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)

  The trouble was, Carol didn’t seem to have a clue. “When did you learn that he was married?” “You know, that’s one of the few things we disagree about,” she replied, still in the same upbeat, chatty tone, as if we’d been discussing shopping for shoes. “He says he told me right away, four years ago when we first met, that he was married with a little boy and a baby girl. But I don’t remember that at all. It wasn’t until two years later when we were so involved with each other that I first suspected, but I didn’t want to ask. He made such an effort to spend all his free time with me and we were so happy, so I told myself that he couldn’t have a wife or a family to go home to. Finally I did ask if he was married and I remember he told me ‘kinda, sorta.’ Well, I probably wouldn’t have allowed myself to get so much involved had I known, but by then we were hopelessly in love, so what could I do?” As I said earlier, parents in these chaotic intact marriages wreak untold havoc on their children who grow up terrified and miserable with a legacy they can’t seem to escape. There is no window of opportunity for them to use because there is no one parent who is willing and perhaps able to put in the extraordinary effort required to bring about change for the child. As mature adults in their late thirties and forties, the men and women are still prisoners of warped expectations and profound needs. Their distorted sense of relationships and hunger for love combine to seriously affect their judgment. Some were in therapy for many years trying to close the door on their unhappy history and eventually succeeded in establishing a happier life. But others, like Carol, settle into a familiar place where the child watches from the wings, a bit player in someone else’s drama. Utterly lost, drifting from relationship to relationship, or remaining stuck in unhappy marriages of their own, they settle for crumbs in love and life. PART THREE The Parentless Child: Paula P TWELVE Growing Up Lonely eople ask me all the time if there’s a best time to get a divorce. Isn’t it easier, they wonder, if the child is still very young and won’t have strong memories of the intact family? Or is it better to wait until children are nearly grown, with one foot out of the nest?

• 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 Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  And if things got out of hand, the police would come and take someone’s drunk dad or unhinged mom down to the city building. That building housed the tax collector, the public utilities, and even a small museum, but all the kids in my neighborhood knew it as the home of Middletown’s short-term jail. I consumed books about social policy and the working poor. One book in particular, a study by eminent sociologist William Julius Wilson called The Truly Disadvantaged , struck a nerve. I was sixteen the first time I read it, and though I didn’t fully understand it all, I grasped the core thesis. As millions migrated north to factory jobs, the communities that sprouted up around those factories were vibrant but fragile: When the factories shut their doors, the people left behind were trapped in towns and cities that could no longer support such large populations with high-quality work. Those who could—generally the well educated, wealthy, or well connected—left, leaving behind communities of poor people. These remaining folks were the “truly disadvantaged”—unable to find good jobs on their own and surrounded by communities that offered little in the way of connections or social support. Wilson’s book spoke to me. I wanted to write him a letter and tell him that he had described my home perfectly. That it resonated so personally is odd, however, because he wasn’t writing about the hillbilly transplants from Appalachia—he was writing about black people in the inner cities. The same was true of Charles Murray’s seminal Losing Ground , another book about black folks that could have been written about hillbillies—which addressed the way our government encouraged social decay through the welfare state. Though insightful, neither of these books fully answered the questions that plagued me: Why didn’t our neighbor leave that abusive man? Why did she spend her money on drugs? Why couldn’t she see that her behavior was destroying her daughter? Why were all of these things happening not just to our neighbor but to my mom? It would be years before I learned that no single book, or expert, or field could fully explain the problems of hillbillies in modern America. Our elegy is a sociological one, yes, but it is also about psychology and community and culture and faith. During my junior year of high school, our neighbor Pattie called her landlord to report a leaky roof. The landlord arrived and found Pattie topless, stoned, and unconscious on her living room couch. Upstairs the bathtub was overflowing—hence, the leaking roof. Pattie had apparently drawn herself a bath, taken a few prescription painkillers, and passed out. The top floor of her home and many of her family’s possessions were ruined. This is the reality of our community. It’s about a naked druggie destroying what little of value exists in her life. It’s about children who lose their toys and clothes to a mother’s addiction. Another neighbor lived alone in a big pink house.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  At every turn, people were tapping into friendship circles and alumni groups to learn about the most important test of our first year. I had no idea what was going on. There was no Ohio State alumni group—when I arrived, I was one of two Ohio State graduates at the entire law school. I suspected the Journal was important, because Supreme Court justice Sonia Sotomayor had been a member. But I didn’t know why. I didn’t even know what the Journal did. The entire process was a black box, and no one I knew had the key. There were official channels of information. But they tele graphed conflicting messages. Yale prides itself on being a low-stress, noncompetitive law school. Unfortunately, that ethos sometimes manifests itself in confused messaging. No one seemed to know what value the credential actually held. We were told that the Journal was a huge career boost but that it wasn’t that important, that we shouldn’t stress about it but that it was a prerequisite for certain types of jobs. This was undoubtedly true: For many career paths and interests, Journal membership was merely wasted time. But I didn’t know which career paths that applied to. And I was unsure how to find out. It was around this time that Amy Chua, one of my professors, stepped in and told me exactly how things worked: “Journal membership is useful if you want to work for a judge or if you want to be an academic. Otherwise, it’s a waste. But if you’re unsure what you want to do, go ahead and try out.” It was million-dollar advice. Because I was unsure what I wanted, I followed it. Though I didn’t make it during my first year, I made the cut during my second year and became an editor of the prestigious publication. Whether I made it isn’t the point. What mattered was that, with a professor’s help, I had closed the information gap. It was like I’d learned to see. This wasn’t the last time Amy helped me navigate unfamiliar terrain. Law school is a three-year obstacle course of life and career decisions. On the one hand, it’s nice to have so many opportunities. On the other hand, I had no idea what to do with those opportunities or any clue which opportunities served some long-term goal. Hell, I didn’t even have a long-term goal. I just wanted to graduate and get a good job. I had some vague notion that I’d like to do public service after I repaid my law school debt. But I didn’t have a job in mind. Life didn’t wait. Almost immediately after I committed to a law firm, people started talking about clerkship applications for after graduation. Judicial clerkships are one-year stints with federal judges. It’s a fantastic learning experience for young lawyers: Clerks read court filings, research legal issues for a judge, and even help the judge draft opinions.

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

  It’s also lucky that in this case Lisa was very young at the time of the divorce. It’s easier for an adult to play with a young child who in turn expects adults to take on authority roles. Adolescents, in contrast, have separate interests and resent being told what to do. This said, it’s a mistake to think that little children have little feelings. Little children have powerful feelings and, despite their limited skills, can disrupt a second marriage as effectively as any adolescent on the warpath. Children of all ages have strong mixed feelings about stepparents. As I noted in discussing stepfathers, the stepmother also has to realize that it takes as long to cultivate the friendship and affection of a child as it does to cultivate the friendship and affection of an adult. Two Worlds IN LOOKING AT Lisa and others who were raised within the protection of good second marriages, I must admit my surprise that the good remarriage of one or both parents was not as influential as I had expected it would be in ameliorating the child’s fear that her own adult relationships would fail. (All too often just one parent finds a happy, lasting remarriage and not both.) Although Lisa loved her father and stepmother, she never felt that their marriage was one that she would like for herself. She knew they were happy, but when she talked about them her tone was always bland. She never volunteered observations about them in the amused, pleased, or critical ways that the adults in intact families talked about their parents. For reasons that we can only speculate about, children raised in remarried families often have a greater psychological distance between themselves and their parents compared with peers raised in an intact family. It was easier for Lisa to spend time with her father and stepmother separately than to feel truly at home with both together, although she loved and admired them. She could never quite visualize them as a couple. Perhaps loyalty to the excluded parent holds the key to these feelings. As a young adolescent, Lisa took on the responsibility and role for keeping her two worlds separate. She tried with all her might to conform to the standards of each household and to say as little as possible, but she was an observant child and it was hard for her to keep everything to herself. Nevertheless, as I learned from talking with both of her parents, she was the soul of discretion. When she was fourteen, she explained to me, “I have two different lives. Everybody is happier this way. They have different expectations. Mom lets me do more of what I want. She has few rules. She understands me more. Dad expects a lot more, especially in schoolwork. He and my stepmother are into table manners and formal dinners. My parents still don’t get along. My dad and stepmother really hate my mom.

• From The Best American Erotica 2001 (2001)

  causes my all natural flesh battery to erect an electric arc of love. Then I look at Fleshlight cupped in my hands. One look at its vanilla, gooey-pink, coin-slot eye and I’m soft again. I crawl into girlfriend’s loft bed and spoon around her warm, velour hips that house her real pussy. She clenches my hands between her breasts. Ah. Better. “What about your date?” she asks. “I left her with the toaster.” © Next morning, while Girlfriend’s in the shower, I’m nursing a coffee at the kitchen table. The sun’s first rays cast a pleasing light across most of the room, and Fleshlight, which stands tall and majestic on the table, casts a shadow like a sundial. Maybe I will do it tonight. After work I feel indecisive. Instead of racing home to fuck the gooey-pink eye, I find myself at one of those bars with a million different beers. It’s midway between my house and Girlfriend’s. Three connoisseurs to my left are talking fruity bouquets. I flirt with the idea of admitting defeat. Somehow my groin is not amused by Fleshlight. Could be the vanilla, could be the slime, could be the coin-slot eye. I order a Boddingtons and watch Bartender-Girl build it the way you build a Guinness. The head rises to the top of the glass, then shrinks as the golden liquid emerges underneath in beer’s more drinkable transparent form. I mean, it’s not like I’m afraid of Fleshlight, is it? When the head settles, she pours another shot from the tap, slices off my foamy head with a but ter knife, and slides the beer in front of me. Looking down into my head of my beer, I see a coin-slot eye. I raise the glass to my lips and it smells somewhat vanilla, and when I set it down

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  When he pushed the goggles up on to his brow I knew for certain that it was his Lordship. My curiosity about him delayed my surprise that he should already be out and taking exercise only ten days after a cardiac arrest. And on the other hand something abnormal in him made me feel that all his manifestations would be unpredictable and irreconcilable with each other. He stared at me, or through me, and I wondered what to say, to what extent recognition was taking place. He doesn’t know at all who I am, I thought; he’s just looking at a pretty young man; he would hardly be able to remember me. And to confirm this he seemed suddenly not to be there himself, appeared to die out of the scene in a moment. He turned and made off slowly to the steps at the corner of the bath; Nigel, the attendant, barely looked up from his book as the old boy hauled himself out and moved with heavy, wavering steps to the stairs. I gave him time to get up them, imagining already a further incident like that in the Kensington Gardens lavatory. The shower-room was in its busy last shift: one of the sudden and unpredictable fluctuations in water temperature occurred as I came in, and there were cat-like yells as naked men leapt aside from the scalding jets. Darting movements of hands tried to regulate the taps, steam filled the air, and through it an impression of Bacchic pinkness was suffused, the colour of Anglo-Saxon flesh flushed by just tolerable heat. Warm from exercise I showered in water that was almost cold, and observed the strange variety of physical forms which were making their lingering transit back to the clean, clothed world. His Lordship was upset by the temperature of his shower, and made feeble efforts to adjust it. He looked unhappy, the rubber cap, which he kept on, intensifying the babyish whiteness of his figure. He took tiny steps back and forth, and peered around with his mouth slightly open, revealing his lower teeth à l’anglaise. Beneath his round belly candy-striped bathing shorts sagged dispiritedly. It struck me I might often have seen him here before but, so selective was my vision, never paid him any attention until he had fallen down in front of me and made his claim to be taken care of.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  At every turn, people were tapping into friendship circles and alumni groups to learn about the most important test of our first year. I had no idea what was going on. There was no Ohio State alumni group—when I arrived, I was one of two Ohio State graduates at the entire law school. I suspected the Journal was important, because Supreme Court justice Sonia Sotomayor had been a member. But I didn’t know why. I didn’t even know what the Journal did. The entire process was a black box, and no one I knew had the key. There were official channels of information. But they tele graphed conflicting messages. Yale prides itself on being a low-stress, noncompetitive law school. Unfortunately, that ethos sometimes manifests itself in confused messaging. No one seemed to know what value the credential actually held. We were told that the Journal was a huge career boost but that it wasn’t that important, that we shouldn’t stress about it but that it was a prerequisite for certain types of jobs. This was undoubtedly true: For many career paths and interests, Journal membership was merely wasted time. But I didn’t know which career paths that applied to. And I was unsure how to find out. It was around this time that Amy Chua, one of my professors, stepped in and told me exactly how things worked: “Journal membership is useful if you want to work for a judge or if you want to be an academic. Otherwise, it’s a waste. But if you’re unsure what you want to do, go ahead and try out.” It was million-dollar advice. Because I was unsure what I wanted, I followed it. Though I didn’t make it during my first year, I made the cut during my second year and became an editor of the prestigious publication. Whether I made it isn’t the point. What mattered was that, with a professor’s help, I had closed the information gap. It was like I’d learned to see. This wasn’t the last time Amy helped me navigate unfamiliar terrain. Law school is a three-year obstacle course of life and career decisions. On the one hand, it’s nice to have so many opportunities. On the other hand, I had no idea what to do with those opportunities or any clue which opportunities served some long-term goal. Hell, I didn’t even have a long-term goal. I just wanted to graduate and get a good job. I had some vague notion that I’d like to do public service after I repaid my law school debt. But I didn’t have a job in mind. Life didn’t wait. Almost immediately after I committed to a law firm, people started talking about clerkship applications for after graduation. Judicial clerkships are one-year stints with federal judges. It’s a fantastic learning experience for young lawyers: Clerks read court filings, research legal issues for a judge, and even help the judge draft opinions.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  He was a white kid from North Carolina who seemed to share my confusion about what we were experiencing during law school. We frequently retreated to the school gym to play basketball and to try to make sense of things. Charlie and I found a place near Atlanta’s Inman Park. After a year, a rent increase forced us to move to the Virginia Highlands section of the city, where we stayed for a year before another rent increase sent us to Midtown Atlanta. The two-bedroom apartment we shared in Midtown was the nicest place in the nicest neighborhood we’d yet found. Because of my growing caseload in Alabama, I didn’t get to spend much time there. My plan for a new law project to represent people on death row in Alabama was starting to take shape. My hope was to get the project off the ground in Alabama and eventually return to Atlanta to live. My docket of new death penalty cases in Alabama meant I was working insane hours driving back and forth from Atlanta and simultaneously trying to resolve several prison condition cases I had filed in various Southern states. Conditions of confinement for prisoners were getting worse everywhere. In the 1970s, the Attica Prison riots drew national attention to horrible prison abuses. The takeover of Attica by inmates allowed the country to learn about cruel practices within prisons such as solitary confinement, where inmates are isolated in a small confined space for weeks or months. Prisoners in some facilities would be placed in a “sweatbox,” a casket-sized hole or a box situated where the inmate would be forced to endure extreme heat for days or weeks. Some prisoners were tortured with electric cattle prods as punishment for violations of the prison’s rule. Inmates at some facilities would be chained to “hitching posts,” their arms fastened above their heads in a painful position where they’d be forced to stand for hours. The practice, which wasn’t declared unconstitutional until 2002, was one of many degrading and dangerous punishments imposed on incarcerated people. Terrible food and living conditions were widespread. The death of forty-two people at the end of the Attica standoff exposed the danger of prison abuse and inhumane conditions. The increased attention also led to several Supreme Court rulings that provided basic due process protections for imprisoned people. Wary of potential violence, several states implemented reforms to eliminate the most abusive practices. But a decade later, the rapidly growing prison population inevitably led to a deterioration in the conditions of confinement. We were getting scores of letters from prisoners who continued to complain about horrible conditions. Prisoners reported that they were still being beaten by correctional staff and subjected to humiliation in stockades and other degrading punishments. An alarming number of cases came to our office involving prisoners who had been found dead in their cells.

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  Helen was talking about her boyfriend Patrick, who had strangled her a little bit the night before. “What I don’t want to hear is how I don’t deserve this,” said Helen. “Last year when George hit me I remember telling some girl who kept saying, ‘Helen, you deserve better than this,’ which is just such a stupid thing to say, I mean, what does it mean?” Connie tried to remember if she had been the person to say this to Helen; it sounded like something she might say. Maybe it was a stupid thing to say, but it seemed as though something should be said. Helen still had faint blue bruises on her neck. “I said to him afterwards, like, were you trying to hurt me or something just now?” This image—Helen frozen in her gestures with utensils and cigarette—receded into another dark corner of her fluid mental field, so that other scenes could crowd the picture. There was Connie, sometimes with Deana, sometimes alone, at a nightclub where a man was saying to her, “With that hat on, you look like you’ve got a piece of the world in your pocketbook,” or at bars and parties, surrounded by well-dressed strangers who wielded their personalities like weapons and shields when they approached her, drinks in hand. In confusion, she withdrew from all these things, which were, after all, only the substance of her life, and viewed them from a distance. Job, social life, relationship. Could these really be the things she did every day? What place was she in now, what was this distance from which they all looked so appalling? It felt like a blank space, silent and empty, so lonely that if she hadn’t remembered it was all nitrous oxide–induced, she might’ve cried. She opened her eyes and looked at the stiff black hairs on Dr. Fangelli’s chin, and then at his placid, daydreaming gray eyes. Past them was the shiny, drab-colored machinery that was so forbidding to her but probably so familiar and homey to him. She shifted her gaze and met Carla’s kind, squirrel-bright brown eyes. Was Carla’s job in this office a set of symbols for her too, or was it an entity complete in itself, an efficient series of movements and interactions that emerged wholly and naturally from her needs and abilities like a bouquet of trick flowers, opening when you least expect it? “Doing all right, aren’t you?” asked Carla.

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

  And I couldn’t help it. There’s a condition kids suffer from, a compulsive disorder that makes them do things they themselves don’t understand. You can tell a child, “Whatever you do, don’t draw on the wall. You can draw on this paper. You can draw in this book. You can draw on any surface you want. But do not draw or write or color on the wall.” The child will look you dead in the eye and say, “Got it.” Ten minutes later the child is drawing on the wall. You start screaming. “Why the hell are you drawing on the wall?!” The child looks at you, and he genuinely has no idea why he drew on the wall. As a kid, I remember having that feeling all the time. Every time I got punished, as my mom was whooping my ass, I’d be thinking, Why did I just do that? I knew not to do that. She told me not to do that. Then once the hiding was over I’d say to myself, I’m going to be so good from here on. I’m never ever going to do a bad thing in my life ever ever ever ever ever—and to remember not to do anything bad, let me write something on the wall to remind myself…and then I would pick up a crayon and get straight back into it, and I never understood why. — My relationship with my mom was like the relationship between a cop and a criminal in the movies—the relentless detective and the devious mastermind she’s determined to catch. They’re bitter rivals, but, damn, they respect the hell out of each other, and somehow they even grow to like each other. Sometimes my mom would catch me, but she was usually one step behind, and she was always giving me the eye. Someday, kid. Someday I’m going to catch you and put you away for the rest of your life. Then I would give her a nod in return. Have a good evening, Officer. That was my whole childhood. My mom was forever trying to rein me in. Over the years, her tactics grew more and more sophisticated. Where I had youth and energy on my side, she had cunning, and she figured out different ways to keep me in line. One Sunday we were at the shops and there was a big display of toffee apples. I loved toffee apples, and I kept nagging her the whole way through the shop. “Please can I have a toffee apple? Please can I have a toffee apple? Please can I have a toffee apple? Please can I have a toffee apple?” Finally, once we had our groceries and my mom was heading to the front to pay, I succeeded in wearing her down. “Fine,” she said. “Go and get a toffee apple.” I ran, got a toffee apple, came back, and put it on the counter at the checkout. “Add this toffee apple, please,” I said.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  I gave a humorous snarl at this attempt at a joke. "What became of Graves, by the way?" "I wonder." The last time I'd seen him was vividly clear to me, shocking and secret. Or maybe it didn't matter. Willie ought to know these things. We were both men of the world, of different but adjacent worlds; and we were about the same age now, though Willie seemed to me to have entered the placid, incurious middle phase, the semi-sedation of hetero expectations, whilst I was still running loose, swerving and tripping through the romantic undergrowth outside. He must be thirty-five, I was thirty-three, would be thirty-four in the week after Christmas; but as always I felt that my age was only a term of convenience, an average age, and that one moment I was donnish and past it and the next a bewildered youngster scarcely out of school. I took my glasses off again to spare his embarrassment. "Do you know about Mr Croy's?" I said. "No, is it a prep-school?" "Not exactly." I gazed at the overlapping aureoles the lamps cast across the ceiling, and saw again the astounding scenes in that house. It was years after school, it was after Cambridge, in my own brief spell as a schoolmaster, on a rainy half-holiday, when I made one of my irregular, urgent visits, and found Graves there, with a crew-cut and ear-rings, and the young assistant from Levertons flushed and greedily at work on him, ribbons of saliva down his chin. "Well, the thing about it is . . . " I said. "What is it, sweetheart?" Willie asked quietly. I smirked at the new endearment. "You see . . ." "Can't you sleep?" I looked across with a frown and blush of my own. A little blonde ghost had appeared at the sofa's end, and Willie's strong arm opened towards it and brought it noiselessly into his embrace. "Sit with us for a while." I pushed my glasses on again and saw the child wriggle and shake her head and hide her face in her father's shirt-front. He rocked her for a bit, resting his chin abstractedly on her curly crown and gazing at the wall. "Sorry, Edward, do go on," he said, snugly, as if he were rocking himself to sleep. "She'll drop off in a minute or two." "Oh, it doesn't matter." He didn't protest, he seemed to find security in the reawakened claims of fatherly duty. I knew he'd prefer it if I went. Before long the child was asleep, or had wandered at least into the dream thickets on the path towards . . . I hunched forward and made half-pissed conventional noises about her beauty and temperament. When he came down again I was waiting in the hall. "How's that drink?" he said.

• From Notes of a Native Son (1955)

  I went downtown. By the time I returned, later the same day, my mother had been carried to the hospital and the baby had been born. III For my father’s funeral I had nothing black to wear and this posed a nagging problem all day long. It was one of those problems, simple, or impossible of solution, to which the mind insanely clings in order to avoid the mind’s real trouble. I spent most of that day at the downtown apartment of a girl I knew, celebrating my birthday with whiskey and wondering what to wear that night. When planning a birthday celebration one naturally does not expect that it will be up against competition from a funeral and this girl had anticipated taking me out that night, for a big dinner and a night club afterwards. Sometime during the course of that long day we decided that we would go out anyway, when my father’s funeral service was over. I imagine I decided it, since, as the funeral hour approached, it became clearer and clearer to me that I would not know what to do with myself when it was over. The girl, stifling her very lively concern as to the possible effects of the whiskey on one of my father’s chief mourners, concentrated on being conciliatory and practically helpful. She found a black shirt for me somewhere and ironed it and, dressed in the darkest pants and jacket I owned, and slightly drunk, I made my way to my father’s funeral. The chapel was full, but not packed, and very quiet. There were, mainly, my father’s relatives, and his children, and here and there I saw faces I had not seen since childhood, the faces of my father’s one-time friends. They were very dark and solemn now, seeming somehow to suggest that they had known all along that something like this would happen. Chief among the mourners was my aunt, who had quarreled with my father all his life; by which I do not mean to suggest that her mourning was insincere or that she had not loved him. I suppose that she was one of the few people in the world who had, and their incessant quarreling proved precisely the strength of the tie that bound them. The only other person in the world, as far as I knew, whose relationship to my father rivaled my aunt’s in depth was my mother, who was not there.

• From Notes of a Native Son (1955)

  But this was not New York. None of my old weapons could serve me here. I did not know what they saw when they looked at me. I knew very well what Americans saw when they looked at me and this allowed me to play endless and sinister variations on the role which they had assigned me; since I knew that it was, for them, of the utmost importance that they never be confronted with what, in their own personalities, made this role so necessary and gratifying to them, I knew that they could never call my hand or, indeed, afford to know what I was doing; so that I moved into every crucial situation with the deadly and rather desperate advantages of bitterly accumulated perception, of pride and contempt. This is an awful sword and shield to carry through the world, and the discovery that, in the game I was playing, I did myself a violence of which the world, at its most ferocious, would scarcely have been capable, was what had driven me out of New York. It was a strange feeling, in this situation, after a year in Paris, to discover that my weapons would never again serve me as they had. It was quite clear to me that the Frenchmen in whose hands I found myself were no better or worse than their American counterparts. Certainly their uniforms frightened me quite as much, and their impersonality, and the threat, always very keenly felt by the poor, of violence, was as present in that commissariat as it had ever been for me in any police station. And I had seen, for example, what Paris policemen could do to Arab peanut vendors. The only difference here was that I did not understand these people, did not know what techniques their cruelty took, did not know enough about their personalities to see danger coming, to ward it off, did not know on what ground to meet it. That evening in the commissariat I was not a despised black man. They would simply have laughed at me if I had behaved like one. For them, I was an American. And here it was they who had the advantage, for that word, Américain, gave them some idea, far from inaccurate, of what to expect from me. In order to corroborate none of their ironical expectations I said nothing and did nothing—which was not the way any Frenchman, white or black, would have reacted. The question thrusting up from the bottom of my mind was not what I was, but who.

• From Notes of a Native Son (1955)

  Germain des Près, I was discovered by this New Yorker and only because we found ourselves in Paris we immediately established the illusion that we had been fast friends back in the good old U.S.A. This illusion proved itself too thin to support an evening’s drinking, but by that time it was too late. I had committed myself to getting him a room in my hotel the next day, for he was living in one of the nest of hotels near the Gare St. Lazare, where, he said, the propriétaire was a thief, his wife a repressed nymphomaniac, the chambermaids “pigs,” and the rent a crime. Americans are always talking this way about the French and so it did not occur to me that he meant what he said or that he would take into his own hands the means of avenging himself on the French Republic. It did not occur to me, either, that the means which he did take could possibly have brought about such dire results, results which were not less dire for being also comic-opera. It came as the last of a series of disasters which had perhaps been made inevitable by the fact that I had come to Paris originally with a little over forty dollars in my pockets, nothing in the bank, and no grasp whatever of the French language. It developed, shortly, that I had no grasp of the French character either. I considered the French an ancient, intelligent, and cultured race, which indeed they are. I did not know, however, that ancient glories imply, at least in the middle of the present century, present fatigue and, quite probably, paranoia; that there is a limit to the role of the intelligence in human affairs; and that no people come into possession of a culture without having paid a heavy price for it. This price they cannot, of course, assess, but it is revealed in their personalities and in their institutions. The very word “institutions,” from my side of the ocean, where, it seemed to me, we suffered so cruelly from the lack of them, had a pleasant ring, as of safety and order and common sense; one had to come into contact with these institutions in order to understand that they were also outmoded, exasperating, completely impersonal, and very often cruel.

• From The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church's Conservative Icon (2009)

  By “law” Paul means all law, not just Jewish law, but Roman law; not just human law, but divine law; not just the written law of covenant, but the unwritten law of conscience. So what is wrong with all law and even divine law for Paul? Here is his specific criticism: “The law brings wrath; but where there is no law, neither is there violation” (4:15); “Apart from the law sin lies dead” (7:8). Does Paul mean that murder, for example, only arises from, because of, or in reaction to the law against it? Does he mean that law provokes sin, command provokes disobedience? Not at all. It is simply that law establishes knowledge, asserts that we now know this or that is wrong, this or that should not be done. If, for example, people declare that all have equal and inalienable rights, they already know that this situation should prevail, they have admitted that they know this, and, unless thereafter they follow through, their very own law condemns them. That 55-mile-an-hour sign does not provoke you unerringly to drive at 75, but it does establish that you now know going over 55 is wrong. You cannot disobey a nonexistent law. Law gives the power of knowledge (we should not do this), but it does not bring inherently with it the power of obedience (we will not do this). “I do not understand my own actions,” says Paul in the name of law, “for I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate” (7:15). This is not a personal or individual confession of inadequacy by Paul before Jewish Torah, but a structural or systemic confession by humanity before its best laws and most sincere ideals. It is the chasm between knowledge and will or conscience and action. Law, declares Paul, establishes information, but not transformation. Law informs conscience externally, declares Paul, but faith empowers it internally. Remember Philemon and Onesimus from Chapter 2? Will Philemon liberate Onesimus freely and willingly from his heart, motivated by his committed Christian faith? Or will he liberate Onesimus because he feels forced to do so simply to appease Paul or even to obey Christian law? Will he act by faith or by works of Christian law? Sin and death. Paul says, “Just as sin came into the world through one man, and death came through sin, and so death spread to all because all have sinned” (5:12). That summarizes his earlier assertion that that “all die in Adam,” that “the last enemy to be destroyed is death,” and that “the sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law” (1 Cor. 15:22, 26, 56). That is certainly clear, but is it right?

• From The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church's Conservative Icon (2009)

  Now imagine Paul telling Lydia about Jesus. Imagine, also, that he focuses on “Christ crucified” (and also, of course, on “Jesus Christ is Lord”). One cannot imagine the conversation going very far before Lydia asks, “Well, this Jesus you talk about who was crucified and then raised from the dead, what was he like?” Paul says, “Never mind what he was like—what really matters is that he was the Son of God who was crucified and died for your sins.” Such an answer would have had no meaning for her. It would have been a conversation stopper. For Paul to have told her about Jesus’s death would have had no meaning unless he also told her about what Jesus was like, about the kind of person he was. What was this person like who got crucified? What did he stand for that led to his execution by the powers that ruled his world and then his resurrection by God? Who was the Jesus who is now Lord? Proclaiming “Christ crucified” could not (and still cannot) exclude talking about what Jesus was like, what he taught, and what he stood for. The cross as substitutionary sacrifice. The second misunderstanding of Paul’s emphasis on the cross is even more important. For many centuries, the death of Jesus has been understood by most Christians as a substitutionary sacrifice for sin, as a substitutionary atonement, as this theological understanding is called. This way of seeing the death of Jesus is very familiar. Most Christians today, and most non-Christians who have heard anything about Christianity, think that the cross means, in slight variations: Jesus died for our sins. Jesus is the sacrifice for sin. Jesus died in our place. Jesus is the payment for sin. For this understanding, the notions of punishment, substitution, and payment are central. We deserve to be punished by God for our sins, but Jesus was the substitute who paid the price. The issue is how we may be forgiven by God for our sin and guilt. In our time, some Christians vigorously defend this understanding as the crucial center of the Christian gospel. Others are uncomfortable with it, troubled by the notion that God required a blood sacrifice and that Jesus was it. Some are not sure what to make of it, and others haven’t thought much about it. But most take it for granted that this is the orthodox Christian meaning of the death of Jesus. But this understanding is less than a thousand years old. It first appeared in 1097 in a theological treatise by Anselm of Canterbury. Its Latin title, Cur Deus Homo? which means “Why Did God Become Human?” states its purpose. Why did God need to become incarnate in Jesus? Anselm answers his question with the following argument: Because of our disobedience to God, we are all sinners. Forgiveness requires that compensation be made.

• From How the Bible Actually Works (2019)

  desires to commune with people of every tribe and nation. But that’s just me. Without a moment’s hesitation, I will say that I favor one story over the other, because it makes more sense to me, as that sense is informed by other experiences that I and those I know have had of God and especially given what I understand of God in my time and place as a Christian. But that’s just me. The more important point to raise is that the very presence of both Nahum and Jonah in our Bible forces us all to ponder what God is like in our here and now just as these authors did . I may be wrong in how I process what God is like, of course, but I am not wrong because I process what God is like. Our diverse Bible demands that we employ wisdom when we read it. It keeps reminding us that we too need to accept our sacred responsibility to sense how God is present in our here and now. Rewriting History The Bible is relentless in modeling for us wisdom—reading the moment, never detached from the sacred tradition but never simply repeating it, because God is always present and on the move. And so we can never just read the Bible without also pondering it, with creativity and imagination, just like the biblical authors, in order to bring these ancient oracles into our own lives. From the second we pick up the Bible and start reading it, we are drawn into an act that requires wisdom. We could go on and on with a lot of great examples from the Bible to support the point, but I’d like to give just one more: the books of 1 and 2 Chronicles. You know, those books that nobody ever reads because they basically repeat those boring stories of Israel’s kings you just slogged through in 1 and 2 Samuel and 1 and 2 Kings. But stick with me. You might come to love these books, or at least hate them less. The books of 1 Samuel through 2 Kings tell the five-hundred-year story of Israel’s monarchy from the first king, Saul (sometime before 1000 BCE), until the Babylonian exile. In my experience most people who try to read all four books one after the other usually scoop their eyes out with a spoon somewhere in the middle of 1 Kings. To actually finish 2 Kings requires a miracle. Continuing on with 1 and 2 Chronicles is superhuman. And I’m pretty sure Jesus would agree. * It doesn’t help that these latter two books come right after 2 Kings. That’s

• From Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again (2021)

  The language used to advocate responsive desire is very telling. In Basson’s work, there is much emphasis on motivation, on incentives and reasons for sex. Women are primarily motivated to sex by non-sexual reasons – by ‘rewards’ or ‘gains’ that are ‘not strictly sexual’ – such as a desire for emotional closeness, or ‘intimacy needs’. Beginning from a state of being ‘sexually neutral’ is ‘not only nonpathological’, Lori Brotto writes, but is also ‘probably quite normal for couples in long-term relationships’. She wants to ‘normalise a woman’s lack of sexual desire at the beginning of a sexual encounter’. Basson, describing her ‘incentive-motivation model’, argues – in a telling turn of phrase – that a person’s ‘arousability’ is their disposition to be ‘moved towards’ sex. That women don’t start from desire – or perhaps even have desire at all – is reflected in the language of diagnostic categories. In the fifth and current DSM, women can no longer be diagnosed with Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder, though men can. There is no category for women in the DSM which includes the term ‘desire’ – women are instead diagnosed with Female Sexual Interest/Arousal Disorder (FSIAD). The diagnostic criteria for FSIAD include not simply a reduction in erotic thoughts or fantasies, but a reduction in the initiation of sexual activity, as well as reduction in responsiveness to a partner’s initiations. Another of the diagnostic criteria is ‘interest in sexual activity’ (not desire). A woman, in the DSM, does not seem to have any sexual desire that is capable of being disordered. Of course, inclusion in the DSM is no marker of liberation, but in the manual, men have desire while women have incentives and motivation; men have desire disorders while women have disorders of interest and arousal. These semantic differences speak volumes: women’s investment in sex is seen as more cognitive, while men’s is more libidinal. Women consider sex, while men want it. Women’s interest in sex is less, well, sexual. We need to question models of desire, and to acknowledge the contexts and conditions that enable or inhibit desire. But is dispensing with the language of desire for women helpful? Or does it entrench an already troubling phenomenon – the suggestion that sex for women is primarily a matter of weighing up their interests, while men’s sexuality remains intact as a deep need?

• From The Sexual Life of Catherine M. (2001)

  While I sought out Jacques’ organ, as if I were going to yoke it up to myself, I caught a glimpse of myself in the rear-view mirror, with my body connected to his and to the whole background. When I see myself in the act, my features seem devoid of expression. There must be moments when, like everybody else, I make faces, but when I chance across a reflection in a window or mirror, I don’t look the way I think I am at that moment: my gaze is vague, looking inwards as it would onto an open space, but trusting, as if trying to find some point of reference.