner of speech, her diction, her intonation, her accent, her phraseology. She conducted herself so skilfully that it was impossible even to broach the subject of origins. She was constantly on her guard, even in her sleep. And, like a good general, she discovered quickly enough that the best defense is attack. She never left a single position unoccupied; her outposts, her scouts, her sentinels were stationed everywhere. Her mind was a revolving searchlight which was never dimmed. Blind to her own beauty, her own charm, her own personality, to say nothing of her identity, she launched her full powers toward the fabrication of a mythical creature, a Helen, a Juno, whose charms neither man nor woman would be able to resist. Automatically, without the slightest knowledge of legend, she began to create little by little the ontological background, the mythic sequence of events preceeding the conscious birth. She had no need to remember her lies, her fictions—she had only to bear in mind her role. There was no lie too monstrous for her to utter, for in her adopted role she was absolutely faithful to herself. She did not have to invent a past: she remembered the past which belonged to her. She was never outflanked by a direct question since she never presented herself to an adversary except obliquely. She presented only the angles of the ever-turning facets, the blinding prisms of light which she kept constantly revolving. She was never a being, such as might finally be caught in repose, but the mechanism itself, relentlessly operating the myriad mirrors which would reflect the myth she had created. She had no poise whatsoever; she was eternally poised above her multiple identities in the vacuum of the self.