Disappointment

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 The Pisces (2018)

  I was stunned. “What? Why?” “To be frank, with this new infusion of personal thoughts and feelings, it can no longer be considered a scholarly text,” said the nose. “This sort of personalized narrative just isn’t what we do around here.” “The truth is, as readers, we are genuinely glad you’ve pivoted,” said the chick. “Your prior thesis clearly wasn’t working.” “But unfortunately, the departments only receive funding for projects that further scholarship—not hybrids of scholarship and creative writing,” said the nose. What was I going to do for money? How was I going to live? “Can I reapply for it somehow?” I asked. “Unfortunately, we won’t be able to instate it,” said the nose. “Can’t or won’t? Don’t you decide what gets funded?” “To some extent, yes,” said the chick. “But we can’t deviate too much from what the university has traditionally focused on,” said the nose. “We have to retain a tonal continuity.” “So what you’re telling me is that this version is much better than the last version. But you were willing to fund the last version and not this one?” I said. “That’s right,” said the nose. “Well, what if I just go back to the old version? Hammer away on that?” “Unfortunately, that isn’t going to work,” said the chick. “Why?” “We were always skeptical of the original premise of the thesis and now you’ve convinced us that the reasoning was faulty.” “Plus, we want to encourage your creative breakthrough.” “Great,” I said. “We suggest that you seek out a mainstream trade publisher, or reapply to a program with a more creative bent than Southwest State,” said the chick. “But you won’t pay for it?” “No,” they said at the same time. 47. Somehow, I found my way to group. Dr. Jude took one look at my unwashed hair, my skirt covered in sand, face drawn and skinny, and nodded knowingly as if to say, This is where the addiction takes you. Yes, this was where you ended up: disheveled, lovesick, alone. Wherever you thought you would end up, wherever you thought the worst could be, was nothing like where you actually ended up. There was a reason they all kept coming back to group. Somewhere, in the backs of their minds, they must have remembered what the pain was like. They didn’t want it anymore. But Sara was still seeing Stan and she seemed like she was doing okay. She chirped about how she was integrating her Stan life into her self-care life. “This time, I’m still doing me,” she said. “I’m still self-dating. But it’s also nice to always have a partner now at salsa dancing. He does warm-ups with me before improv class too. True, I have to pay for everything. And technically he has nowhere else to go.

• From The Pisces (2018)

  Compared to them I’d thought I was normal. I may have been obsessing, but I hadn’t stalked Garrett outside his office or anything. But oddly, everyone in the group seemed to be doing well. Chickenhorse felt proud of herself and was tooting her horn. That morning she had spotted her neighbor’s two dogs locked in their parked car in the heat and swept in to save them. “I called animal services on their asses,” she said. Of course, when animal services arrived, the neighbors, who were merely putting groceries away, were livid. They banged on her door and screamed at her. “You would think I’d be triggered or at least retraumatized!” she said. “But since I’m already being evicted, it felt empowering—as the victim—to stand up for other creatures who were being abused.” Brianne, who looked to have just gotten some fresh Botox in her forehead, had met a man on OkCupid—a new foray for her. They’d even progressed from the messaging stage of the app to actual email. “Of course, he’s on a business trip in Europe,” she said softly, her eyebrows arched like a child’s rendering of geese in flight. “But he said that when he returns he actually wants to get together with me. Face-to-face. In person. At a real restaurant. And I think I am going to go.” I decided to come clean, sort of, about my two dates. I didn’t say that I went home with Adam and watched him jerk off or fucked Garrett on a bathroom floor, but simply that I had gone. “The first guy was gross,” I said. “If they’re gross, I’m fine. I can take it or leave it.” “Why did you go out with him if he was gross?” clucked Chickenhorse. “I didn’t know he was gross beforehand,” I said. “It was an Internet date.” “And the other one?” asked Dr. Jude. “Well, that’s the one that’s the problem. He wasn’t gross. But he seems to have rejected me after. So now I’m all spun out. It’s not like I felt with Jamie. But it’s pretty bad.” “Mmmm,” said Dr. Jude, sipping her tea. “What were you hoping to get out of the date exactly?” I noticed that she had accumulated multiple strands of Tibetan beaded bracelets on her left hand. I wondered how many she would have to acquire until she reached enlightenment. “I don’t know,” I said. “I hadn’t really thought about it. I guess to have some fun. Casual fun, you know?” “It doesn’t sound like you are having much fun,” said Sara, offering me a banana chip. I declined it. But she was right. “Well, maybe I don’t like fun.” “Of course you like fun,” she said. “Everyone does! You just don’t know what’s actually fun for you yet. I’ve had to try out a lot of activities until I found my thing. The heart-opening workshop was just okay.

• From The Pisces (2018)

  He made me feel like a special little pea. Through his work in the desert with the university, he had received a grant from the American Geological Fund to make documentaries on the national parks. He always directed and edited the docs himself, and the grant gave him the power to travel, be free, and always be producing. Even though the documentaries aired at two a.m. on limited cable channels, he could never be accused of failing. “I’m more with the scientists than the artists,” he said. But he had the allure of an artist. In our earlier years together I traveled to see him on location often. I spent my holiday breaks in an Airstream at Acadia National Park, Glacier, Yosemite. He would go on shoots all day and I would go out exploring, bringing back little souvenirs. He loved hearing what I had seen, correcting my landscape terminology. My favorites were the lakes and oceans, the rivers and waterfalls, like nothing we had in the desert. The rushing water, and traveling in general, made me feel like my life was moving forward, in spite of my flagging thesis. I identified myself with his work. It felt adventurous. But later on, he began covering more desert locations: Death Valley, Arches. I would stay in the Airstream all day and wait for him to return. Why did I need to explore another desert when I had a desert right at home? And why had I come to see this man who was the same here as he was at home? Same face, same dick. Same ennui of a long relationship but with no desire to commit. I told him I was staying in the Airstream to work on the thesis. But when people asked me what I did for a living, I glossed over my Sappho and the library, and quickly brought up Jamie’s work. I pretended it was still exciting. But the only real excitement left was the challenge of roping him into our imaginary future. On the day of our breakup, I had blown a tire on Camelback Road and called him for help. When he arrived he looked in my trunk and said, “But you don’t have a spare.” “No,” I said. It was late in the evening on a Sunday and the auto-body shops in town would be closed, so we called AAA. While we waited I felt hot and fussy and angry. I wasn’t sure exactly why. He looked silly to me, dough-bellied and chinless. Everything had rounded out. He was making little sucking noises with his front teeth, alternating with small whistling noises. It was one of those moments when you look at the person you have loved for a long time and everything is wrong with them.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  Or vice versa. Only when the story the gospels are telling is fully integrated with the dogmas the creeds are teaching can we be sure we are on track. Displacement Activities The result of all this has been, I believe, that though the gospels are so rich in material of all sorts, their underlying emphasis has been quietly but thoroughly overlooked. All those parables, moral teachings, remarkable deeds, and so on—one can easily make all kinds of perfectly good theological and practical points out of them. But one may be so busy with that exercise that the main point goes unnoticed. This is what, I believe, has actually happened. The result has been a series of displacement activities. The church has said, in effect: (a) we know the gospels are important, because they are the inspired apostolic witness to Jesus; and (b) we know what is important in Christian theology, namely, the divinity of Jesus and his saving death or, as it may be, his moral teaching and example; so (c) we assume that that is the primary message of the gospels. In fact, to sum up the proposal toward which I have been working, the four gospels are trying to say that this is how God became king . We have, partly deliberately and partly accidentally, forgotten this massive claim almost entirely. Since we cannot stop reading the gospels without ceasing to be proper Christians, we have developed all kinds of strategies for making alternative sense of the gospels and so screening out the dangerous and challenging picture they are actually sketching. That is at the heart of the problem I have been trying to identify. It has been a salutary exercise, I believe, to review in this way the different things that people have said as they face the question of why the gospels included all that material between Jesus’s birth and his death. All these proposals have been advanced quite seriously, and I have tried to take them in the same serious spirit. But it is clear to me that none of them have actually taken the gospels seriously as they stand. They have gone to them with the wrong questions and have found answers, of a sort, to those questions. The challenge now is to accept that we have all misunderstood the gospels and to set about finding ways in which we can put this right. It is time for a fresh look at our central texts. 4 The Story of Israel I MAGINE, IF YOU WILL , that you have set up a new sound system in your living room. You have installed a quadraphonic set of speakers, one in each corner.

• From The Pisces (2018)

  My book presented the argument that one should read the vast number of erasures in Sappho’s work as intentional. True, Sappho had not included these herself. They were created by the passage of time and dirt since 600 BCE. Most of her work was actually missing, with only 650 lines of 10,000 surviving. But I argued that to reimagine these blanks as created by Sappho herself was far less of a co-option than filling in the gaps with what little we know of her life, creating our own meanings for them out of a desire to make history our own, and above all, projecting a first-person speaker upon them. I felt that the only way we would cease projecting was if the blanks were read as intentional text themselves. Forget whether she was a lesbian, preferred younger men, was hypersexual, bisexual, or had multiple male lovers. If we were going to ascribe meaning, let’s do it with what was there rather than what was not there. Unfortunately this was a total garbage proposition. I, myself, had a very complicated relationship with emptiness, blankness, nothingness. Sometimes I wanted only to fill it, frightened that if I didn’t it would eat me alive or kill me. But sometimes I longed for total annihilation in it—a beautiful, silent erasure. A desire to be vanished. And so I was most guilty of all in projecting an agenda. I knew it, which was why I had not really pressed ahead. I wasn’t sure if my advisory committee knew it. But I was about to be cut off and I figured that a shitty book was probably better than no book at all. So I continued to trudge, not wanting to quit and get a “real” job, not really knowing what I could do anyway. Most of my time in public was spent in the library, amidst the undergrads, and that was where I had heard them use the words butterface and brown bagger . They used these words to describe women of attractive body and unattractive face, and this woman on Abbot Kinney was, in my opinion, definitely one. I moved quickly behind her to observe her further. Her visage, when she turned her head to talk to the man, was hard and pronounced, with a jutting nose and chin, but she had good hair and a hot body to save her. She wore a pair of tiny navy silk shorts from which the very bottom of her ass cheeks protruded ever so slightly. You almost felt compelled to touch them. Everything she said was filtered through her own awareness of how good her ass looked, the words she spoke merely an afterthought compared to the glory at the bottom of those shorts. She was almost like a vehicle for shorts and an ass. She sort of danced a little down the sidewalk and flicked her hair. He was no better.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Breaking away from Genoa, Urban went by way of Lucca to Perugia, and then with another army started off for Naples. Charles of Durazzo, who had been called to the throne of Hungary and murdered in 1386, was succeeded by his young son Ladislaus (1386~1414), but his claim was contested by the heir of Louis of Anjou (d. 1384). The pontiff got no farther than Ferentino, and turning back was carried in a carriage to Rome, where he again entered the Vatican, a few months before his death, Oct. 15, 1389. Bartholomew Prignano had disappointed every expectation. He was his own worst enemy. He was wholly lacking in common prudence and the spirit of conciliation. It is to his credit that, as Nieheim urges, he never made ecclesiastical preferment the object of sale. Whatever were his virtues before he received the tiara, he had as pope shown himself in every instance utterly unfit for the responsibilities of a ruler. Clement VII., who arrived in Avignon in June, 1379, stooped before the kings of France, Charles V. (d. 1380) and Charles VI. He was diplomatic and versatile where his rival was impolitic and intractable. He knew how to entertain at his table with elegance.257 The distinguished preacher, Vincent Ferrer, gave him his support. Among the new cardinals he appointed was the young prince of Luxemburg, who enjoyed a great reputation for saintliness. At the prince’s death, in 1387, miracles were said to be performed at his tomb, a circumstance which seemed to favor the claims of the Avignon pope. Clement’s embassy to Bohemia for a while had hopes of securing a favorable declaration from the Bohemian king, Wenzil, but was disappointed.258 The national pride of the French was Clement’s chief dependence, and for the king’s support he was obliged to pay a humiliating price by granting the royal demands to bestow ecclesiastical offices and tax Church property. As a means of healing the schism, Clement proposed a general council, promising, in case it decided in his favor, to recognize Urban as leading cardinal. The first schismatic pope died suddenly of apoplexy, Sept. 16, 1394, having outlived Urban VI. five years.

• From In Search of Paul: How Jesus's Apostle Opposed Rome's Empire with God's Kingdom (2005)

  AUGUSTAN PEACE. It was supposed to have been completed in time for Rome’s Jubilee 2000 celebrations. But you are there two years later, on a hot and muggy mid-afternoon in July, and it’s still hidden within a canvas and metal cocoon. Jackhammers pound and cranes rotate around a scaffold-clad cube inside the construction zone. Outside it, elegantly dressed Italian women turn the Via di Ripetta into a stylish fashion show while young Italian men weave their Vespas in and out of traffic, up and over curbs, racing toward the Ponte Cavour to cross the Tiber. There are only a few other tourists in sight and, oblivious to the normal near accidents all around them, they stagger through the city’s summer heat, looking at clumsily folded maps with hats on and heads down. It’s not Rome’s most visited area, surrounded as it is by drab concrete buildings from Italy’s Fascist 1930s. East of the construction zone is the park around the cypress-crowned ruins of Augustus’s Mausoleum, which, long ago stripped of its marble, has become a refuge for homeless people and a place for walking dogs. Still, the new construction hopes to change that decline, and a huge billboard put up by the Commune di Roma announces the restoration’s chosen architect, political patrons, and corporate sponsors. There is also an illustration of the new museum for the Ara Pacis Augustae, the Altar of Augustan Peace, the magnificent cube of ancient history now hidden behind that protective screen. That modern billboard does not explain how controversy surrounding the museum’s construction and the altar’s renovation caused the long delay. The commissioned architect was the American Richard Meier, whose postmodern works have already appeared around the world and include the new J. Paul Getty Museum in Southern California. But many Romans were outraged when he unveiled a plan calling for a long glass and steel museum to encase the Ara Pacis Augustae, with a fountained plaza at one end and an auditorium at the other, an elongated jewel box along the bank of the Tiber. Some critics ridiculed it as “Los Angelizing” their city, and the flamboyant Italian deputy of culture, Vittorio Sgarbi, derided the piece as an affront to Rome’s cultural legacy. According to its detractors, Meier’s design lacked adequate continuity with classical Roman styles and thus eroded the city’s distinct heritage with a kind of architectural globalism. Many Romans preferred a Roman museum for a Roman monument, but the altar of ancient Roman peace had become an altar of modern Roman strife.

• From Available: The unfiltered and empowering new memoir for women about sex, dating and divorce after 40 (2021)

  He stared hard at me and inhaled deeply, then turned and dramatically closed the double doors to the room so we could speak privately. “Here’s the thing,” he said, pausing as if to make an announcement. “I’m not happy with you.” His words hung heavily in the charged air between us. His demeanor was stiff and formal, so unlike his usually bouncy and high-spirited way of moving through his days that I wanted to laugh and say OK, enough of this charade, let’s be friends. But strangely, he didn’t so much as crack a small smile. “I don’t understand,” I said, shaking my head. “We barely communicate and spend zero time together unless the kids are involved. I’m not happy,” he said again. I suggested that was an easy fix and we should try to spend more time together. He let out a deep sigh, shaking his head. “Laura, you don’t get it. If I had to grade our relationship right now, I would give us a C. That’s how bad it is.” I grimaced and tried to joke that I was pretty sure a B was more in order, but I could see his frustration increase with my inability to digest what he was trying to impress upon me. “I don’t have time to deal with this right now. Work is a disaster and I have to get to the office. We need to deal with this, but not now.” With that, he flung the doors of the room open and within moments was gone from the apartment. I sat immobilized at my desk. What he had said to me felt unfair and out of left field. Happy? Who had said anything about our being entitled to happiness all the time? We were busy and didn’t have much time to connect, it was true. But he was suggesting we were at some sort of a crisis and I was perplexed. Our lives felt chaotic – three kids in three different schools, two homes, a business to run – compounded by a busy fall touring colleges with Daisy and helping to care for my normally healthy mother who had slipped weeks earlier, shattering her wrist and kneecap only days after being diagnosed with breast cancer. Why couldn’t he see that we needed to wait until our plates cleared and then hit the reset button? We had frequently discussed that this time in our lives with our kids at home was precious and fleeting and that we would have countless years alone together in the future – why so much rancor about it all of a sudden? As far as I could see, happiness as an overarching goal was momentarily irrelevant. We needed to get through his business plight, my mother’s health crisis, support Daisy through her senior year of high school, and in general live our lives with a little less angst. Happy? How about we strive not to totally fall apart?

• From Available: The unfiltered and empowering new memoir for women about sex, dating and divorce after 40 (2021)

  Over the next few weeks, I tried a new approach with Michael to force a reintroduction of happiness into our home. During the day, I commuted uptown to accompany my mother to doctor appointments and cook meals for her, squeezing in my responsibilities as PTA president at Daisy’s school and racing back downtown in time to pick Georgia up from school. When Michael came home from work, I greeted him cheerfully and asked if I could heat up dinner for him. I offered glasses of wine and inquired about his day, and when the kids needed homework help or it was time to put Georgia to bed, I did it all without glancing his way to see if he might help. Every few days I asked him if he could find time to talk to me, but he said he was consumed with work and I didn’t press it – I wanted to show him that I could be supportive and loving and not the nag he had accused me of being. On Valentine’s Day, I arrived home from the gym to find Daisy eating a late breakfast at the counter next to a vase of flowers nestled in a delivery box from the florist. I frowned at them, asking her where they had come from. She shrugged, saying they had just been delivered and she assumed they were from Michael. The flowers looked sculptural, overly precious and arranged too deliberately. I riffled through the tissue paper in the box, looking for a card, but there wasn’t one. I texted Michael, asking if he had sent me flowers, and he replied that he had, that they were from a new flower shop near his office that was owned by the woman who used to arrange flowers for Barack Obama when he was in the White House. “What a strange choice,” I muttered out loud. “These are so fancy.” “Mom!” Daisy reprimanded me. “That’s so rude! Dad sends you flowers for Valentine’s Day and you complain that you don’t like them?” “Sorry, I know how I sound ungrateful. It’s just … Dad knows I like cheap bodega flowers, these are too fussy. He’s never once sent me flowers before and knows I wouldn’t want him to spend so much money on something like this. It’s just so out of character,” I said, perplexed, as she gave me a look of consternation. Later, Michael burst through the door with his signature enthusiasm, calling out for the kids to come, that he had special gifts from Cupid for each of them. When he was done passing out treats, he told me to close my eyes and hold out my hands. When I opened my eyes, I saw a cellophane bag with a label from the overpriced gourmet market near his office, its contents an array of pink and red M&M’s. I furrowed my eyebrows and frowned. “Michael, I just stopped eating sugar. Remember?

• From In Search of Paul: How Jesus's Apostle Opposed Rome's Empire with God's Kingdom (2005)

  2An Appealing or Appalling Apostle?Through visual imagery a new mythology of Rome and, for the emperor, a new ritual of power were created. Built on relatively simple foundations, the myth perpetuated itself and transcended the realities of everyday life to project onto future generations the impression that they lived in the best of all possible worlds in the best of all times…. At the same time as his “restoration of the Republic” and the creation of his new political style, Augustus also set in motion a program to “heal” Roman society. The principal themes were renewal of religion and custom, virtus, and the honor of the Roman people. Never before had a new ruler implemented such a far-reaching cultural program, so effectively embodied in visual imagery; and it has seldom happened since. —Paul Zanker, The Power of Images in the Age of Augustus (1990) Given a history in which the apostle’s voice has again and again rung out like iron to enforce the will of slaveholders or to legitimate violence against women, Jews, homosexuals, or pacifists…the voice we have learned to accept as Paul’s is the voice of the sanctified status quo [so] that continued efforts to reclaim Paul’s genuine voice are necessary. For centuries the apostle’s legacy has been systematically manipulated by human structures of domination and oppression, from the conservative interpreters of Paul who found their way into the New Testament itself, down to the legitimation of the “New World Order” or the sonorous waves of antifeminist backlash in our own time…. [Liberating Paul] is written, first of all, for those who have found Paul a stumbling block in their attempt to follow Jesus on the way of justice and peace. —Neil Elliott, Liberating Paul (1994) Two Visions of World Peace Overture

• From Available: The unfiltered and empowering new memoir for women about sex, dating and divorce after 40 (2021)

  #6 is a lovely and decent man, but I’m still smarting from that Saturday morning of feeling unwanted, and I don’t know if I have the patience to wade through the murky waters of his newly single life. Dr. B asks for a few photos of me and in return she sends back one of Mark – he’s nice looking, sporty, has a sweet and genuine smile. He texts me right away and we make a date for the following week. We meet at a small, crowded coffee bar in midtown that is close to his office, and sit on high stools at a narrow bar overlooking the street. He is of medium height and stature, with glasses and thick salt and pepper hair. There is nowhere to hang my coat or bag, so I sit on my soft, fake fur jacket and hold my tote bag in my lap. My jacket is slippery, so every few minutes I have to brace my foot against the base of the stool and push myself back up so as not to slide off. I think I’ve got it down to a subtle routine when he asks me kindly, “Do you always have a hard time sitting still?” I laugh and admit that I am logistically challenged at the moment, and he generously helps me arrange my pile of winter garments onto the tiny counter in front of us. He is fun to talk to, deeply into sports and his kids, well-read and quick to smile. When he invites me to brunch at the apartment that he’s just moved into with his teenage daughter from his first marriage, I readily accept, though I do make a mental note that he’s a few years younger than me and already exiting his second marriage. * With two men now in my life, I come to the inevitable conclusion that my underwear drawer, overstuffed with stretched-out pastel cotton panties and practical bras that once fit, with a few black lace thongs thrown in that have recently seen more than their fair share of action, is no longer adequate. I have long aspired to be the kind of elegant, sophisticated woman who wears matching sets of underwear, and while realistically I know that I have neither the patience nor the finances to make this a reality, I can definitely kick things up a notch. I head to the local outpost of a British lingerie shop, ready to have my breasts manhandled and squeezed into sexy, lacy, overpriced contraptions. I am led to a fitting room by an older woman named Marisol, who eyes and measures me and agrees that my left breast is slightly bigger than my right but is undaunted by it. I confess that I have not bought new bras in longer than I can comfortably say aloud and want some pretty ones that are sexy without being flashy. She nods knowingly and leaves me while she picks some out.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  Oh, no, Mrs. Bingham, never! I hope I knows my place better than that—Miss Stephen herself showed me them dirty nails; she said: “Collins, just look, aren’t my nails awful dirty!” And I said: “You must ask Nanny about that, Miss Stephen.” Is it likely that I’d interfere with your work? I’m not that sort, Mrs. Bingham.’ Oh, Collins, Collins, with those pretty blue eyes and that funny alluring smile! Stephen’s own eyes grew wide with amazement, then they clouded with sudden and disillusioned tears, for far worse than Collins’ poorness of spirit was the dreadful injustice of those lies—yet this very injustice seemed to draw her to Collins, since despising, she could still love her. For the rest of that day Stephen brooded darkly over Collins’ unworthiness; and yet all through that day she still wanted Collins, and whenever she saw her she caught herself smiling, quite unable, in her turn, to muster the courage to frown her innate disapproval. And Collins smiled too, if the nurse was not looking, and she held up her plump red fingers, pointing to her nails and making a grimace at the nurse’s retreating figure. Watching her, Stephen felt unhappy and embarrassed, not so much for herself as for Collins; and this feeling increased, so that thinking about her made Stephen go hot down her spine. In the evening, when Collins was laying the tea, Stephen managed to get her alone. ‘Collins,’ she whispered, ‘you told an untruth—I never showed you my dirty nails!’ ‘ ’Course not!’ murmured Collins, ‘but I had to say something—you didn’t mind, Miss Stephen, did you?’ And as Stephen looked doubtfully up into her face, Collins suddenly stooped and kissed her. Stephen stood speechless from a sheer sense of joy, all her doubts swept completely away. At that moment she knew nothing but beauty and Collins, and the two were as one, and the one was Stephen—and yet not Stephen either, but something more vast, that the mind of seven years found no name for. The nurse came in grumbling: ‘Now then, hurry up, Miss Stephen! Don’t stand there as though you were daft! Go and wash your face and hands before tea—how many times must I tell you the same thing?’ ‘I don’t know—’ muttered Stephen. And indeed she did not; she knew nothing of such trifles at that moment.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  Yes, she struck me as looking thoroughly depressed.’ ‘Oh, but surely you were wrong . . .’ interrupted Stephen. ‘No, I’m perfectly sure I was right,’ he insisted. Then he said: ‘I’m going to take a big risk—I’m going to take the risk of losing your friendship.’ His voice was so genuinely regretful, that Stephen must ask him: ‘Well—what is it, Brockett?’ ‘You, my dear. You’re not playing fair with that girl; the life she’s leading would depress a mother abbess. It’s enough to give anybody the hump, and it’s going to give Mary neurasthenia!’ ‘What on earth do you mean?’ ‘Don’t get ratty and I’ll tell you. Look here, I’m not going to pretend any more. Of course we all know that you two are lovers. You’re gradually becoming a kind of legend—all’s well lost for love, and that sort of thing. . . . But Mary’s too young to become a legend; and so are you, my dear, for that matter. But you’ve got your work, whereas Mary’s got nothing—not a soul does that miserable kid know in Paris. Don’t please interrupt, I’ve not nearly finished; I positively must and will have my say out! You and she have decided to make a ménage—as far as I can see it’s as bad as marriage! But if you were a man it would be rather different; you’d have dozens of friends as a matter of course. Mary might even be going to have an infant. Oh, for God’s sake, Stephen, do stop looking shocked. Mary’s a perfectly normal young woman; she can’t live by love alone, that’s all rot—especially as I shrewdly suspect that when you’re working the diet’s pretty meagre. For heaven’s sake let her go about a bit! Why on earth don’t you take her to Valérie Seymour’s? At Valérie’s place she’d meet lots of people; and I ask you, what harm could it possibly do? You shun your own ilk as though they were the devil! Mary needs friends awfully badly, and she needs a certain amount of amusement. But be a bit careful of the so-called normal.’ And now Brockett’s voice grew aggressive and bitter. ‘I wouldn’t go trying to force them to be friends—I’m not thinking so much of you now as of Mary; she’s young and the young are easily bruised. . . .’ He was perfectly sincere. He was trying to be helpful, spurred on by his curious affection for Stephen. At the moment he felt very friendly and anxious; there was nothing of the cynic left in him—at the moment. He was honestly advising according to his lights—perhaps the only lights that the world had left him. And Stephen could find very little to say.

• From The Pisces (2018)

  At the encouragement of Dr. Jude, Brianne had been going online since last year to meet men. The websites she chose were Match.com and Millionaire Match, and she repeated them as though reciting a mantra: “Match and Millionaire Match, Match and Millionaire Match.” She seemed to be having a rough go of it on both sites, as the men kept disappearing. She would find someone who seemed promising, message with him for a few weeks, and then he would just vanish. On the rare occasion that one of the men didn’t disappear and actually asked her for a date, he would suddenly seem strangely repulsive to her. But mostly, they absconded. The most recent disappearance was a man who claimed to be a retired fighter pilot. She said she liked that, as she liked military men, and he seemed handsome. For two weeks he had sent her messages every day: never saying anything uncouth or sending a picture of his penis. Then, one day, she asked if he might like to meet in person. He deleted his account. “But if it’s meant for me, it’s meant for me. And if it’s not, it’s not,” she said quietly, adjusting the strap on her babydoll dress. She was wearing knee socks and Mary Janes too. “I have a very full life. Very full. I don’t even know if I really want anyone else in it.” Then she sighed. The only person I liked was a woman named Claire. She was British, crass, and irate, with long fiery-red curls. Claire kept saying “Fuck this bullshit” over and over. She had left her husband two years ago when she met a younger man at a juice bar and realized, as she put it, that she hadn’t had a proper dick inside of her in twelve years. The younger man was happy to fuck her, but he never encouraged her to leave her husband. It was she who assumed they would have a life together. For six months they were off and on, until finally, she threw a plate of pesto kelp noodles at him at Café Gratitude and broke it off for good. Clean and sober for nine years, she was afraid the drama would make her drink. Most recently, though, she was hurt and enraged again by a man named Brad. He sounded pretty bad—bald, baseball capped, and litigation lawyery—but she really liked him. She said that they had begun to get really intimate around his mother’s death, then he just disappeared. She wasn’t drinking, but she was taking up a lot of bad behaviors again to cope with her depression. “I left my children with a friend and rented a hotel room, where I could go self-harm in peace,” she said. “But then I got scared I would off myself. I didn’t know what else to do. So I’ve come back to this bloody hellhole.”

• From The Pisces (2018)

  “Fuck him,” I said. “What an idiot. You can do better. You know who else was an old guy with a ponytail? This creepy guy who used to come sit in the library for twelve hours a day. He wasn’t homeless, he had really nice sneakers, but he would just watch all the undergrad girls all day. At first I felt bad for him, because he was old and would sometimes bring soup and there is nothing sadder than an older man eating soup alone. But then one day he was caught in the women’s bathroom. He had been hiding there for hours. His name was Ron. So this guy, Trent or whatever, is basically named Ron. Basically he is a seventy-year-old man with a ponytail named Ron who lurks in women’s bathrooms hoping to catch a sniff of them. Whenever you think he is great, just call him Ron in your head.” I thought I had done a pretty good job. But Claire just cried harder. “That makes it even worse. That someone like him could reject me.” “He’s not rejecting you,” I said. “Yes, he is,” she said. “His wife said she just isn’t comfortable with the arrangement.” “So then it’s not even his fault. He isn’t choosing to reject you.” I wondered how gross dudes like Trent scored both a wife and a woman like Claire. “Yes, but he didn’t even stand up to her,” she said. I wanted to be like, Look, this is what you get when you fuck a guy with a wife. This is what the polyamory people are like. You are never going to get to have the whole person. But I kept my mouth shut. Who was I to say anything? I’d just fucked a guy with a girlfriend on a public floor and wanted him to declare his undying love. “How did the garters go?” she asked, as though reading my mind. “Horrific,” I said. “I’m giving up men for a while.” “No! But I adore this side of you! You were just getting started!” “I’m just too crazy.” “It’s that bloody group that got in your head, isn’t it? Ah well, I guess I’m on my own again to rummage through the cocks. Trent is dead to me, but at least David is more attentive now than ever,” she said. “So pack it all into David. He’s younger and hotter anyway.” “No, it’s too dodgy with him. He’s too hot. I might become too dependent. I need a buffer.” “What about the guy from Best Buy? The really built one.” “It’s not enough,” she said. “He was number three, remember? I need a new two. Or he can move up to two but I still need a new three. I have to have three.”

• From The Pisces (2018)

  Of course, I didn’t say a word about Adam. I didn’t want them reprimanding me or giving me any healthy advice. I knew what they would say: I wasn’t supposed to be dating yet. And meeting up with strangers in alleys doesn’t constitute conscious dating. But maybe I didn’t want to be conscious. 13.Later, as I waited for Adam on Ocean Front Walk, near Marina del Rey, where the homeless cleared and the vibration of the boardwalk became more desolate, I was so excited that I was nauseated. The Santa Monica Mountains were covered in fog, so the pink and palm-tree silhouettes of Venice looked like their own island—an old beach scene frozen in time. It was windy out and I was cold, but I felt important—momentous—like I was on a timeless mission. I could be anyone standing by any beach in history, waiting for a lover. I could be Sappho, unafraid of Eros, calling Aphrodite to her shrine. But as soon as I saw him coming, I thought, Oh God no. He sort of looked like his picture, but more the monkey aesthetic than the hot one. Also, he had an additional werewolf essence that the photo had not captured. It wasn’t just his jagged teeth, the scruffy goatee, but something else that was distinctly werewolf. He waved to me, and I waved back, cursing through my teeth, already disappointed. When he crossed the street I tried not to let it show, to be warm, though I wasn’t sure why I cared what he thought. I guess I felt bad about rejecting someone without even knowing him. I felt sort of ashamed that I was judging him for his looks, but with an alley make-out what other attributes could there be? It figured. Of course this werewolf-monkey creature was the best that I could do. He might have been disappointed in what I looked like too, but he didn’t show it. “You’re really cute,” he said, as though assuring both me and himself. “You look a lot younger than forty. A lot younger.” “I’m thirty-eight,” I said. “Not that I don’t like older women. I love older women. You’ve got seasoning. But you look like a young older woman. Or an old younger woman—” “Okay,” I said, relieving him of having to speak. “I got it.” “So what do you want to do?” he asked. “Do you want to stay here and have a drink or do you want to go for a walk?” “Let’s have a drink first,” I said. “God, you’re really cute,” he said. We turned in to a little dive. I ordered myself a vodka tonic. Rarely did I drink liquor anymore but I felt that the situation called for it. I needed to be less lucid than I was. He didn’t offer to pay for my drink. But he got two tequila shots, offering me one, and a Jack and Coke. I declined, laughing.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  On July 6, 1439, the articles were publicly read in the cathedral of Florence, the Greek text by Bessarion, and the Latin by Cesarini. The pope was present and celebrated the mass. The Latins sang hymns in Latin, and the Greeks followed them with hymns of their own. Eugenius promised for the defence of Constantinople a garrison of three hundred and two galleys and, if necessary, the armed help of Western Christendom. After tarrying for a month to receive the five months of arrearages of his stipend, the emperor returned by way of Venice to his capital, from which he had been absent two years. The Ferrara agreement proved to be a shell of paper, and all the parade and rejoicing at the conclusion of the proceedings were made ridiculous by the utter rejection of its articles in Constantinople. On their return, the delegates were hooted as Azymites, the name given in contempt to the Latins for using unleavened bread in the eucharist. Isidore, after making announcement of the union at Of en, was seized and put into a convent, from which he escaped two years later to Rome. The patriarchs of Jerusalem, Antioch, and Alexandria issued a letter from Jerusalem, 1443, denouncing the council of Florence as a synod of robbers and Metrophanes, the Byzantine patriarch as a matricide and heretic. It is true the articles were published in St. Sophia, Dec. 14, 1452, by a Latin cardinal, but six months later, Constantinople was in the hands of the Mohammedans. A Greek council, meeting in Constantinople, 1472, formally rejected the union. On the other hand, the success of the Roman policy was announced through Western Europe. Eugenius’ position was strengthened by the empty triumph, and in the same proportion the influence of the Basel synod lessened. If cordial relations between churches of the East and the West were not promoted at Ferrara and Florence, a beneficent influence flowed from the council in another direction by the diffusion of Greek scholarship and letters in the West.

• From In Search of Paul: How Jesus's Apostle Opposed Rome's Empire with God's Kingdom (2005)

  The second, or painful, visit did not help, and neither did the third, or tearful, letter. Quite clearly, therefore, things are still getting worse rather than better, and this intensifies our basic question: What went bad and got steadily worse between Paul and Corinth? LETTER 4. There are two separate letters now contained and reversed in the text we know as 2 Corinthians. The chronologically first one is 2 Corinthians 10–13, and it is so bitter that the trouble has clearly escalated into an out-and-out attack on Paul himself. It involves other Christian Jewish missionary opponents whom Paul sarcastically calls “super-apostles,” but regardless of them and their purpose, the question is Why are some, most, or all the Corinthians ready to follow them and not Paul? LETTER 5. After sending that Letter 4, Paul sent Titus ahead of him to see how things stood at Corinth. Paul traveled north from Ephesus expecting to meet Titus either at Troas on the Asian side or Philippi on the European side of the upper Aegean, according to 2 Corinthians 2:12–13. They met in Macedonia, and the news was very, very good, as Paul exults in 2 Corinthians 7:5–15. Paul then wrote the letter we know as 2 Corinthians 1–9, a letter of joyful reconciliation. VISIT 3. After receiving Titus’s report and sending that Letter 5, we may presume that all went well at Corinth, and we will have to return there and consider 2 Corinthians 8–9 and the Great Collection in the next chapter. PROBLEMS. What underlay that complicated weave of visits, reports, and letters was a fundamental clash between two visions of moral community and, even more important, of two fundamental theologies on which those discordant visions were based. At Corinth, Paul and his vision encountered more forcefully than ever before the full normalcy of high-powered Roman patronage backed, of course, by Roman imperial theology. What, after all, was a divine emperor but a supreme patron? First, recall that egalitarian negation of privilege between Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and female “in Christ Jesus,” that is to say, within the Christian assembly, seen earlier in Galatians 3:28. Paul repeats it here in 1 Corinthians 12:13 by saying, “In the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and we were all made to drink of one Spirit.” None of that arises, for Paul, from ideas about general political democracy or universal inalienable rights, but from the common status of Christians as equals before and under God. As he himself put it in Romans 8:29, those whom God “foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn within a large family.” We already saw the practical results of that intra-Christian equality with regard to slavery and patriarchy in Chapter 2.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  In 1384 D’Ailly was made head of the College of Navarre, where he had Gerson for a pupil, and in 1389 chancellor of the university. When Benedict XIII. was chosen successor to Clement VII., he was sent by the French king on a confidential mission to Avignon. Benedict won his allegiance and appointed him successively bishop of Puy, 1395, and bishop of Cambray, 1397. D’Ailly was with Benedict at Genoa, 1405, and Savona, 1407, but by that time seems to have come to the conclusion that Benedict was not sincere in his profession of readiness to resign, and returned to Cambray. In his absence Cambray had decided for the subtraction of its allegiance from Avignon. D’Ailly was seized and taken to Paris, but protected by the king, who was his friend. Thenceforth he favored the assemblage of a general council. At Pisa and at Constance, D’Ailly took the position that a general council is superior to the pope and may depose him. Made a cardinal by John XXIII., 1411, he attended the council held at Rome the following year and in vain tried to have a reform of the calendar put through. At Constance, he took the position that the Pisan council? though it was called by the Spirit and represented the Church universal, might have erred, as did other councils reputed to be general councils. He declared that the three synods of Pisa, Rome and Constance, though not one body, yet were virtually one, even as the stream of the Rhine at different points is one and the same. It was not necessary, so he held, for the Council of Constance to pass acts confirming the Council of Pisa, for the two were on a par.378 In the proceedings against John XXIII., the cardinal took sides against him. He was the head of the commission which tried Huss in matters of faith, June 7, 8, 1415, and was present when the sentence of death was passed upon that Reformer. At the close of the council he appears as one of the three candidates for the office of pope, and his defeat was a disappointment to the French.379 He was appointed legate by Martin V., with his residence at Avignon, and spent his last days there.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Not one of the members of the Council of Constance, after its adjournment, so far as we know, uttered a word of protest against the sentence. No pope or oecumenical synod since has made any apology for it. Nor has any modern Catholic historian gone further than to indicate that in essential theological doctrines Huss was no heretic, though his sentence was strictly in accord with the principles of the canon law. So long as the dogmas of an infallible Church organization and an infallible pope continue to be strictly held, no apology can be expected. It is of the nature of Protestant Christianity to confess wrongs and, as far as is possible, make reparation for them. When the Massachusetts court discovered that it had erred in the case of the Salem witchcraft in 1692, it made full confession, and offered reparation to the surviving descendants; and Judge Sewall, one of the leaders in the prosecution, made a moving public apology for the mistake he had committed. The same court recalled the action against Roger Williams. In 1903, the Protestants of France reared a monument at Geneva in expiation of Calvin’s part in passing sentence upon Servetus. Luther, in his Address to the German Nobility, called upon the Roman Church to confess it had done wrong in burning Huss. That innocent man’s blood still cries from the ground. Huss died for his advocacy of Wycliffism. The sentence passed by the council coupled the two names together.688 The 25th of the 30 Articles condemned him for taking offence at the reprobation of the 45 articles, ascribed to Wyclif. How much this article was intended to cover cannot be said. It is certain that Huss did not formally deny the doctrine of transubstantiation, although he was charged with that heresy. Nor was he distinctly condemned for urging the distribution of the cup to the laity, which he advocated after the council had positively forbidden it. His only offence was his definition of the Church and his denial of the infallibility of the papacy and its necessity for the being of the Church. These charges constitute the content of all the 30 articles except the 25th. Luther said brusquely but truly, that Huss committed no more atrocious sin than to declare that a Roman pontiff of impious life is not the head of the Church catholic.689