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 Jesus and the Disinherited (1949)

  The logic of the development of hatred is death to the spirit and disintegration of ethical and moral values. Above and beyond all else it must be borne in mind that hatred tends to dry up the springs of creative thought in the life of the hater, so that his resourcefulness becomes completely focused on the negative aspects of his environment. The urgent needs of the personality for creative expression are starved to death. A man’s horizon may become so completely dominated by the intense character of his hatred that there remains no creative residue in his mind and spirit to give to great ideas, to great concepts. He becomes lopsided. To use the phrase from Zarathurstra, he becomes “a cripple in reverse.” Jesus rejected hatred. It was not because he lacked the vitality or the strength. It was not because he lacked the incentive. Jesus rejected hatred because he saw that hatred meant death to the mind, death to the spirit, death to communion with his Father. He affirmed life; and hatred was the great denial. To him it was clear Thou must not make division. Thy mind, heart, soul and strength must ever search To find the way by which the road To all men’s need of thee must go. This is the Highway of the Lord.1 1 From my privately published volume of poems, The Greatest of These, p. 9. CHAPTER FIVELoveT HE religion of Jesus makes the love-ethic central. This is no ordinary achievement. It seems clear that Jesus started out with the simple teaching concerning love embodied in the timeless words of Israel: “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord: and thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might,” and “thy neighbour as thyself.” Once the neighbor is defined, then one’s moral obligation is clear. In a memorable story Jesus defined the neighbor by telling of the Good Samaritan. With sure artistry and great power he depicted what happens when a man responds directly to human need across the barriers of class, race, and condition. Every man is potentially every other man’s neighbor. Neighborliness is nonspatial; it is qualitative. A man must love his neighbor directly, clearly, permitting no barriers between. This was not an easy position for Jesus to take within his own community. Opposition to his teaching increased as the days passed. A twofold demand was made upon him at all times: to love those of the household of Israel who became his enemies because they regarded him as a careless perverter of the truths of God; to love those beyond the household of Israel—the Samaritan, and even the Roman. The former demand was deeply dramatized by the fact that Jesus did not consider himself as one who stood outside of Israel.

• From Jesus and the Disinherited (1949)

  In any contest he is defeated before he starts. He cannot meet his opponent on equal terms, because there is no basis of equality that exists between the weak and the strong. The only thing that counts is victory—or any level on which victory can be achieved. There can be no question of honesty in dealing with each other, for there is no sense of community. Such a mood takes for granted a facile insincerity. The fact is, in any great struggle between groups in which the major control of the situation is on one side, the ethical question tends to become merely academic. The advantaged group assumes that they are going to be fooled, if it is possible; there is no expectation of honesty and sincerity. They know that every conceivable device will be used to render ineffective the advantage which they have inherited in their position as the strong. The pattern of deception by which the weak are deprived of their civic, economic, political, and social rights without its appearing that they are so deprived is a matter of continuous and tragic amazement. The pattern of deception by which the weak circumvent the strong and manage to secure some of their political, economic, and social rights is a matter of continuous degradation. A vast conspiracy of silence covers all these maneuvers as the groups come into contact with each other, and the question of morality is not permitted to invade it. The tragic consequences of the alternative that there is no alternative are not far to seek. In the first place, it tends to destroy whatever sense of ethical values the individual possesses. It is a simple fact of psychology that if a man calls a lie the truth, he tampers dangerously with his value judgments. Jesus called attention to that fact in one of his most revealing utterances. His mother, in an attempt to excuse him from the harsh judgment of his enemies, said that he was a little out of his mind—not terribly crazy, but just a little off-balance. Those who did not like him said that he was all right with regard to his mind, but that he was full of the devil, and that it was by the power of the devil that he was casting out devils. Jesus, hearing the discussion, said that these men did not talk good sense: “A house … divided against itself … cannot stand.” He suggested that if they continued saying that he was casting out devils by the power of the devil—and they knew that such was not the case—they would commit the unpardonable sin. That is to say, if a man continues to call a good thing bad, he will eventually lose his sense of moral distinctions. Is this always the result? Is it not possible to quarantine a certain kind of deception so that it will not affect the rest of one’s life?

• 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)

  30 Hour of Lead This is the Hour of Lead— Remembered, if outlived, As freezing persons recollect the Snow— First—Chill—then Stupor—then the letting go— —Emily Dickinson, “After great pain” O nly an alcoholic can so discombobulate her insides that she might weigh in her hands two choices—(a) get drunk and drive into stuff with more molecular density than she has, and (b) be a present and loving mother to her son—and, on picking the latter, plunge into despair. Which explains why I don’t deplane in Boston, saying, Lucky me, freed from paycheck work. Let’s settle down and raise a book . Instead, I come back feeling alternately mite-sized and unworthy, panicked as a felon facing the electric chair thanks to that fat grant. The time I’d bitched for years about not having now falls in abundance. But each day becomes a gray tundra I wade across. Notebooks from that time contain increasingly ornate doodles, designs and lines like (I kid you not) I am sad, the end, by Mary Karr . In the past, I’ve been able to learn poems or whole paragraphs by heart. Now lines pour through me like water. Guilt shadows every underemployed breath. Maybe I steer clear of Warren so much because while I do less, he slaves like a field hand—a forty-hour work week, classes three nights a week, with massive course work and a book-length master’s thesis on Robert Lowell to finish, plus Dev in the evenings and the magazine. Any night he’s home by six, I saunter out to a meeting. Our couples therapy has trailed off. The trips to his parents’ big house, I virtually stop going along on—Christmas being an exception—arguing that the abundant booze makes me nuts. The more Warren does, the more lardassed I get, wallowing in my dusty psychic moonscape. I complete not one sit-up, squat-press no weight, trot not a block. Thrown into a pool, I’d have sunk to the bottom and drowned before flapping a stroke. My daddy’s phrases for the lazy sometimes flurry through me— Wouldn’t say sooey if the hogs were eating her…Wouldn’t hit a lick at a snake reared back …Standing in the shower, I feel something on the back of my leg that turns out to be my ass. One day I might splay across the sofa staring at infomercials with the sound off, wondering whether the Abdominizer is the answer, or the Pocket Fisherman, or that glittering altar of knives. My mental function drags. I walk out leaving the refrigerator open, lock keys in the car more than once. Warren and I sleep together on separate sides, and while for years my revved-up libido has amused me in private, now even that has puttered to a halt. At the halfway house, I develop an aficionado’s taste for Thai kickboxing. Or I languish on their porch among the disabled, pondering the design on a pack of smokes.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  He therefore cultivated a careful facade of respectable Christianity, but in La Celestina, first published in 1499, we find a bleak secularism beneath the bawdy exuberance. There is no God; love is the supreme value, but when love dies, the world is revealed as a wasteland. At the end of the play, Pleberio laments the suicide of his daughter, who alone gave meaning to his life. “O world, world,” he concludes, “when I was young I thought there was some order governing you and your deeds.” But now you seem to be a labyrinth of errors, a frightful desert, a den of wild beasts, a game in which men move in circles ... a stony field, a meadow full of serpents, a flowering but barren orchard, a spring of cares, a river of tears, a sea of suffering, a vain hope. 27 Unable to practice the old faith, alienated by the cruelty of the Inquisition from the new, Rojas had fallen into a despair that could find no meaning, no order, and no ultimate value. The last thing that Ferdinand and Isabella had intended was to make Jews skeptical unbelievers. But throughout our story we will find that coercion of the sort they employed is counterproductive. The attempt to force people to accept the prevailing ideology against their will or before they are ready for it often results in ideas and practices which, in the eyes of the persecuting authorities themselves, are highly undesirable. Ferdinand and Isabella were aggressive modernizers who sought to suppress all dissidence; but their inquisitorial methods led to the formation of a secret Jewish underground and to the first declarations of secularism and atheism in Europe. Later some Christians would become so disgusted by this type of religious tyranny that they too would lose faith in all revealed religion. But secularism could be just as ferocious and, during the twentieth century, the imposition of a secularist ethos in the name of progress has been an important factor in the rise of a militant fundamentalism, which has sometimes been fatal to the government concerned. In 1492, about eighty thousand Jews who had refused to convert to Christianity had been given asylum in Portugal by King João II. It is among these Portuguese Jews and their descendants that we find the most outright and dramatic instances of atheism. Some of these Jews desperately wanted to retain their Jewish faith, yet found it either difficult or impossible to do so because they had no adequate cult. The Jews who fled to Portugal in 1492 were tougher than the Spanish conversos: they preferred to be deported rather than abjure their faith. When Manuel I succeeded to the throne in 1495, he was compelled by Ferdinand and Isabella, his parents-in-law, to have the Jews in his domains forcibly baptized, but he compromised by granting them immunity from the Inquisition for a generation.

• From A Greek-English Lexicon (Liddell-Scott) (1957)

  apa, Ion. apy, 7, a prayer, Il. 15. 378, 598., 23. 199, Hes. Op. 724, Pind. I. 5 (6). 63; ἀρὴν ἐποιήσαντο παῖδα γενέσθαι ᾿Αρίστωνι offered prayers that a child should be born, Hadt. 6. 63. 2. a curse, im- precation, execration, ἐξ ἀρέων μητρὸς .., ἥ pa θεοῖσιν πολλ᾽ ἀχέουσ᾽ ἠρᾶτο Il. 9. 566; freq. in Trag., who also mostly use it in pl., 6. g. Aesch. Pr. gio, Soph. O. T. 295, Eur. Phoen. 67; ἀρὰς ἀρᾶσθαι, προστιθέναι, ἐξανιέναι Soph. O. C. 952, 154,1375; but also in sing., πατρὸς δ᾽ dpa. . κρανθήσεται Aesch, Pr. 910, cf. 946, Ag. 457, etc.; ἡ τοῦ νόμου dpa Plat. Legg. 871 B; ἀρᾷ... ἔνοχος ἔστω Ib. 742-B, etc. :—dpal, dirae, im- precations, are freq. in Inscrr. on those who shall mutilate or remove them, C. 1. 989-991, 2664, al.; v. Newton Halic. 2. pp. 720-45. II. the effect of the curse, bane, ruin, ἀρὴν érapotow ἀμύνειν 1]. 12. 3343 ἀρῆς ἀλκτῆρα γενέσθαι 18. 100; ἀρὴν καὶ λοιγὸν ἀμῦναι 24. 489; cf. Od. 2.59; so in Aesch. Supp. 83, where the gloss of the Schol., βλάβης confirms the reading ἀρῆς for apys. III. ’Apa is personified as the goddess of destruction and revenge, Lat. Dira, distinct from, though with the same office as the Erinyes in Soph. El. 111, ὦ πότνι᾽ ᾿Αρά, σεμναί τε θεῶν παῖδες ᾿Ἐρινύες ; δεινόπους ‘Apa (cf. χαλκόπους Epis) 14. Ο. Τ. 418; but in Aesch. Eum. 417 the Erinyes say that ᾿Αραΐ is their own name γῆς trai, cf. Theb. 701 ;—in Theb. 70 “Apa is addressed as the curse of Oedipus personified; ᾿Αρᾶς ἱερόν Ar. Fr. 481. (Hence the Verb ἀράομαι.) [ἄρ-- Ep. in arsi, dp— in thesi, but in signf. 11. ἄρ-- always. In Att. always dp-.] ᾿Αραβ-άρχης, ov, 6, prefect of the Arabian nome in Egypt, C. 1. 4751, 5075, Joseph. A. J. 18. 8, 1, and received by some Editors (from Mss.) in Cic. Att. 2.17, Juven. 1. 130, for ᾿Αλαβάρχης, Alabarches. This latter form is explained to mean tax-gatherer, in which sense it is applied by Cicero to Pompey ; and in Joseph. it appears to be the name of the chief officer of the Jews at Alexandria.—The question is whether both forms existed, or whether one (and if so, which) is a corruption of the other : cf. dAaBapxéw, ἀλαβαρχία, and v. omn. Sturz Dial. Mac. pp. 65 sq. ἄραβδος, v. ἄρραβδος. ἀράβδωτος, ν. ἀρράβδωτος. ἀραβέω, fut. ἤσω, (ἄραβος) to rattle, ring, Hom. (mostly in Il.) and always of armour, ἤριπεν ἐξ ὀχέων, ἀράβησε δὲ τεύχε᾽ ἐπ᾽ αὐτῷ Il. 5. 42, εἴς. ; of the teeth, to gnash, Theocr. 22. 126; ἀραβεῖ δ᾽ ἃ γνάθος Epich. g Ahr.: but trans. in Hes. Sc. 249, Ap. Rh. 2. 281, ἀρ. ὀδόντας to gnash or grind the teeth.

• From A Greek-English Lexicon (Liddell-Scott) (1957)

  ἀ-πολίτευτος [1], ov, without political constitution (πολιτεία), of nations, Arist. Pol. 7. 7, 2. If. taking no part in public matters, no statesman, Plut. Mar. 31: withdrawn from, unfit for public affairs, Bios, γῆρας Id. 2. 1098 Ὁ, etc.; of offices, language, etc., Id. Crass. 12., 2.7 A, etc.; ἀπ. θάνατος as of a private person, 1d. Lyc. 29 3 ἀπ. λόγοι unpopular language, Id. 2. 1034 B. ἀ-πολίτης [1], ov, 6, a non-citizen, i.e. exile, pedantic word in Theo- pomp. Hist. 332. ἀ-πολῖτικός, ἡ, dv, unfit for public business, Οἷς. Att. 8. 16, I, in Sup. ἀπολιχμάομαι, Dep. = ἀπολείχω, to lick off, αἷμα Il. 21. 123; the Act. occurs in Dion. H. 1. 79. II. to lick, τὸ πρόσωπον Longus 1. 5. ἀ-πολλαπλάσιος, ov, not a multiple, not manifold, Damasc. ἀπολλήγω, v. ἀπολήγω sub fin. ᾿Απολλό-δωρος, ov, 6, n. pr., Apollodorus, Thuc. 7. 20, etc. :—hence Adj. -δώρειος, ov, αἵρεσις Strabo 625. ἀπ-όλλῦμε or —bw (Thuc. 4. 25, Arist. Pol. 4. 12, 6, Menand. Incert. 7, though the form is rejected by the Atticists) : impf. ἀπώλλυν Aesch. Pers. 654, Soph. El. 1360, but ἀπώλλυον Andoc. 8. 37: fut. ἀπολέσω, Ep. ἀπολέσσω, Att. ἀπολῶ, lon. ἀπολέω Hat. 1. 34, al.: aor. ἀπώλεσα, Ep. ἀπό- Aeooa: pf. ἀπολώλεκα :—Hom. often uses it in tmesis: the Prep. comes last in Od. 9. 534. Stronger form of ὄλλυμι, to destroy utterly, kill, slay, Hom., who uses it chiefly of death in battle, ἀπώλεσε λαὸν ᾿Αχαιῶν 1]. 5. 758, al.; ἐκπάγλως ἀπόλεσσαν 1. 268 :—also of things, to demolish, to lay waste, ἀπώλεσεν Ἴλιον ἱρήν 5. 648, etc. :—then very freq. in all relations, βίοτον δ᾽ ἀπὸ πάμπαν ὀλέσσει will waste my substance, Od. 2. 49; of μ᾽ ἀπωλλύτην sought to destroy me (impf. sense), Soph. O. C. 1454; in pregnant sense, ἐπεί με yas ἐκ πατρίας ἀπώ- λεσε drove me ruined from .. , Eur. Hec. 946 :—dm. τί τινος to destroy for the sake of .., Dem. 107. 9:—from phrases like λόγοις ἀπ. τινά Soph. El. 1360, λέγων ἀπ. τινά Ar. Nub. 892, comes the sense to talk or bore one to death, in fut., ἀπολεῖς με Id. Ach. 470; off ὡς ἀπολεῖς pe Pherecr. Μεταλλ. 1. 20; ἀπολεῖ μ᾽ οὑτοσί, by his questions, Antiph. Φιλωτ. 1.8, etc.:—to ruin a woman, Lys. 92. 26. II. to lose utterly, πατέρ᾽ ἐσθλὸν ἀπώλεσα Od, 2. 46, cf. Il. 18.82; ἀπώλεσε νόστιμον ἣμαρ Od. 1. 354; ἀπὸ θυμὸν ὀλέσσαι to lose one’s life, Il. 16. 861, Od. 12. 350; but, θυμὸν ob ἀπώλεσεν loses not his spirit, Soph. El. 26; ἵππους οἱ ἀπολλύασι Thuc. 7. 51; ἀπώλεσαν τὴν ἀρχὴν ὑπὸ Περσῶν Xen. An. 3. 4, Il, οἵ, 7. 2, 22; μηδὲν ἀπολλὺς τοῦ ὄγκου Plat. Theaet. 154 C, etc.

• From A Greek-English Lexicon (Liddell-Scott) (1957)

  ἀπ-ογκέω, fut. Now, (ὄγκος) to swell up, Hipp. 517. 28. ἀπογλαυκόομαι, Pass. to suffer from γλαύκωμα, of the eyes, Plut. Timol. 37; ᾿Απεγλαυκωμένος ἃ play of Alexis (Com. Gr. 3. p. 389). ἀπογλαύκωσις, ews, %, the growing of a Ὑλαύκωμα, Diosc. 1. 64. ἀπογλάφομαι, Med. to scrape off from oneself, obliterate, τὸν ἄνδρα... ἀπεγλαψάμην Com. Anon. 96, cf. Eust. 1504. 21. ἀπόγλουτος, ov, with small rump, Lat. depygis, Suid. 5. ν. λίσποι. GmoyAtKatve, fut. ἄνῶ, to sweeten, Diod. τ. 40; ἀπεγλυκασμένος Diphil. Siphn. ap. Ath. 55 E. ἀπογλύὕφη, ἡ, a place scraped bare, Medic. Ore, ° 3 απογαιος aT ἀποδάκνω. 111 ἀπογλύφω [Ὁ], fut. ψω, to scrape or peel off, Aretae. Cur. M. Diut. 1. 2, Alciphro 3. 60. ἀπογλωττίζομαι, Pass. to be deprived of “tongue, Luc. Lene Dabs ἀπόγνοια, ἡ, (ἀπογιγνώσκω) despair, TOU κρατεῖν Thuc. 23. 85. ἀπογνώμων, ον, of horses, -- ἀγνώμων, λιπογνώμων Hesych., Suid. ἀπογνωσιμἄχέω, Strengthd. for γνωσιμαχέω, ἘΠΡΡῚ 1202. 50. ἀπόγνωσις, ews, ἡ, -- ἀπόγνοια, τοῦ βίου Dion. . 1.81, Aretae. Caus. M. Ac. 2. 2, Luc. Somn. 17. ἀπογνωστέον, verb. Adj. one must give up in despair, ἐλπίδας Philo 1. 455. 2. one must despair of, τινός Synes. 154. C. ἀπογνωστής, οὔ, ὁ, -- ἀπογιγνώσκων, a desperate man, Hesych. ἀπογνωστικῶς, Adv. in a desperate way, as in a hopeless case, Arr. Epict. 3.1, 24. The Adj. -ικός, 7, dv, is found in Jo. Damasc. ἀπογομόω, = ἀπογεμίζω, Epiphan, ἀπογομφόω, to un-nail, i.e. take to pieces, Nicet. Ann. 210 C. ἀπογονή, 7, -- ἀπογέννημα, issue, posterity, Gloss. ἀπόγονοξβ, ov, born or descended from, Lat. oriundus, TAavKov οὔτε τι ἀπ. ἐστι has no descendant, Hdt. 6. 86, 4: in pl. descendants, Id. 1. 7., 4. 148,al., Thuc. 1.101; αὗται γὰρ ἀπόγονοι real; thy offspring? Soph.O.C. 534 :—the degrees are marked by numbers, ἀπόγ. τρίτος, τέταρτος, etc. ἀπογρᾶΐζω, to skim off, ἀφρὸν γάλακτος Schol. Nic. Al. ο1. ἀπογραφεύς, ews, 6, a registrar, Ο.1. (add.) 4944 6, Schol. Plat. II. in Synes. 122 D, prob. an informer, spy. ἀπογρἄφήη, 7, a writing off: a register, list, of lands or property, Plat. Legg. 745 Ὁ, 850 C, Dem., etc.; of the πεντηκοστολόγοι Id. gog. 10; ἀπ. τῆς οὐσίας C. 1. 123.14; ἐφήβων Ib. (add.) 1997 C:—a list of moneys claimed by the state, but held by a private person, Lys. 148. 25, Dem. 467. 6, etc.; cf. Dict. of Antiqq. 2. a register of persons liable to taxation, the Rom. census, Ey. Luc, 2.2; τὴν ἀπ. τῶν χρημά- Tw ποιεῖσθαι --τοὺς φόρους τάσσειν, Plut. Aristid. 241; a roll of sol- diers, Polyb. 2. 23, 9 :—and perhaps hence, in Byz., a tax. 3. generally, ἐξ ὑπογραφῆς λέγειν from a written list, Sotad. Ἔγκλ. 1. 35- II. as Att. law-term, the copy of a declaration made before a magistrate, a deposition, Lys. 114. 30., 181. 23, Lex ap. Dem. 941. 14; ποιεῖσθαι ἀπ. -- ἀπογράφειν, Dem. 1246. 4; τινος κατά τινος Andoc. 4. 19; cf. Harpocr. s. v., Att. Process, p. 254, sq.

• From A Greek-English Lexicon (Liddell-Scott) (1957)

  II. ἘΠ᾿ 393 δύσθραυστος, ov, hard to break, Diosc. 4. 143. δυσθρήνητος, ov, loud-wailing, most mournful, ἔπος Soph. Ant. 1211; θρῆνος Eur. 1.T. 143. δύσθροος, ov, ill-sounding, φωνά Pind. P. 4.111; βάγματα, avin, γόοι Aesch. Pers. 635, 941, 1076. δυσθῦμαίνω, to be dispirited, to despond, h. Hom. Cer. 363. Svcbtpéw, =foreg., Hdt. 8. 100; δ, ταῖς ἐλπίσιν Plut. Timol. 34 :— also in Med. to be melancholy, angry, Eur. Med. 91. δυσθυμία, ἡ, despondency, despair, Hipp. Vet. Med. 12, al., Soph. Fr. 584, Plat., etc.; πρὶν ἐλθεῖν ξυμμάχοις δυσθυμίαν Eur. Supp. 696; in pl., Id. Med. 691, Arist. Probl. 30. 1, 26. δυσθῦμικός, 7, dv, melancholy, Arist. Physiogn. 6, 50. δύσθῦμος, ov, desponding, melancholy, repentant, Soph. El. 218, etc. ; τινι ata thing, Ib. 550: τὸ δ. -- δυσθυμία, Plut. Pericl. 25. Adv., δυσ- θύμως ἔχειν Polyb. 1. 87, 1; Comp. -ότερον, Plat. Phaedo 85 B. δυστατέω, to be hard to heal, Paul. Aeg. p. 69. δυσίᾶτος [1], ov, hard to heal, «Anis Hipp. Art. 790; κακὸν δ. an ill that none can cure, Aesch. Ag. 1103; ὀργή Eur. Med. 520; νόσημα Plat. Legg. 916 A, al. δυσίδρως, wros, 6, ἧ, hardly perspiring, Theophr. Fr. 9. 18. δυσιερέω, to have bad omens in a sacrifice, Lat. non litare, Plut. Caes. 63: opp. to καλλιερέω. δυσιθάλασσος, Att. -ττος, ov, (δύω) dipped in the sea, Anth. P. 6. 38. δύσικμος, ov, (ἰκμάς) hard to wet or moisten, Hipp. 603. δυσίμερος [7], ov, unlovely, hateful, κάματος Ap. Rh. 3. 961. tormented by love, Nonn. D. 42. 191. δύσιππος, ov, hard to ride in; τὰ δ. parts unfit for cavalry-service, Xen. Hell. 3. 4, 12; so, δ. χώρα Plut. Philop. 14 :—also δυσίππαστος, ov, Schol. Plat. δύσις [Ὁ], ews, ἡ, (δύω) a setting of the sun or stars, opp. to ἀνατολή, Aesch. Pr. 458; ἀμφὶ Πλειάδων δύσιν (cf. Πλειάδες) Id. Ag. 826; περὶ δύσιν Πλειάδος Damox. Συντρ. 1.19; ἄχρις ἡλίου δύσεως C.1. 1122; ἁλίου μέχρι δ. 1123; Κυνὸς ψυχρὰν δ. Soph. Fr. 379. 2. the quarter in which the sun sets, the west, πρὸς ἡλίου δύσιν Thuc. 2. 96; πρὸς δύσιν Arist. Mund. 3,8; ἀπὸ δύσεως C. 1.1755; πρὸς δύσει Polyb. I. 42, 5; πρὸς Tas δύσεις Id. 5. 104, 7. II. a place of refuge, a retreat, Opp. H. 1. 330. δυσίχνευτος, ov, hard to track, Schol. Soph. Aj. 32. SvoKans, és, hard to burn, burning badly, Plut. 2. 952 Ὁ. δυσκαθαίρετοξς, ov, hard to overthrow, Philo 1. 61, etc. δυσκάθαρτος, ov, hard to purify, Plut. 2. 991 B. 11. hard to satisfy by purification or atonement, Lat. inexpiabilis, δ. “Διδου λιμήν, ot the house of the Labdacidae in which murders never ceased, Soph. Ant. 1284; δαίμων Ar. Pax 1250. δυσκάθεκτος, ov, hard to hold in, ἵπποι Xen. Mem. 4. 1, 3, Plut. Num. 4. δυσκάϑοδος, ον, hard to go down into, σπηλαῖον Conon ap. Phot. δυσκαμπήπ, és, hard to bend, Plut. 2.650 D, Aretae. Caus. M. Diut. 2, 3. δύσκαμπτοϑ, ov, =foreg., Schol. Ar. Thesm. 68, Basil.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  WB 4, 1121, July 10, 1527. 29. To Melanchthon he wrote that he had been near death and hell for over a week (WB 4, 1126, Aug. 2, 1527); he asked Menius to pray for him, explaining that the torment had been more spiritual than physical (1128); Agricola comforted him and Luther replied thanking him (1132, Aug. 21, 1527); to Rühel he wrote that he was not yet back to full strength (1136, Aug. 26, 1527); to Michael Stifel, he wrote that he had been physically ill for about three months (263:9–10); to Amsdorf he wrote in November that he would reply to the sacramentarians but was too weak to do so now (1164, Nov. 1, 1527, 275:10). 30. WS 23, 665–75; see 672, n.1. 31. When Luther said his first Mass, his father paid for the feast (as Luther always remembered). Luther’s wedding feast was paid for in part by Luther and in part by Elector Johann, Friedrich the Wise’s brother, who provided the gift of game for the feast, and who was in a sense a father figure. 32. WB 4, 973, Jan. 20, 1526, 19:1–3. 33. WB 3, 779, Oct. 3, 1524, 354:15; see Chapter 11. 34. WB 4, 1164, Nov. 1, 1527. In this revealing letter to Amsdorf, Luther asked his friend for comfort and begged him to join in prayer that God would not let him become an enemy of all that he had preached with such energy hitherto. He seems to have been especially reflective about the progress of the Reformation at this point, and dated his letter “All Saints’ Day, in the tenth year after Indulgences were trodden underfoot”—interestingly placing the anniversary of the posting of the Ninety-five Theses on November 1, not October 31. 35. WB 4, 1101: it was available by May 4, 1527. In the interim, some of his sermons against the sacramentarians were published by his supporters in late 1526 because of the urgent need to clarify Luther’s position on the Eucharist and because Luther himself still had not done so: WS 19, 482–523. 36. WS 23, 197:14, 18; 283:1–18. 37. WT 3, 2922 b, 88:15–19 ( Jonas); 83:13–17 (Bugenhagen); see also Cordatus’s account, based on Jonas, WT 3, 2922 a. According to Bugenhagen he had continued, “But even St. John didn’t become a martyr, though he wrote a much worse book against the papacy than I did” (83:15–17). So surprised was Bugenhagen by this statement that he confirmed parenthetically that this was what Luther had actually said. St. John’s “book” was the book of Revelation, which Luther interpreted as unmasking the Pope as the Antichrist; this had become a settled axiom of his theological outlook, finding its most vivid expression in the set of woodcuts and commentaries titled Passional Christi und Antichristi, which Cranach, the goldsmith Christian Döring, and Melanchthon had produced together in 1521. In Luther’s eyes, Revelation was an antipapal book that prefigured his own work.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  1 During the revolutionary period in the early years of the nineteenth century, a new and better world had seemed finally within the grasp of humanity. But this hope was never fulfilled. Instead, the industrial revolution brought new problems and fresh injustice and exploitation. In Hard Times (1854), Charles Dickens presented the industrialized city as an inferno, and showed that modern pragmatic rationalism could be destructive of morality and individuality. The new megacities inspired immense ambivalence. The Romantic poets who denounced the “dark satanic mills” 2 were in flight from urban life, as much as they were inspired by a positive longing for the unspoiled countryside. The British critic George Steiner notes the curious school of painting that developed during the 1830s, which could be seen as a “counter-dream of modernity.” The modern cities—London, Paris, and Berlin—which symbolized the great Western achievement, were depicted in ruins, smashed by some unimaginable catastrophe. 3 People were beginning to fantasize about the destruction of civilization and to take practical steps to bring this about. After the Franco-Prussian War, the nations of Europe began a frantic arms race which led them inexorably to the First World War. They appeared to see war as a Darwinian necessity in which only the fittest would survive. A modern nation must have the biggest army and the most murderous weapons that science could provide, and Europeans dreamed of a war that would purify the nation’s soul in a harrowing apotheosis. The British writer I. F. Clarke has shown that between 1871 and 1914 it was unusual to find a single year in which a novel or short story describing a horrific future war did not appear in some European country. 4 The “Next Great War” was imagined as a terrible but inevitable ordeal: out of the destruction, the nation would arise to a new and enhanced life. At the very end of the nineteenth century, however, British novelist H. G. Wells punctured this utopian dream in The War of the Worlds (1898) and showed where it was leading. There were terrifying images of London depopulated by biological warfare, and the roads of England crowded with refugees. He could see the dangers of a military technology that had been drawn into the field of the exact sciences. He was right. The arms race led to the Somme and when the Great War broke out in 1914, the people of Europe, who had been dreaming of the war to end all wars for over forty years, entered with enthusiasm upon this conflict, which could be seen as the collective suicide of Europe. Despite the achievements of modernity, there was a nihilistic death wish, as the nations of Europe cultivated a perverse fantasy of self-destruction.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  This was the sort of God that human reason naturally tends to envisage, and in the past Jewish and Muslim philosophers had in fact produced a very similar deity. But it never went down well with believers generally. It was not religiously useful, since it was doubtful that the First Cause even knew that human beings existed, as it could contemplate nothing short of perfection. Such a God had nothing to say to human pain or sorrow. For that you needed the mythical and cultic spirituality that was unfamiliar to the Marranos. Most of the Marranos who returned to the faith in Amsterdam were able to one degree or another to learn to appreciate halakhic spirituality. But some found the transition impossible. One of the most tragic cases was that of Uriel da Costa, who had been born into a converso family and educated by the Jesuits, but then found Christianity oppressive, cruel, and composed entirely of man-made rules and doctrines that seemed to bear no relation to the Gospels. Da Costa turned to the Jewish scriptures and developed a highly idealized, rationalistic notion of Judaism for himself. When he arrived in Amsterdam in the early seventeenth century, he was shocked, or so he claimed, to discover that contemporary Judaism was just as much a human construct as Catholicism. Recently scholars have cast doubt on Da Costa’s testimony, and have argued that he had almost certainly had a previous encounter, however sketchy, with some form of halakhic Judaism, though he probably had not realized how deeply the Halakhah dominated normal Jewish life. But there is no doubting da Costa’s total inability to relate to Judaism in Amsterdam. He wrote a treatise attacking the doctrine of the afterlife and Jewish law, declaring that he believed only in human reason and the laws of nature. The rabbis excommunicated him and for years Da Costa led a miserable, isolated life until he broke down, recanted, and was readmitted to the community. But Da Costa had not actually changed his views. He found it impossible to live according to rituals that made no rational sense to him, and was excommunicated on two further occasions. Finally in 1640, crushed, broken, in despair, he shot himself in the head. The tragedy of Da Costa showed that there was as yet no secular alternative to the religious life in Europe. You could cross over to another faith, but unless you were a very exceptional human being (which Da Costa was not), you could not live outside a religious community. During his years as an excommunicate, Da Costa had lived utterly alone, shunned by Jews and Christians alike, and jeered at by children in the streets.

• From The Things They Carried (1990)

  "Roger-dodger. Repeat: one Mama, one fries, one small beer. Fire for effect. Stand by." The intercom squeaked and went dead. "Out," said Norman Bowker. When the girl brought his tray, he ate quickly, without looking up. The tired radio announcer in Des Moines gave the time, almost eight-thirty. Dark was pressing in tight now, and he wished there were somewhere to go. In the morning he'd check out job possibilities. Shoot a few buckets down at the Y, maybe wash the Chevy. He finished his root beer and pushed the intercom button. "Order," said the tinny voice. "All done." "That's it?" "I guess so." "Hey, loosen up," the voice said. "What you really need, friend?" Norman Bowker smiled. "Well," he said, "how'd you like to hear about—" He stopped and shook his head. "Hear what, man?" "Nothing." "Well, hey," the intercom said, "I'm sure as fuck not going anywhere. Screwed to a post, for God sake. Go ahead, try me." "Nothing." "You sure?" "Positive. All done." The intercom made a light sound of disappointment. "Your choice, I guess. Over an' out." "Out," said Norman Bowker. On his tenth turn around the lake he passed the hiking boys for the last time. The man in the stalled motorboat was gone; the mud hens were gone. Beyond the lake, over Sally Gustafson's house, the sun had left a smudge of purple on the horizon. The band shell was deserted, and the woman in pedal pushers quietly reeled in her line, and Dr. Mason's sprinkler went round and round. On his eleventh revolution he switched off the air-conditioning, opened up his window, and rested his elbow comfortably on the sill, driving with one hand. There was nothing to say. He could not talk about it and never would. The evening was smooth and warm. If it had been possible, which it wasn't, he would have explained how his friend Kiowa slipped away that night beneath the dark swampy field. He was folded in with the war; he was part of the waste. Turning on his headlights, driving slowly, Norman Bowker remembered how he had taken hold of Kiowa's boot and pulled hard, but how the smell was simply too much, and how he'd backed off and in that way had lost the Silver Star. He wished he could've explained some of this. How he had been braver than he ever thought possible, but how he had not been so brave as he wanted to be. The distinction was important. Max Arnold, who loved fine lines, would've appreciated it. And his father, who already knew, would've nodded. "The truth," Norman Bowker would've said, "is I let the guy go." "Maybe he was already gone." "He wasn't." "But maybe." "No, I could feel it. He wasn't. Some things you can feel." His father would have been quiet for a while, watching the headlights against the narrow tar road. "Well, anyway," the old man would've said, "there's still the seven medals." "I suppose." "Seven honeys." "Right."

• From The Things They Carried (1990)

  kid decked out for his first prom, looking spiffy in a white tux and a black bow tie, his hair cut short and flat, his shoes freshly polished. My whole life seemed to spill out into the river, swirling away from me, everything I had ever been or ever wanted to be. I couldn't get my breath; I couldn't stay afloat; I couldn't tell which way to swim. A hallucination, I suppose, but it was as real as anything I would ever feel. I saw my parents calling to me from the far shoreline. I saw my brother and sister, all the townsfolk, the mayor and the entire Chamber of Commerce and all my old teachers and girlfriends and high school buddies. Like some outlandish sporting event: everybody screaming from the sidelines, rooting me on—a loud stadium roar. Hotdogs and popcorn—stadium smells, stadium heat. A squad of cheerleaders did cartwheels along the banks of the Rainy River; they had megaphones and pompoms and smooth brown thighs. The crowd swayed left and right. A marching band played fight songs. All my aunts and uncles were there, and Abraham Lincoln, and Saint George, and a nine-year-old girl named Linda who had died of a brain tumor back in fifth grade, and several members of the United States Senate, and a blind poet scribbling notes, and LBJ, and Huck Finn, and Abbie Hoffman, and all the dead soldiers back from the grave, and the many thousands who were later to die —villagers with terrible burns, little kids without arms or legs—yes, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff were there, and a couple of popes, and a first lieutenant named Jimmy Cross, and the last surviving veteran of the American Civil War, and Jane Fonda dressed up as Barbarella, and an old man sprawled beside a pigpen, and my grandfather, and Gary Cooper, and a kind-faced woman carrying an umbrella and a copy of Plato's Republic, and a million ferocious citizens waving flags of all shapes and colors—people in hard hats, people in headbands—they were all whooping and chanting and urging me toward one shore or the other. I saw faces from my distant past and distant future. My wife was there. My unborn daughter waved at me, and my two sons hopped up and down, and a drill sergeant named Blyton sneered and shot up a finger and shook his head. There was a choir in bright purple robes. There was a cabbie from the Bronx. There was a slim young man I would one day kill with a hand grenade along a red clay trail outside the village of My Khe. The little aluminum boat rocked softly beneath me. There was the wind and the sky. I tried to will myself overboard. I gripped the edge of the boat and leaned forward and thought, Now. I did try. It just wasn't possible.

• From The Things They Carried (1990)

  "Anyway," Rat said, "the days aren't so bad, but at night the pictures get to be a bitch. I start seeing my own body. Chunks of myself. My own heart, my own kidneys. It's like —I don't know—tt's like staring into this huge black crystal ball. One of these nights I'll be lying dead out there in the dark and nobody'll find me except the bugs—I can see it—I can see the goddamn bugs chewing tunnels through me—I can see the mongooses munching on my bones. I swear, it's too much. I can't keep seeing myself dead." Mitchell Sanders nodded. He didn't know what to say. For a time they sat watching the shadows come, then Rat shook his head. He said he'd done his best. He'd tried to be a decent medic. Win some and lose some, he said, but he'd tried hard. Briefly then, rambling a little, he talked about a few of the guys who were gone now, Curt Lemon and Kiowa and Ted Lavender, and how crazy it was that people who were so incredibly alive could get so incredibly dead. Then he almost laughed. "This whole war," he said. "You know what it is? Just one big banquet. Meat, man. You and me. Everybody. Meat for the bugs." The next morning he shot himself. He took off his boots and socks, laid out his medical kit, doped himself up, and put a round through his foot. Nobody blamed him, Sanders said. Before the chopper came, there was time for goodbyes. Lieutenant Cross went over and said he'd vouch that it was an accident. Henry Dobbins and Azar gave him a stack of comic books for hospital reading. Everybody stood in a little circle, feeling bad about it, trying to cheer him up with bullshit about the great night life in Japan. The Lives of the Dead But this too is true: stories can save us. I'm forty-three years old, and a writer now, and even still, right here, I keep dreaming Linda alive. And Ted Lavender, too, and Kiowa, and Curt Lemon, and a slim young man I killed, and an old man sprawled beside a pigpen, and several others whose bodies I once lifted and dumped into a truck. They're all dead. But in a story, which is a kind of dreaming, the dead sometimes smile and sit up and return to the world.

• From The Things They Carried (1990)

  On his twelfth revolution, the sky went crazy with color. He pulled into Sunset Park and stopped in the shadow of a picnic shelter. After a time he got out, walked down to the beach, and waded into the lake without undressing. The water felt warm against his skin. He put his head under. He opened his lips, very slightly, for the taste, then he stood up and folded his arms and watched the fireworks. For a small town, he decided, it was a pretty good show. Notes "Speaking of Courage" was written in 1975 at the suggestion of Norman Bowker, who three years later hanged himself in the locker room of a YMCA in his hometown in central Iowa. In the spring of 1975, near the time of Saigon's final collapse, I received a long, disjointed letter in which Bowker described the problem of finding a meaningful use for his life after the war. He had worked briefly as an automotive parts salesman, a janitor, a car wash attendant, and a short-order cook at the local A&W fast-food franchise. None of these jobs, he said, had lasted more than ten weeks. He lived with his parents, who supported him, and who treated him with kindness and obvious love. At one point he had enrolled in the junior college in his hometown, but the course work, he said, seemed too abstract, too distant, with nothing real or tangible at stake, certainly not the stakes of a war. He dropped out after eight months. He spent his mornings in bed. In the afternoons he played pickup basketball at the Y, and then at night he drove around town in his father's car, mostly alone, or with a six-pack of beer, cruising. "The thing is," he wrote, "there's no place to go. Not just in this lousy little town. In general. My life, I mean. It's almost like I got killed over in Nam ... Hard to describe. That night when Kiowa got wasted, I sort of sank down into the sewage with him ... Feels like I'm still in deep shit." The letter covered seventeen handwritten pages, its tone jumping from self-pity to anger to irony to guilt to a kind of feigned indifference. He didn't know what to feel. In the middle of the letter, for example, he reproached himself for complaining too much: God, this is starting to sound like some jerkoff vet crying in his beer. Sorry about that. I'm no basket case—not even any bad dreams. And I don't feel like anybody mistreats me or anything, except sometimes people act too nice, too polite, like they're afraid they might ask the wrong question ... But I shouldn't bitch. One thing I hate

• From The Things They Carried (1990)

  Mitchell Sanders made a sound in his throat. He hoisted up the rucksack, slipped into the harness, and pulled the straps tight. "All right, but this much for sure. The man knew it was raining. He knew about the river. One plus one. Add it up, you get exactly what happened." Sanders glared at the river. "Move it," he said. "Kiowa's waiting on us." Slowly then, bending against the rain, Azar and Norman Bowker and Mitchell Sanders began wading again through the deep waters, their eyes down, circling out from where they had found the rucksack. First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross stood fifty meters away. He had finished writing the letter in his head, explaining things to Kiowa's father, and now he folded his arms and watched his platoon crisscrossing the wide field. In a funny way, it reminded him of the municipal golf course in his hometown in New Jersey. A lost ball, he thought. Tired players searching through the rough, sweeping back and forth in long systematic patterns. He wished he were there right now. On the sixth hole. Looking out across the water hazard that fronted the small flat green, a seven iron in his hand, calculating wind and distance, wondering if he should reach instead for an eight. A tough decision, but all you could ever lose was a ball. You did not lose a player. And you never had to wade out into the hazard and spend the day searching through the slime. Jimmy Cross did not want the responsibility of leading these men. He had never wanted it. In his sophomore year at Mount Sebastian College he had signed up for the Reserve Officer Training Corps without much thought. An automatic thing: because his friends had joined, and because it was worth a few credits, and because it seemed preferable to letting the draft take him. He was unprepared. Twenty-four years old and his heart wasn't in it. Military matters meant nothing to him. He did not care one way or the other about the war, and he had no desire to command, and even after all these months in the bush, all the days and nights, even then he did not know enough to keep his men out of a shit field. What he should've done, he told himself, was follow his first impulse. In the late afternoon yesterday, when they reached the night coordinates, he

• From The Things They Carried (1990)

  kid decked out for his first prom, looking spiffy in a white tux and a black bow tie, his hair cut short and flat, his shoes freshly polished. My whole life seemed to spill out into the river, swirling away from me, everything I had ever been or ever wanted to be. I couldn't get my breath; I couldn't stay afloat; I couldn't tell which way to swim. A hallucination, I suppose, but it was as real as anything I would ever feel. I saw my parents calling to me from the far shoreline. I saw my brother and sister, all the townsfolk, the mayor and the entire Chamber of Commerce and all my old teachers and girlfriends and high school buddies. Like some outlandish sporting event: everybody screaming from the sidelines, rooting me on—a loud stadium roar. Hotdogs and popcorn—stadium smells, stadium heat. A squad of cheerleaders did cartwheels along the banks of the Rainy River; they had megaphones and pompoms and smooth brown thighs. The crowd swayed left and right. A marching band played fight songs. All my aunts and uncles were there, and Abraham Lincoln, and Saint George, and a nine-year-old girl named Linda who had died of a brain tumor back in fifth grade, and several members of the United States Senate, and a blind poet scribbling notes, and LBJ, and Huck Finn, and Abbie Hoffman, and all the dead soldiers back from the grave, and the many thousands who were later to die —villagers with terrible burns, little kids without arms or legs—yes, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff were there, and a couple of popes, and a first lieutenant named Jimmy Cross, and the last surviving veteran of the American Civil War, and Jane Fonda dressed up as Barbarella, and an old man sprawled beside a pigpen, and my grandfather, and Gary Cooper, and a kind-faced woman carrying an umbrella and a copy of Plato's Republic, and a million ferocious citizens waving flags of all shapes and colors—people in hard hats, people in headbands—they were all whooping and chanting and urging me toward one shore or the other. I saw faces from my distant past and distant future. My wife was there. My unborn daughter waved at me, and my two sons hopped up and down, and a drill sergeant named Blyton sneered and shot up a finger and shook his head. There was a choir in bright purple robes. There was a cabbie from the Bronx. There was a slim young man I would one day kill with a hand grenade along a red clay trail outside the village of My Khe. The little aluminum boat rocked softly beneath me. There was the wind and the sky. I tried to will myself overboard. I gripped the edge of the boat and leaned forward and thought, Now. I did try. It just wasn't possible.

• From The Things They Carried (1990)

  The field was boiling. The shells made deep slushy craters, opening up all those years of waste, centuries worth, and the smell came bubbling out of the earth. Two rounds hit close by. Then a third, even closer, and immediately, off to his left, he heard somebody screaming. It was Kiowa— he knew that. The sound was ragged and clotted up, but even so he knew the voice. A strange gargling noise. Rolling sideways, he crawled toward the screaming in the dark. The rain was hard and steady. Along the perimeter there were quick bursts of gunfire. Another round hit nearby, spraying up shit and water, and for a few moments he ducked down beneath the mud. He heard the valves in his heart. He heard the quick, feathering action of the hinges. Extraordinary, he thought. As he came up, a pair of red flares puffed open, a soft blurry glow, and in the glow he saw Kiowa's wide- open eyes settling down into the scum. All he could do was watch. He heard himself moan. Then he moved again, crabbing forward, but when he got there Kiowa was almost completely under. There was a knee. There was an arm and a gold wrist-watch and part of a boot. He could not describe what happened next, not ever, but he would've tried anyway. He would've spoken carefully so as to make it real for anyone who would listen. There were bubbles where Kiowa's head should've been. The left hand was curled open; the fingers were filthy; the wristwatch gave off a green phosphorescent shine as it slipped beneath the thick waters. He would've talked about this, and how he grabbed Kiowa by the boot and tried to pull him out. He pulled hard but Kiowa was gone, and then suddenly he felt himself going, too. The shit was in his nose and eyes. There were flares and mortar rounds, and the stink was everywhere—it was inside him, in his lungs—and he could no longer tolerate it. Not here, he thought. Not like this. He released Kiowa's boot and watched it slide away. Slowly, working his way up, he hoisted himself out of the deep mud, and then he lay still and tasted the shit in his mouth and closed his eyes and listened to the rain and explosions and bubbling sounds. He was alone. He had lost his weapon but it didn't matter. All he wanted was a bath. Nothing else. A hot soapy bath. Circling the lake, Norman Bowker remembered how his friend Kiowa had disappeared under the waste and water. "I didn't flip out," he would've said. "I was cool. If things had gone right, if it hadn't been for that smell, I could've won the Silver Star."

• From The Things They Carried (1990)

  sister, who would not write back, but for now it was a question of pain. He shot off the tail. He shot away chunks of meat below the ribs. All around us there was the smell of smoke and filth and deep greenery, and the evening was humid and very hot. Rat went to automatic. He shot randomly, almost casually, quick little spurts in the belly and butt. Then he reloaded, squatted down, and shot it in the left front knee. Again the animal fell hard and tried to get up, but this time it couldn't quite make it. It wobbled and went down sideways. Rat shot it in the nose. He bent forward and whispered something, as if talking to a pet, then he shot it in the throat. All the while the baby buffalo was silent, or almost silent, just a light bubbling sound where the nose had been. It lay very still. Nothing moved except the eyes, which were enormous, the pupils shiny black and dumb. Rat Kiley was crying. He tried to say something, but then cradled his rifle and went off by himself. The rest of us stood in a ragged circle around the baby buffalo. For a time no one spoke. We had witnessed something essential, something brand-new and profound, a piece of the world so startling there was not yet a name for it. Somebody kicked the baby buffalo. It was still alive, though just barely, just in the eyes. "Amazing," Dave Jensen said. "My whole life, I never seen anything like it." "Never?" "Not hardly. Not once." Kiowa and Mitchell Sanders picked up the baby buffalo. They hauled it across the open square, hoisted it up, and dumped it in the village well. Afterward, we sat waiting for Rat to get himself together. "Amazing," Dave Jensen kept saying. "A new wrinkle. I never seen it before." Mitchell Sanders took out his yo-yo. "Well, that's Nam," he said. "Garden of Evil. Over here, man, every sin's real fresh and original." How do you generalize? War is hell, but that's not the half of it, because war is also mystery and terror and adventure and courage and discovery and holiness and pity and despair and longing and love. War is nasty; war is fun. War is thrilling; war is drudgery. War makes you a man; war makes you dead.