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 A History of Christianity (1976)

  rebuilt as a Roman colonial city. The Jewish-Christian community was dispersed; most of its leaders were no doubt killed. Survivors fled to Asia Minor, the east, Egypt, especially to Alexandria. Thus the centre of Christian gravity shifted to Rome; and the theological vacuum left by the extinction of the Jerusalem Church was filled by the Pauline system. A number of readjustments followed. Paul’s Christ had not been anchored to the historical Jesus of the Jerusalem Church. This was remedied by Mark, who wrote the first biography of Jesus, presenting him as a deity. Luke, in his gospel and his Acts, completed the plastic surgery by giving the decapitated trunk of the Jerusalem Jesus a Pauline head. The change of balance and direction in the Church was eventually accepted by most Christian-Jewish communities in Africa and Asia. It is reflected in a number of documents, such as the gospel of Matthew, who neatly contrives to be both very Jewish and very Christian, and the gospel of John, which marks the triumph of Pauline theology. But other Christian-Jewish fragments declined to change and so became heretical. Such were the Ebionites, or poor ones, chiefly in Egypt. They saw themselves as the true, primitive Church; they had allowed themselves to be by-passed by events, lost their title to orthodoxy, and so came to be treated as false innovators – a familiar paradox in the history of religion. It is interesting that their writings and those of other Jewish-Christians in the fifties who had first introduced the idea of heresy in the portray Paul as antichrist and the first heretic. It was in fact the Jewish Christians in the fifties, who had first introduced the idea of heresy in the campaign against Paul and Hellenization; thus the arrow flew swiftly back to the archer. In Judaism itself, heresy was already a mature and powerful concept. Hence, following the collapse of Jewish Christianity, the orthodox Judaic authorities did not wait long to anathematize Christianity as such. Around 85, the judgment was incorporated in the synagogue liturgy: ‘May the Nazarenes and the heretics be suddenly destroyed and removed from the book of life.’ Heresy was another Judaic gift to the Christian Church, where it soon began to flourish mightily. Yet what was Christian heresy? And, for that matter, what was the Church? Most of our knowledge of early Christian history comes from the writings of Bishop Eusebius of Caesarea in the fourth century. Eusebius was in many ways a conscientious historian, and he had access to multitudes of sources which have since disappeared. But he believed, and was therefore concerned to demonstrate by his presentation of

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  Many straight men fantasize variations on the theme of the omni-sexual woman. She doesn’t have to be wooed or coaxed into sex. She doesn’t have to get in the mood, because she’s always in the mood. She doesn’t say, “How can you think about sex now when we have so much stuff to do?” She says, “More, more, more.” She doesn’t make him feel bad for wanting sex, because she wants it just as much. When two French maids invite you into their bed, you can be sure that neither one of them is going to say, “Not tonight, honey, I’m too tired.” Poor Man’s Bread Until recently, sexual fantasy has gotten a bad rap. What Christianity viewed as a sin later became, in the eyes of modern psychology, a perversion limited to the dissatisfied and the immature. Even today, many people believe that fantasy is nothing more than thin compensation for libidinal frustration and lack of opportunity due to failure of nerve, arrested development, or a paunch. They believe that what we fantasize about sexually is what we want to have happen in reality. “If my husband was really attracted to me he wouldn’t need to look at pictures of women with big boobs,” complains one wife. “When I fantasize about other men ravishing me, I feel like I’m betraying my boyfriend,” says another client. “What kind of woman wants to be raped?” I, too, used to take the narrow view that fantasy was the poor man’s bread—the meal of the sensually impoverished. I had been taught to regard fantasies as a symptom of neurosis or immaturity, or as erotically tinged romantic idealizations that blind one to his or her partner’s true identity and undermine real-life relationships. I was stuck at the border between the imaginary and the real, diverted from delving into the complexity of the erotic mind. Luckily, I was curious enough to ask my patients about their fantasy lives. But once they told me, I still didn’t know what to do with the information. It was like watching a great Russian movie without subtitles; I had no idea what it was about, though I could appreciate the beauty of the cinematography. Over the years, the thinking in the field has evolved, so that we now look at fantasy as a natural component of healthy adult sexuality. From an almost exclusive focus on fantasies as furtive compulsions (or perverse wishes of an unfulfilled minority), the view has widened. The collective work of philosophers and clinicians like Michel Foucault, Georges Bataille, Ethel Spector Person, Robert Stoller, Jack Morin, Michael Bader, and dozens of others has brought about a sea change in grasping the depth and richness of the erotic imagination: what it is, and what it can do.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  [32] Experience thus teaches that one city administered by rulers, changing annually, is sometimes able to do more than some kings having, perchance, two or three cities; and small services exacted by kings weigh more heavily than great burdens imposed by the community of citizens. This held good in the history of the Roman Republic. The plebs were enrolled in the army and were paid wages for military service. Then when the common treasury was failing, private riches came forth for public uses, to such an extent that not even the senators retained any gold for themselves save one ring and the one bulla (the insignia of their dignity). [33] On the other hand, when the Romans were worn out by continual dissensions taking on the proportion of civil wars, and when by these wars the freedom for which they had greatly striven was snatched from their hands, they began to find themselves under the power of emperors who, from the beginning, were unwilling to be called kings, for the royal name was hateful to the Romans. Some emperors, it is true, faithfully cared for the common good in a kingly manner, and by their zeal the commonwealth was increased and preserved. But most of them became tyrants towards their subjects while indolent and vacillating before their enemies, and brought the Roman commonwealth to naught. [34] A similar process took place, also, among the Hebrew people. At first, while they were ruled by judges, they were ravished by their enemies on every hand, for each one “did what was good in his sight” (1 Sam 3:18). Yet when, at their own pressing, God gave them kings, they departed from the worship of the one God and were finally led into bondage, on account of the wickedness of their kings. [351 Danger thus lurks on either side. Either men are held by the fear of a tyrant and they miss the opportunity of having that very best government which is kingship; or, they want a king and the kingly power turns into tyrannical wickedness. CHAPTER 6 THAT IT IS A LESSER EVIL WHEN A MONARCHY TURNS INTO TYRANNY THAN WHEN AN ARISTOCRACY BECOMES CORRUPT[36] When a choice is to be made between two things, from both of which danger impends, surely that one should be chosen from which the lesser evil follows. Now, lesser evil follows from the corruption of a monarchy (which is tyranny) than from the corruption of an aristocracy. [37] Group government [polyarchy] most frequently breeds dissension. This dissension runs counter to the good of peace which is the principal social good. A tyrant, on the other hand, does not destroy this good, rather he obstructs one or the other individual interest of his subjects—unless, of course, there be an excess of tyranny and the tyrant rages against the whole community. Monarchy is therefore to be preferred to polyarchy, although either form of government might become dangerous.

• From Paul and Palestinian Judaism (40th Anniversary Edition) (2017)

  Although it is sufficiently clear that Israel is to obey God's commandments, as we shall see when we discuss the 'righteous', it is a peculiarity of the Psalms of Solomon that God is seldom depicted as giving commandments (an exception is 14.1 [2]), particular commandments are almost never speci fied, and particular transgressions are only infrequently itemized (2.3; 2.14f. [13], see below). The psalmist(s), that is, had very little halakic interest, and in this respect the Psalms of Solomon differ widely from Jubi lees and Rabbinic literature but are closer to the various sections of I Enoch. While keeping the commandments is implied, though not emphasized as the special activity of the covenant people, the author primarily defines the particular situation of the elect in another way, and one which is both unique and striking. The terms of the covenant are that God will be faithful and will not desert his people, and the people are under God's yoke and 'the rod of [His] chastening' (7.8 [9]). That it is the special role of God's people to be chastened and suffer is repeatedly emphasized. God's 'chastisement is upon us as (upon) a first-born, only-begotten son, to tum back the obedient soul from folly (that is wrought) in ignorance' (18.4f. [4]; cf. 8.32 [26]; 8.35 [29]; 10.2f.). This is especially striking in the light of the traditional view that the righteous prosper in this life, which was still dominant in Ben Sirach and which appears in some layers of the Rabbinic literature. 8 It is in some way maintained in the Psalms of Solomon, at least to the degree that the righteous do not suffer so much as do the wicked. They are chastised but not destroyed (13.1-7 [1-8]).9 The author of Ps. 1, however, takes rather ironic note of the traditional view. He had counted himself righteous because of his prosperity, so that when war threatened he thought that God would protect him (1.2f.). But he has to grant that the prosperity of his enemies (probably the Romans, though possibly the Hasmoneans) exceeded anything he had imagined: 'Their wealth spread to the whole earth, and their glory unto the end of the earth' (1.4). If prosperity is a test of righteousness, the Romans (or Has moneans) must have been really righteous! But they became insolent; their sins were in secret ( 1. 6f.) - that is, they were not punished for them and still appeared prosperous and consequently righteous. In this situation the view 8 See above, p. 125. 9 In 13.7 (8), Gray suggests either 'secretly' or 'sparingly' for en peristoli as describing the way in which the righteous are chastened. Stein has 'a little' and Frankenberg leaves a lacuna. Ryle and James translate 'secretly' but were tempted by 'a little'. In any case the difference between the destruction of the wicked and the chastisement of the righteous is clear. The Psalms of Solomon 391

• From Open (2009)

  In the quarters I play Sébastien Grosjean, from France. I breeze through the first set, losing only one game, then Grosjean taps into some hidden reservoir of faith that he can win. Now our self-confidence is equal, but his shot-making is superior. He breaks me to go up 2–0, then breaks me again and wins the second set as easily as I won the first. In the third set he breaks me right away, winning the game with a pretty lob. Then he holds, then breaks me again. I’m done for. In the fourth set I have chances to break his serve, but I can’t capitalize. I hit a backhand that’s weak, unworthy of me, and as I watch it sail wide I know I’m running out of time. He’s serving for the match, I’m holding on by my fingernails, and then I net a forehand. Match point. He closes me out with an ace. Afterward, reporters ask if my concentration was broken by the arrival of President Bill Clinton. Of all the reasons I’ve ever heard, and offered, for losing a match, even I couldn’t come up with one that lame. I didn’t even know Clinton was there, I tell them. I had other things on my mind. Other invisible spectators. I BRING STEFANIE TO GIL’S GYM, under the guise of a workout. She’s beaming, because she knows why we’re really here. Gil asks Stefanie if she’s feeling all right, if she’d like something to drink, if she’d like to sit. He guides her to an exercise cycle and she mounts sidesaddle. She studies the shelf Gil has built along one wall, to hold the trophies from my slams, including those I’ve had replaced since my post-Friends tantrum. I fiddle with a stretching cord and then say: So, uhh, Gil, listen. We’ve picked out a name for our son. Aw. What is it? Jaden. I like that, Gil says, smiling, nodding. Yes I do. I like that. And—we also think we’ve got the perfect middle name. What’s that? Gil. He stares. I say, Jaden Gil Agassi. If he grows up to be half the man you are, he’ll be phenomenally successful, and if I can be half the father you’ve been to me, I’ll have surpassed my own standards. Stefanie is crying. My eyes are filled with tears. Gil is standing ten feet away, in front of the leg extension machine. He has his trademark pencil behind his ear, his glasses on the end of his nose, his da Vinci notebook open. He reaches me in three steps and folds me in his arms. I feel his necklace against my cheek. Father, Son, Holy Ghost. I’M CLOSE TO BEATING RAFTER at the 2001 Wimbledon. Fifth set, serving for the match, two points from winning, I net a tentative forehand. On the next point I miss an easy backhand. He’s broken back. Now it’s he who thinks he’s close to beating me. I shout, Motherfucker.

• From My People (2022)

  Woodson said the Urban League hoped to develop a plan that would “launch an organized attack on crime—not just to make the street safe, but that would speak to such areas as victim relief, penal reform, and various sociological and institutional dimensions of the problem. “Since the federal government won’t do it,” Mr. Woodson said, “we hope to give our people direction from a national black fountainhead.” Economist Finds Widening in Black-White Income GapThe New York Times NOVEMBER 29, 1975 NEWARK, Nov. 28—Despite “temporary” gains made by blacks toward economic parity with whites in the 1960s, recent trends indicate that the gap is once again widening, and that it may be at least seventy-five years before blacks catch up, according to one economist. “The movement of the 1960s toward greater equality seems to be broken,” according to Lester S. Thurow, professor of economics at the Alfred P. Sloan School of Management in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Speaking at a symposium marking the tenth anniversary of the United States Equal Employment Opportunity Commission held at the Newark campus of the Rutgers University Law School, Dr. Thurow said, “At all points in time—good or bad—black unemployment rates are twice as high as white.” At the moment, he said, that condition is exacerbated by the recession and a decline in the proportion of black families with two or more workers—a phenomenon that is the reverse in white families. While current recession data are not yet available, Dr. Thurow, also the author of Poverty and Discrimination , predicted that the trend would continue and the gap would increasingly widen. The essential problem is “a long-run deeply embedded relationship in the economy,” he said. “The rapidly escalating black unemployment rates of this recession or depression are not a temporary phenomenon,” he said. “They are exactly what would have been expected given the structure of the economy. Nothing has changed in the past thirty years. No progress has been made.” Dr. Thurow attributed the gain in relative earnings among blacks to the absorption of younger blacks into the post–World War II labor force—“the type of change that causes the least disruptions” in the labor force. But, he said, in periods of recession, the process is reversed because of seniority provisions (formal and informal) in hiring and layoffs. “The youngest workers are most apt to lose their jobs, and they are the workers where the ratio of black to white earnings is most likely to be near parity,” he said. “Therefore a recession shifts the weight of those remaining fully employed toward older groups with larger relative earning differences.”

• From Saint Augustine (Penguin Lives) (1999)

  Though he says this book was still tainted with the Manichean notion that evil is a substance, he did not dedicate the book to any of his Manichean friends. Trying to advance himself outside his own circle, he addressed it to a distant rhetorician he had never met, Hierius (T 4.21–23). Despite his assurances to Romanian that he had returned to Carthage to acquire more learning for use in Thagaste, Augustine was clearly looking to farther horizons. Though he was a skilled Manichean dialectician, his growing philosophical interests made him suspicious of the faith he defended against others so deftly. Manicheism had promised a rational alternative to scriptural myth, but his work in the “natural philosophers” (very likely Cicero’s treatment of astrology-astronomy) made him doubt that the Manicheans’ own cosmic myths accorded with the state of science in his day. Manichean friends told Augustine his doubts about Manicheisan would be settled when its foremost African spokesman came to Carthage. This was Faustus, on whose name (“Blest”) Augustine would play ironically. Despite a melodramatic asceticism (he had publicly renounced his parents), Faustus turned out to be a charismatic and engaging man, a spellbinding preacher, but no thinker. Augustine was inspired by his speaking skills but disappointed that he could not answer his deeper questions about Manichean truth. “What I had already been told he presented with a much smoother line—but how was serving things up in fancier cups going to ease my thirst?” (T 5.10). Though it had been reported that Faustus was an adept of the liberal arts, he had not even read the serious books Augustine was now sharing with his students (presumably Cicero’s dialogues)—as he winningly admitted: “He was not entirely ignorant of his ignorance” (T 5.13). The two became friends. But Augustine, who had wanted to be the pupil, had turned into the teacher. What makes that fact odd is that Augustine, a success on the hustings and a teacher to the teacher, was a failure in the classroom. His idea of polite exchange was left vulnerable to the student hooliganism Augustine had applauded, from the sidelines, when he consorted with the Subversives. Now he became the victim of such people: “Outsiders, looking almost crazed, barge shamelessly into classrooms and dispel any atmosphere for learning the teacher may have established” (T 5.14). Talk in the profession indicated that students in Rome were more docile, and Augustine used this as one of his excuses for slipping away from Carthage, without informing either his mother or his patron. Taking Una and Godsend with him, he was steering, as Aeneas had, for Rome. II ITALY (383–388) 1. Rome: 383–384 HIS VOYAGE TO ROME was Augustine’s first harrowing experience of the sea. He would sail only one more time in his life—to get back to Africa, and to stay there. The sea, despite its beauty, was a terror to anyone venturing on it (Perler 57–81):

• From The Trembling of the Veil (1922)

  I have a thousand excuses to beg for having so long delayed thanking you my dear Peggy for your agreable Letter, which beleive me I should not have deferred doing, had not every moment of my time during the last five weeks been so fully employed in the necessary arrangements for my sisters wedding, as to allow me no time to devote either to you or myself. And now what provokes me more than anything else is that the Match is broke off, and all my Labour thrown away. Imagine how great the Dissapointment must be to me, when you consider that after having laboured both by Night and by Day, in order to get the Wedding dinner ready by the time appointed, after having roasted Beef, Broiled Mutton, and Stewed Soup enough to last the new-married Couple through the Honey-moon, I had the mortification of finding that I had been Roasting, Broiling and Stewing both the Meat and Myself to no purpose. Indeed my dear Freind, I never remember suffering any vexation equal to what I experienced on last Monday when my sister came running to me in the store-room with her face as White as a Whipt syllabub, and told me that Hervey had been thrown from his Horse, had fractured his Scull and was pronounced by his surgeon to be in the most emminent Danger. “Good God! (said I) you dont say so? Why what in the name of Heaven will become of all the Victuals! We shall never be able to eat it while it is good. However, we’ll call in the Surgeon to help us. I shall be able to manage the Sir-loin myself, my Mother will eat the soup, and You and the Doctor must finish the rest.” Here I was interrupted, by seeing my poor Sister fall down to appearance Lifeless upon one of the Chests, where we keep our Table linen. I immediately called my Mother and the Maids, and at last we brought her to herself again; as soon as ever she was sensible, she expressed a determination of going instantly to Henry, and was so wildly bent on this Scheme, that we had the greatest Difficulty in the World to prevent her putting it in execution; at last however more by Force than Entreaty we prevailed on her to go into her room; we laid her upon the Bed, and she continued for some Hours in the most dreadful Convulsions. My Mother and I continued in the room with her, and when any intervals of tolerable Composure in Eloisa would allow us, we joined in heartfelt lamentations on the dreadful Waste in our provisions which this Event must occasion, and in concerting some plan for getting rid of them. We agreed that the best thing we could do was to begin eating them immediately, and accordingly we ordered up the cold Ham and Fowls, and instantly began our Devouring Plan on them with great Alacrity. We would have persuaded Eloisa to have taken a Wing of a Chicken, but she would not be persuaded. She was however much quieter than she had been; the convulsions she had before suffered having given way to an almost perfect Insensibility. We endeavoured to rouse her by every means in our power, but to no purpose. I talked to her of Henry. “Dear Eloisa (said I) there’s no occasion for your crying so much about such a trifle. (for I was willing to make light of it in order to comfort her) I beg you would not mind it—You see it does not vex me in the least; though perhaps I may suffer most from it after all; for I shall not only be obliged to eat up all the Victuals I have dressed already, but must if Henry should recover (which however is not very likely) dress as much for you again; or should he die (as I suppose he will) I shall still have to prepare a Dinner for you whenever you marry any one else.

• From Between Us

  Likewise, it was hard to gauge the state of my relationships: Did people like me? Did we have a friendship? I was not sure what the daily reassurances meant exactly, and I could not tell if people really cared for me. Or was that even a question to ask? One time, I had new friends over for dinner. The meal was tasty, and the conversation was engaged, and at times intimate. We had fun. It seemed to me that this could be the beginning of a real friendship; that is, until my guests left and thanked me for dinner. I felt crushed, because it had now dawned on me that we had failed to make a true connection. The way I was raised, where there is gratitude (i.e., thanking someone for dinner), there is no room for friendship. “Thank you for dinner” felt to me as an act of distancing, rather than an expression of appreciation. I would have liked my guests to say that they were looking forward to spending more time with me, that they really liked the evening together, or that they felt happy or connected to me. Were these instances merely differences in conventions? Or were my emotions really different from the ones experienced by the American people I encountered? In later years, when relatives or friends from the Netherlands came visiting, I observed how they similarly failed to conform to the social and emotional norms. My dad, accepting a very generous dinner invitation by a local American friend, confirmed it was “fine” to come over for dinner on a Friday night during his stay—not only failing to use a superlative, but also failing to give proper recognition to the extraordinary effort on the part of his host. At that point his behavior made me cringe. Friends, coming to visit from the Netherlands, were friendly and jovial with waiters and shopkeepers, but without praising or thanking them. Their jokes and joviality emphasized the connections between everyone involved, but failed to mark the efforts of the service person. More interesting yet: Dutch friends and relatives privately commented to me that the American emotions they encountered seemed “fake” or “exaggerated.” My son’s schoolteacher, Jill, exclaimed excitedly to my mom, who was visiting, how wonderful it was that my mom came to spend time with her grandchildren. She next asked my mom if she were enjoying herself. My mom confided to me that the teacher’s excitement seemed “fake.” On another occasion, my American colleagues praised the presentation of a visiting European scholar, saying it was brilliant. The European scholar shrugged and later told me that their praise “meant nothing,” and that is was likely “fake,” or “exaggerated.” How else would a European explain the unfailing generosity, interest, praise, and enthusiasm that, in their eyes, many Americans display in circumstances that from a Dutch perspective do not “naturally” give rise to those emotions?

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

  Later generations would idealize the Conquest Era, but it was a difficult time. The failure to defeat Constantinople was a bitter blow. By the time Uthman, the Prophet’s son-in-law, became the third caliph (r. 644–56), Muslim troops had become mutinous and discontented. The distances were now so vast that campaigning was exhausting, and they were taking less plunder. Far from home, living perpetually in strange surroundings, soldiers had no stable family life.53 This disquiet is reflected in the hadith (plural: ahadith) literature, in which the classical doctrine of jihad began to take shape.54 The ahadith (“reports”) recorded sayings and stories of the Prophet not included in the Quran. Now that he was no longer with them, people wanted to know how Muhammad had behaved and what he had thought about such subjects as warfare. These traditions were collected and anthologized during the eighth and ninth centuries and became so numerous that criteria were needed to distinguish authentic reports from the obviously spurious. Few of the ahadith date back to the Prophet himself, but even the more dubious ones throw light on attitudes in the early ummah as Muslims reflected on their astounding success.

• From The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us (2017)

  For Darwin, the preferences that drove sexual selection were taken for granted—given. Men just prefer smooth women, and that’s that. Alfred Russel Wallace, the co-discoverer of natural selection, hated the arbitrariness of Darwinian sexual selection. He wanted females to choose males not by whim but on merit…For Darwin, peahens choose peacocks simply because, in their eyes, they are pretty. Fisher’s later mathematics put that Darwinian theory on a sounder mathematical footing. For Wallaceans, peahens choose peacocks not because they are pretty but because their bright feathers are a token of their underlying health and fitness…Darwin did not try to explain female preference, but was content to postulate it to explain male appearance. Wallaceans seek evolutionary explanations of the preferences themselves. Instead of taking Darwin’s aesthetic language as a hypothesis about the evolutionary elaboration of traits and preferences, Dawkins confounds the arbitrariness of Darwinian sexual traits with a perceived ambiguity about his evolutionary mechanism for the origin of preferences. The anti-aesthetic Wallaceans are portrayed as scientifically progressive, while aesthetic Darwinism is portrayed as fuzzy, lazy, and incomplete. Although Dawkins admits Fisher’s more solid theoretical grounding for the arbitrary, he does not entertain any modern Darwinian alternative to the Wallacean solution. Because the Fisherian answers don’t provide the comforting “rhyme and reason” of the neo-Wallacean solutions, they aren’t even entertained as scientific answers. The earliest branch in the phylogeny: Though somewhat out of date in terms of data quality and quantity, the most current phylogeny of the bowerbirds is Kusmierski et al. (1997). The Australopapuan catbirds (Ailuroedus) are not related to the common North American Gray Catbird (Dumetella carolinensis), which is a member of the mockingbird family (Mimidae). nest construction in catbirds: Frith and Frith (2001). It’s a stage set with props: Prior to the late twentieth-century revival of sexual selection theory, bowers were explained with an updated version of Mivart’s idea of sensory stimulus as a form of adaptive physiological coordination between the sexes (see chapter 1). Jock Marshall (1954) proposed that in the absence of a pair bond, the ancestral female bowerbird needed extra sexual stimulus to be induced to copulate and reproduce. Marshall hypothesized that the bower evolved as a male method of reminding females of the sexually stimulating shared, ancestral nest of their evolutionary past. This would induce them to copulate and to build their own nest and continue with reproduction. This idea fails on so many levels that it is probably best left to the historical past, but it does document the intellectual contortions that evolutionary explanation achieved during the twentieth century in the absence of a theory of evolution by mate choice. the females visited between 1 and 8 males: Uy et al. (2001). the Tooth-Billed Bowerbird is a polygynous species: For the natural history of the Tooth-Billed Bowerbird, see Frith and Frith (2004). pioneering work done by Jared Diamond: Diamond (1986). Diamond did experiments: Diamond (1986). Albert Uy repeated these ornament color choice experiments: Uy and Borgia (2000). Jared Diamond established: Diamond (1986).

• From Sex God: Exploring the Endless Connections Between Sexuality and Spirituality (2007)

  There are six billion people on the planet, and you two ended up together. What was it about him? What was it about her? Many times people forget their own story—the mystery of what brought them together. How much pain in the world can be tied to people losing the power, the mystery, the holiness of their marriage? I Always Watch Their Eyes The creator of the universe has a vested interest in this. God is for marriages. And it must be protected at all costs, especially in the everyday, subtle sorts of ways. I’ve been around lots of couples who cut each other down in public, but it’s all done in the name of humor. “The ball and chain . . .” “My old lady . . .” “He isn’t good for much, but I keep him anyway.” Whenever people talk like this, I always watch their eyes. Is this really all in good fun, or does it carry some truth? Most humor has truth in it. You can tell when the marriage is in trouble. The jokes have an edge to them. The comments linger just a bit too long on the negative. And the eyes. Watch the eyes. A friend of mine is a doctor who specializes in marriage and relational issues. He says he can tell in a couple of seconds whether a marriage will last. Seriously, a couple of seconds. This is a science called thin slicing, and he’s incredibly accurate in his predictions.18 He says it’s all about respect. How he looks at her. How she looks at him. He insists that a few seconds of observing how a couple looks at each other is all he needs to know if the marriage will make it. Maybe that’s another reason why wedding ceremonies are so moving. Watch their eyes. They respect each other. They’re under the chuppah. And then often something happens over time. The ground becomes less holy. And they begin to look at each other differently. Instead of the initial, “Out of all the people in the world, I choose you!” it becomes, “Out of all the people in the world, I chose you?” Recently I was with a couple who is having serious marriage trouble. I know this, of course, because of how they look at each other. But the wife shares with anyone who will listen just how hard it is to live with her husband. One of their friends was telling me just how toxic the two of them have become to those around them. This friend said that it is so hard because she wants to help, but when the wife tells her things, she has this gut reaction that she shouldn’t be hearing them. This couple needs help. There is trouble under the chuppah. But instead of getting counseling for their issues, they’re dragging everything out from under the chuppah and, in the process, making things worse.

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

  It turns out that everything which has been done by the men who comprehended Christ's teaching in a direct manner and lived in conformity with such a comprehension, everything which all true Christians, all Christian champions, have done, everything which now transforms the world under the guise of socialism and communism,—is exaggeration, of which it is not worth while to speak. Men who have been educated in Christianity for eighteen centuries have convinced themselves in the persons of their foremost men, the scholars, that the Christian teaching is a teaching of dogmas, that the vital teaching is a misconception, an exaggeration, which violates the true legitimate demands of morality, which correspond to man's nature, and that the doctrine of justice, which Christ rejected and in the place of which he put his own teaching, is much more profitable for us. The learned consider the commandment of non-resistance to evil an exaggeration and even madness. If it be rejected, it would be much better, they think, without observing that they are not talking of Christ's teaching at all, but of what presents itself to them as such. They do not notice that to say that Christ's commandment about non-resistance to evil is an exaggeration is the same as saying that in the theory of the circle the statement about the equality of the radii of a circle is an exaggeration. And those who say so do precisely what a man, who did not have any conception as to what a circle is, would do if he asserted that the demand that all the points on the circumference should be equally distant from the centre is an exaggeration. To advise that the statement concerning the equality of the radii in a circle be rejected or moderated is the same as not understanding what a circle is. To advise that the commandment about non-resistance to evil in the vital teaching of Christ be rejected or moderated means not to understand the teaching. And those who do so actually do not understand it at all. They do not understand that this teaching is the establishment of a new comprehension of life, which corresponds to the new condition into which men have been entering for these eighteen hundred years, and the determination of the new activity which results from it. They do not believe that Christ wanted to say what he did; or it seems to them that what he said in the Sermon on the Mount and in other passages He said from infatuation, from lack of comprehension, from insufficient development. [10] Therefore I say unto you, Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment? Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them.

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

  In the first year after Jay, the Lions sent five wrestlers to Des Moines, only one of them—Matt McDonough—a returnee from the year before. McDonough battled through the 3A bracket at 112 pounds to capture his first state title, becoming only the fourth individual champion in school history. Jay’s gradually appreciating assessment of Matt as a freshman had proved spot-on; in his sophomore season, Matt was stronger, more assured and consistently tenacious. But Doug Streicher had other reasons to be pleased: Jason Nelson made a surprise run at 152 pounds that resulted in a second-place finish; Wes Shetterly took sixth at his weight class. Linn-Mar, after four years of being known for Jay’s exploits, was producing good wrestlers up and down the scale. By all accounts, it had been another solid wrestling year for the high-schoolers in eastern Iowa. Of course, it couldn’t compare with 2005, when that bumper crop of talent had come blasting through. That group was epic. It would be impossible to re-create that kind of magic. Anyway, they were long gone. So it seemed. When the Iowa wrestling world came unhinged in the spring of 2006 , it did so in the manner Hemingway once suggested of the man who went broke: gradually and then suddenly. The Jim Zalesky years at the University of Iowa had built up this pressure, season by season, championship aspiration followed by NCAA disappointment. Recriminations flew among the bickering faithful, with many calling for Zalesky to go. The ghost of Gable, and all that winning, seemed to hover everywhere. It was finally too much. Zalesky’s team had rallied from a lackluster season the year before to finish second at the NCAAs in the spring of 2004, giving rise to the optimism that Iowa might prove strong enough to rebuild itself from within. Two winters later, that belief was almost fully diminished. Iowa finished the 2005–06 regular season with a 10-7 dual record, absorbing its most defeats in nearly forty years, and the Hawkeyes limped home a distant sixth place at the Big Ten Conference championships, which many Iowans interpreted as a rebuke either of the talent Zalesky had picked for his team or of his ability to coach it. A fourth-place finish at the NCAAs, at which the Hawkeyes crowned no individual national champions for the second straight year, confirmed things: Iowa no longer was perceived as an automatic threat to win. Something had to be done. Still, it took an almost staggering turn of events for things to eventually blow apart the way they did. A job opening had been created at Ohio State, and rumors were flying around the national wrestling community as to who might be recruited to it. Two of the names near the top of the list were Cael Sanderson, the Iowa State assistant, and Tom Brands.

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, Part 4 (300 – 1300, Rome) (2009)

  Certainly it would exclude Augustine’s theology of grace; yet it was Augustine whom the Western Church recognized as a saint, while ecclesiastical history left Cassian under a cloud of disapproval, like Origen and Evagrius before him. Nevertheless, Cassian’s legacy went beyond controversy: he proved as important for Western monasticism as Evagrius in the East. Much as Cassian admired the Egyptian hermits, he felt that their life represented a way of perfection which was not for all, and that most ascetics should live in community. His instructions for such communities, principally set out in his Institutes, were of great influence on a later monk apparently born around 480, a half-century after Cassian’s death. This monk, Benedict, admiring what Cassian had written, created a Rule which became the basis of Western monastic life. Benedict is a shadowy figure who quickly attracted a good deal of legend, lovingly collected into a life by Pope Gregory I at the end of the sixth century. The implausibility of much of Gregory’s narrative has led to suggestions that Benedict may not even have been a single individual, but a representative ‘blessed one’ (Benedictus in Latin), to whom a bundle of ideas came to be attributed as the ‘Rule’ of St Benedict, which was certainly compiled in the sixth century.72 In fact we now know that the Rule draws heavily on a previous text called ‘The Rule of the Master’ (Regula Magistri), probably drawn up some decades before, at the beginning of the sixth century. The later Rule both prunes the text and adds material, and the result is itself the best evidence against Benedict’s identity having been constructed from the collective efforts of some committee of monastic founders. His changes breathe the simplicity, common sense and practical wisdom of a single gifted individual, with a sense of terse style, and a gentler, less autocratic attitude than the Master to the community which an abbot must lead. He is notably kindlier than the Master in the treatment which he offers to monks who fall ill.73 This Rule was intended to guide a number of monastic communities in south Italy, principally the mountain-top house of Monte Cassino (so cruelly bombarded to rubble during an epic siege in the Second World War). In the opening chapter, both the Master and Benedict give honourable mention to the hermit’s vocation, seeing it as a more heroic stage of asceticism than community life, but then Benedict takes over the Master’s brutally contemptuous description of two other variants on the monastic life: groups of two or three living without a Rule, and those individual monks who wandered from place to place – the Rule regards them as parasites on settled communities. This attitude set a pattern which made Western monasticism distinctive, because the wandering holy man remained a common and widely honoured figure in the Eastern Churches. The Rule was there to describe how to construct a single community, living in

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  Often we are ourselves struck at the strange differences in our successive views of the same thing. We wonder how we ever could have opined as we did last month about a certain matter. We have outgrown the possibility of that state of mind, we know not how. From one year to another we see things in new lights. What was unreal has grown real, and what was exciting is insipid. The friends we used to care the world for are shrunken to shadows; the women, once so divine, the stars, the woods, and the waters, how now so dull and common; the young girls that brought an aura, of infinity, at present hardly distinguishable existences; the pictures so empty; and as for the books, what was there to find so mysteriously significant in Goethe, or in John Mill so full of weight? Instead of all this, more zestful than ever is the work, the work; and fuller and deeper the import of common duties and of common goods. But what here strikes us so forcibly on the flagrant scale exists on every scale, down to the imperceptible transition from one hour's outlook to that of the next. Experience is remoulding us every moment, and our mental reaction on every given thing is really a resultant of our experience of the whole world up to that date. The analogies of brain-physiology must again be appealed to to corroborate our view. Our earlier chapters have taught us to believe that, whilst we think, our brain changes, and that, like the aurora borealis, its whole internal equilibrium shifts with every pulse of change. The precise nature of the shifting at a given moment is a product of many factors. The accidental state of local nutrition or blood-supply may be among them. But just as one of them certainly is the influence of outward objects on the sense-organs during the moment, so is another certainly the very special susceptibility in which the organ has been left at that moment by all it has gone through in the past. Every brain-state is partly determined by the nature of this entire past succession. Alter the latter in any part, and the brain-state must be somewhat different.

• From Introduction to the Hebrew Bible and Deutero-Canonical Books (2018)

  Heaven is supported by pillars. This passage ranks with Psalm 104 as one of the major witnesses to an important account of creation that is quite different from anything in the book of Genesis. Job’s Self-Justification (Chapters 29–31) The final speech of Job in chapters 29–31 differs from his earlier outbursts. Up to this point, he had complained that his suffering was unjust but had not discussed his past conduct. Here he paints a picture of his prime, “when the Almighty was still with me, when my children were around me” (29:5). By his own account, he was a champion of righteousness: “eyes to the blind, and feet to the lame . . . a father to the needy, and I championed the cause of the stranger” (29:15-16). In return, he enjoyed respect: “Young men saw me and withdrew, and the aged rose up and stood” (29:8). Moreover, he thought he had a deal with God: “Then I thought, ‘I shall die in my nest, and I shall multiply my days like the phoenix; my roots spread out to the waters, with the dew all night on my branches” (29:18-19). In chapter 30, however, he expresses his profound disillusionment: “But now they make sport of me, those who are younger than I, whose fathers I would have disdained to set with the dogs of my flock” (30:1). He continues, in chapter 31, to set out what might have been fair punishment for various crimes: “If my heart has been enticed by a woman, and I have lain in wait at my neighbor’s door, then let my wife grind for another, and let other men kneel over her” (31:9-10); or: “if I have raised my hand against the orphan . . . then let my shoulder blade fall from my shoulder” (31:21-22). But there is considerable irony in all of this. Job is in no position to bargain with God. The fate that has already befallen him is worse than any of his imprecations. Moreover, he comes across as not only righteous but self-righteous. His contempt for the people he would not put with the dogs of his flock is damning. We need not doubt that Job is genuinely righteous in his behavior. His concern for his slaves is grounded in their common humanity: “Did not he who made me in the womb make them?” (31:15). He plays by the rules in life. But he also expects life to keep the rules as he understands them.

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

  The best solution is not only to disguise and change as many characteristics as you can but also to make the fictional person a composite. Then throw in the teenie little penis and anti-Semitic leanings, and I think you’ll be Okay. [image file=Image00006.jpg] Try not to feel sorry for yourselves, I say, when you find the going hard and lonely. You seem to want to write, so write. You didn’t have to sign up for this class. I didn’t chase you down and drag you by the hair back to my cave. You are lucky to be one of those people who wishes to build sand castles with words, who is willing to create a place where your imagination can wander. We build this place with the sand of memories; these castles are our memories and inventiveness made tangible. So part of us believes that when the tide starts coming in, we won’t really have lost anything, because actually only a symbol of it was there in the sand. Another part of us thinks we’ll figure out a way to divert the ocean. This is what separates artists from ordinary people: the belief, deep in our hearts, that if we build our castles well enough, somehow the ocean won’t wash them away. I think this is a wonderful kind of person to be. Now there is only a little time left in the class, and it feels like that last half hour at camp when you’ve all gathered in the parking lot, waiting for your duffel bags to be loaded on the bus. I think I’ve told my students every single thing I know about writing. Short assignments, shitty first drafts, one-inch picture frames, Polaroids, messes, mistakes, partners. But a lot of these people came to my class with the best ten pages they’ve ever written, hoping to get published, and now they wonder if this was just a pipe dream. I don’t think so. Maybe most of them are not going to be published in big magazines or by big presses. They are not going to end up on talk shows and best-seller lists, are not going to be David Letterman’s best friend or show Sharon Stone a good time. They are not going to buy big houses and pedigreed dogs and fish forks as a result of their writing. Many of them want these things more than anything else. They don’t believe that if they got these things they’d probably end up even more mentally ill and full of stress and self-doubt than they already are. Anyway, it is not going to happen for very many of them. I still think they should write with everything they have, daily if possible, and for the rest of their lives. When I suggest, however, that devotion and commitment will be their own reward, that in dedication to their craft they will find solace and direction and wisdom and truth and pride, they at first look at me with great hostility.

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

  You may want to tape this to the wall near your desk. The banana peel has appeared almost every time I’ve scored a triumph, or what the world would regard as a triumph. It’s God as coyote prankster. Just last week, for instance, I was participating in this illustrious literary event in San Francisco for a national charity. I had waited for years to be included in this event, each year watching six other writers be selected. I had tried to be a good sport about it, God knows I had. I understood that the organizers needed to invite big-time, nationally known writers so as to draw the biggest possible crowd; this made perfect sense. But year after year I felt dejected each time I was not included. Finally this year I was asked, and my joy was boundless. Now, I’m not stupid: I knew it was a nice big plate of cocaine for my ego. I knew it was another golden calf. But still my baby heart soared like an eagle. However. There was this one tiny little problem. I was the last author to be asked and to commit, so I wasn’t on the initial press release that went out three months ago. The publicity chairwoman sent out a second release after I came on board. But when the first big prominent mention was made in the paper a few weeks ago, my name wasn’t included. I was miffed, since it was the most important column in the paper, but I am old and tough and can handle this sort of disappointment. Next there was a paragraph about the event in the book section, and once again I was not included. This time the publicity chairwoman called, upset and so full of apologies that she managed to mollify me. Then there was a big mention in the society pages, and guess what? It felt like seventh grade all over again. The publicity chairwoman called again and was so upset that I thought she might actually drink a big glass of Drano right there on the phone. I felt suddenly so teary and premenstrual and left out that I couldn’t even talk about it. Hours later, I remembered that if I wasn’t enough before being asked to participate in this prestigious event, then participating wasn’t going to make me enough. Being enough was going to have to be an inside job. Also, about an hour after I had slogged through to this conclusion, my mouth dropped open. I had somehow forgotten that it was a charity event!

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

  There will be a few book-signing parties and maybe some readings, at one of which your publisher will spring for a twenty-pound wheel of runny Brie, and the only person who will show has lived on the street since he was twelve and even he will leave, because he hates Brie. You and the people who work at the bookstore will make lots of hilarious jokes about this. You will read to the five of them, and they will respond with great enthusiasm. Maybe there will be a couple of interviews and then probably somewhere along the line, just when you thought things were settling down, your first really devastating review, the review that says your book is dog doo. It is especially festive when this review is in the local press so that all your relatives can read it, too. You can just picture several hundred thousand people perusing the review over their morning coffee, reading it out loud to one another and chuckling about how clever the reviewer is. So you rant and you cry, and then your writer friends call and commiserate. And they really do feel sick for you, and angry, and they know you feel like a wounded animal, a raging bull, and they say the right things, that they love you and they love your book, and that it has happened to them, a year ago or whenever. Because if you are a writer, it is going to happen to you. This is the truth. It has happened to me, and if you get published, it is almost certainly going to happen to you. But the fact of publication is the acknowledgment from the community that you did your writing right. You acquire a rank that you never lose. Now you’re a published writer, and you are in that rare position of getting to make a living, such as it is, doing what you love best. That knowledge does bring you a quiet joy. But eventually you have to sit down like every other writer and face the blank page. The beginnings of a second or third book are full of spirit and confidence because you have been published, and false starts and terror because now you have to prove yourself again. People may find out that you were a flash in the pan, that it was all beginner’s luck. What I know now is that you have to wear out all that dread by writing long and hard and not stopping too often to admire yourself and your publishedness in the mirror. Sometime later you’ll find yourself at work on, maybe really into, another book, and once again you figure out that the real payoff is the writing itself, that a day when you have gotten your work done is a good day, that total dedication is the point. “When is she going to talk about joy ?” the people in the back row whine.