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 Four Days to Glory: Wrestling with the Soul of the American Heartland (2005)

  It would be experimentation in the middle of a match, the kind of thing only the advanced wrestler would really try. This day, though, is not like any other day. Jay, so used to wrestling in this huge place, comes out with no nerves and no indecision. He stalks Abrahamson from the opening whistle and gets a quick takedown, then another. He looks himself, basically. But it doesn’t last. As Jay reaches across Abrahamson’s body late in the first period, looking to get the boy’s arms behind his back and begin the process of wrenching him over onto his shoulders, he loses his grip. Abrahamson tries to squirm free, but there’s nowhere to go. Jay steadies his opponent, locking him back down, and then he reaches for Abrahamson’s arms again. But he misses again, and this time the crowd around the mat begins to murmur. Jay is trying, but he can’t seem to wrap this thing up. It’s as if Abrahamson were dipped in oil. If you didn’t know better, you’d swear that Jay just wasn’t concentrating hard enough to get it done. And then something almost shocking happens: Jay appears to reconsider, right there on the mat. He backs off a bit. He stops trying to pin Abrahamson. The period ends. Jay looks tired—and not just tired, but gassed. And just like that, we have taken a sharp left turn into the land of You Sure Never Know. It isn’t just that Abrahamson is lanky, although that helps—for a wrestler to be longer and leaner means that while he may not pack the raw power of some of his weight-class counterparts, he can cause them problems with his range and his reach. But right now, it’s more about what Jay can’t do than what Abrahamson can. As the second period begins, it becomes obvious that Jay is struggling to get his breath. He’s moving slower than at any time in recent memory. Abrahamson, who does not stack up as a serious threat, suddenly finds himself able to get his hands on Jay and actually gain leverage—and then, to the shock of the people watching, he simply wrenches Jay down to the mat and gains control of him for a takedown. No one can remember the last time a wrestler scored offensive points against Jay, and even though Jay quickly rights himself and gets back on top of Abrahamson, the significance of the moment hasn’t been lost on anyone here. What they just saw was a chink in the armor. For the first time since I arrived in Iowa, Jay spends the rest of his match watching the clock on the scoreboard that has been wheeled out to the edge of the mat. He is actually hoping to grind out the time. As the second period gives way to the third, it is obvious that he just wants the thing to end; he no longer cares about sending a “message” with a vicious pin, or anything of the sort.

• From Four Days to Glory: Wrestling with the Soul of the American Heartland (2005)

  It is the breakfast that cements the relationship for another year, a year of phone calls and cross-checking on rumors and asking questions of one another and spilling the bad news, such as the time in the boys’ sophomore seasons when Jim had to call Bill Anson and tell him sadly, “It looks like it’s going to be 125.” Jim meant 125 pounds, and what that signified, in all likelihood, was the sharp end of the stick for one boy or another. As freshmen, Jay had won his state title at 103 pounds, Kyle at 119. Now both boys were slotted in at 125, the product of their growth, their coaches’ decisions and their teams’ needs. Since both of them competed in Class 3A, something had to give. You can only do so much to get around the realities of the sport you’re in. This was exactly the situation that the families had tried to avoid—and had done a remarkable job of avoiding, for so long. As the boys grew through Pablo Ubasa’s club years, they began to deliberately fan out, wrestling away from each other, each hoping to become a state champion in his own right, each knowing that his fiercest possible competition for a crown might well come from within his closed little circle of friends. Jay’s only high school defeat, as a ninth-grader, had come at the hands of Joey Slaton, right here at the conference tournament, in the finals, in front of God and everybody else. But Jay avenged the defeat on the biggest stage, pinning Joey in the 103-pound finals at the State Tournament, winning that first title while denying Joey his. It was both a wonderful moment and a wrenching one. It was impossible not to want to win—these were wrestlers, not trainers—but Jim Borschel hoped never to see it again. In a national competition, sure; that was unavoidable sometimes. But not here in Iowa. Not with one of the good guys having to take the body blow. Jim didn’t get his wish. It was 125 pounds for both Jay and Kyle in their sophomore years, and the season played out with a sort of inevitability about it. The two wrestlers clearly were at the top of the talent pile; it was a sure track to a confrontation. Jay won that confrontation at the conference and district tournaments, and then, at State, the draw put Jay and Kyle on the same side of the bracket, meaning they would meet in the semifinals. When Jay won that match as well, on the way to his second championship, it marked the death of the dream for his friend. Had he not run into Jay in 2003, Kyle might well have been going for four-timer history himself in the winter of 2005. Informed by that experience, Pablo Ubasa’s little crew began branching out in earnest. Jay shot up to 152 pounds for his junior year. Mitch Mueller went to 135 pounds, Joey Slaton to 119.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  Nantwich proved to be a voracious eater with poor table manners. Half the time he ate with his mouth open, affording me a generous view of masticated pork and applesauce, which he smeared around his wine glass when he drank without wiping his lips. I attended to my trout with a kind of surgical distaste. Its slightly open barbed mouth and its tiny round eye, which had half erupted while grilling, like the core of a pustule, were unusually recriminatory. I sliced the head off and put it on my side-plate and then proceeded to remove the pale flesh from the bones with the flat of my knife. It was quite flavourless, except that, where its innards had been imperfectly removed, silvery traces of roe gave it an unpleasant bitterness. ‘Tell me why you don’t have a job,’ Nantwich asked after we had busied ourselves with our food for an uneasily long time. ‘We all need a job of work. Christ! Without a job doesn’t one just go do-lally?’ ‘It’s because I’m spoilt, I’m afraid. Too much money. I wanted to stay on at Oxford, but I didn’t get a First, though I was supposed to. I did work for a publisher for two years, but then I got out.’ ‘I mean, if you want a job I’ll get you one,’ Nantwich interrupted. ‘You’re very kind … I suppose I should do something soon. My father thought he could get me a job in the City, but I couldn’t face the idea of it, I’m afraid.’ ‘Your father?’ ‘Yes, he’s chairman of, oh … a group of companies.’ ‘Your money comes from him, then?’ ‘No, as it happens, it’s all from my grandfather. He’s very well off, as you can imagine. He’s settling his estate on my sister and me. We get it all in advance to avoid death duties.’ ‘Capital,’ said Nantwich; ‘as it were.’ He munched on for a bit. ‘But tell me, who is your grandfather?’ I had been supposing, somehow, that he knew, and I took a second to rethink everything in the light of the recognition that he didn’t. ‘Oh—er, Denis—Beckwith,’ I then hastened to explain. Again the sudden emission of interest. ‘My dear charming boy, do you mean to say that you are Denis Beckwith’s grandson?’ ‘I’m sorry, I thought you knew.’ Often the intelligence met with a less enthusiastic reception. Then Nantwich’s interest had gone. ‘I suppose you come across each other in the House of Lords,’ I ventured. He had half turned and stared out of the window. When he swung back he leaned close to me and I smelt the pork in his mouth as he said: ‘That chap is a very interesting photographer, indeed.’

• From Four Days to Glory: Wrestling with the Soul of the American Heartland (2005)

  “For some reason, that doesn’t really happen here.” Linn-Mar’s heavier-weight classes began to suffer, as kids who might normally have gravitated toward wrestling after the football season instead skipped the sport’s Spartan demands, choosing to hit the weight room and the Creatine and basically make their own schedules for a few months. It wasn’t a shocking development, exactly—even in Iowa, football has a way of making itself king—and it was hardly unprecedented in the annals of prep sports. But it had its effect. Wrestling, even at Linn-Mar, was bound to struggle now and again. “My first couple of teams were so good,” Jay says. “I thought that’s what it would be like.” Now the issue isn’t merely the number of athletes who won’t come out for the team, but also some of the athletes who do—the ones who have enough interest and ability to make varsity but who, for whatever reason, just won’t sell out to the sport. “They’re just not into it,” Jay says curtly, and what he means is that they’re not into it the way he is into it. It is evident in their three-quarter-intensity workouts, and in the early-morning sessions many of them never attend, and in the afternoon practices they occasionally skip or beg out of with vague injuries, and in the way they sometimes simply accept getting beat in a dual. When Jay was coming up, a little freshman watching the veterans take control of the place, he saw that huge numbers of the junior varsity squad would show up for Streicher’s six a.m. varsity workouts, on the theory that they wanted to learn the techniques the coach was teaching the starters. Now, here in the final winter of Jay’s high school career, the jayvees are all but invisible early in the morning. Jay sees them in the hallways later on at school and finds himself almost involuntarily blurting out, “I was here two hours ago. Where were you?” “It’s like they don’t get it—they need to be there,” Jay says. But the reality is that they don’t need it, at least not the way Jay needs it. That’s life. Even those with whom he remains close on the team, like heavyweight Shawnden Crawford, with whom Jay has been travel ing to wrestling tournaments seemingly forever, don’t feel it the way he feels it. But Jay reserves judgment on Shawnden; he likes him too much personally, and feels about his situation too closely, to be fully critical. Shawnden came into the Borschels’ life because his mother moved him out of a bigger town, worried about his surroundings. Shawnden is black and came from a family with little money, and the town of Marion is mostly white and pretty solidly middle class. But Shawnden shared with Jay a common interest in wrestling, and Jim began bringing him along on Jay’s early forays to local and regional tournaments, sometimes paying Shawnden’s entry fee so he could compete.

• From Four Days to Glory: Wrestling with the Soul of the American Heartland (2005)

  Zalesky, consumed with the real-time pressure of his job at Iowa, had gambled his scholarship money on the athletes already in uniform and then spent the 2004–05 season using many of those wrestlers far sooner, and to far greater reliance, than Iowa traditionally did with its incoming freshmen, many of whom were “redshirted” that first year, meaning they would practice but not compete in dual matches, thus preserving all four years of their NCAA eligibility. And the fissures in the program with regard to the local talent had slowly become more evident, highlighted, perhaps, by the decision of Mack Reiter two years earlier to bypass the Hawkeyes and Zalesky in favor of the University of Minnesota, a four-time state champion blowing out of Iowa completely. Two years later, Reiter, after sitting out a redshirt season, was on his way to being named the Big Ten Conference’s Freshman of the Year. Meanwhile, several publications had listed Iowa State University’s recruiting class as the strongest in the nation, with Tom Brand and his ground-floor project at Virginia Tech ranked second. Iowa? Somewhere around 10th in the country. Even allowing for the vagaries of such a ranking system, it was looking ugly. Borschel. LeClere. Anson. Mueller. Slaton. Morningstar. Six utterly superior high school seniors, in the most wrestling-crazy state of them all, with built-in fan bases and followings that would accompany them throughout their college careers at Iowa. Three went to Tom Brands and the NCAA wrestling equivalent of a start-up company at Virginia Tech. Only one, Ryan Morningstar, was bound for Iowa. Morningstar was undeniably a great talent, and Zalesky later added Chad Beatty, a strong upper-weight wrestler from Class 1A Wilton. Yet the unshakable feeling in the eastern half of the state was that Zalesky had just blown the greatest opportunity of his coaching career to lock down homegrown, conversation-stimulating, fan-invigorating talent for years to come. To Zalesky, this represented only the latest in a series of difficulties that trace, however ironically, to Gable’s massive success. Gable didn’t simply produce winners; he produced future coaches. Those coaches have now begun to fan out and make their influence felt in places other than Iowa City; it was a former Gable assistant, J. Robinson, who scored a major coup by bringing Mack Reiter to Robinson’s program at the University of Minnesota. “There’s probably ten, eleven head coaches that have Iowa connections, and there’s a lot of assistants out there, too,” Zalesky says. “That just makes it tougher sometimes to get the job done. It’s a bunch of [Gable’s] guys who have been through this program and know what we do, and know what it takes to win.” But Zalesky sees other factors behind the mass defection. He sees young athletes who cannot look past today, who cannot look past guaranteed scholarship money at whatever school happens to be offering it or who can’t abide the idea of not having a varsity position waiting for them when they arrive.

• From Four Days to Glory: Wrestling with the Soul of the American Heartland (2005)

  Dan had been right: The boy from the farm could wrestle with these guys. No, the Kalina defeat Dan can live with; it is the only other loss on his high school record that really eats at him, the one he suffered in his junior year to a kid from Minnesota during a tournament. It was an overtime defeat, 4–3, during one of the scads of tournaments Dan entered and usually won over the years. Dan remembers very clearly that he was simply off all day, just not all the way there. He felt, he tells me, like he was losing from the start of the match, even though he had every chance to win, and even though his opponent never did go on the offensive. The kid stayed back and hunkered down and waited for Dan to make a mistake, which Dan finally did, in overtime. It never happened before, and it hasn’t happened since. “He didn’t take it very well,” Brad Bridgewater says. “He was pissed—and he should have been. We took about ten or twelve shots and couldn’t finish anything. The thing goes to overtime and we try the same move we’ve been working all day, and the kid gets around him and scores two, and that’s it. “We did all the work, and at the end they raise the other guy’s hand,” Bridgewater says. “But nobody’s unbeatable. Ask Dan Gable.” It is that message that Bridgewater wants Tyler Burkle to understand, but on this day, Tyler is up against two-time state champion Morningstar. And although Burkle wrestles with great energy, it’s clear early on that he does not want to take too many risks with Morningstar; he is almost afraid to go in and attempt a takedown, and he gets punished for it. Ryan wins the 152-pound championship with a 13–1 major decision, and he looks completely in control doing it. Tyler knows he’s got his work cut out for him if he is to make a run at the state title. By the time they get through the heavyweights and the consolation matches, the day has given way to evening; it’s going on twelve hours since many of these high school kids first arrived at Midland-Wyoming, and a rare full dinner—or at least as much food as their shrunken stomachs can hold—awaits many of them as soon as the tournament titlists are all awarded and the crowd dispatched into the black night. But for the families and wrestlers of North-Linn, there is one more piece of theater to be staged. As the team standings are compiled, it becomes apparent that North-Linn may tie North Cedar for the team championship, an almost freakish thing considering how many different ways points can be compiled here—by advancers, by place-winners, falls, technical falls, all of it. Still, the murmur through the crowd is that the teams will fall exactly even and have to share the crown.

• From Four Days to Glory: Wrestling with the Soul of the American Heartland (2005)

  (No such recruiting occurred, they say.) In the end, it was a tack that succeeded mostly in making Virginia Tech look small. Brands didn’t need to say a word to any of the Iowa boys, nor to Metcalf or Leet. He knew they had come to Blacksburg to wrestle for him, and he believed they would follow him wherever he went. His selling job on the boys had been accomplished more than a year earlier. He only needed to confirm that he was headed to Iowa; his relationship with the wrestlers and their families would take care of the rest. Still, the university had parchment on its side. Under no set of NCAA guidelines was Virginia Tech required—or even much encouraged—to grant an open release to any athlete. Beyond that, the letter of intent that athletes sign when they commit to a program specifically recognizes that they are signing with the university, not a particular coach, and that coaches come and go, as coaches are wont to do. Under the rules, Tech was well within its rights to tell the wrestlers, “He can go. You stay.” And so, it did. From his new perch in Iowa, Brands alternately fumed and suffered. He felt responsible for bringing the recruits to Virginia Tech and angry that, in his view, school officials were blocking clean exits for the five of them as a way of getting back at him for bailing out when the Hawkeyes came calling. He also knew he was helpless to do anything about it. Absent definitive proof of what happened in the meeting with Weaver, the boys were left to make their own decisions. They could remain in Blacksburg and begin competing immediately for the new regime at Tech, at full or nearly full scholarship, under a longtime Virginia high school coach who was hired to replace Brands. Or they could transfer to Iowa, sit out a season without scholarship, and wait for the 2007–08 academic year—some two and a half years removed from their high school glory—to actually compete again under school colors. It was no contest. Every one of them chose to transfer to Iowa, even if that meant losing a year of official college competition. For Jay and Dan in particular, it was time to go home. And so it was that, in the fall of 2006, Jay Borschel found himself on the campus of Iowa University, having come full circle. Dan LeClere was there, too, and Joey Slaton. They would be joining Ryan Morningstar and the other Iowa wrestlers back in the room in which they had grown up together. And they would be doing it in some famous company: As one of his first acts as the Hawkeyes’ new head coach, Brands had reached out to Dan Gable, asking him to come back into the program on an active basis—in the wrestling room, as an assistant coach. Gable, to the approval of virtually the entire state in which he made his name, agreed.

• From Heptaméron (1559)

  an hour after midnight. I need not tell you whether or not the impassioned lover was transported with joy, and was punctual to the assignation. But the fair one, in order to put the force of his passion to a new trial, said to her demoiselle, " I know the love of Seigneur Such-a- one for you, and I know that you are no less in love with him. I take such an interest in your happiness that I have resolved to contrive means for you both to enjoy a long conversation together in private and at your ease." The demoiselle was in such ecstasy that she could not dissemble her passion, and, in obedience to her mistress's directions, lay down alone on a handsome bed. The mistress then, leaving large candles lighted, the better to display the girl's beauty, and the door open, pretended to go away, but contrived to hide herself near the bed so cunningly that she could not be discovered. The lover, expecting to find her as she had promised, stole softly into the room at the appointed hour, shut the door, un- dressed, and got into bed. No sooner had he stretched out his arms to embrace his mistress, as he supposed, than the poor girl, who believed him to be all her own, threw her arms round his neck, and spoke to him with such affection, and with such a charming countenance, that there is not a holy hermit in the world but would have forgotten his paternosters for her sake. But when he recognized her form and her face, the love that had made him get so quickly into bed made him jump out of it still more hastily, on finding that his bedfellow was not she who had made him sigh so long. Vexed then alike with the mistress and the maid, " Your folly," he said, " and the malice of her who put you there, cannot make me other than I am. Try to be an honest woman ; for you shall not lose your good name through me." So saying, he flung himself out of the room in huge dudgeon, ■^i'i'^'lf* The poor girl, believing him to be all her own, threw her arms around his neck. Photographed from Life. Copyright, 1902, by D. Treuor. Second day.\ Q UEEN OF NA VARRE. 1 7 j and it was a long time before he again visited his mis- tress.

• From The Triumph of Christianity (2018)

  < 163 < Lecture 24  The Triumph of Christianity: Gains and Losses ` At the same time, the triumph of Christianity led to some serious losses in the public sphere. This lecture will mention just one. y The religious realm of pagan antiquity embraced massive diversity and tolerance. The thousands of pagan cults involved different gods, known from different myths, worshiped thorough different practices. y There were cults devoted to Zeus, Athena, Apollo, and Aphrodite; to gods of mountains, forests, and streams; gods of different cities, towns, and villages; and to gods of the household. These were all worshiped in gloriously diverse ways. y This diversity brought a widespread tolerance of difference, a sense that varying paths to the divine were acceptable and even valued. ` Most of that was lost with the triumph of Christianity. As a rule, Christians strove for unity, and Christian leaders by and large insisted that they, and they alone, had the correct understanding of both human truth and divine reality. They were not inclusive but exclusive. This led to intolerance. Conclusion ` This question remains: Is the Christianization of the Western world a victory to be celebrated, a defeat to be lamented, or a bit of both? However one evaluates the merits of the case, no one can deny that the conversion of the Roman Empire to Christianity transformed the history of the West. ` What we know of as late antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Reformation, and all history since is inexplicable without it. In short, the triumph of Christianity was the most monumental cultural transformation our world has ever seen. < 164 < Lecture 24  The Triumph of Christianity: Gains and Losses Reading Ehrman, The Triumph of Christianity, afterword. Kristensen, Making and Breaking the Gods . Sauer, The Archaeology of Religious Hatred in the Roman and Early Medieval World. Veyne, Bread and Circuses . Questions ¸ What cultural gains appear to have accrued through the triumph of Christianity over the other religions of Rome? What were the cultural losses? All in all, what is your view of the outcome? Do you consider it a triumph?

• From Four Days to Glory: Wrestling with the Soul of the American Heartland (2005)

  It’s just such an amazing moment: Doug and his former pupil going at it in their street clothes, their faces still trying to keep the mood light, as if to convince the onlookers that neither man cares about the result and both are out there in a sort of mock indignation at having to share the team title. But as they continue to circle and grip each other, and the scab over Doug’s right ear—the one he originally cut while wrestling Tyler in the practice room—finally and predictably tears open, the gymnasium grows a little less lighthearted. It gets quiet for just a few seconds, and it appears that even the longtime wrestling folks aren’t exactly sure what to think. Doug is by now dripping blood down the right side of his face and onto his clothes, which he doesn’t even realize. He is completely outmanned by this extra-large human, Doug trying to stay upright while wearing jeans and a collared shirt and beat-up tennis shoes, and before long what began as a joke takes on the proportion—just very briefly, mind you—of something personal and rooted in grudge. When the huge coach finally uses his bulk to throw Doug to the floor, there is an audible “Ooooh” from the crowd, but even before Doug can spring up, the nervous laughter and friendly calls of “Okay, boys, that’s enough” have begun to circulate. You can tell the people want this thing to end before it actually does get personal. And though Doug and the coach both leave the mat smiling and pretending friendliness, the truth is that Doug is burning inside with the fury and embarrassment of being tossed to the mat—even here, now, with nothing on the line, having been snuck up on by a former student who earlier had spoken of his genuine appreciation for what LeClere taught him in that wrestling room back at North-Linn. Someone hands Doug a towel to wipe off the blood. Most of the observers, knowing nothing about the situation, will walk away under the impression that the blood is a product of a wound inflicted by the North Cedar coach. It is a likelihood that only adds to Doug’s seething sense of humiliation—a sense not similarly shared by anyone around him—at being “beaten” by the big guy with the bear hug. It puts an odd, disquieting spin on this day. And it is something that will gall Doug for weeks to come. CHAPTER 7Only Warm in the RoomOn the same final weekend of January, Doug Streicher already has sent his junior varsity to a meet across town. The rest of Linn-Mar High School looks deserted; the mass of students have long since piled their stuff in their lockers and gotten the hell out. The hallways are empty up there. One level below, down in the wrestling room, it’s learning time. For Streicher, having the varsity and nothing but the varsity is an unimaginable luxury.

• From Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family (1901)

  Take place." Consul Kroger embraced her tenderly and fleetingly and shook the hand of his eldest niece, who was also present in the dining room. He was now about fifty-five years old, and in addition to his small mustache he had grown strong round whiskers, exposing his chin, and quite gray. A few sparse strips of hair were carefully coiffed over his broad and rosy bald head. A wide mourning ribbon sat on the sleeve of his elegant tunic. "You got the latest, Bethsy?" he asked. 'Yes, Tony, you will be particularly interested. In short, our property in front of the castle gate has now been sold ... to whom? Not to one man, but to two, because it will be divided, the house will becanceled, put a fence across it, and then Merchant Benthien builds a kennel on the right and Merchant Sorenson on the left... well, God bless.” "Outrageous," said Frau Grünlich, folding her hands in her lap and looking up at the ceiling... "Grandfather's property! Good, so the property is botched. The appeal was precisely in the spaciousness ... which was actually superfluous ... but that was the distinction. The large garden ... down to the Trave ... and the house in the back with the driveway, the Kastanienallee ... So now it is divided. Benthien will be standing in front of one door, smoking his pipe, and Sorenson in front of the other. Yes, I also say 'God bless', Uncle Justus. There is probably nobody noble enough to inhabit the whole thing. It's a good thing Grandpapa doesn't get to see it anymore..." The mood of mourning was still too heavy and serious in the air for Tony to express their indignation in louder and stronger words. It was on the day of the reading of the will, two weeks after the consul's death, at half past five in the afternoon. The Consul Buddenbrook had asked her brother to come to Mengstrasse so that he could take part in a discussion with Thomas and Herr Marcus, the general manager, about the dispositions of the deceased and the financial situation, and Tony had announced his decision to also take part in the discussions. She had said that she owed this interest to the company as well as to the family, and she took care to give this meeting the character of a meeting, a family council. She had closed the window curtains and despite the two paraffin lamps, all the candles on the large gilded candelabras were lit to excess.

• From Science and Religion (2006)

  51 Historical study holds the promise to correct this problem by indicating the diversity and complexity of past theological debates and responses. Traditional Christian theology shows biblical literalism to be a non-issue. Consider, for example, the case of B. B. War ¿ eld (1851–1921), the strong defender of biblical inerrancy who also supported evolution. The historical background, once known, forces people to ask what makes biblical literalism/evolution an issue now. One cause may simply be unfamiliarity with historical theology and current “high-end” (that is, philosophically sophisticated) theology. Thus, the study of history is again a solution. Rather than merely exemplifying the warfare thesis, both parties involved in the current controversy have adopted it as a model for their own behavior. A warfare metaphor appeals to the Manichean mindset of many fundamentalists. Some scientists, crusading for materialism and atheism, support fundamentalist fears. Such scientists have often forgotten the difference between a professional policy of not invoking supernatural action and a personal credo against everything supernatural. Historical perspective (again) reminds us of the difference. Scientists should avoid making theological or metaphysical claims when they are unquali ¿ ed to do so. An example is the assertion that the inherent randomness of mutation and contingency of natural selection excludes the possibility of divine guidance of evolution. This position is refuted by the 2002 statement “Communion and Stewardship” by the International Theological Commission. The loudest combatants in the evolution controversy are at the extremes. Their arguments tend to harden positions and create division where it need not exist. The perception of the controversy ignores the vast ¿ eld of cooperation and intelligent conversation by the majority in between. Fundamentalists do not have the right to speak for Christianity; declamatory supporters of scientism do not have the right to speak for science. What both lack is a sense of humility before the complexity of the world and man’s place in it. Ŷ Science and theology have experienced nearly opposite trajectories in terms of professionalization, authority, and status.

• From Blue Like Jazz (2003)

  “Yeah, I mean, this is supposed to be a pretty challenging school, and I wasn’t that challenged. Not that good of an introduction if you ask me. I hope they don’t put the cookies on a lower shelf all year.” “Cookies?” I asked. I thought she had cookies. Laura would go on to explain the ideas I didn’t understand. In time she figured out that I was a Christian, but we didn’t talk much about it. We normally discussed literature or the day’s lecture, but one day Laura brought up an odd topic: racism in the history of the church. She had moved to Portland from Georgia where, though she is an atheist, she told me she witnessed, within a church, the sort of racial discrimination most of us thought ended fifty years ago. She asked me very seriously what I thought about the problem of racism in America and whether the church had been a harbor for that sort of hatred. It had been a long time since I’d thought about it, to be honest. Just out of high school I got hooked on Martin Luther King and read most of his books, but since then the issue had faded in my mind. I am sure there are exceptions, but for the most part I think evangelical churches failed pretty badly during the civil rights movement, as did nearly every other social institution. Laura looked down into her coffee and didn’t say anything. I knew, from previous conversations, she had dated a black student back in Atlanta who was now at Morehouse College where Dr. King himself earned a degree. Her question was not philosophical. It was personal. I told her how frustrating it is to be a Christian in America, and how frustrated I am with not only the church’s failures concerning *human rights, but also my personal failure to contribute to the solution. I wondered out loud, though, if there was a bigger issue, and I mistakenly made the callous comment that racism might be a minor problem compared to bigger trouble we have to deal with. “Racism, not an issue?!” she questioned very sternly. “Well, not that it’s not an issue, only that it is a minor issue.” “How can you say that?” She sat back restlessly in her chair. “Don, it is an enormous problem.” I was doing a lot of backpedaling at first, but then I began to explain what I meant. “Yeah, I understand it is a terrible and painful problem, but in light of the whole picture, racism is a signal of something greater. There is a larger problem here than tension between ethnic groups.” “Unpack that statement,” Laura said.

• From Four Days to Glory: Wrestling with the Soul of the American Heartland (2005)

  Brands reluctantly accepted his consolation prize: Top assistant to Zalesky, and chief recruiter. By the winter of 2005, Zalesky’s head-coaching career included three NCAA and three Big Ten team titles and a whole host of individual conference and national champion wrestlers, and it was nowhere near enough. The Hawks had not won a national crown in five years, and the suspicion was beginning to creep in that Zalesky had done his best work in the first three seasons of his career, 1998, 1999 and 2000, when he basically was coaching athletes chosen and recruited by Gable to fit Gable’s system. On his own, Zalesky, with Brands out front on recruiting, getting people fired up to join the Hawkeyes, had signed some tremendous wrestlers but hadn’t been able to put together a team capable of winning it all—and second-place finishes at the NCAAs, no matter how spectacularly they were achieved nor from what difficulties forged, no longer were acceptable at Iowa. Gable had set the bar that high. Jim Zalesky needed to start winning it all again. All of which makes it such a puzzle that the fall of 2004 did not become one of the great talent hauls in University of Iowa wrestling history. Here was this senior class, so loaded with elite Division I potential, and every one of the kids had grown up thinking that someday, maybe, if they hit the weights and ran wind sprints until they puked, if they wrestled so hard and so long that they (like the great Gable was said so often to have done) might have to drag themselves by their arms across the wrestling room at the end of practice—if they did all that, then maybe they would one day find themselves in the yellow-and-black of Iowa. So Zalesky had that going for him, the way he did every year at recruiting time when it came down to the kids from the home state. But this year was different. Zalesky was the same competent coach he had always been, but he no longer had Brands in his corner. Brands had finally followed his ambition and secured a job trying to turn Virginia Tech’s straggling program into a national power. He was pure energy and desire, and he electrified high school kids with his pitch. After Tom Brands came to people’s houses for a visit, half the parents were ready to sign up for six a.m. workouts. He communicated his passion for the sport with sincerity; he could actually make you understand that it was a life-and-death proposition to him, no matter how ridiculous that seems when put down on paper. With his enthusiasm and his clearly defined direction, he had Jay hooked early on.

• From Four Days to Glory: Wrestling with the Soul of the American Heartland (2005)

  He had such an admirer in Dan that the day Brands announced he was leaving for Virginia Tech, Dan remembers thinking to himself, “Iowa may not happen.” What Dan was beginning to realize (and Jay was to discover as well) was that his interest in Iowa had had significantly to do with Brands, whom both boys saw as the next best thing to wrestling for Gable. When Dan watched the Hawkeyes in action, he was always struck by the way that Brands did most of the coaching, and almost all of the yelling. “Zalesky looked more like an organizer than the coach—he kind of stood off to the side,” Dan says. “It was like he was running the business. Brands is just totally different. I had to think about it, and I thought that Brands was the coach who could help me get to the next level, make me better. If Brands was still at Iowa, I’d be at Iowa.” Even if there had been no scholarship money to give? “If Brands was at Iowa,” Dan repeats, “I’d be there.” So Brands was going to make that much difference to the LeCleres and the Borschels of the world, and Zalesky had to find a way to bridge that gap. He had assets, the greatest of which was the fact that his school was still the object of the boys’ wrestling dreams. The Hawkeye wrestling room was still the place where Gable might at any time wander through, stopping to help a wrestler with his positioning or tell a freshman about something he’d seen on tape that might reveal an area to be strengthened. It was a place rich enough in its history and strong enough in its current incarnation to attract the high-profile likes of Falck and Tsirtsis and heavyweight Matt Fields, the former state champion from North Cedar High. It was the ultimate home-field advantage. But it alone wasn’t enough. It was going to be up to Zalesky to make the seniors understand how much he wanted them in Iowa City, how huge a mistake they’d be making by even considering someplace else. He was going to have to overcome his own natural personality, the distance that he tended to put between himself and the parents and athletes whom he met. And, of course, the whole world of wrestlers is not created equal: Zalesky was going to have to decide how many of the seniors he really cared about going after. The answer: Almost none, until it was too late. While Brands did everything but burrow a tunnel between Blacksburg, Virginia, and the homes of the coveted seniors of eastern Iowa, Jim Zalesky went the other way. He played coy. He may actually have been as indifferent as he appeared. He made a visit to the Borschels’ home and had dinner, yet it was Jay and his parents who found themselves constantly having to restart the conversation. “We couldn’t get him to talk,” Jim Borschel says.

• From Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family (1901)

  He was the successor of the jovial and philanthropic old gentleman under whose government Hanno's father and uncle had studied, and who died soon after 1971. At that time Doctor Wulicke, previously a professor at a Prussian grammar school, had been appointed, and with him another, a new spirit had moved into the old school. Where classical education had formerly been seen as a cheerful end in itself, to be pursued with calm, leisure, and happy idealism, the concepts of authority, duty, power, service, and career had now attained the highest dignity, and the "categorical imperative of our philosopher Kant ' was the banner that Director Wulicke menacingly unfurled in every speech. The school had become a state within a state in which Prussian official restraint reigned so violently that not only the teachers but also the students felt themselves to be civil servants who were concerned about nothing but their advancement and being well-regarded by those in power ... Soon after the new director moved in The rebuilding and refurnishing of the institution was started under the most excellent hygienic and aesthetic points of view and everything was happily completed. The question remained, however, whether earlier, when there had been less modern comfort and a little more good nature, spirit, cheerfulness, benevolence and comfort in these rooms, the school had not been a more sympathetic and beneficial institute... who were concerned about nothing but their advancement and being in good standing with those in power ... Soon after the new director had moved in, the reconstruction and refurnishing of the institution, also taking into account the most excellent hygienic and aesthetic aspects, began and everything was completed happily . The question remained, however, whether earlier, when there had been less modern comfort and a little more good nature, spirit, cheerfulness, benevolence and comfort in these rooms, the school had not been a more sympathetic and beneficial institute... who were concerned about nothing but their advancement and being in good standing with those in power ... Soon after the new director had moved in, the reconstruction and refurnishing of the institution, also taking into account the most excellent hygienic and aesthetic aspects, began and everything was completed happily . The question remained, however, whether earlier, when there had been less modern comfort and a little more good nature, spirit, cheerfulness, benevolence and comfort in these rooms, the school had not been a more sympathetic and beneficial institute... to be in good standing with those in power ... Soon after the new director had moved in, the reconstruction and refurnishing of the institution, also taking into account the most excellent hygienic and aesthetic aspects, began and everything was happily completed. The question remained, however, whether earlier, when there had been less modern comfort and a little more good nature, spirit, cheerfulness, benevolence and comfort in these rooms, the school had not been a more sympathetic and beneficial institute... to be in good standing with those in power ...

• From Four Days to Glory: Wrestling with the Soul of the American Heartland (2005)

  He has a crucial strategic decision to make: It is Nick’s choice whether to begin the period in the on-top position (and thus try for a pin or for near-fall points) or the down position (and try for a 1-point escape, then a 2-point takedown to win). Nick looks to his corner for guidance. Doug, straining to be heard over the din of the crowd and all these other matches bursting with sound around him, tries to hand-signal Nick that he can choose whichever position he feels better about—but Nick only sees his father make the “down” motion with his hands. Nick starts on the bottom, but his fatigue is setting in, and almost as soon as the period begins, Norton is able to break down one of Nick’s arms and get one shoulder of Nick’s to the mat. Nick fights to break free, but Norton uses his top-position leverage to finally roll both of Nick’s shoulders onto the mat. Not quite a minute into the third, Nick is pinned. “I did that to him,” Doug says later, downstairs. “He didn’t see my sign. I should have yelled it, too.” Doug is disconsolate. It’s no use telling him the truth, which is that it probably didn’t matter, that Nick was fading physically and stuck in there against a really solid wrestler. After having spent so much time on the sideline this season, Nick cannot summon his A-game on command, and over in the cool-down area, he looks spent. He is. He will go on to lose his consolation semifinal as well. After such a great run through the section and district tournaments, this isn’t Nick’s year, after all. As Dan had earlier observed, it was barely a year at that, and at the finish it was too much to ask to get all the way there. But Nick is only a sophomore. There is still time. There is more LeClere to come. By the time the excitement on the other mats begins to taper off, the crowd inside Veterans Memorial has almost completely turned its attention to an eye-popping scene more or less in the middle of the auditorium. There, down on his hands and knees, is the great Dan LeClere. Stuck. The other wrestler on the mat is Klint Kersten, one of a number of strong entries from a well-coached program, Logan-Magnolia, that will finish this weekend with the top team score in Class 1A. And Kersten has decided, in this semifinal, to put on the match of his life. Dan has stormed the mat with his usual fierceness to begin the contest. He is so ready for this; he has paced himself into his usual frenzy downstairs and come up to this great roar of applause from the North-Linn fans in particular and many in the crowd in general. As the wrestlers circle each other to begin, Dan suddenly springs forward, so quick and so light on his feet, and dives down to spear one of Kersten’s legs.

• From What Belongs to You (2016)

  When I finally made my way down from the garden, I was frustrated to find that access to the water was blocked by a seemingly endless line of construction, complexes of restaurants and casinos and discotheques, all of them boarded up for the season, barricaded against sea and weather and, I assumed, the plundering hands that had covered these boards with graffiti. And yet, when I did find a way through these linked complexes, reaching not quite the beach yet but the road that ran alongside it, I turned away after only a few moments. The wind coming off the sea, unbroken by trees or by the buildings that had frustrated my approach, was too fierce to stand facing it for long. And I was fascinated by those buildings, now that I saw the other side of them, with their garish, amusement-park facades rising above their boarded windows. I could hear a radio playing faintly from within one of the restaurants, but there was no other sign of human presence, no voices or movement save for the cats that had improvised some habitation on the rooftops, where they watched me, disinterested and alert. There was a ghostliness about the whole strip, as if it had been abandoned for years. One restaurant wasn’t boarded up, I don’t know why, and I walked up the few steps to the deck to peer in through the glass, which was crusted with salt and sand. It was a place for children, a restaurant and playroom both, with figurines and coin-operated rides in the shapes of characters from American cartoons. These were wrapped in sheets of plastic, further blurring an image already blurred by the glass, so that they were grotesquely distorted; and for a moment, as I looked at these figures I associated with my childhood, it was as if they took on a kind of agonized life, like quarantined victims of some plague or like infants themselves, suffocating in plastic cauls. Mitko was awake when I returned to the hotel, lounging and watching television, unperturbed by my absence, though he wanted to know where I had been and took my camera to scan through the photos I had taken. He knew every inch of the park, he said, he recognized each of the scenes on the screen, and he demonstrated this knowledge by describing for me what lay outside the frame. Later that afternoon he took me into the center, through its streets and squares, pointing out landmarks that were like miniatures of their counterparts in the capital: monuments to the same patriots, museums of history, of archaeology and ethnography, the Roman ruins and the central cathedral with its efflorescence of domes.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  I was interested to see what effect this would have on Phil, who was washing in a thorough, slightly over-hearty way; but though he glanced shyly at what was going on, his own simple little cock remained unstirred. A couple of Cypriot men, who talked loudly and securely in Greek, old friends with thick moustaches and frames rectangular with muscle, shampooed flossily opposite me; and some greyer specimens, voyeurs who came only for the showers, mooned hungrily at the other end of the room. I was quite brisk, and followed his Lordship out to the drying area. He had a rough old towel, the grey of institutional laundering. He gathered it into a knot and dabbed at himself with it, breathing in a manner that was nearly a whistle, and seemed always about to become a well-known Mozartian tune. I paced around drying myself, then tied my towel round my waist in a kind of Polynesian skirt and couldn’t resist saying to him, with a step forwards and a bid for his attention: ‘Are you feeling better now?’ ‘Hello, hello,’ he said, not at all taken aback. ‘Goodness me …’ he looked around as if something interesting had just started happening somewhere else. ‘I was surprised to see you swimming so soon after your … accident.’ ‘Like to swim you know,’ he said promptly. ‘Floating around in lovely, lovely water.’ I waited for some recognition of the drift of my remarks. He wouldn’t really look at me, though. ‘Do you know, I’ve been swimming here for over forty years? Oh yes—up and down. I expect I’ve swum right round the globe by now—if you added it all together, you know. Splish-splosh, flippety-flop!’ I identified already the abstracted tone with which he produced these inane jingling phrases, as if to prevent objections being made by filling up the space and time with nonsense. Yet somehow, at this stage, I wasn’t going to let him escape. ‘I was there, you know,’ I remarked factually, ‘in Kensington Gardens, when you were taken ill.’ He looked at me with a suddenly summoned attentiveness. ‘I’m quite over all that nasty business now,’ he said patiently. ‘In fact,’ I pursued, ‘it was I who looked after you, you know …’ This seemed to knock him rather, and he started to shamble off into the changing-room and then to think better of it, coming back to me in a sideways manner. His eyes ran down my front and he looked at my long, gappy toes as he said, ‘You were the chappy that, er, puff-puff, bang-bang … I say, goodness me. My dear fellow!’ He did not know what to do. ‘Anyway,’ I said, disappointed of a show of gratitude, ‘I’m glad to see you’ve recovered’—and I moved away feeling foolish and a little cross.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  Up in the showers afterwards he was standing beside the same person, and the reason for it became clearer. The boy, very brown all over, except for a pink triangle above the crack of his ass, was thin and wiry, though not quite unattractively so, his colour glamorising (as it can do a nondescript Italian or Arab) what would have been a meagre body if pale. There was something strained about him, particularly his gaunt, narrow head, hollow-cheeked and with short dark curls. His sunken eyes were a cold blue, made the more striking by his tan; when he turned round I saw that he had shaved off all his pubic hair, which added a kinky and intenser nakedness to his salient, sideways-curving, pink-headed and very large cock. The conversation was not fluent. The youth would pass some bland comment, and James would try to reply with adequate enthusiasm or insouciance. ‘See you,’ said the youth, abruptly turning off his shower and going off to dry. ‘Yes, see you,’ said James, managing to make it seem a careless possibility, though the smile faded off his face in a way that showed it was not spontaneous. He had effectively been put down, as it is impossible to go padding out after someone in simulated sportsman-like ease when they have just said goodbye to you. I crossed over and took my place beside James. ‘Who’s your friend?’ I enquired. He merely gave me a sceptical look. ‘Why don’t you go after him?’ ‘I don’t think I care for him.’ ‘Oh come on! He looked to me as if he quite cared for you—if Dame Tumescence is anything to go by.’ ‘Another time, perhaps.’ He shampooed his receding hair in a listless fashion. ‘I see Miss Manners is having a ball.’ It was one of James’s almanac of nicknames.