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 While You Were Out (2023)

  She was in eighth grade and starting to get into trouble at school, ditching class, drinking gin that she would sneak out of the house in glass peanut butter jars, and smoking cigarettes in Gillson Park. One Saturday afternoon, Nancy was arrested for shoplifting a tube of lip gloss at the Montgomery Ward department store in Old Orchard Shopping Center. Now this. Was she really trying to die or just faking it to get out of trouble? My parents took her to see my mother’s psychiatrist up in Lake Forest. Grandma thought that was about the stupidest thing she’d ever heard. There’s nothing really wrong with that girl, Grandma declared from her breakfast room perch. It’s all in her head. I was inclined to agree. After all, I wasn’t really trying to hurt myself by cutting my eye. We all faked being sick at one time or another to get more attention or wiggle out of having to go to school. Some dupes were easy to spot. When he was in second grade, Danny declared that he needed to stay home because he had menstrual cramps. Nancy’s little pill-swallowing routine looked like nothing more than a little histrionics to me. A FUNGAL INFECTION THAT killed many of the stately elms of Europe made its way across the Atlantic Ocean in the late 1920s and began spreading west at about the time that we were growing up. By the early 1970s, Dutch elm disease had ravaged the forest cover of Chicago and would go on to claim more than forty million trees nationwide. Day after day, crews of tree cutters would rumble down our redbrick street with their chain saws. The motors growled and sawdust flew as they ripped holes in the sky. Before long, the leafy cathedral that framed Greenwood Avenue was destroyed. The sun beat down during the day, singeing our Wiffle ball field. At night, the streetlights, once filtered by branches of elms, now glared through the panes with a harshness that made me feel uneasy and exposed. I’d lie at the foot of my bed and stare out the window, squinting as though someone were shining a flashlight right at me, trying to coax some kind of confession out of me. People began disappearing, too. A teenage boy across the street ran away from home after getting into a fight with his father. I’d look out my bedroom window toward his house and wonder where he was sleeping that night. How did he find food to eat? Several weeks later, we heard he was in California trying to break into show business and that he almost got picked for the role of Robin in the TV show Batman . After a lady down the block suffered her fifth miscarriage, she checked into a mental institution somewhere on the East Coast, and we never saw her again. No explanation. She was just gone, the way my mother had sometimes disappeared years earlier.

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  superior to that of Englishmen. But the truth lay in an ability to work collectively, a desire to understand and appreciate the demands of subsistence farming—a commitment to long-term survival in a sparsely settled colony. Many English settlers were unwilling to work hard, because they lacked any background in farming. Apothecaries, cheese mongers, tinkers, wig makers, and weavers abounded. There were too few who could cultivate the soil. Patrick Tailfer, who drafted one of the petitions in support of slaveholding, refused to cultivate a single acre of the land he had been granted. 51 We should make clear that Oglethorpe was not a modern egalitarian. He did not imagine his colony as a multiracial community, nor did he surmount common prejudices with respect to Africans. He permitted there to be a small number of Indian slaves in the colony. His plan centered on class: he restricted slavery principally because he believed it would shift the balance of class power in Georgia and “starve the poor white laborer.” In the larger scheme of things, his reform philosophy recognized that weak and desperate men could be led to choose a path that dictated against their own interests. A man might sell his land for a glass of rum; debt and idleness were always a temptation. 52 Despite his good intentions, the colony failed to eliminate all class divisions. In addition to the fifty acres allotted to charity cases, settlers who paid their own way might be granted as many as five hundred acres. They were expected to employ between four and ten servants. But five hundred acres was the maximum limit for freeholders. The trustees wanted settlers to occupy the land, not to speculate in land. Absentee landholders were not welcome. Georgia also instituted a policy of keeping the land “tail-male,” which meant that land descended to the eldest male child. This feudal rule bound men to their families. The tail-male provision protected heirs whose poor fathers might otherwise feel pressure to sell their land. 53 Many settlers disliked the practice. Hardworking families worried about the fate of their unmarried daughters, who might be left with nothing. One such complaint came from Reverend Dumont, a leader of French Protestants interested in migrating to Georgia. What would happen to widows “too old to marry or beget children,” he asked. And how could daughters survive, especially those “unfit for Marriage, either by Sickness or Evil Construction of their Body”? 54 Dumont’s questions went to the core of Oglethorpe’s and the trustees’ philosophy. Young widows and daughters were seen as breeders of the next generation of free white laborers. Georgia’s policy was to nurture the natural

• From Cults Inside Out: How People Get In and Can Get Out (2014)

  Scientologists like Hayes, however, appeared to see any change as an unwanted aberration. For example, Hubbard posited the theory that toxins are indefinitely held in the fatty tissues of the body. I pointed out that science has proved Hubbard wrong.964 Yet Scientologists who support the Scientology-linked drug rehabilitation and education program, known as Narconon, refuse to accept this scientific fact. They will not accept that L Ron Hubbard was wrong. We discussed this issue during the third day. After all, Hubbard wasn’t a doctor or a scientist but rather a science fiction writer without a college degree. Isn’t it possible that such a man, writing decades ago, got some things wrong? For example, there is now new research regarding the brain and its chemistry. In the 1950s Hubbard wasn’t aware of this—that is, scientific research hadn’t yet been done. How could Scientology be scientific if it isn’t subject to new discoveries and research? How could it “meet science” without critical questioning or change? As we watched the A&E investigative report, other issues came up. A Scientologist tried to explain the cost of courses and training. He said, “Donations are requested.” I asked the husband whether this statement was disingenuous; that is, Scientology has specific pricing for its courses and services, and they are not simply paid by “donations.” He agreed and was aware of the prices set for services; he saw that the word donation was misleading. At another point during the A&E program, the practice of “disconnection” was discussed. Disconnection is the process in Scientology that provides for the official shunning of declared or designated people outside the organization. Scientologists are expected to cease association and communication with people who have been declared “suppressive persons” (SPs). During the A&E program Mike Rinder, then an official spokesperson for Scientology, claimed that those people declared for disconnection were “antagonistic.” Ironically Rinder himself would years later leave Scientology, be declared an SP, and be subject to disconnection. I asked the husband whether in his experience everyone who went through disconnection had demonstrated that he or she was somehow antagonistic. He responded that not everyone declared that he knew had been antagonistic regarding Scientology or Scientologists. Many had simply opted to leave or discontinue their involvement with Scientology, and subsequently they had been declared SPs. We concurred on this point, then reviewed news reports about former Scientologists and affected families, who claimed Scientology had cut them off.965 Many complained about the lack of meaningful communication from loved ones in the Sea Organization. We continued to watch the A&E report, which served to frame other issues. At one point Isaac Hayes said, “The more you know, the less likely you are to be victimized.” Hayes meant that people should learn more about Scientology. But couldn’t this concept be applicable to almost anything? I asked the husband whether this principle might be applied to our current discussion about Scientology. He agreed. Another day was ending.

• From The Whole Lesbian Sex Book: A Passionate Guide for All of Us (2004)

  7. Stop being lazy about sex.You’ve probably been getting each other off the same way for years. You touch her; she touches you. You lick her; she licks you. Your fist goes in her vagina; her dildo goes in your anus. Over and over, year after year. Even a great program loses something in reruns. Next time you hop in the sack, declare your usual sexual activities off-limits. Unplug that tired old toy—or get a new one. 8. Try something different. If your sex play is exclusively genitally focused, take turns giving each other full-body massages. Try this exercise: Sit facing each other on the bed. Breathe in synch. Run your fingers along her face and neck. Or caress her hands. When was the last time you attended to your partner’s body nonsexually? Describe what you’re seeing and feeling. Offer her your appreciation. Take turns. 9. Switch. After all these years of being the top, have you secretly wanted to throw your heels in the air? Or have you nurtured a secret fantasy of giving your aggressive girlfriend a taste of her own medicine? ‘Fess up, now! 10. Talk—to your partner. Sure, your best friend can recite your marital disappointments blow for blow. But have you talked with your partner about your sexual frustrations? Are you afraid that if you tell her your complaints, she’ll tell you hers, and you’ll realize you’re not so happy after all, and soon you’ll be down $90 a week for couples counseling—forget that trip to London—and besides, you’ll just break up anyway…. Whew! Talk to your partner;tell her your erotic hopes and dreams. 11. Speak in positives; don’t dump. Unless you’ve negotiated a humiliation scene, telling your lover of six years that she bores you is not likely to improve your sex life! Remind her how much you love her.Tell her you’d like to have the sex life of your dreams—with her. Be specific. Know what you want and ask for it. (See chapter 7, Communication and Finding Sex Partners, for hints.) 12. Don’t assume you know what she likes, either. Ask. Then listen. 13. Be blissfully wedded…novices. Pick a sexual activity neither of you has ever done—and do it. Never played with anal beads? Rope bondage? Attended a live erotic performance? Have you thought of cross-dressing? 14. Find a role model. Whether in a self-help book or on your dyke rugby team, find someone who’s in an intimate relationship and has hot sex. Get details! 15. Face your demons. Bet this isn’t the first time your desire has fizzled out on a lover. If so, you’re not alone! Many people find intimate relationships daunting. Why does closeness snuff out your desire? Why do you want to bolt before the ink is dry on the rental agreement? Finding the answers will require some soul-searching, and maybe some help. Do you want an intimate sex life—really? You may have to work very hard to achieve that, but the results can pay off, big-time.

• From Boys & Sex (2020)

  Unfortunately, so-called comprehensive sex ed is not necessarily much better, focused solely on averting disaster: avoiding pregnancy and preventing disease. Fewer than half of high schools and only a fifth of middle schools teach all of the sixteen topics the Centers for Disease Control considers to be essential, such as creating and sustaining respectful relationships; understanding the influence of media, peers, and family; and developing communication and sexual decision-making skills. Note that list does not include understanding consent; only ten states require that, if taught at all, sex education include any discussion of the issue. One of them is California, but in my local high school that has meant a single class period conducted in ninth grade by an outside educator; when I asked a group of my daughter’s friends about its content a year later, none could remember any specifics. We have arrived at this precarious state because the forces that want to ban positive, thorough sexuality education—among them parents who place ideology over their children’s health—are typically more vocal than its supporters. That may reflect, in part, an ambivalence even among progressives, a lingering belief that talking to teenagers about sex gives them license to engage (and, conversely, that if we avoid the topic, they will somehow not find out about it). That, it should be obvious by now, is a myth: decades of research have made clear that talking to children about sex does not reduce the age at which they start. Our teens are in urgent need of high-quality human development courses. Until those exist, relying on school sex education is a risky bet. And that means unless caring adults step up—parents, physicians, youth advocates, faith leaders, coaches—the default educator will be the media; it is impossible for me to believe that we would be so cavalier, so indifferent to any other aspect of children’s development that was so integral to their safety, futures, and well-being.

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  process of “propagation,” as Oglethorpe declared in one of his promotional tracts. His grand plan was to ensure that English and other Protestants would quickly outnumber the French and Spanish in North America. The war against the rival Catholic colonial powers was, at length, a battle of numbers. Georgia had to have enough free white men to field its armies, and it had to benefit from a reproductive advantage, winning the demographic war as well. 55 Alas, Oglethorpe was fighting a losing battle. Many of the men demanding slaves were promised credit to buy slaves from South Carolinian traders. Slaves were a lure, dangled before poorer men in order to persuade them to put up their land as collateral. That is why Oglethorpe believed that a slave economy would have the effect of depriving vulnerable settlers of their land. Keeping out slavery went hand in hand with preserving a more equitable distribution of land. If the colony allowed settlers to have “fee simple” land titles (so they could sell their land at will), large-scale planters would surely come to dominate. He predicted in 1739 that, left to their own devices, the “Negro Merchants” would gain control of “all the lands in the Colony,” leaving nothing for “all the laboring poor white Men.” 56 German Lutherans, who established a community in 1734, also saw the dangers of Georgia becoming like South Carolina. Without encouragement from Oglethorpe, Reverend Bolzius of their contingent observed that “a Common white Laborer in Charles Town” earned no greater wage than “a Negroe.” Africans were encouraged to “breed like animals,” and slaveowners would do everything possible to increase their stock. Merchants and other gentlemen hoarded the best land near the coast or along the commercial rivers, and poorer men were forced to possess remote, less desirable land. South Carolina was a poor white family’s worst nightmare. 57 Oglethorpe left the colony in 1743, never to return. Three years earlier, a soldier had attempted to murder him, the musket ball tearing through his wig. He survived, but his dream for Georgia died. Over the next decade, land tenure policies were lifted, rum was allowed to flow freely, and slaves were sold surreptitiously. In 1750, settlers were formally granted the right to own slaves. 58 A planter elite quickly formed, principally among transplants from the West Indies and South Carolina. By 1788, Carolinian Jonathan Bryan was the most powerful man in Georgia, with thirty-two thousand acres and 250 slaves. He set up shop there in 1750, the very year slavery was made legal, and his numerous slaves entitled him to large tracts of lands. But to build his empire he had to pull the strings of Georgia’s Executive Council, whose chief duty was distributing

• From The Whole Lesbian Sex Book: A Passionate Guide for All of Us (2004)

  Believing that loss of sexual desire is inevitable—which is what we have been told to expect3—discourages us from trying to do anything about it. That gives our sexual relationships a quality of resignation. This belief also makes it hard to maintain loving relationships—monogamous or polyamorous—since most of us would rather not have to choose between an active sex life and a stable love life. None of this, by the way, is any more true for lesbians than it is for heterosexual or gay male couples. “My view is that my lesbian clients who come in complaining of reduced sexual interaction are experiencing real life,” writes lesbian sex researcher and therapist Suzanne Iasenza. “[N]ot unlike their heterosexual brothers and sisters, and gay brothers, the women met, fell in love and created a life together. Their work and family lives developed and demanded attention and energy, sometimes at the cost of quality intimate time together.” Iasenza goes on to say that a “careful” reading of sex research “provides little evidence that lesbian sexuality is less active or less fulfilling than gay or heterosexual sex.” 4 Real life need not doom us to a sexless existence. We can have thriving sex lives. Regardless of the demands we face, we can have fully realized, rich sexual partnerships. With as much sex as we can handle, many of us are not complaining. So, if it’s possible to maintain a vibrant partnered sex life, how do you do it? You make it happen. You bring intention (followed by action) to your sex life. You replace resignation (“We’ve been together ten years—we’re lucky we have sex once a month”) with curiosity (“What would it be like if we decided to have sex twice a month?”). You prioritize your shared erotic life with your partner—with each of your partners, if you have more than one. And you define what that means, which will be particular to each partnership. That means doing some work. Don’t Complain, CollaborateWe talked about how much sex we wanted in our relationship. I had never really ever thought about it. For the first time, I was able to figure out in myself what I wanted/needed in a sexual relationship, and my girlfriend encouraged me to share this with her. The outcome was amazingness. Your sexual satisfaction is your personal responsibility. Don’t just react to what you think is wrong with the sex you are having—or not having—with your current partner. If you only attempt to fix what’s wrong, you’ll end up with a sex life that is shaped by your disappointments, past and present. Make sure you know what you want in a sexual partnership—not just what you don’t want. Ask your partner to do her homework, too. What would she put on her Yes/No/Maybe list? What are her sexual standards for satisfaction? You may find that your partner is also not getting what she wants. Or that what she wants is very different from what you want.

• From Boys & Sex (2020)

  Guys in my interviews were less likely than girls to express anger, betrayal, resentment, or feelings of being “used” in hookups. That’s partly because hookup culture aligns with the values of conventional masculinity: conquest over connection, sex as status-seeking, partners as disposable. While I’ve met both male and female students who embrace (or reject) that philosophy, it tended to ultimately advantage boys, an extension of the myriad small, unchallenged ways—in the locker room, in pop culture, in social media, in porn, from their friends, from their own fathers—they learn to see sex as impersonal and female bodies as vehicles for their own gratification. At one end of the spectrum, that sense of entitlement can justify assault, whether premeditated or spontaneous, acknowledged or not. At the other, it typically means indifference toward a female partner’s pleasure in a hookup. The Online College Social Life Survey found that between 29 and 53 percent of girls climaxed in their most recent hookup (depending on the combination of acts involved), as opposed to between 56 and 81 percent of boys. That orgasm gap shrinks markedly in relationships, a difference attributed to a combination of familiarity, better communication, sobriety, and—significantly—emotional investment on the male partner’s part. In the words of one guy, “It sounds bad, but in a one-time thing, I don’t really care.” Lisa Wade found that, whether consciously or not, boys signaled a partner’s lack of value to them by denying her orgasm and the activities that would most likely produce it (though, at the same time, guys also overestimate women’s orgasms in hookups by a third to a half, either out of ego, ignorance, or because the girl faked it). I recalled talking to a high school senior who broke down in tears while telling me that his girlfriend almost never went down on him. “She thinks it’s dirty and gross and talks about how it tastes bad,” he said. My heart went out to him, it did, especially when he said her rejection made him feel uncared for, unloved. But there was also part of me that recognized the right men feel to sexual pleasure, how dejected and even potentially angry they become when denied it. After all, I thought to myself, you know what an eighteen-year-old girl would call it if a guy wouldn’t go down on her? Normal. There’s even some suggestion that, although hookups are explicitly meant to be devoid of feeling, guys in college use them in part to experience emotional closeness, in however attenuated or fleeting a fashion. If that’s true, the differential between the sexes in those encounters is even bigger than previously thought: guys derive both physical and emotional satisfaction from hookups, while girls generally experience neither.

• From The Erotic Mind (1995)

  Then, of course, there are the couples—nobody knows how many—who go through the motions out of a sense of duty, though they receive minimal pleasure from it. They view sex as necessary maintenance, like doing laundry or grocery shopping. Some of us might consider this an unacceptable solution to sexual boredom, but for many couples it works. Most of what I know about long-term couples I’ve learned while doing therapy with individuals who discussed their relationships or in joint sessions with both partners. Of course, it’s useful to hear about the sexual concerns that motivate people to seek help, but it’s especially valuable to see how couples face their problems and take effective actions to make things better. I’ve also been enlightened by working with couples who entered therapy because of nonsexual problems. Lots of couples maintain active and apparently satisfying sex lives in spite of chronic disagreements and fights. In a logical world, the quality of a couple’s erotic life would bear some relationship to the quality of their overall relationship. But I’ve worked with a number of couples who learned to cooperate more and fight less only to discover that their sex lives got worse. They apparently needed upheaval to fuel their passions. Theories about how couples should behave sexually are of little value and often do great harm by setting up unrealistic expectations and distracting the couple from the delicate adjustments, compromises, and inspirations that have the best chance of working. What interests me is what long-term couples actually do, in concert or individually, to keep sex satisfying as they develop other positive aspects of the relationship—such as companionship, mutual support, and, in the most highly evolved relationships, a loving commitment to the other’s well-being and growth. In this section I want to call your attention to a set of crucial skills that erotic couples appear to develop and apply with remarkable regularity. Long-term couples who discuss their sex lives with me always end up focusing on several—sometimes all—of these skills in one form or another. How consistently couples recognize them and put them to good use appears to have a major impact on the quality of their sexual interaction. I’m quite certain that the majority of couples who conscientiously cultivate these skills will benefit. Nevertheless, when sexual interest is waning there are no sure-fire solutions. The great issues of erotic life are so much a part of the human adventure that they can’t be fixed like a leaky faucet; they can only be lived. In the living, possibilities emerge that defy logic, sometimes with happy results, sometimes not. Whether you are preparing for a future relationship or already involved in one, your journey will be infinitely more satisfying if you realize that the unfolding of eros is a work in progress that is never finished.

• From While You Were Out (2023)

  For dessert, we had our choice of apple pie à la mode, pecan bars, coconut macaroons, blueberry tarts, or, my favorite, hot fudge sundaes with chopped walnuts, scoops of whipped cream, and a cherry on top. I couldn’t live without all that. No one ever told us that we were rich, but it felt like we were, even by Wilmette standards. We got pretty much everything we wanted—horseback riding lessons, summer camp, new bikes every year or two. I never heard Holmer or my mother say, “We can’t afford that.” A cleaning lady came to our house twice a week, and another woman came every few weeks just to do the ironing. We were one of the first families to get a color TV and a second telephone line installed. My parents took us on family ski trips for a week each winter in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and out west to Colorado for two weeks in the summer. They escaped for a week or two by themselves to someplace exotic—Puerto Rico, Palm Springs, Miami Beach, or New Orleans, leaving us with a sitter. They always brought us back gifts, dolls, fancy soap from their hotel, or a new outfit. Once, they went to Europe with Jake for a month. We had no sense of money, where it came from, how to get more, how to manage it, or what to do if it ran out. We simply skimmed the aisles at Betty’s of Winnetka, Bonwit Teller, or Saks Fifth Avenue, picking out whatever tickled our fancy, and had the clerk bag it and put it on the house charge. We charged everything, even candy. Mary Claire and I would stop at Lyman-Sargent’s Pharmacy on our way home from school nearly every day and charge a box of Andes Creme de Menthe Thins on the house account, wolfing them all down before we’d made it home. Nowhere was our family’s opulence on greater display than inside Holmer’s walk-in closet. It was jammed with dozens of Brooks Brothers suits, Italian silk ties that he kept on two racks, stacks of neatly laundered Egyptian cotton shirts, silk knee socks that he held up with garters, and more than a dozen pairs of leather wing tips that he stored on cedar shoe trees so they would retain their shape. He wore felt fedoras with pheasant feathers tucked in the bands of grosgrain ribbon, a Burberry trench coat in the spring and fall, and a finely tailored camel hair coat with braided leather buttons in the winter months. Each night, no matter how much he had to drink, he meticulously hung his clothes up on wooden hangers that he had specially made. Making up for that sailor suit, Mary Kay suggested. Hey, Beau Brummell, ease up on the new clothes, my mother said to him more than once. The cleaning lady started coming just once every two weeks and then not at all. We quit the Chicago Athletic Club, too, where Holmer once entertained customers.

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  awful compound like life in Georgia.” Blount’s Cracker President would have “a richer voice, and a less dismissable smile.” 31 There was probably more redneck in Jimmy than Blount realized. When speechwriter Bob Shrum resigned from the Carter team in 1976, he exposed a less compassionate candidate. The man who publicly advocated for miners when he spoke before a labor audience told Shrum privately that “he opposed increased black-lung benefits for miners, because ‘they chose to be miners.’” Seemingly lacking an understanding of class conditions, Carter right then revealed a mean streak a mile wide. Should miners suffer because they accepted the dangers of the job? He showed his mean side again in 1977 when he endorsed the Hyde Amendment for restricting Medicaid payments to poor women seeking abortions. In answer to a question from Judy Woodruff of NBC, the president did not defend his position on strictly moral grounds, but made a class argument instead: “Well, as you know, there are many things in life that are not fair, that wealthy people can afford and poor people can’t. But I don’t believe that the federal government should take action to try to make these opportunities exactly equal, when there is a moral factor involved.” He basically held that the federal government should be able to deny poor women benefits because they were poor. The wealthy could do as they please, and the poor had to be disciplined. Carter was prone to the fatalistic view: poor women deserve their destiny, and coal miners must endure black-lung disease. In effect, the message was: don’t expect equality or compassion if you can’t help yourself. 32 America’s love affair with Jimmy Carter of Plains, Georgia, faded fairly rapidly. By 1979, his declining popularity was summed up in the parable of the swamp rabbit. It was a story the media refused to let go of, in part because the president’s staff refused to release images of the encounter until pressed. Carter told his own tale of the swamp adventure. Paddling a canoe, he saw a wild rabbit chasing his small craft and “baring his teeth.” He thought it was curious, and also funny. Reporters turned it into a modern version of the frontiersman’s vaunted boasting session. Instead of “Daniel Boone wrestling with bears,” one journalist chided, Carter was taking on “Peter Rabbit.” Others had the president sparring with Banzai Bunny, or the killer rabbit of Monty Python fame. It became a metaphor for a wimpy presidential leadership style, feeding the legend of the country boy who turned coward in what should have been familiar terrain —the marshy wilds of the Georgia backcountry. Jimmy Carter was not the hero of Deliverance; he was closer to Jimmy Stewart of Harvey, a feebleminded man

• From The Ice Storm (1994)

  Where Paul would engage in hand-to-hand combat with the abominable snowman, until Richard Nixon appeared, in person, to plead for peace, as he had done in F.F . #106. Paul’s dad hated comic books, of course. The idea that hard-earned Schackley and Schwimmer dollars might trickle down into the hands of the Marvel Comics Group needled him. Maybe it was because he and Ben Grimm were too much alike. Neither of them wanted to be reminded of it. But it wasn’t only the comics that his father disliked. He disliked Paul’s helmet of long, wavy hair, and his loneliness, and his lack of athletic prowess. Radio club and chorus and recreational tennis failed to impress Paul’s dad. So Paul had given up trying. He hung out with the stoners. Paul was a garbage head! A loser, as they were called among stoners. Paul bought oregano and thought it was good shit. He borrowed nutmeg from a master at school, hoping to catch its buzz. He had smoked a Quaalude; he had overdosed on cold pills. Paul Hood, eater of morning glory seeds. Decipherer of obscure lyrics. He and his roommate had parakeets named Aragorn and Galadriel. He had pored over The Chronicles of Narnia and the pronouncements of Michael Valentine Smith. He had black-light posters and tapestries and he burned incense and wore wire-frame glasses and played military strategy games. He managed to keep one shirttail untucked at all times. His tweed jackets and khakis looked as though he had slept in them. He wore them again today. Top-Siders without socks. His shirttail stirred in the breeze, like a flag from the nation of the feckless and affluent. There was a rush along the Fulham Road! Stamford was a vast, flat expanse below I-95, below the train station. The public-housing projects, a number of circular buildings over to the left there, languished disconsolately on the skyline. Beyond them rose Stamford’s lone office tower. It was a gleaming rocket, sort of like the Fantastic Four’s pogo plane in its sleek design. Or sort of like the Baxter Building. He could easily imagine them taking off from this impressive launchpad to battle Dr. Doom or Blaastar. —Flame on, Paul said. When the train arrived, he took up residence in one of the four-seaters, with his feet propped up across. There was the usual fracas when he realized again that he hadn’t availed himself of the ticket window in Stamford. The conductor invoked a surcharge. —Begging your pardon, Charles, Paul said. The conductor stared blankly at him. —The fault’s all mine, sir. May I please purchase my ticket to Grand Central at the higher price? Then he was thinking about school again. The Kittredge Cult—that was the name they had been given at St. Pete’s. He and his friends. They were Cultists. They had all opted to hide out in the dormitory of that name, one otherwise considered cheap, modern, and lifeless. For two years now, they had all lived there.

• From Boys & Sex (2020)

  As I said at the outset of this book, many parents and advocates work tirelessly to combat the messages girls receive from the youngest ages that reduce them to their bodies or demand the illusion of perpetual sexual availability. Back when my daughter was tiny, for example, I would point to Disney heroines whose eyes were larger than their wrists (“Are your eyes bigger than your wrists? And look at her waist! Where do you think she keeps her uterus? In her purse?”). Honestly? I doubt I would’ve done that with a son. Yet, boys grow up in the same distorted, commodified, misogynist culture as girls; the concern over porn, while valid, can distract from the damaging impact of mainstream entertainment. Remember that, unchecked, media consumption of any kind is associated with greater tolerance for sexual harassment, belief in rape myths, early sexual initiation, sexual risk-taking, a greater number of partners, and stereotyping of women. Boys, too, then, need a strong counternarrative to develop grounded, realistic perspectives on women, men, sex, and love. Frankly, without it, there is a chance that they won’t see women as fully human, and that they will view sex as something a female partner does for them and that they do to her. Start young, by offering little boys books, films, and other media featuring complex female protagonists. Take notice when women are absent or misrepresented on-screen or the playing field. Intervene, even if it annoys guys, to question how the media they consume presents gender roles, bodies (men’s as well as women’s), race, sex (is it valued or cheapened? Is there respect? Coercion? Consent?). Andrew Smiler suggests that while watching TV together, parents could periodically ask, “Would that really happen in real life?” “What is missing?” or “Who is missing?” That works whether characters are engaging in “romantic” behavior that could also be read as stalking, moving directly from kissing to intercourse in the span of fifteen seconds, or hooking up for the first time without any fumbling or awkwardness. One friend of mine told me she encourages her son to play his music in the car, but when she hears lyrics that are demeaning toward women or glorify violence or drugs, she turns it off and insists they talk about it. “We’ve never made it through more than about twenty seconds of a song,” she said wryly. Promote the Healthy and Name the Toxic

• From The City of God

  Books That Matter: The City of God › The gladiator revolt of Spartacus managed to sustain itself for several years as a hostile community in the heart of Italy itself. › Ninus, the mythical founder of Nineveh, was the first to suffer imperii cupiditate—lust of rule—and made Assyria in its day larger and greater than the Roman Empire itself. „ What Augustine establishes What Augustine establishes is not that is not that politics is crime, politics is crime, but that politics is but that politics is not not essentially different from crime essentially different from crime and vice versa. To and vice versa. To say that politics say that politics is nothing is nothing but criminal would be but criminal would be a cynical claim, possible only a cynical claim, possible only if if you imagine that politics you imagine that politics could be could be something something other than power-driven. other than power-driven. But Augustine refuses to imagine that recognition of political reality should cause outrage and disappointment and encourage a belief that some other sort of politics is possible. „ The second part of the attack is a critique of the rhetoric—of the ways that history and symbols, including religions, are used to obscure political realities. Augustine ruthlessly dissects the piety surrounding Roman patriotism, both its nostalgia for the glorious past and the myths and gods it creates to frame the past as a sign of divine favor. › The Romans assumed that their ancestors’ behavior was heroic and morally pure, from which they could judge the present and to which they could aspire. On the contrary, Augustine quotes Sallust’s belief that it was a mortal fear of Carthage that inspired Romans’ focused, ruthlessly self- sacrificial, and collegial behavior, not inherent virtue. 138

• From Apprenticed to Venus: My Secret Life with Anaïs Nin (2017)

  I cried, “Oh, don’t take Rupert. I’ll come get you and drive you to Henry’s.” “It’s too late to change plans. I told Rupert everything.” “Everything? That you and Hugo are still married?” “No! Don’t even say that out loud. I told Rupert I had heard from old friends that Hugo cannot pay his rent, and that I’m indebted to Hugo for his taking care of my family and me when we had nothing. I explained that I want to help Hugo financially when I get my diary published and Rupert said it was a good plan. Isn’t Rupert wonderful?” “Maybe now you could tell Rupert the truth about—” “No! But along those lines, I need your help with Henry.” “Of course,” I said, though I didn’t think she would need my help. I was convinced that the moment Henry saw her, he would be besotted again. “We have to prevent Henry from telling Rupert that I’m still married to Hugo,” she said urgently. “Does Henry know?” “Henry met Rupert eighteen years ago when we visited him in Big Sur, and our social circles here overlap so he’s probably heard that I’m married to Rupert. Would you believe Henry and Hugo are still friends and talk on the phone?” “But Henry will protect you, won’t he? I’m sure he’s still in love with you.” She gave an embarrassed laugh. “Oh, I don’t think so. And Henry is completely unpredictable. If he gets riled up he could say anything in front of Rupert.” “Then don’t bring Rupert!” I didn’t want Rupert standing there when the sparks flew between Anaïs and Henry. “I have to bring Rupert. He’s part of my whole life now,” she said with her uncanny ability to remain unperturbed by her contradictions. [image file=image_rsrc3R3.jpg] Rupert drove the Thunderbird with the top down. Anaïs wore a kerchief and kept the window rolled up on the passenger side while I sat on the rump seat, my long hair blowing into my eyes and mouth. Anaïs bent towards me to speak, the wind whipping away her words. “Remember, you need to help keep the discussion on track with Henry,” she told me. “I’ll do my best,” I sputtered through a mouthful of hair. She turned back to the road, leaving me to savor my anticipation of what would happen when Henry Miller opened the door and saw Anaïs in her new Rudi Gernreich dress. She would start to give Henry a buss on each cheek, and despite Rupert standing there, Henry would take her face in his hands and kiss her mouth, and she would respond. When Henry opened the door to his surprisingly conventional white ranch house, I saw a bald troll holding onto a walker, and my heart sank. Anaïs air-kissed his wrinkled, sagging cheeks.

• From Augustine: A New Biography (2005)

  Augustine’s rejection of Pelagius is doubly complex. First, there was the rivalry for the affections and attention of the well-connected Romans whose support Augustine craved so strongly throughout his career. At the same time, Augustine and his world had changed, and what was needed now was to bring official teaching into line with views that had evolved over time. The teachings of the younger Augustine that had shaped his vision of Christianity as a religion that gentlemen could share had evolved as he read scripture and as he found himself embroiled in the struggles of the African churches. The evolution of the Pelagian controversy over the last twenty years of Augustine’s life depended on the choices he made in 411–12, choices he could have made quite differently. The anti-Pelagian venture was an endless struggle for high principles with no prospect of success. Augustine failed to see that his doctrinal positions were unsustainable as a matter of pastoral practice and thus would be subject to attacks in his own lifetime and for centuries after, from the best-intentioned of his coreligionists. Jerome had shown the way here. Augustine rarely shows us how deeply conscious he was of the anti-Origenist theological wars of the early 400s, but he seems to have missed their main lesson, perhaps because Jerome was the persecuted, rather than the persecutor, in that case. But the “Origenist controversy,” like the “Pelagian controversy” was marked by the same willful creation of a polemical target by those with good intentions and high principles but insufficient detachment and objectivity. It ended with the same mainly counterproductive results.499 So Pelagius sailed away from Africa in 411; the aristocratic refugees from Rome sailed away as well; and the Donatists stayed behind. Augustine always wrote as if it were the other way around. The battles with Pelagianism that sapped Augustine’s energies for years are ones we will return to. THE SILENCE OF EMERITUS

• From Augustine: A New Biography (2005)

  When he was gone, no shrine and no cloud of miracle stories marked where he had walked. Was this his choice? The only miracle story his biographer tells isn’t much. While Augustine was dying, the story goes, a sick man was brought to him and Augustine was asked to lay his hand upon him to make him well. Augustine ventured what, for him, was almost a joke: if he had any power of this sort, he said, he would have used it on himself first. But then the man’s friend tells Augustine about a dream he had in which he heard a voice say to him, “Go to Bishop Augustine to have him lay hands on this man and he will recover.” When Augustine heard that, he did as he had been asked and the sick man went away healed. A fragment of divine power pushed its way through its (reluctant?) instrument, just that once. And then the performance was over. By many measures, Augustine died a failure. The barbarians were at the gates, literally. Invited to Africa by the Roman general Boniface to support his own ambitions, these eighty thousand barbarians (the number may well exaggerate) proved impossible to control. They threatened the whole sweep of Romanized north Africa from the straits of Gibraltar to Carthage and up into the highlands of Numidia. They landed far west of Augustine, in 429, and by the following August they were besieging the city where Augustine neared his end. He escaped to the afterlife before the city surrendered, but surrender it did, not long after. Nine more years passed until, in 439, the Vandal general Gaiseric entered Carthage and seized control of the province. Before Augustine could take to his deathbed, he had had to answer the bishops of his vicinity coming to ask whether they were obliged to stay at their posts as the enemy approached. His answer left them room to flee more or less honorably. The ones whose communities were not much more than fortified farmsteads were likely grateful to do so, while Augustine stayed where he was. His books escaped destruction, we know not how. The poignancy of that lonely death room, the isolation of the bishop, and the atmosphere of fading future are all carefully constructed by Possidius to achieve an effect. These barbarians offer a powerful narrative resolution to the life story of a saint. We know too easily, again today, what barbarians are and how they give us parts to play in a story larger than ourselves, innocent (because civilized!) victims of historical forces too vast to control. Augustine was not an innocent victim, but he knew a lot about escaping from experience into stories. His own deeds had smoothed the path for those barbarians and his ideas helped make it hard for his contemporaries, and for us, to see the barbarians as anything but bogeymen and heretics.

• From Augustine: A New Biography (2005)

  There was no one else. Prolific writer, inspired imaginer of divine truths, powerful controversialist, Augustine was intellectually childless and left behind a depredated church and community. There had been would-be disciples, like Orosius and Consentius, but they embarrassed the master. The other defenders of Augustine in the generation after his death were invariably single-minded and unimaginative: Quodvultdeus, Marius Mercator, and Prosper of Aquitaine spoke up for the master’s most controverted ideas, and did so energetically, but their limitations outweighed their abilities. The “barbarians” were Augustine’s to answer for as well. They came to Africa at the invitation of a political ally of Augustine’s (but Augustine had gone cool on the alliance and thus weakened it), as pawns in a chess game that went bad for Augustine’s party. They succeeded in destroying the church to which Augustine had given his career. The catholicism that Augustine had helped invent and sustain was tossed out bodily by the Arian churchmen the barbarians brought with them. Augustine’s own basilica they made their own, and their burials are the ones we find traces of now. The story we are told by his party is that a hundred years would lapse until orthodox armies from Constantinople dislodged the African barbarians and restored the religion that Augustine preached. Restore it, that is, until the next wave of “barbarians,” this time Islamic invaders from the east, came to uproot it once again in the seventh century, sweeping back east to west over Augustine’s country by about the year 700. But settled Christianity would not have been so easily overturned and eventually uprooted in Africa had Augustine himself not led an astonishingly successful ecclesiastical putsch of his own against the well-rooted native Christian tradition. In the name of catholicism he brought the full and clumsy might of Roman government to bear on compelling his coreligionists to sing his tune, the government’s tune, in his churches. The mass of believers complied, but the effect was in the long run disastrous. The anti-Pelagian quarrels were of little importance in comparison with the struggle close to home, in which the state-supported puppet church Augustine represented imposed its name and will on recalcitrant believers. By the end of his life, Augustine had very quietly rewritten his original views about the church to which he belonged in order to find a place where his intellectually ambitious practice could live side by side with a whole raft of behaviors that he had once boldly called “superstition.” It was too little, too late. WHEN SAINTS DIE Inventing saints took a long time. What began as a courtesy title became eventually a brand name, handed out carefully after only the most rigorous scrutiny. The modern formal process of canonization does not date back before the tenth century and the title depended before that on the spontaneous voice of public acclaim.

• From Augustine: A New Biography (2005)

  His sainthood remains alive most visibly in the interest that people give to the way he lived his life. The power of his Confessions has assured a lively interest. Contemporary readers who come to Augustine most often take up the Confessions first, which is remarkable enough testimony to that work’s power. If readers of the last generation pick up even one book about Augustine, that first book is almost always a biography, and a particular biography—Peter Brown’s classic Augustine of Hippo (1967).617 Brown’s book, marvelous, imperfect, and enduring, was the first modern biography and easily outclassed all competitors. Whatever Augustine taught and did, he is reduced by this preference for life-story-telling to a more ordinary saint than he really is. Having achieved great repute, he is the more readily trivialized. Since he became the first saint known to have his own website (since 1994, when this writer became his webmaster), he has attracted a fairly steady flow of questions and inquiries. Many are quite specific and studious, even scholarly, but the commonest are more superficial. That he was born and lived in Africa leaves many readers, in an age of renewed consciousness of the troubled history of African relations with the developed world, wondering, “Was Augustine black?”618 No less rooted in contemporary concerns is the commonest doctrinal question, a search for a particular quotation: Did Augustine really say the benevolent ecumenical words recommending “in essentials, unity; in doubtful matters, liberty; in all things, charity”? No, he did not, but many have heard he did and very much hope he did, seeking an august, ancient, and improbable patronage for a contemporary predilection for ecumenism.619 What the dying saint thought, what he did, what was of his own doing, what was that of his friends, and what was that of those of us who have read and written of him since—these forces have turned him into a celebrity, known for being known, an object of curiosity, a pawn in our contemporary conversations. He saw us coming, deploring “a tribe eager to know about another man’s life, too lazy to amend their own.”620 Trivialization is not the only risk his future faces. The place of the churches that have been fondest of him is changing in our world, and those churches themselves have been reinventing themselves in ways that need less of him or figures like him. With them or without them, his future begins to shimmer uncertainly.

• From Available: The unfiltered and empowering new memoir for women about sex, dating and divorce after 40 (2021)

  My big weekend is approaching – and by “big” I mean that I have Friday night until Sunday afternoon kid-free – and I try to pin him down to make plans. He is vague about his schedule and finally writes a heartfelt text that he doesn’t think he should see me, that it’s unwise for him to invest further time and feelings in me when it seems unlikely that he will get what he wants out of this relationship. He wants a wife – not me as his wife, but not me if I don’t have the potential to someday be a wife. He says I should call him if I want to discuss it, but I don’t. I thank him for being straightforward and kind, tell him I have loved our time together and I hope he soon finds the lucky woman he can commit to. I feel a pang of disappointment and loss that takes me by surprise. Though we didn’t see much of each other, we had forged a strong connection and it had been reassuring to know there was someone out there who was keeping track of me, who felt invested in me. Will I ever meet another man as gentle and decent as this one? Truthfully, it seems unlikely, but aside from abandoning my life here in the city, tantalizing as that may seem, the writing on the wall is pretty clear: it’s time to move on. #4 has been equally dodgy about making plans for my free weekend, though he and I have only been in touch sporadically. Finally, I text him that I am anxious to cement plans so that I can maximize this rare opportunity of kid-free time, and he texts me back that he is sorry but it’s his family’s busy season at the orchard and he has to help. “I enjoy spending time with you, but I don’t want to chase after someone who doesn’t want to be chased by me. I know you’re busy, but I feel like you’re blowing me off and I would rather you just say so straight out so I stop suggesting we make plans. No hard feelings, I just want to be clear,” I text him. Later in the afternoon, my phone rings and I am surprised to see that it is him as we have never before spoken on the phone. I am walking in the door with Georgia after school, and I take the phone into my shower stall and close the glass door behind me for privacy. “Yeah, so hey listen, I got your text and I don’t want you to feel like I’m blowing you off. I really like being with you, it’s just that it felt like it was getting serious too quickly,” he says.