Despair

Passages

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

Page 33 of 267 · 20 per page

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  My head is grinding out bad news: That bruise on your shin is bone cancer…. But one glance at the husband’s profile, and I flash on my only happy thought for weeks, the smooth moonstone of an idea. If I had a rubber bladder under my pillow—the kind that cartoon characters whip from their sleeves—I could muster the strength to rear up and whack him vigorously about the head. My mouth creaks toward a smile at the prospect, since his sleep has been unbroken now for almost a year. I gaze at him from under the pillow like a rattler under a rock. A swerving comet’s tail of silence issues from the monitor. I let my eyes seal shut, then inwardly tumble back down the black tunnel of oblivion that’s my one aspiration. During my teetotaling pregnancy, when my hormonal stupor must’ve helped me sober up cold turkey, I envisioned these night wakings as if sprinkled with fairy dust. Hearing baby gurgle and coo, I’d leap up to float—smiling and moonlit and brimming with breast milk—in frothy gown to the crib in the next room, Three gasping coughs in rapid succession, rat-a-tat-tat. I blink at the clock hands (2:58). Silence. I’ll get up, my husband says. His muscular arm starts to feel around the night table for his glasses. To which a sane woman with classes to teach tomorrow would’ve said, Thanks, hon, as she sank back into slumbering meadows. He offers again, and again I say no, which is not—as I mean him to think it is—concern for his obligations. Nor is it maternal love for my blond and improbably blue-eyed toddler, just old enough to be lurching around the coffee table, chortling with every stumpy step. I tell the husband I’ve got it because it ticks another plus sign in my column in this game of shit-eating I have composed my marriage to be. Whoever eats the biggest shit sandwich wins, and I’m playing to justify the fact that I’d rather drink than love. The times Dev’s spiked a fever, I shook Warren awake and—fearing meningitis—we tore to Children’s Hospital. With medicine, it’d take Dev a week or so to stop coughing himself awake most nights. Then a week to stop nightly wakings, then here came the next cold, invariably flaming into a fever. The doctors agree the infections and fevers are strange but not unheard of. By every yardstick, my strapping son is a developmental champ. His bounce is boundless, but my limbs are filled with lead pellets, and my head has started to scramble like an anthill. Another series of whooping lands a hammer blow to my sternum, and I jerk upright. It’s the reflexive, automatic move from some gore-fest movie—that last scene when the butchered killer you think has finally bitten it jolts up. My arm wheels over to smack off the baby monitor. Then, lacking the will to rise (3:07), I plummet back down like a shot bird.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  I nod. For the first time, the disease idea isn’t just metaphorical, though Joan the Bone had once said (regarding the patience with which she listened to me drone on): When I look at you, I see somebody swathed in bandages. On those cold concrete steps, some black river is rushing through me down to my fingertips. If I close my eyes to ease the headache I get from even the soft moonlight, I can feel the car spin and see the concrete divider hurling toward me. Progressive means, the young doctor goes on, whatever jackpot you just hit last night, whatever blackout, whatever bottom you found—that’s where you go down from. That’s your highlight. The top of the curve. My mouth forms an O and the noise comes out for it’s dawning on me that liquor will never again salve my aches or loosen the knots that bind me so graciously, as it once did. You’ve passed some line where it works, she says. I used to try to figure it out. Maybe it’s how the pancreas handles sugar, or some enzyme we give off when we drink that sets up a craving. But whatever line it is, you’ve crossed it. Somebody who’s crossed the line and craves liquor like you do and wants to keep drinking is like a pickle who wants to be a cucumber again. You can’t. It’s over. And so it hits me: I have to kiss alcohol goodbye—no half measures, no quibbling, no champagne at the wedding, no valium at the dentist, no codeine for the cough. Ninety meetings in ninety days, she says. I don’t complain but must’ve pulled a face. It’s like you have cancer, she says, and coming here is really chemo. It’s not a luxury. It’s not a help. It’s what stands between you and going insane or winding up in the boneyard. Ninety meetings in ninety days, I say. Consider me the Navy SEAL of sobriety. All yes ma’ams. You have to start giving the higher-power thing a try—it’s the one suggestion you skirted. You didn’t pray. Jenny doesn’t pray, I say, and she’s been sober twenty years. (Jenny is one of the sober ladies I’m getting to know.) And Jenny’s disposition? Mean as a snake, I confirm. You might find sober people who don’t pray, but all the happy ones have some kind of regular meditative or spiritual practice. There are humungous dark trees in the hospital yard, and I gaze into the torn-out spaces between them at a few sequiny stars. I’ve never felt anything even faintly mystical in my life and tell her so. Faith is not a feeling, she says. It’s a set of actions. By taking the actions, you demonstrate more faith than somebody who actually has experienced the rewards of prayer and so feels hope. Fake it till you make it. Didn’t you fake half your life drinking?

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  31 A Short History of My Stupidity The history of my stupidity would fill many volumes . —Czeslaw Milosz, “Account” R emembering the day of my suicide, I see myself at the hospital’s intake desk, holding in my nail-bitten hand a red and white health insurance card embossed with the seal of Harvard University. Veritas , it promises: Truth. Weighing in the low triple digits, I’m sheathed in a black knit minidress with a boat neck ( Vogue headline: SUICIDE DRESSING: THE FINAL CHALLENGE ). In sobriety, I haven’t so much gone insane as awakened to the depth and breadth of my preexisting insanity, a bone-deep sadness or a sense of having been a mistake. Maybe because I feel I am not now who I was then, I have to stare askance at that time, squint to see past clotted and curdled thunderheads to the initial instant of what then seemed like my last crash—a time I now call my nervous breakthrough. The woman who takes my insurance card has tangerine-colored nails and a soft Caribbean accent. She hands me a fistful of pink tissues and asks do I want some herb tea. She keeps some in her drawer. It’s Sunday, and the office is empty but for her and a guy in golf clothes in the corner. I want the tea but say no thank you, for that’s how I believe the human economy works—on some perverse system in which people who offer to do nice things for me are furtively pissed off by acceptance. So it’s better to refuse most kindnesses I come across, an interpretive model of human behavior that—it’s clear enough now—fosters the crappiest of conceivable attitudes in me. It’s no bother, she says. I’m getting some tea for myself. The warmth beaming from her face can’t reach me. I’m too bent over some rotted core, as if to protect it from her. She stands, and a glance from the golf-clothes guy makes me want to crawl under her desk. God how pale I look in the hospital. Crying through my globbed-up mascara has pinched my lashes into clownlike points, and the swollen eyes give me a lizard look. And rivers of snot I keep honking into wads of pink tissue. How long have I been crying? Days, in some ways, years. (If I could tap my own shoulder, I’d say, Of course you’re crying, honey. You’re fucking starving. Drive through a burger joint. Hell, super-size it, spring for a shake. Then go home and take a bath with some dish detergent. Tell your son you’ve gone to Tahiti for an hour. Take the longest bath in the world.) I’m so watery at my edges, so permeable, so easy to hurt, and my inner monologue—what you would hear more or less constantly, should we turn up the volume on it—went, Oh shit, stupid bitch. What’ve you done now?

• From Vision Quest (1979)

  In a few years, no matter how healthy I am, my brain cells will begin to die. I could be the most heavy-duty stud in the northern hemisphere, the ace exobiologist or space physicist in the world, and I’d still really be nothing but a candidate for motehood in the sweep of Time’s great dustcloth. If Time can take the Columbia River and turn it into a big fucking lake, there’s no limit to what it can do to me. My entire relationship with the world changes when I allow myself to get that low. I could actually feel the night go dull around me. I could feel strength leave my muscle tissue. I was beginning to feel the cold. The sparkle of the stars and the glow of the snow, the sharpness of my footsteps and the steady songs of my body—my pulse and my breathing—were pulling away from me. I knew I’d lose them for sure if my spirit couldn’t close the ground. I’d just been jogging, so I started to run. I kicked my knees up high and blew my breath out in sharp whacks against the cold. I spit into the shadows and sent my physical and spiritual warriors on the warpath. I felt a lot better when I hit the park. The night was sharp again and my blood was rumbling. I had a strong buffer stoked up against the cold. Christmas carols wafted faintly from the Lutheran church. They have a tape that runs day and night. They play it real low and it creates a fairyland atmosphere. What can it hurt? I half expected to see Jesus crunching moodily through the park. Poor fucker with all those wasted dreams, all those deluded souls on his back. For a second I thought I did see him off across the track. But it was only Kuch, sneaking from tree to tree, fixing to surprise-attack me. We gave Dad the word on Cindy this morning at breakfast. “A decent woman,” I said. “A good person,” Carla said. We left it at that, not wanting to overbear. XVTo get to see the deer you take Indian Trail Road past the dump almost to Indian Painted Rocks, then turn off on a road the county keeps plowed so they can drive out and dump pelleted alfalfa for the deer. Unless you drive some kind of snow vehicle or a car like our 1941 DeSoto, it’s fairly easy to get stuck, even with the road plowed. The DeSoto is heavy as a mastodon, and with sixteen-inch wheels and a fluid-drive transmission, we cannot get stuck on level ground. Providing the snow isn’t unreasonably deep, that is. Just in case, I’ve got the trunk loaded with sandbags. We brought our tape player and some appropriate deer-watching tapes, a few cold steamed vegetables, a thermos of tea with honey, a can of chicken-vegetable baby food for Katzen, and her blanket and her bear and her vitamins and pooping pan.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  33 Waking in the Blue We are all old timers. Each of us holds a locked razor. —Robert Lowell, “Waking in the Blue” Three weeks after the lamest stab in suicide’s history, I sit typing in the sunlit hall of that asylum so famous one Ivy-League poet later suggests I include my time there on a résumé. In my blue-striped robe and vomit-green happy slippers, I’m finishing a poem about a particular circle of hell in which a sinner is fixed on endless video reruns of her every screwup. An eternity of reruns with eyelids held open by clothespins. Crucifixion by television. Which is how the end of my drinking felt—the anesthesia of liquor had stopped working, and there was nothing much else to aspire to. It’s a crappy poem based on an old idea, but I haven’t written in nine months, so I type it with a jeweler’s lapidary care, the goal being to get through without having to trek to the nurses’ station to borrow white-out, which my shrink has banished. How’s it dangerous? I ask Mary after my next typo. People find creative ways to hurt themselves, she says. Do I look like I wanna hurt myself? I breathe frost on the window and inscribe my initials with a little heart. You’re not the only one on the ward, she says. It pleases me that she plays along with my breezy, confident subterfuge, when I was a sobbing wreck two weeks before. I’d guard it from the other madwomen with my life, I say. She looks around to be sure the other nurses are still doling out meds, then whispers, Your doctor is lobbying to read your poems, in case they’re bad for your mental health. She can’t do that, I say. All kinds of poets wrote here—Anne Sexton, Robert Lowell. She can, I’m afraid, Mary says, her lovely face wearing a look of concern that unsettles me. I say, Don’t you think I’m ready to go home next week? My husband starts school. He’s working full-time. I’ve gotta start teaching. I don’t get to decide, she says. C’mon, Mary. Another nurse steps into the room with a piece of mail Warren had that morning dropped off for me. A delinquent bill, I figure. But the return address holds the scarlet shield of Radcliffe College—the Bunting Institute for women scholars. They’re probably writing to reiterate my rejection, I tell Mary, since the year before I’d applied—for the ninth time—for one of their fanciest postdoctoral fellowships. They gave you money and an office. Because my academic credentials were so stank, and my one book had proven ignorable. I’d never expected to get it. But one poet had decided not to come, and I’m runner-up. It’s maybe the first gift that I understand fully as such. Rather than feel the button-busting pride I’ve been chasing with a decade of arrogantly filled-out grant applications, I feel toadishly unworthy.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  If you get miserable enough, you’ll start taking suggestions. But I didn’t share my difficulties, and I didn’t pray, and a month later, I got drunk.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  The medieval church’s penal system led people to believe that they could earn their way to heaven, and that they therefore must try as hard as possible to do so. Most people weren’t especially successful at it. But Martin Luther had entered the life of a monk precisely because he wished to be successful at it. So he prayed the monastic hours every day as every monk must do, arising extremely early and praying all through the day. And he went to confession at every opportunity. So why did he feel he was making no progress? He confessed and confessed, and yet he knew that if he was honest, there were always some bad thoughts that he had forgotten to confess. Or perhaps if he had been thorough in confession, he would have experienced a sinful pride over that thoroughness, and now he was obliged to confess that pride. The bottom line was that he knew he wasn’t getting anywhere and it was all torturing him. Here he was, having forsaken all, having forsaken even the plans his dear father had worked so hard to make possible, and still he did not feel an iota of comfort that he had really made any spiritual progress. He seemed to be swimming against a riptide, growing more and more tired the harder he tried, to be going backward with every stroke, backward to death and perdition. Would all of these great efforts end with his going to hell after all? Luther Tries to Earn Heaven, FailsLuther was obsessive about confession. In fact, it eventually got to the point that his confessor—who ended up being Staupitz—began to get fed up with his maddeningly overscrupulous confessee. Once, Luther actually continued confessing for six consecutive hours, probing every nook and cranny of every conceivable sin and then every nook and cranny within each nook and cranny, until Staupitz must have been cross-eyed and perspiring just listening. When would it end? But Luther didn’t care. He was simply determined to keep digging until he got to the bottom of it all. But he never did. He did not yet understand that there really was no bottom, that we were sinful all the way down. All Luther knew was that as soon as he left confession, there likely lurked sins he had not ferreted out, despite his digging like a terrier after a rat. He knew that according to all he understood of church doctrine, a sin must be recalled and confessed before it could be repented of and forgiven. But hadn’t he tried as hard as possible to find and confess every one? How did the others do it? Was he more sinful than they? He concluded that he must be and must therefore try harder yet.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Peasant rebellions had been occurring here and there throughout Germany since the previous fall of 1524. But by mid-April, when Luther was in Eisleben—where he had traveled to help establish a Christian Latin school and where he wrote his Admonition to Peace—their rebellion had spread and was in full swing all around Germany. The emperor’s armies were fighting in France, so it had fallen to the local princes to defend themselves, and they had not proven equal to the sheer numbers of pike-wielding peasants. What the emperor was doing far beyond Germany—whether in dealing with difficulties to the west in France or to the east with the Turks—made all the difference in that it prevented him from doing much inside Germany that would have stanched the flow of these revolutionary ideas, sometimes for good and sometimes for ill. In this case, it seemed mostly for ill. What the peasants did in many cases was very disturbing. Their actions were as far from what Luther hoped would result from his ideas as imaginable. That Easter Sunday, for example, peasants captured the Count of Helfenstein and his soldiers near Weinsberg. Although the count endeavored to bargain with the peasants, drunk with their power they slaughtered him on the spot and then sadistically forced two dozen noblemen and their servants to run a gauntlet in which they were all stabbed to death with lances. Their bodies were left to rot. But Luther knew very little about what had been going on all around Germany—much less about such atrocities as happened near Weinsberg—and by the time he was finished advocating for peace, there was precious little peace left to be had. In fact, things were now boiling forward toward a final bloodbath. It was only after he had written this tract urging peace that he began to get a sense that things had moved far beyond what he had known. Everywhere Luther now traveled after Eisleben, he saw groups of peasants on the march, and he sensed the demonic spirit of murder that was in the air. He preached passionately against their violence and did all he could to exhort them to a peaceful conclusion, but those who had seen him as a friend and ally now only jeered at him. He traveled and preached through northern and middle Thuringia, but all in vain. The peasants had wandered far beyond the borders of reason, and Luther knew that the “spirit of Allstedt” had indeed taken hold of them.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Although the theology of the Christian faith had always been that God saved us from our sins—that Jesus was the Savior, not we—and that in his mercy and love God rescued us who could not rescue ourselves, there had nonetheless crept into the reality of Christian life another idea altogether, one that was dramatically opposed to this first idea. There was in medieval Christian life the strong implication that if one could not earn one’s own salvation outright, one could certainly go a long way toward earning it, and one had better do what one could. Had not others distinguished themselves in holy living? Had not the saints shown that it was possible to live holy lives? Had not even Saint Paul said we were to “work out our salvation with fear and trembling”?8 So the theology of the church had strayed very far from the pure idea that God saved us, and strongly implied that, on the contrary, we must save ourselves. Luther had no quibbles with this, and once inside the monastery, where he had time and space to study the Bible, he searched painstakingly for a path to heaven as few had ever done before. The reason it was all so pernicious was that there were clear implications it really was up to the sinner to redeem himself, that this was indeed achievable, and that whether with the help of God’s grace or not, others had done it and so could you. Luther, who was never cynical and who was sometimes innocent to the point of naïveté, took this all at face value and began to work the program, as it were, with all his will. But precisely because he was so scrupulous and honest and clear thinking, it didn’t work. Luther’s overactive mind was constantly finding ways in which he had fallen short, and so every time he went to confession, he confessed all of his sins, as he was supposed to do, but then, knowing that even one unconfessed sin would be enough to drag him down to hell, he racked his brain for more sins and found more. There was no end to them if one was honest about one’s thoughts, and Luther was entirely honest. What if he left confession but had forgotten to confess one errant foul thought from three days before? If one died before one had one’s last rites, one died “in one’s sins.” So Luther would drive himself and his confessor half-mad with his endless confessions, which seemed to make him feel no better, because he would torture himself afterward, feeling that surely he must have forgotten something.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Listen now, God and St. Peter call you. Consider the salvation of your souls and those of your loved ones departed. You priest, you noble, you merchant, you virgin, you matron, you youth, you old man, enter now into your church, which is the Church of St. Peter. Visit the most holy cross erected before you and ever imploring you. Have you considered that you are lashed in a furious tempest amid the temptations and dangers of the world, and that you do not know whether you can reach the haven, not of your mortal body, but of your immortal soul? Consider that all who are contrite and have confessed and made contribution will receive complete remission of all their sins. Listen to the voices of your dear dead relatives and friends, beseeching you and saying, “Pity us, pity us. We are in dire torment from which you can redeem us for a pittance.” Do you not wish to? Open your ears. Hear the father saying to his son, the mother to her daughter, “We bore you, nourished you, brought you up, left you our fortunes, and you are so cruel and hard that now you are not willing for so little to set us free. Will you let us lie here in flames? Will you delay our promised glory?” Remember that you are able to release them, for As soon as the coin in the coffer rings, The soul from purgatory springs.* Will you not then for a quarter of a florin receive these letters of indulgence through which you are able to lead a divine and immortal soul into the fatherland of praise?7 Over the centuries, the church bureaucracy had swelled to become something like a vast corporation or government whose distant leaders were out of touch with its various outposts. It had grown more and more powerful, and the rules and laws of the church had become less and less in tune with anything that would have been recognizable to the first-century Christians; so if Paul or Peter were to stumble upon the church of 1517, he could hardly recognize it as something that had grown out of what he had begun. [image file=image_rsrc6KS.jpg] An illustration of indulgence selling from 1521. The practice of selling indulgences, which had started as something consonant with the church’s teachings, had by Luther’s time slipped the surly bonds of all reasonableness. Thus does the “invisible hand of the market” unmoored from virtue fly troubleward. In his excellent book Brand Luther, Andrew Pettegree calls Cardinal Raymond Peraudi “the great impresario of the indulgence trade,” who brought

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  24 Affliction Affliction makes God appear to be absent for a time, more absent than a dead man, more absent than light in the utter darkness of a cell. A kind of horror submerges the whole soul. During this absence, there is nothing to love. —Simone Weil, “The Love of God and Affliction” I had not planned to get drunk. Ninety days without a drink, I was slated to read poems at Harvard College. This is—for a poet with a shiny new book being ignored for two years all over the planet—a big deal. Still, I inwardly shrink at the prospect of standing without numbing agent before an audience who would see through my thin skin to a rapidly agitating heart muscle. (Was Warren’s not being there due to the perennial unaffordable babysitter? Or did I discourage it? Or did he have a paper to work on? So much between us is blotted out.) The podium I approach sits in the middle of a student lounge with chairs lined up like a tribunal of judges. In my hand, the sheaf of papers shivers. I lean on the podium. I feel my puppet’s mouth open and shut, and I presume the words written down come out, though I say little between the poems. At the end, I’m okay, not having pissed my pants or had a seizure from shame. Some of my students even show up, which touches me. When dinner’s suggested, I’m steered to a restaurant not of my choosing, the first joint with a liquor license I’ve entered in months. Any trepidations I once had about a cocktail’s proximity go poof the instant I cross the threshold, for the atmosphere is harmlessly convivial. At the podium, I hadn’t felt like a poet. But here—among the patrons in crisp-collared shirts and wools that look nubbily expensive—I’m Apollinaire in Paris, just in from walking his lobster down the street on a leash. Somebody takes my coat. Every glass I pass is glittering. The host squires us to the heavy linen tablecloth, the chatter weaving around me, and when the waiter bends at the waist above me, smiling conspiratorially, I hear my puppet mouth ask for a martini. That inverted triangle of glass—with frost at its lip and a speared olive at its nexus—is the perfect accessory to the place. No lightning bolt splits the chandeliered ceiling to pin me where I perch. No one’s expression alters one whisker, and I don’t even consider canceling the order, since just placing it shifted some geological plates around my innards. It lends an almost sexual thrill to waiting for it. Delicious, crossing the threshold into abandon. The martini must’ve come, and I must’ve drunk it, but the wine and cognac and whatnot that I took in that night cauterize the memory. I briefly wake, stumbling down wet streets, looking for my car. How had I been deposited in Boston’s fashionable South End? I turn around on a cobbled street.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  For more than a whole week I have been tossed to and fro in death and in hell, so that I am still drained of all strength in my body and am trembling in all my limbs. I have lost Christ completely and have been shaken by the floods and storms of despair and blasphemy. However, as moved by the prayers of the saints, God has begun to have mercy on me and to snatch my soul from deepest hell.4 It is very difficult for the modern mind to make sense of Luther’s sufferings and to understand how he himself made sense of them. We are tempted to think he must only have been suffering from depression brought on by chemical imbalances and purely physical causes, and therefore to think he was imagining the rest of it. But Luther was himself convinced that this was spiritual warfare, that the enemy of our souls was attacking him, and we have to acknowledge that on this score he is well within the boundaries of standard Christian belief. The stories ranging from the New Testament accounts of Jesus’s dealing with demons all the way to present-day accounts of exorcisms attest to the persistence of such stories, all of which bear enough resemblance in their details to at least warrant being taken seriously. What is also perplexing to us is Luther’s clear suggestion that without the prayers of his friends he might have lost his faith and slipped into perdition. But here he is being perfectly consistent with his theological pronouncements elsewhere, that we are not the ones who pull ourselves into heaven but that God pulls us into heaven. All that is required of us is faith, and the barest modicum of faith is all that’s necessary. But here is the more dramatic point: that even when we don’t have faith, the faith of our friends and family can be enough. So he is saying that his friends’ prayers sustained him when he could not sustain himself. This is consonant with his doctrine that our prayers for an infant are enough to recommend him to God, that our faith for that speechless babe will suffice to open the child to the great channel of God’s mercy. On August 21, he wrote to Johannes Agricola in Eisleben, My hope is that my own battle is of service to many, although there is no evil that my sins have not deserved. Yet my life consists in this, that I know and boast that I have taught the Word of Christ purely and to the salvation of many. This burns up Satan, so that he would kill and destroy me along with the Word. That’s why I have not suffered at the hands of the tyrants of this world, while others have been killed and burned for Christ and have perished; I am buffeted all the more in the spirit by the prince of this world.5

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Melanchthon was not on board. He knew that Karlstadt and Zwilling had not managed things well, that events had taken an unnecessarily unpleasant and strident turn. But he never felt himself the person to restore order. He even now thought of leaving Wittenberg altogether. “The dam has broken,” he wrote, despondent, “and I cannot stem the waters.”15 Many students at the university, caught up in the emotional and rather millennialist tumult of these days, came to the conclusion that their studies were a waste of time. An outbreak of the plague in Wittenberg during this period must have exacerbated this end-time atmosphere. If all that mattered was “preaching the gospel” and saving souls before the Final Reckoning, which was soon to arrive, what was the blessed point of all their Humanistic studies? Why read the obscure thoughts of poets from antiquity when eternity yawned just up ahead? The sloppy anti-intellectualism that has plagued those most zealous about evangelism had here for the first time reared its ignorant head. Another reason some students left was that many of them survived financially by begging. It was something one saw in all university towns in Germany, so if begging was now prohibited by Wittenberg law, how were they any longer to survive? So, many of the students simply took the opportunity to go home. Wittenberg had now come to a genuine crisis, and the city council knew there was only one thing to do: Luther must be summoned home to help. No one had emerged with anything near his leadership abilities, and the time had come for him to put his Wartburg period in the rearview mirror.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  [Our] plan is to follow the example of the prophets and the ancient fathers of the church and to compose psalms for the people [in the] vernacular, that is spiritual songs, so that the Word of God may be among the people also in the form of music. Therefore we are searching everywhere for poets. Since you are endowed with a wealth [of knowledge] and elegance [in handling] the German language, and since you have polished [your German] through much use, I ask you to work with us in this project; try to adapt any one of the psalms for use as a hymn, as you may see [I have done] in this example. But I would like you to avoid any new words or the language used at court. In order to be understood by the people, only the simplest and the most common words should be used for singing; at the same time, however, they should be pure and apt; and further, the sense should be clear and as close as possible to the psalm. You need a free hand here; maintain the sense, but don’t cling to the words; [rather] translate them with other appropriate words.20 By inviting everyone to partake of the Christian experience in a way that had previously been impossible, Luther was really only opening the shades and the windows and letting the fresh air and the sunshine in. Both were meant to be free and to be freely enjoyed. More than that, they were essential for life. There were always risks in doing this. Sometimes insects would come into the house, and sometimes people would get sunburned, but living in a world without sunshine and fresh air was too high a price to pay to avoid these problems, so he was willing to take the risk. CHAPTER NINETEENThe Plague and Anfechtungen ReturnFor more than a whole week I have been tossed to and fro in death and in hell, so that I am still drained of all strength in my body and am trembling in all my limbs. —Luther in a letter to Melanchthon Dear God, what misery I beheld! The ordinary person, especially in the villages, knows absolutely nothing about the Christian faith, and unfortunately many pastors are completely unskilled and incompetent teachers. —Luther, Small Catechism THE YEAR 1527 began with Luther calling King Henry VIII of England a Satan worshipper. On New Year’s Day, he wrote a letter to his friend Wenceslas Linck: Persuaded by the king of Denmark, I wrote a humble and suppliant letter to the king of England [Henry VIII]; I had high hopes and wrote with a guileless and candid heart. He has answered me with such hostility that he sounds . . . as if he rejoiced in the opportunity for revenge. These tyrants have weak, unmanly, and thoroughly sordid characters that make them unworthy of serving any but the rabble. . . . I disdain them and their god Satan.1

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  I don’t know where I get the sentences to speak to her. Maybe honest care for her just infected me, but I say, Whenever you cut yourself, you’re carving your mother’s sick message into your flesh. Digging through the freezer for ice, Tina says, How many shrinks does it take to screw in a lightbulb? I’m serious, I say. None, she says, emerging with a container of yogurt. She adds, The lightbulb has to want to change. I mean it. It’s like me with a drink. Every time I used a manhattan to take the edge off, I never got any better coping skills. Like what? Making a cup of tea. Going to the gym. Calling a pal to unload. She’s pouring tea over ice that crackles in its plastic glass. She turns to me and says, What if none of your pals are home? What if you don’t have a single fucking pal? What if you’re a boy trapped in a girl’s body and the kids at your school call you Pussyeater and Butch and Muffdiver? You tell yourself they’re shitheels and find somebody lonelier than you to be nice to. What if there’s nobody lonelier than you? she says. She turns away to shield her face. I’m standing in the chasm of her statement when she whirls around and throws the yogurt—with the force of a major league pitcher—into the trash can so it splatters up the sides. She stalks out, hitting the light switch on the way. The next morning I wake early, hearing flame-haired Flora in the quiet room, howling in some unintelligible tongue. I step from my room into the faint odor of eucalyptus. The aroma builds up as I get close to the dayroom. A nurse brushes past me, her arms braceleted in red-ribboned Christmas wreaths. Peering past her, I see dozens of wreaths of every kind. They fill the chairs where residents usually hang out. The nurses are stacking them on a dolly the custodians would (with bemused faces) wheel onto the service elevator. Off to one side, Pam stands with an orange ping-pong paddle, occasionally bouncing the ball on it. She says, You missed the showdown. It turns out Tina planted in Betty the hope that—with her extraordinary talent for floral arrangement and Tina’s acumen—they could make millions selling wreaths. Betty could be free from her father’s house, and Tina could leave public housing. So for weeks they’ve been ginning out an extra wreath here and there, squirreling them away in the art room. But in the small and densely packed confines of Tina’s skull, the plan’s gotten larger and larger—visits on Oprah and Johnny Carson are involved. After she stormed out on me the night before, she convinced Betty to break into the art room in the wee hours, even luring Flora and Willy to chip in, like stockholders. At dawn, the day nurses found wreaths by the stack.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  So I failed to tell her that my husband and I had barely spoken that week, and sometimes, before I made dinner, I considered dousing the oven’s pilot light and sticking my head in. Or that—driving to my in-laws’ for Christmas dinner—I’d risen at four, ostensibly to bake pies but actually to drive around the local reservoir, finishing a six-pack of beer while listening to Argentine tangos. Wheeling in tight rings at about sixty around the local reservoir—night smearing across the windows as the tangos unrolled—I’d felt myself circling my marriage and being erased with each rotation. Around and around my head I went. My longed-for circle of family is choking me. The silk bow ties on my cheap business blouses—that middle-class disguise I’d wished for—are choking me. The good family name for my son is a strangle, since it forces me to drive with a restless kid hours in murderous traffic to dine with polite people who never, not in decades, stop being strangers. I’d never have let on when Warren and I married how it tickled me to see our names in the Social Registry, an attitude I now despise in myself, and my sole act of penance had been agreeing with Warren to take us out. During the war-zone months of early infancy when Warren slept, it was as if every hour of sleep I lost, he’d stolen. Now I’ve placed Warren at the radiant center of my misery, no longer comrade but capo. We’ve devolved into a cold war with a child-centered détente. Whap...thunk. The scanning light casts my face the color of ectoplasm in horror films. Plus, just thinking about the easeful, educated parents at daycare makes my throat sour. Walking up the tree-lined boulevard toward the center always brings out my inner Igor. I often run into Wincing Evan, so called because of the flinch—bordering on a Tourette’s-like seizure—he goes into whenever he spots Dev and me approaching. Head down, he’ll actually scamper across the street to avoid saying hello. In some ways, Evan is a figure of the type I aspire to cut. He translates (let’s say) Gogol. He publishes in The New York Review of Books and abroad. Unlike the blocky Boston bankers who abound in Harvard Square, he cruises in for Parents’ Day wearing a fluid flannel coat with French tailoring, for he and his professor wife (a comp-lit professor whose easy red-lipped smile could’ve sold lipstick) summer overseas often enough to use summer as a verb. Their immaculately turned-out son—Jonathan, age under four years—has shining hair and a good start on French and German. He’s a chess player with a princely manner. I swear if his voice were a little deeper, he could join the diplomatic corps. I once saw Dev, whose sandwich that day was, as most days, a peon’s peanut butter and jelly, try to urge Jonathan into swapping lunches. Young Jonathan peeled back one corner of his seven-grain bread carefully enough not to break the crust.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  11 In Search of Incompetence I don’t drink every day, but I find myself unpredictably blotto at inopportune times. Like the night before my thirtieth birthday: I lie fully dressed—albeit shoeless—in a charcoal business suit in the bathtub of a Silicon Valley motel, sipping whiskey from one of those minibar bottles that makes you pucker your lips into a doll’s pinhole mouth. On the shag rug, the legal pad with notes for my all day corporate presentation tomorrow holds a single x and y axis drawn into an L-shaped graph. To say I’m ill prepared understates the problem. My sole plan is to: (1) stride into the boardroom; (2) smile like a monkey as I briskly shake hands. Then I imagine a diaphanous veil falling across the rest of my presentation. I lie in the cold bath as in a tomb. From the outer hallway comes a ruckus that works on my brain like an eggbeater. Much of the Loyola men’s basketball team is running hither and yon, playing some game with a tennis ball. Every now and then they hurl the ball against my hollow-core door. This is not an accident. Earlier tonight, with rabid expression and possibly some spit spray, I told the team they had to keep it down or I’d call the front desk. They froze and stared as if some bog creature had reared up from the mud. The instant I closed the door, the game resumed at full decibel level. The rusty old clerk who came to rescue me had a dowager’s hump that kept him bent over at ninety degrees. He kept glancing over his shoulder at the ballplayers arrayed behind as he said, We’re full tonight. I can’t move your room. Then he turned on his heel and hightailed it through the gauntlet of giants back to the elevator, which two looming guys were holding open. Against the hotel door, the tennis ball occasionally whams, shaking the door earthquakelike on its hinges. If they could bust in, they’d throw me on a bonfire and torch me, I know it. They must sense the pitiful failure I’m mired in: turning thirty, far from home and family, making it up as I go. Worst of all, I’ve failed to publish a book, which means my ancient fantasy of being a writer has abraded off like the name on a wind-worn tombstone. I unscrew the tiny bottle of vodka’s red lid and suck a few drops. Every asshole I know has published a book. Over six years, I’ve collected rejections for my manuscript, sometimes the occasional nice note for second place. So a sheaf of dog-eared pages curling at the edges lies on my desk like drying roadkill, though every dang poem in it has come out in some literary mag, which is—as Warren points out—not nothing.

• From A History of God (1993)

  John Wesley had always been a fervent Christian. When he was a young Fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford, he and his brother Charles had founded a society for undergraduates, known as the Holy Club. It was strong on method and discipline, so its members became known as Methodists. In 1735, John and Charles sailed to the colony of Georgia in America as missionaries, but John returned disconsolate two years later, noting in his journal: “I went to America to convert the Indians; but oh, who will convert me?”27 During the voyage, the Wesleys had been much impressed by some missionaries of the Moravian sect, which eschewed all doctrine and insisted that religion was simply an affair of the heart. In 1738 John underwent a conversion experience during a Moravian meeting in a chapel in Aldersgate Street, London, which convinced him that he had received a direct mission from God to preach this new kind of Christianity throughout England. Thenceforth he and his disciples toured the country, preaching to the working classes and the peasantry in the markets and fields. The experience of being “born again” was crucial. It was “absolutely necessary” to experience “God continually breathing, as it were, upon the human soul,” filling the Christian with “a continual, thankful love to God” that was consciously felt and which made it “natural and, in a manner, necessary, to love every child of God with kindness, gentleness and long suffering.”28 Doctrines about God were useless and could be damaging. The psychological effect of Christ’s words on the believer was the best proof of the truth of religion. As in Puritanism, an emotional experience of religion was the only proof of genuine faith and hence of salvation. But this mysticism-for-everybody could be dangerous. Mystics had always stressed the perils of the spiritual paths and warned against hysteria: peace and tranquillity were the signs of a true mysticism. This Born-Again Christianity could produce frenzied behavior, as in the violent ecstasies of the Quakers and Shakers. It could also lead to despair: the poet William Cowper (1731–1800) went mad when he no longer felt saved, imagining that this lack of sensation was a sign that he was damned.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  19 The Mokus Squirreliness of the Unmet Mind ...oh how oddly the drinker seems to withdraw from the act of drinking. —Rainer Maria Rilke, “Second Elegy” (trans. David Young) I keep getting drunk. There’s no more interesting way to say it. Only drunk does the volume crank down. Liquor no longer lets me bullshit myself that I’m taller, faster, funnier. Instead, it shrinks me to a plodding zombie state in which one day smudges into every other—it blurs time. Swaying on the back landing in the small hours, I stare at the boxy garage and ghostly replicas of it multiplying along either side, like playing cards spread against the slate sky. Though this plural perspective is standard, I’m surprised by my own shitfaced state. The walkman sends punk rock banging across the tiny bones of my ears. And with the phonebook-sized stack of papers on my lap still unmarked, I—once more, with feeling—take the pledge to quit drinking. Cross my heart. Pinky swear to myself. This is it, I say, the last night I sit here. Okay, I say in my head. I give. You’re right. (Who am I talking to? Fighting with?) By the next afternoon, while I’m lugging the third armload of groceries up the back stairs, Dev, who’s bolted ahead to the living room, shrieks like he’s been stabbed, and I drop the sack on the kitchen floor, hearing as it hits what must be a jar of tomato sauce detonating. In the living room, I find Dev has leaped—illicitly, for the nine hundredth time—off the sofa back, trying to land in the clothes basket like a circus diver into a bucket of water. He’s whapped his noggin on the coffee table corner. Now dead center on his pale, formerly smooth forehead, there’s a blue knot like a horn trying to break through. I gather him up and rush to the kitchen, aiming to grab a soothing bag of frozen peas. But I step on a shard of tomato sauce jar, gash my instep, slide as on a banana peel, barely hanging on to Dev till we skid to a stop. I tiptoe across the linoleum, dragging a snail of blood till I can plop him in a kitchen chair, instructing him to hold the peas to his head and not move an inch while I bunny- hop upstairs to bandage my foot. Coming back, I find he’s dragged the formerly white laundry into the kitchen to mop up the tomato sauce. I’m helping, he says, albeit surrounded by gleaming daggers of glass while on his forehead the blue Bambi horn seems to throb. Minutes later, my hand twists off a beer cap as I tell myself that a beer isn’t really a drink after all. So I have another after that to speed preparing the pot roast, and maybe even a third.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Human beings have always created a faith for themselves, to cultivate their sense of the wonder and ineffable significance of life. The aimlessness, alienation, anomie and violence that characterize so much of modern life seem to indicate that now that they are not deliberately creating a faith in “God” or anything else—it matters little what—many people are falling into despair. In the United States, we have seen that ninety-nine percent of the population claim to believe in God, yet the prevalence of fundamentalism, apocalypticism and “instant” charismatic forms of religiosity in America is not reassuring. The escalating crime rate, drug addiction and the revival of the death penalty are not signs of a spiritually healthy society. In Europe there is a growing blankness where God once existed in the human consciousness. One of the first people to express this dry desolation—quite different from the heroic atheism of Nietzsche—was Thomas Hardy. In “The Darkling Thrush,” written on December 30, 1900, at the turn of the twentieth century, he expressed the death of spirit that was no longer able to create a faith in life’s meaning: I leant upon a coppice gate When Frost was spectre-grey And Winter’s dregs made desolate The weakening eye of day. The tangled bine-stems scored the sky Like strings of broken lyres, And all mankind that haunted nigh Had sought their household fires. The land’s sharp features seemed to be The Century’s corpse outleant, His crypt the cloudy canopy, The wind his death-lament. The ancient pulse of germ and birth Was shrunken hard and dry, And every spirit upon earth Seemed fervourless as I. At once a voice arose among The bleak twigs overhead In a full-hearted evensong Of joy illimited; An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small, In blast-beruffled plume, Had chosen thus to fling his soul Upon the growing gloom. So little cause for carolings Of such ecstatic sound Was written on terrestrial things Afar or nigh around, That I could think there trembled through His happy good-night air Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew And I was unaware. Human beings cannot endure emptiness and desolation; they will fill the vacuum by creating a new focus of meaning. The idols of fundamentalism are not good substitutes for God; if we are to create a vibrant new faith for the twenty-first century, we should, perhaps, ponder the history of God for some lessons and warnings. Glossary Alam al-mithal (Arabic) The world of pure images: the archetypal world of the imagination that leads the Muslim mystic and contemplative philosopher to God. Alem (plural, ulema) (Arabic) Muslim cleric. Apatheia (Greek) Impassibility, serenity and invulnerability. These characteristics of the God of the Greek philosophers became central to the Christian conception of God, who was considered impervious to suffering and change. Apophatic (Greek). Silent.