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 Four Days to Glory: Wrestling with the Soul of the American Heartland (2005)

  (Courtesy of The Predicament) CHAPTER 12They Hand Out RosesYou get right down to it, it’s a lousy deal. For years, the Borschels, along with these countless other families whose kids never did get the first-place payoffs that people like Jay and Dan and Kyle and Mitch and Joey got repeatedly, have arranged whole chunks of their years around the questions of when the boys would wrestle and where. And all of this traveling, all of these tournaments and this incremental improvement and advance—it all ultimately has brought the Borschels right back to Marion, to the Linn-Mar team of which Jay now is almost finished being a member. To heartbreak, basically. For Carol, there was never going to be a way to make it easy at the end. She can be in denial with the best of them when it suits her purpose, and prior to this exact moment Carol has done a magnificent job of ignoring the reality that is creeping in around her where it concerns Jay. She is running out of chances to watch her oldest child do the thing he is the best at in the world. A night like this, kids like Matt McDonough can scarcely process—it’s so far away for them, beyond the scope of relevance. But Carol could tell you that it gets here faster than you think. A couple of days ago Jay was the freshman, making his first Linn-Mar varsity team, finding a niche at the lightest weight on the list. Now Jay is the senior who has grown beyond all measure, the one coming into the hallway to greet his mother and walk with her and Jim into the Linn-Mar gymnasium to shake Doug Streicher’s hand and listen to the words spilling out of Kevin McCauley as the assistant coach rattles off Jay’s astonishing athletic accomplishments—and the other things, too. He mentors an elementary-school student once a week. He maintains a 3.4 grade-point average. He’s a founding member of the Tailgating Club, which is basically an excuse to goof around in the parking lot before football games. He can eat a full meal and still make weight. Some things defy the odds. The Linn-Mar gym is a big, bright place, with huge bleachers that come way out without actually even getting close to the basketball court or the wrestling mats. Of course, for the wrestling team no such deep bleachers are needed; Jay is used to that and long ago stopped thinking about it. He has chosen a sport that, at Linn-Mar, has almost nothing to do with fans or attractive girls or mass appeal—that even living in Iowa, one can be a raging success at and largely anonymous at the same time. Of course, that was before Jay became the guy going for a four-timer while ditching his home state to go wrestle in the East. Now the people around here see him coming, for better and for worse.

• From Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (1999)

  “. . . Three, Two, One, Contact: Times Square Red” began as an invited academic lecture and, as such, launches itself with a different order of conceptual difficulty and employs a different level of rhetorical density. Its appeal to theoretical discourse, its mosaic structure, and its range of attendant topics make it as different from “Times Square Blue” as a piece roughly the same length and that (sometimes) focuses on similar topics can be. Indeed, all the commercial forces that yearn to reinstate those authorial unities of history, style, theory, and value are here at their most distressed, so that the very reasonableness of bringing the two together under paired titles in a single book is in question. But a few readers have suggested not so much that the two pieces are “good to think with” but rather that their very differences make them particularly productive for thinking about and against and through each other. If this is the case, their abutment, one against the other here, is worth it. A commitment both to the vernacular and to the expert—and to combining them in reasonable and responsible ways—offers the reader a starting place from which she or he may, if inclined, begin to justify both the organizational eccentricities of “Times Square Red” (to name it by its subtitle) as well as the decision to publish two pieces of such different texture and structure in one book. On my way to deliver some late revisions on the text to the managing editor at New York University Press, I stopped in to see a friend for half an hour at his book-, computer-, and memorabilia-crowded home. There I met a man who, when I mentioned the title of my book, told me he had worked for the Brandt theater chain on Forty-second Street up until 1984. That chain included the majority of the legitimate theaters there; the Brandt Theater itself was, by then, a porn house. The man erupted with a cascade of anecdotes about the appalling working conditions in the Forty-second Street theaters in those years, about young people hired at the concession stands for minimum wage (then $3.50 an hour) and still forced to join a company union as well as to testify in the company’s favor at city hearings. All of this might easily and profitably be researched to expand the annals of human degradation. (Needless to say, most of these young people were black and Hispanic.) These tales are not told here—because, among other things, there were no concession stands in any of the porn theaters I write of. In this regard you will find here a passing concern for diachrony (the overall explanation for the situation the man described is certainly stated in the following pages), but neither “Times Square Blue” nor “Times Square Red” is a history of that area or the city.

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  They insisted on personal holiness, not because that was the end of all religion, but because it was the condition and guarantee of national restoration. Personal religion was chiefly a means to an end; the end was social. We can appreciate to the full the significance and value of the personal religion developed under the abnormal conditions of foreign domination and national prostration, and yet recognize frankly that this gain had involved a tremendous loss and that a religion developed under abnormal conditions is likely itself to be abnormal. This view is confirmed by the subsequent development of religious thought and life. Ezekiel, who lived during the Exile, shows the effect of the separation between the political and religious interests. He too still cherishes the national hope. At the end of his book he describes his vision of Jerusalem as he hoped it would be when restored and rebuilt. The old social convictions still persist; for instance, he takes care to provide for the just distribution of the land. And yet the political commonwealth and the king have become shadowy; the memory of them was growing dim and therefore the hope of them was vague and colorless. On the other hand the community of worshippers and the priests as their leaders were now vividly in the foreground. As a consequence the moral and religious emphasis had changed. His ideal city was no longer a city of justice so much as a city of the true worship. The older prophets had condemned the sins of man against man, especially injustice and oppression. Ezekiel dwelt on the sins of man against God, especially idolatry. Not justice but holiness had become the fundamental requirement, and holiness meant chiefly ceremonial correctness. The righteous nation was turned into a holy church. Ezekiel was a prophet by calling, but he was a priest by birth and training, and in comparing his literary style, his outlook on life, and his spiritual power with that of the older prophets, it is impossible to avoid a sense of religious decadence. The classical age was past. Religion had grown narrower and feebler when it was forced back from the great national and human interests into an ecclesiastical attitude of mind. This impression deepens as we follow the little colony of Jewish Puritans who returned to their home and rebuilt the temple and the city amid poverty and fear. We shall have occasion hereafter to point out how intimately the religious life is connected with the secular life in which it develops. It is unjust to expect that the religious life which took form in the contracted circle that gathered about the rebuilt shrine of Jehovah would have the same bold originality and genius that swept through a hopeful and autonomous nation. But it is also unwise to hold that type of religion up to us as a higher development of religion. It was an earnest, solid community of sifted and picked religious men, with a great preponderance of priests.

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  The Phoenix bus had left already and the next one didn’t come through until late that night, but we were in luck—there was a bus leaving for Portland in a couple of hours, and from there we could make an easy connection to Seattle. I tried to conceal my disappointment but my mother saw it and bought me off with a handful of change. I played the pinball machines for a while and then stocked up on candy bars for the trip, Milk Duds and Sugar Babies and Idaho Spuds, most of which were already curdling in my stomach when at dusk we boarded our bus and stood in the dazed regard of the other passengers. We hesitated for a moment as if we might get off. Then my mother took my hand and we made our way down the aisle, nodding to anyone who looked at us, smiling to show we meant well. Uncool____ We lived in a boardinghouse in West Seattle. At night, if my mother wasn’t too tired, we took walks around the neighborhood, stopping in front of different houses to consider them as candidates for future purchase. We went for the biggest and most pretentious, sneering at ranches and duplexes—anything that smelled of economy. We chose half-timbered houses, houses with columns, houses with sculpted bushes in front. Then we went back to our room, where I read novels about heroic collies while my mother practiced typing and shorthand so she wouldn’t fall behind in her new job. Our room was in a converted attic. It had two camp beds and between them, under the window, a desk and chair. It smelled of mildew. The yellow wallpaper was new but badly hung and already curling at the edges. It was the kind of room that B-movie detectives wake up in, bound and gagged, after they’ve been slipped a Mickey. The boardinghouse was full of old men and men who probably only seemed old. Besides my mother only two women lived there. One was a secretary named Kathy. Kathy was young and plain and shy. She stayed in her room most of the time. When people addressed her she would look at them with a drowning expression, then softly ask them to repeat what they had said. As time went on, her pregnancy began to show through the loose clothes she wore. There didn’t seem to be a man in the picture. The other woman was Marian, the housekeeper. Marian was big and loud. Her arms were as thick as a man’s, and when she pounded out hamburger patties the whole kitchen shook. Marian went with a marine sergeant from Bremerton who was even bigger than she was but more gentle and soft-spoken. He had been in the Pacific during the war. When I kept after him to tell me about it he finally showed me an album of photographs he’d taken. Most of the pictures were of his buddies. Doc, a man with glasses.

• From Open (2009)

  I give her fifteen minutes to reach the island, ten minutes to go from the dock to the hotel, and then I phone the operator and ask for her room. I know her room number because I can still see my damn flowers sitting dejectedly on the patio table. She picks up the phone on the second ring. Hi. It’s Andre. Oh. I just wanted to call and make sure you got my flowers. I did. Oh. Silence. She says, I don’t want any misunderstandings between us. My boyfriend is here. I see. Well, OK, I understand. Silence. Good luck with the tournament. Thank you. You too. Yawning canyon of silence. Well, goodbye. Bye. I fall on the couch and stare at the floor. I have one question for you, J.P. says. What could she possibly have said that would put that look on your face? What scenario did we not rehearse? Her boyfriend is here. Oh. Then I smile. I take a page from Brad’s positive-thinking playbook: maybe she’s sending me a message. Obviously her boyfriend was sitting right there. So? So she couldn’t talk, and rather than say, I have a boyfriend, case closed, leave me alone, she said, My boyfriend is here. So? I think she’s saying there’s a chance. J.P. says he’ll fix me a drink. THE TOURNAMENT PROVIDES a small measure of distraction. Sadly, the distraction lasts only a few hours. In the first round, against Dominik Hrbaty, from Slovakia, I can think only of Steffi and her boyfriend enjoying or awkwardly ignoring my roses. Hrbaty whoops me in three sets. I’m out of the tournament. I should leave Fisher Island. But I stick around, sitting on the beach, plotting with J.P. and Brad. Steffi’s boyfriend probably showed up unexpectedly, Brad says. Plus, she still doesn’t know you’re divorced. She still thinks you’re married to Brooke. Give it time. Let the news come out. Then make your move. You’re right, you’re right. Brad mentions Hong Kong. In light of my performance against Hrbaty, clearly I need another tournament before we head into clay season. Let’s go to Hong Kong, he says. Let’s not sit around anymore thinking and talking about Steffi. Next thing I know I’m settling into a seat on an airplane bound for China. I look at the screen at the head of the cabin. Estimated flight time: 15 hrs, 37 mins. I look at Brad. Fifteen hours and thirty-seven minutes? To obsess about Steffi? I don’t think so. I unbuckle my seat belt and stand. Where are you going? I’m getting off this plane. Don’t be ridiculous. Sit down. Relax. We’re here. We’re all packed. Let’s go play. I ease back into my seat, order two Belvederes, swallow a sleeping pill, and after what feels like a month I’m on the other side of the earth. I’m in a car being whisked along a Hong Kong highway, looking up at the soaring International Finance Centre.

• From The History of Sexuality, Vol. 3: The Care of the Self (1984)

  The conjugalization of sexual activities that tends to localize legitimacy within marriage alone obviously results in their manifest limitation (at least for the husband, since this limitation has long been required of the married woman). Moreover, the insistence on a dissociation between the practice of pleasure and the hedonic finality will tend toward an internal disqualification of this activity itself. But it needs to be understood as well that these restrictions and this disqualification are accompanied by another process: an intensification of the value and meaning of sexual relations within marriage. On the one hand, in fact, intramarital sexual relations are no longer simply the consequence and manifestation of a right. They must be placed within a cluster of relations characterized by affection, attachment, and reciprocity. And on the other hand, while pleasure must be eliminated as a goal, it is, at least in certain of the most subtle formulations of this ethics, to be used as an element (at once an instrument and a guarantee) in the interplay of affective expressions between spouses. And it is precisely on behalf of this intensification of the value of the aphrodisia in marital relations, by reason of the role it is assigned in the communication between husband and wife, that one begins to question, in an increasingly doubtful mode, the privileges that used to be granted to the love of boys. * Babut points out that Antipater, Musonius, and Hierocles “are more interested in marriage than love; they seem to want above all to establish that marriage does not prevent one from leading the philosophical life; in them one finds no trace of one of the important ideas of the Amatorius, namely, that the woman is just as capable as the man of inspiring amorous passion.”23 PART SIX [image file=image_51.jpg] BoysIn the first centuries of our era, compared with the lofty formulations of the classical period, reflection on the love of boys lost some of its intensity, its seriousness, its vitality, if not its topicality. Where it appears, it has a facile, repetitive sound. Playing on ancient themes, often those of Platonism, it participates in the reactivation of classical culture, but in a dull way. Even when philosophy tries to restore to the figure of Socrates some of its former prestige, the love of boys, with the problems it poses, does not constitute an active and vital focus of reflection (the four speeches of Maximus of Tyre cannot furnish an argument to the contrary).

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

  A case of arrested development is always pathetic to see; and the world is full of people whose religious development has been arrested. They stopped learning years ago, and their conduct is that of a child. It is true that Jesus said the greatest thing in the world is the childlike spirit; but there is a tremendous difference between the childlike and the childish spirit. Peter Pan makes a charming play on the stage, but the person who will not grow up makes a tragedy in real life. Let us take care that we do not remain in the religion of childhood when we should have reached the faith of maturity. THE NECESSITY OF PROGRESSHebrews 6:1–3 So, then, let us leave elementary teaching about Christ behind us and let us be borne onwards to full maturity; for we cannot go on laying the foundations all the time and teaching about repentance from dead works and giving information about washings, about the laying on of hands, about the resurrection from the dead and upon that sentence which lasts to all eternity. God willing, this very thing we will do. THE writer to the Hebrews was certain of the necessity of progress in the Christian life. Teachers would never get anywhere if they had to lay the foundations all over again every time they began to teach. The writer to the Hebrews says that his people must be going on to what he calls teleiotēs. The Authorized Version translates this word as perfection. But teleios, the adjective, and its kindred words have a technical meaning. Pythagoras divided his students into hoi manthanontes, the learners, and hoi teleioi, the mature. Philo divided his students into three different classes – hoi archomenoi, those just beginning, hoi prokoptontes, those making progress, and hoi teleiōmenoi, those beginning to reach maturity. Teleiotēs does not imply complete knowledge but a certain maturity in the Christian faith. The writer to the Hebrews means two things by this maturity. (1) He means something to do with the mind. He means that as people get older they should more and more have thought things out for themselves. They should, for instance, be able to say better who they believe Jesus to be. They should have a deeper grasp not only of the facts but also of the significances of the Christian faith. (2) He means something to do with life. As people grow older, their lives should more and more reflect Christ. All the time, they should be ridding themselves of old faults and achieving new virtues. Daily, a new serenity and a new nobility should be breaking upon life. As Karle Wilson has it in her poem ‘Old Lace’: Let me grow lovely, growing old; So many fine things do, Laces and Ivory and Gold and Silks, Need not be new. And there is healing in old trees, Old streets and glamour old, Why may not I, as well as these, Grow lovely, growing old?

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

  His complaint is that his hearers have been Christians for many years and are still babes no nearer maturity. The contrast between the immature Christian and the child, between milk and solid food, often occurs in the New Testament (1 Peter 2:2; 1 Corinthians 2:6, 3:2, 14:20; Ephesians 4:13ff.). Hebrews says that by now they should be teachers. It is not necessary to take that literally. To say that someone was able to teach was the Greek way of saying that that person had a mature grasp of a subject. The writer says that they still need someone to teach them the simple elements (stoicheia) of Christianity. This word has a variety of meanings. In grammar, it means the letters of the alphabet, the A B C; in physics, it means the four basic elements of which the world is composed; in geometry, it means the elements of proof, like the point and the straight line; in philosophy, it means the first elementary principles with which the students begin. It is the sorrow of the writer to the Hebrews that, after many years of Christianity, his people have never got past the basics; they are like children who do not know the difference between right and wrong. Here, he is face to face with a problem which confronts the Church in every generation – that of Christians who refuse to grow up. (1) Christians can refuse to grow up in knowledge. They can be guilty of failure to take the opportunities that broaden horizons and develop ideas. There are people who keep on saying that what was good enough for people in the past is good enough for them. There are Christians in whose faith there has been no development for thirty or forty or fifty or sixty years. There are Christians who have deliberately refused to try to understand the advances that biblical scholarship and theological thought have made. They are grown men and women, and yet they insist on remaining content with the religious development of children. They are like surgeons who refuse to use the new techniques of surgery, refuse to use the new anaesthetics, refuse to use any new equipment and say: ‘What was good enough for Lister in the nineteenth century is good enough for me.’ They are like a physician who refuses to use any of the new drugs and says: ‘What I learned as a student fifty years ago is good enough for me.’ In religious matters, it is even worse. God is infinite; the riches of Christ are unsearchable; and to the end of the day we should be moving forward. (2) There are people who have never grown up in behaviour. It may be forgivable in a child to sulk or to throw fits of temper, but there are many adults who are just as childish in their behaviour.

• From How the Bible Actually Works (2019)

  plague, or otherwise physically punish these frail human vessels God has created. Swift physical retribution seems to be this God’s go-to means of conflict resolution. We only need to get to the sixth chapter of the Bible to see God already so fed up that he drowns all flesh in which is the breath of life —humans together with animals (for good measure, I suppose)—except for Noah and his family (eight in all) and two of each kind of animal that God will need for pressing reset and repopulating the earth, plus more animals so the proper appeasing sacrifices can be made, which, given the circumstances, seems like an excellent idea. Even if we think (as I do) that God didn’t actually drown all life on earth except eight humans and a boat full of animals, and that the story of Noah isn’t historical, but one of many ancient stories from greater Mesopotamia to explain (it seems) a cataclysmic local (not global) deluge of some sort, that doesn’t get us off the hook entirely. We still have the problem that the God of the Bible is portrayed as doing something rather brutal in the first place and so early in the game. Was that the only solution? Was there no backup plan? Was this the only conceivable way forward? Is this what the God of the 546-sextillion-mile-in-diameter universe is really like? Is the God of all there is, was, and ever will be also so quick to erase humanity off this speck of dust we call home like someone hosing grass clippings off the driveway? That just seems out of character to me for a God who set in motion the galaxies, with all their mystery, awe, and incomprehensibility. Is a God like that really going to melt down in Genesis 6 like a frazzled ill-equipped parent of a toddler? And this same God will later, with disturbing regularity, rain down plagues, pestilence, and war on his own people, the Israelites, when they disobey, not to mention command the annihilation of Israel’s enemies and hand out death sentences to adulterers, perjurers, young men who dishonor their parents, and those who falsely claim that a woman is a virgin. The Bible says a lot about God that is comforting, encouraging, and inspiring, but at other times not so much. The Bible sends us conflicting messages about what this God is like. The L ORD is my shepherd or Even though I walk through the darkest valley (Ps. 23:1, 4) aren’t always enough to balance out I am going to . . . destroy . . . all flesh in which is the breath of life (Gen. 6:17) or Take the blasphemer outside the camp . . . and stone him (Lev. 24:14). Making sense of this God creates challenges for me, and when I bring the universe into it, I don’t mind saying once again, I have a hard time connecting the God of back there and then with my world here and now.

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

  (d) The salvation which Jesus brought is an eternal salvation. It is something which keeps people safe both in the present time and in eternity. With Christ, we are safe forever. There are no circumstances that can snatch us from Christ’s hand. THE REFUSAL TO GROW UPHebrews 5:11–14 The story which has been laid upon me to tell you about this matter is a long story, difficult to tell and difficult to grasp, for your ears have become dull. For, indeed, at a stage when you ought to be teachers because of the length of time that has passed since you first heard the gospel, you still need someone to tell you the simple elements of the very beginning of the message of God. You have sunk into a state when you need milk and not solid food; for when anyone is at the stage of participating in milk feeding, he does not really know what Christian righteousness is, for he is only a child. For solid food is for those who have reached maturity, those who, through the development of the right kind of habit, have reached a stage when their perceptions are trained to distinguish between good and evil. HERE, the writer to the Hebrews deals with the difficulties which confront him in attempting to get across an adequate conception of Christianity to his hearers. He is confronted with two difficulties. First, the Christian faith in all its fullness is by no means an easy thing to grasp, nor can it be learned in a day. Second, the hearing of his hearers is dull. The word he uses (nōthros) is full of meaning. It means slow-moving in mind, sluggish in understanding, dull of hearing, stupidly forgetful. It can be used of the numbed limbs of an animal which is ill. It can be used of a person who has the imperceptive nature of a stone. Now, this has something to say to everyone whose business it is to preach and to teach; in fact, it has something to say to everyone whose business it is to think, and that means that it has something to say to everyone. It often happens that we avoid teaching some elements because they are difficult; we defend ourselves by saying that our hearers would never grasp such ideas. It is one of the tragedies of the Church that there is so little attempt to teach new knowledge and new thinking. It is true that such teaching is difficult. It is true that it often means meeting the lethargy of the lazy mind and the defensive prejudice of the shut mind. But the task remains. The writer to the Hebrews did not seek to avoid the duty of bringing his message, even if it was difficult and the minds of his hearers were slow. He regarded it as his supreme responsibility to pass on the truth he knew.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  again: the source of western intolerance was Frankish, rather than papal, at least in origin. In the 860s both Pope Nicholas I and his successor Hadrian II were anxious to give backing to the mission of Constantine and Methodius, to remove it from Byzantine tutelage, and place it under Roman ecclesiastical jurisdiction. The brothers were invited to Rome; there, Constantine-Cyril died (he is buried in San Clemente) but Methodius was issued with a bull (868) authorizing the use of the Slavonic liturgy, and given authority, in the Pope’s name, over a huge area of central Europe. Papal policy was to use the mission to establish control of central Europe at the expense both of the Franks and the Greeks. The strategy was deliberately foiled by the Frankish clergy; in 870 they had Methodius arrested, condemned by a synod for Greek-style ‘irregularities’, and imprisoned. It took the Pope more than three years to secure his release. The mission was finally driven back into the arms of Byzantium by the revival, by Frankish clergy, of the filioque issue. For Methodius as, on the other side, for the Franks, this was the heretical breaking-point, and he had no alternative but to relinquish his Rome connection and identify himself with the Greek Church. The Franks settled the matter by forcing the papacy to renounce the idea of a Slavonic liturgy. The truth is that there was a price to be paid for the Frankish experiment in creating a Christian social structure and culture. It gave to the western Church a wonderful sense of unity and coherence; it gave to western society great dynamism, which lies at the source of the European impact on the world. But it involved a degree of doctrinal, liturgical and, at bottom, cultural and racial intolerance, which made an ecumenical Church impossible. Unity in depth was bought at the expense of unity in breadth. The Christian penetration of every aspect of life in the West meant a highly organized, disciplined and particularist ecclesiastical structure, which could not afford to compromise with eastern deviations. Moreover, the imperiousness of the Carolingian Church gradually coloured the attitudes of the papacy and governed the Roman posture long after the Carolingian empire itself had disappeared. In the tenth and eleventh centuries, Rome used arguments in its confrontations with Constantinople which had been initiated by the Frankish court in the eighth and ninth centuries, and which it had then resisted or sought to tone down. It is useful, at this stage, to trace the dispute to its bitter end. Perhaps a final breach was inevitable once the Popes had committed themselves to the creation of an empire in the West. Either the western empire had to absorb the eastern, or vice versa;

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  systems. After all, ‘when business was over the King and he would sport together like boys of the same age; in hall or in church they sat together; together they went riding . . .’ In fact this contemporary description fails to note that Becket was sixteen years older than the king, and already set in his ways. He was probably a bad influence over the young monarch: an obstinate insistence on the unequivocal acknowledgment of rights, and a fondness for extravagant gestures, marked Henry’s policies when Becket was his chief adviser. In the 1160s, Henry, maturing, gradually adopted a much more conciliatory attitude to the world, and sought to woo opponents rather than shout them down, or smash them. He changed, and became a master of realpolitik. Becket remained the same: an obstinate and at times hysterical man, with an actor’s passion for noisy drama. It was against this personal background that Henry’s England felt the first full impact of the papal revolution. In the Conqueror’s time, wrote Eadmer, ‘all things, spiritual and temporal alike, waited upon the nod of the King’; a council of bishops could not ‘lay down any ordinance or prohibition unless they were agreeable to the King’s wishes, and had first been approved by him’; and a bishop could not, without the king’s agreement, ‘take action against or excommunicate one of his barons or officials for incest or adultery or any other cardinal offence or even when guilt was notorious, lay upon him any penalty of ecclesiastical discipline.’ That was still the world of the Dark Ages. Under William II, and Henry I, there had been a growing sense of antagonism between king and senior clerics; and during the disturbed period of Stephen’s reign a progressive encroachment by the Church on royal legal territory. On the other hand, there is plenty of evidence that compromise was possible. The papal curia was not a monolithic organization; the curia was often divided itself, or sometimes imposed a restraining collective leadership on an impetuous pontiff. John of Salisbury, noting that Eugenius III’s decisions were often subsequently revoked, explains this by saying ‘he was too ready to rely upon his personal opinion in imposing sentences’. At a local level, ecclesiastical authorities had their own motives for trying to avoid a showdown. Becket’s predecessor, Archbishop Theodore, for instance, disliked appeals to Rome unless litigants ‘are in the grip of some necessity from which they cannot free themselves by their own efforts’. He thought that ‘the transgressions of malicious persons are best punished by those who have intimate knowledge of the merits of the parties concerned’; he rebuked the Bishop of Chichester for appealing to Canterbury: ‘That disputes within your jurisdiction find

• From Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (2017)

  At the same time, seeing Black female bodies as sites of theory production allows us to move the work of Black women’s intellectual history beyond triage. One of the unfortunate methodological results of triaging Black women’s histories is that when we have recovered a Black woman figure, that is, when we have saved her from being buried and lost to the annals of history, when we know her name and as many details as we can about her life and work, then we treat her as though it is time to move on to the next patient. That we have not yet engaged with the content of what Black women intellectuals actually said, even as we celebrate all that they did, seems to escape notice. This recovery imperative memorializes Black women figures like Cooper and her race women colleagues while obscuring other kinds of critical scholarly utility they have for our conversations in history, politics, literary studies, and feminist theory. Because we are familiar with Cooper, because we can call her name, because there are two books of critical scholarship about her (albeit written two decades apart), we act as though there is nothing new or groundbreaking to say about her.20 By contrast, we never engage W. E. B. Du Bois in this way. Every year, a new scholarly text is written grappling with his work. Meanwhile, the work of Black women’s intellectual history and Black feminist theory production suffers from lack of access to the rich histories of Black women’s ideas. Thus, this work is not solely a work of recovery. I am deeply concerned about what these new ideas mean for making critical shifts in our intellectual genealogies, in our current Black feminist formulations, and in our telling of Black intellectual history.

• From The Spiritual Works of Leo Tolstoy (selected nonfiction) (2016)

  What must I do to obtain everlasting life? Jesus said to him: Why do you call me good? Only the father is good. If you wish to have life, fulfill the commandments. The official said: There are many commandments-which must I fulfill? And Jesus said: Do not kill, do not lust, do not lie, do not steal. Also, honor your Father and fulfill his will, and love your neighbor as yourself. And the Orthodox official said: I have kept all those commandments since I was a child; but I ask what else must I do according to your teaching? Jesus looked at him and at his rich clothes, smiled, and said: One little thing you have not yet done. You have not fulfilled everything, as you say. If you wish to fulfill the commandments: not to kill, not to lust, not to steal, not to lie, and the chief command, to love your neighbor as yourself-then sell all your possessions at once and give to the poor. Then you will fulfill the Father's will. Hearing this, the official frowned and went away, for he was loathe to part with his possessions. And Jesus said to his pupils: As you see, it is quite impossible to be rich and to fulfill the Father's will. The pupils were horrified at these words, but Jesus repeated them again, and said: Yes, children, it is impossible for him who has riches to be in the Father's will. A camel can pass through the eye of a needle sooner than he who trusts in riches fulfill the will of the Father. And they were still more horrified and said: How then can one preserve one's life? But he said: To a man it seems that he cannot support his life without property, but God preserves a man's life without property. Jesus was once passing through the town of Jericho. And a prominent tax-farmer was there, a rich man named Zacchaeus, who had heard of Jesus' teaching and believed in it, and when he learnt that Jesus was in Jericho he wished to see him. But there was such a crowd round Jesus that it was impossible to push through to him. Zacchaeus was a small man, so he ran ahead and climbed a tree that he might see Jesus as he went past. When passing the tree Jesus saw him, and knowing that he believed in his teaching said: Come down from the tree and go home. I will come to you. Zacchaeus climbed down, ran home, made ready to welcome Jesus, and received him joyfully. The people disapproved of this and said of Jesus: Why, he has gone to a taxfarmer's, to a scoundrel's house! At that very time Zacchaeus was saying to Jesus: See, Master, what I will do: I will give half my property to the poor, and out of what is left I will repay fourfold to all whom I have wronged. And Jesus said: You have saved yourself.

• From Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition (2004)

  205 with Tristan meeting Isolt of the White Hands. Other writers added various endings to the tale. The story poses several problems for critics. Is it unfi nished because Gottfried did not know how to fi nish it? Is the moral of the story that one must adopt an air of resignation in the face of inevitable disappointment? Is the story a utopian idealization of pure love? What is the point of the love potion—to excuse the lovers or to elevate their love to the highest possible plane, to make of it something beyond human will? This is a story of adultery, and the cuckolded husband, Mark, is a sympathetic fi gure. Yet Gottfried’s sympathies, and ours, are with Tristan and Isolt. Is the work intended to criticize conventional court culture and the conventions of courtly love? Is the point that true love is not a courtly entertainment but something so pure, so re fi ned, so powerful that it cannot be integrated into normal society? Is Gottfried inviting us to compare a love that is subject to reason with a love that is irrational and, in equal measures, sublime and destructive? The story’s possibilities are inexhaustible. ■ The Complete Romances of Chrétien de Troyes, trans. Staines. Capellanus, The Art of Courtly Love. von Strassburg, Tristan, trans. Hatto. 1. In what ways can you use Tristan and Roland as characters to compare romance with the chanson de geste? 2. How would you end the story that Gottfried left unfi nished? Questions to Consider Supplementary Reading

• From Open (2009)

  I meet Krajicek in the semis. He’s still feeling good about winning the 1996 Wimbledon, the only Dutchman ever to do it. In the process he beat Pete in the quarters, handing Pete his first Wimbledon loss in years. But I’m not Pete, and I’m not me. Krajicek is down a set, serving at 3–4 in the second set, love–40. Triple break point. I rope the best return of my adult life. The ball seems to clear the net by a centimeter and leaves a smoking skid mark. It’s a true old-fashioned rug-burner. Krajicek shuts his eyes, shoves out his racket, hits a wild volley. It could go anywhere, he has no idea where it might go, but it’s a winner. If his racket had been open another half degree, the ball would have hit somebody in the front row and I would have broken serve and taken control of the match. Instead he wins the point, holds serve, beats me in three sets, ends my streak of consecutive matches at fifteen. In the old days I’d have had trouble getting over it. Now I tell Brad: That’s tennis, right, BG? ENTERING THE 1998 U.S. OPEN, I’m number eight in the world. The crowd is fully behind me, which always lifts my spirits, makes me lighter on my feet. In the round of sixteen I meet Kucera, who seems to be trying to irk me with his serve. He tosses the ball, then stops, catches it, and tosses it again. I’m down two sets to love, sorely annoyed by this guy. Then I remember: the better you play Kucera, the better he plays. Hit shit to him, he hits shit back. That’s it—I’m playing too well! I’m also serving too well. When it’s my serve, I imitate Kucera. The crowd laughs. Then I hit big goofy moonballs. I irk Kucera, irritate my way back into the match. Rain falls. The match is held over until tomorrow. Brooke and I go out for a late dinner with her friends. Actors. It’s always actors. The sky has cleared, so we eat outside at a downtown restaurant with tables on the roof. Afterward, we’re standing in the street, saying goodnight. Good luck tomorrow! the actors shout as they jump into cabs, off to do some more drinking. Brooke watches them, turns to me. Her bottom lip is out. She’s torn. She looks like a child caught between what she should do and what she wants to do. I take a swig from my liter bottle of Gil Water. Go, I say. Really? You won’t mind? No, I lie. Have fun.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  Testament anathema, and at a later session Pope Paul IV branded him as ‘the leader of all heretics’ and called for the burning of his collected works. By this time, too, Erasmus’s unrestricted presence would have been regarded as unwelcome in most of reformed Europe. Erasmus, in fact, rode on the crest of the New Learning, which seemed to offer unlimited opportunities for spiritual and intellectual advancement, and which presaged a thoroughgoing reform of society, conducted from within by a universal and voluntary movement. This rosy prospect was obliterated in the middle decades of the century, and what in fact happened was quite different: a division of Christianity on a compulsory and state basis. Two armed camps came into existence: one, half-reformed, basing its claims exclusively on scripture; the other, unreformed, based exclusively on authority; and between them an unbridgeable chasm, filling with the victims of war and persecution. The outcome, in fact, was almost the complete antithesis of the Erasmian dream. Herein lies one of the central historical tragedies, of Christianity, of Europe, and of the world. The Erasmian dream was not wholly utopian. All men agreed that faith was a unity. Most agreed that there must be a unitary system of knowledge. Society was universally regarded not only as a unity but an organic one. Why should not the first and second infuse the third in harmony? In a sense, the object of these Renaissance reformers was merely to bring the ideal of Carolingian society up to date – to use the new knowledge to correct its accumulated abuses and imperfections. There was, certainly, a consensus of virtually all men that reform was overdue. The astonishing success of Erasmus’s works suggests there was also a wide consensus of educated men for the kind of suggestions he was putting forward. Let us now see what these suggestions were, how much they had in common with the programmes of the Protestant reformers, and where they differed. Erasmus, like all the reformers without exception, began by ignoring the existence of a privileged clerical class. He regarded himself as a layman, and made no distinction between men in orders, like Colet, and lay friends like Sir Thomas More. This was a commonplace among the men of the New Learning, who were interested in the same things and guided by the same considerations irrespective of their status. With leading scholars like Sir John Cheke and Jacob Sturm, for instance, it is often not easy to be sure whether they were in orders or not. Erasmus’s Enchiridion, though specifically addressed to laymen, is a general statement of his views which might, and indeed did, serve equally well for clerics. Intellectually, he was in the tradition of Tertullian and

• From How to Be Yourself: Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety (2018)

  Don’t get me wrong. Perfectionism confers some magical superpowers like high standards, strong work ethic, reliability, and deep care of others. But gone awry, it can subject us to a powerful riptide of I should do more, do better, be more, be better. We might look like we’re hitting it out of the park, but we feel like we’re striking out. For those of us who struggle with it, perfectionism is a misnomer: it’s not about striving to be perfect. Instead, it’s about never feeling good enough. * * * Interestingly, at the heart of perfectionism is something downright magical: conscientiousness. Conscientiousness is the least sexy superpower. Detail-oriented super vision! Single-handedly crush the marshmallow test! Clear the highest standards in a single bound! But it is the most potent trait for a good life. Dr. Angela Duckworth, author of the book Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance, and three colleagues examined almost ten thousand American adults and identified conscientiousness as the most consistent predictor of both objective and subjective success—it plays a role in everything from income to happiness to life satisfaction. Conscientiousness is deeply rooted; the word dates from the 1600s and distills down to conscience, our inner sense of right and wrong. It means caring deeply—caring about doing things right, caring about doing a good job, caring about being a good person. We care deeply about, and for, those around us. But at some point, conscientiousness can tip over into unhelpful perfectionism. Trailblazing Oxford University colleagues Drs. Roz Shafran, Zafra Cooper, and Christopher Fairburn* posit that clinical levels of unhelpful perfectionism emerge when we keep pushing despite adverse consequences; we keep hammering away at the nail long after we’ve smashed our thumb. Two core elements lie at the heart of clinical perfectionism, both of which made my eyebrows shoot up in recognition. First is a hypercritical relationship with oneself. We are our own worst critics. We focus on flaws rather than what’s going well, what is lacking rather than what’s good. When we don’t fulfill those high expectations for ourselves, we are hard on ourselves, but when we do, we decide the expectations were insufficiently demanding in the first place.

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

  “Depression” was another word for what the eighteenth-century governor of Virginia called his impoverished neighbor North Carolina: a “sinkhole.” 13 In the writings that suffused 1930s periodicals as well as government reports, economic failure was associated with the old notion of wasteland. When Roy Stryker was put in charge of the Historical Section of the Resettlement Administration in 1935, he hired a team of talented photographers to record images of barren land dotted with abandoned farms and long stretches of terrain destroyed by dust storms, floods, and gullies—all caused by destructive farming, irresponsible lumbering, and traditional mining techniques. In this literary and visual construction of reality on the ground, class identity was not just a slippery slope; it was closer in nature to the erratically formed, man-made furrows of the gully. People were seen in the numerous images of the FSA as scattered and anonymous, squatting along roads, worn, beaten, set adrift, washed up. The absence of active laborers conveyed its own unmistakable message—a Life story explained that it was hard to “see” depression because of “business not being done.” Documentary photographer Arthur Rothstein took a haunting picture of an Ohio farm community. Only a few buildings were visible, and there were no people present. His camera focused on a sign planted in the frozen mud, marking the identity of this unincorporated town. It read, “Utopia.” 14

• From How to Read the Bible and Still Be a Christian (2015)

  The final question is whether that Sanction -heavy vision in the book of Deuteronomy actually works in practice as the Deuteronomic tradition seeks to interpret biblical history in terms of blessings and rewards for covenantal fidelity and curses and punishments for covenantal infidelity. Furthermore, does the Bible elsewhere always agree with that Deuteronomic vision of the relationship between God and the world or God and Israel? CHAPTER 6Blessing and CurseYou realize by now the part you played To stultify the Deuteronomist And change the tenor of religious thought. ROBERT FROST , “God to Job,” A Masque of Reason (1945) IN 931 BCE THE united monarchy of David and Solomon split, over the issue of excessive taxation, into the divided monarchy that separated the northern Kingdom of Israel from the southern Kingdom of Judah. When that northern Kingdom was destroyed by the ascendant Assyrian Empire in 722–721 BCE , refugees, fleeing to relative safety in the more isolated south, took with them their own traditions, such as that of the Elohist and the Deuteronomist (recall them from Chapter 4). About one hundred years later, in 621 BCE , the high priest Hilkiah informed King Josiah of Judah that he had found the book of Deuteronomy, which he called the “book of the law,” in the Jerusalem Temple (2 Kings 22:8). Thus began what today is called the Deuteronomic Reform under the slogan “one God in one Temple—at Jerusalem” (note, for example, Deut. 12:13–14). Sanction: Curses over BlessingsWHAT IS MOST STRIKING and even startling about the book of Deuteronomy is how it is dominated by covenant, with covenant dominated by Sanction, and with Sanction dominated by curses over blessings. To put it another way: this book’s God of distributive justice is dominated by its God of retributive justice. Watch, for example, how the book climaxes with this multiple Sanction section in Deuteronomy 27–30. First is a ritual and antiphonal renewal of the covenant to be performed with representatives invoking blessings for fidelity and curses for infidelity to which all the people must answer “Amen”: “When you have crossed over the Jordan, these shall stand on Mount Gerizim for the blessing of the people: Simeon, Levi, Judah, Issachar, Joseph, and Benjamin. And these shall stand on Mount Ebal for the curse: Reuben, Gad, Asher, Zebulun, Dan, and Naphtali” (27:12–13). Yet in what follows there is no sixfold invocation of both blessings and curses but only a twelvefold invocation of curses (27:14–36): “‘Cursed be anyone who makes an idol or casts an image, anything abhorrent to the Lord, the work of an artisan, and sets it up in secret.’ All the people shall respond, saying, ‘Amen!’” (27:15); and, “‘Cursed be anyone who deprives the alien, the orphan, and the widow of justice.’ All the people shall say, ‘Amen!’” (27:19). Curses predominate over blessings.