Despair

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  Sandy Labouchère did it soon after we got back from Africa—you can see he had a rather brilliant line when he wanted to. But he hasn’t brought out the child’s gaiety, a kind of radiance … He was the most beautiful thing on earth. You just wanted to look at him and look at him.’ ‘Is he still alive?’ I asked, unable to imagine him going the way of the grocer’s boy into banal middle age; but Charles muttered ‘No, no,’ unanswerably, and then bashed on: ‘So you’ve read all the books I gave you.’ ‘Yes, I have. Well, I haven’t read every word, but I’ve taken a pretty fair sample.’ He nodded reasonably. ‘I would read them really thoroughly, of course, if I decided to take on this … job.’ Charles was quite quick and tactical. ‘Quite so, quite so,’ he said. ‘But tell me, I don’t know what sort of impression those books give. Do they appeal at all to, to a younger person?’ ‘Oh, I think they’re very interesting indeed. And you’ve done so much,’ I obviously went on, ‘and known such extraordinary people.’ He sighed heavily at this. ‘I ought to have been able to make something of it myself; but it’s too late now. As you get near the end of your life you realise you’ve wasted nearly all of it.’ ‘But that’s not the impression I have at all. I’m sure you don’t really think that,’ I said, in the way that one blandly comforts those whose torments one cannot imagine. ‘I mean, I really am wasting my life, and it’s not like what you were doing.’ Charles took this up directly. ‘I’ve no time for idleness,’ he said. ‘I want you to have a job.’ ‘I just don’t want the wrong one,’ I said, sounding spoilt even to myself. ‘I’d like it if I could simply disappear, like you did. It was wonderful how you could disappear into Africa.’ ‘One disappeared,’ Charles admitted. ‘But one also remained in view.’ I came back to it carefully, weighing the weightless teacup and saucer in my hands. ‘What I rather got the impression of is that you were lost in a dream. It’s very beautiful that feeling the diaries give of a constant kind of transport when you were in the Sudan. It’s like a life set to music,’ I said, in a fantastic impromptu, which Charles ignored. ‘We were doing a job, of course. It was exceedingly hard work: relentless and exhausting.’ ‘Oh, I know.’ ‘But you’re right in a way—of me, at any rate. It was a vocation. Not all of them in the Service saw it in quite the same light as I did, perhaps. Many of them hardened. Many of them were dryish sticks long before they reached the desert. They write books about it, even now—fantastically boring.’ Charles shot out his foot and sent a book across the hearth-rug to me.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  His mother went racing in and out of the room. “He’s drunk, he’s drunk,” she repeated to the old man. “We’ve got a drunk for a son.” The old man didn’t seem to hear her. He grabbed a warm washcloth and began scrubbing his son. The last thing he did was to connect the rubber tube that went into the boy’s penis to the long plastic tube that went into the bag on the side of the bed. That was what the nurses in the hospital had taught them to do. It was very important to connect the rubber tube in the boy’s penis to the plastic tube when he went to bed at night. So that everything would run okay. So that everything would be all right. So he did it just the way they had told them and after pulling the sheets and covers up over the body and just below the shoulders of his son, the old man walked out of the room. The lights went out in the house. The boy turned slowly over until he had propped himself up on both elbows with his head pushed down into his pillow. He wanted to forget the terrible night. He wanted to forget it and everything else, the numb legs, the unfeeling numbness. He was lost, more lost than he had ever been in his life. Lost in some kind of limbo land of the dead. He wanted to explode, to get out of this crazy numb body and be a man again. He wanted to be free again, to walk in his back yard on the grass. He wanted to run down to Sparky’s and get a haircut, he wanted to play stickball with Richie, to swing the bat, to feel the gravel on Hamilton Avenue beneath his feet again. He wanted to stand up in the shower every morning with the hot water streaming down his back and off his legs. It was now very clear that this thing was final like death. No one, he thought, ever wanted to think about final things, dead things, things that ended abruptly or could not be explained. Once someone died, he thought, people just put them in the ground, they put them in the ground and stood above the grave saying words that helped explain why there was an end to the person, words that were beautiful like the flowers and the big stone, words that helped others realize that it wasn’t the end, but only the beginning of a wonderful thing. It was so easy for them to say the words, to deny the finality. Why weren’t they saying the words over his bed? Why weren’t they telling him that this whole thing, this whole crazy numb thing, wasn’t final? But for him there were no words and no people, nothing to tell him things would be beautiful again. This end was no beginning.

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

  But there is no minimum age for kidnapping, so the Orange County judge sentenced Antonio to imprisonment until death, asserting that he was a dangerous gang member who could never change or be rehabilitated, despite his difficult background and the absence of any significant criminal history. The judge sent him to California’s dangerous, overcrowded adult prisons. At fourteen, Antonio became the youngest person in the United States condemned to die in prison for a crime in which no one was physically injured. — Most adults convicted of the kinds of crimes with which Trina, Ian, and Antonio were charged are not sentenced to life imprisonment without parole. In the federal system, adults who unintentionally commit arson-murder where more than one person is killed usually receive sentences that permit release in less than twenty-five years. Many adults convicted of attempted murder in Florida serve less than ten years in prison. Gun violence with no reported injuries frequently result in sentences of less than ten years for adult defendants, even in this era of harsh punishments. Children who commit serious crimes long have been vulnerable to adult prosecution and punishment in many states, but the development of juvenile justice systems has meant that most child offenders were sent to juvenile detention facilities. Juvenile justice systems vary across the United States, but most states would have kept Trina, Ian, or Antonio in juvenile custody until they turned eighteen or twenty- one. At most, they might have stayed in custody until age twenty-five or older, if their institutional history or juvenile detention record suggested that they were still a threat to public safety. In an earlier era, if you were thirteen or fourteen when you committed a crime, you would find yourself in the adult system with a lengthy sentence only if the crime was unusually high-profile—or committed by a black child against a white person in the South. For instance, in the infamous Scottsboro Boys case in the 1930s, two of the defendants, Roy Wright and Eugene Williams, were just thirteen years old when they were wrongfully convicted of rape and sentenced to death in Alabama. In another signature case of juvenile prosecution, George Stinney, a fourteen-year-old black boy, was executed by the State of South Carolina on June 16, 1944. Three months earlier, two young white girls who lived nearby in Alcolu, a small mill town where the races were separated by railroad tracks, had gone out to pick flowers and never returned home. Scores of people across the community went searching for the missing girls. Young George and his siblings joined the search party. At some point, George mentioned to one of the white adult searchers that he and his sister had seen the girls earlier in the day.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  For some years now people have credited me with strange insight, and with knowledge of divine secrets. But they are mistaken; I have no such power. It is true, however, that during those nights of Bethar some disturbing phantoms passed before my eyes. The perspectives afforded the mind from the height of those barren hills were less majestic than these of the Janiculum, and less golden than those of Cape Sunion; they offered the reverse and the nadir. I admitted that it was indeed vain to hope for an eternity for Athens and for Rome which is accorded neither to objects nor men, and which the wisest among us deny even to the gods. These subtle and complex forms of life, these civilizations comfortably installed in their refinements of ease and of art, the very freedom of mind to seek and to judge, all this depended upon countless rare chances, upon conditions almost impossible to bring about, and none of which could be expected to endure. We should manage to destroy Simon; Arrian would be able to protect Armenia from Alani invasions. But other hordes would come, and other false prophets. Our feeble efforts to ameliorate man's lot would be but vaguely continued by our successors; the seeds of error and of ruin contained even in what is good would, on the contrary, increase to monstrous proportions in the course of centuries. A world wearied of us would seek other masters; what had seemed to us wise would be pointless for them, what we had found beautiful they would abominate. Like the initiate to Mithraism the human race has need, perhaps, of a periodical bloodbath and descent into the grave. I could see the return of barbaric codes, of implacable gods, of unquestioned despotism of savage chieftains, a world broken up into enemy states and eternally prey to insecurity. Other sentinels menaced by arrows would patrol the walls of future cities; the stupid, cruel, and obscene game would go on, and the human species in growing older would doubtless add new refinements of horror. Our epoch, the faults and limitations of which I knew better than anyone else, would perhaps be considered one day, by contrast, as one of the golden ages of man. Natura deficit, fortuna mutatur, deus omnia cernit. Nature fails us, fortune changes, a god beholds all things from on high: I fingered the stone of a ring on which on a day of bitter depression I had had those few sad words engraved.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  He would go from whorehouse to whorehouse, wheeling the chair in past the pretty painted Mexican women. He would find a table and wait for one to come up and talk to him. Usually they were kind and did not pity him. They would smile back, very interested, very curious, and he would smell their perfume and look at their breasts. He would sleep with a different one every night. He wanted to sleep with as many as he could, trying one after the other. One night another Vietnam veteran from the Village came in with him, a guy named Charlie. Charlie had some good weed and said he wanted to have a real party. They got very stoned and very drunk together, and in the last whorehouse they went to Charlie got into a wild fight with one of the whores. He punched her in the face because she laughed at him when he pulled down his pants and told her he couldn’t feel his penis or move it anymore. He was crazy drunk and he kept yelling and screaming, swinging his arms and his fists at the crowd who had gathered around him. “That goddamn fucking slut! I’m gonna kill that whore for ever laughing at me. That bitch thinks it’s funny I can’t move my dick. Fuck you! Fuck all of you goddamn motherfuckers! They made me kill babies! They made me kill babies!” Charlie screamed again and again. The owner was shaking his fist, telling them both to get out and never come back, and he knew someone was going to kill them if they didn’t leave right away. But he just sat there in the middle of the bar, unable to move. What Charlie was saying was what he had been feeling for a long time. Finally the owner got a couple of guys and threw them out into the street. They managed to get a cab, but halfway home Charlie got into another fight with the driver over the money he was charging, and they both had to get out in the middle of the highway. They sat by the edge of the road for a long time until a Mexican truckdriver picked them up. He just picked them up as if there was nothing at all unusual about finding the two of them out there. He lifted them out of their chairs and put them into the cab of his truck. Charlie was singing by the time they got to the Village and had pissed all over the seat; the driver opened his window but never complained. Somehow that was the end of it for him. The whole thing was over. He had a real cold feeling about it now. He didn’t go back to the city the next night. He spent one more day in the Village, then told Rahilio he’d had enough. He caught the next plane back to New York.

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

  Yet this later iteration of the good news necessarily differed in an important respect from that of Jesus. Jesus’ mission proclaiming the kingdom had ended with his execution. His followers, prompted by the vindicating experience of his resurrection, injected a specific, and specifically Christian, innovation into the traditional sequence of end-time events: the messiah, they now held, would have to come not once, but twice. His first coming had been to suffer and die (cf. Lk 24.26). It would be only at his second coming—glorious, powerful, leading angelic hosts—that he would raise the dead, gather in the elect, and establish the kingdom of his father (Mk 13.26–27; cf. 1 Thes 4.16–17, recognizably the same tradition, which Paul claims to have “by the word of the Lord”). Final redemption, though near, is nevertheless still in the future, insists Paul, both for the individual whose mortal flesh continues to hold him “a captive to the law of sin” (Rm 7.25) and for the entire universe “groaning and travailing until now” in bondage to decay (Rm 8.22). More than humans must be redeemed: all God’s creation awaits. In Paul’s view, the very tissue of the cosmos has been rent by sin’s power, which abides not only in mortal human flesh but also in the upper spheres of the universe (Rm 8.38). When Christ returns—descending from heaven “with a cry of command and the archangel’s call and the sound of the trumpet of God” (1 Thes 4.16)—he will defeat these cosmic powers, rulers and authorities, the lesser deities formerly worshiped by his pagans, and finally he will destroy death itself. Only at that point will Christ “hand over the kingdom to God the Father” (1 Cor 15.24), and God will be “everything in everyone” or “all in all.” How had the entire cosmos, “all creation” (Rm 8.22), heaven and earth, fallen into such dire straits? Paul offers no mythic scaffolding to frame his views, no explanatory narrative of errant angels or of a primeval fall to account for the world’s “bondage.” He does briefly mention Adam as sin’s passageway, through whom “sin came into the world, and through sin, death” (Rm 5.12; cf. 1 Cor 15.20–22, “In Adam all die”). Adam had “trespassed,” bringing “condemnation” on himself and on his progeny (Rm 5.18; “By one man many were made sinners,” 5.19). Christ, the antitype of Adam and the remedy for Adam’s sin, counters—indeed undoes—the “reign of death” begun by Adam. “As one man’s trespass led to condemnation for all men, so one man’s act of righteousness leads to acquittal and life for all men”; disobedience led to sin, obedience will lead to righteousness (Rm 5.18–19); death will cede to life.

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

  In light of this human material, is it any wonder that the social life of fallen humankind is so blighted by strife, injustice, incessant war? The citizens of the earthly city, the city of man, impacted in their own self-love, constantly war against the citizens of the heavenly city, those who love God, as they sojourn in time. It had ever been thus, since the founder of the earthly city, Cain, slew Abel, representative of the city of God (15.1). But the earthly city also wars incessantly within and against itself: “The human race, more than any other species, is at once social by nature and quarrelsome by perversion,” (12.21; on power relations more generally, see 19.7–17). Lust for power (libido dominandi) characterizes all human societies, whether pagan or Christian, whether small or large. “What are kingdoms but large robber bands? What are robber bands but small kingdoms?” (4.4). Even the church itself, before the End, is a corpus permixtum, a society made up of a mixed population, containing both the reprobate and the good (18.49). Peace without war, society without power relations, can and will come only at history’s end, when human nature, vitiated by the Fall, is itself healed and perfected in the final resurrection. But who of the human family will be in this society of saints? What happens to those not elected to salvation? If all humanity is universally trapped in its condition of sin so that none can will effectively not to sin, if it is God alone who gives only to some sinners the grace to be able not to sin, then on what basis does God make his decision? And why, if he is all good and all powerful, did he permit things to happen as they did, condemning all humanity for Adam’s transgression? In the 390s, just preceding his writing of the Confessions, Augustine had considered these questions against the challenge of the Manichees. The Manichees had argued that the good god does only good. Anything bad—including sin—must accordingly proceed from another power opposed to and independent of God. (If this malicious power were not independent of God, God would be complicit in the operation of evil.) Lived experience attested to the cosmic conflict between two independent and opposed realms, Light and Darkness, Good and Evil. And the human being was a miniature instance of this intense battle. His moral failings reflected the strength of the forces of Darkness waging war within him—“the law of my members,” as Paul had written, “at war with the law of my mind” (Rm 7.23–25). People sinned not because they wanted to, said the Manichees, but because they were forced to: they sinned because they were overcome by Sin.22

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

  Joe’s record of mostly misdemeanor-level juvenile incidents—nearly all of which were nonviolent and which did not merit more than a single court adjudication in a two-year period—was viewed differently by the sentencing judge, who concluded that “the juvenile system has been utterly incapable of doing anything with Mr. Sullivan.” The court concluded that Joe had been “given opportunity after opportunity to upright himself and take advantage of the second and third chances he’s been given.” In truth, Joe was never given a second, much less a third, chance to “upright himself,” but he was nonetheless characterized at age thirteen as a “serial” or “violent recidivist” by prosecutors. The judge sentenced him to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. — Despite numerous potentially meritorious grounds for appeal, Joe’s appointed appellate counsel filed an Anders brief—indicating his belief that there were no legitimate grounds for appeal and no credible basis to complain about the conviction or sentence—and was permitted to withdraw from representing Joe. Joe, just one year into his own adolescence, was sent to adult prison, where an eighteen-year nightmare began. In prison, he was repeatedly raped and sexually assaulted. He attempted suicide on multiple occasions. He developed multiple sclerosis, which eventually forced him into a wheelchair. Doctors later concluded that his neurological disorder might have been triggered by trauma in prison. — Another inmate housed with Joe wrote to us and described him as disabled, horribly mistreated, and wrongfully condemned to die in prison for a non-homicide crime at thirteen. In 2007, we wrote to Joe and discovered that he had no legal assistance and had spent the previous eighteen years in prison with no one to help him challenge his conviction or sentence. When I received Joe’s response to my letter, a scribbled note in the handwriting of a child, he could still only read at a third-grade level, despite the fact that he was thirty-one. He told me in his letter that he was “okay.” Then he wrote, “If I didn’t do anything, shouldn’t I be able to go home now? Mr. Bryan, if this is true, can you please write me back and come get me?” I wrote to Joe that we would look deeper into his case and that we were convinced that he had a credible claim of innocence. We attempted to prove his innocence through a motion for DNA testing, but because the state had destroyed the relevant biological evidence, the motion was denied. Disheartened, we decided to challenge Joe’s death-in-prison sentence as unconstitutionally cruel and unusual punishment. I drove from Montgomery through South Alabama to Florida and then along a tangle of wooded back roads to get to the Santa Rosa Correctional Facility in the town of Milton to meet Joe for the first time.

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

  The Fortune who presides over the romances is a literary spirit. Over and over again, Fortune is said to be a dramatist. One character tells Chareas, “Fortune loves invention, and you have been cast in an unhappy drama.” Not just the authors of romance, but also the characters are aware that their lives have the shape of literature. Clitophon launches on his story with the reflection, “I was nineteen years of age when Fortune began her drama.” Later he laments yet another bad turn. “Fortune as usual has set upon me and contrived a new drama.” In The Ethiopian Tale the characters experience the “ceaseless turning of the human lot, full of twists.” In despair Theagenes wonders if he and Charicleia should not just submit to the “destiny that everywhere chased” them by surrendering. The gods’ vendetta was “making us into playthings, as though our affairs were a drama on a stage.” Charicleia, by contrast, counsels resistance. In the final scenes, the king and his people alike marvel at the “theatrics of Fortune.” The literary pretensions of Fortune are part of the high-pitched aesthetic self-awareness of the romances. But given the real place of Fortune in the imperial pantheon, it would be misleading to dismiss these comparisons as empty authorial self-aggrandizement.16 The canny allusions to life as literature manifest themselves in a revealing metaphor that recurs across the romances. When Anthia is enslaved in the brothel, she laments her fate, but she steels her resolve and decides to find “some contrivance” for protecting her chastity: the feigned fit of epilepsy. After she survives and is reunited with her lover, she attributes her chastity to the fact that she contrived “every device” for the protection of virtue. Similarly, in The Ethiopian Tale, the protagonist can rely, in the most hopeless of circumstances, on “some contrivance” that will allow escape. The word for “contrivance,” mēchanē, is a rich word, alluding broadly to man-made devices that illustrate human resourcefulness. But mēchanē can also have the more narrow sense of a stage device, a theatrical machine especially used to produce sudden apparitions of the gods. The ploys of the girls whose chastity is threatened are not only desperate and incredible ploys; they are, self-consciously, stage devices. The girls who preserve their chastity do so simply by playing their role, by compelling the drama somehow to go on, so that the story can unfold according to its logic which, of course, will preserve their bodies inviolate.17

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  But I know what it is to fondle the harsh fibres of a rope or the edge of a knife. Gradually I turned my dread desire into a rampart against itself: the fact that the possibility of suicide was ever present helped me to bear life with less impatience, just as a sedative potion within hand's reach serves to calm a man afflicted with insomnia. By some inner contradiction this obsession with death ceased only after the first symptoms of illness came to distract me from that one thought; I began to interest myself anew in this life which was leaving me; in Sidon's gardens I wanted intensely to enjoy my body for some years more. One desires to die, but not to suffocate; sickness disgusts us with death, and we wish to get well, which is a way of wishing to live. But weakness and suffering, with manifold bodily woes, soon discourage the invalid from trying to regain ground: he tires of those respites which are but snares, of that faltering strength, those ardors cut short, and that perpetual lying in wait for the next attack. I kept sly watch upon myself: that dull chest pain, was it only a passing discomfort, the result of a meal absorbed too fast, or was I to expect from the enemy an assault which this time would not be repulsed? I no longer entered the Senate without saying to myself that the door had perhaps closed behind me as finally as if I had been awaited, like Caesar, by fifty conspirators armed with knives. During the suppers at Tibur I feared to distress my guests by the discourtesy of a sudden and final departure; I was afraid to die in my bath, or in the embrace of young arms. Functions which formerly were easy to perform or even agreeable, become humiliating now that they have become more laborious; one wearies of the silver vase handed each morning to be examined by the physician. The principal ailment brings with it a whole train of secondary afflictions: my hearing is less acute than before; even yesterday I was forced to ask Phlegon to repeat a whole sentence; no crime would have cost me more shame. The months which followed the adoption of Antoninus were bad indeed: the stay in Baiae and the return to Rome, with the negotiations accompanying it, overtaxed what strength I had left. The obsession with death again took hold of me, but this time the reasons were plain to see, and could be told; my worst enemy would have had no cause to smile over my despair.

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

  Between the Theodosian crusade against male prostitution and the reign of Justinian, there are no imperial measures bearing on same-sex erotics. But in 438 the court of Theodosius II completed the milestone of legal codification known as the Theodosian Code. Its editors were empowered to include all “general” laws promulgated since the time of Constantine, catalogued in orderly fashion, with all extraneous rhetoric excised. From January of AD 439, the laws as they stood in the code, in chronological order and whittled down to their legal core, were in force. Both the law of Constans and the law of AD 390 were included in the title of the Theodosian Code on the lex Iulia de adulteriis. That classification is remarkably significant. It reveals the extent to which the umbrella of the lex Iulia had become the utterly dominant locus of sexual regulation. More importantly, it suggests the extent to which the editors of the Code wished to maximize the scope of the law against male prostitution. Thanks to the handiwork of the Christian jurist who transmitted the law of Theodosius in the Collatio, we have a relatively rare opportunity to assess the legal surgery performed by the Theodosian editors. If the measure was originally about male prostitution, then it would be more accurate to describe the editors’ work as a decapitation. There is no mention of the “male brothels,” only the raving attack on male passivity, to be punished with “the avenging flames.” The editors of the Code, intelligent Christian jurists who knew precisely what they were doing, made the law of 390 into a blustering prohibition on male passivity itself. This redaction was doubly significant, because the Theodosian Code was a fundamental source of law in the early medieval west. The editors left no doubt that men playing the passive role in intercourse risked grave physical punishments.32

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  I went deeper in disillusion, and perhaps into blasphemy: I was beginning to find it natural, if not just, that we should perish. Our literature is nearing exhaustion, our arts are falling asleep; Pancrates is not Homer, nor is Arrian a Xenophon; when I have tried to immortalize Antinous in stone no Praxiteles has come to hand. Our sciences have been at a standstill from the times of Aristotle and Archimedes; our technical development is inadequate to the strain of a long war; even our pleasure-lovers grow weary of delight. More civilized ways of living and more liberal thinking in the course of the last century are the work of a very small minority of good minds; the masses remain wholly ignorant, fierce and cruel when they can be so, and in any case limited and selfish; it is safe to wager that they will never change. Our effort has been compromised in advance by too many greedy procurators and publicans, too many suspicious senators, too many brutal centurions. Nor is time granted oftener to empires than to men to learn from past errors. Although a weaver would wish to mend his web or a clever calculator would correct his mistakes, and the artist would try to retouch his masterpiece if still imperfect or slightly damaged, Nature prefers to start again from the very clay, from chaos itself, and this horrible waste is what we term natural order. I raised my head and moved slightly in order to limber myself. From the top of Simon's citadel vague gleams reddened the sky, unexplained manifestations of the nocturnal life of the enemy. The wind was blowing from Egypt; a whirl of dust passed by like a specter; the flattened rims of the hills reminded me of the Arabic range in moonlight. I went slowly back, drawing a fold of my cloak over my mouth, provoked with myself for having devoted to hollow meditations upon the future a night which I could have employed to prepare the work of the next day, or to sleep. The collapse of Rome, if it were to come about, would concern my successors; in that eight hundred and forty-seventh year of the Roman era my task consisted of stifling the revolt in Judaea and bringing back from the Orient, without too great loss, an ailing army. In crossing the esplanade I slipped at times on the blood of some rebel executed the evening before. I lay down on my bed without undressing, to be awakened two hours later by the trumpets at dawn. All my life long I had been on the best of terms with my body; I had implicitly counted upon its docility, and its strength. That close alliance was beginning to dissolve; my body was no longer at one with my will and my mind, and with what after all, however ineptly, I must call my soul; the ready comrade of other days was only a slave sulking at his task.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  Again the dance hall, the money rhythm, the love that comes over the radio, the impersonal, wingless touch of the crowd. A despair that reaches down to the very soles of the boots, an ennui, a desperation. In the midst of the highest mechanical perfection to dance without joy, to be so desperately alone, to be almost inhuman because you are human. If there were life on the moon what more nearly perfect, joyless evidence of it could there be than this? If to travel away from the sun is to reach the chill idiocy of the moon, then we have arrived at our goal and life is but the cold, lunar incandescence of the sun. This is the dance of ice-cold life in the hollow of an atom, and the more we dance the colder it gets. So we dance, to an ice-cold frenzied rhythm, to short waves and long waves, a dance on the inside of the cup of nothingness, each centimeter of lust running to dollars and cents. We taxi from one perfect female to another seeking the vulnerable defect, but they are flawless and impermeable in their impeccable lunar consistency. This is the icy white maidenhead of love’s logic, the web of the ebbed tide, the fringe of absolute vacuity. And on this fringe of the virginal logic of perfection I am dancing the soul dance of white desperation, the last white man pulling the trigger on the last emotion, the gorilla of despair beating his breast with immaculate gloved paws. I am the gorilla who feels his wings growing, a giddy gorilla in the center of a satin-like emptiness; the night too grows like an electrical plant, shooting white-hot buds into velvet black space. I am the black space of the night in which the buds break with anguish, a starfish swimming on the frozen dew of the moon. I am the germ of a new insanity, a freak dressed in intelligible language, a sob that is buried like a splinter in the quick of the soul. I am dancing the very sane and lovely dance of the angelic gorilla. These are my brothers and sisters who are insane and unangelic. We are dancing in the hollow of the cup of nothingness. We are of one flesh, but separated like stars. In the moment all is clear to me, clear that in this logic there is no redemption, the city itself being the highest form of madness and each and every part, organic or inorganic, an expression of this same madness. I feel absurdly and humbly great, not as megalomaniac, but as human spore, as the dead sponge of life swollen to saturation.

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

  are subjected to such disdain that they may not be able to benefi t from the right of power nor may anything be thus acquired by them. It is to be granted to the slaves and daughters and others who have hired themselves out on account of their poverty (whose humble lot has damned them), should they so will, to be relieved of every necessity of this misery by appealing to the succor of bishops, judges, or even defensors. So that, if the pimps shall think these women are to be urged on or impose the necessity of sin on those who are unwilling, they will lose not only that power which they held, but they will be proscribed by exile to the public mines, which is less of a punishment than that of a woman who is seized by a pimp and compelled to endure the fi lth of an intercourse that she did not will.” Rarely is the translation of Christian ideology into statutory law quite so clear. Th e “necessity of sinning” was precisely the language of Basil and Cyril, Augustine and Julian, and the formulation undoubtedly refl ects the impact of Christianity on the imperial chancery. Th e law of 428 was a path-breaking act of social policy. It addressed sin as a social problem. Th e state took an active concern in the spiritual welfare of women forced into prostitution. Th e constitution of Th eodosius II made a statement that the govern- ment was willing to interfere with the private powers of masters and fathers. It also off ered aid to poor women who had been forced into prostitution by circumstance rather than private legal power. But there were limits to the new policy. Th e mea sure did not punish women who prostituted themselves, nor men who patronized the brothel. Prostitution remained legal. Forcible prostitution, forcible sin, even sin caused by poverty, was redressed. Th e nature, timing, and ideological basis of this legislative program have been broadly misunderstood. Th e notion of coerced sin, fi rst outlined by Basil, was in fact at the center of Christian policy on prostitution and was to remain so down to the age of Justinian. Th e attempt to segregate slavery from prostitution was much more than a cosmetic reform. Ancient prostitution was enmeshed in the slave trade. Th e law struck, materially, at the heart of the sex industry in antiquity. Even more, it was the state’s fi rst move toward a moral realignment of the system of prostitution. Women without honor, prostitutes and slaves, were still exposed to the forces of male sexual- C H U R C H , S O C I E T Y, A N D S E X I N T H E A G E O F T R I U M P H 

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  Once you have given up the ghost, everything follows with dead certainty, even in the midst of chaos. From the beginning it was never anything but chaos: it was a fluid which enveloped me, which I breathed in through the gills. In the substrata, where the moon shone steady and opaque, it was smooth and fecundating; above it was a jangle and a discord. In everything I quickly saw the opposite, the contradiction, and between the real and the unreal the irony, the paradox. I was my own worst enemy. There was nothing I wished to do which I could just as well not do. Even as a child, when I lacked for nothing, I wanted to die: I wanted to surrender because I saw no sense in struggling. I felt that nothing would be proved, substantiated, added or subtracted by continuing an existence which I had not asked for. Everybody around me was a failure, or if not a failure, ridiculous. Especially the successful ones. The successful ones bored me to tears. I was sympathetic to a fault, but it was not sympathy that made me so. It was a purely negative quality, a weakness which blossomed at the mere sight of human misery. I never helped any one expecting that it would do any good; I helped because I was helpless to do otherwise. To want to change the condition of affairs seemed futile to me; nothing would be altered, I was convinced, except by a change of heart, and who could change the hearts of men? Now and then a friend was converted: it was something to make me puke. I had no more need of God than He had of me, and if there were one, I often said to myself, I would meet Him calmly and spit in His face. What was most annoying was that at first blush people usually took me to be good, to be kind, generous, loyal, faithful. Perhaps I did possess these virtues but if so it was because I was indifferent: I could afford to be good, kind, generous, loyal, and so forth, since I was free of envy. Envy was the one thing I was never a victim of. I have never envied anybody or anything. On the contrary, I have only felt pity for everybody and everything.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  He wasn’t in jail and in jail at least he knew there were other people around to talk to but now there was no one and all the cheering and all the clapping had stopped and now he was more alone than he had ever been in his life. What kind of miserable life was this, no friends, no legs, people staring at him wherever he went. The depression sometimes was awesome, like he was drowning in it, and no matter how hard he tried he wasn’t ever getting out. He had tried so hard for years to hold on. He had even sometimes invented things that weren’t true, made believe so the feelings would go away. But now he wasn’t making things up anymore, he was too tired to do that, in too much pain. Where were his legs that used to run? he thought. He wanted people around him. He wanted someone to call him on the phone. He wanted just one friend he could talk to about the real things, the painful truths about his miserable existence that would make most people walk away from him—“Sorry I gotta run now. I’m late already.” Other people always seemed able to laugh and joke about the whole thing, but they weren’t the one who was living in this angry numb corpse, they didn’t have to wake up each morning and feel the dead weight of these legs and strain the yellow urine into the ugly rubber bag, they didn’t have to put on the rubber gloves each morning over the bathroom bowl and dig into his rear end to clean the brown chunks of shit out. They lived very easy lives, why their lives were disgustingly easy compared to his and they acted sometimes like everything was equal and he was the same as them, but he knew they were lying and especially the women, when they lay with him and told him how much they loved his body, how it wasn’t any different than any other man’s, that they didn’t care if his dick was numb and dead and he couldn’t feel warm and good inside a woman ever again. He was a half-dead corpse and no one could tell him any different. They could use the fancy medical words like they had in the hospital but he knew who they had brought back with all their new helicopters and wonderful new ways of killing people, all that incredible advancement in technology. He would never have come back from any other war. But now here he was. He was back and dead and breathing. Oh Mom, oh Dad, somebody, Jesus, somebody please help me. No one to love him, no one to touch him the way he had been touched before the war. He was a little speck now, he was a tiny little dot and he had to do something fast because he felt himself getting smaller and smaller. He had to live again, feel again.

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

  For both Theodosius II and Justinian, the two great Christian codifiers of the law, prostitution was a particular fixation. Under Justinian, prostitution was the target of a policy even wider than his campaign against sexual procurement. Justinian and Theodora founded a convent for reformed prostitutes. This refuge was to be a means of escape for women trapped in the life of the brothel. Named “Repentance,” the convent advertised the possibility of inner change for the prostitute and established a reformatory on Christian terms. As we will see in Chapter 4 , the idea of the penitent prostitute is exactly contemporaneous, and ideologically correlated, with the legal program against coercion in the sex industry. As with the regulation of same-sex eros, the state’s intervention in the sex trade reached its pitch of ideological fervor in the reign of Justinian, and once again relied on a religio-juridical complex. In his Secret History, Procopius cynically reported that the emperor and empress forced prostitutes who did not want to convert, against their will, to enter the monastery. He claimed that these prostitutes threw themselves off the walls of the convent as their only means of resistance. The very language, “forced to convert,” showed a close familiarity with the moral and intellectual foundations of Christian policy between Theodosius II and Justinian. Procopius inverted the dynamics of consent and coercion to create a malicious send-up of the Christian approach to prostitution.85 The policy initiated in 428 and fulfilled in the age of Justinian represented a momentous crack in the foundations of an ancient institutional order. What requires emphasis, though, and what proves revealing for the larger question of the Christianization of law, is the extent to which this was not destined to be one Christian sexual policy among others. It was the front edge of Christian legislative intervention in the sexual economy. Rules against homoerotic acts were explosive but exceedingly rare; the statutes against adultery already on the books were sufficient; the direct repression of prostitution was inconceivable. So the Christian state, from Theodosius II to Justinian, the two great codifiers, made sexual coercion the signal reform issue. Over a crucial century, in which other examples of Christian sexual legislation are virtually nonexistent, the problem of coerced prostitution generated a string of enactments whose evolving scope reflects the earnest ambitions of lawmakers. At its core this campaign against coerced prostitution is an expression of a new model of human solidarity. In the name of suppressing sin, the campaign brought the most morally invisible bodies inside the horizons of public solicitude. The state, so long accustomed to limiting its prerogatives to the regulation of property, status, and rank, could no longer remain absolutely indifferent to the exploitation of those bodies beyond civic claim to honor; it is no huge exaggeration to say that this policy marks the passing of an age.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  The boats passing below, the Fall River Line, the Albany Day Line, why am I going to work, what will I do tonight, the warm cunt beside me and can I work my knuckles into her groin, run away and become a cowboy, try Alaska, the gold mines, get off and turn around, don’t die yet, wait another day, a stroke of luck, river, end it, down, down, like a corkscrew, head and shoulders in the mud, legs free; fish will come and bite, tomorrow a new life, where, anywhere, why begin again, the same thing everywhere, death, death is the solution, but don’t die yet, wait another day, a stroke of luck, a new face, a new friend, millions of chances, you’re too young yet, you’re melancholy, you don’t die yet, wait another day, a stroke of luck, fuck anyway, and so on over the bridge into the glass shed, everybody glued together, worms, ants, crawling out of a dead tree and their thoughts crawling out the same way. . . . Maybe, being up high between the two shores, suspended above the traffic, above life and death, on each side the high tombs, tombs blazing with dying sunlight, the river flowing heedlessly, flowing on like time itself, maybe each time I passed up there, something was tugging away at me, urging me to take it in, to announce myself; anyway each time I passed on high I was truly alone and whenever that happened the book commenced to write itself, screaming the things which I never breathed, the thoughts I never uttered, the conversations I never held, the hopes, the dreams, the delusions I never admitted. If this then was the true self it was marvelous, and what’s more it seemed never to change but always to pick up from the last stop, to continue in the same vein, a vein I had struck when I was a child and went down in the street for the first time alone and there frozen into the dirty ice of the gutter lay a dead cat, the first time I had looked at death and grasped it. From that moment I knew what it was to be isolated: every object, every living thing and every dead thing led its independent existence. My thoughts too led an independent existence.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  Why do the skeletons dance so ecstatically, I wonder. Is it the fall of the world? Is it the dance of death which has been so often heralded? To see millions of skeletons dancing in the snow while the city founders is an awesome sight. Will anything ever grow again? Will babes come out of the womb? Will there be food and wine? There are men in the air, to be sure. They will come down to plunder. There will be cholera and dysentery and those who were above and triumphant will perish like the rest. I have the sure feeling that I will be the last man on earth. I will emerge from the show window when it is all over and walk calmly amidst the ruins. I will have the whole earth to myself. Long distance calling! To inform me that I am not utterly alone. Then the destruction was not complete? It’s discouraging. Man is not even able to destroy himself; he can only destroy others. I am disgusted. What a malicious cripple! What cruel delusions! So there are more of the species about and they will tidy up the mess and begin again. God will come down again in flesh and blood and take up the burden of guilt. They will make music and build things in stone and write it all down in little books. Pfui! What blind tenacity, what clumsy ambitions! I am on the bed again. The old Greek world, the dawn of sexual intercourse—and Hymie! Hymie Laubscher always on the same level, looking down on the boulevard across the river. There is a lull in the nuptial feast and the clam fritters are brought in. Move over just a little , he says. There, like that, that’s it! I hear frogs croaking in the swamp outside my window. Big cemetery frogs nourished by the dead. They are all huddled together in sexual intercourse; they are croaking with sexual glee. I realize now how Hymie was conceived and brought into being. Hymie the bullfrog! His mother was at the bottom of the pack and Hymie, then an embryo, was hidden away in her sac. It was in the early days of sexual intercourse and there were no Marquis of Queensbury rules to hinder. It was fuck and be fucked—and the devil take the hindmost. It has been that way ever since the Greeks—a blind fuck in the mud and then a quick spawn and then death. People are fucking on different levels but it’s always in a swamp and the litter is always destined for the same end. When the house is torn down the bed is left standing: the cosmosexual altar. I was polluting the bed with dreams. Stretched out taut on the ferroconcrete my soul would leave its body and roam from place to place on a little trolley such as is used in department stores for making change.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  It’s in the air, in the climate, in the ultra-grandiose landscape, in the stone forests that are lying horizontal, in the torrential rivers that bite through the rocky canyons, in the supra-normal distances, the supernal arid wastes, the over-lush crops, the monstrous fruits, the mixture of quixotic bloods, the fatras of cults, sects, beliefs, the opposition of laws and languages, the contradictoriness of temperaments, principles, needs, requirements. The continent is full of buried violence, of the bones of antediluvian monsters and of lost races of man, of mysteries which are wrapped in doom. The atmosphere is at times so electrical that the soul is summoned out of its body and runs amok. Like the rain everything comes in bucketsful—or not at all. The whole continent is a huge volcano whose crater is temporarily concealed by a moving panorama which is partly dream, partly fear, partly despair. From Alaska to Yucatan it’s the same story. Nature dominates. Nature wins out. Everywhere the same fundamental urge to slay, to ravage, to plunder. Outwardly they seem like a fine, upstanding people—healthy, optimistic, courageous. Inwardly they are filled with worms. A tiny spark and they blow up. Often it happens, as in Russia, that a man came in with a chip on his shoulder. He woke up that way, as if struck by a monsoon. Nine times out of ten he was a good fellow, a fellow whom everyone liked. But when the rage came on nothing could stop him. He was like a horse with the blind staggers and the best thing you could do for him was to shoot him on the spot. It always happens that way with peaceable people. One day they run amok. In America they’re constantly running amok. What they need is an outlet for their energy, for their blood lust. Europe is bled regularly by war. America is pacifistic and cannibalistic. Outwardly it seems to be a beautiful honeycomb, with all the drones crawling over each other in a frenzy of work; inwardly it’s a slaughterhouse, each man killing off his neighbor and sucking the juice from his bones. Superficially it looks like a bold, masculine world; actually it’s a whorehouse run by women, with the native sons acting as pimps and the bloody foreigners selling their flesh. Nobody knows what it is to sit on his ass and be content. That happens only in the films where everything is faked, even the fires of hell. The whole continent is sound asleep and in that sleep a grand nightmare is taking place. Nobody could have slept more soundly than I in the midst of this nightmare. The war, when it came along, made only a sort of faint rumble in my ears. Like my compatriots, I was pacifistic and cannibalistic. The millions who were put away in the carnage passed away in a cloud, much like the Aztecs passed away, and the Incas and the red Indians and the buffaloes.