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 Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  Like Marvin's entire stake. Twenty-two years of sweat and toil, warehouses full of mufflers and brake pads, trailer loads—container loads even—of radial tires and retreads, blown up and away, two turns around Madison Square Park and into the void like a lonely, wind-buffeted snowflake. A thing of no consequence. Never existed. Marvin drank his second scotch and water of the evening and tried to avoid thinking about numbers. He didn't want to think about the loan he'd personally guaranteed so that the busboy, three waiters, and the twelve—count 'em, twelve —cooks Rob had insisted they absolutely had to have, could all sit around the kitchen doing jack-shit. The half-million-dollar kitchen with the brand spanking new Jade ranges and All-Clad pots and pans and induction burners and Pacojet machine and marble counter for the patissier and the custom-made rolling racks and reach-ins and the tandoori oven that Rob had used once and never again as far as Marvin knew, all of which it had been insisted they absolutely had to have. And where was Rob, anyway? Where was "America's Sexiest Chef"? Why wasn't he here to share the pain, the humiliation, the death—in increments—of all their dreams? This is what he got for wanting to play the Bogie part. This is what he got for all those gin-soaked evenings in the Hamptons, still flush with the accumulated liquid assets of years in the auto parts biz, those sweet, lazy afternoons by the pool, dreaming of a white dinner jacket, a smoldering cigarette, of signing checks for favored customers in his very own place. "Okay, Rick." Or, "Okay, Marvin" in this case, swanning around the dining room of his very own place, the hottest place in town, his favorite songs playing in the background. Ingrid Bergman, or someone very much like her, waiting for him in an upstairs apartment. It had seemed so serendipitous at the time, meeting the young Rob Holland just down from Boston, weekending with the Haver-meyers, who had taken a place at the beach. "The hottest chef in the Northeast," Ellie Havermeyer had confided in whispered tones, beaming like she was showing off a prize Pekingese. "And the sexiest fucking thing in checked pants," added her sister Cissy in a slightly more strident aside, coloring as she said it. This had impressed Marvin, as Cissy liked to use the word fuck a lot, and never blushed for anything. Chet the bartender, a long-in-the-tooth ex-model who'd long ago resigned himself to slinging drinks for the rest of his life, wiped the bar and, from the corners of his eyes, glanced pityingly at Marvin (as much as bartenders can feel pity).

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  The author epitomized the Russian intelligentsia snuffed out by the Bolsheviks, of which his contemporary Vladimir Nabokov was also a member—impossibly cultured, preoccupied with the fate of the nation, conservative but not reactionary, liberal but not revolutionary, full of laughter but not irony, receptive to Europe but molecularly Russian, and devoted above all to a kind of proud, earnest, fastidious, and humane decency. It wasn’t progressive enough, but it was beautiful. ‘[Bulgakov’s] earliest memories included his father playing cards, his mother getting ready to go to the theater, guests around a table—everything as it should be’, as Ellendea Proffer renders a quintessential tableau of the milieu in her biography of the author. A personage no other than Stalin counted himself an admirer—he attended one of Bulgakov’s plays fifteen times. And when the art commissars started in on Bulgakov’s work for its nuanced perspective on his vanishing class—of the 301 reviews that Bulgakov, as thin-skinned as the cliché about writers has it, had counted by 1930, 298 were negative—it was Stalin himself who interceded on the writer’s behalf. Some totalitarians prefer to conceal themselves behind the machinery of the state, but, like the cannibal who lovingly cradles his victim as he digs around for his heart, Stalin liked conversing with his terrorized children. He was an intimate murderer. So when Bulgakov, as skilled at despair as at the written word, reached a nadir in 1930 and burned an early draft of Margarita , it was to Stalin he wrote, asking permission to emigrate if his country could not find use for his talents. Bulgakov could not bend. It wasn’t for lack of trying—he didn’t believe that a Russian writer could function outside his homeland, and tried sincerely to write a play with the right message. (The closest he came, a play about Stalin’s early years, was banned by the dictator himself.) If the unbending could not figure out how, they would be broken. But Bulgakov’s great fortune was that, for some reason, he was allowed to live, though relatively little of his work reached the public, a death of a different kind. (‘I ask that it be taken into account’, Bulgakov wrote in a draft of the letter to Stalin, ‘that for me not being allowed to write is tantamount to being buried alive.’) The dictator called several weeks later. ‘What—have you gotten very tired of us?’ he asked the playwright, a rhetorical question if ever there were one.

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  The psychologist Kenneth Pargament has pointed out that religious belief allows people to respond to such crises of faith in two different ways. Religious faith offers resources through its teachings, rituals and narratives for both ‘religious coping through conservation’ (that is, assimilating these events into one’s faith perspective and enriching it) and ‘religious coping through transformation’ (that is, accommodating one’s faith perspective to these events, so that it is challenged and revised in their light).3 Pargament’s ideas can be helpfully correlated with New Testament insights, such as Paul’s declaration that ‘we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope.’4 Perhaps the most illuminating narratives of belief deconstruction are found in the political and religious domains – such as Arthur Koestler’s disenchantment with Marxism-Leninism, or C. S. Lewis’s experience of a partial fragmentation of his faith following the death of his wife – which we will consider later in this chapter. We begin, however, by reflecting on the significance of the rise of religious ‘Nones’. Losing My Religion: The Rise of Religious ‘Nones’One of the most interesting recent trends in modern American culture is the rise of religious ‘Nones’ – that is, individuals who define themselves as ‘none of the above’ in surveys inviting them to name their religious commitment from a standard checklist of possibilities, or who self-identify as having ‘no religion’. Since 2013, Gallup has used this question to explore religious commitment: ‘What is your religious preference – are you Protestant, Roman Catholic, Mormon, Jewish, Muslim, another religion or no religion?’ Gallup reports that the percentage of Nones measured in its surveys has risen from virtually zero during the 1950s to about twenty per cent of the American adult population today. In recent years, this appears to have stabilised: between 2017 and 2022, an average of twenty or twenty-one per cent of Americans defined themselves as Nones.5 Similar patterns can be observed elsewhere in western culture. In the United Kingdom, for example, religious Nones have risen from twenty-five per cent in 2011 to thirty-seven per cent in 2021. It remains to be seen whether this is a plateau, or whether it will increase further in the future. Who are these people, and what does the emergence of this phenomenon have to say about the future of belief? Sociologically, they are likely to be male, younger, higher educated, not married, without children and liberal in their opinions and values.6 Among the factors that lead them to review or reject their religious commitments, the following appear to have been particularly influential: negative reactions against various forms of religious fundamentalism, a rejection of alliances between religion and politics, and intellectual disagreement with religious beliefs and practices. It is clear that Nones have a problem with religious institutions – many of them believe that religious organisations are excessively concerned with money and status, and are dangerously enmeshed with politics.

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  The question of finding meaning through suffering surged in significance during the traumas of the First and Second World Wars. Yet it has been given a new importance with the increase in human lifespan in western culture, which often involves living with suffering over extended periods. As early as 1958, the psychologist Edith Weisskopf-Joelson noticed that American culture seemed intolerant of suffering, and reluctant to help people to find belief systems to cope with this. ‘The incurable sufferer is given very little opportunity to be proud of his suffering and to consider it ennobling rather than degrading.’64 So how can this be done? In an important reflection on means of coping with suffering, Sarah Bachelard suggests that it is helpful to distinguish ‘resigning ourselves to the inevitable’ in relation to a crisis or suffering, and ‘giving ourselves’ into this crisis or suffering,65 allowing this to challenge our preconceptions about what the world ought to be like and learn to live within it as it is. We insert ourselves into the world, and create meaning through the things we encounter, rather than those we expected or hoped to find, not least by allowing what we find to be seen as a means of growth. Perhaps the best-known engagement with this issue arises from the work of Viktor Frankl, whose experiences in Nazi concentration and extermination camps during the Second World War helped him to appreciate the importance of discerning meaning in spite of traumatic situations.66 Frankl argued that survival in concentration camps depended on maintaining the will to live, which involved finding meaning and purpose in demoralising or traumatic situations. Those who coped best were those who had developed frameworks of meaning that enabled them to fit their experiences into these mental maps, and allowed them to interpret and experience them as times of personal growth and development. In exploring this point, Frankl often cited Friedrich Nietzsche’s famous one-liner, ‘If someone knows the “why” of life, then the “how” can look after itself.’67 More recently, the psychologist Jordan Peterson has insisted we recognise the fragility of human existence and recognise the pervasiveness of suffering. ‘Pain and suffering define the world.’ They are givens, not options. We can be damaged, even broken, emotionally and physically, and we are all subject to the depredations of aging and loss. This is a dismal set of facts, and it is reasonable to wonder how we can expect to thrive and be happy (or even to want to exist, sometimes) under such conditions.68 While Peterson’s approach to suffering is opaque and controversial, his willingness to engage this pervasive phenomenon and explore its existential threat has secured him a substantial readership.

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

  Such unromantic beliefs would be encouraged by the usage employed in some Church legal texts for the one sexual position allowed to a married couple: what has flippantly been termed by Westerners ‘the missionary position’ was known in Church Slavonic as sexual congress ‘on a horse’ ( na konĕ ), in reference to its demonstration of the male’s dominance over the female. [48] Predictably, Jerome’s principle derived from the Pythagoreans that too much marital affection was as bad as adultery continued to flourish amid the general Orthodox pessimism about marriage. One thirteenth-century text of moral instruction advised men to ‘separate from your wife, so you don’t become attached to her’. It was common to find in Russian Orthodox guides to what confessors should ask of their penitents that the questions grouped excessive sexual intercourse between married partners alongside serious sexual offences like anal intercourse or association with prostitutes. [49] The northern Orthodox Church faced daunting problems of scale; centuries passed before there was a network of parishes and their priests, such as was created in Mediterranean and western Europe, which could ensure that Orthodox marriage customarily began in a ceremony in church. [50] Yet the same informal alliance that had proved so fruitful to Constantinople in the Iconoclastic Controversy sustained northern Orthodoxy and the Russian Orthodoxy that grew out of it. Monks and mothers, ignoring the whims of monarchs and, indeed, of the Church hierarchy, centred their devotional life on the icon, away from the public sphere. Taking a cue from Mediterranean Orthodox practice, the Russian category of monk was a good deal more capacious than in the increasingly regulated Church of the Latin West. So it was a common experience to meet wandering individual monks, ‘Holy Fools’ even, who were a good deal more like Diogenes of Sinope than they were like Pachomios. In their wild sanctity, they could be lively sustainers of remote communities far from the tidy-mindedness of a bishop. [51] All this was the saviour of Russian Orthodoxy when, after 1917, imperial rule disappeared and the powers of the state were turned viciously on the Church. Over many previous centuries, Orthodoxy had never completely melted into the alliance with power that official Christianity had entered back in the time of Constantine the Great, and that quality endures to the present day, despite what patriarchs might say in Moscow cathedrals.

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  that your father, Vera told me, said Austerlitz, then in the utmost danger, did not leave until it was almost too late, on the afternoon of the fourteenth of March, by plane from Ruzyné to Paris. I still remember, said Vera, that when he said goodbye he was wearing a wonderful plum-colored double-breasted suit, and a black felt hat with a green band and a broad brim. Next morning, at first light, the Germans did indeed march into Prague in the middle of a heavy snowstorm which seemed to make them appear out of nowhere. When they crossed the bridge and their armored cars were rolling up the Narodni a profound silence fell over the whole city. People turned away, and from that moment they walked more slowly, like somnambulists, as if they no longer knew where they were going. What particularly upset us, so Vera remarked, said Austerlitz, was the instant change to driving on the right. It often made my heart miss a beat, she said, when I saw a car racing down the road on the wrong side, since it inevitably made me think that from now on we must live in a world turned upside down. Of course, Vera continued, it was much harder for Agata than for me to manage under the new regime. Since the Germans had issued their decrees on the Jewish population, she could go shopping only at certain times; she must not take a taxi, she could sit only in the last carriage of the tram, she could not visit a coffeehouse or cinema, or attend a concert or any other event. Nor could she herself appear onstage anymore, and access to the banks of the Vltava and the parks and gardens she had loved so much was barred to her. All my green places are lost to me, she once said, adding that only now did she truly understand how wonderful it is to stand by the rail of a river steamer without a care in the world. The ever-extended list of bans—before long it was forbidden for Jews to walk on the pavement on the side of the road next to the park, to go into a laundry or dry cleaner’s, or to make a call from a public telephone—all of this, I still hear Vera telling me, said Austerlitz, soon brought Agata to the brink of despair. I can see her now pacing up and down this room, said Vera, I can see her striking her forehead with the flat of her hand, and crying out, chanting the syllables one by one: I do not un der stand it! I do not un der stand it! I shall ne ver un der stand it!! Nonetheless, she went into the city as often as she could, applying to I don’t know how many or what authorities, she stood for hours in the sole post office which the forty thousand Jews in Prague were allowed to use, waiting to send a telegram; she made inquiries, pulled strings, left financial deposits, produced affidavits and guarantees, and when she came home she would sit up racking her brains until late into the night. But the more trouble she took, and the longer she went on trying, the further did any hope of her getting an emigration permit recede, so in the summer, when there was already talk of the forthcoming war and the likelihood of even harsher restrictions when it broke

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  Chet looked worried, thought Marvin with some satisfaction. Probably because the place was so damn slow the miserable, thieving son of a bitch couldn't even steal like he used to. About a hundred bucks a night he'd been taking down, Marvin figured, back when things were good. Those were acceptable losses for a busy house with a good bartender, like back in the days when the dining room had been full of wine drinkers and hurrying, upselling waiters moving Calvados and magnums of expensive burgundies and twenty- year-old ports, the bar packed three deep with giggly, well-dressed women wondering "Is Rob here tonight? Is the chef around?" Now Marvin wished he could have all that money back. A hundred dollars a night, four shifts a week, times the year and a half Chet had been with Saint Germain—that was enough to pay down the D'Artagnan bill. D'Artagnan, who quite sensibly wouldn't even take COD anymore because the restaurant was so far in arrears, requiring Rob to buy even-more-expensive French foie gras from the dairy and provisions company (who were also, of course, on COD, and likely to suspend deliveries any day now). He was going to lose the house, Marvin just knew, the certain knowledge sitting like an indigestible, malignant lump, halfway down his esophagus. When the house went, his wife would go too. He hadn't let on how deeply in trouble he really was. Things were bad enough, he'd thought, without having to hear about it at home too. She'd divorce him—go for full custody, of course—and the no- doubt wildly expensive lawyer she'd hire off the society pages would get it for her too. Easily. (On the basis of the regrettable "hostess incident" a while back.) She'd get half of what was left, after everybody else piled on. After the banks, the vendors, the credit card companies, the lawyers, accountants, the IRS, state, city, and marshals had finished stripping away what assets they could. And what about Christmas? It was torture coming to work every morning. The decorations, the lights, the Santas on Fifth Avenue were an affront, a reminder of obligations and impossibilities. His kids for instance. Melissa, the eldest, had been agitating for a pony. James, his son, wanted a wide-screen plasma TV and an Xbox. The bottle of Cutty and the gift box of promo goodies from the meat company definitely were not going to be enough for the wife. And where was Rob? Things hadn't turned out too badly for Rob, Marvin thought. He'd parlayed his 60-percent food cost and 40-percent labor cost into that most desirable state of affairs (for a working-class kid from Revere, Mass., anyway): He was now, truly and certifiably, a "celebrity chef." Rob Holland: The name was never mentioned anymore without being preceded by the two other words, celebrity and chef. Two words that, as far as Marvin was concerned, should never go together.

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

  SLAVERY , AND OTHER GOOD CAUSES The abolition of slavery was not originally an Evangelical cause, for the good reason that the Bible, both Old and New Testaments, unmistakably accepts the institution of slavery as part of the fabric of the created and fallen world. [5] Christians did often consider that slavery was not a desirable condition – particularly for oneself – and to free slaves was an act of Christian charity. That is not at all the same as flying in the face of biblical assumptions and condemning the existence of slavery as intrinsically evil. The first Christians corporately to make that leap of the imagination and re-examine the biblical text in the light of prior conviction were those who already sought authority not in the Bible but in the light of God planted within themselves: Quakers. After seven decades of quiet argument, in 1758 the Friends used their dominance in the colony of Pennsylvania to produce an official condemnation of all slavery: a first in any Christian polity. From there, through a chain of personal friendships involving the indomitable Anthony Benezet, a Pennsylvanian Quaker from a refugee Huguenot family, the cause spread to various British Evangelicals. They ventured on the same thought-experiment as the Quakers to reconstruct biblical morality in an entirely new light and came to embrace the fight against slavery as a compelling cause for reform. [6] The long-drawn-out but eventually successful campaign for abolition in Britain has usually been told as a male story of clergy and politicians bringing about parliamentary change. Yet the abolition first of the trade in 1807, and of the institution in 1833, could not have succeeded against the overwhelming economic interest of the British landowning class were it not for decades of agitation by whole families of Evangelicals, with mothers and sisters at the forefront. They applied the standard expectations of Evangelical conversion – a total change of heart after hearing the message – to this new moral cause. They were up against formidable entrenched interests; it would have been well-nigh impossible for anyone in the British elite not to have some direct or indirect entanglement in the trade that became the backbone of British imperial wealth, as became apparent from the very wide range of those benefiting from generous government financial compensation after 1833. [7] There were highs and lows in anti-slavery activism, with the 1790s and the 1830s being key moments; in between, women were instrumental in keeping the issue alive. While the cause involved Evangelicals across denominations, the most radical voices were generally from the wing of ‘rational Dissent’, especially Quakers and prosperous and highly educated Unitarian Dissenting congregations, formed from earlier Independent or Presbyterian Churches

• From Naked Lunch (1959)

  Frogs croak in vacant lots where corn grows and boys catch little green garter snakes under broken limestone stelae stained with shit and threaded with rusty barbed wire.... Neon -- chlorophyll green, purple, orange -- flashes on and off. Johnny extracts a candiru from Mary's cunt with his calipers.... He drops it into a bottle of mescal where it turns into a Maguey worm.... He gives her a douche of jungle bone-softener, her vaginal teeth flow out mixed with blood and cysts.... Her cunt shines fresh and sweet as spring grass.... Johnny licks Mary's cunt, slow at first, with rising excitement parts the lips and licks inside feeling the prickle of pubic hairs on his tumescent tongue.... Arms thrown back, breasts pointing straight up, Mary lies transfixed with neon nails. ...Johnny moves up her body, his cock with a shining round opal of lubricant at the open slit, slides through her pubic hairs and enters her cunt to the hilt, drawn in by a suction of hungry flesh.... His face swells with blood, green lights burst behind his eyes and he falls with a scenic railway through screaming girls.... Damp hairs on the back of his balls dry to grass in the warm spring wind. High jungle valley, vines creep in the window. Johnny's cock swells, great rank buds burst out. A long tuber root creeps from Mary's cunt, feels for the earth. The bodies disintegrate in green explosions. The hut falls in ruins of broken stone. The boy is a limestone statue, a plant sprouting from his cock, lips parted in the half-smile of a junky on the nod. The Beagle has stashed the heroin in a lottery ticket, One more shot -- tomorrow the cure. The way is long. Hard-ons and bring-downs are frequent. It was a long time over the stony reg to the oasis of date palms where Arab boys shit in the well and rock n' roll across the sands of muscle beach eating hot-dogs and spitting out gold teeth in nuggets. Toothless and strictly from the long hunger, ribs you could wash your filthy overalls on, that corrugate, they quaver down from the outrigger in Easter Island and stalk ashore on legs stiff and brittle as stilts... they nod in club windows... fallen into the fat of lack-need to sell a slim body. The date palms have died of meet lack, the well filled with dried shit and mosaic of a thousand newspapers: "Russia denies... The Home Secretary views with pathic alarm... The trap was sprung at 12:02. At 12:30 the doctor went out to eat oysters, returned at 2:00 to clap the hanged man jovially on the back. 'what? Aren't you dead yet? Guess I'll have to pull your leg.

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  He was breathing hard, and did not walk but ran up the hill, pushing his way, and, seeing the file close together before him as before everyone else, made a naive attempt, pretending he did not understand the angry shouts, to break through the soldiers to the very place of execution, where the condemned men were already being taken from the cart. For that he received a heavy blow in the chest with the butt end of a spear, and he leaped back from the soldiers, crying out not in pain but in despair. At the legionary who had dealt the blow he cast a dull glance, utterly indifferent to everything, like a man insensible to physical pain. Coughing and breathless, clutching his chest, he ran around the hill, trying to find some gap in the file on the north side where he could slip through. But it was too late, the ring was closed. And the man, his face distorted with grief, was forced to renounce his attempts to break through to the carts, from which the posts had already been unloaded. These attempts would have led nowhere, except that he would have been seized, and to be arrested on that day by no means entered his plans. And so he went to the side, towards the crevice, where it was quieter and nobody bothered him. Now, sitting on the stone, this black-bearded man, his eyes festering from the sun and lack of sleep, was in anguish. First he sighed, opening his tallith, worn out in his wanderings, gone from light-blue to dirty grey, and bared his chest, which had been hurt by the spear and down which ran dirty sweat; then, in unendurable pain, he raised his eyes to the sky, following the three vultures that had long been floating in great circles on high, anticipating an imminent feast; then he peered with hopeless eyes into the yellow earth, and saw on it the half-destroyed skull of a dog and lizards scurrying around it. The man’s sufferings were so great that at times he began talking to himself. ‘Oh, fool that I am . . .’ he muttered, swaying on the stone in the pain of his heart and clawing his swarthy chest with his nails. ‘Fool, senseless woman, coward! I’m not a man, I’m carrion!’ He would fall silent, hang his head, then, after drinking some warm water from a wooden flask, he would revive again and clutch now at the knife hidden on his chest under the tallith, now at the piece of parchment lying before him on the stone next to a stylus and a pot of ink. On this parchment some notes had already been scribbled: ‘The minutes run on, and I, Matthew Levi, am here on Bald Mountain, and still no death!’ Further: ‘The sun is sinking, but no death.’ Now Matthew Levi wrote hopelessly with the sharp stylus: ‘God!

• From From the Streets to the Sheets: Noire's Urban Erotic Quickies (2007)

  For a minute there, Sam and I were so caught up experimenting with each other’s bodies, that we didn’t realize that Detail was the muthafucka who made all the money. But when the bills became due, it was a quick reminder. Detail was a small, very small, dope pusher, so when Sam called herself going to some of the cats he fucked with to try and get put on or flip a lil’ somethin’ somethin’, all them niggas wanted to do was fuck, and after a minute I could tell Sam was only one more rejection away from actually deciding to trick with one of them hood niggas. I could tell by the look in her eyes, by how worn down she was from trying. It was that same look my moms had had in her eyes after my father left us and she kept getting turned down from jobs. Finally, my moms decided to just start fuckin’ the bastards who weren’t giving her the jobs. That became her job. “You thought Detail beat your ass,” I remember telling Sam as I held her by her wrist. She was older than me, but I was bigger than her. “I swear to God, Sam, if you even think about it—” “Then how the fuck we supposed to live, Sin?” Sam spat as she yanked her wrist away from me, knocking some of the items off of the dresser we were standing by. “I can’t keep this place if I don’t have no money to pay the bills. You thought you were on the streets. We both gon’ be on the streets. Then what we gon’ do, huh?” I thought for a moment. Here I was only sixteen, but feeling like a grown woman. “Samantha, I put it on my life that I’d rather be out there on the goddamn streets homeless with you than under a roof where you got to lay on your back to keep the roof over us.” By then I started to break down just thinking about how my moms went out. “Sin, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,” Sam cried as she comforted me. “I didn’t mean to . . . I just don’t know what to do. I’m sorry, baby.” Sam began kissing my tears away, and then slowly I tasted the salt of my tears on her tongue. I lifted her up and placed her on the dresser. She was only wearing a T-shirt and some panties. I moved her panties aside with my hand and as I tongue-fucked her, I finger-fucked her at the same time. Her ass scooted back and forth on the dresser as she pleased herself with my three fingers that were inside of her. “Oh, Sin,” she moaned. “This isn’t right. I shouldn’t be—”

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

  That problem is encapsulated by a horrible tale told by one of the chief writers in early monasticism, John Cassian, a fourth-century ascetic from the Eastern Empire whose writings brought eastern monastic discipline to the attention of ascetic communities in the western Mediterranean. In his book of community instruction, the Institutes , Cassian reminisces about a wealthy man whom he calls Patermutus, who, when he became a monk, brought his eight- year-old son with him. The abbot now assumed the role of paterfamilias : he deliberately broke them up to sever the biological bond, and sent them to separate communities. Patermutus was then sadistically tested: his little son was ‘purposely neglected’, ‘clothed in rags’ and left filthy, even randomly beaten until he cried, just to emphasize that the natural father should not intervene in this cruelty. The tale shockingly culminates in a ritually enacted parody of the Old Testament patriarch Abraham’s offering his son Isaac for a sacrificial death: the abbot ordered Patermutus to throw his son into the river, and the pair were actually at the water’s edge before a couple of strategically placed monks intervened to tell the father that he had passed the test of loyalty to his new vocation. The boy did not die, any more than Isaac had done, but now Patermutus had lost everything from the past; he was no longer even a parent. [26] * Yet not all Christians submitted as Patermutus did to this twisted version of the ‘silent rebellion’. The growing establishment of the Church brought in many converts who were no less aspiring Christians because they were powerful and wealthy, and who did not choose to reject their existing place in the society of their day. They too could be swept up in the movement to asceticism, but accommodating their power and wealth alongside its flat rejection by other ascetics was not straightforward. One wealthy and spiritually distinguished Christian family set useful patterns providing an answer. With an honourable ancestry among senators and urban magistrates, they lived in rural respectability in Asia Minor. Even before the fourth century, it was not so unusual in Asia Minor to encounter a Christian family among the local landed elite, but one fourth-century generation of the children of Basil and Emmelia made a remarkable joint contribution to Christian life and theology. Basil the son of Basil became Bishop of Caesarea Mazaca (now Kayseri in eastern inland Turkey). Having become a monk, he is known as ‘the Great’ both for his writings about structuring monastic life and general pastoral discipline, and for his strong support of the anti-Arian cause in the Church. Basil’s brother Gregory became Bishop of Nyssa in Asia Minor and was likewise a great Nicene theologian and spiritual writer. They both revered their older sister Macrina (‘the younger’ to distinguish her from a saintly grandmother), who played a major part in educating and bringing up her various brothers.

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

  Tatian’s influence was immense in Syria; his greatest scholarly achievement, his ‘Harmony’ or Diatessaron of the four Gospels, was used liturgically as Gospel text in the Syriac Church from the second down to the fifth century. Not surprisingly, therefore, his views on the literally Satanic nature of sexual intercourse had a considerable following in Christian west Asia. The Christianity that he and his missionary admirers created would necessarily be of a single generation – since his converts could not procreate – but they could sustain their life by drawing others to it. They could and did live in communities together, liberated from the normal expectations of sexuality in the ancient world, taking advantage of the many remote places of their region to practise their faith. In other words, this was the first known example of a pattern that has survived till our own time: the community life of Christian monasticism. The priority of Tatian has rarely been acknowledged in Christian history because of his eventual outcast status. [13] * This is the likely reason for one of the oddest displacements in Christian historical writing: the generally accepted idea that Christian monasticism and the life of hermits originated in Egypt. Not so. There is no chronological evidence for anything in Egypt as early as the undoubted presence of male and female ascetics (so both monks and nuns) in Syria during the second century. Nor did Syrian asceticism consist only of those communities who adhered to Tatian and put themselves beyond the pale of Catholic episcopal Christianity by retreating into solitude. There were also celibate ascetics who gathered in community among other Christians, happy to contribute their service to general community life and liturgy, both men and women: the ‘Sons (or Daughters) of the Covenant’. One of the chief ways in which this movement of the Covenant showed how embedded it was in the general life of the Church was its leading role in Syrian liturgical music. Syria was the first region to foster an increasing elaboration of Christian communal singing after a mainstream Church emerged

• From The Girls (2016)

  But the appeal of the lists wore off quickly or something about them started to depress her, so she stopped. Now Alex was no longer welcome in certain hotel bars, had to avoid certain restaurants. Whatever charm she had was losing its potency. Not fully, not totally, but enough that she began to understand it was a possibility. She’d seen it happen to others, the older girls she’d known since moving here. They defected for their hometowns, making a grab at a normal life, or else disappeared entirely. In April: A manager had, in low tones, threatened to call the police after she’d tried to charge dinner to an old client’s account. Too many of her usuals stopped reaching out, for whatever reason— ultimatums eked out of couples therapy and this new fad of radical honesty, or the first flushes of guilt precipitated by the birth of children, or just plain boredom. Her monthly cash flow fell precipitously. Alex considered breast augmentation. She rewrote her ad copy, paid an exorbitant fee to be featured in the first page of results. Dropped her rates, then dropped them again. Six hundred roses, the ads said. Six hundred kisses. Things only very young girls would want six hundred of. Alex got a series of laser treatments: flashes of blue light soaked her face while she looked out of tinted medical goggles like a somber spaceman. In the meantime, she had her photos redone by a twitchy art student who asked, mildly, whether she might consider a trade for services. He had a pet bunny that lurched around his makeshift studio, its eyes demonic pink. May: One of her roommates wondered why their Klonopin was dwindling so rapidly. A gift card had gone missing, a favorite bracelet. A consensus that Alex had been the one to break the window unit. Had Alex broken the window unit? She had no memory of it, but it was possible. Things she touched started to seem doomed. June: Desperation made her lax with her usual screening policies— she waived references, waived photo IDs, and she’d been ripped off more than once. A guy had Alex take a cab out to the JFK airport hotel, promising to reimburse her in person, and then stopped answering her calls, Alex on the sidewalk dialing again and again, the wind attacking her dress while the taxi drivers slowed to look. And in July, after the roommates demanded that the back rent be paid in the next two weeks or else they would change the locks, Dom came back to town. —DOM HAD BEEN AWAY for almost a year, a self-imposed exile in the wake of some trouble she didn’t want to know too much about. Better, with Dom, to never know too much. He said he’d been arrested— more than once— but never seemed to actually spend any time in jail, alluding vaguely to some variety of diplomatic immunity, some last-minute intervention on his behalf by high-ranking officials.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  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 de- signed 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 learn- ing. 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 fight- ing. 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. And such people frequented Valérie Seymour’s, men and women who must carry God’s mark on their foreheads. For Valérie, placid and self-assured, created an atmosphere of courage; every one felt very normal and brave when they gathered together at Valérie Seymour’s. There she was, this charming and cultured woman, a kind of lighthouse in a storm-swept ocean. The waves had lashed round her feet in vain; winds had howled; clouds had spued forth their hail and their lightning; torrents had deluged but had not destroyed her. The storms, gathering force, broke and drifted away, leaving behind them the shipwrecked, the drown- THE WELL OF LONELINESS 405 ing. But when they looked up, the poor spluttering victims, why what should they see but Valérie Seymour! Then a few would strike boldly out for the shore, at the sight of this indestructible creature.

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  And, of course, it would be terrible even to think that one could execute such a man. There had been no execution! No execution! That was the loveliness of this journey up the stairway of the moon. There was as much free time as they needed, and the storm would come only towards evening, and cowardice was undoubtedly one of the most terrible vices. Thus spoke Yeshua Ha-Nozri. No, philosopher, I disagree with you: it is the most terrible vice! He, for example, the present procurator of Judea and former tribune of a legion, had been no coward that time, in the Valley of the Virgins, when the fierce Germani had almost torn Ratslayer the Giant to pieces. But, good heavens, philosopher! How can you, with your intelligence, allow yourself to think that, for the sake of a man who has committed a crime against Caesar, the procurator of Judea would ruin his career? ‘Yes, yes . . .’ Pilate moaned and sobbed in his sleep. Of course he would. In the morning he still would not, but now, at night, after weighing everything, he would agree to ruin it. He would do everything to save the decidedly innocent, mad dreamer and healer from execution! ‘Now we shall always be together,’ 2 said the ragged wandering philosopher in his dream, who for some unknown reason had crossed paths with the equestrian of the golden spear. ‘Where there’s one of us, straight away there will be the other! Whenever I am remembered, you will at once be remembered, too! I, the foundling, the son of unknown parents, and you, the son of an astrologer-king and a miller’s daughter, the beautiful Pila.’ 3 ‘Yes, and don’t you forget to remember me, the astrologer’s son,’ Pilate asked in his dream. And securing in his dream a nod from the En-Sarid 4 beggar who was walking beside him, the cruel procurator of Judea wept and laughed from joy in his dream. This was all very good, but the more terrible was the hegemon’s awakening. Banga growled at the moon, and the pale-blue road, slippery as though smoothed with oil, fell away before the procurator. He opened his eyes, and the first thing he remembered was that the execution had been. The first thing the procurator did was to clutch Banga’s collar with a habitual gesture, then with sick eyes he began searching for the moon and saw that it had moved slightly to the side and turned silvery. Its light was being interfered with by an unpleasant, restless light playing on the balcony right before his eyes. A torch blazed and smoked in the hand of the centurion Ratslayer.

• From Naked Lunch (1959)

  "What are you thinking?" says the squirming American Tourist.... To which I reply: "Morphine have depressed my hypothalamus, seat of libido and emotion, and since the front brain acts only at second hand with backbrain titillation, being a vicarious type citizen can only get his kicks from behind, I must report virtual absence of cerebral event. I am aware of your presence, but since it has for me no affective connotation, my affect having been disconnect by the junk man for the non-payment, I am not innarested in your doings.... Go or come, shit or fuck yourself with a rasp or an asp -- tis well done and fitting for a queen -- but The Dead and The Junky don't care.... " They are Inscrutable . "Which is the way down the aisle to the water closet?" I asked the blonde usherette. "Right through here, sir.... Room for one more inside." "Have you seen Pantopon Rose?" said the old junky in the black overcoat. The Texas sheriff has killed his complicit Vet., Browbeck The Unsteady, involved in horse heroin racket. . A horse down with the aftosa need a sight of heroin to ease his pain and maybe some of that heroin take off across the lonesome prairie and whinny in Washington Square.... Junkies rush up yelling: "Heigh oOO Silver." "But where is the statuary ?" This arch type bit of pathos screeched out in tea-room cocktail lounge with bamboo decorations, Calle Juarez, Mexico, DF.... Lost back there with a meatball rape rap... a cunt claw your pants down and you up for rape that's statutory, brother.... Chicago calling... come in please... Chicago calling... come in please.... What you think I got the rubber on for goulashes in Puyo? A mighty wet place, reader.... "Take it off! Take it off!" The old queen meets himself coming round the other way in burlesque of adolescence, gets the knee from his phantom of the Old Old Howard... down skid row to Market Street Museum shows all kinds masturbation and self-abuse... young boys need it special.... They was ripe for the plucking forgot way back yonder in the corn hole... lost in little scraps of delight and burning scrolls.... Read the metastasis with blind fingers. Fossil message of arthritis... "Selling is more of a habit than using." -- Lola La Chata, Mexico, DF. Sucking terror from needle scars, underwater scream mouthing numb nerve warnings of the yen to come, throbbing bite site of rabies... "If God made anything better he kept it for himself," the Sailor used to say, his transmission slowed down with twenty goof balls. (Pieces of murder fall slow as opal chips through glycerine. ) Watching you and humming over and over "Johnny's So Long At The Fair." Pushing in a small way to keep up our habit.. "And use that alcohol," I say slamming a spirit lamp down on the table.

• From Naked Lunch (1959)

  The organism neither contracts from pain nor expands to normal sources of pleasure. It adjusts to a morphine cycle. The addict is immune to boredom. He can look at his shoe for hours or simply stay in bed. He needs no sexual outlet, no social contacts, no work, no diversion, no exercise, nothing but morphine. Morphine may relieve pain by imparting to the organism some of the qualities of a plant. (Pain could have no function for plants which are, for the most part, stationary, incapable of protective reflexes.) Scientists look for a non-habit forming morphine that will kill pain without giving pleasure, addicts want – or think they want – euphoria without addiction. I do not see how the functions of morphine can be separated, I think that any effective pain killer will depress the sexual function, induce euphoria and cause addiction. The perfect pain killer would probably be immediately habit forming. (If anyone is interested to develop such a drug, dehydro-oxy-heroin might be a good place to start.) The addict exists in a painless, sexless, timeless state. Transition back to the rhythms of animal life involves the withdrawal syndrome. I doubt if this transition can ever be made in comfort. Painless wihdrawal can only be approached. Cocaine. – Cocaine it the most exhilarating drug I have ever used. The euphoria centres in the head. Perhaps the drug activates pleasure connections directly in the brain. I suspect that an electric current in the right place would produc the same effect. The full exhilaration of cocaine can only be realized by an intravenous injection. The pleasurable effects do not last more than five or ten minutes. If the drug is injected in the skin, rapid elimination vitiate the effects. This goes double for sniffing. It is standard practice for cocaine users to sit up all night shooting cocaine at one minute intervals, alternating with shots of heroin mixed in the same injection to form a "speed ball." (I have never known an habitual cocaine user who was not a morphine addict.) The desire for cocaine can be intense. I have spent whole days walking from one drug store to another to fill a cocaine prescription. You may want cocaine intensely, but you don’t have any metabolic need for it. If you can’t get cocaine you eat, you go to sleep and forget it. I have talked with people who used cocaine for years, then were suddenly cut off from their supply. None of them experienced any withdrawal symptoms. Indeed it is difficult to see how a front brain stimulant could be addicting. Addiction seems to be a monopoly of sedatives. Continued use of cocaine leads to nervousness, depression, sometimes drug psychosis with paranoid hallucinations. The nervousness and depression resulting from cocaine use are not alleviated by more cocaine.

• From The Girls (2016)

  She was probably projecting all that innocence and sweetness on the almost-adult man who eased off his shorts and patted the bed for her to join him. The blurry leavings of amateur tattoos rippling along his arms. I heard the groan of mattress. I wasn’t surprised that they would fuck. But then there was Sasha’s voice, whining like a porno. High and curdled. Didn’t they know I was right next door? I turned my back to the wall, shutting my eyes. Julian growling. “Are you a cunt?” he said. The headboard jacking against the wall. “Are you?” —I’d think, later, that Julian must have known I could hear everything. 19691It was the end of the sixties, or the summer before the end, and that’s what it seemed like, an endless, formless summer. The Haight populated with white-garbed Process members handing out their oat-colored pamphlets, the jasmine along the roads that year blooming particularly heady and full. Everyone was healthy, tan, and heavy with decoration, and if you weren’t, that was a thing, too—you could be some moon creature, chiffon over the lamp shades, on a kitchari cleanse that stained all your dishes with turmeric. But that was all happening somewhere else, not in Petaluma with its low-hipped ranch houses, the covered wagon perpetually parked in front of the Hi-Ho Restaurant. The sun-scorched crosswalks. I was fourteen but looked much younger. People liked to say this to me. Connie swore I could pass for sixteen, but we told each other a lot of lies. We’d been friends all through junior high, Connie waiting for me outside classrooms as patient as a cow, all our energy subsumed into the theatrics of friendship. She was plump but didn’t dress like it, in cropped cotton shirts with Mexican embroidery, too-tight skirts that left an angry rim on her upper thighs. I’d always liked her in a way I never had to think about, like the fact of my own hands. Come September, I’d be sent off to the same boarding school my mother had gone to. They’d built a well-tended campus around an old convent in Monterey, the lawns smooth and sloped. Shreds of fog in the mornings, brief hits of the nearness of salt water. It was an all-girls school, and I’d have to wear a uniform—low-heeled shoes and no makeup, middy blouses threaded with navy ties. It was a holding place, really, enclosed by a stone wall and populated with bland, moon-faced daughters. Camp Fire Girls and Future Teachers shipped off to learn 160 words a minute, shorthand. To make dreamy, overheated promises to be one another’s bridesmaids at Royal Hawaiian weddings. My impending departure forced a newly critical distance on my friendship with Connie. I’d started to notice certain things, almost against my will. How Connie said, “The best way to get over someone is to get under someone else,” as if we were shopgirls in London instead of inexperienced adolescents in the farm belt of Sonoma County.

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

  The Gregorian party elected Gelasius a cardinal-deacon, far advanced in age. His short reign of a year and four days was a series of pitiable misfortunes. He had scarcely been elected when he was grossly insulted by a mob led by Cencius Frangipani and cast into a dungeon. Freed by the fickle Romans, he was thrown into a panic by the sudden appearance of Henry V. at the gates, and fled the city, attempting to escape by sea. The Normans came to his rescue and he was led back to Rome, where he found St. Peter’s in the hands of the anti-pope. A wild riot again forced him to flee and when he was found he was sitting in a field near St. Paul’s, with no companions but some women as his comforters. He then escaped to Pisa and by way of Genoa to France, where he died at Cluny, 1119. The imperialist party had elected an anti-pope, Gregory VIII., who was consecrated at Rome in the presence of Henry V., and ruled till 1121, but was taken captive by the Normans, mounted on a camel, paraded before Calixtus amid the insults and mockeries of the Roman mob, covered with dust and filth, and consigned to a dungeon. He died in an obscure monastery, in 1125, "still persevering in his rebellion." Such was the state of society in Rome. Calixtus II., the successor of Gelasius, 1119–1124, was elected at Cluny and consecrated at Vienne. He began his rule by renewing the sentence of excommunication against Henry; and in him the emperor found his match. After holding the Synod of Rheims, which ratified the prohibition of lay investiture, he reached Rome, 1120. Both parties, emperor and pope, were weary of the long struggle of fifty years, which had, like the Thirty Years’ War five centuries later, kept Central Europe in a state of turmoil and war. At the Diet of Würzburg, 1121, the men of peace were in the majority and demanded a cessation of the conflict and the calling of a council. Calixtus found it best to comply, however reluctantly, with the resolution of the German Diet, and instructed his legates to convoke a general council of all the bishops of France and Germany at Mainz for the purpose of restoring concord between the holy see and the empire. The assembly adjourned from Mainz to Worms, the city which became afterwards so famous for the protest of Luther. An immense multitude crowded to the place to witness the restoration of peace. The sessions lasted more than a week, and closed with a solemn mass and the Te Deum by the cardinal-bishop of Ostia, who gave the kiss of peace to the emperor.