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 Canterbury Tales (2009)

  The Almighty smote him with a grievous wound, invisible and incurable, festering in his guts and causing him unendurable pain. Yet it was a fitting vengeance for one who had inflicted suffering on so many others. Even in his agony he pursued his evil purpose. He ordered his army to prepare for battle. But, as he did so, God crushed his pride. Antiochus was hurled from his chariot by an unseen force, and his body was so badly mangled that the bones protruded through the flesh and skin. He could no longer ride a horse. He could no longer hold the reins. So he was carried everywhere in a chair of state, his body black with bruising. The vengeance of the Lord was soon complete. His festering wounds had bred maggots beneath the skin and, as the wicked worms crept through the body, his flesh began to stink terribly. None of his attendants could bear the smell of him, sleeping or waking. He fell into despair, weeping all the time, because he knew now that God alone was the lord of creation. Neither he, nor those around him, could endure the stench any longer. They could not stay in his company. So he was taken to a hillside, where he was left in all his agony. Alone among the rocks he died. So this thief and murderer ended his days with the just reward for all the pain he had caused to others. He was killed by his own pride. Alexander Do you know the old song, some talk of Alexander, some talk of Hercules? Well, everyone knows the story of Alexander. It is common throughout the civilized world. He conquered the whole world, too, and every sovereign was eager to make peace with him. He laid low the pride of man and beast, as far as the world’s end. There is no comparison to be made between him and any other general; the seas and continents quaked in fear of him. He was the flower of chivalry and the lord of grace. He was the heir of Fortune’s bounty. He was so full of courage that nothing could divert his progress in arms - nothing, that is, except for the charms of wine and women. He does not need my praise. Why should I repeat his victories over Darius, king of the Persians, and of a hundred thousand other rulers, generals and commanders? As far as any man could ride, or travel, the land belonged to Alexander. He owned the world. There is no more to say. He was the son of Philip, king of Macedon and the first high ruler of Greece, and he reigned for twelve years. Oh worthy Alexander, then Fortune rolled the dice against you. You lost the game. Your own people poisoned you.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I lay with my eyes shut and my hands before my face: I didn’t want to look at them, or at any part of the squalid world I was now obliged to share with them. I thought of Zena, and the plan that I had put to her - I thought: It will be hard, it will be terribly hard; but Zena will keep me from the worst of the hardness. Without Zena, it would be hard indeed ... Then I took my hands from my face at last, and turned to gaze at the bed beside me; and it was empty. Zena was gone. The money was gone. She had risen at dawn, with her servant’s habits; and she had left me, slumbering, with nothing. Understanding it at last left me curiously blank: I think, I was too giddy already to be dazed any further, too wretched to descend to greater depths. I rose, and drew my frock from beneath the mattress - it was creased worse than ever - and buttoned it on. The drunkard in the neighbouring bed had spent a ha’penny on a bowl of tepid water, and she let me use it, after she had stood in it and washed herself down, to wipe the last remaining flakes of blood from my cheeks, and to flatten my hair. My face, when I gazed at it in the sliver of mirror that was glued to the wall, looked like a face of wax, that had been set too near a spirit-lamp. My feet, when I stepped on them, seemed to shriek: the shoes were ones I had used to wear as a renter, but either my feet had grown since then, or I had become too used to gentle leather; I had gained blisters in the walk to the Kilburn Road, and now the blisters began to rub raw and wet, and the stockings to fray. We were not allowed to linger past the morning in the bedroom of the lodging-house: at eleven o’clock a woman came, and chivvied us out with a broom. I walked a little way with the drunkard. When we parted, at the top of Maida Vale, she took out the smallest screw of tobacco, rolled two thread-like cigarettes, and gave me one. Tobacco, she said, was the best cure for a bruise. I sat on a bench, and smoked till my fingers scorched; and then I considered my plight. My situation, after all, was a ridiculously familiar one: I had been as cold and as ill and as wretched as this four years before, after my flight from Stamford Hill. Then, however, I had at least had money, and handsome clothes; I had had food, and cigarettes - had all I required to keep me, not happy, but certainly quick. Now, I had nothing.

• From The Canterbury Tales (2009)

  Woe is always the consequence of bliss. Sorrow follows prosperity, and suffering succeeds joy. That is the way of the world. Follow this advice for the sake of your well-being. If you ever experience happiness, keep in mind the day when it will end. Nothing abides. I will be brief. While they were at this feast all the guests, Syrian and Christian, were stabbed or cut to pieces. All of them were killed, with the exception of Constance herself. And who do you think had murdered them? The sultaness, of course, together with her henchmen. The old hag wanted to rule the country alone. She had even murdered her own son. All of the converts to Christianity, who had changed their faith on the instructions of the sultan, were killed before they could escape. Constance herself was immediately dragged to the port, where she was put on a boat without sail or rudder. They told her that it was her chance to learn how to sail, and bid her to go back to Italy. She had managed to take some of her possessions with her. The Syrians had also given her food and drink, as well as a change of clothing. So off she floated on to the salt sea. Oh dear Constance, dearest of the dear, young daughter of the emperor, may Christ the Saviour be your pilot! So Constance blessed herself and, holding the crucifix before her, she wept and prayed. ‘Oh sacred altar, holy cross, red with the blood of the Holy Lamb spilled in pity for this world of sin, keep me safe from the claws of the devil. Safeguard my soul when I drown in the deep. ‘Tree of victory, holy rood, cross of truth, preserve me. Oh tree that bore the sweet weight of our wounded Saviour, guard me. Oh white Lamb, pierced by the spear, who drives away the evil spirits, cast your grace around me. Help me to amend my life and do penance for my sins.’ Her fortune carried her across the eastern Mediterranean, and into the Strait of Gibraltar. She ate only meagre meals as she drifted onward. The days became months, and the months became years. There were many occasions when she prepared herself for death. She did not know if the wild waves would take her to a shore or harbour. Why was she not killed at the feast in Damascus? Who could have saved her? I will answer that question with another. Who saved Daniel in the lion’s den? How did Daniel survive when every other man had been killed and eaten by the creature? God saved him. God was in his heart.

• From The Canterbury Tales (2009)

  She turned and looked at Aurelius. ‘What are you saying to me? Can I believe what I am hearing? I never suspected this of you before. But now I know everything. By the God who gave me soul and life, I never shall be an unfaithful wife. In word and deed, to the utmost limit of my strength, I will be a true lady to my lord. Take that as my final answer.’ But then, as if playing a game with him, she seemed to relent a little. ‘Aurelius,’ she said, ‘I swear to the same god that I will bestow my love on you. I have taken pity on your tears. There is only one condition. On the day that you manage to clear all the rocks that deface the coast of Brittany - on the day that you remove, stone by stone, these cruel impediments to our ships and boats - I will promise to love you as no other man has ever been loved. When the coasts are clear, I will be yours. I swear it.’ ‘Is there no other way?’ he asked her. ‘None. I know that it is never going to happen. Don’t dwell upon the possibilities. It just can’t be done. In any case what kind of a person are you, to have designs upon another man’s wife? My body is not for auction.’ Aurelius sighed very deeply. He was depressed by what he had heard, and with sorrowful countenance he replied to her. ‘Ma dame,’ he said, ‘you have set me an impossible task. There is no choice for me now. I must die a piteous death.’ And with these words he turned and walked away. Now the rest of the company came and joined them, not realizing the conversation that had passed between them. They paraded through the garden walks, and soon began singing and dancing again until the setting of the sun. The horizon dimmed its light. The night came upon them. So they went back to their homes in peace and happiness - all except Aurelius, of course, who returned to a house of woe. He saw no remedy but in death. He felt his breast, and it was as cold as ice. He fell down on his knees and raised his hands to heaven. He prayed - he knew not what. He was out of his mind with grief. He did not know what to say or what to do, so instead he set up a long low complaint to the gods in heaven. He addressed the sun first of all.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  Donne was not alone in his pessimism. That same year Henry IV of Navarre, who had seemed the only monarch capable of stemming the tide of denominational violence that was threatening to engulf the whole of Europe, had been assassinated by a Catholic fanatic. This was immediately recognized as a tragic turning point and had the same kind of impact in seventeenth-century Europe as did the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in twentieth-century America. 3 Henry had been determined to contain the religious passions that were becoming murderously divisive in France and had followed a policy of strict neutrality. He had granted civil liberties to French Protestants, and when the parlement expelled the Jesuits, Henry had reinstated them. His death, which shocked moderate Catholics and Protestants alike, sent a grim message: a policy of toleration had been tried but it had failed. By 1600, England was drifting into a civil war and the principalities of Germany were struggling to achieve independence from the Holy Roman Empire and form nation-states. Sweden supported the Protestant princes, and the Austrian Hapsburgs the Catholics. In 1618, this strife escalated into the full-scale Thirty Years’ War, which killed 35 percent of the population of central Europe, which was reduced to a charnel house. Religion was clearly incapable of bringing the warring parties together. The more Roman Catholic zealots gloried in the slaughter of Protestants and the more Protestants exultantly burned Catholic strongholds to the ground, the more people of moderation and goodwill despaired of a solution. But not everybody shared Donne’s misgivings about the “new Philosophy.” The Flemish Jesuit Leonard Lessius (1554–1623), one of the most distinguished theologians in Europe, shows that not all Catholics had developed the tunnel vision of the Vatican. 4 Lessius was committed to the Catholic Reformation, had studied in Rome under Bellarmine, and on his return to the University of Louvain had introduced the works of Aquinas in their new guise into the curriculum. But he was also a Renaissance man, open to all the changing intellectual currents of the early modern world. He had studied jurisprudence and economics, and had been one of the first to appreciate the altered role of money in the nascent capitalist economy. In 1612, just two years after Galileo had published The Sidereal Messenger, Lessius not only applauded his discoveries but was able to confirm them, because he too had observed the pitted surface of the moon and the satellites of Jupiter through his telescope and was filled with “immense admiration” when he beheld this evidence of “God’s wisdom and power.” 5 These remarks were included in Lessius’s most important work, Divine Providence and the Immortality of the Soul (1612), a treatise directed “against atheists and politicians.” There had been some concern in recent years about the emergence of “atheism,” though at this date the term did not yet mean an outright denial of God’s existence.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  We had to do without God and pour all our loving solicitude and care upon the world. But this would bring no liberation. In The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), Camus showed that the abolition of God required a lifelong and hopeless struggle that it was impossible to rationalize. In his passion for life and hatred of death, Sisyphus, king of ancient Corinth, had defied the gods, and his punishment was to spend eternity engaged in a futile task: each day he had to roll a boulder up a mountainside; but when he reached the summit, the rock rolled downhill, so the next day he had to begin all over again. This was an image of the absurdity of human life, from which even death offered no release. Can we be happy in the knowledge that we are defeated before we even begin? If we make a heroic effort to create our own meaning in the face of death and absurdity, Camus concludes that happiness is possible: I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one’s burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy. 72 By the middle of the twentieth century, many found it impossible to imagine that getting rid of God would lead to a brave new world; there was no serene Enlightenment optimism in the rationality of human existence. Camus had embraced the state of unknowing. He did not know for certain that God did not exist; he simply chose to believe this. We have to live with our ignorance in a universe that is silent in the face of our questioning. Within a decade of Camus’ death, though, the world had drastically changed. There was a rebellion against the ethos of modernity; new forms of religiosity, a different kind of atheism, and, despite the fact that unknowing seemed built into our condition, a strident lust for certainty. D Death of God? uring the 1960s, Europe experienced a dramatic loss of faith. After a rise in religious observance during the austerity years immediately after the Second World War, for example, British people stopped going to church in unprecedented numbers and the decline has steadily continued. 1 A recent poll has estimated that only about 6 percent of Britons attend a religious service regularly. In both Europe and the United States, sociologists proclaimed the triumph of secularism.

• From City of Night (1963)

  We stopped at one of the water faucets along the road and got out. The world shrugged beneath us: expansive and unconcerned. “I—fell off a cliff—once,” Lance said dully, staring down. He laughs bitterly. “If youve been around the bars in Hollywood at all, youve probably heard about it.” I was silent. “No comment? That means youve heard. Hell, I dont care. If I only knew what really happened. I was drunk that night too. Some marines—I was with them—I dont even know how—I was frantic; drunk. Someone had just told me that—...” He stopped for a long while. “I remember shouting something to the marines; I remember—... The car stopped. There was a cliff....” He stood staring down at the impassive world. “Sometimes—sometimes I think—I think I knew that cliff was there when I jumped....” He was silent again. “When you look down like this,” he said, “it’s almost as if the world is waiting for you to jump, and the only thing you can do is turn back and postpone it—for a while—or throw yourself on it and get it over with....” He turned and smiled at me—the enchanted smile of the legendary Lance O’Hara—and he put out his hand to me in a gesture of friendship. “Thanks for coming out here with me.” In the car, he said abruptly. “I know! Lets go there now—to Laguna Beach! I havent been there since that day. Weve still got time! I’d like to see it again.” When we reached Laguna—that city like a slick patchwork quilt—the beach was deserted and cold. We walked on the darkening beach. Lance stared ahead at the ocean. We lay on the sand silently. Then Lance got up, moved to the very edge of the water, which advances murmuring toward him, retreating, advancing closer now more violently. He stood against the sky, a shadow, the water lapping at his feet.... As we drove back, Lance seemed happy. “I want you to stay with me tonight—will you?—and tomorrow Im going to give a party. I want to very much suddenly. I want to invite them all—and theyll all come, if only out of curiosity. But they wont see what they want to see.... Will you stay with me tonight?” 5 This is the house of Lance O’Hara — the house of Esmeralda Drake the Third .... In the hills, serene. The smile on Lance’s face seems serene too: belying the existence of a ghost, tapping along the house with a cane .... Most of the morning, Lance was on the telephone. “Yes, it’s me—Lance! Im having a party.... As early as you like.... Here, in my house—you know where I live....” And most of the morning, and into the afternoon, the telephone rang as if itself aware of the party.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  In 1655 Juan da Prado, who had been a committed member of the Jewish underground in Portugal for twenty years, arrived in Amsterdam. He too had found that without the spiritual exercises that produced them, the ideas of conventional religion lacked substance and had succumbed to Marrano deism, seeing God as identical with the laws of nature.90 He too was shocked by his first encounter with a fully functioning Jewish community and was loud in his complaints. Why did the Jews think they were God’s chosen people? Was it not degrading to imagine that the First Cause was a Personality? Two years after his arrival, Prado was excommunicated and became more extreme in his views, arguing that all religion was rubbish and that reason, not “revelation,” was the sole arbiter of truth. We have no idea how he ended his days. The unhappy stories of Prado and da Costa show that the mythos of confessional religion is unsustainable without spiritual exercises. Reason alone can produce only an attenuated deism that is easily abandoned, as its God is remote, abstract, and ultimately incredible. And yet at the same time as the Jewish community in Amsterdam was being torn apart by these conflicts, the Christians of Europe had begun to develop their own form of deism; like Prado, they too would regard scientific rationality as the only route to truth and would seek a rational certainty that Jewish, Christian, and Muslim philosophers had long held to be impossible in matters of faith. [image file=image_rsrc4UX.jpg] Scientific ReligionIn 1610, the English poet John Donne (1572–1631) lamented the state of the world, which he thought was entering its final phase. A deeply conservative man, Donne was a casualty of the Reformation. Born into a devout Catholic family, he had abjured his faith after his brother had died in prison for sheltering a Catholic priest and had become bitterly hostile to the new Catholicism. He was profoundly disturbed by the recent scientific discoveries that seemed wantonly to have destroyed the old cosmic vision of perfection and harmony. These were hard times. Europe was in the throes of economic recession and the social unrest attendant on modernization, and yet in the midst of this confusion, the “new Philosophy”* called “all in doubt.” ‘Tis all in peeces, all cohaerence gone; All just supply, and all Relation.1 It was as though the universe had suffered a massive earthquake. New stars had been sighted in the firmament, and others had disappeared. The heavens no longer enjoyed their “Sphericall … round proportion embracing all,” and planets were said to wander in “Eccentrique parts” that violated the “pure forme” that men had observed for so long.2 When these fundamentals had shifted, how could anybody be certain of the truth?

• From The Case for God (2009)

  There seems to have been a profound loss of confidence in both the physical world and human nature. Hitherto Greeks, like most other peoples, had seen no impassable gulf between God and humanity. Their philosophers had agreed that as rational animals, human beings contained a spark of the divine within themselves; a sage like Socrates, who incarnated the transcendent ideal of wisdom, was a son of God and an avatar of the divine. People had no doubt that they could ascend to the Good by their own natural powers. Origen, a Platonist, believed that he could get to know God by contemplating the universe and had seen the Christian life as a Platonic ascent that would continue after death until the soul was fully assimilated to the divine. The Egyptian Neoplatonist philosopher Plotinus (c. 205–70) believed that the universe emanated from God eternally, like rays from the sun, so that the material world was a kind of overflowing of God’s very being; when you meditated on the universe, you were, therefore, meditating upon God. But by the early fourth century, people felt that the cosmos was separated from God by a vast, almost unbridgeable chasm. The universe was now experienced as so fragile, moribund, and contingent that it could have nothing in common with the God that was being itself. A terrifying void lay ready to engulf all living things. The primordial question (Why does anything exist rather than nothing at all?) no longer inspired awe, wonder, and delight but had been replaced by a sickening vertigo. The possibility of nothingness lurked threateningly at both the beginning and the end of human existence. Some Christians had already started to promote the new doctrine, entirely unknown in antiquity, of creation ex nihilo. Clement of Alexandria (c. 150–215) believed that the philosophical idea of an eternal cosmos was idolatrous, because it presented nature as a second coeternal god. Nothing could come from nothing, so the universe could only have been summoned out of the primal void by the God that was Life itself. Instead of “deifying the universe,” people needed to know that “the sheer volition of God is the making of the universe.” 1 The idea that God had deliberately created all things posed huge problems: Did it not imply that God was responsible for evil? Yet the belief that matter was eternal seemed to compromise God’s omnipotence and sovereign freedom. Monotheism implied that there was only one omnipotent power, so God’s decisions could surely not be influenced by the independent requirements of matter, which, like Plato’s craftsman, he was merely permitted to arrange and finish off.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  John Wesley (1703–91) was fascinated by the Enlightenment and tried to apply a scientific and systematic “method” to spirituality: his Methodists followed a strict regimen of prayer, scripture study, fasting, and good works. But he insisted that religion was not a doctrine in the head but a light in the heart. “We do not lay the main stress of our religion on any opinions, right or wrong,” he explained. “Orthodoxy or right opinion is at best but a very slender part of religion, if it can be allowed to be any part of it at all.” 24 If the rational evidence for Christianity became “clogged and encumbered, this could be a blessing in disguise, as it would compel people “to look into themselves” and “attend to that same light.” 25 Pietism shared many of the Enlightenment ideals: it mistrusted external authority, ranged itself with the moderns as against the ancients, shared the emphasis on liberty, and was excited by the possibility of progress. 26 But it refused to relinquish the older patterns of religion in favor of a streamlined, rationalized piety. But without discipline, the “religion of the heart” could easily degenerate into sentimentality and even hysteria. We have seen that Eckhart, the author of the Cloud, and Denys the Carthusian had all been concerned about a religiosity that confused affective states with the divine presence. The Enlightenment tendency to polarize heart and head could mean that a faith that was not capable of intelligent self- appraisal degenerated into emotional indulgence. This became clear during the religious revival known as the First Great Awakening that erupted in the American colony of Connecticut in 1734. The sudden deaths of two young people in the community of Northampton plunged the town into a frenzied religiosity, which spread like a contagion to Massachusetts and Long Island. Within six months, three hundred people had experienced “ born-again” conversions, their spiritual lives alternating between soaring highs and devastating lows when they fell prey to intense guilt and depression. When the revival burned itself out, one man committed suicide, convinced that the loss of ecstatic joy must mean that he was predestined to hell. In premodern spirituality, rituals such as the Eleusinian mysteries had been skillfully crafted to lead people through emotional extremity to the other side. But in Northampton, the new American cult of liberty meant that there was no such supervision, that everything was spontaneous and free, and that people were allowed to run the gamut of their emotions in a way that for some proved fatal. There was a paradox in the Enlightenment. 27 Philosophers insisted that individuals must reason for themselves, and yet they were only permitted to think in accordance with the scientific method.

• From The Canterbury Tales (2009)

  ‘Well, sir,’ the apothecary replied, ‘I have the very thing. I swear to God that this arsenic will kill anything and everything. A creature has only to take a tiny piece, the size of a grain of wheat, and it will die. It begins to work after a few minutes. It is strong and violent. And, as I said, it is always fatal.’ ‘Excellent. I will take it.’ So the apothecary made up a box of the poison for him. The young man went out into the street, and walked into a tavern. Here he ordered three bottles of wine. Into two of them he put the poison, while he left the third for his own use. He intended to spend the entire night in carrying the gold back to his own house. After he had finished preparing the poisoned draughts, he returned to his friends beneath the oak tree. Do I need to state the obvious? The two of them, just as they had planned, stabbed the young man to death. When they had murdered him, they laughed. ‘Let us sit down and drink,’ one of them said. ‘We deserve a rest. After we have got through this wine, we can think about burying him.’ He opened one of the bottles and put it to his lips. ‘Chin chin. Open another one.’ So they refreshed themselves, or so they thought. They were drinking poison, of course, and soon died. I don’t think any medical expert could describe in detail all of their suffering. It was unutterably horrible. Death had caught them, after all, two murderers and a poisoner. Oh cursed sinners, filled with malice and wickedness! You have been fattened with gluttony and lapped in luxury. You have thrown the dice for the last time. Blasphemers, your curses against Christ have come back upon you! Your swearing, your pride and folly, have destroyed you. Why is mankind so false to its creator, who purchased its redemption with His own blood? Now, all you good men and women, learn from me and beware the sin of avarice. Forgive us our trespasses. That is the prayer. So I have come here to pardon you. Just give me your coins, your jewellery and your silver spoons. Here is the papal bull of dispensation. Wives, what will you give me for it? Bales of cloth? Look. I can write down your names now, and ensure that you pass easily into the bliss of paradise. By the high powers granted to me, and for a certain sum, I can absolve you of all your sins. You will be as innocent as the day you were born. The price is worth it. Cash down. And may Christ in His mercy grant you His pardon. May He save your soul. Etcetera. Etcetera.

• From The Canterbury Tales (2009)

  So the monk requested leave of his abbot to go on a journey. It was easily granted, since John himself already held the post of bailiff in the monastery. He was used to travelling and supervising the farms and granges of the house. A day or two later he arrived at Saint-Denis, where he received a great welcome. Who was more cherished than ‘our dear cousin, John’? He brought a pitcher of Malmsey wine with him, from the monastery’s cellar, and some bottles of white wine. He brought with him, too, a brace of pheasants. So I will leave the merchant and the monk, for a day or two, to their meat and drink. On the third day the merchant, before travelling to Bruges, was obliged to take stock of his financial affairs. So Peter secluded himself in his counting house to work out the income and expenditure of the last year. He needed to know the amount of his profit. He brought out all of his boxes of money and account books, laying them down carefully on the exchequer board. He was so rich, in coin and credit notes, that he made sure that he locked the inner door before he got down to business. He did not wish to be disturbed by anyone. So he sat there, doing his sums, all morning. The monk had been awake since dawn, too. He had been walking up and down the garden, muttering the devotions of his morning office. The merchant’s wife came softly into the same garden, and greeted him demurely as she had so often done before. She had in her company a young girl who was in her care and under her charge. ‘Oh good John,’ she said, ‘what is the matter with you, rising so early?’ ‘My dear cousin,’ he replied, ‘five hours’ sleep a night is sufficient. Of course that may not be enough for the old or the infirm, or for those poor married men who lie dozing in bed all day like weary hares who have just escaped from the hounds. But, dear cousin, why do you look so pale? Can it be that your husband has been keeping you busy all night, with one thing or another? You need to rest. I can see that.’ Then he laughed out loud. But he also had the good grace to blush at his thoughts. The merchant’s wife shook her head. ‘God, who knows everything, knows this. That has nothing to do with it. As God gave me life, I swear that there is not a woman in France who is less interested in that sad game than me. Do you know the old song: “Alas and woe is me I am forlorn/ I curse the day that I was born”? But I dare not tell how things are with me. There are times when I think of leaving the country. Or of killing myself. I am so full of woe and fear.’

• From City of Night (1963)

  And having said that, as if those words had come from someone else—someone else imprisoned inside me, protesting now—I felt as if something had exploded inside me—and exploding at last, I went on, challenging their astonished look: “No, Im not the way I pretended to be for you—and for others. Like you, like everyone else, Im Scared, cold, cold terrified.” Predictably, I became a stranger to them. They had sought something else in me—the opposite from them; and I had acted out a role for them—as I had acted it out for how many, many others? Almost despising me, I knew, for having duped them—for having exposed my own panic to them when they had sought momentary refuge from theirs in the flaunted, posed lack of it in me—the two moved away, trying perhaps—I think with perverse pleasure—to forget they had ever wanted me. Now theyre talking to a youngman who looks as unconcerned as I had tried to pretend to be with them. I moved back, against the wall, feeling a wave of depression sweep over me; depression made many times more horrible by the fact that, although unfocused (like the thousand unnamed fears experienced in the dark when you know only that Something lurks, waits), it had something to do with vulnerability. I closed my eyes, right at the point where I will admit: Im going to be drunk. But I cling to sobriety when I hear someone say: “Youll feel much better if we leave this place.” When I opened my eyes, I saw a man standing before me looking at me strangely. “Im staying right around the corner,” he said. “Will you come with me?” Outside, a small stranded hotdog wagon steams ominously like a relic out of hell. JEREMY: White Sheets 1 PONDEROUSLY EXHAUSTED AFTER THE DETERMINED EJACULATION—which had come, strained up to the actual moment of discharge, in those doubly orgasmic thrusts as if I had tried to drain from myself something infinitely more than the mere sperm—I had lain back in bed and instantly fallen asleep. Waking up just as suddenly—suddenly alert as if someone had called me—I saw, still lying on the other side of the bed, looking at me, the man who had talked to me earlier at Les Deux Freres bar. Outside, beyond the draped and shuttered windows of this balconied room on Royal (it’s still not time for the Parade, I notice, looking urgently at my watch), the sounds of the revelry continue, like hundreds of phonographs playing different but equally blaring records. Quickly, I sat up on the sheet-rumpled bed and reached for my clothes—to get out of this room, to hurl myself back into the streets, to join the summoning anarchy raging outside: as if I have begun to lag in an important race which I must run.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  When I gazed at the world from my dusty window, I might as well have been gazing at a colony of ants, or a swarming bee-hive: I could recognise nothing in it that had once been mine. It was only by the lightening and the warming of the days, and the thickening of the reek of blood from Smithfield, that I began to realise that the year was edging slowly into spring. I might have faded into nothingness, I think, along with the carpet and the wallpaper. I might have died, and my grave gone unvisited and unmarked. I might have remained in my stupor till doomsday - I think I would have - if something hadn’t happened, at last, to rouse me from it. I had been at Mrs Best’s for about seven or eight weeks, and had not once stepped beyond her door. I still ate only what Mary brought me; and though I only ever sent her off, as I have said, for bread and tea and milk, she sometimes came with more substantial foods, to try and tempt me into eating them. ‘You’ll perish, miss,’ she would say, ‘if you don’t get your wittles’; and she’d hand me baked potatoes, and pies, and eels in jelly, which she bought hot from the stalls and pie-shops on the Farringdon Road, and had bound with layers of newsprint into tight little parcels, steaming and damp. I took them - I might have taken arsenic, if she had offered me a packet of that - and it became my habit, as I ate my potato or my pie, to flatten the wrappings across my lap and study the columns of print - the tales of thefts and murders and prize-fights, ten days old. I would do this in the same dull spirit in which I gazed from my window at the streets of East London; but one evening, as I smoothed a piece of newspaper over my knee and brushed the crumbs of pastry from its creases, I saw a name I knew. The page had been torn from one of the cheap theatrical papers, and bore a feature entitled Music-Hall Romances. The words appeared in a kind of banner, held aloft by cherubs; but beneath them there were three or four smaller headlines - they said things like Ben and Milly Announce Their Engagement; Knockabout Acrobats to Wed; Hal Harvey and Helen’s Heavenly Honeymoon! I knew none of these artistes, nor did I linger over their stories; for in the very centre of the article there was a column of print and a photograph from which, once I had seen it, I could not tear my eyes.

• From City of Night (1963)

  Under the elevated at 63rd and Cottage Grove: nearby: The Temple of Brotherly Love. A cross proclaims: GOD’S CORNER. And GOD’S CORNER is a tangled glob of steel tracks thundering with the roar of trains.... I see only Negro faces for blocks in that area. Jukeboxes shouting.... Vainly, the afternoon sun tries to pierce the tracks into the street Wells. Oak. Franklin. Thirty-fifth. Negro streets at night. Past black faces staring through curtainless windows into the dark streets... Negroes swallowed by the merciful dark. Into the street—into torn porches—they escape out of tiny cramped rooms, the dark stairways like mazetunnels through the open doors.... A little Negro girl asks me derisively: “Hey, mister, ain I seen you on TV?” In the hot nightair, I feel the resentful stares. The silence explodes into laughter coming from somewhere within the crushed darkness. Pursuing ghosts on Clark Street... Panorama of ripped sights along the rows of ubiquitous loan shops, poolrooms, “bargain” centers, billiard halls, cheap moviehouses. Zombies in a ritualistic hungover imitation of life. Men staring dumbly at nothing. A body lies unnoticed in a heap by a doorway. An epileptic woman totters along the block.... Staring startled eyes. Mutilated harpies wobble along the street—past crippled bodies. A man beats a woman ruthlessly as the man’s two husky friends stand guard over the scene. NO DOGS OR OTHER ANIMALS—a sign warns outside of a bar. And I search through the ghosts at the Shamrock.... A ripped bar with tables, tough outcast faces. One woman passes out on the floor with a long, desperate sigh. A man slides a glass of beer toward her. Instantly, she awakens—reaches for the beer, guzzles it, passes out again. Outside.... Skeletons gaze through apartment windows down into the street. As if their gazes were somehow aimed directly at me in horrible judgment! Fun in Hell! The Kings Palace on Clark Street. A skeleton awning (no canvas) and a drawing outside of what could be a mangled clown.... Inside, a huge dirty square hall with two oval bars—those harsh lights which only derelicts with nothing left to hide can stand for long. On the walls, faded paintings hinting of faraway Escape: sailboats, palmtrees, cactusplants, leis. Hybrid of all the tarnished fugitives of America. From a tiny improvised stage a mustached round man announces: “The Amateur Talent Show!”... First prize: Five Magic Dollars! It can buy much magic wine.... A woman who looks like Mrs Haversham of Great Expectations sits woodenly like an elaborate stuffed bird with open eyes. On the stage a gravel-voiced man tries to sing: “Enjoy yourself, it’s later than you think.” A tramp nods, agreeing. A skinny old woman sits at the bar, sticking out her tongue at the world. A drunk man shoves a woman through a door with a sign that says PRIVATE KEEP OUT. She doesnt come out. “Enjoy yourself—it’s later than you think—...”

• From City of Night (1963)

  And for the homeless drifters there is also the panic that one day youll wake up to the fact that youre through on the streets, in the bars—that everyone has had you, that those who havent have lost Interest—that youve been replaced by the fresher faces that come daily into the city in that shifting wave of vagrants—younger than you now (and Youth is at a premium), and now the interest you once felt is focused on someone else. One day someone will say about you: “I had him when he was young and pretty.” And as a reminder of this, beyond Los Angeles Street, in the same area of the world of Main Street but not really a part of it, is Skid Row—and you see prematurely old defeated men, flying on Thunderbird or Gallo wine, lost in this sunny rosy haven—hanging shaggily like zombies waiting for the Mission to open; folded over in a pool of their own urine where theyve passed out along the alleys.... If youre young, you avoid that street, you concentrate on Today. Tomorrow, like Death, is inevitable but not thought of.... At night, the fat Negro woman sprawled like chocolate pudding between Harry’s Bar and Wally’s mumblingly coaxes you to take a copy from the slender stack of religious magazines falling from her lap to her fat tired feet. The magazine shouts: AWAKE! And along that strip, the gray hotels welcome the scores and malehustlers: No Questions Asked. For a few minutes—unless you havent got another place and stay all night—you occupy the fleetingly rented room, where inevitably a neonlight outside will wink off and on feebly like exhausted but persistent lightning.... Throughout the night there are sounds of rapid footsteps running down the stairs. In the morning, if you stay, you walk out into the harsh daylight. The sun bursts cruelly in your eyes. For one blinding instant you see yourself clearly. The day begins again.... The same. Today! SKIPPER: A Very Beautiful Boy 1 ALONG THE PANEL OF AMBER MIRRORS at Harry’s bar, a panorama of searching eyes emerges out of the orangy twilight of cigarette smoke and dimlights: a stew of faces floating murkily in the smoky darkness. In the mirror I see the fat man on the stool beside me as he extends money across the bar to buy my drink. I turn away from the image of myself sitting next to him. I face him directly. Like pale dough, his pudgy face—coagulating into a tiny upturned nose—seems molded about a cigar which he munches lewdly, his puffy rounded lips caressing it intimately. He reeks of cologne and beer, cigar smoke. With one fleshy hand he slides the drink in my direction—after counting his change ostentatiously and stuffing it into his wallet. “Drink up, sonny!—drink up and I’ll buyyanother-one.”

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

  The Augustinian, Lutheran, and Calvinistic systems rest on the same anthropology, and must stand or fall together with the doctrine of the universal damnation of the whole human race on the sole ground of Adam’s sin, including infants and entire nations and generations which never heard of Adam, and which cannot possibly have been in him as self-conscious and responsible beings.817 They have alike to answer the question how such a doctrine is reconcilable with the justice and mercy of God. They are alike dualistic and particularistic. They are constructed on the ruins of the fallen race, instead of the rock of the redeemed race; they destroy the foundation of moral responsibility by teaching the slavery of the human will; they turn the sovereignty of God into an arbitrary power, and his justice into partiality; they confine the saving grace of God to a particular class. Within that favorite and holy circle all is as bright as sunshine, but outside of it all is as dark as midnight. These systems have served, and still serve, a great purpose, and satisfy the practical wants of serious Christians who are not troubled with theological and philosophical problems; but they can never satisfy the vast majority of Christendom. We are, indeed, born into a world of sin and death, and we cannot have too deep a sense of the guilt of sin, especially our own; and, as members of the human family, we should feel the overwhelming weight of the sin and guilt of the whole race, as our Saviour did when he died on the cross. But we are also born into an economy of righteousness and life, and we cannot have too high a sense of God’s saving grace which passeth knowledge. As soon as we enter into the world we are met with the invitation, "Suffer little children to come unto me." The redemption of the race is as much an accomplished fact as the fall of the race, and it alone can answer the question, why God permitted or caused the fall. Where sin has abounded, grace has abounded not less, but much more. Calvinism has the advantage of logical compactness, consistency, and completeness. Admitting its premises, it is difficult to escape its conclusions. A system can only be overthrown by a system. It requires a theological genius of the order of Augustin and Calvin, who shall rise above the antagonism of divine sovereignty and human freedom, and shall lead us to a system built upon the rock of the historic Christ, and inspired from beginning to end with the love of God to all mankind. NOTES ON AMERICAN CALVINISM.

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

  takes up all the main data of Christ’s life, from the conception to the crucifixion. Justification is not a progressive process, but a single instantaneous act.1522 Faith, working by love, lays hold of this grace. Scarcely any teaching of Augustine and Thomas Aquinas arouses so much revolt in the Christian theology of this age as the teaching about the future estate of unbaptized children dying in infancy. These theologians agree in denying to them all hope of future bliss. They are detained in hell for the sin of Adam, being in no wise bound to Christ in His passion and death by the exercise of faith and love, as the baptized and the patriarchs of the Old Testament are. The sacrament of faith, that is, baptism, not being applied to them, they are forever lost. Baptism liberates from original sin, and without baptism there is no salvation.1523 The doctrine of the sacraments, as expounded by Thomas, is, in all particulars, the doctrine of the Catholic Church. Christ won grace. The Church imparts it. The sacraments are visible signs of invisible things, as Augustine defined them. The number is seven, corresponding to the seven cardinal virtues and the seven mortal sins. They are remedies for sin, and make for the perfecting of man in righteousness.1524 The efficacy lies in a virtue inherent in the sacrament itself, and is not conditioned by faith in the recipient. Three of the sacraments —baptism, confirmation, and ordination—have an indelible character. Every conceivable question pertaining to the sacraments is taken up by Thomas and solved. The treatment of baptism and the eucharist occupies no less than two hundred and fifty pages of Migne’s edition, IV. 600–852. Baptism, the original form of which was immersion, cleanses from original sin and incorporates into the body of Christ. Children of Jews and infidels are not to be baptized without the consent of their parents.1525 Ordination is indispensable to the existence of the Church. In the Lord’s Supper the glorified body of the Redeemer is wholly present essentially, but not quantitatively. The words of Christ, "This is my body" are susceptible of only one interpretation —the change of the elements into the veritable body and blood of Christ. The substance of the bread undergoes change. The dimensions of the bread, and its other accidents, remain. The whole body is in the bread, as the whole body is also in the wine.1526 Penance is efficacious to the removing of guilt incurred after baptism. Indulgences have efficacy for the dead as well as the living. Their dispensation belongs primarily to the pope, as the head of the Church. The fund of merit is the product chiefly of the superabounding merit of Christ, but also of the supererogatory works of the saints.1527 In regard to the Last Things, the fire of hell will be physical.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  It is therefore impossible to speak of purpose and design in the universe: we must accept the fact that we humans have come into being by accident; that there is no benign Creator, no divine Friend that shapes our lives and values; and that we are alone in the immense and impersonal cosmos. Like Clifford, Monod maintained that it was not only intellectually but also morally wrong to accept any ideas that were not scientifically verifiable. But he admitted that there was no way of proving that this ideal of objectivity was in fact true: it was an ideal that was essentially arbitrary, a claim for which there was insufficient evidence. 20 He thus tacitly admitted that even the scientific quest began with an act of faith. Monod’s ideas were not always accessible to those not steeped in French culture, and some of the first popular expositions of the implications of evolution in the English-speaking world were written, with great brilliance and clarity, by the Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins. In The Blind Watchmaker (1986), he explained that while Paley’s argument for an Intelligent Designer had been perfectly acceptable in the early nineteenth century, Darwin had shown that the appearance of design occurred quite naturally in the process of evolutionary development. The “Blind Watchmaker” was natural selection, a blind, purposeless process that could not plan intelligently; nor could it deliberately produce the “contrivance” that Paley had found in nature. For Dawkins, atheism is a necessary consequence of evolution. He has argued that the religious impulse is simply an evolutionary mistake, a “misfiring of something useful”; 21 it is a kind of virus, parasitic on cognitive systems naturally selected because they had enabled a species to survive. Dawkins is an extreme exponent of the scientific naturalism, originally formulated by d’Holbach, that has now become a major worldview among intellectuals. More moderate versions of this “scientism” have been articulated by Carl Sagan, Steven Weinberg, and Daniel Dennett, who have all claimed that one has to choose between science and faith. For Dennett, theology has been rendered superfluous, because biology can provide a better explanation of why people are religious. But for Dawkins, like the other “new atheists”—Sam Harris, the young American philosopher and student of neuroscience, and Christopher Hitchens, critic and journalist—religion is the cause of all the problems of our world; it is the source of absolute evil and “poisons everything.” 22 They see themselves in the vanguard of a scientific/rational movement that will eventually expunge the idea of God from human consciousness. But other atheists and scientists are wary of this approach. The American zoologist Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) followed Monod in his discussion of the implications of evolution.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  It is also misleading to insist that all the problems of the modern world are entirely due to religion, if only because at this perilous moment in human history we need clear heads and accurate intelligence. At the beginning of his book, Dawkins asks us to imagine, with John Lennon, a world without religion. Imagine no suicide bombers, no 9/11, no 7/7, no Crusades, no witch-hunts, no Gunpowder Plot, no Indian partition, no Israeli/Palestinian wars, no Serb/Croat/Muslim massacres, no persecution of Jews as “Christ killers,” no Northern Ireland “troubles,” no “honour killings,” no shiny-suited bouffant-haired televangelists fleecing gullible people of their money.40 But not all these conflicts are wholly due to religion. The new atheists show a disturbing lack of understanding of or concern about the complexity and ambiguity of modern experience, and their polemic entirely fails to mention the concern for justice and compassion that, despite their undeniable failings, has been espoused by all three of the monotheisms. Religious fundamentalists also develop an exaggerated view of their enemy as the epitome of evil. This makes the critique of the new atheists too easy. They never discuss the work of such theologians as Bultmann or Tillich, who offer a very different view of religion and are closer to mainstream tradition than any fundamentalist. Unlike Feuerbach, Marx, and Freud, the new atheists are not theologically literate. As one of their critics has remarked, in any military strategy it is essential to confront the enemy at its strongest point; failure to do so means that their polemic remains shallow and lacks intellectual depth.41 It is also morally and intellectually conservative. Unlike Feuerbach, Marx, Ingersoll, or Mill, these new atheists show little concern about the poverty, injustice, and humiliation that have inspired many of the atrocities they deplore; they show no yearning for a better world. Nor, like Nietzsche, Sartre, or Camus, do they compel their readers to face up to the pointlessness and futility that ensue when people lack the means of creating a sense of meaning. They do not appear to consider the effect of such nihilism on people who do not have privileged lives and absorbing work.