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 St. Augustine's Confessions (2004)

  Questions to Consider: 1. What is the significance of Augustine’s move from Carthage to Italy, both literally and metaphorically? 2. How does Augustine’s disappointment with Faustus’s response to his questions further his quest for wisdom? 3. How good a speaker is Ambrose, and what does Augustine learn about rhetoric from listening to Ambrose’s sermons? ©2004 The Teaching Company. 35 Lecture Twelve Book VI—A New Look at Christianity Scope: As Augustine continues to bemoan people’s inability to find those things that last forever, he also takes a fresh look at the Bible and Christianity. While doing this, he considers the idea of faith, something he had previously regarded as an insufficient basis for accepting anything. He wanted the certitude he found in mathematics as the basis for anything he would commit himself to. However, he realized that everyone has faith in something because no one has sufficient knowledge. It is not a question of “Do you have faith?” but of “What do you put your faith in?” As he is moving toward Christianity, Augustine “interrupts” the narrative to tell the readers about a new friend, Alypius, and how he had gone astray with a love of gladiatorial violence while in Rome. This seeming digression is vitally important, because Alypius will convert to Christianity just minutes after Augustine, and they will be baptized together. Again, Augustine asks readers to consider the nature and value of friendship. Outline I. Augustine’s movement toward Christianity in Book VI is intertwined with three important people in his life: Monica, his mother; Ambrose, bishop of Milan; and a friend named Alypius. II. In this book, Augustine takes a fresh look at Christianity by reading the Bible in a new way and by examining carefully, for the first time, the rationality of believing on faith. III. At the beginning of the book, Monica is more confident about the conversion of Augustine than Augustine himself is. A. Augustine is, thus, able to narrate his own doubts, yet give readers clues to the ultimate outcome of the story he is telling. B. He also tells us some interesting details of his mother’s life, preparing us for the longer account that he will give us in Book IX. ©2004 The Teaching Company. 36

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  the oil that had risen to the surface until the paint, which was the color of buttercups, had turned creamy. I dipped in a fat brush and spread the paint along the old clapboard siding in long, smooth strokes. It went on bright and glossy and looked even better than I had hoped. I started on the far side of the porch, around the door that went into the kitchen. In a few hours, I had covered everything that could be reached from the porch. Parts of the front were still unpainted, and so were the sides, but I had used less than a quarter of the paint. If everyone else helped, we could paint all the areas I couldn’t reach, and in no time we would have a cheerful yellow house. But neither Mom nor Dad nor Brian nor Lori nor Maureen was impressed. “So part of the front of the house is yellow now,” Lori said. “That’s really going to turn things around for us.” I was going to have to finish the job myself. I tried to make a ladder from bits of scrap wood, but it kept collapsing whenever I put my weight on it. I was still trying to build a sturdy ladder when, during a cold snap a few days later, my can of paint froze solid. When it got warm enough for the paint to thaw, I opened the can. During the freeze, the chemicals had separated and the once-smooth liquid was as lumpy and runny as curdled milk. I stirred it as hard as I could and kept stirring even after I knew the paint was ruined, because I also knew that we’d never get more, and instead of a freshly painted yellow house, or even a dingy gray one, we now had a weird-looking half-finished patch job—one that announced to the world that the people inside the house wanted to fix it up but lacked the gumption to get the work done.

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  The Tug, Dad said, had the highest level of fecal bacteria of any river in North America. “What’s fecal?” I asked. Dad watched the river. “Shit,” he said. Dad led us along the main road through town. It was narrow, with old brick buildings crowding in close on both sides. The stores, the signs, the sidewalks, the cars were all covered with a film of black coal dust, giving the town an almost monochromatic look, like an old hand-tinted photograph. Welch was shabby and worn out, but you could tell it had once been a place on its way up. On a hill stood a grand limestone courthouse with a big clock tower. Across from it was a handsome bank with arched windows and a wrought-iron door. You could also tell that the people of Welch were still trying to maintain some pride of place. A sign near the town’s only stoplight announced that Welch was the county seat of McDowell County and that for years, more coal had been mined in McDowell County than any comparable spot in the world. Next to it, another sign boasted that Welch had the largest outdoor municipal parking lot in North America. But the cheerful advertisements painted on the sides of buildings like the Tic Toc diner and the Pocahontas movie theater were faded and nearly illegible. Dad said bad times had come in the fifties. They hit hard and stayed. President John F. Kennedy had come to Welch not long after he was elected and personally handed out the nation’s first food stamps here on McDowell Street, to prove his point that—though ordinary Americans might find it hard to believe—starvation-level poverty existed right in their own country. The road through Welch, Dad told us, led only farther up into the wet, forbidding mountains and on to other dying coal towns. Few strangers passed through Welch these days, and almost all who did came to inflict one form of misery or another—to lay off workers, to shut down a mine, to foreclose on someone’s house, to compete for the rare job opening. The townspeople didn’t care much for outsiders. The streets were mostly silent and deserted that morning, but every now and then we’d pass a woman wearing curlers or a group of men in T-shirts with motor-oil decals, loitering in a doorway. I tried to catch their eyes, to give them a nod and a smile to let them know we had only good intentions, but they never nodded or spoke a word or even glanced our way. As soon as we passed, however, I could feel eyes following us up the street. Dad had brought Mom to Welch for a brief visit fifteen years earlier, right after they were married. “Gosh, things have gone downhill a little bit since we were here last,” she said. Dad gave a short snort of a laugh. He looked at her like he was about to say What the hell did I tell you?

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  DAD STAYED IN THE hospital for six weeks. By then he’d not only beaten back the TB, he’d been sober longer than any time since the Phoenix detox. He knew that if he went back to the streets, he’d start drinking again. One of the hospital administrators got him a job as a maintenance man at an upstate resort, room and board included. He tried to talk Mom into going with him, but she flatly refused. “Upstate’s the sticks,” she said. So Dad went alone. He called me from time to time, and it sounded like he’d put together a life that worked for him. He had a one-room apartment over a garage, enjoyed doing the repairs and upkeep on the old lodge, loved being back within walking distance of untamed country, and was staying sober. Dad worked at the resort through the summer and into the fall. As it began to turn cold again, Mom called him and mentioned how much easier it was for two people to stay warm during the winter, and how much Tinkle the dog missed him. In November, after the first hard frost, I got a call from Brian, who said that Mom had succeeded in persuading Dad to quit his job and return to the city. “Do you think he’ll stay sober?” I asked. “He’s already back on the booze,” Brian said. A few weeks after Dad got back, I saw him at Lori’s. He was sitting on the sofa with an arm around Mom and a pint bottle in his hand. He laughed. “This crazy-ass mother of yours, can’t live with her, can’t live without her. And damned if she doesn’t feel the same about me.” • • • All of us kids had our own lives by then. I was in college, Lori had become an illustrator at a comic-book company, Maureen lived with Lori and went to high school, and Brian, who had wanted to be a cop ever since he’d had to call a policeman to our house in Phoenix to break up a fight between Mom and Dad, had become a warehouse foreman and was serving on the auxiliary force until he was old enough to take the police department’s entrance exam. Mom suggested we all celebrate Christmas at Lori’s apartment. I bought Mom an antique silver cross, but finding a

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  Uncle Jim’s land. We have to keep it in the family.” “You mean you own land worth a million dollars?” I was thunderstruck. All those years in Welch with no food, no coal, no plumbing, and Mom had been sitting on land worth a million dollars? Had all those years, as well as Mom and Dad’s time on the street—not to mention their current life in an abandoned tenement—been a caprice inflicted on us by Mom? Could she have solved our financial problems by selling this land she never even saw? But she avoided my questions, and it became clear that to Mom, holding on to land was not so much an investment strategy as it was an article of faith, a revealed truth as deeply felt and incontestable to her as Catholicism. And for the life of me, I could not get her to tell me how much the land was worth. “I told you I don’t know,” she said. “Then tell me how many acres it is, and where exactly it is, and I’ll find out how much an acre of land is going for in that area.” I wasn’t interested in her money; I just wanted to know—needed to know—the answer to my question: How much was that freaking land worth? Maybe she truly didn’t know. Maybe she was afraid to find out. Maybe she was afraid of what we’d all think if we knew. But instead of answering me, she kept repeating that it was important to keep Uncle Jim’s land—land that had belonged to her father and his father and his father before that—in the family. “Mom, I can’t ask Eric for a million dollars.” “Jeannette, I haven’t asked you for a lot of favors, but I’m asking you for one now. I wouldn’t if it wasn’t important. But this is important.” I told Mom I didn’t think Eric would lend me a million dollars to buy some land in Texas, and even if he would, I wouldn’t borrow it from him. “It’s too much money,” I said. “What would I do with the land?” “Keep it in the family.” “I can’t believe you’re asking me this,” I said. “I’ve never even seen that land.” “Jeannette,” Mom said when she had accepted the fact that she would not get her way, “I’m deeply disappointed in you.”

• From Delta of Venus (1977)

  A writer, who was a celebrity in Paris, had entered her shop one day. He was not looking for a hat. He asked if she sold luminous flowers that he had heard about, flowers which shone in the dark. He wanted them, he said, for a woman who shone in the dark. He could swear that when he took her to the theatre and she sat back in the dark loges in her evening dress, her skin was as luminous as the finest of sea shells, with a pale pink glow to it. And he wanted these flowers for her to wear in her hair. Mathilde did not have them. But as soon as the man left she went to look at herself in the mirror. This was the kind of feeling she wanted to inspire. Could she? Her glow was not of that nature. She was much more like fire than light. Her eyes were ardent, violet in color. Her hair was dyed blond but it shed a copper shadow around her. Her skin was copper-toned, too, firm and not at all transparent. Her body filled her dresses tightly, richly. She did not wear a corset, but her body had the shape of the women who did. She arched so as to throw the breasts forward and the buttocks high. The man had come back. But this time he was not asking for anything to buy. He stood looking at her, his long finely carved face smiling, his elegant gestures making a ritual out of lighting a cigarette, and said, “This time I came back just to see you.” Mathilde’s heart beat so swiftly that she felt as if this were the moment she had expected for years. She almost stood up on her toes to hear the rest of his words. She felt as if she were the luminous woman sitting back in the dark box receiving the unusual flowers. But what the polished gray-haired writer said in his aristocratic voice was, “As soon as I saw you, I was stiff in my pants.” The crudity of the words was like an insult. She reddened and struck at him. This scene was repeated on several occasions. Mathilde found that when she appeared, men were usually speechless, deprived of all inclination for romantic courtship. Such words as these fell from them each time at the mere sight of her. Her effect was so direct that all they could express was their physical disturbance. Instead of accepting this as a tribute, she resented it. Now she was in the cabin of the smooth Spaniard, Dalvedo. Dalvedo was peeling some cactus figs for her, and talking. Mathilde was regaining confidence. She sat on the arm of a chair in her red velvet evening dress.

• From Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (1994)

  This is not verbatim. I was a little edgy for the next six weeks, as you can imagine. I had lots and lots of drinks every night, and told lots of strangers at the bar about how my dad had died and I’d written this book about it, and how the early reviewers had criticized it, and then I’d start to cry and need a few more drinks, and then I’d end up telling them about this great dog we’d had named Llewelyn who had to be put to sleep when I was twelve, which still made me so sad even to think about, I’d tell my audience, that it was all I could do not to go into the rest room and blow my brains out. Then the book came out. I got some terrific reviews in important places, and a few bad ones. There were a few book-signing parties, a few interviews, and a number of important people claimed to love it. But overall it seemed that I was not in fact going to be taking early retirement. I had secretly believed that trumpets would blare, major reviewers would proclaim that not since Moby Dick had an American novel so captured life in all of its dizzying complexity. And this is what I thought when my second book came out, and my third, and my fourth, and my fifth. And each time I was wrong. But I still encourage anyone who feels at all compelled to write to do so. I just try to warn people who hope to get published that publication is not all that it is cracked up to be. But writing is. Writing has so much to give, so much to teach, so many surprises. That thing you had to force yourself to do—the actual act of writing—turns out to be the best part. It’s like discovering that while you thought you needed the tea ceremony for the caffeine, what you really needed was the tea ceremony. The act of writing turns out to be its own reward. I’ve managed to get some work done nearly every day of my adult life, without impressive financial success. Yet I would do it all over again in a hot second, mistakes and doldrums and breakdowns and all. Sometimes I could not tell you exactly why, especially when it feels pointless and pitiful, like Sisyphus with cash-flow problems.

• From The Canterbury Tales (2009)

  Although he was of gentle birth, well mannered and well groomed, he happened to see a low-born kite sailing by. On that instant the sweet gentleman became infatuated with a scavenger bird. Can you believe it? Of course he forgot all about his love for me. He broke all his oaths and promises. So my so-called lover has fallen for a kite. And I am left behind without hope!’ At that the falcon let out a scream, and fainted dead away in the lap of Canacee. The princess and her entourage were greatly moved by the falcon’s plight, but they did not know how to comfort her. Canacee decided to take the bird home, cradling her in her lap, and then she began to wrap up the self-inflicted wounds with bandages and plasters. The princess also took rare herbs from the garden of the palace, making ointments and other medicines from them; she tried everything in her power to heal the hawk. She even made a pen of wickerwork by the side of her bed, draped in blue velvet cloths, where the bird might rest. Blue, of course, is the colour of faithfulness. The outside of this cage was painted green, and on it were depicted the images of all the false birds of the world - the owls, the tercelets, the lecherous sparrows. There were also placed here, in derision, the portraits of those little chatterers known as magpies. How they scold and chide! So I will leave Canacee in the company of her ailing hawk. I will say no more about her magic ring until a later occasion, when I will tell you how the poor bird regained her repentant lover. The old books relate how this reunion was accomplished by the son of Genghis Khan, Cambalus. I think I have mentioned him before. Anyway, he was the one who brought the birds together. Enough of that. I now want to proceed to tales of battle and adventure. I have many marvels to impart to you. I will tell you the history of Genghis Khan, the great conqueror. Then I will speak of Algarsif, the oldest son of the mighty warrior, who won his wife by magical means. He would have been in great danger, if he had not been saved by that wondrous horse of brass. Then I will narrate the adventures of another warrior who fought the two brothers for the hand of their sister, Canacee. There is so much to tell you! I will begin again where I left off. PART THREE

• From Summer Sisters (1998)

  Abby didn’t miss that either. Sweetie, who’d been resting under the table, began to bark and when Daniel kneeled down to pet her she growled at him. “Jesus ... what kind of dog is this anyway?” Daniel asked, jumping out of the way. “A lab,” Lamb said. “She’s usually very friendly.” He opened the door and shooed Sweetie outside. “Well ...” Abby said, trying to be positive. “This house has a lot of ... possibilities.” They went on an island tour, all six of them crammed into the Volvo, the two boys in the back seat, one staring out the left window, one staring out the right, and Caitlin and Vix on the floor in the way-back with Sweetie. Lamb opened the rear window so they wouldn’t suffocate. In the front, Abby and Lamb were just la-ti-da, as if this were even better than the Brady Bunch. While they were gone the cleaning service would be trying to whip the house into shape. They’d told Lamb it would take all day, maybe two days. Lamb promised a bonus if they finished in one. They didn’t visit Trisha’s boat this time, or go to the nude beach. Instead of clam dogs and french fries, lunch was a dreary affair at a harborside restaurant, with Daniel sulking and Sharkey’s inner motor running on high. Caitlin moved her food around on her plate but didn’t eat a bite. Vix tried her best, pretending to be fascinated by The Story of Abby and Lamb, and how they’d met and how they’d instantly been attracted and blah blah blah ... who cared? “He couldn’t believe I was a student at The B-School,” Abby said, laughing. “Still can’t,” Lamb added, nuzzling her. Vix didn’t have a clue what The B-School was but it didn’t matter. Nobody noticed. “I came to Boston after the divorce, after living my entire life in Chicago,” Abby said. “I’d hoped Daniel would come, but you know how it is, he didn’t want to leave his friends or his school.” She tried to tousle Daniel’s hair but he pulled away angrily. “So, for now, Daniel’s living with his dad.” Vix kept nodding, the way reporters do on TV when they’re conducting an interview, to prove they’re really listening. “And when I get my MBA, next summer,” Abby continued, “I’ll decide whether to go back to Chicago or look for a job in the East.” She smiled at Lamb, a private kind of smile. Vix wondered if she knew about Trisha.

• From The Letter to the Hebrews (The New Daily Study Bible) (2002)

  (1) We look for peace in escape. But the trouble about escape is that it is always necessary to return. A. J. Gossip draws a picture of a woman whose home was a complete mess. She leaves her home one afternoon and goes to a cinema. For an hour or two, she escapes into the glamour and the luxury of the world of the film – and then she must go back home. It is escape all right – but there is the inevitable return. W. M. Macgregor tells of an old woman who lived in a terrible slum in Edinburgh called the Pans. Periodically, she would grow disgusted with the surroundings in which she lived and would make a tour of her friends, extracting a small sum of money from each. With the proceeds, she would get helplessly drunk. When others remonstrated with her, she would answer: ‘Do you grudge me my one chance to get out of the Pans with a sup of whisky?’ Again it was escape – but she, too, had to return. It is always possible to find some kind of peace by the route of escape, but it is never a lasting peace. The great eighteenth-century man of letters Dr Samuel Johnson used to insist that everyone should have a hobby, for he held that people should have as many retreats for their minds as possible. But even there, there is the necessity to return. Escape is not wrong; sometimes it is necessary if health and sanity are to be preserved; but it is always something that only alleviates pain and is never a cure. (2) There is the peace of evasion. Many people seek peace by refusing to face their problems: they push them to the back of their minds and seek to pull down the blind on them. There are two things to be said about that. The first is that no one ever solved a problem by refusing to face it. However much we evade it, it is still there. And problems are like diseases: the longer we refuse to take them seriously, the worse they get. We may well come to a stage when a disease is incurable and a problem insoluble. The second thing is maybe even more serious. Psychology tells us that there is a part of the mind which never stops thinking. With our conscious minds, we may be evading a problem; but our subconscious mind is teasing away at it. The thing is there like a piece of hidden shrapnel, a splinter of metal in the body; and it can ruin life. Far from bringing peace, evasion is most destructive of peace.

• From The Letter to the Hebrews (The New Daily Study Bible) (2002)

  It often happens that we avoid teaching some elements because they are difficult; we defend ourselves by saying that our hearers would never grasp such ideas. It is one of the tragedies of the Church that there is so little attempt to teach new knowledge and new thinking. It is true that such teaching is difficult. It is true that it often means meeting the lethargy of the lazy mind and the defensive prejudice of the shut mind. But the task remains. The writer to the Hebrews did not seek to avoid the duty of bringing his message, even if it was difficult and the minds of his hearers were slow. He regarded it as his supreme responsibility to pass on the truth he knew. His complaint is that his hearers have been Christians for many years and are still babes no nearer maturity. The contrast between the immature Christian and the child, between milk and solid food, often occurs in the New Testament (1 Peter 2:2; 1 Corinthians 2:6, 3:2, 14:20; Ephesians 4:13ff.). Hebrews says that by now they should be teachers. It is not necessary to take that literally. To say that someone was able to teach was the Greek way of saying that that person had a mature grasp of a subject. The writer says that they still need someone to teach them the simple elements ( stoicheia ) of Christianity . This word has a variety of meanings. In grammar, it means the letters of the alphabet, the A B C; in physics, it means the four basic elements of which the world is composed; in geometry, it means the elements of proof, like the point and the straight line; in philosophy, it means the first elementary principles with which the students begin. It is the sorrow of the writer to the Hebrews that, after many years of Christianity, his people have never got past the basics; they are like children who do not know the difference between right and wrong. Here, he is face to face with a problem which confronts the Church in every generation – that of Christians who refuse to grow up . (1) Christians can refuse to grow up in knowledge. They can be guilty of failure to take the opportunities that broaden horizons and develop ideas. There are people who keep on saying that what was good enough for people in the past is good enough for them.

• From The Canterbury Tales (2009)

  I am not my own master. My subjects beg me to choose another wife. They will not be denied. The pope himself has decreed that I can divorce you, to restrain their anger, and marry again. There is not much more to say to you. My new bride is already on her way here.

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  Most of the people who lived there were Mexicans who kept chickens and goats in their yards, which was where they practically lived themselves, cooking on grills and dancing to the Mexican music that blared from their radios. Dogs and cats roamed the dusty streets, and irrigation canals at the edge of town carried water to the crop fields. No one looked sideways at you if you wore your big sister's hand-me-downs or your mom drove an old brown Dart. Our neighbors lived in little adobe houses, but we rented a cinder-block bungalow. It was Mom's idea to paint the cinder blocks turquoise blue and the door and windowsills tangerine orange. "Let's not even pretend we want to blend in," she said. Mom was a singer, songwriter, and actress. She had never actually been in a movie or made a record, but she hated to be called "aspiring," and truth be told, she was a little older than the people described that way in the movie magazines she was always buying. Mom's thirty-sixth birthday was coming up, and she complained that the singers who were getting all the attention, like Janis Joplin and Joni Mitchell, were at least ten years younger. Even so, Mom always said her big break was right around the corner. Sometimes she got callbacks after auditions, but she usually came home shaking her head and saying the guys at the studio were just tire-kickers who wanted a second look at her cleavage. So while Mom had her career, it wasn't one that produced much in the way of income—yet. Mostly we lived on Mom's inheritance. It hadn't been a ton of money to begin with, and by the time we moved to Lost Lake, we were on a pretty tight budget. When Mom wasn't taking trips into L. A.—which were draining because the drive was nearly four hours in each direction—she tended to sleep late and spend the day writing songs, playing them on one of her four guitars. Her favorite, a 1961 Zemaitis, cost about a year's rent. She also had a Gibson Southern Jumbo, a honey-colored Martin, and a Spanish guitar made from Brazilian rosewood. If she wasn't practicing her songs, she was working on a musical play based on her life, about breaking away from her stifling old-South family, jettisoning her jerk of a husband and string of deadbeat boyfriends—together with all the tire-kickers who didn't reach the boyfriend stage—and discovering her true voice in music. She called the play "Finding the Magic." Mom always talked about how the secret to the creative process was finding the magic. That, she said, was what you needed to do in life as well. Find the magic.

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  The porches were every bit as furnished as the insides of most houses, with rust-stained refrigerators, folding card tables, hook rugs, couches or car seats for serious porch-sitting, and maybe a battered armoire with a hole cut in the side so the cat would have a cozy place to sleep. We followed the road almost to the end, where Dad pointed up at our new house. “Well, kids, welcome to Ninety-three Little Hobart Street!” Mom said. “Welcome to home sweet home.” We all stared. The house was a dinky thing perched high up off the road on a hillside so steep that only the back of the house rested on the ground. The front, including a drooping porch, jutted precariously into the air, supported by tall, spindly cinder-block pillars. It had been painted white a long time ago, but the paint, where it hadn’t peeled off altogether, had turned a dismal gray. “It’s good we raised you young ’uns to be tough,” Dad said. “Because this is not a house for the faint of heart.” Dad led us up the lower steps, which were made of rocks slapped together with cement. Because of settling and erosion and downright slipshod construction, they tilted dangerously toward the street. Where the stone steps ended, a rickety set of stairs made from two-by-fours—more like a ladder than a staircase—took you up to the front porch. Inside were three rooms, each about ten feet by ten feet, facing onto the front porch. The house had no bathroom, but underneath it, behind one of the cinder-block pillars, was a closet-sized room with a toilet on a cement floor. The toilet wasn’t hooked up to any sewer or septic system. It just sat atop a hole about six feet deep. There was no running water indoors. A water spigot rose a few inches above the ground near the toilet, so you could get a bucket and tote water upstairs. While the house was wired for electricity, Dad confessed that we could not at the moment afford to have it turned on. On the upside, Dad said, the house had cost only a thousand dollars, and the owner had waived the down payment. We were supposed to pay him fifty dollars a month. If we could make the payments on time, we’d own the place outright in under two years. “Hard to believe that one day this will all be ours,” said Lori. She was developing what Mom called a bit of a sarcastic streak. “Count your blessings,” Mom said. “There are people in Ethiopia who would kill for a place like this.” She pointed out that the house did have some attractive features. For example, in the living room was a cast-iron potbellied coal stove for heating and cooking. It was big and handsome, with heavy bear-claw feet, and she was certain it was valuable, if you took it to a place where people appreciated antiques.

• From Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990)

  And the sexual harassment of gay people may well take place not in the service of shoring up gender hierarchy, but in promoting gender normativity. Whereas MacKinnon offers a powerful critique of sexual harassment, she institutes a regulation of another kind: to have a gender means to have entered already into a heterosexual relationship of subordination. At an analytic level, she makes an equation that resonates with some dominant forms of homophobic argument. One such view prescribes and condones the sexual ordering of gender, maintaining that men who are men will be straight, women who are women will be straight. There is another set of views, Franke’s included, which offers a critique precisely of this form of gender regulation. There is thus a difference between sexist and feminist views on the relation between gender and sexuality: the sexist claims that a woman only exhibits her womanness in the act of heterosexual coitus in which her subordination becomes her pleasure (an essence emanates and is confirmed in the sexualized subordination of women); a feminist view argues that gender should be overthrown, eliminated, or rendered fatally ambiguous precisely because it is always a sign of subordination for women. The latter accepts the power of the former’s orthodox description, accepts that the former’s description already operates as powerful ideology, but seeks to oppose it. I belabor this point because some queer theorists have drawn an analytic distinction between gender and sexuality, refusing a causal or structural link between them. This makes good sense from one perspective: if what is meant by this distinction is that heterosexual normativity ought not to order gender, and that such ordering ought to be opposed, I am firmly in favor of this view. 4 If, however, what is meant by this is that (descriptively speaking), there is no sexual regulation of gender, then I think an important, but not exclusive, dimension of how homophobia works is going unrecognized by those who are clearly most eager to combat it. It is important for me to concede, however, that the performance of gender subversion can indicate nothing about sexuality or sexual practice. Gender can be rendered ambiguous without disturbing or reorienting normative sexuality at all. Sometimes gender ambiguity can operate precisely to contain or deflect non-normative sexual practice and thereby work to keep normative sexuality intact. 5 Thus, no correlation can be drawn, for instance, between drag or transgender and sexual practice, and the distribution of hetero-, bi-, and homo-inclinations cannot be predictably mapped onto the travels of gender bending or changing. Much of my work in recent years has been devoted to clarifying and revising the theory of performativity that is outlined in Gender Trouble. 6 It is difficult to say precisely what performativity is not only because my own views on what “performativity” might mean have changed over time, most often in response to excellent criticisms, 7 but because so many others have taken it up and given it their own formulations.

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  Our dog, Tinkle, the part–Jack Russell terrier who had followed Brian home one day, caught the rat in his jaws and banged it on the floor until it was dead. When Mom ran into the room, Tinkle was strutting around, all pumped up like the proud beast-slayer that he was. Mom said she felt a little sorry for the rat. “Rats need to eat, too,” she pointed out. Even though it was dead, it deserved a name, she went on, so she christened it Rufus. Brian, who had read that primitive warriors placed the body parts of their victims on stakes to scare off their enemies, hung Rufus by the tail from a poplar tree in front of our house the next morning. That afternoon we heard the sound of gunshots. Mr. Freeman, who lived next door, had seen the rat hanging upside down. Rufus was so big, Mr. Freeman thought he was a possum, went and got his hunting rifle, and blew him clean away. There was nothing left of Rufus but a mangled piece of tail. • • • After the Rufus incident, I slept with a baseball bat in my bed. Brian slept with a machete in his. Maureen could barely sleep at all. She kept dreaming that she was being eaten by rats, and she used every excuse she could to spend the night at friends’ houses. Mom and Dad shrugged off the Rufus incident. They told us that we had done battle with fiercer adversaries in the past, and we would again someday. “What are we going to do about the garbage pit?” I asked. “It’s almost filled up.” “Enlarge it,” Mom said. “We can’t keep dumping garbage out there,” I said. “What are people going to think?” “Life’s too short to worry about what other people think,” Mom said. “Anyway, they should accept us for who we are.” I was convinced that people might be more accepting of us if we made an effort to improve the way 93 Little Hobart Street looked. There were plenty of things we could do, I felt, that would cost almost nothing. Some people around Welch cut tires into two semicircles, painted them white, and used them as edging for their gardens. Maybe we couldn’t afford to build the Glass Castle quite yet, but certainly we could put painted tires around our front yard to spruce it up. “It would make us fit in a little bit,” I pleaded with Mom. “It sure would,” Mom said. But when it came to Welch, she had no interest in fitting in. “I’d rather have a yard filled with genuine garbage than with trashy lawn ornaments.” I kept looking for other ways to make improvements. One day Dad brought home a five-gallon can of house paint left over from some job he’d worked on. The next morning I pried the can open. It was nearly full of bright yellow paint. Dad had brought some paintbrushes home, too.

• From Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (1994)

  There will be a few book-signing parties and maybe some readings, at one of which your publisher will spring for a twenty-pound wheel of runny Brie, and the only person who will show has lived on the street since he was twelve and even he will leave, because he hates Brie. You and the people who work at the bookstore will make lots of hilarious jokes about this. You will read to the five of them, and they will respond with great enthusiasm. Maybe there will be a couple of interviews and then probably somewhere along the line, just when you thought things were settling down, your first really devastating review, the review that says your book is dog doo. It is especially festive when this review is in the local press so that all your relatives can read it, too. You can just picture several hundred thousand people perusing the review over their morning coffee, reading it out loud to one another and chuckling about how clever the reviewer is. So you rant and you cry, and then your writer friends call and commiserate. And they really do feel sick for you, and angry, and they know you feel like a wounded animal, a raging bull, and they say the right things, that they love you and they love your book, and that it has happened to them, a year ago or whenever. Because if you are a writer, it is going to happen to you. This is the truth. It has happened to me, and if you get published, it is almost certainly going to happen to you. But the fact of publication is the acknowledgment from the community that you did your writing right. You acquire a rank that you never lose. Now you’re a published writer, and you are in that rare position of getting to make a living, such as it is, doing what you love best. That knowledge does bring you a quiet joy. But eventually you have to sit down like every other writer and face the blank page. The beginnings of a second or third book are full of spirit and confidence because you have been published, and false starts and terror because now you have to prove yourself again. People may find out that you were a flash in the pan, that it was all beginner’s luck. What I know now is that you have to wear out all that dread by writing long and hard and not stopping too often to admire yourself and your publishedness in the mirror. Sometime later you’ll find yourself at work on, maybe really into, another book, and once again you figure out that the real payoff is the writing itself, that a day when you have gotten your work done is a good day, that total dedication is the point. “When is she going to talk about joy ?” the people in the back row whine.

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  The Tug, Dad said, had the highest level of fecal bacteria of any river in North America. “What’s fecal?” I asked. Dad watched the river. “Shit,” he said. Dad led us along the main road through town. It was narrow, with old brick buildings crowding in close on both sides. The stores, the signs, the sidewalks, the cars were all covered with a film of black coal dust, giving the town an almost monochromatic look, like an old hand-tinted photograph. Welch was shabby and worn out, but you could tell it had once been a place on its way up. On a hill stood a grand limestone courthouse with a big clock tower. Across from it was a handsome bank with arched windows and a wrought-iron door. You could also tell that the people of Welch were still trying to maintain some pride of place. A sign near the town’s only stoplight announced that Welch was the county seat of McDowell County and that for years, more coal had been mined in McDowell County than any comparable spot in the world. Next to it, another sign boasted that Welch had the largest outdoor municipal parking lot in North America. But the cheerful advertisements painted on the sides of buildings like the Tic Toc diner and the Pocahontas movie theater were faded and nearly illegible. Dad said bad times had come in the fifties. They hit hard and stayed. President John F. Kennedy had come to Welch not long after he was elected and personally handed out the nation’s first food stamps here on McDowell Street, to prove his point that—though ordinary Americans might find it hard to believe—starvation-level poverty existed right in their own country. The road through Welch, Dad told us, led only farther up into the wet, forbidding mountains and on to other dying coal towns. Few strangers passed through Welch these days, and almost all who did came to inflict one form of misery or another—to lay off workers, to shut down a mine, to foreclose on someone’s house, to compete for the rare job opening. The townspeople didn’t care much for outsiders. The streets were mostly silent and deserted that morning, but every now and then we’d pass a woman wearing curlers or a group of men in T-shirts with motor-oil decals, loitering in a doorway. I tried to catch their eyes, to give them a nod and a smile to let them know we had only good intentions, but they never nodded or spoke a word or even glanced our way. As soon as we passed, however, I could feel eyes following us up the street. Dad had brought Mom to Welch for a brief visit fifteen years earlier, right after they were married. “Gosh, things have gone downhill a little bit since we were here last,” she said. Dad gave a short snort of a laugh. He looked at her like he was about to say What the hell did I tell you?

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

  In strictness, not a single one of the ante-Nicene fathers fairly agrees with the Roman standard of doctrine in all points. Even Irenaeus and Cyprian differed from the Roman bishop, the former in reference to Chiliasm and Montanism, the latter on the validity of heretical baptism. Jerome is a strong witness against the canonical value of the Apocrypha. Augustin, the greatest authority of Catholic theology among the fathers, is yet decidedly evangelical in his views on sin and grace, which were enthusiastically revived by Luther and Calvin, and virtually condemned by the Council of Trent. Pope Gregory the Great repudiated the title "ecumenical bishop" as an antichristian assumption, and yet it is comparatively harmless as compared with the official titles of his successors, who claim to be the Vicars of Christ, the viceregents of God Almighty on earth, and the infallible organs of the Holy Ghost in all matters of faith and discipline. None of the ancient fathers and doctors knew anything of the modern Roman dogmas of the immaculate conception (1854) and papal infallibility (1870). The "unanimous consent of the fathers" is a mere illusion, except on the most fundamental articles of general Christianity. We must resort here to a liberal conception of orthodoxy, and duly consider the necessary stages of progress in the development of Christian doctrine in the, church. On the other hand the theology of the fathers still less accords with the Protestant standard of orthodoxy. We seek in vain among them for the evangelical doctrines of the exclusive authority of the Scriptures, justification by faith alone, the universal priesthood of the laity; and we find instead as early as the second century a high estimate of ecclesiastical traditions, meritorious and even over-meritorious works, and strong sacerdotal, sacramentarian, ritualistic, and ascetic tendencies, which gradually matured in the Greek and Roman types of catholicity. The Church of England always had more sympathy with the fathers than the Lutheran and Calvinistic Churches, and professes to be in full harmony with the creed, the episcopal polity, and liturgical worship of antiquity before the separation of the east and the west; but the difference is only one of degree; the Thirty-Nine Articles are as thoroughly evangelical as the Augsburg Confession or the Westminster standards; and even the modern Anglo-Catholic school, the most churchly and churchy of all, Ignores many tenets and usages which were considered of vital importance in the first centuries, and holds others which were unknown before the sixteenth century. The reformers were as great and good men as the fathers, but both must bow before the apostles. There is a steady progress of Christianity, an ever-deepening understanding and an ever-widening application of its principles and powers, and there are yet many hidden treasures in the Bible which will be brought to light in future ages.

• From St. Augustine's Confessions (2004)

  C. Ambrose was such a good rhetorician that Augustine could not divorce form from content and began to listen to the message that Ambrose was preaching. 1. That message was, specifically, that some biblical stories, especially ones in Hebrew Scripture, were not meant to be understood primarily at a literal level but had deeper meanings. 2. Ambrose’s figural interpretations of certain biblical stories opened Augustine to the possibility that Christians were not materialists and literalists, as the Manichees had taught him to believe. 3. The encounter with Ambrose presented Augustine with the possibility that he should rethink his understanding of Christianity and, perhaps, once again look at the Bible. VIII. The lessons that Augustine learned from Faustus and Ambrose are essential to moving toward a glimpse of eternal truth. A. The encounter with Faustus clarified for Augustine that truth does not necessarily abide in the most beautiful packages. B. The experience listening to Ambrose reinforced for Augustine the idea that he must look beyond the surface to the substance of things. Suggested Readings: O’Connell, St. Augustine’s Confessions: The Odyssey of Soul, chapter 7. A Reader’s Companion, chapter 5. Questions to Consider: 1. What is the significance of Augustine’s move from Carthage to Italy, both literally and metaphorically? 2. How does Augustine’s disappointment with Faustus’s response to his questions further his quest for wisdom? 3. How good a speaker is Ambrose, and what does Augustine learn about rhetoric from listening to Ambrose’s sermons? ©2004 The Teaching Company. 35