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 Iraq's Secret Sex Trade

  (sad string music continues) Mona's in such an impossible situation, what she thought was her teenage love story has ended up ruining her entire future. And if it wasn't for the cleric convincing her that it's religiously OK, this would have never happened. (suspenseful music) In Iraq today, Conservative Shia clerics give more than just spiritual advice. After years of sectarian conflict, they've gained political leverage often with the backing of armed militias. Activists say they're pushing women's rights back decades. There were laws that protected women, some protection for us in our marriages. It seems that all the things that we gained in decades of hard work of the generation of our mothers were just lost. Once the Islamic clerics rule the first losers are the women. (tense music) Our findings show that Iraqi law is failing to protect women. To try to understand what's happening, I've come to the courthouse in Sadr City. (indistinct talking) Just outside, I see the clerics I'd met earlier. They're operating a parallel religious legal system, conducting Sharia marriages and divorces. Faris al-Musawi is doing a Sharia divorce. It only takes 5 minutes. Divorce under Sharia law is easier than under Iraqi civil law. And leaves women with fewer rights. Sharia also allows child marriage. What's the youngest age that you'll marry? Under Iraqi law a girl must be 15 to marry. But this doesn't seem to bother some clerics. Inside the court, they're dealing with the consequences. Iraqi law doesn't recognise Sharia marriages. So to be legal, couples must have their marriage signed off by a judge. The law on the minimum age for marriage should be enforced. But that's not happening. (talking) Haneen is getting her marriage registered. She's dressed like a grown woman, but actually she's only 13 years old. (sad music) A cleric married Haneen to her husband under Sharia law six months ago. Now she's pregnant. Because she got married underage, Haneen's father and groom could get two years in prison. Instead they've been fined $50. It's up to the judge. And these days, many are lenient. (indistinct talking) There's a queue of fathers waiting for their daughters to get married before the judge. Sami Okaybi is here with his 14-year-old daughter. He didn't want her face shown. Why are you marrying your daughter off so young? Is there anything you're going to miss from your previous life? (indistinct talking) The court's social worker is registering the teenage brides and their grooms. She's processed 126 underage marriages in the last six weeks. She predicts almost all these teenagers will end up divorcing. If you're a divorced woman you don't have a future. You're looked at as a tainted person. You become very vulnerable to that cleric who whispers in your ears that he has the solution. They call it temporary marriage, being thrown off from one man to the other to the third, to the fourth, until you find out that you're a prostitute, with a religious cover.

• From The Confessions of Saint Augustine (354)

  But now despairing to make proficiency in that false doctrine, even those things (with which if I should find no better, I had resolved to rest contented) I now held more laxly and carelessly. For there half arose a thought in me that those philosophers, whom they call Academics, were wiser than the rest, for that they held men ought to doubt everything, and laid down that no truth can be comprehended by man: for so, not then understanding even their meaning, I also was clearly convinced that they thought, as they are commonly reported. Yet did I freely and openly discourage that host of mine from that over-confidence which I perceived him to have in those fables, which the books of Manichaeus are full of. Yet I lived in more familiar friendship with them, than with others who were not of this heresy. Nor did I maintain it with my ancient eagerness; still my intimacy with that sect (Rome secretly harbouring many of them) made me slower to seek any other way: especially since I despaired of finding the truth, from which they had turned me aside, in Thy Church, O Lord of heaven and earth, Creator of all things visible and invisible: and it seemed to me very unseemly to believe Thee to have the shape of human flesh, and to be bounded by the bodily lineaments of our members. And because, when I wished to think on my God, I knew not what to think of, but a mass of bodies (for what was not such did not seem to me to be anything), this was the greatest, and almost only cause of my inevitable error.

• From The Confessions of Saint Augustine (354)

  O Thou, my hope from my youth, where wert Thou to me, and whither wert Thou gone? Hadst not Thou created me, and separated me from the beasts of the field, and fowls of the air? Thou hadst made me wiser, yet did I walk in darkness, and in slippery places, and sought Thee abroad out of myself, and found not the God of my heart; and had come into the depths of the sea, and distrusted and despaired of ever finding truth. My mother had now come to me, resolute through piety, following me over sea and land, in all perils confiding in Thee. For in perils of the sea, she comforted the very mariners (by whom passengers unacquainted with the deep, use rather to be comforted when troubled), assuring them of a safe arrival, because Thou hadst by a vision assured her thereof. She found me in grievous peril, through despair of ever finding truth. But when I had discovered to her that I was now no longer a Manichee, though not yet a Catholic Christian, she was not overjoyed, as at something unexpected; although she was now assured concerning that part of my misery, for which she bewailed me as one dead, though to be reawakened by Thee, carrying me forth upon the bier of her thoughts, that Thou mightest say to the son of the widow, Young man, I say unto thee, Arise; and he should revive, and begin to speak, and Thou shouldest deliver him to his mother. Her heart then was shaken with no tumultuous exultation, when she heard that what she daily with tears desired of Thee was already in so great part realised; in that, though I had not yet attained the truth, I was rescued from falsehood; but, as being assured, that Thou, Who hadst promised the whole, wouldest one day give the rest, most calmly, and with a heart full of confidence, she replied to me, “She believed in Christ, that before she departed this life, she should see me a Catholic believer.” Thus much to me. But to Thee, Fountain of mercies, poured she forth more copious prayers and tears, that Thou wouldest hasten Thy help, and enlighten my darkness; and she hastened the more eagerly to the Church, and hung upon the lips of Ambrose, praying for the fountain of that water, which springeth up unto life everlasting. But that man she loved as an angel of God, because she knew that by him I had been brought for the present to that doubtful state of faith I now was in, through which she anticipated most confidently that I should pass from sickness unto health, after the access, as it were, of a sharper fit, which physicians call “the crisis.”

• From Iraq's Secret Sex Trade

  The girl is looked at as a piece of merchandise, and using the merchandise in specific ways is allowed, but the virginity is kept for that big sale that they will do in the future. (traffic sound) The 'big sale' is marriage. Yanar told me that some families see girls as a financial burden, and want to marry them off. But parents can only find a husband if their daughter's virginity is guaranteed. Pretending he had a real girl in mind, our reporter asked Sayyid Raad what would happen if he did take the girl's virginity during a pleasure marriage. They are speaking of how a man can get away with the crime of raping a young girl. So 'just leave her and go', what does this mean for the girl involved? If the males of the family are aware of what happened to her, they will be killing her, and then the honour of the male patriarchs is preserved. It is always the girl and the women who pay the price. (tense music) I interviewed a girl who is at grave risk of violence from her relatives. She lost her virginity in a pleasure marriage. We'll call her Mona and for her safety, we filmed an actor telling her story, using Mona's exact words. A few weeks later, the man took Mona to a cleric in Kadhimiya. She was only 14. Her parents knew nothing about it. So the Sheikh knew you were a virgin? Did he ask for your parents consent? When she tried to stop seeing the man, he turned to blackmail. Mona had been groomed by a sexual predator, with the help of a cleric. We wanted to see how difficult it would be to get a cleric to do a pleasure marriage with a very young girl. It turned out to be easy. Sayyid Raad took our reporter to a waiting taxi. Our reporter had told him he wanted to do a pleasure marriage with a 13 year old virgin. He didn't ask to meet the girl in person, or talk to her family. He agreed to do the ceremony over the phone. Basically another colleague of mine, she was in the hotel and when he ring the phone my female colleague, she was on the other end of the phone and she was ready to answer. (phone ringing) I'm not thinking this marriage would be that simple. The only question he asks is, what is your name? And he began the ceremony without any questions. In just a few minutes, Sayyid Raad had made $200 for a pleasure marriage with a girl he believed to be only 13. For Mona, the consequences of her teenage pleasure marriage have been disastrous. (sullen string music) Her family are now pressuring her to get married. She told us something similar had happened to her cousin, with fatal results.

• From Another Country (1962)

  That fence is falling down, he might have thought as the train rushed toward it, or That house needs paint, or The tree is dead. In an instant, gone in an instant—it was not his fence, his farmhouse, or his tree. As now, passing, he recognized faces, bodies, postures, and thought. That’s Ruth. Or There’s old Lennie. Son of a bitch is stoned again. It was very silent. He passed Cornelia Street. Eric had once lived there. He saw again the apartment, the lamplight in the corners, Eric under the light, books falling over everything, and the bed unmade. Eric——and he was on Sixth Avenue, traffic lights and the lights of taxis blazing around him. Two girls and two boys, white, stood on the opposite corner, waiting for the lights to change. Half a dozen men, in a heavy gleaming car, rolled by and shouted at them. Then there was someone at his shoulder, a young white boy in a vaguely military cap and a black leather jacket. He looked at Rufus with the greatest hostility, then started slowly down the Avenue away from him, waving his rump like a flag. He looked back, stopped beneath the marquee of a movie theater. The lights changed. Rufus and the two couples started toward each other, came abreast in the middle of the avenue, passed—only, one of the girls looked at him with a kind of pitying wonder in her eyes. All right, bitch. He started toward Eighth Street, for no reason; he was simply putting off his subway ride. Then he stood at the subway steps, looking down. For a wonder, especially at this hour, there was no one on the steps, the steps were empty. He wondered if the man in the booth would change his five-dollar bill. He started down. Then, as the man gave him change and he moved toward the turnstile, other people came, rushing and loud, pushing past him as though they were swimmers and he nothing but an upright pole in the water. Then something began to awaken in him, something new; it increased his distance; it increased his pain. They were rushing—to the platform, to the tracks. Something he had not thought of for many years, something he had never ceased to think of, came back to him as he walked behind the crowd. The subway platform was a dangerous place—so he had always thought; it sloped downward toward the waiting tracks; and when he had been a little boy and stood on the platform beside his mother he had not dared let go her hand. He stood on the platform now, alone with all these people, who were each of them alone, and waited in acquired calmness, for the train. But suppose something, somewhere, failed, and the yellow lights went out and no one could see, any longer, the platform’s edge? Suppose these beams fell down?

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  I made it sound rational, at least to myself, but this was a crazy scheme and a telling indication of the state I was in. Compared with most students, I was well off. My grant more than covered my needs and I also had five hundred pounds on deposit, a not inconsiderable sum in those days. The order had given me a hundred pounds on my departure, my grandmother had left me a small legacy, and I had won an academic prize worth another hundred guineas. But saving and hoarding had become an obsession, so much so that when I came to buy my first apartment in 1976, I had squirreled away enough money to put down a deposit and furnish the entire flat. I can still see the astonishment on the face of the building society representative when I told him that I had saved this money from my student grant: he agreed to allow me a mortgage without further demur. Money is not a neutral factor, but is highly symbolic. I had convinced myself that I was not going to be able to earn my own living, and I simply could not make myself believe that this was a ridiculous assumption. What I was really saying was that I did not have a future. I was just not making it out here as a secular. I could not, as that perceptive Basque consultant had noted, attach myself to anything. How could I engage with life when my heart was dead? How could I become an academic when I was no longer able to respond spontaneously to literature? How could I function when I was increasingly subject to “weird seizures”? When I looked ahead, the only possible future I could see for myself was a locked ward or a padded cell. My years as a nun had somehow made me unfit for the world, had broken something within me, and now I seemed unable to put myself together again. And I did not want to nourish myself. What was the point of feeding my body when my mind and heart had been irreparably broken? And yet, in a way, I also felt that by starving myself I was reaching out to the world. I was asking for help. People kept telling me that I was fine and congratulating me on how well I was doing. But I was not fine and I wanted people to know this. As the pounds fell off, as people like Jenifer started to notice my growing emaciation, I felt a perverse gratification. Look, I was saying, this is what I really feel like. Please notice—and help me.

• From Another Country (1962)

  FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, FEBRUARY 1993 Copyright © 1960, 1962 by James Baldwin Copyright renewed 1988, 1990 by Gloria Baldwin Karefa-Smart All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover by The Dial Press, New York, in 1962. Lyrics from “Porgy and Bess” copyright © 1935 by Gershwin Publishing Corporation, New York, N.Y. Reprinted by permission of the Gershwin Publishing Corporation. Grateful acknowledgment is made to Warner/Chappell Music, Inc. for permission to reprint excerpts from the lyrics of two songs: “Since I Fell For You” by Buddy Johnson. © 1948 Warner Bros., Inc. (Renewed). All rights reserved. Used by permission. “I Loves You Porgy” by Ira Gershwin, DuBose Heyward, and George Gershwin. © 1935 (renewed 1962) George Gershwin Music, Ira Gershwin Music, and DuBose and Dorothy Heyward Memorial Fund. All rights administered by WB Music Corp. All rights reserved. Used by permission. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Baldwin, James, 1924— Another country / by James Baldwin. p. cm. eISBN: 978-0-8041-4971-6 I. Title. PS3552.A45A84 1993 813′.54—dc20 92-50564 Design by Marc J. Cohen Cover photograph © 1965 by Charles Moore/Black Star rh_3.1_c0_r5 For Mary S. Painter Contents Cover Title Page Copyright Dedication Epigraph Book One: Easy Rider Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Book Two: Any Day Now Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Book Three: Toward Bethlehem Chapter 1 Chapter 2 About the Author Other Books by This Author They strike one, above all, as giving no account of themselves in any terms already consecrated by human use; to this inarticulate state they probably form, collectively, the most unprecedented of monuments; abysmal the mystery of what they think, what they feel, what they want, what they suppose themselves to be saying. HENRY JAMES Book One: EASY RIDER I told him, easy riders Got to stay away, So he had to vamp it, But the hike ain’t far. —W. C. HANDY 1 He was facing Seventh Avenue, at Times Square. It was past midnight and he had been sitting in the movies, in the top row of the balcony, since two o’clock in the afternoon. Twice he had been awakened by the violent accents of the Italian film, once the usher had awakened him, and twice he had been awakened by caterpillar fingers between his thighs. He was so tired, he had fallen so low, that he scarcely had the energy to be angry; nothing of his belonged to him anymore—you took the best, so why not take the rest?—but he had growled in his sleep and bared the white teeth in his dark face and crossed his legs. Then the balcony was nearly empty, the Italian film was approaching a climax; he stumbled down the endless stairs into the street.

• From Talk Dirty to Me: An Intimate Philosophy of Sex (1994)

  Some transsexuals themselves define a transsexual by the willingness to have the surgery: castration in exchange for a vagina and breasts, mastectomy and hysterectomy in exchange for a penis. Research shows that suicide rates among transsexuals, six times higher than the rest of the population to begin with, don’t significantly drop after surgery, that at least one-fourth of postsurgical TSs regret the operation. But hormones and living the role is not always enough. If you believe women are people who have vaginas, you have to have a vagina at the point at which you have socially and culturally become a woman. “Because we are men, not having a penis is very traumatic,” says an FTM transsexual, neatly transcribing the most acute and persistent penis envy in human nature. Once he has a penis of some kind, that envy merges into a lifelong fear of castration. Transsexuals willingly undergo the kind of mutilation rituals associated with great rites of passage in many cultures. Where in another culture a person may face circumcision, tattooing, piercing, and other rituals of endurance and pain, the transsexual has body-transforming hormones, castration, bilateral mastectomies or breast implants, voice lessons, rhinoplasty, jaw reductions. Most male-to-female transsexuals have their entire beards removed by electrolysis. Some have their trachea, or Adam’s apple, surgically shaved to a more feminine curve. And last is the reconstruction. How do you make a vagina? You can invert the penis, or use rectal tissue, which provides natural lubrication, or use an intestinal segment, each of these alternatives to be placed in a constructed abdominal cavity. Part of the scrotum becomes labia, complete with hair follicles, and a clitoral bud is taken from “sensitive” tissue. Postoperative care is extensive—the vagina must be stretched to keep it from closing, using a dilator for a period of weeks. Orgasm is common after surgery, and the surgery as a whole can be so good, it fools gynecologists. But not usually; there is often disappointment. On the other hand, only about one out of every ten FTMs go all the way through surgery, into the making of a penis. They often live in between, multihued, passing as men, but not men. Men have penises. To make a penis is much harder than making a vagina. One surgery simply releases the enlarged clitoris from its hood, removes the vagina, and constructs a scrotal sack out of the labia, adding implants for testicles. Others create new penises out of tissue from the abdomen. A partial change leads, sometimes, to partial acceptance; says one FTM of his mother’s reaction: “On Mother’s Day I get flowers, and on Father’s Day I get ties.”

• From The Argonauts (2015)

  That evening, Reverend Starbuck—who listed her denomination as “Metaphysical” on our forms—rush-delivered our paperwork, along with that of hundreds of others, to whatever authorities had been authorized to deem our speech act felicitous. By the end of the day, 52 percent of California voters had voted to pass Prop 8, thus halting “same-sex” marriages across the state, reversing the conditions of our felicity. The Hollywood Chapel disappeared as quickly as it had sprung up, waiting, perhaps, to emerge another day. One of the most annoying things about hearing the refrain “same-sex marriage” over and over again is that I don’t know many—if any—queers who think of their desire’s main feature as being “same-sex.” It’s true that a lot of lesbian sex writing from the ’70s was about being turned on, and even politically transformed, by an encounter with sameness. This encounter was, is, can be, important, as it has to do with seeing reflected that which has been reviled, with exchanging alienation or internalized revulsion for desire and care. To devote yourself to someone else’s pussy can be a means of devoting yourself to your own. But whatever sameness I’ve noted in my relationships with women is not the sameness of Woman, and certainly not the sameness of parts. Rather, it is the shared, crushing understanding of what it means to live in a patriarchy. My stepson is too old for Fallen Soldier or Bear Family now. As I write, he’s listening to Funky Cold Medina on his iPod—eyes closed, in his gigantic body, lying on the red couch. Nine years old. There’s something truly strange about living in a historical moment in which the conservative anxiety and despair about queers bringing down civilization and its institutions (marriage, most notably) is met by the anxiety and despair so many queers feel about the failure or incapacity of queerness to bring down civilization and its institutions, and their frustration with the assimilationist, unthinkingly neoliberal bent of the mainstream GLBTQ+ movement, which has spent fine coin begging entrance into two historically repressive structures: marriage and the military. “I’m not the kind of faggot who wants to put a rainbow sticker on a machine gun,” declares poet CAConrad. If there’s one thing homonormativity reveals, it’s the troubling fact that you can be victimized and in no way be radical; it happens very often among homosexuals as with every other oppressed minority. This is not a devaluation of queerness. It is a reminder: if we want to do more than claw our way into repressive structures, we have our work cut out for us. At the 2012 Pride intervention in Oakland, some antiassimilationist activists unfurled a banner that read: CAPITALISM IS FUCKING THE QUEER OUT OF US. A distributed pamphlet read:

• From Another Country (1962)

  He saw the train in the tunnel, rushing under water, the motor-man gone mad, gone blind, unable to decipher the lights, and the tracks gleaming and snarling senselessly upward forever, the train never stopping and the people screaming at windows and doors and turning on each other with all the accumulated fury of their blasphemed lives, everything gone out of them but murder, breaking limb from limb and splashing in blood, with joy—for the first time, joy, joy, after such a long sentence in chains, leaping out to astound the world, to astound the world again. Or, the train in the tunnel, the water outside, the power failing, the walls coming in, and the water not rising like a flood but breaking like a wave over the heads of these people, filling their crying mouths, filling their eyes, their hair, tearing away their clothes and discovering the secrecy which only the water, by now, could use. It could happen. It could happen; and he would have loved to see it happen, even if he perished, too. The train came in, filling the great scar of the tracks. They all got on, sitting in the lighted car which was far from empty, which would be choked with people before they got very far uptown, and stood or sat in the isolation cell into which they transformed every inch of space they held. The train stopped at Fourteenth Street. He was sitting at the window and he watched a few people get on. There was a colored girl among them who looked a little like his sister, but she looked at him and looked away and sat down as far from him as she could. The train rolled on through the tunnel. The next stop was Thirty-fourth Street, his stop. People got on; he watched the stop roll by. Forty-second Street. This time a crowd got on, some of them carrying papers, and there were no seats left. A white man leaned on a strap near him. Rufus felt his gorge rise. At Fifty-ninth Street many came on board and many rushed across the platform to the waiting local. Many white people and many black people, chained together in time and in space, and by history, and all of them in a hurry. In a hurry to get away from each other, he thought, but we ain’t never going to make it. We been fucked for fair. Then the doors slammed, a loud sound, and it made him jump. The train, as though protesting its heavier burden, as though protesting the proximity of white buttock to black knee, groaned, lurched, the wheels seemed to scrape the track, making a tearing sound. Then it began to move uptown, where the masses would divide and the load become lighter. Lights flared and teetered by, they passed other platforms where people waited for other trains.

• From Another Country (1962)

  Fiction/Literature GOING TO MEET THE MAN “There’s no way not to suffer. But you try all kinds of ways to keep from drowning in it.” The men and women in these eight short fictions grasp this truth on an elemental level, and their stories, as told by James Baldwin, detail the ingenious and often desperate ways in which they try to keep their heads above water. It may be the heroin that a down-and-out jazz pianist uses to face the terror of pouring his life into an inanimate instrument. It may be the brittle piety of a father who can never forgive his son for his illegitimacy. Or it may be the screen of bigotry that a redneck deputy has raised to blunt the awful childhood memory of the day his parents took him to watch a black man being murdered by a gleeful mob. Fiction/Literature IF BEALE STREET COULD TALK Tish and Fonny have pledged to get married, but Fonny is falsely accused of a terrible crime and imprisoned. Their families set out to clear his name, and as they face an uncertain future, the young lovers experience a kaleidoscope of emotions—affection, despair, and hope. Fiction/Literature NO NAME IN THE STREET A searing memoir and an extraordinary history of the turbulent sixties and early seventies, No Name in the Street is James Baldwin’s powerful commentary on the political and social agonies of America’s contemporary history. The prophecies of The Fire Next Time have been tragically realized—through assassinations, urban riots, and increased racial polarization—and the hope for justice seems more elusive than ever. Through it all, Baldwin’s uncompromising vision and his fierce disavowal of despair are ever present in this eloquent and personal testament to his times. Nonfiction NOBODY KNOWS MY NAME Nobody Knows My Name is a collection of illuminating, deeply felt essays on topics ranging from race relations in the United States—including a passionate attack on William Faulkner for his ambivalent views about the segregated South—to the role of the writer in society, with personal accounts of such writers as Richard Wright and Norman Mailer. Literature/African American Studies TELL ME HOW LONG THE TRAIN’S BEEN GONE In this magnificently passionate, angry, and tender novel, James Baldwin created one of his most striking characters, a man struggling to become himself even as he juggles multiple identities—as black man, bisexual, and artist–on the mercilessly floodlit stage of American public life. At the height of his theatrical career, the actor Leo Proudhammer is nearly felled by a heart attack. As he hovers between life and death, Baldwin shows the choices that have made him enviably famous and terrifyingly vulnerable. For between Leo’s childhood on the streets of Harlem and his arrival into the intoxicating world of the theater lies a wilderness of desire and loss, shame and rage.

• From Another Country (1962)

  But he did nothing; he lit a cigarette; the palms of his hands were wet. Rufus choked, sputtered, and sat up. He turned his agonized face to Vivaldo for an instant. Then: “Whores!” he shouted and began to laugh again. “What’s so funny?” Vivaldo asked, quietly. “If you don’t see it, I can’t tell you,” Rufus said. He had stopped laughing, was very sober and still. “Everybody’s on the A train—you take it uptown, I take it downtown—it’s crazy.” Then, again, he looked at Vivaldo with hatred. He said, “Me and Leona—she’s the greatest lay I ever had. Ain’t nothing we don’t do.” “Crazy,” said Vivaldo. He crushed out his cigarette on the floor. He was beginning to be angry. At the same time he wanted to laugh. “But it ain’t going to work,” said Rufus. “It ain’t going to work.” They heard the whistles on the river; he walked to the window again. “I ought to get out of here. I better get out of here.” “Well, then, go. Don’t hang around, waiting—just go.” “I’m going to go,” said Rufus. “I’m going to go. I just want to see Leona one more time.” He stared at Vivaldo. “I just want to get laid— get blowed—loved—one more time.” “You know,” said Vivaldo, “I’m not really interested in the details of your sex life.” Rufus smiled. “No? I thought all you white boys had a big thing about how us spooks was making out.” “Well,” said Vivaldo, “I’m different.” “Yeah,” said Rufus, “I bet you are.” “I just want to be your friend,” said Vivaldo. “That’s all. But you don’t want any friends, do you?” “Yes, I do,” said Rufus, quietly. “Yes, I do.” He paused; then, slowly, with difficulty, “Don’t mind me. I know you’re the only friend I’ve got left in the world, Vivaldo.” And that’s why you hate me, Vivaldo thought, feeling still and helpless and sad. Now Vivaldo and Rufus sat together in silence, near the window of the pizzeria. There was little left for them to say. They had said it all—or Rufus had; and Vivaldo had listened. Music from a nearby night club came at them, faintly, through the windows, along with the grinding, unconquerable hum of the streets. And Rufus watched the streets with a helpless, sad intensity, as though he were waiting for Leona. These streets had claimed her. She had been found, Rufus said, one freezing night, half-naked, looking for her baby. She knew where it was, where they had hidden her baby, she knew the house; only she could not remember the address. And then, Rufus said, she had been taken to Bellevue, and he had been unable to get her out.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  So that was that. To this day, some of my friends—even those who did not know me at the time—insist that I could still have reversed this decision. I cannot imagine what they think I could have done. Chained myself to the railings outside the Examination Schools? Picketed the Dame’s house? Prostrated myself in front of the Sheldonian Theatre and stopped the traffic? Gone on hunger strike? It was quite clear to me and my supporters that the game was up. I found it very comforting that there had been such a row, that people had fought on my behalf, and that I had not gone quietly. I was glad that I wasn’t simply an ordinary failure, though there was something disturbing about all the notoriety. There seemed to be something irremediably odd and freakish about me. I tried to behave with dignity, but I still experienced the final decision as a body blow. It would be a long time before I could hear the words “Tennyson,” “doctorate,” or “thesis” without pain. I was not angry with Alastair Courtney. I suspected that, for all the fuss, he had been right. I was no good, and he had unmasked me. I had failed as a nun; I had failed as an academic. I was cracking up mentally. I could not see what I could usefully do with the rest of my life. As I traveled between the college and my flat, the city seemed to mirror my depression. SAME THING DAY AFTER DAY, read a famous graffito snaking between the Ladbroke Grove and Westbourne Park tube stations. TUBE—WORK—DINER [sic]—WORK—TUBE— ARMCHAIR—TUBE—WORK—HOW MUCH MORE CAN YOU TAKE—ONE IN FIVE CRACKS UP. Nineteen seventy-five was a grim year in London. Britain was in recession, the IRA had brought its terror campaign to the mainland, and the tabloid newspapers were apocalyptic, calling for a return to law and order. The unemployment figures were among the worst since the Second World War, and I took perverse consolation from the fact that even if I had got my doctorate, I probably wouldn’t have got a university post. The colorful interlude of the sixties was over. The hippie commune had been replaced by the “squat,” an ideological protest against the futility and absurdity of work, and the young seemed afflicted by what was termed “a poverty of desire.” The dream of a brave new world, which had seemed almost palpable during my Oxford years, was over.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  When I entered my convent, I thought I had embarked on a mystical adventure like that of Percival and the other knights of the Grail, but instead of finding my own path, I had to follow somebody else’s. Instead of striking out on my own, I had conformed to a way of life and modes of thought that had often seemed alien. As a result, I found myself in a wasteland, an inauthentic existence, in which I struggled mightily but fruitlessly to do what I was told. Even after I left the convent, I continued to follow goals that were not right for me, “desiring this man’s gift and that man’s scope.” I had too clear a preconceived idea of what I was supposed to be, and was not open to new possibilities. So again I got lost in the wasteland. I had been repeatedly warned, for example, that I was not suited to the academic life, yet I had plowed stubbornly on. I longed to be like everybody else, with a warm family life and a successful career. But I was no more suited to university or school teaching than to the glitzy lifestyle of the television personality. No wonder each of these enterprises had ended in disaster. These were professions that brought fulfillment to other people, but they were not for me. Now circumstances had forced me to find my own track and enter the forest at a point that I myself had chosen, where there was no established path. I cannot pretend, however, that at the time I felt like an intrepid knight, striding heroically into the darkness. Instead, it seemed to me that I was being driven away from “the usual reign” against my will, and I kept turning back resentfully, casting envious glances at the receding world. I had no idea that I was about to “turn again” and experience what the Greeks call metanoia, or conversion. That was the last thing I wanted, and if anybody had told me that it was in the cards, I would probably have abandoned the God book immediately and started forthwith on that biography of Fanny Burney. It is only now, after more than a decade of study, that I can understand what happened.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  Catholics have ashes smeared on their foreheads to remind them of their mortality, because it is only when we have become fully aware of the frailty that is inherent in our very nature that we can begin our quest. During Lent, Christians embark on six weeks of penitence and reflection that lead to the rebirth of Easter—a life that we could not possibly have imagined at the outset. In Eliot’s Ash-Wednesday, we watch the poet painfully climbing a spiral staircase. This image is reflected in the twisting sentences of the verse, which often revolves upon itself, repeating the same words and phrases, apparently making little headway, but pushing steadily forward nevertheless. My own life has progressed in the same way. For years it seemed a hard, Lenten journey, but without the prospect of Easter. I toiled round and round in pointless circles, covering the same ground, repeating the same mistakes, quite unable to see where I was going. Yet all the time, without realizing it, I was slowly climbing out of the darkness. In mythology, stairs frequently symbolize a breakthrough to a new level of consciousness. For a long time I assumed that I had finished with religion forever, yet in the end, the strange and seemingly arbitrary revolutions of my life led me to the kind of transformation that—I now believe—was what I was seeking all those years ago, when I packed my suitcase, entered my convent, and set off to find God. 2 2. The Devil of the Stairs It began with the smell. It was a sweet but sulfury aroma, reminiscent of bad eggs and giving off an aura of imminent menace. Like any odor, it was also intensely evocative. I recognized it immediately. This was how it always started. In the convent I had several times been assailed by this strange smell, had looked around for a cause and found the world splintering around me. The sunlight, the flickering candles of the altar, and the electric light seemed to oscillate crazily; there would be a moment of pure nausea, and then nothing: a long, long fall into emptiness. These fainting attacks had occurred four or five times, to the intense irritation of my superiors. Once it had happened on the day before Easter, and although afterward I felt reasonably well, Mother Frances had sent me to bed in disgrace and I was forbidden to attend the midnight Vigil.

• From Another Country (1962)

  He was hungry, his mouth felt filthy. He realized too late, as he passed through the doors, that he wanted to urinate. And he was broke. And he had nowhere to go. The policeman passed him, giving him a look. Rufus turned, pulling up the collar of his leather jacket while the wind nibbled delightedly at him through his summer slacks, and started north on Seventh Avenue. He had been thinking of going downtown and waking up Vivaldo—the only friend he had left in the city, or maybe in the world—but now he decided to walk up as far as a certain jazz bar and night club and look in. Maybe somebody would see him and recognize him, maybe one of the guys would lay enough bread on him for a meal or at least subway fare. At the same time, he hoped that he would not be recognized. The Avenue was quiet, too, most of its bright lights out. Here and there a woman passed, here and there a man; rarely, a couple. At corners, under the lights, near drugstores, small knots of white, bright, chattering people showed teeth to each other, pawed each other, whistled for taxis, were whirled away in them, vanished through the doors of drugstores or into the blackness of side streets. Newsstands, like small black blocks on a board, held down corners of the pavements and policemen and taxi drivers and others, harder to place, stomped their feet before them and exchanged such words as they both knew with the muffled vendor within. A sign advertised the chewing gum which would help one to relax and keep smiling. A hotel’s enormous neon name challenged the starless sky. So did the names of movie stars and people currently appearing or scheduled to appear on Broadway, along with the mile-high names of the vehicles which would carry them into immortality. The great buildings, unlit, blunt like the phallus or sharp like the spear, guarded the city which never slept. Beneath them Rufus walked, one of the fallen—for the weight of this city was murderous—one of those who had been crushed on the day, which was every day, these towers fell. Entirely alone, and dying of it, he was part of an unprecedented multitude. There were boys and girls drinking coffee at the drugstore counters who were held back from his condition by barriers as perishable as their dwindling cigarettes.

• From Another Country (1962)

  He stood at the center of the bridge and it was freezing cold. He raised his eyes to heaven. He thought, You bastard, you motherfucking bastard. Ain’t I your baby, too? He began to cry. Something in Rufus which could not break shook him like a rag doll and splashed salt water all over his face and filled his throat and his nostrils with anguish. He knew the pain would never stop. He could never go down into the city again. He dropped his head as though someone had struck him and looked down at the water. It was cold and the water would be cold. He was black and the water was black. He lifted himself by his hands on the rail, lifted himself as high as he could, and leaned far out. The wind tore at him, at his head and shoulders, while something in him screamed, Why? Why? He thought of Eric. His straining arms threatened to break. I can’t make it this way. He thought of Ida. He whispered, I’m sorry, Leona, and then the wind took him, he felt himself going over, head down, the wind, the stars, the lights, the water, all rolled together, all right. He felt a shoe fly off behind him, there was nothing around him, only the wind, all right, you motherfucking Godalmighty bastard, I’m coming to you. 2It was raining. Cass sat on her living-room floor with the Sunday papers and a cup of coffee. She was trying to decide which photograph of Richard would look best on the front page of the book-review section. The telephone rang. “Hello?” She heard an intake of breath and a low, vaguely familiar voice: “Is this Cass Silenski?” “Yes.” She looked at the clock, wondering who this could be. It was ten-thirty and she was the only person awake in her house. “Well”—swiftly—“I don’t know if you remember me, but we met once, downtown, in a night club where Rufus was working. I’m his sister—Ida? Ida Scott——” She remembered a very young, striking, dark girl who wore a ruby-eyed snake ring. “Why, yes, I remember you very well. How are you?” “I’m fine. Well”—with a small, dry laugh—“maybe I’m not so fine. I’m trying to locate my brother. I been calling Vivaldo’s house all morning, but he’s not home”—the voice was making an effort not to tremble, not to break—“and so I called you because I thought maybe you’d seen him, Vivaldo, I mean, or maybe you could tell me how to reach him.” And now the girl was crying. “You haven’t seen him, have you? Or my brother?” She heard sounds coming from the children’s bedroom. “Please,” she said, “try not to be so upset. I don’t know where Vivaldo is this morning but I saw your brother last night. And he was fine.” “You saw him last night?” “Yes.” “Where’d you see him? Where was he?”

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  There was another, deeper reason for this. These frightening incidents were changing me. I now knew that at any second, the pleasant, innocent-seeming surface of normality could split apart, and this knowledge infected everything. I knew that other people had been to this dark place. I could see it in van Gogh’s tormented, writhing olive trees and swirling, starry skies. It was in the infernal visions of Bosch; it was the heart of darkness evoked by Joseph Conrad. It didn’t matter how often I told myself that these experiences had no substantive reality. However you accounted for them, this was a region of the human mind. And because I had visited it, I felt set apart. I was surrounded by girls whose existence was beginning to blossom. Most of them were hopeful, cheerful, and excited by their unfolding lives, but I could no longer share this instinctive optimism. I was now doubly out of place among my fellow students, as though I were the wicked fairy in the story, brooding balefully over the party. Increasingly I felt as though I were witnessing everything at one remove. As time went on, solid physical objects appeared ephemeral, and people seemed like ghosts, with no clearly defined identity. When your surroundings can so suddenly take on a frightening aspect, you start to experience them as fluid, unreliable, and without inherent integrity. Things seemed to flow into one another; a kind face could rapidly become menacing, a pleasant landscape take on a malign aspect. Sometimes I felt as though I were looking at reality through a sheet of glass. If I put my hand out to touch an object, I often expected to feel this barrier; sounds seemed faint and dim. This happened so gradually and became so habitual that, after a time, I ceased to remark upon it. It became the norm, the element in which I lived. I was rather like the little fish in the Sufi parable, who asks his mother about this stuff called water that he hears everybody discussing but which he has never seen. It is not until the condition lifts that you realize that it was abnormal. At the time, it simply seemed that the world from which I had retreated had now begun to recede from me.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  In the summer of 1982, as the school year came to an end, Through the Narrow Gate came out in paperback, so that meant more talk shows and more publicity. I was expected to be positive with my interviewers, and confident about the future, but I felt as though I were heading into an abyss. One evening, after a day in school, I got onto the bus and found tears rolling down my cheeks. I could not stop them, but sat throughout the long journey home to North London weeping quietly. There seemed no hope at all. The next morning I woke up feeling empty and hollow. Looking into the mirror, I winced. Not a pretty sight. And today, as ill luck would have it, I had an appointment with a television crew. Perhaps I could get out of it! I could always ring up and say that I wasn’t feeling well. It wasn’t as though this project would do anything for the book; in fact, it seemed I would simply be doing the film company a favor. “Don’t feel you have to do this, Karen,” Jacqui, my publicist, had said when she had included it on the schedule. “It’s only a pilot for Channel Four, the new television channel starting this autumn. The film company is doing a few programs to persuade the channel’s editor to give them a commission for a series. So nothing may come of it. If you don’t want to do this, please feel free to say no.” But I had agreed to go along and had spoken with the producer. He asked me to think of a topic on any subject that I felt I could talk about. As long as it was punchy and controversial, it didn’t matter what it was. I had not given the program a thought, and spending the morning in a hot studio was the last thing I felt like. All I wanted to do was crawl under the bedclothes and shut out the world. I even dialed the office of the production company, but of course there was no reply. They would all be waiting for me at the studio, setting up, as they called it. A car was coming to collect me in forty-five minutes. I often wonder how my life would have turned out if I had managed to get through to the producer, offered my excuses, and pulled out.

• From Deceptions and Myths of the Bible (1975)

  And the great city was divided into three parts, and the cities of the nations fell: and great Babylon came in remembrance before God, to give unto her the cup of the wine of the fierceness of his wrath. The “seventh angel” is the power of the seventh involutionary plane—the sun-earth stage, symbolized by the city Babylon. The warfare is that between the spiritual and material forces. In this the material wins. Here the creative process ends and so the voice from heaven says, “It is done.” And elsewhere, “It is finished.” After this the earth is divided into three parts, Involution, Devolution and Evolution. 1. And I saw a new heaven and a new earth (Evolution): for the first heaven and the first earth (Involution) were passed away; and there was no more sea (the prephysical elements; Chap. 21). And we said these no longer existed when the physical was formed. We also said that this newborn world was no Garden of Eden, and John agrees. He calls it a seven-headed beast on which sits a whore, clothed in jewels and fine raiment; none other than the “woman clothed with the sun,” now material and evil. 4. And the woman (the Earth Mother) was arrayed in purple and scarlet colour, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a golden cup in her hand full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication (symbols of materiality; Chap. 17). This scriptural harlot is decked out just like the “holy city,” and in verse 18 we find she is that city. “And the woman which thou sawest is that great city which reigneth over the kings of the earth.” Not kings, but kingdoms. 5. And upon her forehead was a name written, MYSTERY, BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH. (Babylon, like Egypt, is a mythic symbol of the earth.) 6. And I saw the woman drunken with the blood of the saints, and with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus: and when I saw her, I wondered with great admiration (Chap. 17). The earth is drenched with blood, not just of martyred saints, but of martyred life. This is “the will of God,” but because of a false theology no man dares say so. 7. And the angel said unto me, wherefore didst thou marvel? I will tell thee the mystery of the woman, and of the beast that carrieth her, which hath the seven heads and ten horns. 8. The beast that thou sawest was, and is not; and shall ascend out of the bottomless pit, and go into perdition: and they that dwell on the earth shall wonder, whose names were not written in the book of life from the foundation of the world, when they behold the beast that was, and is not, and yet is (Chap. 17). Such an explanation does not explain; it only compounds the mystery. But this is as it was meant to be.