Disappointment

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  Piety, conscience, and ultimate happiness are important, but not nearly as important as Jesus himself. You see, the reason Jesus wasn’t the sort of king people had wanted in his own day is—to anticipate our conclusion—that he was the true king, but they had become used to the ordinary, shabby, second-rate sort. They were looking for a builder to construct the home they thought they wanted, but he was the architect, coming with a new plan that would give them everything they needed, but within quite a new framework. They were looking for a singer to sing the song they had been humming for a long time, but he was the composer, bringing them a new song to which the old songs they knew would form, at best, the background music. He was the king, all right, but he had come to redefine kingship itself around his own work, his own mission, his own fate. It is time, I believe, to recognize not only who Jesus was in his own day, despite his contemporaries’ failure to recognize him, but also who he is, and will be, for our own. “He came to what was his own,” wrote one of his greatest early followers, “and his own people did not accept him” (John 1:11). That puzzle continues. Perhaps, indeed, it has been the same in our own day. Perhaps even “his own people”—this time not the Jewish people of the first century, but the would-be Christian people of the Western world—have not been ready to recognize Jesus himself. We want a “religious” leader, not a king! We want someone to save our souls, not rule our world! Or, if we want a king, someone to take charge of our world, what we want is someone to implement the policies we already embrace, just as Jesus’s contemporaries did. But if Christians don’t get Jesus right, what chance is there that other people will bother much with him? This book is written in the belief that the question of Jesus—who he really was, what he really did, what it means, and why it matters— remains hugely important in every area, not only in personal life, but also in political life, not only in “religion” or “spirituality,” but also in such spheres of human endeavor as worldview, culture, justice, beauty, ecology, friendship, scholarship, and sex. You may be relieved, or perhaps disappointed, to know that we won’t have space to address all of these. What we will try to do is to look, simply and clearly, at Jesus himself, in the hope that a fresh glimpse of him will enable us to gain a new perspective on everything else as well.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

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

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  For what it’s worth, my long-lasting impression is that the “Jesus” who gets caught in the cross fire of these cultural wars may be considerably less than the Jesus we actually find in the pages of the early Christian writings—and in real, first-century history itself. After all, just as it’s quite possible for skeptics to be mistaken, so it’s quite possible, as church history shows in plenty, for devout Jesus-followers to be mistaken as well. It is vital to look again at Jesus himself. Two Jesus Myths There are, then, two myths that swirl around our heads, around the churches, around the TV studios, and around the editorial offices of newsmagazines. Let’s name them even more clearly and, to some extent, shame them, so we can be clear about the present confusions before we turn to the equally confusing world of the first century. We’ll take them in the reverse order this time. First, the high-pressure system of conservative Christianity. Here we find the classic Western Christian myth about Jesus, which is still believed by millions around the world. In this myth, a supernatural being called “God” has a supernatural “son” whom he sends, virgin-born, into our world, despite the fact that it’s not his natural habitat, so that he can rescue people out of this world by dying in their place. As a sign of his otherwise secret divine identity, this “son” does all kinds of extraordinary and otherwise impossible “miracles,” crowning them all by rising from the dead and returning to “heaven,” where he waits to welcome his faithful followers after their deaths. In the Catholic version of this classic Western myth, Jesus calls his close friend Peter to found the church; anyone who wants to be with Jesus, here or hereafter, must join Peter’s movement. In the Protestant version, Jesus commissions his followers to write the New Testament, which reveals the absolute truth about Jesus and, once more, how to get to heaven. (Already I hear that wind getting up. “What d’you mean it’s a myth? Don’t you believe that? Are you one of those dangerous liberals after all? Aren’t you a bishop?” Okay, okay, I hear you. Please wait. Patience is a Christian virtue.)

• From The Fermata (1994)

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

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

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

• From The Fermata (1994)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  As its title suggests, this second volume attempted to tell the story of my return to secular life. But it was far too soon to write about those years, which had been extremely painful, even traumatic. I had scarcely begun to recover and was certainly not ready to see this phase of my life in perspective. Yet there was another reason for the failure of Beginning the World. At almost the exact moment when I sent the manuscript off to the publishers, my life changed completely in a most unexpected way. I started on an entirely new course, which took me off in a direction that I never could have anticipated. As a result, the years 1969 to 1982, which I had tried to describe in this memoir, took on a wholly different meaning. In that first, ill-conceived sequel, I had tried to show that I had put the convent completely behind me, had erased the damage and completed the difficult rite of passage to a wholly secular existence: I had indeed “begun the world.” But I had done no such thing. As I am going to try to show this time around, I have never managed to integrate fully with “the world,” although I have certainly tried to do so. Despite my best endeavors, I have in several important ways remained an outsider. I was much closer to the truth at the end of Through the Narrow Gate, when I predicted that I would in some sense be a nun all my life. Of course, it is true that in superficial ways, my present life is light-years away from my convent experience. I have dear friends, a pretty house, and money. I travel, have a lot of fun, and enjoy the good things of life. Nothing nunnish about any of this. But although I tried a number of different careers, doors continually slammed in my face until I settled down to my present solitary existence, writing, thinking, and talking almost all day and every day about God, religion, and spirituality. In this book I have tried to show how this came about and what it has meant.

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

  It was hot, inconvenient, and unhygienic. But the modern dress gave the nuns greater freedom of movement, and I noticed that some of them fidgeted in their pews, as though the imposed stillness had become more of a strain. Or—and this was an arresting thought—perhaps I had not been the only one who had had difficulties with prayer. The next morning, I knelt with a few other seculars in the chapel for Mass, which was now said facing the people, in accordance with the directives of the Vatican Council. When the nuns processed up the aisle to receive Communion, I glanced at Rebecca and felt the shock as acutely as though I were seeing her emaciated frame for the first time. The whole decorous structure of the convent suddenly seemed a sham. The nuns who gathered together around the altar seemed an image of prayerful community, and yet they were allowing one of their number to waste away before their very eyes. They might have comfortable chairs in the community room and take more frequent baths, but the old attitudes were still in place. How could women who had spent thirty or forty years in the religious life and been even more indelibly shaped by the old system than I change overnight? No, I told myself as I watched them file back to their seats, their eyes cast down and their gaze directed inward, it was no good looking back with nostalgia. When the world outside seemed baffling, I sometimes felt homesick for a way of life that, with all its shortcomings, was at least familiar, just as I had instinctively relaxed when I had walked into the convent yesterday. I could only move forward, however difficult that might seem. “Karen, my dear, how very nice to see you.” I looked up from my breakfast, which I was enjoying in the elegant parlor. How odd it was to be waited on in this way, as I had so often waited on visitors, bringing in coffee, toast, and eggs, while a few hundred yards away the community were eating cornflakes, bread, and margarine. There were some advantages to secular life, I reflected, helping myself to more marmalade but hastily suppressing my involuntary smile of enjoyment when Mother Frances came into the room. She looked somewhat less imposing in her new habit, but she had recently been promoted to become one of the provincial councillors. “But I’m interrupting your breakfast.”

• From The Fermata (1994)

  “I understand—let’s not belabor it. My only regret is that the imaging system couldn’t quite keep up with you and I had to keep telling you to slow down. I hope you had an okay orgasm even so?” “Oh, it was a dandy. No, that was fine that you told me to slow down—slow is good.” She told me that I could set up an appointment with her in several weeks to go over the nerve-profiles. “But from what I saw on the monitors, I would suggest that you switch to your left hand if you want to get rid of your carpal-tunnel problem.” “I’ll begin tomorrow,” I said. “Thank you, doctor.” I couldn’t quite say “Susan” at this point. “Thank you for taking part,” she said. We shook hands. Then, smiling, she snapped her fingers. “Just like that?” “Right, just like that,” I said, pleased. I snapped my fingers for her, and while she stood fixedly, still in the midst of her good-natured, faintly flirtatious leave-taking smile, I kissed her name-tag and removed the white Post-It note from inside her bra. It would only have perplexed and disturbed her to discover it stuck to her breast (that soft, heavy, somewhat sticky breast) that evening. And what if she took off her bra in front of her husband, and he noticed it there before she did—a note saying THANKS on her breast? It would have caused needless suffering. To recuperate from the experiment, I spent the next five days snapped into the Fold reading Louisa May Alcott; I didn’t go near a computer keyboard or my penis the whole time. My wrist pain, which at first was so bad I could barely open a piece of junk mail, moderated considerably. I borrowed a friend’s Hermes manual portable and used it to do some of my creative rotting; the deeper keystrokes were, as Dr. Orowitz-Rudman had suggested, a kind of physical therapy. And I did briefly try to teach myself to jack ambidickstrously, but I failed: my left hand simply did not feel good enough. After a month, I called Dr. Orowitz-Rudman to schedule a follow-up visit. She called me back that evening. I told her that my wrist was doing a lot better, thanks to her. I asked her how the motion studies were going, and she said they were going well. “We’ve decided to focus on keyboard problems for now, though,” she said. “Oh? But what about—other obvious causes? You were so enthusiastic. You were so—forgive the jargon—sex-positive.” I couldn’t help sounding slightly disappointed. “We established the link informally and that’s as far as we can take it for the time being,” she said. “I want to concentrate on keyboard-related injuries for right now.” “I knew it,” I said sadly. “I was too talkative in the magnet.”

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

  And I was also determined not to fall into the trap of making the book merely a clever, shallow rebuttal of God’s existence. That would be not only boring and predictable, but also inappropriate. This could not be a wholly cerebral book, because images of God had, surely, much to tell us about the pathos of human aspiration. Nobody thought much of the idea, however, and it was a long time before my new agent found a publisher. “It can’t be done,” said one of the editors who saw my synopsis. “It’s impossible to condense such a huge idea into a single volume.” “Who’s going to read it?” asked another. “Religious people won’t want to hear that their God is on a par with the gods of other faiths, and unbelievers won’t be interested.” “It’s so religious!” sighed a friend who worked in one of the houses that had rejected the book. “Karen, don’t write this book now! You need to do something more mainstream.” More secular, she meant. “You read English at college. Perhaps you could do something literary? A new biography of Fanny Burney or George Eliot.” “What about a travel book?” Charlotte asked. “You enjoyed the travel you did with the Israelis, didn’t you? Why not go on a journey to somewhere important. Japan, for instance. What about a look at modern Japan?” Anything, it seemed, would be better than God. This was sensible advice. After all, I wasn’t a believer, so why let my career be hamstrung by this religious stuff? The book on the Crusades had been a disaster and the dismal sales figures would not endear me to a future publisher. Better to make it clear that I had turned over a new leaf and abjured my unprofitable past. Yet despite the lack of encouragement, I refused to relinquish the project. Why? It was not as though I were passionately in love with the subject. I had rarely read a book about God that was not, at least in part, abstract and dull. Why should my own be any different? I had no training in philosophy or metaphysics, and might write something hopelessly naïve. And why go on producing religious books in Britain, where only about 6 percent of the population attended a service on a regular basis? It seemed a doomed and even a self-destructive project. Many found the very idea hilarious. “Hi, Karen—how’s God?” they would ask, as though inquiring about a mutual acquaintance. Others raised their eyebrows in mild disapproval. “Do you think you can find anything new to say? Do we really need yet another book about God?”

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

  I had told the headmistress about the book, of course, and promised that I would confine my writing to the school holidays and weekends, so that it did not detract from my schoolwork. She had smiled and wished me luck. I see now that she probably expected the book to creep humbly into the back of the book-stores, gain a couple of kind notices in some obscure religious journals, and die an early death. That did not happen. June had sold the serial rights to a tabloid newspaper, which had also run a big interview with me, complete with photographs, in the Sunday edition. There were more profiles and photographs in some of the women’s magazines, and I had appeared on several radio and television programs. The children were agog, arriving in school each day brandishing copies of the Express and looking at me with new eyes. I was no longer just a boring teacher who nagged them about their punctuation, but had suddenly acquired celebrity status and had a kinky past. Of course, it was only a nine days’ wonder, and by the time I received my quietus from the school, the excitement had long subsided. The head had never remonstrated with me about the fuss, but she did not need to. A grim air of disapproval and reserve had made her position quite clear. This kind of notoriety was not what she expected from her staff. I myself had doubts about the wisdom of this publicity. Writing Through the Narrow Gate had been an act of restoration and self-discovery. It had redeemed the time I had spent in the religious life and set it in proper perspective. As I had unearthed more and more layers of the experience, I had felt that I was reclaiming my past. But now my inner journey had become a sensational story in the popular press. Any subtlety that the book might have had had been lost in the Express’s abridgement, especially when the newspaper text was punctuated with such subheadings as WHIP, TEARS, ANGUISH, and BLOOD. When I had written the last pages of Through the Narrow Gate, I had realized that those years had probably been the most significant of my life; they had changed me forever. I might have lost my faith, I could no longer believe in God or the doctrines of the church, but I still longed for the sense of heightened intensity and transcendence that the convent had promised to give me. Was I still a nun, living in the world and yearning for a deity that did not exist?

• From The Fermata (1994)

  She hadn’t liked it. How very sad and disappointing. Had she listened to all of it and then decided she didn’t like it, or had she hated it so much that she had tossed it halfway through? I pushed up on my glasses and checked her car stereo: yes, Suzanne Vega was back in place. Nor were Adele’s nipples noticeably erect under her pink floral sweater. Was she made of stone? Imagine her chucking my cassette right out the window! Hours and hours of work, all custom joinery, all for her, dismissed. Of course I had said that she should feel free to do that, but still, I hadn’t expected her to do it. My pride was hurt. I paced around in the tall grass where I thought I had seen the tape land, but I couldn’t find it. And I didn’t want to spend much time out of the car, because the grass I walked in had the same disturbingly blurred quality that the road had—I felt I would inflict some rending injury to the network of cosmic wormholes if I walked on the median strip for too long. I started up time and drove slowly, until Adele was way ahead of me. At the next exit, I turned around and drove home. When I woke up the next morning, my Fold-powers were gone. [image file=image_rsrc1BH.jpg] 16THE WEEK FOLLOWING MY FAILED DRIVE, I WORKED FIFTEEN hours of overtime at a consulting firm. I was bothered by a persistent tingly feeling in the base of my right palm and increasing pain in my forearm. I needed at least a week off from typing, but because my Fermatal visitation-rights were now denied, I didn’t get one. What was clearly a carpal-tunnel problem got quite bad over the next several months. An over-the-counter wrist brace didn’t fit properly and made the pain worse. I was able to alleviate the symptoms a little by sleeping with my arm embracing a spare pillow. After a particularly trying stint typing an eighty-page price list, I went to Commonhealth and saw several nurse practitioners and doctors. Each of them tapped the inside of my wrist hard and asked what it felt like. Every diagnostic tap further injured the nerve, it seemed to me. I went up the chain of specialists until I reached the in-house repetitive-motion expert, Dr. Susan Orowitz-Rudman, a short cheerful woman of forty. I told her that I was a career temp and that I really had to be able to continue using the keyboard. She was full of ideas and theories. I found her hyphenated name powerfully attractive.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  Jie holds the broomstick and I hold the radio. The copper wire wraps around both ends of the broomstick and the radio is taped to one end, the hair-clump of extra wire dragging on the ground like a tail. Jie switches the radio to AM and the morning news sounds like someone getting strangled, all static, a sound like the sea muffled inside our mouths. We discipline the dirt. Rake into rows and follow along. I warm the radio on my skin while it announces the weather: the sky cussing rain at us in the afternoon, more rain tomorrow morning. Jie skims the soil with the broomstick, sweeping its splintered end in half-circles, shushing me even though I’m not talking. When we’re near metal, the radio will whine with another voice, a song in gold’s frequency. I hear nothing until the static sours into something higher and raspier, almost Ma’s voice. Jie says, Dig here. We’re on a square of land where shadows don’t seem to survive. We dig with our bare hands, but we’re only a fist deep when we find an old lawnmower blade. The radio sings in three more spots, but the quicker we dig, the sooner we surrender to our suspicions: that the gold’s gone. In its place: five spent bullets, a dog whistle, a saw blade, some pennies, a bike chain, a whisk, a blank dog tag. The bullets glisten like dog eyes and my toes remember when they were shot, their ache outdated and residing in my spine. Jie finds and adds two more bullets to our metal shitpile. We’ve never seen the gold ourselves, and neither of us says it, but we know there is nothing here. The radio’s still tuned in to the soil’s soprano, the static louder where we’ve dug up nothing but the dark. Jie throws down the broomstick, stomps on it with both feet. It breaks easy as bone. I hope there’s really nothing to find, Jie says, though I disagree. I think it’s better to have something to lose, even if the gold’s now archived with the bones and the bullets. But Jie says the gold is better off buried, womb-safe, our lives spent waiting for its birth. Jie and I rebury everything we find. It feels like we’ve disturbed a cemetery, rifling through lives that aren’t ours to remember. I keep the blank dog tag and promise to carve it a name worth carrying home. _ We find Ba in the bedroom, bellydown on the mattress, his face so glossed with spit he looks candied. While he’s asleep, Jie says, we should detect for metals in his body. Maybe the gold is still buried inside him.

• From Wild (2012)

  “That’s what the Australians told me. Did you ever meet them?” I shook my head. “They’re a married couple on their honeymoon. They decided to ditch the PCT too. They took off to go hike the AT instead.” It was only once I’d decided to hike the PCT that I learned about the AT—the Appalachian Trail, the far more popular and developed cousin of the PCT. Both were designated national scenic trails in 1968. The AT is 2,175 miles long, approximately 500 miles shorter than the PCT, and follows the crest of the Appalachian Mountains from Georgia to Maine. “Did Greg go to the AT too?” I squeaked. “Nah. He didn’t want to keep missing so much of the trail, doing all these bypasses and taking alternate routes, so he’s coming back to hike it next year instead. That’s what the Australians told me, anyway.” “Wow,” I said, feeling sick at the news. Greg had been a talisman for me since the day I met him in the very hour I’d decided to quit. He’d believed that if he could do this, I could too, and now he was gone. So were the Australians, a pair I’d never met, but a picture of them formed instantly in my mind anyway. I knew without knowing that they were buff and Amazonian, dazzlingly fit for the rugged outdoors by virtue of their Australian blood in ways I would never be. “Why aren’t you going to hike the AT instead?” I asked, worried he’d reveal that in fact he was. He thought about it for a while. “Too much traffic,” he said. He continued looking at me, at Bob Marley’s face so big on my chest, as if he had more to say. “That’s a seriously awesome shirt, by the way.”