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.

Page 152 of 267 · 20 per page

• From Deceptions and Myths of the Bible (1975)

  With this in mind, the authors have Jesus tell his disciples, “Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.” The fruit implied here is biologic life. In this lies also the meaning of that statement, “And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto me.” Those who interpret this as meaning the lifting up of the man Jesus upon a wooden cross, that all men may be drawn up also, are those to whom He referred when he said, “To them it is not given to know the mysteries of the kingdom.” And this includes the entire clergy. This lifting-up of Jesus is identical with the lifting-up of the serpent in the wilderness. The Bible furnishes no better proof of the purely genetic nature of Jesus than these statements. The genetic principle must die, in matter, that is, become inactive; and when it rises up in Evolution it draws everything with it, including the epigenetic. Personifying this, the Bible calls them “men,” and ever since men have taken it literally. But they are not consistent in their literalism; if they were they would insist that this excludes women. But sane men no longer want war and so for once they become symbolists. This genetic must have a garden to grow in, and now we find Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane—the word means “the wine press,” symbolically, the earth. This is the scene of life’s aforesaid agony, and here the Life Principle is strained through that cosmic ethmos, matter, that from it may come forth that “good wine” kept till the last—conscious, qualitative life. And here the Creator prays to his Father, whoever that might be, that the cup may pass from Him—but there was no answer. He is doomed as in the Greek tragedy. And here we see the error of New Testament theology. That a God of love should demand such a sacrifice from his “only begotten son,” is incredible, but that the inexorable law of Creation should demand it is quite believable. And let us remember here that the source of this “only begotten” is the Greek word monogene —one gene. Here in this New Testament Garden of Eden, the Creator becomes “heavy” and His disciples fall asleep. This is the same sleep that overtook Adam, Noah, Abraham, and others; and the “rest” they took is that “rest” God took at this same point. Now come the priestly hirelings, symbols of materiality, to make of Jesus the New Testament’s “Prometheus Bound.” It seems, however, they met with some opposition. 47. And one of them that stood by drew a sword, and smote a servant of the high priest, and cut off his ear (Mark 14). And to this day no priest or servant thereof can hear the truth. Judas, their servant, seals its doom with the kiss of death and they do the rest. 3.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  Putting together this strange, apparently jerky and disjointed set of oracles, we begin to see a pattern emerging. Israel’s exile is to be reversed under the rule of the anointed king, who will end up ruling the whole world. The pagan nations will do their worst, but God himself will come to fight against them, and he will be king over all the earth. Meanwhile, however, Israel’s official rulers and guardians, the “shepherds,” have failed hopelessly in their task. But YHWH’s own “shepherd” is to be killed and the sheep scattered in order that somehow—the prophet doesn’t explain how—the victory can be won. All of this seems to have helped to shape Jesus’s own sense of vocation. His actions in Jerusalem—riding in on a donkey and then driving the traders out of the Temple—seem to hold together Zechariah 9:9–10 and 14:21. He seems then to have applied the passage about the shepherds both to his own critique of Israel’s leadership and, more strikingly still, to his own forthcoming fate. For our purposes, the main thing to notice here is that Zechariah, like Isaiah and Daniel, envisages the same three lines all converging: the wicked pagan nations who fight against God and his people; the failed Jewish leadership; and God himself coming to do what nobody else can do. These are the three elements that, as seen by Jesus himself, constituted the perfect storm into which he rode, sorrowful but determined, for that final Passover in Jerusalem. I said there were three main scriptural passages that seem to have contributed to Jesus’s sense of vocation as he undertook this final journey. I mentioned then, and now recall, a fourth element we should factor in as well: the Psalms. We should assume that Jesus knew the Psalms as well as anyone and that they formed his natural prayer book and, as such, played a major role in shaping his worldview. And it is in the Psalms that we find, once more, the major themes of YHWH becoming king, installing his Messiah—his “son”!—in Jerusalem, and bidding the surrounding nations pay him homage (e.g., Pss. 2; 72). But it is in the Psalms too that we find, even in a psalm that speaks so powerfully of God’s kingdom coming, the sense of utter desolation, of being abandoned by God to horrible and shameful suffering and death (Ps. 22). These themes come together in many different ways in these ancient poems, and we are on utterly safe ground in assuming that Jesus not only knew them and reflected on them, but made them the very stuff of his vocation. He found himself in them and determined to act accordingly. All of this means that we can at last approach the central questions of who, what, and why. Who did Jesus think he was, what was he intending to do, and why? What did he think it would all accomplish? What did he think it would all mean?

• From Another Country (1962)

  “I’m beginning to think,” she said, “that growing just means learning more and more about anguish. That poison becomes your diet—you drink a little of it every day. Once you’ve seen it, you can’t stop seeing it—that’s the trouble. And it can, it can”—she passed her hand wearily over her brow again—“drive you mad.” She walked away briefly, then returned to their corner. “You begin to see that you yourself, innocent, upright you, have contributed and do contribute to the misery of the world. Which will never end because we’re what we are.” He watched her face from which the youth was now, before his eyes, departing; her girlhood, at last, was falling away from her. Yet, her face did not seem precisely faded, or, for that matter, old. It looked scoured, there was something invincibly impersonal in it. “I watched Richard this morning and I thought to myself, as I’ve thought before, how much responsibility I must take for who he is, for what he’s become.” She put the tip of her finger against her lips for a moment, and closed her eyes. “I score him, after all, for being second-rate, for not having any real passion, any real daring, any real thoughts of his own. But he never did, he hasn’t changed. I was delighted to give him my opinions; when I was with him, I had the daring and the passion. And he took them all, of course, how could he tell they weren’t his? And I was happy because I’d succeeded so brilliantly, I thought, in making him what I wanted him to be. And of course he can’t understand that it’s just that triumph which is intolerable now. I’ve made myself—less than I might have been—by leading him to water which he doesn’t know how to drink. It’s not for him. But it’s too late now.” She smiled. “He doesn’t have any real work to do, that’s his trouble, that’s the trouble with this whole unspeakable time and place. And I’m trapped. It doesn’t do any good to blame the people or the time—one is oneself all those people. We are the time.” “You think that there isn’t any hope for us?” “Hope?” The word seemed to bang from wall to wall. “Hope? No, I don’t think there’s any hope. We’re too empty here”—her eyes took in the Sunday crowd—“too empty—here.” She touched her heart. “This isn’t a country at all, it’s a collection of football players and Eagle Scouts. Cowards. We think we’re happy. We’re not. We’re doomed.” She looked at her watch. “I must get back.” She looked at him. “I only wanted to see you for a moment.” “What are you going to do?”

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

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

• From Another Country (1962)

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

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  She lived in the present only, and that was my refuge. My flight from death was on her barred and beating wings. But I had forgotten that the puzzle that was death was caught up in the hawk, and I was caught up in it too. ‘To him I am still the rarely tolerated enemy, and to me he is always the presence of death,’ White wrote of Gos in his notebook. ‘Death will be my last failure.’ His neglect had made Gos wild again, and the hawk had become death to him because it could not be beaten. For six weeks he had struggled with it and the struggle had been as Jacob’s with the angel. ‘I have lived for this hawk,’ he wrote in despair. ‘I have gone half bird myself, transforming my love and interest and livelihood into its future, giving hostages to fortune as madly as in marriage and family cares. If the hawk dies almost all my present me dies with it. It has treated me today as if I were a dangerous and brutal enemy never seen before.’ Perhaps the final blow, when it came, was born of simple exhaustion. His hawk had beaten him, and he could not bear to fight it any more. But I think that it was more than this, much more. When I think of the tragedy of White and Gos I think of a small boy back in India standing in front of a wooden play-castle his father has made for his birthday. It is a big castle, big enough to get into, and his father has fixed a real pistol barrel to the battlements. It is to fire a salute for his birthday, but the little boy stares at it in dread. His father has forced him to stand in front of the castle, and he knows he is to be executed. There is nothing he can do. He is powerless. He cries silently, inconsolably, knowing that his father will shoot him, knowing he is about to die. What must it be like to live in a world where you cry because you believe your father will kill you on your birthday, a world in which you are beaten, daily, for no reason? A world in which you write a letter to your mother in India enclosing your school photograph, and she writes back to tell you that your lips are ‘growing sensual’, and that you should hold them in, with your teeth if necessary? I cannot imagine White’s childhood of terror and shame, but I can understand how it made him see the world as controlled by cruelty, by dictators and madmen.

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

  All this was very bad for the book, because the repeated interruptions damaged my concentration. Books need solid blocks of time, not a week here or a fortnight there. When I did get a sustained period to work on the manuscript, I had to work too fast, and all around the clock, because I was under pressure from the publishers to make sure that the book would be in print when the television series was screened. I felt strained, ill used, and miserably aware that I was cutting corners, not doing as good a job as I wished. One night I felt so distraught that the whole house seemed to be shaken by the strong winds blowing outside. I got little sleep, but was at my desk as usual early the next morning. Shortly after nine o’clock, my mother telephoned. “How are you getting on?” she asked, with obvious trepidation. “Oh, not too bad,” I replied wearily. “I’ve just finished the third draft of chapter three, and the first chapter—” “No, no, no!” she interrupted impatiently. “The storm! How is your house?” It was the night of the great hurricane of October 1987. “Oh!” I said wonderingly as she recited the catalogue of disasters—people killed, power lines down, trees uprooted, Kew Gardens irretrievably damaged, houses destroyed—and I then looked out at the devastation in my own street. “I thought it was a little windy!” By the summer of 1988 we had shot all my pieces to camera, but the production had come to a standstill. The company had exhausted its credit and we could neither film nor buy essential footage. Channel 4 declared the series bankrupt and pulled out. Three years’ work had gone down the drain, and my television career was in ruins. I felt abandoned. Joel had cracked under the strain, gone back to drink, and finished in a rehabilitation center. June had decided to close her literary agency. John had left Channel 4 to take up an appointment with Danish television. His successor had little time for me, clearly thought I was yesterday’s news, and never fully explained what had happened. The film that we had shot was confiscated pending a legal inquiry (which never in fact came to court).

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

  So that was that. To this day, some of my friends—even those who did not know me at the time—insist that I could still have reversed this decision. I cannot imagine what they think I could have done. Chained myself to the railings outside the Examination Schools? Picketed the Dame’s house? Prostrated myself in front of the Sheldonian Theatre and stopped the traffic? Gone on hunger strike? It was quite clear to me and my supporters that the game was up. I found it very comforting that there had been such a row, that people had fought on my behalf, and that I had not gone quietly. I was glad that I wasn’t simply an ordinary failure, though there was something disturbing about all the notoriety. There seemed to be something irremediably odd and freakish about me. I tried to behave with dignity, but I still experienced the final decision as a body blow. It would be a long time before I could hear the words “Tennyson,” “doctorate,” or “thesis” without pain. I was not angry with Alastair Courtney. I suspected that, for all the fuss, he had been right. I was no good, and he had unmasked me. I had failed as a nun; I had failed as an academic. I was cracking up mentally. I could not see what I could usefully do with the rest of my life. As I traveled between the college and my flat, the city seemed to mirror my depression. SAME THING DAY AFTER DAY, read a famous graffito snaking between the Ladbroke Grove and Westbourne Park tube stations. TUBE—WORK—DINER [sic]—WORK—TUBE— ARMCHAIR—TUBE—WORK—HOW MUCH MORE CAN YOU TAKE—ONE IN FIVE CRACKS UP. Nineteen seventy-five was a grim year in London. Britain was in recession, the IRA had brought its terror campaign to the mainland, and the tabloid newspapers were apocalyptic, calling for a return to law and order. The unemployment figures were among the worst since the Second World War, and I took perverse consolation from the fact that even if I had got my doctorate, I probably wouldn’t have got a university post. The colorful interlude of the sixties was over. The hippie commune had been replaced by the “squat,” an ideological protest against the futility and absurdity of work, and the young seemed afflicted by what was termed “a poverty of desire.” The dream of a brave new world, which had seemed almost palpable during my Oxford years, was over.

• From Another Country (1962)

  I can tell by the way they talk to you, the way they treat you.” “I guess they are pretty nice,” he said, “at that.” She laughed. “ You’re a funny boy”—she corrected herself—“a funny person . You act like you don’t know who you are.” “I know who I am, all right,” he said, aware of the eyes that watched them pass, the nearly inaudible murmur that came from the benches or the trees. He squeezed her thin hand between his elbow and his side. “I’m your boy. You know what that means? ” “What does it mean?” “It means you’ve got to be good to me.” “Well, Rufus, I sure am going to try.” Now, bowed down with the memory of all that had happened since that day, he wandered helplessly back to Forty-second Street and stopped before the large bar and grill on the corner. Near him, just beyond the plate glass, stood the sandwich man behind his counter, the meat arrayed on the steam table beneath him. Bread and rolls, mustard, relish, salt and pepper, stood at the level of his chest. He was a big man, wearing white, with a blank, red, brutal face. From time to time he expertly knifed off a sandwich for one of the derelicts within. The old seemed reconciled to being there, to having no teeth, no hair, having no life. Some laughed together, the young, with dead eyes set in yellow faces, the slackness of their bodies making vivid the history of their degradation. They were the prey that was no longer hunted, though they were scarcely aware of this new condition and could not bear to leave the place where they had first been spoiled. And the hunters were there, far more assured and patient than the prey. In any of the world’s cities, on a winter night, a boy can be bought for the price of a beer and the promise of warm blankets. Rufus shivered, his hands in his pockets, looking through the window and wondering what to do. He thought of walking to Harlem but he was afraid of the police he would encounter in his passage through the city; and he did not see how he could face his parents or his sister. When he had last seen Ida, he had told her that he and Leona were about to make it to Mexico, where, he said, people would leave them alone. But no one had heard from him since then. Now a big, rough-looking man, well dressed, white, with black-and-gray hair, came out of the bar.

• From Another Country (1962)

  “Then he took me to that place he has, way over on the East River. I kept wondering what I was going to do. I didn’t know what to do. I watched his face in the taxicab. He put his hand on my leg. And he tried to take my hand. But I couldn’t move. I kept thinking of what that black man had said to me, and his face when he said it, and I kept thinking of Rufus, and I kept thinking of you. It was like a merry-go-round, all these faces just kept going around in my mind. And a song kept going around in my head, Oh, Lord, is it I? And there he sat, next to me, puffing on his cigar. The funny thing was that I knew if I really started crying or pleading, he’d take me home. He can’t stand scenes. But I couldn’t even do that. And God knows I wanted to get home, I hoped you wouldn’t be here, so I could just crawl under the sheets and die. And, that way, when you came home, I could tell you everything before you came to bed, and—maybe—but, no, we were going to his place and I felt that I deserved it. I felt that I couldn’t fall much lower, I might as well go all the way and get it over with. And then we’d see, if there was anything left of me after that, we’d see.” She threw down about two fingers of whiskey and immediately poured herself another drink. “There’s always further to fall, always, always.” She moved from the table, holding her glass, and leaned against the icebox door. “And I did everything he wanted, I let him have his way. It wasn’t me. It wasn’t me.” She gestured aimlessly with her glass, tried to drink from it, dropped it, and suddenly fell on her knees beside the table, her hands against her belly, weeping.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  But the Romans closed in with massive force, compelling him and his followers to retreat, and then pursued them into caves and other hiding places. Archaeology has uncovered enough from those caves for us to realize how horrible the end must have been for Simon and many others. Later Jewish writings sometimes speak of Simon not as bar-Kochba, “son of the Star,” or by his proper name, bar-Kosiba, “son of Kosiba,” but by a different pun: bar-Koziba, “son of the lie.” He was, they believed, a false messiah. Indeed, many then drew the conclusion that it was false to expect a messiah at all. There were, in any case, no more Jewish uprisings. From then on, the Jews were content to live out their obedience to their God and his law in private and to let other people run the world if they so wished. Some Jewish teachers had been advocating this policy for quite a while. Now it was adopted without further question. The story of Simon the Star, coming three hundred years after Judah the Hammer, indicates a remarkable common pattern, even though the end results were so different. The story line is once more the same, echoing the Exodus, David and Solomon, and the return from Babylon: the wicked pagan king, suffering and persecution, the emergence of a hero, victories, the cleansing and restoration of the Temple, and the establishment of the new regime. In Judah’s case, all went according to plan. It was only gradually, in the years that followed, that people began to doubt whether this had been after all the long-awaited divine liberation. In Simon’s case, all went according to plan for three years; then, instead of the final victory and rebuilding, there occurred a disaster so great that for many generations it was spoken of, if at all, with a shudder. The great gale of Roman imperial power had quenched the high- pressure system of Jewish aspiration, leaving a disturbing question mark over the third element: what was Israel’s God up to? But the story in which Simon and his followers had lived was the same story. It was, they believed, the scriptural story, the story in which the scriptural promises would be fulfilled. It was the story that was in the heads and the hearts of those who first heard Jesus of Nazareth speaking about God finally becoming king. It was the story that they turned into song as he rode into Jerusalem. Before we can come back to Jesus himself, though, we need to look at two other kings.

• From Another Country (1962)

  He had been walking along the Rue des St. Pères on a spring evening, and his thoughts had not been pretty. Paris seemed, and had seemed for a long time, the loneliest city under heaven. And whoever prolongs his sojourn in that city—who tries, that is, to make a home there—is doomed to discover that there is no one to be blamed for whatever happens to him. Contrary to its legend, Paris does not offer many distractions; or, those distractions that it offers are like French pastry, vivid and insubstantial, sweet on the tongue and sour in the belly. Then the discontented wanderer is thrown back on himself—if his life is to become bearable, only he can make it so. And, on that spring evening, walking up the long, dark, murmuring street toward the Boulevard, Eric was in despair. He knew that he had a life to make, but he did not seem to have the tools. Then, as he neared the Boulevard, he heard music. At first, he thought it came from the houses, but then he realized that it was coming from the shadows across the street, where there were no houses. He stood still and listened; to Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto, which was moving away from him. Then, out of the shadows, ahead of him, and on the other side of the street, he saw the long, lean figure of a boy. He stood on the corner, waiting for the lights to change, and Eric saw that he was carrying a small portable radio, holding it with both hands. Eric walked to the corner, the lights changed, the boy crossed the street, and Eric followed. Down the long, dark street, the boy on one side and he on the other, and with the violence of the music, which was like the violence in his heart, filling the soft, spring air. They reached the corner of the Rue de Rennes. The concerto was approaching its end. To the right, far from them, squatted the bulk of the Gare Montparnasse; to the left, and somewhat nearer, were the cafés and the Boulevard, and the clean, gray spire of St. Germain-des- Près. The boy hesitated on the corner; looked over, briefly, and his eyes met Eric’s. He turned in the direction of St. Germain-des-Près. Eric crossed the street. Tum-ta-tum, tum-ta-tum, tum-ta-tum, tum-ta-tum! went the music. “Hello,” Eric said. “I’m afraid I’ve got to hear the end of that concerto.” Yves turned and Eric was immediately struck by his eyes. In the candor with which they regarded him, they were like the eyes of a child; and yet there was also something in that scrutiny which was not childish at all. Eric felt his heart pound once, hard, against his chest. Then Yves smiled. “It is almost ended,” he said. “I know.”

• From The Fermata (1994)

  I think, too, that it is exceedingly dangerous to Drop when you are in any sort of depression about how bad the world is. A Fold then can deepen infinitely—since in a way you are now in control over whether all the world’s continuing atrocities and tragedies should resume or not. You know that as soon as you give the go-ahead to time again, pets will not be given enough water, feelings will be needlessly hurt, killings, crashes, miscarriages of justice, bureaucratic harassment, infidelity, artistic disappointments, and worse will all go forward,and you begin to think that you will be in a sense their cause, you will be directly responsible for them, since you have a choice whether to let them happen, by opting to restart time or not. When I am in a Fold, I know for a fact that no woman anywhere is crying or feeling betrayed, and since I want above all for women not to cry, I can begin to believe, irrationally, that it is my duty to live out my entire life in this artificial solitude, eating canned foods. “He died suddenly,” they would say on discovering my abruptly aged body. But when I died, all the misery-in-progress that I had so heroically held at bay for forty-odd years would resume anyway. I don’t have any power to alter the fact that evils will do their work, only how “soon” they will. As a consequence, I have determined that my Foldouts should in general be short, recreational, and masturbatory, rather than deep and pained.

• From Another Country (1962)

  “What kind of sandwich would you like?” “Corned beef,” Rufus whispered, “on rye.” They watched while the meat was hacked off, slammed on bread, and placed on the counter. The man paid and Rufus took his sandwich over to the bar. He felt that everyone in the place knew what was going on, knew that Rufus was peddling his ass. But nobody seemed to care. Nobody looked at them. The noise at the bar continued, the radio continued to blare. The bartender served up a beer for Rufus and a whiskey for the man and rang up the money on the cash register. Rufus tried to turn his mind away from what was happening to him. He wolfed down his sandwich. But the heavy bread, the tepid meat, made him begin to feel nauseous; everything wavered before his eyes for a moment; he sipped his beer, trying to hold the sandwich down. “You were hungry.” Rufus, he thought, you can’t make this scene. There’s no way in the world you can make it. Don’t come on with the man. Just get out of here. “Would you like another sandwich?” The first sandwich was still threatening to come up. The bar stank of stale beer and piss and stale meat and unwashed bodies. Suddenly he felt that he was going to cry. “No, thank you,” he said, “I’m all right now.” The man watched him for a moment. “Then have another beer.” “No, thank you.” But he leaned his head on the bar, trembling. “Hey!” Lights roared around his head, the whole bar lurched, righted itself, faces weaved around him, the music from the radio pounded in his skull. The man’s face was very close to his: hard eyes and a cruel nose and flabby, brutal lips. He smelled the man’s odor. He pulled away. “I’m all right.” “You almost blacked out there for a minute.” The bartender watched them. “You better have a drink. Hey, Mac, give the kid a drink.” “You sure he’s all right?” “Yeah, he’s all right, I know him. Give him a drink.” The bartender filled a shot glass and placed it in front of Rufus. And Rufus stared into the gleaming cup, praying, Lord, don’t let it happen. Don’t let me go home with this man. I’ve got so little left, Lord, don’t let me lose it all. “Drink. It’ll do you good. Then you can come on over to my place and get some sleep.” He drank the whiskey, which first made him feel even sicker, then warmed him. He straightened up. “You live around here?” he asked the man. If you touch me, he thought, still with these strange tears threatening to boil over at any moment, I’ll beat the living shit out of you. I don’t want no more hands on me, no more, no more, no more. “Not very far. Forty-sixth Street.” They walked out of the bar, into the streets again.

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

  True. But not here, I pleaded with the absent, nonexistent God during school prayers on that first morning. Because of my experience in higher education, I had been made a sixth-form tutor, so I was standing with my new charges in the gallery, looking down on the serried ranks of girls in the hall below, all clad in an unbecoming navy uniform. The headmistress walked onto the stage. “Lift up your hearts!” she murmured in a listless, lifeless tone, and I felt my own heart plummet to my boots. I just did not want to be there. Yet there really seemed no alternative. I had come a long way in the seven years since I had left the religious life, and in recent months I knew that I had made great strides. I no longer feared for my sanity; I had a new circle of friends; I was having fun. And for the first time in my life I had a home of my own. Because I now had a secure job and a stable income, I had become eligible for a mortgage and was now the possessor of a tiny one-bedroom flat in Highbury, near the stadium of the Arsenal Football Club; henceforth my Saturday afternoons were punctuated with great roars from the fans who crowded into the neighborhood for the weekly match. The flat was a symbolic step. I now had a place in the world—something which had once seemed psychologically impossible. But despite all this undoubted progress, the failure of my thesis and my consequent expulsion from academia had severely wounded my confidence. I had managed to recover my equilibrium, but I had very little belief in my talents. The idea of striking out into an entirely different field was beyond me, and I was too exhausted by the struggle and drama of the recent past even to contemplate such a venture. I needed a rest. I was in a convalescent state, and was simply not fit enough for anything more ambitious. I had been fortunate to get this job, I repeated to myself over and over again, and I must just settle for what I had. Not hope to turn again. Find strength in what remains behind.

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

  Nothing else seemed to work. Even Dr. Piet had seemed somewhat at a loss since his method had not yielded the result he had expected. If nothing could be done, maybe I should just stop fighting this peculiar malady of mine and “go with the flow,” like the hippies. My mind seemed irreparably injured in some way, and perhaps I would never be wholly normal. But if I accepted this handicap as my lot, as other disabled people did, then perhaps I would discover a source of peace and endurance within myself. There was nothing I could do about the past that had brought me to this impasse. But I could deliberately cultivate the kind of robust gladness that seemed to come quite naturally to Jane. I recalled Wordsworth’s decision, when he realized that the glory of the world that he had experienced as a boy had gone forever: We will grieve not, rather find Strength in what remains behind. Perhaps I could take that as a mantra. Jane was horrified by the idea that I should go back to the convent to recuperate. “You can’t want to do that!” she insisted. “It’s that whole rotten system that put you in here, surely? That’s the last place you should be.” I shook my head. I wouldn’t have that. The system hadn’t worked for me or for Rebecca, but it hadn’t affected the vast majority of women who had undergone its disciplines in this way. I certainly could not lay it all at the door of the nuns. “There was something in me—in my temperament, my genes, whatever— which was antipathetic to that kind of training. Antipathetic to religion, come to that,” I added gloomily. “What do you mean?” Jane was immediately interested. “I couldn’t make religion work for me,” I explained. “I really tried. I tried to pray, to meditate, but I never got anywhere. Oh yes, I know the ritual was wonderful—I remember how much it meant to you—but don’t you see? That was just an aesthetic response. The real test is when you try to find God on your own, without props, without beautiful music, singing, and spectacle—when there is just you on your knees. And I could never do that.” “Have you lost your faith, then?” Jane asked sharply. “I don’t know that I ever had any faith, not true faith. I wanted to believe it all; I wanted to have an encounter with God. But I never did. God was never a reality for me, never a genuine presence in my life as he was for the other sisters.” “And what about now?” Jane went on. “I mean, suicide’s a mortal sin, right? Are you feeling guilty?” “No,” I said slowly. “No. Of course, I’m sorry to have caused so much trouble. But I’m not feeling guilty because I’ve offended God. No.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  [image file=image_rsrc1BH.jpg] 5OBVIOUSLY I WAS MISTAKEN IN PREDICTING EARLIER IN these pages that Joyce would play a minor role in my autobiography. I finished doing her tape and walked over to her office to deliver it, intending to ask her out. But she was talking to a witty charming SVP whom I found intimidating and didn’t want to compete with. Instead, I just nodded at them both and gave her the papers. At five o’clock I left. I got to my place feeling extremely sad, hopeless, almost tearful. On my desk were three vibrating dildos of varying degrees of stylization, along with a woman-designed vibrating butterfly, and a Jeff Stryker penis pump. They were all “mint-in-box,” as toy collectors say. I sat down in my chair and looked at them, feeling great waves of misery. I had ordered them from a company in San Francisco, paying extra for Federal Express delivery, in the momentary grip of the idea that I would be able sometime soon to watch Joyce use one or more of these devices on herself. I bought the penis pump as an afterthought, so that I would have it in reserve as a bargaining tool: “You go ahead and use these vibrating dildos for me, and I’ll pump my penis for you with this penis pump.” But I couldn’t afford these machines—almost two hundred dollars’ worth of sexual hardware—and it seemed pathetic and undignified for me to have them in storage in my life when I would never be able to use them with someone like Joyce. Sipping wine, with the radio playing some progressive jazz construct with the usual cleanly miked bongos and synthesized tribal flutes and pre-enjoyed Steely Dan chords, I filled out the return slip, wrote, Nobody to use these with, unfortunately, next to the REASON FOR RETURN line, and one by one I tucked them back in the carton they came in (they had been responsibly packed in recycled styrene), my self-pity mounting to impossible heights. I wanted … I wanted to tell Joyce my dream of a flying blue brassiere: that we would be stranded in a rowboat in the middle of a sulfur lake, and the only way we could escape is if she took off her shirt and removed her flying blue brassiere and kneeled in its cups and took strong hold of the straps and pulled up on them for lift, using them as a steering-bridle. I would ride piggyback, and she, noble bare-breasted horsewoman of Lycra, would lift us and swoosh us to verdant safety. I also wanted to tell her the dream I had many mornings just before I woke up, that my mouth was filled with an enormous wad of decayed Bazooka chewing gum: I had stuffed in eight or nine loaves of gum because the first taste was so attention-gettingly tart, but now it was changed for the worse—sticky and oppressive, almost doughy, almost friable, and I tried to hook its unpleasant mass out of my mouth with my finger and couldn’t remove it, but on waking I discovered that the gum-mass was in reality just my tongue, which as I moved up toward consciousness had made its sluggish presence known against the reviving nerves of the roof of my mouth. I wanted to tell Joyce these dreams. But she wasn’t my lover, and lovers are the only people who will put up with hearing your dreams.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  Before we come back to Jesus himself, we need to jump forward, past his day, to another movement that tells us a good deal about how people were telling the story and trying to live it out. We turn from Judah the Hammer to Simon the Star. Or rather, Simon Son-of-the-Star. The year is AD 132, almost exactly a hundred years after the public career of Jesus of Nazareth and hence almost exactly three hundred years after Judah the Hammer. CHRONOLOGY OF SIMON SON-OF-THE-STAR AD 115–17Unsuccessful Jewish revolts against Rome in Egypt, Cyrene, Cyprus117Hadrian becomes emperor132Hadrian institutes anti-Jewish legislation, builds temple of Jupiter in Jerusalem133Start of bar-Kochba rebellion; Rabbi Akiba hails bar-Kochba as the Messiah133Coins with “year 1”134Coins with “year 2”135Coins with “year 3”135Rome crushes rebellion; bar-Kochba and Akiba killedThe story starts off the same. Another wicked king; another time of intense suffering; and another new hero emerges, winning (it seems) some initial victories. Another three-year campaign. The aim was the same: defeat the pagan enemy, reestablish the Temple, liberate the Judaeans, and establish a new king as master in his own realm, and perhaps more widely. The wicked king this time was the Roman emperor Hadrian. People in my country still know his name, because he built a wall across the north of England, more than two thousand miles from Jerusalem, to keep his empire safe from the wild tribes of Scotland. Like many other successful emperors, Hadrian was brilliant and ruthless. Two of his predecessors, Vespasian and Titus, had defeated the Jewish rebels in a famous and bitter war, culminating in the burning of the Temple in AD 70. Now Hadrian, perhaps spurred on by the possibility of further Jewish uprisings, decided on drastic measures. Like Antiochus Epiphanes, he transformed Jerusalem into a pagan city, giving it a new name, Aelia Capitolina. Antiochus, we recall, had attacked the major symbols of Jewish life and tradition, not least the food laws (by trying to force people to eat pork). Hadrian likewise attacked the Jewish symbols, with a particular focus being his ban on the practice of circumcision.

• 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.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  He had established his rule, even though the great victory was still to come and the Temple was still to be rebuilt. The three years of his rule were thus a kind of interim period: the new day had dawned, and the new day was about to dawn! Once we think in terms of the real politics of the time, that makes a lot of sense. In the language we used earlier on, this was both retrospective eschatology and prospective eschatology: a long story had already reached its climax (the king was already here!), and the same long story was about to reach its climax (the king was on the way to his great victory!). To deny that the new day had dawned would be to deny that he, bar-Kochba, really was the Messiah. But to imagine that, because the new day had dawned, there was nothing more to be done would be to miss the point. This was a time for planning the great victory, for keeping holy and saying fervent prayers, for organizing the continuing anti-Roman revolt, and for developing the design for rebuilding the Temple. Bar-Kochba’s coins speak of a period of history that began with a bang, but that needed to be completed with further decisive actions, if that beginning was to be consolidated and validated. It came to nothing—or rather it came to even greater suffering. Simon the Star seems to have won some early victories and to have established an administration over at least part of the ancient Jewish homeland. He was in charge—for a while and over some territory. But the Romans closed in with massive force, compelling him and his followers to retreat, and then pursued them into caves and other hiding places. Archaeology has uncovered enough from those caves for us to realize how horrible the end must have been for Simon and many others. Later Jewish writings sometimes speak of Simon not as bar-Kochba, “son of the Star,” or by his proper name, bar-Kosiba, “son of Kosiba,” but by a different pun: bar-Koziba, “son of the lie.” He was, they believed, a false messiah. Indeed, many then drew the conclusion that it was false to expect a messiah at all. There were, in any case, no more Jewish uprisings. From then on, the Jews were content to live out their obedience to their God and his law in private and to let other people run the world if they so wished. Some Jewish teachers had been advocating this policy for quite a while. Now it was adopted without further question.