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 City of Night (1963)

  At a turn in the road, the car almost swerved into the trees. Lance sat up: “Have—a—baaall!” he laughed. “Crash the fuckin car!—lets go up in flames!—aim for Heaven!—get there with a Wham!” Green scenery rushing toward us, retreating. Vast blue of the sky like shifting panels.... “Im drunk,” Lance said. “You too?... Here—if we drink more, we’ll be on the way back—cold sober again.... There....” Crack of wood! Green shrubbery trembles. The car has stopped. I leaned on the wheel, surrendering to the dizzy carousel of green. Dots of sun needled my eyes as the leaves shifted dazedly about us. Lance staggered out. “Great to be Drunk!” he says, making his way down the hill. “Great, great! Everyone should be drunk—all the time—right?... Whole fuckin world on one great big endless: Durrrunk!” I pushed against the door, against the bushes. Tall trees sheltered us from the sun. At the foot of the hill, some water, very blue and clear like the sky, winds serenely along the trees. I knelt, throwing water on my face, trying to stop the green merry-go-round whirling about me. And in one wild instant Lance was hugging me to him, sobbing urgently. “Dean—dont—go—away—” “Im not Dean,” I kept repeating. But he didnt hear me. “Dean—” he was sobbing, holding me tightly. The scenery stopped spinning now and collapsed, came crashing over us—the trees burst, shattered. Again, once, the sun pierced the leaves in a myriad of light—pinpoints bursting in the water shimmering. And Lance’s arms squeezed me tightly—and he whispered over and over: “Dean...” I felt my hand in the water, my one contact with reality. I let my fingers dangle in the spring.... And the scenery which had closed in on us green, blackened, and... the... pinpoints... of... the... shattered... sun... are... closing. I awoke and the sun slashed through the trees blindingly at my eyes. Beside me, Lance’s head almost touched the spring. I pulled him away, threw water on his face, and he opened his eyes abruptly, stared at me, surprised, trying to remember. And then he turned from me and began to sob. I walked back to the car and waited, and finally Lance returned. “Who are you?” he asks me. “I just met you—early this morning.” He was silent “You asked me to take your car.” “I remember—something like that.” His eyes stared ahead in the dreadful limbo of after-drunkenness and near-hangover. “Where are we?” he asked. “Near Arrowhead—I think.” He still avoided looking at me. “I remember now—I saw you in some bar. I mistook you for Dean. I dont know what I was doing looking for him in the bars—hes not even old enough to get in.” “I was drunk too,” I said, to ease his obvious embarrassment As I drove his car down the mountain, he became friendlier, his embarrassment relaxing. “I dont remember everything,” he said, “but whatever happened—if something was wrong—Im sorry. I cant drink,” he explained.

• From City of Night (1963)

  Strangely, illogically—like a shadowy movie cut indiscriminately without logical order, I remember living next to the Y in Los Angeles, where I sunbathed on the roof of that apartment building, and by signals from the residents of the Y, I would meet them later on the street.... I remember Griffith Park—the hill where you could make it hidden by trees.... I remember the police, the many roustings, finger-printings, interrogations: the cops, the rival gang—the enemy: the world.... Laguna Beach, the sand drifting into the bar. Lance... poised on a cliff.... And I remember a Texas sky .... I remember a party where three of us turned on with marijuana in the locked head, and I remember the indiscriminate partners, later, outside in the yard.... Remembering a man on the Boulevard who picked me up, who paid me to tell him what the others I had been with had done; and as he listened, he tried to conceal the fact that he was pulling off.... That sky recalled from a childhood in gray, gray shades.... I remember a steambath and the naked bodies pacing hungrily along the hallways, the sudden entrances and exits into the tiny cubicles; and, in the phosphorescent grayness, like nameless bodies in a morgue.... I think of St Louis Cemetery in this city, the stark graves above the Waiting ground.... And the wind had swept that sky, coming in a steelgray cloud.... I think of the beach in Chicago, deserted except for the maleshadows hugging the cold walls. And I remember the FASCINATION sign in New York.... In Dallas—remembering—the doors of rooms left open at the Y and the steamy intimacy in the showers.... I imagine Miss Destiny storming heaven, protesting to God, shaking her beads.... Remembering Sylvia, I think: And she slaughtered her son and he slaughtered her because they each had to.... And I remember: Out of that Window during that windstorm which is now howling again in my mind, I watched a tree bend with the wind .... Something searched, its fulfillment hinted by the fact that the heart craves it—but not to be found. Not found. And the heart weakens and resists even hope.... Twas the night before Ash Wednesday and All Through The City—... I remembered someone in San Francisco who had followed me and someone else to an apartment, and later I looked out the window and saw the man who had followed us still waiting, looking up forlornly to where we were, his hands in his pockets.... Finally, the wind had lashed furiously at the tree, tearing off the branches, which had hinted of spring.... And the dust rose, coming from the orange horizon, settling on my mind . Dregs of memories churn. Remembering.... This:

• From We Were Here (2011)

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

• From City of Night (1963)

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

• From City of Night (1963)

  “ I pissed on them!” His voice quavered, broke, halted. He turned his face away from me. His shoulders trembled as if in a sudden cold wind. “So you see: power and strength—” he began weakly without finishing. I sat next to him, where he had sunk onto the bed. But is there anything you can say now to Neil? It’s too late. It’s too late. Through the open door of the bathroom I see a water-soaked bag on the floor. CITY OF NIGHT CHICAGO! (San Francisco... the fog... the mourning wind... the discovered violence, hatred.... I fled California. San Francisco, which had lured me spuriously with its promise of renewed life, had withdraw that promise.) Now it will be Chicago—that savage city like a black fortress erected against the blue of the sky, the blue of the lake. And what have I come here to search for? Something not yet clearly defined which has to do with the antithesis of Neil’s world. And I’ll search again through the labyrinthine world I had found on Times Square, in downtown Los Angeles, Hollywood, Market Street... I stayed in an apartment house on Dearborn next to the YMCA.... And nearby was the beach. And nearby is the hustling park. On the beach (which is not so much a beach as a loop of sanded concrete along the lake—to get to which you walk through a subway tunnel—lights slanted on one side of the wall flashing like interrogation lights in your eyes—and you emerge, somehow guiltily, and see, through cracks in the cement, weeds and patches of grass struggling to emerge for one last breath of the expiring-summer air), I will meet a series of new faces which will be added to the hundreds that have already paraded through my life. Near-autumn afternoons spent there waiting to be picked up. (Behind me, the outline of the wealthy Gold Coast: luxurious apartments glistening goldenly in the sun—resembling, for all their plush elegance, clean hospital wards: rows of giant apartment buildings like monsters ready to march snobbishly into the lake, their backs haughtily to the rest of the city as they huddle—healthy and muscular but still somehow afraid—close to each other as if for protection.) Sometimes, at night, I’ll return there. Ghostly waves will seek out life, dashing against the shore (while teenagers swim bravely in the cold water, men fish, couples make love, tramps sleep along the expanse of cement ground).... And I wandered along the beach, idly, until someone spoke to me. But, mostly—at night in that city—I will search the park between Dearborn and Clark: Chicago’s Pershing Square, without the almost-healthy indolence of Los Angeles. This park where in the afternoons the city’s old and young vagrants serve their novitiate before the derelict jungles of the city.... They gather drearily here in bunches, frantic in the awareness that soon the weather will turn cold. I watch and listen and join in.

• From City of Night (1963)

  When I had first seen him at the Splendide, the subdued light had chosen mercifully to bless him—and I had seen the youngman who had reigned securely. Now, in the glare of the summer sun, there was little mercy. I see the crushed Lance O’Hara of the now-fading legend: tall, yes—slender; but his face, bloated from drinking and sleepless nights, had the look of alarm which only the faces of the once very beautiful and anarchically disdainful, on the brink of relinquishing their claim to that anarchy, can have: The skin was yellowish in the bright light, lines converged under the eyes forming small sagging sacks; his dark hair was matted at the forehead with perspiration. But the haunted eyes looking at me, a clear blue that melted almost indistinguishably into the white, are what I notice most: They are the astonished eyes of someone who after years of wearing sunglasses is forced suddenly to remove them in the savage stare of the sun.... “Lets—drive—somewhere,” he said. “Anywhere—nowhere—sooooooooommmmmmmmmewhere—over the rainbow!” Laughing chokingly, he swerves sideways on the seat—“Ooops!”—retrieves a bottle of whiskey which had rolled under the seat and drank thirstily from it. I started the car, moving toward the Strip on Sunset. As if on its own, the car speeds past the California palmtrees, silent witnesses to speeding life, fleeting Youth. Lance opens his eyes suddenly wide, seeing me, I thought, really for the first time. “You dont even look like him,” he said. “Not at all, really. I followed you out When I saw you leave—leave the bar, I thought—I thought you were—Dean.... Hey! Lets make it: A Party—havent had—party in—oh, long, long—... I wanna get realleeee drunk!” He held the bottle to me and I drank from it. His panic was infectious. Im aware of Flight now, acutely—of Lance’s, mine. “Wowee,” he said, “youre drunk too—thats it—wowee!” We were on the Freeway now, cars racing before us, toward us, next to us. The world, everyone on the Freeway, is spinning in wide swirls... Away!... “Bumpity-bump,” said Lance, drinking again from the bottle, handing it to me. “More I drink, more you look like him. Dont care who you are—so—long—as—you—driiiive. Oops! Liquor hit—my head! Bumpity-bump. Hey! Lets ballt...” Then he was silent, eyes closed. “You dont know—Dean—do you?” he asked me abruptly. “Havent seen him—since—whee—...” holding the bottle for me again. “Dean,” he said furrily, and again he seemed to pass out. Now my vision became fantastically clear—which is that stage preparatory to my becoming drunk, when each object becomes sharply real. The traffic had thinned, and we were moving past many-colored fruitstands strung along the highway like a gypsy caravan. Now we’re in the mountains, here lushly green, there brown-patched, leprous—past, occasionally, areas of burned-down trees: Dead. The road winds treacherously in a series of tight S’s—the sky is blue and clear: a cool inverted inaccessible lake.

• From The Pisces (2018)

  If we didn’t chase the light, did people like us just end up here anyway? If Claire had never left her marriage, where would she be now? She said that she was depressed during her marriage and ended up here once before. And that was before she began her odyssey of love and sex. If you were just going to end up here, regardless of what you did, it seemed worth it to really push things like she did. The nothingness was going to eat you alive anyway. It was going to be mashed potatoes at the end no matter what. So why not just grab for whatever you could get? — “Well, I’ve really mucked it up this time,” said Claire. “I’m back in group therapy now, only here with a pack of sad arses who are completely catatonic—which is maybe actually better.” She laughed. It was good to see her sense of humor back. Her hair was still greasy, piled on top of her head, but the circles under her eyes had diminished and there was a glint in her eyes again. “You seem better,” I said. “Like you’re not just staring at the wall.” “Yes, with my last suicide attempt I woke up completely miffed that I was still alive. But this one was oddly refreshing. Maybe I just needed some sort of sorbet—a life palate cleanser.” My God, I loved her. “I get it,” I said. “I mean, not really, because mine wasn’t really a consciously active attempt.” “No, yours was more of a gesture.” “Exactly, a gesture. I’m not the suicide pro that you are. But I think I understand.” “Love, if I were a pro I wouldn’t be here.” “Right,” I said. “But I mean I’m not as, like, experienced with suicide or whatever. Like it’s not as much a part of my oeuvre. I’m more—I don’t know what I am actually. But I know what you mean by a palate cleanser. Sometimes everything is just so bleh that you need to fucking cut it with a knife.” I was trying to ask her in a roundabout way if it was worth it. We felt the same nothingness, of that I was sure. But I wanted to see if she knew if we were going to be okay or not. Or, at least, if I was. I was asking life advice, couched in the language of suicide, from a friend in a mental hospital. This was the direction my life had taken. “So are you glad about everything? Like, everything that led you up to this point where you feel okay, maybe even good about being alive? Are you glad for that trajectory of your life?” “Yeah,” she said. “I feel strangely good about everything.

• From City of Night (1963)

  And then one afternoon, High, sitting in the park, hearing the convulsed chanting, the spiritual singing—in the midst of the lonesome hunting, the sexual hunger in the eyes all around—the franticness to fill each space of time with something! —I imagined— Suddenly! as if in a nightmare—as the crowds emerged from the depths of the subterranean garage, swarmed from across the streets—that all the world was pouring into Pershing Square in a tidal wave of faces—that frantically each person would shout his Loss—into Eternity—to an uncaring Heaven! In panic, I returned to that rented room on Hope Street I shut the windows, drew the shades, bolted the door. Still, I could hear life shrieking at me.... Now again there came a time when I stayed away from the streets. I took a job.... Again the guilt. At night I found relief from the strange terror in the joints of marijuana which I smoked on the roof of that hotel. As the false clarity of the weed seized me, I would look onto the city showered by the black of the Night—and imagine, as if in a dumb show in which all emotion is muted, that I was separated from the world: as I had felt as a boy watching out the window, separated from life. The world was revealing its death to me by the process of slow discovery: the slowly gnawing loss of innocence; and I found myself longing for the God in Whom, unquestioningly, I had believed as a child. But this world of loneliness and desperation belied Him. The sky was now a black cave where once it had been limitless, stretching into that Heaven of childhood angels and peace. As the doleful sounds of the bells from the church across the street mourned into the night, I looked from the roof in the direction of Pershing Square: One day, in sorrow at His own creation, God plunged into Hell.... Now the world spun dizzily like a ferris wheel out of control . CHUCK: Rope Heaven by the Neck 1 “HEY, MAN!—HOW YOU MAKIN IT?... Cummon over—jine me.” Chuck sat familiarly on the railing at Pershing Square under the statue of a World War I soldier valiantly facing the street. Wearing a new pair of cowboy boots—resplendently Bright (orange, brown, traces of yellow)—which hes showing off by rolling his levis an extra turn—Chuck sits there as if on his own frontporch. “Where you been?” he asks me.

• From Memoirs of Fanny Hill (1749)

  In this situation I sat near half an hour, swallowed up in grief and despair, when my landlady came in, and observing a death-like dejection in my countenance, still in pursuance of her plan, put on a false pity, and bidding me be of good heart: “Things,” she said, “would be but my own friend”; and closed with telling me “she had brought a very honourable gentleman to drink tea with me, who would give me the best advice how to get rid of all my troubles.” Upon which, without waiting for a reply, she goes out, and returns with this very honourable gentleman, whose very honourable procuress she had been, on this, as well as other occasions. The gentleman, on his entering the room, made me a very civil bow, which I had scarce strength, or presence of mind enough to return a curtsey to; when the landlady, taking upon her to do all the honours of the first interview (for I had never, that I remember, seen the gentleman before), sets a chair for him, another for herself. All this while not a word on either side; a stupid stare was all the face I could put on this strange visit. The tea was made, and the landlady, unwilling, I suppose, to lose any time, observing my silence and shyness before this entire stranger: “Come, Miss Fanny,” says she, in a coarse familiar style, and tone of authority, “hold up your head, child, and do not let sorrow spoil that pretty face of yours. What! sorrows are only for a time; come, be free, here is a worthy gentleman who has heard of your misfortunes, and is willing to serve you; you must be better acquainted with him, do not you now stand upon your punctilios, and this and that, but make your market while you may.”

• From The Canterbury Tales (2009)

  Yet what of poor Aurelius? He had lost everything. So he cursed the day he was born. ‘Oh God,’ he cried, ‘I owe a thousand pounds of gold to the magician! What am I going to do? I am ruined. I will need to sell everything I own, and roam the streets as a beggar. I cannot stay here and be a source of perpetual shame to my family. My only hope is that he will be merciful towards me. I will suggest to him that I pay the debt by instalments, year by year, on a certain day. If he is kind enough to agree, I will never let him down.’ So with aching heart he went to his strongbox, unlocked it, and took out about five hundred pounds of gold. He presented the money to the magician, and asked him if he could pay the rest at a later date. ‘I have never broken a promise in my life, sir,’ he said. ‘I will repay my debt to you. Even if I have to go begging in my bare tunic, you will get your money. I swear it. If you can give me two or three years, I would be very grateful. Otherwise I will have to sell my patrimony, house and all. There is nothing else I can tell you.’ The philosopher listened silently and solemnly. ‘Did I not make an agreement with you?’ ‘Yes, sir, you did. Most certainly.’ ‘Did you not enjoy the lady, as you wished?’ ‘No. Alas, I did not.’ ‘Why not? Tell me the whole story.’ So Aurelius went through the entire sequence of events. There is no need for me to repeat them, is there? ‘Arveragus,’ he said, ‘is such a worthy knight that he would rather die of shame and distress than allow his wife to break her oath.’ Then he told the magician all about the anguish experienced by Dorigen at the thought of being unfaithful to her husband. She would rather have lost her life. She had made her original promise quite innocently. She had no knowledge of magic and illusion. ‘So I felt sorry for her, sir. Arveragus sent her to me without conditions, and I freely returned her to him. That is the gist of it.’

• From The Case for God (2009)

  Even in the camps, some of the inmates continued to study the Torah and to observe the festivals, not in the hope of placating an angry deity but because they found, by experience, that these rituals helped them to endure the horror. One day a group of Jews decided to put God on trial. In the face of such inconceivable suffering, they found the conventional arguments utterly unconvincing. If God was omnipotent, he could have prevented the Shoah; if he could not stop it, he was impotent; and if he could have stopped it but chose not to, he was a monster. They condemned God to death. The presiding rabbi pronounced the verdict, then went on calmly to announce that it was time for the evening prayer. Ideas about God come and go, but prayer, the struggle to find meaning even in the darkest circumstances, must continue. The idea of God is merely a symbol of indescribable transcendence and has been interpreted in many different ways over the centuries. The modern God—conceived as powerful creator, first cause, supernatural personality realistically understood and rationally demonstrable —is a recent phenomenon. It was born in a more optimistic era than our own and reflects the firm expectation that scientific rationality could bring the apparently inexplicable aspects of life under the control of reason. This God was indeed, as Feuerbach suggested, a projection of humanity at a time when human beings were achieving unprecedented control over their environment and thought they were about to solve the mysteries of the universe. But many feel that the hopes of the Enlightenment also died in Auschwitz. The people who devised the camps had imbibed the classical nineteenth-century atheistic ethos that commanded them to think of themselves as the only absolute; by making an idol of their nation, they felt compelled to destroy those they viewed as enemies. Today we have a more modest conception of the powers of human reason. We have seen too much evil in recent years to indulge in a facile theology that says—as some have tried to say—that God knows what he is doing, that he has a secret plan that we cannot fathom, or that suffering gives men and women the opportunity to practice heroic virtue. A modern theology must look unflinchingly into the heart of a great darkness and be prepared, perhaps, to enter into the cloud of unknowing. After the Second World War, philosophers and theologians all struggled with the idea of God, seeking to rescue it from the literalism that had made it incredible. In doing so, they often revived older, premodern ways of thinking and speaking about the divine. In his later years, Wittgenstein changed his mind. He no longer believed that language should merely state facts but acknowledged that words also issued commands, made promises, and expressed emotion.

• From City of Night (1963)

  And West Madison stretches in shabby tatters for blocks of leprous buildings. Networks of fire escapes cling to the crumbling walls like tenacious steel spiderwebs. Intertwined among the transient hotels and the harsh yellow-lighted bars are the missions. Each presents its scrubbed face to the stained desperate faces of the doomed tramps, waiting for the sermon and whatever else theyll get. I pursued those streets as if hunting ghosts. In one mission, a deacon-type athletic man, radiating health, shouts: “I got a friend in Jesus!”—while an old tramp, doubled over in a wrecked heap, experiences a religious (drunken-hungry) fit, howling: “Lord, Lord, Lord!” Men outside pace the fetid street funereally, sleep under parked cars, trucks. I see a man roll onto the street, groaning, while the parade of wined-up zombies passes, ignoring him. Others stand like displaced sentinels; dismal mask-faces hanging lifeless outside of doorways. Shadows huddle, drinking. From the street, I looked up into the apartment buildings, into the naked windows of the tiny cubicle-rooms. More haggard faces peering blankly; skinny, maimed bodies of uncaring women in slips; men without shirts. All have the same look: the look of nolonger-questioning, resigned doom. The world on its knees.... A beat-up old man before me chases a wine bottle along its course into the gutter. He yells at it: “Go on, damya—into the gutter whereya belong. I aint gonna touchya no more.” Instantly, three men jump out of the shadows to retrieve the bottle. Discovering it empty, one smashes it on the filthy street. I see the terrible cheated eyes. Other ghosts to pursue through the bandaged jungles. Beyond the tangle of the elevated, to State Street: carnival street: Tattoo joints; novelty shops (horror masks leering among rubber cobra snakes, masks less hideous than the human ones along the Madison doorways); arcades (“Parisian Movies,” “Chauffeur Photos,” “Art Films”). Tough girls shoot pool. Sailors stand on corners. Burlesque bars coax you with NO COVER NO MINIMUM. The Gayety Burlesque is featuring Teddy Bare and Borden’s Ice Cream. A tall gaunt man hands me a pamphlet. ARE YOU BORN AGAIN? And I followed the ghosts into the burlesque theater. Blondes! redheads! brunettes!—lips liver-colored in the changing light; shouting Ah-haaaaa like cowboys; hands edging toward the hypnotic spot between the legs, resting there caressingly; hips momentarily magnetized, suddenly released, swinging sex around; kneeling.... Fingers teasingly exploring the breasts, playfully pinching them, coyly affecting looks of mock pain.... G-strings like phosphorescent badges etched across the thighs; spread legs radiating their unfulfilled invitation; breasts like searchlights, completely uncovered; apocalyptically revealed pink-crowned nipples, presented cupped in white hands like an offering to the hungry audience; breasts bouncing playfully, jiggling temptingly like white-jelly.... Night Train from the jungle of exhibitionistic sex.... Hands at the back, naked breasts pointing Heavenward; tensed stomachs forming a tight “8”; legs arched open; fingers sliding into G-strings; thighs thrust out groaningly simulating orgasm. Hungry unfulfilled eyes in the male audience, focused on the promised but unattainable.... Pursuing ghosts through Negro streets....

• From City of Night (1963)

  And a priest who sounded very young answered, and he didnt hang up and he was the one I had tried to reach, I knew, and he spoke to me and spoke—and I can remember only one thing he said—and the rest doesnt matter because all I had wanted was to hear a voice from a childhood in the wind.... And what I do remember that priest saying is merely this: “I know,” he said. “Yes, I know.” And I returned to El Paso. Here, by another window, I’ll look back on the world and I’ll try to understand.... But, perhaps, mysteriously, it’s all beyond reasons. Perhaps it’s as futile as trying to capture the wind. And it’s windy here now. No matter how you close the windows or pull the curtains or try to hide from it or shelter yourself from it, it’s there. It’s impossible to escape the Wind. You can still hear it shrieking. You always know it’s there. Waiting. And I know it will wait patiently for me, ineluctably, when inevitably I’ll leave this city again. And what has been found? Nothing. A circle which winds around, without beginning, without end. The clouds are storming angrily across the orange-gray sky. They rush at each other as if to battle. You know how it is in Texas each year before spring. One moment theres the stunning awareness that soon spring is coming, with the yellow-green clusters of leaves budding on the skeleton trees, hinting of a potential revival—soon, soon. And the next moment the fierce wind comes screaming, whirling the needle-pointed dust, stifling all hope. And you know then that what has not happened will never happen. That hope is an end within itself. And the fierce wind is an echo of angry childhood and of a very scared boy looking out the window—remembering my dead dog outside by the wounded house as the gray Texas dust gradually covered her up—and thinking: It isnt fair! Why cant dogs go to Heaven?

• From The Canterbury Tales (2009)

  telling the truth. Now that I have saved his life, the time has come.’ She turned to face him. ‘Now, sir knight, I ask that you marry me without delay. I wish to be your wife.’ He looked at her in horror. ‘Oh my God! Is that it? How can I? I admit that I did swear an oath to you. But for God’s sake ask for something else. Take all my money. Anything. But don’t take my body.’ ‘No way. I will not betray myself, or you. I may be foul and old and poor, but I don’t want your money. I would not part with you for all the gold in the world. I only want your love.’ ‘My love? No. My ruin. My despair. I am to be degraded and disgraced.’ He complained in vain. It was determined that he must marry this old woman. He was also obliged to go to bed with her. I wish that I could tell you all about the happy festivities and the joyful ceremonies that accompanied the union. But I can’t. There were none. There were no speeches of congratulation, no toasts, no wedding cake. There were, instead, expressions of sorrow and pity. He married her secretly the next morning, and then hid himself from the light of day like an owl. He could not look at her, ugly and dirty as she was. When eventually he got into bed with his new wife, he was disgusted and ashamed; he turned and twisted beneath the sheets, while she just lay there with a smile on her face. ‘Oh husband dear,’ she said. ‘Bless me! Is this the way that knights treat their new brides? Is this the household law of King Arthur? Is everyone of your rank so shy? I am the love of your life, your own wife. I am the woman who saved you. I have never done you any harm. I know that much. So why are you behaving like this on our first night together? You are writhing like a madman. What is my crime? Tell me, for God’s sake. If I can amend it, I will do so.’ ‘Amend it? I don’t think so. There is nothing you can do about it. You are old. You are ugly. You come from such low stock that it is little wonder that I twist and turn. My lineage is besmirched! I wish to God that my heart would break!’ ‘Is that the only reason for your distress?’ ‘Only! What do you think?’ ‘Well, sir, I think I can cure it. I think I may do you a service, in a day or two if necessary. If you showed me a little bit more consideration, I might help you out. But please don’t go on about your high rank. You get your lineage from old money. That is all. It isn’t worth a damn. It is sheer conceit. You should be more concerned with human virtue.

• From The Canterbury Tales (2009)

  Once more he began to cry out loud. ‘Oh cruel gods that govern this world, binding it with your eternal decrees inscribed on sheets of adamantine steel, what is humankind to you? Do men mean more to you than the sheep that cower in the fold? Men must die, too, like any beast of the field. Men also dwell in confinement and restraint. Men suffer great sickness and adversity, even when they are guilty of no sin. What glory can there be for you in treating humankind so ungenerously? What is the good of your foreknowledge, if it only torments the innocent and punishes the just? What is the purpose of your providence? One other matter, too, outrages me. Men must perform their duty and, for the sake of the gods, refrain from indulging their desires. They must uphold certain principles, for the salvation of their souls, whereas the silly sheep goes into the darkness of non-being. No beast suffers pain in the hereafter. But after death we all may still weep and wail, even though our life on earth was also one of suffering. Is this just? Is this commendable? I suppose I must leave the answer to theologians, but I know this for a fact. The world is full of grief. I have seen a serpent sting an unwary traveller and then glide away. I have seen the thief murder his prey, and then wander forth unchecked and unharmed. But I must linger here in prison. Truly the gods, in their jealous rage against my race, have all but destroyed my family and razed the walls of Thebes. Now Venus herself has decided to slay me, too, by poisoning me with jealousy for Arcite. Where can I turn?’ I will now leave Palamon in his sad plight for a moment, and tell you what has been happening to Arcite. The summer has passed, and the long nights have merely increased the duration of his pain. In truth I do not know who has endured the most suffering, the freed lover or the prisoner. Let me summarize their situation. Here is Palamon. He is condemned to perpetual imprisonment, consigned to chains and shackles until the day of his death. Here is Arcite. On pain of death by beheading he is exiled from the territory of Athens, forever excluded from the sight of fair Emily. I will ask you lovers the question. Who is worse off? One of them can glimpse his gracious lady, day by day, but will never be able to approach her. The other is as free as air, able to journey wherever he wishes, but he will never see Emily again. Consider it. Judge the matter as best you can. Put the two characters before you, as if they were upon a gaming board. Meanwhile I will carry on with the story, just to see what happens next. PART TWO

• From The Case for God (2009)

  But to blame the entire catastrophe on religion is simply—and perhaps even dangerously—inaccurate. Far from being in conflict with the rational pursuit of well-organized, goal-oriented modernity, the hideous efficiency of the Nazis was a supreme example of it. Rulers had long initiated policies of ethnic cleansing when setting up their modern, centralized states. In order to use all the human resources at their disposal and to maintain productivity, governments had found it necessary to bring out-groups such as the Jews into the mainstream, but the events of the 1930s and 1940s showed that this tolerance was merely superficial and the old bigotry still lurked beneath. To carry out their program of genocide, the Nazis relied on the technology of the industrial age: the railways, the advanced chemical industry, and rationalized bureaucracy and management. The camp replicated the factory, the hallmark of industrial society, but what it mass-produced was death. Science itself was implicated in the eugenic experiments carried out there. The modern idolatry of nationalism had so idealized the German volk that there was no place for the Jews: born of the new “scientific” racism, the Holocaust was the ultimate in social engineering in what has been called the modern “garden culture,” which simply eliminated weeds—the supreme, perverted example of rational planning in which everything is subordinated to a single, clearly defined objective.38 Perhaps the Holocaust was not so much an expression as a perversion of Judeo-Christian values.39 As atheists had been eager to point out, the symbol of God had marked the limit of human potential. At the heart of the Nazi ideology was a romantic yearning for a pre-Christian German paganism that they had never properly understood, and a negation of the God who, as Nietzsche had suggested, put a brake on ambition and instinctual “pagan” freedom. The extermination of the people who had created the God of the Bible was a symbolic enactment of the death of God that Nietzsche had proclaimed.40 Or perhaps the real cause of the Holocaust was the ambiguous afterlife of religious feeling in Western culture and the malignant energies released by the decay of the religious forms that had channeled them into more benign, productive outlets.41 In Christian theology, hell had traditionally been defined as the absence of God, and the camps uncannily reproduced the traditional symbolism of the inferno: the flaying, racking, whipping, screaming, and mocking; the distorted bodies; the flames and stinking air all evoked the imagery of hell depicted by the artists, poets, and dramatists of Europe.42 Auschwitz was a dark epiphany, providing us with a terrible vision of what life is like when all sense of the sacred is lost and the human being—whoever he or she may be—is no longer revered as an inviolable mystery.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  There was a paradox in the Enlightenment.27 Philosophers insisted that individuals must reason for themselves, and yet they were only permitted to think in accordance with the scientific method. Other more intuitive ways of arriving at different kinds of truth were now belittled in a manner that would prove highly problematic for religion. Again, revolutionary leaders in France and America preached the doctrine of untrammeled liberty with immense passion and enthusiasm, but their doctrine of nature was rigorously mechanical: the motion and organization of every single component of the universe was completely determined by the interaction of its particles and the iron rule of nature’s law. In England, Newton’s cosmology would be used to endorse a social system in which the “lower” orders were governed by the “higher,” while in France, Louis XIV, the Sun King, presided over a court in which his courtiers revolved obsequiously around him, each in his allotted orbit. Central to this political vision and Newtonian science was the doctrine of the passivity of matter, which needed to be activated and controlled by a higher power. People who challenged this orthodoxy were associated with radical movements and often found themselves in bad odor with the establishment.28 In rather the same way as Spinoza, John Toland believed that God was identical with nature and that matter was, therefore, not inert but vital and dynamic: he died in abject poverty. Locke thought it possible that some material substances might be able to “think” and perform rational procedures. He had a radical past: because he was involved in the turbulence preceding the Glorious Revolution of 1688, he had been forced to flee to Holland, where he lived in exile for six years as “Mr. van der Linden.” The Presbyterian minister and chemist Joseph Priestley (1733–1804), who remained an outsider all his life—educated in Daventry instead of Oxford and exercising his ministry in the provinces—argued that Newtonian theory was not in fact dependent upon the inertia of matter. When he spoke in support of the French Revolution in 1789, a Birmingham mob burned his house to the ground and he migrated to America.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  They have created religions and works of art to help them find value in their lives, despite all the dispiriting evidence to the contrary. The initiation experience also shows that a myth, like that of the Animal Master, derives much of its meaning from the ritualized context in which it is imparted. 21 It may not be empirically true, it may defy the laws of logic, but a good myth will tell us something valuable about the human predicament. Like any work of art, a myth will make no sense unless we open ourselves to it wholeheartedly and allow it to change us. If we hold ourselves aloof, it will remain opaque, incomprehensible, and even ridiculous. Religion is hard work. Its insights are not self-evident and have to be cultivated in the same way as an appreciation of art, music, or poetry must be developed. The intense effort required is especially evident in the underground labyrinth of Trois Frères at Ariège in the Pyrenees. Doctor Herbert Kuhn, who visited the site in 1926, twelve years after its discovery, described the frightening experience of crawling through the tunnel—scarcely a foot high in some places— that leads to the heart of this magnificent Palaeolithic sanctuary. “I felt as though I were creeping through a coffin,” he recalled. “My heart is pounding and it is difficult to breathe. It is terrible to have the roof so close to one’s head.” He could hear the other members of his party groaning as they struggled through the darkness, and when they finally arrived in the vast underground hall, it felt “like a redemption.” 22 They found themselves gazing at a wall covered in spectacular engravings: mammoths, bison, wild horses, wolverines, and musk oxen; darts flying everywhere; blood spurting from the mouths of the bears; and a human figure clad in animal skin playing a flute. Dominating the scene was a large painted figure, half man, half beast, who fixed his huge, penetrating eyes on the visitors. Was this the Animal Master? Or did this hybrid creature symbolize the underlying unity of animal and human, natural and divine? A boy would not be expected to “believe” in the Animal Master before he entered the caves. But at the culmination of his ordeal, this image would have made a powerful impression; for hours he had, perhaps, fought his way through nearly a mile of convoluted passages to the accompaniment of “songs, cries, noises or mysterious objects thrown from no one knows where,” special effects that would have been “easy to arrange in such a place.” 23 In archaic thinking, there is no concept of the supernatural, no huge gulf separating human and divine. If a priest donned the sacred regalia of an animal pelt to impersonate the Animal Master, he became a temporary manifestation of that divine power. 24 These rituals were not the expression of a “belief” that had to be accepted in blind faith.

• From City of Night (1963)

  I close my eyes. I try to sleep. But I cant. Because when I close my eyes, that recurrent nightmare I had had as a very little boy comes again: And Im being crushed by wooden stones, over which theres a thin, flimsy veil. I try to push them away. But even when I open my eyes, the stones keep crushing me, the veil melting like wax over my face. Finally it was gone. Sleep is coming—not that slow entering into a state of momentary beinglessness. No. It was as if for a long, long time I struggle to open an enormous black door—beyond which I shut myself at last in sleep. Wide awake suddenly, I opened my eyes. I saw three cockroaches crawling on my arm. And in the flickering light of the movie, I looked down on a man squatting before me on the floor, his hungry hot hands on my thighs, his moist lips glued to the opening of my pants. The first church I telephoned was St Patrick’s. “I cant see you,” said the priest, “not until morning, we’re closed now.” And he hung up. I called St Louis Cathedral. “I cant see you—of course not—I get these calls all the time.” A third one—and I said hurriedly: “Dont hang up, Father. Ive got to talk to someone!” And he listened only a few moments. “You must be drunk,” he said angrily, and he hung up. And I called The Church of Eternal Succor, and I called other churches—and they all said: “No.” “Go to sleep.” “Come tomorrow to the confessional.” (Where life doesnt roar so loudly—in whispers, it can be listened to....) “Some time else.” “When we are open.” One even said: “God bless you,” before he hung up. And I was experiencing that only Death, which is the symbolic death of the soul. It’s the death of the soul, not of the body—it’s that which creates ghosts, and in those moments I felt myself becoming a ghost, drained of all that makes this journey to achieve some kind of salvation bearable under the universal sentence of death. And the body becomes cold because the heart and the soul, about to give up, are screaming for sustenance—from any source, even a remote voice on a telephone—and they drain the body in order to support themselves for that one last moment before the horror comes stifling out that already-dying spark. And I was thinking that although there is no God, never was a God, and never will be One—considering the world He made, it is possible to understand Him—or that part of Him that had forbidden Knowing, because—Christ!—at that moment I longed for innocence more than for anything else, and I would have thrown away all the frantic knowing for a return to a state of Grace—which is only the state of, idiot-like, Not Knowing. I called one more church. St Vincent de Paul.

• From The Canterbury Tales (2009)

  Let us return to the cell where Palamon still lay. After the sudden departure of Arcite, he cried out in a paroxysm of anguish and despair. The dark tower rang with his laments. The fetters that held his legs were wet and shining with his salt and bitter tears. ‘Alas, Arcite,’ he cried, ‘in our contest you have the victory! You now enjoy your freedom in our home city. Why should you give a thought to my suffering here? I know that you are valiant. I know that you are shrewd. It is possible that you will call together the members of our affinity, and prosecute so bold a war against Athens that by some chance - or even by some treaty with Theseus - you will obtain the hand of my lady Emily. I would rather lose my life than lose her. But you are free to roam. You have been delivered from our prison. And you are a great lord. My case is different. I am confined. I must weep and wail, for the rest of my life, with all the woes that prison life can give. Yet there is no woe so deep as that of unrequited love. So I must endure a double torment upon this earth.’ As he lay upon the stone floor of his prison, lamenting, he was seized by a fit of jealousy so strong and so sudden that he felt his heart contract within him. It enveloped him like madness. He turned as pale as milk - no, worse - as pale as the bark of a dead ash tree.