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.

Page 221 of 267 · 20 per page

• From Ulysses (Kindle edition — verify full work) (1922)

  In his essay on escape in the fiction of Gayl Jones, literary critic Jerry W.Ward Jr. notes that "the thinking in Eva's Man shows paralysis of consciousness, the inability to make certain decisions"; Eva "is the victim of her own passivity, her tendency to accept the Playboy fantasy of what a woman is. Her life history contains a series of sordid, dehumanizing sexual encounters."18 Ward's reading of Eva is based on a characterization of Eva as engendering a passive acquiesce to skewed conceptualizations, based on Playboy iconography and constructions, of what constitutes a "woman" that fundamentally implicates her and assumes she is responsible for her own purported degradation-sexual and otherwise. Given the aforementioned instances in which she does not acquiesce but rather flees or inflicts violence, I would argue otherwise: that, while Eva is often silent, her nonvocality is a deliberate resistance to vocalized expression that, in and of itself, overturns assumptions regarding her passivity. Such silence should not, then, be confounded and read as indecisiveness, acquiescence, or passivity, especially if passivity signifies silence rooted in Eva's "acceptance of the words and definitions of others."19 Eva is not so much paralyzed by complacency, nor does she capitulate to narrow masculinist fantasies of women as sexual objects for male sexual gratification or definitions others impose upon her. Such readings castigate, or at the very least implicate, Eva, while exonerating the sexual dehumanization she encounters-and later inflicts upon Davis as retribution for the cumulative sexual violations she has endured-and the larger social structures that perpetuate such conceptualizations of women. Instead, Eva, as well as the men she confronts throughout her life (and even the other couples throughout the novel-John and Marie, Jean and Alfonso, Queen Bee and her string of lovers), is caught in a conundrum of tenuous sexual politics laden with violence, tension, and problematic gender dynamics. What Eva experiences, along with other couples, are problematic politics governing gender and sexuality that forestall what feminist scholar Barbara Ehrenreich recognizes as "opportunit[ies] for men and women to [...] meet as equals without the pretenses involved in gender roles, and to get together against" their "common sources of oppression .1121 In other words, they need models of relationships not fraught with sexual tension but characterized instead by a different set of sexual politics. As Patricia Hill Collins deftly notes, "[s]exual politics can be defined as a set of ideas and social practices shaped by gender, race, and sexuality that frame all men and women's treatment of one another, as well as how individual men and women are perceived and treated by others."21 These dynamics surrounding sexual politics, particularly men's perception and treatment of women, are concretized in Eva's Man and manifest especially in Eva and Davis's interactions.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  and trans., Vita Sancti Anselmi by Eadmer (Oxford, 1962); Benedicta Ward, ed. and trans., The Prayers and Meditations of St. Anselm with the Proslogion, intro. by R. W. Southern (London and New York, 1973); Ward, “Anselm of Canterbury and His Influence” in Jill Raitt, ed., Christian Spirituality: High Middle Ages and Reformation (New York, 1988; London, 1989), pp. 197–203; Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine, 5 vols. (Chicago and London, 1971–89), 3:106–44, 257–63; John Macquarrie, In Search of Deity: An Essay in Dialectical Theism (London, 1984), pp. 201–2.3. Anselm, Epistle 136 in Pelikan, Christian Tradition, 3:258.4. Anselm, Proslogion 1.143–45 in Ward, trans., Meditations and Prayers.5. Anselm, Monologion 32, 68 in F. S. Schmitt, ed., Sancti Anselmi Cantuariensis archiepiscopi opera omnia, 6 vols. (Edinburgh, 1938–61). My translation.6. Anselm, Proslogion 1.150–51. Ward translation.7. Anselm, Proslogion 1.153–57. My translation. See Wilfred Cantwell Smith, Belief in History (Charlottesville, Va., 1985), pp. 312–13.8. Anselm, Proslogion 2.159. Ward translation.9. Anselm, Proslogion 2.161. My translation. See Macquarrie, In Search of Deity, p. 201, who argues that the idea of “perfection” is included in maius as well as “greatness.”10. Anselm, Proslogion 3.197–98. Ward translation; my italics.11. Psalm 14:1.12. Anselm, Proslogion 2.180–83. Ward translation.13. Anselm, Proslogion 2.180–86.14. See Macquarrie, In Search of Deity, pp. 201–2.15. Jean Leclerq, “Ways of Prayer and Contemplation: West,” in Bernard McGinn and John Meyendorff, eds., Christian Spirituality: Origins to the Twelfth Century (London, 1986), pp. 417–25.16. Anselm, Prayers and Meditations, preface. Ward translation.17. Ibid.18. Anselm, Proslogion, preface. Ward translation.19. Ibid.20. Southern, Vita Sancti Anselmi, p. 20.21. Ibid.22. I have discussed the philosophical movement in Islam and Judaism and explored its implications in greater detail in A History of God: The 4000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (New York, 1993), pp. 170–208.23. Quoted in S. H. Nasr, “Theology and Spirituality,” in Islamic Spirituality: Manifestations, ed. S. H. Nasr (London, 1991), p. 411.24. From the Rasa’il, a tenth-century Ismaili text, quoted in Majid Fakhry, A History of Islamic Philosophy (New York and London, 1970), p. 187.25. W. Montgomery Watt, Muslim Intellectual: The Struggle and Achievement of al-Ghazzali (Edinburgh, 1963), pp. 133–40.26. Maimonides, The Guide to the Perplexed, trans. M. Friedlander (London, 1936), p. 87.27. Moshe Idel, “PaRDeS: Some Reflections on Kabbalistic Hermaneutics,” in John Collins and Michael Fishbane, eds., Death, Ecstasy, and Other Worldly Journeys (Albany, N.Y., 1995), pp. 249–57.28. Brian Davies, The Thought of Thomas Aquinas (Oxford, 1992); Denys Turner, Faith, Reason and the Existence of God (Cambridge, U.K., 2004); Denys Turner, “Apophaticism, Idolatry and the Claims of Reason,” in Oliver Davies and Denys Turner, eds., Silence and the Word, Negative Theology and Incarnation (Cambridge, U.K., 2002), pp. 23–34; Herbert McCabe, God Matters (London, 1987); Herbert McCabe, “Aquinas on the Trinity,” in Davies and Turner, Silence and the Word, pp.

• From City of Night (1963)

  (“He hasnt got the Magic,” the director will say to his friends later about Skipper. “But there is this young boy at the studio, I just talked to him today about his Possibilities — and: he is A Very Beautiful Boy.”) “You must have been a very beautiful boy,” the skinny man muttered. Skipper winced. He looked at the skinny man, startled. He looks in bewilderment about him—as if the echo of the words he had heard through those precious years of his life had momentarily transferred him somewhere else: the director’s mansion, the homes he had been in, progressively less and less extravagant. In his look now I see, blurred, the slow surrender. “What happened then?” the fatman said. Exhaling two fat cylinders of smoke through his nostrils, he resembled a charging bull. “Oh—I—well—later—I moved out. But I kept going to this acting teacher—and, well, see—I moved in with him—and then—see—I had met lots of other people—when I was living with this Director—and then through this teacher—and—I—well—they liked me.... Shit man,” he said suddenly, “I lived with them all, one right after the mother-fucking other.” “And after them?” “Others,” Skipper said dully. “And then?” the fatman persists. “Then—then I got fed up, see? Put it all down—I split. Then—when I came back—hell—I didnt even wanna—didnt even wanna see those people. And some of them—” he adds bitterly, “—they didnt wanna see me. Theyd call someone else—put me up for a while—with a friend of theirs.... Then I hung around Schwartz’s, that movie drugstore—Hollywood Boulevard—the beaches: the whole scene.... So I came back—to Main Street—I didnt even wanna see Hollywood anymore—not even think about it... Then—Christ!—I even got inna mess in fuckin Pershing Square.... Pershing Square!” he says contemptuously. “Hows that?” “This cop—this Sergeant Morgan. Man—he rousts me once, takes me downstairs—where they interrogate you. We’re alone—tries to put the make on me—I slug him. Man! A cop! But, hell—dig: hes scared shitless—scared Im gonna tell on him. He lets me go—tells me if I ever show, he’ll bust me—...” He holds his glass in both hands, squeezing it tightly. “Motherfuckers,” he says, shaking his head, as if he were passing judgment on all the people crammed into his life. The fatman eyed him stonily. Then he yawns, looks at his watch. “It’s past one,” he says.... About us the desperation to find a partner has begun: Make it! During the past hour many couples have left, for the hotels along the block, for apartments, homes—parties that will last into the next day. But the bar is still jammed. The music seems louder, the laughter is more piercingly shrill, more forced. A sustained roar of words crowds you almost physically. The poses have become more effeminate on one side, more masculine on the other.

• From Ulysses (Kindle edition — verify full work) (1922)

  Wright's description helps elucidate the nexus of madness, race, gender, and the law, wherein a resistance to capitulate or embrace Jim Crow politics (laws that, in and of themselves, were biased and insanely nonsensical) provides momentary subjectivity and liberation for the otherwise disempowered, disenfranchised, and/ or marginalized. Rebelliousness and recalcitrance in the face of restriction (or the limit) land the transgressor in an asylum labeled as "mad," or living out another possible ending that, nonetheless, offers temporary relief and/or freedom from the limit. And so, the "oscillation" of Bigger between "intense elation and depression" is consequential and loaded. It is emblematic of the elation that accompanies the luxury of partaking in the freedoms of indulgence in the putative "norm" (access to which is restricted and not extended to all); yet, it quickly transforms into depression, the material/psychological condition that ensues as a consequence of both denial and the transgressor's reacclimation to disempowerment. This same nature surrounds madness in Eva's Man, wherein Eva transgresses several "taboos"-particularly those pertaining to gender, sexuality, and womanhood-while concomitantly gaining access to power in her eventual rejection of gendered sexual hegemony. And, she, too, ultimately lands in an asylum: the psychiatric ward of a prison. Because of the type of crime Eva commits, her status is dubious and defies comprehension; and, in her resistance to vocalizing precisely why she inflicts sexualized violence of such proportions on Davis, her transgressive behavior is inexplicable, though always associated and linked with a particular "craziness." As Eva's cellmate Elvira asserts, "You know, I ain't seen you laugh, I ain't seen you cry, I ain't seen you do nothing, cept breathe hard last night. You too serene. When a woman done something like you done and serene like that, no wonder they think you crazy" (155, emphasis mine). What stand out in Elvira's assertion are the operative words "they think you crazy," indicative of thought and a projection of insanity or psychosis onto Eva versus any indication or declarative affirmation (or, for that matter, diagnosis) as to whether she is indeed crazy. Because Eva commits a crime, especially one that is unfathomable and a severe breach of convention, she is associated with madness since such behavior, otherwise, has no label-no language, words, or terminology-by which to explain it in a rhetoric that is coterminous with or reflective of the act. It literally transgresses language and comprehension. This inability to understand and comprehend is evidenced in the degree to which Eva is interrogated not only by the police, the psychiatrist, and news reporters, but also by her cellmate Elvira. They simply cannot understand-it does not render itself subject to logic or reason-and they are left with the incessant and inevitable question: Why? "Why did you kill him? [...] Why did you think you bit it all off?" (167).

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

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

• From The Case for God (2009)

  There was a new skepticism about the role of science, the modern expectation of continuous progress, and the Enlightenment ideal of rationality. The modern dualities of mind/body; spirit/matter, and reason/emotion were challenged. Finally, the “lower orders,” who had been marginalized and even subjugated during the modern period— women, homosexuals, blacks, indigenous populations, colonized peoples—were demanding and beginning to achieve liberation. Atheism was no longer regarded as a term of abuse. As Nietzsche had predicted, the idea of God had simply died, and for the first time ordinary folk, who were not pioneering scientists or philosophers, were happy to call themselves atheists. 3 They did not spend time examining the scientific and rational arguments against God’s existence: for many Europeans, God had simply become otiosus (“superfluous”). As the political philosophers Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt have explained: Modern negativity is located not in any transcendent realm but in the hard reality before us: the fields of patriotic battles in the First and Second World Wars, from the killing fields at Verdun to the Nazi furnaces and the swift annihilation of thousands in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the carpet bombing of Vietnam and Cambodia, the massacres from Setif and Soweto to Sabra and Shatila, and the list goes on and on. There is no Job who can sustain such suffering. 4 Belief had emerged as the enemy of peace. John Lennon’s song “Imagine” (1971) looked forward to a world where there was no heaven and no hell—”above us only sky.” The elimination of God would solve the world’s problems. This was a simplistic belief, since many of the conflicts that had inspired the peace movement were caused by an imbalance of political power, secular nationalism, and the struggle for world domination. But religion had been implicated in many of these atrocities: in Northern Ireland and the Middle East it had served as a tribal or ethnic marker, it was used rhetorically by politicians, and it was clear that it had signally failed in its mandate of saving the world . In the United States, a small group of theologians created a form of “Christian atheism” that tried to engage with the “hard reality” of world events and enthusiastically proclaimed the death of God. In The Gospel of Christian Atheism (1966), Thomas J. J. Altizer (b. 1927) announced the “good news”: God’s demise had freed us from slavery to a tyrannical, transcendent deity. Altizer spoke in mystical, poetic terms of the dark night of the soul, the pain of abandonment, and the silence that must ensue before what we mean by “God” can become meaningful once more. Our former notions of divinity had to die before theology could be reborn.

• From Going Clear (2013)

  Hubbard suffered a severe stroke on January 16, 1986, at the Creston ranch. He realized that he was in his final days. He summoned Ray Mithoff, one of his most senior Messengers, to help him put his affairs in order and administer a “death assist.” He didn’t ask to see any of his family members; indeed, one of his last actions was to sign a will reducing their inheritance, except for a provision for Mary Sue, who received $1 million, which may have been a part of the agreement that had kept her from testifying against him. He had previously disowned his daughter Alexis, an embarrassing reminder of his bigamous marriage to Sara Northrup. Hubbard was in a nightgown, pacing up and down, saying, “Let’s get this over with! My head is hurting!” He signed the will with a shaky hand. Hubbard also proclaimed Flag Order 3879, “The Sea Org & the Future,” in which he promoted himself to Admiral and retired the rank of Commodore. He instituted a new rank, that of Loyal Officer, after the stalwart members of the Galactic Confederacy who had imprisoned the tyrannical overlord Xenu. Hubbard appointed only two persons to serve at that level, Pat and Annie Broeker. They were an attractive couple, his closest advisers; he was clearly passing them the scepter. “I’ll be scouting the way and doing the first port survey missions,” Hubbard promised his followers. “We will meet again later.” On Friday evening, January 24, 1986, Hubbard died in the Blue Bird bus that had served as his living quarters for the past three years. Ray Mithoff, Pat Broeker, and Hubbard’s personal physician, Eugene Denk, were at his side, along with a handful of acolytes and employees. His body had suffered the usual insults of old age, along with the consequences of obesity and a lifetime of heavy smoking. Dr. Denk had given him injections of Vistaril, a tranquilizer, usually prescribed for anxiety. Whatever powers Scientology was supposed to bestow were no more evident in the death of its founder than they had been in his life. Late that night, a handful of senior executives and a couple of private investigators drove to a restaurant in Paso Robles, where they were met by Pat Broeker, who guided them to the Creston ranch. The site was so secret that none of the executives, including Miscavige, had ever actually been there. They arrived around four in the morning. Earle Cooley, a church attorney, took charge of the body. At seven thirty that morning, about twelve hours after Hubbard’s death, the mortuary in San Luis Obispo was notified. Cooley demanded an immediate cremation, but when the owner of the mortuary saw the name on the death certificate, she called the coroner.

• From Mud Vein (2014)

  It was awful. It was painful. “Senna, what do you want?” I wanted my white room. I wanted to never have smelled him or heard the words to his music. “I don’t know.” He took a step backwards, toward the door. I wanted to step toward him. I wanted to. “Senna…” He took another step back, like he wanted me to stop him. He’s giving me a chance, I thought. Three more and he would be out the door. I felt the pull. It was in the hollows behind my kneecaps, something tugging me to him. I wanted to reach down and still it. Another step. Another. His eyes were pleading with me. It was no use. I was too far gone. “Goodbye, Isaac.” I took it as a loss. I thought so anyway. It had been a long time since I had mourned a person—twenty years, to be exact. But I mourned Isaac Asterholder in my own way. I didn’t cry; I was too dry to cry. Every day I touched the spot where Nick’s book used to sit on my nightstand. Dust was starting to fill the space. Nick was something to me. We shared a life. Isaac and I had shared nothing. Or maybe that wasn’t true. We shared my tragedies. People leave—that’s what I was used to—but Isaac showed up. I sat in my white room for days trying to clear myself of all the color I was suddenly feeling: red bikes, lyrics with thorns, the smell of herbs. I sat on the floor with my dress pulled over my knees and my head curled into my lap. The white room couldn’t cure me. Color stained everything. Seven days after he walked backwards out of my house I went to the mailbox and on my way back, found a CD on my windshield. I clutched it to my chest for an hour before I slipped it into my stereo. It was an intense crescendo of lyrics and drums and harp and everything he was feeling—and I was, too. The most remarkable thing was that I was feeling. It ripped at me until I wanted to gasp for breath. How could music know what you were feeling? How could it help you name it? I went to my closet. There was a box on my top shelf. I pulled it down and ripped off the lid. There was a red vase. Bright. Brighter than blood. My father sent it to me when my first book was published. I thought it was terrible—so bright it hurt my eyes. Now, my eyes were drawn to the color. I carried it to my white room and set it on the desk. Now there was blood everywhere. I searched for a song for days. I was new to the wonders of iTunes. I went back to Florence Welch. There was something about the intensity of her.

• From Educated (2018)

  But there was no Buck’s Peak. During the day, Buck’s Peak was all there was—that and the site in Blackfoot. Shawn and I spent the better part of a week making purlins to finish the barn roof. We used a machine the size of a mobile home to press them into a Z shape, then we attached wire brushes to grinders and blasted away the rust so they could be painted. When the paint was dry we stacked them next to the shop, but within a day or two the wind from the peak had covered them in black dust, which turned to grime when it mixed with the oils on the iron. Shawn said they had to be washed before they could be loaded, so I fetched a rag and a bucket of water. It was a hot day, and I wiped beads of sweat from my forehead. My hairband broke. I didn’t have a spare. The wind swept down the mountain, blowing strands in my eyes, and I reached across my face and brushed them away. My hands were black with grease, and each stroke left a dark smudge. I shouted to Shawn when the purlins were clean. He appeared from behind an I-beam and raised his welding shield. When he saw me, his face broke into a wide smile. “Our N—r’s back!” he said. —THE SUMMER SHAWN AND I had worked the Shear, there’d been an afternoon when I’d wiped the sweat from my face so many times that, by the time we quit for supper, my nose and cheeks had been black. That was the first time Shawn called me “N—r.” The word was surprising but not unfamiliar. I’d heard Dad use it, so in one sense I knew what it meant. But in another sense, I didn’t understand it as meaning anything at all. I’d only ever seen one black person, a little girl, the adoptive daughter of a family at church. Dad obviously hadn’t meant her. Shawn had called me N—r that entire summer: “N—r, run and fetch those C-clamps!” or “It’s time for lunch, N—r!” It had never given me a moment’s pause. Then the world had turned upside down: I had entered a university, where I’d wandered into an auditorium and listened, eyes wide, mind buzzing, to lectures on American history. The professor was Dr. Richard Kimball, and he had a resonant, contemplative voice. I knew about slavery; I’d heard Dad talk about it, and I’d read about it in Dad’s favorite book on the American founding. I had read that slaves in colonial times were happier and more free than their masters, because the masters were burdened with the cost of their care. That had made sense to me. The day Dr. Kimball lectured on slavery, he filled the overhead screen with a charcoal sketch of a slave market. The screen was large; as in a movie theater it dominated the room. The sketch was chaotic.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  Here He is—He is hanging here on this gallows.” 44 This story can also be seen as an outward sign of the death of God announced by Nietzsche. How do we account for the great evil we see in a world supposedly created and governed by a benevolent deity? For the Jewish writer Richard Rubenstein this conception of God is no longer viable. Because Jews so narrowly escaped extermination, Rubenstein does not believe that they should jettison their religion, as this would cut them off from their past. But the nice, moral God of liberal Jews seems too anodyne and antiseptic: it ignores life’s inherent tragedy in the hope that things will improve. Instead, Rubenstein is drawn to the self-emptying God of Isaac Luria, who had not been able to control the world he had brought into being. The mystics had seen God as Nothingness; Auschwitz had revealed the abysmal emptiness of life, and the contemplation of Luria’s En Sof was a way of entering into the primal Nothingness from which we came and to which we all return. 45 The British theologian Louis Jacobs, however, believed that Luria’s impotent God could not give meaning to human existence. He preferred the classic solution that God is greater than human beings can conceive and that his ways are not our ways. God may be incomprehensible, but people have the option of putting their trust in this ineffable God and affirming a meaning, even in the midst of meaninglessness. Another Auschwitz story shows people doing precisely that. Even in the camps, some of the inmates continued to study the Torah and to observe the festivals, not in the hope of placating an angry deity but because they found, by experience, that these rituals helped them to endure the horror. One day a group of Jews decided to put God on trial. In the face of such inconceivable suffering, they found the conventional arguments utterly unconvincing. If God was omnipotent, he could have prevented the Shoah; if he could not stop it, he was impotent; and if he could have stopped it but chose not to, he was a monster. They condemned God to death. The presiding rabbi pronounced the verdict, then went on calmly to announce that it was time for the evening prayer. Ideas about God come and go, but prayer, the struggle to find meaning even in the darkest circumstances, must continue. The idea of God is merely a symbol of indescribable transcendence and has been interpreted in many different ways over the centuries.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

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

• From Educated (2018)

  I was so tempted, the pain in my jaw so savage, that I must have held it for ten seconds before passing it back. —I HAD A JOB at the campus creamery, flipping burgers and scooping ice cream. I got by between paydays by neglecting overdue bills and borrowing money from Robin, so twice a month, when a few hundred dollars went into my account, it was gone within hours. I was broke when I turned nineteen at the end of September. I had given up on fixing the tooth; I knew I would never have fourteen hundred dollars. Besides, the pain had lessened: either the nerve had died or my brain had adjusted to its shocks. Still, I had other bills, so I decided to sell the only thing I had of any value—my horse, Bud. I called Shawn and asked how much I could get. Shawn said a mixed breed wasn’t worth much, but that I could send him to auction like Grandpa’s dog-food horses. I imagined Bud in a meat grinder, then said, “Try to find a buyer first.” A few weeks later Shawn sent me a check for a few hundred dollars. When I called Shawn and asked who he’d sold Bud to, he mumbled something vague about a guy passing through from Tooele. I was an incurious student that semester. Curiosity is a luxury reserved for the financially secure: my mind was absorbed with more immediate concerns, such as the exact balance of my bank account, who I owed how much, and whether there was anything in my room I could sell for ten or twenty dollars. I submitted my homework and studied for my exams, but I did so out of terror—of losing my scholarship should my GPA fall a single decimal—not from real interest in my classes. In December, after my last paycheck of the month, I had sixty dollars in my account. Rent was $110, due January 7. I needed quick cash. I’d heard there was a clinic near the mall that paid people for plasma. A clinic sounded like a part of the Medical Establishment, but I reasoned that as long as they were taking things out, not putting anything in, I’d be okay. The nurse stabbed at my veins for twenty minutes, then said they were too small. I bought a tank of gas with my last thirty dollars and drove home for Christmas. On Christmas morning, Dad gave me a rifle—I didn’t take it out of the box, so I have no idea what kind. I asked Shawn if he wanted to buy it off me, but Dad gathered it up and said he’d keep it safe. That was it, then. There was nothing left to sell, no more childhood friends or Christmas presents. It was time to quit school and get a job. I accepted that. My brother Tony was living in Las Vegas, working as a long-haul trucker, so on Christmas Day I called him.

• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  Certainly not Pre. “Sure there will be a lot of pressure,” he told Sports Illustrated. “And a lot of us will be facing more experienced competitors, and maybe we don’t have any right to win. But all I know is if I go out and bust my gut until I black out and somebody still beats me, and if I have made that guy reach down and use everything he has and then more, why then it just proves that on that day he’s a better man than I.” Right before Pre and Bowerman left for Germany, I filed for a patent on Bowerman’s waffle shoe. Application no. 284,736 described the “improved sole having integral polygon shaped studs… of square, rectangular or triangle cross section… [and] a plurality of flat sides which provide gripping edges that give greatly improved traction.” A proud moment for both of us. A golden moment of my life. Sales of Nike were steady, my son was healthy, I was able to pay my mortgage on time. All things considered, I was in a damned fine mood that August. And then it began. In the second week of the Olympic Games, a squad of eight masked gunmen scaled a back wall of the Olympic village and kidnapped eleven Israeli athletes. In our Tigard office we set up a TV and no one did a lick of work. We watched and watched, day after day, saying little, often holding our hands over our mouths. When the terrible denouement came, when the news broke that all the athletes were dead, their bodies strewn on a blood-spattered tarmac at the airport, it recalled the deaths of both Kennedys, and of Dr. King, and of the students at Kent State University, and of all the tens of thousands of boys in Vietnam. Ours was a difficult, death-drenched age, and at least once every day you were forced to ask yourself: What’s the point? When Bowerman returned I drove straight down to Eugene to see him. He looked as though he hadn’t slept in a decade. He told me that he and Pre had been within a hair of the attack. In the first minutes, as the terrorists took control of the building, many Israeli athletes were able to flee, slipping out side doors, jumping out windows. One made his way to the next building over, where Bowerman and Pre were staying. Bowerman heard a knock, opened the door of his room, and found this man, a race walker, shivering with fear, babbling about masked gunmen. Bowerman pulled the man inside and phoned the U.S. consul. “Send the marines!” he shouted into the phone. They did. Marines quickly secured the building where Bowerman and the U.S. team were staying.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  It is significant that today a detective story based on such problem solving is popularly known as a “mystery.” But for Marcel this is a “fundamentally vicious proceeding” that could be symptomatic of a “corruption of the intelligence.” 71 Philosophers and scientists were beginning to return to a more apophatic approach to knowledge. But the tradition of Denys, Thomas, and Eckhart had been so submerged during the modern period that most religious congregations were unaware of it. They tended still to think about God in the modern way, as an objective reality, “out there,” that could be categorized like any other being. During the 1950s, for example, I learned by heart this answer to the question “What is God?” in the Roman Catholic catechism: “God is the supreme spirit, who alone exists of himself and is infinite in all perfections.” Denys, Anselm, and Aquinas were probably turning in their graves. The catechism had no hesitation in asserting that it was possible simply to draw breath and define , a word that literally means “to set limits upon,” a transcendent reality that must exceed all words and concepts. Not surprisingly, many thoughtful people were unable to believe in this remote and abstractly conceived deity. By the middle of the twentieth century, it was commonly imagined that secularism was the coming ideology and that religion would never again play a role in public life. But atheism was still not perceived as an easy option. Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80) spoke of a God-shaped hole in human consciousness where the sacred had always been. The desire for what we call God is intrinsic to human nature, which cannot bear the utter meaninglessness of the cosmos. We have invented a God to explain the inexplicable; it is a divinized humanity. But even if God existed, Sartre claimed, it would be necessary to reject him, since this God negates our freedom. This was not a comfortable creed. It demanded a bleak acceptance of the fact that our lives had no meaning—a heroic act that brought an apotheosis of freedom but also a denial of an intrinsic part of our nature. Albert Camus (1913–60) could no longer subscribe to the nineteenth-century dream of a deified humanity. Our lives were rendered meaningless by our mortality, so any philosophy that tried to make sense of human existence was a delusion. We had to do without God and pour all our loving solicitude and care upon the world.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  Another Auschwitz story shows people doing precisely that. Even in the camps, some of the inmates continued to study the Torah and to observe the festivals, not in the hope of placating an angry deity but because they found, by experience, that these rituals helped them to endure the horror. One day a group of Jews decided to put God on trial. In the face of such inconceivable suffering, they found the conventional arguments utterly unconvincing. If God was omnipotent, he could have prevented the Shoah; if he could not stop it, he was impotent; and if he could have stopped it but chose not to, he was a monster. They condemned God to death. The presiding rabbi pronounced the verdict, then went on calmly to announce that it was time for the evening prayer. Ideas about God come and go, but prayer, the struggle to find meaning even in the darkest circumstances, must continue. The idea of God is merely a symbol of indescribable transcendence and has been interpreted in many different ways over the centuries. The modern God—conceived as powerful creator, first cause, supernatural personality realistically understood and rationally demonstrable—is a recent phenomenon. It was born in a more optimistic era than our own and reflects the firm expectation that scientific rationality could bring the apparently inexplicable aspects of life under the control of reason. This God was indeed, as Feuerbach suggested, a projection of humanity at a time when human beings were achieving unprecedented control over their environment and thought they were about to solve the mysteries of the universe. But many feel that the hopes of the Enlightenment also died in Auschwitz. The people who devised the camps had imbibed the classical nineteenth-century atheistic ethos that commanded them to think of themselves as the only absolute; by making an idol of their nation, they felt compelled to destroy those they viewed as enemies. Today we have a more modest conception of the powers of human reason. We have seen too much evil in recent years to indulge in a facile theology that says—as some have tried to say—that God knows what he is doing, that he has a secret plan that we cannot fathom, or that suffering gives men and women the opportunity to practice heroic virtue. A modern theology must look unflinchingly into the heart of a great darkness and be prepared, perhaps, to enter into the cloud of unknowing.

• From Educated (2018)

  —WHEN I LOST MY SISTER, I lost the family. I knew my father would pay my brothers the same visit he’d paid her. Would they believe him? I thought they would. After all, Audrey would confirm it. My denials would be meaningless, the rantings of a stranger. I’d wandered too far, changed too much, bore too little resemblance to the scabby-kneed girl they remembered as their sister. There was little hope of overpowering the history my father and sister were creating for me. Their account would claim my brothers first, then it would spread to my aunts, uncles, cousins, the whole valley. I had lost an entire kinship, and for what? It was in this state of mind that I received another letter: I had won a visiting fellowship to Harvard. I don’t think I have ever received a piece of news with more indifference. I knew I should be drunk with gratitude that I, an ignorant girl who’d crawled out of a scrap heap, should be allowed to study at that grand place, but I couldn’t summon the fervor. I had begun to conceive of what my education might cost me, and I had begun to resent it. —AFTER I READ AUDREY’S LETTER, the past shifted. It started with my memories of her. They transformed. When I recalled any part of our childhood together, moments of tenderness or humor, of the little girl who had been me with the little girl who had been her, the memory was immediately changed, blemished, turned to rot. The past became as ghastly as the present. The change was repeated with every member of my family. My memories of them became ominous, indicting. The female child in them, who had been me, stopped being a child and became something else, something threatening and ruthless, something that would consume them. This monster child stalked me for a month before I found a logic to banish her: that I was likely insane. If I was insane, everything could be made to make sense. If I was sane, nothing could. This logic seemed damning. It was also a relief. I was not evil; I was clinical. I began to defer, always, to the judgment of others. If Drew remembered something differently than I did, I would immediately concede the point. I began to rely on Drew to tell me the facts of our lives. I took pleasure in doubting myself about whether we’d seen a particular friend last week or the week before, or whether our favorite crêperie was next to the library or the museum. Questioning these trivial facts, and my ability to grasp them, allowed me to doubt whether anything I remembered had happened at all. My journals were a problem. I knew that my memories were not memories only, that I had recorded them, that they existed in black and white. This meant that more than my memory was in error.

• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  If we could sell 30 percent of Blue Ribbon, at two bucks a share, we could raise three hundred thousand dollars overnight. The timing for such an offering seemed ideal. In 1970 the first-ever venture capital firms were starting to sprout up. The whole concept of venture capital was being invented before our eyes, though the idea of what constituted a sound investment for venture capitalists wasn’t very broad. Most of the new venture capital firms were in Northern California, so they were mainly attracted to high-tech and electronics companies. Silicon Valley, almost exclusively. Since most of those companies had futuristic-sounding names, I formed a holding company for Blue Ribbon and gave it a name designed to attract tech-happy investors: Sports-Tek Inc. Woodell and I sent out fliers advertising the offering, then sat back and braced for the clamorous response. Silence. A month passed. Deafening silence. No one phoned. Not one person. That is, almost no one. We did manage to sell three hundred shares, at one dollar per. To Woodell and his mother. Ultimately we withdrew the offering. It was a humiliation, and in its wake I had many heated conversations with myself. I blamed the shaky economy. I blamed Vietnam. But first and foremost I blamed myself. I’d overvalued Blue Ribbon. I’d overvalued my life’s work. More than once, over my first cup of coffee in the morning, or while trying to fall asleep at night, I’d tell myself: Maybe I’m a fool? Maybe this whole damn shoe thing is a fool’s errand? Maybe, I thought. Maybe. I SCRAPED TOGETHER the twenty thousand dollars from our receivables, paid off the bank, and took delivery of the order from Onitsuka. Another sigh of relief. Followed by a tightening in the chest. What would I do the next time? And the next? I needed cash. That summer was unusually warm. Languorous days of golden sunshine, clear blue skies, the world a paradise. It all seemed to mock me and my mood. If 1967 had been the Summer of Love, 1970 was the Summer of Liquidity, and I had none. I spent most of every day thinking about liquidity, talking about liquidity, looking to the heavens and pleading for liquidity. My kingdom for liquidity. An even more loathsome word than “equity.” Eventually I did what I didn’t want to do, what I’d vowed never to do. I put the touch on anybody with ears. Friends, family, casual acquaintances. I even went with my hand out to former teammates, guys I’d sweated and trained and raced alongside. Including my former archrival, Grelle. I’d heard that Grelle had inherited a pile from his grandmother. On top of that, he was involved in all sorts of lucrative business ventures. He worked as a salesman for two grocery store chains, while selling caps and gowns to graduates on the side, and both ventures were said to be humming along.

• From City of Night (1963)

  He opens His arms to embrace me in His batwinged cape! And I lunge toward Him anxious to be claimed, and He encloses the flapping wings about me.... Freed of his embrace, I look at the ghostly steeples of the Cathedral. I’ll climb to that nonexistent Heaven! ... Now at Cindy’s bar a man is groping me, and gropes someone else—and all around, hands are searching—while Cindy herself, globs of frantic, shaking flesh, bouncing, moves chaperonely nervously sighing: “Please, please, please , boys! Be Nice!” Outside again, I recognized the ovaled fairy who had made it with me that first day in New Orleans; he is a freckled schoolboy, with a lollypop. With him is his youngman-lover who had turned femme—and he is, resignedly perhaps, a schoolgirl: bloomers peeking, ruffled, from beneath the starched skirt. “Tramp!” the ovaled one sneers at me—and he skipped quickly away as if I would menace or contaminate them. Past the giant burlesque picture of Holly Sand on Bourbon. And I imagine her making quite a breeze, creating quite a storm, fanning waves of flesh-desire (to go all the way), and the poster of Aloha twirled giant mechanical breasts like windmills— whoosh! and around; whoosh! and around.... I look about me searching Burlesque street, L.A. Instead, I see the costumed orgy of Mardi Gras. “Lover!” A fat woman embraces me tightly. We kiss. Now I turn to a young girl near me, shes dressed in a leopard suit I kiss her too, pushing my tongue urgently into her mouth, crushing her mouth—as if to erase from my own the stamp of Jeremy’s remembered kiss.... The sky has darkened. The streetlights, turned on now, will prolong the naked street merriment to midnight. Tomorrow, I keep thinking. Tomorrow... When Ash Wednesday will hang like a pall over this city. “Lets make it, man!” Sonny shouted into my ear, his lips so near they brushed my face. Still shirtless, he embraced me drunkenly while the two suited scores hes still with look on disapprovingly. “Later,” I said dazedly, taking the pill he slipped into my hand. “Later....” The Cathedral is solemn like a tomb. I think groggily: Dave.... The man on the beach, now somewhere in this city.... Lance, Pete, Mr King.... Miss Destiny. Skipper.... Jeremy. Each in his own way.... Each in his own way what? And Barbara. And Jocko in his way.... What! Nothing, I thought. “Nothing!” I said aloud, as face blends with hunting face. “Honey,” said Whorina, “youre twisted out of your swinging mind. Whatve you been taking? Here. I got something thatll straighten you out.” She hands me a strange pill which looks like a raisin.

• From Educated (2018)

  Then I’d remind her I was only seventeen, and she’d tell me I could stay. “You have an opportunity to help your father,” she said. “He needs you. He’ll never say it but he does. It’s your choice what to do.” There was silence, then she added, “But if you don’t help, you can’t stay here. You’ll have to live somewhere else.” The next morning, at four A.M ., I drove to Stokes and worked a ten-hour shift. It was early afternoon, and raining heavily, when I came home and found my clothes on the front lawn. I carried them into the house. Mother was mixing oils in the kitchen, and she said nothing as I passed by with my dripping shirts and jeans. I sat on my bed while the water from my clothes soaked into the carpet. I’d taken a phone with me, and I stared at it, unsure what it could do. There was no one to call. There was nowhere to go and no one to call. I dialed Tyler in Indiana. “I don’t want to work in the junkyard,” I said when he answered. My voice was hoarse. “What happened?” he said. He sounded worried; he thought there’d been another accident. “Is everyone okay?” “Everyone’s fine,” I said. “But Dad says I can’t stay here unless I work in the junkyard, and I can’t do that anymore.” My voice was pitched unnaturally high, and it quivered. Tyler said, “What do you want me to do?” In retrospect I’m sure he meant this literally, that he was asking how he could help, but my ears, solitary and suspicious, heard something else: What do you expect me to do? I began to shake; I felt light-headed. Tyler had been my lifeline. For years he’d lived in my mind as a last resort, a lever I could pull when my back was against the wall. But now that I had pulled it, I understood its futility. It did nothing after all. “What happened?” Tyler said again. “Nothing. Everything’s fine.” I hung up and dialed Stokes. The assistant manager answered. “You done working today?” she said brightly. I told her I quit, said I was sorry, then put down the phone. I opened my closet and there they were, where I’d left them four months before: my scrapping boots. I put them on. It felt as though I’d never taken them off. Dad was in the forklift, scooping up a stack of corrugated tin. He would need someone to place wooden blocks on the trailer so he could offload the stack. When he saw me, he lowered the tin so I could step onto it, and I rode the stack up and onto the trailer. —MY MEMORIES OF THE UNIVERSITY faded quickly.

• From Educated (2018)

  I carried them to the car and put them in the backseat. “I’m going for a drive,” I told Mother. I tried to keep my voice smooth. I hugged her, then took a long look at Buck’s Peak, memorizing every line and shadow. Mother had seen me take my journals to the car. She must have known what that meant, must have sensed the farewell in it, because she fetched my father. He gave me a stiff hug and said, “I love you, you know that?” “I do,” I said. “That has never been the issue.” Those words are the last I said to my father. —I DROVE SOUTH; I didn’t know where I was going. It was nearly Christmas. I had decided to go to the airport and board the next flight to Boston when Tyler called. I hadn’t spoken to my brother in months—after what happened with Audrey, it had seemed pointless to confide in my siblings. I was sure Mother would have told every brother, cousin, aunt and uncle the story she had told Erin: that I was possessed, dangerous, taken by the devil. I wasn’t wrong: Mother had warned them. But then she made a mistake. After I left Buck’s Peak, she panicked. She was afraid I might contact Tyler, and that if I did, he might sympathize with me. She decided to get to Tyler first, to deny anything I might tell him, but she miscalculated. She didn’t stop to think how the denials would sound, coming from nowhere like that. “Of course Shawn didn’t stab Diego and threaten Tara with the knife,” Mother reassured Tyler, but to Tyler, who had never heard any part of this story, not from me or anyone else, this was somewhat less than reassuring. A moment after he said goodbye to Mother, Tyler called me, demanding to know what had happened and why I hadn’t come to him. I thought he’d say I was lying but he didn’t. He accepted almost immediately the reality I’d spent a year denying. I didn’t understand why he was trusting me, but then he told me his own stories and I remembered: Shawn had been his older brother, too. In the weeks that followed, Tyler began to test my parents in the subtle, nonconfrontational way that was uniquely his. He suggested that perhaps the situation had been mishandled, that perhaps I was not possessed. Perhaps I was not evil at all. I might have taken comfort in Tyler’s trying to help me, but the memory of my sister was too raw, and I didn’t trust him. I knew that if Tyler confronted my parents—really confronted them—they would force him to choose between me and them, between me and the rest of the family. And from Audrey I had learned: he would not choose me. —MY FELLOWSHIP AT HARVARD finished in the spring. I flew to the Middle East, where Drew was completing a Fulbright.