Despair

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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

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

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

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

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

  I hadn’t done my Death Trance since she had manifested herself those two weeks ago. It was just too much of a temptation for her and the shock of her walking in had been way too much when she was flesh and blood. Since she was a ghost — well, I don’t really want to see if ’'m cardiac prone. Had trouble sleeping a few years back. I was lucky enough to have health insurance at the time, so was able to see a doc who could actually give me pills. I had only taken one — the fuckers were so strong that I stopped taking them and simply started staying up late. I took five and lay down in the warm water. We are nothing but matter. We are nothing but the flesh that hangs on our bones, the blood that gushes through our meat. Bach took shits, Aristotle got piss hard-ons, Mother Theresa the runs, Ghandi really liked enemas, Lincoln got wind. We are animals that have learned to walk upright, that have trained themselves to use the next best thing to fishing with termites with a stick: the nuclear bomb. I didn’t have to think long. About the time I was drawing analogies between Sartre and seals that know how to play “Lady of Spain” on car horns, I was interrupted by a tiny sound, the sound of cheap Mexican toe rings chiming their tinny, cheap tones: the tinkling of tiny silver bells. Then the sound of Jasmine pissing into the toilet. But this time it didn’t sound mischievous, it sounded sad. The pills had started to take effect, I braced my feet against the tub so I wouldn’t drown and whispered, as loud as I could (which was just loud enough for the dead to hear), “Follow me.” I don’t know what she saw, but I started to hallucinate pretty badly. Either the pills, or I had really started to fade, myself — I don’t know. I was in the kitchen, full and real and solid, looking out of my window. The sun was bright, so bright that I had to close my eyes against the brightness — but for some reason it reached right through my eyelids and right into my brain. I realized then that it couldn’t be the sun — for at least the obvious reason that sun never came in that window, anyway. No tunnel, no saints (or sinners, either), just that bright light. I felt - myself start to come apart, like the flesh I had always talked about, thought about in my trances, was starting to unravel and decompose around me, leaving just a lightweight fragment of Roger Corn left. 278 M. Christian It wasn’t a pull or an enticement, it was just a direction that I was walking myself to.

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

  “Come upstairs”, I coaxed and she came, and we went to bed: I found her mad with desire; but after I had brought her in an hour to hysteria and she lay in my arms crying, she suddenly said: “he promised to come home early this afternoon and I said I’d have a surprise for him. When he finds us together like this, it’ll be a surprise, won’t it?” “But you’re mad!” I cried, getting out of bed in a flash, “I shall never be able to visit you in Denver if we have a row here!” “That’s true”, she said as if in a dream, “that’s true: it’s a pity: I’d love to have seen his foolish face stretched to wonder; but you’re right. Hurry!” she cried and was out of the room in a twinkling. When she returned, I was dressed. “Go downstairs and wait for me”, she commanded, “on our sofa. If he knocks, open the door to him; that’ll be a surprise, though not so great a one as I had planned”, she added, laughing shrilly. “Are you going without kissing me?” she cried when I was at the door, “Well, go, it’s all right, go! for if I felt your lips again, I might keep you.” I went downstairs and in a few moments she followed me. “I can’t bear you to go!” she cried, “how partings hurt!” she whispered. “Why should we part again, love mine?” and she looked at me with rapt eyes. “This life holds nothing worth having but love; let us make love deathless, you and I, going together to death. What do we lose? Nothing! This world is an empty shell! Come with me, love, and we’ll meet Death together!” “Oh, I want to do such a lot of things first”, I exclaimed, “Death’s empire is eternal; but this brief taste of life, the adventure of it, the change of it, the huge possibilities of it beckon me—I can’t leave it.” “The change!” she cried with dilating nostrils while her eyes darkened, “the change!” “You are determined to misunderstand me,” I cried, “is not every day a change?” “I am weary”, she cried, “and beaten: I can only beg you not to forget your promise to come—ah!” and she caught and kissed me on the mouth: “I shall die with your name on my lips”, she said, and turned to bury her face in the sofa cushion. I went: what else was there to do? I saw them off at the station: Lorna had made me promise to write often, and swore she would write every day and she did send me short notes daily for a fortnight: then came gaps ever lengthening: “Denver society was pleasant and a Mr. Wilson, a student, was assiduous: he comes every day”, she wrote. Excuses finally, little hasty notes, and in two months her letters were formal, cold; in three months they had ceased altogether.

• From The Decameron (1353)

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

• From A Way of Being (1980)

  dieting. As she says later, “Something in me rebels against becoming fat. Rebels against becoming healthy, having plump red cheeks, becoming a simple, robust woman, as corresponds to my true nature.” In other words, if she were to trust her own feelings, desires, experiences, she would become a robust, plump, young woman and marry the student she loves. But her feelings have been proven completely unreliable, her desires and experiences totally untrustworthy guides. So she must not only deny her feelings for her loved one; she also must starve and coerce her body into a form approved by others but completely opposite from her own tendencies. She has lost, completely, her trust in her own experiencing as the basis for living. I shall comment briefly on one other episode. She finds her cousin to be a possible mate, and this choice is approved by her family. They plan to marry. But for two more years, until age twenty-eight, she vacillates between her cousin and the student she has loved. She goes to see the student and breaks off with him, leaving, in her words, an “open wound.” We know nothing of the content of this most crucial interaction, but I would speculate that her psychological life hung in the balance here. Should she trust her own experiencing and choose the person she loves, or should she choose her cousin? Her own feelings are cooler toward the cousin, but for him she should feel all the approved feelings she is supposed to feel. I suspect that she realized dimly that if she chose the student, she would be choosing the uncharted path of autonomous self-hood. If she chose her cousin, she would be living the life expected of her by others, but it would be a safe and approved pretense. She chose her cousin and married him, thus renouncing still further any trust in her self. * By the age of thirty-two, she is totally obsessed with the idea that she must make herself thin. To this end she starves herself and takes sixty laxative pills a day! Not surprisingly, she has little strength. She tries psychoanalysis but feels she is not helped. She says, “I analyzed with my mind, but everything remained theory”; and, “The analyst can give me discernment, but not healing.” However, when the analysis is broken off by circumstances, she becomes worse. During this period she speaks of her ideal love, the student. She says to her husband in a letter, “At that time you were the life I was ready to accept and to give up my ideal for. But it was . . . a forced resolve.” She appears to be trying desperately to have the feelings that others want her to have, but she has to force herself. From here on, the estrangement within herself leads to more estrangement and to more and more feelings of isolation from others. It is not surprising that her first attempt at suicide comes at a point when her second analyst, working with her in the hospital to which she was sent, repeats the now familiar pattern. Her

• From A Way of Being (1980)

  husband wants to be with her in the hospital—and she wants him to be with her. But the father-figure, the analyst, knows better, and he sends the husband away. He destroys still further any lingering confidence she might have in herself as a self-directing person. From this point on, the isolation is ever greater, and the tragedy closes in. She goes to more doctors, to more psychiatrists, becoming increasingly an object in the eyes of those dealing with her. She is finally placed in Dr. Binswanger’s sanitarium, where she remains for a number of months. During this period there are continuing differences over her diagnosis. Emil Kraepelin, the noted psychiatrist, diagnoses her during one of her depressed periods as a victim of melancholia. Her second analyst diagnoses her as having a “severe obsessive neurosis combined with manic-depressive oscillations.” A consulting psychiatrist says that her problem is a “psychopathic constitution progressively unfolding.” He says she is not schizophrenic, because there is no intellectual defect. But Drs. Bleuler and Binswanger are in agreement that her situation is “progressive schizophrenic psychosis (schizophrenia simplex).” They see little hope for her and say, “It was clear that a release from the institution meant certain suicide.” Since Ellen was aware of a number of these discussions, she must have come to seem to herself not a person but some strange abnormal mechanism, completely out of her control, going its own way to destruction. One looks in vain through all these “diagnoses” for any trace of recognition that the doctors were dealing with a human person! It is not hard to understand Ellen’s words: “I confront myself as a strange person. I am afraid of myself.” Or, at another time: “On this one point I am insane—I am perishing in the struggle against my nature. Fate wanted to have me fat and strong, but I want to be thin and delicate.” Indeed, she is perishing in the struggle with her nature. Her organism wants to be healthy and strong, but the introjected “I”—the false self she has taken on to please others—wants to be, as she says at one point, thin and “intellectual.” The wise doctors, in spite of the risk of suicide, come to the following conclusion: “No definitely reliable therapy is possible. We therefore resolved to give in to the patient’s demand for discharge.” She left the hospital. Three days later, she seemed well and happy, ate well for the first time in years, and then took a lethal dose of poison. She was thirty-three. Her epitaph might well be her own words: “I feel myself, quite passively, the stage on which two hostile forces are mangling each other.” What went so fatally wrong in the life of Ellen West? I hope I have indicated my belief that what went wrong is something that occurs to some degree in the

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

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

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

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

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

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

• From Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (2020)

  The carnage and horrors of warfare put an end to all that.9 In the wake of this disillusionment, the more militant model of Christian masculinity lost much of its luster. In its place, the ideal of the Christian businessman resurfaced as a prototype of Christian manhood. Bruce Barton’s The Man Nobody Knows (1925) exemplified this shift. Barton, an advertising executive, depicted Jesus as “the world’s greatest business executive,” yet Barton’s Jesus was no pushover. Not to be confused with the “pale young man with flabby forearms and a sad expression” depicted on Sunday school walls across the nation—the “physical weakling,” the “sissified,” “meek and lowly” man of sorrows—Barton’s Jesus was a “winner,” a strong, “magnetic” man, the kind who could “inspire great enthusiasm and build great organizations.” Strength remained vital, but aggression and violence gave way to efficiency and magnetism.10 Yet many fundamentalists retained more than vestiges of the former militancy. As premillennialists, fundamentalists were less troubled by the horrors of war. They knew better than to expect a war to end all wars before Christ’s return, and their penchant for apocalyptic prophecies gave them a framework for understanding the war’s outcome without succumbing to disillusionment and despair. In fact, having shed much of their ambivalence, fundamentalists emerged from the war more patriotic, combative, and cantankerous than ever. And more convinced of their need to defend fundamental truths. Having attributed German wartime barbarism to the influence of liberal theology and evolutionary theory, they determined to secure American Christianity and culture against those same hazards. On a more practical level, as fundamentalists proved unable to seize or maintain control of major denominations and seminaries in the postwar years, combativeness seemed wholly appropriate—even a badge of honor.11 By asserting this militant masculinity in the postwar era, however, fundamentalists found themselves increasingly out of step with mainstream American Christianity, and with American culture more broadly. Authors like Sinclair Lewis and H. L. Mencken made a sport of ridiculing the retrograde muscular Christianity of fundamentalists as further evidence that they were hopeless relics of a time gone by. Such cultural disdain only served to enhance fundamentalists’ perception of themselves as an embattled, faithful remnant. Having failed in their bid to gain control of existing denominational structures, fundamentalists struck off on their own, creating a vibrant array of Bible schools, churches, mission organizations, publishing houses, and other religious associations. But they chafed at their marginal status, and by the 1940s they decided it was time to reengage on a national scale. Rather than blundering about in isolated “squads or platoons,” they resolved to unite as “a mighty army.”12 To launch the offensive, a group of fundamentalist leaders came together in 1942 to form the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE). Their choice of the word “evangelical” was strategic. Aware of their image problem, fundamentalists knew they needed to rebrand their movement.

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

  Even though it is set in an earlier time, the epic probably reflects the period after Ashoka’s death in 232 BCE, when the Mauryan Empire began its decline and India entered a dark age of political instability that lasted until the rise of the Gupta dynasty in 320 CE. 105 There is, therefore, an implicit assumption that empire—or in the poem’s terms, “world rule”—is essential to peace. And while the poem is unsparing about the ferocity of empire, it poignantly recognizes that nonviolence in a violent world is not only impossible but can actually cause himsa (“harm”). Brahmin law insisted that the king’s chief duty was to prevent the fearful chaos that would ensue if monarchical authority failed, and for this, military coercion ( danda ) was indispensable. 106 Yet while Yudishthira is divinely destined to be king, he hates war. He explains to Krishna that even though he knows that it is his duty to regain the throne, warfare brings only misery. True, the Kauravas usurped his kingdom, but to kill his cousins and friends—many of them good and noble men—would be “a most evil thing.” 107 He knows that every Vedic class has its particular duty—“The shudra obeys, the vaishya lives by trade.… The Brahmin prefers the begging bowl”—but the Kshatriyas “live off killing,” and “any other way of life is forbidden to us.” The Kshatriya is therefore doomed to misery. If defeated, he will be reviled, but if he achieves victory by ruthless methods, he incurs the taint of the warrior, is “deprived of glory and reaps eternal infamy.” “For heroism is a powerful disease that eats up the heart, and peace is found only by giving it up or by serenity of mind,” Yudishthira tells Krishna. “On the other hand if final tranquillity were ignited by the total eradication of the enemy that would be even crueler.” 108 To win the war, the Pandavas have to kill four Kaurava leaders who are inflicting grave casualties on their army. One of them is the general Drona, whom the Pandavas love dearly because he was their teacher and initiated them in the art of warfare. In a council of war, Krishna argues that if the Pandavas want to save the world from total destruction by establishing their rule, they must cast virtue aside. A warrior is obliged to be absolutely truthful and keep his word, but Krishna tells Yudishthira that he can kill Drona only by lying to him. In the midst of the battle, he must tell him that his son Ashwatthaman has died so that, overcome with grief, Drona will lay down his weapons. 109 Most reluctantly, Yudishthira agrees, and when he delivers this terrible news, Drona never imagines that Yudishthira, the son of Dharma, would lie.

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

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

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

  Judaism has remained more conscious of the reality that prophets spoke primarily to their own times, pitilessly clarifying current crises and how these represented judgements of God on the backsliding of his chosen people. [24] What is noticeable about the prophetic literature even in its earliest surviving phase is the emphatic connection it makes between sexual misconduct, more often than not on the part of women, and infidelity to the God of Israel. It is not surprising that this eventually led to the ejection of God’s wife from her place of honour (though, of course, the causality might be the other way round). Hosea was a prophet of the eighth century whose diatribe is one of the earliest to survive in written form. He shaped his bitter denunciation of the people’s betrayal of God around what he at least claimed was his own personal tragedy: a direct divine command to marry a woman he already knew to be promiscuous, and soon to be the mother of illegitimate sons and daughters – ‘children of harlotry’. This extreme form of enacted prophecy was a mirror to the religious unfaithfulness of Israel, the dark reversal of God’s promise of fatherhood to Abraham; Hosea interrupts even the promises of national restoration in his text’s latter half with more sexual denunciation. [25] This theme of personal sexual humiliation mirroring a cosmic tragedy is extremely powerful: it has resonated with the fears and miseries of countless individuals through three millennia, as well as providing a dark but plausible explanation of communal misfortune. Equally extravagant on the theme of promiscuous unfaithfulness was the later prophet Ezekiel, both prophet and sometime priest in the last years of the Jerusalem Temple at the beginning of the sixth century BCE. The sexual theme in the collection is not as all-consuming as in Hosea, but when the denunciation of sexual and religious faithlessness does emerge, it is startlingly and brutally uninhibited. At what is now Chapter 23, verse 20, for instance, a harlot is portrayed in nostalgic mood for her time back in Egypt, and ‘her paramours there, whose members were like those of donkeys, and whose emission was like that of stallions’. That is the attempt of the New Revised Standard English translation to be relatively decorous while still faithful to the text; James Davidson’s more full-throated recent rendering of it gives the male lovers ‘cocks as big as donkeys’ ’, and their sperm ‘as copious as that of horses’. That passage ends (23.45–48) with God smacking his divine lips at the thought of the violent execution by stoning of such promiscuous women in Israel. [26] Small wonder that the text of Ezekiel that we now have is so damaged (see above, Chapter 1). *

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

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

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

  I told her I didn’t know what I wanted because I had never been in a relationship like this. I didn’t know what it would do to me. I didn’t tell her that I was in free-fall. I didn’t say what I thought, which was that this was about other things. That we both wanted our lives back and we had run our course together and there was nowhere left to go. I wanted to write and she wanted to save her marriage and I wanted to find someone who would love me all the time even though I doubted I would. Even though I knew deep inside that being with her part time and sharing her was more than I would ever get full time with someone else. But we had stopped growing. Everything had stopped. We were stuck and there was nowhere for us and there was no acceptable change. She wasn’t going to leave her husband and the depression that lifted when we met had returned and engulfed me and was getting worse. Our four days was two hours and twenty minutes from ending. She was meeting her husband at Union Square. They were going * Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession by Janet Malcolm 406 Stephen Elhott to go shopping, and then maybe see a movie. It was New Year’s Eve tomorrow and she wanted to get groceries so on New Year’s Day she could have a traditional breakfast with fish and rice, friends invited over to start the new year correctly. Earlier in our relationship she mentioned that she hoped we could get to where I could come over for New Year’s and be comfortable with her husband and he with me. But we never got to that point. I never fully joined her harem with her husband who has stayed true to his wife these nine years while she went through a parade of men looking to see if it was possible to love two men at the same time and finally deciding on me. Maybe it was the sex. We fucked like animals. She rarely had sex with her husband. He wasn’t into the kinky things we were into. He hadn’t grown up eroticizing his childhood trauma the way I had. And he had married a sadist. We had two hours and twenty minutes and she said she couldn’t do it and I agreed. Then I waited a heartbeat and I said, “So we’re breaking up?” And this time I knew it was true because I started to cry and she grabbed me closely and I buried my face inside her hair.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

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

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

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

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

  Their writings were composed for an “in-group” with a private symbolism that was incomprehensible to outsiders. In the Fourth Gospel, Jesus frequently baffles his audience by his enigmatic remarks. For these so-called Johannine Christians, having the correct view of Jesus seemed more important than working for the coming of the kingdom. They too had an ethic of love, but it was reserved only for loyal members of the group; they turned their backs on “the world,” 90 condemning defectors as “anti-Christs” and “children of the devil.” 91 Spurned and misunderstood, they had developed a dualistic vision of a world polarized into light and darkness, good and evil, life and death. Their most extreme scripture was the book of Revelation, probably written while the Jews of Palestine were fighting a desperate war against the Roman Empire. 92 The author, John of Patmos, was convinced that the days of the Beast, the evil empire, were numbered. Jesus was about to return, ride into battle, slay the Beast, fling him into a pit of fire, and establish his kingdom for a thousand years. Paul had taught his converts that Jesus, the victim of imperial violence, had achieved a spiritual and cosmic victory over sin and death. John, however, depicted Jesus, who had taught his followers not to retaliate violently, as a ruthless warrior who would defeat Rome with massive slaughter and bloodshed. Revelation was admitted to the Christian canon only with great difficulty, but it would be scanned eagerly in times of social unrest when people were yearning for a more just and equitable world. The Jewish revolt had broken out in Jerusalem in 66 after the Roman governor had commandeered money from the temple treasury. Not everybody supported it. The Pharisees in particular feared that it would make trouble for diaspora Jews, but the new party of Zealots ( kanaim ) thought that they had a good chance of success because the empire was currently split by internal dissension. They managed to drive out the Roman garrison and set up a provisional government, but the emperor Nero responded by dispatching a massive army to Judea led by Vespasian, his most gifted general. Hostilities were suspended during the disturbances that followed Nero’s death in 68, but after Vespasian became emperor, his son Titus took over the siege of Jerusalem, forced the Zealots to capitulate, and on August 28, 70, burned city and temple to the ground.

• From The New Testament (Great Courses) (1997)

  29 is blind and gradually regains his sight. This account appears to be a symbolic expression of what will happen to the disciples, who gradually come to see who Jesus really is (8:22–26). In the next story, Jesus asks his disciples who they think he is. Peter replies, “You are the Messiah” (8:29). Jesus warns them not to tell anyone. But why? Is it because he’s not the messiah anyone expected? That he’s not the great and powerful ¿ gure who will overthrow his enemies? Jesus begins to teach that he must go to Jerusalem to suffer and die. Peter rebukes him for saying so (how could the messiah suffer?). And Jesus in turn rebukes Peter, telling him that he doesn’t understand yet the truth about himself (8:31–38). In fact, Jesus is the messiah, but he’s the messiah who has to suffer—even if no one else recognizes it. From this point on in the narrative, Jesus regularly predicts that he needs to suffer and die. After each of these predictions (8:31; 9:31; 10:33–34), the disciples demonstrate their complete inability to understand. They don’t realize that Jesus is not going to overthrow the Romans; he is going to be crushed by them. Mark’s Gospel has sometimes been called a “Passion Narrative with a Long Introduction.” In this context the term passion refers to the “suffering” of Christ. Fully six of the 16 chapters in the book deal with the ¿ nal week of Jesus’ life, leading up to his death. After 10 chapters of teaching the multitudes, healing the sick, casting out the demons, and even raising the dead, Jesus goes to Jerusalem for the Passover. He spends a week there preaching in the Temple. He then has a last meal with his disciples, after which he is betrayed by Judas, arrested by the authorities, denied by Peter, put on trial before the Jewish leaders and then before the Roman governor Pilate, who condemns him to die on a cross. Next comes the climax of the narrative, Jesus’ death itself. Up until this point, no one seems to understand who Jesus is. Even those like the disciples who appear to have some inkling have still not realized that to be the messiah means to suffer. It seems that, at the end, even Jesus himself is not so sure. He prays three times for God to remove his fate from him (as if the messiah could escape suffering). At the end, he is completely silent, as if in shock, until after all his rejection, pain, and suffering, he cries out in despair what I take to be a genuine question: “My God my God, why have you forsaken me?” (15:34). He then dies. Even if Jesus has doubts at the end, though, the reader does not. Mark clearly indicates in the very next two verses what this death was all about (15:38–