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 City of Night (1963)

  “Everyone in the world has the same loves you have, huh, lovebushel?” Carl asked. “Well, you do!—and Dont You Forget It!” Neil hurled at him. Carl closed his eyes, sipped the wineglass empty, refilled it “Their souls—our souls,” he sighed. Neil: “What are you babbling about?” Carl giggled. “You. Im babbling about you. And Souls!” “Besides,” Neil said absently as if to himself, “he wasnt even any good. He just wanted to lay there— naked!” “You told me he loved costumes,” said Carl in mock surprise. “And your guns, remember?—he loved those too. You mean, Neil, he just knocked you out—just like that—you werent even going through one of your fantasies?” “Naked!” said Neil contemptuously. Carl: “Why do you hate the body so much, Neil?” The phone rang. “Hello?” Neil answered.... Nothing. “Your new disciple?” Carl asked when Neil returned. “One day hell speak,” said Neil pensively. “Maybe theres lots and lots—and lots of em, Neil—all women! ” He spat the last word at Neil. “Maybe theres a counter-conspiracy afoot! To drive you may-ad!” “Shut up, Carl,” Neil said. “You really are a Saint,” Carl said. “You may say it sarcastically—youre so drunk you dont even know what youre saying. But I do bring people out.” “Hes really right about that,” Carl says to me. “Have you taken him around yet?” he asks Neil. To me: “He will—if you stick around. (But dont, baby, dont!) Hell take you to the bars—hell dress you up—hell show you around. Hes already taken pictures of you!... And he’ll introduce you to the motorcycle leather-crowd—show you their ‘initiations.’ The first time I went, they tied one guy up to a post, took turns—... The blood was coming, but he was screaming for more!” And still addressing me, he went on: “And then one day, Neil will show you his collection in his studio in the basement” He shuddered. “Did you know, Neil, that once, when I told you there was a guy who hung out in Union Square in leather and you went and sat there three straight nights in a row waiting for him—did you know that I made it up, hoping one of the park regulars would pick you up and really—and seriously—beat the hell out of you?” He says that in a jocular tone, but his eyes are fixed on Neil with unequivocal hatred. “And later,” Carl sighs, “when I heard of someone new, I was waiting for him!” Neil laughs—but nervously. He comes in illogically, whether to change the subject or whether still obsessed by the kid who had clipped his guns: “Sometimes, you know, sometimes I can still get aroused by the—... naked... body.”

• From The Canterbury Tales (2009)

  You have probably understood me by now. ‘So I tell them tales of old times, taken out of books. The lewd people love a good story. That is the only way they can remember anything. Do you really think that I am going to live like a monk, when I can earn money so easily? I have never even considered the idea. Truly. I can preach and beg in all sorts of places. I never intend to work. I am not going to make baskets, or thresh wheat, for a living. I never beg in vain. I always get my reward. I am not going to imitate the example of the apostles, in other words. I want meat and fine clothes, and bread and cheese, and of course money. I will take it from the meanest servant or the poorest widow in the village, even though she has to deprive her children of food. I like to drink and make merry, too, and I make sure I have a whore in every town. Listen to me, ladies and gentlemen, in conclusion. You want me to recite a tale to you. I have had a draught of the landlord’s best ale in that hostelry, and I am ready to tell you a story that will really entertain you. I may be a very wicked man, but I can relate a highly virtuous tale. It is one of the stories I use in my sermons, after all. So be silent. I will begin.’

• From Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990)

  I think that style is a complicated terrain, and not one that we unilaterally choose or control with the purposes we consciously intend. Fredric Jameson made this clear in his early book on Sartre. Certainly, one can practice styles, but the styles that become available to you are not entirely a matter of choice. Moreover, neither grammar nor style are politically neutral. Learning the rules that govern intelligible speech is an inculcation into normalized language, where the price of not conforming is the loss of intelligibility itself. As Drucilla Cornell, in the tradition of Adorno, reminds me: there is nothing radical about common sense. It would be a mistake to think that received grammar is the best vehicle for expressing radical views, given the constraints that grammar imposes upon thought, indeed, upon the thinkable itself. But formulations that twist grammar or that implicitly call into question the subject-verb requirements of propositional sense are clearly irritating for some. They produce more work for their readers, and sometimes their readers are offended by such demands. Are those who are offended making a legitimate request for “plain speaking” or does their complaint emerge from a consumer expectation of intellectual life? Is there, perhaps, a value to be derived from such experiences of linguistic difficulty? If gender itself is naturalized through grammatical norms, as Monique Wittig has argued, then the alteration of gender at the most fundamental epistemic level will be conducted, in part, through contesting the grammar in which gender is given. The demand for lucidity forgets the ruses that motor the ostensibly “clear” view. Avital Ronell recalls the moment in which Nixon looked into the eyes of the nation and said, “let me make one thing perfectly clear” and then proceeded to lie. What travels under the sign of “clarity,” and what would be the price of failing to deploy a certain critical suspicion when the arrival of lucidity is announced? Who devises the protocols of “clarity” and whose interests do they serve? What is foreclosed by the insistence on parochial standards of transparency as requisite for all communication? What does “transparency” keep obscure?

• From The Canterbury Tales (2009)

  Of all the four orders, however, his was the most inclined to gossip and to flattery. He had arranged many marriages and sometimes, for reasons that I will not mention, he had to pay for them himself. Still, he was a pillar of the faith. He was well known to all the rich landowners of his neighbourhood and he was familiar, too, with the worthy women of his town. He had full power of confession, which, as he said himself, was superior to that of an ordinary curate; he could absolve the most awful sins. He heard the confessions very patiently, and pronounced the absolution very sweetly; he exacted the mildest of penances, especially if the penitent had something to give to his poor order. Bless me, father, for I have sinned and I have a large purse. That was the kind of thing he liked to hear. For, as he said, what is better proof of penitence than dispensing alms to the friars of God? There are many men who suffer from guilt and repentance, but are so hard of heart that they cannot weep for their sins. Therefore, instead of tears and prayers, these men must give silver to the friars. The tip of his hood, hanging down his back, was stuffed full of knives and pins which he gave away to pretty wives; whether he got anything in return, I could not say. I am only the narrator. I cannot be everywhere at once. I can say that the Friar had a very pleasant voice; he could sing well, and play on the gitern or lute. There was no one to beat him with a ballad. I heard him sing ‘Grimalkin, our cat’. He was excellent. And when he played the harp, and sang an accompaniment, his eyes shone like the stars on a clear crisp night of frost. He had skin as white as a lily, but he was not lily-livered; he was as strong as a champion at the Shrovetide games. He knew the taverns in every town, as well as every landlord and barmaid; certainly he spent more time with them than with lepers or beggar-women. Who could blame him? ‘My position as a confessor,’ he told me, ‘does not allow me to consort with the poorer sort. It would not be honourable. It would not be respectable. It would not be beneficial. I am more at my ease with the rich, and with the wealthier merchants. They are my congregation, sir.’ So, wherever there was profit to be gained, he was modest and courteous and virtuous to a fault. No one was better at soliciting funds. Even a widow with no shoes to her name would have given him something. When he greeted a poor householder with ‘In principio’, he would end up with a farthing at least. In the beginning was the coin. His total income was higher than his projected income. I will say no more.

• From The Canterbury Tales (2009)

  So let me turn to gambling. Next to drunkenness, gaming is the worst vice. Dice are the mothers of lies. They are the cause of deceit, of cursing, of perjury, of blasphemy, and even of manslaughter. They waste time and money. And, furthermore, to be known as a common gambler is deemed to be a great dishonour. The more exalted a man is in rank, as a gambler, the more infamous he will become. A gambling prince would be unfit to frame a policy. He would be considered incompetent in public life. Once upon a time the philosopher Stilbo was sent from Sparta as an ambassador to form an alliance with Corinth. He travelled in great state but, on his arrival, he happened to find all the greatest in the land grouped around a gaming table. As soon as he could, he returned to his own nation. ‘I am not going to lose my reputation,’ he said to his rulers, ‘or bring shame to my own people, by making an alliance with gamblers. Send other wise envoys, if you wish, but on my honour I would rather die than negotiate with such wastrels. We Spartans are a glorious people. We cannot allow ourselves to be associated with them. I for one could not sign such a treaty.’ So spoke the wise philosopher. Take the case of King Demetrius. The king of Persia sent him a pair of golden dice to signify his scorn for him as a well-known gambler. Demetrius had no thought for his honour or his glory. As a result he had no reputation in the outside world. The great lords of the earth can surely think of better ways to spend their time than in dicing.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  99 This state of “unknowing” was not a defeat but an achievement; we arrived at this point by ruthlessly paring down all our God talk, until prayer was reduced to a single syllable: “God!” or “Love!” It was not easy. The mind rushed to fill the vacuum we were trying to create within ourselves with “wonderful thoughts of [God’s] kindness” and reminded us “of God’s sweetness and love, his grace and mercy.” But unless we turned a deaf ear to this pious clamor, we would be back where we started. 100 In the meantime, the apprentice must continue with his prayers, liturgy, and lectio divina like everybody else. This was not what Eckhart would have called a special spiritual “way” but was a practice that should inform all the routine devotions and spiritual exercises of the Christian life. If we persevere, the intellect will eventually abdicate and allow love to take over. Here we see the new separation of knowledge from the affections: “Therefore I will leave on one side everything I can think, and choose for my love that which I cannot think!” the author exclaims. “Why? Because [God] may well be loved but not thought. By love he may be caught and held but by thinking never.” 101 But the apophatic habit is still so strong that the author immediately starts to deconstruct the notion of “love” and explain what it is not. There is no glow, no heavenly music, or interior sweetness in the Cloud. In fact the author seems to have Rolle in mind when he comes out strongly against the idea of an intense experience of God’s love. He warns beginners to be on their guard against the absurd literalism of this new spirituality. Novices hear talk of all kinds of special feelings— “how a man shall lift up his heart to God and continually long to feel his love. And immediately in their silly minds they understand these words not in the intended spiritual sense but in a physical and material, and they strain their natural hearts outrageously within their breasts!” Some even feel an “unnatural glow.” 102 It is impossible to feel for God the love we feel for creatures; the “God” with whom these so-called mystics are infatuated is simply the product of their unhinged imagination. Clearly this “sham spirituality” 103 was becoming a problem. When novices are told to stop all “exterior” mental activity, the author explains, they don’t know what “interior” work means, so “they do it wrong. For they turn their actual physical minds inwards to their bodies, which is an unnatural thing, and they strain as if to see spiritually with their physical eyes.” 104 Their antics are painful to behold. They stare into space, looking quite deranged, squat “as if they were silly sheep,” and “hang their heads to one side as if they had a worm in their ear.” 105 But “interiority” is achieved only by the discipline of “forgetting.”

• From City of Night (1963)

  Outside again, I recognized the ovaled fairy who had made it with me that first day in New Orleans; he is a freckled schoolboy, with a lollypop. With him is his youngman-lover who had turned femme—and he is, resignedly perhaps, a schoolgirl: bloomers peeking, ruffled, from beneath the starched skirt. “Tramp!” the ovaled one sneers at me—and he skipped quickly away as if I would menace or contaminate them. Past the giant burlesque picture of Holly Sand on Bourbon. And I imagine her making quite a breeze, creating quite a storm, fanning waves of flesh-desire (to go all the way), and the poster of Aloha twirled giant mechanical breasts like windmills— whoosh! and around; whoosh! and around.... I look about me searching Burlesque street, L.A. Instead, I see the costumed orgy of Mardi Gras. “Lover!” A fat woman embraces me tightly. We kiss. Now I turn to a young girl near me, shes dressed in a leopard suit I kiss her too, pushing my tongue urgently into her mouth, crushing her mouth—as if to erase from my own the stamp of Jeremy’s remembered kiss.... The sky has darkened. The streetlights, turned on now, will prolong the naked street merriment to midnight. Tomorrow, I keep thinking. Tomorrow... When Ash Wednesday will hang like a pall over this city. “Lets make it, man!” Sonny shouted into my ear, his lips so near they brushed my face. Still shirtless, he embraced me drunkenly while the two suited scores hes still with look on disapprovingly. “Later,” I said dazedly, taking the pill he slipped into my hand. “Later....” The Cathedral is solemn like a tomb. I think groggily: Dave.... The man on the beach, now somewhere in this city.... Lance, Pete, Mr King.... Miss Destiny. Skipper.... Jeremy. Each in his own way.... Each in his own way what? And Barbara. And Jocko in his way.... What! Nothing, I thought. “Nothing!” I said aloud, as face blends with hunting face. “Honey,” said Whorina, “youre twisted out of your swinging mind. Whatve you been taking? Here. I got something thatll straighten you out.” She hands me a strange pill which looks like a raisin. She says: “Nothing like it, honey, You Just Wait and See.” I pop it into my mouth and hurl myself back into the crowd. Although the star-tossed sky is clear—as if to reveal the city, Naked, to the sight of Heaven—I hope it will begin to snow suddenly: a sheet of snow covering this city drowning the shrieking colors.... The ice age of the heart.... But I forget about that quickly, forget about the snow which would purify the city.... In the courtyard of The Rocking Times, moments later, I saw Kathy. Still with Jocko as if he can protect her from something shadowing her, she smiles as she stares at the mobs.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  Freud had studied medicine at the University of Vienna but always had a deep interest in religion and philosophy. His religious studies, however, were conducted in light of the death of God in his heart. There was no need to justify his atheism, because its truth was self-evident. The idea of God was “so patently infantile, so foreign to reality, that to anyone with a friendly attitude to humanity, it is painful to think that the great majority of mortals would never be able to rise above this view of life.”86 Observing the similarity between religious rites and the obsessive rituals of some of his patients, Freud concluded that religion was a neurosis that bordered on insanity. The desire for God sprang from the infant’s experience of helplessness and his yearning for a protector; it reflected the child’s passion for justice and fairness and his longing for life to continue forever. Freud had already worked out his theory of the origins of faith before he began to study religion. He simply selected texts, which he interpreted somewhat eccentrically, that supported his conviction that religion sprang from psychological pressures reflecting our evolutionary development. He had been influenced by the theories of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829), who thought all living creatures had an innate urge to adapt to their environment. To reach the leaves on a high branch, a giraffe learned how to stretch its neck and passed this acquired characteristic to the next generation. In a Lamarckian theory, since dismissed as simplistic, Freud suggested that religion was an acquired trait of this kind, which had developed in response to a specific event. At a very early stage of human history, he suggested in Totem and Taboo (1913), the patriarch had exclusive rights to the females of the tribe. This aroused the hostility and resentment of his sons, who overthrew and killed him but later, tormented by remorse, invented rituals to assuage their guilt. In Moses and Monotheism (1938), Freud argued that Moses had been killed by the Israelites in the wilderness during a ritual reenactment of this primal murder. His definition of religion in The Future of an Illusion (1927) is also reductive: religion is wish fulfillment of instinctual, unconscious desires, a fantasy that was once consoling but is now doomed to failure, because its myths and rituals belong to such a primitive stage of human evolution. It was time to allow science to allay our fears and provide a new basis for morality. These explanations won respect because they were rooted in science, but Freud’s critique was flawed by a rather unscientific view of the female as homme manqué: religion was a female activity, while atheism represented the postreligious, healthy masculine human being.87 His view of religion as rooted in the infant’s veneration of the father also prompts the question of whether Freud’s rejection of God did not spring from an unconscious hostility to his own father.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  Voltaire defined Deism in his Philosophical Dictionary (1764). Like Newton, he thought that true religion should be “easy,” its truths clearly discernible, and, above all, it should be tolerant. Would it not be that which taught much morality and very little dogma? That which tended to make men just without making them absurd? That which did not order one to believe in things that are impossible, contradictory, injurious to divinity, and pernicious to mankind, and which dared not menace with eternal punishment anyone possessing common sense? Would it not be that which did not uphold its belief with executioners, and did not inundate the earth with blood on account of unintelligible sophism? Which taught only the worship of one god, justice, tolerance, and humanity? 9 Scarred by the theological wrangling and violence of the Reformation and the Thirty Years’ War, European Deism was marked by anticlericalism but was by no means averse to religion itself. Deists needed God. As Voltaire famously remarked, if God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him. The Enlightenment was the culmination of a vision that had been long in the making. It built on Galileo’s mechanistic science, Descartes’ quest for autonomous certainty, and Newton’s cosmic laws, and by the eighteenth century, the philosophes believed that they had acquired a uniform way of assessing the whole of reality. Reason was the only path to truth. The philosophes were convinced that religion, society, history, and the workings of the human mind could all be explained by the regular natural processes discovered by science. But their rational ideology was entirely dependent upon the existence of God. Atheism as we know it today was still intellectually inconceivable. Voltaire regarded it as a “monstrous evil,” but was confident that because scientists had found definitive proofs for God’s existence, there were “fewer atheists today than there have ever been.” 10 For Jefferson, it was impossible that any normally constructed mind could contemplate the design manifest in every atom of the universe and deny the necessity of a supervising power. 11 “If Men so much admire Philosophers, because they discover a small Part of the Wisdom that made all things,” Cotton Mather argued, “they must be stark blind, who do not admire that Wisdom itself.” 12 Science could not explain its findings without God; God was a scientific as well as a theological necessity. Disbelief in God seemed as perverse as refusing to believe in gravity. Giving up God would mean abandoning the only truly persuasive scientific explanation of the world. This emphasis on proof was gradually changing the conception of belief. Jonathan Edwards (1703–58), the New England Calvinist theologian, was thoroughly conversant with Newtonian science and was moving away so radically from the idea of an interventionist God that he denied the efficacy of petitionary prayer.

• From The Canterbury Tales (2009)

  ‘You recall, Thomas, that Moses fasted for forty days and forty nights before he was permitted to converse with Almighty God on the summit of Mount Sinai? Only after he had denied himself food for all that time was he permitted to receive the Ten Commandments, written with Jehovah’s own finger of fire. And do you remember Elijah on Mount Horeb? The prophet fasted, too, and spent his days in contemplation before God deemed it right to speak to him. Aaron and all the other priests of the temple would never dare to approach the incense altar without mortifying their flesh. They prayed only after they had abstained from drink. How could they be drunk in the holy place? It was unthinkable. God would have struck them dead. Take warning from what I say, Thomas. The priest who prays for your welfare and recovery must be sober - or else . . . well, I will say no more. You catch my drift. ‘Our own Saviour, as the New Testament tells us, gave us many examples of fasting and of prayer. That is why simple friars like myself are wedded to poverty and to celibacy. We lead lives of charity, of pity and of purity. I myself am always weeping. Yes I am. Of course sometimes we are persecuted for our holiness. That is the world for you. Nevertheless I tell you this. Our prayers are more acceptable to God. They rise higher than those of you and your kind, who can think only of your sensual appetites. Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden of Eden for the sin of gluttony. Is that not so? It was not for lechery. I know that much. ‘Thomas, listen to me, I beseech you. I don’t have the exact text about me at the moment, but I can remember the gist of it. These are the words of sweet Lord Jesus, when He was talking about us friars. “Blessed,” He said, “are the poor in spirit.” That’s me! All the gospels sing our praises. Cleanliness is next to godliness. The eye of the needle. That kind of thing. Do you think they are referring to us or to those of you who wallow in your possessions? I pity those who are in thrall to gluttony. I spit on those who are addicted to lechery. I abjure them, Thomas. I renounce them. They are no better than that heretic Jovinian. He was as fat as a whale, and he waddled like a swan. He was as full of booze as a bottle in an alehouse. How can people like that pray? When they pray, they burp instead. Do you know that psalm of David when he says that his heart is issuing a great matter? All they issue is gas. ‘No. We are the ones that humbly follow the path and example of Jesus. We are meek. We are poor. We are chaste. We are lowly, Thomas, ever so lowly.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  Kellogg and The Science of Power (1918) by Benjamin Kidd—had made a great impression on him. The authors reported interviews with German soldiers, who had testified to the influence that Darwinian ideas had played in Germany’s determination to declare war. This “research” convinced Bryan that evolutionary theory heralded the collapse of morality and decent civilization. His ideas were naive, simplistic, and incorrect, but people were beginning to be suspicious of science and he found a willing audience. When Bryan toured the United States, his lecture “The Menace of Darwinism” drew large crowds and got extensive media coverage. But an unexpected development in the South threw the campaign into even greater prominence. At this date, the fundamentalist movement was chiefly confined to the northern states, but southerners had become concerned about evolution. In 1925, the state legislatures of Florida, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Louisiana passed laws to prohibit the teaching of evolution in the public schools. In response, John Scopes, a young teacher in Dayton, Tennessee, decided to strike a blow for free speech, confessed that he had broken the law, and in July 1925 was brought to trial. The new American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) sent a team of lawyers to defend him, headed by the rationalist campaigner Clarence Darrow (1857–1938). When Bryan agreed to speak in defense of the anti- evolution law, the trial ceased to be about civil liberties and became a contest between religion and science. Like many fundamentalist disputes, the Scopes trial was a clash between two incompatible points of view. 33 Both Darrow and Bryan represented core American values: Darrow, of course, stood for intellectual liberty and Bryan for the rights of the ordinary folk, who were traditionally leery of learned experts, had no real understanding of science, and felt that sophisticated elites were imposing their own values on small-town America. In the event, Bryan was a disaster on the stand and Darrow was able to argue brilliantly for the freedom that was essential to the scientific enterprise. At the end of the trial, Darrow emerged as the hero of lucid rational thought, while Bryan was seen as a bumbling, incompetent anachronism who was hopelessly out of touch with the modern world: he compounded the symbolism by dying a few days later. Scopes was convicted, the ACLU paid his fine, but Darrow and science were the real victors at Dayton. The press had a field day. Most notably, the journalist H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) denounced the fundamentalists as the scourge of the nation.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  71 Closely allied to the “warfare” myth in atheistic polemic was the view that belief in itself was immoral, which has also become an essential ingredient of atheist ideology. It dates from the publication of Ethics of Belief (1871) by William Kingdon Clifford (1845–79), professor of mathematics at University College, London, who argued that it was not only intellectually but morally perverse to accept any opinion—religious, scientific, or ethical—without sufficient evidence. He illustrated his thesis with the story of a shipowner who knew that his ship needed extensive repairs but decided to spare himself the expense, reflecting that it had survived many voyages and that God would not allow it to sink with so many passengers on board. When the ship went down in midocean, he was able to collect the insurance. Clifford’s book struck an instant chord. By the late 1860s, widespread veneration for science as the only path to truth had made the idea of “belief” without verification offensive not only intellectually but morally. For the American sociologist Lester Ward (1841–1913), superstition (a term that he applied indiscriminately to any religious idea) led to neurological softening of the brain and weakened moral fiber. Once you had accepted the idea that some matters lay beyond human comprehension, you would swallow anything. 72 For the English philosopher John Stuart Mill (1806–73), the delusions of faith “would sanction half the mischievous illusions recorded in history.” 73 Credulity was an act of abject cowardice: “Give me the storm and tempest of thought and action, rather than the dead calm of ignorance and faith!” Ingersoll protested with his usual bravura, “Banish me from Eden if you will; but first let me eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge!” 74 Today we are so used to the idea that science and religion are at loggerheads that these ideas no longer surprise us. But in the late nineteenth century, most churchmen still looked up to science; they had not yet fully appreciated how thoroughly Darwinism had undermined the natural theology on which their “belief” was based. At this time, it was not the religious who were fueling the antagonism between the two disciplines but the advocates of science. Most scientists had no interest in bashing religion; they were content to get on quietly with their research and objected only when theologians tried to obstruct their inquiries. 75 It was the popularizers of Darwin who went on the offensive in an antireligious crusade.

• From The Canterbury Tales (2009)

  Once upon a time there was living in my district an archdeacon, a man of great position who sat in judgment on all sorts of matters - fornication, witchcraft, bawdy, slander, adultery. That kind of thing. He laid down the law on robbery, violations of contract, making of wills, failure to take the sacraments, usury and simony. He was tough, but he was really hard on those caught in the act of lechery. He made them pay for it. Did they sing! Then there were those who did not pay the proper taxes to the Church. If any parish priest complained about them, they were severely punished by the archdeacon. They never escaped a very heavy fine. If anyone gave a small offering in church, or a small tithe, he was in trouble. He was in the archdeacon’s black book before he could be hooked by the bishop’s staff. The archdeacon had all the authority he needed; he represented Church justice, after all. Now among his officers there was a summoner. There was no more crafty man in England. He had his own secret network of spies, who told him exactly what was going on. So he could go easy on one or two adulterers, as long as they led him to a score of others. I can see that our Summoner here is becoming angry. His nose is twitching like the snout on a March hare. But I will not spare him on that account. I will reveal all. He has no authority among us, does he? He cannot punish us now or ever - ‘That is what all the harlots say,’ exclaimed the Summoner. ‘You can’t touch us. We are in the liberties. No wonder a harlot like you follows suit.’ ‘Stop this!’ Our Host was very firm. ‘God’s punishment on you if you carry on like this! Continue with your story, sir Friar, and pay no attention to the Summoner. Don’t spare his blushes.’ ‘Thank you, Mr Bailey. As I was saying -’

• From City of Night (1963)

  “And my dear, Dear sistuh Lola—” Miss Destiny is saying (queens calling each other sisters); and Lola is quite possibly “dear, Dear” because undoubtedly shes the ugliest queen in the world, with painted eyes like a silent moviestar, and a black turtleneck sweater running into her coarse shiny black hair so that it seems shes wearing a hood—and has a husky meanman’s voice and looks like nothing but an ugly man in semidrag. “Always room for one more,” she rasps, welcoming me. “And you have of course already met Mistuh Chuck,” Miss Destiny says sighingly, and Chuck tipped his widehat in salutation: “Howdee.” “And this is Tiguh—” Miss Destiny went on. And Tiger (names, you will notice, as obviously emphatically masculine as the queens’ are emphatically obviously feminine and for the same reason: to emphasize the roles they will play) is a heavily tattooed youngman who has precisely that quality you sense in caged tigers glowering savgely through iron bars. “And Darling Dolly—” Miss Destiny said. And Darling Dolly corrects Miss Destiny: “Darling Dolly Dane , Destiny dear.” And Destiny corrects her: “Miss Destiny, Darling Dolly Dane, dear.” Truly, you will admit, Darling Dolly Dane is cute in the dimlight and smokeshadows, with softlooking creamskin and dancing eyes and a loose sweater tonight and slacks—acting like a flirt teenage girl out to get laid. “And Buddy—” Miss Destiny finishes with the introductions. Buddy is a blond very young boy, I would say 19—at whom, as Miss Destiny and I sit at the already-crowded table, Darling Dolly Dane is glaring. Miss Destiny tells me confidentially, to explain the cool looks between Darling Dolly and Buddy, that Buddy had been living with Darling Dolly Dane until last night when she found he hocked some of her drag clothes and she locked him out and he had to sleep in his brokendown Mercury, which may not even be his.... Now a score at the bar is ostentatiously turning us on to free drinks—and cokes for Darling Dolly, who is making such a thing about her Not Drinking. On a small balcony over the head, the rock-n-roll spades are going, perched like a nest of restless blackbirds. A queen, obviously drunk, has climbed on it and has started to do an imitation strip, and Ada, who runs the bar and is a real woman—a mean, tough blonde like a movie madam—climbs after her dragging her roughly off the balcony just as the queen is unsnapping her imaginary brassiere, saying: “Ssssssssssssufferrrrrrrrrrrr....”

• From City of Night (1963)

  The skinny man standing beside us at the crowded bar slices the air with a cigarette holder. “Who are you playing tonight?” he asks the fatman. “Santa Claus?” Emaciatedly skinny, in his late 30s—his eyes gaunt with years of frustration—he stands there—body curved vampishly, one hand on his hips, the other balancing the black cigarette holder like a parody trumpet, lightly—lightly—between long manicured fingers. “Dont pay attention to her, sonny,” the fatman says to me. When he smiles, the flesh squeezes his tiny eyes, almost shutting them. “Shes just in from New York,” he explains, indicating the skinny man, “and I told her she’d have to see Main Street.”... And so the fatman has been playing the role of initiated Guide to the other’s First-Trip-to-Main-Street-and-Vice amazement. “Dont—call—me—‘she,’” the skinny man said, stretching his lips across his face tightly in a straight pink line.... I can tell hes Gigantically intrigued with this bar; nevertheless hes affecting indifference. Crazily, I imagine him walking along Madison Avenue in New York, mincing in a tight olive-green suit as if his legs were tied at the knees; carrying a pencil-thin umbrella as affectedly as he carries—and he carried it—the cigarette holder; entertaining, in the evenings, his equally closeted friends—with Cocktails. Late at night, he will lonesomely pull off, looking at pictures of youngmen.... Sometime tonight, I felt certain—if I stuck around (twice I had started to leave, repelled by the fatman, and twice he had showily slapped a large bill on the bar for drinks: “Drink up; buyyanother-one”)—sometime tonight, I would hear the skinny one, in excited tones, claim surprise that “supposedly straight men” take money from homosexuals in exchange for sex.... Still, I felt strangely sorry for him for the mask which defensively he has to wear. But I avoid looking at them now. I study this familiar bar: the exotic plants painted to suggest a jungle: a giant butterfly, trying futilely to Escape! —the canvas from wall to wall drooping heavily from the ceiling, shelteringly or oppressively. Pinpoints of colored lights dart into the darkness from the pinball machines... feeble childhood sparklers, expiring.... In the booths, figures huddle intimately—shadowy clustered vulture forms when you first walk into the smoky twilight, features swallowed by the darkness, emerging into the splashes of light like flotsam out of shallow water; then eyes become visible, incessantly finding a new object to focus on. Like buyers in a market place, scores in groups, before scattering singly about the bar for the actual Hunt, may exchange remarks about the malehustlers: discuss them openly, weighing one against the other—as if, like inanimate objects, the hustlers cannot hear.... And like conspirators against a common enemy who must nevertheless be used, the malehustlers, also momentarily together, braggingly discuss how much a particular score is worth.... So the two armies—scores and hustlers—meet here nightly.

• From The Canterbury Tales (2009)

  He went to an apothecary in the town, and told him that he wanted to buy poison to exterminate some rats; he said that he also wanted to get rid of a weasel that killed the chickens in his yard, as well as all the other household vermin that creep out by night. ‘Well, sir,’ the apothecary replied, ‘I have the very thing. I swear to God that this arsenic will kill anything and everything. A creature has only to take a tiny piece, the size of a grain of wheat, and it will die. It begins to work after a few minutes. It is strong and violent. And, as I said, it is always fatal.’ ‘Excellent. I will take it.’ So the apothecary made up a box of the poison for him. The young man went out into the street, and walked into a tavern. Here he ordered three bottles of wine. Into two of them he put the poison, while he left the third for his own use. He intended to spend the entire night in carrying the gold back to his own house. After he had finished preparing the poisoned draughts, he returned to his friends beneath the oak tree. Do I need to state the obvious? The two of them, just as they had planned, stabbed the young man to death. When they had murdered him, they laughed. ‘Let us sit down and drink,’ one of them said. ‘We deserve a rest. After we have got through this wine, we can think about burying him.’ He opened one of the bottles and put it to his lips. ‘Chin chin. Open another one.’ So they refreshed themselves, or so they thought. They were drinking poison, of course, and soon died. I don’t think any medical expert could describe in detail all of their suffering. It was unutterably horrible. Death had caught them, after all, two murderers and a poisoner. Oh cursed sinners, filled with malice and wickedness! You have been fattened with gluttony and lapped in luxury. You have thrown the dice for the last time. Blasphemers, your curses against Christ have come back upon you! Your swearing, your pride and folly, have destroyed you. Why is mankind so false to its creator, who purchased its redemption with His own blood? Now, all you good men and women, learn from me and beware the sin of avarice. Forgive us our trespasses. That is the prayer. So I have come here to pardon you. Just give me your coins, your jewellery and your silver spoons. Here is the papal bull of dispensation. Wives, what will you give me for it?

• From The Case for God (2009)

  From this it follows that no single vision can be sovereign; that our knowledge is relative, subjective, and fallible rather than certain and absolute; and that truth is inherently ambiguous. Received ideas that are the products of a particular historical and cultural milieu must, therefore, be stringently deconstructed. But this analysis must not be based on any absolute principle, and there is no assurance that we will ever arrive at—or even approximate—a wholly accurate version of the truth. Fundamental to postmodern thought is the conviction that instead of ideologies mirroring external conditions, the world is profoundly affected by the ideology that human beings impose upon it. We are not forced by sense data to adopt a particular worldview, so we have a choice in what we affirm—as well as an immense responsibility. Postmodernists are particularly suspicious of Big Stories. They regard Western history as scarred by the ceaseless compulsion to impose a totalizing system on the world. Sometimes this has been theological and has resulted in crusade and persecution, but the “stories” have also been scientific, economic, ideological, and political, resulting in the technological domination of nature and the sociopolitical subjection of others in slavery, genocide, colonialism, anti-Semitism, and the oppression of women and other minorities. So, like Nietzsche, Freud, and Marx, postmodernists seek to deflate such beliefs but without attempting to substitute an absolute “story” of their own. Postmodernism is iconoclastic, therefore. As one of its early luminaries, Jean-François Lyotard (1924–98), explained, it can be defined as “the incredulity towards grand narratives (grands récits).” Top of the list of such récits is the modern “God,” who is omnipotent and omniscient and keeps watch over the world, working all things to his own purposes. But postmodernism is also averse to an atheism that makes absolute, totalistic claims. As Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) cautioned, we must also be alert to “theological prejudices” not only in religious contexts, where they are overt, but in all metaphysics—even those that profess to be atheist. 55 Like any postmodern philosopher, Derrida was deeply suspicious of the fixed, binary polarities that characterize modern thought, and the atheist/theist divide was, he believed, too simple. Atheists have reduced the complex phenomena of religion to formulas that suit their own ideologies—as Marx did when he called religion an opiate of the oppressed or Freud when he saw it as oedipal terror.

• From City of Night (1963)

  “I told you: I’ll buy him for you—if you haven’t got the guts to do it yourself,” said the fatman pitilessly. “Go on, offer him a drink—bring him over and I’ll fix it up for you. Leave it to me, honey. I mean, your blond ‘savage’ is certainly—uh—entertaining.” “If you want him.” said the skinny one, “why dont you go after him?” “I like the one I have,” the fatman said. In his voice, nevertheless, there is a tone of deep resentment.... If I make the scene with him, he will probably yawn after it’s over; say something to put me down. He will give me the money contemptuously—but necessarily. Bigly. He will adjust his expensive tie carefully, pointedly emphasizing what he would be trying to convince himself the real difference between our worlds is: trying to forget the previous one-sided desire—which will recur in him again and again for whomever.... “Good luck,” he might even say, but I’ll know that hes looking forward to the time when whatever of desirability he may have seen in me—as he has seen it in others, from night to night—will have evaporated.... Looking up, I see my own reflection now in the panel of mirrors; and reflected behind me, that life that has fascinated me greets me victoriously: All along this long closed-in bar, the composite face of this submerged world stares defiantly at me. “Your blond in the T-shirt is really too much,” the fatman is going on. “You just wont believe it!” he says to the skinny one. “He carries some clippings—and those photographs!” “What Photographs?” said the skinny one. “Shes interested all right,” the fatman says, winking at me, trying to ally me with him against the skinny one. “I—Told—You,” said the skinny one firmly. “Don’t Call Me ‘she.’” “On, Mary, get off it!” the fatman says impatiently with a fatwave of his hand, as if he were stripping off tne skinny one’s mask. “Who do you think youre fooling? Youve got the hotpants—and youll pay for it—just like I do— because you have to!” he lasned. “So stop your goddam pretending—And Face It!” He turns his swollen round back to his skinny friend. Mouth ovaled, a look of enormous indignation on his face, the skinny man moved away. He stood momentarily in the middle of the bar—then he marched rigidly toward the door. I watch him as he stands there undecided. And then, abruptly, he turns back. “Did he leave?” the fatman asks me. “No.” “I Knew it!” he says triumphantly, transferring the pounds and pounds of his fleshy body on the stool to face the door. He stares at the skinny man, now stanuing only a few feet from the jukebox, glaring back at the fatman. I look at the fatman. in the pudgy pigfeatures there is something indefinably sinister.

• From The Canterbury Tales (2009)

  There was a lord in his household who was a proper and virtuous man. Now it happened one day that this good lord said to the king, “If a lord is vicious, then he is lost. Drunkenness is itself a blot on the name of any man, but especially on that of a ruler. A lot of people are watching him. He does not know all the eyes and ears that surround him. So, for God’s love, sire, drink more temperately. Wine can affect the brain. It can affect the body, too.” ‘“Is that what you think?” Cambises replied. “I will prove to you how wrong you can be. The exact opposite is the case, as you will soon find out for yourself. No wine on earth is going to affect my eyesight, or my limbs, or my strength. Watch.” So then he began to drink much more than he had ever done before - a hundred times more, I should say. When he was thoroughly pissed, he ordered the son of this courtier to be brought before him. He told the boy to stand upright in front of him. Then he took out his bow and arrow, and stretched the bow-string right back to his ear. Then he let go. The arrow killed the child, of course. “Don’t you think,” he asked the grieving father, “that I have a steady hand? Has my strength gone? Has my eyesight suffered? Has my judgement? I don’t think so.” ‘What use was the answer of the courtier? His son was dead. There was nothing more to say. So beware, my friend, how you deal with kings and lords. Just say, “If it please you, sir” or “I will do whatever I can for you, sir.” You can tell a poor man what you think of him, vices and all, but you cannot berate your master. Even if he seems to be going straight to hell, say nothing. ‘Think of that other Persian king, Cyrus, who in his anger destroyed the river Gyndes because one of his sacred white horses had drowned in it on the way to Babylon. He drained the river by diverting it into various channels, so that in the end women could cross it without getting their skirts wet. What did wise Solomon tell us? “Never make friends with an angry man. Never walk in company with a madman. You will be sorry.” I will say no more on that matter, Thomas. ‘So swallow your anger. You will find me as straight and firm as a carpenter’s square. Don’t thrust the knife of the devil into your heart. Your anger will do you infinite harm. Come now, Thomas. Give me your full confession.’ ‘No way,’ Thomas replied. ‘I have already confessed to the curate this morning. I have told him everything. There is no need to repeat it all.’ ‘In any case, give me some of your money. Give us gold to build a cloister for the Lord.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  The Protestant reformers may have demanded that Christians be free to read and interpret the Bible as they chose, but there was no toleration for anybody who opposed their own teachings. Luther believed that all “heretical” books should be burned, and both Calvin and Zwingli were prepared to execute dissidents. Despite its intense religiosity, the divisions effected by the Protestant Reformation also helped to accelerate the process of secularization and the growth of nationalism. In order to maintain order, the princes had to separate themselves from the turmoil engendered by the squabbling churches and denominations, whose political power therefore diminished. As an infant nation struggled for political independence from Rome, it built a distinct identity, opting for Catholic or Protestant affiliation, and nonconformists were often persecuted as political dissidents and traitors. As it entered the modern period, therefore, the West was torn between a frequently strident dogmatism on the one hand, and a more liberal humility that recognized the limits of knowledge on the other. The plays of William Shakespeare (1564–1616) explored the myriad possibilities of the human personality. He shared the Renaissance understanding of the importance of context; ideas, customs, and behavior were inextricably combined with a particular set of circumstances, so it was impossible to judge them from a purely objective, theoretical point of view. Human affairs were not motivated primarily by rational considerations. People were often caught unawares by unconscious or emotional impulses that were neither pragmatic nor efficient but sometimes worked against their own interests. Hamlet depicted the tortured consciousness of a hero with whom everybody somehow identified turning ceaselessly yet fruitlessly upon itself, unable to understand its motivation or achieve any degree of certainty about the most pressing and practical matters. In Othello, the apparently “motiveless malignancy” of Iago militated against simplistic ideas of good and evil. Shakespeare made his audiences aware that human beings were mysterious to themselves and others, and that it was disastrous and counterproductive to either attempt to manipulate them or expect them to act in a certain way. In his own distinctive way, the French essayist Michel de Montaigne (1533–92) expressed a similar spirit, and was skeptical of any human attempt to attain absolute truth. In the famous “Apology of Raymond Sebond,” written, tongue-in-cheek, largely to please his father, Montaigne had marveled at Sebond’s intellectual confidence. This sixteenth-century Spanish philosopher had argued that we could derive all the information we required about God, salvation, and human life from a study of the natural world.