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 Wild (2012)

  “It’s socked in pretty much everywhere above here,” she replied. “All the thru-hikers have come down off the trail this year. They’re all walking along the Gold Lake Highway instead.” “The Gold Lake Highway?” I asked, bewildered. “Was there a man here in the past few days? His name is Greg. He’s fortyish? With brown hair and a beard.” She shook her head, but the waitress chimed that she’d talked to a PCT hiker who met that description, though she didn’t know his name. “You can take a seat, if you’d like to eat,” the woman said. A menu sat on the counter and I picked it up just to see. “Do you have anything that costs sixty cents or less?” I asked her in a jesting tone, so quiet my voice barely rose above the din. “Seventy-five cents will get you a cup of coffee. Free refills,” she replied. “I’ve got lunch in my pack, actually,” I said, and walked toward the door, past pushed-aside plates that were piled with perfectly edible scraps of food that no one but me and the bears and raccoons would have been willing to eat. I continued out to the porch and sat beside Monster. I pulled my sixty cents from my pocket and stared at the silver coins in my palm as if they would multiply if I stared at them hard enough. I thought of the box waiting for me in Belden Town with the twenty-dollar bill inside. I was starving and it was true I had lunch in my pack, but I was too disheartened to eat it. I paged through my guidebook instead, trying yet again to hatch a new plan. “I overheard you inside talking about the Pacific Crest Trail,” a woman said. She was middle-aged and slim, her frosted blonde hair cut in a stylish bob. In each ear she wore a single diamond stud. “I’m hiking it for a few months,” I said. “I think that’s so neat.” She smiled. “I always wondered about the people who do that. I know the trail is up there,” she said, waving her hand westward, “but I’ve never been on it.” She came closer and for a moment I thought she’d try to give me a hug, but she only patted my arm. “You’re not alone, are you?” When I nodded, she laughed and put a hand to her chest. “And what on earth does your mother have to say about that?” “She’s dead,” I said, too discouraged and hungry to soften it with a note of apology, the way I usually did. “My goodness. That’s terrible.” Her sunglasses sat against her chest, dangling from a string of glittery pastel beads. She reached for them and put them on. Her name was Christine, she told me, and she and her husband and their two teenaged daughters were staying in a cabin nearby. “Would you like to come back there with me and take a shower?” she asked.

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

  My grant more than covered my needs and I also had five hundred pounds on deposit, a not inconsiderable sum in those days. The order had given me a hundred pounds on my departure, my grandmother had left me a small legacy, and I had won an academic prize worth another hundred guineas. But saving and hoarding had become an obsession, so much so that when I came to buy my first apartment in 1976, I had squirreled away enough money to put down a deposit and furnish the entire flat. I can still see the astonishment on the face of the building society representative when I told him that I had saved this money from my student grant: he agreed to allow me a mortgage without further demur. Money is not a neutral factor, but is highly symbolic. I had convinced myself that I was not going to be able to earn my own living, and I simply could not make myself believe that this was a ridiculous assumption. What I was really saying was that I did not have a future. I was just not making it out here as a secular. I could not, as that perceptive Basque consultant had noted, attach myself to anything. How could I engage with life when my heart was dead? How could I become an academic when I was no longer able to respond spontaneously to literature? How could I function when I was increasingly subject to “weird seizures”? When I looked ahead, the only possible future I could see for myself was a locked ward or a padded cell. My years as a nun had somehow made me unfit for the world, had broken something within me, and now I seemed unable to put myself together again. And I did not want to nourish myself. What was the point of feeding my body when my mind and heart had been irreparably broken? And yet, in a way, I also felt that by starving myself I was reaching out to the world. I was asking for help. People kept telling me that I was fine and congratulating me on how well I was doing. But I was not fine and I wanted people to know this. As the pounds fell off, as people like Jenifer started to notice my growing emaciation, I felt a perverse gratification. Look, I was saying, this is what I really feel like. Please notice—and help me. “Well . . .” Jenifer trailed off. Her heart was just not in this at all. “Don’t let your egg get cold. By the way,” she added, as if in an afterthought, “I’ve been thinking that it might be nice if you could join us for Sunday lunch. It’s the only meal that we all eat together, and you are part of the household now. I really mean it,” she went on, less embarrassed now that she felt on firmer ground. “You’ve fitted in so well.

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

  Every time I thought I had turned a corner, I seemed to get knocked back. Even God, for whom I had searched so long, was simply the product of a faulty brain, a neurological aberration. I went to bed that night in despair. So it is epilepsy, then?” I asked Dr. Wolfe, the consultant, some weeks later. “Yes, I’m afraid it certainly looks that way.” He nodded briskly, a lean, elegant man with a sharply intelligent face. His eyes held mine kindly. “The electroencephalograph shows a small but definite abnormality.” A few days earlier, I had had a preliminary EEG, during which numerous small electrodes had been inserted into my scalp to measure the brain rhythms. “But we didn’t find anything very terrible,” Dr. Wolfe continued. “That’s good news. Epilepsy isn’t the end of the world, you know. It is even curable, if we get it in time. We can do a lot nowadays with drugs and you can learn how to avoid unnecessary risks.” “How did I get this?” I asked wearily, expecting to be told that my unstable nerves had brought me to this sorry pass. Dr. Wolfe shrugged. “We can’t be sure, but I would suspect some kind of brain injury. It could have been a bad knock on the head, or a birth trauma, which has left some scarring on the brain. Are you aware of anything like that?” I shook my head, but later my mother recalled that my birth had been difficult. When the contractions had become severe, she had been given a shot of morphine and had passed out. It seems likely that I was deprived of oxygen for a few critical moments and suffered mild brain damage. I am lucky that I was not as badly injured as Jacob. “There are one or two questions I would like to ask you,” Dr. Wolfe went on, “just to give me a clearer idea of what part of the brain has been damaged and what kind of epilepsy you have. Epilepsy is a generic term, you know; it covers a multitude of very different conditions.” I nodded vaguely, though I had little idea of what he meant. For me, epilepsy meant the grand mal seizures that I had seen in Jacob. I did not know that there could be any other kind. “Tell me, I know this was your first grand mal attack, but are you ever prone to fainting? Loss of consciousness—anything of that sort?” There was a moment when, as they say, the world stood still. I felt literally blank, and could not even begin to think what this might mean. There was a pause, and then I told him about the blackouts. “And you were about eighteen when this started?” Dr.

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

  “So in the future,” Dr. Piet said pointedly as he drew the session to a close, “let’s not waste any more time. Let us have no more agonizing about unimportant details. Let’s get right in there to the basic difficulties, which are the cause of all these symptoms. And do me a favor—let’s have no more histrionics about perfectly normal absentmindedness. After all, Karen”—he smiled to soften his bleak conclusions—“it’s not as if you ever did anything very dreadful at these times. Making a cup of coffee? Going to a library? Come on! You of all people, with your Gothic imagination, can do better than that! Let’s see what you’re really like when you lose control. Surprise me!” And so, a few weeks later, in the autumn of 1971, I did just that. I woke up in hospital throwing up an overdose of sleeping pills. Again, I have no recollection of what happened. I do remember pouring myself a glass of the sherry that Jane had given to me for my twenty-seventh birthday. I had wanted to forget myself, to escape from the hallucinations, the fear, and the perplexity, and to give myself a little treat. But I don’t recall swallowing a large number of the purple sleeping tablets that Dr. Piet had prescribed for my insomnia. I certainly cannot remember deciding to end it once and for all. There was nothing conscious or deliberate about the act. I could recall the sweet stickiness of the sherry—but of the pills, my discovery by Jane, the alarm, the ambulance, I had no memory, no recollection at all. So the forced vomiting, the pain, the indignity, and the curt orders of the doctors were devastating. I had no notion of what had happened or where I was. A nurse asked peremptorily for my name. Did I know how old I was? What was the date? Who was the prime minister? I remember Jane’s anxious face, the succession of ceilings and doors, as I was wheeled down one corridor after another, and a numbing cold. As I was lifted onto a bed in the ward, I heard one of the other patients shouting officiously: “She’ll be cold! She’ll need another blanket, nurse! She’ll be cold!” “Mind your own business, Brenda! Get back into bed,” somebody replied sharply. “We can deal with this, thank you.” But I reached gratefully for the word, which had eluded me, and was able to croak: “I’m so cold!” I could hear Jane giggle and say wryly, “Spot on, Brenda.” Then a nurse leaned over my bed, her face lit grotesquely by the harsh beam of light. “Where’s your sponge bag, dear?” I stared at her, bewildered. “Your sponge bag! Surely you didn’t forget to bring it with you?”

• From Another Country (1962)

  He wanted to stand up, breathe, and at the same time he wanted to lie flat on the floor and to be swallowed into whatever would stop this pain. Yet, he was aware, perhaps for the first time in his life, that nothing would stop it, nothing: this was himself. Rufus was aware of every inch of Rufus. He was flesh: flesh, bone, muscle, fluid, orifices, hair, and skin. His body was controlled by laws he did not understand. Nor did he understand what force within this body had driven him into such a desolate place. The most impenetrable of mysteries moved in this darkness for less than a second, hinting of reconciliation. And still the music continued, Bessie was saying that she wouldn’t mind being in jail but she had to stay there so long. “I’m sorry,” he said, and raised his head. Vivaldo gave him a handkerchief and he dried his eyes and blew his nose. “Don’t be sorry,” said Vivaldo. “Be glad.” He stood over Rufus for yet another moment, then he said, “I’m going to take you out and buy you a pizza. You hungry, child, that’s why you carrying on like that.” He went into the kitchen and began to wash his face. Rufus smiled, watching him, bent over the sink, under the hideous light. It was like the kitchen in St. James Slip. He and Leona had ended their life together there, on the very edge of the island. When Rufus had ceased working and when all his money was gone, and there was nothing left to pawn, they were wholly dependent on the money Leona brought home from the restaurant. Then she lost this job. Their domestic life, which involved a hideous amount of drinking, made it difficult for her to get there on time and also caused her to look more and more disreputable. One evening, half-drunk, Rufus had gone to the restaurant to pick her up. The next day she was fired. She never held a steady job again. One evening Vivaldo came to visit them in their last apartment. They heard the whistles of tugboats all day and all night long. Vivaldo found Leona sitting on the bathroom floor, her hair in her eyes, her face swollen and dirty with weeping. Rufus had been beating her. He sat silently on the bed. “Why?” cried Vivaldo. “I don’t know,” Leona sobbed, “it can’t be for nothing I did. He’s always beating me, for nothing, for nothing!” She gasped for breath, opening her mouth like an infant, and in that instant Vivaldo really hated Rufus and Rufus knew it. “He says I’m sleeping with other colored boys behind his back and it’s not true, God knows it’s not true!” “Rufus knows it isn’t true,” Vivaldo said. He looked over at Rufus, who said nothing. He turned back to Leona. “Get up, Leona. Stand up.

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

  But there were other things that I had given up—or perhaps it was truer to say that they had given up on me. It appeared now that I could “not hope to know again” what Eliot called “the infirm glory of the positive hour.” I no longer had a healthy mind that could contemplate the world in a wholly cheerful light. I had found that any such vision was indeed infirm and weak, because I had experienced the horror that lay just beneath our ordinary waking consciousness. Nothing could change that. Even if I never had another panic attack, I would never be able to forget what I had seen. And God had gone too. True, I had never known “the blessèd face,” but (I had now concluded) that was because there was nothing to know. When I had embarked upon the religious life, I had been certain that if only I tried hard enough, I would see the world transfigured by the presence of God and that I would, as the Bible promised, soar like an eagle. But now the world had shrunk, and I found that such wings as I had hoped to possess were “merely vans to beat the air,” which had become “small and dry.” My hope of discovering eternity had died, and instead I knew that all we have is now; that “time is always time” and place “is always and only place.” What Wordsworth had called “the glory and the dream” had faded, and the only joy to which I could aspire lay “in what remains behind.” But what thrilled me most about Eliot’s poem were the words “because” and “consequently.” There was nothing depressing about this deliberate acceptance of reduced possibilities. It was precisely “because” the poet had learned the limitations of the “actual” that he could say: “I rejoice that things are as they are.” Because I cannot hope to turn again Consequently I rejoice, having to construct something Upon which to rejoice The sudden clumsiness of the syntax and language showed that this was no easy solution. It was not something that came naturally. The new joy demanded effort. It would have to be constructed as laboriously and carefully as I put together a chapter of my thesis or as engineers and aeronautical experts built an airplane. It would be a lifelong task, requiring alert attention to the smallest detail, dedication, and unremitting effort; but as I listened to Dame Helen that day, I knew that it could be done. My confidence sprang from the fact that the process had already started. I had resolved to stop fighting my malady, to accept what my life had become, and—“consequently”—for the first time in years I had responded spontaneously and with my whole being to a poem, just as I had before I had incurred this damage. It was a sign of life, a shoot that had suddenly broken through the frozen earth.

• From Deceptions and Myths of the Bible (1975)

  For the arrows of the Almighty are within me, the poison whereof drinketh up my spirit: the terrors of God do set themselves in array against me (the one man in all literature who dared say, “J’aecuse”; Chap . 6). 3. Is it good unto thee that thou shouldest oppress, that thou shouldest despise the work of thine hands, and shine upon the counsel of the wicked? 4. Hast thou eyes of flesh? or seest thou as man seeth? (Chap. 10). “Doest thou well to be angry!” Is it not better than ignorance of Reality babbling about love and mercy, peace and brotherhood? These are for us to create, God knows them not. 21. Oh that one might plead for a man with God, as a man pleadeth for his neighbour! (Chap. 16). 4. I would order my cause before him, and fill my mouth with arguments (Chap. 23). But no: 32. For he is not a man, as I am, that I should answer him, and we should come together in judgment (Chap. 9). This is the plight of life itself—pain without recourse, prayers and the soundless void, suffering sentiency unable to reason with its intangible cause. Only something nonmoral and unconscious of what it has done can account for this predicament. Blame not then any self-conscious Being; the crime is much too great. Impute, not blame, unconscious creativity. This we have asserted from the beginning; it is our Genetic Cosmo-Conception. In this there is no blame, no paradox, no agonizing question, If God is love, why do I suffer so? As a part of a suffering whole, suffering is inevitable. As the whole is also a victim, of necessity, man need not bow down before it. Such humility is not a virtue; it is but ignorance’s attitude towards what it does not understand. And what does Job offer for this attitude? Immortality? Eternal bliss in an unearned heaven? No, this is the priest’s idea; Job had a different one. 20. Are not my days few? cease then, and let me alone, . . . 21. Before I go whence I shall not return, even to the land of darkness and the shadow of death (Chap. 10). 9. As the cloud is consumed and vanisheth away: so he that goeth down to the grave shall come up no more (Chap. 7). 1. Call now, if there be any that will answer thee; and to which of the saints wilt thou turn? (Chap. 5). The saints would have us believe that this is but the cry of a poor distracted soul, tested by God to prove his worthy and that salvation lies in persevering faith in God and a Redeemer. To this end they deliberately changed the words of Job to read, “For I know that my Redeemer liveth.” These words did not exist in the original texts.

• From The Argonauts (2015)

  If you're looking for sexual tidbits as a female child, and the only ones that present themselves depict child rape or other violations (all my favorite books in my preteen years: *I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Clan of the Cave Bear, The World According to Garp*, as well as the few R-rated movies I was allowed to see—*Fame*, most notably, with its indelible scene of Irene Cara being asked to take her shirt off and suck her thumb by a skeezy photographer who promises to make her a star), then your sexuality will form around that fact. There is no control group. I don't even want to talk about "female sexuality" until there is a control group. And there never will be.

• From Another Country (1962)

  On the day that Yves no longer needed him, Eric would drop back into chaos. He remembered that army of lonely men who had used him, who had wrestled with him, caressed him, and submitted to him, in a darkness deeper than the darkest night. It was not merely his body they had used, but something else; his infirmity had made him the receptacle of an anguish which he could scarcely believe was in the world. This anguish rendered him helpless, though it also lent him his weird, doomed grace and power, and it baffled him and set the dimensions of his trap. Perhaps he had sometimes dreamed of walking out of the drama in which he was entangled and playing some other role. But all the exits were barred—were barred by avid men; the role he played was necessary, and not only to himself. And he thought of these men, that ignorant army. They were husbands, they were fathers, gangsters, football players, rovers; and they were everywhere. Or they were, in any case, in all of the places he had been assured they could not be found and the need they brought to him was one they scarcely knew they had, which they spent their lives denying, which overtook and drugged them, making their limbs as heavy as those of sleepers or drowning bathers, and which could only be satisfied in the shameful, the punishing dark, and quickly, with flight and aversion as the issue of the act. They fled, with the infection lanced but with the root of the infection still in them. Days or weeks or months might pass—or even years—before, once again, furtively, in an empty locker room, on an empty stairway or a roof, in the shadow of a wall in the park, in a parked car, or in the furnished room of an absent friend, they surrendered to the hands, to the stroking and fondling and kissing of the despised and anonymous sex. And yet the need did not seem to be predominantly physical. It could not be said that they were attracted to men. They did not make love, they were passive, they were acted on. The need seemed, indeed, to be precisely this passivity, this gift of illicit pleasure, this adoration. They came, this army, not out of joy but out of poverty, and in the most tremendous ignorance. Something had been frozen in them, the root of their affections had been frozen, so that they could no longer accept affection, though it was from this lack that they were perishing. The dark submission was the shadow of love—if only someone, somewhere, loved them enough to caress them this way, in the light, with joy! But then they could no longer be passive.

• From Another Country (1962)

  Or they were to be found, as five o’clock fell, in discreetly dim, anonymously appointed bars, uneasy, in brittle, uneasy, female company, pouring down joyless martinis. This note of despair, of buried despair, was insistently, constantly struck. It stalked all the New York avenues, roamed all the New York streets; was as present in Sutton Place, where the director of Eric’s play lived and the great often gathered, as it was in Greenwich Village, where he had rented an apartment and been appalled to see what time had done to people he had once known well. He could not escape the feeling that a kind of plague was raging, though it was officially and publicly and privately denied. Even the young seemed blighted—seemed most blighted of all. The boys in their blue jeans ran together, scarcely daring to trust one another, but united, like their elders, in a boyish distrust of the girls. Their very walk, a kind of anti-erotic, knee-action lope, was a parody of locomotion and of manhood. They seemed to be shrinking away from any contact with their flamboyantly and paradoxically outlined private parts. They seemed—but could it be true? and how had it happened?—to be at home with, accustomed to, brutality and indifference, and to be terrified of human affection. In some strange way they did not seem to feel that they were worthy of it. Now, late on a Sunday afternoon, having been in New York four days, and not yet having written his parents in the South, Eric moved through the tropical streets on his way to visit Cass and Richard. He was having a drink with them to celebrate his return. “I’m glad you think it’s something to celebrate,” he had told Cass over the phone. She laughed. “That’s not very nice. You sound as though you haven’t missed us at all.” “Oh, I certainly want to see all of you . But I don’t know if I ever really missed the city very much. Did you ever notice how ugly it is?” “It’s getting uglier all the time,” Cass said. “A perfect example of free enterprise gone mad.” “I wanted to thank you,” he said, after a moment, “for writing me about Rufus.” And he thought, with a rather surprising and painful venom, Nobody else thought to do it. “Well, I knew,” she said, “that you’d want to know.” Then there was a silence. “You never knew his sister, did you?” “Well, I knew he had one. I never met her; she was just a kid in those days.” “She’s not a kid now,” Cass said. “She’s going to be singing Sunday, down in the Village, with some friends of Rufus’s. For the first time. We promised to bring you along. Vivaldo will be there.” He thought of Rufus. He did not know what to say. “She’s something like her brother, huh?” “I wouldn’t say that.

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

  I made it sound rational, at least to myself, but this was a crazy scheme and a telling indication of the state I was in. Compared with most students, I was well off. My grant more than covered my needs and I also had five hundred pounds on deposit, a not inconsiderable sum in those days. The order had given me a hundred pounds on my departure, my grandmother had left me a small legacy, and I had won an academic prize worth another hundred guineas. But saving and hoarding had become an obsession, so much so that when I came to buy my first apartment in 1976, I had squirreled away enough money to put down a deposit and furnish the entire flat. I can still see the astonishment on the face of the building society representative when I told him that I had saved this money from my student grant: he agreed to allow me a mortgage without further demur. Money is not a neutral factor, but is highly symbolic. I had convinced myself that I was not going to be able to earn my own living, and I simply could not make myself believe that this was a ridiculous assumption. What I was really saying was that I did not have a future. I was just not making it out here as a secular. I could not, as that perceptive Basque consultant had noted, attach myself to anything. How could I engage with life when my heart was dead? How could I become an academic when I was no longer able to respond spontaneously to literature? How could I function when I was increasingly subject to “weird seizures”? When I looked ahead, the only possible future I could see for myself was a locked ward or a padded cell. My years as a nun had somehow made me unfit for the world, had broken something within me, and now I seemed unable to put myself together again. And I did not want to nourish myself. What was the point of feeding my body when my mind and heart had been irreparably broken? And yet, in a way, I also felt that by starving myself I was reaching out to the world. I was asking for help. People kept telling me that I was fine and congratulating me on how well I was doing. But I was not fine and I wanted people to know this. As the pounds fell off, as people like Jenifer started to notice my growing emaciation, I felt a perverse gratification. Look, I was saying, this is what I really feel like. Please notice—and help me.

• From Another Country (1962)

  He was hungry, his mouth felt filthy. He realized too late, as he passed through the doors, that he wanted to urinate. And he was broke. And he had nowhere to go. The policeman passed him, giving him a look. Rufus turned, pulling up the collar of his leather jacket while the wind nibbled delightedly at him through his summer slacks, and started north on Seventh Avenue. He had been thinking of going downtown and waking up Vivaldo—the only friend he had left in the city, or maybe in the world—but now he decided to walk up as far as a certain jazz bar and night club and look in. Maybe somebody would see him and recognize him, maybe one of the guys would lay enough bread on him for a meal or at least subway fare. At the same time, he hoped that he would not be recognized. The Avenue was quiet, too, most of its bright lights out. Here and there a woman passed, here and there a man; rarely, a couple. At corners, under the lights, near drugstores, small knots of white, bright, chattering people showed teeth to each other, pawed each other, whistled for taxis, were whirled away in them, vanished through the doors of drugstores or into the blackness of side streets. Newsstands, like small black blocks on a board, held down corners of the pavements and policemen and taxi drivers and others, harder to place, stomped their feet before them and exchanged such words as they both knew with the muffled vendor within. A sign advertised the chewing gum which would help one to relax and keep smiling. A hotel’s enormous neon name challenged the starless sky. So did the names of movie stars and people currently appearing or scheduled to appear on Broadway, along with the mile-high names of the vehicles which would carry them into immortality. The great buildings, unlit, blunt like the phallus or sharp like the spear, guarded the city which never slept. Beneath them Rufus walked, one of the fallen—for the weight of this city was murderous—one of those who had been crushed on the day, which was every day, these towers fell. Entirely alone, and dying of it, he was part of an unprecedented multitude. There were boys and girls drinking coffee at the drugstore counters who were held back from his condition by barriers as perishable as their dwindling cigarettes.

• From Another Country (1962)

  He stood at the center of the bridge and it was freezing cold. He raised his eyes to heaven. He thought, You bastard, you motherfucking bastard. Ain’t I your baby, too? He began to cry. Something in Rufus which could not break shook him like a rag doll and splashed salt water all over his face and filled his throat and his nostrils with anguish. He knew the pain would never stop. He could never go down into the city again. He dropped his head as though someone had struck him and looked down at the water. It was cold and the water would be cold. He was black and the water was black. He lifted himself by his hands on the rail, lifted himself as high as he could, and leaned far out. The wind tore at him, at his head and shoulders, while something in him screamed, Why? Why? He thought of Eric. His straining arms threatened to break. I can’t make it this way. He thought of Ida. He whispered, I’m sorry, Leona, and then the wind took him, he felt himself going over, head down, the wind, the stars, the lights, the water, all rolled together, all right. He felt a shoe fly off behind him, there was nothing around him, only the wind, all right, you motherfucking Godalmighty bastard, I’m coming to you. 2It was raining. Cass sat on her living-room floor with the Sunday papers and a cup of coffee. She was trying to decide which photograph of Richard would look best on the front page of the book-review section. The telephone rang. “Hello?” She heard an intake of breath and a low, vaguely familiar voice: “Is this Cass Silenski?” “Yes.” She looked at the clock, wondering who this could be. It was ten-thirty and she was the only person awake in her house. “Well”—swiftly—“I don’t know if you remember me, but we met once, downtown, in a night club where Rufus was working. I’m his sister—Ida? Ida Scott——” She remembered a very young, striking, dark girl who wore a ruby-eyed snake ring. “Why, yes, I remember you very well. How are you?” “I’m fine. Well”—with a small, dry laugh—“maybe I’m not so fine. I’m trying to locate my brother. I been calling Vivaldo’s house all morning, but he’s not home”—the voice was making an effort not to tremble, not to break—“and so I called you because I thought maybe you’d seen him, Vivaldo, I mean, or maybe you could tell me how to reach him.” And now the girl was crying. “You haven’t seen him, have you? Or my brother?” She heard sounds coming from the children’s bedroom. “Please,” she said, “try not to be so upset. I don’t know where Vivaldo is this morning but I saw your brother last night. And he was fine.” “You saw him last night?” “Yes.” “Where’d you see him? Where was he?”

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

  There was another, deeper reason for this. These frightening incidents were changing me. I now knew that at any second, the pleasant, innocent-seeming surface of normality could split apart, and this knowledge infected everything. I knew that other people had been to this dark place. I could see it in van Gogh’s tormented, writhing olive trees and swirling, starry skies. It was in the infernal visions of Bosch; it was the heart of darkness evoked by Joseph Conrad. It didn’t matter how often I told myself that these experiences had no substantive reality. However you accounted for them, this was a region of the human mind. And because I had visited it, I felt set apart. I was surrounded by girls whose existence was beginning to blossom. Most of them were hopeful, cheerful, and excited by their unfolding lives, but I could no longer share this instinctive optimism. I was now doubly out of place among my fellow students, as though I were the wicked fairy in the story, brooding balefully over the party. Increasingly I felt as though I were witnessing everything at one remove. As time went on, solid physical objects appeared ephemeral, and people seemed like ghosts, with no clearly defined identity. When your surroundings can so suddenly take on a frightening aspect, you start to experience them as fluid, unreliable, and without inherent integrity. Things seemed to flow into one another; a kind face could rapidly become menacing, a pleasant landscape take on a malign aspect. Sometimes I felt as though I were looking at reality through a sheet of glass. If I put my hand out to touch an object, I often expected to feel this barrier; sounds seemed faint and dim. This happened so gradually and became so habitual that, after a time, I ceased to remark upon it. It became the norm, the element in which I lived. I was rather like the little fish in the Sufi parable, who asks his mother about this stuff called water that he hears everybody discussing but which he has never seen. It is not until the condition lifts that you realize that it was abnormal. At the time, it simply seemed that the world from which I had retreated had now begun to recede from me.

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

  In the summer of 1982, as the school year came to an end, Through the Narrow Gate came out in paperback, so that meant more talk shows and more publicity. I was expected to be positive with my interviewers, and confident about the future, but I felt as though I were heading into an abyss. One evening, after a day in school, I got onto the bus and found tears rolling down my cheeks. I could not stop them, but sat throughout the long journey home to North London weeping quietly. There seemed no hope at all. The next morning I woke up feeling empty and hollow. Looking into the mirror, I winced. Not a pretty sight. And today, as ill luck would have it, I had an appointment with a television crew. Perhaps I could get out of it! I could always ring up and say that I wasn’t feeling well. It wasn’t as though this project would do anything for the book; in fact, it seemed I would simply be doing the film company a favor. “Don’t feel you have to do this, Karen,” Jacqui, my publicist, had said when she had included it on the schedule. “It’s only a pilot for Channel Four, the new television channel starting this autumn. The film company is doing a few programs to persuade the channel’s editor to give them a commission for a series. So nothing may come of it. If you don’t want to do this, please feel free to say no.” But I had agreed to go along and had spoken with the producer. He asked me to think of a topic on any subject that I felt I could talk about. As long as it was punchy and controversial, it didn’t matter what it was. I had not given the program a thought, and spending the morning in a hot studio was the last thing I felt like. All I wanted to do was crawl under the bedclothes and shut out the world. I even dialed the office of the production company, but of course there was no reply. They would all be waiting for me at the studio, setting up, as they called it. A car was coming to collect me in forty-five minutes. I often wonder how my life would have turned out if I had managed to get through to the producer, offered my excuses, and pulled out.

• From Deceptions and Myths of the Bible (1975)

  And the great city was divided into three parts, and the cities of the nations fell: and great Babylon came in remembrance before God, to give unto her the cup of the wine of the fierceness of his wrath. The “seventh angel” is the power of the seventh involutionary plane—the sun-earth stage, symbolized by the city Babylon. The warfare is that between the spiritual and material forces. In this the material wins. Here the creative process ends and so the voice from heaven says, “It is done.” And elsewhere, “It is finished.” After this the earth is divided into three parts, Involution, Devolution and Evolution. 1. And I saw a new heaven and a new earth (Evolution): for the first heaven and the first earth (Involution) were passed away; and there was no more sea (the prephysical elements; Chap. 21). And we said these no longer existed when the physical was formed. We also said that this newborn world was no Garden of Eden, and John agrees. He calls it a seven-headed beast on which sits a whore, clothed in jewels and fine raiment; none other than the “woman clothed with the sun,” now material and evil. 4. And the woman (the Earth Mother) was arrayed in purple and scarlet colour, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a golden cup in her hand full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication (symbols of materiality; Chap. 17). This scriptural harlot is decked out just like the “holy city,” and in verse 18 we find she is that city. “And the woman which thou sawest is that great city which reigneth over the kings of the earth.” Not kings, but kingdoms. 5. And upon her forehead was a name written, MYSTERY, BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH. (Babylon, like Egypt, is a mythic symbol of the earth.) 6. And I saw the woman drunken with the blood of the saints, and with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus: and when I saw her, I wondered with great admiration (Chap. 17). The earth is drenched with blood, not just of martyred saints, but of martyred life. This is “the will of God,” but because of a false theology no man dares say so. 7. And the angel said unto me, wherefore didst thou marvel? I will tell thee the mystery of the woman, and of the beast that carrieth her, which hath the seven heads and ten horns. 8. The beast that thou sawest was, and is not; and shall ascend out of the bottomless pit, and go into perdition: and they that dwell on the earth shall wonder, whose names were not written in the book of life from the foundation of the world, when they behold the beast that was, and is not, and yet is (Chap. 17). Such an explanation does not explain; it only compounds the mystery. But this is as it was meant to be.

• From Dante's Divine Comedy (2001)

  ©2001 The Teaching Company 26 C. They have lost self-determination in hell, just as they have given up self-determination with their sin. III. Dante listens to the spurting branch of Pier delle Vigne, “chief of staff” to the Emperor Frederick II, who “writes” what is in effect a posthumous suicide note. A. Pier talks about his loyalty and fidelity to Frederick. B. He blames his fall, and his suicide, on the envy of the court. C. His description is especially self-serving. D. He uses highly charged religious language to describe the relationship between himself and Frederick, a heretic who is himself in the Inferno (cf. Canto 10). E. Suicide becomes at once a self-justification and a way of getting even with his enemies. IV. Because of Dante’s own “future” fall from political power, this is a particularly powerful “ghost of Christmas future” for Dante. A. It is not an accident that this canto also takes place in a “dark wood.” B. Dante, too, will have to deal with the powerlessness of exile, separated from the “body politic” of his native Florence. C. Pier’s behavior is an especially strong example of how not to act in exile and, thus, an especially strong warning to Dante. Whether or not Dante himself was literally tempted by suicide, he was certainly tempted by the selfish, despairing attitude that Pier represents. V. In Canto 15, we encounter violence against God in the form of sodomy. A. As in the discussion of heresy, the literal sin is not discussed directly. B. But the geography at the beginning of the canto, much of it drawn from the opening of Genesis, directs our attention to the biblical concept of being fruitful and multiplying. VI. Dante has a conversation with his old teacher, the poet, rhetorician, and Guelf leader Brunetto Latini. ©2001 The Teaching Company 27 A. Brunetto recognizes Dante as his star pupil and encourages him to “follow his star.” Brunetto is really thinking of his own fame. B. Brunetto’s seductive argument on the nature of fame helps to suggest the nature of sodomy by analogy: Brunetto is suggesting that fame is a kind of idol, a false form of eternal life. C. A barren earthly fame becomes an analogous way of talking about sodomy. D. Just as in his talk with Francesca da Rimini Dante learned that there are false and dangerous types of reading, so in his colloquy with Brunetto he learns that there are dangerous ways of writing. E. Brunetto’s discourse is also connected to important ideas of free will and determinism. Readings: Dante, Inferno, Cantos 11–15. Robert Hollander, Allegory in Dante’s Commedia, Chapter 1.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  So he continues with the warning, which, in all our sources, he went on to enact in a dramatic symbol. Jerusalem itself was going to be thrown down, stone by stone. The harsh wind of western empire would blast away the Temple itself, the central symbol of national identity and the building that made Jerusalem what it was, because Jerusalem and its leaders had not recognized the moment when God was visiting them, was coming back to them in person (Luke 20:44). The Wind of God Here, then, is the third element in the first-century perfect storm: the strange, unpredictable, and highly dangerous divine element. The wind of God. This is God’s moment, declares Jesus, and you were looking the other way. Your dreams of national liberation, leading you into head-on confrontation with Rome, were not God’s dreams. God called Israel, so that through Israel he might redeem the world; but Israel itself needs redeeming as well. Hence God comes to Israel riding on a donkey, in fulfillment of Zechariah’s prophecy of the coming peaceful kingdom, announcing judgment on the system and the city that have turned their vocation in upon themselves and going off to take the weight of the world’s evil and hostility onto himself, so that by dying under them he might exhaust their power. All his public career Jesus had been embodying the rescuing, redeeming love of Israel’s God, and Israel’s own capital city and leaders couldn’t see it. The divine hurricane sweeps in from the ocean, and to accomplish its purpose it must meet, head-on, the cruel western wind of pagan empire and the high-octane high-pressure system of national aspiration. Jesus seizes the moment, the Passover moment, the Exodus moment, not least because these too speak of the sovereign freedom and presence of God as much over his rebellious and incomprehending people as over the tyranny of Egypt. And as we watch the events of Jesus’s final days unfold, we cannot simply look on and register them as an odd quirk of history. The claim being made in the stories of Jesus is that this was the perfect storm. This was where the hurricane of divine love met the cold might of empire and the overheated aspiration of Israel. Only when we reflect on that combination do we begin to understand the meaning of Jesus’s death.

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

  So even in the convent, God had been conspicuous by his absence from my life. And that, I became convinced, must be my fault. My case seemed to be so peculiar that it could not be a mere failure of the system. If only I had tried a little harder, concentrated just that little bit more, or found more interesting topics for meditation. The quality of a nun’s commitment was reflected in the quality of her prayer. And how could I hope to sense God’s presence when I continually broke the silence, frequently had uncharitable thoughts, and above all, constantly yearned for human affection and wept when reprimanded? It was, of course, a vicious circle. The emptier my prayers, the more I sought consolation in mundane things and in people. Round and round. Then there were my secret doubts. Even though I tried to tiptoe gingerly around difficult articles of faith, I could not stop wondering whether the Virgin Mary really had been conceived without original sin and been taken up body and soul into heaven after her death. How did anybody know that Jesus was God? And was there even a God out there at all? Perhaps that was why I never encountered him in prayer? As I knelt in the chapel, watching my sisters kneeling quietly with their heads bowed contemplatively in their hands, I would sometimes wonder whether it wasn’t a bit like the emperor’s new clothes: nobody ever experienced God but nobody dared to admit it. And then I would mentally shake myself. How could God reveal himself to a nun who harbored these shocking doubts? And so came the morning when, just a few days after I had been dispensed from my vows, my alarm clock rang at 6 a.m. and instead of getting up and walking down the road to Saint Aloysius’s Church for early Mass, I simply switched it off and went back to sleep. For seven years, each day had begun with prayer and Eucharist, but now there seemed no point in any of that. I would still go to Mass on Sundays, of course, because this was obligatory, binding upon all Catholics. Leaving the church as well as the convent was at present a step too far. But the very idea of kneeling silently in a darkened church—yet again—filled me with immense fatigue. I cannot do that anymore, I told myself wearily that morning; I simply cannot do it. The accumulated failure had left me feeling not merely exhausted but also slightly sick.

• From Another Country (1962)

  4And the summer came, the New York summer, which is like no summer anywhere. The heat and the noise began their destruction of nerves and sanity and private lives and love affairs. The air was full of baseball scores and bad news and treacly songs; and the streets and the bars were full of hostile people, made more hostile by the heat. It was not possible in this city, as it had been for Eric in Paris, to take a long and peaceful walk at any hour of the day or night, dropping in for a drink at a bistro or flopping oneself down at a sidewalk café—the half-dozen grim parodies of sidewalk cafés to be found in New York were not made for flopping. It was a city without oases, run entirely, insofar, at least, as human perception could tell, for money; and its citizens seemed to have lost entirely any sense of their right to renew themselves. Whoever, in New York, attempted to cling to this right, lived in New York in exile—in exile from the life around him; and this, paradoxically, had the effect of placing him in perpetual danger of being forever banished from any real sense of himself. In the evenings, and on week ends, Vivaldo sat in his undershorts at the typewriter, his buttocks sticking to the chair, sweat rolling down his armpits and behind his ears and dripping into his eyes and the sheets of paper sticking to each other and to his fingers. The typewriter keys moved sluggishly, striking with a dull, wet sound—moved, in fact, rather the way his novel moved, lifelessly, pushed forward, inch by inch by recalcitrant inch, almost entirely by the will. He scarcely knew what his novel was about any longer, or why he had ever wished to write it, but he could not let it go. He could not let it go, nor could he close with it, for the price of that embrace was the loss of Ida’s, or so he feared. And this fear kept him suspended in a pestilential, dripping limbo.