Despair

Passages

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

Page 82 of 267 · 20 per page

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  I have come to believe in death and renewal by fire. Past questioning the necessities of blood or why it must be mine or my children’s time that will see the grim city quake to be reborn perhaps blackened again but this time with a sense of purpose; tired of the past tense forever, of assertion and repetition of the ego-trips through an incomplete self where two years ago proud rang for promise but now it is time for fruit and all the agonies are barren— only the children are growing: For how else can the self become whole save by making self into its own new religion? I am bound like an old lover—a true believer— to this city’s death by accretion and slow ritual, and I submit to its penance for a trial as new steel is tried I submit my children also to its death throes and agony and they are not even the city’s past lovers. But I submit them to the harshness and growing cold to the brutalizations which if survived will teach them strength or an understanding of how strength is gotten and will not be forgotten: It will be their city then: I submit them loving them above all others save myself to the fire to the rage to the ritual scarifications to be tried as new steel is tried; and in its wasting the city shall try them as the blood-splash of a royal victim tries the hand of the destroyer. II I hide behind tenements and subways in fluorescent alleys watching as flames walk the streets of an empire’s altar raging through the veins of the sacrificial stenchpot smeared upon the east shore of a continent’s insanity conceived in the psychic twilight of murderers and pilgrims rank with money and nightmare and too many useless people who will not move over nor die, who cannot bend even before the winds of their own preservation even under the weight of their own hates Who cannot amend nor conceive nor even learn to share their own visions who bomb my children into mortar in churches and work plastic offal and metal and the flesh of their enemies into subway rush-hour temples where obscene priests finger and worship each other in secret and think they are praying when they squat to shit money-pebbles shaped like their parents’ brains— who exist to go into dust to exist again grosser and more swollen and without ever relinquishing space or breath or energy from their private hoard. I do not need to make war nor peace with these prancing and murderous deacons who refuse to recognize their role in this covenant we live upon and so have come to fear and despise even their own children; but I condemn myself, and my loves past and present and the blessed enthusiasms of all my children to this city without reason or future without hope to be tried as the new steel is tried before trusted to slaughter.

• 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 Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  And this joy of living, because it is unnaturally acquired, is a poison which eventually vitiates the whole world. Whatever is created beyond the normal limits of human suffering, acts as a boomerang and brings about destruction. At night the streets of New York reflect the crucifixion and death of Christ. When the snow is on the ground and there is the utmost silence there comes out of the hideous buildings of New York a music of such sullen despair and bankruptcy as to make the flesh shrivel. No stone was laid upon another with love or reverence; no street was laid for dance or joy. One thing has been added to another in a mad scramble to fill the belly, and the streets smell of empty bellies and full bellies and bellies half full. The streets smell of a hunger which has nothing to do with love; they smell of the belly which is insatiable and of the creations of the empty belly which are null and void. In this null and void, in this zero whiteness, I learned to enjoy a sandwich, or a collar button. I could study a cornice or a coping with the greatest curiosity while pretending to listen to a tale of human woe. I can remember the dates on certain buildings and the names of the architects who designed them. I can remember the temperature and the velocity of the wind, standing at a certain corner; the tale that accompanied it is gone. I can remember that I was even then remembering something else, and I can tell you what it was that I was then remembering, but of what use? There was one man in me which had died and all that was left were his remembrances; there was another man who was alive, and that man was supposed to be me, myself, but he was alive only as a tree is alive, or a rock, or a beast of the field. Just as the city itself had become a huge tomb in which men struggled to earn a decent death so my own life came to resemble a tomb which I was constructing out of my own death. I was walking around in a stone forest the center of which was chaos; sometimes in the dead center, in the very heart of chaos, I danced or drank myself silly, or I made love, or I befriended some one, or I planned a new life, but it was all chaos, all stone, and all hopeless and bewildering. Until the time when I would encounter a force strong enough to whirl me out of this mad stone forest no life would be possible for me nor could one page be written which would have meaning.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  Every day this colossal reality took on new proportions, every day it became more terrifying, more paralyzing. Every day she had to grow swifter wings, sharper jaws, more piercing, hypnotic eyes. It was a race to the outermost limits of the world, a race lost from the start, and no one to stop it. At the edge of the vacuum stood Truth, ready in one lightning-like sweep to recover the stolen ground. It was so simple and obvious that it drove her frantic. Marshal a thousand personalities, commandeer the biggest guns, deceive the greatest minds, make the longest detour—still the end would be defeat. In the final meeting everything was destined to fall apart—the cunning, the skill, the power, everything. She would be a grain of sand on the shore of the biggest ocean, and, worse than anything, she would resemble each and every other grain of sand on that ocean’s shore. She would be condemned to rocognize her unique self everywhere until the end of time. What a fate she had chosen for herself! That her uniqueness should be engulfed in the universal! That her power should be reduced to the utmost node of passivity! It was maddening, hallucinating. It could not be! It must not be! Onward! Like the black legions. Onward! Through every degree of the ever-widening circle. Onward and away from the self, until the last substantial particle of the soul be stretched to infinity. In her panic- stricken flight she seemed to bear the whole world in her womb. We were being driven out of the confines of the universe toward a nebula which no instrument could visualize. We were being rushed to a pause so still, so prolonged, that death by comparison seems a mad witches’ revel. In the morning, gazing at the bloodless crater of her face. Not a line in it, not a wrinkle, not a single blemish! The look of an angel in the arms of the Creator. Who killed Cock Robin? Who massacred the Iroquois? Not I, my lovely angel could say, and by God, who, gazing at that pure, blameless face, could deny her? Who could see in that sleep of innocence that one half of the face belonged to God and the other half to Satan? The mask was smooth as death, cool, lovely to the touch, waxen, like a petal open to the faintest breeze. So alluringly still and guileless was it that one could drown in it, one could go down into it, body and all, like a diver, and nevermore return.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  This door which the body wears, if opened out onto the world, leads to annihilation. It is the door in every fable out of which the magician steps; nobody has ever read of him returning home through the selfsame door. If opened inward there are infinite doors, all resembling trapdoors: no horizons are visible, no airlines, no rivers, no maps, no tickets. Each couche is a halt for the night only, be it five minutes or ten thousand years. The doors have no handles and they never wear out. Most important to note—there is no end in sight. All these halts for the night, so to speak, are like abortive explorations of a myth. One can feel his way about, take bearings, observe passing phenomena; one can even feel at home. But there is no taking root. Just at the moment when one begins to feel “established” the whole terrain founders, the soil underfoot is afloat, the constellations are shaken loose from their moorings, the whole known universe, including the imperishable self, starts moving silently, ominously, shudderingly serene and unconcerned, toward an unknown, unseen destination. All the doors seem to be opening at once; the pressure is so great that an implosion occurs and in the swift plunge the skeleton bursts asunder. It was some such gigantic collapse which Dante must have experienced when he situated himself in Hell; it was not a bottom which he touched, but a core, a dead center from which time itself is reckoned. Here the comedy begins, from here it is seen to be divine. All this by way of saying that in going through the revolving door of the Amarillo Dance Hall one night, some twelve or fourteen years ago, the great event took place. The interlude which I think of as the Land of Fuck, a realm of time more than of space, is for me the equivalent of that Purgatory which Dante has described in nice detail. As I put my hand on the brass rail of the revolving door to leave the Amarillo Dance Hall, all that I had previously been, was, and about to be foundered. There was nothing unreal about it; the very time in which I was born passed away, carried off by a mightier stream. Just as I had previously been bundled out of the womb, so now I was shunted back to some timeless vector where the process of growth is kept in abeyance. I passed into the world of effects. There was no fear, only a feeling of fatality. My spine was socketed to the node; I was up against the coccyx of an implacable new world. In the plunge the skeleton blew apart, leaving the immutable ego as helpless as a squashed louse. If from this point I do not begin, it is because there is no beginning. If I do not fly at once to the bright land it is because wings are of no avail.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  P. Morganana is placidly wiping his ass while the telephone girls plug the switchboards, while dicks with rubber hoses practice the third degree, while my old friend MacGregor scrubs the germs out of his cock and sweetens it and examines it under the microscope. Everybody caught with his pants down, including the strip teasers who wear no pants, no beards, no mustaches, just a little patch to cover their twinkling little cunts. Sister Antolina lying in the convent bed, her guts trussed up, her arms akimbo and waiting for the Resurrection, waiting, waiting for life without hernia, without intercourse, without sin, without evil, meanwhile nibbling a few animal crackers, a pimento, some fancy olives, a little headcheese. The Jewboys on the East Side, in Harlem, the Bronx, Canarsie, Brownsville, opening and closing the trapdoors, pulling out arms and legs, turning the sausage machine, clogging up the drains, working like fury for cash down and if you let a peep out of you out you go. With eleven hundred tickets in my pocket and a Rolls Royce waiting for me downstairs I could have the most excruciatingly marvelous time, throwing a fuck into each and every one respectively regardless of age, sex, race, religion, nationality, birth or breeding. There is no solution for a man like myself, I being what I am and the world being what it is. The world is divided into three parts of which two parts are meat balls and spaghetti and the other part a huge syphilitic chancre. The haughty one with the statuesque figure is probably a cold turkey fuck, a sort of con anonyme plastered with gold leaf and tin foil. Beyond despair and disillusionment there is always the absence of worse things and the emoluments of ennui. Nothing is lousier and emptier than the midst of bright gaiety clicked by the mechanical eye of the mechanical epoch, life maturating in a black box, a negative tickled with acid and yielding a momentaneous simulacrum of nothingness. At the outermost limit of this momentaneous nothingness my friend MacGregor arrives and is standing by my side and with him is the one he was talking about, the nymphomaniac called Paula.

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

  Once again, Ralph Myers was having second thoughts. After months in the county jail, away from death row, Myers again realized he didn’t want to implicate himself in a murder he had not committed. He waited until the morning that the trial was set to begin before he told investigators that he could not testify because what they wanted him to say was not true. He tried to wrangle for more favorable treatment but decided that there was no punishment he was willing to accept for a murder he hadn’t committed. Myers’s refusal to cooperate got him sent back to death row. Back at Holman, it wasn’t long before he again showed serious emotional and psychological distress. After a couple of weeks, prison officials were so concerned that they sent him to the state hospital for the mentally ill. The Taylor Hardin Secure Medical Facility in Tuscaloosa did all of the diagnostic and assessment work for courts managing people accused of crimes who might be incompetent to stand trial due to mental illness. It had frequently been criticized by defense lawyers for almost never finding serious mental disabilities that would prevent defendants from going to trial. Myers’s time at Taylor Hardin did very little to change his predicament. He hoped that he might be returned to the county jail after his thirty-day stint at the hospital, but instead he was returned to death row. Realizing he could not escape the situation he’d created for himself, Myers told investigators he was ready to testify against McMillian. A new trial date was scheduled for August 1988. Walter had been on death row for over a year. As hard as he had tried to adjust, he couldn’t accept the nightmare his life had become. Although he was nervous, he had been convinced that he was going home back in February, when the first trial was scheduled. His lawyers seemed happy that Myers was struggling and told Walter it was a good sign when the trial was continued because Myers refused to testify. But it meant another six months on death row for Walter, and he couldn’t see anything encouraging about that. When they finally moved him to the Baldwin County Jail in Bay Minette for the August trial, Walter left death row confident he’d never return. He had become friends with several men on the row and was surprised by how conflicted he felt about leaving them, knowing what they would soon face.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  Everybody was being let down hard—not only the installment companies, but the landlord, the butcher, the baker, the gas, water and electricity devils, everybody. If only I could get to believe in this business of work! To save my life I couldn’t see it. I could only see that people were working their balls off because they didn’t know any better. I thought of the speech I had made which won me the job. In some ways I was very much like Herr Nagel myself. No telling from minute to minute what I would do. No knowing whether I was a monster or a saint. Like so many wonderful men of our time, Herr Nagel was a desperate man—and it was this very desperation which made him such a likable chap. Hamsun didn’t know what to make of this character himself: he knew he existed, and he knew that there was something more to him than a mere buffoon and a mystifier. I think he loved Herr Nagel more than any other character he created. And why? Because Herr Nagel was the unacknowledged saint which every artist is—the man who is ridiculed because his solutions, which are truly profound, seem too simple for the world. No man wants to be an artist—he is driven to it because the world refuses to recognize his proper leadership. Work meant nothing to me, because the real work to be done was being evaded. People regarded me as lazy and shiftless, but on the contrary I was an exceedingly active individual. Even if it was just hunting for a piece of tail, that was something, and well worth while, especially if compared to other forms of activity—such as making buttons or turning screws, or even removing appendixes. And why did people listen to me so readily when I applied for a job? Why did they find me entertaining? For the reason, no doubt, that I had always spent my time profitably. I brought them gifts—from my hours at the public library, from my idle ramblings through the streets, from my intimate experiences with women, from my afternoons at the burlesque, from my visits to the museum and the art galleries. Had I been a dud, just a poor honest bugger who wanted to work his balls off for so much a week, they wouldn’t have offered me the jobs they did, nor would they have handed me cigars or taken me to lunch or lent me money, as they frequently did. I must have had something to offer which perhaps unknowingly they prized beyond horsepower or technical ability. I didn’t know myself what it was, because I had neither pride, nor vanity, nor envy.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  But you’ve got something in you—only you’re too damned lazy to bring it out. Listen, when I hear you talk sometimes I think to myself—if only that guy would put it down on paper! Why you could write a book that would make a guy like Dreiser hang his head. You’re different from the Americans I know; somehow you don’t belong, and it’s a damned good thing you don’t. You’re a little cracked, too—I suppose you know that. But in a good way. Listen, a little while ago, if it had been anybody else who talked to me that way I’d have murdered him. I think I like you better because you didn’t try to give me any sympathy. I know better than to expect sympathy from you. If you had said one false word tonight I’d have really gone mad. I know it. I was on the very edge. When you started in about General Ivolgin I thought for a minute it was all up with me. That’s what makes me think you’ve got something in you . . . that was real cunning! And now let me tell you something . . . if you don’t pull yourself together soon you’re going to be screwy. You’ve got something inside you that’s eating you up. I don’t know what it is, but you can’t put it over on me. I know you from the bottom up. I know there’s something griping you—and it’s not just your wife, nor your job, nor even that nigger wench whom you think you’re in love with. Sometimes I think you were born in the wrong time. Listen, I don’t want you to think I’m making an idol of you but there’s something to what I say . . . if you had just a little more confidence in yourself you could be the biggest man in the world today. You wouldn’t even have to be a writer. You might become another Jesus Christ for all I know. Don’t laugh—I mean it. You haven’t the slightest idea of your own possibilities . . . you’re absolutely blind to everything except your own desires. You don’t know what you want. You don’t know because you never stop to think. You’re letting people use you up. You’re a damned fool, an idiot. If I had a tenth of what you’ve got I could turn the world upside down. You think that’s crazy, eh? Well, listen to me . . . I was never more sane in my life. When I came to see you tonight I thought I was about ready to commit suicide. It doesn’t make much difference whether I do it or not. But anyway, I don’t see much point in doing it now. That won’t bring her back to me. I was born unlucky. Wherever I go I seem to bring disaster. But I don’t want to kick off yet . . .

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  Never once did she circle about the flying field; never once did she cast a glance backward toward those whom she was abandoning. Nor did she leave the slightest crumb of personality behind her; she took to the air with all her belongings, with every slightest scrap of evidence which might testify to the fact of her existence. She didn’t even leave the breath of a sigh behind, not even a toenail. A clean exit, such as the Devil himself might make for reasons of his own. One was left with a great void on his hands. One was deserted, and not only deserted, but betrayed, inhumanly betrayed. One had no desire to detain her nor to call her back; one was left with a curse on his lips, with a black hatred which darkened the whole day. Later, moving about the city, moving slowly in pedestrian fashion, crawling like the worm, one gathered rumors of her spectacular flight; she had been seen rounding a certain point, she had dipped here or there for what reason no one knew, she had done a tail-spin elsewhere, she had passed like a comet, she had written letters of smoke in the sky, and so on and so forth. Everything she had done was enigmatic and exasperating, done apparently without purpose. It was like a symbolic and ironic commentary on human life, on the behavior of the antlike creature man, viewed from another dimension. Between the time she took off and the time she returned I lived the life of a full-blooded schizerino. It was not an eternity which elapsed, because somehow eternity has to do with peace and with victory, it is something man made, something earned: no, I experienced an entr’acte in which every hair turns white to the roots, in which every millimeter of skin itches and burns until the whole body becomes a running sore. I see myself sitting before a table in the dark, my hands and feet growing enormous, as though elephantiasis were overtaking me at a gallop. I hear the blood rushing up to the brain and pounding at the eardrums like Himalayan devils with sledge-hammers; I hear her flapping her huge wings, even in Irkutsk, and I know she is pushing on and on, ever further away, ever further beyond reach. It is so quiet in the room and so frightfully empty that I shriek and howl just to make a little noise, a little human sound. I try to lift myself from the table but my feet are too heavy and my hands have become like the shapeless feet of the rhinoceros.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  If you know what freedom means, absolute freedom and not a relative freedom, then you must recognize that this is the nearest to it you will ever get. If I am against the condition of the world it is not because I am a moralist—it is because I want to laugh more. I don’t say that God is one grand laugh: I say that you’ve got to laugh hard before you can get anywhere near God. My whole aim in life is to get near to God, that is, to get nearer to myself. That’s why it doesn’t matter to me what road I take. But music is very important. Music is a tonic for the pineal gland. Music isn’t Bach or Beethoven; music is the can opener of the soul. It makes you terribly quiet inside, makes you aware that there’s a roof to your being. The stabbing horror of life is not contained in calamities and disasters, because these things wake one up and one gets very familiar and intimate with them and finally they become tame again . . . no, it is more like being in a hotel room in Hoboken, let us say, and just enough money in one’s pocket for another meal. You are in a city that you never expect to be in again and you have only to pass the night in your hotel room, but it takes all the courage and pluck you possess to stay in that room. There must be a good reason why certain cities, certain places, inspire such loathing and dread. There must be some kind of perpetual murder going on in these places. The people are of the same race as you, they go about their business as people do anywhere, they build the same sort of house, no better, no worse, they have the same system of education, the same currency, the same newspapers—and yet they are absolutely different from the other people you know, and the whole atmosphere is different, and the rhythm is different and the tension is different. It’s almost like looking at yourself in another incarnation. You know, with a most disturbing certitude, that what governs life is not money, not politics, not religion, not training, not race, not language, not customs, but something else, something you’re trying to throttle all the time and which is really throttling you, because otherwise you wouldn’t be terrified all of a sudden and wonder how you were going to escape. Some cities you don’t even have to pass a night in—just an hour or two is enough to unnerve you. I think of Bayonne that way. I came on it in the night with a few addresses that had been given me. I had a brief case under my arm with a prospectus of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

• From The History of Christianity II: From the Reformation to the Modern Megachurch (2017)

  57Lecture 6—The Church Militant in the Spanish Empire the New World. So the colonial government forced the headman of each Indian village to send teams to work in the mines or the fields. Technically they might have been free, but in practice this was forced labor. Moreover, the workers typically fell into debt and ended up trapped at the bottom of the economic food chain. õThe friars and other missionaries were basically content with this system, even if they clashed with civil authorities over policies toward Indians. They were more concerned with the Indians’ souls than with their bodies. õThe way they saw things, Satan had been in control of Pueblo country since time immemorial, and now it was the missionaries’ job to root him out. This meant smashing and burning all the native religious objects they could find, especially Kachina dolls, the ceremonial dolls that some Pueblo used to represent deities in the spirit world. In 1630, one friar bragged that he had destroyed “more than a thousand idols” at one time, in a giant bonfire, while a Pueblo servant watched with a heartbroken look on his face. õThe missionaries used some less violent, more savvy techniques too. Sometimes they grouped young Indian men into teams, each with a captain who was in charge of making sure every member of his team went to church. õBy some estimates, by the end of the 16 th century, seven million Indians in the Spanish empire had become Christians, at least in name. But for Westerners, conversion meant complete abandonment of any pre- Christian worldview,and the total embrace of Christianity’s worldview: salvation in Jesus Christ and only him. õMost Indians did not approach religion this way. For the Pueblo, to “convert” might mean to embrace the outward demands of Catholicism to the extent that it made life under Spanish rule more bearable, or to incorporate Christian ideas and understandings of God into Pueblo spirituality alongside their traditional gods. 58The History of Christianity II õThe Pueblos were a relatively peaceful people, but there came a point when Spanish aggression drove them to rise up. They had suffered years of a long drought, waves of nasty European diseases, and raids by nomadic tribes. Basically, they had a lot of reasons to wonder if the Christian God was all he was cracked up to be. õIn 1680, the Pueblo villages coordinated with each other to rebel. Part of the reason they could do this was that the colonists had forced them to learn Spanish, so that villages that once spoke only their own languages could now talk to each other. õA leader named Popé rallied the Pueblo to rise up not only by making a political argument against Spanish rule. He drew on religious authority as well. He said the old gods were the right ones, and they demanded a return to traditional Pueblo worship.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  The food and the rent—that was all there was to fight about— but there was no way, no clear, visible way, to fight for it. It was like seeing an army strong and well equipped, capable of licking anything in sight, and yet ordered to retreat every day, to retreat and retreat and retreat because that was the strategic thing to do, even though it meant losing ground, losing guns, losing ammunition, losing food, losing sleep, losing courage, losing life itself finally. Wherever there were men fighting for food and rent there was this retreat going on, in the fog, in the night, for no earthly reason except that it was the strategic thing to do. It was eating the heart out of him. To fight was easy, but to fight for food and rent was like fighting an army of ghosts. All you could do was to retreat, and while you retreated you watched your own brothers getting popped off, one after the other, silently, mysteriously, in the fog, in the dark, and not a thing to do about it. He was so damned confused, so perplexed, so hopelessly muddled and beaten, that he put his head in his arms and wept on my desk. And while he’s sobbing like that suddenly the telephone rings and its the vice- president’s office—never the vice-president himself, but always his office—and they want this man Griswold fired immediately and I say Yes Sir! and I hang up. I don’t say anything to Griswold about it but I walk home with him and I have dinner with him and his wife and kids. And when I leave him I say to myself that if I have to fire that guy somebody’s going to pay for it—and anyway I want to know first where the order comes from and why. And hot and sullen I go right up to the vice-president’s office in the morning and I ask to see the vice- president himself and did you give the order I ask—and why? And before he has a chance to deny it, or to explain his reason for it, I give him a little war stuff straight from the shoulder and where he don’t like it and can’t take it—and if you don’t like it, Mr. Will Twilldilliger, you can take the job, my job and his job and you can shove them up your ass—and like that I walk out on him. I go back to the slaughterhouse and I go about my work as usual. I expect, of course, that I’ll get the sack before the day’s over. But nothing of the kind.

• From The History of Christianity II: From the Reformation to the Modern Megachurch (2017)

  250The History of Christianity II õThe Russian Orthodox Church splintered almost immediately. Those who rejected any compromise at all with the communist regime broke away and went underground or set up rival organizations abroad. It’s remarkable that by 1937, 57 percent of Soviet population still called themselves religious believers, even though the Russian Orthodox Church was only a skeleton of what it once was. By 1939, there were only four bishops in the whole country who weren’t in prison. õThen came World War II. Stalin had brokered a non-aggression pact with Hitler that was supposed to guarantee that the Nazis would focus on fighting the Allied powers to the west and leave the Soviet Union alone. When Hitler went back on his word and invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, Stalin was caught off guard and scrambled to rally his people. õThe communists grudgingly came to the conclusion that if they were going to expect the Russian people to make another colossal sacrifice, then they needed religion. They needed the help of the church. CONCLUSION õThe war years were a time of religious revival in the Soviet Union. Church attendance grew enormously. Stalin reversed his policy of suppressing church activity. Churches, theological schools, and monasteries all started to function again—as long as all church officials supported the war effort and demonstrated total loyalty to Stalin’s policies. õIt is impossible to overstate the devastation that the war wrought on Soviet society. The Soviets lost at least 11 million soldiers. Estimates of civilian deaths range from 7 to 20 million. õIt’s likely Stalin understood that religion had to play a role in helping his people rebuild their lives and their country. But throughout the Cold War, the Soviet state’s relationship with organized religion would prove to be complicated: a mix of cooptation, persecution, and benign neglect, depending on the political needs of the moment. 251Lecture 25—The Church and the Russian Revolution õThere is no doubt that brutal Bolshevik policies and the Orthodox Church’s own corruption destroyed the faith of many people. But the long history of Russians’ deep commitment to the weekly rhythms of their churches and the commitment of religious dissenters—even to the point of self-inf licted pain and martyrdom—give a sense of the tenaciousness of Russian Christianity. SUGGESTED READING Engelstein, Castration and the Heavenly Kingdom. Figes, A People’s Tragedy. Shevzov, Russian Orthodoxy on the Eve of Revolution. QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER äHow might an ordinary Russian peasant have thought of their parish priest at the turn of the 20 th century? äWhat could motivate a person to join the Doukhobors or the Skoptsy? äOn paper, the Soviet constitution protected freedom of religion. How might the communists have reconciled that commitment with their real-life policy toward religious groups?

• From The History of Christianity II: From the Reformation to the Modern Megachurch (2017)

  õ In the Netherlands, sphere sovereignty was actually meant to grant people more freedoms. That’s because in the Netherlands, those separate communities tended to break down along the lines of belief: Protestants, Catholics, atheists, socialists. The idea of sphere sovereignty was supposed to enhance civil liberties for each group. õ But in South Africa, the most obvious lines to white Afrikaners were racial. They drew on these Dutch Reformed ideas to create a powerful ideology of Christian nationalism. The result was a lot of freedom for whites and very little freedom for blacks. THE SOUTH AFRICAN LIBERATION TRADITION õ Black South African clergy and activists saw that many, if not most, white-dominated churches had decided to place themselves at the service of apartheid. But some South Africans looked to Christianity’s prophetic tradition. A number of anti-apartheid activists took the egalitarian, social justice strand of Christianity that inspired the American civil rights activists and combined it with African traditions. õ One man who spent most of his life trumpeting this prophetic call to South Africans was Desmond Tutu. Tutu was ordained as an Anglican priest in 1961 after he abandoned a career in education as a protest against a new law relegating black students to the worst schools. õ He combined the Christian notion that all humans are equal as creatures made in the image of God with the Bantu idea of ubuntu, which means “I am, because you are.” In other words: I deserve the same consideration as you, but we are also dependent on each other; we’re in this together. õ In the early years, the possibility that nonviolent protest could dismantle the apartheid regime probably seemed even more remote than its potential to end the Jim Crow laws in America. For example, bus boycotts in Johannesburg only won a small fare decrease and a vague promise that the government would take a look at low wages in the future. 298 The History of Christianity II õ Nonviolence seemed even more foolish after police gunned down 69 protestors at the Sharpeville Massacre in 1960—an event that led to a ban on the African National Congress, or ANC, which was the main organized voice of protest against apartheid. õ The ban on the ANC persuaded many anti-apartheid leaders, like Nelson Mandela, that nonviolent reform was a pipe dream. Mandela helped found a group called uMkhonto we Sizwe, meaning “Spear of the Nation” in the Xhosa language. This group carried out several bombings in the 1960s and 1970s. One killed 19 and wounded more than 200 people. Lecture 30—The Gospel and Global Civil Rights 299

• From The History of Christianity II: From the Reformation to the Modern Megachurch (2017)

  298The History of Christianity II õIn the Netherlands, sphere sovereignty was actually meant to grant people more freedoms. That’s because in the Netherlands, those separate communities tended to break down along the lines of belief: Protestants, Catholics, atheists, socialists. The idea of sphere sovereignty was supposed to enhance civil liberties for each group. õBut in South Africa, the most obvious lines to white Afrikaners were racial. They drew on these Dutch Reformed ideas to create a powerful ideology of Christian nationalism. The result was a lot of freedom for whites and very little freedom for blacks. THE SOUTH AFRICAN LIBERATION TRADITION õBlack South African clergy and activists saw that many, if not most, white-dominated churches had decided to place themselves at the service of apartheid. But some South Africans looked to Christianity’s prophetic tradition. A number of anti-apartheid activists took the egalitarian, social justice strand of Christianity that inspired the American civil rights activists and combined it with African traditions. õOne man who spent most of his life trumpeting this prophetic call to South Africans was Desmond Tutu. Tutu was ordained as an Anglican priest in 1961 after he abandoned a career in education as a protest against a new law relegating black students to the worst schools. õHe combined the Christian notion that all humans are equal as creatures made in the image of God with the Bantu idea of ubuntu, which means “I am, because you are.” In other words: I deserve the same consideration as you, but we are also dependent on each other; we’re in this together. õIn the early years, the possibility that nonviolent protest could dismantle the apartheid regime probably seemed even more remote than its potential to end the Jim Crow laws in America. For example, bus boycotts in Johannesburg only won a small fare decrease and a vague promise that the government would take a look at low wages in the future. 299Lecture 30—The Gospel and Global Civil Rights õNonviolence seemed even more foolish after police gunned down 69 protestors at the Sharpeville Massacre in 1960—an event that led to a ban on the African National Congress, or ANC, which was the main organized voice of protest against apartheid. õThe ban on the ANC persuaded many anti-apartheid leaders, like Nelson Mandela, that nonviolent reform was a pipe dream. Mandela helped found a group called uMkhonto we Sizwe, meaning “Spear of the Nation” in the Xhosa language. This group carried out several bombings in the 1960s and 1970s. One killed 19 and wounded more than 200 people.

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

  Almost all of them were at Angola, a notoriously difficult place to do time, especially in the 1970s and 1980s when many had first arrived. For many years, violence was so bad at Angola that it was almost impossible to be incarcerated and not get disciplinaries—additional punishments or time tacked onto your sentence—due to conflicts with another inmate or staff. Prisoners were required to do manual labor in very difficult work environments or face solitary confinement or other disciplinary action. It was not uncommon for inmates to be seriously injured, losing fingers or limbs, after working long hours in brutal and dangerous conditions. For years, Angola—a slave plantation before the end of the Civil War—forced inmates to work in the fields picking cotton. Prisoners who refused would receive “write-ups” that went into their files and face months of solitary confinement. The horrible conditions of confinement and their constantly being told that they would die in prison no matter how well they behaved meant that most of our clients had long lists of disciplinaries. At the resentencing hearings we were preparing, state lawyers were using these prior disciplinaries to argue against favorable new sentences. Remarkably, several former juvenile lifers had developed outstanding institutional histories with very few disciplinaries, even though they did their time with no hope of ever being released or having their institutional history reviewed. Some became trustees, mentors, and advocates against violence among inmates. Others had become law librarians, journalists, and gardeners. Angola evolved over time to have some excellent programs for incarcerated people who stayed out of trouble, and many of our clients took full advantage. We decided to prioritize resentencing hearings in Louisiana for the “old-timers,” juvenile lifers who had been there for decades. Joshua Carter and Robert Caston were the first two cases we decided to litigate. In 1963, when he was sixteen, Joshua Carter was accused of a rape in New Orleans and quickly given the death penalty. A condemned black child awaiting execution in those days had little reason to hope for relief. But to coerce a confession from him, police officers had beaten Joshua so brutally that even in 1965 the Louisiana Supreme Court felt the need to overturn his conviction. Mr. Carter was resentenced to life imprisonment without parole and sent to Angola. After struggling for years, he became a model prisoner and trustee. In the 1990s, he developed glaucoma and didn’t get the medical care he needed, and he soon lost his sight in both eyes. We tried to persuade New Orleans prosecutors that Mr. Carter, blind and in his sixties, should be released after nearly fifty years in prison. Robert Caston had been at Angola for forty-five years.

• From Stone Butch Blues (1993)

  “Ts this really it?” I asked her. She nodded. We kissed each other as deeply as we could. Then we parted physically. I walked outside the door and turned to look back at her. She smiled, almost apologetically. I nodded. She closed the door. Suddenly I thought of things I needed to say to her, but I knew she didn’t need to hear them just then. I sat on the landing for a while. But it occurred to me Theresa might call a friend to console her and I didn’t want to be on our stairs. I went downstairs and out into the backyard. I overturned a wooden milk crate and sat down on it. The sky was black and strewn with stars. I felt alone on the planet. I was so scared I could hardly breathe. I didn’t know where I was headed. I didn’t know what to do with my life. I couldn’t even figure out what direction to begin walking. I sat on that crate all night long, looking up into the sky. Sometimes I cried, sometimes I just sat. I strained to look into my future, trying to picture the road ahead of me, searching for a glimpse of who I would become. All I could see was the night sky and the stars above me. 166 = Leslie Feinberg THE NIGHT SKY LIGHTENED FROM black to indigo. I was still sitting on the crate in our backyard. Soon the sun would tise. I didn’t want to be there when Theresa and the rest of the world began their day. I swung my leg over my Norton and kick-started it. As the engine roared to life between my legs, I fastened my helmet and flipped down the visor. Now this was the place I found my mobility and my safety—on this bike, under this helmet. As dawn streaked the sky I rode through a maze of silent city streets. Mist clung to the asphalt, suspended like smoke. A light rain began to fall. I rode into my own future as though it was only a dream. Rain fell harder, pelting me. Water beaded on my helmet, ran in little rivulets down the back of my neck, and soaked my shirt beneath my leather jacket. Wet denim stretched taut and cold across my thighs. Every street corner was a new crisis. Turn left? Turn right? Go straight? Hunger finally pulled me off the streets and into Loblaw’s supermarket. I called Jan’s house. No answer. I didn’t want to call Ed this early because Darlene would be sleeping. I filled a plastic bag with bing cherries and walked up and down the aisles eating them. My jeans stuck to my legs as I moved. I followed women who pushed shopping carts filled with cereals and children. Those who stared at me made sure I registered their disgust before they turned away. I did.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  And if he says it is because he has to make a living I will offer him what money I have and beg him once again to think what he is doing. I want to prevent as many men as possible from pretending that they have to do this or that because they must earn a living. It is not true. One can starve to death—it is much better. Every man who voluntarily starves to death jams another cog in the automatic process. I would rather see a man take a gun and kill his neighbor, in order to get the food he needs, than keep up the automatic process by pretending that he has to earn a living. That’s what I want to say, Mr. John Doe. I pass on. Not the stabbing horror of disaster and calamity, I say, but the automatic throwback, the stark panorama of the soul’s atavistic struggle. A bridge in North Carolina, near the Tennessee border. Coming out of lush tobacco fields, low cabins everywhere and the smell of fresh wood burning. The day passed in a thick lake of waving green. Hardly a soul in sight. Then suddenly a clearing and I’m over a big gulch spanned by a rickety wooden bridge. This is the end of the world! How in God’s name I got here and why I’m here I don’t know. How am I going to eat? And if I ate the biggest meal imaginable I would still be sad, frightfully sad. I don’t know where to go from here. This bridge is the end, the end of me, the end of my known world. This bridge is insanity: there is no reason why it should stand there and no reason why people should cross it. I refuse to budge another step, I balk at crossing that crazy bridge. Nearby is a low wall which I lie against trying to think what to do and where to go. I realize quietly what a terribly civilized person I am—the need I have for people, conversation, books, theater, music, cafés, drinks, and so forth. It’s terrible to be civilized, because when you come to the end of the world you have nothing to support the terror of loneliness. To be civilized is to have complicated needs. And a man, when he is full blown, shouldn’t need a thing. All day I had been moving through tobacco fields, and growing more and more uneasy. What have I to do with all this tobacco? What am I heading into? People everywhere are producing crops and goods for other people—and I am like a ghost sliding between all this unintelligible activity.

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

  ORIGEN. (t. xxxii. 16.) Our Lord then said to Judas, That thou doest, do quickly, and the traitor this once obeyed his Master. For having received the sop, he started immediately on his work: He then having received the sop, went, immediately out. And indeed he did go out, not only from the house in which he was, but from Jesus altogether. It would seem that Satan, after he had entered into Judas, could not bear to be in the same place with Jesus: for there is no agreement between Jesus and Satan. Nor is it idle enquiring why after he had received the sop, it is not added, that he ate it. Why did not Judas cat the bread, after he received it? Perhaps because, as soon as he had received it, the devil, who had put it into his heart to betray Christ, fearful that the bread, if eaten, might drive out what he had put in, entered into him, so that he went out immediately, before he ate it. And it may be serviceable to remark, that as he who eateth our Lord’s bread and drinketh His cup unworthily, eateth and drinketh to his own damnation; so the bread which Jesus gave him was eaten by the rest to their salvation, but by Judas to his damnation, inasmuch as after it the devil entered into him. CHRYSOSTOM. (Hom. lxxii. 2.) It follows: And it was night, to shew the impetuosity of Judas, in persisting in spite of the unseasonableness of the hour. ORIGEN. (t. xxxii. 16.) The time of night corresponded with the night which overspread the soul of Judas. GREGORY. (ii. Mor. 11) By the time of the day is signified the end of the action. Judas went out in the night to accomplish his perfidy, for which he was never to be pardoned. 13:31–3231. Therefore, when he was gone out, Jesus said, Now is the Son of man glorified, and God is glorified in him. 32. If God be glorified in him, God shall also glorify him in himself, and shall straightway glorify him.