Despair

Passages

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

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• From The Canterbury Tales (2009)

  There was among the dancers a jolly young squire, handsome and fleet of foot; he was fresher than the spring day and, according to all reports, he could sing and dance better than any other man in the world. He was also one of the most good-looking. He was young and strong, virtuous and rich, wise and well respected. What else can I say? Oh, one more thing. Unknown to Dorigen and the others, this young squire, Aurelius by name, was in thrall to Venus; for the last two years he had secretly been enamoured of Dorigen. He loved her more than anyone else in the world, but of course he had not been able to disclose his love. He had drunk the bitter cup of misery down to the lees. He was in despair; but he was silent, save for the songs of woe that he sometimes sang. He did not sing of his own case but, rather, made general complaint about the pains of love in various chants and lyrics, roundels and virelays. He sang of a lover who was not beloved. He sang of a true heart beating in vain. He sang of a lover suffering all the pains of hell. Echo pined away for love of Narcissus. That will always be the fate of the star-struck lover. So in all his pain Aurelius dared not reveal his feelings to Dorigen. Yet there were times, at dances where the young come together, when he looked upon her with such intentness that he seemed to be asking her for mercy. But she knew nothing about this. Nevertheless it happened on this day that, after the dance was over, they fell into conversation. There was nothing wrong with that. They were neighbours. They had known each for a long time. And he was an honourable man. Yet, as they talked, Aurelius came closer and closer towards the one theme that haunted him. When he saw the right time, he spoke out. ‘Ma dame,’ he said, ‘I wish to God that I had gone over the seas like your husband. I wish I had set sail on the same day. If it would make you happy, I would gladly travel to a distant land from which I could never return. I know well enough that my service to you here is all in vain. My reward is a broken heart. Ma dame, have pity on my pain. You can cure me or kill me with one word. I wish that I lay buried here beneath your feet. I have no more to say. Have mercy on me, sweet Dorigen, or else I will die!’

• From The Canterbury Tales (2009)

  Yet, in truth, he suffered more keenly than before. He felt all the pangs of death. He wept; he wailed; he groaned; he lamented. He secretly longed for an occasion to kill himself. ‘Alas,’ he cried, ‘that I was ever born! My prison now is darker and more dreary than my cell. I am now forced to endure the torments of hell, not of purgatory as before. I wish that I had never known Perotheus. Then I could still lie imprisoned with Palamon. Then I would have been in bliss and not in woe. For then, even fettered and immured, I could have enjoyed the sight of the mistress I adore. I may never have enjoyed her favour, but at least I could have looked upon her. Oh Palamon, dear cousin, you have been awarded the palm of victory. You may endure the pain of imprisonment - endure, no, enjoy. Compared to me, you are in paradise. Fortune has turned the dice for you. You have the sight of her while I am rendered blind. And since you have the blessing of her presence near at hand it is possible that you, a worthy and a handsome knight, might one day attain that goal you so fervently desire. Fortune is ever turning like the wheel. But I, living in barren exile, have no such expectation of grace. I am deprived of all hope, in such despair that no creature on earth can comfort me. There is nothing made of fire, of earth, or water, or of air, that can console me. So I must live, and die, in misery and distress. I must say farewell to joy and happiness.’

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

  CONCLUSION: FROM PARODY TO POLITICS DOI: 10.4324/9780203824979-4 I began with the speculative question of whether feminist politics could do without a “subject” in the category of women. At stake is not whether it still makes sense, strategically or transitionally, to refer to women in order to make representational claims in their behalf. The feminist “we” is always and only a phantasmatic construction, one that has its purposes, but which denies the internal complexity and indeterminacy of the term and constitutes itself only through the exclusion of some part of the constituency that it simultaneously seeks to represent. The tenuous or phantasmatic status of the “we,” however, is not cause for despair or, at least, it is not only cause for despair. The radical instability of the category sets into question the foundational restrictions on feminist political theorizing and opens up other configurations, not only of genders and bodies, but of politics itself. The foundationalist reasoning of identity politics tends to assume that an identity must first be in place in order for political interests to be elaborated and, subsequently, political action to be taken. My argument is that there need not be a “doer behind the deed,” but that the “doer” is variably constructed in and through the deed. This is not a return to an existential theory of the self as constituted through its acts, for the existential theory maintains a prediscursive structure for both the self and its acts. It is precisely the discursively variable construction of each in and through the other that has interested me here. The question of locating “agency” is usually associated with the viability of the “subject,” where the “subject” is understood to have some stable existence prior to the cultural field that it negotiates. Or, if the subject is culturally constructed, it is nevertheless vested with an agency, usually figured as the capacity for reflexive mediation, that remains intact regardless of its cultural embeddedness. On such a model, “culture” and “discourse” mire the subject, but do not constitute that subject. This move to qualify and enmire the preexisting subject has appeared necessary to establish a point of agency that is not fully determined by that culture and discourse. And yet, this kind of reasoning falsely presumes (a) agency can only be established through recourse to a prediscursive “I,” even if that “I” is found in the midst of a discursive convergence, and (b) that to be constituted by discourse is to be determined by discourse, where determination forecloses the possibility of agency. Even within the theories that maintain a highly qualified or situated subject, the subject still encounters its discursively constituted environment in an oppositional epistemological frame. The culturally enmired subject negotiates its constructions, even when those constructions are the very predicates of its own identity. In Beauvoir, for example, there is an “I” that does its gender, that becomes its gender, but that “I,” invariably associated with its gender, is nevertheless a point of agency never fully identifiable with its gender.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  When the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) looked into the hearts of his contemporaries, he found that God had already died, there, but as yet very few people were aware of this.79 In The Gay Science (1882), he told the story of a madman who ran one morning into the marketplace, crying: “I seek God!” In mild amusement, the sophisticated bystanders asked him if God had run away or emigrated. “Where has God gone?” the madman demanded. “We have killed him—you and I! We are all his murderers!”80 The astonishing progress of science had made God quite irrelevant; it had caused human beings to focus so intently on the physical world that they would soon be constitutionally unable to take God seriously. The death of God—the fact that the Christian God had become incredible—was “beginning to cast its first shadows over Europe.” The tiny minority who were able to understand the implications of this unprecedented event were already finding that “some sun seems to have set and profound trust has been turned to doubt.”81 By making “God” a purely notional truth attainable by the rational and scientific intellect, without ritual, prayer, or ethical commitment, men and women had killed it for themselves. Like the Jewish Marranos, Europeans were beginning to experience religion as tenuous, arbitrary, and lifeless. The madman longed to believe in God but he could not. The unthinkable had happened: everything that the symbol of God had pointed to—absolute goodness, beauty, order, peace, truthfulness, justice—was being slowly but surely eliminated from European culture. Morality would no longer be measured by reference to an ultimate value that transcended human interests but simply by the needs of the moment. For Marx the death of God had been a project—something to be achieved in the future; for Nietzsche it had already occurred: it was only a matter of time before “God” would cease to be a presence in the scientific civilization of the West. Unless a new absolute could be found to take its place, everything would become unhinged and relative: “What were we about when we uncoupled this earth from the sun?” the madman demanded. “Where is the earth moving to now? Are we falling continuously? And backwards and sideways and forwards in all directions? Is there still an above and below? Do we not stray, as though through an infinite nothingness?”82 Nietzsche was, of course, familiar with the philosophical and scientific arguments for the denial of God, but he did not bother to rehearse them. God had not died because of the critique of Feuerbach, Marx, Vogt, and Buchner. There had simply been a change of mood. Like the ancient Sky God, the remote modern God was retreating from the consciousness of his former worshippers.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  His definition of religion in The Future of an Illusion (1927) is also reductive: religion is wish fulfillment of instinctual, unconscious desires, a fantasy that was once consoling but is now doomed to failure, because its myths and rituals belong to such a primitive stage of human evolution. It was time to allow science to allay our fears and provide a new basis for morality. These explanations won respect because they were rooted in science, but Freud’s critique was flawed by a rather unscientific view of the female as homme manqué: religion was a female activity, while atheism represented the postreligious, healthy masculine human being. 87 His view of religion as rooted in the infant’s veneration of the father also prompts the question of whether Freud’s rejection of God did not spring from an unconscious hostility to his own father. Freud has been called the last of the philosophes. In one sense, psychoanalysis can be seen as the culmination of the Enlightenment project to bring the whole of reality under the control of reason. Thanks to Freud’s pioneering work, dreams could be interpreted, subconscious impulses brought to light, and the hidden meaning of ancient myths laid bare. But Freud also diminished the Enlightenment ideal by demonstrating that reason comprised only the outermost rind of the human mind and was a superficial crusting on a seething melting pot of primitive instincts over which we had little control. Where Darwin had revealed that nature was “red in tooth and claw,” Freud showed that the mind was a battlefield on which we struggled endlessly with the unconscious forces of our own psyche, with little hope of final resolution. Freud brought to light a darker strand of the fin de siècle when he suggested that human beings were as strongly motivated by a death wish as by the lust for procreation. But at the end of the nineteenth century, many Christians believed that human beings were evolving to a new and more perfect state. For their part, agnostics were convinced that the world would be a better place without God. Ingersoll looked forward to a future in which “man, gathering courage from a succession of victories over the obstructions of nature, will attain to a serene grandeur unknown to the disciples of any superstition.” 88 Doubt was “the womb and cradle of progress.” 89 The idea that a “personal God does all” had bred “idleness, ignorance and misery,” 90 but now people could channel the energies that had been sapped by religion into the creation of a more just and equal world. “A battle is going on, in which the humblest human creature is not incapable of taking some part, between the powers of good and those of evil,” wrote John Stuart Mill. The task of this generation was to promote “the very slow and often almost insensible progress by which good is gradually being ground from evil.”

• From The Case for God (2009)

  In Holland, Jews were not confined to ghettos, as they were elsewhere in Europe; they became successful businessmen and mingled freely with gentiles. When they arrived in Amsterdam, the Marranos were eager for the opportunity to practice their faith fully. But they found conventional religious life bewildering. For decades the Iberian Jews had lived without communal religious life and had no experience of ritual observance. The Dutch rabbis had the difficult task of guiding them back into the fold, making allowances for their problems without compromising tradition, and it is a tribute to them that most of the Marranos were able to make the transition. 86 But initially their reaction was similar to that of people today who find the “beliefs” of religion arbitrary and incredible because they have not fully participated in its transformative rites. The abstruse laws of diet and purification must have seemed barbaric and meaningless to the Marrano sophisticates, who found it difficult to accept the rabbis’ explanations because they were used to thinking things out rationally for themselves. According to Isaac Orobio de Castro, a philosophy professor who had lived in Iberia for years as a closet Jew, some of them had become “unspeakable atheists”: 87 they were “full of vanity, pride and arrogance,” loved to display their learning “by contradicting what they do not understand,” and felt that their expertise in the modern sciences put them above “those who are indeed educated in the sacred laws.” 88 A tiny minority of the Marranos found the transition to full cultic observance impossible. One of the most tragic cases was that of Uriel da Costa, who had experienced Portuguese Christianity as oppressive, cruel, and composed of rules and doctrines that bore no relation to the gospels. 89 He had formed his own idea of Jewish religion by reading the Bible, but when he arrived in Amsterdam he was shocked to find that contemporary Judaism was just as far removed from scripture as Catholicism. Outraged, he published a treatise attacking the Torah and declaring that he believed only in human reason and the laws of nature. He caused such ferment that the rabbis were forced to excommunicate him. There was as yet no notion in Europe of a “secular Jew,” and as an excommunicate da Costa was shunned by Jews and Christians alike; children jeered at him in the street. In despair, he returned to the synagogue, but he still could not adapt to a faith that seemed incomprehensible. In 1640, he committed suicide.

• From The Canterbury Tales (2009)

  We search for felicity down every lane and alley, but often enough we take the wrong path. All will agree. And I especially know the truth of this - I, who believed that release from prison would be the highest good! I should have known better. Now I am exiled from all hope of happiness. Since I can no longer see you, Emily, I

• From The Canterbury Tales (2009)

  ‘The tree you saw,’ she told him, ‘signifies the gallows. The washing of Jupiter signifies the rain and the snow. The towel that Phoebus brought you is an image of the sun’s warm rays. You are going to be hanged, Father. There is no doubt about it. The rain will wash you, and the sun will dry you.’ So did his daughter, whose name was Phania, warn him of his coming fate. And indeed he was hanged. The proud king ended on the gallows, where his royal estate could not save him. The tragedies of the proud and the fortunate have the same burden. They are threnodies of grief against the guile of Dame Fortune, who kills where she might cure. When men put their faith in her, she fails them and covers her bright face with a cloud. Heere stynteth the Knyght the Monk of his tale

• From The Case for God (2009)

  Not surprisingly, many thoughtful people were unable to believe in this remote and abstractly conceived deity. By the middle of the twentieth century, it was commonly imagined that secularism was the coming ideology and that religion would never again play a role in public life. But atheism was still not perceived as an easy option. Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80) spoke of a God-shaped hole in human consciousness where the sacred had always been. The desire for what we call God is intrinsic to human nature, which cannot bear the utter meaninglessness of the cosmos. We have invented a God to explain the inexplicable; it is a divinized humanity. But even if God existed, Sartre claimed, it would be necessary to reject him, since this God negates our freedom. This was not a comfortable creed. It demanded a bleak acceptance of the fact that our lives had no meaning—a heroic act that brought an apotheosis of freedom but also a denial of an intrinsic part of our nature. Albert Camus (1913–60) could no longer subscribe to the nineteenth-century dream of a deified humanity. Our lives were rendered meaningless by our mortality, so any philosophy that tried to make sense of human existence was a delusion. We had to do without God and pour all our loving solicitude and care upon the world. But this would bring no liberation. In The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), Camus showed that the abolition of God required a lifelong and hopeless struggle that it was impossible to rationalize. In his passion for life and hatred of death, Sisyphus, king of ancient Corinth, had defied the gods, and his punishment was to spend eternity engaged in a futile task: each day he had to roll a boulder up a mountainside; but when he reached the summit, the rock rolled downhill, so the next day he had to begin all over again. This was an image of the absurdity of human life, from which even death offered no release. Can we be happy in the knowledge that we are defeated before we even begin? If we make a heroic effort to create our own meaning in the face of death and absurdity, Camus concludes that happiness is possible: I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one’s burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.72

• From The Case for God (2009)

  The most advanced and civilized countries in Europe had crippled themselves and their opponents with their new military technology simply to serve the national ego. The war itself seemed a terrible parody of the mechanical ideal: once the intricate mechanism of conscription, troop transportation, and the manufacture of weapons had been switched on, it seemed to acquire its own momentum and proved almost impossible to stop. After the armistice, the economy of the West seemed in terminal decline, and the 1930s saw the Great Depression and the rise of fascism and communism. By the end of the decade, the unthinkable had happened and the world was embroiled in a second global war. It was now difficult to feel sanguine about the limitless progress of civilization. Modern secular ideologies were proving to be as lethal as any religious bigotry. They revealed the inherent destructiveness of all idolatry: once the finite reality of the nation had become an absolute value, it was compelled to overcome and destroy all rival claimants. Modern science had been founded on the belief that it was possible to achieve objective certainty. Hume and Kant had cast doubt on this ideal by suggesting that our understanding of the external world was merely a reflection of human psychology. But even Kant believed that the fundamental categories of Newtonian science—space, time, substance, and causality—were beyond question. Yet within a generation of Hilbert’s confident prediction that all physicists had to do was add the final touches to Newton’s great “Systeme,” it had been superseded. Already in the late nineteenth century, the Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell (1831–79) had developed the theory of electromagnetic radiation, showing that physicists were beginning to understand time quite differently from the way we experience it, since a radio wave could be received before it had been sent. The puzzling experiments on ether drift and the speed of light conducted by the American scientists Albert Michelson (1852–1931) and Edward Morley (1838–1923) suggested that the relative velocities of light from the sun were the same in the direction of the earth’s rotation as when opposed to it, which was entirely inconsistent with Newtonian mechanics. There followed the discovery of radioactivity by Alexander-Edmond Becquerel (1820–91) and the isolation of quantum phenomena by Max Planck (1858–1947). Finally, Albert Einstein (1879–1955) applied Planck’s quantum theory to light, and formulated his theories of special (1905) and general (1916) relativity. Relativity was able to accommodate the Michelson-Morley findings by merging the concepts of space and time, regarded as absolutes by Newton, into a space-time continuum.

• From The Canterbury Tales (2009)

  I suppose I must leave the answer to theologians, but I know this for a fact. The world is full of grief. I have seen a serpent sting an unwary traveller and then glide away. I have seen the thief murder his prey, and then wander forth unchecked and unharmed. But I must linger here in prison. Truly the gods, in their jealous rage against my race, have all but destroyed my family and razed the walls of Thebes. Now Venus herself has decided to slay me, too, by poisoning me with jealousy for Arcite. Where can I turn?’ I will now leave Palamon in his sad plight for a moment, and tell you what has been happening to Arcite. The summer has passed, and the long nights have merely increased the duration of his pain. In truth I do not know who has endured the most suffering, the freed lover or the prisoner. Let me summarize their situation. Here is Palamon. He is condemned to perpetual imprisonment, consigned to chains and shackles until the day of his death. Here is Arcite. On pain of death by beheading he is exiled from the territory of Athens, forever excluded from the sight of fair Emily. I will ask you lovers the question. Who is worse off? One of them can glimpse his gracious lady, day by day, but will never be able to approach her. The other is as free as air, able to journey wherever he wishes, but he will never see Emily again. Consider it. Judge the matter as best you can. Put the two characters before you, as if they were upon a gaming board. Meanwhile I will carry on with the story, just to see what happens next. PART TWO When Arcite eventually returned to Thebes, he grew faint and sick. His one word, endlessly repeated, was ‘Alas!’ We know the reason. I will add only that no other creature upon the earth has ever suffered, or will ever suffer, so painfully. He could not sleep. He did not eat or drink. He became lean and emaciated, as dry and brittle as a stick; his eyes were hollow, and his complexion turned a sickly yellow as if he had the jaundice. He looked truly frightful. And he was alone. He sought out solitude like a wounded animal. He spent his nights in tears and, if ever he heard the music of a lyre or lute, he wept openly and without pause. His spirits were so feeble, and his demeanour so changed, that no one recognized him or knew his voice. He behaved madly, wildly. He did not seem to be suffering from lovesickness, but rather from despair engendered by the melancholy humour; he had been touched in the foremost ventricle of the brain, which is the proper home of the imagination. So, in the fantasy of Arcite, everything was turned upside down. All was on a totter.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  Despite Hilbert, we seemed no closer to understanding the universe. Human beings, randomly produced minutiae whose existence was probably ephemeral, still appeared to be cast adrift in a vast, impersonal universe. There was no clear answer as to what had preceded the “big bang” that had given birth to the universe. Even physicists did not believe that the equations of quantum theory described what was actually there; these mathematical abstractions could not be put into words, and our knowledge was confined to symbols that were mere shadows of an indescribable reality. Unknowing seemed built into the human condition. The revolution of the 1920s had overturned traditional scientific orthodoxy, and if that had happened once, it could happen again. Some Christians believed that the new physics was friendly to faith, even though Einstein always insisted that relativity was a scientific theory and had no bearing on religion. They seized eagerly on his famous remark in a debate with Bohr in Brussels (1927) that although quantum mechanics was “certainly imposing,” an “inner voice tells me that it ... does not bring us any closer to the secret of the Old One. I, at any rate, am convinced that He does not throw dice.” 2 But Einstein was not referring to the personal God; he had simply used the “Old One” (a medieval Kabbalistic image) to symbolize the impersonal, intelligible, and immanent order of what exists. The British astronomer Arthur Stanley Eddington, however, saw relativity as evidence for the existence of mind in nature; Canon Arthur F. Smethurst regarded it as a manifestation of the Holy Spirit; 3 others saw the new conception of time as validating the after-life; 4 big bang theory was thought to substantiate the Genesis account; 5 and some even managed to see the indeterminacy of quantum mechanics as support for God’s providential control of the world. 6 This type of speculation was ill-conceived. Inured to their need for scientific proof, these apologists were still interpreting the ancient biblical symbols in too literal a manner. Max Planck had a more sage view of the relations between science and religion. The two were quite compatible: science dealt with the objective, material world and religion with values and ethics. Conflict between them was based “on a confusion of the images and parables of religion with scientific statement.” 7 After Einstein, it became disturbingly clear that not only was science unable to provide us with definitive certainty but its findings were inherently limited and provisional too. In 1927, Heisenberg formulated the principle of indeterminacy in nuclear physics, showing that it was impossible for scientists to achieve an objective result because the act of observation itself affected their understanding of the object of their investigation. In 1931, the Austrian philosopher Kurt Gödel (1906–78) devised a theorem to show that any formal logical or mathematical system must contain propositions that are not verifiable within that system; there would always be propositions that could be proved or disproved only by input from outside.

• From City of Night (1963)

  At the table, everyone is talking, eyes constantly searching the bar. The beat of the music somehow matches the movements, the stares, the muted desperation all around; the smothered moans of the spade now blaring words from the balcony is like a composite moan, a wail emanating in unison from everyone crushed into this dirty bar.... Darling Dolly is breathlessly explaining the Severe Jolt she got when she got home and found her best drag clothes gone: “My lovely lace negligee—my studded shoes!” Buddy shakes his head and says to the table: “I needed the bread.” Darling Dolly stabs him with a look. Chuck says hes heard of a malehouse in Hollywood where he can make hundreds of dollars a day: “But I don know where it is so I cain apply.” Miss Destiny says, “Chuck, my dear, you are just too lazy to get ahead—remember the $15 score I got you and you fell asleep?”... Trudi is wondering wheres her daddy, and Miss Destiny explains to me that Trudi’s “daddy” is an old man whos been “keeping Trudi for ages—and keeps Skipper, too, sometimes—but indirectly”: Skipper living off and on with Trudi and hitting it big occasionally—“after being Really Big in Hollywood once”—and going away, coming back to Trudi’s.... Nearby, an emaciated man with devouring deep-buried eyes is pretending to read the titles on the jukebox, but it’s obvious that he is fascinatedly studying Tiger’s tattoos—and Tiger, noticing this, glances at him with huge undisguised contempt, which sends the emaciated man into an ecstasy of sick smiles. Now the queens at the table are wondering aloud who the score buying the juice is digging: the queens or otherwise, and which one. And which does it turn out hes digging? The queens. And which one? Darling Dolly Dane. And when this became known, by means of the “waitress,” Darling Dolly skips over to him, perches on the stool next to him at the bar, and says, “Another tall cool Coca-Cola please, honey, and make it straight.” Miss Destiny sighed, “Well, lordee, Tara is saved tonight.” Immediately Skipper had a plan to clip the score, and Trudi says philosophically, “Dont get nervous, youll shake the beads”—(the beads being life—fate—chance—anything)—“and besides, Darling Dolly saw him first.” Miss Destiny says theyre all Too Much. Suddenly shes becoming depressed—and the obvious reason is that the score who it turned out dug queens didnt dig her. “Oh, Im really depressed now!” Miss Destiny said. Someone had mentioned that Pauline had just walked in. I looked, and theres Pauline—a heavily painted queen who thinks she looks like Sophia Loren—with a collar like the wicked queen’s in Snow White. Miss Destiny said icily: “Pauline... is a lowlife... prostitute.” Trudi: “A cheap whore.” Lola, in her husky man’s voice and glowering nearsightedly: “A slut.” Trudi: “A common streetwalker.” Lola: “A chippy.” Miss Destiny—conclusively, viciously: “A cocksucker! ” Chuck gagged on his beer. “She ain got nothin on you, Destinee!”

• From Birthday Girl (2018)

  Me detengo frente a Lindsay, escaneo el estacionamiento a mi alrededor por el Challenger de Cole. No lo veo, pero apenas puedo ver nada bajo la lluvia en este momento. Lo llamé y a Jordan sin parar durante las últimas veinticuatro horas, pero no puedo soportarlo más. Si él quiere tiempo, puedo hacer eso. Si necesita espacio, se lo daré. Pero necesito disculparme cara a cara. Necesito que sepa que lo amo, y no quise que esto sucediera. No es que él me escuche o probablemente incluso me escuche a través de su ira, pero no puedo sentarme sin hacer nada. Salgo de mi camioneta, corro hacia la puerta de Lindsay, bajo el porche cubierto, y golpeo con mi puño. Ha estado lloviendo todo el día y, aunque dejé que los chicos tuvieran el día libre, todavía fui al sitio y me encargué del negocio solo para matar el tiempo hasta que Cole saliera del trabajo hoy. Si es que ya comenzó su nuevo trabajo, claro. Lin abre la puerta, todavía con su falda recta de oficina, pero descalza y con la camisa por fuera. Me ve y cruza sus brazos sobre su pecho, inmovilizándome con una mirada presumida. —Quiero hablar con él —le digo. —Has hecho suficiente —se burla, sacando su cola de caballo apretada—. Jesús, pensé que yo era una mala madre. ¿Qué estabas pensando? ¿Tomando sus sobras como si no hubiera otra mujer en esta ciudad que pudieras follar? —No fue así. —Ahórrame los detalles. —Se acerca a una mesa cercana y toma un vaso que lo más probable es que sea vodka y jugo de naranja—. Ella no es diferente de lo que pensabas que era yo. Ella te usó, Pike. Te utilizó por un lugar para vivir y conveniencia, y oh, ¿qué más hiciste? ¿Arreglar su auto también? —Sacude la cabeza, sonriendo amargamente—. Ella tuvo suerte contigo, y todo lo que tuvo que hacer fue abrir sus piernas. Cristo, ustedes los hombres son realmente densos cuando se trata de una cara bonita. Mi mandíbula se tensa. Jordan no es así. Ella no se parece en nada a ti. No estoy aquí para hablar de ella de todos modos. —Tú no sabes nada —digo. —Aw, ¿están enamorados? Mi corazón late dos veces más fuerte, y mi rostro cae, una imagen parpadea en mi mente de ella de pie junto a la piscina hace tres noches, pidiéndome que le contara a Cole y luego que la llevara a la cama, a nuestra cama. Mi estómago se hunde. La extraño tanto. —Oh, Dios mío, la amas —dice Lindsay, mirándome a la cara y luciendo como si estuviera a punto de reír. Pero antes que pueda decirme algo más, me enderezo. —¿Dónde está? —Se fue —dice, apoyándose en la puerta y tomando un sorbo de su bebida—. Por las próximas ocho semanas. —¿Qué?

• From Birthday Girl (2018)

  Ahora lo hago. Mis ojos arden, las lágrimas se acumulan, pero es extraño. No estoy segura de estar triste. Lo que dice es casi un consuelo, porque conozco esta historia. Estoy acostumbrada a ella. Camino hacia la puerta. —No estoy listo para dejarte ir —me dice, parándose frente a mí—. Simplemente no todavía. No he terminado... —busca las palabras—, de hablar contigo y... de amarte. —Me toma de los hombros, moviéndonos detrás de la puerta de entrada, mi espalda contra el armario—. Vayamos a algún sitio, solo nosotros. Hoy hay un espectáculo de medianoche. Vamos. Salgamos de aquí y alejémonos por un par de horas y hablaremos. Lo miro fijamente. —En algún lugar oscuro, ¿cierto? ¿En un teatro donde no seremos vistos? Me mira como si eso fuera exactamente lo que estaba pensando y lo lamenta, pero así son las cosas. —Lo solucionaremos. —Planta sus manos a ambos lados de mi cabeza en la puerta detrás de mí y se inclina—. Simplemente todavía no. No te vayas todavía. El entumecimiento que he sentido desde anoche flaquea y lo escucho en mi cabeza. No voy a ninguna parte. No voy a ninguna parte... No tengo dudas de que eso sea verdad. Y siempre será verdad, Pike no se aleja de sus responsabilidades. Siempre cuidará de mí. Y no puedo pensar en nada más que preferiría ser para él más que una obligación. No puedo ser como Cole o su trabajo, su casa o sus facturas. No soy una obligación. Soy cualquier otra cosa. —¿Me amas? —pregunto—. ¿Estás enamorado de mí? Sostiene mis ojos e incluso en la oscuridad, puedo ver que sus ojos están rojos, cansados y dolidos. Pero cuando abre la boca, no salen las palabras. Sacudo mi cabeza. —No importa, supongo. —Me rindo—. No tienes el valor, así que no serás para siempre. —Me enderezo, apretando mi mano alrededor de las correas de mis bolsas—. Y al final, acabarás siendo nada más que una pérdida de mi tiempo. Su rostro cae y se ve tan completamente derrotado. No tiene la convicción de hacer nada. Todo lo que sabe es que no quiere que me vaya. —Oh, esto es demasiado bueno —dice alguien—. Así que ese es tu perversión, ¿eh, Jordan? Pike y yo giramos nuestras cabezas rápidamente para ver que Jay acaba de salir de la cocina y entrar en la sala de estar. Pike deja caer sus manos y se endereza, fijando a Jay con una mirada dura. —Vamos, nena —se burla Jay de mí y puedo oler la cerveza en su aliento desde aquí—. Seré tu papá y podrás abrir tus piernas para mí también por un poco de dinero de alquiler. Pike se lanza hacia él y jadeo. Toma a Jay por el cuello y lo lanza, enviándolo volando para atravesar la contrapuerta. Jay apenas se estremece, probablemente porque sabía lo que estaba haciendo. Mi corazón se detiene, viéndolo tambalearse hacia el porche y a Pike correr detrás de él.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  Artists deliberately flouted their viewers’ expectations, tacitly proclaiming the need for a new vision in a new world. Old certainties were evaporating. Some wanted to contemplate irreducible fundamentals, cut out the peripheral, and focus on the essential in order to construct a different reality: scientists searched for the atom or the particle; sociologists and anthropologists reverted to primeval societies and primitive artifacts. People wanted to break the past asunder, split the atom to make something new. Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) either dismembered his subjects or viewed them simultaneously from different perspectives. The novels of Woolf and James Joyce (1882–1941) abandoned the traditional narratives of cause and effect, throwing their readers into the chaotic stream of their characters’ consciousness, so that they were uncertain about what actually was happening or how they should judge the action. But the First World War revealed the self-destructive nihilism that, despite its colossal attainments, lurked at the heart of modern Western civilization. It has been described as the collective suicide of Europe: by slaughtering a generation of young men, the war so damaged European society at its core that arguably it has never fully recovered. The utter futility of trench warfare, fought as it was for no adequate social, ideological, or humanitarian cause, defied the rationalism of the scientific age. The most advanced and civilized countries in Europe had crippled themselves and their opponents with their new military technology simply to serve the national ego. The war itself seemed a terrible parody of the mechanical ideal: once the intricate mechanism of conscription, troop transportation, and the manufacture of weapons had been switched on, it seemed to acquire its own momentum and proved almost impossible to stop. After the armistice, the economy of the West seemed in terminal decline, and the 1930s saw the Great Depression and the rise of fascism and communism. By the end of the decade, the unthinkable had happened and the world was embroiled in a second global war. It was now difficult to feel sanguine about the limitless progress of civilization. Modern secular ideologies were proving to be as lethal as any religious bigotry. They revealed the inherent destructiveness of all idolatry: once the finite reality of the nation had become an absolute value, it was compelled to overcome and destroy all rival claimants. Modern science had been founded on the belief that it was possible to achieve objective certainty. Hume and Kant had cast doubt on this ideal by suggesting that our understanding of the external world was merely a reflection of human psychology. But even Kant believed that the fundamental categories of Newtonian science—space, time, substance, and causality—were beyond question. Yet within a generation of Hilbert’s confident prediction that all physicists had to do was add the final touches to Newton’s great “Systeme,” it had been superseded.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  Rulers had long initiated policies of ethnic cleansing when setting up their modern, centralized states. In order to use all the human resources at their disposal and to maintain productivity, governments had found it necessary to bring out-groups such as the Jews into the mainstream, but the events of the 1930s and 1940s showed that this tolerance was merely superficial and the old bigotry still lurked beneath. To carry out their program of genocide, the Nazis relied on the technology of the industrial age: the railways, the advanced chemical industry, and rationalized bureaucracy and management. The camp replicated the factory, the hallmark of industrial society, but what it mass-produced was death. Science itself was implicated in the eugenic experiments carried out there. The modern idolatry of nationalism had so idealized the German volk that there was no place for the Jews: born of the new “scientific” racism, the Holocaust was the ultimate in social engineering in what has been called the modern “garden culture,” which simply eliminated weeds—the supreme, perverted example of rational planning in which everything is subordinated to a single, clearly defined objective. 38 Perhaps the Holocaust was not so much an expression as a perversion of Judeo-Christian values. 39 As atheists had been eager to point out, the symbol of God had marked the limit of human potential. At the heart of the Nazi ideology was a romantic yearning for a pre- Christian German paganism that they had never properly understood, and a negation of the God who, as Nietzsche had suggested, put a brake on ambition and instinctual “pagan” freedom. The extermination of the people who had created the God of the Bible was a symbolic enactment of the death of God that Nietzsche had proclaimed. 40 Or perhaps the real cause of the Holocaust was the ambiguous afterlife of religious feeling in Western culture and the malignant energies released by the decay of the religious forms that had channeled them into more benign, productive outlets. 41 In Christian theology, hell had traditionally been defined as the absence of God, and the camps uncannily reproduced the traditional symbolism of the inferno: the flaying, racking, whipping, screaming, and mocking; the distorted bodies; the flames and stinking air all evoked the imagery of hell depicted by the artists, poets, and dramatists of Europe.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  But they found conventional religious life bewildering. For decades the Iberian Jews had lived without communal religious life and had no experience of ritual observance. The Dutch rabbis had the difficult task of guiding them back into the fold, making allowances for their problems without compromising tradition, and it is a tribute to them that most of the Marranos were able to make the transition.86 But initially their reaction was similar to that of people today who find the “beliefs” of religion arbitrary and incredible because they have not fully participated in its transformative rites. The abstruse laws of diet and purification must have seemed barbaric and meaningless to the Marrano sophisticates, who found it difficult to accept the rabbis’ explanations because they were used to thinking things out rationally for themselves. According to Isaac Orobio de Castro, a philosophy professor who had lived in Iberia for years as a closet Jew, some of them had become “unspeakable atheists”:87 they were “full of vanity, pride and arrogance,” loved to display their learning “by contradicting what they do not understand,” and felt that their expertise in the modern sciences put them above “those who are indeed educated in the sacred laws.”88 A tiny minority of the Marranos found the transition to full cultic observance impossible. One of the most tragic cases was that of Uriel da Costa, who had experienced Portuguese Christianity as oppressive, cruel, and composed of rules and doctrines that bore no relation to the gospels.89 He had formed his own idea of Jewish religion by reading the Bible, but when he arrived in Amsterdam he was shocked to find that contemporary Judaism was just as far removed from scripture as Catholicism. Outraged, he published a treatise attacking the Torah and declaring that he believed only in human reason and the laws of nature. He caused such ferment that the rabbis were forced to excommunicate him. There was as yet no notion in Europe of a “secular Jew,” and as an excommunicate da Costa was shunned by Jews and Christians alike; children jeered at him in the street. In despair, he returned to the synagogue, but he still could not adapt to a faith that seemed incomprehensible. In 1640, he committed suicide.

• From We Were Here (2011)

  WE WERE HERE CaptionMax Page 21 3/23/2011 really a camaraderie there. You know, of course, you know, we made mistakes. Uh, you know, when we first started the AZT trials, we were giving way too much. You know, that’s why people got so sick on it, and it got a bad rap. If you ever come to our office, we have this picture of this guy who uh, is almost like a skeleton, and he’s holding a sign, man can’t live on AZT alone. 1:50:20 ON-SCREEN TEXT (on protest sign) MAN CAN NOT LIVE ON AZT ALONE 1:50:22 EILEEN (VO/ON) (CONT’D) And every time I see that picture, it brings me back to those days of we need more treatments. We need more than AZT, and in-- And we need them to happen quickly. 1:50:37 ON-SCREEN TEXT (on newspaper clippings) Compound Q HPA-23 Pentamidine DNCB IL-2 1:50:40 PAUL (VO/ON) I remember one fellow particularly said to me, “You know, I’m at the end of my chemical rope.” Um, and I thought, boy, what a phrase from our, you know, from this time. 1:50:50 ON-SCREEN TEXT (on headline clips) Co-enzyme Q10 Ganciclovir AL721 Septra DDC Ribavarin 1:50:52 GUY (VO/ON) These doctors were coming up with every kind of pill that you should take. It seemed like every day they were coming up with a new cure, but my friends were Guinea pigs, and those cures didn’t work.

• From City of Night (1963)

  God damn it, I want to shout to her, dont smile, dont laugh! I want to say to her: Cry, Kathy! But the smile is permanent as she seems to loom over the crowd—a luminous apparition: amused perhaps by the cruel knowledge of herself—the knowledge that shes been twice doomed: by the limbo sex and death lurking prematurely in a threatening black-out which will end, in her very youth, even her defiance of the despising world that tampered with her sex and stamped her face with Impossible beauty. Struggling through the crowd toward her, I said: “Kathy.... Kathy.” “Yes, baby?” “Why are you smiling?” “Because,” she said easily, “Im going to die.” “Babe, I’d like to eat you,” said the man in the ballet tights at Les Deux Freres. “I dare you,” I challenged. “You do?” “I dare you,” I repeated. “Right here?” “I dare you—right here,” I said, laughing, feeling out of control. He slid on his knees. He opens my fly, begins to go down on me in the thronged bar. And they started daring each other, and a youngman dressed only in a striped bikini pushed his trunks to his knees and stood there waiting, and immediately there was someone pressing behind him and someone squatting in front. I leaned groggily against the bar looking down at the bobbing head between my legs.