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 Way of Being (1980)

  I think I have succeeded, not just in becoming a whole man, but more importantly, in understanding what one is. What I discovered was that a whole man is comprised of mind, heart, soul, muscle, and balls. What I discovered about the faculty, for the most part, is that it is men comprised of mind. It was an unfortunate discovery, difficultly tolerated in an age in which so much understanding, strength and action are essential. (p. 26) Archibald MacLeish stated the problem very well years ago: “We do not feel our knowledge. Nothing could better illustrate the flaw at the heart of our civilization. . . . Knowledge without feeling is not knowledge and can lead only to public irresponsibility and indifference, and conceivably to ruin” (as quoted by Reston, 1970). This “knowledge without feeling” has made it possible for our military men, and for us as a people, to commit incredible atrocities without any particular sense of guilt. We should not forget some of the events of the war in Southeast Asia. In the bombings of North and South Vietnam, and of Cambodia, we were frequently engaged in a slaughter of the innocents. But thanks in part to our successfully compartmentalized cognitive education, we simply know the intellectual facts and do not feel our knowledge. Yet, when we are forced to look at the bodies of men and women machine-gunned by our own boys, then the gut- level reaction breaks through, and we are horrified at what we have done. Only if

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

  right.31 This was a moment when the immense conquests of Genghis and his successors might have promoted an official Dyophysite Christianity throughout Asia from the Black Sea to the China Sea. During the thirteenth century, the Turkic people in Inner Mongolia known as the Önggüds mostly became Christian, including their royal family, and they remained so for more than a century. As a result of Genghis’s carefully planned set of alliances with Christian Kerait Mongol princesses, a series of Great Khans had Christian mothers, including Kublai Khan, who in the years up to 1279 fought his way to become the first Yuan emperor of China. Under Kublai Khan, Dyophysite Christians returned to the centre of power in China. After nearly three centuries in which their presence had been scarcely perceptible, they revealed themselves from generations of outward profession of other Chinese religions which had official favour. Yet the old pattern repeated itself. The Yuan rulers of China quickly conformed themselves to the rich and ancient culture which they had seized and, worse still, successive Yuan monarchs showed themselves steadily more incompetent to rule. Their overthrow by the fiercely xenophobic native Ming dynasty in 1368 was a bad blow to Christianity in the empire. It still had yet to interest more than a minority of Chinese. It is perhaps appropriate that the only apparent modern linguistic survival of the Syriac missions in the Far East is the word for ‘tomb’, qavra, used by the Turco-Mongol people known as the Uyghur, in the Xinjiang Autonomous Region of China.32 So in neither of its great missionary ventures did the Church of the East achieve enough indigenous support to make an open stand against whatever the emperor decreed. By the time that a new wave of Western Latin Christians arrived from Europe in the sixteenth century, Christian faith and practice had once more virtually disappeared – at least in public. What has become evident in recent years in the countryside beyond the former imperial capital Xi’an, around that extraordinary survival the Ta Qin monastery pagoda, is the likelihood that a consciousness of the Christian tradition and even a Christianity disguised as Taoism did persist. After the Catholic missions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, this small area became and remains a stronghold of rural Chinese Catholicism, Catholic parish churches now peppering the skyline as they might do in southern Europe. Maybe this was not the only place in China which was home to such a survival. Maybe secret Christians remained to welcome the first Western missionaries, as they did in later centuries after later persecutions, and there are many remarkable possibilities still to be investigated in the history of Chinese Christianity.33 The Mongols’ conquests turned west as well. They finally shattered the power

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  Next day he came and assured me he had promised monies on the strength of my promise, had bought a hundred crates, too, of chickens to ship to Denver and had already an offer from the Mayor of Denver at double what he had given. I read the letters and wire he showed me and let him have four hundred dollars, which drained me and kept me poor for months; indeed, till I brought off the deal with Dingwall which I am about to relate which put me on my feet again in comfort. I should now tell of Willie’s misadventure with his car-load of chickens: it suffices here to say that he was cheated by his purchaser and that I never saw a dollar of all I had loaned him. Looking back I understand that it was probably the slump of 1873 that induced the Mayhews to go to Denver; but after they left, I was at a loose end for some months. I could not get work though I tried everything: I was met everywhere with the excuse: “hard times: hard times!” At length I took a place as waiter in the Eldridge House, the only job I could find that left most of the forenoon free for the University. Smith disliked this new departure of mine and told me he would soon find me a better post, and Mrs. Gregory was disgusted and resentful—partly out of snobbishness, I think. From this time on I felt her against me and gradually she undermined my influence with Kate: I soon knew I had fallen in public esteem too, but not for long. One day in the fall Smith introduced me to a Mr. Rankin, the cashier of the First National Bank, who handed over to me at once the letting of Liberty Hall, the one hall in the town large enough to accommodate a thousand people: it had a stage, too, and so could be used for theatrical performances. I gave up my work in the Eldridge House and instead used to sit in the box-office of the Hall from two every afternoon till seven, and did my best to let it advantageously to the advance agents of the various travelling shows or lecturers. I received sixty dollars a month for this work and one day got an experience which has modified my whole life, for it taught me how money is made in this world and can be made by any intelligent man. One afternoon the advance agent of the Hatherly Minstrels came into my room and threw down his card. “This old one-hoss shay of a town”, he cried, “should wear grave-clothes.”

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

  Wealth can be accumulated, but to what purpose, if one does not enjoy it? In the end the person who accumulates wealth must leave it to someone who did not toil for it (2:21). We are reminded of the parable of the rich man in Luke 12:16-20, who built his barns but never lived to enjoy them. Wisdom, Qoheleth asserts, is better than folly just as light is better than darkness, yet the same fate befalls the wise and the fool. Here is precisely the core of the problem. Wise and fool alike die, and there is no enduring remembrance of either one. Even wisdom, then, yields no enduring profit. Human labor is simply “the business that God has given to human beings to be busy with” (1:13). Yet Qoheleth’s conclusion from his experiments is not as negative as we might have expected. “There is nothing better for mortals than to eat and drink, and find enjoyment in their toil. This also, I saw, is from the hand of God” (2:24). To reach this conclusion, however, is to give up on the quest for a “profit” in life. There is no profit, but life can still be enjoyed. The point is not to attain a destination, but to enjoy the journey. This, in a nutshell, is the message of Qoheleth. People who spend their lives gathering and heaping are “sinners” who miss the mark of what life is about. Those who enjoy life as it passes are those who please God. It is unclear whether the last sentence of chapter 2, “This also is vanity,” applies to the work of gathering and heaping, or to the conclusion that Qoheleth has just enunciated. In this passage, the vanity is most probably the gathering and heaping. But it is typical of Qoheleth that he undermines anything that might be taken for certainty. So we must reckon with the possibility that even his own conclusions are reckoned as “vanity” and “chasing after wind.” Certainty is not given to human beings, and even when we hold convictions we should not lose sight of their ephemeral character. A Time for Everything The limits of human wisdom are set out clearly in a famous passage in 3:1-9: “For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven.” The passage goes on to list fourteen pairs of opposites: to be born and to die, to kill and to heal, to love and to hate, and so on. The assertion that there is a time for each of these may seem shocking at first: should there be a time to kill and a time to hate?

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  The break did not surprise me: I had taught her that youth was the first requisite in a lover for a woman of her type: she had doubtless put my precepts into practice: Mr. Wilson was probably as near the ideal as I was and very much nearer to hand. The passions of the senses demand propinquity and satisfaction and nothing is more forgetful than pleasures of the flesh. If Mrs. Mayhew had given me little, I had given her even less of my better self. * * * HARD TIMES AND NEW LOVES Chapter XII. So far I had had more good fortune than falls to the lot of most youths starting in life; now I was to taste ill-luck and be tried as with fire. I had been so taken up with my own concerns that I had hardly given a thought to public affairs; now I was forced to take a wider view. One day Kate told me that Willie was heavily in arrears: he had gone back to Deacon Conkling’s to live on the other side of the Kaw River and I had naturally supposed that he had paid up everything before leaving. Now I found that he owed the Gregorys sixty dollars on his own account and more than that on mine. I went across to him really enraged. If he had warned me, I should not have minded so much; but to leave the Gregorys to tell me, made me positively dislike him and I did not know then the full extent of his selfishness. Years later my sister told me that he had written time and again to my father and got money from him, alleging that it was for me and that I was studying and couldn’t earn anything: “Willie kept us poor, Frank”, she said, and I could only bow my head; but if I had known this fact at the time, it would have changed all my relations with Willie. As it was, I found him in the depths. Carried away by his optimism, he had bought real estate in 1871 and 1872, mortgaged it for more than he gave and as the boom continued, he had repeated this game time and again till on paper and in paper he reckoned he had made a hundred thousand dollars. This he had told me and I was glad of it for his sake, unfeignedly glad.

• From Working Girl: On Selling Art and Selling Sex (2023)

  Tourmaline’s Wikipedia page still identifies her as an “activist,” in spite of her photographs and films sitting in the permanent collections of every major museum in New York City, and others worldwide. The creative and intellectual work of Black people, particularly if it draws on their relationships to their own identities, is often heralded as activism, rather than art or scholarship. In August 2020, writer and researcher Dr. Zoé Samudzi tweeted, “I can’t wait till I’m invited to talk about white supremacy-related stuff and people stop calling me an ‘activist.’ I’m literally a sociologist *studying* genocide and white nationalism lmao … it’s just very apparent the different ways people don’t fully acknowledge or take seriously your work even as they’re inviting you to speak on something.” Aruna D’Souza, art critic and curator, replied: “People do this to me all the time and it’s embarrassing because I haven’t actually done the work to be considered an activist. But apparently there’s no way to be understood as an art critic or a writer if you’re not stanning for whiteness, so activist is the best they can do?” To be clear, Tourmaline was an activist for many years; she worked as a community organizer for more than a decade and, in that time, uncovered archival footage and ephemera on Marsha P. Johnson, Sylvia Rivera, and their grassroots coalition STAR (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries), whose outreach and housing provisions for young, homeless trans people was funded through whoring and hustling. She single-handedly made this archive public and accessible. But this is not her work anymore. Who the canon recognizes as an artist, and who (when their identity is in vogue) is celebrated as an activist for their art is telling. Johnson was both a sex worker and a visionary performance artist; she performed internationally with the drag troupe Hot Peaches, as well as putting on surreal and jubilant shows on street corners in the Village. And further, she walked down Christopher Street naked—for which she was arrested, jailed, and forcibly medicated, treated as mentally ill—while Madonna hitchhiked naked in Miami a few decades on, photographed by Steven Meisel, and was heralded as a transgressive pop icon.

• From Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics (1932)

  These were books largely of social and political analysis, with hardly any theological content. Nevertheless, they had an amazing impact in American social thought and on liberal religion. I can recall in 1932—I was thirteen—my father coming out of his office waving a copy of Moral Man and Immoral Society and saying “Reinie’s gone crazy!”—and most liberal, social-gospel ministers like my father felt the same way, though by the end of the decade they had come to agree with him. Why did this book have such a profound and disturbing impact? Most of liberal culture in America in the 1930s—secular, academic, and religious alike—was still deeply optimistic about society and so about history. As in Europe before World War I, they believed thoroughly in historical progress: as science, technology, and industry had developed or evolved, so correspondingly had legal, political, and social institutions—from autocratic and despotic governments to democracy, from religious and racial intolerance to tolerance, from authoritarian and dogmatic religion to liberal, congregational religion. Social customs, laws, and values were surely getting better, evolving as species had done into higher forms. Accordingly, people were becoming more moral, society was becoming almost Christian, and the task of the churches was building the Kingdom of God on earth. Now, it was precisely this fundamental faith that Niebuhr challenged in these books. Karl Barth had done just that in Europe after World War I; Niebuhr did it in America and in England in the early 1930s. His challenge, however, was not by appeal to the Bible, though that came later, but rather by empirical argument, by pointing to the actual character of contemporary capitalistic, racial, and international life. If you read Moral Man and Immoral Society , you will see that he proved his case, as, of course, was the entire course of history to do at the end of the decade! In order to understand the importance of Niebuhr’s early writings, it is necessary, I think, to recall their historical context. Despite the residual optimism I have described, the 1930s was a period of intense turmoil, suffering, and increasing anxiety in America and in Europe alike. It was, first of all, the period of the Great Depression, when large sections of the population were out of work, incomes were vastly reduced, and economic activity was almost at a standstill. Much as after the collapse of Russian Communism in 1989, socialism came to be seen by most observers as having revealed its inadequacy; so after the Depression of 1929 most observers agreed that capitalism was deeply flawed, if not on the way out of history.

• From The Journals of Sylvia Plath (1982)

  July 18, 1957 . A brief before-bed fling to say how lousy today was. After the night drive with Spauldings last evening, the gnats biting itches into the bone, the late greasy dishes, the Woolf sting in Jacob’s Room put off because of it, a strange sleep. No more dreams of queen and king for a day with valets bringing in racks of white suits, jackets, etc., for Ted & ball gowns and tiaras for me. A semiplangent dream of children, sullen, cloudy, oppressed, squatting and being eel-catchers. Then a pleasant view of Ted’s rosy mother holding a lovely droll baby, with two older children at her right side, me taking the cheeks of the baby & squeezing them into a comical dear O-face: her children or mine? Very tired, contrasted with the crisp blue new morning, bowls of coffee made with milk and a morning of futile shilly-shallying over the mother’s helper story, with the characters obstinate, not moving or speaking, and me with no definite idea of who they are: shall Sassy be a shy bookworm, dominated by mother, who comes out of her shell & gets a man? Or a tomboy terror, very athletic, who falls in love for the first time against her mother’s directions, with a nice simple guy? God knows. About three stories are pulling me: mother dominates daughter, only nineteen years older, or twenty: girl 17, mother 37: mother flirts with girl’s dates. Girl fights for freedom & integrity. Sat Eve Post story: suddenly possible as I think about it. Get tension of scenes with mother during Ira and Gordon crisis. Rebellion. Car keys. Psychiatrist. Details: Dr. B.: baby. Girl comes back to self, can be good daughter. Sees vision of mother’s hardships. Yes yes. This is a good one. A subject. Dramatic. Serious. Enough of the hyphenated society names. Mental hospital background. Danger. Dynamite under high tension. Mother’s character. At first menacing, later pathetic, moving. Seen from outside first, then inside. Girl comes back: grown bigger: ready to be bigger. Like mother, yet furious about it. Wants to be different. Bleaches hair. Policemen. Annoying her. Story in newspapers. After suicide attempt. Earthy Dr. B. Nowhere to go. Back to school. Then what? Something. Laborious charts. MOTHER-DAUGHTER . Troubles. Graphic. A real story. “Trouble-making Mother.” Okay. An idea. Just when you thought nothing had come. Or could. In six weeks you better be on a pile of written mss. Do it. Like Kazin said, this summary about what it is just isn’t the story. It’s playing about. But for me to break open an idea in summary is at this early stage a life-saving event. Not to scratch on the glossy surface of my head begging an idea to hatch, complete as a day-old chicken, on the blank page. Even the mother’s helper story should do something. Fresh, brazen stubborn girl Sassy? Get to kernel of character: what motivates her to do what? Conflict: Stages.

• From Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics (1932)

  Complete rational objectivity in a social situation is impossible. The very social scientists who are so anxious to offer our generation counsels of salvation and are disappointed that an ignorant and slothful people are so slow to accept their wisdom, betray middle-class prejudices in almost everything they write. Since reason is always, to some degree, the servant of interest in a social situation, social injustice cannot be resolved by moral and rational suasion alone, as the educator and social scientist usually believes. Conflict is inevitable, and in this conflict power must be challenged by power. That fact is not recognized by most of the educators, and only very grudgingly admitted by most of the social scientists. If social conflict be a part of the process of gaining social justice, the idea of most of Professor Dewey’s disciples that our salvation depends upon the development of “experimental procedures” 2 in social life, commensurate with the experimentalism of the physical sciences, does not have quite the plausibility which they attribute to it. Contending factions in a social struggle require morale; and morale is created by the right dogmas, symbols and emotionally potent oversimplifications. These are at least as necessary as the scientific spirit of tentativity. No class of industrial workers will ever win freedom from the dominant classes if they give themselves completely to the “experimental techniques” of the modern educators. They will have to believe rather more firmly in the justice and in the probable triumph of their cause, than any impartial science would give them the right to believe, if they are to have enough energy to contest the power of the strong. They may be very scientific in projecting their social goal and in choosing the most effective instruments for its attainment, but a motive force will be required to nerve them for their task which is not easily derived from the cool objectivity of science. Modern educators are, like rationalists of all the ages, too enamored of the function of reason in life. The world of history, particularly in man’s collective behavior, will never be conquered by reason, unless reason uses tools, and is itself driven by forces which are not rational. The sociologists, as a class, understand the modern social problem even less than the educators. They usually interpret social conflict as the result of a clash between different kinds of “behavior patterns,” which can be eliminated if the contending parties will only allow the social scientist to furnish them with a new and more perfect pattern which will do justice to the needs of both parties. With the educators they regard ignorance rather than self-interest as the cause of conflict. “Apparently,” declares Kimball Young, “the only way in which collective conflicts, as well as individual conflicts, can be successfully and hygienically solved is by securing a redirection of behavior toward a more feasible environmental objective.

• From The Journals of Sylvia Plath (1982)

  Then: the magazine story: written seriously, but easily, because it is easier to manipulate strictly limited characters, almost caricatures, some of them, than the diary “I” of the novel, who must also become, in her way limited, but only so that she can grow to the vision I have now of life, which tomorrow will be a fuller vision, and tomorrow. Yesterday was the first day of work: a bad day. Spent time on a very desperately elaborate psychological idea and wrote maybe one good image (the boy with the whole ocean bottled in his head) to a raft of brittle, stilted artificial stuff. Not touching on my deep self. This bad beginning depressed me inordinately. It made me not hungry nor want to cook, because of the bestialness of eating and cooking without keen thought and creation. The beach: too late, after a hot walk along a gravelly, sunny sidewalk on Route 6, the deathly pink, yellow and pistachio colored cars shooting by like killer instruments from the mechanical tempo of another planet. Broken glass, then the scrub pine shadowing Bracket Road, the whisk of bird and squirrel in underbrush, green berried shrubs, and the rough tar. A great blue span of Atlantic under the cliff at Nauset Light, and a swim in the warmish green seaweeded water, rising and falling with the tall waves at tide turn. Lay in sun far up beach, but the sun was cold, and the wind colder. The boom, boom of great guns throbbing in the throat, then the ride back, bad-tempered. Making mayonnaise, and it coming out well. Fine. Then, grubbing over supper, with the badly begun poem like an albatross round the neck of the day, nothing else. And the tables and chairs insulting the way they are when a human being tries to live their merely phenomenal life and miserably doesn’t succeed. They go smug, I-told-you-so. Now it is near ten, and the morning yet untried, unbroken. The feeling one must get up earlier and earlier to get ahead of the day, which by one o’clock is determined. Last night: finished The Waves , which disturbed; almost angered by the endless sun, waves, birds, and the strange unevenness of description—a heavy, ungainly ugly sentence next to a fluent, pure running one. But then the hair-raising fineness of the last 50 pages: Bernard’s summary, an essay on life, on the problem: the deadness of a being to whom nothing can happen, who no longer creates, creates, against the casting down. That moment of illumination, fusion, creation: We made this: against the whole falling apart, away, and the coming again to make and make in the face of the flux: making of the moment something of permanence. That is the lifework. I underlined & underlined: reread that. I shall go better than she. No children until I have done it .

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

  Here’s where an experimental attitude helps. If you can detach from your frustration and disappointment (I know, I know), you may be able to locate your pleasure as you experiment with touch and sensation. A completely different touch may produce some sensation. If you previously used a vibrator, try your own fingers. If you are used to light, indirect clitoral stimulation, go for something more direct. Never tried a vibrator? Time to go shopping. If you can’t come—but you do find touch pleasurable—try focusing on sensation rather than orgasm. If sex doesn’t end with orgasm, how might it end? Rather than stop in failure (after exhausting every possible means to reaching orgasm), decide in advance that you’re going to engage in a session of touch and sensual awareness for, say, 20 minutes. When the need to come builds toward frustration, stop. Back off, relax all the muscles that have contracted in orgasmic tension, take a few deep breaths, and start again. Approach pleasure in a different way: notice what produces a yummy sensation rather than what you think will get you off. Antidepressants or Orgasm Suppressants?Most notorious for negative sexual side affects are the SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors), the class of drugs most frequently prescribed for depression. While medications like Effexor, Paxil, Prozac, Zoloft, and others have helped many overcome debilitating depression (and no doubt saved lives), they have also been known to cause sexual problems for many who take them. Psychiatrists and other physicians have come up with a few tricks, such as combining two different antidepressants—for instance, coupling an SSRI with another type of antidepressant, such as Wellbutrin, that doesn’t seem to adversely affect sexual functioning. Tianeptine, a French drug, seems to be as effective as other drugs in treating depression, but without the sexual side effects. It hasn’t been approved by the FDA for use in the U.S. yet.16 Physicians can also closely monitor patients to find the precise dosage that ameliorates the symptoms of depression while minimizing adverse side effects. Landing on a treatment that works for you can take months of persistent effort—no small task for someone suffering from depression. Health-care practitioners have come up with other creative solutions as well. Some recommend testosterone for women used in conjunction with an SSRI. Small doses of testosterone can add a bit of zip to the libido, they say. Likewise, some women who take an SSRI report an increase in libido when it is combined with Dehydroepiandrosterone (DHEA), an adrenal hormone used by bodybuilders. (DHEA use has also been linked to acne and mood swings.) There hasn’t been sufficient research on DHEA or testosterone to know whether long-term use by women will lead to other health problems.

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

  alteration became a matter of high offence in the East (see p. 350). Augustine’s reputation among Greeks suffered accordingly. Modern Western readers may find it hard to understand Greek anger over the Augustinian view of the Trinity, while finding Augustine’s view of human nature more difficult to condone, particularly if one reads the increasingly harsh later phases of his writings against the Pelagians. What we need to remember is that Augustine’s bleak view of human nature and capabilities was formed against a background of the destruction of the world he loved. In one of the greatest disappointments ever experienced by the Church, the Western Roman Empire of the 390s, which had promised to be an image of God’s kingdom on earth, disintegrated into chaos and futility. Augustine himself died in 430 during a siege of his beloved Hippo by the Arian Vandals, who captured all North Africa and bitterly persecuted the Catholic Church there for sixty years. He stands between the Classical world and a very different medieval society, sensing acutely that the world was getting old and feeble: a sense which did not desert Western Europe down to the seventeenth century. EARLY MONASTICISM IN THE WEST (400–500) It was hardly surprising that the sudden sequence of great power and great disappointment for the imperial Church in the West inspired Western Christians to imitate the monastic life of the Eastern Church. Among the first was Martin, who became one of the most important saints in Western Latin devotion. An ex- soldier like the Egyptian pioneer Pachomius, he abandoned his military career in Gaul (France) to live a life apart from the world. Around him, probably in the year 361, there gathered the West’s first known monastic community at what seems to have been an ancient local cultic site in a marshy valley, now called Ligugé; it was near the city of Pictavia (now Poitiers), which was already the seat of an important bishopric. Archaeological traces still remain of Martin’s first community buildings at Ligugé, treasured by the monks who, after many vicissitudes, have returned to this place so resonant in the story of the religious life.59 Not long afterwards, in 372, Martin was one of the first ascetics anywhere in the Church to be chosen as a bishop, in the Gaulish city far north of Poitiers called Civitas Turonum (now Tours). While bishop, he still lived as a monk, and his second monastic foundation near Tours was destined to fare rather better than Ligugé in its later monastic history: as Marmoutier, it remained one of the most famous and ancient abbeys in France until its near-total destruction in the French Revolution.

• From The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature (2000)

  Imagine a tribe of hominids, half of them male and half female, all single, all just reaching sexual maturity at the same time. Some males have higher fitness than other males, and they advertise their higher fitness using fitness indicators such as vigorous dancing, intelligent conversing, or realistic cave-painting. Some females have higher fitness than other females, which they advertise through the same sorts of fitness indicator. Fitness is genetically heritable, so higher-fitness parents generally have higher-fitness offspring. The tribe has a tradition of strict monogamy and no infidelity. Every individual has to pick a partner once and stick with them until they die. Both sexes exercise mate choice, accepting and rejecting whomever they want. What will happen? Each individual wants to attract the highest-fitness mate they can, because they want the best genes for their offspring. There will be a sorting process. Probably, the highest-fitness male will court the highest-fitness female first. If she is sensible, she will accept him, and they will pair off, leaving the rest of the tribe to sort themselves out. The second-highest-fitness male is disappointed. He wanted the highest-fitness female, but could not attract her. He must settle for the second-highest-fitness female. She is also disappointed, because she wanted the best male. But she settles for male number two, because she cannot do any better. Perhaps they fall in love, thanking their lucky stars that they did not end up with the cold and snooty number ones, or the repulsively inferior number threes. Now the third-highest-fitness male is doubly heart-broken. Golden female number one and silver female number two have both ignored him, leaving him to court bronze female number three. He can’t do any better, and neither can she, so they pair off. And so on. Eventually, the whole tribe sorts itself into mated pairs of roughly equal fitness. The fitness matching does not result from any individual’s preference for a similarly ranked mate. Instead, it results from the interaction of everyone’s preferences during the sorting process. Everybody would prefer a higher-fitness mate rather than a same-fitness mate. But the opposite sex feels the same way too. For a male to mate above his fitness, a female would have to mate below her fitness. Her response to his offer will be “Dream on, loser.” Likewise for females trying to mate above their fitness. Individuals have no realistic hope of mating far above their own fitness level, or any willingness to mate below their fitness. The result will be that mated pairs will correlate highly for fitness. If height correlates with fitness, they will be of similar height. If intelligence correlates with fitness, they will be similarly bright. If facial attractiveness correlates with fitness, they will be similarly beautiful. This is basically what we see in modern human couples: a fairly high degree of “assortative mating” for fitness indicators.

• From The Principle of Desire (2013)

  The ring was beautiful. She couldn’t fault his taste, and he obviously knew her own fairly well. The band was engraved with a beaded line and encrusted with diamonds, a perfect setting for the gorgeous center gem with its halo of smaller stones. It looked vintage, or maybe very well-made retro. It looked expensive. In that way, it matched Aaron’s lifestyle. His lavishly updated forties-era house in West University. His wardrobe, mostly low-key clothes in subtle colors and fabrics that looked and felt like money. She had helped host dinner parties here in the past, playing the role of future faculty wife, even though she never expected to be one. She knew the house inside and out. But Aaron had never invited her to live here, not really. He hadn’t declared his love, or asked for her hand, or been remotely romantic. Not until it was too late. If he really was in love with her, he must be hopelessly broken because he had the worst way of showing love she’d ever encountered. For years Beth had assumed it was a Dominant thing, that emotional distance. Eventually she’d met enough other Doms to know it was just something about Aaron. His upbringing, perhaps, by a series of nannies who treated him like a young prince and parents who rarely held him accountable for anything. He was smart and appealing, and he faked being a grown-up well, so well he seemed to have fooled himself. He had a job, was respected in his field and among his kinky peers, but deep down he was still a dilettante playboy. Beth felt a pang for him, that he seemed to be figuring this out only now, in middle age, when his life was probably more than half over. Possibly a lot more than half over, she corrected herself. While he was in London, apparently, his previously insignificant mitral valve prolapse had worsened after a sinus infection led to a severe bout of bacterial endocarditis. He’d spent weeks in the hospital, and now his valve showed signs of damage and a decrease in function. “Bum ticker,” he’d summed it up. His uncle had died at fifty of the same condition, and apparently Aaron was now convinced he would suffer a similar fate. He gave himself no more than five years, though his doctors were more optimistic. Beth thought self-fulfilling prophecy was the greater danger, but she kept it to herself. The heart scare might explain his sudden change of attitude, but it didn’t excuse his previous appalling behavior. And yet...spending time with him, tending to his needs, had an alluring, familiar rhythm. She knew these days, and enough of her bitterness had worn off that she remembered the many good times she and Aaron had shared. Aaron had been there so long and established so many of her baselines. After a few days in his house, Beth began to wonder if Aaron was her default setting. It was always easier to return to that.

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

  McNamara repeatedly states that the Palestinian Targum is of great importance/or New Testament studies. 16 The individual studies in his two books do indeed focus on trying to explain New Testament passages, so that one is hardly in a position to learn much about Judaism for its own sake. The same is true of most of the studies in Vermes's Scripture and Tradition in Judaism. When he does discuss a matter of importance for Jewish religion, the ground of redemption and atonement, 1 7 his method takes him astray, in spite of his undoubted knowledge of a wide range of Jewish literature. In focusing on a few brief references connecting God's accepting sacrifices with his remembering the binding of Isaac, Vermes concludes that, according to ancient Jewish theology, the atoning efficacy of the Tamid offering, of all the sacrifices in which a lamb was immolated, and perhaps, basically, of all expiatory sacrifice irrespective of the nature of the victim, depended upon the virtue of the Akedah, the self-offering of the Lamb [Isaac] whom God had recognized as the perfect victim of the perfect burnt offering. 18 Similarly he writes later that 'the saving virtue of the Passover Lamb proceeded from the merits of that first Lamb, the son of Abraham, who offered himself upon the altar'. 19 He cites a passage from the Mekilta: 'And When I See the Blood. I see the blood of the sacrifice [aqedah] oflsaac', 20 not noting that this is only one of the interpretative remarks on the biblical phrase 'when I see the blood'. He takes such midrashic interpretations of what blood was seen as establishing a Jewish doctrine: 'The firstborn sons of Israel were spared and the people delivered from captivity because the sacrifice of the Paschal lamb reminded God of the sacrifice of Isaac.' 21 Thus he can state that 'the Binding of Isaac was thought to have played a unique role in the whole economy of the salvation of Israel, and to have a permanent redemptive effect on behalf of its people' . 22 This gives the scant references to the binding of Isaac in the Tannaitic midrash a significance far out of proportion to what they actually hold in Rabbinic literature. Vermes has 16 McNamara, The Nelll Testament and the Palestinian Targum, pp. 3ef., :z53; cf. Targum and Testa- ment, p. 13. 17 'Redemption and Genesis XXII', Scripture and Tradition, pp. 193-227. 18 Ibid., p. 21 r. 19 Ibid., p. 215. 20 Mek. Pis\Ja 7 (24; I, 57; to 12.13); repeated ibid. II (39; I, 87f.; to 1:z.:z3); Vennes, Scripture and Tradition, pp. :z 1 sf. 21 Vennes, p. :z16. 22 Ibid., p. 2o8. Sources 29 apparently been misled in part by his method: one focuses on a single tradition and attempts to unravel its history.

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

  It was prepared in great haste, during the sessions of the Diet of Augsburg, by Bucer, with the aid of Capito and Hedio, in the name of those four cities (hence the name) which were excluded by the Lutherans from their political and theological conferences, and from the Protestant League. They would greatly have preferred to unite with them, and to sign the Augsburg Confession, with the exception of the tenth article on the eucharist, but were forbidden. The Landgrave Philip of Hesse was the only one who, from a broad, statesmanlike view of the critical situation, favored a solid union of the Protestants against the common foe, but in vain. Hence, after the Lutherans had presented their Confession June 25, and Zwingli his own July 8, the four cities handed theirs, July 11, to the Emperor in German and Latin. It was received very ungraciously, and not allowed to be read before the Diet; but a confutation full of misrepresentations was prepared by Faber, Eck, and Cochlaeus, and read Oct. 24 (or 17). The Strassburg divines were not even favored with a copy of this confutation, but procured one secretly, and answered it by a "Vindication and Defense" in the autumn of 1531. The Tetrapolitan Confession consists of twenty-three chapters, besides preface and conclusion. It is in doctrine and arrangement closely conformed to the Lutheran Confession, and breathes the same spirit of moderation, but is more distinctly Protestant. This appears at once in the first chapter (On the Matter of Preaching), in the declaration that nothing should be taught in the pulpit but what was either expressly contained in the Holy Scriptures, or fairly deduced therefrom. (The Lutheran Confession is silent on the supreme authority of the Scriptures.) The evangelical doctrine of justification is stated in the third and fourth chapters more clearly than by Melanchthon; namely, that we are justified not by works of our own, but solely by the grace of God and the merits of Christ, through a living faith, which is active in love, and productive of good works. Images are rejected in Chap. XXII. The doctrine of the Lord’s Supper (Chap. XVIII.) is couched in dubious language, which was intended to comprehend in substance the Lutheran and the Zwinglian theories, and accords with the union tendency of Bucer. But it contains the germ of the Calvinistic view. In this ordinance, it is said, Christ offers to his followers, as truly now as at the institution, his very body and blood as spiritual food and drink, whereby their souls are nourished to everlasting life. Nothing is said of the oral manducation and the participation of unbelievers, which are the distinctive features of the Lutheran view. Bucer, who had attended the Conference at Marburg in 1529, labored with great zeal afterwards to bring about a doctrinal compromise between the contending theories, but without effect.

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

  Luther appreciated the merits of Erasmus, and frankly acknowledged his literary superiority.540 But he knew his weakness, and expressed, as early as 1516, the fear that he understood too little of the grace of God.541 He found in his writings more refutation of error than demonstration of truth, more love of peace than love of the cross. He hated his way of insinuating doubts. On June 20, 1523, he wrote to Oecolampadius:542 "May the Lord strengthen you in your proposed explanation of Isaiah [in the University of Basel], although Erasmus, as I understand, does not like it .... He has done what he was ordained to do: he has introduced the ancient languages, in the place of injurious scholastic studies. He will probably die like Moses in the land of Moab. He does not lead to better studies which teach piety. I would rather he would entirely abstain from explaining and paraphrasing the Scriptures, for he is not up to this work .... He has done enough to uncover the evil; but to reveal the good and to lead into the land of promise, is not his business, in my opinion." In a letter to Erasmus, dated April, 1524, a few months before the open breach, he proposed to him that they should let each other alone, and apologized for his subserviency to the papists, and his want of courage, in a manner which could not but wound the sensitive scholar.543 Luther on the Slavery of the Human Will.

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

  Emmys. Haley had done something few imagined possible: he had traced his African American family’s history back to a village in Gambia. The author’s success was based wholly on his claims to have discovered his paternal ancestor, Kunta Kinte, who acquired the name Toby in America. Haley insisted that he had spent long years doing careful research that had enabled him to prove that his family’s oral history (and that told by an African storyteller) could be corroborated with archival documentation. The dialogue in his book may have been made up, but the family saga was a true slice of history. Impressed by this gargantuan effort, the New York Times praised Haley for his “wealth of authentic detail,” and for having instilled his narrative with the “feel of history.” The most prominent review in the newspaper of record averred, “Its truths have been quarried by a mountain of facts.” Newsweek likewise lauded the work as an “extraordinary social document, grounded in exhaustive research and animated by a grand passion for personal and historical truth.” But it was all a lie. 4 Far from uncovering his real roots, it was discovered that the mega-selling author had invented his lineage. Controversy over his historical claims hit the news in 1977, as prominent journalists and scholars called his work a “fraud,” and the full story unfolded over the next five years. He had manipulated his family oral accounts and embellished his family tree in order to tell a grand tale of an exceptional heritage that never existed. For starters, the Gambian storyteller he relied upon merely told Haley what he wanted to hear. The historical Toby was not even born with the name Kunta Kinte—that genealogical lineage was pure fiction. While Haley’s Africa was not a caricature on the order of Tarzan’s overripe jungle, it was a half-conscious or self- conscious distortion: he converted Gambia into a place mirroring middle America, as a land of many villages. The actual village of his reputed ancestors, as Haley admitted, was a British trading post, not the symbolic West African “Eden” it was portrayed as, a pristine world to constitute for history-hungry African-Americans a reverse Plymouth Rock. 5 If that were the extent of the author’s crimes, it would be bad enough. But Haley’s attempts at research actually exposed far more serious errors. The birthdates of Kunta Kinte’s American progeny were wrongly given, and Haley attributed to his family tree the names of people to whom he was unrelated. Neither the white nor the black families archived in Roots matched existing historical records.

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

  The real strength of Odum’s work came from the amount of information he amassed. He was able to prove that the South had surrendered ninety-seven million acres to erosion (an area larger than the two Carolinas and Georgia); it had squandered the chances of millions of people by tolerating poverty and illiteracy; and it had ignored human potential by refusing to provide technological training, or even basic services, to its people. The overwhelming power of Odum’s data undercut (what Odum himself called) Gone with the Wind nostalgia—the collective self-image elite southerners had cultivated. Here was one southerner who wanted to see some “sincere, courageous telling of the truth about the South.” He was “tired of the defense complex,” he said, and the unending ridicule, complacency, ignorance, and, above all, the poverty. The greatest virtue of Southern Regions was its quantitative weight and its objective outlook. As the southern historian Broadus Mitchell insisted at the same time, “The South does not need defense, but exposition.” 47 The primary target of Odum’s research was sectionalism’s destructive legacy. Mitchell interpreted Odum in such a way as to say that there was no longer a justification for using Yankee oppression for the South’s refusal to change. To Odum, there were “many Souths”; what was needed now was a regional vision. As a cattle breeder, he compared the sectional dictate to “cultural inbreeding,” and to the “stagnation” that came from resisting the “cross-fertilization of ideas” and by refusing to engage with those beyond one’s state. When he looked at the Tennessee Valley Authority, he saw unmistakably the most successful of New Deal projects in regional planning; the TVA had harnessed the power of seven monumental dams, coordinating among seven states and employing nearly ten thousand people in an area that previously had suffered under tremendous poverty. Odum said he hoped the TVA “would constitute the 49th State.” The straitjacket of states’ rights had suffocated southern progress long enough. 48 Odum was right about the TVA. It was a shining example of positive planning. Its dams alone were marvels of engineering, elegant and modern architectural wonders. Intelligent management resulted in soil conservation; flood, malaria, and pollution control; reforestation; and improved fertilization— all sensible land-use strategies. The TVA led to well-designed communities that supported libraries and health and recreation facilities—everything that Wilson had prescribed for the homestead villages. There were training centers in agriculture, marketing, automotive and electrical repair, mechanical work and metalwork; there were classes in engineering and mathematics at nearby

• From The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature (2000)

  I have already argued that effective verbal courtship is a reliable fitness indicator precisely because it is costly and difficult. Animals evolve to allocate their energies efficiently. If it took a million words to establish a sexual relationship with you, your boyfriend was apparently willing to absorb those costs, just as his male ancestors were. But if it takes only twenty words a day to maintain exclusive sexual access to you, why should he bother uttering more? His motivational system has evolved to deploy his courtship effort where it makes a difference to his reproductive success—mainly by focusing it where it improves his rate of sexual intercourse. Men apparently did not evolve from male ancestors who squandered high levels of verbal courtship effort on already-established relationships. Of course, if an established partner suspends sexual relations, or threatens to have an affair, evolution would favor motivations that produce a temporary resurgence of verbal courtship until the danger has passed. Frustratingly, a woman may find that the greater the sexual commitment she displays the less her man speaks. This analysis may sound heartlessly unromantic, but evolution is heartlessly unromantic. It is stingy with courtship effort, stacking it heavily where it does the most good, and sprinkling it very lightly elsewhere. Human courtship, like courtship in other animals, has a typical time-course. Courtship effort is low when first assessing a sexual prospect, increases rapidly if the prospect reciprocates one’s interest, peaks when the prospect is deciding whether to copulate, and declines once a long-term relationship is established. We all enjoy a desired partner besieging us with ardent, witty, energetic courtship. That enjoyment is the subjective manifestation of the mate preferences that shaped human language in the first place. As with any evolved preference, we may desire more than we can realistically get. Evolution’s job is to motivate us, not to satisfy us. So, when women universally complain about their slothfully mute boyfriends, we learn two things. First, women have a universal desire to enjoy receiving high levels of verbal courtship effort. Second, high levels of verbal courtship effort are so costly that men have evolved to produce them only when they are necessary for initiating or reviving sexual relationships. Far from undermining the courtship hypothesis for language evolution, this phenomenon provides two key pieces of evidence that support it. The Scheherazade StrategyBecause verbal courtship is mutual, we might expect men to feel equally frustrated by women lapsing into habitual silence as a relationship ages. This seems less often lamented, either because men develop less hunger for conversation, or because women maintain their verbal courtship effort at a higher pitch for longer.