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 Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  pitilessly reminded their enthralled audiences from pulpit or market cross. The Church offered the remedy: its contact with the divine, summed up in the consecrated Host exhibited amid a blaze of candles, promised hope and salvation. Although the means of salvation differed, the histrionics and the saving of the desperate from despair were not dissimilar in their message from themes prominent in the revivals which Protestants began to foment a century later (see chapter 20).42 Time itself was divided by the Reformation. An energetic and intellectually curious pope, Gregory XIII, took it upon himself, with the newfound papal confidence of the Counter-Reformation, to reform the deficiencies of the existing Julian calendar, from 15 October 1582. He was much concerned for unity with the Eastern Churches, that process which indeed did produce the Union of Brest under one of his successors fourteen years later. So to emphasize the temporal as well as ecclesiastical role of the papacy as focus for world unity, Gregory decided to model himself on Constantine the Great. According to Eusebius, Constantine had been commanded by God to convene the Council of Nicaea in order to fix a universally reliable date for Easter in the face of the Julian calendar’s inaccuracy. Unsurprisingly, Protestants took the papacy’s overdue scientific correction as a sinister plot. They took a long time to accept it, at different dates in different parts of Europe, to the despair of later historians trying to work out relative dates in documents. In England, the delay extended to 1752, over 150 years after the more Protestant but also more logical Scots had accepted (without obvious public gratitude) that the Pope was right.43 Having made the correct scientific decision over the calendar, Rome made a disastrous miscalculation in its treatment of the great Italian astronomer and mathematician Galileo Galilei. Galileo was condemned by the Roman Inquisition in 1633 for providing empirical evidence for the radical revision of cosmology proposed by the long-dead Polish cleric Nicolaus Copernicus. In 1616 the Church had belatedly declared Copernicus to be in error; the Roman authorities then forced Galileo to deny that the earth moved round the sun and not the other way round, because his observations challenged the Church’s authority as the source of truth. There were good theological reasons why they should reject heliocentric theory: the Bible presents creation in moral terms, and depicts a cosmic drama of sin and redemption centred on God’s relationship with humankind. It was not unreasonable to assume that in his creation, he would have made the planet earth, the stage for that drama, the centre of his universe, rather than a morally neutral fiery disc. Yet Galileo’s observations represented reality. Obstinately he turned his humiliation by the Roman authorities to positive use: after they had forced him

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  8. Asia in 1260 Timur’s orgies of destruction hit Christian populations in Central Asia which had already been terribly reduced by the advance of the plague which western Europe would come to know in 1348–9 as the Black Death. From now on, outside the comparative safety of India, the story of the Church of the East recedes to the efforts by disparate enclaves to cling on to existence in the face of Islamic dominance, usually in remote upland areas out of sight of the authorities. Even when Timur found no successors in his cruelty and the Mongol threat receded, the growing power of the Ottoman Turks (see p. 483) continued the pressure on non-Muslims. In an increasingly hostile Islamic world, embittered at the memory of the alien outrage of the Western Crusades, the ancient privileged place of Christians at the Courts of monarchs disappeared. The Miaphysite Church of Armenia suffered like the Dyophysites from the calamities of the fourteenth century. The last independent Armenian kingdom, in Cilicia in south-west Turkey, fell to Mamluk forces in 1375 and more than two centuries of struggle for Christian survival followed. The Armenians had centuries of experience in being buffeted by neighbouring great powers and they were long used to migrating away from disaster. These desperate years sent more of them travelling through eastern Europe as far away as Poland, let alone whatever refuge they could find in Asia – but as with the Jews in diaspora, their sufferings sharpened their skills in commerce and negotiation, skills which they were ready to apply to their religious troubles. From the fourteenth century, at odds theologically with both their Byzantine neighbours and the Church of the

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  to be summed up in the Last Days, with Pole as his agent.11 The Holy Spirit did not oblige, and with Pole’s defeat there died the last chance of a peaceful settlement of religion in Western Christendom of which his hero Erasmus might have approved. One sign of radical change and of the quashing of alternative futures in that decade after 1545 was a literally spectacular volte-face from the best-informed family in Italy, the Florentine Medici. Throughout the 1540s, Duke Cosimo de’ Medici continued to extend patronage and protection to disciples of Juan de Valdés, not least because Cosimo hated both Paul III (who was not above sheltering admirers of the unmentionable Savonarola) and Cardinal Carafa, who became Pope Paul IV in 1555. Apart from his fear of the family ambitions of a Farnese pope, Cosimo shared the determination of his own patron, Charles V, to seek ways of conciliating Protestants in the fashion of the Regensburg Colloquy. He prolonged his policy dangerously late. For a decade from 1545, the Medici were paying for a new scheme of fresco decoration for the choir and family chapels in their ancestral parish church of San Lorenzo, one of Florence’s oldest and most famous churches. Their frescoes were an open declaration of support for evangelical reform in the Catholic Church. It is unlikely that the artist, Jacopo da Pontormo, himself dreamt up the iconography of this highly sensitive project, startling in what it did not depict: any emblem of Purgatory, sacraments, institutional Church or Trinity. What it did draw on were themes from the Catechism of Valdés, already prohibited in 1549 by the authorities in Venice, later also by the Roman Inquisition – images which clearly pointed those with eyes to see to the doctrine of justification by faith. Like Valdés’s tract, Pontormo’s paintings approached this incendiary theme through well-known Old Testament stories such as Noah building his ark, or Abraham about to sacrifice his son Isaac. With Pontormo dead in 1556 and Paul IV’s death in 1559 bringing a pope much more congenial to the Medici, silence descended on the conundrum of why Pontormo had painted what he had painted. Medici publicists, led by the art historian Giorgio Vasari, attributed the fresco design to the artist’s mental instability, and while the Medici became devout patrons of the Counter-Reformation (gaining an augmented title of Grand Duke from Pope Pius V), the unfortunate Pontormo has gone down in art history as a lunatic. Although his frescoes survived much criticism and perplexity up to 1738, now we only have some of his original cartoons and a few rough sketches.12 It is worth focusing on this episode, because it illuminates the murky and uncertain background to the early development of the Jesuits. It is no coincidence that they remained aloof from the work of the Inquisitions,

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  trained English members for the Society – but an English version of Ignatius’s Exercises went on sale, and Jesuits actually arrived in 1558 poised for action, only to be pre-empted by Mary’s death.19 English Catholicism now faced a disaster, since Philip could only have succeeded to the English throne if Mary had borne him an heir, under the stringent terms of the marriage deal of 1554, negotiated by English politicians whose suspicion of Habsburg acquisitiveness had outweighed their Catholic sentiment. Instead, the new queen, last of the Tudors, was Protestant Elizabeth, who did not expend great energy in responding to some rather unconvincing courting from her half-sister’s widower. Now the Jesuits were banned from the realm, together with all other Catholic clergy trained abroad, facing execution if they arrived in England and were captured, yet Catholics still felt an urgent need to sustain the minority who wanted to remain loyal to Rome. In the face of often savage though inconsistent repression (and also amid some bitter internal disagreements about future strategy), Jesuit and non-Jesuit clergy alike patiently and heroically built up a community of Catholics, led by gentry families scattered throughout England and Wales. It survived Elizabeth’s death in 1603 and persisted through seventeenth-century persecutions and eighteenth-century marginalization, embodied in a formidable set of discriminatory legislation, into modern times.20 In Elizabethan Ireland, Franciscan friars led a parallel mission which was able to enjoy far wider success, partly because the Protestant Reformation there quickly became fatally identified with Westminster’s exploitation of the island and made little effort to express itself in the Gaelic language then spoken by the majority of the population. Ireland became the only country in Reformation Europe where, over a century, a monarchy with a consistent religious agenda failed to impose it on its subjects: an extraordinary failure on the part of the Tudors and Stuarts. Yet there is irony in that exceptional story. It was Catholic Queen Mary who implemented a policy of planting settlements of English incomers in Leix and Offaly, counties which were officially known until the revolution of 1918–22 as King’s and Queen’s Counties, a commemoration of both Mary and her husband, Philip of Spain, already the proprietor of the spectacularly successful Spanish colonies in Central and South America. If the English monarchy had remained Catholic, perhaps Ireland would have become as Protestant as the Dutch Republic in reaction to this alien colonial occupation; but as it was, Mary’s early death and Protestant Elizabeth’s accession made it increasingly easy for both the Gaelic-and English-speaking Irish to identify Catholicism as a symbol of Irish difference from the English. With England lost, and most of northern Europe in Protestant hands, Tridentine Catholicism looked to Habsburg power. Charles V on his abdication

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  “I hope this baby holds out for another two and a half days,” Anders said. “It sure has performed admirably, hasn’t it?” None of the men had dwelled on what awaited them if the SPS engine didn’t perform. If test pilots and fighter pilots thought like that, they would never climb into a cockpit. But none of the men could say he hadn’t thought about being marooned in lunar orbit, or how he’d spend his remaining time—perhaps four days—before dying. In fact, Borman had been asked about it before launch. “I don’t know how I’d want to spend my last days,” he’d told reporters. “I think that’s something you decide when it happens. If the engine doesn’t work, we’ve had a bad day.” NASA had considered a plan for a lunar rescue mission should something catastrophic happen. It involved sending a single astronaut to the Moon in his own command and service module, atop his own Saturn V, which would stand ready to launch at Cape Kennedy. Once in lunar orbit, rendezvous and rescue would involve complex maneuvers that would also place the rescuing astronaut at risk. Such a contingency would add significantly to the agency’s already massive budget. In the end, the idea was scrapped. NASA hadn’t bothered training the astronauts on how to handle being stranded at the Moon, or being flung off irretrievably toward the Sun, or any other hopeless scenario. It hadn’t supplied them with a suicide pill or any other means of putting an end to their lives. But the crew knew how things would end for them. About a week after TEI failed, the canisters of lithium hydroxide used to purge exhaled carbon dioxide from the cabin would run out, causing the men to grow drowsy, fall asleep, and suffocate. None of them intended to waste that week, though they did not discuss the matter aloud. Almost certainly, they would have continued to make observations of the Moon, providing as much detail as possible for Houston. They would also have continued to wear a biomedical harness, to give NASA and its doctors information about what happens as one meets his end in space. And they would have radioed home to say goodbye to their parents, wives, and children, and told them how much they loved them. But they might not have waited to suffocate. Satisfied that their work had been done, the crew likely would have decided together to shut down their communications, then vent the spacecraft by opening a pressure relief valve. Doing so would cause an immediate loss of oxygen in the cabin, a fast loss of consciousness, and a painless death. For now, the astronauts could only hope that that wouldn’t be necessary. —Twenty minutes remained until the SPS engine was scheduled to fire for TEI. Ordinary people might use this time to say something profound, or perhaps to bid their companions goodbye in case things went bad.

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  Charles: Yes, they haunt you. Dr. Wheeler: Why are you ashamed? Charles: Because I don’t have the money. —To win the Democratic nomination for president, Robert Kennedy had to win the California primary. A week earlier, he’d lost Oregon to McCarthy, and was trailing new entrant Vice President Hubert Humphrey in delegates. For RFK, the Golden State was the crossroads. If he lost there, he’d likely drop out. As the California returns rolled in, it was clear Kennedy would win. Just before midnight, the candidate went to the sweltering ballroom at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles and addressed a packed house of supporters. Looking more boyish than his forty-two years, Kennedy spoke of his belief that America could be healed and come together. In closing, he made a V with his raised fingers—which in 1968 stood for both peace and victory. Followed by his entourage and a string of reporters, Kennedy made his way to the hotel’s pantry, where he reached out to shake hands with Juan Romero, a seventeen-year-old busboy who’d delivered food to his room earlier that week. As the two moved close, a man with a pistol lunged forward, pointed the gun just inches from Kennedy, and began firing, hitting the senator once in the head and twice in the right armpit. As Kennedy collapsed, Romero cradled his head to protect it from the cold concrete and tried to comfort the senator, who had been kind to him a few days earlier and had treated him as an equal. Photographers snapped photos of Romero holding Kennedy. The images would become among the most memorable of the twentieth century. Pandemonium erupted throughout the hotel; supporters held their heads, sobbed, and screamed “No! No!” and “Not again!” Police seized the shooter, a twenty-four-year-old Jordanian American named Sirhan Bishara Sirhan. In his pocket they found a newspaper story noting Kennedy’s support for Israel. Kennedy was rushed to the hospital, where he clung to life. In England, the British Broadcasting Corporation told its audience, “We pray for the American people that they may come to their senses.” Early the next morning, on June 6, Kennedy died of his wounds. Across the country, people walked around dazed. In New York City, WPIX-TV broadcast the image of a single word—SHAME —and let it run for two and a half hours. People of all colors and classes and ages gathered spontaneously at railroad tracks to glimpse the train that carried Kennedy’s body from New York City to Washington. When it passed, mothers holding babies waved, children saluted, the elderly tried to stand. Black and white Americans chased the train, running on the tracks together until the last car disappeared. —Richard Nixon became the Republican nominee for president on the first ballot at the party’s national convention in Miami in early August. His running mate, Maryland governor Spiro Agnew, had backed the Civil Rights Movement but now scolded black people, and some of their leaders, for not disavowing so-called black racists.

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  The centrepiece became a Coptic Patriarchal College founded, as its name implied, by the head of the Coptic Church, Kyrillos (Cyril) IV, who initiated a wave of Church reforms, a surprising number of which survived, considering that he had only seven years in which to implement them. The CMS were disappointed in their initial hopes of mass conversions of Egyptian Muslims, but unwittingly they had aided a renaissance in an ancient Church. In the face of all the tribulations which followed for Ottoman Christians in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it was to prove one of the most successful in all Eastern Christianity.66 Ethiopia’s continuing existence was the most emphatic reminder that Christianity was an ancient African faith, and the resurgence of its Church owed little to the sort of quasi-colonial assistance which benefited the Copts. In the early nineteenth century the Ethiopian Empire might have entirely disintegrated, but it was rescued by a provincial governor, Kassa, who hacked his way to power so successfully that in 1855 he was crowned Negus under the name of Tewodros (Theodore), the hero whose providential arrival as monarchical saviour had been predicted in a sixteenth-century Ethiopian Christian prophecy. Intensely pious – ‘Without Christ I am nothing,’ he declared – he ended the tradition of royal polygamy and toyed with Protestant missions travelling down from Egypt, some of whom had a particular use for him in their ability to manufacture armaments. But like several of Ethiopia’s most energetic monarchs before him, Tewodros descended into paranoia and murderous vindictiveness; it was not good for his sanity to think himself lineally descended from King David. His cruelty alienated his own people, and his imperial posturing led to a British expeditionary force which crushed his armies at Maqdala in 1868. In despair, he turned one of his missionary-forged guns on himself.67 Ethiopia survived this disaster and its Church maintained its Miaphysite character. Yöhannes IV, another provincial governor turned Negus, imitated Constantine in presiding over a Church council in 1878 to settle long-standing disputes on Christology, although his order to tear out the tongues of some of those challenging his decision rather outdid the Roman Emperor’s enforcement of Nicene Orthodoxy.68 His less opinionated successor, Menelik II, brought the empire to an unprecedented size, and delivered the most lasting defeat suffered by a colonial power during the nineteenth century when he crushed the invading Italians at Adwa in 1896. It was an event celebrated all over Africa: a sign (like the Japanese victory over the Russian Empire nine years later) that Europeans were not all-powerful. It was also a triumph for authentically African Christianity, which might now turn to Ethiopia for inspiration. Already in 1892, far away in the Transvaal, a Methodist minister of the Pedi

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  were trying to destroy. Their detestation of Christianity was as extreme as that of the Jacobins in the French Revolution; the formal separation of Church and State in January 1918 was just one first step towards death and destruction, the Romanov family’s murder being symbolic of so many others. The civil war which was already raging by then, and which ended in 1922 with Bolshevik victory, marked the beginning of seventy years for the Russian Orthodox Church which represent one of the worst betrayals of hope in the history of Christianity. During those terrible decades, the destruction of life and of the material beauty of church buildings and art outdid anything in Orthodox experience since the Mongol invasions; the Orthodox faithful were made strangers amid the culture which they had shaped over centuries. Patriarch Tikhon, desperately trying to protect his Church with no real assets at his disposal apart from the ability to forgive his enemies, eventually died under house arrest in 1925. It is likely that he was murdered by thugs commanded by a Bolshevik leader who was possibly the bastard son of a priest and in early life was one of the most unpromising of seminarians. Long before Tikhon’s death, this Georgian gangster, who never fulfilled his mother’s hopes that he might become a bishop, had adopted the pseudonym Josef Stalin.13 The Bolsheviks’ hatred of religious practice extended far beyond the official Church. Of all the stories of Christian suffering in Russia after 1917, that of the Mennonites can stand for others because of the peculiar moral dilemma it presented for this sect, which since the Reformation had itself rejected the ideal of Christendom now in collapse. First gathered in the Netherlands in the 1530s by Menno Simons, a Frisian former priest sickened by the blood-soaked end to the siege of Münster (see pp. 623–4), Mennonites expressed their difference from the world around them by renouncing all forms of coercion or public violence, soldiering of course included. Their hard work and orderly peace- ableness made them attractive colonists for the tsars, and by the time of the revolution hundreds of thousands lived in Mennonite communities, mostly in the Volga region. Their prosperity attracted Bolshevik and anarchist raids, both out of ideological hatred of ‘bourgeois’ farmers, and from simple greed or necessity – but there was another intoxicating element for bullies: the Mennonites would not fight back when attacked. Men were murdered, women raped, everything was stolen. For many of them, it was too much. They fought back and sent perpetrators of the outrages packing – but now they had to face the wrath of brethren and sisters who said that they were betraying Mennonite principles. When Russian Mennonites finally had the chance, most made new lives in communities in North America; but they did not forget the controversy. Bad feeling and arguments about the Russian civil war still beset quiet places in the

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  disciples, amid his varied and profound influences on European thought, would be able to find any God at all. Among them was Ludwig Feuerbach, whose reading of Hegel led him along with a number of self-styled ‘Young Hegelians’ to the conclusion that Christianity must be superseded because it represented a form of ‘false consciousness’. Humanity’s sense of its intimacy with God arose from the fact that humanity itself had created God in its own image: ‘the object of any subject is nothing else than the subject’s own nature taken objectively. Such are a man’s thoughts and dispositions, such is his God; so much worth as a man has, so much and no more has his God.’40 That which was called divine revelation only revealed humanity to itself. It was this proposition which lay behind the radical rejection of the Christian Church by Marx and his admirers, though not all Marxists have found it impossible to hold together Marxism and Christianity. The strangest reaction to the progress of Protestant philosophy from Kant to Hegel, yet perhaps one of the most significant in the long term for Western Christianity, came from a Danish Lutheran, S㸡ren Kierkegaard. He was never short of money thanks to his father’s prosperity in business and his own earnings from writing (matched by his ability to spend them on himself), so he hardly bothered having a life, outside his publication of thirty books and a heap of writings still in manuscript at his death. Famously he broke off his one engagement, and much (probably too much) has been made of that in interpreting the discussion of tragedy and meaninglessness which runs through his works. Retreating from much practical engagement with the world – though he would regularly and cheerfully venture from his desk for a ‘people bath’ in the streets or the theatre – he plunged himself in his solitariness into an engagement with human experience in turns savage and apparently frivolous, shape-shifting in his writings under a variety of pseudonyms, and mocking the good-mannered Christianity which Lutheranism in Copenhagen had constructed out of good education, everyday virtue and measured interpretation of Hegel. He looked behind his father’s respectability to see the poverty-stricken boy who had cursed God, married his housekeeper (S㸡ren’s mother) because of her pregnancy, and had never lost his sense of horror and despair at his own sins.41 In reflecting on such anguish lying behind the decorous façade of city life, Kierkegaard explored the inner consciousness of the individual, and he condemned Hegel’s dialectic path to the Absolute as a betrayal of the individual. Sin was not an aspect of some impersonal Hegelian process; it was a dark half of human existence, a stark alternative to a road which led to the broken, powerless Christ. Faced with such a choice, there could be no middle ground – so Kierkegaard offensively expressed loathing and contempt for the most respected

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  sudden escalation of Western interference in traditional culture led to such ideological fusions, in which the Christian idea of the Last Days was a favourite galvanizing force, usually with devastating results. So in the same decade that saw the Taiping explosion, the Xhosa of South Africa tried to slaughter all their cattle; they were convinced by prophecies from the young girl Nongqawuse that they must remedy their impurities, in preparation for the return of a former Xhosa leader, allegedly now commanding the Russians against the British in the Crimean War, who would bring them a new abundance. Yet the Xhosa had found that only horrific hunger and death rewarded their delusional devotion; the same reward awaited the Taiping.82 China’s huge scale magnified the effects of apocalypticism in the Taiping Rebellion. It took over most of central China, and proved far more traumatic even than India’s Great Rebellion. Taiping means ‘Great Peace’, but this was the most destructive civil war in world history, far outstripping the contemporary American Civil War, and little outdone in mayhem by the Second World War a century later. The Taiping created an entire governmental structure, with a formidable army, but Hong Xiuquan’s rapid accretion of power did nothing for his fragile mental state. He lapsed into passivity and withdrawal, his favourite reading the new Chinese translation of John Bunyan’s Protestant classic Pilgrim’s Progress. His Protestant cousin Hong Rengan, arriving at the Taiping capital of Nanjing in 1859 after years of residence in British-ruled Hong Kong, tried to pull the movement out of its antipathy to foreigners and create a more rational organization, combining the best in traditionally meritocratic government with what attracted him in European culture: this would be a thoroughly modernized China, based on the Taiping’s new syncretistic faith and the Chinese version of the King James Bible. Even when Taiping military power collapsed in the wake of Hong Xiuquan’s final illness in 1864, Hong Rengan, now a prisoner of the Imperial Army, obstinately reaffirmed his pride in his cousin and the ‘display of divine power’ which had sustained the movement for fourteen years. Flare-ups of resistance persisted for years, and although a combination of dogged provincial-led armies proved a good deal more effective against the rebels than central forces, the empire never recovered. Even while the war raged, a new round of unequal treaties with external powers in 1858–60 gave new freedoms to missionary work within the imperial boundaries.83 Chinese cultural misapprehensions were equalled by those of many missionaries who began work after 1842. Like Catholics before them, they mostly found the basic task of mastering the fearful complexity of the Chinese language humiliatingly difficult, and often their reaction was to externalize their own shortcomings. When they were not blaming the workings of Satan in

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  that discharged flowed uphill on one of America’s most exclusive streets, seeking higher and higher levels so that Humphrey would hear it in his twenty-fifth-floor room, and LBJ would hear it at his ranch in Texas. The police stood there taking the worst of it. In ordinary times, a person cursed at a Chicago cop at their peril. Yet peril seemed to be what the demonstrators wanted most. After thirty minutes, the police obliged them, smashing and clubbing and kicking and dragging anyone they could reach—demonstrators, onlookers, journalists—and it didn’t matter that the network television cameras were filming or that people were yelling “The whole world is watching!” or that those in the streets weren’t Vietcong or Soviets but the sons and daughters of fellow citizens; all that mattered for the next eighteen minutes of brutality and mayhem was that something had fractured in America and no one had any idea how to stop it, and after order was restored there still seemed to be cries coming from the streets, even though there was no one left to make them. Among the millions who watched the unedited footage on television, there hardly seemed a soul among them—rich or poor, young or old, left or right—who didn’t wonder if America could be put back together again. — On Sunday, September 8, the crew of Apollo 8 flew their T-38 jets from Houston to Cape Kennedy in Florida, checked in to the Holiday Inn at Cocoa Beach, and prepared to die. Often. In the morning, they would start training in the command module simulator, an Earth-based model of the Apollo spacecraft they would pilot in December. Housed in nondescript buildings at the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston and at Cape Kennedy in Florida, the machines were highly accurate mock-ups of the real thing, their cabins outfitted with every switch, lever, dial, gauge, light, alarm, circuit breaker, and readout the astronauts would use on the lunar journey. Everything worked—the simulator itself didn’t move, but optics could be projected onto screens, navigational information displayed, sounds played over speakers, and lights flashed. The seven hundred–plus manual controls functioned just as they would during an actual mission. An astronaut could spend years poring over diagrams and schematics, but he would

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  television Anders bought so his family could watch the launch, and the Life magazine photographers who were now showing up almost daily to take photos of the family doing things they didn’t do in real life, like eating ice cream together at the kitchen table. When Borman arrived home for Thanksgiving, Susan had the house perfect and ready for him, as she always did. In the 1950s, when they were moving from base to base, she’d read and absorbed The Army Wife by Nancy Shea, a book about making a good life and a good home while married to a military man. “Every Army wife has three basic responsibilities,” the author wrote: 1.To make a congenial home 2.To rear a family of which he will be proud 3.To strengthen her husband’s morale “Your whole scheme of life revolves around your husband, your children, and a happy home,” Shea added. Susan had been the perfect Army wife for eighteen years, since Frank had graduated from West Point in 1950, but now she wondered whether she’d be able to keep it up, whether the pressure might finally break her. Susan believed, with one hundred percent certainty, that Frank was going to die aboard Apollo 8. Frank knew she had been drinking, but he didn’t think she had a problem because she kept such a beautiful home, raised her sons with honor and dignity, and never expressed a moment’s concern for herself. He’d never seen her drunk, not once. When he discussed Apollo 8 with Susan, she told him, “I know you’ll be fine.” Inside, she was dying, watching her life and the lives of her sons being torn apart before her eyes, her best friend being taken away forever, to a place she could never reach. If Borman had had even an inkling that his wife was suffering, he would have explained the mission to her, laid out maps, described how thoroughly NASA had engineered the flight, listed all the precautions that were in place. If her sons, now seventeen and fifteen, had known that their mother was so worried, they would have hugged and reassured her. But no one knew, which was just how Susan wanted it—she didn’t want anyone to suffer on her account.

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  ask, “Can we get there?” By that time, someone else would have answered, “We did.” NASA had little choice but to keep working. But as spring turned to summer, there was more bad news for the agency. Plagued by design and production problems, the lunar module had fallen behind schedule. Engineers reported that a fix could take six months or more. That threatened to delay several planned Apollo flights—including those to the Moon. By early August 1968, things looked dire for the American space program. The Saturn V rocket was in no shape to fly with a crew aboard. The Soviets looked ready to send men around the Moon by year’s end. And now, because of issues with the lunar module, Kennedy’s end-of- decade deadline for a lunar landing was slipping away. NASA always proceeded deliberately and carefully. They didn’t skip ahead; the risks of manned spaceflight were simply too great. But their hand had been forced. So Deke Slayton had to ask Frank Borman an unthinkable question: Will you and your crew go suddenly—in just four months’ time—to the Moon? Now Slayton needed an answer. Chapter Three

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  engine—the one required to send Apollo to the Moon—failed to reignite. A backup plan was put into effect, but the reentry of the command module into Earth’s atmosphere was too slow to fully test the heat shield. To many at NASA, the ten-hour flight had been a disaster. By the time the Apollo command module splashed down into the ocean, any chance for a lunar landing by the end of 1969 looked to have burned away. “What was illustrated,” wrote The New York Times, “...was the extraordinary difficulty of assuring that every one of the literally millions of components in such an extremely complicated system as the Saturn 5 works perfectly....This fact argues for a slow but sure approach to future Apollo tests, rather than an adventuresome policy aimed primarily at completing the job by the end of 1969.” — On the same day that Apollo 6 went haywire, United States intelligence agencies delivered a report on the Soviet space program. It was marked TOP SECRET and went only to high-ranking government policymakers and top NASA officials. It read: The Soviets will probably attempt a manned circumlunar flight both as a preliminary to a manned lunar landing and as an attempt to lessen the psychological impact of the Apollo program. That much wasn’t news. But the estimate on when it would happen jumped off the page. The report said that 1969 was more likely for this manned circumlunar flight. But the second half of 1968 was entirely possible. NASA had no plans to send men to the Moon in 1968. The soonest they’d be ready to try was mid-1969, when Apollo 10 would orbit the Moon—a test run before Apollo 11 attempted a landing. By that time, a cosmonaut might already have reached the Moon. And that would be more than just the greatest technological achievement in history. It would be a definitive victory for the Soviets in the Space Race. The landing would still matter, of course. But no one ever again would

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  prairies of Canada.14 The end of the war on Europe’s other frontiers in late 1918 brought the collapse of three more empires. The twin Protestant and Catholic heirs of the Holy Roman Empire now quit their thrones, as the pressure of central European nationalisms led to the disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy and the shock of Germany’s sudden capitulation in the West precipitated the overthrow of Kaiser Wilhelm. An array of impressively bewhiskered German princelings followed in their wake. The third to fall was the Ottoman Sultan, who had entered the war on the side of Germany and Austria, and who was ejected from his palaces in 1922; the caliphate was formally abolished two years later. Of all the European imperial crowned heads, only the British King-Emperor remained.15 The death throes of the Ottoman Empire led to further disasters for Orthodoxy and the ancient Miaphysite and Dyophysite Churches of the East. Nineteenth- century massacres caused by the new self-consciousness of Ottoman Islam were outclassed by what now happened in Anatolia and the Caucasus. From the beginning of the war, the reformist ‘Young Turk’ regime in Constantinople saw the Christians of the region as fifth columnists for Russia (with some justification) and was determined to neutralize them. The measures it authorized were increasingly extreme, to the point that it is difficult to find historians outside Turkey who are not prepared to use the word genocide to describe the deaths of more than a million Armenian Christians between 1915 and 1916. One city, Van, largely Armenian in 1914, simply does not exist on the site that it then occupied.16 Britain, Russia and France appealed to the Turks during the war to end these atrocities, threatening post-war retribution to those involved and denouncing these ‘new crimes of Turkey against humanity and civilization’. The word ‘humanity’ had significantly replaced ‘Christianity’ in an earlier draft of the statement, and there was little comfort for Christian victims in the peace settlements which followed.17 No official statement was made about the Armenian holocaust. 23. Europe in 1914

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  A DEEPLY TROUBLED YEAR Streaking away from Earth, the astronauts left behind a deeply troubled planet at the end of a deeply troubled year. Nineteen sixty-eight had begun on an optimistic note, with a medical miracle. At Stanford University in California, Dr. Norman Shumway performed the first successful heart transplant in the United States. A week after the operation, fifty-four-year-old steelworker Mike Kasperak appeared to be doing fine. As America picked up the confetti from its New Year’s celebrations, the country’s presidential campaigns began in earnest. President Lyndon Johnson, who’d won in a landslide in 1964, looked to be the certain nominee for the Democrats. The early front-runner for the Republicans was former vice president Richard Nixon, who’d begun to tour the country and make his case. In Alabama, former governor George Wallace was preparing a third-party run based on a pro-segregation platform that was popular in the deep South. Looming over the campaigns was the war in Vietnam. Half a million American troops were in country; since 1965, when official combat units arrived, nearly twenty thousand American lives had been lost in the fighting against North Vietnamese Communist and guerrilla forces. Still, President Johnson and William Westmoreland, the general in charge of U.S. forces in Vietnam, promised the public that the war was going well and that victory was on the horizon. On January 21, fifteen days after the operation, the heart transplant recipient in California died despite having made it through “a fantastic galaxy of complications,” according to his surgeon. Just after midnight on the final day of January, tens of thousands of North Vietnamese troops and Vietcong guerrillas launched a coordinated attack on nearly every major city and town in South Vietnam. The action came as a surprise to American troops, who were honoring a two-day

• From Books That Have Made History: Books That Can Change Your Life (2005)

  148 Lecture 28: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, Part 1 Faust. In the next scene, we meet Faust, a professor of great repute, learned in theology, medicine, law, Greek, and Latin. He laments that all he has learned in his studies is that man knows nothing. He would give anything for true wisdom. Faust rejects the biblical concept “In the beginning was the word.” For him, the act, not the word, was the beginning. Faust decides that the only act that has meaning to him is suicide, but he defers his suicide when he hears the bells of Easter. The next day, Faust and Wagner, his research assistant, are out walking and encounter a poodle. When Faust and the poodle return to Faust’s study, the poodle transforms into a scholar. He announces that he is the devil and says that he can bring meaning to Faust’s life. Faust declares that he wants really to live. Instead of studying, he wants money and women. The devil makes the bargain for Faust’s soul in return for giving the professor everything that he wants; he has Faust sign a contract in blood. After a visit to a wine cellar, Faust wishes for true love with a woman who loves him in return. He has set his eye on Margaret, or Gretchen, a pure young woman. The devil encourages Faust to seduce Gretchen and plants jewels in her room. Gretchen keeps the jewels although she knows that she should not. The devil gives Faust a sleeping potion for Gretchen’s mother, to get her out of the way while Gretchen and Faust make love. Gretchen gives the sleeping potion to her mother, but the potion kills her. Gretchen’s brother returns, and the devil kills him. The devil advises Faust to abandon the pregnant Gretchen. While Faust and the devil are celebrating at a wild revel, Gretchen is imprisoned on charges of murdering her mother and the baby. Faust wants to return to Gretchen, but the devil insists that Faust is powerless to prevent her death and has no responsibility in the matter. Faust returns to Gretchen, who has become insane. The devil tells Faust that he is guilty as an accessory to the murder of Gretchen’s mother, baby, and brother. He reminds Faust of the contract and that Faust will die a sinner. Faust leaves with the devil and Gretchen is executed. ■ Goethe, Faust, Part I. Essential Reading 149 Sharpe, Cambridge Companion to Goethe. 1. Would you sign a pact with the devil? 2. Does Gretchen deserve any blame? Supplementary Reading Questions to Consider

• From Scandalous Liaisons (2007)

  Without a word, Lucien strode through the open French doors and out to the garden beyond. He heard Julienne calling his name, her voice choked and pleading, but he couldn’t go back. God, how he wanted her! His hands were shaking and his breath shuddering as he mounted his horse in the mews. He was completely undone, knowing, as he pulled away from Julienne’s home, that it would be the last time he ever spoke to her. Chapter Seven Julienne watched Lucien boldly, uncaring who saw her. After weeks of self-imposed exile, he’d reappeared in Society looking leaner and paler, the skin around his eyes shadowed. He didn’t look well, but to Julienne he looked wonderful. Beautifully dressed in evening attire, he stood out from the crowd, his presence so compelling and so uncivilized despite his refined exterior. Lucien must have felt her regard. He turned his head and met her gaze, his expression altering not at all upon seeing her. He turned back to his companion, a voluptuous and obviously smitten woman of the world. An experienced femme fatale, with flame-red hair and lips, who held his arm and rubbed her full breasts against it, while Lucien sliced Julienne through the heart with the cut direct. She reminded herself that she’d never had a claim to him. Even when he’d rashly offered marriage, Lucien had never agreed to be hers. But that didn’t stop her from feeling as if she would cast up her accounts all over the ballroom floor. “What are you contemplating, Lady Julienne?” Fontaine asked as he leaned over her. “I’m thinking you should ask me to dance.” Her handsome suitor’s mouth curved in a smile that caused other women to swoon, yet affected Julienne not at all. “Another dance?” he murmured. “How deliciously scandalous.” With consummate skill, he moved her from the edge of the dance floor and into the line of waiting couples. As the music began and they moved with the other dancers, she watched Lucien lead the redhead to a deserted corner, his hand cupping the curve of her derriere. Dismayed, Julienne missed a step. Fontaine’s arm tightened, supporting her, his quick response preventing any embarrassment for them. “Thank you,” she said, with a grateful smile, swallowing back her misery. Justin tilted his head in acknowledgment. “We rub along well together.” “Yes,” she agreed. “We do.” His gaze filled with satisfaction. Their nuptials were quickly becoming a foregone conclusion. Soon, very soon, Julienne would have to explain her brother’s plight. Raised an aristocrat, the same as she was, the present Marquess of Fontaine knew the workings of upper-tier marriages, and her situation, while pitiable, was fairly common. In fact, she was almost certain he already knew of her brother’s troubles.

• From Bright Lights, Big City (1984)

  What’s more, you can’t really afford the rent. You keep meaning to look for a new place, and to do the dishes and the laundry. You close the door and stand in the foyer, listening. For some time after Amanda left, you would pause here in the hope that you would hear her inside, that she had returned, that you would discover her, penitent and tender, when you stepped into the living room. That hope is mostly gone, but still you observe this brief vigil inside the door, gauging the quality of the silence to see if it is only the melancholy silence of absence, or whether it is full of high-register shrieks and moans. Tonight you are uncertain. You step into the living room and throw your jacket on the love seat. You hunt up your slippers and read the spines of the books in the shelves, determined to make ago of this quiet-night-at-home idea. A random sampling of titles induces vertigo: As I Lay Dying, Under the Volcano, Anna Karenina, Being and Time, The Brothers Karamazov . You must have had an ambitious youth. Of course, many of these spines have never been cracked. You have been saving them up. Nothing seems to be what you want to do until you consider writing. Suffering is supposed to be the raw stuff of art. You could write a book. You feel that if only you could make yourself sit down at a typewriter you could give shape to what seems merely a chain reaction of pointless disasters. Or you could get revenge, tell your side of the story, cast some version of yourself in the role of wronged hero. Hamlet on the battlements. Maybe get outside autobiography altogether, lose yourself in the purely formal imperatives of words in the correct and surprising sequence, or create a fantasy world of small furry and large scaly creatures. You have always wanted to be a writer. Getting the job at the magazine was only your first step toward literary celebrity. You used to write what you believed to be urbane sketches infinitely superior to those appearing in the magazine every week. You sent them up to Fiction; they came back with polite notes. “Not quite right for us now, but thanks for letting us see this.” You would try to interpret the notes: what about the word now —do they mean that you should submit this again, later? It wasn’t the notes so much as the effort of writing that discouraged you. You never stopped thinking of yourself as a writer biding his time in the Department of Factual Verification. But between the job and the life there wasn’t much time left over for emotion recollected in tranquillity. For a few weeks you got up at six to compose short stories at the kitchen table while Amanda slept in the other room. Then your night life started getting more interesting and complicated, and climbing out of bed became harder and harder.

• From Bright Lights, Big City (1984)

  You know this moment has come and gone, but you are not yet willing to concede that you have crossed the line beyond which all is gratuitous damage and the palsy of unraveled nerve endings. Somewhere back there you could have cut your losses, but you rode past that moment on a comet trail of white powder and now you are trying to hang on to the rush. Your brain at this moment is composed of brigades of tiny Bolivian soldiers. They are tired and muddy from their long march through the night. There are holes in their boots and they are hungry. They need to be fed. They need the Bolivian Marching Powder. A vaguely tribal flavor to this scene—pendulous jewelry, face paint, ceremonial headgear and hair styles. You feel that there is also a certain Latin theme—something more than the piranhas cruising your bloodstream and the fading buzz of marimbas in your brain. You are leaning back against a post that may or may not be structural with regard to the building, but which feels essential to your own maintenance of an upright position. The bald girl is saying this used to be a good place to come before the assholes discovered it. You don’t want to be talking to this bald girl, or even listening to her, which is all you are doing, but just now you do not want to test the powers of speech or locomotion. How did you get here? It was your friend, Tad Allagash, who powered you in here, and he has disappeared. Tad is the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning. He is either your best self or your worst self, you’re not sure which. Earlier in the evening it seemed clear that he was your best self. You started on the Upper East Side with champagne and unlimited prospects, strictly observing the Allagash rule of perpetual motion: one drink per stop. Tad’s mission in life is to have more fun than anyone else in New York City, and this involves a lot of moving around, since there is always the likelihood that where you aren’t is more fun than where you are. You are awed by his strict refusal to acknowledge any goal higher than the pursuit of pleasure. You want to be like that. You also think he is shallow and dangerous. His friends are all rich and spoiled, like the cousin from Memphis you met earlier in the evening who would not accompany you below Fourteenth Street because, he said, he didn’t have a lowlife visa. This cousin had a girlfriend with cheekbones to break your heart, and you knew she was the real thing when she steadfastly refused to acknowledge your presence. She possessed secrets—about islands, about horses, about French pronunciation—that you would never know. You have traveled in the course of the night from the meticulous to the slime.