Despair

Passages

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

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• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  One could hear the wet sand crunch under his feet, then the stamp of his boots on the marble between the lions, then his legs were cut off, then his body, and finally the hood also disappeared. Only here did the procurator notice that the sun was gone and twilight had come. CHAPTER 26: The Burial, THE MASTER AND MARGARITA CHAPTER 26 The Burial And perhaps it was the twilight that caused such a sharp change in the procurator’s appearance. He aged, grew hunched as if before one’s eyes, and, besides that, became alarmed. Once he looked around and gave a start for some reason, casting an eye on the empty chair with the cloak thrown over its back. The night of the feast was approaching, the evening shadows played their game, and the tired procurator probably imagined that someone was sitting in the empty chair. Yielding to his faint-heartedness and ruffling the cloak, the procurator let it drop and began rushing about the balcony, now rubbing his hands, now rushing to the table and seizing the cup, now stopping and staring senselessly at the mosaics of the floor, as if trying to read something written there . . . It was the second time in the same day that anguish came over him. Rubbing his temple, where only a dull, slightly aching reminder of the morning’s infernal pain lingered, the procurator strained to understand what the reason for his soul’s torments was. And he quickly understood it, but attempted to deceive himself. It was clear to him that that afternoon he had lost something irretrievably, and that he now wanted to make up for the loss by some petty, worthless and, above all, belated actions. The deceiving of himself consisted in the procurator’s trying to convince himself that these actions, now, this evening, were no less important than the morning’s sentence. But in this the procurator succeeded very poorly. At one of his turns, he stopped abruptly and whistled. In response to this whistle, a low barking resounded in the twilight, and a gigantic sharp-eared dog with a grey pelt and a gold-studded collar sprang from the garden on to the balcony. ‘Banga, Banga,’ the procurator cried weakly. The dog rose on his hind legs, placed his front paws on his master’s shoulders, nearly knocking him to the floor, and licked his cheek.

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  the bottling of ink dust, or the silkworm-breeding station run under the aegis of the SS; or, alternatively, employed in one of the operations serving the ghetto’s internal economy, in the clothing store, for instance, in one of the precinct mending and darning rooms, the shredding section, the rag depot, the book reception and sorting unit, the kitchen brigade, the potato-peeling platoon, the bone-crushing mill, the glue-boiling plant, or the mattress department, as medical and nursing auxiliaries, in the disinfestation and rodent control service, the floor space allocation office, the central registration bureau, the self- administration housed in barrack block BV, known as “The Castle,” or in the transport of goods maintained within the walls of the fortress by means of a medley of carts of every conceivable kind and four dozen ancient hearses brought from the now defunct Jewish communities in the Bohemian countryside to Terezin, where they moved along the crowded streets with two men harnessed between the shafts and four to eight pushing or putting their weight against the spokes of the wheels of these oddly swaying conveyances, which were covered by ulcerations of peeling black varnish and from which, before long, the rickety superstructures, high-built coach boxes, and silver-bronzed canopies resting on turned columns had been roughly sawn away, so that the lower parts, on the sides of which rows of letters and numbers were coarsely painted in lime-wash, scarcely betrayed their former function, a function, said Austerlitz, for which they were still frequently employed even now, since much of the load carted round Theresienstadt every day was made up by the dead, of whom there were always a great many because the high population density and poor diet rendered it impossible for the course of such infectious diseases as scarlet fever, enteritis, diphtheria, jaundice, and tuberculosis to be stemmed, and because the average age of those brought from all regions of the German Reich to the ghetto was over seventy, and these people, who before they were sent away had been led to believe some tale about a pleasant resort in Bohemia called Theresienbad, with beautiful gardens, promenades, boardinghouses, and villas, and many of whom had been persuaded or forced to sign contracts, so-called Heimeinkaufsvertrdge, said Austerlitz, offering them, against deposits of up to eighty thousand Reichsmarks, the right of residence in what was described to them as a most salubrious place, these people, Austerlitz continued, had come to Theresienstadt, completely misled by the illusions implanted in their minds, carrying in their luggage all manner of personal items and mementoes which could be of no conceivable use in the life that awaited them in the ghetto, often arriving already ravaged in body and spirit, no longer in their right minds, delirious, frequently unable to remember their own names, surviving the procedure of being sluiced in, as it was termed, either not at all or only by a few days, in which latter case,

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  that your father, Vera told me, said Austerlitz, then in the utmost danger, did not leave until it was almost too late, on the afternoon of the fourteenth of March, by plane from Ruzyné to Paris. I still remember, said Vera, that when he said goodbye he was wearing a wonderful plum-colored double-breasted suit, and a black felt hat with a green band and a broad brim. Next morning, at first light, the Germans did indeed march into Prague in the middle of a heavy snowstorm which seemed to make them appear out of nowhere. When they crossed the bridge and their armored cars were rolling up the Narodni a profound silence fell over the whole city. People turned away, and from that moment they walked more slowly, like somnambulists, as if they no longer knew where they were going. What particularly upset us, so Vera remarked, said Austerlitz, was the instant change to driving on the right. It often made my heart miss a beat, she said, when I saw a car racing down the road on the wrong side, since it inevitably made me think that from now on we must live in a world turned upside down. Of course, Vera continued, it was much harder for Agata than for me to manage under the new regime. Since the Germans had issued their decrees on the Jewish population, she could go shopping only at certain times; she must not take a taxi, she could sit only in the last carriage of the tram, she could not visit a coffeehouse or cinema, or attend a concert or any other event. Nor could she herself appear onstage anymore, and access to the banks of the Vltava and the parks and gardens she had loved so much was barred to her. All my green places are lost to me, she once said, adding that only now did she truly understand how wonderful it is to stand by the rail of a river steamer without a care in the world. The ever-extended list of bans—before long it was forbidden for Jews to walk on the pavement on the side of the road next to the park, to go into a laundry or dry cleaner’s, or to make a call from a public telephone—all of this, I still hear Vera telling me, said Austerlitz, soon brought Agata to the brink of despair. I can see her now pacing up and down this room, said Vera, I can see her striking her forehead with the flat of her hand, and crying out, chanting the syllables one by one: I do not un der stand it! I do not un der stand it! I shall ne ver un der stand it!! Nonetheless, she went into the city as often as she could, applying to I don’t know how many or what authorities, she stood for hours in the sole post office which the forty thousand Jews in Prague were allowed to use, waiting to send a telegram; she made inquiries, pulled strings, left financial deposits, produced affidavits and guarantees, and when she came home she would sit up racking her brains until late into the night. But the more trouble she took, and the longer she went on trying, the further did any hope of her getting an emigration permit recede, so in the summer, when there was already talk of the forthcoming war and the likelihood of even harsher restrictions when it broke

• From Comrade Loves of the Samurai (1972)

  One evening the mother said despairingly to her son: 'Dear Inosuke, we have nothing more to live on, and, indeed, to continue this existence is merely to prolong our suffering. I think that it is better to die than to remain in such a pitiable Sate. If I do not die a beautiful death by committing suicide, it is no shame; for I am an old woman. But you are a young samurai, and you must pass honourably. Be brave, my son, and go first. I shall follow you Straightway.' Inosuke calmly answered: 'Yes, mother.'He did up his hair, bared his breast, and serenely sat down on a mat. He was already holding the knife in his hand and preparing to kill himself, when there crept into the room a little dog which seemed to belong to some good family. It was white with some black spots, and had a collar with a little bell. Tied to its neck were two packets wrapped in paper. It wagged its tail very familiarly, and went up to Inosuke as if it wanted to speak to him. The astonished mother untied the packets and opened them. One contained some provisions, and a note on which was written this sentence: 'It is easy to die.'In the other packet were some comforts and another note with this sentence: 'But it is more difficult to live for honour's sake.' In this manner someone had sent them help just as they were despairing. Mother and son wondered who in the world this person could have been who wished them well. Someone at least knew of the injustice of their disgrace. They resolved to live a little longer, and delayed their death. They caressed the dog, who was very pleased with this and went out by a hole in the wall. After that, the faithful little beast came every morning and evening, bringing round his neck something for their subsistence. Two years passed in this way, and it was now five since the Lord had exiled them and con-fined them to their cottage. Inosuke was grieving to death, and indeed fell ill; but a kindly Heaven was watching over them. The Lord at last relented and delivered them from this long disgrace. Inosuke thanked him, and asked the reason for his punishment. The Lord showed him the paper telling of his scandalous conduct, and Inosuke at once guessed that another page, named Naminojyo Toyura, had plotted to denounce him to his master because he was jealous of him, and that he who had written the false and outrageous accusation was a certain fencing master of the people, named Kenpatji Iwasaka. Both of these men were put to a cruel death. The Lord regretted that he had punished Inosuke so long and so unjustly, and made him a samurai and Keeper of the Seals. Thus Inosuke's honour was ensured, and the people loved and honoured him more than before.

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  Excuse me, where’s the telephone?’ ‘Let him use the telephone,’ the doctor told the orderlies. Ivan grabbed the receiver, and the woman meanwhile quietly asked Riukhin: ‘Is he married?’ ‘Single,’ Riukhin answered fearfully. ‘Member of a trade union?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Police?’ Ivan shouted into the receiver. ‘Police? Comrade officer, give orders at once for five motor cycles with machine-guns to be sent out to catch the foreign consultant. What? Come and pick me up, I’ll go with you . . . It’s the poet Homeless speaking from the madhouse . . . What’s your address?’ Homeless asked the doctor in a whisper, covering the receiver with his hand, and then again shouting into it: ‘Are you listening? Hello! . . . Outrageous!’ Ivan suddenly screamed and hurled the receiver against the wall. Then he turned to the doctor, offered him his hand, said ‘Goodbye’ drily, and made as if to leave. ‘For pity’s sake, where do you intend to go?’ the doctor said, peering into Ivan’s eyes. ‘In the dead of night, in your underwear . . . You’re not feeling well, stay with us.’ ‘Let me pass,’ Ivan said to the orderlies, who closed ranks at the door. ‘Will you let me pass or not?’ the poet shouted in a terrible voice. Riukhin trembled, but the woman pushed a button on the table and a shiny little box with a sealed ampoule popped out on to its glass surface. ‘Ah, so?!’ Ivan said, turning around with a wild and hunted look. ‘Well, then . . . Goodbye!’ And he rushed head first into the window-blind. The crash was rather forceful, but the glass behind the blind gave no crack, and in an instant Ivan Nikolaevich was struggling in the hands of the orderlies. He gasped, tried to bite, shouted: ‘So that’s the sort of windows you’ve got here! Let me go! Let me go! . . .’ A syringe flashed in the doctor’s hand, with a single movement the woman slit the threadbare sleeve of the shirt and seized the arm with unwomanly strength. There was a smell of ether, Ivan went limp in the hands of the four people, the deft doctor took advantage of this moment and stuck the needle into Ivan’s arm. They held Ivan for another few seconds and then lowered him on to the couch. ‘Bandits!’ Ivan shouted and jumped up from the couch, but was installed on it again. The moment they let go of him, he again jumped up, but sat back down by himself. He paused, gazing around wildly, then unexpectedly yawned, then smiled maliciously. ‘Locked me up after all,’ he said, yawned again, unexpectedly lay down, put his head on the pillow, his fist under his head like a child, and muttered now in a sleepy voice, without malice: ‘Very well, then . . . you’ll pay for it yourselves . . .

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  on account of the extreme psychopathic personality changes which they had undergone and which generally resulted in a kind of infantilism divorcing them from reality and entailing an almost total loss of the ability to speak and act, they were immediately sectioned in the casemate of the Cavalier Barracks, which served as a psychiatric ward and where they usually perished within a week under the dreadful conditions prevailing there, so that although there was no shortage of doctors and surgeons in Theresienstadt who cared for their fellow prisoners as well as they could, and in spite of the steam disinfection boiler installed in the malting kiln of the former brewery, the hydrogen cyanide chamber, and other hygienic measures introduced by the Kommandantur in an all-out campaign against infestation with lice, the number of the dead—entirely in line, said Austerlitz, with the intentions of the masters of the ghetto—rose to well above twenty thousand in the ten months between August 1942 and May 1943 alone, as a result of which the joiner’s workshop in the former riding school could no longer make enough deal coffins, there were sometimes more than five hundred dead bodies stacked in layers on top of each other in the central morgue in the casemate by the gateway to the Bohusevice road, and the four naphtha-fired incinerators of the crematorium, kept going day and night in cycles of forty minutes at a time, were stretched to the utmost limits of their capacity, said Austerlitz, and this comprehensive system of internment and forced labor which, in Theresienstadt as elsewhere, was ultimately directed, so he continued, solely at the extinction of life and was built on an organizational plan regulating all functions and responsibilities, as Adler’s reconstruction shows, with a crazed administrative zeal—from the use of whole troops of workers in building the branch railway line from Bohusevice to the fort, to the one man whose job it was to keep the clock mechanism in the closed Catholic church in order—this system had to be constantly supervised and statistically accounted for, particularly with respect to the total number of inmates of the ghetto, an uncommonly time-consuming business going far beyond civilian requirements when you remember that new transports were arriving all the time, and people were regularly weeded out to be sent elsewhere with their files marked R.n.e. for Riickkehr nicht erwiinscht, Return Not Desired, a purpose for which the SS men responsible, who regarded numerical accuracy as one of their highest principles, had a census taken several times, on one occasion, if I remember correctly, said Austerlitz, on 10 November 1943 outside the gates in the open fields of the Bohusevice basin, when the entire population of the ghetto —children, old people, and any of the sick at all able to walk not excepted—was marched out after assembling in the barracks yards at dawn to be drawn up in block formation behind numbered wooden boards, and there, through the whole

• From An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness (1995)

  The morbidity of my mind was astonishing: Death and its kin were constant companions. I saw Death everywhere, and I saw winding sheets and toe tags and body bags in my mind’s eye. Everything was a reminder that everything ended at the charnel house. […] And, always, everything was an effort. Washing my hair took hours to do, and it drained me for hours afterward; filling the ice-cube tray was beyond my capacity, and I occasionally slept in the same clothes I had worn during the day because I was too exhausted to undress.

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  subterranean world, through the most nightmarish depths, said Austerlitz, to which no human voice has ever descended. None of the words of the commentary could be distinguished anymore. At the point where, on the original Berlin copy, a male voice, in high-pitched, strenuous tones forced through the larynx, had spoken of task forces and cohorts of workers deployed, as circumstances required, in various different ways, or if necessary retrained, so that everyone willing to work—jeder Arbeitswillige!, so Austerlitz interrupted himself—had an opportunity of fitting seamlessly into the production process, at this point of the tape all that could now be made out, Austerlitz continued, was a menacing growl such as I had heard only once before in my life, on an unseasonably hot May Day many years ago in the Jardin des Plantes in Paris when, after one of the peculiar turns that often came over me in those days, I rested for a while on a park bench beside an aviary not far from the big cats’ house, where the lions and tigers, invisible from my vantage point and, as it struck me at the time, said Austerlitz, driven out of their minds in captivity, raised their hollow roars of lament hour after hour without ceasing. And then, Austerlitz continued, towards the end of the film there was the comparatively long sequence showing the first performance of a piece of music composed in Theresienstadt, Pavel Haas’s study for string orchestra, if I am not mistaken. The series of frames begins with a view into the hall from the back. The windows are

• From An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness (1995)

  The Charnel House [image file=image_rsrcW1.jpg] I reaped a bitter harvest from my own refusal to take lithium on a consistent basis. A floridly psychotic mania was followed, inevitably, by a long and lacerating, black, suicidal depression; it lasted more than a year and a half. From the time I woke up in the morning until the time I went to bed at night, I was unbearably miserable and seemingly incapable of any kind of joy or enthusiasm. Everything—every thought, word, movement—was an effort. Everything that once was sparkling now was flat. I seemed to myself to be dull, boring, inadequate, thick brained, unlit, unresponsive, chill skinned, bloodless, and sparrow drab. I doubted, completely, my ability to do anything well. It seemed as though my mind had slowed down and burned out to the point of being virtually useless. The wretched, convoluted, and pathetically confused mass of gray worked only well enough to torment me with a dreary litany of my inadequacies and shortcomings in character, and to taunt me with the total, the desperate, hopelessness of it all. What is the point in going on like this? I would ask myself. Others would say to me, “It is only temporary, it will pass, you will get over it,” but of course they had no idea how I felt, although they were certain that they did. Over and over and over I would say to myself, If I can’t feel, if I can’t move, if I can’t think, and I can’t care, then what conceivable point is there in living? The morbidity of my mind was astonishing: Death and its kin were constant companions. I saw Death everywhere, and I saw winding sheets and toe tags and body bags in my mind’s eye. Everything was a reminder that everything ended at the charnel house. My memory always took the black line of the mind’s underground system; thoughts would go from one tormented moment of my past to the next. Each stop along the way was worse than the preceding one. And, always, everything was an effort. Washing my hair took hours to do, and it drained me for hours afterward; filling the ice-cube tray was beyond my capacity, and I occasionally slept in the same clothes I had worn during the day because I was too exhausted to undress.

• From An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness (1995)

  Within psychiatric circles, if you kill yourself, you earn the right to be considered a “successful” suicide. This is a success one can live without. Suicidal depression, I decided in the midst of my indescribably awful, eighteen-month bout of it, is God’s way of keeping manics in their place. It works. Profound melancholia is a day-in, day-out, night-in, night-out, almost arterial level of agony. It is a pitiless, unrelenting pain that affords no window of hope, no alternative to a grim and brackish existence, and no respite from the cold undercurrents of thought and feeling that dominate the horribly restless nights of despair. There is an assumption, in attaching Puritan concepts such as “successful” and “unsuccessful” to the awful, final act of suicide, that those who “fail” at killing themselves not only are weak, but incompetent, incapable even of getting their dying quite right. Suicide, however, is almost always an irrational act and seldom is it accompanied by the kind of rigorous intellect that goes with one’s better days. It is also often impulsive and not necessarily undertaken in the way one originally planned. I, for example, thought I had covered every contingency. I could not stand the pain any longer, could not abide the bone-weary and tiresome person I had become, and felt that I could not continue to be responsible for the turmoil I was inflicting upon my friends and family. In a perverse linking within my mind I thought that, like the pilot whom I had seen kill himself to save the lives of others, I was doing the only fair thing for the people I cared about; it was also the only sensible thing to do for myself. One would put an animal to death for far less suffering. At one point I bought a gun, but, in a transient wave of rational thought, I told my psychiatrist; reluctantly, I got rid of it. Then for many months I went to the eighth floor of the stairwell of the UCLA hospital and, repeatedly, only just resisted throwing myself off the ledge. Suicidal depression does not tend to be a considerate, outward, or other-considering sort of state, but somehow the thought that my family would have to identify the fallen and fractured me made that ultimately not an acceptable method. So I decided upon a solution that seemed to me to be poetic in its full-circledness. Lithium, although it ultimately saved my life, at that particular time was causing me no end of grief and sorrow. So I decided to take a massive overdose.

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  Yet reading and writing, he added, had always been his favorite occupation. How happily, said Austerlitz, have I sat over a book in the deepening twilight until I could no longer make out the words and my mind began to wander, and how secure have I felt seated at the desk in my house in the dark night, just watching the tip of my pencil in the lamplight following its shadow, as if of its own accord and with perfect fidelity, while that shadow moved regularly from left to right, line by line, over the ruled paper. But now I found writing such hard going that it often took me a whole day to compose a single sentence, and no sooner had I thought such a sentence out, with the greatest effort, and written it down, than I saw the awkward falsity of my constructions and the inadequacy of all the words I had employed. If at times some kind of self-deception nonetheless made me feel that I had done a good day’s work, then as soon as I glanced at the page next morning I was sure to find the most appalling mistakes, inconsistencies, and lapses staring at me from the paper. However much or little I had written, on a subsequent reading it always seemed so fundamentally flawed that I had to destroy it immediately and begin again. Soon I could not even venture on the first step. Like a tightrope walker who has forgotten how to put one foot in front of the other, all I felt was the swaying of the precarious structure on which I stood, stricken with terror at the realization that the ends of the balancing pole gleaming far out on the edges of my field of vision were no longer my guiding lights, as before, but malignant enticements to me to cast myself into the depths. Now and then a train of thought did succeed in emerging with wonderful clarity inside my head, but I knew even as it formed that I was in no position to record it, for as soon as I so much as picked up my pencil the

• From From the Streets to the Sheets: Noire's Urban Erotic Quickies (2007)

  By the time I got to the last tape my eyes were swollen from crying and my throat raw from screaming. During the very last scene, Keita was kneeling in front of the camera, waiting for God knew who. A tall cat with piss-yellow skin came into frame, totally naked. Keita proceeded to lick up and down the shaft of his dick, while running her nails across his ass cheeks. His back arched in ecstasy as she sucked him like a peppermint stick. Dude grabbed her by the wig she was wearing and began fucking her mouth like a jackhammer. She began jerking his dick while she licked under his balls and made her way around to his ass. I wanted to throw up again, but I didn’t have anything left in my stomach! As if the knife hadn’t been driven in deep enough, the dude’s face came into frame and what little bit of breath I had left in my body escaped me. It was my man Reggie. So, Keita was the freak-ass stripper that he had been spending so much of his time and money with. I sat there and watched helplessly as my man fucked my girl in every single hole. When he was done, he came all over her face and proceeded to wipe what was left onto her waiting lips. I was a man defeated. For all the running around on Keita I did, it never occurred to me that she might be doing the same. Not my love-goddess. Never in a million years. I thought I knew all the tricks, but apparently she knew one that I didn’t. Keita had put one over on the infamous Chocolate. Seeing my woman fucking all those guys on tape took something out of me. The fire that had only hours prior burned within me was gone. I no longer had the strength or desire to live. I crawled—yes, crawled—to where my gym bag lay and retrieved my gun. The iron felt cool yet comforting in my hands. I placed the barrel in my mouth and prepared to leave this cruel world behind, until I heard the sound of the front door opening. “Baby, are you here?” she called up. “Dante, why are all the lights off? Are you being nasty?” Hearing her voice enraged me. Here I was about to check out over a no-good, low-life bitch. The more she talked, the madder I got. At one point I felt like I had completely taken leave of my senses, and for the kind of shit I was thinking about, I guess I had. Suddenly, a plan began to form in my mind.

• From An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness (1995)

  One day in our discussions we found out that each of us had been rating our own moods—he on a 10-point scale of subjective ratings ranging from “terrible” to “great,” and me on a scale ranging from -3 (paralytic and entirely despairing) to +3 (magnificent mood and vitality), in an attempt to discover some sort of rhyme or reason to their comings and goings. Now and again we would talk about the possibility of taking antidepressant medications, but we were deeply skeptical that they would work and wary of potential side effects. Somehow, like so many people who get depressed, we felt our depressions were more complicated and existentially based than they actually were. Antidepressants might be indicated for psychiatric patients, for those of weaker stock, but not for us. It was a costly attitude; our upbringing and pride held us hostage. Despite my swings in mood—for my depressions continued to be preceded by giddy, intoxicating highs—I felt I had a haven in my undergraduate research assistantship with him. Many times, having turned out the light in my office in order to sleep because I couldn’t face the world, I would wake up to find his coat over my shoulders and a note on top of my computer printout saying “You’ll feel better soon.” My tremendous enjoyment of and education from the work I was doing with him, the continued satisfaction in my other work with the more mathematically inclined professor with whom I had been working since my freshman year, the strong influence of William James, and the instability and restlessness of my temperament all combined to help me make up my mind to study for a Ph.D. in psychology rather than go to medical school. UCLA was then, and still is, one of the best graduate programs in psychology in the United States; I applied for admission and began my doctoral studies in 1971.

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  I save you and go with you! I, Matthew, your faithful and only disciple!’ And if God granted him one more free instant, he would also have time to stab himself and avoid death on a post. This last, however, was of little interest to Levi, the former tax collector. He was indifferent to how he died. He wanted one thing, that Yeshua, who had never in his life done the least evil to anyone, should escape torture. The plan was a very good one, but the fact of the matter was that Levi had no knife with him. Nor did he have a single piece of money. Furious with himself, Levi got out of the crowd and ran back to the city. A single feverish thought was leaping in his burning head: how to procure a knife there in the city, in any way possible, and have time to overtake the procession. He ran up to the city gate, manoeuvring amidst the throng of caravans being sucked into the city, and saw to his left the open door of a little shop where bread was sold. Breathing hard after running down the scorched road, Levi got control of himself, entered the shop very sedately, greeted the woman behind the counter, asked her to take the top loaf from the shelf, which for some reason he liked better than the others, and when she turned around, silently and quickly took from the counter that than which there could be nothing better—a long, razor-sharp bread knife—and at once dashed out of the shop. A few moments later he was again on the Jaffa road. But the procession was no longer in sight. He ran. At times he had to drop down right in the dust and lie motionless to recover his breath. And so he would lie there, to the astonishment of people riding on mules or walking on foot to Yershalaim. He would lie listening to his heart pounding not only in his chest but in his head and ears. Having recovered his breath a little, he would jump up and continue running, but ever slower and slower. When he finally caught sight of the long procession raising dust in the distance, it was already at the foot of the hill. ‘Oh, God! . . .’ Levi moaned, realizing that he was going to be too late. And he was too late. When the fourth hour of the execution had gone by, Levi’s torments reached their highest degree and he fell into a rage. Getting up from the stone, he flung to the ground the stolen knife—stolen in vain, as he now thought—crushed the flask with his foot, depriving himself of water, threw off his kefia, seized his thin hair, and began cursing himself.

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

  About the middle of the twelfth century, heresy suddenly appeared again at Liége, and prosecutions were begun. In 1145 eight men and three women were burnt at Cologne. The firmness of the victims was exemplified in the case of a young woman, who was held back for a time with the promise of marriage, but, on seeing her coreligionists burnt, broke from her keepers and, hiding her face in her dress, threw herself into the flames. And so, Caesar of Heisterbach goes on to say, she descended with her fellow-heretics to hell.975 At Rheims, 1157, and again at Cologne in 1163 we hear of trials and burnings, but thereafter the Cathari are no more heard of in Germany. Their only appearance in England was at Oxford, 1161, when more than thirty illiterate Germans, men and women, strove to propagate their errors. They were reported as "detesting" marriage, the eucharist, baptism, and the Catholic Church, and as having quoted Matt. 5:10, "Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." A council of bishops ordered them branded on the forehead and flogged.976 Henry II. would not allow heretics to be burnt to death, though offences in his reign against the forest laws were punished with blinding and castration.977 In France the Cathari were strong enough in 1167 to hold a council at St. Felix de Caraman near Toulouse. It was attended by Nicetas of Constantinople, to whom the title of pope was given. He was accompanied by a Catharan bishop, Marcus of Lombardy.978 Contemporary reports represent the number of heretics as very large. They were compared by William of Newburgh to the sand of the sea, and were said by Walter Map to be infinite in number in Aquitaine and Burgundy.979 By the end of the twelfth century they were reported to have followers in nearly 1000 cities.980 The Dominican Rainerius gave 4,000,000 as a safe estimate of their number and declared this was according to a census made by the Cathari themselves.981 Joachim of Flore stated that they were sending out their emissaries like locusts.982 Such statements are not to be taken too seriously, but they indicate a widespread religious unrest. Men did not know whereunto heresy might grow. In Southern France the priests were the objects of ridicule. In that region, as well as in many of the cities of Lombardy, the Cathari had schools for girls and boys. Agreed as the Cathari were in opposing many customs and doctrines of the established Church, they were divided among themselves and broken up into sects,—seventy-two, according to one document.983 Chief among them were the Albanenses and Concorrezzi, deriving their names from two Lombard towns, Alba and Concorreggio, near Monza.984 A position intermediate between them was occupied by the Bagnolenses, so called from the Italian town of Bagnolo, near Lodi. This third party had a bishop whose authority was acknowledged by the Cathari in Mantua, Brescia, and Bergamo.985

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

  Calif, or Successor of Mohammed. Later tradition, and even the earliest biography, ascribe to the prophet of Mecca strange miracles, and surround his name with a mythical halo of glory. He was saluted by walking trees and stones; he often made by a simple touch the udders of dry goats distend with milk; be caused floods of water to well up from the parched ground, or gush forth from empty vessels, or issue from betwixt the fingers; he raised the dead; he made a night journey on his steed Borak through the air from Mecca to Jerusalem, from Jerusalem to paradise and the mansions of the prophets and angels, and back again to Mecca.158 But he himself, in several passages of the Koran, expressly disclaims the power of miracles; he appeals to the internal proofs of his doctrine, and shields himself behind the providence of God, who refuses those signs which might diminish the merit of faith and aggravate the guilt of unbelief.159 Character of Mohammed. The Koran, if chronologically arranged, must be regarded as the best commentary on his character. While his followers regard him to this day as the greatest prophet of God, he was long abhorred in Christendom as a wicked impostor, as the antichrist, or the false prophet, predicted in the Bible, and inspired by the father of lies. The calmer judgment of recent historians inclines to the belief that he combined the good and bad qualities of an Oriental chief, and that in the earlier part of his life he was a sincere reformer and enthusiast, but after the establishment of his kingdom a slave of ambition for conquest. He was a better man in the period of his adversity and persecution at Mecca, than during his prosperity and triumph at Medina. History records many examples of characters rising from poverty and obscurity to greatness, and then decaying under the sunshine of wealth and power. He degenerated, like Solomon, but did not repent, like the preacher of "vanity of vanities." He had a melancholic and nervous temperament, liable to fantastic hallucinations and alternations of high excitement and deep depression, bordering at times on despair and suicide. The story of his early and frequent epileptic fits throws some light on his revelations, during which he sometimes growled like a camel, foamed at his mouth, and streamed with perspiration. He believed in evil spirits, omens, charms, and dreams. His mind was neither clear nor sharp, but strong and fervent, and under the influence of an exuberant imagination. He was a poet of high order, and the Koran is the first classic in Arabic literature. He believed himself to be a prophet, irresistibly impelled by supernatural influence to teach and warn his fellow-men.

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  any valuables such as pictures or antiques, and I remember, said Vera, how she once showed me a passage in one of those proclamations issued by the occupying power stating that in the case of any contravention of this regulation, both the Jew concerned in the transaction and the person acquiring the property must expect the most severe of measures to be taken by the State Police. The Jew concerned in the transaction! Agata had cried, adding: Really, the way these people write! It’s enough to make your head swim. I think it was in the late autumn of 1941, said Vera, that Agata had to take her wireless, her gramophone and the records she loved so much, her binoculars and opera glasses, musical instruments, jewelry, furs, and the clothes Maximilian had left behind to the so- called Compulsory Collection Center. Because of some mistake she had made in complying with this order, she was sent to shovel snow on Ruzyné airfield on a freezing day—winter came very early that year, said Vera—and at three o’clock the next morning, in the deepest part of the night, the two envoys of the Israelite religious community whom she had been expecting for some time arrived with the news that Agata must prepare to be taken away within six days. These messengers, as Vera described them to me, said Austerlitz, who were strikingly alike and had faces that seemed somehow indistinct, with flickering outlines, wore jackets furnished with assorted pleats, pockets, button facings, and a belt, garments which looked especially versatile although it was not clear what purpose they served. The pair spoke quietly to Agata for some time, and gave her a sheaf of printed forms and instructions setting out everything down to the very smallest detail: where and when the person summoned must present herself, what items of clothing were to be brought—coat, raincoat, warm headgear, earmuffs, mittens, nightdress, underclothes, and so on—what articles of personal use it was advisable to bring, for instance sewing things, leather grease, a spirit stove, and candles; the weight of the main item of luggage, which was not to exceed fifty kilos; what else could be brought in the way of hand baggage and provisions; how the luggage was to be labeled, with name, destination, and the number allotted to her; the proviso that all the attached forms were to be filled in and signed, that it was not permitted to bring cushions or other articles of furnishing, or to make rucksacks and traveling bags out of Persian rugs, winter coats, or other valuable remnants of fabric; and furthermore that matches, lighters, and smoking were prohibited at the embarkation point and thereafter in general, and all orders issued by the official authorities were to be followed to the letter in every contingency. Agata was unable, as I could see for myself, said Vera, to follow these nauseatingly phrased directives; instead, she simply flung a few wholly impractical items into a bag at random, like someone going away for the weekend, so that finally, difficult as it was for me and guilty as it made me

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

  Theirs is the punishment of eternal death,—supplicium mortis aeternae, —but their damnation is the lightest of all—omnium levissima. They have no hope of beatitude. God, in His justice, provides that they never make any advance nor go back, that they neither have joy nor grief. They remain forever unchanged.1822 Such is the hopeless doom to which the great Dominican and the great Franciscan theologians of the Middle Ages consigned all children dying unbaptized. Strange that the Schoolmen, in the interest of a more

• From Saint Augustine (Penguin Lives) (1999)

  Even while thrashing about with stymied effort, my will still had effect on my body—unlike the situation of those who have the will but not the bodily effect (because, perhaps, a limb they want to move is amputated, tied down, withered by a malady, or otherwise debilitated). No, when I tore my hair, pounded my head, laced fingers around my knee to hug it to me, I was accomplishing what the will told the body to do. The willing would not have been followed by this effect if my limbs were pinned down, since here the effecting was a different thing from the willing. Yet I could not do what I far more ardently wanted to do, and which I should have been able to do at will, since what I wanted was, precisely, to will. Here the motion to be dictated was in the will itself, and simply to will were to do. Yet I could not. My body’s limbs were moved by the soul’s lightest volition, yet the soul did not respond to its own ardent willing, though this was its own will. (T 8.20) In his agony, Augustine imagines a personified Self-Control (Continentia) islanded off from him in a place he fears to enter. She “reaches out hands of affection toward me, to receive and embrace me”—Virgil’s image is vaguely present, of souls that yearn for a far shore, “stretching hands toward it” (Aeneid 6.314). The appearance of self-control is something that occurs “in my own heart, pitting myself against myself” (T 8.27). Augustine then turns himself away from Alypius, to go deeper into his interior desert. He sits beneath a fig tree. Why stop to notice the particular species? Augustine is not at leisure, now of all times, for botanizing (Recherches 192). Pierre Courcelle (193) rightly argued that the tree is symbolic. He thinks the reference is primarily to Nathaniel under the fig tree at John 1.48. But after noticing all the other uses of Genesis in The Testimony, it is clear that we should think first of Adam’s and Eve’s inner division, which made them aware of their nakedness: “Puzzled at the insubordination of their bodies, a symbol of their own insubordination, [Adam and Eve] made aprons from the leaves of the fig tree” (CG 14.17). Before his fall, Adam wore the clothing (indutamentum) of grace. Afterward, his body was estranged from his will. Augustine, in the public baths with his father, had been clothed in the shame of Adam—but here, under the fig tree, he is about to put on the clothing of Christ.

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  perhaps they hoped to reverse the petrifaction of their emotions, which must have been becoming more unbearable to them every day, by devoting themselves together to bringing up a boy then aged four and a half, or perhaps they thought they owed it to a higher authority to perform some good work beyond the level of ordinary charity, a work entailing personal devotion and sacrifice. Or perhaps they thought they ought to save my soul, innocent as it was of the Christian faith. I myself cannot say what my first few days in Bala with the Eliases really felt like. I do remember new clothes which made me very unhappy, and the inexplicable disappearance of my little green rucksack, and recently I have even thought that I could still apprehend the dying away of my native tongue, the faltering and fading sounds which I think lingered on in me at least for a while, like something shut up and scratching or knocking, something which, out of fear, stops its noise and falls silent whenever one tries to listen to it. And certainly the words I had forgotten in a short space of time, and all that went with them, would have remained buried in the depths of my mind had I not, through a series of coincidences, entered the old waiting room in Liverpool Street Station that Sunday morning, a few weeks at the most before it vanished for ever in the rebuilding. I have no idea how long I stood in the waiting room, said Austerlitz, nor how I got out again and which way I walked back, through Bethnal Green or Stepney, reaching home at last as dark began to fall. Exhausted as I was, I lay down in my drenched clothes and fell into a deep, uneasy sleep from which, as I discovered afterwards by making the calculation several times, I did not wake until the middle of the night after the next day. In that sleep, when my body feigned death while feverish thoughts whirled through my head, I was at the innermost heart of a star-shaped fortress, a dungeon entirely cut off from the outside world, and I had to try finding my way into the open, passing down long, low passages which led me through all the buildings I had ever visited and described. It was a nightmarish, neverending dream, with its main plot interrupted several times by other episodes. One of them gave me a bird’s-eye view of a lightless landscape through which a very small railway train was hurrying, twelve earth-colored miniature carriages and a coal-black locomotive under a plume of smoke wafting horizontally backwards, with the far end of the plume constantly blown this way and that, like the tip of a large ostrich feather, by the speed of the journey. In another episode, looking out of the window of my train compartment, I saw dark forests of firs, a deeply carved river valley, mountain ranges of cloud on the horizon, and windmills towering above the roofs of the houses clustered around them, with their broad sails cutting rhythmically through the faint light of dawn. In the middle of these dreams, said Austerlitz, somewhere behind his eyes, he had felt these overwhelmingly