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 Sense and Sensibility (1811)

  “There is no persuading you to change your mind, Brandon, I know of old,” said Sir John, “when once you are determined on anything. But, however, I hope you will think better of it. Consider, here are the two Miss Careys come over from Newton, the three Miss Dashwoods walked up from the cottage, and Mr. Willoughby got up two hours before his usual time, on purpose to go to Whitwell.” Colonel Brandon again repeated his sorrow at being the cause of disappointing the party; but at the same time declared it to be unavoidable. “Well, then, when will you come back again?” “I hope we shall see you at Barton,” added her ladyship, “as soon as you can conveniently leave town; and we must put off the party to Whitwell till you return.” “You are very obliging. But it is so uncertain, when I may have it in my power to return, that I dare not engage for it at all.” “Oh! he must and shall come back,” cried Sir John. “If he is not here by the end of the week, I shall go after him.” “Ay, so do, Sir John,” cried Mrs. Jennings, “and then perhaps you may find out what his business is.” “I do not want to pry into other men’s concerns. I suppose it is something he is ashamed of.” Colonel Brandon’s horses were announced. “You do not go to town on horseback, do you?” added Sir John. “No. Only to Honiton. I shall then go post.” “Well, as you are resolved to go, I wish you a good journey. But you had better change your mind.” “I assure you it is not in my power.” He then took leave of the whole party. “Is there no chance of my seeing you and your sisters in town this winter, Miss Dashwood?” “I am afraid, none at all.” “Then I must bid you farewell for a longer time than I should wish to do.” To Marianne, he merely bowed and said nothing. “Come Colonel,” said Mrs. Jennings, “before you go, do let us know what you are going about.” He wished her a good morning, and, attended by Sir John, left the room. The complaints and lamentations which politeness had hitherto restrained, now burst forth universally; and they all agreed again and again how provoking it was to be so disappointed. “I can guess what his business is, however,” said Mrs. Jennings exultingly. “Can you, ma’am?” said almost every body. “Yes; it is about Miss Williams, I am sure.” “And who is Miss Williams?” asked Marianne. “What! do not you know who Miss Williams is? I am sure you must have heard of her before. She is a relation of the Colonel’s, my dear; a very near relation. We will not say how near, for fear of shocking the young ladies.” Then, lowering her voice a little, she said to Elinor, “She is his natural daughter.” “Indeed!”

• From The City of God

  256 Books That Matter: The City of God emperor can expect, which, as we saw, was not exactly happiness as the pagans understood it, but something quite different, and deferred until after this transient mortal life. Throughout all this, he had a subtle positive aim—to show that Christian faith provides a firmer foundation for the civic virtues, even though it can offer only an eschatologically-deferred happiness in hope for its adherents. Thus, Books 1–5 climax in this discussion of what it means to be happy in hope at the end of Book 5. Now, he takes up the second challenge—that Christianity is a bad philosophy—in Books 6–10. And just as the first five are a response to the loss of moral innocence, here we can see these next five books as a response to a loss of intellectual innocence. Once we’ve seen that our childhood confidence in the surface meanings of the fables and legends that our elders taught us has been misplaced, that confidence has been misplaced, what do we do now? What should our relationship now be to the basic framework of existence? Ought we to simply reject all these fables? Ought we to inhabit them in some ironic, Varronic way? Ought we to see them as obliquely telling a truth, which our dalliances with the demons can get us close to, as the Platonic theurgists seem to have suggested? Or ought we try to do something else entirely? He answers this in stages. First, he explores the official public religion of Rome, which, he argued, cannot be inhabited in a coherent way that would secure its adherents for any viable prospect of otherworldly happiness. Then he explores what he takes to be the most powerful personal philosophy available to Roman elites in his day—namely, Platonism—and he argues that, despite its many insights, it doesn’t work either, for what we’ve seen are three reasons. First, the demons it relies upon cannot be proper mediators, and the whole idea of mediation that the reliance on them assumes is deeply misconstrued. Second, true mediation must come from a divine

• From House of Holes: A Book of Raunch (2011)

  Ned watched Woo flip his cock up. Tendresse pulled his slouchy hairless satchel toward her face and jostled its contents. “Nice size, nice movement,” she said. She closed her eyes and sniffed. “Mmmmm, yes. Rainy ruins. Frogs. Cement statuary. Gongs. Tractor tires. Mushrooms.” Pleased, Woo said, “So do I have magic sperm?” “No, sorry, no,” said Tendresse. “But your balls are well shaped. Very nice pair. Thank you so much. You can pull your boxers up now.” Woo seemed disappointed. “Sometimes I do kinky things,” he said defensively. “Once I let a girlfriend place a cucumber in my back end. It was a long British cucumber. They have the plastic sheath, and we thought that was safer.” “And how was it for you?” asked Tendresse. “Good, but I had to go to the bathroom afterward.” “Please,” said Ned. “Now it’s your turn,” said Tendresse, turning to Ned. Ned held his cock up against his abdomen and stood with his legs a little apart so that Tendresse, still blindfolded, could smell his balls. She made several long sniffing sounds. “Mmmm, warm granite, campfires, catcher’s mitts, Play-Doh, padded mailers. Very subtle. I think I know a good woman for you. I’ve sniffed hundreds of crotches, men’s and women’s. One couple I sniffed and matched got married. May I taste?” “What on earth?” said Woo, outraged. “By all means,” said Ned. Tendresse flicked her tongue over Ned’s crinkled scro-tatiousness, and then she drew the entire left ball into her mouth like a new potato. “Yow!” Ned said. His cock responded enthusiastically, although he had had a nice orgasm in the shower that morning. She suckled his other ball. Then she threw her head back and opened her mouth wide. “Now both together,” she said. “Fill my mouth with the manly warmth of your nutbag.” “Very well,” said Ned. He fed his manly nutbag into her mouth, and she made muffled gobbling and gargling noises. “Just plain disgusting,” said Woo, bending to get a better look. “Now drop the cock,” she said. “Drop it on my face, Ned. I want it.” Ned, canting his hips forward, let his cock fall gently against her nose. “Mmmmmmmm,” said Tendresse, inhaling. “You do not have magic sperm, but I know several women for you. Come, let’s meet Lila.” [image "decoration" file=image_rsrc2SW.jpg] Luna Goes to a Concert [image "decoration" file=image_rsrc2SX.jpg] Luna met a man named Chuck at the soup kitchen. He was manning the sink and she was unloading the dishwasher, which wasn’t an easy job because the steam was hot. They developed a nice wordless rhythm together of unloading and drying and stacking. Then, wiping the edge of the sink with a clean dish towel, Chuck directed his restless blue eyes directly at her and asked her if she would like to go with him to the Masturboats. Just like that, all of a sudden: “Would you like to go with me to the Masturboats?”

• From House of Holes: A Book of Raunch (2011)

  “He’s kind of angry,” she whispered. Then she listened some more to the telephone. “He wants to talk to you.” Cardell took the phone. “Hello, sir?” There was a strong voice in his ear. “I don’t know who you are, but stay away from my wife. Leave the condo immediately.” “I will leave the condo, but I would really like to see her come first, and I know that’s a problem for you, but I also know she wants to see my mandingo. I’m just going to shuck my boxers off, and my mandingo will be sticking out, and she’ll get a good look at it. She wants to, I know it. Do you say yes?” “No, you will not bring out any such mandingo!” the husband choked. “You will absolutely do nothing of the sort! You are out of line!” He hung up. Cardell handed the phone back to Betsy, shaking his head. “Oh, he’s such an old poke-in-the-dough,” she said. “Are you disappointed?” He nodded. “You poor thing, you wanted to see me come, didn’t you?” He nodded again. She looked at him appraisingly. “And then you’d come, wouldn’t you? You probably have a cock that you’d jerk off big-time, wouldn’t you? I know you just love jerking off that proud nasty cock.” “That I do,” he said. “Hard as a ship’s biscuit, but fresher.” She had an idea. “I’ll tell you what we’ll do. Let’s go out on the back deck and I’ll pretend to have sex with my husband, and I’ll tell you all about it, and you’ll watch me pretending. Will that work?” “That sounds like a good fallback,” Cardell said. So they went out to the back deck, and she started with the running commentary. “Usually I’m in bed first,” she said. “He stays up doing the crossword—he’s good at it, but it takes him a long time sometimes, and I read a book.” “Like what?” “Oh, maybe something a little frisky, a little naughty,” said Betsy. “And sometimes I just turn my light off and go to sleep, and sometimes I’m still reading when I hear him washing up and sniffing. He hangs up his pants carefully and puts on his pajamas, which are on a hook on the back of the closet door. We have two hooks. Am I boring you?” Cardell was smiling, watching her tell the story, lying back on a lounge chair and feeling perfectly happy. He shook his head. “Good. Then he gets in bed, and if I’m awake and I stir he says, ‘Good-night, hon,’ and I say, ‘Good-night, darling.’ And often we go to sleep.” “But sometimes you don’t.” “Right, sometimes we’ve made a prior arrangement to do the triple-X dirty nasty.” “I see.”

• From The City of God

  171 Lecture 8 Transcript—Splendid Vices and Happiness in Hope (Book 5) what he has done, they have no grounds to complain to the universe about it. The problem the Romans face, then, is in the ends of their glory, the purposes for which they act. Fallen humanity tries to glorify and raise up temporal ends, so they promote themselves, their causes, their countries. Even among the Christian churches, there are many who seek glory for themselves, or their fleshly churches, in this way, in Augustine’s day as well as our own. All of these are impermanent and ultimately disappointing ends. One thing to see here is a lesson very deep in Augustine’s anthropology: whatever else the human is, the human is a creature who loves; and love means to adore; and to adore means to exult, to delight in the adoration of the object that you love, to seek to find a happiness outside of your self-satisfaction. Humans, Augustine thinks, want to worship. We need to worship. The question is what will the object of our worship be? Once you see that glory is a common human practice, and that the issue is what you give glory to, the question then becomes, for Augustine, what should Christians think of Roman glory? On one level, it’s fundamentally disappointing and tragic. Roman glory should make the Christians feel sad for the pagans, that they have attached their longings to a worldly end. But the Christians should also pursue glory, for they are no less doxological creatures than any other humans. After all, remember—and I can’t say this enough— remember that Augustine begins the whole of The City of God by claiming that that city, the city of God, is the most glorious thing in Creation. Remember, the first word of The City is gloriosissimam— most glorious is the city of God. But Christians seek to glorify not Rome or themselves but God as the true author of all that happens in reality. So when Christian saints and martyrs did their deeds, they, and I’m quoting Augustine here, “did not rest in that glory as if it were the virtue which they sought as their end. Rather, they referred that glory itself to the glory of God, by Whose grace they were who they were.” This referring means they

• From The City of God

  Chapter 18. --What the History of Sallust Reveals Regarding the Life of the Romans, Either When Straitened by Anxiety or Relaxed in Security. I will therefore pause, and adduce the testimony of Sallust himself, whose words in praise of the Romans (that "equity and virtue prevailed among them not more by force of laws than of nature") have given occasion to this discussion. He was referring to that period immediately after the expulsion of the kings, in which the city became great in an incredibly short space of time. And yet this same writer acknowledges in the first book of his history, in the very exordium of his work, that even at that time, when a very brief interval had elapsed after the government had passed from kings to consuls, the more powerful men began to act unjustly, and occasioned the defection of the people from the patricians, and other disorders in the city. For after Sallust had stated that the Romans enjoyed greater harmony and a purer state of society between the second and third Punic wars than at any other time, and that the cause of this was not their love of good order, but their fear lest the peace they had with Carthage might be broken (this also, as we mentioned, Nasica contemplated when he opposed the destruction of Carthage, for he supposed that fear would tend to repress wickedness, and to preserve wholesome ways of living), he then goes on to say:"Yet, after the destruction of Carthage, discord, avarice, ambition, and the other vices which are commonly generated by prosperity, more than ever increased. "If they "increased," and that "more than ever," then already they had appeared, and had been increasing. And so Sallust adds this reason for what he said. "For," he says, "the oppressive measures of the powerful, and the consequent secessions of the plebs from the patricians, and other civil dissensions, had existed from the first, and affairs were administered with equity and well-tempered justice for no longer a period than the short time after the expulsion of the kings, while the city was occupied with the serious Tuscan war and Tarquin's vengeance. "You see how, even in that brief period after the expulsion of the kings, fear, he acknowledges, was the cause of the interval of equity and good order. They were afraid, in fact, of the war which Tarquin waged against them, after he had been driven from the throne and the city, and had allied himself with the Tuscans. But observe what he adds: "After that, the patricians treated the people as their slaves, ordering them to be scourged or beheaded just as the kings had done, driving them from their holdings, and harshly tyrannizing over those who had no property to lose. The people, overwhelmed by these oppressive measures, and most of all by exorbitant usury, and obliged to contribute both money and personal service to the constant wars, at length took arms and seceded to Mount Aventine and Mount Sacer, and thus obtained for themselves tribunes and protective laws. But it was only the second Punic war that put an end on both sides to discord and strife. "You see what kind of men the Romans were, even so early as a few years after the expulsion of the kings; and it is of these men he says, that "equity and virtue prevailed among them not more by force of law than of nature. "

• From Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953)

  Florence, meanwhile, attempted to distract John’s attention from the brooch by offering him an orange; but he had seen oranges before; he merely looked at it a moment before letting it fall to the floor. He began again, in his disturbingly fluid fashion, to quarrel about the brooch. ‘He like you,’ said Elizabeth, finally, calmed a little by watching him. ‘You must be tired,’ said Florence, then: ‘Put him down there.’ And she dragged one large easy chair to the table so that John could watch them while they ate. ‘I got a letter from my brother the other day,’ she said, bringing the food to the table. ‘His wife, poor ailing soul, done passed on, and he thinking about coming North.’ ‘You ain’t never told me,’ said Elizabeth, with a quick and rather false interest, ‘you had a brother! And he coming up here?’ ‘So he say. Ain’t nothing, I reckon, to keep him down home no more—now Deborah’s gone.’ She sat down opposite Elizabeth. ‘I ain’t seen him,’ she said, musingly, ‘for more than twenty years.’ ‘Then it’ll be a great day,’ Elizabeth smiled, ‘when you two meet again.’ Florence shook her head, and motioned for Elizabeth to start eating. ‘No,’ she said, ‘we ain’t never got along, and I don’t reckon he’s changed.’ ‘Twenty years is a mighty long time,’ Elizabeth said, ‘he’s bound to have changed some. ’ ‘That man,’ said Florence, ‘would have to do a whole lot of changing before him and me hit it off. No,’—she paused, grimly, sadly—‘I’m mighty sorry he’s coming. I didn’t look to see him no more in this world—or in the next one, neither.’ This was not, Elizabeth felt, the way a sister ought to talk about her brother, especially to someone who knew him not at all, and who would, probably, eventually meet him. She asked, helplessly: ‘What do he do—your brother?’ ‘He some kind of preacher,’ said Florence. ‘I ain’tnever heard him. When I was home he weren’t doing nothing but chasing after women and lying in the ditches, drunk.’ ‘I hope,’ laughed Elizabeth, ‘he done changed his ways at least.’ ‘Folks,’ said Florence, ‘can change their ways much as they want to. But I don’t care how many times you change your ways, what’s in you is in you, and it’s got to come out.’ ‘Yes,’ said Elizabeth, thoughtfully. ‘But don’t you think,’ she hesitantly asked, ‘that the Lord can change a person’s heart?’ ‘I done heard it said often enough,’ said Florence, ‘but I got yet to see it. These niggers running around, talking about the Lord done changed their hearts—ain’t nothing happened to them niggers. They got the same old black hearts they was born with. I reckon the Lord done give them those hearts—and, honey, the Lord don’t give out no second helpings, I’m here to tell you.’ ‘No,’ said Elizabeth heavily, after a long pause.

• From Sense and Sensibility (1811)

  “Yes. But I did not love only him; and while the comfort of others was dear to me, I was glad to spare them from knowing how much I felt. Now, I can think and speak of it with little emotion. I would not have you suffer on my account; for I assure you I no longer suffer materially myself. I have many things to support me. I am not conscious of having provoked the disappointment by any imprudence of my own, I have borne it as much as possible without spreading it farther. I acquit Edward of essential misconduct. I wish him very happy; and I am so sure of his always doing his duty, that though now he may harbour some regret, in the end he must become so. Lucy does not want sense, and that is the foundation on which every thing good may be built. And after all, Marianne, after all that is bewitching in the idea of a single and constant attachment, and all that can be said of one’s happiness depending entirely on any particular person, it is not meant—it is not fit—it is not possible that it should be so. Edward will marry Lucy; he will marry a woman superior in person and understanding to half her sex; and time and habit will teach him to forget that he ever thought another superior to her.” “If such is your way of thinking,” said Marianne, “if the loss of what is most valued is so easily to be made up by something else, your resolution, your self-command, are, perhaps, a little less to be wondered at.—They are brought more within my comprehension.”

• From The City of God

  388 Books That Matter: The City of God In this way, the wisdom of the city of God, Augustine argues, is more ancient than that of the city of Man—although Augustine begrudgingly admits that there was pre-Mosaic wisdom in Egypt and elsewhere. For while Moses was the primary source of divine wisdom, even he had been taught and had been given what Augustine actually calls a liberal education in Egypt—so, Moses went to college. Indeed, Augustine goes so far as to propound the antiquity of Hebrew wisdom over all other kinds, especially Egyptians, he says, who are, he says, mostly fakers; they claim that their wisdom goes back 100,000 years, which is clearly a lie. But there’s another and altogether more troubling way in which the past is said to prefigure the Christian present for Augustine, and this is how Augustine understands the relationship between ancient Israel and the Christian Churches. Again, the ancient community of believers plays a role in the history of salvation, and so the tradition of Ancient Israel is honored in this account. But as for the Judaism that was contemporary to Augustine, Augustine’s vision is far more ambiguous—perhaps, at best, ambivalent—and has had disastrous consequences sine his life. Augustine affirms, in this context, two things. First of all, the people Israel—the Jews of his time, anyway; the Judaism as practiced in his day—this is the residual people of the first promise. And that first promise was important; but, he says, only as prefiguring the coming of Christ. So the history of Israel is important but cannot be properly understood, Augustine thinks, on its own terms, but only as leading to Christianity. And then the people of Israel did, for Augustine—in some important way—miss the boat. They refused the promise of God, and so now seem to be outside the salvation history that continued from ancient Israel into Jesus Christ, and then through Christ into the church. So the Jews, as the Jews, are not properly saved on his account.

• From Notes of a Native Son (1955)

  (The Afro-American recently ran a series of articles on this subject, “The Education of a Genius,” by Mrs. Amarintha Work, who recorded in detail the development of her mulatto son, Craig.) Ebony and Our World are the two big magazines in the field, Ebony looking and sounding very much like Life, and Our World being the black man’s Look. Our World is a very strange, disorganized magazine indeed, sounding sometimes like a college newspaper and sometimes like a call to arms, but principally, like its more skillful brothers, devoted to the proposition that anything a white man can do a Negro can probably do better. Ebony digs feature articles out of such things as the “real” Lena Horne and Negro FBI agents, and it travels into the far corners of the earth for any news, however trivial, concerning any Negro or group of Negroes who are in any way unusual and/or newsworthy. The tone of both Ebony and Our World is affirmative; they cater to the “better class of Negro.” Ebony ’s November 1947 issue carried an editoral entitled “Time To Count Our Blessings,” which began by accusing Chester Himes (author of the novel Lonely Crusade ) of having a color psychosis, and went on to explain that there are Negro racists also who are just as blind and dangerous as Bilbo, which is incontestably true, and that, compared to the millions of starving Europeans, Negroes are sitting pretty—which comparison, I hazard, cannot possibly mean anything to any Negro who has not seen Europe. The editorial concluded that Negroes had come a long way and that “as patriotic Americans” it was time “we” stopped singing the blues and realized just how bright the future was. These cheering sentiments were flanked—or underscored, if you will—by a photograph on the opposite page of an aging Negro farm woman carrying home a bumper crop of onions. It apparently escaped the editors of Ebony that the very existence of their magazine, and its table of contents for any month, gave the lie to this effort to make the best of a bad bargain. The true raison d’être of the Negro press can be found in the letters-to-the-editor sections, where the truth about life among the rejected can be seen in print. It is the terrible dilemma of the Negro press that, having no other model, it models itself on the white press, attempting to emulate the same effortless, sophisticated tone—a tone its subject matter renders utterly unconvincing. It is simply impossible not to sing the blues, audibly or not, when the lives lived by Negroes are so inescapably harsh and stunted.

• From Sense and Sensibility (1811)

  “Poor Marianne!” said her brother to Colonel Brandon, in a low voice, as soon as he could secure his attention: “She has not such good health as her sister,—she is very nervous,—she has not Elinor’s constitution;—and one must allow that there is something very trying to a young woman who has been a beauty in the loss of her personal attractions. You would not think it perhaps, but Marianne was remarkably handsome a few months ago; quite as handsome as Elinor. Now you see it is all gone.” CHAPTER XXXV. Elinor’s curiosity to see Mrs. Ferrars was satisfied. She had found in her every thing that could tend to make a farther connection between the families undesirable. She had seen enough of her pride, her meanness, and her determined prejudice against herself, to comprehend all the difficulties that must have perplexed the engagement, and retarded the marriage, of Edward and herself, had he been otherwise free; and she had seen almost enough to be thankful for her own sake, that one greater obstacle preserved her from suffering under any other of Mrs. Ferrars’s creation, preserved her from all dependence upon her caprice, or any solicitude for her good opinion. Or at least, if she did not bring herself quite to rejoice in Edward’s being fettered to Lucy, she determined, that had Lucy been more amiable, she ought to have rejoiced. She wondered that Lucy’s spirits could be so very much elevated by the civility of Mrs. Ferrars;—that her interest and her vanity should so very much blind her as to make the attention which seemed only paid her because she was not Elinor, appear a compliment to herself—or to allow her to derive encouragement from a preference only given her, because her real situation was unknown. But that it was so, had not only been declared by Lucy’s eyes at the time, but was declared over again the next morning more openly, for at her particular desire, Lady Middleton set her down in Berkeley Street on the chance of seeing Elinor alone, to tell her how happy she was. The chance proved a lucky one, for a message from Mrs. Palmer soon after she arrived, carried Mrs. Jennings away. “My dear friend,” cried Lucy, as soon as they were by themselves, “I come to talk to you of my happiness. Could anything be so flattering as Mrs. Ferrars’s way of treating me yesterday? So exceeding affable as she was! You know how I dreaded the thoughts of seeing her; but the very moment I was introduced, there was such an affability in her behaviour as really should seem to say, she had quite took a fancy to me. Now was not it so? You saw it all; and was not you quite struck with it?” “She was certainly very civil to you.”

• From The City of God

  491 sociality has not gone away; it has only become warped into our various political passions. So much of this is actually captured in Augustine’s choice of the word “city” in his title and as his central operational concept of the whole work. And so we need to see that our politics is always, inescapably, a disappointed politics of heaven. And knowing that, for Augustine, is the first axiom of political wisdom. And so Augustine affirms the necessity of politics, and even its significance while refusing it direct salvific importance. In this way, we can say that Augustine offers no discrete and portable political philosophy at all, but only a political theology in which the activities and affections that we count as political appear to be a rather haphazard collection of phenomena scattered across the several dimensions of human life in the world as a whole—human life in which what we call politics has a small subsidiary part. Yes, humans must inhabit political communities in no small part out of a positive need, the mutuality of sustenance—although this could also be accomplished by families—but also out of a negative need, the need to suppress or expel the kinds of turbulent passions and people who make a social life so dangerous in a fallen world. And that is a tricky path to take, but Augustine saw no other viable route through worldly life. We must critique the religious propriety of patriotism, but we cannot deny the religious duty of public service. Christians must seek the welfare of the city where they live, and in so doing, they serve that city better than its more fanatically attached devotees, whatever those latter groups think. The 20 th -century political thinker Hannah Arendt, who knew Augustine’s work very well, once said that Augustine was the last man before modernity who knew what politics truly was, what it meant to be a citizen. And it’s true; one can get quite a political education from him. But that education would be for naught if you miss the way that such a political education can only be a secondary and inadvertent Lecture 23 Transcript—The City of God as a Single Book

• From Sense and Sensibility (1811)

  “Perhaps,” said Marianne, “I may consider it with some surprise. Edward is very amiable, and I love him tenderly. But yet—he is not the kind of young man—there is something wanting—his figure is not striking; it has none of that grace which I should expect in the man who could seriously attach my sister. His eyes want all that spirit, that fire, which at once announce virtue and intelligence. And besides all this, I am afraid, Mama, he has no real taste. Music seems scarcely to attract him, and though he admires Elinor’s drawings very much, it is not the admiration of a person who can understand their worth. It is evident, in spite of his frequent attention to her while she draws, that in fact he knows nothing of the matter. He admires as a lover, not as a connoisseur. To satisfy me, those characters must be united. I could not be happy with a man whose taste did not in every point coincide with my own. He must enter into all my feelings; the same books, the same music must charm us both. Oh! mama, how spiritless, how tame was Edward’s manner in reading to us last night! I felt for my sister most severely. Yet she bore it with so much composure, she seemed scarcely to notice it. I could hardly keep my seat. To hear those beautiful lines which have frequently almost driven me wild, pronounced with such impenetrable calmness, such dreadful indifference!” “He would certainly have done more justice to simple and elegant prose. I thought so at the time; but you would give him Cowper.” “Nay, Mama, if he is not to be animated by Cowper!—but we must allow for difference of taste. Elinor has not my feelings, and therefore she may overlook it, and be happy with him. But it would have broke my heart, had I loved him, to hear him read with so little sensibility. Mama, the more I know of the world, the more am I convinced that I shall never see a man whom I can really love. I require so much! He must have all Edward’s virtues, and his person and manners must ornament his goodness with every possible charm.” “Remember, my love, that you are not seventeen. It is yet too early in life to despair of such a happiness. Why should you be less fortunate than your mother? In one circumstance only, my Marianne, may your destiny be different from hers!” CHAPTER IV. “What a pity it is, Elinor,” said Marianne, “that Edward should have no taste for drawing.”

• From House of Holes: A Book of Raunch (2011)

  There was a bonging sound and a commotion. A disembodied male arm leapt up, twirled once in the air, and seized Dune by the wrist. Krock hurried in and grabbed the knife. Mischa set out the chopping block on a towel. “Dune, why did you do it?” said Shandee, full of disappointment and concern. “I forgot myself, I’m sorry,” said Dune, disengaging the viselike fingers of Dave’s arm. He turned to Krock and Mischa. “Now hear me out, guys. I play keyboards and guitar, and to be honest I’d rather lose my pecker for a little while than my ability to make music.” That statement got Krock’s attention. “Daggett,” he said into his communicator, “tell Lila that Dune has verbally agreed before witnesses to lose his pecker.” Lila was pacing up and down in front of her desk when Dune was led in. “All right, Mr. Pussyfinger,” she said firmly. “Just for that bit of defiance, we’re going to do a switcheroo on you.” She opened a door. In walked Marcela, the art critic, in a black slip. “Hello,” she said, with a nervous smile. [image "decoration" file=image_rsrc2SW.jpg] Chilli Goes to the Porndecahedron with Dave [image "decoration" file=image_rsrc2SX.jpg] Chilli met Dave at eleven o’clock at the border crossing. She’d put on a little makeup and was wearing sandals and a sleeveless white shirt with black buttons. “Hi there,” she said. “I just wanted to tell you that I’m really sorry, I can’t go with you.” “Oh, pshaw, sure you can,” said Dave. “See the sights!” “Well, just a quick visit then.” They walked through a thicket and emerged at a clearing and climbed a low stone fence and walked a little farther. Dave pointed out the White Lake and the midway. They bought some falafels and ate them, while Dave told her about the darkrooms, where you talked in utter darkness. Chilli seemed to like that idea, so they checked into a darkroom and sat. “So how did everything go yesterday?” asked Dave in the dark. “Just fine,” Chilli said, enigmatically. “Now, tell me how this Porndecahedron works.” Dave said, “It’s a twelve-sided projection theater, like a dodecahedron. You’ve heard of buckyballs, right? It’s a big buckyball that you go inside of. There’s a cluster of seats in the middle, either single or tandem seats, and you go in and sit in a seat, buckled in for safety, because you’re suspended. You sit there and movies play on all the screens around you.” “Dirty movies.” “Well, you pick the playlist. Could be music videos, or a mashup from Brad Pitt movies, or handjobs, or beautiful Balinese dancers, or men having sex with each other—some women like to watch men having sex, it seems. Some people are into fetishes, so then there’ll be twelve screens of, say, men coming on women’s feet.” “Oh, wow,” said Chilli.

• From House of Holes: A Book of Raunch (2011)

  “Take a shower at my studio,” he said. He said he wouldn’t bother her or make any moves. He just wanted to paint her in her cuffed shorts, he said—but topless. “You know I’ve just had an orgasm so I’m obviously not going to wig out and attack you or something,” he said. Jessica said okay, and then she had a thought. There was a store across the street. “I’m just going to run in there and get some panties,” she said. “I hate getting out of the shower and putting on the same pair. Wait here.” She bought a three-pack of panties, and they walked four blocks over to his studio. He said that he’d been painting for fifteen years. He was a little older than she’d thought at first—maybe thirty-eight, fit and kind of craggy with a confused boyish look that she liked. Every so often as they walked he’d lean toward her and say something like, “This is the best day of my life. I’m so eager to get painting. I understand everything about beauty now, now that I’ve seen you.” His studio was on the third floor. There were ten chairs on one side of the room and a bunch of canvases leaning against the wall. She recognized several of the chairs from the paintings at the gallery. “I haven’t painted anyone in this chair,” he said. He positioned it on a bare stretch of floor with windowlight coming in. “I’ll just have a shower,” she said. “One thing,” he said. “When you come out, please don’t put your bra on. It leaves red marks on your skin.” “Okay,” she said. She went into his shower and washed using his soap and tore open the packet of panties and put one pair on. She didn’t put her bra on but just her shirt, buttoned once. He gestured her to a chair—white, covered in a nubby fabric. “Sit here and take off your shirt,” he said. Here she hesitated. “I warn you, I have tattoos,” she said. He froze. “You do?” “Yes. Is that a problem?” “No, of course not,” he said. But he was clearly lying. She could hear the unhappiness in his voice, and she could see it in his face. “You’re disappointed,” she said. “Admit it.” “It’s just that—I haven’t yet fully come to an understanding with tattoos. They tug at my eye, and I have to resist them. They distract me from the line.” “Well, I have a bunch, in various places,” said Jessica. “Sometimes now I kind of wish I didn’t, but I do.” “Do you really want them gone?” Bosco asked eagerly. “I know a way. You go to this tattoo-remover man, Hax. He has a suite at the House of Holes. He removes them completely, no ghostly traces.” “He must charge a lot of money.” “It won’t cost you a thing.” He handed Jessica a card with a hole punched in it. “Tell Lila that you want to see Hax.”

• From The City of God

  374 Books That Matter: The City of God reestablished through multitudinous forms of violence. It is a rigid singularity, imposed precariously only by force, and typically the force of imperium. In this way, the history of the world is a history of domination. „In the earthly city, human society is at war with itself because everyone desires some of the same things, and each is at war with herself or himself, because our desires are inconstant. Just as the earthly city has no true harmony or coherence, neither has it true originality. It has no novelty, but simply reiterates its own claim to be free of divine sponsorship. „In sum, Augustine says the earthly city’s day is already over. It goes on, but it lives entirely in the past. Its time is out of joint with the new eon that the Christian churches proclaim and pray to represent. It is already dead; it simply doesn’t know it. The Heavenly Jerusalem „In contrast to the parodic incoherence of the pagan political actors and philosophers who sought answers by human powers, the harmony and unity of the city of God is communicated by the prophetic conveyance of divine words, received gracefully by the community and obeyed as true nourishment. „None of this about the heavenly Jerusalem is actually true, and Augustine knows it. „The city of God on pilgrimage still lives in the morally and spiritually homogeneous era of the world and partakes in all ways in the tedium and sinfulness of humanity before the Second Coming. This fact severely complicates, some would say utterly obstructs, any hope for a stable or durable progress or sanctification of humans in the church during history. ›There will be fallbacks, failures, and all sorts of other disappointments.

• From The City of God

  409 Lecture 19 Transcript—Happiness and Politics (Book 19) earthly peace. They may not know that that is all they can attain, but it is. So while the agents of the earthly city work desperately, though futilely, to secure an ultimate peace in this fleeting age, the citizens of the heavenly city have to work alongside them and slipping into their slipstream, as it were, so long as they understand that their hopes cannot rest in the kind of flactual muck of this world, but must seek true peace through the use of temporal things and reside in this world as in captivity. This minimalist vision of what politics can accomplish rests on the conviction that the whole realm of human politics is in an important and inescapable way, tragic. By tragic here I mean that, in this sin- riddled world, individuals and groups will find their political hopes and expectations vexed by the very conditions that give rise to the need for politics itself. Politics is the art of compromise and cohesion where such compromise is required for the achievement of even provisional good. It is the creation of alliances about which parties will inevitably have second thoughts and resentments. It is the coordination of desires among different people with different desires, and whose individual desires are not even themselves collectively coherent or durably stable. It is an attempt to create conditions in which humans can flourish, but which at best only partially satisfy our ends. It is building a house on shifting foundations because no other foundations are available, and some habitation must be built. So understood, this vision of politics is not very inspiring; it makes for poor campaign slogans. But what it lacks in pizzazz, Augustine thinks, it more than makes up for in truthfulness. This vision of politics understands politics as always shadowed by the threat; not infrequently by the reality, of violence, a cure that at best does almost as much to harm as to help. Here some real idealism appears, but it is an idealism about what this politics lacks, not what it offers. For Augustine, on his reading of Genesis, God created humans with no need of political power—no lordship, no dominari—or domination—

• From The City of God

  396 Books That Matter: The City of God „All the routes to happiness that the philosophers and others have scouted out are shown to be inadequate. This world is filled with opportunities for destabilizing misery, and any attempt to avoid that misery would simply leave us more miserable still. The world for Christians is full of blessings, but no matter how cannily we seek them, none offers secure happiness. „The first four chapters of book 19 are a classic example of a well- established philosophical genre in the ancient world—calmly and lucidly laying out the possible options for the wise man to consider in the leisure of his study. „Augustine says this whole approach is built on the illusion that some technique or trick or gimmick that will help us acquire this happiness for ourselves. This idea is the root of our error. „Ironically, the very failure of our hopes reveals a clue to a better way. The ways in which our happiness is vexed, in their various modes of frustration, exhibit the depth and breadth of the universal longing for happiness. For Augustine, the true happiness must be the truest kind of peace. Once happiness is reimagined as peace, we have a useful concept for understanding any society. „In looking for happiness, we have been subtly misconceiving our desired end. We imagine we can achieve happiness by doing something. But peace is not something you do. Peace is something you are. ›Describing our end as peace challenges the presumption that our capacities for agency are a centrally useful tool in our quest for happiness. Perhaps our end is not something we can accomplish, but gift to us that we must at best receive. ›Christians thus face something of a quandary. The conditions of sinful worldly existence make our lives inhospitable sites for the cultivation of our true happiness, which is genuine peace.

• From Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982)

  She lived next to the church, and after school, that day, she invited me to her house for a cup of cocoa. I ran away without answering, dashing across the street and into the safety of my house. I ran up the stairs, my bookbag banging against my legs. I pulled out the key pinned to my uniform pocket and unlocked the door to our apartment. The house was warm and dark and empty and quiet. I did not stop running until I got to my room at the front of the house, where I flung my books and my coat in a corner and collapsed upon my convertible couch-bed, shrieking with fury and disappointment. Finally, in the privacy of my room, I could shed the tears that had been burning my eyes for two hours, and I wept and wept. I had wanted other things before that I had not gotten. So much so, that I had come to believe if I really wanted something badly enough, the very act of my wanting it was an assurance that I would not get it. Was this what had happened with the election? Had I wanted it too much? Was this what my mother was always talking about? Why she had been so angry? Because wanting meant I would not get? But somehow this felt different. This was the first time that I had wanted something so badly, the getting of which I was sure I could control. The election was supposed to have gone to the smartest girl in the class, and I was clearly the smartest. That was something I had done, on my own, that should have guaranteed me the election. The smartest, not the most popular. That was me. But it hadn’t happened. My mother had been right. I hadn’t won the election. My mother had been right. This thought hurt me almost as much as the loss of the election, and when I felt it fully I shrieked with renewed vigor. I luxuriated in my grief in the empty house in a way I could never have done if anyone were home. All the way up front and buried in my tears, kneeling with my face in the cushions of my couch, I did not hear the key in the lock, nor the main door open. The first thing I knew, there was my mother standing in the doorway of my room, a frown of concern in her voice. “What happened, what happened? What’s wrong with you? What’s this racket going on here?” I turned my wet face up to her from the couch. I wanted a little comfort in my pain, and getting up, I started moving toward her. “I lost the election, Mommy,” I cried, forgetting her warnings. “I’m the smartest girl in class, Sister Blanche says so, and they chose Ann Archdeacon instead!”

• From The City of God

  Chapter 16. --That If the Gods Had Really Possessed Any Regard for Righteousness, the Romans Should Have Received Good Laws from Them, Instead of Having to Borrow Them from Other Nations. Moreover, if the Romans had been able to receive a rule of life from their gods, they would not have borrowed Solon's laws from the Athenians, as they did some years after Rome was founded; and yet they did not keep them as they received them, but endeavored to improve and amend them. [110]Although Lycurgus pretended that he was authorized by Apollo to give laws to the Lacedemonians, the sensible Romans did not choose to believe this, and were not induced to borrow laws from Sparta. Numa Pompilius, who succeeded Romulus in the kingdom, is said to have framed some laws, which, however, were not sufficient for the regulation of civic affairs. Among these regulations were many pertaining to religious observances, and yet he is not reported to have received even these from the gods. With respect, then, to moral evils, evils of life and conduct,--evils which are so mighty, that, according to the wisest pagans, [111] by them states are ruined while their cities stand uninjured,--their gods made not the smallest provision for preserving their worshippers from these evils, but, on the contrary, took special pains to increase them, as we have previously endeavored to prove. [110] In the year a. u. 299, three ambassadors were sent from Rome to Athens to copy Solon's laws, and acquire information about the institutions of Greece. On their return the Decemviri were appointed to draw up a code; and finally, after some tragic interruptions, the celebrated twelve tables were accepted as the fundamental statutes of Roman law (fons universi publici privatique juris). These were graven on brass, and hung up for public information. Livy, iii. 31-34. [111] Possibly he refers to Plautus' Persa, iv. 4. 11-14.