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 Simply Jesus (2011)

  But the Accuser is wrong to imagine that this is the creator’s last word. What we see throughout Jesus’s public career is that he himself is being accused—accused of being a blasphemer by the self-appointed thought police, accused of being out of his mind by his own family, even accused by his followers of taking his vocation in the wrong direction. All the strands of evil throughout human history, throughout the ancient biblical story, come rushing together as the gospels tell the story of Jesus, from the demons shrieking at him in the synagogue to the sneering misunderstanding of the power brokers to the frailty and folly of his own friends and followers. Finally, of course—and this is the point in the story to which the evangelists are drawing our attention—he is accused in front of the chief priests and the council and in the end by the high priest himself. He is accused of plotting against the Temple; he is accused of forbidding the giving of tribute to Caesar (a standard ploy of revolutionaries); he is accused of claiming to be king of the Jews, a rebel leader; he is accused of blasphemy, of claiming to be God’s son. Accusations come rushing together from all sides, as the leaders accuse Jesus before Pilate; and Pilate finally does what all the accusations throughout the gospel have been demanding and has him crucified. Jesus, in other words, has taken the accusations that were outstanding against the world and against the whole human race and has borne them in himself. That is the point of the story the way the evangelists tell it. Albert Schweitzer, one of the greatest human beings of the twentieth century, suggested that Jesus had glimpsed his own role within the long biblical story of what Schweitzer called “the messianic woes.” Many prophets and subsequent Jewish writers spoke of the suffering that would come upon God’s people—wave upon wave of suffering, reaching a climax at the time of the Messiah, a climax of horror and despair in which evil did its worst, only so that its defeat could pave the way to the redemption God had in mind. Jesus, in Schweitzer’s vision, grasped this idea and believed it was his vocation to go to the point where this great “woe,” this great “time of testing,” would burst in with its full force. That is why he told his disciples to pray that they would be spared the time of testing. He had to go into it himself, but they must not. There are signs, particularly in the Garden of Gethsemane, that Jesus was indeed thinking this way. Schweitzer then used the image of the great wheel of history. Jesus had hoped that it would begin to turn in the opposite direction, and when it refused, he threw himself upon it. It crushed him; but it did indeed start to move in the opposite direction.

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

  As Tennyson put it, I saw myself as a ghost in a world of ghosts. I had existed for so long in this twilight state that nothing seemed quite real any longer, and therefore nothing seemed to matter very much. I could also see that Dr. Piet was no longer quite so dismissive of my amnesia, however. “It would have been much easier, Karen, if you had made an extra appointment and told me that you were feeling this depressed,” he said, with a certain exasperation. “I’m your doctor and I should know if you are feeling suicidal.” “But I wasn’t,” I snapped, stung momentarily out of my frozen calm. “I didn’t know that I was going to take the wretched pills. It was like the other times. I didn’t know what I was doing.” He sighed. “And I have been telling you how bad I’ve been feeling,” I went on, hopelessly. “I’ve told you again and again.” “But don’t you see that this is another evasive tactic?” Dr. Piet shook his head. “We’re going to have to work really hard now on the underlying causes of all this.” My heart sank. “But you do need a bit of a rest, I think,” Dr. Piet continued more kindly. “You’re going to need looking after. The hospital will let you out tomorrow. Where do you intend to go?” “I can’t go back to the Harts’,” I said. This was one aspect of the whole debacle that I could not contemplate with equanimity. They had been so kind, and how had I repaid them? “No.” I waved away Dr. Piet’s next question. “I can’t ask them; it would put them in an intolerable position! How could they decently say no?” We ran through my options. My parents were away on holiday, and I did not want them to know about any of this. I could not bear to think of their distress if they realized how bad things were. And whatever Dr. Piet thought, this was not their fault. If they had had their way I would never have set foot in the convent. Nobody had forced me into the religious life; nobody had compelled me to stay there for so long. I had been responsible for the damage of my own mind. “Well, you can’t live by yourself,” Dr. Piet said testily. “We’ll have to keep an eye on you now.” The only alternative that I could come up with was Cherwell Edge. The nuns there had made a few wan overtures to me, implying that if I needed anything, I had only to ask. It was by no means an ideal solution, and I could see that Dr. Piet was not entirely happy about it, but it was better than being admitted to a psychiatric hospital, which was the only other option. So we left it that I would ring the nuns and ask if I might stay in the convent for a while.

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

  How was I going to explain this to Richard and Jackie? Dazed, I got up and walked groggily through the other galleries. My colleagues’ reaction, I told myself grimly, was the least of my problems. Nothing ever got better. My mind was as infirm and as unreliable as ever. I seemed quite unable to function as a normal human being. Again I glimpsed the locked ward, the padded cell. I felt sick, and had a strong desire to lie down on one of the long benches and sleep for hours. Outside the midwinter rain cut into my face and the wind penetrated to my bones. As I walked toward Pimlico station, the white, peeling houses, decayed relics of a splendid past, looked blank and shuttered. As soon as I opened the envelope, I knew that it was hopeless. The terse official letter from Oxford told me that my academic career was over. The professor who had been so hostile to the very idea of my thesis had been appointed as my examiner. Friends, family, and colleagues told me that I was despairing too soon. I wondered how they could be so certain about this, but after a while I realized that their remarks were not really considered statements, but were more in the nature of denial. It had to be all right, because the alternative was unthinkable. “Let’s face it, Karen,” Jane exclaimed cheerfully on the phone, “if you fail, there’s no hope for any of us.” So for the next three months, while I waited for the viva that was to be held—a cruel irony, this— on Valentine’s Day, most people refused to discuss the matter. “It will be fine!” they said airily. “Don’t even think about it!” Even my supervisor seemed unconcerned. “It’s such a lovely piece of work,” she assured me. “It simply cannot fail.” Mind you, she admitted, there were irregularities. She had protested against the appointment of the hostile professor—let us call him Alastair Courtney—who had long been on the Oxford faculty but now occupied a chair in a provincial university. She had pointed out to the Academic Board that I now had two external examiners. The other examiner, who was favorably disposed to my work but not nearly such a big shot as Courtney, was at the University of Birmingham. “It’s against the regulations for Miss Armstrong to have two external examiners,” she had complained. “Oxford should also be represented.” She herself had taken her first degree at Birmingham and, in the patrician climate of Oxford, felt at a permanent disadvantage. “My dear,” Dame Helen Gardner had replied suavely, “Alastair is much more internal than somebody like you!”

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

  That had been the end of the matter, though when Mother wasn’t looking, Sister Mary Jonathan had winked at me and pulled a face. With hindsight, that complicity had been prophetic. She had left the order shortly before I had. She had fallen in love with a young Jesuit with whom she was studying at London University. Somehow she had held on to herself better than I. I was quite sure that she would not find it difficult to tell anybody what she thought. My problem, as I wrestled with my highly unsatisfactory essay for Dr. Brentwood Smyth, was that I had no thoughts of my own at all. Every time the frail shoots of a potentially subversive idea had broken ground, I had stamped on them so firmly that they tended not to come anymore. True, at the very end of my religious life I had argued with Mother Praeterita, my Oxford superior, but the ideas I used against her had not been mine. I was simply parroting books and articles that I had read. It seemed that I could no longer operate as an intellectual free agent. You can probably abuse your mind and do it irrevocable harm, just as you can damage your body by feeding it the wrong kind of food, depriving it of exercise, or forcing your limbs into a constricting straitjacket. My brain had been bound as tightly as the feet of a Chinese woman, and I had read that when the bandages were taken off, the pain was excruciating. The restraints had been removed too late and she would never walk normally again. I knew that a good nun must be ready to give up everything and count the world well lost for God. But what had happened to God? My life had been turned upside down, but God should still be the same. It seemed that without realizing it, I had indeed become like Saint Ignatius’s dead body or old man’s stick. My heart and my mind both seemed numb and etiolated, but God seemed to have gone too. In the place that he had occupied in my mind there was now a curious blank. Or perhaps it was only now that I could admit to this God-shaped gap in my consciousness. One of the most painful failures of my convent life had been my inability to pray. Our whole existence had had God as its pivotal point. The silence of our days had been designed to enable us to listen to him. But he had never spoken to me.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I washed my hair and cleaned the muck from my eyes; the flesh beneath my ears and behind my knees, in the crooks of my arms and between my legs, I rubbed till it was red and stinging.At last I think I dozed; and as I did so I had a strange, unsettling vision.I remembered a woman from Whitstable - an old neighbour of ours - of whom I had not thought in years. She had died while I was still a child, quite unexpectedly, and of a peculiar condition. Her heart, the doctors said, had hardened. The outer skin of it had grown leathery and tough; its valves had turned sluggish, then had begun to falter in their pumping, then ceased entirely. Save a little tiredness and breathlessness there had been no warning; the heart had worked away on its private, fatal, project, at its own secret pace - then stopped.This story had thrilled and terrified my sister and me, when we first heard it. We were young and well cared for; the idea that one of our organs - our most vital organ, at that - might baulk at its natural role, might conspire with itself to choke, rather than to nurture, us, seemed an appalling one. For a week after the woman’s death we talked of nothing else. At night, in bed, we would lie trembling; we would rub and worry at our ribs with sweating fingers, conscious of the unemphatic pulse beneath, terrified that the flimsy rhythm would falter or slow, certain that - like hers, our poor, dead, unsuspecting neighbour’s - our hearts were stealthily hardening, hardening, in the tender red cavities of our breasts.Now, waking to the reality of the cooling tub, the colourless room, the photograph upon the wall, I found my fingers once again upon my breast-bone, probing and chafing, searching for the thickening organ behind it. This time, however, it seemed to me that I found it. There was a darkness, a heaviness, a stillness at the very centre of me, that I had not known was growing there, but which gave me, now, a kind of comfort. My breast felt tight and sore - but I didn’t writhe, or sweat, beneath the pain of it, rather, I crossed my arms over my ribs, and embraced my dark and thickened heart like a lover.Perhaps, even as I did it, Walter and Kitty were walking together, on a street in France or Italy; perhaps he leaned to touch her, as I touched myself; perhaps they kissed; perhaps they lay in a bed ... I had thought such things a thousand times, and wept and bitten my lips to think them; but now I gazed at the photograph and felt my misery stiffen, as my heart had stiffened, with rage and frustration.

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

  I would spend whole evenings in tears and days in a state of sheer panic. I simply did not know what to do and could see no solution. As the doctor had pointed out, there seemed little point in applying for another teaching job, and I could not imagine how I could finance any training for an alternative career. Friends assumed that I had made a lot of money from Through the Narrow Gate, but that was not the case. Because of the recession, the advance royalties had been very modest. The money might tide me over for a year or, if I was very frugal, even two, but what then? “Well, you must write, of course!” was the continual response. But write what? The publishers had commissioned a sequel and I used this fallow year to write Beginning the World, but I obviously could not continue to write volumes of autobiography. As it was, I was struggling hard with this second memoir and realized that I had not begun to assimilate these last difficult years. 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.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  I disliked how strange I must be appearing to her. She said, “While we were making love, you reached in these pants and pulled out a piece of electrical equipment and held on to it? Why ?” Now she was sitting up, wanting very much to get an explanation from me that would clear everything up. Her breasts looked aggrieved. “It’s hard to explain,” I said. “I guess I wanted to imagine that I was an android.” I laughed sheepishly to confirm my fabrication. “An invincible hard-body android. It’s stupid, I know.” I felt despair at how ridiculous this explanation sounded, but I couldn’t bring myself to launch into the truth, fearing that she would take it poorly. “I hate these stupid condoms,” I said fussily, tying a knot in the one we had just used. Rhody shook her head. “I’m not very comfortable with this, Arno. I really didn’t plan to be fucked by an electric motor this afternoon.” “I know. I’m sorry.” I hugged her guiltily. She lay on her back, thinking. “Let me ask you this,” she then said. “Is your idea of the perfect life to be able to stop time anytime you want and take off women’s clothes on the subway and feel their breasts?” “I know what you’re thinking,” I said. “You think that I’m turning out to be some kind of techno-sex nutcase.” “Well? No, I’m just a little surprised at all this. First you tell me this long story about a piano chord, insisting that I must find aspects of the idea sexually exciting, and now you hold this thing in your hand—what is it?” “It’s just a plain-vanilla on-off switch, a rocker-switch,” I said. I tried mild indignation. “It’s nothing! Forget it. It’s just a little sixteen-amp rocker-switch.” “Well, it seems a very strange thing to bring into the bedroom. You should have told me beforehand. If it excites you to make love to me pretending you’re a machine, fine. But you have to include me in it. What I don’t like is discovering that you’re doing this somewhat odd thing literally behind my back.” “You’re right, I should have included you,” I said. “But you know—I tried to include you in something fairly important to me when I told you about the fermata chord, and I must say I got a pretty lukewarm reception.” “Well, right, it was a loveless fantasy. It had no love in it.” “But I meant it as an act of love to tell it to you!” “No,” said Rhody. “What that fantasy says is that your idea of heaven is being able to hit the PLAY button on a Walkman and take off women’s clothes and feel their breasts. Right?” “I don’t think it’s my idea of heaven, exactly,” I said, with some awkwardness.

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

  At the time, however, I simply grabbed at the idea as a pragmatic expedient. I was desperate to get to work on something— anything—to convince myself that I still had a future. I expected this new book to follow the somewhat skeptical line of its predecessors. God, of course, did not exist, but I would show that each generation of believers was driven to invent him anew. God was thus simply a projection of human need; “he” mirrored the fears and yearnings of society at each stage of its development. Jews, Christians, and Muslims had all produced the same kind of God because they had similar desires and insecurities, but increasingly, in the clear light of rational modernity, people were learning how to do without this divine prop. That was my idea at the outset, but even then I expected some surprises. By this time I had enough experience to know that the finished work was always different from my original proposal. And I was also determined not to fall into the trap of making the book merely a clever, shallow rebuttal of God’s existence. That would be not only boring and predictable, but also inappropriate. This could not be a wholly cerebral book, because images of God had, surely, much to tell us about the pathos of human aspiration. Nobody thought much of the idea, however, and it was a long time before my new agent found a publisher. “It can’t be done,” said one of the editors who saw my synopsis. “It’s impossible to condense such a huge idea into a single volume.” “Who’s going to read it?” asked another. “Religious people won’t want to hear that their God is on a par with the gods of other faiths, and unbelievers won’t be interested.” “It’s so religious!” sighed a friend who worked in one of the houses that had rejected the book. “Karen, don’t write this book now! You need to do something more mainstream.” More secular, she meant. “You read English at college. Perhaps you could do something literary? A new biography of Fanny Burney or George Eliot.” “What about a travel book?” Charlotte asked. “You enjoyed the travel you did with the Israelis, didn’t you? Why not go on a journey to somewhere important. Japan, for instance. What about a look at modern Japan?” Anything, it seemed, would be better than God.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  Now, however, I felt I could not let it from my sight. I ran a finger-nail around the edge of the article, then tore, slowly and neatly, where I had scored. The paper that was left over I did cast into the grate; but the slip of newsprint that bore Kitty and Walter’s wedding-portrait I held carefully, in the palm of my hand - as carefully as if it were a moth’s wing that might tarnish with too much fingering. After a moment’s thought I stepped to the looking-glass. There was a gap between the glass itself and the frame which held it, and into this I placed one edge of the piece of paper. Here it was held fast in space, and cut across my own reflection - unmissable, in that tiny room, from any vantage-point.Perhaps I was a little feverish; yet my head felt clearer than it had in a month and a half. I gazed at the photograph, and then at myself. I saw that I was wasted and grey, that my eyes were swollen and purpled with shadows. My hair, which I had loved before to keep so trim and sleek, was long and filthy; my lips were bitten almost to the blood; my frock was stained and rancid at the armpits. They, I thought - the smiling couple in the photograph - they had done this to me!But for the first time in all those long, miserable weeks, I thought, too, what a fool I had been, to let them.I turned my head away then and stepped to the door, and gave a shout for Mary. When she came running, breathless and a little nervous, I told her I wanted a bath, and soap, and towels. She looked at me rather strangely - I had never called for such a thing before - then she ran to the basement, and soon there came the thump of the tub upon the stairs as she hauled it up behind her, and the clatter of pans and kettles in the kitchen. Soon, too, Mrs Best emerged from her parlour, disturbed once again by the noise. When I explained my sudden longing to bathe she said, ‘Oh Miss Astley, now is that really wise?’, and looked pale and shaken. I believe she thought I intended to drown myself, or cut my wrists into the water.I did, of course, neither. Instead I sat for an hour in the steaming tub, gazing into the fireplace or at Kitty’s picture, gently massaging the life back into my aching limbs and joints with a piece of soap and flannel.

• From Wild (2012)

  It takes four hours to drive from Sioux Falls to Minneapolis. Aimee followed me the next morning in her car, in case my truck broke down again. I drove without listening to the radio, thinking about my pregnancy. It was the size of a grain of rice and yet I could feel it in the deepest, strongest part of me, taking me down, shaking me up, reverberating out. Somewhere in the southwestern farmlands of Minnesota, I burst into tears, crying so hard I could barely steer, and not only for the pregnancy I didn’t want. I was crying over all of it, over the sick mire I’d made of my life since my mother died; over the stupid existence that had become my own. I was not meant to be this way, to live this way, to fail so darkly. It was then that I remembered that guidebook I’d plucked from a shelf at REI while waiting to buy the shovel a couple of days before. The thought of the photograph of a boulder-strewn lake surrounded by rocky crags and blue sky on its cover seemed to break me open, frank as a fist to the face. I believed I’d only been killing time when I’d picked up the book while standing in line, but now it seemed like something more—a sign. Not only of what I could do, but of what I had to do. When Aimee and I reached Minneapolis, I waved her off at her exit, but I didn’t go to mine. Instead, I drove to REI and bought The Pacific Crest Trail, Volume 1: California and took it back to my apartment and stayed up reading it all night. I read it a dozen times over the next months. I got an abortion and learned how to make dehydrated tuna flakes and turkey jerky and took a refresher course on basic first aid and practiced using my water purifier in my kitchen sink. I had to change. I had to change was the thought that drove me in those months of planning. Not into a different person, but back to the person I used to be—strong and responsible, clear-eyed and driven, ethical and good. And the PCT would make me that way. There, I’d walk and think about my entire life. I’d find my strength again, far from everything that had made my life ridiculous. But here I was, on the PCT, ridiculous again, though in a different way, hunching in an ever-more-remotely upright position on the first day of my hike.

• From Wild (2012)

  I reached for my compass, which hung from a cord on the side of my pack near the world’s loudest whistle. I hadn’t used it since the day I was hiking on that road after my first hard week on the trail. I studied it in conjunction with the map and made my best guess about where I might be and walked on, inching forward uncertainly on the snow, alternately skidding across the top or breaking through the surface, my shins and calves growing ever more chafed each time. An hour later I saw a metal diamond that said PACIFIC CREST TRAIL tacked to a snowbound tree, and my body flooded with relief. I still didn’t know precisely where I was, but at least I knew I was on the PCT. By late afternoon I came to a ridgeline from which I could see down into a deep snow-filled bowl. “Greg!” I called, to test if he was near. I hadn’t seen a sign of him all day long, but I kept expecting him to appear, hoping the snow would slow him enough that I’d catch him and we could navigate through it together. I heard faint shouts and saw a trio of skiers on an adjoining ridge on the other side of the snowy bowl, close enough to hear, but impossible to reach. They waved their arms in big motions to me and I waved back. They were far enough away and dressed in enough ski gear that I couldn’t make out whether they were male or female. “Where are we?” I yelled across the snowy expanse. “What?” I barely heard them yell back. I repeated the words over and over again—Where are we, Where are we—until my throat grew raw. I knew approximately where I believed myself to be, but I wanted to hear what they’d say, just to be sure. I asked and asked without getting through, so I tried one last time, putting everything I had into it, practically hurling myself off the side of the mountain with the effort, “WHERE ARE WE?” There was a pause, which told me they’d finally registered my question, and then in unison they yelled back, “CALIFORNIA!” By the way they fell against one another, I knew they were laughing. “Thanks,” I called out sarcastically, though my tone was lost in the wind. They called something back to me that I couldn’t quite make out. They repeated it again and again, but it got muddled each time until finally they shouted out the words one by one and I heard them. “ARE” “YOU” “LOST?” I thought about it for a moment. If I said yes, they’d rescue me and I’d be done with this godforsaken trail. “NO,” I roared. I wasn’t lost. I was screwed.

• From Bold Move

  That night, my grandmother was not able to get through to me; there was too much history with my father, too much pain in that moment. As I look back, I see that my brain was in survival mode: my amygdala was predominately in charge, and I was predicting the world through my own beliefs that formed when things fell apart in my childhood: I am not enough. Through these lenses, I was unable to even consider another view of the world. Back then, my brain felt like a locked vault; the keys were thrown out, and forever and ever this would be the only way I would ever see the world . . . forever. Did I say forever ? The conclusion my brain had drawn generated no dissonance because it just confirmed my core belief. But in doing so, my brain had made a giant pretzel with the information coming in: “My father didn’t show” was twisted into “It is all my fault.” That day, confirmation bias won: my brain interpreted my father’s absence as confirmation that I wasn’t enough. Yet, there is a catch here. By allowing confirmation bias to guide our conclusions, we are merely confirming beliefs that may no longer fit us or have any basis in reality. That day, I proved that it was indeed my fault that my father was not there because if I was enough, he would have shown up for me . (I wish I could give younger me a hug and teach her all that I know today!) While I hope you have not had the experience of a parent standing you up like this, most of you can likely relate on some level—a friend who disappointed you, a date who didn’t show, a boss who did not come through with their promised raise . . .

• 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 Wild (2012)

  I sang cool songs as I walked, the sun beating me as if it had an actual physical force that consisted of more than heat. Sweat collected around my sunglasses and streamed into my eyes, stinging them so I had to stop and wipe my face every now and then. It seemed impossible that I’d been up in the snowy mountains wearing all of my clothes only the week before, that I’d awakened to a thick layer of frost on my tent walls each morning. I couldn’t rightly remember it. Those white days seemed like a dream, as if all this time I’d been staggering north in the scorching heat into this, my fifth week on the trail, straight through the same heat that had almost driven me off the trail in my second week. I stopped and drank again. The water was so hot it almost hurt my mouth. Sagebrush and a sprawl of hardy wildflowers blanketed the wide plain. As I walked, scratchy plants I couldn’t identify grazed my calves. Others I knew seemed to speak to me, saying their names to me in my mother’s voice. Names I didn’t realize I knew until they came so clearly into my mind: Queen Anne’s lace, Indian paintbrush, lupine—those same flowers grew in Minnesota, white and orange and purple. When we passed them as we drove, my mother would sometimes stop the car and pick a bouquet from what grew in the ditch. I stopped walking and looked up at the sky. The birds of prey still circled, hardly seeming to flap their wings. I will never go home, I thought with a finality that made me catch my breath, and then I walked on, my mind emptying into nothing but the effort to push my body through the bald monotony of the hike. There wasn’t a day on the trail when that monotony didn’t ultimately win out, when the only thing to think about was whatever was the physically hardest. It was a sort of scorching cure. I counted my steps, working my way to a hundred and starting over again at one. Each time I completed another set it seemed as if I’d achieved a small thing. Then a hundred became too optimistic and I went to fifty, then twenty-five, then ten. One two three four five six seven eight nine ten. I stopped and bent over, pressing my hands to my knees to ease my back for a moment. The sweat dripped from my face onto the pale dirt like tears.

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

  In Eliot’s Ash-Wednesday, we watch the poet painfully climbing a spiral staircase. This image is reflected in the twisting sentences of the verse, which often revolves upon itself, repeating the same words and phrases, apparently making little headway, but pushing steadily forward nevertheless. My own life has progressed in the same way. For years it seemed a hard, Lenten journey, but without the prospect of Easter. I toiled round and round in pointless circles, covering the same ground, repeating the same mistakes, quite unable to see where I was going. Yet all the time, without realizing it, I was slowly climbing out of the darkness. In mythology, stairs frequently symbolize a breakthrough to a new level of consciousness. For a long time I assumed that I had finished with religion forever, yet in the end, the strange and seemingly arbitrary revolutions of my life led me to the kind of transformation that—I now believe—was what I was seeking all those years ago, when I packed my suitcase, entered my convent, and set off to find God.2 T. S. ELIOT, Ash-Wednesday, I Because I do not hope to turn again Because I do not hope Because I do not hope to turn Desiring this man’s gift and that man’s scope I no longer strive to strive towards such things (Why should the agèd eagle stretch its wings?) Why should I mourn The vanished power of the usual reign? Because I do not hope to know again The infirm glory of the positive hour Because I do not think Because I know I shall not know The one veritable transitory power Because I cannot drink There, where trees flower, and springs flow, for there is nothing again Because I know that time is always time And place is always and only place And what is actual is actual only for one time And only for one place I rejoice that things are as they are and I renounce the blessèd face And renounce the voice Because I cannot hope to turn again Consequently I rejoice, having to construct something Upon which to rejoice And pray to God to have mercy upon us And I pray that I may forget These matters that with myself I too much discuss Too much explain Because I do not hope to turn again Let these words answer For what is done, not to be done again May the judgement not be too heavy upon us Because these wings are no longer wings to fly But merely vans to beat the air The air which is now thoroughly small and dry Smaller and dryer than the will Teach us to care and not to care Teach us to sit still. Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death Pray for us now and at the hour of our death. 1. Ash Wednesday

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

  “You’re looking very smart indeed.” He did, too: white jersey, brown cord trousers, and hair brushed and curly. “Now, Jacob, you look at the papers while I make our toast.” “Karen.” He put his head round the door. “You won’t be angry, will you, if I spill coffee all the way down the front of my white jersey?” “Not if it’s an accident, no.” “But if I do it on purpose?” “Then I’ll be very angry indeed.” “Because, Karen, I’m going to do it!” He picked up his mug and regarded me hopefully. “Don’t you dare!” I thundered predictably. “Oh, don’t be severe!” Jacob beamed. “I shall be very severe indeed, if you’re not sitting in your place in two seconds flat!” “Oh, don’t be displeased!” As he returned to the dining room, I heard him mutter: “Karen was extremely oppressive with Jacob. ‘Don’t you dare do it!’ she cried angrily . . . Jacob looked crestfallen and pleaded with Karen. ‘Oh, don’t be displeased,’ he begged wistfully.” When, an hour later, Mass began, Jacob behaved beautifully. He stood with his eyes closed and his hands joined, fingers pointing heavenward. He must have learned this in school. “You don’t have to stand like that all the time,” I whispered. He nodded gravely. During the hymns and music, he listened intently, head averted, a strange half smile of approval on his lips. Rapturously, he flung his head back and inhaled the incense. “Karen,” he whispered luxuriantly between sniffs, “I like coming to Blackfriars, I really do!” Well, Jenifer had been right. Jacob really was getting something from this. But what was it doing for me? This morning, the ritual seemed remote, arbitrary, and to have nothing to do with my own perplexities. This was the new vernacular Mass, the creation of the Second Vatican Council. It was lively, fresh, and cheerful— perhaps a little too cheery for my taste. It was all so sensible and matter-of-fact. It suggested that God was well disposed toward us and could be approached in a casual, confident spirit, as though he were a congenial boss. But God was not my friend. I could see now that he never had been. And this service was so wordy. The old liturgy, punctuated by singing that gave the congregation time for reflection, had had a silent, contemplative core. But we now seemed afraid to stop talking, and were reminding God insistently that he had created the world and redeemed us, as though he were too absentminded to recall these deeds. I cast my mind back to Mrs. Moore in E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India, confronted by the abysmal echo of the Marabar caves and finding no help in “poor, talkative little Christianity.” Perhaps we were afraid that if we stopped chattering to God in this way, the empty silence would cause him to vanish. As perhaps he had.

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

  Jacob beamed. “I shall be very severe indeed, if you’re not sitting in your place in two seconds flat!” “Oh, don’t be displeased!” As he returned to the dining room, I heard him mutter: “Karen was extremely oppressive with Jacob. ‘Don’t you dare do it!’ she cried angrily . . . Jacob looked crestfallen and pleaded with Karen. ‘Oh, don’t be displeased,’ he begged wistfully.” When, an hour later, Mass began, Jacob behaved beautifully. He stood with his eyes closed and his hands joined, fingers pointing heavenward. He must have learned this in school. “You don’t have to stand like that all the time,” I whispered. He nodded gravely. During the hymns and music, he listened intently, head averted, a strange half smile of approval on his lips. Rapturously, he flung his head back and inhaled the incense. “Karen,” he whispered luxuriantly between sniffs, “I like coming to Blackfriars, I really do!” Well, Jenifer had been right. Jacob really was getting something from this. But what was it doing for me? This morning, the ritual seemed remote, arbitrary, and to have nothing to do with my own perplexities. This was the new vernacular Mass, the creation of the Second Vatican Council. It was lively, fresh, and cheerful— perhaps a little too cheery for my taste. It was all so sensible and matter-of-fact. It suggested that God was well disposed toward us and could be approached in a casual, confident spirit, as though he were a congenial boss. But God was not my friend. I could see now that he never had been. And this service was so wordy. The old liturgy, punctuated by singing that gave the congregation time for reflection, had had a silent, contemplative core. But we now seemed afraid to stop talking, and were reminding God insistently that he had created the world and redeemed us, as though he were too absentminded to recall these deeds. I cast my mind back to Mrs. Moore in E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India, confronted by the abysmal echo of the Marabar caves and finding no help in “poor, talkative little Christianity.” Perhaps we were afraid that if we stopped chattering to God in this way, the empty silence would cause him to vanish. As perhaps he had. When we stood for the creed, Jacob looked around expectantly, hoping for more incense. I listened to the familiar words: “I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth . . . in Jesus Christ . . . begotten, not made, of one substance with the Father. . . .” The congregation repeated these extraordinary propositions without surprise, as I had done so often in the past, but now I felt that I could not longer join them. I remembered a Jesuit telling us once during a retreat that faith was not really an intellectual assent but an act of will.

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

  Christians could accept their essentially incredible tradition only by making a deliberate choice to believe. You could not prove or disprove these doctrines, but you could consciously decide to take them on trust. They might even turn out to be true. But somewhere along the line, I had given up. I could no longer summon up the emotional or spiritual energy to make that choice. I felt tired out, drained, and slightly repelled by it all. I was finished with God; and God—if he existed at all—had long ago finished with me. “Karen! Will you bring me to Blackfriars again next week?” Jacob asked as we crossed St. Giles and hurried past the Lamb and Flag. He had had a wonderful morning. After Mass, I had taken him into the coffee room, and again he had behaved beautifully, standing quietly beside me with his cup and listening as usual with averted face to the people who had come over to say hello. Geoffrey Preston had made a point of talking to Jacob and had asked him if he would like to serve on the altar one day. That had seemed a little too ambitious to me, but as Geoffrey pointed out, Bernard, who had Down’s syndrome, regularly assisted at Mass and carried the cross at the head of the procession. Jacob did not answer Geoffrey directly, of course, but he looked thoughtful and smiled to himself. He clearly felt at ease in Blackfriars, and the community there had generously taken him in. “Karen!” Jacob tugged at my arm and put his face close to mine, so that our noses almost touched. I smiled at him. “Karen, we will be going to Blackfriars again next week, won’t we?” It seemed that Jacob’s religious life was beginning as mine was ending. And if I didn’t take him to Mass, nobody would. “Of course we’ll be going!” I replied, and, satisfied, Jacob broke away and trotted ahead in the lopsided gait that was so like his father’s, looking back occasionally to see that I was still there. Yes, I would continue to take him to Blackfriars. I did not believe in any of it anymore; God had finally departed from my life; but it would do me no harm to sit for a while every week with those good people. And giving Jacob this new chance would be a positive thing to do. He had so few pleasures, and when he had found something that he so clearly relished, it would be cruel to take it away from him. It wasn’t as though I had anything else to do on Sunday mornings. In fact, I really didn’t have anything else to do in my life at all. 4.

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

  A couple of hours later, the attending doctor in the A and E department of the Middlesex Hospital told me that I had suffered an epileptic seizure, and arranged an appointment for me in the neurology department. I truly did not know whether to laugh or cry. I was an ex-nun, a failed academic, mentally unstable, and now I could add epileptic to this dismal list. 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?”