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 Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  Meanwhile the other one is waiting. I can see her again as she sat on the low stoop waiting for me, her eyes large and dolorous, her face pale and trembling with eagerness. Pity I always thought it was brought me back, but now as I walk toward her and see the look in her eyes I don’t know any more what it is, only that we will go inside and lie together and she will get up half weeping, half laughing, and she will grow very silent and watch me, study me as I move about, and never ask me what is torturing me, never, never, because that is the one thing she fears, the one thing she dreads to know. I don’t love you! Can’t she hear me screaming it? I don’t love you! Over and over I yell it, with lips tight, with hatred in my heart, with despair, with hopeless rage. But the words never leave my lips. I look at her and I am tongue-tied. I can’t do it. . . . Time, time, endless time on our hands and nothing to fill it but lies. Well, I don’t want to rehearse the whole of my life leading up to the fatal moment—it is too long and too painful. Besides, did my life really lead up to this culminating moment? I doubt it. I think there were innumerable moments when I had the chance to make a beginning, but I lacked the strength and the faith. On the evening in question I deliberately walked out on myself: I walked right out of the old life and into the new. There wasn’t the slightest effort involved. I was thirty then. I had a wife and child and what is called a “responsible” position. These are the facts and facts mean nothing. The truth is my desire was so great it became a reality. At such a moment what a man does is of no great importance, it’s what he is that counts. It’s at such a moment that a man becomes an angel. That is precisely what happened to me: I became an angel. It is not the purity of an angel which is so valuable, as the fact it can fly. An angel can break the pattern anywhere at any moment and find its heaven; it has the power to descend into the lowest matter and to extricate itself at will. The night in question I understood it perfectly. I was pure and inhuman, I was detached, I had wings. I was depossessed of the past and I had no concern about the future. I was beyond ecstasy. When I left the office I folded my wings and hid them beneath my coat. The dance hall was just opposite the side entrance of the theater where I used to sit in the afternoons instead of looking for work.

• From Combating Cult Mind Control: The Guide to Protection, Rescue and Recovery from Destructive Cults (1988)

  A related problem is child abuse. Many children have died or been scarred for life because of their parents’ involvement in destructive cults.72 Many people have forgotten that nearly 300 children were murdered during the Jonestown massacre. Those children had no choice but to drink the poisoned Kool-Aid. The public also doesn’t know that many of these children were the wards of the state of California and had been adopted by Peoples Temple members to provide more income as well as serve as cheap labor. Some groups advocate beating and even torturing children to enforce discipline. At Jonestown, at night, some children were put into dark pits that they were told were filled with snakes. Members would dangle ropes from above to scare them. Although Jonestown was an extreme example, several groups do use rods and sticks to beat children, at times for hours and sometimes all over their bodies. Some groups subject children to sexual abuse as a matter of doctrine. Because children are often kept out of school and away from other contact with society, the abuse goes unreported. Children are often raised communally and allowed only infrequent visits with their parents. The children are taught to place their allegiance with the cult leader or the group as a whole, not with their parents. Playtime is limited or denied altogether. Children typically receive an inferior education, if any. Like their parents, they are taught that the world is a hostile, evil place, and they are forced to depend on cult doctrine to understand reality. Although they may be regarded as the future of the group, they are also usually seen as a hindrance to the immediate demands of the cult’s “work.” Terrorist cults are known to abduct children and turn them into killers and rapists. I wish to make special mention of Harvey L. Schwartz’s book about trauma inflicted on children recruited to become soldiers, The Alchemy of Wolves and Sheep: A Relational Approach to Internalized Perpetration in Complex Trauma Survivors.73 The casualties of mind control thus include millions of cult members, their children, and society as well. Our nation is being robbed of our greatest resource: bright, idealistic, ambitious people who are capable of making an enormous contribution to humankind. Many of the former cult members I know have become doctors, teachers, counselors, inventors and artists. Imagine what so many cult members could accomplish if they were all set free to develop their unique talents and abilities. What if they channeled their energies into problem solving, rather than trying to undermine the world’s freedoms with some warped totalitarian vision?

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  “I don’t have a volunteer lawyer, Mr. Stevenson. I don’t have anyone. My volunteer lawyer said he couldn’t do any more to help me over a year ago. I need your help.” We still didn’t have computers or law books, and I didn’t have other lawyers on staff. I had hired a classmate of mine from Harvard Law School who agreed to join our staff and moved to Alabama from his home in Boston. I was thrilled to finally have some help. He had been in Montgomery for a few days when I had to leave town for a fundraising trip. When I returned, he was gone. He left a note explaining that he didn’t realize how challenging it would be for him to live in Alabama. He hadn’t been there a week. Trying to stop an execution would mean nonstop work eighteen hours a day for a month, desperately trying to get a stay order from a court. Only an all-out effort would get it done, and it was still wildly improbable that we’d succeed in blocking the execution. When I could think of nothing to fill the silence, Richardson continued: “Mr. Stevenson, I have thirty days. Please say you’ll help me.” I didn’t know what else to do but be truthful. “Mr. Richardson, I’m so sorry, but I don’t have books, staff, computers, or anything we need to take on new cases yet. I haven’t even hired lawyers. I’m trying to get things set up—” “But I have an execution date. You have to represent me. What’s the point of all that other stuff if you’re not going to help people like me?” I could hear his breath growing ragged. “They’re going to kill me,” he said. “I know what you’re saying, and I’m trying to figure out how to help. We’re just so overextended—” I didn’t know what to say, and a long silence fell between us. I could hear him breathing heavily on the phone, and I could imagine how frustrated he must be. I was bracing myself for him to say something angry or bitter, steeling myself to absorb his understandable rage. But then the phone suddenly went silent. He’d hung up. I was unnerved by the call for the rest of the day and couldn’t find sleep that night. I was haunted by my helpless bureaucratic demurrals in the face of his desperation and the silence of his response. The next day he called again, to my relief. “Mr. Stevenson, I’m sorry, but you have to represent me. I don’t need you to tell me that you can stop this execution; I don’t need you to say you can get a stay. But I have twenty-nine days left, and I don’t think I can make it if there is no hope at all. Just say you’ll do something and let me have some hope.” It was impossible for me to say no, so I said yes.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  In a moment of sudden despair I knew that they must have a guitar. I got undressed and turned the light off and sat waiting for the next remark or the first explosive chord. Once or twice I thought I heard the first squeaking stoppings, the hunched rehearsal of the chord-changes before the right hand springs its hackneyed horrors from the box . . . But perhaps it was just a distant creaking in the house or the bell of the night tram out by the station. After a while I could hear only my own indignant pulse and the hairs on my legs sliding together. Then the twelve o'clock carillon from St Narcissus, almost welcome, with its plonking hymn that had become a sort of malign lullaby. "Yes, close your eyes up tight: you will not sleep tonight"—the dud note, the metrical space marked only by a rusty click, falling on the word "eyes". Chapter 10 "Hello." "Hello? Matt?" "Matt's not here, I'm afraid." A thoughtful pause. "Oh yes." The line went dead. I carried on sorting out the orders, clipped pink slips on which products were tactfully referred to by number. A good sprawl of post awaited me each afternoon on the floor of the porch—the business letters addressed to Matt, and occasional envelopes for a certain Wim Vermeulen, which I set aside and which aroused my curiosity more. I supposed he must be one of his old lovers or partners, or perhaps the previous occupant. Something kept me from opening them—I wondered raffishly if it might be thieves' honour. The letters from Matt's subscribers were often several sheets long, full of secret enthusiasm and not easy to read. "I can't thank you enough for introducing me to young Casey Hopper," one of them began. "What a 'doll'! I've quite fallen for him. It's such a pleasure to find a lad of that age who really likes to take it from an older—and bigger—man. And Casey, I am pleased to say, is certainly well set-up himself. He has such a pleading look as he lies there spread out, when his arms and legs are tied to the bedposts and I can gaze at his secret treasure. Sometimes it is 'all over' then, before anything else has happened. "Perhaps I should tell you a bit about myself. I used to be in the agribusiness in Ghent, where I have lived all my life. I am sixty-seven by the way, and have retired now, so I have plenty of time on my hands, and will certainly be getting in touch with you again. I like young men, eighteen to twenty-five or so, well-built, with short hair. I do not like boys with obviously dyed hair or who are effeminate in any way and wear ear-rings or jewellery. As you can imagine Casey Hopper tops my bill!

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  The Ephesian Tale, an imperial romance authored by an otherwise unknown bearer of the name Xenophon, has seemed so abrupt and artless that it is uncertain whether what we have is the original text or a mere summary. Regardless, romance, even at its best, is a genre made of conventions, and the author of the Ephesian Tale as we possess it has made strikingly little effort to conceal the dependence of his narrative on prefabricated parts. The heroine, Anthia, is a superlative beauty who suffers an utterly predictable sequence of threats to her chastity. “Oh dangerous charm, oh ill-starred beauty, why do you persecute me, why do you cause me such evil? Were the tombs and murders, the chains of slavery and the lawlessness of pirates not enough?” Having survived all this, the final threat to Anthia’s corporal integrity was to be the most trying, as well as the most melodramatic. “Now I will be placed in a house of ill-repute, and a pimp will compel me to lose the chastity which I have guarded up to now for Habrocomes.” When she learns that it is her lot to be sold into prostitution, she asks the slave who is the instrument of her fate to kill her. Anthia’s experience of the brothel, and her eventual escape from it, is not only the climactic episode of the Ephesian Tale. It is, in its utter conventionality, a paradigm of the romance, of the genre’s most basic assumptions about the body and society.4 Despite her pitiful death wish, Anthia ended up in the clutches of a brothel keeper in Tarentum, Italy. He compelled her to be placed in front of the brothel, and she lamented that she was compelled to play the harlot. But her despair quickly turned to resolve. “Why do I bewail my fate instead of finding some contrivance [mēchanē] by which I might preserve the chastity which I have safeguarded up to now?” As the crowd of lustful customers jostled to pay for her services, Anthia, “without any recourse [amēchanē] from this evil, nevertheless found a device for her escape.” She threw herself to the ground and feigned the violent convulsions of an epileptic fit. The dumbstruck crowd felt “pity and fear,” and their erotic aspirations were, temporarily, dampened. The pimp took her home to recover, and she wove an elaborate story to convince him that she was truly afflicted with the disease. Her feint succeeded in creating just enough delay to let the universe resolve itself happily. She remained inviolate, and when she eventually rejoined her husband, she could boast to him, “I remain pure for you, having contrived every device [mēchanē] for the preservation of chastity.” He, too, protested his unimpeachable fidelity, and they “easily persuaded each other, since that was what they wanted.”5

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  One morning, Herbert completed his assembly of the bomb and placed it on his former girlfriend’s porch. The woman’s niece and another little girl came out instead and saw the peculiar package. The ten-year-old niece was drawn to the odd bag with a clock on it and picked up the device. She shook the clock to see if it would tick, which triggered a violent explosion. The child was killed instantly, and her twelve-year-old friend, who was standing next to her, was traumatized. Herbert knew both children. In this community, children were always roaming the streets looking for something to do. Herbert loved kids and would invite them into his yard, pay them to do errands, and talk to them. He started making cereal and cooking for the kids who would wander by. The two girls had come by his house for breakfast. Herbert, watching the house from across the street, was devastated. He had planned to run to his girlfriend’s aid when the bomb exploded to reinforce his readiness to protect her and to keep her safe. When the child picked up the bomb and it detonated, Herbert ran across the street and found himself in a circle of grieving neighbors. It didn’t take long for police to make an arrest. They found pipes and other bomb-making materials in Herbert’s car and front yard. Because the victims were black and poor, this wasn’t the kind of case that would usually be prosecuted as a capital crime, but Herbert wasn’t local. His identity as an outsider, a Northerner, and the nature of the crime seemed to generate heightened contempt from law enforcement officials. Placing a bomb anywhere in Dothan, even in a poor section of town, posed a different kind of threat than “typical” domestic violence. The prosecutor argued that Herbert was not just tragically misguided and reckless; he was evil. The State sought the death penalty. After striking all of the black prospective jurors in a county that is 28 percent black, the prosecutor told the all-white jury in his closing argument that a conviction was appropriate because Herbert was “associated with Black Muslims from New York City” and deserved no mercy. Alabama’s capital statute requires that any murder eligible for the death penalty be intentional, but it was clear that Herbert had no intent to kill the child. The State decided to invoke an unprecedented theory of “transferred intent” to make the crime eligible for the death penalty. But Herbert had no intention to kill anyone .

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  What you call the charms. Well, he is an older man, but still very sporting and fit. He has a huge apartment with the most fantastic curtains . . ." What was an older man, I wondered? I was looking at Ty close to, and in a better light than when we had first met: he might be my age or more, to judge from the little creases around his eyes when he beamed at his own anecdotes, though in composure, and in a general innocent vanity, he was amazingly fresh and young. I began to admit to myself how like Luc he was, the high cheek-bones, the rather small, guarded, grey eyes, the thick fair hair. I hadn't realised before—of course, I hadn't even met Luc yet that night at the Bar Biff: I was looking at anyone in that first week as though they might be my friend and my future. I wondered if Ty had been an abortive first attempt, a dry-run, at Luc, who was made to the same formula, but was the real brute thing. " . . . anyway, he said, 'Why don't you come to my house, which is in the country, because we have a lot of things in common to discuss, and maybe, who knows, we can work something out.' So I said—" "I know," I broke in, "why don't you get me a drink. I find it hard to concentrate without one, somehow. Also, I'm fucking miserable, fed up." "Oh . . . what is the matter?" He looked round as if the explanation might be to hand. "Are you by yourself here tonight?" "I was," I said rudely. "I'm waiting for someone. Well, Cherif, you remember him." "Oh him," said Ty condescendingly. "He's a stupid young man." "He's living with me at the moment," I said, not exactly to contradict him. And then in a few sentences I told him how I was despairing in love, trapped in my own home by a boy who was in love with me, and now my place of work had been infiltrated by someone I hated. I doubt I would have poured it all out so succinctly and bitterly to anyone capable of responding, but to formulate it to Ty was a distinct lonely relief. All I kept back was the repeating shock of Dawn's being dead, my own regret at his not having said goodbye, the guilty certainty that anything I did was something he couldn't do. His reply was blithe but still surprising. "Well, I know what you are like. You must tell your love to the boy, otherwise you will never have peace with yourself, and try to find out the good side of the Rex Stout person, which there must be, and say to someone who has just come into the bar that he must go and live somewhere else and go to hell too." "Thank you," I said, as he got up and finger-waved goodbye.

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  I can get a job while I’m living with Kathy and give you money to buy food.” I pull away from her and shove her across the kitchen. I watch her face turn from soft patience to red anger. “You can work here, too, you know! There are stores all over Middle Country Road. You can work at Shoes ’N Things, or the muffler place, or get a job at the supermarket. We just walked by a hundred places, why can’t you stay here?” She wraps her arms around me again, trying to steady me as much as console me. “Because I don’t want to,” she speaks softly into my hair. “I don’t want to be a mom anymore. I raised you. It’s your turn now.” “But I’ve been doing this already.” I peel my hair from my face, damp with sweat and tears, in a plea of desperation for her to listen. I think of the possibilities—intruders, landlords, police, social workers, having to manage any of them all by myself. “I need help, Camille. Don’t go. Please don’t leave me alone again, you don’t know what it’s like when you’re not here, I need you, I need help—” “Gi,” she says, trying to calm me down. “I promise I’ll be back to check in on you. I’ll bring you food. You won’t be out stealing by yourself. You’ll know where I am and I’ll get you dimes to call me.” “I need to call my friends, too, I need something more than this.” I gesture into the air to refer to the desolation we’re held up in. If I can’t negotiate for her to stay, then I have to negotiate for her money. “I’ll bring money every week, I promise,” she says, wrapping me again in her arms. We stand there awhile, just hugging, and I hope that any second she’ll whisper, Hey. Do you want to come with me? But her silence cements it: Kathy can’t take all of us. When we finally pull away, I look around at the kitchen that’s now all mine to manage. Finally I pull away from her and stand over the stove, trying to concentrate on the macaroni and cheese, blending the powdered cheese with a little milk and coating each of the noodles in the mix. Camille helps me spoon dinner onto three plates—she has plans to eat with Doug, so there will be more for leftovers tomorrow. She pours two glasses of milk and carries them into the living room, while I cover the leftovers and hurry to place the bowl in the refrigerator. The kids sit up when they see us carrying food, and I notice how loud they have the TV cranked up. It’s clear they heard us yelling in the kitchen and turned up the volume to tune us out. Camille heads upstairs, where I know she will gather her things.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  The Greeks and Romans of the high empire still conceived of sexual desire as an appetite that was basically indiscriminate in its choice of object. For a man to play the insertive role in coital encounters was normative, so long as the passive flesh was smooth. At the same time, the Roman male was impenetrable, even during the temporary indeterminacy of adolescence. In the imperial period, this norm, which was always one element among others in the Greek cultural atmosphere, if not always the dominant one, drove out the competing alternatives. Of course, such an attitude rests on a bedrock of slavery. To read closely the famous “contests of loves” in the imperial period is to see how deeply insinuated slavery had become in the nexus of erotic practice. Yet despite the vitality of various forms of same-sex erotics in the high empire, it would be a grave mistake to say that the Romans had anything resembling tolerance for homosexuality. The code of manliness that governed the access to pleasures in the classical world was severe and unforgiving, and deviance from it was socially mortal. The viciousness of mainstream attitudes toward passivity is startling for anyone who approaches the ancient sources with the false anticipation that pre-Christian cultures were somehow reliably civilized toward sexual minorities. CHASTITY: THE SEXUAL LIFE COURSE FOR WOMEN In a scene worthy of a modern action film, Achilles Tatius described a boat chase in which Clitophon and his comrades race after a band of pirates who have abducted Leucippe. As the pursuers bear down on the pirates, the villains expose Leucippe on deck and ostentatiously decapitate her, casting the headless body into the sea. Clitophon is despondent. He was so convinced of her death that he would reluctantly agree to marry the young widow Melite. Only at the very end of the novel, after Leucippe has passed a frightening test confirming her virginity, is “the enigma of the severed head” explained. In Leucippe’s words, the pirates had also taken on board an “ill-starred woman who earned her living from selling the acts of Aphrodite,” and they “sacrificed her in my stead.” Although the drama of this revelation is deliberately heightened by the long delay, Achilles is not simply relishing the art of his own special effects. Apparent deaths and failed identifications are essential to the Greek romances. The decapitated prostitute was Leucippe’s doppelgänger. Leucippe called her an “ill-starred” woman, just as Thersander called Leucippe an “ill-starred slave” during his crucial misrecognition scene. Leucippe described the prostitute’s substitutional death in the language of animal sacrifice; it was a resonant statement in a culture that still very much believed in the mysterious powers of propitiation. While Leucippe’s eleutheria, her freedom and sexual respectability, kept her body inviolate through the most extreme tribulations, fate was not so kind to her opposite, the unfortunate prostitute.30

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  Dark premonitions of this impending crash lurk already the first installment of The City of God. In his pursuit of Lucretia, Augustine compasses a murky possibility. “Perhaps she killed herself not because of her innocence but because of her guilty conscience? What if (and only she would have known), despite the fact that she was violently ravished, her libido was led astray and she consented, and she was so racked by her guilt she thought to expiate it by her death?” The sinister insinuation—from which Augustine sheepishly retreats—cannot be ascribed to prosecutorial zeal. It was part of Augustine’s distinctive view of the sex drive, a view that was to receive fateful expression in the coming years. Augustine developed a view of human sexuality as something refractory, uncontrollable, mysterious. Centuries of untrammeled Christian optimism about the pliability of the sexual instinct would crash on the rocks of Augustine’s doctrine of original sin. Augustine believed not only that the state of the will was the measure of morality, but also that mastery of the will was humanly impossible. Sex came to epitomize, for Augustine, the recalcitrance of the will. The City of God, like no other text, symbolizes the simultaneous triumph and disintegration of ancient Christian notions of the will.61 The century between the conversion of Constantine and the appearance of the first installment of The City of God was a golden age for Christian free will. Eusebius, the church historian, wrote about free will more extensively, if less creatively, than any Christian before him. In his polemic against Hierocles, Eusebius attacks pagan determinism at length, a sign that fatalism had become caught up in the sniping between pagans and Christians in the last age of persecution. The entire sixth book of his Preparation for the Gospel is dedicated to the defense of free will against an eclectic pagan determinism. He attacks the critic Porphyry, who cited the veracity of oracles as a manifest proof of an overarching fate. Eusebius was intent to establish the justice of divine judgment, which was incompatible with determinism. Every event had one of three causes: natural law, randomness, and human will. All evil had its origins in the “self-initiated choice of the soul.” The human soul stood outside of nature and its chain of physical causes; the soul was “free, autonomous, and master of itself.” What impious slanderer, for instance, would accuse God of making a man use his body “against nature”? More than any other author, Eusebius offered a defense of free will that was framed against a developed form of pagan determinism in which a Platonic cosmos and the governance of the traditional pantheon were assimilated into a compassing determinism. Over the next decades, in the wake of Christian triumph, the freedom of the will—a concept born in the competition of cosmologies of the high Roman Empire—would spread farther than ever before.62

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  AUGUSTINE. (ubi sup.) Now that he was bound by brazen fetters and chains, signifies the harsh and severe laws of the Gentiles, by which also in their states offences are restrained. But, that having burst these chains he was driven by the evil spirit into the wilderness, means that having broken through these laws, he was also led by lust to those crimes which exceeded the ordinary life of men. By the expression that there was in him a legion of devils, the nations are signified who served many devils. But the fact that the devils were permitted to go into the swine, which fed on the mountains, signifies also the unclean and proud men over whom the evil spirits have dominion, because of their worship of idols. For the swine are they who, after the manner of unclean animals without speech and reason, have defiled the grace of their natural virtues by the filthy actions of their life. AUGUSTINE. (ubi sup.) But by their being sent down violently into the lake, it is meant that the Church has been purified, and now that the Gentiles are delivered from the dominion of evil spirits, those who refuse to believe in Christ, carry on their unholy rites in hidden places with dark and secret watchings. AMBROSE. They are carried violently down, for they are reclaimed not by the contemplation of any good deed, but thrust as from a higher place to a lower, along the downward path of iniquity, they perish amidst the waves of this world, shut out from the approach of air. For they who are carried to and fro by the rapid tide of pleasure cannot receive the communication of the Spirit; we see then that man himself is the author of his own misery. For unless a man lived like the swine, the devil would never have received power over him, or received it, not to destroy but to prove him. And perhaps the devil, who after the coming of our Lord can no longer steal away the good, seeks not the destruction of all men, but only the wanton, as the robber lies in wait not for armed men, but the unarmed. When those who kept the herd saw this they fled. For neither the teachers of philosophy nor the chief of the synagogue can bring a cure to perishing mankind. It is Christ alone who takes away the sins of the people.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  After my call with Herbert, I filed a flurry of stay motions in various courts. I knew the odds were low that we would block the execution. By the late 1980s, the U.S. Supreme Court had grown impatient with challenges to capital punishment. The Court had justified reauthorization of the death penalty in the mid-1970s on the promise that proceedings would be subject to heightened scrutiny and meticulous compliance with the law but then began to retreat from the existing review procedures. The Court’s rulings had become increasingly hostile to death row prisoners and less committed to the notion that “death is different,” requiring more careful review. The Court decided to bar claims from federal habeas corpus review if they weren’t initially presented to state courts. Federal courts were then forbidden to consider new evidence unless it was first presented to state courts. The Court began insisting that federal judges defer more to state court rulings, which tended to be more indulgent of errors and defects in capital proceedings. In the 1980s, the Court rejected a constitutional challenge to imposing the death penalty on juveniles; upheld the death penalty for disabled people suffering from “mental retardation”; and, in a widely condemned opinion, found no constitutional violation in the extreme racial disparities that could be seen throughout most death penalty jurisdictions. By the end of the decade, some justices had become openly critical of the review that death penalty cases received. Chief Justice William Rehnquist urged restrictions on death penalty appeals and the endless efforts of lawyers to stop executions. “Let’s get on with it,” he famously declared at a bar association event in 1988. Finality, not fairness, had become the new priority in death penalty jurisprudence. —

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  AUGUSTINE. (de Quæst. Ev. lib. ii. qu. 33.) But that which is said to have taken place not many days after, namely, that gathering all together he set out abroad into a far country, which is forgetfulness of God, signifies that not long after the institution of the human race, the soul of man chose of its free will to take with it a certain power of its nature, and to desert Him by whom it was created, trusting in its own strength, which it wastes the more rapidly as it has abandoned Him who gave it. Hence it follows, And there wasted his substance in riotous living. But he calls a riotous or prodigal life one that loves to spend and lavish itself with outward show, while exhausting itself within, since every one follows those things which pass on to something else, and forsakes Him who is closest to himself. As it follows, And when he had spent all, there arose a great famine in that land. The famine is the want of the word of truth. It follows, And he began to be in want. Fitly did he begin to be in want who abandoned the treasures of the wisdom and the knowledge of God, and the unfathomableness of the heavenly riches. It follows, And he went and joined himself to a citizen of that country. AUGUSTINE. (ubi sup.) One of the citizens of that country was a certain prince of the air belonging to the army of the devil, whose fields signify the manner of his power, concerning which it follows, And he sent him into the field to feed swine. The swine are the unclean spirits which are under him. BEDE. But to feed swine is to work those things in which the unclean spirits delight. It follows, And he would have filled his belly with the husks which the swine did eat. The husk is a sort of bean, empty within, soft outside, by which the body is not refreshed, but filled, so that it rather loads than nourishes. AUGUSTINE. (ubi sup.) The husks then with which the swine were fed are the teaching of the world, which cries loudly of vanity; according to which in various prose and verse men repeat the praises of the idols, and fables belonging to the gods of the Gentiles, wherewith the devils are delighted. Hence when he would fain have filled himself, he wished to find therein something stable and upright which might relate to a happy life, and he could not; as it follows, And no one gave to him.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  F R O M S H A M E TO S I N fi nds its most poignant expression in Mary’s encounter with the mother of God. Because this is an allegory of sin and repentance, the scale of Mary’s depravity is a mea sure of the infi nite grace she can receive. At the same time, in Mary’s story the toll of such forgiveness is plain to see. Mortifi cation, self- abasement, death unto this world— such are the adjuncts of redemption. Th e penitent prostitute is walled into a cell, she surrenders her beauty, she sobs eternally. In Mary’s case, she suff ers hauntingly until her evils have evaporated along with her body. She becomes a phantasm, a pure, pitiful creature whose body has been wasted to virtual nothingness. Th e body, its existence in the world, its participation in the mysterious cycles of regeneration, off er no truth, no plea sure, no redemption. In structure and in spirit, the Life of Mary is the quintessential antiromance. CO N C LU S I O N : M Y TH I C A L I M P E R I A L I S M I N L ATE A NTI Q U IT Y In the eighth century, a mischievous Byzantine author wrote a hagiographi-cal romance that begins where the novel of Achilles Tatius ends. Clitophon and Leucippe— whose name has been apathetically disguised as “Gleucippe”— are married and living in Emesa. Gleucippe is infertile, and Clitophon is a wife- beater. She regularly beseeches Artemis (her savior in the romance) to allow her to have a child, without issue. Not until she converts to Christianity does she bear a son, Galaktion, who will become the chaste, Christian hero of the story. Th e saint’s life proves that hagiogra- phers, even at this date, simply could not live without the imaginary world created by the authors of romance. Th e grotesque story of Gleucippe and Clitophon is probably the least subliminal instance of what Frye called “mythical imperialism.” Th e invention of the penitent prostitutes was only one campaign in a massive cultural conquest that sprawled across the entire continent of ancient literature. But this new archetype, born from the warm embers of imperial romance, refl ects an especially meaningful encounter in the transition to a Christian culture. Th e stories of the penitent prostitutes, as a subgenre, mirror the coming of age of Christianity as a dominant public ideology. Th e woman’s body was a potent symbol, a shorthand for the order of society. At the deepest level, the redemption of a prostitute’s corrupted fl esh stood for the ability of the church to absorb society and through baptism to cleanse it. Th e prostitute’s sins are only an exaggerated R O M A N C E I N T H E L AT E C L A S S I C A L WO R L D 

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  He became still and quiet and suddenly looked very worried. “Well, it looks like I’m back here,” he said with a heavy sigh. “They done put me back on death row.” His voice was mournful. “I tried, I tried, I tried, but they just won’t let me be.” He looked me in the eye. “Why they want to do somebody like they’re doing me is something I’ll never understand. Why are people like that? I mind my own business. I don’t hurt nobody. I try to do right, and no matter what I do, people come along, put me right back on death row...for nothing. Nothing. I ain’t done nothing to nobody. Nothing, nothing, nothing.” He was becoming agitated so I put my hand on his arm. “Hey, it’s okay,” I said as gently as I could. “It’s not as bad as it seems. I think—” “You’re going to get me out, right? You’re going to get me off the row again?” “Walter, this isn’t the row. You haven’t been feeling well, and so you’re here so you can get better. This is a hospital.” “They’ve got me again, and you’ve got to help me.” He was starting to panic, and I wasn’t sure what to do. Then he started crying. “Please get me out of here. Please? They’re going to execute me for no good reason, and I don’t want to die in no electric chair.” He was crying now with a forcefulness that alarmed me. I moved to the bed next to him and put my arm around him. “It’s okay, it’s okay. Walter, it’s going to be all right. It’s going to be all right.” He was trembling, and I got up so that he could lie down. He stopped crying as his head hit the pillow. I began talking to him softly about trying to make arrangements so he could stay at home and how we needed to find help, and that the problem was that it really wasn’t safe for him to be alone. I could see his eyes drooping as I spoke, and within a matter of minutes he was sound asleep. I’d been with him less than twenty minutes. I pulled his blankets up and watched him sleep. In the hallway, I asked one of the nurses how he’d been doing. “He’s really sweet,” she said. “We love having him here. He’s nice to the staff, very polite and gentle. Sometimes he gets upset and starts talking about prison and death row. We didn’t know what he was talking about, but one of the girls looked him up on the Internet, and that’s when we read what happened to him. Somebody said someone like that is not supposed to be here, but I told them that our job is to help anybody who needs help.” “Well, the State acknowledged that he didn’t do anything wrong. He is innocent.” The nurse looked at me sweetly. “I know, Mr.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  We also make terrible mistakes. Scores of innocent people have been exonerated after being sentenced to death and nearly executed. Hundreds more have been released after being proved innocent of noncapital crimes through DNA testing. Presumptions of guilt, poverty, racial bias, and a host of other social, structural, and political dynamics have created a system that is defined by error, a system in which thousands of innocent people now suffer in prison. Finally, we spend lots of money. Spending on jails and prisons by state and federal governments has risen from $6.9 billion in 1980 to nearly $80 billion today. Private prison builders and prison service companies have spent millions of dollars to persuade state and local governments to create new crimes, impose harsher sentences, and keep more people locked up so that they can earn more profits. Private profit has corrupted incentives to improve public safety, reduce the costs of mass incarceration, and most significantly, promote rehabilitation of the incarcerated. State governments have been forced to shift funds from public services, education, health, and welfare to pay for incarceration, and they now face unprecedented economic crises as a result. The privatization of prison health care, prison commerce, and a range of services has made mass incarceration a money-making windfall for a few and a costly nightmare for the rest of us. — After graduating from law school, I went back to the Deep South to represent the poor, the incarcerated, and the condemned. In the last thirty years, I’ve gotten close to people who have been wrongly convicted and sent to death row, people like Walter McMillian. In this book you will learn the story of Walter’s case, which taught me about our system’s disturbing indifference to inaccurate or unreliable verdicts, our comfort with bias, and our tolerance of unfair prosecutions and convictions. Walter’s experience taught me how our system traumatizes and victimizes people when we exercise our power to convict and condemn irresponsibly—not just the accused but also their families, their communities, and even the victims of crime. But Walter’s case also taught me something else: that there is light within this darkness. Walter’s story is one of many that I tell in the following chapters. I’ve represented abused and neglected children who were prosecuted as adults and suffered more abuse and mistreatment after being placed in adult facilities. I’ve represented women, whose numbers in prison have increased 640 percent in the last thirty years, and seen how our hysteria about drug addiction and our hostility to the poor have made us quick to criminalize and prosecute poor women when a pregnancy goes wrong. I’ve represented mentally disabled people whose illnesses have often landed them in prison for decades. I’ve gotten close to victims of violent crime and their families and witnessed how even many of the custodians of mass imprisonment—prison staff—have been made less healthy, more violent and angry, and less just and merciful.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  The troubles of the working poor are well known to policymakers, but Vance offers an insider’s view of the problem.” —Christianity Today “Required reading.” —Jewish Daily Forward “A searching—and searing—memoir about growing up poor in the decaying former steel town of Middletown, Ohio. . . . Vance takes an affectionate but critical look at his people.” —Columbus Monthly “With a sense of the poetic, Vance writes of the beauty of the place of his kin: deep hollers, green rolling hillsides, and people who live by a fierce code of honor. But we learn a different story, too: that of hopelessness, early pregnancies, addiction, and the sense that poverty is a life sentence.” —Evansville Courier & Press “[Hillbilly Elegy] does an excellent job of shedding a light on the voters in the Rust Belt states that flipped the last election. . . . There is plenty of sadness and anger in its pages, but those emotions are overwhelmed by a murky truth that would do us good to try to understand.” —East Oregonian “[A]n embodiment of certain timeless and universal truths that speak to us all, regardless of our backgrounds. . . . Hillbilly Elegy is a story of inspiration that should be read by everyone because of its message of hope and personal triumph in the face of overwhelming obstacles.” —Fayetteville Observer “This admirably frank book illumines poverty through memoir.” —Lincoln Journal Star “[Vance’s] narrative is attention-grabbing, gritty, and provides down-to-earth insight into why the United States is now so politically divided. . . . Hillbilly Elegy is at times very funny, disturbing, and deeply poignant.” —Missourian “Vance is brutally honest in sharing his story.” —Highland Country Press “Unflinching.” —Lafayette Journal & Courier “Vance is a wonderful memoirist.” —Toronto Star “A serious, fascinating, human—with all the good and bad that word involves— insight into the lives of people from the white working class of Rust Belt America.” —The Australian “In this searching recollection of his childhood in Appalachia and Rust Belt Ohio, Vance . . . trains an unflinching eye on the rural working class. . . . [Hillbilly Elegy is] a requiem for an identity that sees no place for itself in a postindustrial world.” —Slate “A highly personal deep dive into a segment of American society that is painfully trapped in cycles of despair and failure, some of which is the product of self-destructive behavior that only exacerbates the paucity of economic opportunity.” —Bloomberg “Vance’s is a unique voice. He offers a tough but sympathetic glimpse into a pocket of white America that is too easily lampooned in popular culture, and he does it as only someone who’s lived in that world can.” —Vox “In his touching memoir, J.D. Vance examines the socioeconomic conditions that affected his and other Appalachian families in the twentieth century.” —Bustle “A spare and poignant look at impoverished rural Ohio and Kentucky.” —The Paris Review Daily “If you have not read J.D.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  Augustine believed not only that the state of the will was the mea sure of morality, but also that mastery of the will was humanly impossible. Sex came to epito- mize, for Augustine, the recalcitrance of the will. Th e City of God, like no other text, symbolizes the simultaneous triumph and disintegration of an- cient Christian notions of the will.  Th e century between the conversion of Constantine and the appearance of the fi rst installment of Th e City of God was a golden age for Christian free will. Eusebius, the church historian, wrote about free will more extensively, if less creatively, than any Christian before him. In his polemic against Hi- erocles, Eusebius attacks pagan determinism at length, a sign that fatalism had become caught up in the sniping between pagans and Christians in the last age of persecution. Th e entire sixth book of his Preparation for the Gos- pel is dedicated to the defense of free will against an eclectic pagan deter- minism. He attacks the critic Porphyry, who cited the veracity of oracles as a manifest proof of an overarching fate. Eusebius was intent to establish the justice of divine judgment, which was incompatible with determinism. Ev- ery event had one of three causes: natural law, randomness, and human will. All evil had its origins in the “self- initiated choice of the soul.” Th e human soul stood outside of nature and its chain of physical causes; the soul was “free, autonomous, and master of itself.” What impious slanderer, for in- stance, would accuse God of making a man use his body “against nature”? More than any other author, Eusebius off ered a defense of free will that was framed against a developed form of pagan determinism in which a Platonic cosmos and the governance of the traditional pantheon were assimilated into a compassing determinism. Over the next de cades, in the wake of Christian triumph, the freedom of the will— a concept born in the compe- tition of cosmologies of the high Roman Empire— would spread farther than ever before.  What is so striking about the discourse of free will in the long fourth century is its quantity and breadth. For three or four generations the Chris- tian understanding of the universe fl ourished and spread across the Medi- terranean. It is remarkable how untroubled this literature is by the impend- ing Augustinian earthquake. In the late fourth century, a Cappadocian bishop, Amphilocius of Iconium, could insert the doctrine of free will un- CHURCH, SOCIETY, AND SEX IN THE AGE OF TRIUMPH  problematically into an exegesis of the “sinful woman” from the Gospel of Luke. His sermon is revealing on many counts, not least its total innocence of the doctrinal issues that would, within a few de cades, erupt with such force. Th e “sinful woman” was, unsurprisingly, regarded as a prostitute. More un- expectedly, she was interpreted as a fi gure of Eve, the protosinner.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  21. Plutarch on male passives: Plut. Amat. 23.768E; muscular lads: Luc. Adv. indoct. 25; male prostitute: Luc. Adv. indoct. 25; Polyphemus: Luc. Pseudolog. 27; for graffiti, see Antonio Varone, Erotica pompeiana: Iscrizioni d’amore sui muri di Pompei (Rome, 1994), and most recently Sarah Levin-Richardson, “Facilis hic futuit: Graffiti and Masculinity in Pompeii’s ‘Purpose-Built’ Brothel,” Helios 38 (2011): 59–78. 22. Ptol. Tetr. 3.14; in general, Tamsyn S. Barton, Power and Knowledge: Astrology, Physiognomics, and Medicine under the Roman Empire (Ann Arbor, 1994); Brooten, Love between Women, 140–142. 23. Ptol. Tetr. 3.14.171–172; for the relative lack of sources on lesbianism (esp. in Latin), see Butrica, “Some Myths and Anomalies,” 261. 24. Born to be penetrated: Sen. Ep. 95.21; Luc. Adv. indoct. 23; Rhet. praecept. 11; appearance and deviance: Adamantius, Physiog. A4; Simon Swain, ed., Seeing the Face, Seeing the Soul: Polemon’s Physiognomy from Classical Antiquity to Medieval Islam (Oxford, 2007), 496–497; “knowledge of the internal constitution”: Istanbul Polemon, fo. 40, trans. Antonella Ghersetti, in Swain, Seeing the Face, p. 481; “easily outed”: Adamantius, Physiog. B38, in Swain, Seeing the Face, p. 536. 25. Phaedr. Fab. 4.16. 26. Richlin, “Not before Homosexuality,” 530; Taylor, “Two Pathic Subcultures,” 319–371; Bruce Frier, “Review of Craig A. Williams, Roman Homosexuality: Ideologies of Masculinity in Classical Antiquity,” BMCR, Nov. 5, 1999; Butrica, “Some Myths and Anomalies,” 236. 27. Ptol. Tetr. 3.14.172. 28. Nero: Suet. Nero 28; Tac. Ann. 15.370; Elagabulus: Cass. Dio 79–80; Xen. Eph. 5.15; Mart. Ep. 7.58; 12.42; 1.24; Juv. Sat. 2.47; John Boswell, Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe (New York, 1994), 53–107, is a useful assemblage of evidence. 29. Ptol. Tetr. 3.14.171; instrument: Ps.-Luc. Amor. 28; wives: Ptol. Tetr. 3.14.172; Clem. Paid. 3.3.21.3; Luc. Dial. meretr. 5; for the dextrarum iunctio, and in general by far the most reliable treatment, Brooten, Love between Women, 59; Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, 83, part of broader changes in the emotional value of marriage. 30. Boat chase: Ach. Tat. 5.7; severed head: 8.15.4; ill-starred: 8.16.1. 31. McGinn, Prostitution, Sexuality, and the Law, on the polarization of female sexual honor; Langlands, Sexual Morality in Ancient Rome, on female norms in general. 32. Plaut. Cist. 78–81, with Langlands, Sexual Morality in Ancient Rome, 207; Cic. Cael. 49; Theodor Mommsen, Römisches strafrecht (Leipzig, 1899), 691; in general, Riccardo Astolfi, La Lex Iulia et Papia (Padua, 1970); David Cohen, “The Augustan Law on Adultery: The Social and Cultural Context,” in The Family in Italy from Antiquity to the Present, ed. David Kertzer and Richard Saller (New Haven, 1991), 109–126; see esp. McGinn, Prostitution, Sexuality, and the Law. 33. Behavior: Dig. 50.16.46; vestments: Dig. 47.10.15.15; on the language of mater familias, see McGinn, Prostitution, Sexuality, and the Law, 9, 153.

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  but when she steps out back for a cigarette break, I spend some of my newfound salary to scarf down a sandwich and hide some snacks in the deli kitchen to give Rosie and Norman later. I find work not only helps provide for my siblings and me—it also keeps my mind distracted from how my family is crumbling. When I’m idle, I’m in so much pain wishing my older sisters wanted me; or that just once, my mother would tell me she loves me. When Cookie’s working and Norm and Rosie are watching TV, I lock myself in my bedroom and cut my arms with scissors. I watch the skin give way, then the blood comes to a swell, and for a second there’s some release to the pain deep inside me. Sometimes when Cookie and I are working together in the kitchen, I try and flaunt the gashes just to see if she cares at all. One day, she finally throws me a bone. “You got a little problem with your arms there?” she asks me. Behind her in the distance I see Hank working the register. I shrug. Cookie laughs. “Next time, if you’re going to do it, do it right,” she says. “You cut on your wrists. Not your forearms.” A few days later, I’m startled from my thoughts of this conversation when a man wearing a black T-shirt, jeans, and work boots appears at the deli’s Employees Only kitchen door. I take in the vision of him—dark curls framing a tanned, handsome face and eyes shining pure as onyx—then I get back to peeling potatoes. I pause, waiting to see whether he’ll say anything. He stares. “Can I help you?” He examines me, taking in all my features. Finally, silently, he shakes his head. I look back down to peel the potatoes; when I move my eyes to see if he’s still there . . . he’s gone. Although I don’t recall ever meeting him, something about his eyes is eerily familiar. I can’t shake the certainty that I’ve seen them somewhere before. “HIS NAME IS Paul Accerbi.” The flicking sound of Cookie’s lighter collides with the ding of the dishes I’m setting on the table for dinner. “He comes waltzing in, digging through his wallet, then looks up at me—a deer in friggin’ headlights.” I stop setting the table to stare at her. “God, what I wouldn’t give to capture the look on his face when he saw me. ‘Your daughter’s in the back, ’ I tell him. Do you know how long I waited to deliver that line?” She takes a drag of her cigarette. “Well, actually, I’ll tell you how long: eleven looong years.” She laughs, a cackle then a hack.