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 Simply Jesus (2011)

  It came to nothing—or rather it came to even greater suffering. Simon the Star seems to have won some early victories and to have established an administration over at least part of the ancient Jewish homeland. He was in charge—for a while and over some territory. But the Romans closed in with massive force, compelling him and his followers to retreat, and then pursued them into caves and other hiding places. Archaeology has uncovered enough from those caves for us to realize how horrible the end must have been for Simon and many others. Later Jewish writings sometimes speak of Simon not as bar-Kochba, “son of the Star,” or by his proper name, bar-Kosiba, “son of Kosiba,” but by a different pun: bar-Koziba, “son of the lie.” He was, they believed, a false messiah. Indeed, many then drew the conclusion that it was false to expect a messiah at all. There were, in any case, no more Jewish uprisings. From then on, the Jews were content to live out their obedience to their God and his law in private and to let other people run the world if they so wished. Some Jewish teachers had been advocating this policy for quite a while. Now it was adopted without further question. The story of Simon the Star, coming three hundred years after Judah the Hammer, indicates a remarkable common pattern, even though the end results were so different. The story line is once more the same, echoing the Exodus, David and Solomon, and the return from Babylon: the wicked pagan king, suffering and persecution, the emergence of a hero, victories, the cleansing and restoration of the Temple, and the establishment of the new regime. In Judah’s case, all went according to plan. It was only gradually, in the years that followed, that people began to doubt whether this had been after all the long-awaited divine liberation. In Simon’s case, all went according to plan for three years; then, instead of the final victory and rebuilding, there occurred a disaster so great that for many generations it was spoken of, if at all, with a shudder. The great gale of Roman imperial power had quenched the high-pressure system of Jewish aspiration, leaving a disturbing question mark over the third element: what was Israel’s God up to? But the story in which Simon and his followers had lived was the same story. It was, they believed, the scriptural story, the story in which the scriptural promises would be fulfilled. It was the story that was in the heads and the hearts of those who first heard Jesus of Nazareth speaking about God finally becoming king. It was the story that they turned into song as he rode into Jerusalem. Before we can come back to Jesus himself, though, we need to look at two other kings. Both failed, though for quite different reasons. Herod the Great

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  Other factors too led to revolt. Rome had hinted at one point that the Judaeans might be allowed to rebuild the Temple, so when, instead, the city was turned into a pagan center, there would have been be a toxic mixture of disappointment and righteous indignation. Heavy taxation may have added fuel to the fire. There may also have been a perceived timetable. Jerusalem had been destroyed in AD 70; Jeremiah had spoken of seventy years of desolation, followed by restoration; perhaps after all God was intending to liberate his people in or around AD 140. It is noticeable that the previous great revolt, in AD 66, was nearly seventy years after the original establishment of Roman rule in Judaea. Rebels will often strike at the moment of regime change, when they perceive a potential power vacuum. But rebels who believe God has revealed his plan to them may choose to strike at the time when, according to that revelation, God has promised to act. Perhaps, they may have thought, the best way to make this happen, to get things ready for God to act, would be to launch a liberation movement a few years in advance. Some or all of these factors contributed to the readiness of people to risk all and sign on when a new leader emerged. The new leader, Simon bar-Kosiba (“Simon, Kosiba’s son”), was hailed as bar-Kochba, “son of the Star,” echoing an ancient prophecy: A star shall come out of Jacob, and a scepter shall rise out of Israel; it shall crush the borderlands of Moab, and the territory of all the Shethites. . . . One out of Jacob shall rule, and shall destroy the survivors of Ir. (Num. 24:17–19) It didn’t take much imagination to transfer those ancient victories over Moab, the Shethites, and “the survivors of Ir” to the world of the second century. Simon was the man to do it! Some said he performed miracles; others, later, that he proclaimed himself to be “a great heavenly light.” One tradition says that the greatest Jewish teacher of the time, Rabbi Akiba himself, declared that Simon was indeed the Messiah, Israel’s long-awaited king.

• From Another Country (1962)

  Richard’s novel was about to be published, and it promised to be very successful. Vivaldo, to his confusion and relief, had not found it very remarkable. But he had not had the courage to say this to Richard or to admit to himself that he would never have read the novel if Richard had not written it. All the street sounds eventually ceased—motors, and the silky sound of tires, footfalls, curses, pieces of songs, and loud and prolonged good nights; the last door in his building slammed, the last murmurs, rustling, and creaking ended. The night grew still around him and his apartment grew cold. He lit the oven. They swarmed, then, in the bottom of his mind, his cloud of witnesses, in an air as heavy as the oven heat, clustering, really, around the desired and unknown Ida. Perhaps it was she who caused them to be so silent. He stared into the streets and thought—bitterly, but also with a chilling, stunned sobriety—that, though he had been seeing them so long, perhaps he had never known them at all. The occurrence of an event is not the same thing as knowing what it is that one has lived through. Most people had not lived—nor could it, for that matter, be said that they had died—through any of their terrible events. They had simply been stunned by the hammer. They passed their lives thereafter in a kind of limbo of denied and unexamined pain. The great question that faced him this morning was whether or not he had ever, really, been present at his life. For if he had ever been present, then he was present still, and his world would open up before him. Now the girl who lived across the street, whose name, he knew, was Nancy, but who reminded him of Jane—which was certainly why he never spoke to her—came in from her round of the bars and the coffee houses with yet another boneless young man. They were everywhere, which explained how she met them, but why she brought them home with her was a somewhat more sinister question. Those who wore their hair long wore beards; those who wore theirs short felt free to dispense with this useful but somewhat uneasy emphasis. They read poetry or they wrote it, furiously, as though to prove that they had been cut out for more masculine pursuits. This morning’s specimen wore white trousers and a yachting cap, and a paranoiac little beard jutted out from the bottom half of his face. This beard was his most aggressive feature, his only suggestion of hardness or tension. The girl, on the other hand, was all angles, bone, muscle, jaw; even her breasts seemed stony. They walked down the street, hand in hand, but not together. They paused before her stoop and the girl staggered.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  And that was exactly how it went the first day. Nothing bad happened. All went well. I left the transformer in my desk overnight, and I tried it again the following morning, with big plans, but unfortunately this time, as soon as I flipped the switch, the fluorescent lights in the ceiling fluttered and went out. There was an even stronger smell of burning. Miss Dobzhansky sent for the custodian. Time flowed on without interruption. After school, I carried the ruined transformer home in my lunch box. It was totally wrecked. The red jeweled light was partially melted, and there were whitish heat marks around the lower edge of the unit. Just to be sure, I plugged it in in my room one last time after dinner and flipped the switch, but I got no response. The cat continued to lick between the pads of her paws. The traffic lights at the corner colored segments of the big double icicle outside my window red, then green, then orange. It was over. I had only been able to pause the universe twice, for a total of maybe six minutes.

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

  The faculty did not seem to consist of intellectual giants. My nerves were no worse than usual. I certainly didn’t feel that I was being unduly challenged—or stretched in any way at all. It was, indeed, pleasant. But wasn’t it already a little . . . predictable? Was it not a trifle . . . dull? I remember when I finally allowed this question to surface. It was toward the end of my first term and I was hurrying home to my flat in North London. The underground station at King’s Cross was packed with commuters and I tried to find a quiet place in my mind away from the crowds, the noise, and the bustle. Two free research days lay ahead. I could stay at home, finish the chapter that I was working on, and go to the British Library. Wonderful! Two whole days away from college! But then I stopped short: why was I so delighted? For the last couple of months I had been telling myself how lucky I was to have landed this job, but now, as I stood on the crowded platform, I asked myself: Is this it, then? Was this what I really wanted to do with the rest of my life? Of course, it was all very . . . pleasant. That was the word that continually came to mind when I tried to describe my new life. But it seemed wrong somehow. “Pleasant” sounded so insipid, so bland. They had been wrong at St. Anne’s, I thought. I can do this job, very easily indeed. Perhaps it was too easy? Had that entire struggle, all that striving led to something that was merely pleasant? Of course, I enjoyed it all. It was fun gossiping with Richard and Jackie. Moreover, I was hugely privileged to have a job that was pleasant, for heaven’s sake. And it wasn’t as though there was anything else that I wanted to do. There was no other profession for which I was remotely qualified. But somehow I had always thought that life should be more than merely pleasant. I tried to push the thought away. I am doing a useful job of work, I told myself firmly as I boarded the train and stood crammed against other bodies, swaying in unison with them through the dark subterranean tunnels. But was I? Only that afternoon, I had been giving a tutorial on the Romantic period to three students. They had been quiet, docile, and attentive, carefully noting down my every word—even the jokes—but had not seemed at all excited by Coleridge’s poetry. None of them had asked me anything, except how to spell a word or to repeat a date. But then, who was I to talk? I knew what it was like to feel tongue-tied in class, to have nothing to say. But these students had worried me. However empty and numb I may have felt, I had always been caught up intellectually in what I was studying.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  21:33–46) The crowds understood that one all right, without any further explanation. So did the chief priests and the Pharisees, who rightly saw that the story had been told against them. “Don’t Miss It” Jesus’s stories build to a crescendo, keeping pace with the wider narrative of his brief public career. The kingdom is coming, on earth as in heaven; but the people of the kingdom, “the children of the kingdom,” are missing out on it! Everything is coming right at last—and everything is going wrong at the same time. There is a dark twist in the way God’s plans are working out, in the way that Israel’s destiny is being fulfilled. All suggestions that Jesus was simply a “great religious teacher” telling his contemporaries about a new pattern of spirituality or even a new scheme of salvation must be set aside (unless, of course, we are to rewrite the gospels wholesale, which is what many have done in their efforts to domesticate Jesus and his message). Jesus’s parables, never mind for the moment anything else about him, tell us in their form alone, but also in their repeated and increasingly direct content, that the purposes of heaven are indeed coming true on earth, but that the people who in theory have been longing for that to happen are turning their backs on it now that it is actually knocking on their door: Jesus spoke to them once again in parables. “The kingdom of heaven,” he said, “is like a king who made a wedding feast for his son. He sent his slaves to call the invited guests to the wedding, and they didn’t want to come. “Again he sent other slaves, with these instructions: ‘Say to the guests, Look! I’ve got my dinner ready; my bulls and fatted calves have been killed; everything is prepared. Come to the wedding!’ “But they didn’t take any notice. They went off, one to his own farm, another to see to his business. The others laid hands on his slaves, abused them, and killed them. (The king was angry, and sent his soldiers to destroy those murderers and burn down their city.) Then he said to his slaves, ‘The wedding is ready, but the guests didn’t deserve it. So go to the roads leading out of town, and invite everyone you find to the wedding.’ The slaves went off into the streets and rounded up everyone they found, bad and good alike. And the wedding was filled with partygoers. “But when the king came in to look at the guests, he saw there a man who wasn’t wearing a wedding suit. “‘My friend,’ he said to him, ‘how did you get in here without a wedding suit?’

• From The Fermata (1994)

  As I fed magazines through the gap in the door, Adele would leaf through them, at first attentively, then less so. She wouldn’t react as I had hoped. “I don’t know,” she would say several times with different intonations. I would push a few more through to her. Finally she would say, “No. I don’t go for this. The skin has an unreal look. All the women look the same. Why do men need so many identical pictures in one month?” She would finish flipping through the last magazine. “No. I just don’t think I can take any of these to the bath with me; I don’t think I can take seeing any more pictures of women’s vaginas. I’ve never seen so many vaginas in my life. Here.” She would slip the magazines back through the gap in the door to me. I would pile them up neatly as they reappeared, two by two. I would try to recoup through explanation. I would tell her that bringing out all your magazines and arranging them on the bed was sort of like getting an erection. First your periodical pornography is folded away in darkness in a drawer or a bag or a box, stored in its most compact form, and then you bring it out, you flap it around in the light, you increase its two-dimensional surface area. I would grant her that there was a feeling of sameness at times, that sometimes I got surfeited, that my interest went through phases. (Which would be a true statement: I rarely used porn when I had Fold-powers, since all the world was a dirty magazine then.) But in general, I would say, men unfortunately do want the same thing over and over—a different woman identically posed is the only difference they need. I would tell her that each tiny variation between two women’s bodies constituted a huge difference from a sexual point of view. The same body wearing different clothes or with different-colored hair didn’t read as sexually different; it had to be a different body. I would tell her this not as if I were pleased about it, but as if it were simply the way it was. For some women like when men tell the truth about themselves.

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

  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. But whatever the reason, my sudden fall from grace was a great blow. The possibility of a life in scholarship had been the one hopeful thing in my life. Now, yet again, it seemed that I was to be prized away from a familiar world. Jacob slept peacefully, turned on his side away from me. I took out my book and started to read by the small circle of pale light that came from Jenifer’s bedside lamp. I was on the late shift, sitting with Jacob until his mother, who was at a college dinner, returned home. Lying on Jenifer’s bed in the long attic room, I felt peacefully away from things. An owl hooted outside and I looked anxiously at Jacob, who was a light sleeper and, once woken, was likely to remain restless all night.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  Jesus’s stories build to a crescendo, keeping pace with the wider narrative of his brief public career. The kingdom is coming, on earth as in heaven; but the people of the kingdom, “the children of the kingdom,” are missing out on it! Everything is coming right at last—and everything is going wrong at the same time. There is a dark twist in the way God’s plans are working out, in the way that Israel’s destiny is being fulfilled. All suggestions that Jesus was simply a “great religious teacher” telling his contemporaries about a new pattern of spirituality or even a new scheme of salvation must be set aside (unless, of course, we are to rewrite the gospels wholesale, which is what many have done in their efforts to domesticate Jesus and his message). Jesus’s parables, never mind for the moment anything else about him, tell us in their form alone, but also in their repeated and increasingly direct content, that the purposes of heaven are indeed coming true on earth, but that the people who in theory have been longing for that to happen are turning their backs on it now that it is actually knocking on their door: Jesus spoke to them once again in parables. “The kingdom of heaven,” he said, “is like a king who made a wedding feast for his son. He sent his slaves to call the invited guests to the wedding, and they didn’t want to come. “Again he sent other slaves, with these instructions: ‘Say to the guests, Look! I’ve got my dinner ready; my bulls and fatted calves have been killed; everything is prepared. Come to the wedding!’ “But they didn’t take any notice. They went off, one to his own farm, another to see to his business. The others laid hands on his slaves, abused them, and killed them. (The king was angry, and sent his soldiers to destroy those murderers and burn down their city.) Then he said to his slaves, ‘The wedding is ready, but the guests didn’t deserve it. So go to the roads leading out of town, and invite everyone you find to the wedding.’ The slaves went off into the streets and rounded up everyone they found, bad and good alike. And the wedding was filled with partygoers. “But when the king came in to look at the guests, he saw there a man who wasn’t wearing a wedding suit. “‘My friend,’ he said to him, ‘how did you get in here without a wedding suit?’ And he was speechless. Then the king said to the servants, ‘Tie him up, hands and feet, and throw him into the darkness outside, where people weep and grind their teeth.’ “Many are called, you see, but few are chosen.” (Matt. 22:1–14)

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  So why did people think that Jesus might be any different? It wasn’t as though they hadn’t had disappointments before. The long story of Israel had had its high points, but if you add up everything that had happened over the previous thousand years, the sequence of disappointments is so long, so repetitive, and so dispiriting that you might forgive them for giving up hope altogether. Some did. Most didn’t. And the reasons why they didn’t give up hope tell us a great deal about what they thought would happen if and when their God finally took charge. At this point we must take off the spectacles through which we normally see the world, not least the modern Western world, and put on a different set. If we are to understand Jesus, we have to learn to see the world as his contemporaries saw it. We have already begun to do this in the opening chapters. Now, tricky though this is for a historian (because our sources are thin and patchy), we must take this process a step farther. What Went Wrong? To put it very simply, the Jews of Jesus’s day believed that their God had made the world and that he had remained in charge of it. They didn’t understand, any more than we do, why a world made by a good God would somehow go wrong, but clearly that had happened. The signs were all there: broken bodies, broken lives, broken systems, broken countries. The whole thing needed fixing, needed mending, needed to be put right. And the Jewish people believed that they, the family of Abraham, were part of the answer, part of the mending operation, part of the putting-right plan.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  Too much: other people had, and still have, remarkable gifts of healing. That’s always been a feature on the edge of religious movements, and sometimes in the center of them. But it doesn’t mean that the person doing the healing is “God,” just like that. Were that to be the case, there would be quite a lot of gods. Equally, too little: those who have seen Jesus’s powerful acts as “proofs of divinity” have often just stopped there, as though that was the main thing one was supposed to conclude from a reading of the gospels. They have then allowed the “right” answer to the question about “divinity” to shut down the question the gospels are urgently pressing upon us—is God becoming king? A considerable amount of “apologetics” to this day, in fact, has consisted of arguing for the “right answers” to two questions. First, asks the apologist, did Jesus do these things? Yes! Second, what does it prove? That he was God! QED! And off goes the apologist in triumph, a day’s work done. And Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John would call the apologist back. Sorry, but you’ve just scored a home run when you should have scored an end run. You’re playing the wrong game. The gospels are not about “how Jesus turned out to be God.” They are about how God became king on earth as in heaven. The good is the enemy of the best. From one point of view it’s good to see the intimate connection, throughout the gospels, of Jesus with Israel’s God. If you’re trying to score a point against a Deist opponent who sniffily suggests that Jesus couldn’t possibly have been “divine,” because no sane human being could imagine that he was God incarnate, you may end up winning that game. But you may then lose the real one. Plenty of Christians, alas, have imagined that a “divine Jesus” had come to earth simply to reveal his divinity and save people away from earth for a distant “heaven.” (Some have even imagined, absurdly, that the point of “proving that Jesus really did all those things” is to show that the Bible is true—as though Jesus came to witness to the Bible rather than the other way around.) It has been all too possible to use the doctrine of the incarnation or even the doctrine of the inspiration of scripture as a way of protecting oneself and one’s worldview and political agenda against having to face the far greater challenge of God taking charge, of God becoming king, on earth as in heaven.

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

  There is going to be a row.” 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. So that was that. To this day, some of my friends—even those who did not know me at the time—insist that I could still have reversed this decision. I cannot imagine what they think I could have done. Chained myself to the railings outside the Examination Schools? Picketed the Dame’s house? Prostrated myself in front of the Sheldonian Theatre and stopped the traffic? Gone on hunger strike? It was quite clear to me and my supporters that the game was up.

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

  And yet in other ways the convent was simply not the same. The old hushed silence had gone. Nuns stood in groups, chatting and laughing—sometimes quite loudly. They wore short utilitarian skirts and flighty little veils. Doors closed noisily, and the younger nuns often swung their arms as they walked with defiant casual-ness. Even in church there was a new restlessness. In the old habit you had to kneel perfectly still or the veil fell over your shoulders like a tent and your legs tangled and twisted the voluminous skirts. I had no romantic regrets about the old habit. It was hot, inconvenient, and unhygienic. But the modern dress gave the nuns greater freedom of movement, and I noticed that some of them fidgeted in their pews, as though the imposed stillness had become more of a strain. Or—and this was an arresting thought—perhaps I had not been the only one who had had difficulties with prayer. The next morning, I knelt with a few other seculars in the chapel for Mass, which was now said facing the people, in accordance with the directives of the Vatican Council. When the nuns processed up the aisle to receive Communion, I glanced at Rebecca and felt the shock as acutely as though I were seeing her emaciated frame for the first time. The whole decorous structure of the convent suddenly seemed a sham. The nuns who gathered together around the altar seemed an image of prayerful community, and yet they were allowing one of their number to waste away before their very eyes. They might have comfortable chairs in the community room and take more frequent baths, but the old attitudes were still in place. How could women who had spent thirty or forty years in the religious life and been even more indelibly shaped by the old system than I change overnight? No, I told myself as I watched them file back to their seats, their eyes cast down and their gaze directed inward, it was no good looking back with nostalgia. When the world outside seemed baffling, I sometimes felt homesick for a way of life that, with all its shortcomings, was at least familiar, just as I had instinctively relaxed when I had walked into the convent yesterday. I could only move forward, however difficult that might seem.

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

  We had often eyed each other knowingly, wryly acknowledging that we were both struggling, so it was good to be spending more time together. Charlotte wanted to be a novelist—“She can really write,” Dorothy Bednarowska had told me, and she had already introduced Charlotte to a literary agent. But Charlotte found the academic study of literature difficult. Her work was brilliant and original, but, she told me, “Studying literature so critically and technically is bad for my writing.” Fearing that it would cramp her own style, she refused to study the novel at all. As was customary at Oxford, we had to read our essays aloud to our tutor during the weekly tutorial, and Charlotte was obviously perplexed, even repelled, by mine. “I don’t know how you churn out all this stuff,” she had said to me once. “It’s beautiful in a way. Your essays are like Gothic cathedrals, with all the right scholars and theories slotted together and built into a massive structure of conformity.” I wasn’t sure that I liked the sound of that. I enjoyed reading the literary criticism that Charlotte hated. I found it fun to weigh one scholar against another and make a pattern of my own out of other people’s thoughts. But I was uneasily aware that not much of myself was going into my work and that what I was presenting, week after week, was other people’s ideas rather than my own. But that would not be allowed this term. Our new tutor was a rather affected but reputedly very clever young don at one of the more modern colleges. We sat in his bright, book-lined room overlooking the forecourt, watching some students teasing the goldfish in the moat. Dr. Brentwood Smyth sprawled elegantly in a large leather armchair, leaping up occasionally to consult a text. “You got a Violet Vaughan Morgan Prize, didn’t you?” he asked me. “Impressive. You must be very good at exams.” I could tell that he did not think much of this accomplishment. He seemed more interested in Charlotte, whose original, thoughtful response to his questions clearly intrigued him. “Oh, don’t let’s have a fixed time!” he cried impatiently when I asked him when we should come for tutorials. “That’s the trouble with the women’s colleges! They’re organized like high schools. Just ring me up when your essay is done.” “What should we write about?” I asked him. “Oh, anything you like! I’m not going to set you one of those dreary exam questions. I’m sure you get quite enough of those at St. Anne’s. No. Just write me something on one poem. Take ‘Frost at Midnight.’ Coleridge. Don’t read any literary criticism. Just live with the poem for a week and then tell me what it means to you. Not to anybody else.

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

  I remember when I finally allowed this question to surface. It was toward the end of my first term and I was hurrying home to my flat in North London. The underground station at King’s Cross was packed with commuters and I tried to find a quiet place in my mind away from the crowds, the noise, and the bustle. Two free research days lay ahead. I could stay at home, finish the chapter that I was working on, and go to the British Library. Wonderful! Two whole days away from college! But then I stopped short: why was I so delighted? For the last couple of months I had been telling myself how lucky I was to have landed this job, but now, as I stood on the crowded platform, I asked myself: Is this it, then? Was this what I really wanted to do with the rest of my life? Of course, it was all very . . . pleasant. That was the word that continually came to mind when I tried to describe my new life. But it seemed wrong somehow. “Pleasant” sounded so insipid, so bland. They had been wrong at St. Anne’s, I thought. I can do this job, very easily indeed. Perhaps it was too easy? Had that entire struggle, all that striving led to something that was merely pleasant? Of course, I enjoyed it all. It was fun gossiping with Richard and Jackie. Moreover, I was hugely privileged to have a job that was pleasant, for heaven’s sake. And it wasn’t as though there was anything else that I wanted to do. There was no other profession for which I was remotely qualified. But somehow I had always thought that life should be more than merely pleasant. I tried to push the thought away. I am doing a useful job of work, I told myself firmly as I boarded the train and stood crammed against other bodies, swaying in unison with them through the dark subterranean tunnels. But was I? Only that afternoon, I had been giving a tutorial on the Romantic period to three students. They had been quiet, docile, and attentive, carefully noting down my every word—even the jokes—but had not seemed at all excited by Coleridge’s poetry. None of them had asked me anything, except how to spell a word or to repeat a date. But then, who was I to talk? I knew what it was like to feel tongue-tied in class, to have nothing to say. But these students had worried me. However empty and numb I may have felt, I had always been caught up intellectually in what I was studying. I always wanted to find out more, to see things clearly. And once an idea had been suggested to me, I got real pleasure from it—even if I could rarely come up with ideas of my own. But these three might as well have been studying quantum mechanics.

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

  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. I needed a rest. I was in a convalescent state, and was simply not fit enough for anything more ambitious. I had been fortunate to get this job, I repeated to myself over and over again, and I must just settle for what I had. Not hope to turn again. Find strength in what remains behind.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  On the other hand, even six timeless minutes was pretty good. I adjusted remarkably quickly to the idea that I had seen as much of Miss Dobzhansky as I was probably ever going to see. My next task, to which I devoted the ensuing spring and summer months, was to develop an alternate, non-electrical way into the Fold. I explored a number of experimental possibilities, courting the unnatural. I sprayed some new mock-orange leaves with green spray paint to see whether they would become permanent fakes, since I had always found the notion of bronzed baby shoes mysterious and suggestive. I grafted a very fast-growing thistle to our magnolia tree, wrapping the conjoined wounds with heavy-duty thread, theorizing that the mingling of incompatible growth hormones might have chronoactive effects. I heated six marbles on a baking sheet in a slow oven and then spooned them one by one into a glass of ice water which I held quite close to my eye. Into the glass I had first placed a fossil crinoid and a snip of my fingernail. (Now that I think of it, the sound of my ex-girlfriend Rhody using a fingernail trimmer in the morning in the bathroom, the extremely brief and high-pitched chirping sound of the smiling snipper blades meeting after they had snapped through her nail, which I listened to in bed as some listen to real birdsong, is one of the most satisfying memories that I possess of that relationship.) I fully expected time to stop at the moment the interior of each hissing marble suddenly crazed itself with decorative cracks, but it didn’t. I used the butane torch my father had bought for a refinishing project to heat a notched stainless-steel serving spoon until it turned a deep orange. Though it looked soft and slightly swollen, its edges rounded like the edges of a stick of butter, I could not get the spoon to melt. Then I put a small oval pebble in the same spoon and played the torch flame over it, hoping for some lava. The pebble exploded with a snap, sending a stinging fragment of rock into my T-shirt. All of these experiments, and many others I performed during that period, were inconclusive and, frankly, disappointing. It wasn’t until the summer after fifth grade that I was once again able to Drop in, with the help of our basement washing machine and some thread.

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

  “And it does,” I concluded. If I had found it impossible to beat the conditioning, why should the nuns find it any easier to adapt? Rebecca and I looked at each other bleakly. There was no need to spell out the implications for us. That, I thought, was the best thing about talking to Rebecca. She knew what it was like, and nobody else really had a clue. “What are you going to do?” I asked. “Oh, my father has got me a job with The Tablet. Nothing much; nothing too onerous. But it will be interesting, I think.” “Is that a good idea?” I asked, startled. I didn’t want to be discouraging, but The Tablet seemed far too depressingly familiar. It is the chief intellectual Catholic journal in Britain. It was, no doubt, a very worthy and, in its own way, even an excellent paper, but frankly I had no desire ever to set eyes on it again, let alone help to produce it. “Isn’t it a little . . . er . . . Catholic?” Rebecca smiled. “Very Catholic indeed. Yes, I know what you mean. But I’m not sure that I could cope with anything more challenging. Not yet, at any rate. No, it will be nice. There’s a tiny office—just three or four of us. It will be quite a little community, in a way. Quite comforting, in fact.” I could see it all: a small enclosed world that viewed everything entirely from the church’s perspective, and whose radius of interest rarely extended beyond Catholic preoccupations. At an instinctive level, I could understand exactly why Rebecca wanted to work for The Tablet, even though I felt it to be a mistake. But it was then that I recalled my conversation with Charlotte. Was I really any better? So we’re leaving,” Jane told me grimly as we left the English Faculty Library and headed for her flat. “It’s definite. Keswick, here we come!” Jane and Mark had married the previous summer, and Mark, who was currently a lecturer in a teachers’ training college in London, had just accepted a promotion in a similar college in the Lake District. And as a good wife, Jane, of course, was going with him. “How do you feel about it?” I asked cautiously. This could mean the end of Jane’s career, or at least of a certain kind of career. Unlike me, Jane had been pegged for stardom. The powers that be wanted to keep her in Oxford. “Not great.” Jane grimaced, until her ebulliently positive nature asserted itself. “But hey—it’s beautiful up there. We’ve rented a lovely old eighteenth-century manor house—it’s even in Pevsner. It’s a mess at the moment. We’ll have to paint it from top to bottom. But when that’s over and Markie has started in college, it will be just the sheep and me. No distractions. It will force me to finish the damn thesis.”

• From The Fermata (1994)

  I didn’t feel lust for her, really. In fact, that word, lust, is too abstract and intransitive and preacherly to apply even now to my feelings for Miss Dobzhansky or any other woman. I never “lust for” or “after” a woman. I want to do specific things: have dinner with, make smile, hold hips of. I didn’t even, in the beginning, imagine that I wanted to see Miss Dobzhansky in a state of undress. What first made me want to stop time was that after Christmas break she changed the original seating arrangement of the class. I had been in front and now I was all the way in the back. A kid who wrote words backward sat at my old desk. I understood her reasons, but still I was a little hurt. And I noticed then that I couldn’t see the chalkboard as well as I had. It was not a question of my being unable to read the words or decipher the figures. It was merely that I could no longer tell at a glance, as I had been able to in my former seat, whether Miss Dobzhansky was using a piece of newly broken chalk with a sharp edge that sometimes briefly left a faint second parallel line, or whether she was holding a more rounded piece that she had used before. I wanted to know exactly what was going on on the surface of the chalkboard—I felt I was missing out on the physical reality of her writing, as opposed to what it meant. When I was in front, I had been able to monitor the chalky ghost of a word she had several times erased; now that was almost always impossible. Two other kids had already gotten glasses, and I knew that glasses would help me a little, but what I really wanted to do was to stop the whole class, the whole school, the whole school district, for a few minutes whenever I needed to walk up to the board and inspect its surface at very close range. My big Christmas present that year was a figure-eight race-track and one blue and one brown race car that drove around it and occasionally flipped off. I played with it for a week or two. The problem with it was that there weren’t enough segments of track to make an asymmetrical race-course, and I strongly preferred asymmetry in race-courses. Soon the track got dusty and the cars began to halt suddenly when their bushings lost contact. I pushed it under my bed and thought instead about meat thermometers and toads who can hibernate for years in dried desert mud.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  But when she thought it over an hour later, she was not perfectly satisfied. The orgasm itself, though it had unquestionably had a beginning, a middle, and an end, had lacked, despite its intensity, the lush greenery and winding roads and hot, fruit-filled bazaars that her hour of ridem mowing had led her to expect almost as her right. Perhaps she needed to do something to pep up her masturbational technique; perhaps her clitoris was simply tired of her own fingers after all these years. The vibration of the mower had felt so unexpectedly good. A year earlier, David’s car had developed a problem with wheel alignment, so that the steering wheel started wobbling dramatically at about sixty-three miles an hour, and she now remembered that before he had gotten it fixed she had been obliged once or twice to pull over to the shoulder and get her orgasm out of the way so that she wouldn’t be a hazard to others on the road. She simply needed more vibration, faster vibration, in her life—it was that simple. The idea of sexual devices had seemed faintly ludicrous in previous years, and when it stopped seeming ludicrous it began seeming too trendy—she couldn’t escape the suspicion that the majority of vibrators were still given as joke gifts at office good-bye parties. But why shouldn’t she at least try a toy of some kind? She had gotten rid of David, she was beginning her life afresh. She went back to her Cosmo, avoiding Patrick Swayze (who looked a little the worse for wear anyway), and found in the back pages an ad for a company in San Francisco, “women owned and operated.” They rushed her a catalog, sensing her breathlessness, and a week and a half later the good old UPS man was asking her to sign on line 34 for a large white box that Marian expected to contain four hand-held devices and a container of Astroglide. The UPS man, she noticed with relief, was, though handsome, not perfect—with a slight double chin and a pleasant asymmetrical smile and a hint of David’s incipiently stocky shape.