Despair

Passages

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

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• From The Pisces (2018)

  You had to hold out for these moments until you knew for sure they were gone and never coming back. I didn’t want group to ruin the way I felt. I saw this in Diana, with whom I still spoke. She had been in pain but couldn’t surrender—not until she knew it was truly over between her and the objects of her affection. It wasn’t enough for the tennis boys to ignore her texts. They would have to go further. They would have to tell her she disgusted them and it was never happening again. Even that might not be enough. In truth what she needed was to have no remaining options at all, no one left to fuck. She would have to burn through all of the tennis boys in Los Angeles, maybe in the state of California. Perhaps again in the future, the pain of not hearing from her conquests—the pain of waiting—would outweigh the potential for sparkle itself. Diana would come back to group and get strong for just a day or for a few weeks. But the moment she got a text, the moment that glitter reached out to her, she would forget what that pain had felt like. She would want only the glitter. Euphoric recall of past glitter would blind her to the suffering it had caused. Then, the group would become just an afterthought: a place for sick people to go, but not for her. She was not so bad off as the sick people. When she called me I could hear it in her voice. Who could blame her? Somehow she had gotten another taste of sparkle. Now that she had a taste or saw its potential she was going for it again. When she looked back at the group she saw sick, miserable humans, something she would want to block out having ever been a part of. But the women in the group would see her as the sick, miserable one. They thought she would either come back or face devastation. But they’d forgotten the sensation of what it was like out there, to be in the throes of madness. I didn’t tell Diana about Theo, either. I took Dominic for a quick walk. He began pulling me in the direction of Oakwood Park, but I didn’t have the energy for it. I held the leash tightly as he yanked and skipped in place, whimpering with his head pointing in that direction. I knew that I should give him what he wanted, a little piece of that effortless happiness, but I couldn’t play wolf woman today. My mind was too much elsewhere, already on the rocks, waiting, waiting for Theo to surface and transform my perception. My mind was already in the ocean. I decided I would call Claire. “How are you doing, dearest?” I asked. “I’m better,” she said. “David called. I’m seeing him tomorrow. I told him he isn’t giving me enough of what I need.

• From The Pisces (2018)

  Things were so bad for me by the end—the end of my last run. It could have killed me, easily. If I ever end up in that emotional space again? In a way, I think I’d be lucky to be dead. It would be worse to roam the planet, a tormented soul, for the rest of my life.” Maybe this was why I was in group, to remind people like her of the hell that awaited them just on the other side. I was here to be a cautionary tale. “How did you get through your withdrawal without dying?” I asked. “I just kept going. One minute at a time. And gradually I saw that the feelings didn’t destroy me.” “But you were forced to give him up, right? You didn’t choose to do it. I mean, he got a restraining order?” “What does a restraining order mean to people like us? In the face of our kind of obsession? But I guess, technically, yes, I was forbidden from being with him. I didn’t make the choice.” So there it was. She hadn’t so much recovered as she was stopped by the law. I pictured her like a marionette, a marionette of obsessive love, with a judge pulling the strings. She was running in place, like a boxer, but could not move toward what she thought she loved. “But what if you could be with him? If you could be with him again, wouldn’t you do it in a heartbeat?” “No, I wouldn’t,” she said quickly. “Come on. What if he was standing right here on the sidewalk?” She thought about it for a second and the corners of her mouth twitched downward. “Do I still miss him? Yes, I do. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t. But I don’t miss what being with him took away from me.” “Like what?” “Everything,” she said. “Dignity, sanity. My life.” “What was the restraining order for anyway?” I said. “It’s embarrassing.” “Come on. I’m in child’s pose on the sidewalk.” She laughed. I’d never seen her laugh before. “Fine,” she said. “One day I saw his wife out walking. I’d never met her, only stalked her on the Internet. But there she was, power walking down Montana right in front of me. And I thought about how unfair it was that I knew so much about her, from the stalking, and she didn’t even know I existed. I just felt livid about it. And I sort of chased her down…with my Prius.” “No!” “It’s true.” “You chased her down! Like tried to run her over?” “I wouldn’t have said that at the time. But yes, that’s what I was doing.” “My God, that’s amazing.” I laughed. “It’s not,” she said. “It’s pretty disgusting.” “I suddenly like you so much more,” I said. “You shouldn’t. None of it was her fault. It was her husband’s fault.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  Every road for miles around Upton was familiar, yet she had not the least idea where she was going. Nor did she know how long she drove, nor when she stopped to procure fresh petrol. The sun rose high and hot in the heavens; it beat down on her without warming her coldness, for always she had the sense of a dead thing that lay close against her heart and oppressed it. A corpse—she was carrying a corpse about with her. Was it the corpse of her love for Angela? If so that love was more terrible dead—oh, far more terrible dead than living. The first stars were shining, but as yet very faintly, when she found herself driving through the gates of Morton. Heard Puddle’s voice calling: ‘Wait a minute. Stop, Stephen!’ Saw Puddle barring her way in the drive, a tiny yet dauntless figure. She pulled up with a jerk: ‘What’s the matter? What is it?’ ‘Where have you been?’ ‘I—don’t know, Puddle.’ But Puddle had clambered in beside her: ‘Listen, Stephen,’ and now she was talking very fast, ‘listen, Stephen—is it—is it Angela Crossby? It is. I can see the thing in your face. My God, what’s that woman done to you, Stephen?’ Then Stephen, in spite of the corpse against her heart, or perhaps because of it, defended the woman: ‘She’s done nothing at all—it was all my fault, but you wouldn’t understand—I got very angry and then I laughed and couldn’t stop laughing—’ Steady—go steady! She was telling too much: ‘No—it wasn’t that exactly. Oh, you know my vile temper, it always goes off at half cock for nothing. Well, then I just drove round and round the country until I cooled down. I’m sorry, Puddle, I ought to have rung up, of course you’ve been anxious.’ Puddle gripped her arm: ‘Stephen, listen, it’s your mother—she thinks that you started quite early for Worcester, I lied—I’ve been nearly distracted, child. If you hadn’t come soon, I’d have had to tell her that I didn’t know where you were. You must never, never go off without a word like this again—But I do understand, oh, I do indeed, Stephen.’ But Stephen shook her head: ‘No, my dear, you couldn’t—and I’d rather not tell you, Puddle.’ ‘Some day you must tell me,’ said Puddle, ‘because—well, because I do understand, Stephen.’ 4 That night the weight against Stephen’s heart, with its icy coldness, melted; and it flowed out in such a torrent of grief that she could not stand up against that torrent, so that drowning though she was she found pen and paper, and she wrote to Angela Crossby. What a letter! All the pent-up passion of months, all the terrible, rending, destructive frustrations must burst from her heart: ‘Love me, only love me the way I love you.

• From In Search of Paul: How Jesus's Apostle Opposed Rome's Empire with God's Kingdom (2005)

  The structural weakness that was but the other side of Rome’s governmental strength was already lethally evident. The system of two annual consuls, twin kings for a year, avoided the danger of royal tyranny, but invited the danger of social anarchy if and when aristocrats, consuls, or generals-become-warlords fought with one another. Roman civil war, with battle-hardened legions on either side, devastated farms, ruined cities, destroyed families, and dispossessed, proscribed, exiled, or slaughtered enemies. Athens had learned that you could have a democracy or an empire, but not both. Rome would learn, that fall day at Philippi, that you could have a republic or an empire, but not both. That lesson would be certified off Actium on the opposite side of Greece on another fall day a decade later. The Republican battle positions were excellent and, like Philippi itself, they straddled the road. Cassius’s forces were south with marshes behind; Brutus’s were north with mountains behind. The Gangitis River ran in front of both and, through the narrows behind their positions, the Republicans held the city and a secure supply route eastward to their fleet off coastal Neapolis, modern Kavalla. The Caesarian legions lacked all of that, but they had, in Antony, the best general and, in Octavian, a divi filius, the divine son of the deified Julius Caesar. The outcome was by no means inevitable, although you might claim, with infallible hindsight, that the Republicans fought for a past already gone, the Caesarians for a future already present. You see, in imagination, those two separate battles at Philippi and, at the end, Cassius dead, a suicide too soon; Brutus dead, a suicide too late; and Antony and Octavian victorious despite that bloody confusion of a general too many. A little over a decade later Antony and Octavian finally faced one another, not as allies, but as enemies. On the morning of September 2, 31 B.C.E., Antony’s squadrons moved out from the Ambracian Gulf on the northwestern coast of Greece, for breakout if possible, for battle if necessary, for victory if imaginable. They rowed past the narrows of Cape Actium with Cleopatra’s fleet forming up behind Antony’s battle line. Octavian and his admiral-general, Agrippa, waited for them out in the Ionian Sea, and both sides maneuvered to turn each other’s flank by means of the rising northwesterners. It was all over before it began, and by day’s end defeat, defection, and despair sent Antony back on Cleopatra’s flagship to another double suicide, this time at Alexandria. Never in the field of human conflict has so much been changed for so many by so little.

• From The Pisces (2018)

  When it manifested as a feeling of emptiness, you could inject something into it: a 3 Musketeers, a walk, something to kind of give it a new form. You could penetrate it and give it more of a shape you felt better about. Or at least you could make a shape inside it or around it. But this was something new, like a thicker, gooey sludge. It had its own shape. It could not be contained. It was a terror. Of what I was terrified I couldn’t exactly say, but it was sitting on me. Every other shape was being absorbed into it. I no longer slept. Was this all because of Jamie? How could someone who got on my nerves so much have this much power over me? I asked my doctor for Ambien. The Ambien helped me sleep. But in the mornings the goo was right there, waiting for me. I was already in it. It was becoming more dense. One night I took nine Ambien. I was not trying to kill myself so much as vanish. I just wanted to go to sleep and be transported into the ether, another world. I guess that vanishing would have meant death, so perhaps it was an attempt at suicide? But I felt afraid of death, or at least, afraid of dying. Was there something that wasn’t death but wasn’t here either? I woke up fourteen hours later, ravenous. Doughnuts! I had to have doughnuts. Stoned from the Ambien, I got in my car and the rest was a blur. I must have blacked out. I only remember waking up on the road, parked, wearing my nightie, with doughnuts strewn around the car seats: powdered, cream-filled, a jelly. I didn’t even like jelly. Cars were honking behind me but I couldn’t figure out what to do. So I just stayed parked like that in the middle of the road and went back to sleep on the steering wheel. Then I woke up again. Now a police officer was leaning into my car on the passenger’s side. He asked if I could get out of the car. I climbed out hazily. I remember thinking a dumb joke about cops and doughnuts. Then I realized: it was the same cop who had come to my house about Jamie’s nose. “Hi,” I said. He gave me a Breathalyzer to test my blood alcohol levels. Those were normal. Then he searched the car for drugs but couldn’t find any. “I’m really feeling sick,” I said. “First the breakup, now some kind of flu. I was going to get the doughnuts for the sugar. I must have fainted. Anyway, if you just let me go home I’ll be okay.” “Ma’am, I can’t let you drive in this condition. Is there anyone I can call to come get you?” I thought of Jamie. He was usually my emergency contact. But I didn’t want him to know I needed anything from him.

• From The Pisces (2018)

  Really it was my fault.” “Huh,” I said. We were silent for a little while. “Do you want to come back inside?” she asked. “I’ll be back in a minute. I just need a little more air.” But I didn’t have the strength to go back in. And I knew that if I tried to walk home I wouldn’t make it. Laughing had given me vertigo and now the sidewalk was spinning. I felt the cement with my palm and it was cooler than the afternoon air. I wondered if perhaps I should just lie down right there. Should I just lie down with my cheek against the sidewalk, just lie down and go to sleep? If I die in that sleep I think I would be okay. But I didn’t want to die there in public in front of whoever could walk by. Suddenly I was afraid again. I took out my phone and pressed the buttons to get a car to take me home. This was just what people did now. We went from emotion to phone. This was how you didn’t die in the twenty-first century. The driver, whose name was Chase, pulled up in a silver Honda. He was cute, with a gap in his front two teeth—maybe age twenty-six at most. He looked like he was trying to grow a mustache, and his brown hair was past his ears under a baseball cap that read FML . He babbled that he was an actor, or was trying to become one. His favorite philosophy about acting was Uta Hagen’s, something about being a student of humanity. Well, for a student of humanity he was shitty at reading people. In my head I just kept saying, Shut up, shut up! I wanted to say, Don’t you know I am dying? But even in my dying I couldn’t be mean to him for fear that he would think I was a bitch. Why did I even care what he thought? Was my death that unimportant? How could I prioritize the feelings of this vacant, mustached kid over my own—me, who was probably dying? I repeated, “That’s nice” and “Oh, interesting,” and lay down in the backseat. I didn’t announce that I would be lying down, I just did it. He wasn’t paying any attention to what I was doing, instead going on about an upcoming audition for a prescription allergy medication where he would play the son-in-law of a woman with adult allergies. He said he had mixed feelings about it, because he didn’t want to limit his range to pharmaceuticals. The part he really wanted was at an audition for Samsung next week. He was trying out to play the phone. “It’s not easy to make it in this town. I’m going up against two hundred other potential phones, at least,” he said, looking in the mirror at the traffic behind him. I noticed he had green eyes.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  The chief interest of the controversy was now shifted to the strictly theological question whether Christ and his Apostles observed complete poverty. This dispute threatened to rend the wing of the Conventuals itself. Michael of Cesena, Ockam, and others, took the position that Christ and his Apostles not only held no property as individuals, but held none in common. John, opposing this view, gave as arguments the gifts of the Magi, that Christ possessed clothes and bought food, the purse of Judas, and Paul’s labor for a living. In the bull Cum inter nonnullos, 1323, and other bulls, John declared it heresy to hold that Christ and the Apostles held no possessions. Those who resisted this interpretation were pronounced, 1324, rebels and heretics. John went farther, and gave back to the order the right of possessing goods in fee simple, a right which Innocent IV. had denied, and he declared that in things which disappear in the using, such as eatables, no distinction can be made between their use and their possession. In 1326 John pronounced Olivi’s commentary on the Apocalypse heretical. The three Spiritual leaders, Cesena, Ockam, and Bonagratia were seized and held in prison until 1328, when they escaped and fled to Lewis the Bavarian at Pisa. It was at this time that Ockam was said to have used to the emperor the famous words, "Do thou defend me with the sword and I will defend thee with the pen"—tu me depfendes gladio, ego te defendam calamo. They were deposed from their offices and included in the ban fulminated against the anti-pope, Peter of Corbara. Later, Cesena submitted to the pope, as Ockam is also said to have done shortly before his death. Cesena died at Munich, 1342 He committed the seal of the order to Ockam. On his death-bed he is said to have cried out: "My God, what have I done? I have appealed against him who is the highest on the earth. But look, O Father, at the spirit of truth that is in me which has not erred through the lust of the flesh but from great zeal for the seraphic order and out of love for poverty." Bonagratia also died in Munich.126 Later in the fourteenth century the Regular Observance grew again to considerable proportions, and in the beginning of the fifteenth century its fame was revived by the flaming preachers Bernardino of Siena and John of Capistrano. The peace of the Franciscan order continued to be the concern of pope after pope until, in 1517, Leo X. terminated the struggle of three centuries by formally recognizing two distinct societies within the Franciscan body. The moderate wing was placed under the Master-General of the Conventual Minorite Brothers, and was confirmed in the right to hold property. The strict or Observant wing was placed under a Minister-General of the Whole Order of St. Francis.127 The latter takes precedence in processions and at other great functions, and holds his office for six years.

• From Available: The unfiltered and empowering new memoir for women about sex, dating and divorce after 40 (2021)

  She has lost her lustrous, cascading curls and now a colorful silk scarf frames her face. I tell her that I am inspired by her, the way she bounces through the world with such bravery and positivity; she tells me that I do the same for her. I want her to know that I don’t think we are in the same camp, that there is a difference between my heartbroken status and her fight-for-her-life status, that my courage pales in comparison to hers. “To be honest, Laura, I would say it’s pretty even. I don’t know how I would survive being in your shoes.” I am dumbfounded. Sure, it’s a nightmare to have an unfaithful husband, but I cannot believe that someone would prefer to fight a life-threatening illness. When I mention this to a close friend who recovered from cancer years earlier, she surprises me by not agreeing with me. “I get it,” she says. “When you’re sick, you strategize to attack it. You turn to experts to make decisions. In your situation, there’s no clear path. You may have tons of love and support from friends but at the end of the day, none of them can tell you what to do. The unknown is more terrifying to a lot of people than something known and scary.” This must be bad , I think to myself. I have at times tried to convince myself that men (and women too, but mostly men, let’s be honest) have been having extramarital affairs since the beginning of time, and that since it happens all the time, maybe it’s not as big a deal as I’m making it. If I can put it into historical context, I will be fine. Of course it doesn’t feel fine at all, but sometimes I can convincingly rationalize to myself that this is nothing but a bump. Now people around me are validating the worst and scariest of what I feel: that this is just as bad, if not even more calamitous, than I had thought. When I confide in friends, they inevitably ask, how did you find out? It amazes me that no matter how compassionate they are, and knowing this will evoke painful memories for me, they have to know. I understand and have reverse sympathy. They need to believe there was a fatal error I made, or something inherently wrong with Michael, anything to verify their own immunity. I am annoyed that their need to know trumps their wanting to protect me from having to relive the story, but I comply with an answer anyway. This is the story I tell. For weeks, maybe months, I had a nagging sense that something was wrong with Michael. In our 27 years together, he had usually been the first to apologize, asking within minutes of an argument, “Can we be friends again?” He did not hold grudges and moved on from personal and business disagreements with admirable speed.

• From The Pisces (2018)

  When it manifested as a feeling of emptiness, you could inject something into it: a 3 Musketeers, a walk, something to kind of give it a new form. You could penetrate it and give it more of a shape you felt better about. Or at least you could make a shape inside it or around it. But this was something new, like a thicker, gooey sludge. It had its own shape. It could not be contained. It was a terror. Of what I was terrified I couldn’t exactly say, but it was sitting on me. Every other shape was being absorbed into it. I no longer slept. Was this all because of Jamie? How could someone who got on my nerves so much have this much power over me? I asked my doctor for Ambien. The Ambien helped me sleep. But in the mornings the goo was right there, waiting for me. I was already in it. It was becoming more dense. One night I took nine Ambien. I was not trying to kill myself so much as vanish. I just wanted to go to sleep and be transported into the ether, another world. I guess that vanishing would have meant death, so perhaps it was an attempt at suicide? But I felt afraid of death, or at least, afraid of dying. Was there something that wasn’t death but wasn’t here either? I woke up fourteen hours later, ravenous. Doughnuts! I had to have doughnuts. Stoned from the Ambien, I got in my car and the rest was a blur. I must have blacked out. I only remember waking up on the road, parked, wearing my nightie, with doughnuts strewn around the car seats: powdered, cream-filled, a jelly. I didn’t even like jelly. Cars were honking behind me but I couldn’t figure out what to do. So I just stayed parked like that in the middle of the road and went back to sleep on the steering wheel. Then I woke up again. Now a police officer was leaning into my car on the passenger’s side. He asked if I could get out of the car. I climbed out hazily. I remember thinking a dumb joke about cops and doughnuts. Then I realized: it was the same cop who had come to my house about Jamie’s nose. “Hi,” I said. He gave me a Breathalyzer to test my blood alcohol levels. Those were normal. Then he searched the car for drugs but couldn’t find any. “I’m really feeling sick,” I said. “First the breakup, now some kind of flu. I was going to get the doughnuts for the sugar. I must have fainted. Anyway, if you just let me go home I’ll be okay.” “Ma’am, I can’t let you drive in this condition. Is there anyone I can call to come get you?” I thought of Jamie. He was usually my emergency contact. But I didn’t want him to know I needed anything from him.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  Morton—so quietly perfect a thing, yet the thing of all others that she must fly from, that she must forget; but she could not forget it in these surroundings; they reminded by contrast. Curious what Brockett had said that evening about putting the sea between herself and England. . . . In view of her own half-formed plan to do so, his words had come as a kind of echo of her thoughts; it was almost as though he had peeped through a secret keyhole into her mind, had been spying upon her trouble. By what right did this curious man spy upon her—this man with the soft, white hands of a woman, with the movements befitting those soft, white hands, yet so ill-befitting the rest of his body? By no right; and how much had the creature found out when his eye had been pressed to that secret keyhole? Clever—Brockett was fiendishly clever—all his whims and his foibles could not disguise it. His face gave him away, a hard, clever face with sharp eyes that were glued to other people’s keyholes. That was why Brockett wrote such fine plays, such cruel plays; he fed his genius on live flesh and blood. Carnivorous genius. Moloch, fed upon live flesh and blood! But she, Stephen, had tried to feed her inspiration upon herbage, the kind, green herbage of Morton. For a little while such food had sufficed, but now her talent had sickened, was dying perhaps—or had she too fed it on blood, her heart’s blood when she had written The Furrow? If so, her heart would not bleed any more—perhaps it could not—perhaps it was dry. A dry, withered thing; for she did not feel love these days when she thought of Angela Crossby—that must mean that her heart had died within her. A gruesome companion to have, a dead heart. Angela Crossby—and yet there were times when she longed intensely to see this woman, to hear her speak, to stretch out her arms and clasp them around the woman’s body—not gently, not patiently as in the past, but roughly, brutally even. Beastly—it was beastly! She felt degraded. She had no love to offer Angela Crossby, not now, only something that lay like a stain on the beauty of what had once been love. Even this memory was marred and defiled, by herself even more than by Angela Crossby.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  Something had to be done. Go into the bedroom, Stephen Gordon’s bedroom that faced on the courtyard . . . just a few short steps and then the window. A girl, hatless, with the sun falling full on her hair . . . she was almost running . . . she stumbled a little. But now there were two people down in the courtyard—a man had his hands on the girl’s bowed shoulders. He questioned her, yes, that was it, he questioned; and the girl was telling him why she was there, why she had fled from that thick, awful darkness. He was looking at the house, incredulous, amazed; hesitating as though he were coming in; but the girl went on and the man turned to follow . . . They were side by side, he was gripping her arm . . . They were gone; they had passed out under the archway. Then all in a moment the stillness was shattered: ‘Mary, come back! Come back to me, Mary!’ David crouched and trembled. He had crawled to the bed, and he lay there watching with his eyes of amber; trembling because such an anguish as this struck across him like the lash of a whip, and what could he do, the poor beast, in his dumbness? She turned and saw him, but only for a moment, for now the room seemed to be thronging with people. Who were they, these strangers with the miserable eyes? And yet, were they all strangers? Surely that was Wanda? And some one with a neat little hole in her side—Jamie clasping Barbara by the hand; Barbara with the white flowers of death on her bosom. Oh, but they were many, these unbidden guests, and they called very softly at first and then louder. They were calling her by name, saying: ‘Stephen, Stephen!’ The quick, the dead, and the yet unborn—all calling her, softly at first and then louder. Aye, and those lost and terrible brothers from Alec’s, they were here, and they also were calling: ‘Stephen, Stephen, speak with your God and ask Him why He has left us forsaken!’ She could see their marred and reproachful faces with the haunted, melancholy eyes of the invert—eyes that had looked too long on a world that lacked all pity and all understanding: ‘Stephen, Stephen, speak with your God and ask Him why He has left us forsaken!’ And these terrible ones started pointing at her with their shaking, white-skinned, effeminate fingers: ‘You and your kind have stolen our birthright; you have taken our strength and have given us your weakness!’ They were pointing at her with white, shaking fingers.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  The end of Jacques de Molay, the 22d and last grand-master of the order of Templars, was worthy of its proudest days. At the first trial he confessed to the charges of denying Christ and spitting upon the cross, and was condemned, but afterwards recalled his confession. His case was reopened in 1314. With Geoffrey de Charney, grand-preceptor of Normandy, and others, he was led in front of Notre Dame Cathedral, and sentenced to perpetual imprisonment. Molay then stood forth and declared that the charges against the order were false, and that he had confessed to them under the strain of torture and instructions from the king. Charney said the same. The commission promised to reconsider the case the next day. But the king’s vengeance knew no bounds, and that night, March 11, 1314, the prisoners were burned. The story ran that while the flames were doing their grewsome (sic) work, Molay summoned pope and king to meet him at the judgment bar within a year. The former died, in a little more than a month, of a loathsome disease, though penitent, as it was reported, for his treatment of the order, and the king, by accident, while engaged in the chase, six months later. The king was only 46 years old at the time of his death, and 14 years after, the last of his direct descendants was in his grave and the throne passed to the house of Valois. As for the possessions of the order, papal decrees turned them over to the Knights of St. John, but Philip again intervened and laid claim to 260,000 pounds as a reimbursement for alleged losses to the Temple and the expense of guarding the prisoners.105 In Spain, they passed to the orders of San Iago di Compostella and Calatrava. In Aragon, they were in part applied to a new order, Santa Maria de Montesia, and in Portugal to the Military Order of Jesus Christ, ordo militiae Jesu Christi. Repeated demands made by the pope secured the transmission of a large part of their possessions to the Knights of St. John. In England, in 1323, parliament granted their lands to the Hospitallers, but the king appropriated a considerable share to himself. The Temple in London fell to the Earl of Pembroke, 1313.106

• From In Search of Paul: How Jesus's Apostle Opposed Rome's Empire with God's Kingdom (2005)

  In Epode 16, as if in reply to Epode 7’s terrible question, Horace offers an equally terrible answer, since “a second generation is being ground to pieces by civil war, and Rome through her own strength is tottering” (1–2). This city that no one else could conquer, “this selfsame city we ourselves shall ruin, we, an impious generation, of stock accurst,” and wild animals and wilder barbarians will soon track through “the ashes of our city” (9–12). And the solution? Abandon Rome immediately and take ship westward vowing never to return. But the vow must be absolute, never to return until, per impossibile, rocks float, the Apennines become peninsulas, and “the trustful herd fear not the tawny lion.” Having vowed these solemn pledges and whatever can prevent our sweet return, let us go forth, the State entire, or the portion better than the ignorant herd!…Us the encompassing Ocean awaits. Let us seek the Fields, the Happy Fields, and the Islands of the Blest…. Jupiter set apart these shores for a righteous folk, ever since with bronze he dimmed the luster of the Golden Age. (35–37, 41–42, 63–64) Horace describes the Golden Age on those mythical isles as Virgil did in his Eclogue 4 or Isaiah in the quotation below. It is the standard dream of feral harmony and unlabored fertility: “There the goats come unbidden to the milking-pail; and the willing flock brings swelling udders home; nor does the bear at eventide growl ’round the sheepfold, nor the ground swell high with vipers” (49–52). For Horace, at that stage, the Golden Age was not imminent in historical time and present place, but only in mythical time and distant place for those who would abandon Rome. The early 30s B.C.E. were Virgil’s paradise gained, but Horace’s paradise lost. A Question of Divine Justice COSMIC TRANSFORMATION. In Jerusalem by the 730s B.C.E., the prophet-priest Isaiah had already imagined a perfect world where animals and humans lived together in harmony, peace, and nonviolence: The wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them. The cow and the bear shall graze, their young shall lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put its hand on the adder’s den. They will not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain; for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea. (11:6–9)

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Suso’s constitution, which was never strong, was undermined by the rigorous penitential discipline to which he subjected himself for twenty-two years. An account of it is given in his Autobiography. Its severity, so utterly contrary to the spirit of our time, was so excessive that Suso’s statements seem at points to be almost incredible. The only justification for repeating some of the details is to show the lengths to which the penitential system of the Mediaeval Church was carried by devotees. Desiring to carry the marks of the Lord Jesus, Suso pricked into his bare chest, with a sharp instrument, the monogram of Christ, IHS. The three letters remained engraven there till his dying day and, "Whenever my heart moved," as he said, "the name moved also." At one time he saw in a dream rays of glory illuminating the scar. He wore a hair shirt and an iron chain. The loss of blood forced him to put the chain aside, but for the hair shirt he substituted an undergarment, studded with 150 sharp tacks. This he wore day and night, its points turned inwards towards his body. Often, he said, it made the impression on him as if he were lying in a nest of wasps. When he saw his body covered with vermin, and yet he did not die, he exclaimed that the murderer puts to death at one stroke, "but alas, O tender God, — zarter Gott,—what a dying is this of mine!" Yet this was not enough. Suso adopted the plan of tying around his neck a part of his girdle. To this he attached two leather pockets, into which he thrust his hands. These he made fast with lock and key till the next morning. This kind of torture he continued to practise for sixteen years, when he abandoned it in obedience to a heavenly vision. How little had the piety of the Middle Ages succeeded in correcting the perverted views of the old hermits of the Nitrian desert, whose stories this Swiss monk was in the habit of reading, and whose austerities he emulated!

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  There was Margaret Roland, the poetess, a woman whose work was alive with talent. The staunchest of allies, the most fickle of lovers, she seemed likely enough to end up in the work-house, with her generous financial apologies which at moments made pretty large holes in her savings. It was almost impossible not to like her, since her only fault lay in being too earnest; every fresh love affair was the last while it lasted, though of course this was apt to be rather misleading. A costly business in money and tears; she genuinely suffered in heart as in pocket. There was nothing arresting in Margaret’s appearance, sometimes she dressed well, sometimes she dressed badly, according to the influence of the moment. But she always wore ultra feminine shoes, and frequently bought model gowns when in Paris. One might have said quite a womanly woman, unless the trained ear had been rendered suspicious by her voice which had something peculiar about it. It was like a boy’s voice on the verge of breaking. And then there was Brockett with his soft, white hands; and several others there were, very like him. There was also Adolphe Blanc, the designer—a master of colour whose primitive tints had practically revolutionized taste, bringing back to the eye the joy of the simple. Blanc stood in a little niche by himself, which at times must surely have been very lonely. A quiet, tawny man with the eyes of the Hebrew, in his youth he had been very deeply afflicted. He had spent his days going from doctor to doctor: ‘What am I?’ They had told him, pocketing their fees; not a few had unctuously set out to cure him. Cure him, good God! There was no cure for Blanc, he was, of all men, the most normal abnormal. He had known revolt, renouncing his God; he had known despair, the despair of the godless; he had known wild moments of dissipation; he had known long months of acute self-abasement. And then he had suddenly found his soul, and that finding had brought with it resignation, so that now he could stand in a niche by himself, a pitiful spectator of what, to him, often seemed a bewildering scheme of creation. For a living he designed many beautiful things—furniture, costumes and scenery for ballets, even women’s gowns if the mood was upon him, but this he did for a physical living. To keep life in his desolate, long-suffering soul, he had stored his mind with much profound learning. So now many poor devils went to him for advice, which he never refused though he gave it sadly. It was always the same: ‘Do the best you can, no man can do more—but never stop fighting. For us there is no sin so great as despair, and perhaps no virtue so vital as courage.’ Yes, indeed, to this gentle and learned Jew went many a poor baptized Christian devil.

• From The Pisces (2018)

  It’s like if Sara the foot-toucher were on acid all the time. It makes me grateful for my own problems. I would love to bring the two groups together into one big circle of healing. This way, when Brianne is complaining about Millionaire Match, she can be reminded that at least she doesn’t have auditory hallucinations. Maybe I’m destined to lead a group-therapy exchange program.” “Wow, sounds like they really got you, didn’t they?” I laughed. “I don’t know if they did or didn’t. But do you want to know what’s the weirdest? The strangest thing of all? I don’t want men anymore. I feel finished.” “Wow.” “They say that you don’t hit rock bottom until you hit rock bottom. Lucy, what if this is it?” “What if it is?” “All I can tell you is that I feel so bloody free right now!” she said, adjusting her hospital bracelet. “I’m so glad for you, Claire,” I said. Then I began to cry. “Oh no, what’s wrong?” “Please. You have to help me. I am in so much pain. Theo is gone forever and I don’t know what to do,” I said. “The swimmer?” she asked. “What happened?” “He left,” I said. “He just left and I don’t think he’s ever coming back.” “Oh love,” she said. “What do I do?” I asked. “Ignore him,” she said. “Ignore, ignore, ignore. Do not pursue. In your mind, you have to literally give him up.” “If I give him up do you think he will come back?” “They always come back if you give them up—especially, as we know, if you find other cock. But what if you don’t do that? What if you don’t replace him with anyone? You don’t have to give him up just so that he will come back to you. You could give him up just to give him up.” “Why?” “Well, for one thing, it might behoove you to sit with yourself for a while.” Who was this talking? “So that’s it? Just give him up and sit?” “None of these wankers are worth the pain,” she said. “You have to dump them on the roadside and let them rot there.” “You don’t understand,” I said. “He didn’t fuck me over. It was me who hurt him. It was me who lied to him, not the other way around. This isn’t like the other ones. This time I’m in control. Sort of.” “You asked my advice and I’m giving it to you.” “I can’t do that,” I said. “I need love. Or if it’s not love, then the power of that feeling. I love it. I love love. It’s the only thing I have.” “Oh, Lucy,” she said. “You have a lot. It’s like your tits.” “What?” “Your tits. You always say that you have no tits. But really, your breasts are ample.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  The Jewish political and military messiah meant nothing to Greeks and Romans. And to Paul Jesus had never been a messiah in this sense. That was not at all what Christianity was about. As a diaspora Jew, he had no quarrel with the Romans. On the contrary, he seems to have admired the Roman system and took advantage of it. His public claim to Roman citizenship was more than a physical escape from the justice of the law, now odious to him: it was a symbolic renunciation of Judaic status. Paul did not wish to see the Christian movement damaged and perhaps ruined by involvement with the (to him) irrelevant and hopeless quest for a Jewish state. Christ’s kingdom was not of this world! In this respect Paul saw eye to eye with Josephus: would that the two might have met, for Paul could have found a convert. But Paul was defeated and the Jewish-Christian Church of Jerusalem moved closer to Judaism, and – being a radical movement – to Zealotry and nationalism. A Slavonic translation of an early, uncensored, version of Josephus’s history suggests that the missing passages on Christianity emphasize the political aims of the Jewish-Christian resurrectionists in Judea. During the sixties the Jerusalem Church lost its Christian significance and the remains of its universalism as it became identified with the growing revolt against Rome. Zealots roamed the country districts. Religious terrorism increased in the towns. The crowded processions of the great feasts became the occasions for sudden murders which provoked riots and brutal retaliation. Law and order broke down and Rome was blamed for the economic distress which ensued. In Jerusalem a despairing proletariat turned against Rome, against a collaborationist sacerdotal aristocracy, and towards wonder-workers, patriotic brigands, and the sectaries. The final revolt and its repression lasted four years. It placed a great strain on the military and economic resources of the empire and Rome was correspondingly vengeful. The total of Jewish losses provided by Josephus add up to nearly one and a half million. The figure is unrealistic but it accurately mirrors the horrors of those years. There was a new, desperate diaspora. The Temple was destroyed and henceforth Judaism became the religion of the Talmud. The Jewish nation never recovered from the blow, though the final dispersion took place in the next century, when Jerusalem was razed and rebuilt as a Roman colonial city. The Jewish-Christian community was dispersed; most of its leaders were no doubt killed. Survivors fled to Asia Minor, the east, Egypt, especially to Alexandria. Thus the centre of Christian gravity shifted to Rome; and the theological vacuum left by the extinction of the Jerusalem Church was filled by the Pauline system. A number of readjustments followed. Paul’s Christ had not been anchored to the historical Jesus of the Jerusalem Church. This was remedied by Mark, who wrote the first biography of Jesus, presenting him as a deity.

• From The Pisces (2018)

  I grabbed Dominic and got a car to her apartment in West L.A. I saw, for the first time, where she lived. It was not at all what I expected. I knew that her ex-husband had kept their home in Pacific Palisades and she had taken an apartment, but I had imagined a grand courtyard with a fountain: something small yet charming, Old World Spanish with luxe modern interiors. But this reminded me of my place in Phoenix and that I would be going back there. The complex was big, old, and musty, and there was a pool drained of water. A sign hung on the gate read CLOSED. When I went in she looked completely different, her hair greasy, unwashed, and piled high on her head in a bun, instead of the flowing curls I was used to. Under her eyes were big circles, the faint purple color of the underside of a shell. They were deep and I imagined lying down in them. She was wearing a T-shirt inside out and sweatpants, no bra. Her breasts sort of hung there, facing down. Depression is real, I thought. It’s a real disease. I don’t know why I thought that then. Like, that it just dawned on me. I’d had depression my whole life too but more of a dysthymia—a general malaise. I had never thought of it as an ailment that manifested physically. At least, it had never affected my physicality in the way that it seemed to have affected Claire’s. Or maybe it did and I simply couldn’t see it. Maybe this was what I had looked like when I broke down after Jamie. Maybe this is what people saw when they saw me. “Are your kids here?” I asked. “Arnold has them, thank God.” I was a little scared of her. Even when she said she’d been harming herself there was still a bit of Claire in her, some of the humor and charm, as though the depression was something she could slip out of when she needed to engage with the world. When she needed to protect me from seeing it. But now she was clearly gone. I wondered if it really had to do with David or Trent or any of the men, or if the two just coincided. This seemed so much greater than men. “You’re going to be okay,” I said. But I wasn’t convinced. “I’m gutted. I really just don’t see the point of going on living,” she said. “It just seems so insane. Like, why would you?” “I don’t know,” I said, because truthfully I didn’t. “I’m probably not the best person to talk you out of suicide.” I was trying to make her laugh but she didn’t.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  He was furious when he discovered that people were using the water in which he washed to effect cures: ‘he said that if a serf did it he should be maimed, and if a free man, he should be reduced to servitude . . . people took his threats of mutilation seriously, knowing that he would not yield in the matter of punishment.’ So far as one can gather, Gerald did nothing more than treat his dependents justly, by the very imperfect standards of the times; that, in the tenth century, was sufficiently rare to promote a reputation for sanctity. It is a chilling little tale. Of course, the expectations of Dark Age man were not high. The Carolingian age itself was a comparatively brief episode of order between repeated breakdowns in society. The profound pessimism which Christians drew from Augustine’s writings itself seemed to mirror the uncertainties of life as they knew it. There grew up at this time a strong sense of the pointlessness of earthly life, which persisted long after horizons had widened – indeed, until the Renaissance. We find it particularly in endowment charters and documents justifying gifts of property to the church. In 1126, for instance, Stephen, Count of Boulogne, made over lands to Furness Abbey, ‘seeing that the bonds of this our age are breaking and falling daily into decay, seeing, again, how all the transitory pomp of this world, with the flowers and rosy chaplets and palms of flourishing kings, emperors, dukes and all rich men do wither from day to day; how, again, death casts them all into one mingled mass and hurries them swiftly to the grave ...’ And so forth. Otto, Bishop of Bamberg, asked why he founded monasteries when there were already so many, replied: ‘This whole world is a place of exile; and so long as we live in this life we are pilgrims of the Lord. Therefore we need spiritual stables and inns, and such resting-places as monasteries afford to pilgrims. Moreover, the end of all things is at hand, and the whole world is seated in wickedness; wherefore it is good to multiply monasteries for the sake of those who would flee from the world and save their souls.’ Despite these limitations, however, the attempt to create a totally Christian society was neither ignoble nor wholly unsuccessful. There is something enormously impressive, almost heroic, about the work of such men as Charlemagne and Alfred. The Christian theory of kingship had allotted them a giant’s role: they did their best to rise to it. Augustinian theory saw Christian mankind and its institutions as a whole, fully integrated, almost organic. During this period a conscious effort was made to realize the conception, and genuine progress was made. Never before or since has any human society come closer to operating as a unity, wholly committed to a perfectionist programme of conduct.

• From The Pisces (2018)

  52.I returned to the rocks. I knew I belonged there. If there was going to be desolation, no number of terrestrial men could fix me. I needed to go to the ocean, the primal tap, where the catalyst of my illness swam freely. If I was going to be alone and full of despair, let me at least be desolate here. Let me go cold turkey in the place I now loved most. Maybe it wouldn’t be so cold turkey after all? Maybe the fumes of memories could bring me down more gently. Only once in that week of waiting by the rocks did someone bother me. A lifeguard drove by in a jeep and asked me if everything was okay. I wanted to say, Well, actually, if you really want to know… but instead I said that I was fine. Then I told him I was a scientist conducting a study of the waves. “You know you’re not supposed to be out here this late at night,” he said. “I know. But it’s for the good of the tides.” “Are you sure you’re okay?” “I’m okay.” Then everything fell silent and he drove away. I took this to mean that I was supposed to be there. I was surely being tested, to see how strong and devoted I was. It was like I was part of some ancient worship ceremony, only instead of leaving candles, food, or wine at the altar, I was leaving myself. And instead of an altar there was the ocean. I would look out into the waves and for a moment I would really believe that I saw him. I had never seen him out in the waves, he never swam close enough to the surface, but now I constantly hallucinated him. Usually he was a bird skimming across the water. Once he was a dolphin. And every time, when what I thought was him would turn out to be only seafoam, or the wind blowing on the water, I wondered how much of everything I had seen or thought I’d seen in my lifetime had been only illusion like that. I wondered if anything was really living or if anything had ever lived.