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 Cult: A Love Story: Ten Years Inside a Canadian Cult and the Subsequent Long Road of Recovery (2013)

  Sheila, Limori’s co-facilitator, broke away from the group and formed a circle of her own, and Limori made the mistake of criticizing my mother’s partner, John. As I mentioned earlier, this was a common strategy on Limori’s part, but it backfired with several people, including my mother. She wisely and rightly resented the tactics Limori was employing to undermine her relationship with her partner, and by the middle of the year she had left Limori and followed Sheila off to another, short-lived meditation group. This was a tumultuous time for me; Sheila and my mother’s split from the group left me feeling that my loyalties were torn. Sheila and Limori had been an especially magical team to be around, both channelling Spirit and both working for God. The fact that they were disagreeing was confusing for me, and I wondered, “How could they disagree when they both have access to higher realms? Wouldn’t the spirits be giving the same messages to both of them?” It is a testament to both my naiveté and the state of my mind-controlled brain that I could not take a step back and think logically about this situation. It was two women with egos of their own, clashing about who was in charge. But the only answer to this problem that I was comfortable with in my black-and-white mindset was that one of them was “good” and one was “evil.” I landed on the side of the fence that housed Limori and my other friends. But it was especially difficult for me to see my mother leave, because I believed she was turning her back on God. My devotion to Limori proved strong enough to help me weather this storm, and in the summer of 1992 an opportunity came for me to live with her. She was moving out of the high-rise apartment building that she’d been living in for a few years, to a house she’d rented in a suburb of Vancouver. I was made an offer I felt was too good to refuse; I could live in the house in my own room, and keep my job outside the home. I would thus be part of God’s world and work but would not have to entirely let go of my regular life. This was an unusual offer, because those who lived with Limori, with the exception of her spouse Matthew, worked exclusively for her, although without pay. The three women who were then her personal aides had left their jobs and their homes and, in two cases, husbands, and lived a life entirely of service. They spent their days doing Limori’s bidding: meditating, travelling with her when required, working their fingers to the bone and generally making her life easier and more pleasurable. All this was in God’s name, of course, and they viewed it as an honour to be atop the highest rungs of the group hierarchy.

• From Cult: A Love Story: Ten Years Inside a Canadian Cult and the Subsequent Long Road of Recovery (2013)

  And yet, at the time, I didn’t understand why I felt Lisa was a zombie; I simply had the almost uncontrollable urge to shout it out. Coupled with my confusion about why I would think something so treacherous was my shock at how close I had come to betraying the group code of conduct by stating my thought out loud. I was so shocked that I just sat, stunned and frightened, and said nothing to Michael, blinking at him with what was, I’m sure, a stupefied look on my face. There was a battle going on in my mouth and in my heart but he couldn’t know that, and at the time I couldn’t have explained what was happening. He held my eyes for a few more seconds, waiting for my response, and then gave up and helped Lisa clear the table, chatting with her about Wolf’s Den and how much they both loved it. I immediately got to work inside myself, pushing away the feeling of wanting to point out to Michael that Lisa had become a zombie. It was too uncomfortable for me to consider, although the power of what I felt and the energy it took to repress saying it was monumental. Lisa had turned into a zombie, just like Alice. I had known her fairly well when we both lived in Vancouver and attended Wednesday and Thursday night meditations. She had started out as normal and unique as any of the rest of us; she had an excellent sense of humour, a delightfully cheeky mischievousness, a kind and caring heart and, not least of all, three beautiful children. And now she was like a clone of Alice: silent, obedient, working around the clock, absent even when she was present. While I was having my own experiences with Limori and being pulled ever more deeply into the group she helmed, I watched Lisa become what cult experts call a true believer. I could probably write an individual chapter on my observations of all of my friends in the group, but it was Lisa whose transformation was the most dramatic. When I met Lisa through the group, in 1989 or 1990, she was married and the mother of one toddler, living in a distant suburb of Vancouver and travelling into town twice each week for our evening meetings. She was also spending time with Limori at her home. When I compare and contrast Lisa’s journey with my own and with those of others in the group, I find the perfect example of the Frog in Boiling Water analogy. Lisa and I joined the group at almost the same time, and yet, while watching her journey from spiritual seeker to true believer, it became clear to me that she was not only prepared but eager to endure faster-rising temperatures than anyone else at that time. The flame burned brightly under her.

• From Another Country (1962)

  And he looked at the quiet street, at the shadows thrown by houses and trees, with a new sense of its menace, and its terrifying loneliness. And he looked at Eric again, in very much the same way he had looked at him in the film, wondering again who Eric was, and how he bore it. They entered Eric’s small, lighted vestibule and climbed the stairs to his apartment. One light, the night light over the bed, was burning, “To keep away robbers,” Eric said; and the apartment was in its familiar state of disorder, with the bed unmade and Eric’s clothes draped over chairs and hanging from knobs. “Poor Cass,” Eric laughed, “she keeps trying to establish some order here, but it’s uphill work. Anyway, the way things are between us, I don’t give her much time to do much in the way of straightening up.” He walked about, picking up odds and ends of clothing, which he then piled all together on top of the kitchen table. He turned on the kitchen light and opened his icebox. Vivaldo flopped down on the unmade bed. Eric poured two drinks and sat down opposite him on a straight-backed easy chair. Then there was silence for a moment. “Turn out that kitchen light,” Vivaldo said, “it’s in my eyes.” Eric rose and switched off the kitchen light and came back with the bottle of whiskey and put it on the floor. Vivaldo flipped off his shoes and drew his legs up, playing with the toes of one foot. “Are you in love with Cass?” he asked, abruptly. Eric’s red hair flashed in the dim light, as he looked down into his drink, then looked up at Vivaldo. “No. I don’t think I’m in love with her. I think I wish I were. I care a lot about her—but, no, I’m not in love.” And he sipped his drink. “But she’s in love with you,” said Vivaldo. “Isn’t she?” Eric raised his eyebrows. “I guess she is. She thinks she is. I don’t know. What does it mean, to be in love? Are you in love with Ida?” “Yes,” said Vivaldo. Eric rose and walked to the window. “You didn’t even have to think about it. I guess that tells me where I am.” He laughed. With his back to Vivaldo, he said, “I used to envy you, you know that?” “You must have been out of your mind,” said Vivaldo. “Why?” “Because you were normal,” Eric said. He turned and faced Vivaldo. Vivaldo threw back his head and laughed. “Flattery will get you nowhere, son. Or is that a subtle put-down?” “It’s not a put-down at all,” said Eric. “But I’m glad I don’t envy you any more.” “Hell,” said Vivaldo, “I might just as easily envy you. You can make it with both men and women and sometimes I’ve wished I could do that, I really have.” Eric was silent. Vivaldo grinned. “We’ve all got our troubles, Buster.”

• From Deceptions and Myths of the Bible (1975)

  Now Judah, Onan’s father (anything is possible in mythology), commands him to go in and lie with his brother’s wife, to preserve the seed, which, from a moral standpoint, was contrary to Onan’s conscience. He therefore refused, but instead of commending him, “God slew him.” More strange justice: a moral God slays a man for following his moral conscience, and blesses thieves and murderers. You see, this Book is preposterous save as we interpret it. This God is the nonmoral genetic principle, here the planetary seed; and from its standpoint nothing matters but its own continuity, and nothing is wrong that is conducive to its purpose. This is the central fact that we must keep in mind if we would understand the subsequent atrocities of the Bible. The rest of Chapter 38 carries on the genetic process—Judah’s misconduct with his daughter-in-law who plays the harlot. Thus the chapter is a genetic prelude and key to Joseph in Egypt. His story, in fact, begins in the same vein. He is sold to Potiphar, the guard, that is, the guardian law of matter; and the symbol of matter is woman. The Bible does not tell us her name, but it was Zuleika.1 7. And it came to pass after these things, that his master’s wife cast her eyes upon Joseph; and she said, Lie with me. 12. And she caught him by his garment, saying, Lie with me: and he left his garment in her hand, and fled, and got him out (Chap. 39). Joseph is virtuous Adam and Prometheus, and so he will have naught to do with sensuous matter, as yet. And yet how the inner contradicts the outer, for this is precisely what happens to Joseph. Since “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned,” the hussy has him thrown into that prison that is matter. Here he meets Pharaoh’s chief baker and butler, personifications of the earth’s substance and life’s sustenance. Both these dreamed strange dreams that only Joseph could interpret. Joseph’s brothers called him a dreamer and now we find him an interpreter of dreams, including Pharaoh’s. Now dreams imply sleep, and the prominence given here to sleep implies a sleepy place, Eden, “the land of Nod,” Noah’s garden, and so on. Here the Life Principle slept and dreamed. Now before we can understand Pharaoh or his dream, we must know who Pharaoh was, or more correctly, is. According to popular belief the scriptural Pharaohs were three Egyptian kings, yet nowhere, save in the Bible, is there any account of these specific kings, particularly the cruel Pharaoh; this is slander. Neither is there any record of Joseph, Moses, or even the captivity. Yet according to the Hebrews, Moses practically destroyed Egypt. Were this literally true, some record should remain. Since there is none, this itself should make us suspect it is wholly Hebrew in origin, and mythical at that. The etymology of the word “Pharaoh” is a matter of dispute.

• From Cult: A Love Story: Ten Years Inside a Canadian Cult and the Subsequent Long Road of Recovery (2013)

  Limori spoke to us for several hours, providing multiple and various reassurances that what Susan and Brent were doing was not only copacetic with God and the participants in this affair (but not Susan’s husband – I don’t know if he was aware of what was going on at the time), but also that it was important for Susan and Brent’s learning. Any impropriety or potential hurt feelings on Susan’s husband’s part were not as important as the positive energy changes that were happening as a result of Susan and Brent’s willingness to follow God’s instruction and teaching. We each left the apartment that night a degree or two warmer in our metaphorical pots on the stove than when we had walked in. I recently learned, while sharing my memories of this event with Gayle, that she was a witness to this relationship from the Wolf’s Den side of things because she happened to be there at the time. When this affair happened, Limori was still spending part of her time in the city and part of it at Wolf’s Den. A few weeks before our meeting with her, she had been up at the lodge and announced to the group that God said that Susan needed to cure her sexual issues and that the way to do this was to spend a romantic afternoon in bed with Brent in Limori’s bedroom. Gayle reports sitting in the dining room of the lodge while this was going on, having the same battle of feelings that I’ve reported having during circumstances like this – wanting to feel comfortable with God’s orders and trying to believe that God was helping Susan, but also struggling with the impropriety and deception of it all. Gayle knew and liked Susan’s husband, and her essential self was naturally repelled by Limori’s orchestration of sex for “learning purposes.” However, she kept her mouth shut, as we all did, and Susan and Brent spent not only that afternoon together, but the rest of the summer. During this time, Limori convinced Susan to stay at Wolf’s Den permanently and divorce her husband, although the relationship with Brent ended after a few months. To date this was the furthest Limori had pushed the group toward the promiscuity end of the cult spectrum, but she lost none of us by turning up the heat in this way. As time moved on and she coupled and uncoupled others in the group, we became so used to the game of Musical Beds that eventually we were immune to it; gradually, orchestrated relationships became the standard for those that took place in the group, such as the marriages between Michael and Jessica and Gary and Karen, which we would witness later. In The Guru Papers , Kramer and Alstad describe the phenomenon that I’ve called Musical Beds like this: [A] parental type of authority is at the very core of the guru’s power over disciples.

• From Wild (2012)

  I was excited to be back on the trail, 450 PCT miles north of where I’d been. The snowy peaks and high granite cliffs of the High Sierra were no longer in view, but the trail felt the same to me. In many ways, it looked the same too. For all the endless mountain and desert panoramas I’d seen, it was the sight of the two-foot-wide swath of the trail that was the most familiar, the thing upon which my eyes were almost always trained, looking for roots and branches, snakes and stones. Sometimes the trail was sandy, other times rocky or muddy or pebbly or cushioned with layers upon layers of pine needles. It could be black or brown or gray or blond as butterscotch, but it was always the PCT. Home base. I walked beneath a forest of pine, oak, and incense cedar, then passed through a stand of Douglas firs as the trail switchbacked up and up, seeing no one all that sunny morning as I ascended, though I could feel Greg’s invisible presence. With each mile that feeling waned, as I imagined him getting farther and farther ahead of me, hiking at his customary blazing pace. The trail passed from the shady forest to an exposed ridge, where I could see the canyon below me for miles, the rocky buttes overhead. By midday I was up above seven thousand feet and the trail grew muddy, though it hadn’t rained in days, and finally, when I rounded a bend, I came upon a field of snow. Or rather, what I took to be a field, which implied there was an end to it. I stood at its edge and searched for Greg’s footprints, but saw none. The snow wasn’t on a slope, just a flat among a sparse forest, which was a good thing, since I didn’t have my ice ax any longer. I’d left it that morning in the PCT hiker free box at the Sierra City post office as Greg and I strolled out of town. I didn’t have the money to mail it back to Lisa’s, much to my regret, given its expense, but I wasn’t willing to carry it either, believing I’d have no use for it from here on out. I jabbed my ski pole into the snow, skidded onto its icy surface, and began to walk, a feat I achieved only intermittently. In some places I skittered over the top of it; in others, my feet crashed through, sometimes forming potholes halfway up to my knees. Before long, the snow was packed into the ankles of my boots, my lower legs so snowburned it felt as if the flesh had been scraped away with a dull knife.

• From Another Country (1962)

  Let’s go downstairs.” He heard Lorenzo’s laugh. “What’s the matter, you shy?” “No.” He heard a giggle and a whisper. “Let’s go down.” “They’re stoned out of their heads, they don’t care.” She giggled again. “Look at them.” He closed his eyes. He felt another weight on his chest, a hand, and he looked into Harold’s face. Terribly weary and lined and pale, and his hair was damp and curled on his forehead. And yet, beneath this spectacular fatigue, it was the face of a very young boy which stared at him. “How’re you doing?” “Great. It was great charge.” “I knew you’d dig it. I like you, man.” He was surprised and yet not surprised by the intensity in Harold’s eyes. But he could not bear it; he turned his face away; then he put the weight of Harold’s head on his chest. “Please, man,” he told him after a moment, “don’t bother. It’s not worth it, nothing will happen. It’s been too long.” “What’s been too long?” And Vivaldo smiled to himself suddenly, a smile as sad as his tears, thinking of shooting matches and other contests on rooftops and basements and in locker-rooms and cars half his lifetime ago. And he had dreamed of it since, though it was only now that he remembered the dreams that he had dreamed. Feeling very cold now, inwardly cold, with Harold’s hand on his cock and Harold’s head on his chest, and knowing that: yes, something could happen, he recalled his fantasies—of the male mouth, male hands, the male organ, the male ass. Sometimes, a boy—who always rather reminded him of his younger brother, Stevie, and perhaps this was the prohibition, as, in others, it might be the key—passed him, and he watched the boy’s face and watched his ass, and he felt something, wanting to touch the boy, to make the boy laugh, to slap him across his young behind. So he knew that it was there, and he probably wasn’t frightened of it any more; but it was, possibly, too expensive for him, it did not matter enough. So he said to Harold, gently, “Understand me, man, I’m not putting you down. But my time with boys was a long time ago. I’ve been busy with girls. I’m sorry.” “And nothing can happen now?” “I’d rather not. I’m sorry.” Harold smiled. “I’m sorry, too.” Then, “Can I lie here with you, like this, just the same?” Vivaldo held him and closed his eyes. When he opened them, the sky was a great brass bowl above him. Harold lay near him, one hand on Vivaldo’s leg, asleep. Belle and Lorenzo lay wrapped in the blanket, like two dirty children. He stood up, moving too close to the edge, getting a dreadful glimpse of the waiting, baking streets. His mouth felt like Mississippi in the days when cotton was king.

• From Boys & Sex (2020)

  Chapter 2If It Exists, There Is Porn of ItMason, nineteen, met me in the lobby of his dorm at the Big Ten university where he was a sophomore, dressed in a thrift-store cardigan, gray sweatpants, thick-soled sneakers, and two different-colored argyle socks. I couldn’t tell what the length or color of his hair might be—it was completely covered, as were his eyebrows, by a neon-green stocking cap onto which he’d doodled stars and moons with a Sharpie, along with a favorite quote by Jean-Paul Sartre: “Like all dreamers, I mistook disenchantment for truth.” When I commented on his outfit, Mason looked down quizzically, almost as if he were surprised to be wearing anything at all. “I guess I’m kinda ‘dadcore,’” he said mildly. At five foot ten and 190 pounds, some might say Mason had a bit of a dad bod as well, though he was significantly trimmer than a few years before, when he played defensive lineman for his suburban Milwaukee high school football team. “I used to be pretty fat,” he admitted. “The coaches would tell you to eat as much fast food as you can. They’re like, ‘After practice, have your parents take you to McDonald’s.’” Mason was so soft-spoken, so laid-back that I had a hard time imagining him on the gridiron. The truth was, although he joined his first team at age eight, he’d never loved the game—for one thing, he hated being hit. He only continued because his two older brothers had played, so he thought he was “supposed to”; after eleventh grade, he finally bailed. “I understand it’s a boy thing to get all rugged and dirty and bruised up,” he said, “and I’m down for rugged and dirty, but I don’t like experiencing physical pain.”

• From Cult: A Love Story: Ten Years Inside a Canadian Cult and the Subsequent Long Road of Recovery (2013)

  My body knows this and clearly tells me so, while my brain remains wrapped in knots, trying to figure things out. Of course, when I was learning to accept double binds as the rule of law in Limori’s group, I knew none of this, but my body did. It never stopped telling me that what I was learning didn’t make sense. However, the sinister, dangerous beauty of authoritarian rule is that at the same time that Limori was manipulating me, she was teaching me to ignore any signals from my body or mind that would contradict her position of power. The analogy I use is that gurus teach us to build a dependence on compass points that are outside ourselves. We become completely dependent on these external references because we are simultaneously being taught that our internal compass is faulty. Not knowing any of this at the time, I became fully integrated into the spiritual community I’d found. The feeling of being specially chosen by God was reinforced by spending weeknights, some weekends and later a week at a time in a spiritual setting with others who were on the same path. My social circle had grown, but was almost entirely comprised of those in the group, and I spent most of my spare time with them as well, especially Debbie and Amber, who were both single like I was, and close to my age. I’ll reference Robert J. Lifton again, and his first criteria for thought reform, milieu control: the control of human communication within an environment. One of the elements of milieu control that Lifton cites is a mind-control guru setting up “a sense of antagonism with the outside world; it’s us against them.”9 This was certainly the case with Limori’s group; we were continually immersed in messages about the sacredness of what we were doing, the importance of our work for God. The difference between of all of us who were there, willing to listen to and follow Limori, and those who were not in the group, and therefore had less value in God’s eyes, was often brought to our attention. One of the reasons I found myself wanting to develop friendships with others who followed Limori’s teaching was that I had early on absorbed the group message that life consisted of two types of people: “us” and “them,” “them” being literally everyone on the planet who did not believe in or follow Limori. She planted the seeds of us against them in many ways, some subtle, some not so much. For example, we were a community of searchers. It was our desire for a deeper understanding of life that brought us to Limori in the first place. Therefore, most naturally, many of us spent a great portion of our time in the exploration of the world and the spiritual ideas put forth by those both ancient and recent.

• From Talk Dirty to Me: An Intimate Philosophy of Sex (1994)

  Freud wisely thought sexual identity was unstable, unreliable. One was always having to reinvent oneself as man or woman, always having to cling to the markers of gender, because otherwise they would slip away. It is one of Freud’s wisest and most enduring wisdoms, I think, whether he understood the implications another century would give it or not. Freud presumed that noting the slipperiness of gender and sex would encourage society to shore up and strengthen the artificial roles we have. Instead, a century later, gender roles seem an ill-defined mess, and each generation more marked by the clash between gender bending and gay bashing. We are proving Freud’s theory of gender confusion more true every passing day. The polarity of male and female has never been ignored. Not only have men and women rarely worn the same kinds of clothes, they have rarely been trained to move or sit or eat the same way, speak the same way, about the same things. It was presumed (by men, who largely created the social conventions) that the hopes, desires, talents, and the nature of women’s souls were different from those of men. There have been periods when men wore wigs and women didn’t, when men wore corsets and women didn’t, but the point has always been the difference itself, not its form. The masquerade of womanliness persists. Every man trying to pass as a woman knows this, and so does every woman who doesn’t wear the mask. Inasmuch as male and female exist as separate forms, they are parallel, perhaps complementary, separate and entwined within every individual and every relationship. Some mornings looking feminine seems like a lot of work because I don’t feel feminine at the time, and I don’t care, and not caring is a sign of not feeling feminine. Other times I wake with an urge to cultivate the disguise, put on lipstick and lingerie. It might be because I’m feeling a little doubtful about myself; then again, it might be because I’m more confident than usual, enjoying the game. My own comfort level with feminine disguise is fairly low, and my best results aren’t particularly vivid in the larger scheme of things. Sometimes I put on lipstick and feel like a clown. Straight men who like to cross-dress and pass as real women are fond of calling themselves “girls,” and they are almost as afraid of being mistaken for lesbians as they are of being read as cross-dressing men. Both are failures of the feminine disguise. Fashion is psychoanalysis in action.

• From The Confessions of Saint Augustine (354)

  O crooked paths! Woe to the audacious soul, which hoped, by forsaking Thee, to gain some better thing! Turned it hath, and turned again, upon back, sides, and belly, yet all was painful; and Thou alone rest. And behold, Thou art at hand, and deliverest us from our wretched wanderings, and placest us in Thy way, and dost comfort us, and say, “Run; I will carry you; yea I will bring you through; there also will I carry you.” Book VII Deceased was now that my evil and abominable youth, and I was passing into early manhood; the more defiled by vain things as I grew in years, who could not imagine any substance, but such as is wont to be seen with these eyes. I thought not of Thee, O God, under the figure of a human body; since I began to hear aught of wisdom, I always avoided this; and rejoiced to have found the same in the faith of our spiritual mother, Thy Catholic Church. But what else to conceive of Thee I knew not. And I, a man, and such a man, sought to conceive of Thee the sovereign, only, true God; and I did in my inmost soul believe that Thou wert incorruptible, and uninjurable, and unchangeable; because though not knowing whence or how, yet I saw plainly, and was sure, that that which may be corrupted must be inferior to that which cannot; what could not be injured I preferred unhesitatingly to what could receive injury; the unchangeable to things subject to change. My heart passionately cried out against all my phantoms, and with this one blow I sought to beat away from the eye of my mind all that unclean troop which buzzed around it. And to, being scarce put off, in the twinkling of an eye they gathered again thick about me, flew against my face, and beclouded it; so that though not under the form of the human body, yet was I constrained to conceive of Thee (that incorruptible, uninjurable, and unchangeable, which I preferred before the corruptible, and injurable, and changeable) as being in space, whether infused into the world, or diffused infinitely without it. Because whatsoever I conceived, deprived of this space, seemed to me nothing, yea altogether nothing, not even a void, as if a body were taken out of its place, and the place should remain empty of any body at all, of earth and water, air and heaven, yet would it remain a void place, as it were a spacious nothing.

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

  Judaism, with its religion and its sacred writings, and Graeco-Roman heathenism, with its secular culture, its science, and its art, were designed to pass into Christianity to be transformed and sanctified. But even in the apostolic age many Jews and Gentiles were baptized only with water, not with the Holy Spirit and fire of the gospel, and smuggled their old religious notions and practices into the church. Hence the heretical tendencies, which are combated in the New Testament, especially in the Pauline and Catholic Epistles.775 The same heresies meet us at the beginning of the second century, and thenceforth in more mature form and in greater extent in almost all parts of Christendom. They evince, on the one hand, the universal import of the Christian religion in history, and its irresistible power over all the more profound and earnest minds of the age. Christianity threw all their religious ideas into confusion and agitation. They were so struck with the truth, beauty, and vigor of the new religion, that they could no longer rest either in Judaism or in heathenism; and yet many were unable or unwilling to forsake inwardly their old religion and philosophy. Hence strange medleys of Christian and unchristian elements in chaotic ferment. The old religions did not die without a last desperate effort to save themselves by appropriating Christian ideas. And this, on the other hand, exposed the specific truth of Christianity to the greatest danger, and obliged the church to defend herself against misrepresentation, and to secure herself against relapse to the Jewish or the heathen level. As Christianity was met at its entrance into the world by two other religions, the one relatively true, and the other essentially false, heresy appeared likewise in the two leading forms of ebionism and gnosticism, the germs of which, as already observed, attracted the notice of the apostles. The remark of Hegesippus, that the church preserved a virginal purity of doctrine to the time of Hadrian, must be understood as made only in view of the open advance of Gnosticism in the second century, and therefore as only relatively true. The very same writer expressly observes, that heresy had been already secretly working from the days of Simon Magus. Ebionism is a Judaizing, pseudo-Petrine Christianity, or, as it may equally well be called, a Christianizing Judaism; Gnosticism is a paganizing or pseudo-Pauline Christianity, or a pseudo-Christian heathenism.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  But I was no longer an official representative of the Catholic Church, and while I listened to the arguments from the Common Room floor, I found, somewhat to my surprise, that I felt no desire to support those students who fought against the abolition of the gate hours on Christian grounds. My indifference was in part the result of anxious preoccupation with my own personal drama. I was drained and exhausted by the events of the past few weeks, and had little energy to spare for this battle. But there was more to it than that. When I thought about the issue, I found only a question mark where the old conviction should have been. I had experienced this time and again recently; it seemed as though I had discarded a good deal of my old religious self when I had taken off my habit. Beliefs and principles that I had taken so completely for granted that they seemed part of my very being now appeared strangely abstract and remote. In fact (I reflected uneasily) I did not seem to think or feel anything very strongly anymore. I had now been studying at Oxford for nearly eighteen months, and for two years before that I had been preparing for the rigorous entrance examinations to the university. Academia had its own disciplines that were as exacting in their own way as those of the convent. One of these was already ingrained in my heart and mind: do not pronounce on subjects that you know nothing about. I had now acquired a healthy respect for the limits of my own knowledge and expertise. One of the chief effects of my education so far had been an acute consciousness of everything that I did not know. What did I know about sex? I asked myself during the explosive Common Room debates. What did I know about men, relationships, or love? What did I know about the brave new world of the sixties? I knew nothing at all, and was not, therefore, entitled to an opinion. And remembering my own protests against an outworn system only a few months earlier, I felt that I should listen carefully to those who demanded change. In the meantime, there seemed no need for me to contribute.

• From The Confessions of Saint Augustine (354)

  Does not my soul most truly confess unto Thee, that I do measure times? Do I then measure, O my God, and know not what I measure? I measure the motion of a body in time; and the time itself do I not measure? Or could I indeed measure the motion of a body how long it were, and in how long space it could come from this place to that, without measuring the time in which it is moved? This same time then, how do I measure? do we by a shorter time measure a longer, as by the space of a cubit, the space of a rood? for so indeed we seem by the space of a short syllable, to measure the space of a long syllable, and to say that this is double the other. Thus measure we the spaces of stanzas, by the spaces of the verses, and the spaces of the verses, by the spaces of the feet, and the spaces of the feet, by the spaces of the syllables, and the spaces of long, by the space of short syllables; not measuring by pages (for then we measure spaces, not times); but when we utter the words and they pass by, and we say “it is a long stanza, because composed of so many verses; long verses, because consisting of so many feet; long feet, because prolonged by so many syllables; a long syllable because double to a short one. But neither do we this way obtain any certain measure of time; because it may be, that a shorter verse, pronounced more fully, may take up more time than a longer, pronounced hurriedly. And so for a verse, a foot, a syllable. Whence it seemed to me, that time is nothing else than protraction; but of what, I know not; and I marvel, if it be not of the mind itself? For what, I beseech Thee, O my God, do I measure, when I say, either indefinitely “this is a longer time than that,” or definitely “this is double that”? That I measure time, I know; and yet I measure not time to come, for it is not yet; nor present, because it is not protracted by any space; nor past, because it now is not. What then do I measure? Times passing, not past? for so I said.

• From Boys & Sex (2020)

  It may seem extreme to equate a discomfort with emotions to incest, but I understood what Cole meant. He wasn’t the first boy to use the phrase “behind a wall” when referring to feelings. Noah, a sophomore at a Los Angeles–area college, said he, too, built “a wall” to conceal any emotional vulnerability: “I felt it happen starting in high school,” he recalled. “And it’s not like my dad is some alcoholic, emotionally unavailable asshole-with-a-pulse. He’s a normal, loving, charismatic guy who’s not at all intimidating. And my group of friends—I don’t mean to put it on these guys because they’re still my best friends, the best people I’ve met in my life. Maybe they would say they had to act that way as much because of me as I say I did because of them. But there’s a block there. There’s a hesitation that I don’t like to admit. A hesitation to talk about . . . anything, really. We learn to confide in nobody. So you sort of train yourself not to feel.” There is no difference at birth between boys’ and girls’ need for connection, nor, neurologically, in their capacity for empathy—there’s actually some evidence that infant boys are the more expressive sex. Yet, from the get-go, they are relegated to a more restrictive emotional landscape. In a classic study, adults shown a video of an infant startled by a jack-in-the-box were more likely to presume the baby’s response was “angry” if first told the child was a male. Mothers of young children have repeatedly been found to talk more to their daughters and to employ a broader, richer emotional vocabulary. With sons, again, they focus primarily on one emotion: anger. (Fathers speak with less emotional range than mothers regardless of their child’s gender, though they do sing to and smile at their daughters more often, as well as more readily acknowledge girls’ sadness.) Despite that, according to Judy Y. Chu, who studies early gender socialization, preschool boys retain a keen understanding of feelings and a desire for close relationships. But by midway through kindergarten—that’s age five or six—they’ve learned from their peers to knock that stuff off, at least in public: to disconnect from feelings, shun intimacy, and become more hierarchical in their behavior. The lifelong physical and mental health consequences of that gender performance are ingrained as early as age ten. By fourteen, boys become convinced that other guys will “lose respect” for them if they talk about problems (early adolescence, incidentally, is both critically important to boys’ development and vastly understudied). They suspect girls won’t be attracted to them, either, and, frankly, they may be right: in a Canadian study, college-aged women found men who used shorter words and spoke less to be more appealing than others. And Brené Brown, who calls vulnerability the special sauce that holds relationships together, has noted that even women who claim to want guys who are emotionally transparent may grow uncomfortable around, or even reject, men who respond.

• From Talk Dirty to Me: An Intimate Philosophy of Sex (1994)

  Perhaps the way we present and talk about sex will change only when we ourselves change in fundamental ways. Our jealous, lonesome hearts have been the same for eons. I have no doubt that many a Sumerian or Hittite fretted about the same things we worry over—sexual allure, fantasies, what other people get up to behind closed doors. Until the human animal, that peculiar combination of self-consciousness and instinct, evolves into something new, we’re stuck with this conundrum, bound up in our own histories, colliding with one another’s histories, talking across and over one another—about sex, about gender, about cultural mores and regulation. About our own troubling thoughts. Sex is normal, sex is interesting, sex is scary, sex is unavoidable, and sex is wound throughout the textures of life. When I wrote Talk Dirty to Me, I was trying to solve my own sex panic—the secret fears and hopes I kept banging up against in bed. I set out, too, with a deep curiosity about those closed doors, about other people, their fears, their secrets. To me, sex was a problem and I write my way out of problems. It was a natural subject, but I had no idea what I was getting into by writing about sex. The discomfort that most people feel about sex—that is to say, about themselves as sexual beings—meant that no matter what the book contained, people were going to be uncomfortable. They were going to be confused about the book and about me. The conversations I had about this book changed depending on where I was. Many people could read the book only through their own particular lens; others found themselves in it, recognized their own experiences. In England, I got a little nudge-nudge, wink-wink, but for the most part I was asked philosophical questions on topics like the nature of the embodied self. In Canada and (to my surprise) with Italian journalists, I was seen as a sex-positive feminist and the book was largely treated as political material. In the United States, I was asked to talk dirty. I was kissed and even propositioned a few times at readings, as though anyone writing about sex was asking to have sex then and there. Others found it hard to believe that I really meant anything I said. I remember in particular a long review by a New York intellectual, a sweaty-lipped little man whose aversion to sex talk was obvious. He thought that I didn’t know my own mind; I didn’t really want to have sex at all, he wrote: I just “wanted a hug.”

• From The Argonauts (2015)

  Professor: I can’t stop thinking about the others out there, all those minds that I touched. I could feel them, their isolation, their hopes, their ambitions. I tell you we can start something incredible, Erik. We can help them. Erik Lehnsherr: Can we? Identification, that’s how it starts. And ends with being rounded up, experimented on and eliminated. Professor: Listen to me very carefully, my friend: killing Shaw will not bring you peace. Erik Lehnsherr: Peace was never an option. We bantered good-naturedly, yet somehow allowed ourselves to get polarized into a needless binary. That’s what we both hate about fiction, or at least crappy fiction—it purports to provide occasions for thinking through complex issues, but really it has predetermined the positions, stuffed a narrative full of false choices, and hooked you on them, rendering you less able to see out, to get out. While we talked we said words like nonviolence, assimilation, threats to survival, preserving the radical. But when I think about it now I hear only the background buzz of our trying to explain something to each other, to ourselves, about our lived experiences thus far on this peeled, endangered planet. As is so often the case, the intensity of our need to be understood distorted our positions, backed us further into the cage. Do you want to be right or do you want to connect? ask couples’ therapists everywhere. The aim is not to answer questions, it’s to get out, to get out of it. Flipping channels on a different day, we landed on a reality TV show featuring a breast cancer patient recovering from a double mastectomy. It was uncanny to watch her performing the same actions we were performing—emptying her drains, waiting patiently for her unbinding—but with opposite emotions. You felt unburdened, euphoric, reborn; the woman on TV feared, wept, and grieved. Our last night at the Sheraton, we have dinner at the astoundingly overpriced “casual Mexican” restaurant on the premises, Dos Caminos. You pass as a guy; I, as pregnant. Our waiter cheerfully tells us about his family, expresses delight in ours. On the surface, it may have seemed as though your body was becoming more and more “male,” mine, more and more “female.” But that’s not how it felt on the inside. On the inside, we were two human animals undergoing transformations beside each other, bearing each other loose witness. In other words, we were aging.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  But I was only eighteen years old and this had not been an isolated incident. On the very first day of our postulantship, Mother Albert, our mistress, explained that during the first years of our religious lives we would constantly be told things that seemed incredible or irrational. But they only seemed this way because we were lacking in spiritual maturity. We were learning to inhabit a different element from the rest of the world, to breathe another atmosphere. We were still fresh from “the world” and its taints; we still thought and responded like secular people, but now we had to enter into God’s perspective. Had God not told Isaiah: For my thoughts are not your thoughts, My ways are not your ways, For as high as the heavens are above the earth So are my thoughts above your thoughts, my ways above your ways. So when we were tempted to question the ideas, principles, and customs of the order, we must remember that as yet we were simply not in a position to understand. We were like babies, learning an entirely new language. One day, in the not too distant future, when we had developed spiritually, we would see all these matters quite differently. Until then, we just had to wait patiently, in what the mystics had called the cloud of unknowing, and all would be revealed. So my lying little essay on the Resurrection was part of this larger program. So was the fact that I had once, during my postulantship, spent hours treadling a sewing machine that had no needle. To be fair, this was the result of a misunderstanding, but the underlying principle still applied. I was finding all needlework very difficult indeed, and had just put the good sewing machine in our community room out of action. Furious, Mother Albert told me to practice on an older machine in the adjoining room for half an hour a day. But it had no needle. My mistake was to point this out. Mother Albert had been meaning to replace that needle for some time, but it had completely slipped her mind. She was already angry with me, however, and I was not supposed to answer back in this way. “How dare you!” she said, her voice cold with rage. “Don’t you know that a nun must never correct her superior in such a pert manner. ‘There’s no needle in that machine!’ ” she cried, tossing her head in supposed imitation of my defensive manner. “You will go to that machine next door, Sister, and work on it every day, needle or no needle, until I give you permission to stop.”

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  So to many, mixed-sex colleges seemed the next logical step. But that might take time. Women, for example, would require better bathroom facilities than the gruesome arrangements in the men’s colleges. But as a preliminary, students all over the university were demanding that the gate hours be abolished. We all had to be in college by midnight, and visitors were obliged to write their names in a book at the porter’s lodge and sign out before the gates were closed. Of course, people disregarded these gate hours. There were several places where it was very easy to climb over the college wall; everybody knew this and most turned a blind eye. If somebody were caught, he or she would suffer a mild reprimand and pay a small fine. But in these heady days of revolution, these rules seemed absurd to the more radical, and in my new official capacity, I had to attend heated meetings in which students and dons argued about them. As far as I was concerned, the question was wholly academic. There was no man clamoring to spend the night in my small college room, and the possibility of my climbing over the college wall after a love tryst was about as remote as my scaling the Great Wall of China. Moreover, until a few weeks before, I had been a very visible representative of an institution that condemned all sex outside marriage as gravely sinful. But those days were over. I still regarded myself as a Catholic, but I was aware that its traditional teachings on sexual matters had become extremely controversial within the church itself. Some of the nuns had been devastated the previous summer when Pope Paul VI’s encyclical Humanae Vitae had outlawed the practice of artificial contraception. In one of our convents, I had heard, one of the more adventurous nuns had caused a minor sensation, on the morning after the papal ruling, by putting a pill (a mere aspirin, of course) on each of the sisters’ breakfast plates. Nuns naturally had no personal stake in the pope’s decision, but the encyclical had become symbolic of the authoritarian government of the church: by ignoring the advice of married couples, doctors, and psychologists in order to reassert the church’s traditional position, Paul VI seemed to be withdrawing from the new spirit of the Vatican Council, retreating yet again from the laity, and turning his back on the plight of those married couples who were loyal Catholics but who wanted to limit their families responsibly. The Catholic Church was undergoing its own sexual revolution, but most of those who campaigned against Humanae Vitae would not have condoned the use of the pill by unmarried people, and many of them would have expected me to take a strong line on the gate hours issue and speak up for good Catholic values. A few weeks before, I would probably have done this without hesitation.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  “I know,” he said. “Or—maybe he’d just look at her, I don’t know.” “I suppose it’s all basically equivalent,” I said, thinking out loud. “I mean, unbuttoning one button is just as bad, since it’s done without her say-so. But I don’t really believe that, for some reason. I think there are levels to it. I personally would just undress her.” “What, undress her and pound your pud, man?” he cried. “You’d just unbutton a few buttons and catch a bit of tit and go, Oh, sorry I had to lay a hand on you, and then you’d fucking masturbate, man? What a waste! I’d fucking jump in there. I’d fucking yank the remote from you and start whaling on her. What’s the difference? As far as I can see there’s no difference between just tearing her clothes off and hammering on her.” “I guess not, essentially,” I said. A brown and white cab drove slowly by but it didn’t stop. “Still—there she is standing there, in a certain position, not moving. She’s dry! How could you possibly want to fuck her?” “Easy, I’d just move her arms around, adjust her legs.” “But, I’m telling you, she’s dry!” I was trying to give him every chance to reconsider and retract. “All right. Say I see this incredible chick coming out of NAPA.” “Out of what?” I asked. “Out of NAPA. Auto parts. I haul her to the alley, I rip her clothes off, and I try to stick it in her, and she’s a little dry, right? Then I notice that there’s some fucking grease in the bag she’s carrying, this tube of axle grease she’s bought for her husband, right? I squeeze some of that on my cock and I fuck her with the help of that, and then I leave her there, and she wakes up, and she goes, What the fuck? Or no, I dress her back up, and I put her back where she was in front of the store, and I take off, and I click the remote, and she’s there on the street, and there’s this tingling in her cunt, and she goes to wipe herself later, and this fucking black grease smears all over her hand, and she thinks, What the fuck is going on here?” “I don’t understand why you have to haul her off to an alley,” I said. “Why not right there in front of the NAPA store?”