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.

Page 141 of 189 · 20 per page

• 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 Birthday Girl (2018)

  Más tarde esa noche, me recuesto en el sofá con el brazo metido detrás de la cabeza y una cerveza en la mano, mirando la televisión. He estado en un lúcido aturdimiento desde hace un rato, mientras un programa se ha convertido en cinco. Dejo mi cerveza y levanto el control remoto, finalmente apagando el HGTV y parpadeando, creo que por primera vez en tres horas. —Tiene razón —murmuro—. Están malditamente obsesionados con la placa para salpicaduras. En un momento de curiosidad, había sintonizado el canal después de llegar a casa de Home Depot y es como si me hubiera desmayado después de eso, solo despertando momentáneamente para hacer un sándwich e intentar hablar con Cole. Sin embargo, ahora salió de nuevo, dándose una ducha rápida y saliendo rápidamente después de llegar a casa del trabajo y darse cuenta que Jordan no estaba aquí. Pensé que podríamos ir a cenar tarde o algo así, pero al parecer, sus planes no se podían cancelar de nuevo. O tiene miedo de estar a solas conmigo. No es como si quisiera pelear, tampoco. Incluso simplemente ver juntos un programa en la televisión estaría bien. Quiero decir, hemos logrado no matarnos el uno al otro en el pasado. Solía caerle bien. ¿Y de dónde saca todo este dinero para salir de fiesta? Tiene que estarse gastando todo lo que está ganando. No es que tenga prisa por hacer que ahorre dinero y se vaya, pero creo que ahora puedo juzgarme tan duramente como juzgué a Jordan. Cuanto más haces por alguien, menos hacen por sí mismos. Soy tan culpable como ella. Cole no crecerá hasta que se vea obligado a hacerlo. Bebo el resto de mi cerveza y me pongo de pie, llevando la botella vacía a la cocina. Mi teléfono suena en mi bolsillo y lo saco. Dutch. —Hola —respondo, arrojando la botella a la basura. —Hola. Deberías venir a Grounders ahora mismo. ¿Eh? —Como en este momento —agrega antes que tenga la oportunidad de decir algo.

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

  When someone reliable gives you this kind of feedback, you now have some true sense of your work’s effect on people, and you may now know how to approach your final draft. If you are getting ready to send your work to a potential agent for the first time, you don’t want to risk burning that bridge by sending something that’s just not ready. You really must get your piece or book just right, as right as you can. Sometimes it is just a matter of fine-tuning, or maybe one whole character needs to be rethought. Sometimes the friend will love the feel of the writing, the raw material, and yet feel that it is a million miles from being done. This can be deeply disappointing, but again, better that your spouse or friend tell you this than an agent or an editor. I heard Marianne Williamson say once that when you ask God into your life, you think he or she is going to come into your psychic house, look around, and see that you just need a new floor or better furniture and that everything needs just a little cleaning—and so you go along for the first six months thinking how nice life is now that God is there. Then you look out the window one day and see that there’s a wrecking ball outside. It turns out that God actually thinks your whole foundation is shot and you’re going to have to start over from scratch. This is exactly what it can be like to give, say, a novel to someone else to read. This person can love it and still find it a total mess, in need of a great deal of work, of even a new foundation. So how do I find one of these partners? my students ask. The same way you find a number of people for a writing group. The only difference is that in this case, you’re looking for one partner instead of several. So if you are in a class, look around, see if there’s someone whose work you’ve admired, who seems to be at about the same level as you. Then you can ask him or her if he or she wants to meet for a cup of coffee and see if you can work with each other. It’s like asking for a date, so while you are doing this, you will probably be rolfed by all your most heinous memories of seventh and eighth grade. If the person says no, it’s good to wait until you get inside your car before you fall apart completely. Then you can rend your clothes and keen and do a primal scream. Of course, you probably want to be sure that the person hasn’t followed you out to your car.

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  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.” LORI WAS WORKING as a freelance artist specializing in fantasy, illustrating calendars and game boards and book jackets. Brian had joined the police force as soon as he turned twenty. Dad couldn’t figure out what he’d done wrong, raising a son who’d grown up to become a member of the gestapo. But I was so proud of my brother on the day he was sworn in, standing there in the ranks of the new officers, straight-shouldered in his navy blue uniform with its glittering brass buttons. Meanwhile, Maureen had graduated from high school and enrolled in one of the city colleges, but she never really applied herself and ended up living with Mom and Dad. She worked from time to time as a bartender or waitress, but the jobs never lasted long. Ever since she was a kid, she’d been looking for someone to take care of her. In Welch, the Pentecostal neighbors provided for her, and now in New York, with her long blond hair and wide blue eyes, she found various men who were willing to help out. The boyfriends never lasted any longer than the jobs. She talked about finishing college and going to law school, but distractions kept cropping up. The longer she stayed with Mom and Dad, the more lost she became, and after a while she was spending most of her days in the apartment, smoking cigarettes, reading novels, and occasionally painting nude self-portraits.

• 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 Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  But she said she could never forgive us kids and didn’t want us in her house any longer, even if we stayed in the basement and kept as quiet as church mice. We were banished. That was the word Dad used. “You did wrong,” he said, “and now we’ve all been banished.” “This isn’t exactly the Garden of Eden,” Lori said. I was more upset about the bike than I was about Erma banishing us. “Why don’t we just move back to Phoenix?” I asked Mom. “We’ve already been there,” she said. “And there are all sorts of opportunities here that we don’t even know about.” She and Dad set out to find us a new place to live. The cheapest rental in Welch was an apartment over a diner on McDowell Street that cost seventy-five dollars a month, which was out of our price range. Also, Mom and Dad wanted outdoor space we could call our own, so they decided to buy. Since we had no money for a down payment and no steady income, our options were pretty limited, but within a couple of days, Mom and Dad told us they had found a house we could afford. “It’s not exactly palatial, so there’s going to be a lot of togetherness,” Mom said. “And it’s on the rustic side.” “How rustic?” Lori asked. Mom paused. I could see her debating how to phrase her answer. “It doesn’t have indoor plumbing,” she said. • • • Dad was still looking for a car to replace the Olds—our budget was in the high two figures—so that weekend we all hiked over for our first look at the new place. We walked down the valley through the center of town and around a mountainside, past the small, tidy brick houses put up after the mines were unionized. We crossed a creek that fed into the Tug River and started up a barely paved one-lane road called Little Hobart Street. It climbed through several switchbacks and, for a stretch, rose at an angle so steep you had to walk on your toes; if you tried walking flatfooted, you stretched your calves till they hurt. The houses up here were shabbier than the brick houses lower down in the valley. They were made of wood, with lopsided porches, sagging roofs, rusted-out gutters, and balding tar paper or asphalt shingles slowly but surely parting from the underwall. In almost every yard, a mutt or two was chained to a tree or to a clothesline post, and they barked furiously as we walked by. Like most houses in Welch, these were heated by coal. The more prosperous families had coal sheds; the poorer ones left their coal in a pile out front.

• From Summer Sisters (1998)

  Phoebe SHE HADN’T MEANT to take Vix by surprise. That look on her face. The way she’d dropped the melon. Gads! She was sure Vix would have known. After all, the two of them were inseparable, weren’t they? She couldn’t begin to guess what game Caity was playing this time. Not that Caity tells her anything. Never has. Not really. She’s missed that part of the mother-daughter relationship. She has the feeling Vix has, too. Ah well ... maybe they’ll do a better job with their daughters. The idea of Caity having a daughter makes her laugh, until she realizes that would make her a grandmother! Now there’s an experience she can do without for another ten years, at least. “I’M TRYING TO give my life meaning,” Caitlin said when Vix called. “Does that make any sense to you?” When Vix didn’t answer right away Caitlin added, “Why am I asking you? Your life has always had meaning.” “You sure you’re not confusing meaning with struggle?” “How do I know? Do you think by trying not to be ordinary I’ve become neurotic?” “Are you seeing a shrink ... is that what this is about?” “Of course I’m seeing a shrink. Do you know anyone who isn’t ... besides you?” “I can’t afford therapy.” “I’m sure Abby would help.” “Is that a jab?” “Does it feel like one?” “Yes.” After a long pause Vix said, “I’m sorry about your friend.”

• 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 Going Clear (2013)

  He later confessed the incident during an auditing session and was sent to the Ethics Office, where he was assigned some minor punishment. He had been to Ethics before, usually for missing coursework, but he was beginning to feel that the more famous he became, the less likely he was to be rebuked for behavior that was considered “out ethics” for other members. Anytime Haggis boggled at an illogical or fanciful piece of data, he was invariably reminded that it was his failure entirely. He had come into Scientology as an adult, so his experience outside the church still informed his judgments. When he stumbled on something in Scientology that he thought was ridiculous, he would make a mental detour around it, not wanting to spend the time and money to do the “repairs” that his supervisors would prescribe. Although he never lost his skepticism, his daughters were born into the religion. They were schooled in it from the beginning. Nearly everyone they knew was a Scientologist. Each of the girls was a near clone of one of the parents. Alissa and Katy were Paul, pale and blond, but more sharp-featured, with dimpled noses and sculpted cheekbones. Lauren, the middle daughter, was Diane, inheriting her half-Greek mother’s olive skin and dark, Mediterranean eyes. The girls were bright, inquisitive, and cheerful by nature, but their parents’ divorce was an endless, churning, distracting, heartbreaking trauma, and it took a toll. The girls went to Delphi Academy, a private school that uses Hubbard “study tech.” It is largely self-guided. According to Scientology pedagogy, there are three barriers that retard a student’s progress. The first is “Lack of Mass.” This principle was derived from Alfred Korzybski’s observation that the word and the object that it names are not the same thing. If the student is studying tractors, for instance, it is best to have a real tractor in front of him. The absence of the actual object is disorienting to the student. “It makes him feel physiologically condensed,” Hubbard writes. “Actually makes him feel squashed. Makes him feel bent, sort of spinny, sort of dead, bored, exasperated.” Photographs of the object can help, or motion pictures, as they are “a sort of promise of hope of the mass,” but they are not an adequate substitute for the tractor under study. The result for the student is that he becomes dizzy, he’ll have headaches, his stomach gets upset, his eyes will hurt, and “he’s going to wind up with a face that feels squashed.” Illness and even suicide may be the expected result. Hubbard’s study tech remedies the problem by using clay or Play-Doh for the student to make replicas of the object.

• From St. Augustine's Confessions (2004)

  II. During Augustine’s time with the Manichees, he had formulated some questions that the local Manichees could not answer. A. Augustine always got the same answer: “Wait for Faustus,” a Manichean leader. B. Finally, Faustus arrived, and Augustine wasted no time questioning him. III. Faustus did not have answers that satisfied Augustine. A. Augustine found Faustus to be pleasant and to have a certain eloquence. B. However, the eloquence could not, for Augustine, conceal the fact that Faustus had little of substance to say. C. By this time, Augustine is beginning to perceive the differences between eloquence and truth. 1. This distinction between surface and substance is an essential advance in Augustine’s search for truth. 2. He tells the reader that an eloquent statement is not necessarily true, nor is one stated inelegantly consequently false. IV. After Faustus’s failure to address Augustine’s concerns, Augustine begins a period in which he wonders if humans are at all able to comprehend eternal wisdom. Augustine had no thought at this time to reexamine Christianity, because he still accepted a Manichean interpretation of the Bible. V. Augustine moves to Rome, where he believes that he will find better students. Because his mother, Monica, did not want to bid farewell to her son, Augustine snuck away after lying to her. VI. Augustine discovers that students in Rome find ways to cheat teachers out of payment and decides to move to Milan. VII. In Milan, Augustine meets Bishop Ambrose. A. Because Ambrose had a reputation for being an excellent rhetorician, Augustine went to listen to him for the purposes of what we would call today “professional development.” B. Augustine explicitly sought to divorce form from content and pay attention only to the manner in which Ambrose spoke. 34 ©2004 The Teaching Company.

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

  The straight mind continues to affirm that incest, and not homosexuality, represents its major interdiction. Thus, when thought by the straight mind, homosexuality is nothing but heterosexuality. —Monique Wittig, “The Straight Mind” On occasion feminist theory has been drawn to the thought of an origin, a time before what some would call “patriarchy” that would provide an imaginary perspective from which to establish the contingency of the history of women’s oppression. Debates have emerged over whether prepatriarchal cultures have existed, whether they were matriarchal or matrilineal in structure, whether patriarchy could be shown to have a beginning and, hence, be subject to an end. The critical impetus behind these kinds of inquiry sought understandably to show that the antifeminist argument in favor of the inevitability of patriarchy constituted a reification and naturalization of a historical and contingent phenomenon. Although the turn to a prepatriarchal state of culture was intended to expose the self-reification of patriarchy, that prepatriarchal scheme has proven to be a different sort of reification. More recently, some feminists have offered a reflexive critique of some reified constructs within feminism itself. The very notion of “patriarchy” has threatened to become a universalizing concept that overrides or reduces distinct articulations of gender asymmetry in different cultural contexts. As feminism has sought to become integrally related to struggles against racial and colonialist oppression, it has become increasingly important to resist the colonizing epistemological strategy that would subordinate different configurations of domination under the rubric of a transcultural notion of patriarchy. The articulation of the law of patriarchy as a repressive and regulatory structure also requires reconsideration from this critical perspective. The feminist recourse to an imaginary past needs to be cautious not to promote a politically problematic reification of women’s experience in the course of debunking the self-reifying claims of masculinist power. The self-justification of a repressive or subordinating law almost always grounds itself in a story about what it was like before the advent of the law, and how it came about that the law emerged in its present and necessary form.1 The fabrication of those origins tends to describe a state of affairs before the law that follows a necessary and unilinear narrative that culminates in, and thereby justifies, the constitution of the law. The story of origins is thus a strategic tactic within a narrative that, by telling a single, authoritative account about an irrecoverable past, makes the constitution of the law appear as a historical inevitability.

• 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

• From Birthday Girl (2018)

  Los últimos días han sido una locura, y no puedo creer que ese tipo sea su padre. ¿Cuáles son las posibilidades? Ojalá nos hubiéramos conocido de un modo un poco diferente. No conduciendo a la estación de policía a las dos en punto de la mañana para sacar a su hijo, mi novio, de la cárcel. —Vamos, te lo dije —comenta Cole, volviendo al auto por más cosas—. Mi papá fue quien se ofreció a dejar que nos quedáramos aquí. Simplemente ayudamos en las tareas domésticas, y esto nos da la oportunidad de ahorrar para un nuevo lugar. Un mejor lugar. Claro. ¿Y cuántos niños se mudan a casa para hacer eso y terminan quedándose otros tres años en su lugar? Su padre tenía que saber a qué se estaba ofreciendo. Haré todo lo posible para irme lo más pronto posible, pero Cole no ahorra dinero. Conseguir un nuevo lugar, con un depósito, el cual perdimos en el apartamento anterior debido a daños menores en las alfombras, y los servicios públicos requerirán un efectivo sustancial. Una vez que tengamos un lugar, Cole puede ayudar a pagarlo, pero en realidad conseguirlo y asegurarlo dependerá de mí. Han pasado tres días desde el teatro y de conocer a Pike Lawson. Una vez que sacamos a Cole, llegué a casa y encontramos nuestro departamento completamente destrozado. Aparentemente, estaba tratando de hacerme una fiesta de cumpleaños tarde en nuestra casa, pero nuestros amigos, sus amigos, no esperaron para comenzar las festividades. A las once, todos estaban borrachos, la pizza ya no estaba, pero bueno, me guardaron un pedazo de pastel. Tuve que ir al baño para no llorar frente a ellos cuando vi el lugar. Aparentemente, comenzó una pelea durante la fiesta, los vecinos se quejaron del ruido, Cole los insultó, y él y otro de sus amigos fueron llevados para que se calmaran. Mel, el propietario, declaró en términos inequívocos que ya había tenido suficiente y que Cole tenía que irse. Fui bienvenida a quedarme, pero no había forma de que pudiera pagar todo por mi cuenta. No después de haber agotado mis ahorros ayudando a reparar su auto el mes pasado. Y, gracias a Dios, la policía lo dejó ir sin fianza esta vez, porque no tenía cien dólares para exprimir de ninguna parte, mucho menos dos mil quinientos. —Eres su hijo —le recuerdo a Cole, agarrando mi lámpara de pie, una de las únicas cosas importantes que no almacenamos, ya que el padre de Cole ya tenía una de las habitaciones extras amuebladas—. ¿Pero quedarme aquí también, que él pague todas las cuentas? No es correcto.

• From The Canterbury Tales (2009)

  ‘On the day of his departure he was so sorrowful that I believed he suffered as much as I did. When I heard him speak, and saw his pale countenance, I truly believed that he was also in despair. Nevertheless I was convinced that he would return to me as quickly as possible. I reassured myself that he would be back soon enough. He had to go away, for reasons of duty. So I made a virtue of necessity. I tried to stay cheerful. I concealed my pain, I took him by the hand and, calling on Saint John as a witness, told him that I would always be faithful to him. “I will be yours,” I said, “for now and ever more. Please be loyal to me, too.” There is no need to tell you his reply. Who could speak more nobly than him? Who could act more wickedly? “He who sups with the devil needs a long spoon.” Is that not the saying? So, having made his little speech, he left and flew to his destination. I do not know where. But when he finally came to rest, I am sure that he had the following text in mind. “All creatures of the earth,” wrote Boethius, “when they regain their proper nature, naturally rejoice.” I think it was Boethius. Men love novelty. I know that much. Have you ever seen those birds that live in cages? They are fed on milk and honey, bread and sugar. Their cages are lined with straw as soft and smooth as silk. Yet as soon as the door of the cage is opened, what do they do? They fly away, of course. They leave the little cup and bells. They take wing to the wood where they can feed on worms and dirt. They need new meat. They need change and a new diet. Good breeding does not come into it. ‘This is what happened to my tercelet. I could weep even now. 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.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  12 But perhaps that is because we have too limited an idea of God. We have not been doing our practice and have lost the “knack” of religion. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a time that historians call the early modern period, Western people began to develop an entirely new kind of civilization, governed by scientific rationality and based economically on technology and capital investment. Logos achieved such spectacular results that myth was discredited and the scientific method was thought to be the only reliable means of attaining truth. This would make religion difficult, if not impossible. As theologians began to adopt the criteria of science, the mythoi of Christianity were interpreted as empirically, rationally, and historically verifiable and forced into a style of thinking that was alien to them. Philosophers and scientists could no longer see the point of ritual, and religious knowledge became theoretical rather than practical. We lost the art of interpreting the old tales of gods walking the earth, dead men striding out of tombs, or seas parting miraculously. We began to understand concepts such as faith, revelation, myth, mystery, and dogma in a way that would have been very surprising to our ancestors. In particular, the meaning of the word “belief” changed, so that a credulous acceptance of creedal doctrines became the prerequisite of faith, so much so that today we often speak of religious people as “believers,” as though accepting orthodox dogma “on faith” were their most important activity. This rationalized interpretation of religion has resulted in two distinctively modern phenomena: fundamentalism and atheism. The two are related. The defensive piety popularly known as fundamentalism erupted in almost every major faith during the twentieth century. 13 In their desire to produce a wholly rational, scientific faith that abolished mythos in favor of logos, Christian fundamentalists have interpreted scripture with a literalism that is unparalleled in the history of religion. In the United States, Protestant fundamentalists have evolved an ideology known as “creation science” that regards the mythoi of the Bible as scientifically accurate. They have, therefore, campaigned against the teaching of evolution in the public schools, because it contradicts the creation story in the first chapter of Genesis. Historically, atheism has rarely been a blanket denial of the sacred per se but has nearly always rejected a particular conception of the divine. At an early stage of their history, Christians and Muslims were both called “atheists” by their pagan contemporaries, not because they denied the reality of God but because their conception of divinity was so different that it seemed blasphemous. Atheism is therefore parasitically dependent on the form of theism it seeks to eliminate and becomes its reverse mirror image. Classical Western atheism was developed during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, whose ideology was essentially a response to and dictated by the theological perception of God that had developed in Europe and the United States during the modern period.