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 Manhunt (2022)

  A mini Snickers bar, the bite-sized kind people gave out—used to give out—on Halloween. Her favorite. She pressed it tight against her chest, tears threatening. Her jaw felt like someone had hooked it up to a corroded car battery and coated the jumper cable jaws with chili powder for good measure. She squeezed her eyes shut tight and imagined kids in costume running down the sidewalk through dead leaves and misting rain, the street lights coming on above their laughter. “Thankth, Beth.” Fran slept badly that night, alternately shivering and sweating, guzzling water whenever she stirred and then limping around to the back of the van to piss every fifteen minutes. Her clothes felt tight and itchy. Her skin was grimy, her hair tangled. She combed it with her fingers as she stared up at the stars through the van’s cracked and lichen-spotted windshield. Her empty socket throbbed with a sick, vacant ache. When she did sleep, she dreamed of the world that was gone, of her last few shifts at the Park Avenue Starbucks and the sputtering progress of her FFS fundraiser on Twitter. She dreamed of refreshing the page again and again only to find donations draining away, supportive comments deleted. She dreamed of the slender, elegant face she’d designed with her surgeon, Dr. Bakshi. I was so close, she thought miserably, sitting down to a candlelit dining room table where on her plate an eight-inch cock sat crisped up beautifully under a thin drizzle of vinaigrette reduction. I was so close to being a girl. Across the table, shrouded in the gloom of the vast dining room, another figure stirred. Cutlery squealed against bone china. The sound of chewing, loud and breathy, squelched beneath the sharper sound. Blood dripped onto the edge of a plate just revealed by candlelight. So close. The outline of the face she’d made, the one she’d dreamed of pulling down over her own as though she could step into a dream and wear it waking, leered at her through flame and melting wax. Blood and gore slicked its narrow chin, and behind its perfectly arched brows and Roman nose seethed great thick slabs of fat and bone and muscle pulsing in the dark, a huge rotten man-body hiding itself behind what she would never have. She looked down at her plate. Blood spurted pitifully from the cock’s bare head and pooled on the porcelain. The thing across the table smacked its lips, which should have been hers, and would have been if T-Day had come just a few weeks later. She’d been scheduled, hadn’t she? The plague had snatched her finished self away.

• From Going Clear (2013)

  The last time he showed Excalibur to a publisher, he said, the reader brought the manuscript into the room, set it on the publisher’s desk, then jumped out the window of the skyscraper. Hubbard despondently returned to the pulps. Five years of torrential output had left him exhausted and bitter. His work was “ worthless,” he admitted. “I have learned enough of my trade, have developed a certain technique,” he wrote to Hays. “But curbed by editorial fear of reality and hindered by my own revolt I have never dared loose the pent flame, so far only releasing the smoke.” That same year Hubbard received an offer to write for a magazine called Astounding Science-Fiction . The editor, John W. Campbell, Jr., twenty-seven years old at the time, was to preside over what Hubbard and others would mark as the Golden Age of Science Fiction. One of the many brilliant young writers who would be pulled into Campbell’s orbit, Isaac Asimov, described Campbell as “ a tall, large man with light hair, a beaky nose, a wide face with thin lips, and with a cigarette holder forever clamped between his teeth.” Campbell was an overbearing champion of extreme right-wing ideas and crackpot science—especially psychic phenomena—and he would hold forth in nonstop monologues, often adopting perverse views, such as supporting slavery, then defending such propositions to the point of exhausting everyone in the room. “ A deviant figure of marked ferocity,” as the British writer Kingsley Amis observed. On the other hand, Campbell was also a caring and resourceful editor who groomed inexperienced writers, such as Robert A. Heinlein—first published in Astounding —and turned them into cultural icons. Campbell considered science fiction to be something far more than cheap literary diversion; for him, it amounted to prophecy. His conviction of the importance of the genre added a mystical allure that other forms of pulp fiction never aspired to. Fanzines and sci-fi clubs, composed largely of adolescent boys who were drawn to the romanticized image of science, formed in many cities around the country; some of those fans went on to become important scientists, and their work was animated by ideas that had first spilled out of the minds of writers such as Heinlein, Asimov, and Hubbard. “ Science fiction, particularly in its Golden Age, had a mission,” Hubbard writes. “To get man to the stars.” He saw himself as well qualified for the field: “ I had, myself, somewhat of a science background, had done some pioneer work in rockets and liquid gases.” Hubbard discovered his greatest talents as a writer in the field of science fiction, a more commodious genre and far more intellectually engaging than westerns or adventure yarns. Science fiction invites the writer to grandly explore alternative worlds and pose questions about meaning and destiny. Inventing plausible new realities is what the genre is all about. One starts from a hypothesis and then builds out the logic, adding detail and incident to give substance to imaginary structures.

• From Going Clear (2013)

  Suddenly the idea of going Clear began to catch on. McMaster adopted a clerical outfit that befitted his designation as the church’s unofficial ambassador to the United Nations. At one point, Hubbard designated him Scientology’s first “pope.” It was a matter of puzzlement to Hubbard’s closest associates, given Hubbard’s disparagement of homosexuals in his books, that he would enlist a person to serve as the church’s representative who was obviously gay. “ He was very pronounced in his affect,” one of Hubbard’s medical officers remembered. But Hubbard’s relationship to homosexuality was apparently more complicated in life than in theory. CONVINCED THAT the British, American, and Soviet governments were interested in gaining control of Scientology’s secrets in order to use them for evil intentions, Hubbard began looking for a safe harbor—ideally, a country that he could rule over. England had taken steps to “ curb the growth” of Scientology, and Hubbard took the hint. He also suffered from the damp weather. “ I had been ill with pneumonia for the third time in England and on the suggestion of my doctor was seeking a warmer climate for a short while in order to recover,” he said, in an unprompted explanation to the CIA. He resigned as Executive Director of the Church of Scientology and sold his interests in the Hubbard Association of Scientologists International, although he maintained actual control of the organization through his innumerable telexes. He journeyed to Rhodesia, the South African republic that had recently declared its independence from the United Kingdom (it later became Zimbabwe). Isolated, diplomatically spurned, and subject to international sanctions, the Rhodesian government served a clique of white colonists who ruled over an insurgent black majority. To Hubbard, Rhodesia seemed ripe for a takeover. He felt a kinship with the republic’s dashing and flamboyant founder, Cecil John Rhodes, who also had red hair and a taste for swashbuckling adventure. Hubbard believed he might have been Rhodes in a previous life, although it’s unclear whether he knew that Rhodes was homosexual. Hubbard had a fantasy that he would be welcomed in Rhodesia, that the black population would embrace him like a brother, and that eventually he would become its leader, issuing passports and his own currency. However, the current prime minister, Ian Smith, was desperately trying to negotiate a settlement with the black nationalist movement that would preserve white-minority rule. Hubbard thoughtfully wrote up a constitution for the government that he claimed would accomplish just that, but he couldn’t get anyone to take it seriously. While Hubbard talked about his big plans for developing the country, the government became increasingly suspicious of his motives and his resources. Ultimately, Hubbard’s visa was not renewed. “ He told me Ian Smith was going to be shot because he was a ‘Suppressive,’ ” John McMaster said. “The real reason that Hubbard was kicked out of Rhodesia was that his cheques bounced.” Hubbard returned to England with a new scheme.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  "'No, I. see that you don't love me; for it is not possible that you—a young man——' "She did not finish. Teleny felt the sting of her reproaches, but remained passive; for the phallus is not stiffened by taunts. "She took the lifeless object in her delicate fingers. She rubbed and manipulated it. She even rolled it between her two soft hands. It remained like a piece of dough. She sighed as piteously as Ovid's mistress must have done on a like occasion. She did like this woman did some hundreds of years before. She bent down; she took the tip of that inert piece of flesh between her lips—the pulpy lips which looked like a tiny apricot—so round, sappy, and luscious. Soon it was all in her mouth. She sucked it with as much evident pleasure as if she were a famished baby taking her nurse's breast. As it went in and out, she tickled the prepuce with her expert tongue, touched the tiny lips on her palate. "The phallus, though somewhat harder, remained always limp and nerveless. "You know our ignorant forefathers believed in the practice called 'nouer les aiguillettes'—that is, rendering the male incapable of performing the pleasant work for which Nature has destined him. We, the enlightened generation, have discarded such gross superstitions, and still our ignorant forefathers were sometimes right." "What! you do not mean to say that you believe in such tomfoolery?" "It might be tomfoolery, as you say; but still it is a fact. Hypnotize a person, and then you will see if you can get the mastery over him or not." "Still, you had not hypnotized Teleny?" "No, but our natures seemed to be bound to one another by a secret affinity." "At that moment I felt a secret shame for Teleny. Not being able to understand the working of his brain, she seemed to regard him in the light of a young cock, who, having crowed lustily once or twice at early dawn, has strained his neck to such a pitch that he can only emit hoarse, feeble, gurgling sounds out of it after that. "Moreover, I almost felt sorry for that woman; and I thought, if I were only in her place, how disappointed I should be. And I sighed, repeating almost audibly,—'Were I but in her stead.'

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  Inhibited by absurd fears, they only discuss the puerilities with which every fool is familiar, and dare not, by addressing themselves boldly to the investigation of the human heart, offer its gigantic idiosyncrasies to our view." "Very well, Monsieur, I shall proceed," Therese resumed, affected, "and proceeding as I have done until this point, I will strive to offer my sketches in the least revolting colors." Roland, with whose portrait I ought to begin, was a short, heavy-set man, thirty-five years old, incredibly vigorous and as hirsute as a bear, with a glowering mien and fierce eye; very dark, with masculine features, a long nose, bearded to the eyes, black, shaggy brows; and in him that part which differentiates men from our sex was of such length and exorbitant circumference, that not only had I never laid eyes upon anything comparable, but was even absolutely convinced Nature had never fashioned another as prodigious; I could scarcely surround it with both hands, and its length matched that of my forearm. To this physique Roland joined all the vices which may be the issue of a fiery temperament, of considerable imagination, and of a luxurious life undisturbed by anything likely to distract from one's leisure pursuits. From his father Roland very early on in life he had become surfeited by ordinary pleasures, and begun to resort to nothing but horrors; these alone were able to revive desires in a person jaded by excessive pleasure; the women who served him were all employed in his secret debauches and to satisfy appetites only slightly less dishonest within which, nevertheless, this libertine was able to find the criminal spice wherein above all his taste delighted; Roland kept his own sister as a mistress, and it was with her he brought to a climax the passions he ignited in our company. He was virtually naked when he entered; his inflamed visage was evidence simultaneously of the epicurean intemperance to which he had just given himself over, and the abominable lust which consumed him; for an instant he considers me with eyes that unstring my limbs. "Get out of those clothes," says he, himself tearing off what I was wearing to cover me during the night... "yes, get rid of all that an follow me; a little while ago I made you sense what you risk by laziness; but should you desire to betray us, as that crime would be of greater magnitude, its punishment would have to be proportionally heavier; come along and see of what sort it would be."

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  Scarcely had we thought of something to say, and said it, when we had to resume our silence and try to discover new subjects. Literally, we did not know what to say to each other. All that we could think of concerning the life that was before us and our home was said. “And then what? If we had been animals, we should have known that we had not to talk. But here, on the contrary, it was necessary to talk, and there were no resources! For that which occupied our minds was not a thing to be expressed in words. “And then that silly custom of eating bon-bons, that brutal gluttony for sweetmeats, those abominable preparations for the wedding, those discussions with mamma upon the apartments, upon the sleeping-rooms, upon the bedding, upon the morning-gowns, upon the wrappers, the linen, the costumes! Understand that if people married according to the old fashion, as this old man said just now, then these eiderdown coverlets and this bedding would all be sacred details; but with us, out of ten married people there is scarcely to be found one who, I do not say believes in sacraments (whether he believes or not is a matter of indifference to us), but believes in what he promises. Out of a hundred men, there is scarcely one who has not married before, and out of fifty scarcely one who has not made up his mind to deceive his wife. “The great majority look upon this journey to the church as a condition necessary to the possession of a certain woman. Think then of the supreme significance which material details must take on. Is it not a sort of sale, in which a maiden is given over to a débauché , the sale being surrounded with the most agreeable details?” CHAPTER XII. “Strange theory!” cried I. “Strange in what? According to all the doctrines of the Church, the world will have an end. Science teaches the same fatal conclusions. Why, then, is it strange that the same thing should result from moral Doctrine? ‘Let those who can, contain,’ said Christ. And I take this passage literally, as it is written. That morality may exist between people in their worldly relations, they must make complete chastity their object.

• From Going Clear (2013)

  “Ron introduced me to his mother, whose long light brown hair seemed dark beside the reddish glow of her son’s hair and face,” Free wrote, in one of the few records of the actual relationship between Hubbard and his mother. “I recall little else about her except that like her husband, Navy lieutenant Henry Ross Hubbard, she plainly adored young Ron and considered him a budding genius.” Hubbard filled Free in on new developments. Phil Browning, the other partner, had dropped out at the last minute, but he had managed to get the loan of some laboratory equipment from the University of Michigan; meantime, Hubbard was negotiating with a professional cameraman for the anticipated films of the voodoo rites “and that sort of salable material.” Thanks to Free’s efforts to sign up more than twenty new members of the expedition, Hubbard said, “We have enough cash to go ahead.” The trip was a calamity from the start. A number of the “buccaneers” who signed up bailed out at the last minute, but fifty-six green collegians with no idea what they were doing clambered aboard the antiquated, four-masted schooner Doris Hamlin . The adventure began with the Doris Hamlin having to be towed out of Baltimore harbor because of lack of wind. That was almost the end of the expedition, since the tug was pulling toward the sea while the ship was still tied to the dock. Once in the Atlantic, the ship was either becalmed in glassy seas or roiling in high chop. The mainsails blew out in a squall as the expedition steered toward St. Thomas. Seasickness was rampant. At every port, more of the disgusted crew deserted. The only film that was shot was a desultory cockfight in Martinique. It soon became evident that the expedition was broke. There was no meat or fruit, and the crew was soon reduced to buying their own food in port. Hubbard didn’t have enough money to pay the only professional sailors on the ship—the captain, the first mate, and the cook—so he offered to sell shares in the venture to his crewmates and borrowed money from others. He raised seven or eight hundred dollars that way, and was able to set sail from Bermuda, only to become mired in the Sargasso Sea for four days. After a meager supper one night, George Blakeslee, who had been brought along as a photographer, had had enough. “ I tied a hangman’s noose in a rope and everybody got the same idea,” he wrote in his journal. “So we made an effigy of Hubbard and strung it up in the shrouds. Put a piece of red cloth on the head and a sign on it. ‘Our red-headed ______!’ ” Hubbard stayed in his cabin after that.

• From Going Clear (2013)

  The next day, Scobee got a call from a sheepish Davis. He said that someone had broken into his car and stolen the briefcase out of the trunk. “When we told Tommy what was in the briefcase, he freaked,” Scobee recalled. “He went around for a week, searching through Dumpsters.” Finally, someone approached Davis about the reward he had offered and led him to the thief, a homeless man who was trying to sell the briefcase; the contents, which were still in it, meant nothing to him. Davis gave the man twenty dollars. 2 Davis was disappointed because the search forced him to miss the ceremony where John Travolta was awarded a Scientology medal. Davis went through a period of doubt and actually considered dropping out of the Sea Org, according to Scobee, but then he recommitted and became so enthusiastic that he had the Sea Org logo—a laurel wreath with twenty-six leaves representing the stars in the Galactic Confederacy—tattooed on his arm. When Miscavige found out, he berated Davis, saying that he had violated the church’s copyright. Davis began working with Marty Rathbun during his intensive auditing of Cruise. When Rathbun was thrown in the Hole, Davis became something more than a gofer for the star. He provided a line to Cruise at a time when the actor’s relationship with the church was not yet solidified, and his constant presence beside the superstar boosted the image of Scientology as a hip, insider network. Although Cruise is ten years older, the two men physically resemble each other, with long faces and strong jaws, a likeness that is enhanced by similar spiky haircuts. Their relationship evolved into a friendship, but one that reflected the immense power imbalance between them, as well as Davis’s position as a deputy of the church in the service of its most precious asset. Until his association with Cruise, Davis had been called Tom, but he became Tommy to distinguish him from the star. In other ways, he became more like him—his clothes, his hair, his intensity. At the age of nineteen, Davis married a dreamy Belgian woman, Nadine van Hootegem, who was also in the Sea Org. “I made the decision to forward the aims of Scientology,” she told the ABC News program 20/20 in 1998. “I actually compare it a little bit like Mother Teresa.” She added, “It’s a fun activity to set men free.” According to Mike Rinder, Nadine Davis became intensely involved in Tom Cruise’s entourage. “Somehow dealing with Katie Holmes, she did something wrong,” Rinder says. “She became a non-person.” He says that Tommy was forced to divorce her. 3 Soon after Cruise’s troubles in 2005, Tommy Davis was sent to Clearwater to participate in the Estates Project Force. Normally, the EPF functions as a kind of boot camp for new Sea Org members.

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

  Mohammed was a slave of sensual passion. Ayesha, who knew him best in his private character and habits, used to say: "The prophet loved three things, women, perfumes and food; he had his heart’s desire of the two first, but not of the last." The motives of his excess in polygamy were his sensuality which grew with his years, and his desire for male offspring. His followers excused or justified him by the examples of Abraham, David and Solomon, and by the difficulties of his prophetic office, which were so great that God gave him a compensation in sexual enjoyment, and endowed him with greater capacity than thirty ordinary men. For twenty-four years he had but one wife, his beloved Chadijah, who died in 619, aged sixty-five, but only two months after her death he married a widow named Sawda (April 619), and gradually increased his harem, especially during the last two years of his life. When he heard of a pretty woman, says Sprenger, he asked her hand, but was occasionally refused. He had at least fourteen legal wives, and a number of slave concubines besides. At his death he left nine widows. He claimed special revelations which gave him greater liberty of sexual indulgence than ordinary Moslems (who are restricted to four wives), and exempted him from the prohibition of marrying near relatives.160 He married by divine command, as he alleged, Zeynab, the wife of Zayd, his adopted son and bosom-friend. His wives were all widows except Ayesha. One of them was a beautiful and rich Jewess; she was despised by her sisters, who sneeringly said: "Pshaw, a Jewess!" He told her to reply: "Aaron is my father and Moses my uncle!" Ayesha, the daughter of Abû Bakr, was his especial favorite. He married her when she was a girl of nine years, and he fifty-three years old. She brought her doll-babies with her, and amused and charmed the prophet by her playfulness, vivacity and wit. She could read, had a copy of the Koran, and knew more about theology, genealogy and poetry than all the other widows of Mohammed. He announced that she would be his wife also in Paradise. Yet she was not free from suspicion of unfaithfulness until he received a revelation of her innocence. After his death she was the most sacred person among the Moslems and the highest authority on religious and legal questions. She survived her husband forty-seven years and died at Medina, July 13, 678, aged sixty-seven years.161 In his ambition for a hereditary dynasty, Mohammed was sadly disappointed: he lost his two sons by Chadijah, and a third one by Mary the Egyptian, his favorite concubine.

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

  Shortly after his return, Beza was sent forth again, July 20, 1560. The occasion was, however, quite different. The Prince de Condé, shorn of his power by the Guises, had fled to Nérac. He desired to attach to the Protestant party his brother, Antoine de Bourbon-Vendôme, king of Navarre. Calvin had already, by letter, made some impression on the irresolute and fickle king, but Condé induced his brother to send for Beza, who, with his eloquence and his courtly bearing, quite captivated the king, who declared that he would never hear the mass again, but would do all he could to advance the Protestant cause. His zeal was, however, of very short duration; for no sooner did his brother, the cardinal of Bourbon, arrive, than he and his queen, Jeanne d’Albret, who afterwards was a sincere convert to Protestantism, heard mass in the convent of the Cordeliers at Nérac. Beza, seeing that Antoine would not hold out, but was certain to fall into the power of the Catholic party, quietly left him, Oct. 17, and after many dangers reached Geneva early in November. The journey had taken three weeks, and had, for the most part, to be performed at night.1286 § 170. Beza at the Colloquy of Poissy.1287

• From Going Clear (2013)

  There were no days off, although they were allowed to call their families on Christmas. Their sole diversion was watching the big Scientology galas on television. After all, the elaborate sets for these events were constructed by the RPF’ers in Los Angeles or at Flag Base in Clearwater. To view the big Cruise event, they were all taken to the mess hall. One of the penitents was Mark McKinstry, who had been National Sales Manager at Bridge Publications when the movie version of Battlefield Earth, starring John Travolta, came out in 2000. Hubbard’s tale is about an alien race of “Psychlos,” who have turned people into slaves—until a hero arises to liberate humanity. Travolta had worked for years to get the movie made, and wound up paying a significant portion out of his own pocket. It was at the peak of his career. “I told my manager, ‘If we can’t do the things now that we want to do, what good is the power?’ ” he remarked at the time. Miscavige had been deeply involved in the filming from the beginning. He would watch dailies of the film in Clearwater while he was overseeing the handling of the Lisa McPherson case. His critiques would then be typed up and sent to the Scientology representative who was always at Travolta’s side. When the movie was completed, Miscavige called Travolta to congratulate him, saying that LRH would be proud. He predicted it was going to be a blockbuster. McKinstry had been working for a year promoting the movie edition of the book. He traveled across the country with Travolta to push the book in bookstores, malls, and Walmarts. About 750,000 copies were sold. Like many others who have spent time with Travolta, McKinstry came to like him immensely. The actor was devoting a substantial amount of his own time and energy to making the book a success. But when the movie came out, it was a critical and box-office catastrophe. Even at the premiere, Sea Org members had to be bused in to Grauman’s Chinese Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard to fill the empty seats for as many as three shows a day. For some of them, it was the first movie they had seen in years. “ ‘Battlefield Earth’ may well turn out to be the worst movie of this century,” the New York Times critic observed, in what proved to be a typical review. There were false accusations that the film contained subliminal messages promoting Scientology. Travolta’s career went into a lengthy dark period. Cruise later complained to Miscavige, saying that the movie was terrible for the church’s public image.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  What is it that renders married ties unbearable? The too-great intimacy, the sordid cares, the triviality of every-day life. The young bride must love indeed if she feels no disappointment when she sees her mate just awakened from a fit of tough snoring, seedy, unshaven, with braces and slippers, and hears him clear his throat and spit—for men actually spit, even if they do not indulge in other rumbling noises. "The husband, likewise, must love indeed, not to feel an inward sinking when a few days after the wedding he finds his bride's middle parts tightly tied up in foul and bloody rags. Why did not nature create us like birds—or rather, like midges—to live but one summer day—a long day of love? "On the night of this next day Teleny surpassed himself at the piano; and when the ladies had finished waving their tiny handkerchiefs, and throwing flowers at him, he stole away from a host of congratulating admirers, and came to meet me in my carriage, waiting for him at the door of the theatre; then we drove away to his house. I passed that night with him, a night not of unbroken slumbers, but of inebriating bliss. "As true notaries of the Grecian god, we poured out seven copious libations to Priapus—for seven is a mystic, cabalistic, propitious number—and in the morning we tore ourselves from each other's arms, vowing everlasting love and fidelity; but, alas! what is there immutable in the ever-changing world, except, perhaps, the sleep eternal in the eternal night." "And your mother?" "She perceived that a great change had been wrought in me. Now, far from being crabbed and waspish, like an old maid that cannot find rest anywhere, I was even-tempered and good-humoured. She, however, attributed the change to the tonics I was taking, little guessing the real nature of these tonics. Later, she thought I must have some kind of liaison or other, but she did not interfere with my private affairs; she knew that the time for sowing my wild oats had come, and she left me complete freedom of action." "Well, you were a lucky fellow." "Yes, but perfect happiness cannot last long. Hell gapes on the threshold of heaven, and one step plunges us from ethereal light into erebian darkness. So it has ever been with me in this chequered life of mine. A fortnight after that memorable night of unbearable anguish and of thrilling delight, I awoke in the midst of felicity to find myself in thorough wretchedness. "One morning, as I went in to breakfast, I found on the table a note which the postman had brought the evening before. I never received letters at home, having hardly any correspondence, save a business one, which was always transacted at the office.

• From Going Clear (2013)

  Gerald Armstrong testified that he had seen a document, “either a fitness report or something similar around the time of the end of the war,” that bore the signature of “a Commander Thompson,” which he believed that Hubbard had actually forged (Church of Scientology California v. Gerald Armstrong , May 15, 1984). EpilogueI f Scientology is based on a lie, as Tommy Davis’s formulation at the New Yorker meeting suggests, what does it say about the many people who believe in its doctrine or—like Davis and Feshbach—publicly defend and promote the organization and its practices? Of course, no religion can prove that it is “true.” There are myths and miracles at the core of every great belief system that, if held up to the harsh light of a scholar or an investigative reporter, could easily be passed off as lies. Did Mohammed really ride into Heaven on the back of his legendary transport, the steed Buraq? Did Jesus’s disciples actually encounter their crucified leader after his burial? Were these miracles or visions or lies? Would the religions survive without them? There is no question that a belief system can have positive, transformative effects on people’s lives. Many current and former Scientologists have attested to the value of their training and the insight they derived from their study of the religion. They have the right to believe whatever they choose. But it is a different matter to use the protections afforded a religion by the First Amendment to falsify history, to propagate forgeries, and to cover up human-rights abuses. Hubbard once wrote that “ the old religion”—by which he meant Christianity—was based on “a very painful lie,” which was the idea of Heaven. “Yes, I’ve been to Heaven. And so have you,” he writes. “It was complete with gates, angels and plaster saints—and electronic implantation equipment.” Heaven, he says, was built as an implant station 43 trillion years ago. “So there was a Heaven after all—which is why you are on this planet and were condemned never to be free again—until Scientology.” He went on: “What does this do to any religious nature of Scientology? It strengthens it. New religions always overthrow the false gods of the old, they do something to better man. We can improve man. We can show the old gods false. And we can open up the universe as a happier place in which a spirit may dwell.” One might compare Scientology with the Church of Latter-day Saints, a new religion of the previous century. The founder of the movement, Joseph Smith, claimed to have received a pair of golden plates from the angel Moroni in upstate New York in 1827, along with a pair of magical “seeing stones,” which allowed him to read the contents. Three years later, he published The Book of Mormon , founding a movement that would provoke the worst outbreak of religious persecution in American history.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  Once they had achieved imperial rule, alas, the Hasmoneans’ piety was unable to sustain the brute realities of political dominance, and they became as cruel and tyrannical as the Seleucids. At the end of the second century BCE, a number of new sects sought a more authentically Jewish alternative; Christianity would later share some of their enthusiasms. To initiate their disciples, all these sects set up systems of instruction that became the closest thing to an educational establishment in Jewish society. Both the Qumran sect and the Essenes—two distinct groups that are often erroneously identified—were attracted toward an ethical community life: meals were eaten together, ritual purity and cleanliness were stressed, and goods were held in common. Both were critical of the Jerusalem temple cult, which, they believed, the Hasmoneans had corrupted. Indeed, the Qumran commune beside the Dead Sea regarded itself as an alternative temple: on the cosmic plane, the children of light would soon defeat the sons of darkness, and God would build another temple and inaugurate a new world order. The Pharisees were also committed to an exact and punctilious observance of the biblical law. We know very little about them at this date, however, even though they would become the most influential of these new groups. Some Pharisees led armed revolts against the Hasmoneans but finally concluded that the people would be better off under foreign rule. In 64 BCE, therefore, as the Hasmonean excesses had become intolerable, the Pharisees sent a delegation to Rome requesting that the empire depose the regime. The following year the Roman warlord Pompey invaded Jerusalem, killing twelve thousand Jews and enslaving thousands more. Not surprisingly, most Jews hated Roman rule, but no empire can survive unless it is able to co-opt at least some of the local population. The Romans ruled Palestine through the priestly aristocracy in Jerusalem, but they also created a puppet king, Herod, a prince of Idumea and a recent convert to Judaism. Herod built magnificent fortifications, palaces, and theaters throughout the country in the Hellenistic style and on the coast constructed Caesarea, an entirely new city, in honor of Augustus. His masterpiece, however, was a magnificent new temple for Yahweh in Jerusalem, flanked significantly by the Antonia fortress, manned by Roman troops. A cruel ruler, with his own army and secret police, Herod was extremely unpopular. The Jews of Palestine were therefore ruled by two aristocracies: the Herodians and the Sadducees, the Jewish priestly nobility. Both collected taxes, so Jews bore a double tax burden.11

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

  But the enthusiasm kindled by Carlyle for the prophet of Mecca has been considerably checked by fuller information from the original sources as brought out in the learned biographies of Weil, Nöldeke, Sprenger and Muir. They furnish the authentic material for a calm, discriminating and impartial judgment, which, however, is modified more or less by the religious standpoint and sympathies of the historian. Sprenger represents Mohammed as the child of his age, and mixes praise and censure, without aiming at a psychological analysis or philosophical view. Sir William Muir concedes his original honesty and zeal as a reformer and warner, but assumes a gradual deterioration to the judicial blindness of a self-deceived heart, and even a kind of Satanic inspiration in his later revelations. "We may readily admit," he says, "that at the first Mahomet did believe, or persuaded himself to believe, that his revelations were dictated by a divine agency. In the Meccan period of his life, there certainly can be traced no personal ends or unworthy motives to belie this conclusion. The Prophet was there, what he professed to be, ’a simple Preacher and a Warner;’ he was the despised and rejected teacher of a gainsaying people; and he had apparently no ulterior object but their reformation .... But the scene altogether changes at Medina. There the acquisition of temporal power, aggrandizement, and self-glorification mingled with the grand object of the Prophet’s previous life; and they were sought after and attained by precisely the same instrumentality. Messages from heaven were freely brought forward to justify his political conduct, equally with his religious precepts. Battles were fought, wholesale executions inflicted, and territories annexed, under pretext of the Almighty’s sanction. Nay, even baser actions were not only excused but encouraged, by the pretended divine approval or command .... The student of history will trace for himself how the pure and lofty aspirations of Mahomet were first tinged, and then gradually debased by a half unconscious self-deception, and how in this process truth merged into falsehood, sincerity into guile,—these opposite principles often co-existing even as active agencies in his conduct. The reader will observe that simultaneously with the anxious desire to extinguish idolatry and to promote religion and virtue in the world, there was nurtured by the Prophet in his own heart a licentious self-indulgence; till in the end, assuming to be the favorite of Heaven, he justified himself by ’revelations’ from God in the most flagrant breaches of morality. He will remark that while Mahomet cherished a kind and tender disposition, ’Weeping with them that wept,’ and binding to his person the hearts of his followers by the ready and self-denying offices of love and friendship, he could yet take pleasure in cruel and perfidious assassination, could gloat over the massacre of entire tribes, and savagely consign the innocent babe to the fires of hell. Inconsistencies such as these continually present themselves from the period of Mahomet’s arrival at Medina; and it is by, the study of these inconsistencies that his character must be rightly comprehended. The key, to many difficulties of this description may be found, I believe, in the chapter ’on the belief of Mahomet in his own inspiration.’ When once he had dared to forge the name of the Most High God as the seal and authority of his own words and actions, the germ was laid from which the errors of his after life freely and fatally developed themselves."208

• From Mud Vein (2014)

  I only wrote the book because he wrote one for me. It seemed fair. Most people text, or call, or write e-mails. My love and I write each other books. Hey! Here’s a hundred thousand words of ‘Why the hell did we break up anyway?’ It was Nick who had finally crippled me; it was Nick who took my belief away. And I decided sometime after I filed the restraining order against Isaac that it was a story worth telling. When we broke up it was his choice. Nick liked to love me. I was not like him, and he valued that. I think I made him feel more like an artist because he didn’t know how to suffer until I came into his life. But he didn’t understand me. He tried to change me. And that was our destruction. And then Isaac read that book to me, perched on the edge of my hospital bed, my breasts sitting in a medical waste container somewhere. Suddenly I was hearing Nick’s thoughts, seeing myself as he saw me, and I heard him calling to me. Nick Nissley was perfect. Perfect looking, perfectly flawed, perfect in everything he said. His life was graceful and his words were whetted to poignancy—both written and spoken. But he didn’t mean any of them. And that was the greatest disappointment. He was a pretender, trying to grasp what it felt like to live. So, he found me looking at a lake and grabbed me. Because I wore a shroud of darkness and he wanted desperately to understand what that was like. I was charmed for a while. Charmed that someone so gifted was interested in me. I thought that by being with him, his talent would rub off on me. I was always waiting to see what he would do next. How he would handle the waitress who spilled an entire dish of pumpkin curry on his pants (he took his pants off and ate his meal in boxers); or what he would say to the fan who tracked him down and showed up at his door while we were having sex (he signed her book half leaning out the door with his hair ruffled and a sheet wrapped around his waist). He taught me how to write by simply existing—and existing well. I can’t say for sure when it was that I fell in love with him. It might have been when he told me that I had a mud vein. It might have been days later when I realized it was true. But whatever moment it took for my heart to decide to love him, it decided swiftly, and it decided for me.

• From Going Clear (2013)

  Spectator, Capt. Humbert Reynolds, Rene Lafayette, Winchester Remington Colt, et cetera— accumulating about twenty aliases over the years. He said that when he was writing stories he would simply “roll the pictures” in his mind and write down what he saw as quickly as possible. It was a physical act: he would actually perspire when he wrote. His philosophy was “First draft, last draft, get it out the door.” Ron and Polly’s son, L. Ron Hubbard, Jr., was born prematurely on May 7, 1934, in Encinitas, California, where the couple had gone to vacation. The baby, whom they called Nibs, weighed little more than two pounds at birth. Ron fashioned an incubator out of a cupboard drawer, using a lightbulb to keep it warm, while Polly fed Nibs with an eyedropper. Two years later, in New York City, Polly gave birth to a daughter, Katherine May Hubbard, whom they called Kay. In 1936, the family moved to Bremerton, Washington, near where Ron’s parents were then living, as well as his mother’s family, the Waterburys. They warmly accepted Polly and the kids. Ron was doing well enough to buy a small farm in nearby Port Orchard with a house, five bungalows, a thousand feet of waterfront, and a view of Mount Rainier—“the prettiest place I ever saw in my life,” he wrote to his best friend, Russell Hays, a fellow author of pulps who lived in Kansas. Ron spent much of his time in New York, however, cultivating his professional contacts, and leaving his wife and children for long periods of time. Hubbard pined for Hollywood, in what would be a long-term, unrequited romance. Despite his overtures, he received only “vague offers” from studios for short-term contracts. “I have discarded Hollywood,” he complained to Hays. “I haven’t got enough charm.” But by spring of 1937, Columbia Pictures had finally optioned one of Hubbard’s stories to be folded into a serial, titled The Secret of Treasure Island. Hubbard quickly moved to Hollywood, hoping to finally make it in the movie business. (He later claimed to have worked on a number of films during this time—including the classic films Stagecoach, with John Wayne, and The Plainsman, with Gary Cooper—but he never actually received any film credits other than The Secret of Treasure Island.) By midsummer he had fled back to the farm in Washington, blaming the long hours, tension, and “dumb Jew producers.” Once again, he threw himself into writing the pulps with a fury, but also with a new note of cynicism. “Never write about a character type you cannot find in the magazine for which the story is intended,” he advised Hays. “Never write about an unusual character.”

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  Carefully briefed by the French Institut d’Égypte, he addressed the sheikhs of the Azhar madrassa in Arabic, expressing his deep respect for the Prophet and promising to free Egypt from the oppression of the Ottomans and their Mamluk agents. Accompanying the French army was a corps of scholars, a library of modern European literature, a laboratory, and a printing press with Arabic type. The ulema were not impressed: “All this is nothing but deceit and trickery,” they said, “to entice us.” 86 They were right. Napoleon’s invasion, exploiting Enlightenment scholarship and science to subjugate the region, marked the beginning of Western domination of the Middle East. To many it seemed that the French Revolution had failed. The systemic violence of Napoleon’s empire betrayed revolutionary principles, and Napoleon also reinstated the Catholic Church. For decades the hopes of 1789 were dashed by one disillusioning event after another. The glory days of the fall of the Bastille were followed by the September Massacres, the Reign of Terror, the Vendée genocide, and a military dictatorship. After Napoleon’s fall from power in 1814, Louis XVIII (the brother of Louis XVI) was returned to the throne. But the republican dream refused to die. The republic was revived for two brief periods, during the Hundred Days before Napoleon’s final defeat at Waterloo in 1815 and for a brief period between 1848 and 1852. In 1870 it was restored yet again, this time lasting until it was destroyed by the Nazis in 1940. Instead of seeing the French Revolution as a failure, therefore, we should perhaps see it as the explosive start of a lengthy process. Such massive social and political change overturning millennia of autocracy cannot be achieved overnight. Revolutions take a long time. But unlike several other European countries, where aristocratic regimes were so deeply entrenched that they managed to hang on, albeit in limited form, France eventually achieved its secular republic. We should bear this long-drawn-out and painful process in mind before dismissing as failures revolutions that have taken place in our own time in Iran, Egypt, and Tunisia, for example. The French Revolution may have changed the politics of Europe, but it did not affect the agrarian economy. Modernity came of age in Britain’s Industrial Revolution, which began in the later eighteenth century, though its social effects would not be truly felt until the early nineteenth. 87 It started with the invention of the steam engine, which provided more energy than the country’s entire workforce put together, so the economy grew at an unprecedented rate. It was not long before Germany, France, Japan, and the United States followed Britain’s lead, and all these industrialized countries were forever transformed. To man the new machines, the population had to be mobilized for industry instead of agriculture; economic self-sufficiency now became a thing of the past. The government also began to control the lives of ordinary folk in ways that had been impossible in agrarian society.

• From Mud Vein (2014)

  He looks affronted. I try to soften my face. This isn’t his fault. Or maybe it is. “How did you find me, then?” “The Canadian police put out an APB on her vehicle. She was picked up at the border. She gave us the coordinates to the house where she was keeping you.” “Just like that?” He nods. “I don’t get it.” “The house is on a large portion of land that she owns. Actually, large portion is an understatement. She owns forty thousand acres. Her late husband owned oil wells. He was also a conspiracy theorist. He published some books on Armageddon survival. We think he built the house out there as a result of those theories.” “You know all of that, but you don’t know what she was going to do with me?” “It’s easy to find information that is already there, Ms. Richards. Extracting information from the human mind proves a little more difficult.” Maybe I underestimated soft s Detective Garrison. “My mother…?” I ask. He cocks his head, his eyebrows drawing together. “Never mind.” Perhaps she had no part in this. Perhaps Saphira found her and read her book without ever contacting her. “I want to go home,” I say, suddenly. He nods. “Just a few more days. Bear with us…” [image file=image43.jpg] Nick is waiting for me when my flight lands in Seattle. I knew he would be. He contacted me through e-mail asking when I’d be coming home. He asked if he could be there. I sent him a quick response telling him the day, time, and flight number. When I come down the escalator to baggage claim, he doesn’t see me right away. He looks nervous, which is unusual for him. I hide behind a huge potted plant, and peer at him through the leaves. My muse. My ten years wasted. It used to be that when I saw him my emotions would pitch a fever. I’d feel as if I were tumbling down, down, down, into something deep. Now he just looks like a guy in a trench coat with too much gel in his hair. No, that’s unfair. He looks like a stew pot of memories; his hands are memories, his lips are memories, his body is a memory. But they don’t entrance me like they used to. Either a year of imprisonment has left me more numb, or I’ve outgrown the love of my life. “Where did your glimmer go, Nick?” I say through the plant. I am curious to know if it’s still there. If I’ll burst open the minute we make contact, like some quintessential love story.

• From Mud Vein (2014)

  I see the cover—the words, the oranges and teals that make up the pattern of a woman’s dress. You can only see the back of her, but her arms are spread wide, her blonde hair cascading down her back. The Fall. The fall of my mother. I wonder if she wrote this for me. Is that too much to ask? An explanation for your abandoned daughter … your china doll? My mother is a narcissist. She wrote this for herself, to feel better for leaving me. I flip open the cover and search for a picture on the dust jacket. There is none. I wonder if she’s still pretty. If she still wears flower skirts and headbands. She writes under the name Cecily Crowe. I grin. Her real name was Sarah Marsh. She hated the normalcy of it. Cecily Crowe lives everywhere. She does not believe in dogs or cats. This is her first novel, and probably her last. I close the book; slide it back into the space it came from. I have no desire to read it again, not even in order with page numbers. I got to know my mother in a discombobulated way. I am her china doll. She mourned me a little, but not enough. I can’t fault her for running—I’ve been running my entire life; bad blood, maybe. Or maybe she taught me, and someone taught her. I don’t know. We can’t blame our parents for everything. I don’t think I care anymore. It’s just the way it is. I walk out of the store. I put her to rest. [image file=image45.jpg] Three months after I get home, I drive to the hospital to see Isaac. I don’t know if he wants to see me. He hasn’t tried to contact me since I’ve been back. It hurts after the emotional violence we experienced together, but it’s not like I tried to contact him either. I wonder if he told Daphne everything. Maybe that’s why… I don’t know what to say. What to feel. Relief because we both survived? Do we talk about what happened? I miss him. Sometimes I wish we could go back, and that’s just sick. I feel as if I have Stockholm Syndrome, but not for a person—for a house in the snow. I pull into a space and sit in my car for at least an hour, picking at the rubber on the steering wheel. I called ahead, so I know he’s here. I don’t know what it’s going to feel like to see him. I held his body while he was dying. He held mine. We survived something together. How do you stand back and shake someone’s hand in the real world when you were clutched together in a nightmare? I fling open my car door and it cracks against the side of an already beat up minivan. “Sorry,” I tell it, before stepping away.