Contempt

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 Bad Behavior (1988)

  Jarold had been in love with Magdalen. At breakfast, he would look at her as she sullenly pushed her egg around her plate while the other children chattered, as if her bored, pale face gave him the energy to go to work. He read all of her papers from school; he always wanted to take her picture. She could make him do anything for her. He’d let her stay out all night; he let her spend the weekend in New York when she was fifteen. Wherever she was, even when she was traveling around Canada with a busload of hippies and a black person, if she cabled home for money, Jarold sent it immediately. If he tried to be strict, she would tease and flatter him. The few times he lost his temper and punished her, she punished him with silence. When he dragged her up the stairs and spanked her, she ran away from home. She called a week later and spoke to Virginia, but she hung up when Jarold got on the phone. It was the first time that Virginia had seen Jarold cry. “Magdalen has real charm,” said Jarold to Lily. “She can charm the birds off the trees. You don’t have any of that. You don’t have any personality at all.” Virginia was surprised at the intensity of Jarold’s dislike for Lily. And, although Lily never expressed it openly, Virginia felt that Lily hated him too. Lily never argued with him; she barely acknowledged his presence. When she had to speak to him, her voice was clipped and subtly condescending, as though he were beneath defiance. One evening, Lily and Virginia were sitting together in lawn chairs in the back yard when Charles and Daniel approached them with a big piece of wood. The boys had shot four squirrels, skinned them and nailed the skins to it. They displayed the skins proudly, and Virginia praised them. Lily said nothing until they left. Then she said that she thought it was sick. “I know, it seems awful,” said Virginia. “But they’re little boys and it means something to them. They do it to impress their father.” Virginia was unnerved by the sudden look of contempt on Lily’s face. “I know,” she said. — Lily’s stay gradually became more and more unpleasant and eventually became a discomfiting memory that hung over the house for quite a while. But there were bright spots that stood out of the unpleasantness so vividly that they seemed to come from somewhere else altogether.

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  “It’s not a question of handling it.” She said these last two words very sarcastically. “So far everything you’ve said to me has been incredibly banal. You haven’t presented anything in a way that’s even remotely attractive.” She sounded like a prim, prematurely adult child complaining to her teacher about someone putting a worm down her back. He felt like an idiot. How had he gotten stuck with this prissy, reedy-voiced thing with a huge forehead who poked and picked over everything that came out of his mouth? He longed for a dim-eyed little slut with a big, bright mouth and black vinyl underwear. What had he had in mind when he brought this girl here, anyway? Her serious, desperate face, panicked and tear-stained. Her ridiculous air of sacrifice and abandonment as he spread-eagled and bound her. White skin that marked easily. Frightened eyes. An exposed personality that could be yanked from her and held out of reach like…oh, he could see it only in scraps; his imagination fumbled and lost its grip. He looked at her hatefully self-possessed, compact little form. He pushed her roughly. “Oh, I’d do anything with you,” he mimicked. “You would not.” She rolled away on her side, her body curled tightly. He felt her trembling. She sniffed. “Don’t tell me I’ve broken your heart.” She continued crying. “This isn’t bothering me at all,” he said. “In fact, I’m rather enjoying it.” The trembling stopped. She sniffed once, turned on her back and looked at him with puzzled eyes. She blinked. He suddenly felt tired. I shouldn’t be doing this, he thought. She is actually a nice person. For a moment he had an impulse to embrace her. He had a stronger impulse to beat her. He looked around the room until he saw a light wood stick that his grandmother had for some reason left standing in the corner. He pointed at it. “Get me that stick. I want to beat you with it.” “I don’t want to.” “Get it. I want to humiliate you even more.” She shook her head, her eyes wide with alarm. She held the blanket up to her chin. “Come on,” he coaxed. “Let me beat you. I’d be much nicer after I beat you.” “I don’t think you’re capable of being as nice as you’d have to be to interest me at this point.” “All right. I’ll get it myself.” He got the stick and snatched the blanket from her body. She sat, her legs curled in a kneeling position. “Don’t,” she said. “I’m scared.” “You should be scared,” he said. “I’m going to torture you.” He brandished the stick, which actually felt as though it would break on the second or third blow. They froze in their positions, staring at each other. She was the first to drop her eyes. She regarded the torn-off blanket meditatively. “You have really disappointed me,” she said. “This whole thing has been a complete waste of time.”

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  “I’m an architect. Do you want some coke?” “No, thank you.” He looked at her as though she were completely mad and walked away. She quickly moved off the spot of this encounter toward a roomful of people in groups, determined to hear at least part of an interesting conversation. She was stopped by a man who wanted to know if she was Italian. She said no and escaped him. She was continuing toward a courtly group of large, aging transvestites who were the most welcoming and companionable bunch she’d seen all night when a very handsome black man took her elbow and said, “Bonsoir. Are you French?” “No.” “Italian?” “No.” His faced changed a shade. “What are you?” “I’m from Illinois.” He dropped her elbow with unmistakable contempt and turned his back to her. That was the last straw. She walked out of the club and into the street, not even bothering to look for Babette. She walked ten blocks in her high heels, and was almost home when she decided to stop at a neighborhood lesbian bar. It would be comfortable, she thought, to get drunk in the company of jovial women. And it was, until a pleasant conversation she thought she was having turned into a nasty argument, before she ever saw the turn, about whether or not bisexual women are lying cowards. Then she staggered home. At twelve o’clock the next day she answered the phone, making her voice as feeble and throaty as possible, the better to parry Babette with a muddled excuse. She didn’t recognize his voice right away, not even when he mentioned Christine’s, and he was beginning to sound insulted when she finally said, “Oh, hi,” her voice wobbling pleasingly (to her) and making her feel like a tousle-haired, mascara-smeared movie babe in a rumpled bed. He was in the neighborhood, and he wanted to meet her for lunch. “Gosh, I’d like to, but I was out late last night, I’m still in bed and I look awful.” “Well, I’m disappointed, but maybe some other time.” “Well, maybe I could…where are you?” Half an hour later she was sitting with him in an expensive eggs Benedict place, with waiters in black pants mincing about as a piped-in symphony identified this as a haven of Western civilization. “I tried to call you before, but you weren’t at home and then I got incredibly busy. There’s been a lot of fuss over a particular couple of blocks in the Village.” “I’ve heard,” she said. “Actually, I wish they weren’t doing that to the Village. It’s going to be awfully sterile soon.” “That may be,” he said easily. “But it would be sterile, not to say precious, if the old neighborhood were artificially maintained.”

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  This was a discouraging idea, but it was better than thinking that the entire place was a nonsensical bore that people actually longed to belong in. “Hi,” said a man with a hideous hunk of hair. “I like your hat.” “Thank you.” “Would you like to dance?” “No, thank you.” She looked right at him when she said this, meaning to convey that she didn’t consider him repulsive, but that she was deep in thought and couldn’t dance. It didn’t work; he stared away with a ruffled air and then said, “Do you want to go to the Palladium?” “No, thank you.” He looked at her with theatrical scorn and she noticed that he was actually very handsome. “Are you French?” he asked. “No. Why do you ask? Do I sound French?” “I don’t know. You just look like you might be. Are you a dancer?” “No. Why?” “I don’t know. You have to be something.” He looked as if he was about to spit. “What do you do?” she asked. “I’m an architect. Do you want some coke?” “No, thank you.” He looked at her as though she were completely mad and walked away. She quickly moved off the spot of this encounter toward a roomful of people in groups, determined to hear at least part of an interesting conversation. She was stopped by a man who wanted to know if she was Italian. She said no and escaped him. She was continuing toward a courtly group of large, aging transvestites who were the most welcoming and companionable bunch she’d seen all night when a very handsome black man took her elbow and said, “Bonsoir. Are you French?” “No.” “Italian?” “No.” His faced changed a shade. “What are you?” “I’m from Illinois.” He dropped her elbow with unmistakable contempt and turned his back to her. That was the last straw. She walked out of the club and into the street, not even bothering to look for Babette. She walked ten blocks in her high heels, and was almost home when she decided to stop at a neighborhood lesbian bar. It would be comfortable, she thought, to get drunk in the company of jovial women. And it was, until a pleasant conversation she thought she was having turned into a nasty argument, before she ever saw the turn, about whether or not bisexual women are lying cowards. Then she staggered home. At twelve o’clock the next day she answered the phone, making her voice as feeble and throaty as possible, the better to parry Babette with a muddled excuse. She didn’t recognize his voice right away, not even when he mentioned Christine’s, and he was beginning to sound insulted when she finally said, “Oh, hi,” her voice wobbling pleasingly (to her) and making her feel like a tousle-haired, mascara-smeared movie babe in a rumpled bed.

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

  But in Lucian’s satirical account of an all- male society on the moon, the boys played the part of wives until twenty- fi ve, then en- tered the ranks of the husbands.  Th e notion of “Greek love” is misleading on two counts. In the fi rst place, practices and attitudes varied across the Greek world, and classical Athenian culture was hardly standard. Even in Athens, pederasty could not be washed of its aristocratic connotations, and the law was ambiguous enough that the adult partner might fi nd himself liable for criminal viola- tion. It is an even greater error, though, to insinuate that Greek love was not an indigenous Roman practice. Th is charge goes back to late republican moralists, who, in chauvinistic terms, decried the eff ects of underlying so- cial change as the by- product of Hellenization. In reality, Greek and Ro- man codes of sexual behavior shared profound structural similarities: a sexual act was composed of an active and a passive partner, and masculinity required the insertive role. Roman pederasty was distinct in small but deci- sive ways. Th e Romans had an absolute abhorrence for the violation of freeborn boys; the body of the Roman man was impenetrable, and there was no twilight of indeterminacy between boyhood and manhood. Th is prohibition was backed by the fearsome power of public law. Th e severity of the rule eliminated the zone of ambiguity that had proven such fertile ground in the Greek philosophical tradition for celebrating the mentorship of the lover and beloved.   FROM SHAME TO SIN Th e great chasm separating Roman pederastic practice from earlier mod- els was the omnipresence of slaves. Classical Greece had seen an unpre ce- dented expansion of the slave trade, which laid the institutional and com- mercial foundations for the Roman slave system. Slaves, already in Greek culture, were subjected to untrammeled sexual abuse. But the Romans built one of history’s most enduring and extensive slave systems, and the own- ership of slaves would gradually shape virtually every social institution in Roman life, including pederasty. Th e laws defl ected lust away from the freeborn body, and slaves provided a ready outlet. In Roman pederasty, elaborate courtship before the act was replaced by the master’s authority, and intentional obscurity about the nature of the act gave way to a coarse simplicity about the physical mechanics of plea sure. Th e most striking physical artifact of Roman pederasty, the Warren Cup, simultaneously cel- ebrates love between males and explores the dependence of the practice on the institution of slavery. A silver goblet of the early fi rst century, the War- ren Cup juxtaposes two panels. On one side a young master, wearing a wreath, penetrates an even younger slave. On the reverse, the two fi gures are many years older. Th e slave lowers himself onto the master, who is again wearing a wreath.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  So I just lay there with a stiff prick up against her ass and I gave it to her by mental telepathy. And by Jesus, she must have gotten the message sound asleep though she was, because it wasn’t any trouble going in by the stable door and besides I didn’t have to look at her face which was one hell of a relief. I thought to myself, as I gave her the last hook and whistle—“me lad, it’s limburger cheese and now you can turn over and snore. . . .” It seemed as if it would go on forever, the sex and death chant. The very next afternoon at the office I received a telephone call from my wife saying that her friend Arline had just been taken to the insane asylum. They were friends from the convent school in Canada where they had both studied music and the art of masturbation. I had met the whole flock of them little by little, including Sister Antolina who wore a truss and who apparently was the high priestess of the cult of onanism. They had all had a crush on Sister Antolina at one time or another. And Arline with the chocolate eclair mug wasn’t the first of the little group to go to the insane ayslum. I don’t say it was masturbation that drove them there but certainly the atmosphere of the convent had something to do with it. They were all spoiled in the egg. Before the afternoon was over my old friend MacGregor walked in. He arrived looking glum as usual and complaining about the advent of old age, though he was hardly past thirty. When I told him about Arline he seemed to liven up a bit. He said he always knew there was something wrong with her. Why? Because when he tried to force her one night she began to weep hysterically. It wasn’t the weeping as much as what she said. She said she had sinned against the Holy Ghost and for that she would have to lead a life of continence. Recalling the incident he began to laugh in his mirthless way. “I said to her—well you don’t need to do it if you don’t want . . . just hold it in your hand. Jesus, when I said that I thought she’d go clean off her nut. She said I was trying to soil her innocence—that’s the way she put it. And at the same time she took it in her hand and she squeezed it so hard I damned near fainted. Weeping all the while, too. And still harping on the Holy Ghost and her ‘innocence,’ I remembered what you told me once and so I gave her a sound slap in the jaw. It worked like magic. She quieted down after a bit, enough to let me slip it in, and then the real fun commenced. Listen, did you ever fuck a crazy woman?

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

  e famously rigorous sexual prescriptions of Musonius are detailed in a passage titled “On Sexual Pleasures.” Th roughout his argument, a dualism between “luxury” and “self- control” guides his logic. Th e life of luxury led men to lust after excessive and abnormal sexual pleasures with both women and men. Th e man with sōphrosynē, by contrast, would not compass sexual relations with a prostitute, a slave, or a respectable woman other than his wife. “Anyone who is not craven or evil must reckon that only sex within marriage and for the generation of children is just, for it is lawful. But sexual aff airs that have in view the love of plea sure are unjust and unlawful, even within marriage.” Th ere is no denying the severity, and the novelty, of such austere prescriptions. Musonius would limit sexual intercourse not merely to marriage, but to procreative endeavors within marriage. Th e logic of his argument was impeccable, his view of “nature” highly restrictive. Within a system of values that placed no store in plea sure as such, sex had no positive mea sure. Th e procreative strictures of Musonius were not a “Pythagorean” code clothed in Stoic language; he was little preoccupied with the problem of wasted seed as a seepage of vital force or lost soul- matter. His conclusions and his logic were authentically Stoic. What is creative about the tantalizing passages of Musonius that survive is an instinct for fi nding powerful objective correlatives to his moral principles. He spoke with unpre ce dented clarity of the behavioral rules implied by the devaluation of plea sure. What made Musonius such a sensation was his stunning and provocative ability to legislate a code of personal behavior. His strictures on the use of slaves and prostitutes may have been no more eff ective than his (far less celebrated) disapproval of shoes, but they are in the same spirit and equally account for the spread of his legend. Musonius had an impact that continued to reverberate in lasting and unexpected ways through the work of his pupils. Musonius inspired the remarkable social thought of Dio Chrysostom, who carried his teacher’s legacy into the world of grand public oratory. Dio’s seventh opus, the “Euboean Oration,” is a unique masterpiece of Greco- Roman rhetoric. Th e speech vividly narrates an encounter with two peasant families living in the  F R O M S H A M E TO S I N idyllic hinterland of a Greek town. Th e natural virtue of their rustic life was contrasted, in the second half of the speech, with the vices of the contemporary Greek city. Th

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

  Within only a few decades the procreative purpose of marriage would gradually become a conceptual justification for sex. The shadowy figure of Athenagoras, a Christian philosopher writing in the reign of Marcus Aurelius, took this fateful step. His Embassy is among the finest of the second-century apologies. Athenagoras accused the Romans of a litany of formulaic sexual excesses. “They set up a marketplace for fornication and set up unholy stations offering every shameful pleasure to the young. They refrain not even from males, men practicing terrible things with men.… These adulterers and pederasts reproach us, who are eunuchs and monogamists.” Athenagoras focuses his disdain for contemporary sexual practice not on any lurid rumor of imperial debauchery, nor on improbable tales of private debasement, but rather on the institutionalized dispensations of pleasure, visible in the light of day. He pointed out that Christians owned slaves, whose omnipresent eyes were the surest form of surveillance in the Roman world, and yet no plausible charges against Christian chastity could be alleged. The exceptional purity of the Christians was emphasized by the fact that they, in obedience to the words of Jesus, did not even look with lust upon women. In an empire full of cities that offered endless visual allurements, such restraint would have stood as no minor accomplishment. But ocular abstemiousness was not the end of Christian virtue. “Since we have a hope for eternal life, we hold in contempt the affairs of this life, up to and including the pleasures of the soul. We consider her a wife whom we have taken according to our own laws, exclusively for the purpose of procreation. Just as the farmer sows his seeds in the earth and waits for the harvest without sowing again, so for us procreation is the limit of our desire.”36

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  An unbuttoned fly was enough to put her in a trance. It was almost shameful the things Curley made her do. He took pleasure in degrading her. I could scarcely blame him for it, she was such a prim, priggish bitch in her street clothes. You’d almost swear she didn’t own a cunt, the way she carried herself in the street. Naturally, when he got her alone he made her pay for her highfalutin’ ways. He went at it coldbloodedly. “Fish it out!” he’d say, opening his fly a little. “Fish it out with your tongue!” (He had it in for the whole bunch because, as he put it, they were sucking one another off behind his back.) Anyway, once she got the taste of it in her mouth you could do anything with her. Sometimes he’d stand her on her hands and push her around the room that way, like a wheelbarrow. Or else he’d do it dog fashion, and while she groaned and squirmed he’d nonchalantly light a cigarette and blow the smoke between her legs. Once he played her a dirty trick doing it that way. He had worked her up to such a state that she was beside herself. Anyway, after he had almost polished the ass off her with his back-scuttling he pulled out for a second, as though to cool his cock off, and then very slowly and gently he shoved a big long carrot up her twat. “That, Miss Abercrombie,” he said, “is a sort of Doppelgänger to my regular cock,” and with that he unhitches himself and yanks up his pants. Cousin Abercrombie was so bewildered by it all that she let a tremendous fart and out tumbled the carrot. At least, that’s how Curley related it to me. He was an outrageous liar, to be sure, and there may not be a grain of truth in the yarn, but there’s no denying that he had a flair for such tricks. As for Miss Abercrombie and her high-tone Narragansett ways, well, with a cunt like that one can always imagine the worst. By comparison Hymie was a purist. Somehow Hymie and his fat circumcised dick were two different things. When he got a personal hard on, as he said, he really meant that he was irresponsible. He meant that Nature was asserting itself—through his, Hymie Laubscher’s, fat circumcised dick. It was the same with his wife’s cunt. It was something she wore between her legs, like an ornament. It was a part of Mrs. Laubscher but it wasn’t Mrs. Laubscher personally, if you get what I mean. Well, all this is simply by way of leading up to the general sexual confusion which prevailed at this time. It was like taking a flat in the Land of Fuck.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  Mine is to do or die, as Kipling says: I plug on, through one victim after another, the telephone ringing like mad, the place smelling more and more vile, the holes getting bigger and bigger. Each one is a human being asking for a crust of bread; I have his height, weight, color, religion, education, experience, etc. All the data will go into a ledger to be filed alphabetically and then chronologically. Names and dates. Fingerprints too, if we had the time for it. So that what? So that the American people may enjoy the fastest form of communication known to man, so that they may sell their wares more quickly, so that the moment you drop dead in the street your next of kin may be apprised immediately, that is to say, within an hour, unless the messenger to whom the telegram is entrusted decides to throw up the job and throw the whole batch of telegrams in the garbage can. Twenty million Christmas blanks, all wishing you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, from the directors and president and vice-president of the Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company, and maybe the telegram reads “Mother dying, come at once,” but the clerk is too busy to notice the message and if you sue for damages, spiritual damages, there is a legal department trained expressly to meet such emergencies and so you can be sure that your mother will die and you will have a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year just the same. The clerk, of course, will be fired and after a month or so he will come back for a messenger’s job and he will be taken on and put on the night shift near the docks where nobody will recognize him, and his wife will come with the brats to thank the general manager, or perhaps the vice-president himself, for the kindness and consideration shown. And then one day everybody will be heartily surprised that said messenger robbed the till and O’Rourke will be asked to take the night train for Cleveland or Detroit and to track him down even if it costs ten thousand dollars. And then the vice-president will issue an order that no more Jews are to be hired, but after three or four days he will let up a bit because there are nothing but Jews coming for the job. And because it’s getting so very tough and the timber so damned scarce I’m on the point of hiring a midget from the circus and I probably would have hired him if he hadn’t broken down and confessed that he was a she.

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  He could feel his eyes become clouded with privacy as he slipped discreetly into a sheltering cave of sexual fantasy. His focus wobbled, he slipped out again. In Ann Arbor he had pierced his ear, he had worn a beret sometimes. He had written articles in the student paper on labor unions. He had brought Andy Warhol to Cinema I. He saw himself drunk on the curb outside the Del Rio, talking with Wilson and vomiting. They were talking about politics and sex, Wilson mainly talking politics, since he rarely fucked anybody. Joel had just met Sara. “She’s great. She’s every man’s dream. I can’t tell you how, because she made me promise not to.” He turned and barfed. Everything was so important in Ann Arbor, so fraught with the tension held tight in the bud of fantasy before it bursts into gaily striped attempt. “I have this fantasy of becoming an anarchist on the Left Bank,” he said to Sara. “Throwing bombs and creating a disturbance.” “I want to become a good painter,” she said. “Or a great painter.” “Listen,” he said, raising himself above her on his elbow. “I want you to be strong. You’ve come so far in spite of everything. I want you to be successful.” “I am strong,” she said. Her eyes were serene. “I’m stronger than anyone else I know.” He cleared his eyes and looked once more at the querulous buildings sweating in the afternoon heat. Of course, she hadn’t been strong at all. He remembered the tremulous whine coming out of the phone during their last conversation. “I’m scared,” she’d wept. “I feel like I don’t exist, I can’t eat, I can’t do anything. I want to kill myself.” “Look, I grew up in a normal, happy family,” he’d said. “I’m well adjusted. I can’t identify with this self-esteem crisis, or whatever it is you’ve got. Anyway, we’ve only known each other for a few months and I’m not obligated to listen to your problems. You should call a psychiatrist, and anyway I have to take a bath right now.” He couldn’t stand weak women. — He went to a nightclub in the evening with his friend Jerry and two of Jerry’s hulking lawyer friends. They went to a club that made them and a lump of other people line up outside the door for inspection by a haughty doorman who might or might not admit them, depending on whether or not he liked their appearance. Joel and Jerry, with the lawyers, had to wait an inordinate length of time while a series of habitual clubbers insouciantly gained entrance. It could’ve been humiliating, but instead it was an intriguing form of entertainment, a piece of behavior to be observed. One of the lawyers kept saying, “I don’t want to go in there anyway. This is a drag. Let’s go somewhere else.” “No, it’s really good in here,” said Jerry. “You’ll see.”

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

  Nowhere is this extreme breadth and pliability of the word’s meaning clearer than in the Apostolic Decree, the code of conduct laid down at the Council of Jerusalem to impose mini- mal standards of purity on gentile converts. Th e inclusion of porneia on the short list— the very short list— of moral imperatives signals the uncanny power of the term to condense a whole bundle of expectations about the use of the body.  Th e inclusion of porneia in the Apostolic Decree is a signal that the word’s adoption by Paul in First Corinthians was not circumstantial. Th e word was already a slogan of moral rectitude in Christian circles. But it is THE WILL AND THE WORLD  through the epistolary conversations between Paul and his eclectic assem- blies of messianic believers that we watch the early and decisive develop- ment of the term. Paul was drawn into the topic of sexual comportment by a scandal within his Corinthian community that had shaken the small cir- cle of the faithful. A man was living with his father’s wife, “a kind of por- neia that is not found even among pagans.” A man had begun to cohabit with his stepmother, probably widowed. Th e two may not have been so far apart in age. Such scenarios were the material for much ribald comedy in Greek and Roman cultures. For Paul, the relationship was intolerable, and he sternly reminded the Corinthians, “I wrote to you in my letter not to associate with fornicators.” Th e Christian community, an evangelical mi- nority steeled for the end times, could not abide such impurity. As for Philo, so for Paul, sexual morality was a presumptive requirement of com- munal belonging.  Th e backsliding believer in love with his stepmother was symptomatic of deeper and more complex antagonisms at Corinth. Paul was faced with an intellectually armored libertine wing within the incipient church. Some of the Corinthians were claiming that the emancipatory message of the gospel freed the body from petty moral demands: “All things are lawful for me.” Paul’s response was both sharp and ranging. Th e body, he insisted, was not made for fornication. Th e believer’s body was a “member of Christ,” and the member of Christ could not be made “a member of a prostitute.” Paul’s libertine interlocutors espoused a traditional upper- class attitude toward the male body, whose desires were to be balanced by vigilant control but not self- denial. Paul’s response betrays an acute sensitivity to bodily purity. Th e sexual machinery of the body was something to be protected from contami- nation, not simply kept in proper balance.

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

  The references to philosophers and philosophizing scattered throughout his novel are uniformly smirking. The word “philosophy” occurs six times in Leucippe and Clitophon. Three times “to philosophize” means “to abstain from sex,” as when the villain Thersander incredulously asks Leucippe if the pirates who abducted her became philosophers. Twice it means “to wax eloquent for self-interested purposes,” as when Melite makes her final proposition to Clitophon. One time it means “to suffer, passively,” as when Clitophon takes a throttling from Thersander without resistance. Certainly these passages play on the mixed reputation of contemporary philosophy for sophism, complaisance, and fussy continence. Stoicism is clearly in view. The Stoic allusions of the novel are deliberate, but they are not flattering. Stoicism is evoked because it represented the closest thing to a philosophical koinē in the Roman Empire; more than a school, Stoicism seeped into public consciousness. Achilles Tatius is less concerned with its doctrines than with its stance toward the world. Leucippe and Clitophon is, in fact, a grand rejection of Stoicism, or of any philosophy that denies eros as a positive, constitutive source of the self.94 Stoicism in particular was a systematic philosophy, and its sexual ethics cannot be abstracted from the web of problems internal to Stoicism. The core ethical commitment of Stoicism was the principle that happiness, as the end of life, consisted in the possession of virtue. Virtue was sufficient for happiness. Stoic virtue was a thoroughly rationalist exercise, for virtue was the state of a soul in reasoned accord with nature. To live in agreement with nature was the highest ideal of the Stoic sage. Such serene rationality could be fully exercised only in a state of calm that was immune to the impulses of the passions. The Stoic sought apatheia, peace of mind, a reasoned indifference to things external. Hence, the true Stoic was impervious to misfortune; because he would “not for even the shortest time look away from reason,” he could “remain ever the same, in the sharpest pain, at the loss of a child, through the worst disease.” The Stoic achieved, through meditative self-discipline, a wisdom that brought freedom, in the highest sense that nothing external could truly affect the Stoic and his moral commitments.95

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  I suppose you’ll tell me you’ve got a wife and a kid to’ look after. Listen when are you going to break off with that battle-ax of yours? Don’t you know that you’ve got to ditch her?” He begins to laugh softly. “Ho! Ho! To think that I was the one who picked her out for you! Did I ever think you’d be chump enough to get hitched up to her? I thought I was recommending you a nice piece of tail and you, you poor slob, you marry her. Ho ho! Listen to me, Henry, while you’ve got a little sense left: don’t let that sour-balled puss muck up your life for you, do you get me? I don’t care what you do or where you go. I’d hate to see you leave town.... I’d miss you, I’m telling you that frankly, but Jesus, if you have to go to Africa, beat it, get out of her clutches, she’s no good for you. Sometimes when I get hold of a good cunt I think to myself now there’s something nice for Henry —and I have in mind to introduce her to you, and then of course I forget. But Jesus, man, there’s thousands of cunts in the world you can get along with. To think that you had to pick on a mean bitch like that. . . . Do you want more bacon? You’d better eat what you want now, you know, there won’t be any dough later. Have another drink, eh? Listen, if you try to run away from me today I swear I’ll never lend you a cent. . . . What was I saying? Oh yeah, about that screwy bitch you married. Listen, are you going to do it or not? Every time I see you you tell me you’re going to run away, but you never do it. You don’t think you’re supporting her, I hope? She don’t need you, you sap, don’t you see that? She just wants to torture you. As for the kid. . . . well, shit, if I were in your boots I’d drown it. That sounds kind of mean, doesn’t it, but you know what I mean. You’re not a father. I don’t know what the hell you are . . . I just know you’re too goddamned good a fellow to be wasting your life on them. Listen, why don’t you try to make something of yourself? You’re young yet and you make a good appearance. Go off somewhere, way the hell off, and start all over again. If you need a little money I’ll raise it for you. It’s like throwing it down a sewer, I know, but I’ll do it for you just the same. The truth is, Henry, I like you a hell of a lot. I’ve taken more from you than I would from anybody in the world. I guess we have a lot in common, coming from the old neighborhood.

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  They eventually gained admission and roamed the three floors of the club, greedily looking around. Joel drank one paper cup of watered-down alcohol after another and stared at the moiling sweat-dampened crowd with an attitude of wistful contempt. They were coiffed like Dr. Seuss characters and dressed like children in their parents’ clothes. At one time he had wanted to be like them. Now he thought they were stupid, although he still liked to look at them. He saw a girl standing alone at a bar, dressed like a twelve-year-old’s idea of a hooker. Tight black bodice, short flared ballerina skirt. She was small, she stood with her ankles together. He edged along the wall, pretending to study the material hung up as art. He remembered the blow-up doll he had once hung up in his Ann Arbor apartment as a party decoration. It wore Sara’s clothes and bore, with Scotch tape, a sign that read “Hurt Me Beat Me Fuck Me.” Wilson had said, “Joel, come on. This is too much. It’s not funny.” Joel continued toward the girl at the bar, fighting the anxious crimp in his shoulders. The terse conversation with her didn’t result in her phone number on a piece of paper in his pocket. He found the lawyers again and stalked around with them, making jokes. They couldn’t find Jerry, so the three of them got into a cab and left together, a trio of masculine shoulders filling the paned-in back seat with gruff laughter and blurted comments. He entered his dark, narrow-halled apartment in a grainy mental state. He stopped briefly before the toilet on his way to bed. He stripped off his clothes and dropped them in the middle of the floor. He lay on his back and put one hand on his cock. He imagined dozens of intriguing images, perusing the possible nuance of each circumstance. There was Cecilia. There was the girl at the bar. There was Sara. “Get my belt,” he had said to her. She hesitated. “Don’t you think you deserve it?” He masturbated watching spread-legged Sara arch her neck and rub her injured-looking vagina. He finished. He mopped his abdomen with a “snot rag.” A memory separated from the fantasy and lingered. “I love you,” said Sara. “It’s not real,” he said. “It’s puppy love.” “No. I love you.” She nuzzled his cheek with her nose and lips, and her tenderness pierced him. The image became tiny and unnaturally white, was surrounded by darkness, then faded like the picture on a turned-off TV.

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

  cubated in the radical air of persecution, was forced, unexpectedly, into the mold of a regulatory system. Certainly Paul, who believed that the rulers of this age were “doomed to pass away,” would not have dreamed that his terse missives would become the touchstone of an entire culture. Th e shift from an apologetic to an imperial mode was halting and not always predictable. In sum, it meant a deeper engagement with society and with the moral entanglements of the sexual agent as a part of society. Th is shift is detectible already in the Divine Institutes of Lactantius, an apology written against the backdrop of the great persecution but a work that nevertheless points toward the new, imperial sensibility of Christian sexual ethics. Lactantius is intensely aware of the moral agent’s embeddedness in the world. When he turns to consider the libido, “which must be severely repressed, because it does the most severe harm,” it is a faculty tempted and threatened by the habits of the Roman world. Th e dev il had contrived inge- nious tests of the moral will and institutionalized them in Roman society.  F R O M S H A M E TO S I N “So that no one would have to abstain from sex with another out of fear of punishment, he established brothels and exposed the sexual modesty of unfortunate women, to the ruin of the men who use them as much as the women who are forced to suff er.” To the audience that Lactantius was addressing, the brothel presented an especially diabolical source of temptation, because it removed all material impediments to the fulfi llment of desire. Still the dev il was not fi nished with his tricks. “He also joined males with males and designed unholy coitus in violation of the laws of God and nature.” What most disturbed Lactantius was a shared feature of same- sex eros and prostitution: they were socially acceptable. “Among them these outrages are a light matter, virtually respectable.” Lactantius still spoke, in the apologetic tradition, of depraved sexual habits among “them,” the mainstream non- Christians. But the line between the Christian and the outside world has started to grow decidedly thin, and within only a few generations it will have quietly vanished. It is highly telling that the passages of the Divine Institutes devoted to libido are followed immediately by the pre sen ta tion of Christian notions of penance. A rigorous sexual morality, if it is genuinely ambitious, will have mechanisms ready for the contingency of errant behavior. “Let no one desert or despair of himself if, overtaken by passion, driven by lust, deceived by error, or coerced by violence, he has fallen down the path of injustice.” Just a few years later, after the conversion of Constantine, Lactantius issued an abbreviated second edition of the Divine Institutes. Indulgence is given an even wider berth. “But in fact all of these things are diffi cult for man, nor

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

  Although it is not altogether impossible that this ghastly case was ripped from the headlines, the chance of unwitting incest in Roman society was, pace Tertullian, vanishingly remote. What is significant about Tertullian’s apology is the overriding awareness that the vast gulf between Christian standards and contemporary sexual practice was shaped by an expansive slave trade and a flourishing sex industry. The important comparandum, for an apologist of the second century, was not Platonic or Stoic sexual ideology but public sexual culture. Tertullian’s diatribe is shaped by its stark attribution of a sexual profile to two groups, “we” and “you.” It is easy enough to accuse Tertullian of selecting his enemies wisely, in order to place the opposition in the worst possible light. But he has understood the foundations of Roman sexual culture rather accurately, and his case should not be too lightly dismissed as the salacious concoction of a zealot. Tertullian’s address belongs to an important class of early Christian literature, apologetics. Apologetic literature marked the coming-of-age of Christianity as a self-aware movement within the pluralist landscape of Roman intellectual life. Christian apologies were part of a broader culture of public address, often aimed at the awesome figure of the emperor himself. We need not believe that most, or any, Christian speeches reached the ears of the prince, to recognize how powerfully the context of the official audience shaped the self-projection of the religion. Indeed, apology was not just a category of literature but also a stance, a style of perception and presentation. The apologetic literature of the second century was not only a crucial bridge between the compositions of the New Testament and the oeuvre of Clement—the greatest of the apologists. It offers us a chance to witness the development of orthodox Christian sexuality as a moral ideology that set Christians apart from the world.33

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  Perhaps . In my zeal now, which is again American , I am about to give birth to a monstrous edifice, a skyscraper, which will last undoubtedly long after the other skyscrapers have vanished, but which will vanish too when that which produced it disappears. Everything American will disappear one day, more completely than that which was Greek, or Roman, or Egyptian. This is one of the ideas which pushed me outside the warm, comfortable bloodstream where, buffaloes all, we once grazed in peace. An idea that has caused me infinite sorrow, for not to belong to something enduring is the last agony. But I am not a buffalo and I have no desire to be one, I am not even a spiritual buffalo. I have slipped away to rejoin an older stream of consciousness, a race antecedent to the buffaloes, a race that will survive the buffalo. All things, all objects animate or inanimate that are different , are veined with ineradicable traits. What is me is ineradicable, because it is different. This is a skyscraper, as I said, but it is different from the usual skyscraper à I’américaine. In this skyscraper there are no elevators, no seventy-third-story windows to jump from. If you get tired of climbing you are shit out of luck. There is no slot directory in the main lobby. If you are searching for somebody you will have to search. If you want a drink you will have to go out and get it; there are no soda fountains in this building, and no cigar stores, and no telephone booths. All the other skyscrapers have what you want! this one contains nothing but what I want, what I like. And somewhere in this skyscraper Valeska has her being, and we’re going to get to her when the spirit move me. For the time being she’s all right, Valeska, seeing as how she’s six feet under and by now perhaps picked clean by the worms. When she was in the flesh she was picked clean too, by the human worms who have no respect for anything which has a different tint, a different odor. The sad thing about Valeska was the fact that she had nigger blood in her veins. It was depressing for everybody around her. She made you aware of it whether you wished to be or no. The nigger blood, as I say, and the fact that her mother was a trollop. The mother was white, of course. Who the father was nobody knew, not even Valeska herself. Everything was going along smoothly until the day an officious little Jew from the vice-president’s office happened to espy her. He was horrified, so he informed me confidentially, to think that I had employed a colored person as my secretary. He spoke as though she might contaminate the messengers. The next day I was put on the carpet. It was exactly as though I had committed sacrilege.

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

  It was front-page news all over the country. White people lost their shit. Oh my word, it was insane. The security guard was arrested and put on trial and found guilty of animal abuse. He had to pay some enormous fine to avoid spending several months in jail. What was ironic to me was that white people had spent years seeing video of black people being beaten to death by other white people, but this one video of a black man kicking a cat, that’s what sent them over the edge. Black people were just confused. They didn’t see any problem with what the man did. They were like, “Obviously that cat was a witch. How else would a cat know how to get out onto a soccer pitch? Somebody sent it to jinx one of the teams. That man had to kill the cat. He was protecting the players.” In South Africa, black people have dogs. [image file=image_rsrc2TU.jpg] [image file=image_rsrc2TV.jpg] FUFIA month after we moved to Eden Park, my mother brought home two cats. Black cats. Beautiful creatures. Some woman from her work had a litter of kittens she was trying to get rid of, and my mom ended up with two. I was excited because I’d never had a pet before. My mom was excited because she loves animals. She didn’t believe in any nonsense about cats. It was just another way in which she was a rebel, refusing to conform to ideas about what black people did and didn’t do. In a black neighborhood, you wouldn’t dare own a cat, especially a black cat. That would be like wearing a sign that said, “Hello, I am a witch.” That would be suicide. Since we’d moved to a colored neighborhood, my mom thought the cats would be okay. Once they were grown we let them out during the day to roam the neighborhood. Then we came home one evening and found the cats strung up by their tails from our front gate, gutted and skinned and bleeding out, their heads chopped off. On our front wall someone had written in Afrikaans, “Heks”—“Witch.” Colored people, apparently, were no more progressive than black people on the issue of cats. I wasn’t exactly devastated about the cats. I don’t think we’d had them long enough for me to get attached; I don’t even remember their names. And cats are dicks for the most part. As much as I tried they never felt like real pets. They never showed me affection nor did they accept any of mine. Had the cats made more of an effort, I might have felt like I had lost something. But even as a kid, looking at these dead, mutilated animals, I was like, “Well, there you have it. Maybe if they’d been nicer, they could have avoided this.”

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  His own home was a stable divinely suited to his genius, but the parlor of our home was like the waiting room of a mortician’s office and Grover was a lout who didn’t even know enough to wipe his feet. In the wintertime his nose ran like a sewer and, Grover being too engrossed in his music to bother wiping his nose, his cold snot was left to trickle down until it reached his lips where it was sucked in by a very long white tongue. To the flatulent music of Weber, Berlioz, Liszt and Co. it added a piquant sauce which made those empty devils palatable. Every other word from Grover’s lips was an oath, his favorite expression being—“I can’t get the fucking thing right!” Sometimes he grew so annoyed that he would take his fists and pound the piano like a madman. It was his genius coming out the wrong way. His mother, in fact, used to attach a great deal of importance to these fits of anger; they convinced her that he had something in him. Other people simply said that Grover was impossible. Much was forgiven, however, because of his clubfoot. Grover was sly enough to exploit this bad foot; whenever he wanted anything badly he developed pains in the foot. Only the piano seemed to have no respect for this maimed member. The piano therefore was an object to be cursed and kicked and pounded to bits. If he were in good form, on the other hand, Grover would remain at the piano for hours on end; in fact, you couldn’t drag him away. On such occasions his mother would go stand in the grass plot in front of the house and waylay the neighbors in order to squeeze a few words of praise out of them. She would be so carried away by her son’s “divine” playing that she would forget to cook the evening meal. The old man, who worked in the sewers, usually came home grumpy and famished. Sometimes he would march directly upstairs to the parlor and yank Grover off the piano stool. He had a rather foul vocabulary himself and when he let loose on his genius of a son there wasn’t much left for Grover to say. In the old man’s opinion Grover was just a lazy son of a bitch who could make a lot of noise. Now and then he threatened to chuck the fucking piano out of the window—and Grover with it. If the mother were rash enough to interfere during these scenes he would give her a clout and tell her to go piss up the end of a rope. He had his moments of weakness too, of course, and in such a mood he might ask Grover what the hell he was rattling away at, and if the latter said, for example, “why the Sonata Pathétique,” the old buzzard would say—“What the hell does that mean?