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 Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  No, you must kill him.” 110 An Israelite town guilty of this idolatry must be put under the “ban,” burned to the ground, and its inhabitants slaughtered. 111 This was all so novel that in order to justify these innovations, the Deuteronomists literally had to rewrite history. They began a massive editorial revision of the texts in the royal archives that would one day become the Hebrew Bible, changing the wording and import of earlier law codes and introducing new legislation that endorsed their proposals. They recast the history of Israel, adding fresh material to the older narratives of the Pentateuch and giving Moses a prominence that he may not have had in some of the earlier traditions. The climax of the Exodus story was no longer a theophany but the gift of the Ten Commandments and the sefer torah. Drawing on earlier sagas, now lost to us, the reformers put together a history of the two kingdoms of Israel and Judah that became the books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings, which “proved” that the idolatrous iniquity of the northern kingdom had been the cause of its destruction. When they described Joshua’s conquests, they depicted him slaughtering the local population of the Promised Land and devastating their cities like an Assyrian general. They transformed the ancient myth of the ban so that it became an expression of God’s justice and a literal rather than a fictional story of attempted genocide. Their history culminated in the reign of Josiah, the new Moses who would liberate Israel from Pharaoh once again, a king who was even greater than David. 112 This strident theology left an indelible trace on the Hebrew Bible; many of the writings so frequently quoted to prove the ineradicable aggression and intolerance of “ monotheism” were either composed or recast by these reformers. Yet the Deuteronomist reform was never implemented. Josiah’s bid for independence ended in 609 BCE, when he was killed in a skirmish with Pharaoh Neco. The new Babylonian empire replaced Assyria and competed with Egypt for control of the Middle East. For a few years Judah dodged between these great powers, but eventually, after an uprising in Judah in 597, Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, deported eight thousand Judean aristocrats, soldiers, and skilled artisans. 113 Ten years later he destroyed the temple, razed Jerusalem to the ground, and deported five thousand more Judeans, leaving only the lower classes in the devastated land. In Babylonia the Judean exiles were reasonably well treated. Some lived in the capital; others were housed in undeveloped areas near the new canals and could, to an extent, manage their own affairs. 114 But exile is a spiritual as well as a physical dislocation. In Judah the deportees had been the elite class; now they had no political rights, and some even had to work in the corvée.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  It showed what can happen once the sense of the sacredness of every single human being—a conviction at the heart of traditional religions that quasi-religious systems seem unable or disinclined to re-create—is lost. On August 6, 1945, a 3,600-kilogram atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, killing approximately 140,000 people instantaneously. Three days later a plutonium-type bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, killing some 24,000 people. 8 For centuries people had dreamed of a final apocalypse wrought by God; now, with weapons of mass destruction, it appeared that human beings no longer needed God to achieve apocalyptic effects. The nation had become a supreme value, and the international community acknowledged the legitimacy of a nuclear strike to protect it, despite the prospect of total annihilation that such means suggested. There could be no more potent evidence of the death wish Freud had described. But it also, perhaps, suggests a flaw in the purely secular ideal that eliminates “holiness” from its politics—the conviction that some things or people must be “set apart” from our personal interests. The cultivation of that transcendence—be it God, Dao, Brahman, or Nirvana—had, at its best, helped people to appreciate human finitude. But if the nation becomes the absolute value (in religious terms, an “idol”), there is no reason why we should not liquidate those who appear to threaten it. This death wish was, however, not only present in the godless violence of secular nationalism but is also evident in the religiously articulated violence of the late twentieth century. Westerners were quite rightly horrified by the Iranian child- martyrs who died on the battlefields of the Iraq-Iran War. As soon as war was declared, adolescents from the slums and shantytowns had crowded into the mosques, begging to be sent to the front. Radicalized by the excitement of the revolution, they hoped to escape the tedium of their grim lives. And so, as in traditional societies of times past, the potential for ecstasy and intensity through warfare beckoned. The government issued an edict allowing male children as young as twelve to enlist at the front without their parents’ permission. They became wards of the imam and were promised a place in paradise. Tens of thousands of adolescents poured into the war zone, wearing the martyrs’ insignia of crimson headbands. Some, trying to clear minefields, ran ahead of the troops and were blown to pieces. Others attacked as suicide bombers, deploying a tactic that has been used in various contexts of asymmetrical warfare since the eleventh century. Scribes were sent to the front to write the martyrs’ wills, many of which took the form of letters to the Imam and spoke of their joy in fighting “alongside friends on the road to Paradise.”

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  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. Angela, for God’s sake, try to love me a little—don’t throw me away, because if you do I’m utterly finished. You know how I love you, with my soul and my body; if it’s wrong, grotesque, unholy—have pity. I’ll be humble. Oh, my darling, I am humble now; I’m just a poor, heart-broken freak of a creature who loves you and needs you much more than its life, because life’s worse than death, ten times worse without you. I’m some awful mistake—God’s mistake—I don’t know if there are any more like me, I pray not for their sakes, because it’s pure hell. But oh, my dear, whatever I am, I just love you and love you. I thought it was dead, but it wasn’t. It’s alive—so terribly alive to-night in my bedroom. . . .’ And so it went on for page after page. But never a word about Roger Antrim and what she had seen that morning in the garden. Some fine instinct of utterly selfless protection towards this woman had managed to survive all the anguish and all the madness of that day. The letter was a terrible indictment against Stephen, a complete vindication of Angela Crossby. 5Angela went to her husband’s study, and she stood before him utterly shaken, utterly appalled at what she would do, yet utterly and ruthlessly determined to do it from a primitive instinct of self-preservation. In her ears she could still hear that terrible laughter—that uncanny, hysterical, agonized laughter. Stephen was mad, and God only knew what she might do or say in a moment of madness, and then—but she dared not look into the future. Cringing in spirit and trembling in body, she forgot the girl’s faithful and loyal devotion, her will to forgive, her desire to protect, so clearly set forth in that pitiful letter. She said: ‘Ralph, I want to ask your advice. I’m in an awful mess—it’s Stephen Gordon. You think I’ve been carrying on with Roger—good Lord, if you only knew what I’ve endured these last few months! I have seen a great deal of Roger, I admit—quite innocently of course—still, all the same, I’ve seen him—I thought it would show her that I’m not—that I’m not—’ For one moment her voice seemed about to fail her, then she went on quite firmly: ‘that I’m not a pervert; that I’m not that sort of degenerate creature.’ He sprang up: ‘What?’ he bellowed.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  But if you are unwilling to concede me this favour, let me at least have a beaker of water so that I may moisten my mouth, which is so parched and dry that my tears will not suffice to bathe it.’ From the sound of her voice, the scholar realized all too plainly that her strength was failing. Furthermore, from that part of her body which was visible to him, he could see that she must be burnt by the sun from head to toe. All of which, together with the humble tone of her entreaties, caused him to feel a modicum of pity for her; but nevertheless he replied: ‘Vile strumpet that you are, you shall not perish by these hands of mine, but by your own, if you really want to die. You will have as much water from me to relieve you from the heat, as you gave me fire to restore me from the cold. My one great regret is that the illness I suffered on account of the cold had to be treated with the warmth of stinking dung, whereas your own injuries, occasioned by the heat, can be treated with fragrant rose-water. And whereas I practically lost my life as well as the use of my limbs, you will merely be flayed by this heat, and emerge with your beauty unimpaired, like a snake that has sloughed off its skin.’ ‘Ah! woe is me,’ cried the lady. ‘I pray to God that only my worst enemies should acquire beauty by such means as this! But how could you be so cruel as to torture me in this fashion? What greater punishment could you or anyone else have inflicted upon me, if I had caused your entire kith and kin to the a lingering death? Of this at least I am certain, that no traitor who had put a whole city to the slaughter could have been more barbarously treated than I have, for not only do you cause me to be roasted in the sun and devoured by flies, but you refuse me a beaker of water, when even a condemned murderer on his way to the gallows will frequently be given wine to drink if only he asks for it. However, since I see you are determined to be quite ruthless, and my suffering cannot move you in the slightest, I shall now prepare to die with resignation, so that God may have mercy on my soul, and I pray that He will observe what you have done and judge you accordingly.’ Having uttered these words, she crawled in terrible agony, being convinced that she would never survive the intense heat, towards the centre of the platform, where, quite apart from her other torments, she felt that she would swoon from thirst at any moment. And all the time, she was wailing loudly and bemoaning her misfortunes.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  It was easy to see that the boom and inflation period had been based at first on the extraordinary growth of the country through the immigration and trade that had followed the Civil War. But the Franco-German war had wasted wealth prodigiously, deranged trade too, and diverted commerce into new channels. France and then England first felt the shock: London had to call in monies lent to American railways and other enterprises. Bit by bit even American optimism was overcome for immigration in 1871 and 1872 fell off greatly and the foreign calls for cash exhausted our banks. The crash came in 1873; nothing like it was seen again in these States till the slump of 1907 which led to the founding of the Federal Reserve Bank. Willie’s fortune melted almost in a moment: this mortgage and that, had to be met and could only be met by forced sales with no buyers except at minimum values. When I talked to him, he was almost in despair; no money: no property: all lost; the product of three years’ hard work and successful speculation all swept away. Could I help him? If not, he was ruined. He told me then he had drawn all he could from my father: naturally I promised to help him; but first I had to pay the Gregorys and to my astonishment he begged me to let him have the money instead. “Mrs. Gregory and all of ’em like you”, he pleaded, “they can wait, I cannot; I know of a purchase that could be made that would make me rich again!” I realised then that he was selfish through and through, conscienceless in egotistic greed. I gave up my faint hope that he would ever repay me: henceforth he was a stranger to me and one that I did not even respect, though he had some fine, ingratiating qualities. I left him to walk across the river and in a few blocks met Rose. She looked prettier than ever and I turned and walked with her, praising her beauty to the skies and indeed she deserved it; short green sleeves, I remember, set off her exquisite, plump, white arms. I promised her some books and made her say she would read them; indeed I was astonished by the warmth of her gratitude: she told me it was sweet of me, gave me her eyes and we parted the best of friends, with just a hint of warmer relationship in the future. That evening I paid the Gregorys, Willie’s debt and my own and—did not send him the balance of what I possessed as I had promised; but instead, a letter telling him I had preferred to cancel his debt to the Gregorys.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  A week later we reached Wichita where we decided to rest for a couple of days and there we encountered another piece of bad luck. Ever since he had caught syphilis, Charlie seemed to have lost his gay temper: he became gloomy and morose and we could do nothing to cheer him up. The very first night he had to be put to bed at the gambling saloon in Wichita where he had become speechlessly drunk. And next day he was convinced that he had been robbed of his money by the man who kept the bank and went about swearing that he would get even with him at all costs. By the evening he had infected Bent and Jo with his insane determination and finally I went along hoping to save him, if I could, from some disaster. Already I had asked Bob to get another herdsman and drive the cattle steadily towards Kansas City: he consented and for hours before we went to the saloon, Bob had been trekking north. I intended to rejoin him some five or six miles further on and drive slowly for the rest of the night. Somehow or other, I felt that the neighborhood was unhealthy for us. The gambling saloon was lighted by three powerful oil lamps: two over the faro-table and one over the bar. Jo stationed himself at the bar while Bent and Charlie went to the table: I walked about the room trying to play the indifferent among the twenty or thirty men scattered about. Suddenly about 10 o’clock Charlie began disputing with the banker: they both rose, the banker drawing a big revolver from the table drawer in front of him. At the same moment Charlie struck the lamp above him and I saw him draw his gun just as all the lights went out leaving us in pitch darkness. I ran to the door and was carried through it in a sort of mad stampede. A minute afterwards Bent joined me and then Charlie came rushing out at top speed with Jo hard after him. In a moment we were at the corner of the street where we had left our ponies and were off: one or two shots followed; I thought we had got off scot free; but I was mistaken. We had ridden hell for leather, for about an hour when Charlie without apparent reason pulled up and swaying fell out of his saddle: his pony stopped dead and we all gathered round the wounded man: “I’m finished”, said Charlie in a weak voice, “but I’ve got my money back and I want you to send it to my mother in Pleasant Hill, Missouri. It’s about a thousand dollars, I guess.” “Are you badly hurt?” I asked. “He drilled me through the stomach first go off” Charlie said pointing, “and I guess I’ve got it at least twice more through the lungs: I’m done.”

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  Many there are who 'succumb' to sorrow to such a degree that they literally cannot stand upright, but sink or lean against surrounding objects, fall on their knees, or, like Romeo in the monk's cell, throw themselves upon the earth in their despair. "But this weakness of the entire voluntary motor apparatus (the so-called apparatus of 'animal' life) is only one side of the physiology of grief. Another side, hardly less important, and in its consequences perhaps even more so, belongs to another subdivision of the motor apparatus, namely, the involuntary or 'organic' muscles, especially those which are found in the walls of the blood-vessels, and the use of which is, by contracting, to diminish the latter's calibre. These muscles and their nerves, forming together the 'vaso-motor apparatus,' act in grief contrarily to the voluntary motor apparatus. Instead of being paralyzed, like the latter, the vascular muscles are more strongly contracted than usual, so that the tissues and organs of the body become anæmic. The immediate consequence of this bloodlessness is pallor and shrunkenness, and the pale color and collapsed features are the peculiarities which, in connection with the relaxation of the visage, give to the victim of grief his characteristic physiognomy, and often give an impression of emaciation which ensues too rapidly to be possibly due to real disturbance of nutrition, or waste uncompensated by repair. Another regular consequence of the bloodlessness of the skin is a feeling of cold, and shivering. A constant symptom of grief is sensitiveness to cold, and difficulty in keeping warm. In grief, the inner organs are unquestionably anæmic as well as the skin. This is of course not obvious to the eye, but many phenomena prove it. Such is the diminution of the various secretions, at least of such as are accessible to observation. The mouth grows dry, the tongue sticky, and a bitter taste ensues which, it would appear, is only a consequence of the tongue's dryness. [The expression 'bitter sorrow' may possibly arise from this.] In nursing women the milk diminishes or altogether dries up. There is one of the most regular manifestations of grief, which apparently contradicts these other physiological phenomena, and that is the weeping, with its profuse secretion of tears, its swollen reddened face, red eyes, and augmented secretion from the nasal mucous membrane." Lange goes on to suggest that this may be a reaction from a previously contracted vaso-motor state. The explanation seems a forced one. The fact is that there are changeable expressions of grief.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  with national identity and national sin that can frequently seem so wearing in the tradition of the Law and the Prophets. The idea of ‘Covenant’, already prominent in the Deuteronomic tradition, became increasingly central to other new sacred texts, as Judaeans brooded on their history of disasters and decided that an overarching explanation was God’s anger at their failure to keep a sequence of covenants or agreements: divine requirements expressed in the various lawcodes recorded in the Hebrew Bible. Second Temple writers created a tidy narrative out of the bundle of legends they inherited from their remote past, and these backdated the successive covenants to God’s promises in the time of such patriarchs as Abram/Abraham and Jacob/Israel. Covenants with God and leading figures of the biblical story are therefore repeatedly found in the Hebrew Bible, right back to God’s command to Adam not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, disobeyed with lasting consequences (Gen. 2.15–17). [38] Our finished text of the Book of Genesis now tells us that Abram first journeyed to the Promised Land from Ur, a city then near the mouth of the Euphrates in Mesopotamia. He had done so, making his Covenant with God in the land, more than a millennium before the Children of Israel had suffered seventh- and sixth-century exile to Assyria and Babylon, and even before their supposed four centuries in Egypt. It is not hard to see this historical double- back as wishful thinking, a comforting assurance through an ancient link to Ur that recent Judaic exile in Mesopotamia was simply a return visit, part of God’s plan for them; now God had given them back the land of Israel. [39] It was a way to cope with the very partial control that Judaeans now had over their own affairs; but it also placed the whole history of Israel in a covenantal framework that embraced all matters sexual in God’s overall purposes. That would set patterns for Judaism as it encountered cultures with very different attitudes to sex and the family; we must now turn to this, often uncomfortable, cross-cultural conversation.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  How was I to get free? Where should I go? What should I do? One day in an illustrated paper in ’68, I read of the discovery of the diamonds in the Cape, and then of the opening of the Diamond fields. That prospect tempted me and I read all I could about South Africa, but one day I found that the cheapest passage to the Cape cost fifteen pounds and I despaired. Shortly afterwards I read that a steerage passage to New York could be had for five pounds; that amount seemed to me possible to get; for there was a prize of ten pounds for books to be given to the second in the Mathematical scholarship exam that would take place in the summer: I thought I could win that, and I set myself to study Mathematics harder than ever. The result was—but I shall tell the result in its proper place. Meanwhile I began reading about America and soon learned of the buffalo and Indians on the Great Plains and a myriad entrancing romantic pictures opened to my boyish imagining. I wanted to see the world and I had grown to dislike England; its snobbery, though I had caught the disease, was loathsome and worse still, its spirit of sordid self-interest. The rich boys were favored by all the Masters, even by Stackpole; I was disgusted with English life as I saw it. Yet there were good elements in it which I could not but see, which I shall try to indicate later. Towards the middle of this winter term it was announced that at Midsummer, besides a scene from a play of Plautus to be given in Latin, the trial scene of “The Merchant of Venice” would also be played—of course, by boys of the Fifth and Sixth form only, and rehearsals immediately began. Naturally I took out “The Merchant of Venice” from the school library and in one day knew it by heart. I could learn good poetry by a single careful reading: bad poetry or prose was much harder. Nothing in the play appealed to me except Shylock and the first time I heard Fawcett of the Sixth recite the part, I couldn’t help grinning: he repeated the most passionate speeches like a lesson in a singsong, monotonous voice. For days I went about spouting Shylock’s defiance and one day, as luck would have it, Stackpole heard me. We had become great friends: I had done all Algebra with him and was now devouring trigonometry, resolved to do Conic Sections afterwards, and then the Calculus. Already there was only one boy who was my superior and he was Captain of the Sixth, Gordon, a big fellow of over seventeen, who intended to go to Cambridge with the eighty Pound Mathematical Scholarship that summer.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  5Stephen rested her head on her hand as she sat at her desk—it was well past midnight. She was heartsick as only a writer can be whose day has been spent in useless labour. All that she had written that day she would destroy, and now it was well past midnight. She turned, looking wearily round the study, and it came upon her with a slight sense of shock that she was seeing this room for the very first time, and that everything in it was abnormally ugly. The flat had been furnished when her mind had been too much afflicted to care in the least what she bought, and now all her possessions seemed clumsy or puerile, from the small, foolish chairs to the large, roll-top desk; there was nothing personal about any of them. How had she endured this room for so long? Had she really written a fine book in it? Had she sat in it evening after evening and come back to it morning after morning? Then she must have been blind indeed—what a place for any author to work in! She had taken nothing with her from Morton but the hidden books found in her father’s study; these she had taken, as though in a way they were hers by some intolerable birthright; for the rest she had shrunk from depriving the house of its ancient and honoured possessions.

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

  Baldwin V., 1184–1186, a child of five, and son of Sybilla, was succeeded by Guy of Lusignan, Sybilla’s second husband. Saladin met Guy and the Crusaders at the village of Hattin, on the hill above Tiberius, where tradition has placed the delivery of the Sermon on the Mount. The Templars and Hospitallers were there in force, and the true cross was carried by the bishop of Acre, clad in armor. On July 5, 1187, the decisive battle was fought. The Crusaders were completely routed, and thirty thousand are said to have perished. Guy of Lusignan, the masters of the Temple395 and the Hospital, and Reginald of Châtillon, lord of Kerak, were taken prisoners by the enemy. Reginald was struck to death in Saladin’s tent, but the king and the other captives were treated with clemency.396 The true cross was a part of the enemy’s booty. The fate of the Holy Land was decided. On Oct. 2, 1187, Saladin entered Jerusalem after it had made a brave resistance. The conditions of surrender were most creditable to the chivalry of the great commander. There were no scenes of savage butchery such as followed the entry of the Crusaders ninety years before. The inhabitants were given their liberty for the payment of money, and for forty days the procession of the departing continued. The relics stored away in the church of the Holy Sepulchre were delivered up by the conqueror for the sum of fifty thousand bezants, paid by Richard I.397 Thus ended the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem. Since then the worship of Islam has continued on Mount Moriah without interruption. The Christian conquests were in constant danger through the interminable feuds of the Crusaders themselves, and, in spite of the constant flow of recruits and treasure from Europe, they fell easily before the unifying leadership of Saladin. After 1187 a line of nominal kings of Jerusalem presented a romantic picture in European affairs. The last real king, Guy of Lusignan, was released, and resumed his kingly pretension without a capital city. Conrad of Montferrat, who had married Isabella, daughter of Amalric, was granted the right of succession. He was murdered before reaching the throne, and Henry of Champagne became king of Jerusalem on Guy’s accession to the crown of Cyprus. In 1197 the two crowns of Cyprus and Jerusalem were united in Amalric II. At his death the crown passed to Mary, daughter of Conrad of Montferrat. Mary’s husband was John of Brienne. At the marriage of their daughter, Iolanthe, to the emperor Frederick II., that sovereign assumed the title, King of Jerusalem. § 52. The Fall of Edessa and the Second Crusade.

• From Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble (2014)

  Guys like Loud Pete operate under tremendous pressure and against long odds. They’ll hit the phone all day. On average, one call out of eighty lands someone who agrees to look at a demonstration of the software. That’s all the spider monkeys have to do, just get someone to say yes to a demo. At that point the lead gets passed to someone else. Those people are paid better than the telemarketing people, but they too operate under insane pressure. Selling software is a grueling job, and it’s especially rough at HubSpot, which imposes monthly quotas on its sales rep rather than quarterly or annual quotas that other companies use. “Your life hits reset every month. It’s a hamster wheel,” one high-level sales rep says. “That’s why the sales reps are so young. There’s hardly anybody who has been here more than five years. People don’t last. People who are forty years old, who are married and have kids, they don’t want to live like this.” Halligan is a former sales guy. He knows the kind of pressure he is putting on his reps. He is aware that no one can do this job for long without burning out, and he is okay with that. The spider monkeys are not being hired with the expectation that they will spend their careers at HubSpot. They are being rounded up to work for a few years, then go somewhere else. I don’t doubt that Dharmesh really does care about creating a company that people can love, but I am equally sure that Halligan cares only about the numbers. While Dharmesh obsesses about the five principles that make up HEART, Halligan’s big metric is something called VORP, or value over replacement player. The idea comes from Major League Baseball, where it is used to set prices on players. At HubSpot, VORP means evaluating the difference between what you are paid and the least amount the company could pay someone else to do your job. It’s a vicious metric, with only one goal, which is to drive the price of labor as low as possible. All that stuff from Dharmesh about being lovable, engaging in delightion, having HEART, and creating a culture code—that’s great for the keynote speech at the Inbound conference. That’s the face we show to the outside world. But there’s not much delightion in this room. Yet this canyon of desperation, packed with beer-drinking shitheads trying to hit their quotas—this, I realize, is the real heart and soul of HubSpot. This is where the money gets made. VORP may be heartless, but it works. Halligan never lets up the pressure. Then again, Halligan is under pressure himself. He has taken $100 million from venture capital firms and is expected to deliver a return. His investors include Sequoia Capital, a firm with a reputation for throwing out founders who fail to meet expectations. HubSpot needs to pull off a big IPO, and to do that, the company must keep growing.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  70 Indeed, Mencius had even convinced himself that the masses yearned for such correction and that the barbarians vied with one another to be conquered by the Chinese. 71 But it was never permissible to fight equals: “A punitive expedition is waged by one in authority against his subordinates. It is not for peers to punish one another by war.” 72 The current interstate warfare between rulers of equal status, therefore, was perverse, illegal, and a form of tyranny. China desperately needed wise rulers like Yao and Shun, whose moral charisma could restore the Great Peace. “The appearance of a true King has never been longer overdue than today,” wrote Mencius; “and the people have never suffered more under tyrannical government than today.” If a militarily powerful state were to govern benevolently, “the people would rejoice as if they had been released from hanging by the heels.” 73 Despite their convictions about equality, the Confucians were aristocrats who could not transcend the assumptions of the ruling class. In the writings of Mozi (c. 480–390), however, we hear the voice of the commoner. Mozi headed a brotherhood of 180 men, who dressed like peasants and craftsmen and traveled from one state to another, instructing rulers in the new military technology for defending a city when it was besieged by the enemy. 74 Mozi was almost certainly an artisan, and he regarded the elaborate rituals of the nobility as a waste of time and money. But he too was convinced that ren was China’s only hope and emphasized the danger of political sympathy extending no further than one’s own kingdom even more strongly than Confucius. “Others must be regarded like the self,” he insisted. This “concern” ( ai ) must be “all-embracing and exclude nobody.” 75 The only way to stop the Chinese from destroying one another was to persuade them to practice jian ai (“concern for everybody”). Instead of simply worrying about their own kingdom, Mozi urged each prince to “regard another’s state as your own”; for if rulers truly had such solicitous regard for one another, they would not go to war. Indeed, the root cause of all the “world’s calamities, dispossessions, resentments, and hatreds is lack of jian ai. ” 76 Unlike the Confucians, Mozi had nothing positive to say about war. From a poor man’s perspective, it made no sense at all. Warfare ruined harvests, killed multitudes of civilians, and wasted weapons and horses. Rulers claimed that the conquest of more territory enriched the state and made it more secure, but in fact only a tiny proportion of the population benefited, and the capture of a small town could result in such heavy casualties that there was nobody left to farm the land. 77 Mozi believed that a policy could be called virtuous only if it enriched the poor, prevented pointless death, and contributed to public order.

• From The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica Volume 10 (2011)

  “Jesus has forgiven us of all our past sins, do you believe me, Nixie? And the Lord forgives us our future sins even before they’re done. Do you trust me, Nixie? Even if we be weak in the eyes of God, we are forgiven by grace alone. Do you believe that?” “No ...” I whisper. “I don’t.” “Tm not perfect, Nixie.” His fingers move over my nipples. “What we're doing, this will be our secret. Do you trust me?” “No...” I whisper. “I don’t.” Gently, I push him away from me. He raises his arm, poirits his finger and says, “Get thee behind } . . me!” “Get thee behind me?” “Satan!” He shakes his hand at me. And points again. “Get thee behind me, demon! I cast thee out in the name of Jesus Christ.” I fall on my knees. I spread my arms wide for the devil to leave me. The preacher man comes towards me, stands in front of me, towering down imperiously. His cock is in my face and it’s bobbing with his heart beat. “I command you ...” he sighs. “Obey me. Obey me. Adonai — abbba laba elehu abba. Abba.” I am waiting for the devil to leave me. For the peace to come and heal me and make me a good girl for Daniel again so he will come back to me, and the angry angels beating me with their lightning will leave me alone. Alone! Alone! I close my eyes and wait for the miracle. I feel something soft and hot brush my lips. The angels go away. I open my eyes and his cock is in my face. Pray. Pray for me. Prey. Prey for me. Overhead the stars are falling and the moon is turning as red as blood. The earth is crawling with dumb bastards. The night sky is ripped in two with thunder revealed to me. Iam the Dragon of God. I am the Wrath of God made rampant. I am the one true way. I am Death made perfect. The prey is not perfect. I will make him perfect. 526 C. Sanchez-Garcia aoe I stand up slowly, silently so as not to startle him. With one hand I soothe the stiff penis, to relax the prey. I feel him become languid. The prey has closed his eyes and is moving his cock inside my fist. I’ve seen it all before so many times. It’s all so tedious. The prey is ready now. I flip the knife open and the smell of the prey’s blood fills my head. “Abbbaaa ... Adonai... adaonai . . hallelujah .. .” he whispers. . My hand lets go of his cock, strikes out and grabs his throat. The prey’s eyes pop open. “I am not possessed by a demon.” I lean in and scream at his face, “J am the demon!”

• 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 Well of Loneliness (1928)

  alérie stared at Stephen in amazement: ‘But . . . it’s such an extraordinary thing you’re asking! Are you sure you’re right to take such a step? For myself I care nothing; why should I care? If you want to pretend that you’re my lover, well, my dear, to be quite frank, I wish it were true—I feel certain you’d make a most charming lover. All the same,’ and now her voice sounded anxious, ‘this is not a thing to be done lightly, Stephen. Aren’t you being absurdly self-sacrificing? You can give the girl a very great deal.’ Stephen shook her head: ‘I can’t give her protection or happiness, and yet she won’t leave me. There’s only one way . . .’ Then Valérie Seymour, who had always shunned tragedy like the plague, flared out in something very like temper: ‘Protection! Protection! I’m sick of the word. Let her do without it; aren’t you enough for her? Good heavens, you’re worth twenty Mary Llewellyns! Stephen, think it over before you decide—it seems mad to me. For God’s sake keep the girl, and get what happiness you can out of life.’ ‘No, I can’t do that,’ said Stephen dully. Valérie got up: ‘Being what you are, I suppose you can’t—you were made for a martyr! Very well, I agree’; she finished abruptly, ‘though of all the curious situations that I’ve ever been in, this one beats the lot!’ That night Stephen wrote to Martin Hallam. 2Two days later as she crossed the street to her house, Stephen saw Martin in the shadow of the archway. He stepped out and they faced each other on the pavement. He had kept his word; it was just ten o’clock. He said: ‘I’ve come. Why did you send for me, Stephen?’ She answered heavily: ‘Because of Mary.’ And something in her face made him catch his breath, so that the questions died on his lips: ‘I’ll do whatever you want,’ he murmured. ‘It’s so simple,’ she told him, ‘it’s all perfectly simple. I want you to wait just under this arch—just here where you can’t be seen from the house. I want you to wait until Mary needs you, as I think she will . . . it may not be long . . . Can I count on your being here if she needs you?’ He nodded: ‘Yes—yes!’ He was utterly bewildered, scared too by the curious look in her eyes; but he allowed her to pass him and enter the courtyard. 3She let herself into the house with her latchkey. The place seemed full of an articulate silence that leapt out shouting from every corner—a jibing, grimacing, vindictive silence. She brushed it aside with a sweep of her hand, as though it were some sort of physical presence.

• From Apprenticed to Venus: My Secret Life with Anaïs Nin (2017)

  The prospect of film school and the teaching job Anaïs had created for me were handholds to a new beginning. But I knew I lacked the will to start over in LA. I couldn’t face the shame of having been dumped by Philip and of my dumping my respectable academic career for the roulette wheel of filmmaking. Besides, I was so run down with weeping and malnutrition that I didn’t have the strength to terminate my teaching contract and get back to the beach house before it was rented to someone else. The lights had all gone out in me. It took all the energy I could muster to follow Anaïs’s instruction to see a doctor. When he examined my infected foot he scared me by saying that if I’d waited much longer, he’d have had to amputate. How could I have ignored a blister that bad? Between sobs I told him how I’d been jilted by my boyfriend and no longer wanted to live. He said, “If you don’t get it together in a week, I’m putting you in the hospital.” “You mean to amputate my foot?!” “No, a mental hospital.” I laughed, then realized he was deadly serious. When I left his office, I thought, Thank you, you just made my decision a lot easier. No way was I going to be locked up in a mental hospital in the middle of fucking nowhere! I ran home hobbling on that blistered foot, called the chair who had hired me and told him my mother had had a heart attack (which was true, though she’d recovered), and I needed to go home. When he kindly offered to find someone to take over my classes for the semester, I immediately booked a red-eye flight to LAX, threw some things into my suitcase, and phoned one of my devoted students to drive me to the Indianapolis Airport. While waiting for my student to arrive, I caught a glimpse of my gaunt, sallow reflection in the corroded bathroom mirror. There was no way that stricken face could return to Los Angeles and succeed at anything. Yet if I stayed in Bloomington I knew I would end up in that mental hospital. I studied my mouth in the mirror. It was not just sad, it seemed narrower, and … bitter. I looked ten years older. I recalled what Anaïs had said about bitterness aging you, but how could I get rid of it? My heart was permanently broken and my psyche shattered.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  The lady had been hearing many reports of the wonderful garden, and when she saw the flowers and the fruits, she began to repent of her promise. But for all her repentance, being curious to observe so rare a phenomenon, she went with several other ladies of the town to see the garden, and after commending it greatly and betraying no little astonishment, she made her way home in the depths of despair, thinking of what it obliged her to do. So profound was her distress, in fact, that she was unable to conceal it, with the inevitable result that her husband, noticing how melancholy she looked, demanded to know the reason. For some little time she remained silent, being too embarrassed to say anything, but finally he forced her to tell him the whole story from beginning to end. Gilberto was at first extremely angry, but after mature reflection, bearing in mind the purity of his wife’s intentions, he put aside his anger and said: ‘Dianora, no wise or virtuous woman should ever pay heed to messages of that sort, nor should she ever barter her chastity with anyone, no matter what terms she may impose. The power of words received by the heart through the ears is greater than many people think, and to those who are in love nearly everything becomes possible.2 Hence you did wrong, first of all to pay any heed to him and secondly to barter with him. But because I know you were acting from the purest of motives, I shall allow you, so as to be quit of your promise, to do something which possibly no other man would permit, being swayed also by my fear of the magician, whom Messer Ansaldo, if you were to play him false, would perhaps encourage to do us a mischief. I therefore want you to go to him, and endeavour in every way possible to have yourself released from this promise without loss of honour; but if this should prove impossible, just for this once you may give him your body, but not your heart.’ On hearing her husband speak in this way, the lady burst into tears, maintaining that she wanted no such favour from him; but no matter how loudly she protested, Gilberto was adamant. And so next morning, just as dawn was breaking, the lady set out, by no means richly adorned, together with one of her maids, and preceded by two of her husband’s retainers she made her way to Messer Ansaldo’s house. Messer Ansaldo was astounded to hear that his lady had come, and leaping out of bed he summoned the magician and said to him: ‘I want you to see for yourself how great a prize your skill has procured me.’

• From Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010)

  He quickly became expert, attaining the very highest states of trance. But he did not agree with the way his teachers interpreted these peak experiences. They told him that he had tasted the supreme enlightenment, but Gotama discovered that after the ekstasis had faded he was plagued by greed, lust, envy, and hatred in the same old way. He tried to extinguish these passions by practicing such fierce asceticism that he became horribly emaciated and almost ruined his health. Yet still his body clamored for attention. Finally, in a moment of mingled despair and defiance, he cried, “Surely there must be another way to enlightenment!” and at that moment a new solution declared itself to him. 18 He recalled an incident from his early childhood, when his father had taken him to watch the ritual plowing of the fields before the first planting of the year. His nurse had left him under a rose-apple tree while she attended the ceremony, and little Gotama sat up and noticed that some tender shoots of young grass had been torn up by the plow and that the tiny insects clinging to them had been killed. 19 He felt a pang of grief as though his own relatives had died, and this moment of empathy took him out of himself, so that he achieved a “release of the mind” ( ceto-vimutti ). He felt a pure joy welling up from the depth of his being, sat in the yogic position, and, even though he had never had a yoga lesson in his short life, immediately entered a state of trance. Looking back on that pivotal episode, Gotama realized that for those blessed moments his mind had been entirely free of greed, hatred, envy, and lust. So instead of trying to quench his humanity with harsh practices, he thought perhaps he should cultivate the emotions that had brought him ceto-vimutti: compassion, joy, and gratitude. He also realized that the five “prohibitions” should be balanced by their more positive counterparts. So instead of simply crushing his violent impulses, he would try to encourage feelings of loving kindness; instead of just refraining from lying, he would make sure that everything he said was “reasoned, accurate, clear and beneficial.” 20 He would no longer be content to avoid theft, but would learn to take pleasure in the freedom he gained by possessing the bare minimum. In order to enhance the natural impulse to empathy and compassion, Gotama developed a special form of meditation.

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

  The Vedas, portions of which date from the fifteenth century before Christ, the Laws of Menu, which were completed before the rise of Buddhism, that is, six or seven centuries before our era, and the numerous other sacred books of the Indian religion, enjoin by example and precept entire abstraction of thought, seclusion from the world, and a variety of penitential and meritorious acts of self-mortification, by which the devotee assumes a proud superiority over the vulgar herd of mortals, and is absorbed at last into the divine fountain of all being. The ascetic system is essential alike to Brahmanism and Buddhism, the two opposite and yet cognate branches of the Indian religion, which in many respects are similarly related to each other as Judaism is to Christianity, or also as Romanism to Protestantism. Buddhism is a later reformation of Brahmanism; it dates probably from the sixth century before Christ (according to other accounts much earlier), and, although subsequently expelled by the Brahmins from Hindostan, it embraces more followers than any other heathen religion, since it rules in Farther India, nearly all the Indian islands, Japan, Thibet, a great part of China and Central Asia to the borders of Siberia. But the two religions start from opposite principles. Brahmanic asceticism260 proceeds from a pantheistic view of the world, the Buddhistic from an atheistic and nihilistic, yet very earnest view; the one if; controlled by the idea of the absolute but abstract unity and a feeling of contempt of the world, the other by the idea of the absolute but unreal variety and a feeling of deep grief over the emptiness and nothingness of all existence; the one is predominantly objective, positive, and idealistic, the other more subjective, negative, and realistic; the one aims at an absorption into the universal spirit of Brahm, the other consistently at an absorption into nonentity, if it be true that Buddhism starts from an atheistic rather than a pantheistic or dualistic basis. "Brahmanism"—says a modern writer on the subject261—"looks back to the beginning, Buddhism to the end; the former loves cosmogony, the latter eschatology. Both reject the existing world; the Brahman despises it, because he contrasts it with the higher being of Brahma, the Buddhist bewails it because of its unrealness; the former sees God in all, the other emptiness in all." Yet as all extremes meet, the abstract all-entity of Brahmanism and the equally abstract non-entity or vacuity of Buddhism come to the same thing in the end, and may lead to the same ascetic practices. The asceticism of Brahmanism takes more the direction of anchoretism, while that of Buddhism exists generally in the social form of regular convent life. The Hindoo monks or gymnosophists (naked philosophers), as the Greeks called them, live in woods, caves, on mountains, or rocks, in poverty, celibacy, abstinence, silence: sleeping on straw or the bare ground, crawling on the belly, standing all day on tiptoe, exposed to the pouring rain or scorching sun