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 Well of Loneliness (1928)

  She could not weep, for a great desolation too deep for tears lay over her spirit—the great desolation of things that pass, of things that pass away in our lifetime. And then of what good, after all, are our tears, since they cannot hold back this passing away—no, not for so much as a moment? She looked round her now at the empty stables, the unwanted, uncared for stables of Morton. So proud they had been that were now so humbled, even unto cobwebs and dust were they humbled; and they had the feeling of all disused places that have once teemed with life, they felt pitifully lonely. She closed her eyes so as not to see them. Then the thought came to Stephen that this was the end, the end of her courage and patient endurance—that this was somehow the end of Morton. She must not see the place any more; she must, she would, go a long way away. Raftery had gone a long way away—she had sent him beyond all hope of recall—but she could not follow him over that merciful frontier, for her God was more stern than Raftery’s; and yet she must fly from her love for Morton. Turning, she hurriedly left the stables. 5Anna was standing at the foot of the stairs. ‘Are you leaving now, Stephen?’ ‘Yes—I’m going, Mother.’ ‘A short visit!’ ‘Yes, I must get back to work.’ ‘I see. . . .’ Then after a long, awkward pause: ‘Where would you like him buried?’ ‘In the large north paddock where he died—I’ve told Jim.’ ‘Very well, I’ll see that they carry out your orders.’ She hesitated, as though suddenly shy of Stephen again, as she had been in the past; but after a moment she went on quickly: ‘I thought—I wondered, would you like a small stone with his name and some sort of inscription on it, just to mark the place?’ ‘If you’d care to put one—I shan’t need any stone to remember.’ The carriage was waiting to drive her to Malvern. ‘Good-bye, Mother.’ ‘Good-bye—I shall put up that stone.’ ‘Thanks, it’s a very kind thought of yours.’ Anna said: ‘I’m so sorry about this, Stephen.’ But Stephen had hurried into the brougham—the door closed, and she did not hear her mother. CHAPTER 301A

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  Yet Stephen was his friend—he had sought her out, had all but forced his friendship upon her; had forced his way into her life, her home, her confidence; she had trusted his honour. And now he must either utterly betray her or through loyalty to their friendship, betray Mary. And he felt that he knew, and knew only too well, what life would do to Mary Llewellyn, what it had done to her already; for had he not seen the bitterness in her, the resentment that could only lead to despair, the defiance that could only lead to disaster? She was setting her weakness against the whole world, and slowly but surely the world would close in until in the end it had utterly crushed her. In her very normality lay her danger. Mary, all woman, was less of a match for life than if she had been as was Stephen. Oh, most pitiful bond so strong yet so helpless; so fruitful of passion yet so bitterly sterile; despairing, heart-breaking, yet courageous bond that was even now holding them ruthlessly together. But if he should break it by taking the girl away into peace and security, by winning for her the world’s approbation so that never again need her back feel the scourge and her heart grow faint from the pain of that scourging—if he, Martin Hallam, should do this thing, what would happen, in that day of his victory, to Stephen? Would she still have the courage to continue the fight? Or would she, in her turn, be forced to surrender? God help him, he could not betray her like this, he could not bring about Stephen’s destruction—and yet if he spared her, he might destroy Mary. Night after night alone in his bedroom during the miserable weeks of that summer, Martin struggled to discover some ray of hope in what seemed a well-nigh hopeless situation. And night after night Stephen’s masterful arms would enfold the warm softness of Mary’s body, the while she would be shaken as though with great cold. Lying there she would shiver with terror and love, and this torment of hers would envelop Mary so that sometimes she wept for the pain of it all, yet neither would give a name to that torment. ‘Stephen, why are you shivering?’ ‘I don’t know, my darling.’ ‘Mary, why are you crying?’ ‘I don’t know, Stephen.’ Thus the bitter nights slipped into the days, and the anxious days slipped back into the nights, bringing to that curious trinity neither helpful counsel nor consolation. 2 It was after they had all returned to Paris that Martin found Stephen alone one morning. He said: ‘I want to speak to you—I must.’ She put down her pen and looked into his eyes: ‘Well, Martin, what is it?’ But she knew already. He answered her very simply: ‘It’s Mary.’

• From Trash (1988)

  So I made a list. I told her: that one went insane—got her little brother with a tire iron; the three of them slit their arms, not the wrists but the bigger veins up near the elbow; she, now she strangled the boy she was sleeping with and got sent away; that one drank lye and died laughing soundlessly. In one year I lost eight cousins. It was the year everybody ran away. Four disappeared and were never found. One fell in the river and was drowned. One was run down hitchhiking north. One was shot running through the woods, while Grace, the last one, tried to walk from Greenville to Greer for some reason nobody knew. She fell off the overpass a mile down from the Sears, Roebuck warehouse and lay there for hunger and heat and dying. Later sleeping, but not sleeping, I found that my hands were up under Jesse’s chin. I rolled away, but I didn’t cry. I almost never let myself cry. Almost always, we were raped, my cousins and I. That was some kind of joke, too. “What’s a South Carolina virgin?” “ ’At’s a ten-year-old can run fast.” It wasn’t funny for me in my mama’s bed with my stepfather; not for my Cousin Billie in the attic with my uncle; nor for Lucille in the woods with another cousin; for Danny with four strangers in a parking lot; or for Pammy, who made the papers. Cora read it out loud: “Repeatedly by persons unknown.” They stayed unknown since Pammy never spoke again. Perforations, lacerations, contusions, and bruises. I heard all the words, big words, little words, words too terrible to understand. DEAD BY AN ACT OF MAN. With the prick still in them, the broom handle, the tree branch, the grease gun . . . objects, things not to be believed . . . whiskey bottles, can openers, grass shears, glass, metal, vegetables . . . not to be believed, not to be believed. Jesse says, “You’ve got a gift for words.” “Don’t talk,” I beg her, “don’t talk.” And this once, she just holds me, blessedly silent. I dig out the pictures, stare into the faces. Which one was I? Survivors do hate themselves, I know, over the core of fierce self-love, never understanding, always asking, “Why me and not her, not him?” There is such mystery in it, and I have hated myself as much as I have loved others, hated the simple fact of my own survival. Having survived, am I supposed to say something, do something, be something?

• From The Decameron (1353)

  In the course of his harrowing description of the plague and its disastrous effects on the traditions and institutions of Florentine society,54 Boccaccio repeatedly directs attention to the chaos and disorder brought by the Black Death to the city he nostalgically recalls as the most noble of any in Italy (‘oltre ad ogni altra italica nobilissima’), and he deplores the breakdown of those moral and legal restraints which had contributed to the city’s cultural and social pre-eminence. He stresses that in the face of the misery and affliction occasioned by the plague all respect for the laws of God and of man had broken down and been extinguished, and that consequently everyone was free to behave as he pleased. The departure from generally accepted rules and standards of behaviour is graphically illustrated in two passages referring to women. In the first, Boccaccio writes that whenever a woman was taken ill, she raised no objection, no matter how gracious or beautiful or gently bred she might be, to being attended by a male servant, and that she had no scruples about showing him every part of her body as freely as she would have displayed it to a woman. This practice, he goes on to suggest in a slightly flippant aside, was responsible for a subsequent decline in the sexual morals of those women who were fortunate enough to recover. But if chastity waned, so too did the compassion ordinarily associated with the feminine ideal. In a passage describing Florentine burial customs, and the role that had traditionally been played in them by the womenfolk of the dead, it is pointed out that these customs had been abandoned, and that not only did people die without having many women about them, but they also died with few people if any to mourn them, or even to witness their passing. Indeed, with the overturning of normal values that accompanied the plague, bereavement became the signal for black humour – laughter, witticisms, and general jollification – the practice of which, as the author ruefully adds, women had learned to perfection.

• From Trash (1988)

  “No, she an’t.” I tried to catch Arlene’s hand, but she hugged her elbows in tight and just looked at me. “Arlene, she’s not going to get any better. She’s going to get worse. If the tumor on her lung doesn’t kill her, then the ones in her head will.” Arlene’s pale face darkened. When she spoke her words all ran together. “They don’t know what that stuff was. That could have been dust in the machine. I read about this case where that was what happened—dust and fingerprints on X-rays.” She tore at a pack of Salems, ripping one cigarette in half before she could get another out intact. “God, Arlene.” “Don’t start.” “Look, we have to make some decisions.” I was thinking if I could speak quietly enough, Arlene would hear what I was saying. “We have to take care of Mama, not talk about stuff that’s going to get in the way of that.” Arlene’s voice was as loud as mine had been soft. “Mama needs our support, not you going on about death and doom.” Sympathetic magic, Jaybird called it. Arlene believed in the power of positive thinking the way some people believed in saints’ medals or a Santeria’s sacrificed chicken. Stopping us talking about dying was the thing she believed she was supposed to do. I dropped into one of the plastic chairs. Arlene’s head kept jerking restlessly, but she managed not to look into my face. This is how she always behaved. “Mama’s gonna beat this thing,” she’d announced when I had first come home, as if saying it firmly enough would make it so. She was the reason Mama had gone to MacArthur in the first place. Jo and I had wanted the hospice that Mama’s oncologist had recommended. But Arlene had refused to discuss the hospice or to look at the results of the brain scan. Those little starbursts scattered over Mama’s cranium were not something Arlene could acknowledge. “We could keep Mama at home,” she’d told the hospital chaplain. “We could all move back home and take care of her till she’s better.” “Lord God!” I had imagined Jo’s response to that. “Move back home? Has she gone completely damn crazy?” The chaplain told Arlene that some people did indeed take care of family at home, and if that was what she wanted, he would help her. I had watched Arlene’s face as he spoke, the struggle that moved across her flattened features. “It might not work,” she had said. She had looked at me once, then dropped her head. “She might need more care than we could give, all of us working you know.” She had dropped her face into her hands. I signed off on the bills where the insurance didn’t apply. For the rental on a wheelchair and a television, I used a credit card. Jo laughed at me when she saw them.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  4As long as she lived Stephen never forgot her first impressions of the bar known as Alec’s—that meeting-place of the most miserable of all those who comprised the miserable army. That merciless, drug-dealing, death-dealing haunt to which flocked the battered remnants of men whom their fellow men had at last stamped under; who, despised of the world, must despise themselves beyond all hope, it seemed, of salvation. There they sat, closely herded together at the tables, creatures shabby yet tawdry, timid yet defiant—and their eyes, Stephen never forgot their eyes, those haunted, tormented eyes of the invert. Of all ages, all degrees of despondency, all grades of mental and physical ill-being, they must yet laugh shrilly from time to time, must yet tap their feet to the rhythm of music, must yet dance together in response to the band—and that dance seemed the Dance of Death to Stephen. On more than one hand was a large, ornate ring, on more than one wrist a conspicuous bracelet; they wore jewelry that might only be worn by these men when they were thus gathered together. At Alec’s they could dare to give way to such tastes—what was left of themselves they became at Alec’s. Bereft of all social dignity, of all social charts contrived for man’s guidance, of the fellowship that by right divine should belong to each breathing, living creature; abhorred, spat upon, from their earliest days the prey to a ceaseless persecution, they were now even lower than their enemies knew, and more hopeless than the veriest dregs of creation. For since all that to many of them had seemed fine, a fine, selfless and at times even noble emotion, had been covered with shame, called unholy and vile, so gradually they themselves had sunk down to the level upon which the world placed their emotions. And looking with abhorrence upon these men, drink-sodden, doped as were only too many, Stephen yet felt that some terrifying thing stalked abroad in that unhappy room at Alec’s; terrifying because if there were a God His anger must rise at such vast injustice. More pitiful even than her lot was theirs, and because of them mighty should be the world’s reckoning. Alec the tempter, the vendor of dreams, the dispenser of illusions whiter than snow; Alec, who sold little packets of cocaine for large bundles of notes, was now opening wine, with a smile and a flourish, at the next-door table. He set down the bottle: ‘Et voilà, mes filles!’ Stephen looked at the men; they seemed quite complacent. Against the wall sat a bald, flabby man whose fingers crept over an amber chaplet. His lips moved; God alone knew to whom he prayed, and God alone knew what prayers he was praying—horrible he was, sitting there all alone with that infamous chaplet between his fingers.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  Try as he might he could not deceive her, for this man was almost painfully honest, and any deception became him so ill that it seemed to stand out like a badly fitting garment. Yet now there were times when he avoided her eyes, when he grew very silent and awkward with Stephen, as though something inevitable and unhappy had obtruded itself upon their friendship; something, moreover, that he feared to tell her. Then one day in a blinding flash of insight she suddenly knew what this was—it was Mary. Like a blow that is struck full between the eyes, the thing stunned her, so that at first she groped blindly. Martin, her friend . . . But what did it mean? And Mary . . . The incredible misery of it if it were true. But was it true that Martin Hallam had grown to love Mary? And the other thought, more incredible still—had Mary in her turn grown to love Martin? The mist gradually cleared; Stephen grew cold as steel, her perceptions becoming as sharp as daggers—daggers that thrust themselves into her soul, draining the blood from her innermost being. And she watched. To herself she seemed all eyes and ears, a monstrous thing, a complete degradation, yet endowed with an almost unbearable skill, with a subtlety passing her own understanding. And Martin was no match for this thing that was Stephen. He, the lover, could not hide his betraying eyes from her eyes that were also those of a lover; could not stifle the tone that crept into his voice at times when he was talking to Mary. Since all that he felt was a part of herself, how could he hope to hide it from Stephen? And he knew that she had discovered the truth, while she in her turn perceived that he knew this, yet neither of them spoke—in a deathly silence she watched, and in silence he endured her watching.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  And this dream of hers was immensely compelling, so that all that she did seemed clearly pre-destined; she could not have acted otherwise, nor could she have made a false step, although dreaming. Like those who in sleep tread the edge of a chasm unappalled, having lost all sense of danger, so now Stephen walked on the brink of her fate, having only one fear; a nightmare fear of what she must do to give Mary her freedom. In obedience to the mighty but unseen will that had taken control of this vivid dreaming, she ceased to respond to the girl’s tenderness, nor would she consent that they two should be lovers. Ruthless as the world itself she became, and almost as cruel in this ceaseless wounding. For in spite of Mary’s obvious misgivings, she went more and more often to see Valérie Seymour, so that gradually, as the days slipped by, Mary’s mind became a prey to suspicion. Yet Stephen struck at her again and again, desperately wounding herself in the process, though scarcely feeling the pain of her wounds for the misery of what she was doing to Mary. But even as she struck the bonds seemed to tighten, with each fresh blow to bind more securely. Mary now clung with every fibre of her sorely distressed and outraged being; with every memory that Stephen had stirred; with every passion that Stephen had fostered; with every instinct of loyalty that Stephen had aroused to do battle with Martin. The hand that had loaded Mary with chains was powerless, it seemed, to strike them from her. Came the day when Mary refused to see Martin, when she turned upon Stephen, pale and accusing: ‘Can’t you understand? Are you utterly blind—have you only got eyes now for Valérie Seymour?’ And as though she were suddenly smitten dumb, Stephen’s lips remained closed and she answered nothing. Then Mary wept and cried out against her: ‘I won’t let you go—I won’t let you, I tell you! It’s your fault if I love you the way I do. I can’t do without you, you’ve taught me to need you, and now . . .’ In half-shamed, half-defiant words she must stand there and plead for what Stephen withheld, and Stephen must listen to such pleading from Mary. Then before the girl realized it she had said: ‘But for you, I could have loved Martin Hallam!’ Stephen heard her own voice a long way away: ‘But for me, you could have loved Martin Hallam.’ Mary flung despairing arms round her neck: ‘No, no! Not that, I don’t know what I’m saying.’ 3 The first faint breath of spring was in the air, bringing daffodils to the flower-stalls of Paris. Once again Mary’s young cherry tree in the garden was pushing out leaves and tiny pink buds along the whole length of its childish branches. Then Martin wrote: ‘Stephen, where can I see you? It must be alone.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  All of them were only too eager to eat one of the sweets, and so Bruno, having lined them up with Calandrino in the middle, started from one end and began to hand one out to each of them in turn. When he came to Calandrino, he picked up one of the sweets of the canine variety and placed it in the palm of his hand. Calandrino promptly tossed it into his mouth and began to chew on it, but no sooner did his tongue come into contact with the aloe than, finding the bitter taste quite intolerable, he spat it out again. They were all keeping a close watch on one another to see who was going to spit out his sweet, and Bruno, who still had several more to distribute, carried on as though nothing had happened until he heard a voice behind him saying: ‘Hey, Calandrino, what’s the meaning of this?’ Turning quickly round, and seeing that Calandrino had spat his out, he said: ‘Wait a minute! Perhaps he spat it out for some other reason. Here, take another!’ And picking up the second one, he thrust it into Calandrino’s mouth before proceeding to hand out the ones he had left. Bitter as Calandrino had found the first, the second seemed a great deal more so, but being ashamed to spit it out, he kept it in his mouth for a while. As he chewed away at it, tears as big as hazelnuts began to roll down his cheeks until eventually, being unable to bear it any longer, he spat it out like the first. Buffalmacco was meanwhile handing out drinks all round, with the assistance of Bruno. And when, along with all the others, they observed what had happened, everyone declared that Calandrino had obviously stolen the pig himself, and there were one or two who gave him a severe scolding about it. However, when the crowd had dispersed, leaving Bruno and Buffalmacco alone with Calandrino, Buffalmacco turned to him and said: ‘I was convinced all along that you were the one who had taken it. You were just pretending to us that it had been stolen so that you wouldn’t have to buy us a few drinks out of the proceeds.’ Calandrino, who still had the bitter taste of the aloe in his mouth, swore to them that he had not taken the pig, but Buffalmacco said: ‘Own up, man, how much did it fetch? Six florins?’ Calandrino was by now on the brink of despair, but Bruno said:

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  So careful she was when they were together, so guarded lest she should betray her feelings, so pitifully insistent that all was yet well—that life had in no way lessened her courage. But Martin was not deceived by these protests, knowing how she clung to what he could offer, how gladly she turned to the simple things that so easily come to those who are normal. Under all her parade of gallantry he divined a great weariness of spirit, a great longing to be at peace with the world, to be able to face her fellow men with the comforting knowledge that she need not fear them, that their friendship would be hers for the asking, that their laws and their codes would be her protection. All this Martin perceived; but Stephen’s perceptions were even more accurate and far-reaching, for to her there had come the despairing knowledge that the woman she loved was deeply unhappy. At first she had blinded herself to this truth, sustained by the passionate stress of the battle, by her power to hold in despite of the man, by the eager response that she had awakened. Yet the day came when she was no longer blind, when nothing counted in all the world except this grievous unhappiness that was being silently borne by Mary. Martin, if he had wished for revenge, might have taken his fill of it now from Stephen. Little did he know how, one by one, Mary was weakening her defences; gradually undermining her will, her fierce determination to hold, the arrogance of the male that was in her. All this the man was never to know; it was Stephen’s secret, and she knew how to keep it. But one night she suddenly pushed Mary away, blindly, scarcely knowing what she was doing; conscious only that the weapon she thus laid aside had become a thing altogether unworthy, an outrage upon her love for this girl. And that night there followed the terrible thought that her love itself was a kind of outrage.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  ‘But I don’t understand . . .’ ‘You must trust me, Martin.’ And now she heard herself speaking very gravely: ‘Would you trust me enough to do anything I asked, even although it seemed rather strange? Would you trust me if I said that I asked it for Mary, for her happiness?’ His fingers tightened: ‘Before God, yes. You know that I’d trust you!’ ‘Very well then, don’t leave Paris—not now.’ ‘You really want me to stay on, Stephen?’ ‘Yes, I can’t explain.’ He hesitated, then he suddenly seemed to come to a decision: ‘All right . . . I’ll do whatever you ask me.’ They paid for their coffee and got up to leave: ‘Let me come as far as the house,’ he pleaded. But she shook her head: ‘No, no, not now. I’ll write to you . . . very soon . . . Good-bye, Martin.’ She watched him hurrying down the street, and when he was finally lost in its shadows, she turned slowly and made her own way up the hill, past the garish lights of the Moulin de la Galette. Its pitiful sails revolved in the wind, eternally grinding out petty sins—dry chaff blown in from the gutters of Paris. And after a while, having breasted the hill, she must climb a dusty flight of stone steps, and push open a heavy, slow-moving door; the door of the mighty temple of faith that keeps its anxious but tireless vigil. She had no idea why she was doing this thing, or what she would say to the silver Christ with one hand on His heart and the other held out in a patient gesture of supplication. The sound of praying, monotonous, low, insistent, rose up from those who prayed with extended arms, with crucified arms—like the tides of an ocean it swelled and receded and swelled again, bathing the shores of heaven. They were calling upon the Mother of God: ‘Sainte Marie, Mère de Dieu, priez pour nous, pauvres pêcheurs, maintenant et à l’heure de notre mort.’ ‘Et à l’heure de notre mort,’ Stephen heard herself repeating. He looked terribly weary, the silver Christ: ‘But then He always looks tired,’ she thought vaguely; and she stood there without finding anything to say, embarrassed as one so frequently is in the presence of somebody else’s sorrow. For herself she felt nothing, neither pity nor regret; she was curiously empty of all sensation, and after a little she left the church, to walk on through the wind-swept streets of Montmartre. CHAPTER 561V

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  A voice like the awful, deep rolling of thunder; a demand like the gathering together of great waters. A terrifying voice that made her ears throb, that made her brain throb, that shook her very entrails until she must stagger and all but fall beneath this appalling burden of sound that strangled her in its will to be uttered. ‘God,’ she gasped, ‘we believe; we have told You we believe . . . We have not denied You, then rise up and defend us. Acknowledge us, oh God, before the whole world. Give us also the right to our existence!’ THE END

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  she had divined in the love that existed between her parents. Never before had she seen so clearly all that was lacking to Mary Llewellyn, all that would pass from her faltering grasp, perhaps never to return, with the passing of Martin — children, a home that the world would respect, ties of affection that the world would hold sacred, the blesséd security and the peace of being re- leased from the world’s persecution. And suddenly Martin ap- peared to Stephen as a creature endowed with incalculable bounty, having in his hands all those priceless gifts which she, love’s mendicant, could never offer. Only one gift could she offer to love, to Mary, and that was the gift of Martin. In a kind of dream she perceived these things. In a dream she now moved and had her being; scarcely conscious of whither this dream would lead, the while her every perception was quickened. And this dream of hers was immensely compelling, so that all that she did seemed clearly predestined; she could not have acted otherwise, nor could she have made a false step, although dream- ing. Like those who in sleep tread the edge of a chasm unappalled, having lost all sense of danger, so now Stephen walked on the brink of her fate, having only one fear; a nightmare fear of what she must do to give Mary her freedom. In obedience to the mighty but unseen will that had taken control of this vivid dreaming, she ceased to respond to the girl’s tenderness, nor would she consent that they two should be lovers. Ruthless as the world itself she became, and almost as cruel in this ceaseless wounding. For in spite of Mary’s obvious misgivings, she went more and more often to see Valérie Seymour, so that gradu- ally, as the days slipped by, Mary’s mind became a prey to sus- picion. Yet Stephen struck at her again and again, desperately wounding herself in the process, though scarcely feeling the pain of her wounds for the misery of what she was doing to Mary. But even as she struck the bonds seemed to tighten, with each fresh blow to bind more securely. Mary now clung with every fibre of her sorely distressed and outraged being; with every memory that Stephen had stirred; with every passion that Stephen had fostered; with every instinct of loyalty that Stephen had aroused to do battle THE WELL OF LONELINESS 499 with Martin. The hand that had loaded Mary with chains was powerless, it seemed, to strike them from her. Came the day when Mary refused to see Martin, when she turned upon Stephen, pale and accusing: ‘ Can’t you understand? Are you utterly blind — have you only got eyes now for Valérie Seymour? ’ And as though she were suddenly smitten dumb, Stephen’s lips remained closed and she answered nothing.

• From Trash (1988)

  I began to court it. Cowardly, traditionally—that is, in the tradition of all those others like me, through drugs and drinking and stubbornly putting myself in the way of other people’s violence. Even now, I cannot believe how it was that everything I survived became one more reason to want to die. But one morning, I limped into my mama’s kitchen and sat alone at her dining table. I was limping because I had pulled a muscle in my thigh and cracked two ribs in a fight with a woman I thought I loved. I remember that morning in all its details, the scratches on my wrists from my lover’s fingernails, the look on Mama’s face as she got ready to go to work—how she tried not to fuss over me, and the way I could not meet her eyes. It was in my mama’s face that I saw myself, in my mama’s silence, for she behaved as if I were only remotely the daughter she had loved and prayed for. She treated me as if I were in a way already dead, or about to die—as unreachable, as dangerous as one of my uncles on a three-day toot. That was so humiliating it broke my pride. My mouth opened to cry out, but I shut it stubbornly. It was in that moment I made my decision—not actually the decision to live, but the decision not to die on her. I shut my mouth on my grief and my rage, and began to pretend as if I would live, as if there were reason enough to fight my way out of the trap I had made for myself—though I had not yet figured out what that reason was. I limped around tight-lipped through the months it took me to find a job in another city and disappear. I took a bus to the city and spoke to no one, signed the papers that made me a low-level government clerk, and wound up sitting in a motel room eating peanut butter sandwiches so I could use the per diem to buy respectable skirts and blouses—the kind of clothes I had not worn since high school. Every evening I would walk the ten blocks from the training classes to the motel, where I could draw the heavy drapes around me, open the windows, and sit wrapped around by the tent of those drapes. There I would huddle and smoke my hoarded grass. Part of me knew what I was doing, knew the decision I was making. A much greater part of me could not yet face it. I was trying to make solid my decision to live, but I did not know if I could. I had to change my life, take baby steps into a future I did not trust, and I began by looking first to the ground on which I stood, how I had become the woman I was.

• From Under the Banner of Heaven (2003)

  By and by, a message from God inched across the screen: Ron’s inaugural revelation. He received a second revelation on February 25, and a third on the 27th. Upon witnessing his brother receiving revelations from God, Dan was spellbound, and excited. “I never received any revelations when we were in the School of the Prophets,” he explains. “Everyone else in the school did, and I’ve received revelations since then, so now I understand the phenomenon, but I didn’t at that time. So I was fascinated. I’d ask, ‘What is it like?!’ Ron said it was hard to describe, but I remember once he said, ‘It’s like a blanket falls over you, and you can feel the Lord’s thoughts, and you write them down.’ One revelation came to him a single word at a time, and he didn’t even know if it was coherent until he was done receiving it, and then went back and read it. But they didn’t always come that way. Sometimes he’d receive whole phrases at a time.” The revelation Ron received on February 27 was in fact a message from the Lord to Ron’s wife, with Ron simply serving as the conduit. In this commandment God reiterated that the earth would soon be destroyed, and He warned Dianna: Thou are a chosen daughter but My wrath is kindled against thee because of thy rebelliousness against thy husband, and I command thee to repent. Have I not said that it is not good for a man to be alone? I will not suffer My servant Ron to be alone much longer for even now I am preparing someone to take thy place. Nevertheless if thou wilst speedily repent I will greatly bless thee and thy children, otherwise I will remove thee from thy place for I will not suffer that thy children should suffer longer because of thy disobedience. I have heard the prayers of My son Ron and I know his desires, and it is only because of his desires that I have spared thee till now. Harken unto My word for the time is short. I am Alpha and Omega even the beginning and the end and surely I will fulfill all My promises unto My servant Ron. Even so Amen. According to psychiatrist C. Jess Groesbeck, who examined Ron after the murders, as Ron began to understand that Dianna really was going to take their children and leave forever, it slowly “becomes clear that this man is losing the most important thing he’s ever lost in his life. . . . I can’t stress enough how deep this loss was. . . . He feels low, worthless. And his anger and aggression are almost unbounded. . . . He compensates by creating a new but unreal view of himself and the world. He develops an inflated God-like self-image in an effort to avoid the pain and deny the truth of what he really is.” Buttressing Dr.

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

  hold cups both delicately and firmly with the tips of their fingers, others, to fan fresh air upon the head. Our table must bend under the load of dishes, while all the kingdoms of nature, air, water and earth, furnish copious contributions, and there must be almost no room for the artificial products of cook and baker .... The poor man is content with water; but we fill our goblets with wine to drunkenness, nay, immeasurably beyond it. We refuse one wine, another we pronounce excellent when well flavored, over a third we institute philosophical discussions; nay, we count it a pity, if he does not, as a king, add to the domestic wine a foreign also."226 Still more unfavorable are the pictures which, a half century later, the Gallic presbyter, Salvianus, draws of the general moral condition of the Christians in the Roman empire.227 It is true, these earnest protests against degeneracy themselves, as well as the honor in which monasticism and ascetic contempt of the world were universally held, attest the existence of a better spirit. But the uncontrollable progress of avarice, prodigality, voluptuousness, theatre going, intemperance, lewdness, in short, of all the heathen vices, which Christianity had come to eradicate, still carried the Roman empire and people with rapid strides toward dissolution, and gave it at last into the hands of the rude, but simple and morally vigorous barbarians. When the Christians were awakened by the crashings of the falling empire, and anxiously asked why God permitted it, Salvian, the Jeremiah of his time, answered: "Think of your vileness and your crimes, and see whether you are worthy of the divine protection."228 Nothing but the divine judgment of destruction upon this nominally Christian, but essentially heathen world, could open the way for the moral regeneration of society. There must be new, fresh nations, if the Christian civilization prepared in the old Roman empire was to take firm root and bear ripe fruit. § 24. Byzantine Court Christianity. The unnatural confusion of Christianity with the world culminated in the imperial court of Constantinople, which, it is true, never violated moral decency so grossly as the court of a Nero or a Domitian, but in vain pomp and prodigality far outdid the courts of the better heathen emperors, and degenerated into complete oriental despotism. The household of Constantius, according to the description of Libanius,229 embraced no less than a thousand barbers, a thousand cup bearers, a thousand cooks, and so many eunuchs, that they could be compared only to the insects of a summer day. This boundless luxury was for a time suppressed by the pagan Julian, who delighted in stoical and cynical severity, and was fond of displaying it; but under his Christian successors the same prodigality returned; especially under Theodosius and his sons.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  She accordingly felt as though the world beneath her feet had suddenly been taken away, and fell in a dead faint on the platform of the tower, where she lay for some time before recovering her senses. On coming round, she began to weep and wail in a most heartrending fashion, and realizing all too well that this was the scholar’s handiwork, she repented the wrong she had done, as well as the excessive trust she had placed in someone she had every reason to look upon as her enemy. And whilst she was thus reproaching herself, a considerable time elapsed. Eventually she looked all around her in search of some way to descend, but being unable to find any, she burst once more into tears and thought, bitterly, to herself: ‘Oh, hapless woman, what will your brothers, your kinsfolk, your neighbours, and Florentine people in general have to say, when it is known that you were found in this spot, completely naked? Your fair repute will be seen as merely an empty façade; and if you try to brazen it out by giving some spurious explanation or other, you will be exposed by this accursed scholar, who knows all about your private affairs. Ah, poor wretch, that at one and the same moment you should have lost not only the young man you were foolish enough to love, but your good name into the bargain!’ And her anguish grew to such a pitch that she was almost on the point of hurling herself from the tower to the ground. The sun having now arisen, however, she moved a little closer to the wall on one side of the tower, thinking she might see some youngster driving his sheep in her direction, whom she could send to fetch her maidservant. But as she peeped over the rim, she caught sight of the scholar, who had just woken up after sleeping for a while under a bush. ‘Good morning, madam,’ he said. ‘Have the young ladies arrived yet?’ On hearing these words, the lady burst into tears yet again, and begged him to come inside the tower so that she could speak to him. The scholar very politely granted her request, and the lady, lying face downwards on the floor of the roof in such a way that only her head appeared in the aperture, addressed him, weeping plaintively and saying:

• From Under the Banner of Heaven (2003)

  The contenders fell into two camps: those bitterly opposed to polygamy, who saw Joseph’s death as an opportunity to eradicate the practice before it gained traction, and those who had already taken plural wives and regarded polygamy as a divinely ordained principle that must be sustained. Joseph had first come forward with his covert revelation sanctioning celestial marriage scarcely a year before his martyrdom—and even after he’d documented the revelation in writing, only a select group of his most trusted cronies had been let in on the secret. During the bleak, chaotic days that followed Joseph’s murder, 95 percent of Mormons still had no clue that their prophet had married more than one wife and had declared plural marriage to be one of the most crucial keys to gaining entry to the Kingdom of Heaven. Emma Smith, Samuel Smith, Sidney Rigdon, William Law, and others who despised polygamy—committed Mormons who were convinced that it would be the ruin of their church—desperately wanted to install a successor to Joseph who would revoke the doctrine before it took hold. On July 13 Emma warned that if the next leader of the Mormons “is not a man she approves of she will do the church all the injury she can.” Apostles John Taylor, Willard Richards, Brigham Young, and their brethren in the pro-polygamy camp wanted just as desperately to install a prophet who would uphold the doctrine, lest the plural wives these men had covertly married be branded as whores. The succession crisis was further complicated by the fact that ten members of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, including Brigham Young, were roaming far afield during the spring of 1844, having been dispatched across the nation by Joseph to drum up support for his bid to become president of the United States. Young, who was in Massachusetts when Joseph was shot, didn’t learn about the prophet’s death until nineteen days after the fact. Crushed by the news, Brigham initially despaired that without Joseph, the Mormon Church would surely disintegrate. “My head felt so distressed,” he lamented, “[I] thought it would crack.” As soon as they heard of the assassination, Brigham and the rest of the apostles rushed back to Nauvoo with the utmost haste. The anti-polygamy camp maneuvered furiously to have one of their own confirmed as prophet before the full Quorum of the Twelve Apostles had a chance to return to Nauvoo from various distant corners of the republic. Young Joseph Smith III had the most legitimate claim to the throne, but because he had not yet even reached puberty, the anti-polygamists focused their energies on giving the job to the departed prophet’s younger brother, Samuel H. Smith, instead. On July 30, however, just as it was looking as if he had the job locked up, Samuel abruptly died. Compelling circumstantial evidence suggests that he succumbed from poison administered by Hosea Stout, the chief of the Nauvoo police, who was loyal to Brigham Young and the other polygamists.

• From Under the Banner of Heaven (2003)

  “Dianna could see right away that the changes in Ron were a really bad thing, and I’ve never seen a woman work harder at trying to save a man. She would stay up most of the night trying to talk sense into him. In the hope of bringing him around and saving him, she tried to remain on his good side by going along with some of his crazy demands. But she was only willing to go so far, and then she’d have to say, ‘No, Ron, this just isn’t right.’ ” As Ron became more controlling and more extreme, Dianna slowly lost hope that she could change Ron back into the loving father and considerate husband she’d known previously. He began to talk with growing enthusiasm about polygamy, which made her sick to even contemplate. When Ron announced that he intended to marry off their teenage daughters as plural wives, Dianna reached her breaking point. Desperate, she turned for help to Weiss and other close friends, to leaders of her LDS ward, and especially to Brenda Lafferty—who was married to Allen, the youngest of the six Lafferty brothers. After Dan persuaded his brothers to adopt his fundamentalist beliefs, all their wives acquiesced and submitted, to one degree or another, to the humiliations decreed in The Peace Maker —all their wives, that is, except one: Brenda Wright Lafferty. Intelligent, articulate, and assertive, “Brenda stood up to those Lafferty boys,” says her mother, LaRae Wright. “She was probably the youngest of the wives, but she was the strong one. She told the other wives to stand up for their rights and to think for themselves. And she set an example by refusing to go along with Allen’s demands. She told him in no uncertain terms that she didn’t want him doing things with his brothers. And the brothers blamed her for that, for keeping their family apart. The Lafferty boys didn’t like Brenda, because she got in their way.” Brenda was the second oldest of seven children raised by LaRae, a schoolteacher, and Jim Wright, an agronomist. Born in Logan, Utah, Brenda moved with her family to Ithaca, New York, when she was just a year old, in order for her father to obtain his doctorate at Cornell University. Jim and LaRae pined for the wide-open country of the Rocky Mountain West, but upstate New York was not without appeal, and there was a major attraction just up the road from Ithaca: Palmyra, the birthplace of their LDS faith. As soon as he received his Ph.D., however, Jim moved his family back to the West—to Twin Falls, Idaho, an agricultural town forty miles north of the Utah state line, where Brenda enjoyed a storybook childhood. “She was outgoing, full of life, and had a lot of personality,” says her older sister, Betty Wright McEntire. “Brenda was just real fun.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  So proud they had been that were now so humbled, even unto cobwebs and dust were they humbled; and they had the feeling of all disused places that have once teemed with life, they felt pitifully lonely. She closed her eyes so as not to see them. Then the thought came to Stephen that this was the end, the end of her courage and patient endurance—that this was somehow the end of Morton. She must not see the place any more; she must, she would, go a long way away. Raftery had gone a long way away—she had sent him beyond all hope of recall—but she could not follow him over that merciful frontier, for her God was more stern than Raftery’s; and yet she must fly from her love for Morton. Turning, she hurriedly left the stables. 5 Anna was standing at the foot of the stairs. ‘Are you leaving now, Stephen?’ ‘Yes—I’m going, Mother.’ ‘A short visit!’ ‘Yes, I must get back to work.’ ‘I see. . . .’ Then after a long, awkward pause: ‘Where would you like him buried?’ ‘In the large north paddock where he died—I’ve told Jim.’ ‘Very well, I’ll see that they carry out your orders.’ She hesitated, as though suddenly shy of Stephen again, as she had been in the past; but after a moment she went on quickly: ‘I thought—I wondered, would you like a small stone with his name and some sort of inscription on it, just to mark the place?’ ‘If you’d care to put one—I shan’t need any stone to remember.’ The carriage was waiting to drive her to Malvern. ‘Good-bye, Mother.’ ‘Good-bye—I shall put up that stone.’ ‘Thanks, it’s a very kind thought of yours.’ Anna said: ‘I’m so sorry about this, Stephen.’ But Stephen had hurried into the brougham—the door closed, and she did not hear her mother. CHAPTER 29 1 S oon after the New Year, nine months later, Stephen’s second novel was published. It failed to create the sensation that the first had created, there was something disappointing about it. One critic described this as: ‘A lack of grip,’ and his criticism, on the whole, was a fair one. However, the Press was disposed to be kind, remembering the merits of The Furrow. But the heart of the Author knoweth its own sorrows and is seldom responsive to false consolation, so that when Puddle said: ‘Never mind, Stephen, you can’t expect every book to be The Furrow—and this one is full of literary merit,’ Stephen replied as she turned away: ‘I was writing a novel, my dear, not an essay.’ After this they did not discuss it any more, for what was the use of fruitless discussion? Stephen knew well and Puddle knew also that this book fell far short of its author’s powers. Then suddenly, that spring, Raftery went very lame, and everything else was forgotten.