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 Deceptions and Myths of the Bible (1975)

  Thus Christ was not the first to perform this miracle. Today we look back upon these wonders and say, “That was the age of miracles.” We also wonder why we, with all our science and technology, have no such power. This too is woeful ignorance. There never was an age of miracles; miracles, like Saviors, belong to mythology. Because of that their power was simply nonexistent. Once this is understood their power over us will also be nonexistent. It’s obvious St. Augustine had no such understanding. He tells us he accepted Christianity only because of the overwhelming evidence of the miracles. And now we find they were not miracles at all. They are, however, morals. There are multitudes “ahungered” in our world too but we do not feed them. We do not multiply our crops to fill empty mouths, but bulging pockets. We cannot reach these empty mouths because under our system every mouthful must first be paid for. We are followers of Christ in name only. Any system that compels the individual to think only of himself and his family is inimical to human welfare. It breeds selfishness, the very opposite of altruism and brotherly love. We think of the home as the center of love, of kindness and self-sacrifice, but how all embracing are these noble qualities; how much do they counteract the products of selfishness? Marriage, home and children are the basis of our world but with human consciousness limited to them, they become the baseness of our world as well, covert motives for overt mischief. If we would get rid of the baseness we must elevate the basis—not the home but man’s home. Domesticity is not enough; we must think of Demos as well. Important as the home is, it is not the Omega but the Alpha of human society, the racial nursery in which we learn the rudiments of social civility. This accomplished, we leave the home and enter the world. This is individual maturation, and it applies to the race as well. This was Christ’s idea: “Who is my mother and who are my brethren?” But, you say, that was all right for the Son of God but not for us. No, it is not for us to carry to extremes examples set by world Saviors, but the very purpose of such Saviors, mythical though they be, is to show us how and when to do in moderation what they did in the extreme. 5. Walking on the WaterThe fifth major miracle is that in which Jesus walks on the water, calms the sea, and so on. This one, we have in duplicate, therefore, it must have happened. The first is in Matthew, chapter 8. 23. And when he was entered into a ship, his disciples followed him. 24. And, behold, there arose a great tempest in the sea, insomuch that the ship was covered with the waves: but he was asleep. 25.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  “Karen, my dear, how very nice to see you.” I looked up from my breakfast, which I was enjoying in the elegant parlor. How odd it was to be waited on in this way, as I had so often waited on visitors, bringing in coffee, toast, and eggs, while a few hundred yards away the community were eating cornflakes, bread, and margarine. There were some advantages to secular life, I reflected, helping myself to more marmalade but hastily suppressing my involuntary smile of enjoyment when Mother Frances came into the room. She looked somewhat less imposing in her new habit, but she had recently been promoted to become one of the provincial councillors. “But I’m interrupting your breakfast.” Mother Frances gestured toward the hot buttered toast. “Not at all, Reverend Mother.” Instantly I became the young nun again, unable to swallow a single mouthful while my former superior stood waiting to speak to me. “Well, you’re looking very well,” she went on, settling herself in one of the oak carvers at the head of the table. “Are you well?” “Not really, Reverend Mother.” I knew that I was supposed to say that everything was fine, but I suddenly pictured Rebecca’s stricken face. “I’m finding it very hard—almost impossible—to adapt. And it seems to be making me ill.” I briefly gave her the headlines: the fainting, the panic attacks, and the psychiatrist. “Oh really, Sister—Karen, I mean.” She corrected herself, laughing lightly but without amusement. “I really had hoped that you would grow out of all that nonsense! It’s high time, surely. You must be twenty-five? Twenty-six?” “Twenty-five,” I replied, though I couldn’t really see what my age had to do with it. “Well, there you are, then. Far too old for these childish displays.” “But how do I adjust?” Perhaps she should understand the problem so that she could advise other nuns who were thinking of leaving. “I trained to become a nun for five solid years. You know what it was like. You call it ‘formation’ now, I believe, and that’s what it is. It’s a training that shapes you at a very deep level. And I just can’t stop being a nun. I need a new training—one that is equally intensive—to turn me into a secular. Undoing habits and attitudes which are now engrained. I don’t know how to do this. You and Mother Walter made me a nun, but how do I reverse that? I don’t have anybody to help me deprogram myself, and I don’t think I can do it alone.” “Still as dramatic as ever, I see.” Mother Frances sounded bored, as she often did when, I suspected, she felt on uncertain ground. “It’s bound to be difficult at first. Of course it is.” She smiled brightly, and in an effort, perhaps, to avoid my eye, she started to brush away the crumbs scattered on the gleaming tabletop. “But I’m sure it’s only a matter of time.”

• From Talk Dirty to Me: An Intimate Philosophy of Sex (1994)

  Most fantasies have exaggerated or forbidden elements; some are genuinely scary or painful—and worth dreaming of still. But fantasies aren’t about our ordinary lives. Fulfilling the plot of a fantasy in real life is almost certain to be disappointing because it means losing this control, control over what we can never control, and in exchange, returning to a world that is often mundane, uncomfortable, and ambivalent. A world that condemns the world of the fantasy in the first place. I suspect the man who goes to a prostitute to fulfill his fantasy of having sex with a prostitute is really fulfilling a wish—a psychic dare—and not the complex subconscious narrative ground of fantasy that makes prostitutes so desirable to him. If I fulfilled my fantasy of being a prostitute by taking on a client, I don’t think the fantasy would be satisfied at all. It wouldn’t be the same—couldn’t be, at least in part because the “me” that is the prostitute is not exactly me. I sometimes find it disturbing to read about people making their fantasies come true for real. I won’t soon forget a long and terribly uncomfortable story by a woman who dressed in a little-girl nightie and had her “daddy” (another woman) awaken her, seduce her, spank her until she collapsed in childish weeping, and then comfort her and put her back to bed. The extraordinary courage of the writer melds with the rarity of anyone going about conquering her private fears this way. This is primal scream therapy, true-life recovery, and real sex all at once. For the most part, I suspect such efforts don’t work as well, because the psychic impetus has to be so strong. Just as we can be both subject and object of pornography, move in and out of its power that way, within fantasy we can be mover or moved, giver or receiver—we can be top or bottom, man or woman. More specifically, we can be imagined man and imagined woman. Women become boys and men become mothers, fucking boys, or girls, fucking girls, or goats, or brothers, or fathers fucking mothers or schoolteachers or angels, or dogs. Men have no penises but giant vaginal mouths, women thrust and intrude upon men. Blurring is inevitable. In our sexual fantasies we transmutate like superheroes of the boudoir, sprouting pricks, wings, breasts, tentacles, growing in stature and magical staying power. All Americans share the fantasy of physical beauty and strength. Those with bodies beyond normal often fill our fantasies; they are dream creatures, incubus and succubus, heroines and heroes, archetypes of the possible. We would like to be them; in fantasy, we are them.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  That was the theory. But far from progressing to these more advanced states, I never left base camp. Of course, there were moments when I felt moved by the beauty of the music or uplifted by a rousing sermon, but in my view this did not count. It was simply an aesthetic response, something that even an atheist could experience at a concert or when she was exposed to skillful rhetoric. I never had what seemed to be an encounter with anything supernatural, with a being that existed outside myself. I never felt caught up in something greater, never felt personally transfigured by a presence that I encountered in the depths of my being. I never experienced Somebody Else. And how could I possibly hope to have such an encounter when my mind was unable to wait upon God? Prayer, we were always told, was simply a way of quieting the soul, enabling it to apprehend the divine. You had to gather up your dissipated faculties, bring them together, and present yourself, whole and entire, to God, so that every single part of your mind and heart could honestly say with the prophet Samuel: “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.” But my mind, heart, and faculties remained scattered. Try as I would, I could not re-collect, so there was no way that God could get through to me. I tried to discuss this with my superiors, of course. On several occasions I explained that I never had any consolation and could not keep my mind on my meditation. But they seemed frankly incredulous. “You’re always so extreme, Sister!” Mother Frances, the mistress of scholastics, had said with irritation. “You’re always exaggerating. Everybody has consolation at some time or another. Are you seriously telling me that in all the six years of your religious life you have never once experienced consolation?” I had nodded. She looked baffled. “Well, I really don’t know what to say to you,” she said, clearly at a loss. “That’s most unusual. I don’t know how anybody could go on without some consolation. “But I’m sure that things aren’t really as bad as you say,” she went on briskly. “You probably just feel a bit down at the moment, that’s all, and being you, you have to make a major drama out of the whole business.” This was not reassuring. I must be a particularly hard case, I thought miserably. As for my confession that I could never keep my mind on my prayers, this was also airily waved to one side. “Everybody has their off days, Sister!” Nobody would believe that I would love to have had some off days, because it would have meant that some of my days were “on.”

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  The head made a decisive gesture of refusal. “You know that isn’t the answer,” she said. “You know that wouldn’t work. Miss Cockburn, to whom I’m going to offer the department, would be miserable with you working under her. And you should know— you of all people—that nobody should ever, ever go backwards.” I gazed out of the window, trying to stifle my rising panic. A group of girls passed outside, laughing loudly. The head winced at the noise but, controlling her irritation, turned back to me. “And anyway, the job itself is too much for you. Look at yourself, my dear. You look ill; you are ill. I’m told you’ve been spending your weekends in bed.” I could not deny it. Gone were the days when I had partied in North London after a school day. Now I would crawl home on Friday evening and fall into bed, exhausted by the demands of the week. The head let the point sink in and continued: “This is no good for you. You’re still a young woman. You are—how old are you?—thirty-six? That’s nothing at all, believe me. You shouldn’t be struggling like this, with no life at all outside school. You know that this isn’t right.” “But what am I going to do?” My voice had thickened with tears, which I firmly tamped down. I wasn’t going to beg. And my financial prospects were no concern of the headmistress, who now dismissed any thought of perpetual penury with an airy laugh. “Oh, any number of things! You have remarkable talents, Miss Armstrong. You’re wasted here, my dear. A lot of people could teach English literature to the level required here, but you have an exceptional mind and you’re not using it to anything like its full capacity. There is nothing here to stretch or challenge you intellectually. You know that. You must be bored stiff a great deal of the time.” Again, I had nothing to say. She was quite right, of course. When I went into a classroom preparing to teach a class of fourteen-year-olds how to use the semicolon, I sometimes wondered how I could face the next forty minutes. But at least it was a job. This talk about my intellectual superiority was all very fine, but it had no market value outside the classroom that I could see. Feeling the familiar sensation of utter defeat, I looked down at my lap, unable for a moment to speak.

• From Talk Dirty to Me: An Intimate Philosophy of Sex (1994)

  No one ever needs to take a deep breath, walk into the XXX store, and ask for a movie with an embarrassing title again. (I’m glad I had to do that—it was hard the first few times, but I learned a lot, about myself and about all those scary other people behind that door.) Anything legal is easy enough to find. (I want to make it clear that I am talking about consensual acts between adults.) Fetish-based material that once required research and a big time commitment to find is readily available. I have to laugh at the trend these days toward so-called vintage porn; many of the movies are ones I asked for with such trepidation twenty years ago. The sheer quantity of amateur pornography available for free staggers me. There are a lot of curious and enterprising plumbers and soccer moms out there, but I’m not sure how many really grasp the tentacular grip of the Internet on every picture posted. Perhaps they all do; exhibitionism is a common sexual urge, and we live in the most exhibitionistic of times. Reality television has crept along this edge for a while now. How long before we have a competition to be the next big porn star? Until recently, I hadn’t looked at pornography for quite a while. I wasn’t interested—it’s one of the ways twenty years has changed me. The baby boomers with their intricate sense of entitlement have begun to retire; my generation, the first to thoroughly enjoy reliable birth control and to march for gay liberation, is balding or in menopause. Young women talk more easily about sex than I did at the same age, but they seem no wiser; they’re still discovering fire. People have had fire for some time, and each generation discovers it anew; we certainly did, with a lot of self-congratulation. Great sexual literature, spanning centuries—erotica, advice, science, anthropology, some really good and nasty stuff—fills the shelves of good bookstores and many libraries, but only the dreadful Fifty Shades of Grey is on the bestseller list. Many people interested in sexual culture are ambivalent about that book’s success. On the one hand, people are openly reading a book intended for masturbation. But on the other, it’s a bad book. Perhaps if Macho Sluts or Mr. Benson were published now, they would be sold on display tables at Barnes & Noble. Or perhaps not—real pornography may be defined by its outlaw status; pornography is pornographic because it violates the mainstream point of view. That Shades of Grey is so successful is a mark of what’s missing.

• From The Argonauts (2015)

  One month our donor friend tells us that he has to go out of town for a college reunion. Not wanting to lose the month’s egg, we trudge back to the bank. We track the egg’s progress via ultrasound: it looks bulbous and beautiful and ready to burst out of its follicle in the late afternoon, but by the next morning there is no sign of it, not even a trace of fluid from its ruptured sac. I am beyond frustrated, beyond hope. But Harry—always the optimist!—insists it might not be too late. The nurse concurs. Knowing that I have a bad habit of deeming myself lost and getting off the freeway one exit before I would have found my way, I decide, once again, to join them. [Single or lesbian motherhood] can be seen as [one] of the most violent forms taken by the rejection of the symbolic … as well as one of the most fervent divinizations of maternal power—all of which cannot help but trouble an entire legal and moral order without, however, proposing an alternative to it. Given that one-third of American families are currently headed by single mothers (the census doesn’t even ask about two mothers or any other forms of kinship—if there is anyone in the house called mother and no father, then your household counts as single mother), you’d think the symbolic order would be showing a few more dents by now. But Kristeva is not alone in her hyperbole. For a more disorienting take on the topic, I recommend Jean Baudrillard’s “The Final Solution,” in which Baudrillard argues that assisted forms of reproduction (donor insemination, surrogacy, IVF, etc.), along with the use of contraception, herald the suicide of our species, insofar as they detach reproduction from sex, thus turning us from “mortal, sexed beings” into clone-like messengers of an impossible immortality. So-called artificial insemination, Baudrillard argues, is linked with “the abolition of everything within us that is human, all too human: our desires, our deficiencies, our neuroses, our dreams, our disabilities, our viruses, our lunacies, our unconscious and even our sexuality—all the features which make us specific living beings.”

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  What could anyone have against Keats? Didn’t they admire those extraordinary odes, the sonnets—the letters, for heaven’s sake? The students continued to look at me expectantly, and for a wild moment I longed for one of them to get up and yell that he absolutely hated Keats, that he thought Keats was insufferably indulgent, pretentious, and overrated. I would have welcomed any sign of involvement or commitment. “Do you really not like Keats?” I asked again, hoping to coax them into a reaction. They shrugged and smiled sweetly. There was no hostility; they were perfectly . . . pleasant. I gave up. “Well, what about John Clare?” “Okay,” the girl replied equably, “I’ll do Clare.” I had given them a reading list and an essay title, which they had written down diligently, and we had parted cordially. But now, as I hurtled northward on the rattling train, I wondered what on earth was the point. Of course, not all the students were so passive. Only last week I had had a splendid session with two highly intelligent girls. But what had those three students actually learned this afternoon, and what would they learn about Clare? Certainly they would acquire a little information about him, but was their course teaching them to think? Was it enhancing their lives? Would the world be a better place because they had shared Clare’s insights? Or were they simply passing the time pleasantly? I shook myself irritably out of this reverie. I was glad to have this job. I couldn’t expect the moon. And yet I had thought, at some absurd level of my being, that if only I could get an academic post, everything would fall neatly into place. I had believed that I would find a new vocation. When I arrived home that evening, my flat did little to cheer me. I had been rather spoiled by life at the Harts’, where there was always something interesting going on. I had also been horrified by the exorbitant rents charged for the most meager of rooms in London and had been lucky to find this quite reasonable apartment near Highgate. It consisted of a bedroom and sitting room, with a minute kitchenette portioned off behind the bed. There was no garden or balcony, but my bedroom overlooked Highgate Wood. I had done my best to cheer the place up, but the furniture and curtains were not really to my taste, and the flat had an unloved air. Nothing quite came together. But it was spacious and quiet, so I was able to work there quite successfully. The chief problem was the landlady, who tended to lurk in the hall ready to pounce on me when I came home. On several occasions I had been waylaid for nearly two hours, while she told me endless tales about her deceased husband and unsatisfactory daughter.

• From Boys & Sex (2020)

  A moment to define terms: “Hookup,” a word high school and college students bandy about incessantly, is intentionally vague. Although it presumes a lack of connection and commitment, beyond that, the details are indeterminate, shifting with age, geography, and personal experience. I once heard college freshmen debate whether a dance floor make-out (DFMO) “counted” as a hookup. It would have in high school, they concluded, but not anymore, though it definitely would if you engaged in the exact same behavior back in someone’s room. In reality, around 35 to 40 percent of college hookups include intercourse, which means 60 percent or more do not; about 13 percent involve oral sex (mostly performed by girls on boys); 12 percent consist of some naked genital touching; and 35 percent—over a third—go no further than kissing and groping. Because of that ambiguity, however, students tend to radically overestimate what their classmates are up to (not to mention allowing others to draw inflated conclusions about their own exploits); that can fuel feelings of inadequacy and FOMO, contributing to pressure to keep pace through undesired sex, coerciveness, or aggression. According to the Online College Social Life Survey, which encompassed more than twenty thousand students nationally, close to three-quarters of both male and female students will hook up at least once by their senior year, engaging in some combination of the above behaviors. The average number of partners? Seven to eight. That’s maybe one a semester—not exactly the fall of Rome. Forty percent hook up fewer than three times during their college career, and a full quarter never hook up, though 20 percent do hook up ten times or more. The behavior is most common among affluent, white heterosexuals, and predominant in Greek life. Uncommitted sex in college is certainly nothing new. The real shift, then, is not “hookups” but hookup culture: the idea that casual sex is no longer an exception, but that physical intimacy is expected to be the precursor to emotional intimacy rather than its product. Students, both in high school and college, see hooking up as the first step toward a relationship, although most hookups don’t result in one. No wonder as many as 85 percent of college students report ambivalence or unhappiness with hookup culture and one in three say their intimate relationships have been “traumatic.” According to Lisa Wade, an associate professor of sociology at Occidental College, students express “a deep, indefinable disappointment” in their sexual experiences. “They worry that they’re feeling too much or too little. They are frustrated and feel regret, but they’re not sure why.” Although some students thrive, most wonder why they aren’t having fun yet.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  There were plenty of events in my external life, but I cannot— at least at present—find a narrative there. The real story was unfolding, at first imperceptibly and by slow degrees, within myself. When I entered my convent, I thought I had embarked on a mystical adventure like that of Percival and the other knights of the Grail, but instead of finding my own path, I had to follow somebody else’s. Instead of striking out on my own, I had conformed to a way of life and modes of thought that had often seemed alien. As a result, I found myself in a wasteland, an inauthentic existence, in which I struggled mightily but fruitlessly to do what I was told. Even after I left the convent, I continued to follow goals that were not right for me, “desiring this man’s gift and that man’s scope.” I had too clear a preconceived idea of what I was supposed to be, and was not open to new possibilities. So again I got lost in the wasteland. I had been repeatedly warned, for example, that I was not suited to the academic life, yet I had plowed stubbornly on. I longed to be like everybody else, with a warm family life and a successful career. But I was no more suited to university or school teaching than to the glitzy lifestyle of the television personality. No wonder each of these enterprises had ended in disaster. These were professions that brought fulfillment to other people, but they were not for me. Now circumstances had forced me to find my own track and enter the forest at a point that I myself had chosen, where there was no established path. I cannot pretend, however, that at the time I felt like an intrepid knight, striding heroically into the darkness. Instead, it seemed to me that I was being driven away from “the usual reign” against my will, and I kept turning back resentfully, casting envious glances at the receding world. I had no idea that I was about to “turn again” and experience what the Greeks call metanoia, or conversion. That was the last thing I wanted, and if anybody had told me that it was in the cards, I would probably have abandoned the God book immediately and started forthwith on that biography of Fanny Burney. It is only now, after more than a decade of study, that I can understand what happened. Hyam Maccoby had given me a clue when we sat together, six years earlier, eating egg-and-tomato sandwiches in the little café near Finchley Central tube station. He had told me that in most traditions, faith was not about belief but about practice. Religion is not about accepting twenty impossible propositions before breakfast, but about doing things that change you. It is a moral aesthetic, an ethical alchemy. If you behave in a certain way, you will be transformed.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  But this was easier said than done. I was still locked inside my own head, in rather the same way as Charlotte was imprisoned in her bed-sitting-room and Rebecca in her hospital bed. I couldn’t be like Jane, who seemed instinctively to know how to reach out and have a good time. She and Mark would often invite me to join them for a drive and lunch in the country, or she would descend upon me in the library and sweep me off to the pub. Jane knew how things worked and was at home in the world in a way I feared I would never be. And (I was becoming aware) she was obviously going to succeed professionally, and (it seemed increasingly clear) I was not. Jane and I had both sailed through the qualifying examinations for the doctoral program with distinction. But now our paths were dividing. Jane had won a junior research fellowship at St. Anne’s; I had been advised not to apply. My tutors told me repeatedly that I had no future in academia: I should think about traveling, perhaps. I could get a job in a liberal arts college in the United States, a place most of them regarded with ill-concealed disdain. Or I should seriously consider school teaching. That, Dorothy Bednarowska claimed, would be much more my métier. I could not agree. A school, with its bells, rules, and authority figures, was far too like the convent. I wanted to be a scholar. But somehow, it was made clear to me, my face did not fit. This was nothing to do with class, nor was anybody concerned about my mental instability. Nobody took my psychiatric troubles very seriously. Those who knew that I was seeing Dr. Piet simply thought that I was making rather heavy weather about leaving the convent, and would soon come to my senses. Besides, Oxford dons are not the most stable group of people in the world. No, their opposition to my academic career seemed more deeply rooted. “They were really determined to get rid of you,” Jane agreed, years after it had ceased to matter. “They wanted me and they didn’t want you.” But why? My work was considered good. Jane was obviously more “normal” than I, but when had Oxford ever been interested in the norm? There was something about me that my tutors and mentors felt instinctively to be wrong; their recoil was similar, perhaps, to the way a patient will reject a transplanted heart as alien, something that her body cannot assimilate. I doubt they could have put it into words, and now, with hindsight, I think they were right. I was not really suited to the life of a university teacher, nor to the type of scholarship that was currently in vogue at Oxford. I had different talents, but none of us could have known that in 1971, when in some ways I seemed a model student.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  When The First Christian was screened in January 1984, it was a minor success. People liked the raw quality of the film, which, many felt, had freshness and originality. In secular Britain, my criticism of organized religion was also popular, and though, as expected, I received a lot of hate mail, a significant number of people wrote to tell me that after seeing the series, they felt that they could go back to church. I did not understand this. Had I not shown conclusively that the very foundations of Christian doctrine had been undermined by modern biblical scholarship? Why did people feel that their beliefs had been renewed by this onslaught? Again, I recalled Hyam Maccoby’s insistence that intellectual assent was not the same as faith, and that theology was not very important for Jews. I still could not see how this would work in practice, yet it appeared that some of my Christian audience had come to a similar conclusion. John had predicted that The First Christian would make me a television star. It did not. I was not sufficiently photogenic, and though the series got good ratings, religion could only be of minority interest in England. Even my friends rarely bothered to tune in. “How can you be interested in this stuff?” they would ask in bewilderment. “Who cares about it?” But I was finding it increasingly interesting—though strictly as a detached observer. After my return to London, I made two interview series. The first was called Varieties of Religious Experience. I talked to ten people from very different religious backgrounds about their faith. Tongues of Fire focused on poetry. Six poets—Craig Raine, D. M. Thomas, Seamus Heaney, Czeslaw Milosz, Derek Walcott, and Peter Levi—read their favorite religious poems and discussed them with me. These series were not very successful. Interviewing is an extremely difficult and underestimated skill, and I did not have it. I was too full of my own ideas, and was therefore unable to draw out my interviewee and make the best of him or her. Often I arrogantly thought that I could give more interesting answers to the questions myself, which was absolutely the wrong attitude. It was fun to meet the interviewees and a privilege to meet the poets, but the knowledge that I acquired while preparing for the programs, mastering the rudiments of Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Sufism, and Kabbalah, remained superficial. Television is a transient medium. One week I would interview a rabbi, the next a Buddhist monk, and as soon as he had left the studio, I started to prepare for the following week’s faith healer. It was not like The First Christian, when I had lived with Saint Paul for nearly eighteen months and had learned to hear the emotional resonance of his ideas. My brief from John Ranelagh was to quiz my interviewees as though I were a news reporter, exposing the holes in their logic, and to interlard their reflections with sharp, incisive comments of my own.

• From Boys & Sex (2020)

  Before the start of this school year, Nate’s “dry spell” seemed to be ending. He was in a relationship with a girl that lasted a full two weeks, until other guys told him she was “quote-unquote ‘slutty’”—their word, he assured me, not his. Because although any hookup might be marginally better than no hookup, you only truly got points for hooking up with the right kind of girl. “There’s this whole thing that if you hook up with the girl that’s below your status it’s an L,” Nate explained. “A loss. Like a bad move.” So he stopped talking to the girl, which was unfortunate: he’d really liked her. Bored with watching Kyle trash the kitchen, Nate retreated to the couch, letting people swirl around him, occasionally taking what he hoped were artsy photos of the trees and lights outside the living room window. He was starting to relax, to enjoy himself. Gucci Mane, newly out of prison, was streaming on Spotify, boasting about sex and money. Lil mama wanna suck me and she ain’t never met me. . . . The kids at his school, who were mostly white and affluent, ate that shit up. Suddenly, Nicole, the party’s host and a senior, plopped onto Nate’s lap, handing him a shot of vodka. Nate was surprised: usually, if a girl wanted to hook up with you, she’d go through an intermediary, instructing her friends to ask you whether you were up for it. There were texts and Snapchats, and if you said yes, it was on—everyone would be anticipating it, and everyone would expect a postmortem the next day. Nate was impressed, if a little confused, by Nicole’s boldness. She was blond and slim, with amazing eyes and major breasts. Kyle, who was still splashing Sprite all over the kitchen floor, had been obsessed with Nicole. Hooking up with her would be a W—a win for Nate. A big one. And sure, he also thought Nicole was hot, though he never actually liked her very much and he’d never been especially interested in her before this moment. He glanced around the room subtly, wanting to make sure, without appearing to care, that everyone who mattered, everyone “relevant,” saw what was going down. A couple guys gave him little nods. One winked. Kyle came in from the kitchen and slapped him on the shoulder. Nate feigned nonchalance, like nothing out of the ordinary was happening. Meanwhile, he told me later, “I was just trying not to pop a boner, because that would be weird. But, you know, I’m pretty sure she felt it.” “Hey, Nicole,” Kyle said. “Do you want to show Nate your room?” “Okay,” Nicole agreed. Taking Nate’s hand, she led him along a hallway and down a flight of stairs, laughing, smiling at her friends. He stopped when they reached her door. “Are you sure you’re sober enough do this?” he asked.

• From Dante's Divine Comedy (2001)

  ©2001 The Teaching Company. 72 E. I n d e s c r i b i n g t h e o r i g i n s o f t h e quarrel, the canto singles out Buondelmonte—in effect the “founder” of Dante’s own White Guelf faction—as the one chiefly to blame for the precipitating incident. IV. I n C a n t o 1 7 , C a c c i a g u i d a c o n t i n u e s t h e d i s c o u r s e i n t o t h e f u t u r e a n d gives a remarkable, sustained account of Dante’s upcoming exile. A. D a n t e t e l l s C a c c i a g u i d a t h a t h e i s r e a d y f o r a f u l l e r a c c o u n t o f what earlier predictions have suggested will happen to him. Dante does not give in to fatalism—he knows his own moral responsibility. B. C a c c i a g u i d a t e l l s h i m o f e x i l e b y s p e c i f i c a l l y d e s c r i b i n g t h e hardships that it will entail (“the arrows in the bow your exile will shoot”). 1. D a n t e w i l l k n o w t h e s a l t y t a s t e o f o t h e r s ’ b r e a d . ( F l o r e n t i n e bread is made without salt.) 2. H e w i l l c l i m b s t a i r s t h a t a r e n o t h i s o w n . 3. M o s t o f a l l , h e w i l l b e i n t h e c o m p a n y o f r a s c a l s a n d k n a v e s . 4. H e w i l l s p e n d h i s e a r l y e x i l e t r y i n g t o g e t b a c k . C.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  And so there was. If a thesis is failed—not simply referred back to the student for correction, but failed outright, as mine had been—the examiner is expected to write a very detailed report, going through the text page by page, point by point, and drawing attention to errors and flaws. Professor Courtney, however—at least, this is what I was told—had written half a paragraph to the effect that I was a clever young woman, but that in his view the topic of my thesis was unsuitable for a doctorate. This reflected badly on the university, which had approved the subject, and the faculty was furious. Now, apparently, when it was too late, the Academic Board was also incensed that I had not had an internal examiner, and insulted by what they regarded as Courtney’s arrogant brevity. They wrote back, I was told, telling him that he had failed as an examiner on eleven points and that it would be a long time before he was invited to examine for Oxford again. But what were they going to do with me? For five months, the faculty discussed my fate. In any other university, I expect that the thesis could have been reexamined, but Oxford was a law unto itself. There had not been a case like this before (though a few dons darkly recalled something similar happening fifteen years earlier in the History Faculty), and many felt that reexamination would create a dangerous precedent. Any student could demand the right to get a better result. To my surprise, I found that I had powerful champions. Some of the most distinguished members of the board pleaded my cause and argued for me with passion, and this I found consoling: not everybody, apparently, thought I was a fool and a failure. Some remembered my very nice undergraduate degree and were outraged by what had happened. For months there was deadlock. I had very little hope of a favorable outcome, and knew that whatever happened, there would always be something questionable about me in academic circles. In any event, in July 1975, Dame Helen, the chairman of the board, settled the matter. An injustice had been done, she told the dean of graduate studies, who was staunchly on my side. She was very sorry for Miss Armstrong, but the sanctity of the Oxford doctorate could only be impaired by reexamination.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  This was one of the best private girls’ schools in London. It was academic, and still taught Latin and Greek as well as the sciences to a high level. I had been appointed an assistant mistress (I was amused by the archaic ambiguity of my title), but the following year I would become the new head of English and run my own department. At my interview, Pearl, who was currently in charge of English studies, told me that she hoped to retire soon and that I would be nicely placed to take over. “I’m beginning to find it all rather a grind,” she told me in her rather arch drawl. “I’ve been doing this job for over twenty years, you see.” “Twenty years!” I was aghast; I had been wondering how I was going to endure the next twenty minutes. “Well, you’ve got to spend twenty years somewhere” was her unruffled reply. True. But not here, I pleaded with the absent, nonexistent God during school prayers on that first morning. Because of my experience in higher education, I had been made a sixth-form tutor, so I was standing with my new charges in the gallery, looking down on the serried ranks of girls in the hall below, all clad in an unbecoming navy uniform. The headmistress walked onto the stage. “Lift up your hearts!” she murmured in a listless, lifeless tone, and I felt my own heart plummet to my boots. I just did not want to be there. Yet there really seemed no alternative. I had come a long way in the seven years since I had left the religious life, and in recent months I knew that I had made great strides. I no longer feared for my sanity; I had a new circle of friends; I was having fun. And for the first time in my life I had a home of my own. Because I now had a secure job and a stable income, I had become eligible for a mortgage and was now the possessor of a tiny one-bedroom flat in Highbury, near the stadium of the Arsenal Football Club; henceforth my Saturday afternoons were punctuated with great roars from the fans who crowded into the neighborhood for the weekly match. The flat was a symbolic step. I now had a place in the world—something which had once seemed psychologically impossible. But despite all this undoubted progress, the failure of my thesis and my consequent expulsion from academia had severely wounded my confidence. I had managed to recover my equilibrium, but I had very little belief in my talents. The idea of striking out into an entirely different field was beyond me, and I was too exhausted by the struggle and drama of the recent past even to contemplate such a venture.

• From The Erotic Engine (2011)

  Webcams were mixed with instant messaging or “chat” functions, so that viewers could type messages to the girl on the screen and then watch as she typed responses. (The porn industry was also a very early adopter of instant messaging behind the scenes. It wasn’t just for show—they also used chat to do business. One insider told me that a great number of people who work in adult still do business via ICQ, which was the first chat service not tied to a particular Internet service provider. Though the modern Internet boasts many such services, the porn industry sticks with the pioneering software for which they were the original business clientele. Many business cards handed out at porn trade shows include all the modern means of contact, but also include an ICQ address for those who have been in the business since the start of the boom.) Dennis is philosophical about what he gained and lost through his JenniCam experience, and the inexorable evolution from Jennifer Ringley’s relatively tame performance-art version of voyeurism to the Cam Whores and others who made the medium purely pornographic. “Sex sells,” he said, echoing dozens of other interview subjects. “Men and women both need it, but men are far more willing than women to accept a commodified version of it. Technology early adopters are almost exclusively men. So in a world where women are rare, men are common as weeds, and an interest in sex way exceeds the ability to actually get it, the interest in pornography should not be in any way surprising.” Like so many aspects of the relationship between pornography and technology, though, the cam phenomenon was not always about selling sex. Mo, the Middle Eastern man who learned so much about sex and sexuality from Usenet, says that one piece of technology he remembers acquiring specifically to improve his porn experience was a webcam. He bought his first in 1995. “I went through several webcams, upgraded from parallel port technology to serial port technology to USB,” he said. “By far, the leading usage was porn. I remember seeing at a couple of companies I worked at these great Silicon Graphics desktop computers with webcams on the top, but they were all gathering dust. Not a single person used them. Webcams weren’t yet ready for office use.” Mo’s webcam interests extended beyond sexual applications, but it would be more than a decade before any other use became at all viable. “I could find [webcam] communities online with people who wanted to take their clothes off if I did, and that was great. But what was frustrating was that until about 2007, there wasn’t a single friend of mine I could have a video conversation with.”

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  We can of course see why, faced with the Jesus-the-Marxist theory, many scholars and preachers have reacted in horror. It wasn’t just their possible right-wing sympathies, though those may have come into play as well. It was that the whole thrust of Jesus’s public career, insofar as we can reconstruct it from passage after passage in the gospels, seemed to be going in a very different direction. Whatever else he was, he wasn’t a violent revolutionary. We have already studied his commands to love and forgive and we have set them in their first-century political context. He warned at one point that, if God’s kingdom was breaking into the world, the men of violence were trying to muscle their way into the act (Matt. 11:12; Luke 16:16). He just wasn’t the sort of freedom fighter we have come to know rather well in the last hundred years or so. It won’t do, then, to suppose that what Jesus was doing was simply advancing a kind of human revolution, a proto-Marxist movement in which the poor would overthrow the rich. Jesus has plenty of harsh words for the rich—far more than for anyone else, in fact. But, just as, to the dismay of his own imprisoned cousin, he showed no sign of launching a movement to oust Herod Antipas and set his prisoners free, so he showed no sign either of joining one of the various already existing resistance movements or of starting his own. Those movements, clearly, were using the same language as he was, since they too spoke about God becoming king. But what Jesus meant by that, acted out in a hundred vivid demonstrations of God’s sovereign power, and explained in a hundred parables that told the ancient stories in a new way, was quite different from what the ordinary revolutionaries had in mind. Nor does that mean, of course—in the light of the first point we have just made—that Jesus was saying, “Forget revolution. Go to heaven instead.” It was about giving up the ordinary kind of revolution, in which violent change produces violent regimes, which are eventually toppled by further violent change, and discovering an entirely different way instead. “Don’t resist evil,” he said, and the words he used didn’t mean, “Lie down and let people walk all over you.” They meant, “Don’t join the normal ‘resistance’ movements.” The Marxist or quasi-Marxist option simply has too many elements of the story running against it. Clearly, Jesus was not apolitical—how could he be, talking about God becoming king in first-century Palestine?—but his “politics” don’t seem to fit the molds into which many have tried to squash him. Nor was Jesus simply advocating a clever, philosophically savvy way of living courageously within the present evil world, a way by which his followers might be able to attain some kind of detachment.

• From Another Country (1962)

  The taxi could not move and the driver began cursing. Cass lit a cigarette and handed it to Vivaldo. She lit another for herself. Then, abruptly, the taxi jerked forward. The driver turned on his radio and the car was filled suddenly with the sound of a guitar, a high, neighing voice, and a chorus, crying, “love me!” The other words were swallowed in the guttural moans of the singer, which were nearly as obscene as the driver’s curses had been, but these two words kept recurring. “My whole family thinks I’m a bum,” said Vivaldo. “I’d say they’ve given me up, except I know they’re scared to death of what I’ll do next.” She said nothing. He looked out of the cab window. They were crossing Columbus Circle. “Sometimes—like today,” he said, “I think they’re probably right and I’ve just been kidding myself. About everything.” The walls of the park now closed on either side of them and beyond these walls, through speed and barren trees, the walls of hotels and apartment buildings. “ My family thinks I married beneath me,” she said. “Beneath them .” And she smiled at him and crushed out her cigarette on the floor. “I don’t think I ever saw my father sober,” he said, “not in all these years. He used to say, ‘I want you to tell me the truth now, always tell me the truth.’ And then, if I told him the truth, he’d slap me up against the wall. So, naturally, I didn’t tell him the truth, I’d just tell him any old lie, I didn’t give a shit. The last time I went over to the house to see them I was wearing my red shirt, and he said, ‘What’s the matter, you turned queer?’ Jesus.” She lit another cigarette and she listened. There was a horseback rider on the bridle path, a pale girl with a haughty, bewildered face. Cass had time to think, unwillingly, as the rider vanished forever from sight, that it might have been herself, many years ago, in New England. “That neighborhood was terrific,” Vivaldo said, “you had to be tough, they’d kill you if you weren’t, people were dying around us all the time, for nothing. I wasn’t really much interested in hanging out with most of those kids, they bored me. But they scared me, too. I couldn’t stand watching my father. He’s such an awful coward. He spent all his time pretending—well, I don’t know what he was pretending, that everything was great, I guess—while his wife was going crazy in the hardware store we’ve got. And he knew that neither me nor my brother had any respect for him. And his daughter was turning into the biggest cock teaser going. She finally got married, I hate to think what her husband must have to promise her each time she lets him have a little bit.”

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  The long, hot summer of 1976 was my last at Bedford College. In the autumn I would begin a new career as a schoolteacher, a prospect that filled me with gloom. Thanks to the failure of my thesis, I had no luck in my applications for academic posts, but when I started applying to high schools, I got the very first job I put in for. It was a good position in a prestigious school in South London, and there was a strong possibility of my being promoted to head of department in a year or so. But I just did not want to do it. I felt shades of the prison house begin to close around me, and I was determined, during these few sultry months, to have fun. I was befriended by a group of mature students at Bedford who were about my own age, and they invited me to their parties, introduced me to their friends, and life took on the hectic, crazy quality of a delayed adolescence. And of course, there were men. I would not dignify these encounters with the term “love affairs,” but there was at least some good humor and affection. I have not spoken at all in these pages about my so-called love life, because it has been a dead end. My more serious relationships have usually been (to paraphrase Hobbes) nasty, brutish, and not as short as they should have been. Last summer I was having dinner with two gay friends in upstate New York. They quizzed me about my single state, perhaps expecting me to come out to them. But to their delight and to the utter astonishment of the young waiter, who was uncorking our bottle of wine, I explained that I was a “failed heterosexual.” I added that though I liked men very much, and had often been in love, men did not seem to see me as female. They either looked through me with an indifference that is almost comical or saw me as a dear old pal— “one of the boys.” Throughout our relationship, one of my former lovers, who was not English, persistently used the masculine form of the local endearment—as it were, caro instead of cara. Now that I am older, I no longer expect male attention, and as I explained that evening to my gay friends, the problem has been compounded by the fact that I have enjoyed some success and have money, which men of my generation sometimes find difficult. “Sounds good to me!” said our waiter.