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 Sister Outsider (1984)

  I do not have to be you to recognize that our wars are the same. What we must do is commit ourselves to some future that can include each other and to work toward that future with the particular strengths of our individual identities. And in order to do this, we must allow each other our differences at the same time as we recognize our sameness. If our history has taught us anything, it is that action for change directed only against the external conditions of our oppressions is not enough. In order to be whole, we must recognize the despair oppression plants within each of us — that thin persistent voice that says our efforts are useless, it will never change, so why bother, accept it. And we must fight that inserted piece of self-destruction that lives and flourishes like a poison inside of us, unexamined until it makes us turn upon ourselves in each other. But we can put our finger down upon that loathing buried deep within each one of us and see who it encourages us to despise, and we can lessen its potency by the knowledge of our real connectedness, arcing across our differences. Hopefully, we can learn from the 60s that we cannot afford to do our enemies’ work by destroying each other. What does it mean when an angry Black ballplayer — this happened in Illinois — curses a white heckler but pulls a knife on a Black one? What better way is there to police the streets of a minority community than to turn one generation against the other? Referring to Black lesbians and gay men, the student president at Howard University says, on the occasion of a Gay Student Charter on campus, “The Black community has nothing to do with such filth — we will have to abandon these people.” [italics mine] Abandon? Often without noticing, we absorb the racist belief that Black people are fitting targets for everybody’s anger. We are closest to each other, and it is easier to vent fury upon each other than upon our enemies. Of course, the young man at Howard was historically incorrect. As part of the Black community, he has a lot to do with “us.” Some of our finest writers, organizers, artists and scholars in the 60s as well as today, have been lesbian and gay, and history will bear me out.

• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  When the terrible denouement came, when the news broke that all the athletes were dead, their bodies strewn on a blood-spattered tarmac at the airport, it recalled the deaths of both Kennedys, and of Dr. King, and of the students at Kent State University, and of all the tens of thousands of boys in Vietnam. Ours was a difficult, death-drenched age, and at least once every day you were forced to ask yourself: What’s the point? When Bowerman returned I drove straight down to Eugene to see him. He looked as though he hadn’t slept in a decade. He told me that he and Pre had been within a hair of the attack. In the first minutes, as the terrorists took control of the building, many Israeli athletes were able to flee, slipping out side doors, jumping out windows. One made his way to the next building over, where Bowerman and Pre were staying. Bowerman heard a knock, opened the door of his room, and found this man, a race walker, shivering with fear, babbling about masked gunmen. Bowerman pulled the man inside and phoned the U.S. consul. “Send the marines!” he shouted into the phone. They did. Marines quickly secured the building where Bowerman and the U.S. team were staying. For this “overreaction,” Bowerman was severely reprimanded by Olympic officials. He’d exceeded his authority, they said. In the heat of the crisis they made time to summon Bowerman to their headquarters. Thank goodness Jesse Owens, the hero of the last German Olympics, the man who “beat” Hitler, went with Bowerman and voiced his support for Bowerman’s actions. That forced the bureaucrats to back off. Bowerman and I sat and stared at the river for a long while, saying little. Then, his voice scratchy, Bowerman told me that those 1972 Olympics marked the low point of his life. I’d never heard him say a thing like that, and I’d never seen him look like that. Defeated. I couldn’t believe it. The cowards never started and the weak died along the way—that leaves us. Soon after that day Bowerman announced that he was retiring from coaching. A GRIM TIME. Skies were grayer than usual, and low. There was no fall. We just woke up and winter was upon us. The trees went overnight from full to bare. Rain fell without stop. At last, a needed boon. We got word that a few hours north, in Seattle, at the Rainier International Classic, a fiery Romanian tennis player was destroying every opponent in his path, and doing it in a brand-new pair of Nike Match Points. The Romanian was Ilie Nastase, aka “Nasty,” and every time he hit his patented overhead smash, every time he went up on his toes and stroked another unreturnable serve, the world was seeing our swoosh. We’d known for some time that athlete endorsements were important.

• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  What the government was demanding, $25 million, was very nearly our sales number for all of 1977. And even if we could somehow give them a year’s worth of revenue, we couldn’t continue to pay import duties that were 40 percent higher. So there was only one thing to do, I told Strasser with a sigh. “We’ll have to fight this with everything we’ve got.” I DON’T KNOW why this crisis hit me harder, mentally, than all the others. I tried to tell myself, over and over, We’ve been through bad times, we’ll get through this. But this one just felt different. I tried to talk to Penny about it, but she said I didn’t actually talk, I grunted and stared off. “Here comes the wall,” she’d say, exasperated, and a little frightened. I should have told her, That’s what men do when they fight. They put up walls. They pull up the drawbridge. They fill in the moat. But from behind my rising wall I didn’t know how. I lost the ability in 1977 to speak. It was either silence or rage with me. Late at night, after talking on the phone with Strasser, or Hayes, or Woodell, or my father, I couldn’t see any way out. I could only see myself folding up this business I’d worked so hard to build. So I’d erupt—at the telephone. Instead of hanging up, I’d slam the receiver down, then slam it down again, harder and harder, until it shattered. Several times I beat the living tar out of that telephone. After I’d done this three times, maybe four, I noticed the repairman from the telephone company eyeing me. He replaced the phone, checked to make sure there was a dial tone, and as he was packing up his tools he said very softly: “This is... really... immature.” I nodded. “You’re supposed to be a grown-up,” he said. I nodded again. If a phone repairman feels the need to chastise you, I told myself, your behavior probably needs modifying. I made promises to myself that day. I vowed that from then on I’d meditate, count backward, run twelve miles a night, whatever it took to hold it together. HOLDING IT TOGETHER wasn’t the same thing as being a good father. I’d always promised myself that I’d be a better father to my sons than my father had been to me —meaning I’d give them more explicit approval, more attention. But in late 1977, when I evaluated myself honestly, when I looked at how much time I was spending away from the boys, and how distant I was even when I was home, I gave myself low marks. Going strictly by the numbers, I could only say that I was 10 percent better than my father had been with me. At least I’m a better provider, I told myself. And at least I keep telling them their bedtime stories. Boston, April 1773.

• From We Were Here (2011)

  WE WERE HERE CaptionMax Page 12 3/23/2011 how are you getting it. Who are you getting it from? Whose giving it to who? Um, and in that little office, some of that feeling-- Like, I’m pretty sure they had all sex with one another, but once again, in my kind of mismatched way, I hadn’t had sex with any of them. Um, (clicks tongue) they all- they all got infected, and they all died except one. 1:26:09 DANIEL (VO/ON) My partner, Steve, was an immunology researcher. We had been together for quite a while, probably about eight years. And all of a sudden, people were coming to him and asking him to explain what’s going on, and it was interesting. I mean, his self-esteem sort of turned around because he was a holder of very important information. He ended up working in Jay Levy’s lab, which was one of the most important AIDS research labs in the world. We got tested because Steve took my blood and brought it into Jay Levy’s lab. So we were like some of the first people who knew that we were actually positive, ‘cause the test wasn’t even available. When Steve came back from Jay Levy’s lab and told me that we were both HIV positive, it-- I ch- Uh, my- my life changed completely. Um, I- I had had five people working for me. Um, and I let them go, and uh, luckily, I had saved some money, and I just started doing sculpture. 1:27:27 PAUL (VO/ON) Here am I, the- the kid from San Jose, come up here. I’m now the vice president of some little gay Democratic club where maybe fifteen or twenty people show up. And suddenly, the community starts to die of these extraordinary, horrible diseases, and they want help. How do we, you know, how do we s- eh, keep them alive? How do we make sure they don’t die of starvation because they can’t cook? How do we-- And meanwhile, there’s all these attacks that are occurring. Meanwhile, there’s this tremendous debate within the community about, well, maybe these are all wrong decisions. Maybe we shouldn’t be sexually free. Maybe uh-- And all these other debates are occurring. But it’s occurring-- The leadership, such as it is, is guys like me, who are suddenly in this little group. We’re uh, forced to deal with this unbelievable circumstance of a community that, in addition to being hated and under attack, is now forced alone to try to figure out how to deal with this extraordinary m- medical disaster.

• From Ulysses (Kindle edition — verify full work) (1922)

  While the epigraph pertains to Meridian's later relationship with Truman, a civil rights worker, it also encapsulates her relationship with Eddie; and, equally consequential, it bears striking semblance to Walker's own personal, sociopolitical, and sexual experiences. As a student at Spelman College, the historically black women's institution in Atlanta, Georgia, where Walker spent two years as a student, she was galvanized and inspired, in part, by another Spelmanite: Ruby Doris Smith Robinson, the legendary civil rights activist and, by Walker's own account, the partial inspiration for the novel's eponymous character.24 Walker participated in the Atlanta (civil rights) movement before transferring after two years at Spelman, which she considered steeped in Victorian conservatism, to Sarah Lawrence College in New York in December 1963. Her studies commenced in January 1964, and in the fall of 1965 she learned that she was pregnant: the result of a summer abroad in Kenya and Uganda sponsored by the Experiment in International Living. Walker held the conviction that if she did not have an abortion, she would surely kill herself, asserting that "one or the other of us was not going to survive"; and so, "it was me or it."25 She succeeded in having an abortion that predated by eight years Roe v. Wade, the landmark Supreme Court case that legalized abortion in 1973. Her experience is dramatized in the novel's account of Meridian's abortion after she becomes pregnant by Truman. Walker's experiences, then, inspire Meridian's character(ization). [image file=img/img0004.jpg] FIGURE 3.1 Excerpt from Alice Walker's Meridian, featured in Essence, July 1976. In terms of her relationship with Eddie, who marries her as he "had always promised he would `if something went wrong"' (61), Meridian does not fully acquiesce or subscribe to certain marital roles, particularly her sexual role as wife. Instead, she regulates, be it through elusion, the terms of their sex life. Now married and in a union that not only sanctions but legitimates sex, the very meaning of sex and its function changes for Meridian. Whereas it had operated previously as a conduit by which to secure protection from external male advances, now, as Eddie's wife, she no longer contends with such threats-as marriage marks her "unavailable" to men besides her husband. As such, she does not have to contend with male propositions. No longer needing sex as mediation and disinterested in it, Meridian implements certain regulatory practices to curtail and altogether elude sex with Eddie. In addition to "locking" her legs to the point Eddie must "fight to get [them] open," she also relies on seemingly legitimate excuses-grounded in community-based superstitions-to avoid sex: "she put the blame on any handy thing: her big stomach, the queasiness, the coming baby, [and] old wives' tales that forbade intercourse until three months after the baby was born" (65).

• From Ulysses (Kindle edition — verify full work) (1922)

  In his essay on escape in the fiction of Gayl Jones, literary critic Jerry W.Ward Jr. notes that "the thinking in Eva's Man shows paralysis of consciousness, the inability to make certain decisions"; Eva "is the victim of her own passivity, her tendency to accept the Playboy fantasy of what a woman is. Her life history contains a series of sordid, dehumanizing sexual encounters."18 Ward's reading of Eva is based on a characterization of Eva as engendering a passive acquiesce to skewed conceptualizations, based on Playboy iconography and constructions, of what constitutes a "woman" that fundamentally implicates her and assumes she is responsible for her own purported degradation-sexual and otherwise. Given the aforementioned instances in which she does not acquiesce but rather flees or inflicts violence, I would argue otherwise: that, while Eva is often silent, her nonvocality is a deliberate resistance to vocalized expression that, in and of itself, overturns assumptions regarding her passivity. Such silence should not, then, be confounded and read as indecisiveness, acquiescence, or passivity, especially if passivity signifies silence rooted in Eva's "acceptance of the words and definitions of others."19 Eva is not so much paralyzed by complacency, nor does she capitulate to narrow masculinist fantasies of women as sexual objects for male sexual gratification or definitions others impose upon her. Such readings castigate, or at the very least implicate, Eva, while exonerating the sexual dehumanization she encounters-and later inflicts upon Davis as retribution for the cumulative sexual violations she has endured-and the larger social structures that perpetuate such conceptualizations of women. Instead, Eva, as well as the men she confronts throughout her life (and even the other couples throughout the novel-John and Marie, Jean and Alfonso, Queen Bee and her string of lovers), is caught in a conundrum of tenuous sexual politics laden with violence, tension, and problematic gender dynamics. What Eva experiences, along with other couples, are problematic politics governing gender and sexuality that forestall what feminist scholar Barbara Ehrenreich recognizes as "opportunit[ies] for men and women to [...] meet as equals without the pretenses involved in gender roles, and to get together against" their "common sources of oppression .1121 In other words, they need models of relationships not fraught with sexual tension but characterized instead by a different set of sexual politics. As Patricia Hill Collins deftly notes, "[s]exual politics can be defined as a set of ideas and social practices shaped by gender, race, and sexuality that frame all men and women's treatment of one another, as well as how individual men and women are perceived and treated by others."21 These dynamics surrounding sexual politics, particularly men's perception and treatment of women, are concretized in Eva's Man and manifest especially in Eva and Davis's interactions.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  and trans., Vita Sancti Anselmi by Eadmer (Oxford, 1962); Benedicta Ward, ed. and trans., The Prayers and Meditations of St. Anselm with the Proslogion, intro. by R. W. Southern (London and New York, 1973); Ward, “Anselm of Canterbury and His Influence” in Jill Raitt, ed., Christian Spirituality: High Middle Ages and Reformation (New York, 1988; London, 1989), pp. 197–203; Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine, 5 vols. (Chicago and London, 1971–89), 3:106–44, 257–63; John Macquarrie, In Search of Deity: An Essay in Dialectical Theism (London, 1984), pp. 201–2.3. Anselm, Epistle 136 in Pelikan, Christian Tradition, 3:258.4. Anselm, Proslogion 1.143–45 in Ward, trans., Meditations and Prayers.5. Anselm, Monologion 32, 68 in F. S. Schmitt, ed., Sancti Anselmi Cantuariensis archiepiscopi opera omnia, 6 vols. (Edinburgh, 1938–61). My translation.6. Anselm, Proslogion 1.150–51. Ward translation.7. Anselm, Proslogion 1.153–57. My translation. See Wilfred Cantwell Smith, Belief in History (Charlottesville, Va., 1985), pp. 312–13.8. Anselm, Proslogion 2.159. Ward translation.9. Anselm, Proslogion 2.161. My translation. See Macquarrie, In Search of Deity, p. 201, who argues that the idea of “perfection” is included in maius as well as “greatness.”10. Anselm, Proslogion 3.197–98. Ward translation; my italics.11. Psalm 14:1.12. Anselm, Proslogion 2.180–83. Ward translation.13. Anselm, Proslogion 2.180–86.14. See Macquarrie, In Search of Deity, pp. 201–2.15. Jean Leclerq, “Ways of Prayer and Contemplation: West,” in Bernard McGinn and John Meyendorff, eds., Christian Spirituality: Origins to the Twelfth Century (London, 1986), pp. 417–25.16. Anselm, Prayers and Meditations, preface. Ward translation.17. Ibid.18. Anselm, Proslogion, preface. Ward translation.19. Ibid.20. Southern, Vita Sancti Anselmi, p. 20.21. Ibid.22. I have discussed the philosophical movement in Islam and Judaism and explored its implications in greater detail in A History of God: The 4000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (New York, 1993), pp. 170–208.23. Quoted in S. H. Nasr, “Theology and Spirituality,” in Islamic Spirituality: Manifestations, ed. S. H. Nasr (London, 1991), p. 411.24. From the Rasa’il, a tenth-century Ismaili text, quoted in Majid Fakhry, A History of Islamic Philosophy (New York and London, 1970), p. 187.25. W. Montgomery Watt, Muslim Intellectual: The Struggle and Achievement of al-Ghazzali (Edinburgh, 1963), pp. 133–40.26. Maimonides, The Guide to the Perplexed, trans. M. Friedlander (London, 1936), p. 87.27. Moshe Idel, “PaRDeS: Some Reflections on Kabbalistic Hermaneutics,” in John Collins and Michael Fishbane, eds., Death, Ecstasy, and Other Worldly Journeys (Albany, N.Y., 1995), pp. 249–57.28. Brian Davies, The Thought of Thomas Aquinas (Oxford, 1992); Denys Turner, Faith, Reason and the Existence of God (Cambridge, U.K., 2004); Denys Turner, “Apophaticism, Idolatry and the Claims of Reason,” in Oliver Davies and Denys Turner, eds., Silence and the Word, Negative Theology and Incarnation (Cambridge, U.K., 2002), pp. 23–34; Herbert McCabe, God Matters (London, 1987); Herbert McCabe, “Aquinas on the Trinity,” in Davies and Turner, Silence and the Word, pp.

• From City of Night (1963)

  (“He hasnt got the Magic,” the director will say to his friends later about Skipper. “But there is this young boy at the studio, I just talked to him today about his Possibilities — and: he is A Very Beautiful Boy.”) “You must have been a very beautiful boy,” the skinny man muttered. Skipper winced. He looked at the skinny man, startled. He looks in bewilderment about him—as if the echo of the words he had heard through those precious years of his life had momentarily transferred him somewhere else: the director’s mansion, the homes he had been in, progressively less and less extravagant. In his look now I see, blurred, the slow surrender. “What happened then?” the fatman said. Exhaling two fat cylinders of smoke through his nostrils, he resembled a charging bull. “Oh—I—well—later—I moved out. But I kept going to this acting teacher—and, well, see—I moved in with him—and then—see—I had met lots of other people—when I was living with this Director—and then through this teacher—and—I—well—they liked me.... Shit man,” he said suddenly, “I lived with them all, one right after the mother-fucking other.” “And after them?” “Others,” Skipper said dully. “And then?” the fatman persists. “Then—then I got fed up, see? Put it all down—I split. Then—when I came back—hell—I didnt even wanna—didnt even wanna see those people. And some of them—” he adds bitterly, “—they didnt wanna see me. Theyd call someone else—put me up for a while—with a friend of theirs.... Then I hung around Schwartz’s, that movie drugstore—Hollywood Boulevard—the beaches: the whole scene.... So I came back—to Main Street—I didnt even wanna see Hollywood anymore—not even think about it... Then—Christ!—I even got inna mess in fuckin Pershing Square.... Pershing Square!” he says contemptuously. “Hows that?” “This cop—this Sergeant Morgan. Man—he rousts me once, takes me downstairs—where they interrogate you. We’re alone—tries to put the make on me—I slug him. Man! A cop! But, hell—dig: hes scared shitless—scared Im gonna tell on him. He lets me go—tells me if I ever show, he’ll bust me—...” He holds his glass in both hands, squeezing it tightly. “Motherfuckers,” he says, shaking his head, as if he were passing judgment on all the people crammed into his life. The fatman eyed him stonily. Then he yawns, looks at his watch. “It’s past one,” he says.... About us the desperation to find a partner has begun: Make it! During the past hour many couples have left, for the hotels along the block, for apartments, homes—parties that will last into the next day. But the bar is still jammed. The music seems louder, the laughter is more piercingly shrill, more forced. A sustained roar of words crowds you almost physically. The poses have become more effeminate on one side, more masculine on the other.

• From Ulysses (Kindle edition — verify full work) (1922)

  This section begins with an evocation of transgression and the limit, marked by both certainty and uncertainty as it intersects with "thought," to elaborate on transgressive behavior. Whereas chapter 3 foregrounds an iteration of transgression predicated on the individual, a prioritized self invested in mutual personal and universal racial/communal freedom, transgression might also be understood as contestation or contestatory acts that exceed and violate the limit. "Violates" is the operative word, as it is precisely a violation of-or violence against-boundaries, whether sexual, racial, gender, or psychological, that are not only traversed but obstructed. Such instantiations of transgression are evident in Gayl Jones's 1976 novel Eva's Man, which provides rich insight into the linkages between transgression and the limit, as these very dynamics-the "play" between the limit and transgression, and an incessant crossing and recrossing of boundaries-pervade Jones's text. What I suggest is that in Eva's Man transgression manifests not only in its physicality but also vis-a-vis linguistics and an iconography marked by a perversity of desire that almost always erupts into violence. These, in turn, are mediated by "the uncertain," as well as "certainties," while shrouded in an ambivalence of madness, the material and psychological embodiment, whether real or performative, of transgression. Put another way, transgression manifests as a dynamic that exceeds comprehension: it cannot be articulated or understood in terms of reason. Jones limns individuals, Eva particularly, ensnared in sexual(ized) violence, transgression, and putative "madness" or mental/psychic instability. Society, including the psychiatrist and cellmates, characterize Eva and the (sexualized) assault of her lover as an irrational act of madness precisely because they cannot convey in words-there is no language, rhetoric, or logic-by which to explicate/understand her extreme excoriation of patriarchal sexual domination. Her violent act should, then, be interpreted as transgressive violence against or the demise of patriarchal racialized/gendered/sexualized limits placed upon her. Narrated from the vantage point of Eva Medina Canada, the female protagonist incarcerated in the psychiatric ward of a prison (after committing the horrendous, fatal sexualized crime of poisoning and then orally castrating her lover Davis), the narrative betrays linearity, logic, and conventional realism in the same way that Eva transgresses boundaries and convention. In her narration, Eva often vacillates between streams of consciousness and linearity (rationality/comprehensibility) and nonlinearity (irrationality/obfuscation), which results in shifts between "the uncertain" and "certainties" in terms of thought, consciousness, and temporality. Past and present, the cerebral and visceral, even sanity and madness collide and, to some extent, emulsify in ways that stymie coherence, order, structure, or the ability to distinguish between varied events. "Thought," truth, and accuracy/reality are in flux and rendered unreliable, if not downright inexplicable, to the extent that they resist simple or easy interpretability, as the following scene-Eva's recollection of her ex-husband James's reaction when her male classmate randomly appears at their home-makes transparent: [James] didn't say anything [...], and then he just reached over and grabbed my shoulder, got up and started slapping me. "You think you a whore, I'll treat you like a whore." [...]

• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  “Vixie—didn’t you get them?” Vixie looked perplexed. “Yes, I got them.” Bowerman took off his ball cap, put it back on, took it off. “Yeah, well,” he grumbled, “but you didn’t send the outer soles.” Johnson’s face reddened. “I sent those, too! Vixie?” “Yes,” Vixie said, “we got them.” Now we all turned to Bowerman, who was pacing, or trying to. There was no room. The office was dark, but I could still tell that my old coach’s face was turning red. “Well... we didn’t get them on time!” he shouted, and the tines of the rakes trembled. This wasn’t about uppers and outer soles. This was about retirement. And time. Like Pre, time wouldn’t listen to Bowerman. Time wouldn’t slow down. “I’m not going to put up with this bullshit anymore,” he huffed, and stormed out, leaving the door swinging open. I looked at Johnson and Vixie and Hollister. They all looked at me. It didn’t matter if Bowerman was right or wrong, we’d just have to find a way to make him feel needed and useful. If Bowerman isn’t happy, I said, Nike isn’t happy. A FEW MONTHS later, muggy Montreal was the setting for Nike’s grand debut, our Olympic coming-out party. As those 1976 Games opened, we had athletes in several high-profile events wearing Nikes. But our highest hopes, and most of our money, were pinned on Shorter. He was the favorite to win gold, which meant that Nikes, for the first time ever, were going to cross an Olympic finish line ahead of all other shoes. This was an enormous rite of passage for a running-shoe company. You really weren’t a legitimate, card-carrying running-shoe company until an Olympian ascended to the top medal stand in your gear. I woke up early that Saturday—July 31, 1976. Right after my morning coffee I took up my position in my recliner. I had a sandwich at my elbow, cold sodas in the fridge. I wondered if Kitami was watching. I wondered if my former bankers were watching. I wondered if my parents and sisters were watching. I wondered if the FBI was watching. The runners approached the starting line. With them I crouched forward. I probably had as much adrenaline in my system as Shorter had in his. I waited for the pistol, and for the inevitable close-up of Shorter’s feet. The camera zoomed in. I stopped breathing. I slid out of my recliner onto the floor and crawled toward the TV screen. No, I said. No, I cried out in anguish. “No. NO!” He was wearing... Tigers. I watched in horror as the great hope of Nike took off in the shoes of our enemy. I stood, walked back to my recliner, and watched the race unfold, talking to myself, mumbling to myself. Slowly the house grew dark. Not dark enough to suit me. At some point I drew the curtains, turned off the lights. But not the TV.

• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  We owed him a cool half million dollars, and he wanted to let us know that he was boarding a plane and coming to Oregon to get it. The second was Bill Manowitz, head of Mano International, a trading company in New York. We owed him one hundred thousand dollars, and he, too, was coming to Oregon to force a showdown. And to cash out. After the summit adjourned I was the last to leave. Alone, I staggered out to my car. In my lifetime I had finished many races on sore legs, gimpy knees, zero energy, but that night I wasn’t altogether sure I had the strength to drive home.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I could think only of my own sorry plight; and when I rang the bell and no one came, I thought: Well, I will sit upon the step, Mrs Milne is never out for long; and if I grow numb from the cold, it will serve me right... But then I pressed my face to the glass beside the door and peered into the hall beyond, and I saw that the walls - that used to have Gracie’s pictures on them, the Light of the World and the Hindoo idol, and the others - I saw that they were bare; that there were only marks upon them, where the pictures had been fastened. And at that, I trembled. I caught hold of the door-knocker and banged it, in a kind of panic; and I called into the letter-box: ‘Mrs Milne! Mrs Milne!’ and ‘Gracie! Grace Milne!’ But my voice sounded hollow, and the hall stayed dark. Then there came a shout, from the tenement behind. ‘Are you looking for the old lady and her daughter? They have gone, dear - gone a month ago!’ I turned, and looked up. From a balcony above the street a man was calling to me, and nodding to the house. I went out, and gazed miserably up at him, and said, Where had they gone to? He shrugged. ‘Gone to her sister’s, is what I heard. The lady was took very bad, in the autumn; and the girl being a simpleton - you knew that, did you? - they didn’t think it clever to leave the pair of them alone. They have took all the furniture; I daresay that the house will come up for sale ...’ He looked at my cheek. ‘That’s a lovely black eye you have,’ he said, as if I might not have noticed. ‘Just like in the song - ain’t it? Except you only have one of ‘em!’ I stared at him, and shivered while he laughed. A little fair-haired girl had appeared on the balcony beside him, and now gripped the rail and put her feet upon the bars. I said, ‘Where does the lady live - the sister they’ve gone to?’ and he pulled at his ear and looked thoughtful. ‘Now, I did know, but have forgotten it ...

• From The Case for God (2009)

  As their faith ebbed, many Victorians sensed the void that it left behind. 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. The century that had begun with a conviction of boundless possibility was giving way to a nameless dread.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I said. ‘A guinea is as fair a price as you will get, tonight.’ He sniffed again. ‘I daresay they are hot enough.’ ‘They ain’t hot at all,’ said Zena. ‘But the guinea will do; and if you’ll chuck in a couple of ladies’ niceties and a pair of hats with bows on, call it a pound.’ The drawers and stockings he gave us were yellowed with age; the hats were terrible; and we were both, of course, still in need of stays. But Zena, at least, seemed satisfied with the deal. She pocketed the money, then led me to a baked-potato stall, and we had a potato each, and a cup of tea between us. The potatoes tasted of mud. The tea was really tinted water. But at the stall there was a brazier, and this warmed us. Zena, as I have said, seemed very changed since our expulsion from the house. She did not tremble - it was I who trembled now - and she had an air of wisdom and authority about her, a way of passing through the streets, as if she were quite at her ease upon them. I had been at ease upon them once; now, I think that, if she had let me hold her hand, I would have done it - as it was, I could only stumble at her heels, saying wretchedly, ‘What shall we do next, Zena?’ and ‘Oh, Zena, how cold it is!’ and even ‘What do you suppose they are doing now, Zena, at Felicity Place? Oh, can you believe that she has really cast me from her!’ ‘Miss,’ she said to me at last, ‘don’t take it the wrong way; but if you don’t shut up, I really shall be obliged to hit you, after all.’ I said: ‘I’m sorry, Zena.’ In the end she fell into conversation with a gay girl who had also come to stand beside the brazier; and from her she got the details of a lodging-house nearby, that was said to take people in, all through the night. It turned out to be a dreadful place, with one chamber for the women and another for the men; and everyone who slept there had a cough. Zena and I lay two in a bed - she keeping her dress on, for the sake of the warmth, but me still fretting over the creases in mine, and so placing it beneath the foot of the mattress in the hope that it would press flat overnight.

• From Going Clear (2013)

  Hubbard suffered a severe stroke on January 16, 1986, at the Creston ranch. He realized that he was in his final days. He summoned Ray Mithoff, one of his most senior Messengers, to help him put his affairs in order and administer a “death assist.” He didn’t ask to see any of his family members; indeed, one of his last actions was to sign a will reducing their inheritance, except for a provision for Mary Sue, who received $1 million, which may have been a part of the agreement that had kept her from testifying against him. He had previously disowned his daughter Alexis, an embarrassing reminder of his bigamous marriage to Sara Northrup. Hubbard was in a nightgown, pacing up and down, saying, “Let’s get this over with! My head is hurting!” He signed the will with a shaky hand. Hubbard also proclaimed Flag Order 3879, “The Sea Org & the Future,” in which he promoted himself to Admiral and retired the rank of Commodore. He instituted a new rank, that of Loyal Officer, after the stalwart members of the Galactic Confederacy who had imprisoned the tyrannical overlord Xenu. Hubbard appointed only two persons to serve at that level, Pat and Annie Broeker. They were an attractive couple, his closest advisers; he was clearly passing them the scepter. “I’ll be scouting the way and doing the first port survey missions,” Hubbard promised his followers. “We will meet again later.” On Friday evening, January 24, 1986, Hubbard died in the Blue Bird bus that had served as his living quarters for the past three years. Ray Mithoff, Pat Broeker, and Hubbard’s personal physician, Eugene Denk, were at his side, along with a handful of acolytes and employees. His body had suffered the usual insults of old age, along with the consequences of obesity and a lifetime of heavy smoking. Dr. Denk had given him injections of Vistaril, a tranquilizer, usually prescribed for anxiety. Whatever powers Scientology was supposed to bestow were no more evident in the death of its founder than they had been in his life. Late that night, a handful of senior executives and a couple of private investigators drove to a restaurant in Paso Robles, where they were met by Pat Broeker, who guided them to the Creston ranch. The site was so secret that none of the executives, including Miscavige, had ever actually been there. They arrived around four in the morning. Earle Cooley, a church attorney, took charge of the body. At seven thirty that morning, about twelve hours after Hubbard’s death, the mortuary in San Luis Obispo was notified. Cooley demanded an immediate cremation, but when the owner of the mortuary saw the name on the death certificate, she called the coroner.

• From Mud Vein (2014)

  It was awful. It was painful. “Senna, what do you want?” I wanted my white room. I wanted to never have smelled him or heard the words to his music. “I don’t know.” He took a step backwards, toward the door. I wanted to step toward him. I wanted to. “Senna…” He took another step back, like he wanted me to stop him. He’s giving me a chance, I thought. Three more and he would be out the door. I felt the pull. It was in the hollows behind my kneecaps, something tugging me to him. I wanted to reach down and still it. Another step. Another. His eyes were pleading with me. It was no use. I was too far gone. “Goodbye, Isaac.” I took it as a loss. I thought so anyway. It had been a long time since I had mourned a person—twenty years, to be exact. But I mourned Isaac Asterholder in my own way. I didn’t cry; I was too dry to cry. Every day I touched the spot where Nick’s book used to sit on my nightstand. Dust was starting to fill the space. Nick was something to me. We shared a life. Isaac and I had shared nothing. Or maybe that wasn’t true. We shared my tragedies. People leave—that’s what I was used to—but Isaac showed up. I sat in my white room for days trying to clear myself of all the color I was suddenly feeling: red bikes, lyrics with thorns, the smell of herbs. I sat on the floor with my dress pulled over my knees and my head curled into my lap. The white room couldn’t cure me. Color stained everything. Seven days after he walked backwards out of my house I went to the mailbox and on my way back, found a CD on my windshield. I clutched it to my chest for an hour before I slipped it into my stereo. It was an intense crescendo of lyrics and drums and harp and everything he was feeling—and I was, too. The most remarkable thing was that I was feeling. It ripped at me until I wanted to gasp for breath. How could music know what you were feeling? How could it help you name it? I went to my closet. There was a box on my top shelf. I pulled it down and ripped off the lid. There was a red vase. Bright. Brighter than blood. My father sent it to me when my first book was published. I thought it was terrible—so bright it hurt my eyes. Now, my eyes were drawn to the color. I carried it to my white room and set it on the desk. Now there was blood everywhere. I searched for a song for days. I was new to the wonders of iTunes. I went back to Florence Welch. There was something about the intensity of her.

• From Educated (2018)

  We got more than we can spend!” Because his health was fragile, my father took the bed. I had purchased an air mattress, which I gave to Mother. I slept on the tile floor. Both my parents snored loudly, and I lay awake all night. When the sun finally rose I stayed on the floor, eyes closed, breathing slow, deep breaths, while my parents ransacked my mini fridge and discussed me in hushed tones. “The Lord has commanded me to testify,” Dad said. “She may yet be brought to the Lord.” While they plotted how to reconvert me, I plotted how to let them. I was ready to yield, even if it meant an exorcism. A miracle would be useful: if I could stage a convincing rebirth, I could dissociate from everything I’d said and done in the last year. I could take it all back—blame Lucifer and be given a clean slate. I imagined how esteemed I would be, as a newly cleansed vessel. How loved. All I had to do was swap my memories for theirs, and I could have my family. My father wanted to visit the Sacred Grove in Palmyra, New York—the forest where, according to Joseph Smith, God had appeared and commanded him to found the true church. We rented a car and six hours later entered Palmyra. Near the grove, off the highway, there was a shimmering temple topped by a golden statue of the angel Moroni. Dad pulled over and asked me to cross the temple grounds. “Touch the temple,” he said. “Its power will cleanse you.” I studied his face. His expression was stretched—earnest, desperate. With all that was in him, he was willing me to touch the temple and be saved. My father and I looked at the temple. He saw God; I saw granite. We looked at each other. He saw a woman damned; I saw an unhinged old man, literally disfigured by his beliefs. And yet, triumphant. I remembered the words of Sancho Panza: An adventuring knight is someone who’s beaten and then finds himself emperor. When I reflect on that moment now, the image blurs, reconstituting itself into that of a zealous knight astride a steed, charging into an imaginary battle, striking at shadows, hacking into thin air. His jaw is set, his back straight. His eyes blaze with conviction, throwing sparks that burn where they lay. My mother gives me a pale, disbelieving look, but when he turns his gaze on her they become of one mind, then they are both tilting at windmills. I crossed the grounds and held my palm to the temple stone. I closed my eyes and tried to believe that this simple act could bring the miracle my parents prayed for. That all I had to do was touch this relic and, by the power of the Almighty, all would be put right. But I felt nothing. Just cold rock. I returned to the car. “Let’s go,” I said.

• From Educated (2018)

  When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies? In the days that followed, I wrote that passage everywhere—unconsciously, compulsively. I find it now in books I was reading, in my lecture notes, in the margins of my journal. Its recitation was a mantra. I willed myself to believe it—to believe there was no real difference between what I knew to be true and what I knew to be false. To convince myself that there was some dignity in what I planned to do, in surrendering my own perceptions of right and wrong, of reality, of sanity itself, to earn the love of my parents. For them I believed I could don armor and charge at giants, even if I saw only windmills. We entered the Sacred Grove. I walked ahead and found a bench beneath a canopy of trees. It was a lovely wood, heavy with history. It was the reason my ancestors had come to America. A twig snapped, my parents appeared. They sat, one on either side of me. My father spoke for two hours. He testified that he had beheld angels and demons. He had seen physical manifestations of evil, and had been visited by the Lord Jesus Christ, like the prophets of old, like Joseph Smith had been in this very grove. His faith was no longer a faith, he said, but a perfect knowledge. “You have been taken by Lucifer,” he whispered, his hand on my shoulder. “I could feel it the moment I entered your room.” I thought of my dorm room—of the murky walls and frigid tiles, but also of the sunflowers Drew had sent, and of the textile wall hanging a friend from Zimbabwe had brought from his village. Mother said nothing. She stared at the dirt, her eyes glossy, her lips pursed. Dad prodded me for a response. I searched myself, reaching deep, groping for the words he needed to hear. But they were not in me, not yet. Before we returned to Harvard, I convinced my parents to take a detour to Niagara Falls. The mood in the car was heavy, and at first I regretted having suggested the diversion, but the moment Dad saw the falls he was transformed, elated. I had a camera. Dad had always hated cameras but when he saw mine his eyes shone with excitement. “Tara! Tara!” he shouted, running ahead of me and Mother. “Get yourself a picture of this angle. Ain’t that pretty!” It was as if he realized we were making a memory, something beautiful we might need later. Or perhaps I’m projecting, because that was how I felt. There are some photos from today that might help me forget the grove, I wrote in my journal. There’s a picture of me and Dad happy, together. Proof that’s possible. —WHEN WE RETURNED TO HARVARD, I offered to pay for a hotel. They refused to go. For a week we stumbled over one another in my dorm room.

• From Educated (2018)

  Every morning my father trudged up a flight of stairs to the communal shower in nothing but a small white towel. This would have humiliated me at BYU, but at Harvard I shrugged. I had transcended embarrassment. What did it matter who saw him, or what he said to them, or how shocked they were? It was his opinion I cared about; he was the one I was losing. Then it was their last night, and still I had not been reborn. Mother and I shuffled around the shared kitchen making a beef and potato casserole, which we brought into the room on trays. My father studied his plate quietly, as if he were alone. Mother made a few observations about the food, then she laughed nervously and was silent. When we’d finished, Dad said he had a gift for me. “It’s why I came,” he said. “To offer you a priesthood blessing.” In Mormonism, the priesthood is God’s power to act on earth—to advise, to counsel, to heal the sick, and to cast out demons. It is given to men. This was the moment: if I accepted the blessing, he would cleanse me. He would lay his hands on my head and cast out the evil thing that had made me say what I had said, that had made me unwelcome in my own family. All I had to do was yield, and in five minutes it would be over. I heard myself say no. Dad gaped at me in disbelief, then he began to testify—not about God, but about Mother. The herbs, he said, were a divine calling from the Lord. Everything that happened to our family, every injury, every near death, was because we had been chosen, we were special. God had orchestrated all of it so we could denounce the Medical Establishment and testify of His power. “Remember when Luke burned his leg?” Dad said, as if I could forget. “That was the Lord’s plan. It was a curriculum. For your mother. So she would be ready for what would happen to me.” The explosion, the burn. It was the highest of spiritual honors, he said, to be made a living testament of God’s power. Dad held my hands in his mangled fingers and told me that his disfiguration had been foreordained. That it was a tender mercy, that it had brought souls to God. Mother added her testimony in low, reverent whispers. She said she could stop a stroke by adjusting a chakra; that she could halt heart attacks using only energy; that she could cure cancer if people had faith. She herself had had breast cancer, she said, and she had cured it. My head snapped up. “You have cancer?” I said. “You’re sure? You had it tested?” “I didn’t need to have it tested,” she said. “I muscle-tested it. It was cancer. I cured it.” “We could have cured Grandma, too,” Dad said. “But she turned away from Christ.

• From Educated (2018)

  —I STOPPED GOING TO my French group, then to my sketching class. Instead of reading in the library or attending lectures, I watched TV in my room, working my way through every popular series from the past two decades. When one episode ended, I would begin the next without thinking, the way one breath follows another. I watched TV eighteen or twenty hours a day. When I slept I dreamed of home, and at least once a week I awoke standing in the street in the middle of the night, wondering if it was my own cry that I’d heard just before waking. I did not study. I tried to read but the sentences meant nothing. I needed them to mean nothing. I couldn’t bear to string sentences into strands of thought, or to weave those strands into ideas. Ideas were too similar to reflection, and my reflections were always of the expression on my father’s stretched face the moment before he’d fled from me. The thing about having a mental breakdown is that no matter how obvious it is that you’re having one, it is somehow not obvious to you. I’m fine, you think. So what if I watched TV for twenty-four straight hours yesterday. I’m not falling apart. I’m just lazy . Why it’s better to think yourself lazy than think yourself in distress, I’m not sure. But it was better. More than better: it was vital. By December I was so far behind in my work that, pausing one night to begin a new episode of Breaking Bad, I realized that I might fail my PhD. I laughed maniacally for ten minutes at this irony: that having sacrificed my family to my education, I might lose that, also. After a few more weeks of this, I stumbled from my bed one night and decided that I’d made a mistake, that when my father had offered me the blessing, I should have accepted it. But it wasn’t too late. I could repair the damage, put it right. I purchased a ticket to Idaho for Christmas. Two days before the flight, I awoke in a cold sweat. I’d dreamed I was in a hospital, lying on crisp white sheets. Dad was at the foot of the gurney, telling a policeman I had stabbed myself. Mother echoed him, her eyes panicked. I was surprised to hear Drew’s voice, shouting that I needed to be moved to another hospital. “He’ll find her here,” he kept saying. I wrote to Drew, who was living in the Middle East. I told him I was going to Buck’s Peak. When he replied his tone was urgent and sharp, as if he was trying to cut through whatever fog I was living in. My dear Tara, he wrote. If Shawn stabs you, you won’t be taken to a hospital. You’ll be put in the basement and given some lavender for the wound.