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)

  Yet, in truth, he suffered more keenly than before. He felt all the pangs of death. He wept; he wailed; he groaned; he lamented. He secretly longed for an occasion to kill himself. ‘Alas,’ he cried, ‘that I was ever born! My prison now is darker and more dreary than my cell. I am now forced to endure the torments of hell, not of purgatory as before. I wish that I had never known Perotheus. Then I could still lie imprisoned with Palamon. Then I would have been in bliss and not in woe. For then, even fettered and immured, I could have enjoyed the sight of the mistress I adore. I may never have enjoyed her favour, but at least I could have looked upon her. Oh Palamon, dear cousin, you have been awarded the palm of victory. You may endure the pain of imprisonment - endure, no, enjoy. Compared to me, you are in paradise. Fortune has turned the dice for you. You have the sight of her while I am rendered blind. And since you have the blessing of her presence near at hand it is possible that you, a worthy and a handsome knight, might one day attain that goal you so fervently desire. Fortune is ever turning like the wheel. But I, living in barren exile, have no such expectation of grace. I am deprived of all hope, in such despair that no creature on earth can comfort me. There is nothing made of fire, of earth, or water, or of air, that can console me. So I must live, and die, in misery and distress. I must say farewell to joy and happiness.’

• From Summer Sisters (1998)

  31 ON JANUARY28, the Challenger shuttle blew up during takeoff, killing all the astronauts aboard, including Christa McAuliffe, and that night Vix fell apart, crying uncontrollably, banging her fists against the wall. What was the point? You worked your ass off, you struggled to get someplace, and wham! just like that, it could all come crashing down. Nothing made sense. She’d suppressed her feelings about Bru until that moment. But just like the shuttle, their love had come crashing down, over in a flash. Maybe the Countess was right after all. Live for the moment. There might be no tomorrow. And even if there is, nobody really gives a damn. Her hysteria frightened Maia, who ran down the hall to find Paisley. When the truth came out, she and Paisley exchanged such looks! “You broke up with Bru and you didn’t tell us?” Maia asked. “How could you keep something like that to yourself?” But she was a master at keeping it all to herself. She’d learned at the feet of an even greater master, hadn’t she? Deny ... deny ... deny ... When they’d returned from vacation they’d had two weeks of reading time, two weeks to prepare for exams. She couldn’t tell them about Bru then, couldn’t allow herself to think about it. And if the shuttle hadn’t blown up she might have made it through the semester without confronting reality. “We didn’t exactly break up,” she explained. “We’re taking time off.” That was the truth, wasn’t it? They hadn’t broken up. No one ever said they were breaking up. “Whose idea ... his or yours?” Maia asked. “We agreed.” “Who suggested it?” “Does it matter?” “Just tell me, okay ...” “He did.” “Then he’s an idiot and you’re better off without him.”

• From Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990)

  CONCLUSION: FROM PARODY TO POLITICS DOI: 10.4324/9780203824979-4 I began with the speculative question of whether feminist politics could do without a “subject” in the category of women. At stake is not whether it still makes sense, strategically or transitionally, to refer to women in order to make representational claims in their behalf. The feminist “we” is always and only a phantasmatic construction, one that has its purposes, but which denies the internal complexity and indeterminacy of the term and constitutes itself only through the exclusion of some part of the constituency that it simultaneously seeks to represent. The tenuous or phantasmatic status of the “we,” however, is not cause for despair or, at least, it is not only cause for despair. The radical instability of the category sets into question the foundational restrictions on feminist political theorizing and opens up other configurations, not only of genders and bodies, but of politics itself. The foundationalist reasoning of identity politics tends to assume that an identity must first be in place in order for political interests to be elaborated and, subsequently, political action to be taken. My argument is that there need not be a “doer behind the deed,” but that the “doer” is variably constructed in and through the deed. This is not a return to an existential theory of the self as constituted through its acts, for the existential theory maintains a prediscursive structure for both the self and its acts. It is precisely the discursively variable construction of each in and through the other that has interested me here. The question of locating “agency” is usually associated with the viability of the “subject,” where the “subject” is understood to have some stable existence prior to the cultural field that it negotiates. Or, if the subject is culturally constructed, it is nevertheless vested with an agency, usually figured as the capacity for reflexive mediation, that remains intact regardless of its cultural embeddedness. On such a model, “culture” and “discourse” mire the subject, but do not constitute that subject. This move to qualify and enmire the preexisting subject has appeared necessary to establish a point of agency that is not fully determined by that culture and discourse. And yet, this kind of reasoning falsely presumes (a) agency can only be established through recourse to a prediscursive “I,” even if that “I” is found in the midst of a discursive convergence, and (b) that to be constituted by discourse is to be determined by discourse, where determination forecloses the possibility of agency. Even within the theories that maintain a highly qualified or situated subject, the subject still encounters its discursively constituted environment in an oppositional epistemological frame. The culturally enmired subject negotiates its constructions, even when those constructions are the very predicates of its own identity. In Beauvoir, for example, there is an “I” that does its gender, that becomes its gender, but that “I,” invariably associated with its gender, is nevertheless a point of agency never fully identifiable with its gender.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  When the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) looked into the hearts of his contemporaries, he found that God had already died, there, but as yet very few people were aware of this.79 In The Gay Science (1882), he told the story of a madman who ran one morning into the marketplace, crying: “I seek God!” In mild amusement, the sophisticated bystanders asked him if God had run away or emigrated. “Where has God gone?” the madman demanded. “We have killed him—you and I! We are all his murderers!”80 The astonishing progress of science had made God quite irrelevant; it had caused human beings to focus so intently on the physical world that they would soon be constitutionally unable to take God seriously. The death of God—the fact that the Christian God had become incredible—was “beginning to cast its first shadows over Europe.” The tiny minority who were able to understand the implications of this unprecedented event were already finding that “some sun seems to have set and profound trust has been turned to doubt.”81 By making “God” a purely notional truth attainable by the rational and scientific intellect, without ritual, prayer, or ethical commitment, men and women had killed it for themselves. Like the Jewish Marranos, Europeans were beginning to experience religion as tenuous, arbitrary, and lifeless. The madman longed to believe in God but he could not. The unthinkable had happened: everything that the symbol of God had pointed to—absolute goodness, beauty, order, peace, truthfulness, justice—was being slowly but surely eliminated from European culture. Morality would no longer be measured by reference to an ultimate value that transcended human interests but simply by the needs of the moment. For Marx the death of God had been a project—something to be achieved in the future; for Nietzsche it had already occurred: it was only a matter of time before “God” would cease to be a presence in the scientific civilization of the West. Unless a new absolute could be found to take its place, everything would become unhinged and relative: “What were we about when we uncoupled this earth from the sun?” the madman demanded. “Where is the earth moving to now? Are we falling continuously? And backwards and sideways and forwards in all directions? Is there still an above and below? Do we not stray, as though through an infinite nothingness?”82 Nietzsche was, of course, familiar with the philosophical and scientific arguments for the denial of God, but he did not bother to rehearse them. God had not died because of the critique of Feuerbach, Marx, Vogt, and Buchner. There had simply been a change of mood. Like the ancient Sky God, the remote modern God was retreating from the consciousness of his former worshippers.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  His definition of religion in The Future of an Illusion (1927) is also reductive: religion is wish fulfillment of instinctual, unconscious desires, a fantasy that was once consoling but is now doomed to failure, because its myths and rituals belong to such a primitive stage of human evolution. It was time to allow science to allay our fears and provide a new basis for morality. These explanations won respect because they were rooted in science, but Freud’s critique was flawed by a rather unscientific view of the female as homme manqué: religion was a female activity, while atheism represented the postreligious, healthy masculine human being. 87 His view of religion as rooted in the infant’s veneration of the father also prompts the question of whether Freud’s rejection of God did not spring from an unconscious hostility to his own father. Freud has been called the last of the philosophes. In one sense, psychoanalysis can be seen as the culmination of the Enlightenment project to bring the whole of reality under the control of reason. Thanks to Freud’s pioneering work, dreams could be interpreted, subconscious impulses brought to light, and the hidden meaning of ancient myths laid bare. But Freud also diminished the Enlightenment ideal by demonstrating that reason comprised only the outermost rind of the human mind and was a superficial crusting on a seething melting pot of primitive instincts over which we had little control. Where Darwin had revealed that nature was “red in tooth and claw,” Freud showed that the mind was a battlefield on which we struggled endlessly with the unconscious forces of our own psyche, with little hope of final resolution. Freud brought to light a darker strand of the fin de siècle when he suggested that human beings were as strongly motivated by a death wish as by the lust for procreation. But at the end of the nineteenth century, many Christians believed that human beings were evolving to a new and more perfect state. For their part, agnostics were convinced that the world would be a better place without God. Ingersoll looked forward to a future in which “man, gathering courage from a succession of victories over the obstructions of nature, will attain to a serene grandeur unknown to the disciples of any superstition.” 88 Doubt was “the womb and cradle of progress.” 89 The idea that a “personal God does all” had bred “idleness, ignorance and misery,” 90 but now people could channel the energies that had been sapped by religion into the creation of a more just and equal world. “A battle is going on, in which the humblest human creature is not incapable of taking some part, between the powers of good and those of evil,” wrote John Stuart Mill. The task of this generation was to promote “the very slow and often almost insensible progress by which good is gradually being ground from evil.”

• From The Canterbury Tales (2009)

  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. No tears are enough to lament your fall. In you died honour and nobility. You conquered the world, and yet that empire was not large enough for you. Are there words enough to describe false fortune and the horror of poisoning? I don’t think so. Julius Caesar By dint of labour, of wisdom, and of strength, Caesar rose up from humble beginnings to the highest power. He was the conqueror of the Western world, by force or by treaty. All the nations were tributaries of Rome at the time Caesar became emperor. But then Dame Fortune’s wheel turned.

• From The Canterbury Tales (2009)

  A day or two later this false judge was sitting in his courtroom, giving his verdict on various cases, when Claudius came before him and stood in the well of the court. ‘I seek justice,’ he said, ‘I have a petition. I am filing a suit against Virginius.’ He was the father of the girl, if you remember. ‘If he denies the charge, then I will bring evidence against him. Do me justice, sir. I have truth on my side.’ The judge pretended to reflect upon the matter. ‘In the absence of the defendant,’ he said, ‘I cannot come to a definitive judgment. Call him to the stand. Then you will get your justice.’ So Virginius was brought before the judge, and the following accusation was read out to him. ‘Heretofore and hence-forward I will right aptly show you, sir judge, that the defendant has willingly and maliciously done wrong to your plaintiff Claudius. To wit, that against all equity and all law and all feeling this defendant stole from me under cover of night and darkness one of my servants, bound to me by duty and obligation. She was very young at the time. I also declare that this defendant did willingly and maliciously claim this young girl to be his lawful daughter. I will bring forward witnesses to testify on my behalf, sir judge. Whatever he says, the young maid is not his daughter. Return her to me, sir, and uphold the law.’ Virginius looked with horror upon this villain. Of course he was ready to swear that Virginia was his child. He would have proved it in trial by battle, as suits a knight. He would have brought forward witnesses, too, to testify that the man was lying. But he did not get the chance. The judge refused to listen to any more evidence. He was an old man in a hurry. He cut Virginius short, and then delivered his verdict. ‘I have decided that the plaintiff has suffered wrong, and can now claim back his servant. Wherefore, sir defendant, you no longer have the right to keep her in your house. Bring her forth and place her in my custody. Justice must prevail at all costs.’ That is what happened. The noble knight, Virginius, was forced by a false process of law to place his daughter in the hands of a lecher. The judge would soon be all over the young virgin. After the verdict was delivered Virginius returned home, and sat down in the hall. Then he called for his daughter. With ashen face, and piteous countenance, he looked upon her. He felt such pity for her that he could not express it. But he knew what he had to do.

• From Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (1994)

  That’s how real life works, in our daily lives as well as in the convalescent home and even at the deathbed, and this is what good writing allows us to notice sometimes. You can see the underlying essence only when you strip away the busyness, and then some surprising connections appear. Plot TreatmentMy students assume that when well-respected writers sit down to write their books, they know pretty much what is going to happen because they’ve outlined most of the plot, and this is why their books turn out so beautifully and why their lives are so easy and joyful, their self-esteem so great, their childlike senses of trust and wonder so intact. Well. I do not know anyone fitting this description at all. Everyone I know flails around, kvetching and growing despondent, on the way to finding a plot and structure that work. You are welcome to join the club. On the other hand, in lieu of a plot you may find that you have a sort of temporary destination, perhaps a scene that you envision as the climax. So you write toward this scene, but when you get there, or close, you see that because of all you’ve learned about your characters along the way, it no longer works. The scene may have triggered the confidence that got you to work on your piece, but now it doesn’t ring true and so it does not make the final cut. I went through this process with my second novel, where an image kept me going while I came to have a strong sense of the people I was writing about. Yet when it was that climactic image’s turn on the dance floor, it was all wrong. So I got very quiet for a few days and waited for the characters to come to me with their lines and intentions. Gradually I came to feel that I knew how the book ended, how it all hung together. By then, I had spent two solid years on the book, sending it off chunk by chunk to my editor at Viking. My editor had loved the characters all along, had loved the tone and the writing, but after reading my finished second draft straight through, he sent me back a letter that began, “This is perhaps the hardest letter I’ve ever had to write.” I saw stars right there at the post office, as if someone had hit me on the head. The room spun. The editor went on to say that while he enjoyed the people and what they had to say, I had in effect created a beautiful banquet but never invited the reader to sit down and eat. So the reader went hungry. And that, to mix metaphors, the book felt like a house with no foundation, no support beams, which was collapsing in on itself, and there was no way to shore it up.

• From The Canterbury Tales (2009)

  am as good as dead. Who can give more heat to the fire, or joy to heaven, or pain to hell? There is no more to say.’ He sat in silence, and bowed his head. Let us return to the cell where Palamon still lay. After the sudden departure of Arcite, he cried out in a paroxysm of anguish and despair. The dark tower rang with his laments. The fetters that held his legs were wet and shining with his salt and bitter tears. ‘Alas, Arcite,’ he cried, ‘in our contest you have the victory! You now enjoy your freedom in our home city. Why should you give a thought to my suffering here? I know that you are valiant. I know that you are shrewd. It is possible that you will call together the members of our affinity, and prosecute so bold a war against Athens that by some chance - or even by some treaty with Theseus - you will obtain the hand of my lady Emily. I would rather lose my life than lose her. But you are free to roam. You have been delivered from our prison. And you are a great lord. My case is different. I am confined. I must weep and wail, for the rest of my life, with all the woes that prison life can give. Yet there is no woe so deep as that of unrequited love. So I must endure a double torment upon this earth.’ As he lay upon the stone floor of his prison, lamenting, he was seized by a fit of jealousy so strong and so sudden that he felt his heart contract within him. It enveloped him like madness. He turned as pale as milk - no, worse - as pale as the bark of a dead ash tree. Once more he began to cry out loud. ‘Oh cruel gods that govern this world, binding it with your eternal decrees inscribed on sheets of adamantine steel, what is humankind to you? Do men mean more to you than the sheep that cower in the fold? Men must die, too, like any beast of the field. Men also dwell in confinement and restraint. Men suffer great sickness and adversity, even when they are guilty of no sin. What glory can there be for you in treating humankind so ungenerously? What is the good of your foreknowledge, if it only torments the innocent and punishes the just? What is the purpose of your providence? One other matter, too, outrages me. Men must perform their duty and, for the sake of the gods, refrain from indulging their desires. They must uphold certain principles, for the salvation of their souls, whereas the silly sheep goes into the darkness of non-being. No beast suffers pain in the hereafter. But after death we all may still weep and wail, even though our life on earth was also one of suffering. Is this just? Is this commendable?

• From The Canterbury Tales (2009)

  So I will lament, in the manner of tragedy, the fate of those who once stood in high degree. They fell so far that they could not be rescued from the darkness. When the doom of Fortune has been decided, no one can avert its course. Never rely upon prosperity. That is the lesson of these little histories. Lucifer I will begin with Lucifer. I know that he is an angel rather than a man, but he is a very good example to us all. Fortune cannot help or harm an angel, of course. Nevertheless he fell from heaven into hell, where he still resides. Oh Lucifer, son of the morning, you can never escape from the flames of the inferno. You have become Satan. How you have fallen! Adam Behold Adam, lying in Eden (now known as Damascus). He was not made from human seed, but wrought by God’s own finger. He ruled over all of Paradise, with the exception of one tree. No human being has ever been so blessed as Adam. Yet for one bad act he fell from grace. He was consigned to a fallen world of labour and misery. Sampson Behold great Sampson, heralded by an angel before his birth, consecrated to Almighty God! While he retained his sight, he was the noblest of all. No one in the world was stronger or more courageous. Yet foolishly he told the secret of his strength to his wife. In doing so, he condemned himself to death. This mighty champion slew a lion, and tore it to pieces with his bare hands. He was on his way to his own wedding, and he had no weapons. His wife knew how to please him, with her wicked wiles, and could coax all of his confidences out of him. Then she betrayed him to his enemies, and took another man in his place. In his anger he took up three hundred foxes and bound them together by their tails. Then he set the tails on fire, with a burning torch tied to each one, and with them he set ablaze all the cornfields in the land. He destroyed the olive trees and the vineyards. In his rage he killed a thousand men, although his only weapon was the jawbone of an ass. After they were slain he was tortured by a thirst so great that he turned to God for help. He prayed Him to send water, or else he would die. Lo and behold, a miracle occurred. From the molar tooth of this dry jawbone there sprang forth a fountain of water, with which Sampson refreshed himself. So God saved him. All this really happened. You can read about it in the Book of Judges.

• From The Canterbury Tales (2009)

  ‘Fair Apollo,’ he prayed, ‘you are god and governor of every living thing on earth. You lend the time and give the season for every plant and flower and tree. Just as you take care of Nature, great god, will you take care of your poor servant Aurelius? Cast your eye upon the wretch who kneels before you. Oh god above! I am lost. My lady has condemned me to death, but I am innocent. Through your divine kindness have some pity on my plight. I know well enough, great Phoebus, that you could help me best - next to Dorigen, of course. I know that you can work all things to your will. Please tell me what I ought to do. Please give me hope. ‘I know that your sister, Lucina, full of grace, is the mistress of the moon. She is also the principal goddess of the sea and the tides; she has dominion even over Neptune in the affairs of the deep. You know better than I do, Lord Phoebus, that she likes nothing better than to be lit by your fire. So she follows you through the firmament, and in turn the mighty seas follow her as their lawful protector and deity; she holds sway over every stream and brook. So this is my request to you, great lord. Perform this miracle for me, or I will die. When you and your sister are in opposition within the sign of Leo, when the tides are high, will you beseech her to send so great a flood along the coast that the highest rocks in Brittany are overwhelmed by five fathoms of water? That is my plea. And will you ask your sister to maintain the seas at that pitch for at least two years? Then I will be able to tell Dorigen that I have performed my part of the bargain and that she must fulfil hers.

• From Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990)

  Hence, according to Kristeva, female homosexuality is the emergence of psychosis into culture: The homosexual-maternal facet is a whirl of words, a complete absence of meaning and seeing; it is feeling, displacement, rhythm, sound, flashes, and fantasied clinging to the maternal body as a screen against the plunge ... for woman, a paradise lost but seemingly close at hand. 10 For women, however, this homosexuality is manifest in poetic language which becomes, in fact, the only form of the semiotic, besides childbirth, which can be sustained within the terms of the Symbolic. For Kristeva, then, overt homosexuality cannot be a culturally sustainable activity, for it would constitute a breaking of the incest taboo in an unmediated way. And yet why is this the case? Kristeva accepts the assumption that culture is equivalent to the Symbolic, that the Symbolic is fully subsumed under the “Law of the Father,” and that the only modes of nonpsychotic activity are those which participate in the Symbolic to some extent. Her strategic task, then, is neither to replace the Symbolic with the semiotic nor to establish the semiotic as a rival cultural possibility, but rather to validate those experiences within the Symbolic that permit a manifestation of the borders which divide the Symbolic from the semiotic. Just as birth is understood to be a cathexis of instinctual drives for the purposes of a social teleology, so poetic production is conceived as the site in which the split between instinct and representation exists in culturally communicable form: The speaker reaches this limit, this requisite of sociality, only by virtue of a particular, discursive practice called “art.” A woman also attains it (and in our society, especially) through the strange form of split symbolization (threshold of language and instinctual drive, of the “symbolic” and the “semiotic”) of which the act of giving birth consists. 11 Hence, for Kristeva, poetry and maternity represent privileged practices within paternally sanctioned culture which permit a nonpsychotic experience of that heterogeneity and dependency characteristic of the maternal terrain. These acts of poesis reveal an instinctual heterogeneity that subsequently exposes the repressed ground of the Symbolic, challenges the mastery of the univocal signifier, and diffuses the autonomy of the subject who postures as their necessary ground. The heterogeneity of drives operates culturally as a subversive strategy of displacement, one which dislodges the hegemony of the paternal law by releasing the repressed multiplicity interior to language itself. Precisely because that instinctual heterogeneity must be re-presented in and through the paternal law, it cannot defy the incest taboo altogether, but must remain within the most fragile regions of the Symbolic. Obedient, then, to syntactical requirements, the poetic-maternal practices of displacing the paternal law always remain tenuously tethered to that law. Hence, a full-scale refusal of the Symbolic is impossible, and a discourse of “emancipation,” for Kristeva, is out of the question. At best, tactical subversions and displacements of the law challenge its self-grounding presumption.

• From City of Night (1963)

  “And at night in bed drowning in the dark, I think tomorrow will be just like today—but I’ll be older—or I come unexpectedly on myself in a mirror or a reflection in a window, and it takes my breath: Me!! ... And I think about my wedding and how Fabulous I’ll be—but I want to fly out of my skin! jump out! be someone else! so I can leave Miss Destiny far, far behind....” (And Miss Destiny wakes up at night terrified by the knowledge of that strange impossibility, and the darkness screams Loneliness! and impossibility, whirling around us—and soon youll have to face the morning and yourself—the same, again....) In the other room someone yelled, and it was the nympho. I heard Chuck shouting Whoooooooppeeeee!!... and Darling Dolly shrieked: “Chuck, get off!—thats Buddy!” And Lola came out rushing yelling at no one, “Leave me alone! Im ugly! Im ugly!”—her face smeared grotesquely with paint and enormous tears—“Im ugly, Im ugleeeeeeeee!” and Trudi trying to soothe her with her fur stole—momentarily leaving Skipper, who is passed out drunk.... “All this is going on,” Miss Destiny sighed, hugging the orphan doll, “and when tomorrow someone will maybe ask us, What did you do last night?—we’ll answer, Nothing.... And, oh, do you believe in God?” she asks me abruptly, and I answered it’s a cussword. “Oh, yes, my dear,” Miss Destiny said, “there is a God, and He is one hell of a joker. Just—look—” and she indicates her lovely green satin dress and then waves her hand over the entire room. “Trapped! ... But one day, in the most lavish drag youve evuh seen—heels! and gown! and beads! and spangled earrings!—Im going to storm heaven and protest! Here I am!!!!! I’ll yell—and I’ll shake my beads at Him.... And God will cringe!” Now Miss Destiny leans toward me and I can smell the sweet liquor and the sweet... lost... perfume—and with a franticness that only abysmal loneliness can produce, she whispered. “Marry me please, dear!” 5 I was out in the street with the jazzcat from New York wearing dark shades who had somehow turned up later at Destiny’s. And Los Angeles was- dreary in the earlyhours with the sidewalks wet where theyve just watered them and the purplish haze of the early morning. And he asked me which way I was going. That way, I said. Me too, he said. And we walked through the streets. Then somewhere a bell began to sound, and I looked up instinctively at the sky.... One day that bell will sound and Miss Destiny’s evil angel will appear!... I left Los Angeles without seeing Miss Destiny after that night. And I went to San Diego, briefly. And I returned to Los Angeles.

• From The Canterbury Tales (2009)

  boar of Mycenae. He even held the heavens upon his shoulders. No man in myth or history has killed so many monsters and prodigies as Hercules. His fame spread all over the world; he was renowned for his beauty as much as for his strength. He visited every kingdom and was welcomed everywhere. No man could defeat him. One commentator says that he was able to raise pillars to mark the eastern and western boundaries of the known world. This noble warrior had a lover. Her name was Deianira, and she was as fresh as the first day of May. The old writers tell us that she was busily employed in knitting him a shirt, as women do. It was bright and colourful, but it had one fault. It was suffused with a fatal poison. Hercules had worn it only for a few hours when the flesh began to fall from his bones. Some learned men tell us that a man named Nessus was responsible for making this shirt. I do not know. I will not accuse Deianira. I only tell you what I have read. As soon as Hercules had put on the shirt, the flesh on his back began to bake and harden. When he realized that there was no remedy he threw himself into the hot coals of a fire. He did not want to die by poison. It was too undignified. So died Hercules, a mighty and worthy man. Who can trust the dice that Fortune throws? Anyone who makes his way in the difficult world must know that misfortune and disaster are always at hand. The only remedy is self-knowledge. Beware of Dame Fortune. When she wants to mislead, or to deceive, she chooses the least predictable path. Nebuchadnezzar No one can conceive or describe the majesty of this mighty and glorious king. No one can count his wealth or estimate his power. Twice he conquered Jerusalem, and stole all the sacred vessels of the temple. He took them back with him to Babylon, where they were laid down reverently with his other treasures. He had captured the royal children of Israel and had ordered them to be castrated; then they became his slaves. Daniel was among them, and even then he was judged to be the wisest of all. It was he who could interpret the dreams of the king, when the king’s own seers and magicians were baffled by them. Clever boy. Then Nebuchadnezzar ordered a statue of gold to be fashioned, sixty cubits in height and seven cubits in breadth. He ordered all of his subjects to worship and make sacrifice to this golden image, on pain of death. Anyone who disobeyed his command would be flung in a fiery furnace. Yet Daniel, and two of his young cousins, refused to bow down before it. The great king was filled with pride and was fully conscious of his might.

• From The Canterbury Tales (2009)

  So we toiled over the coals and crucibles all day and all night, with the lamps burning around us. The furnace was at full blast, and we heated the liquids to their various boiling points. We used unslaked lime as a caustic, as well as chalk and the whites of eggs; we had powder ground out of ashes and dog shit, piss and clay; we made fires out of wood and out of charcoal; we sprinkled purified salt and vitriol, and then mixed in alum and brewer’s yeast, the hairs of men and of horses, the grease of a sow and the sweat of a red-haired child. Sometimes the amalgam turned yellow, and sometimes silver white. We would fuse and ferment, diffuse and distil. Let me explain to you the nature of the four spirits and the seven bodies, as my master taught them to me. The first spirit is mercury or quicksilver and the second is orpiment of golden hue; the third spirit is sal ammoniac, the moisture of volcanoes, and the fourth is brimstone. The seven bodies are as follows. The sun is gold, and silver is the moon; Mars is iron and Mercury, of course, is quicksilver; Saturn is lead and Jupiter is tin. The seventh, Venus herself, is copper. Whoever practises this cursed art is doomed to failure and ruin. He will sell all his goods and come to no good. There can be no doubt that he will lose everything. So come forward, budding alchemists, and try your luck. If you have money to burn, then stoke up the chemical fires. Do you think that it is an easy craft to learn? Not so. You can be a priest or canon, monk or friar - I promise that you will not have scholarship enough. You can study all the texts, night and day, and still go nowhere. The mystery is too deep. For a layman, it is impossible to unravel. It makes no difference whether he is learned or not, he will fail in either case. Alchemy is too difficult. Oh, I forgot to mention the acids we use, with the metals and oils. They help in the hardening or softening of the materials. They can also be used to cleanse and purify - you need more than a book to understand these things. No more words now. I have named things that should not be named. I have said enough to raise a fiend, the ugliest in hell.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  Despite Hilbert, we seemed no closer to understanding the universe. Human beings, randomly produced minutiae whose existence was probably ephemeral, still appeared to be cast adrift in a vast, impersonal universe. There was no clear answer as to what had preceded the “big bang” that had given birth to the universe. Even physicists did not believe that the equations of quantum theory described what was actually there; these mathematical abstractions could not be put into words, and our knowledge was confined to symbols that were mere shadows of an indescribable reality. Unknowing seemed built into the human condition. The revolution of the 1920s had overturned traditional scientific orthodoxy, and if that had happened once, it could happen again. Some Christians believed that the new physics was friendly to faith, even though Einstein always insisted that relativity was a scientific theory and had no bearing on religion. They seized eagerly on his famous remark in a debate with Bohr in Brussels (1927) that although quantum mechanics was “certainly imposing,” an “inner voice tells me that it ... does not bring us any closer to the secret of the Old One. I, at any rate, am convinced that He does not throw dice.” 2 But Einstein was not referring to the personal God; he had simply used the “Old One” (a medieval Kabbalistic image) to symbolize the impersonal, intelligible, and immanent order of what exists. The British astronomer Arthur Stanley Eddington, however, saw relativity as evidence for the existence of mind in nature; Canon Arthur F. Smethurst regarded it as a manifestation of the Holy Spirit; 3 others saw the new conception of time as validating the after-life; 4 big bang theory was thought to substantiate the Genesis account; 5 and some even managed to see the indeterminacy of quantum mechanics as support for God’s providential control of the world. 6 This type of speculation was ill-conceived. Inured to their need for scientific proof, these apologists were still interpreting the ancient biblical symbols in too literal a manner. Max Planck had a more sage view of the relations between science and religion. The two were quite compatible: science dealt with the objective, material world and religion with values and ethics. Conflict between them was based “on a confusion of the images and parables of religion with scientific statement.” 7 After Einstein, it became disturbingly clear that not only was science unable to provide us with definitive certainty but its findings were inherently limited and provisional too. In 1927, Heisenberg formulated the principle of indeterminacy in nuclear physics, showing that it was impossible for scientists to achieve an objective result because the act of observation itself affected their understanding of the object of their investigation. In 1931, the Austrian philosopher Kurt Gödel (1906–78) devised a theorem to show that any formal logical or mathematical system must contain propositions that are not verifiable within that system; there would always be propositions that could be proved or disproved only by input from outside.

• From City of Night (1963)

  At the table, everyone is talking, eyes constantly searching the bar. The beat of the music somehow matches the movements, the stares, the muted desperation all around; the smothered moans of the spade now blaring words from the balcony is like a composite moan, a wail emanating in unison from everyone crushed into this dirty bar.... Darling Dolly is breathlessly explaining the Severe Jolt she got when she got home and found her best drag clothes gone: “My lovely lace negligee—my studded shoes!” Buddy shakes his head and says to the table: “I needed the bread.” Darling Dolly stabs him with a look. Chuck says hes heard of a malehouse in Hollywood where he can make hundreds of dollars a day: “But I don know where it is so I cain apply.” Miss Destiny says, “Chuck, my dear, you are just too lazy to get ahead—remember the $15 score I got you and you fell asleep?”... Trudi is wondering wheres her daddy, and Miss Destiny explains to me that Trudi’s “daddy” is an old man whos been “keeping Trudi for ages—and keeps Skipper, too, sometimes—but indirectly”: Skipper living off and on with Trudi and hitting it big occasionally—“after being Really Big in Hollywood once”—and going away, coming back to Trudi’s.... Nearby, an emaciated man with devouring deep-buried eyes is pretending to read the titles on the jukebox, but it’s obvious that he is fascinatedly studying Tiger’s tattoos—and Tiger, noticing this, glances at him with huge undisguised contempt, which sends the emaciated man into an ecstasy of sick smiles. Now the queens at the table are wondering aloud who the score buying the juice is digging: the queens or otherwise, and which one. And which does it turn out hes digging? The queens. And which one? Darling Dolly Dane. And when this became known, by means of the “waitress,” Darling Dolly skips over to him, perches on the stool next to him at the bar, and says, “Another tall cool Coca-Cola please, honey, and make it straight.” Miss Destiny sighed, “Well, lordee, Tara is saved tonight.” Immediately Skipper had a plan to clip the score, and Trudi says philosophically, “Dont get nervous, youll shake the beads”—(the beads being life—fate—chance—anything)—“and besides, Darling Dolly saw him first.” Miss Destiny says theyre all Too Much. Suddenly shes becoming depressed—and the obvious reason is that the score who it turned out dug queens didnt dig her. “Oh, Im really depressed now!” Miss Destiny said. Someone had mentioned that Pauline had just walked in. I looked, and theres Pauline—a heavily painted queen who thinks she looks like Sophia Loren—with a collar like the wicked queen’s in Snow White. Miss Destiny said icily: “Pauline... is a lowlife... prostitute.” Trudi: “A cheap whore.” Lola, in her husky man’s voice and glowering nearsightedly: “A slut.” Trudi: “A common streetwalker.” Lola: “A chippy.” Miss Destiny—conclusively, viciously: “A cocksucker! ” Chuck gagged on his beer. “She ain got nothin on you, Destinee!”

• From The Case for God (2009)

  Artists deliberately flouted their viewers’ expectations, tacitly proclaiming the need for a new vision in a new world. Old certainties were evaporating. Some wanted to contemplate irreducible fundamentals, cut out the peripheral, and focus on the essential in order to construct a different reality: scientists searched for the atom or the particle; sociologists and anthropologists reverted to primeval societies and primitive artifacts. People wanted to break the past asunder, split the atom to make something new. Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) either dismembered his subjects or viewed them simultaneously from different perspectives. The novels of Woolf and James Joyce (1882–1941) abandoned the traditional narratives of cause and effect, throwing their readers into the chaotic stream of their characters’ consciousness, so that they were uncertain about what actually was happening or how they should judge the action. But the First World War revealed the self-destructive nihilism that, despite its colossal attainments, lurked at the heart of modern Western civilization. It has been described as the collective suicide of Europe: by slaughtering a generation of young men, the war so damaged European society at its core that arguably it has never fully recovered. The utter futility of trench warfare, fought as it was for no adequate social, ideological, or humanitarian cause, defied the rationalism of the scientific age. The most advanced and civilized countries in Europe had crippled themselves and their opponents with their new military technology simply to serve the national ego. The war itself seemed a terrible parody of the mechanical ideal: once the intricate mechanism of conscription, troop transportation, and the manufacture of weapons had been switched on, it seemed to acquire its own momentum and proved almost impossible to stop. After the armistice, the economy of the West seemed in terminal decline, and the 1930s saw the Great Depression and the rise of fascism and communism. By the end of the decade, the unthinkable had happened and the world was embroiled in a second global war. It was now difficult to feel sanguine about the limitless progress of civilization. Modern secular ideologies were proving to be as lethal as any religious bigotry. They revealed the inherent destructiveness of all idolatry: once the finite reality of the nation had become an absolute value, it was compelled to overcome and destroy all rival claimants. Modern science had been founded on the belief that it was possible to achieve objective certainty. Hume and Kant had cast doubt on this ideal by suggesting that our understanding of the external world was merely a reflection of human psychology. But even Kant believed that the fundamental categories of Newtonian science—space, time, substance, and causality—were beyond question. Yet within a generation of Hilbert’s confident prediction that all physicists had to do was add the final touches to Newton’s great “Systeme,” it had been superseded.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  Rulers had long initiated policies of ethnic cleansing when setting up their modern, centralized states. In order to use all the human resources at their disposal and to maintain productivity, governments had found it necessary to bring out-groups such as the Jews into the mainstream, but the events of the 1930s and 1940s showed that this tolerance was merely superficial and the old bigotry still lurked beneath. To carry out their program of genocide, the Nazis relied on the technology of the industrial age: the railways, the advanced chemical industry, and rationalized bureaucracy and management. The camp replicated the factory, the hallmark of industrial society, but what it mass-produced was death. Science itself was implicated in the eugenic experiments carried out there. The modern idolatry of nationalism had so idealized the German volk that there was no place for the Jews: born of the new “scientific” racism, the Holocaust was the ultimate in social engineering in what has been called the modern “garden culture,” which simply eliminated weeds—the supreme, perverted example of rational planning in which everything is subordinated to a single, clearly defined objective. 38 Perhaps the Holocaust was not so much an expression as a perversion of Judeo-Christian values. 39 As atheists had been eager to point out, the symbol of God had marked the limit of human potential. At the heart of the Nazi ideology was a romantic yearning for a pre- Christian German paganism that they had never properly understood, and a negation of the God who, as Nietzsche had suggested, put a brake on ambition and instinctual “pagan” freedom. The extermination of the people who had created the God of the Bible was a symbolic enactment of the death of God that Nietzsche had proclaimed. 40 Or perhaps the real cause of the Holocaust was the ambiguous afterlife of religious feeling in Western culture and the malignant energies released by the decay of the religious forms that had channeled them into more benign, productive outlets. 41 In Christian theology, hell had traditionally been defined as the absence of God, and the camps uncannily reproduced the traditional symbolism of the inferno: the flaying, racking, whipping, screaming, and mocking; the distorted bodies; the flames and stinking air all evoked the imagery of hell depicted by the artists, poets, and dramatists of Europe.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  But they found conventional religious life bewildering. For decades the Iberian Jews had lived without communal religious life and had no experience of ritual observance. The Dutch rabbis had the difficult task of guiding them back into the fold, making allowances for their problems without compromising tradition, and it is a tribute to them that most of the Marranos were able to make the transition.86 But initially their reaction was similar to that of people today who find the “beliefs” of religion arbitrary and incredible because they have not fully participated in its transformative rites. The abstruse laws of diet and purification must have seemed barbaric and meaningless to the Marrano sophisticates, who found it difficult to accept the rabbis’ explanations because they were used to thinking things out rationally for themselves. According to Isaac Orobio de Castro, a philosophy professor who had lived in Iberia for years as a closet Jew, some of them had become “unspeakable atheists”:87 they were “full of vanity, pride and arrogance,” loved to display their learning “by contradicting what they do not understand,” and felt that their expertise in the modern sciences put them above “those who are indeed educated in the sacred laws.”88 A tiny minority of the Marranos found the transition to full cultic observance impossible. One of the most tragic cases was that of Uriel da Costa, who had experienced Portuguese Christianity as oppressive, cruel, and composed of rules and doctrines that bore no relation to the gospels.89 He had formed his own idea of Jewish religion by reading the Bible, but when he arrived in Amsterdam he was shocked to find that contemporary Judaism was just as far removed from scripture as Catholicism. Outraged, he published a treatise attacking the Torah and declaring that he believed only in human reason and the laws of nature. He caused such ferment that the rabbis were forced to excommunicate him. There was as yet no notion in Europe of a “secular Jew,” and as an excommunicate da Costa was shunned by Jews and Christians alike; children jeered at him in the street. In despair, he returned to the synagogue, but he still could not adapt to a faith that seemed incomprehensible. In 1640, he committed suicide.